title: Henkel

text: In 1993, 1994, and 1997, Henkel & Schwarzkopf organized the Miss Fa beauty pageant in Russia and CIS. 1997's pageant "Miss Fa Russia & CIS" was the largest, held in major cities of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan as part of the show "World of Fantastic sensation". The 26 winners of the regional rounds participated the final in Yalta, with Elena Khibliko ultimately winning the title. Sales of the Fa brand throughout Russia increased by 40% for the year, while overall sales of the company's products increased by 30%. The cost of this event is $1 million.


title: Henkel

text: Henkel sponsored two Socially Responsible Laundries in homeless shelters run by the Catholic charity Saint Brother Albert Aid Society in Poland (Gdańsk, 2020, and Wrocław, 2022). In both cases Henkel refused the blessing of the laundries by the Catholic bishops. In Wrocław the charity decided to return the equipment and materials donated by the company, and Henkel issued an apology.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: The Ineos Grenadier is an off-road utility vehicle designed and produced by Ineos Automotive Ltd. It went into production in July 2022. The Grenadier was designed to be a modern replacement of the original Land Rover Defender, with boxy bodywork, a steel ladder chassis, beam axles with long-travel progressive-rate coil spring suspension (front and rear), and powered by BMW six-cylinder internal combustion engines.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: Ineos Automotive Ltd. was founded by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, billionaire and chairman of the multinational chemicals company Ineos. Ratcliffe came up with the idea of building a replacement for his Land Rover Defender and approached Jaguar Land Rover to buy the tooling to continue production after the original model ceased at Solihull after 67 years in January 2016. Ratcliffe later decided to initiate a project to design and build a similar vehicle under the codename "Projekt Grenadier".


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: The vehicle is named after Ratcliffe's favourite pub, The Grenadier, in Belgravia, London, where the initial idea was considered, and where a promotional presentation was shown. Comparing this project to James Dyson's plan to build an electric car in Singapore, which was cancelled in October 2019, writing off £500 million of his own money, an industry insider commented "If JLR, which made the Defender for 70 years, is struggling, then that's an indicator of how tough it's going to be for a newcomer".


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: The vehicle was proposed to be manufactured in Wales, but later confirmed to be made in France. Production started in July 2022 at Ineos Automotive plant in Hambach, France.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: In October 2022, the Ineos Grenadier goes into production, with the first deliveries set for December.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: In March 2019, Ineos Automotive announced that it had entered into a powertrain technology partnership with BMW. It was announced in September 2019 that the Grenadier would be manufactured at a bespoke new manufacturing facility on a greenfield site in Bridgend, Wales. Ineos Automotive also confirmed that it would be investing in a sub-assembly plant in Estarreja, Portugal, for the Grenadier's body and chassis. In December 2019, Ineos Automotive announced the Austrian-based Magna Steyr as their engineering partner for the development of the Grenadier. This partnership would oversee turning the development project concept into a mass-produced machine. Development of the off-roader will see it undergo 1.1 million miles (1.8 million km) as part of a grueling testing regime. Mark Tennant, the commercial director of Ineos Automotive, told the Financial Times there had been 50,000 expressions of interest before the designs of the vehicle had been made public. The brand expects to build 25,000 Grenadier models a year at full capacity. In June 2020, Ineos Automotive unveiled a first look at the exterior design of the Grenadier, as well as some technical information relating to the vehicle's chassis, towing capabilities and suspension.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: On 7 July 2020, it was reported that Ineos Automotive was in talks with Daimler AG, the owners of Mercedes-Benz, to buy the Smart factory in Hambach, France, and build the Grenadier there instead of Wales and Portugal. "It's a serious business consideration," Tennant said. Ken Skates, Welsh Government Minister for Economy, Transport and North Wales said it would be "a real blow if Ineos reneged on its very public commitment". The government of Wales was reported in July 2020 to have spent £5 million on supporting the Ineos factory development at Bridgend with enabling work and road infrastructure, and said at that time that it would "look to recoup appropriate costs from the company" if the Bridgend factory was cancelled.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: In November 2020, it was announced that Ineos would work with Korean carmaker Hyundai on a longer-term plan to develop a reliable source of hydrogen in Europe to use Hyundai fuel cell technology, with no carbon dioxide emissions, on later Grenadier production.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: On 8 December 2020 Ineos announced it had purchased the Smartville factory at Hambach, France, to build the Grenadier, stating that the site's location "gives excellent access to supply chains, automotive talent and target markets". Ineos denied on Twitter having received "grants or other direct financial support" from either the Welsh or Portuguese governments.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: On 29 September 2021, Ineos announced it would locate its North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. In November 2021, Ineos Automotive revealed that it had made losses exceeding £250 million over three years on the project. Other companies owned by Ratcliffe made loans to the automotive subsidiary, so that his total commitment at the time could be over £650m.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: In January 2022, Ineos' engineering team was caught in a ‘one-in-a-hundred year (flood) event’ during hot weather testing in outback South Australia. Ineos plans on returning to Australia to complete this testing, along with undertaking an expedition of the Canning Stock Route.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: While the Grenadier is not a direct replica of a Land Rover Defender (it uses none of the original tooling or componentry), Toby Ecuyer made it very clear that their mission was specifically to build a modern Defender, citing the 'massive shame' it was that the outgoing Defender was ceasing production. In an interview with Autocar UK, he explained that their mission initially began with trying to do just that. "We thought, well, we’ll replace it. Then we thought, let’s build a better one, something that doesn’t leak and is comfortable. After all, this isn’t 1948. We can move on." Speaking on how they would modernise the Defender's design he stated "That was when we started collecting similar vehicles – Bronco, Pajero, G-Wagen, various Jeeps – to see how other manufacturers had done it".


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: At the online launch, Toby Ecuyer, Head of Design at Ineos Automotive, said: "We had Jeeps, Land Rovers, Toyota Hiluxes, a Toyota Land Cruiser, Nissan Patrols, Ford Broncos. And we looked at vans, lorries, Unimogs, military vehicles, tractors. African-spec vehicles were particularly interesting. They all shaped our plan for a vehicle that would be extremely capable but also very honest and uncomplicated"" The exterior design of the Grenadier was shown to the public for the first time in an online launch on 1 July 2020. At the launch Ratcliffe said "The Grenadier project started by identifying a gap in the market, abandoned by a number of manufacturers, for a utilitarian off-road vehicle. This gave us our engineering blueprint for a capable, durable and reliable 4x4 built to handle the world’s harshest environments".


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: Steve Cropley, Editor in Chief at "Autocar" said "The result is a simple, well-proportioned and familiar-looking off-roader."


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: Ecuyer is hoping that none of the inevitable discussion of the homage to the Defender's design obscures the unique and utilitarian design behind the Grenadier: the roof that doubles as a load rack, the roof tie bars (that go roughly where the Defender 110 has roof lights), the two-piece rear door, the exposed door hinges and the multi-purpose ‘utility rails’ that run along the exterior of the door panels where scuff bars would usually be placed.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: The Grenadier is powered by a choice of BMW six-cylinder engines; the 3.0L B58 inline 6 petrol engine and the 3.0L B57 inline 6 diesel engine. In the Grenadier, B57 diesel engine makes 183 kW of power (3250-4200rpm) and 550Nm of torque (1250-3000rpm). The B58 petrol engine makes 210 kW of power (4750rpm) and 450Nm of torque (1750-4000rpm).


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: Both engines come mated to a ZF eight-speed automatic transmission (codenamed 8HP51 for the petrol, 8HP76 for the diesel), with what Ineos calls a new “heavy duty” torque converter.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: All Grenadiers come standard with permanent four-wheel drive (4WD), with low-range accessed through a 2.5:1 Tremec two-speed transfer case.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: The Grenadier is built on a box-section ladder frame chassis. There are heavy duty Carraro beam axles at each end, paired to five-link coil suspension supplied by Eibach offering nine degrees of front axle articulation and 12 degrees at the rear, and anti-roll bars for road handling.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: Tennant said that internal combustion engines were best for "rough, tough jobs", and pointed out the need for good range and autonomy in remoter parts of the world, with hydrogen fuel cells part of the longer-term plan.


title: Ineos Grenadier

text: Deploying a hydrogen supply chain could in itself benefit Ineos, which produces 300,000 - 400,000 tonnes of hydrogen a year.


title: Early childhood education

text: Early childhood education (ECE), also known as nursery education, is a branch of education theory that relates to the teaching of children (formally and informally) from birth up to the age of eight. Traditionally, this is up to the equivalent of third grade. ECE is described as an important period in child development.


title: Early childhood education

text: ECE emerged as a field of study during the Enlightenment, particularly in European countries with high literacy rates. It continued to grow through the nineteenth century as universal primary education became a norm in the Western world. In recent years, early childhood education has become a prevalent public policy issue, as funding for preschool and pre-K is debated by municipal, state, and federal lawmakers. Governing entities are also debating the central focus of early childhood education with debate on developmental appropriate play versus strong academic preparation curriculum in reading, writing, and math. The global priority placed on early childhood education is underscored with targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.


title: Early childhood education

text: ECE is also a professional designation earned through a post-secondary education program. For example, in Ontario, Canada, the designations ECE (Early Childhood Educator) and RECE (Registered Early Childhood Educator) may only be used by registered members of the College of Early Childhood Educators, which is made up of accredited child care professionals who are held accountable to the College's standards of practice.


title: Early childhood education

text: The Developmental Interaction Approach is based on the theories of Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, John Dewey, and Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The approach focuses on learning through discovery.


title: Early childhood education

text: Jean Jacques Rousseau recommended that teachers should exploit individual children's interests to make sure each child obtains the information most essential to his personal and individual development. The five developmental domains of childhood development include: To meet those developmental domains, a child has a set of needs that must be met for learning. Maslow's hierarchy of needs showcases the different levels of needs that must be met the chart to the right showcases these needs.


title: Early childhood education

text: Friedrich Froebel was a German Educator that believed in the idea of children learning through play. Specifically, he said, "play is the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in the child’s soul." Froebel believed that teachers should act as a facilitators and supporters for the students's play, rather than an authoritative, disciplinary figure. He created educational open-ended toys that he called "gifts" and "occupations" that were designed to encourage self expression and initiation.


title: Early childhood education

text: Maria Montessori was an Italian physician that, based on her observations of young children in classrooms, developed a method of education that focused on independence. In Montessori education, a typical classroom is made up of students of different ages and curriculum is based on the students' developmental stage, which Montessori called the four planes of development.


title: Early childhood education

text: Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed a "socio-cultural learning theory" that emphasized the impact of social and cultural experiences on individual thinking and the development of mental processes. Vygotsky's theory emerged in the 1930s and is still discussed today as a means of improving and reforming educational practices.


title: Early childhood education

text: In Vygotsky's theories of learning, he also postulated the theory of the zone of proximal development. This theory ties in with children building off prior knowledge and gaining new knowledge related to skills they already have. In the theory it describes how new knowledge or skills are taken in if they are not fully learned but are starting to emerge. A teacher or older friend lends support to a child learning a skill, be it building a block castle, tying a shoe, or writing one's name. As the child becomes more capable of the steps of the activity, the adult or older child withdraws supports gradually, until the child is competent completing the process on his/her own. This is done within that activity's zone—the distance between where the child is, and where he potentially will be. In each zone of proximal development, they build on skills and grow by learning more skills in their proximal development range. They build on the skills by being guided by teachers and parents. They must build from where they are in their zone of proximal development.


title: Early childhood education

text: Vygotsky argued that since cognition occurs within a social context, our social experiences shape our ways of thinking about and interpreting the world. People such as parents, grandparents, and teachers play the roles of what Vygotsky described as knowledgeable and competent adults. Although Vygotsky predated social constructivists, he is commonly classified as one. Social constructivists believe that an individual's cognitive system is a resditional learning time. Vygotsky advocated that teachers facilitate rather than direct student learning. Teachers should provide a learning environment where students can explore and develop their learning without direct instruction. His approach calls for teachers to incorporate students’ needs and interests. It is important to do this because students' levels of interest and abilities will vary and there needs to be differentiation.


title: Early childhood education

text: However, teachers can enhance understandings and learning for students. Vygotsky states that by sharing meanings that are relevant to the children's environment, adults promote cognitive development as well. Their teachings can influence thought processes and perspectives of students when they are in new and similar environments. Since Vygotsky promotes more facilitation in children's learning, he suggests that knowledgeable people (and adults in particular), can also enhance knowledges through cooperative meaning-making with students in their learning, this can be done through the zone of proximal development by guiding children's learning or thinking skills . Vygotsky's approach encourages guided participation and student exploration with support. Teachers can help students achieve their cognitive development levels through consistent and regular interactions of collaborative knowledge-making learning processes.


title: Early childhood education

text: Jean Piaget's constructivist theory gained influence in the 1970s and '80s. Although Piaget himself was primarily interested in a descriptive psychology of cognitive development, he also laid the groundwork for a constructivist theory of learning. Piaget believed that learning comes from within: children construct their own knowledge of the world through experience and subsequent reflection. He said that "if logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning." Within Piaget's framework, teachers should guide children in acquiring their own knowledge rather than simply transferring knowledge.


title: Early childhood education

text: According to Piaget's theory, when young children encounter new information, they attempt to accommodate and assimilate it into their existing understanding of the world. Accommodation involves adapting mental schemas and representations to make them consistent with reality. Assimilation involves fitting new information into their pre-existing schemas. Through these two processes, young children learn by equilibrating their mental representations with reality. They also learn from mistakes.


title: Early childhood education

text: A Piagetian approach emphasizes experiential education; in school, experiences become more hands-on and concrete as students explore through trial and error. Thus, crucial components of early childhood education include exploration, manipulating objects, and experiencing new environments. Subsequent reflection on these experiences is equally important.


title: Early childhood education

text: Piaget's concept of reflective abstraction was particularly influential in mathematical education. Through reflective abstraction, children construct more advanced cognitive structures out of the simpler ones they already possess. This allows children to develop mathematical constructs that cannot be learned through equilibration – making sense of experiences through assimilation and accommodation – alone.


title: Early childhood education

text: According to Piagetian theory, language and symbolic representation is preceded by the development of corresponding mental representations. Research shows that the level of reflective abstraction achieved by young children was found to limit the degree to which they could represent physical quantities with written numerals. Piaget held that children can invent their own procedures for the four arithmetical operations, without being taught any conventional rules.


title: Early childhood education

text: Piaget's theory implies that computers can be a great educational tool for young children when used to support the design and construction of their projects. McCarrick and Xiaoming found that computer play is consistent with this theory. However, Plowman and Stephen found that the effectiveness of computers is limited in the preschool environment; their results indicate that computers are only effective when directed by the teacher. This suggests, according to the constructivist theory, that the role of preschool teachers is critical in successfully adopting computers as they existed in 2003.


title: Early childhood education

text: David Kolb's experiential learning theory, which was influenced by John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget, argues that children need to experience things to learn: "The process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combinations of grasping and transforming experience." The experimental learning theory is distinctive in that children are seen and taught as individuals. As a child explores and observes, teachers ask the child probing questions. The child can then adapt prior knowledge to learning new information.


title: Early childhood education

text: Kolb breaks down this learning cycle into four stages: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Children observe new situations, think about the situation, make meaning of the situation, then test that meaning in the world around them.


title: Early childhood education

text: In recent decades, studies have shown that early childhood education is critical in preparing children to enter and succeed in the (grade school) classroom, diminishing their risk of social-emotional mental health problems and increasing their self-sufficiency later in their lives. In other words, the child needs to be taught to rationalize everything and to be open to interpretations and critical thinking. There is no subject to be considered taboo, starting with the most basic knowledge of the world that they live in, and ending with deeper areas, such as morality, religion and science. Visual stimulus and response time as early as 3 months can be an indicator of verbal and performance IQ at age 4 years. When parents value ECE and its importance their children generally have a higher rate of attendance. This allows children the opportunity to build and nurture trusting relationships with educators and social relationships with peers.


title: Early childhood education

text: By providing education in a child's most formative years, ECE also has the capacity to pre-emptively begin closing the educational achievement gap between low and high-income students before formal schooling begins. Children of low socioeconomic status (SES) often begin school already behind their higher SES peers; on average, by the time they are three, children with high SES have three times the number of words in their vocabularies as children with low SES. Participation in ECE, however, has been proven to increase high school graduation rates, improve performance on standardized tests, and reduce both grade repetition and the number of children placed in special education.


title: Early childhood education

text: A study was conducted by the Aga Khan Development Network's Madrasa Early Childhood Programme on the impact that early childhood education had on students’ performance in grade school. Looking specifically at students who attended the Madrasa Early Childhood schools (virtually all of whom came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds), the study found that they had consistently ranked in the top 20% in grade 1 classes. The study also concluded that any formal early childhood education contributed to higher levels of cognitive development in language, mathematics, and non-verbal reasoning skills.


title: Early childhood education

text: Especially since the first wave of results from the Perry Preschool Project were published, there has been widespread consensus that the quality of early childhood education programs correlate with gains in low-income children's IQs and test scores, decreased grade retention, and lower special education rates.


title: Early childhood education

text: Several studies have reported that children enrolled in ECE increase their IQ scores by 4–11 points by age five, while a Milwaukee study reported a 25-point gain. In addition, students who had been enrolled in the Abecedarian Project, an often-cited ECE study, scored significantly higher on reading and math tests by age fifteen than comparable students who had not participated in early childhood programs. In addition, 36% of students in the Abecedarian Preschool Study treatment group would later enroll in four-year colleges compared to 14% of those in the control group.


title: Early childhood education

text: In 2017, researchers reported that children who participate in ECE graduate high school at significantly greater rates than those who do not. Additionally, those who participate in ECE require special education and must repeat a grade at significantly lower rates than their peers who did not receive ECE. The NIH asserts that ECE leads to higher test scores for students from preschool through age 21, improved grades in math and reading, and stronger odds that students will keep going to school and attend college.


title: Early childhood education

text: Nathaniel Hendren and Ben Sprung-Keyser, two Harvard economists, found high Marginal Values of Public Funds (MVPFs) for investments in programs supporting the health and early education of children, particularly those that reach children from low-income families. The average MVPF for these types of initiatives is over 5, while the MVPFs for programs for adults generally range from 0.5 to 2.


title: Early childhood education

text: Beyond benefitting societal good, ECE also significantly impacts the socioeconomic outcomes of individuals. For example, by age 26, students who had been enrolled in Chicago Child-Parent Centers were less likely to be arrested, abuse drugs, and receive food stamps; they were more likely to have high school diplomas, health insurance and full-time employment. Studies also show that ECE heightens social engagement, bolsters lifelong health, reduces the incidence of teen pregnancy, supports mental health, decreases the risk of heart disease, and lengthens lifespans.


title: Early childhood education

text: The World Bank's 2019 World Development Report on "The Changing Nature of Work" identifies early childhood development programs as one of the most effective ways governments can equip children with the skills they will need to succeed in future labor markets.


title: Early childhood education

text: According to a 2020 study in the Journal of Political Economy by Clemson University economist Jorge Luis García, Nobel laureate James J. Heckman and University of Southern California economists Duncan Ermini Leaf and María José Prados, every dollar spent on a high-quality early-childhood programs led to a return of $7.3 over the long-term.


title: Early childhood education

text: The Perry Preschool Project, which was conducted in the 1960s in Ypsilanti, Michigan, is the oldest social experiment in the field of early childhood education and has heavily influenced policy in the United States and across the globe. The experiment enrolled 128 three- and four-year-old African-American children with cognitive disadvantage from low-income families, who were then randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The intervention for children in the treatment group included active learning preschool sessions on weekdays for 2.5 hours per day. The intervention also included weekly visits by the teachers to the homes of the children for about 1.5 hours per visit to improve parent-child interactions at home.


title: Early childhood education

text: Initial evaluations of the Perry intervention showed that the preschool program failed to significantly boost an IQ measure. However, later evaluations that followed up the participants for more than fifty years have demonstrated the long-term economic benefits of the program, even after accounting for the small sample size of the experiment, flaws in its randomization procedure, and sample attrition. There is substantial evidence of large treatment effects on the criminal convictions of male participants, especially for violent crime, and their earnings in middle adulthood. Research points to improvements in non-cognitive skills, executive functioning, childhood home environment, and parental attachment as potential sources of the observed long-term impacts of the program. The intervention's many benefits also include improvements in late-midlife health for both male and female participants. Perry promoted educational attainment through two avenues: total years of education attained and rates of progression to a given level of education. This pattern is particularly evident for females. Treated females received less special education, progressed more quickly through grades, earned higher GPAs, and attained higher levels of education than their control group counterparts.


title: Early childhood education

text: Research also demonstrates spillover effects of the Perry program on the children and siblings of the original participants. A study concludes, "The children of treated participants have fewer school suspensions, higher levels of education and employment, and lower levels of participation in crime, compared with the children of untreated participants. Impacts are especially pronounced for the children of male participants. These treatment effects are associated with improved childhood home environments." The study also documents beneficial impacts on the male siblings of the original participants. Evidence from the Perry Preschool Project is noteworthy because it advocates for public spending on early childhood programs as an economic investment in a society's future, rather than in the interest of social justice.


title: Early childhood education

text: The first World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education took place in Moscow from 27 to 29 September 2010, jointly organized by UNESCO and the city of Moscow. The overarching goals of the conference are to:


title: Early childhood education

text: Under Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which the UN General Assembly unanimously approved in 2015, countries committed to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education’ including early childhood." Two targets related to goal 4 are "by 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education." The ‘Framework for Action’ adopted by UNESCO member states later in 2015 outlines how to translate this last target into practice, and encourages states to provide "at least one year of free and compulsory pre-primary education of good quality." The Sustainable Development Goals, however, are not binding international law.


title: Early childhood education

text: It has been argued that "International law provides no effective protection of the right to pre-primary education." Just two global treaties explicitly reference education prior to primary school. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women requires states to ensure equality for girls "in pre-school." And in the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, states agree that access to "public pre-school educational institutions" shall not be denied due to the parents’ or child's "irregular situation with respect to stay."


title: Early childhood education

text: Less explicitly, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires that "States Parties shall ensure an inclusive education system at all levels."


title: Early childhood education

text: In 2022, Human Rights Watch adopted a policy calling on states to make at least one year of free and compulsory, inclusive, quality pre-primary education available and accessible for all children. In doing so they advocated making one year of pre-primary education to be included as part of the minimum core of the right to education. They further called on all states to adopt a detailed plan of action for the progressive implementation of further years of pre-primary education, within a reasonable number of years to be fixed in the plan.


title: Early childhood education

text: According to UNESCO, a preschool curriculum is one that delivers educational content through daily activities and furthers a child's physical, cognitive, and social development. Generally, preschool curricula are only recognized by governments if they are based on academic research and reviewed by peers.


title: Early childhood education

text: Preschool for Child Rights have pioneered into preschool curricular areas and is contributing into child rights through their preschool curriculum.


title: Early childhood education

text: Curricula in early childhood care and education (ECCE) is the driving force behind any ECCE programme. It is ‘an integral part of the engine that, together with the energy and motivation of staff, provides the momentum that makes programmes live’. It follows therefore that the quality of a programme is greatly influenced by the quality of its curriculum. In early childhood, these may be programs for children or parents, including health and nutrition interventions and prenatal programs, as well as center-based programs for children.


title: Early childhood education

text: Children's learning potential and outcomes are negatively affected by exposure to violence, abuse and child labour. Thus, protecting young children from violence and exploitation is part of broad educational concerns. Due to difficulties and sensitivities around the issue of measuring and monitoring child protection violations and gaps in defining, collecting and analysing appropriate indicators, data coverage in this area is scant. However, proxy indicators can be used to assess the situation. For example, ratification of relevant international conventions indicates countries’ commitment to child protection. By April 2014, 194 countries had ratified the CRC3; and 179 had ratified the 1999 International Labour Organization's Convention (No. 182) concerning the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. However, many of these ratifications are yet to be given full effect through actual implementation of concrete measures. Globally, 150 million children aged 5–14 are estimated to be engaged in child labour. In conflict-affected poor countries, children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday compared to those in other poor countries. In industrialized countries, 4 per cent of children are physically abused each year and 10 per cent are neglected or psychologically abused.


title: Early childhood education

text: In both developed and developing countries, children of the poor and the disadvantaged remain the least served. This exclusion persists against the evidence that the added value of early childhood care and education services are higher for them than for their more affluent counterparts, even when such services are of modest quality. While the problem is more intractable in developing countries, the developed world still does not equitably provide quality early childhood care and education services for all its children. In many European countries, children, mostly from low-income and immigrant families, do not have access to good quality early childhood care and education.


title: Early childhood education

text: A lack of education during the early childhood years for orphans is a worldwide concern. Orphans are at higher risk of "missing out on schooling, living in households with less food security, and suffering from anxiety and depression." Education during these years has the potential to improve a child's "food and nutrition, health care, social welfare, and protection." This crisis is especially prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa which has been heavily impacted by the aids epidemic. UNICEF reports that "13.3 million children (0–17 years) worldwide have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Nearly 12 million of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa." Government policies such as the Free Basic Education Policy have worked to provide education for orphan children in this area, but the quality and inclusiveness of this policy has brought criticism.


title: Pickup artist

text: Pickup artists (PUA), self-identified as dating coaches, the seduction community or the pickup community, is a movement of men (or women) whose goal is seduction and sexual success. The community exists through Internet newsletters and blogs, marketing (e.g. banner ads, seminars, one-on-one coaching), forums and groups, as well as local clubs, known as "lairs".


title: Pickup artist

text: The rise of "seduction science", "game", "rizz", or "studied charisma" has been attributed to modern forms of dating and social norms between sexes which have developed from a perceived increase in the equality of women in western society and changes to traditional gender roles. Commentators in the media have described "game" as sexist or misogynistic.


title: Pickup artist

text: Modern pickup artist practice dates at least to 1970, with the publication of "How to Pick Up Girls!" by Eric Weber. However, one self-described "picker-upper of women" preceding Weber was rational emotive psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who wrote "The Art of Erotic Seduction" in 1967 with Roger Conway. It is a how-to guide for men that encourages them to meet women through the "pickup".


title: Pickup artist

text: In 1991, Ross Jeffries taught workshops, promoted a collection of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques called "speed seduction" (SS), and published a short book of his techniques, "How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed". Other exponents established themselves in roughly the same era, but lacked contacts with each other. In 1994, Lewis De Payne, then a student of Jeffries, founded the newsgroup alt.seduction.fast (ASF). This then spawned a network of other Internet discussion forums, email lists, blogs, and sites where seduction techniques could be exchanged.


title: Pickup artist

text: In the late 1990s, Clifford Lee began his "Cliff's List Seduction Letter" as a central independent voice of the community.


title: Pickup artist

text: Other pickup teachers emerged with competing methods, and became known within this community as "seduction gurus" or "gurus".


title: Pickup artist

text: The community was brought to greater mainstream awareness with the 1999 drama film "Magnolia", in which Tom Cruise portrayed a charismatic yet embittered and emotionally-troubled pickup guru who was loosely modeled on Ross Jeffries.


title: Pickup artist

text: In 2005, journalist Neil Strauss published "", an exposé of the PUA community. "The Game" reached the New York Times Bestseller List, and made pickup techniques known to a wider audience. The community was further publicized with the television show "The Pick Up Artist" (2007–2008) on VH1.


title: Pickup artist

text: Within the community, "seduction lairs" are underground meeting groups for men devoted to the study of obtaining sex taught in the seduction community. Lairs first began as study groups soon after Ross Jeffries released his first products and began teaching sometime in the early 1990s. A "lair" typically involves two elements: an online forum and group meetings.


title: Pickup artist

text: Many pickup artists work on their "game" by improving their understanding of psychology, their confidence and self-esteem ─ collectively termed "inner game" ─ and their social skills and physical appearance (physical fitness, fashion sense, grooming) ─ collectively termed the "outer game". Many members of the community believe that one's "game" is refined through regular practice, with the idea that the abilities needed to interact in this way with women can be improved.


title: Pickup artist

text: Pickup artists have a set of acronyms and jargon for describing male–female dynamics and social interaction. For example, "average frustrated chump" (AFC) is a term coined by Ross Jeffries to describe males who are typically clueless and incompetent with women.


title: Pickup artist

text: The original Jeffries' version of pickup is based on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a theory that claims existence of a connection between neurological processes, language and behavioural patterns learned through experience. This version of pickup supposes that one can model a person to obtain their skills. But, according to scientific consensus, NLP is a pseudoscience and its methods have no evidenciary base.


title: Pickup artist

text: Jeffries proposes to imitate seduction experts to obtain their skills and attract women's attention, and founds his claims on NLP. More modern pickup gurus gave up his strongest claims, while still using basic elements of NLP.


title: Pickup artist

text: The pickup community has a special terminology, which allows to distinguish the initiated. Pickup terms are borrowed from the everyday English vocabulary or from special areas like business terminology, thus are quite transparent for novices.


title: Pickup artist

text: The borrowing of the terminology corresponds to the process called framing, which means re-contextualization of a situation within the perspective of another situation, like sports training. In the process of framing the terms from several different domains are used. It can be considered as a metaphorical translation from one situation to another. The framing is also used to reduce tension of the need to succeed, because in the training, there is no problem in failure.


title: Pickup artist

text: A pickup artist (commonly abbreviated PUA) is a person who practices finding multiple sexual partners. Such a person purportedly abides by a certain system deemed effective by that community in his attempts to seduce partners.


title: Pickup artist

text: The use of "pickup" in this context, slang for making a casual acquaintance with a stranger in anticipation of sexual relations, was popularized by the 1970 book "How to Pick Up Girls" by Eric Weber, and by "Pick-Up Times", a short-lived 1970s magazine, and the 1987 semi-autobiographical romantic comedy "The Pick-up Artist", written and directed by James Toback. More recent works of pickup artist culture include Neil Strauss's book, "", and the 2007 VH1 reality television series, "The Pickup Artist", starring the pickup artist Mystery. The former pickup artist Roosh V, who has since recanted his past and converted to Oriental Orthodox Christianity, previously had self-published 14 books describing techniques for seducing women. According to "Salon", such books are the "cash cow" of the pickup industry.


title: Pickup artist

text: The term pickup artist is also associated with a male heterosexual subculture which strives to improve sexual success with women. Routines and gambits are developed to stimulate purported "attraction switches", sometimes combined with mental-conditioning techniques such as neuro-linguistic programming. Members aim to improve their seductive capabilities through the development of various lifestyles. The culture surrounding pickup has spawned an entire industry servicing those who want to improve their social and seduction skills with consultations and in-field training.


title: Pickup artist

text: Pickup artists receive mixed to negative responses from the press and general public, with many regarding both the practice and theory as immoral, sexist and ineffective. In 2014, following widely supported public petitions, U.S.-based PUA speaker and instructor Julien Blanc was denied entry to both the United Kingdom and Australia after he published YouTube videos explaining and demonstrating behaviors such as grabbing women by the throat, and forcing their heads towards his crotch.


title: Pickup artist

text: Pickup artists have also been parodied, as in the March 2011 "The Scott Mills Show". BBC Radio 1 debated Neil Strauss' "" on many shows.


title: Pickup artist

text: Psychologist Petra Boynton has stated that there is "no evidence of effectiveness" for any claims of pickup artists. Research by Nathan Oesch of the University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology, however, confirmed attraction and seduction principles, as described in Strauss' books on the subject, do have a factual basis in social, physiological and evolutionary psychology.


title: Pickup artist

text: There are a variety of PUA "schools of thought" that promote numerous different methods. These range from approaches that are very indirect, and stress starting with casual conversation before building into a flirt, to methods in which attraction is communicated very openly and directly. Most PUAs acknowledge the distinction between so-called "inner game" and "outer game", where the former relates to techniques directed towards increasing one's self-confidence and mindset, whilst the latter are about actual interaction with real people. Inner game may involve taking greater care in one's looks and presentation, identifying and neutralising self-defeating mental habits (also known as "limiting beliefs"), and developing mental routines to build confidence. Outer game involves actual interaction with individuals and groups of people, from body language to conversation. The pick-up artist may frequent a self-help group and converse with MRA's (men's rights activists), incels (involuntary celibates), and other PUA's to discuss techniques.


title: Pickup artist

text: In "", Neil Strauss documents various practices among pickup artists. Members of the community believe in achieving success with women through putatively scientific and empirical means, rather than by relying on good looks or instinct, or by following societal courtship conventions. The practice of going out with the purpose of meeting women is known as "sarging", a term coined by Ross Jeffries, after his cat "Sarge". A pickup artist can "sarge" alone, or with a wingman.


title: Pickup artist

text: Jeffries employed neuro-linguistic programming techniques for the purposes of sexual conquest, although Strauss claims in "The Game" that NLP was quickly rendered obsolete by the rise of techniques based on social dynamics, particularly Erik von Markovik's "Mystery Method". The Mystery Method describes seduction as a linear process involving three stages (establishing attraction, building comfort, and seduction) each of which involves a variety of techniques.


title: Pickup artist

text: "Negging", one of von Markovik's most famous and controversial techniques, has been described as the practice of giving a woman a backhanded compliment such as "nice nails – are they real?", to weaken her confidence and therefore render her more vulnerable to seduction, or that depriving a woman of obsequious validation and attention will influence her to seek it from the man who negs her. Strauss refers to negs as "disqualifiers" in his book "Rules of the Game", emphasizing that the primary purpose of using a neg is not to put a woman down, but for a man to disqualify himself as a potential suitor, thereby allowing for interaction to start on less loaded terms. Conor Friedersdorf lambasted the use of negging by pick-up artists, but admitted that, based on his observations, negging did appear to be effective at generating attraction from some women.


title: Pickup artist

text: "Pawning" is trading or discarding an unwanted woman as proof of the PUA's own social value, and "going caveman" is escalating physical contact while reducing verbal contact.


title: Pickup artist

text: One constellation of PUA techniques, called "Last Minute Resistance" tactics (LMR tactics), is designed to convince a woman to have sex after she has indicated that she doesn't want to. This includes tactics from those which are mutually beneficial – such as being okay with the woman being on her period – to "callous manipulation" and rape.


title: Pickup artist

text: Pickup artists generally assume the mindset that men should lead and initiate contacts and plans in general in order to be more attractive, and that women will not generally initiate contact although they want men to, requiring men to begin any interaction by approaching them, but many have also cultivated a sensitivity to direct and indirect signals of possible sexual interest.


title: Pickup artist

text: Pickup artists often practice approaching and opening repetitively; some have done thousands of approaches. Strauss describes a pickup artist who did 125 approaches in one day.


title: Pickup artist

text: The "Mystery Method" encourages approaching groups of strangers, starting indirect conversations, and giving attention to all members of the group without initiating conversation with the "target" until attraction has been established.


title: Pickup artist

text: Having a notorious reputation outside the community, the PUA movement has been described as sexist, misogynistic and pseudoscientific.


title: Pickup artist

text: Roosh V has been called hateful and a misogynist for his views on women and sex by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and accused of rape advocacy and multiple instances of rape depicted in his books.


title: Pickup artist

text: Feminist BDSM writer and activist Clarisse Thorn, author of "Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men", criticizes the PUA community as frequently "absurd and sexist", "pushy and problematic" and encouraging adversarial gender roles. However, she also argues that PUA tactics are worth understanding because they are not unique to the PUA community, but instead represent society-wide beliefs and patterns and strategies of human sexual behaviour. Other dating coaches, such as Sebastian Harris, publicly speak against the misogynistic tendencies of pickup artists. The UCLA Center for the Study of Women argues that PUA culture is misogynistic, and exists on a continuum of sexist behaviours and attitudes that includes rape and murder.


title: Pickup artist

text: Pickup artists have received increased media attention, since the publication of Strauss's article on the community in "The New York Times", and his memoir "The Game". Response has been varied; it has been called misogynistic, and a review of "The Game" in the "San Francisco Chronicle" characterized the community as "a puerile cult of sexual conquest", and calls its tactics "sinister" and "pathetic". According to the review, "if women in the book are sometimes treated as a commodity, they come out looking better than the men, who can be downright loathsome—and show themselves eventually to be pretty sad, dysfunctional characters".


title: Pickup artist

text: Feminists tend to be critical of pickup artists. Beatrix Campbell has stated that "The Game" "sexually objectifies women", arguing that "Nowhere from its description do you get a sense of men being helped to be human in an easy and agreeable way...it's not about having any rapport or relationship... the only thing that will help them in relationships is empathy and liking women."


title: Pickup artist

text: According to an article in "Eye Weekly", some feminists believe that pickup "isn't just cheesy; it's offensive". The article cites a proposal put forward by a feministblogs.org writer as an alternative to the formula used by expert PUAs: "Shake my hand. [Say] 'Hi, my name is ...' Treat me like a human being. Avoid seeing women as conquests and men as competition."


title: Pickup artist

text: An article in the "Houston Press" claimed that pickup artist activity "isn't the lechfest it might sound like". The article quotes the webmaster of confidentup.com defending the community: "It's no more deceptive than push-up bras or heels or going to the gym to work out...This isn't just a game of words and seduction, it's an overall life improvement." Strauss says, "I really think all of these routines and manipulations are just a way for a guy to get his foot in the door so that if a woman connects with him, she can still choose him," and that pickup techniques "can be used for good or evil!" He argues that "women are incredibly intuitive—the creepy guys with bad intentions don't do nearly as well as the guys who love and respect women".


title: Pickup artist

text: Several writers describe observing pickup artists first-hand. Some women recount experiences with men they believed to be pickup artists who tried to "pick them up", and some men recount trying out pickup techniques. Catherine Townsend, writing for "The Independent", describes a negative experience with a man she believed was a pickup artist and used a lot of "negs" on her: "The problem is that some guys clearly don't know when to quit."


title: Pickup artist

text: An article in "San Francisco Magazine" recounts the experience of the blogger "Dolly", who is the author of the popular sex blog "The Truth about Cocks and Dolls", with pickup artists. According to the article, Dolly was:


title: Pickup artist

text: After spending three days immersed in a Mystery Method Corp (now Love Systems) seminar, Gene Weingarten expressed his uneasiness about "a step by step tutorial for men in how to pick up women, make them comfortable in your presence, and bed them, ideally within seven hours of your first meeting" and wondered aloud, "Is there something inherently wrong with the notion of sexual conquest as a classroom-taught skill, complete with a long hierarchy of 'lines' that work, seemingly spontaneous topics of conversation that are anything but spontaneous, tricks for seeming 'vulnerable', and tips on how to behave so as to deliver subtle but effective nonverbal inducements to intimacy?"


title: Pickup artist

text: For an article for the "Times Online", Hugo Rifkind participated in a seminar by Neil Strauss. Rifkind describes initially struggling with pickup techniques, eventually learning to attract women's interest, and then feeling guilty. Rifkind writes, "After a little more practice, my 'game' is improving dramatically. I can open with fluency, and there's an injection of confidence which comes from knowing exactly what you are going to say next." When he attracts a woman's attention, "she is—quite honestly—looking at me like I'm the most fascinating person she's ever met. As a human being and, perhaps more crucially, as somebody with a girlfriend, I feel like absolute scum."


title: Pickup artist

text: The media attention and rapid increase in pickup artists has led to commercialization and competition. Gurus sell workshops, books, e-books, DVDs, CDs and online video courses and video-call mentoring over the Internet. In "", Strauss describes the competition between gurus. In The Journal, teaching of these methods is shown by way of 50+ examples.


title: Pickup artist

text: An academic paper on the community, published in 2012 by Eric C. Hendriks in the journal "Cultural Analysis", details the value system guiding successful pickup artists based on an international study including participant observation of bootcamp and "lair" meetings in Germany. The article argues that the values of successful practitioners of the "Venusian arts" are informed by an intertwining of "hedonistic goals and diffused forms of innerworldly asceticism". According to Hendricks, the hedonistic goal of sexual satisfaction interacts in a complex fashion with a set of "disciplinarian and ascetic values", and the author stresses that these disciplinarian and ascetic values are central to the value system of performant practitioners, even though the marketing of gurus often promises an easy, effortless "quick fix".


title: Pickup artist

text: Nathan Oesch from the University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology claims to have confirmed attraction and pickup principles, as described in Strauss' books on the subject, do have a factual basis in social, physiological and evolutionary psychology.


title: Pickup artist

text: Andrew King's cultural history of the pickup artist in the journal "Sexuality & Culture" argues that, as a genre, the growth of PUA philosophy parallels the rise of feminism in academic and popular culture—and in some ways can be seen as a critique of its limitations, particularly the idea of gender egalitarianism.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s.


title: Smalltalk

text: The language was first generally released as Smalltalk-80. Smalltalk-like languages are in active development and have gathered loyal communities of users around them. ANSI Smalltalk was ratified in 1998 and represents the standard version of Smalltalk.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk took second place for "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2017, but it was not among the 26 most loved programming languages of the 2018 survey.


title: Smalltalk

text: There are a large number of Smalltalk variants. The unqualified word "Smalltalk" is often used to indicate the Smalltalk-80 language, the first version to be made publicly available and created in 1980. The first hardware-environments which run the Smalltalk VMs were Xerox Alto computers.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk was the product of research led by Alan Kay at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); Alan Kay designed most of the early Smalltalk versions, Adele Goldberg wrote most of the documentation, and Dan Ingalls implemented most of the early versions. The first version, termed Smalltalk-71, was created by Kay in a few mornings on a bet that a programming language based on the idea of message passing inspired by Simula could be implemented in "a page of code". A later variant used for research work is now termed Smalltalk-72 and influenced the development of the Actor model. Its syntax and execution model were very different from modern Smalltalk variants.


title: Smalltalk

text: After significant revisions which froze some aspects of execution semantics to gain performance (by adopting a Simula-like class inheritance model of execution), Smalltalk-76 was created. This system had a development environment featuring most of the now familiar tools, including a class library code browser/editor. Smalltalk-80 added metaclasses, to help maintain the "everything is an object" (except variables) paradigm by associating properties and behavior with individual classes, and even primitives such as integer and boolean values (for example, to support different ways to create instances).


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk-80 was the first language variant made available outside of PARC, first as Smalltalk-80 Version 1, being given to a small number of firms (Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Tektronix, and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)) and universities (UC Berkeley) for "peer review" and implementing on their platforms. Later, in 1983, a general availability implementation, named Smalltalk-80 Version 2, was released as an image (platform-independent file with object definitions) and a virtual machine specification. ANSI Smalltalk has been the standard language reference since 1998.


title: Smalltalk

text: Two currently popular Smalltalk implementation variants are descendants of those original Smalltalk-80 images. Squeak is an open source implementation derived from Smalltalk-80 Version 1 by way of Apple Smalltalk. VisualWorks is derived from Smalltalk-80 version 2 by way of Smalltalk-80 2.5 and ObjectWorks (both products of ParcPlace Systems, a Xerox PARC spin-off company formed to bring Smalltalk to the market). As an interesting link between generations, in 2001 Vassili Bykov implemented Hobbes, a virtual machine running Smalltalk-80 inside VisualWorks. (Dan Ingalls later ported Hobbes to Squeak.)


title: Smalltalk

text: During the late 1980s to mid-1990s, Smalltalk environments—including support, training and add-ons—were sold by two competing organizations: ParcPlace Systems and Digitalk, both California based. ParcPlace Systems tended to focus on the Unix/Sun microsystems market, while Digitalk focused on Intel-based PCs running Microsoft Windows or IBM's OS/2. Both firms struggled to take Smalltalk mainstream due to Smalltalk's substantial memory needs, limited run-time performance, and initial lack of supported connectivity to SQL-based relational database servers. While the high price of ParcPlace Smalltalk limited its market penetration to mid-sized and large commercial organizations, the Digitalk products initially tried to reach a wider audience with a lower price. IBM initially supported the Digitalk product, but then entered the market with a Smalltalk product in 1995 called VisualAge/Smalltalk. Easel introduced Enfin at this time on Windows and OS/2. Enfin became far more popular in Europe, as IBM introduced it into IT shops before their development of IBM Smalltalk (later VisualAge). Enfin was later acquired by Cincom Systems, and is now sold under the name ObjectStudio, and is part of the Cincom Smalltalk product suite.


title: Smalltalk

text: In 1995, ParcPlace and Digitalk merged into ParcPlace-Digitalk and then rebranded in 1997 as ObjectShare, located in Irvine, CA. ObjectShare (NASDAQ: OBJS) was traded publicly until 1999, when it was delisted and dissolved. The merged firm never managed to find an effective response to Java as to market positioning, and by 1997 its owners were looking to sell the business. In 1999, Seagull Software acquired the ObjectShare Java development lab (including the original Smalltalk/V and Visual Smalltalk development team), and still owns VisualSmalltalk, although worldwide distribution rights for the Smalltalk product remained with ObjectShare who then sold them to Cincom. VisualWorks was sold to Cincom and is now part of Cincom Smalltalk. Cincom has backed Smalltalk strongly, releasing multiple new versions of VisualWorks and ObjectStudio each year since 1999.


title: Smalltalk

text: Cincom, GemTalk, and Instantiations, continue to sell Smalltalk environments. IBM has 'end of life'd VisualAge Smalltalk having in the late 1990s decided to back Java instead and it is, , supported by Instantiations, Inc. who renamed the product VA Smalltalk (VAST Platform) and continue to release new versions yearly. The open Squeak implementation has an active community of developers, including many of the original Smalltalk community, and has recently been used to provide the Etoys environment on the OLPC project, a toolkit for developing collaborative applications Croquet Project, and the Open Cobalt virtual world application. GNU Smalltalk is a free software implementation of a derivative of Smalltalk-80 from the GNU project. Pharo Smalltalk is a fork of Squeak oriented toward research and use in commercial environments.


title: Smalltalk

text: A significant development, that has spread across all Smalltalk environments as of 2016, is the increasing usage of two web frameworks, Seaside and AIDA/Web, to simplify the building of complex web applications. Seaside has seen considerable market interest with Cincom, Gemstone, and Instantiations incorporating and extending it.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk was one of many object-oriented programming languages based on Simula. Smalltalk is also one of the most influential programming languages. Virtually all of the object-oriented languages that came after—Flavors, CLOS, Objective-C, Java, Python, Ruby, and many others—were influenced by Smalltalk. Smalltalk was also one of the most popular languages for agile software development methods, rapid application development (RAD) or prototyping, and software design patterns. The highly productive environment provided by Smalltalk platforms made them ideal for rapid, iterative development.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk emerged from a larger program of Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded research that in many ways defined the modern world of computing. In addition to Smalltalk, working prototypes of things such as hypertext, GUIs, multimedia, the mouse, telepresence, and the Internet were developed by ARPA researchers in the 1960s. Alan Kay (one of the inventors of Smalltalk) also described a tablet computer he called the Dynabook which resembles modern tablet computers like the iPad.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk environments were often the first to develop what are now common object-oriented software design patterns. One of the most popular is the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern for user interface design. The MVC pattern enables developers to have multiple consistent views of the same underlying data. It's ideal for software development environments, where there are various views (e.g., entity-relation, dataflow, object model, etc.) of the same underlying specification. Also, for simulations or games where the underlying model may be viewed from various angles and levels of abstraction.


title: Smalltalk

text: In addition to the MVC pattern, the Smalltalk language and environment were highly influential in the history of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) user interface, font editors, and desktop metaphors for UI design. The powerful built-in debugging and object inspection tools that came with Smalltalk environments set the standard for all the integrated development environments, starting with Lisp Machine environments, that came after.


title: Smalltalk

text: As in other object-oriented languages, the central concept in Smalltalk-80 (but not in Smalltalk-72) is that of an "object". An object is always an "instance" of a "class". Classes are "blueprints" that describe the properties and behavior of their instances. For example, a GUI's window class might declare that windows have properties such as the label, the position and whether the window is visible or not. The class might also declare that instances support operations such as opening, closing, moving and hiding. Each particular window object would have its own values of those properties, and each of them would be able to perform operations defined by its class.


title: Smalltalk

text: The state an object holds is always private to that object. Other objects can query or change that state only by sending requests (messages) to the object to do so. Any message can be sent to any object: when a message is received, the receiver determines whether that message is appropriate. Alan Kay has commented that despite the attention given to objects, messaging is the most important concept in Smalltalk: "The big idea is 'messaging'—that is what the kernel of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's something that was never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase)."


title: Smalltalk

text: Unlike most other languages, Smalltalk objects can be modified while the system is running. Live coding and applying fixes ‘on-the-fly’ is a dominant programming methodology for Smalltalk and is one of the main reasons for its efficiency.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk is a "pure" object-oriented programming language, meaning that, unlike C++ and Java, there is no difference between values which are objects and values which are primitive types. In Smalltalk, primitive values such as integers, booleans and characters are also objects, in the sense that they are instances of corresponding classes, and operations on them are invoked by sending messages. A programmer can change or extend (through subclassing) the classes that implement primitive values, so that new behavior can be defined for their instances—for example, to implement new control structures—or even so that their existing behavior will be changed. This fact is summarized in the commonly heard phrase "In Smalltalk everything is an object", which may be more accurately expressed as "all values are objects", as variables are not.


title: Smalltalk

text: Since all values are objects, classes are also objects. Each class is an instance of the "metaclass" of that class. Metaclasses in turn are also objects, and are all instances of a class called Metaclass. Code blocks—Smalltalk's way of expressing anonymous functions—are also objects.


title: Smalltalk

text: Reflection is a term that computer scientists apply to software programs that have the ability to inspect their own structure, for example their parse tree or data types of input and output parameters. Reflection is a feature of dynamic, interactive languages such as Smalltalk and Lisp. Interactive programs with reflection (either interpreted or compiled) maintain the state of all in-memory objects, including the code object itself, which are generated during parsing/compilation and are programmatically accessible and modifiable.


title: Smalltalk

text: Reflection is also a feature of having a meta-model as Smalltalk does. The meta-model is the model that describes the language, and developers can use the meta-model to do things like walk through, examine, and modify the parse tree of an object, or find all the instances of a certain kind of structure (e.g., all instances of the Method class in the meta-model).


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk-80 is a totally reflective system. Smalltalk-80 provides both structural and computational reflection. Smalltalk is a structurally reflective system which structure is defined by Smalltalk-80 objects. The classes and methods that define the system are also objects and fully part of the system that they help define. The Smalltalk compiler compiles textual source code into method objects, typically instances of codice_1. These get added to classes by storing them in a class's method dictionary. The part of the class hierarchy that defines classes can add new classes to the system. The system is extended by running Smalltalk-80 code that creates or defines classes and methods. In this way a Smalltalk-80 system is a "living" system, carrying around the ability to extend itself at run time.


title: Smalltalk

text: Since the classes are objects, they can be asked questions such as "what methods do you implement?" or "what fields/slots/instance variables do you define?". So objects can easily be inspected, copied, (de)serialized and so on with generic code that applies to any object in the system.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk-80 also provides computational reflection, the ability to observe the computational state of the system. In languages derived from the original Smalltalk-80 the current activation of a method is accessible as an object named via a pseudo-variable (one of the six reserved words), codice_2. By sending messages to codice_2 a method activation can ask questions like "who sent this message to me". These facilities make it possible to implement co-routines or Prolog-like back-tracking without modifying the virtual machine. The exception system is implemented using this facility. One of the more interesting uses of this is in the Seaside web framework which relieves the programmer of dealing with the complexity of a Web Browser's back button by storing continuations for each edited page and switching between them as the user navigates a web site. Programming the web server using Seaside can then be done using a more conventional programming style.


title: Smalltalk

text: An example of how Smalltalk can use reflection is the mechanism for handling errors. When an object is sent a message that it does not implement, the virtual machine sends the object the codice_4 message with a reification of the message as an argument. The message (another object, an instance of codice_5) contains the selector of the message and an codice_6 of its arguments. In an interactive Smalltalk system the default implementation of codice_4 is one that opens an error window (a Notifier) reporting the error to the user. Through this and the reflective facilities the user can examine the context in which the error occurred, redefine the offending code, and continue, all within the system, using Smalltalk-80's reflective facilities.


title: Smalltalk

text: By creating a class that understands (implements) only doesNotUnderstand:, one can create an instance that can intercept any message sent to it via its doesNotUnderstand: method. Such instances are called transparent proxies. Such proxies can then be used to implement a number of facilities such as distributed Smalltalk where messages are exchanged between multiple Smalltalk systems, database interfaces where objects are transparently faulted out of a database, promises, etc. The design of distributed Smalltalk influenced such systems as CORBA.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk-80 syntax is rather minimalist, based on only a handful of declarations and reserved words. In fact, only six "keywords" are reserved in Smalltalk: codice_8, codice_9, codice_10, codice_11, codice_12, and codice_2. These are properly termed "pseudo-variables", identifiers that follow the rules for variable identifiers but denote bindings that a programmer cannot change. The codice_8, codice_9, and codice_10 pseudo-variables are singleton instances. codice_11 and codice_12 refer to the receiver of a message within a method activated in response to that message, but sends to codice_12 are looked up in the superclass of the method's defining class rather than the class of the receiver, which allows methods in subclasses to invoke methods of the same name in superclasses. codice_2 refers to the current activation record. The only built-in language constructs are message sends, assignment, method return and literal syntax for some objects. From its origins as a language for children of all ages, standard Smalltalk syntax uses punctuation in a manner more like English than mainstream coding languages. The remainder of the language, including control structures for conditional evaluation and iteration, is implemented on top of the built-in constructs by the standard Smalltalk class library. (For performance reasons, implementations may recognize and treat as special some of those messages; however, this is only an optimization and is not hardwired into the language syntax.)


title: Smalltalk

text: The adage that "Smalltalk syntax fits on a postcard" refers to a code snippet by Ralph Johnson, demonstrating all the basic standard syntactic elements of methods:


title: Smalltalk

text: The following examples illustrate the most common objects which can be written as literal values in Smalltalk-80 methods.


title: Smalltalk

text: The last two entries are a binary and a hexadecimal number, respectively. The number before the 'r' is the radix or base. The base does not have to be a power of two; for example 36rSMALLTALK is a valid number equal to 80738163270632 decimal.


title: Smalltalk

text: Two equal strings (strings are equal if they contain all the same characters) can be different objects residing in different places in memory. In addition to strings, Smalltalk has a class of character sequence objects called Symbol. Symbols are guaranteed to be unique—there can be no two equal symbols which are different objects. Because of that, symbols are very cheap to compare and are often used for language artifacts such as message selectors (see below).


title: Smalltalk

text: Many Smalltalk dialects implement additional syntaxes for other objects, but the ones above are the essentials supported by all.


title: Smalltalk

text: The two kinds of variables commonly used in Smalltalk are instance variables and temporary variables. Other variables and related terminology depend on the particular implementation. For example, VisualWorks has class shared variables and namespace shared variables, while Squeak and many other implementations have class variables, pool variables and global variables.


title: Smalltalk

text: Temporary variable declarations in Smalltalk are variables declared inside a method (see below). They are declared at the top of the method as names separated by spaces and enclosed by vertical bars. For example:


title: Smalltalk

text: declares two variables: index and vowels. All variables are initialized. Variables are initialized to nil except the indexed variables of Strings, which are initialized to the null character or ByteArrays which are initialized to 0.


title: Smalltalk

text: Assigns the string codice_23 to the formerly declared vowels variable. The string is an object (a sequence of characters between single quotes is the syntax for literal strings), created by the compiler at compile time.


title: Smalltalk

text: In the original Parc Place image, the glyph of the underscore character ⟨_⟩ appeared as a left-facing arrow ⟨←⟩ (like in the 1963 version of the ASCII code). Smalltalk originally accepted this left-arrow as the only assignment operator. Some modern code still contains what appear to be underscores acting as assignments, hearkening back to this original usage. Most modern Smalltalk implementations accept either the underscore or the colon-equals syntax.


title: Smalltalk

text: The message is the most fundamental language construct in Smalltalk. Even control structures are implemented as message sends. Smalltalk adopts by default a dynamic dispatch and single dispatch strategy (as opposed to multiple dispatch, used by some other object-oriented languages).


title: Smalltalk

text: In this situation 42 is called the message "receiver", while 'factorial' is the message "selector". The receiver responds to the message by returning a value (presumably in this case the factorial of 42). Among other things, the result of the message can be assigned to a variable:


title: Smalltalk

text: "factorial" above is what is called a "unary message" because only one object, the receiver, is involved. Messages can carry additional objects as "arguments", as follows:


title: Smalltalk

text: In this expression two objects are involved: 2 as the receiver and 4 as the message argument. The message result, or in Smalltalk parlance, "the answer" is supposed to be 16. Such messages are called "keyword messages". A message can have more arguments, using the following syntax:


title: Smalltalk

text: which answers the index of character 'o' in the receiver string, starting the search from index 6. The selector of this message is "indexOf:startingAt:", consisting of two pieces, or "keywords".


title: Smalltalk

text: Such interleaving of keywords and arguments is meant to improve readability of code, since arguments are explained by their preceding keywords. For example, an expression to create a rectangle using a C++ or Java-like syntax might be written as:


title: Smalltalk

text: The receiver in this case is "Rectangle", a class, and the answer will be a new instance of the class with the specified width and height.


title: Smalltalk

text: Finally, most of the special (non-alphabetic) characters can be used as what are called "binary messages". These allow mathematical and logical operators to be written in their traditional form:


title: Smalltalk

text: which sends the message "+" to the receiver 3 with 4 passed as the argument (the answer of which will be 7). Similarly,


title: Smalltalk

text: Notice, that the Smalltalk-80 language itself does not imply the meaning of those operators. The outcome of the above is only defined by how the receiver of the message (in this case a Number instance) responds to messages "+" and ">".


title: Smalltalk

text: A side effect of this mechanism is operator overloading. A message ">" can also be understood by other objects, allowing the use of expressions of the form "a > b" to compare them.


title: Smalltalk

text: An expression can include multiple message sends. In this case expressions are parsed according to a simple order of precedence. Unary messages have the highest precedence, followed by binary messages, followed by keyword messages. For example:


title: Smalltalk

text: will change the meaning so that the expression first computes "3 factorial + 4" yielding 10. That 10 then receives the second "factorial" message, yielding 3628800. 3628800 then receives "between:and:", answering false.


title: Smalltalk

text: Note that because the meaning of binary messages is not hardwired into Smalltalk-80 syntax, all of them are considered to have equal precedence and are evaluated simply from left to right. Because of this, the meaning of Smalltalk expressions using binary messages can be different from their "traditional" interpretation:


title: Smalltalk

text: is evaluated as "(3 + 4) * 5", producing 35. To obtain the expected answer of 23, parentheses must be used to explicitly define the order of operations:


title: Smalltalk

text: which sends "factorial" to 3, then "factorial" to the result (6), then "log" to the result (720), producing the result 2.85733.


title: Smalltalk

text: A series of expressions can be written as in the following (hypothetical) example, each separated by a period. This example first creates a new instance of class Window, stores it in a variable, and then sends two messages to it.


title: Smalltalk

text: If a series of messages are sent to the same receiver as in the example above, they can also be written as a "cascade" with individual messages separated by semicolons:


title: Smalltalk

text: This rewrite of the earlier example as a single expression avoids the need to store the new window in a temporary variable. According to the usual precedence rules, the unary message "new" is sent first, and then "label:" and "open" are sent to the answer of "new".


title: Smalltalk

text: A block of code (an anonymous function) can be expressed as a literal value (which is an object, since all values are objects). This is achieved with square brackets:


title: Smalltalk

text: The resulting block object can form a closure: it can access the variables of its enclosing lexical scopes at any time. Blocks are first-class objects.


title: Smalltalk

text: Blocks can be executed by sending them the "value" message (compound variations exist in order to provide parameters to the block e.g. 'value:value:' and 'valueWithArguments:').


title: Smalltalk

text: The literal representation of blocks was an innovation which on the one hand allowed certain code to be significantly more readable; it allowed algorithms involving iteration to be coded in a clear and concise way. Code that would typically be written with loops in some languages can be written concisely in Smalltalk using blocks, sometimes in a single line. But more importantly blocks allow control structure to be expressed using messages and polymorphism, since blocks defer computation and polymorphism can be used to select alternatives. So if-then-else in Smalltalk is written and implemented as


title: Smalltalk

text: Note that this is related to functional programming, wherein patterns of computation (here selection) are abstracted into higher-order functions. For example, the message "select:" on a Collection is equivalent to the higher-order function filter on an appropriate functor.


title: Smalltalk

text: Control structures do not have special syntax in Smalltalk. They are instead implemented as messages sent to objects. For example, conditional execution is implemented by sending the message ifTrue: to a Boolean object, passing as an argument the block of code to be executed if and only if the Boolean receiver is true. The two subclasses of Boolean both implement ifTrue:, where the implementation in subclass True always evaluates the block and the implementation in subclass False never evaluates the block.


title: Smalltalk

text: Blocks are also used to implement user-defined control structures, enumerators, visitors, exception handling, pluggable behavior and many other patterns.


title: Smalltalk

text: In the last line, the string is sent the message select: with an argument that is a code block literal. The code block literal will be used as a predicate function that should answer true if and only if an element of the String should be included in the Collection of characters that satisfy the test represented by the code block that is the argument to the "select:" message.


title: Smalltalk

text: A String object responds to the "select:" message by iterating through its members (by sending itself the message "do:"), evaluating the selection block ("aBlock") once with each character it contains as the argument. When evaluated (by being sent the message "value: each"), the selection block (referenced by the parameter "aBlock", and defined by the block literal "[:aCharacter | aCharacter isVowel]"), answers a boolean, which is then sent "ifTrue:". If the boolean is the object true, the character is added to a string to be returned.


title: Smalltalk

text: Because the "select:" method is defined in the abstract class Collection, it can also be used like this:


title: Smalltalk

text: The exception handler's "ex" argument provides access to the state of the suspended operation (stack frame, line-number, receiver and arguments etc.) and is also used to control how the computation is to proceed (by sending one of "ex proceed", "ex reject", "ex restart" or "ex return").


title: Smalltalk

text: Often, most of this definition will be filled in by the environment. Notice that this is a message to the codice_24 class to create a subclass called codice_25. In other words: classes are first-class objects in Smalltalk which can receive messages just like any other object and can be created dynamically at execution time.


title: Smalltalk

text: When an object receives a message, a method matching the message name is invoked. The following code defines a method publish, and so defines what will happen when this object receives the 'publish' message.


title: Smalltalk

text: Note that objects are responsible for determining dynamically at runtime which method to execute in response to a message—while in many languages this may be (sometimes, or even always) determined statically at compile time.


title: Smalltalk

text: creates (and returns) a new instance of the MessagePublisher class. This is typically assigned to a variable:


title: Smalltalk

text: The Hello world program is used by virtually all texts to new programming languages as the first program learned to show the most basic syntax and environment of the language. For Smalltalk, the program is extremely simple to write. The following code, the message "show:" is sent to the object "Transcript" with the String literal 'Hello, world!' as its argument. Invocation of the "show:" method causes the characters of its argument (the String literal 'Hello, world!') to be displayed in the transcript ("terminal") window.


title: Smalltalk

text: Most popular programming systems separate static program code (in the form of class definitions, functions or procedures) from dynamic, or run time, program state (such as objects or other forms of program data). They load program code when a program starts, and any prior program state must be recreated explicitly from configuration files or other data sources. Any settings the program (and programmer) does not explicitly save must be set up again for each restart. A traditional program also loses much useful document information each time a program saves a file, quits, and reloads. This loses details such as undo history or cursor position. Image based systems don't force losing all that just because a computer is turned off, or an OS updates.


title: Smalltalk

text: Many Smalltalk systems, however, do not differentiate between program data (objects) and code (classes). In fact, classes are objects. Thus, most Smalltalk systems store the entire program state (including both Class and non-Class objects) in an image file. The image can then be loaded by the Smalltalk virtual machine to restore a Smalltalk-like system to a prior state. This was inspired by FLEX, a language created by Alan Kay and described in his M.Sc. thesis.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk images are similar to (restartable) core dumps and can provide the same functionality as core dumps, such as delayed or remote debugging with full access to the program state at the time of error. Other languages that model application code as a form of data, such as Lisp, often use image-based persistence as well. This method of persistence is powerful for rapid development because all the development information (e.g. parse trees of the program) is saved which facilitates debugging. However, it also has serious drawbacks as a true persistence mechanism. For one thing, developers may often want to hide implementation details and not make them available in a run time environment. For reasons of legality and maintenance, allowing anyone to modify a program at run time inevitably introduces complexity and potential errors that would not be possible with a compiled system that exposes no source code in the run time environment. Also, while the persistence mechanism is easy to use, it lacks the true persistence abilities needed for most multi-user systems. The most obvious is the ability to do transactions with multiple users accessing the same database in parallel.


title: Smalltalk

text: Everything in Smalltalk-80 is available for modification from within a running program. This means that, for example, the IDE can be changed in a running system without restarting it. In some implementations, the syntax of the language or the garbage collection implementation can also be changed on the fly. Even the statement codice_28 is valid in Smalltalk, although executing it is not recommended.


title: Smalltalk

text: Smalltalk programs are usually compiled to bytecode, which is then interpreted by a virtual machine or dynamically translated into machine-native code.


title: Smalltalk

text: OpenSmalltalk VM (OS VM) is a notable implementation of the Smalltalk Runtime runner on which many modern Smalltalk implementations are based or derived from. OS VM itself is transpiled from a set of Smalltalk source code files (using a subset of Smalltalk called Slang) to native C language source code (by using a transpiler called VMMaker), which is in turn compiled against specific platform and architecture of the hardware practically enabling cross-platform execution of the Smalltalk images. The source code is available on GitHub and distributed under MIT License. The known Smalltalk implementations based on the OS VM are:


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Malcolm Wrightson Nance (born September 20, 1961) is an American author and media pundit. He is a former United States Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer specializing in naval cryptology.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance is an intelligence and foreign policy analyst who frequently discusses the history, personalities, and organization of jihadi radicalization and al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS), Southwest Asian and African terror groups, as well as counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare. Schooled in Arabic, he is active in the field of national security policy particularly, in anti- and counter-terrorism intelligence, terrorist strategy and tactics, torture and counter-ideology in combating Islamic extremism. In 2016, he published the book, "Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe", and published "The Plot to Hack America" the same year.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: In 2014, he founded and became the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI), a Hudson, New York–based think tank.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance was born in Philadelphia. He attended the city's West Catholic Boys High School. He studied Spanish, French, and Latin, and took advantage of free classes in Russian and Chinese offered at South Philadelphia High School on Saturdays. In 2011, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York's Excelsior College.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance began working in the civilian intelligence arena through research into the history of the Soviet Union and its spy agency the KGB. He subsequently analyzed Middle East terrorism and sovereign nations with ties to the Russian Federation.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance served in the U.S. Navy for 20 years from 1981 to 2001, receiving several military decorations. As a U.S. Navy specialist in Naval Cryptology, Nance was involved in numerous counter-terrorism, intelligence, and combat operations. He garnered expertise within the fields of intelligence and counterterrorism.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: He was an instructor in wartime and peacetime Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), training Navy and Marine Corps pilots and aircrew how to survive as prisoners of war. There Nance helped to initiate the Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival course of instruction.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance took part in combat operations that occurred after the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, was peripherally involved with the 1986 United States bombing of Libya, served on USS "Wainwright" during Operation Praying Mantis and was aboard during the sinking of the Iranian missile boat "Joshan", served on USS "Tripoli" during the Gulf War, and assisted during a Banja Luka, Bosnia air strike.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: On April 18, 2022, Nance revealed that he had joined the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine in March 2022. He supports the North Atlantic Fellas Organization and uses a NAFO Shiba Inu as his Twitter profile icon. In an interview with Michael Harriot of "The Guardian", Nance alluded to African-American military aviator Eugene Bullard's service in the French Foreign Legion to his service in Ukraine, hoping to inspire "African Americans and young Americans who have been in the military" and describing the International Legion as "the pantheon of the defense of democracy in the defense of Ukraine".


title: Malcolm Nance

text: In 2001, Nance founded Special Readiness Services International (SRSI), an intelligence support company. On the morning of 9/11, driving to Arlington he witnessed the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. He acted as a first responder at the helipad crash site where he helped organize the rescue and recovery of victims. Subsequently, Nance served as an intelligence and security contractor in Iraq, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and North Africa.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Between 2005 and 2007 Nance was a visiting lecturer on counterterrorism in Sydney, Australia at Macquarie University's Centre on Policing, Intelligence and Counter-terrorism (PICT) and at Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, New Zealand.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance now directs a think tank that he founded, the "Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies", which analyzes counterterrorism. Nance is also a member of the advisory board of directors for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: On March 22, 2019, hours before Attorney General William Barr's controversial letter about the Mueller Report on the 2016 Trump campaign and its connections to Russia was released, Nance said the report could reveal treason exceeding that of Benedict Arnold.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: In 2007, Nance wrote an article criticizing waterboarding for the counterinsurgency blog "Small Wars Journal" titled "Waterboarding is Torture... period." Nance wrote: "I know waterboarding is torture—because I did it myself." Nance said he witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Republished in the "Pentagon Early Bird", it set off a firestorm as the first credible description of the torture technique as used in SERE. The article strongly swayed the Pentagon against the use of the waterboard because its misuse would damage America's reputation worldwide. Nance argued that using the torture techniques of America's former enemies dishonors the memory of U.S. service members who died in captivity through torture, and that torture does not produce credible intelligence.


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance was called to testify before the U.S. Congress about the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques". He told the House Judiciary Committee that: "Waterboarding is torture, period... I believe that we must reject the use of the waterboard for prisoners and captives and cleanse this stain from our national honor...water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel(ing) your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs."


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance's books on counter-terrorism and intelligence include: "An End to al-Qaeda", "Terrorist Recognition Handbook", "The Terrorists of Iraq", "Defeating ISIS", "The Plot to Hack America", and "Hacking ISIS". In 2018, he published "The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West". In 2019, he published "The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It".


title: Malcolm Nance

text: Nance has suggested that Donald Trump was surveilled by Russia as early as 1977. Nance elaborated, "First, you start off as a useful idiot, right? Next is unwitting assets... a person who doesn’t know that there was an intelligence operation around him. The next progression is a witting asset. I have never said the next step. I have never said Donald Trump was an agent of Russia."


title: Lykoi

text: The Lykoi (commonly called wolf cat or werewolf cat) is a natural mutation from a domestic short-haired cat. The mutation has occurred in domestic cats over the last 20 years. DNA testing has been done by UC Davis to confirm that the cats do not carry the Sphynx/Devon Rex gene. The breed was developed by Patti Thomas in Vonore, Tennessee.


title: Lykoi

text: "Lykos" (λύκος, "lýkos", pl. λύκοι, "lýkoi", Ancient: λῠ́κος, "lúkos", pl. λῠ́κοι, "lúkoi") means "wolf" in Greek.


title: Lykoi

text: Lykoi vary from completely covered in hair to partially hairless. Sometimes, they may lose all of their hair resulting in them looking like a Sphynx, but it grows back. Lykoi are genetically distinct from the Canadian Sphynx. The hair coat is unique in appearance in that it resembles the coat of an opossum when mostly coated. Standards call for a roan coat (of any colour, although black is most common), a wedge-shaped head, and a lithe body of solid weight without excessive bulk. Lykoi are said to be friendly and unchallenging in their behaviour. They display a high level of affection for their owners.


title: Lykoi

text: A unique characteristic of the cat breed is that the Lykoi sheds a lot when older, but regrows its hair later in life depending on the season.


title: Lykoi

text: Two different sets of domestic short-hairs with the Lykoi gene were adopted from a rescue after being discovered in Virginia in 2010, by Patti Thomas, who co-founded and named the breed, and in 2011, a second pair were located in Tennessee, by Johnny Gobble.