title: Letters to Cleo

text: Letters to Cleo was reported to be back together and recording new music in February, 2016. The band's Facebook and Twitter feeds have been active with status updates, pictures and videos of ongoing recording.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Letters to Cleo appeared as the musical guest at Geek Bowl XII, the twelfth annual event of its kind put on by Geeks Who Drink Pub Quizzes. The event took place in the band's hometown of Boston on Saturday, February 17, 2018.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Most of the band members also have solo careers. Most notable is Kay Hanley's career, which produced the albums "Cherry Marmalade" in 2002, "The Babydoll EP" in 2004, and "Weaponize" in 2008. She provided singing vocals for Rachael Leigh Cook in the 2001 film "Josie and the Pussycats". In 2003, Hanley collaborated with Sega and musician Jun Senoue for the song "Follow Me" in the video game "Sonic Heroes". Hanley has also been involved with Disney on several children's projects, including the Disney Channel's "My Friends Tigger & Pooh", as well as writing all original songs for Disney Junior's hit series, "Doc McStuffins".


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Michael Eisenstein has been doing session work and touring work for many artists including Our Lady Peace and Lisa Loeb. He is a producer and engineer.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Hanley and Eisenstein married in the late '90s and have two children, Zoe Mabel and Henry Aaron (named for legendary baseball Hall Of Famer). They split up in 2010.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Drummer Stacy Jones went on to form American Hi-Fi with fellow Boston musicians Drew Parsons, Jamie Arentzen and Brian Nolan. In addition to being the musical director and drummer for Miley Cyrus, Jones is also the musical director for Life of Dillon. Previous gigs also include playing drums for Matchbox Twenty, Madonna, Dia Frampton, Veruca Salt, Avril Lavigne, Ariana Grande, Joan Jett, Against Me!, The Jonas Brothers, The Flaming Lips, Lily Allen, Billy Ray Cyrus, Sheryl Crow, Cobra Starship, Aimee Mann, The Cab, Hey Monday, Butch Walker, and more.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Scott Riebling went into the production side of music. He has produced work for The Von Bondies, Cobra Starship and Fall Out Boy. Riebling resides in Massachusetts. His brother Eric Riebling plays bass in Pittsburgh band The Affordable Floors. He co-owns a pizza chain (Stoked Pizza) located in the Boston area.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Co-founding member Greg McKenna is playing live with his new band, City Rivals. McKenna resides in Dorchester, Massachusetts.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Tom Polce played with several prominent Boston-based bands and is a producer and engineer. He lives in California.


title: Letters to Cleo

text: Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) wears a Letters to Cleo shirt on the show "Parks and Recreation" on multiple occasions while he is between jobs. Letters To Cleo also makes an appearance on the show, playing during the Pawnee/Eagleton Unity Concert in the last episode of "Season 6".


title: ArXiv

text: arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, and had hit a million by the end of 2014.


title: ArXiv

text: arXiv was made possible by the compact TeX file format, which allowed scientific papers to be easily transmitted over the Internet and rendered client-side. Around 1990, Joanne Cohn began emailing physics preprints to colleagues as TeX files, but the number of papers being sent soon filled mailboxes to capacity. Paul Ginsparg recognized the need for central storage, and in August 1991 he created a central repository mailbox stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) which could be accessed from any computer. Additional modes of access were soon added: FTP in 1991, Gopher in 1992, and the World Wide Web in 1993. The term e-print was quickly adopted to describe the articles.


title: ArXiv

text: It began as a physics archive, called the LANL preprint archive, but soon expanded to include astronomy, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology and, most recently, statistics. Its original domain name was xxx.lanl.gov. Due to LANL's lack of interest in the rapidly expanding technology, in 2001 Ginsparg changed institutions to Cornell University and changed the name of the repository to arXiv.org. It is now hosted principally by Cornell, with five mirrors around the world.


title: ArXiv

text: ArXiv was an early adopter and promoter of preprints. Its success in sharing preprints was one of the precipitating factors that led to the later movement in scientific publishing known as open access. Mathematicians and scientists regularly upload their papers to arXiv.org for worldwide access and sometimes for reviews before they are published in peer-reviewed journals. Ginsparg was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002 for his establishment of arXiv.


title: ArXiv

text: The annual budget for arXiv was approximately $826,000 for 2013 to 2017, funded jointly by Cornell University Library, the Simons Foundation (in both gift and challenge grant forms) and annual fee income from member institutions. This model arose in 2010, when Cornell sought to broaden the financial funding of the project by asking institutions to make annual voluntary contributions based on the amount of download usage by each institution. Each member institution pledges a five-year funding commitment to support arXiv. Based on institutional usage ranking, the annual fees are set in four tiers from $1,000 to $4,400. Cornell's goal is to raise at least $504,000 per year through membership fees generated by approximately 220 institutions.


title: ArXiv

text: In September 2011, Cornell University Library took overall administrative and financial responsibility for arXiv's operation and development. Ginsparg was quoted in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" as saying it "was supposed to be a three-hour tour, not a life sentence". However, Ginsparg remains on the arXiv's Scientific Advisory Board and its Physics Advisory Committee.


title: ArXiv

text: Although arXiv is not peer reviewed, a collection of moderators for each area review the submissions; they may recategorize any that are deemed off-topic, or reject submissions that are not scientific papers, or sometimes for undisclosed reasons. The lists of moderators for many sections of arXiv are publicly available, but moderators for most of the physics sections remain unlisted.


title: ArXiv

text: Additionally, an "endorsement" system was introduced in 2004 as part of an effort to ensure content is relevant and of interest to current research in the specified disciplines. Under the system, for categories that use it, an author must be endorsed by an established arXiv author before being allowed to submit papers to those categories. Endorsers are not asked to review the paper for errors, but to check whether the paper is appropriate for the intended subject area. New authors from recognized academic institutions generally receive automatic endorsement, which in practice means that they do not need to deal with the endorsement system at all. However, the endorsement system has attracted criticism for allegedly restricting scientific inquiry.


title: ArXiv

text: A majority of the e-prints are also submitted to journals for publication, but some work, including some very influential papers, remain purely as e-prints and are never published in a peer-reviewed journal. A well-known example of the latter is an outline of a proof of Thurston's geometrization conjecture, including the Poincaré conjecture as a particular case, uploaded by Grigori Perelman in November 2002. Perelman appears content to forgo the traditional peer-reviewed journal process, stating: "If anybody is interested in my way of solving the problem, it's all there let them go and read about it". Despite this non-traditional method of publication, other mathematicians recognized this work by offering the Fields Medal and Clay Mathematics Millennium Prizes to Perelman, both of which he refused.


title: ArXiv

text: While arXiv does contain some dubious e-prints, such as those claiming to refute famous theorems or proving famous conjectures such as Fermat's Last Theorem using only high-school mathematics, a 2002 article which appeared in "Notices of the American Mathematical Society" described those as "surprisingly rare". arXiv generally re-classifies these works, e.g. in "General mathematics", rather than deleting them; however, some authors have voiced concern over the lack of transparency in the arXiv screening process.


title: ArXiv

text: Papers can be submitted in any of several formats, including LaTeX, and PDF printed from a word processor other than TeX or LaTeX. The submission is rejected by the arXiv software if generating the final PDF file fails, if any image file is too large, or if the total size of the submission is too large. arXiv now allows one to store and modify an incomplete submission, and only finalize the submission when ready. The time stamp on the article is set when the submission is finalized.


title: ArXiv

text: The standard access route is through the arXiv.org website or one of several mirrors. Other interfaces and access routes have also been created by other un-associated organisations.


title: ArXiv

text: Metadata for arXiv is made available through OAI-PMH, the standard for open access repositories. Content is therefore indexed in all major consumers of such data, such as BASE, CORE and Unpaywall. As of 2020, the Unpaywall dump links over 500,000 arxiv URLs as the open access version of a work found in CrossRef data from the publishers, making arXiv a top 10 global host of green open access.


title: ArXiv

text: Finally, researchers can select sub-fields and receive daily e-mailings or RSS feeds of all submissions in them.


title: Enel

text: Enel S.p.A. is an Italian multinational manufacturer and distributor of electricity and gas. Enel, which originally stood for Ente nazionale per l'energia elettrica (National Electricity Board), was first established as a public body at the end of 1962, and then transformed into a limited company in 1992. In 1999, following the liberalisation of the electricity market in Italy, Enel was privatised. The Italian state, through the Ministry of Economy and Finance, is the main shareholder, with 23.6% of the share capital as of 1 April 2016.


title: Enel

text: Enel is the 73rd largest company in the world by revenue, with 88 billion in 2021. As of 2018, Enel is also the second largest power company in the world by revenue after the State Grid Corporation of China. The company is quoted on the FTSE MIB index on the Milan Stock Exchange.


title: Enel

text: In 1898, the production of electricity in Italy was 100 GWh, and had a value of over $56 billion by 1960. The majority of the electricity was produced by regional private companies, or by companies linked to other industrial bodies, that were both local and regional, by exploiting the specific characteristics of the territory: its hydrogeological resources.


title: Enel

text: The state subsidised the construction of power stations and other necessary construction work in a territory in order to increase the production of electricity. In 1961, the state regulated distribution with unified national tariffs set on the basis of equal consumption classes (through the Equalisation Fund for the Electricity Sector), and by requiring power companies to provide access to electricity for everyone.


title: Enel

text: In 1962, the government institutionalised the Entity for electricity with the aim of making electricity a means for the development of the country and in order to define a national policy for electricity based on the experiences of other countries such as France and the United Kingdom.


title: Enel

text: At the beginning of 1962, the Fanfani IV Cabinet committed the government to put together a proposal for the unification of the national electricity system within three months of the parliament passing a confidence motion.


title: Enel

text: During the Chamber of Deputies assembly of 26 June 1962, the government presented a bill that sanctioned the principles and procedures for the establishment of the "Ente Nazionale per l'energia Elettrica" (E.N.EL).


title: Enel

text: According to the bill, Enel was going to acquire all assets of companies producing, processing, transmitting, and distributing electricity, with the exception of self-producers—companies that produced more than 70% of their electricity for other production processes—(the same exception was later applied to municipal authorities), and of small businesses that did not produce more than 10 million kilowatt hours per year.


title: Enel

text: Procedures to assess the value of the acquired companies were defined, and it was established that compensation was to be paid to creditors in 10 years at an interest rate of 5.5%. Within this framework, 1962 was to be considered a transition year, in which all income and expenses of the acquired companies would be transferred to Enel. 1963 was thus the first operational year of the newly formed company.


title: Enel

text: The first companies to be acquired were: SIP (Piedmont), Edison Volta (Lombardy), SADE (Veneto), SELT-Valdarno (Tuscany), SRE (Lazio), SME (Campania), SGES (Sicily), and Carbosarda (Sardinia).


title: Enel

text: Enel's early goals were the modernization and development of the electricity grid with the construction of a high voltage power lines backbone, international connections, connections to the islands, rural electrification, and the creation of a national centre for dispatching. These projects were to be co-financed by the state through the issuing, in 1965, of bonds valued over 200 billion Italian liras. In 1967, Enel, which was originally supervised by the Committee of Ministers, began to be overseen by the inter-ministerial Committee for Economic Planning (CIPE), under the Ministry of Industry. During this period, production from thermal power stations surpassed, for the very first time, that of hydroelectric power.


title: Enel

text: In 1963, the National Dispatch Centre of Rome was created, to manage the energy network by coordinating the production plants, the transmission network, the distribution, as well as the interconnection of the Italian electricity system with that of foreign countries, by adjusting in real time the production and transmission of energy on the basis of actual demand.


title: Enel

text: In terms of rural electrification, the settlements that were not connected to the electricity grid declined from 1.27% in 1960 to 0.46% in 1964, with over 320,000 new residents being connected.


title: Enel

text: In the five-year period between 1966 and 1970, further investments for rural electrification were made, where 80% of the costs were covered by the state and 20% by Enel, part of those costs being incurred by reducing some rates as an incentive for agricultural development.


title: Enel

text: In 1968, the construction of the 380 kV high-voltage connection between Florence and Rome began, with the aim of joining the high voltage electrical system of the north with that of the centre and the south. Around the same time, international high voltage connections with France (380 kV Venaus-Villarodin, 1969) and Switzerland were also put in place. In the same year, undersea electrical cables were put in place to connect the peninsula and the islands of Elba (1966), Ischia (1967), and Sardinia through Corsica (1967).


title: Enel

text: In 1963, Enel was involved in the Vajont Dam disaster. On 9 October 1963, a huge landslide of 260 million cubic metres fell into the reservoir formed by the dam. The dam and power plant had been built by the Società Adriatica di Elettricità (the Adriatic Electricity Company, or SADE) and then sold to Edison, and it had just been transferred as part of the nationalisation process to the newly established Enel. The landslide created huge waves in the Vajont reservoir, which partially flooded the villages of Erto e Casso and swept over the dam, completely wiping out the towns in the valley below it: Longarone, Pirago, Rivalta, Villanova and Faè. Approximately two thousand people died in the disaster. Enel and Montedison were charged in the ensuing trial as the companies responsible for the disaster, a responsibility considered all more serious because of the predictability of the event. The two companies were forced to pay damages to the communities involved in the catastrophe.


title: Enel

text: The decade of the 1970s was distinguished by a major energy crisis that led the company to implement drastic austerity measures, and the establishment of a national energy plan that defined the objectives of both building new power plants and searching for new energy sources.


title: Enel

text: In 1975, as a result of the 1973 oil crisis and the austerity measures, and following the establishment of the first National Energy Plan (PEN), the aim of the company became that of reducing Enel's dependence on hydrocarbons, which was to be achieved with the use of other energy sources, including hydro, geothermal, coal, reducing waste, and, in particular, the use of nuclear power.


title: Enel

text: Several new plants were built in the course of the decade. In the early 1970s, the construction of the nuclear power station Caorso (Emilia-Romagna), the first major nuclear power plant in Italy (to generate 840-860 MW), began. The station became operational in 1978. Between 1972 and 1978, the hydroelectric plant of Taloro was built in the province of Nuoro (Sardinia). In 1973, the hydroelectric plant of San Fiorano became operational. In 1977, a thermoelectric power plant opened in Torre del Sale, near Piombino (Tuscany). At the end of the 1970s, the construction of the thermal power plant of Porto Tolle (Veneto) began, whose first completed section became active in 1980.


title: Enel

text: Between 1973 and 1977, wells for the production of geothermal energy were drilled in Torre Alfina, in the province of Viterbo (Lazio).


title: Enel

text: The dam of Alto Gesso (Piedmont) was completed in 1982 as part of the hydroelectric power station Luigi Einaudi "Entracque".


title: Enel

text: The 1980s were characterised by the construction of new plants and the testing of alternative forms of energy, the Italian nuclear power phase-out, as well as a gradual reduction of reliance on oil, which decreased from 75.3% in 1973 to 58.5% in 1985. Several large power plants became active during this period. Among these, the fossil fuel power plant of Fiumesanto (Sardinia) in 1983–84; the pumped-storage hydroelectricity power station of Edolo (Lombardy) in 1984–85, one of the biggest of its kind in Europe; and the coal power plant of Torrevaldiagia Nord (Lazio) in 1984.


title: Enel

text: In 1981, with the help of the European Economic Community, Enel built the first large scale compact linear Fresnel reflector concentrated solar power plant, the 1 MWe Eurelios power station in Adrano (Sicily). The plant was shut down in 1987.


title: Enel

text: In 1984, the photovoltaic power station of Vulcano (Sicily) became active. In the same year, the first wind farm of the country became operational in Alta Nurra (Sardinia).


title: Enel

text: During 1985, the national center for the dispatch and control of the electricity network was gradually transferred from the center of Rome to Settebagni, and made a part of a bigger European network for the synchronisation of electricity production.


title: Enel

text: In 1987, in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, the first referendum on nuclear power took place and was won by those opposed to nuclear power. This result marked the end of nuclear power in Italy, the closing and suspension of all construction of nuclear power stations, and the establishment of a new national energy plan. The Caorso Nuclear Power Plant in Emilia-Romagna, which had been inactive since 1986 due to refuelling, was never reactivated and was finally closed in 1990. The Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant in Piedmont was deactivated in 1987 and shut down in 1990. The construction work on the Montalto di Castro Nuclear Power Station, started in 1982, was interrupted in 1988. The station was converted the following year into a multi-fuel plant. The Latina Nuclear Power Plant was shut down in 1988. The Garigliano Nuclear Power Plant had been shut down since 1978.


title: Enel

text: In 1988, the new National Energy Plan (PEN) established its key objectives: increased energy efficiency, environmental protection, the exploitation of national resources, the diversification of sources of supply from abroad, and the overall competitiveness of the production system.


title: Enel

text: Between 1990 and 2000, the Italian electricity market was progressively liberalized. In 1991, Law No. 9/1991 sanctioned a first partial liberalisation of the production of electricity generated from conventional sources and renewable energy sources; companies were allowed to produce electricity for their own use with an obligation to hand over the excess amount to Enel. In July 1992, the Amato I Cabinet turned Enel into a joint-stock company with the Treasury as the sole shareholder.


title: Enel

text: In 1999, the D'Alema I Cabinet issued Legislative Decree no. 79 of 16 March 1999 (known as the Bersani Decree) to liberalise the electricity sector. This opened up the possibility for other actors to operate in the energy market. Enel—which had so far been the only actor in the production, distribution, and sale of electricity in Italy—had now to change its corporate structure by distinguishing the three phases and constituting itself as three different companies: Enel Produzione, Enel Distribuzione, and Terna, respectively, for energy production, distribution, and transmission. Moreover, Enel could produce only 50% of the national production according to the new law. That same year, 31.7% of the company, in its new structure, was privatised. Following privatization, Enel was put on the stock market; its shares were listed on the Italian Stock Exchange with a value of €4.3 per share; the total number was 4,183 million shares for a total value of 18 billion.


title: Enel

text: In this period, Enel was involved in several new projects. In 1993, the company built the Serre photovoltaic plant. At the time, this was largest of its kind in Europe with an installed capacity of 3.3 megawatts. In 1997, Enel, Orange S.A., and Deutsche Telekom funded Wind Telecomunicazioni as a joint venture, a mobile and fixed telecom operator. In 2000, Enel launched a project to connect Italy's and Greece's power grids by laying a 160 km underwater power line, capable of carrying 600 megawatts, to connect Otranto (Apulia) with the Greek city of Aetos. The project, completed in 2002, had a total cost of 339 million.


title: Enel

text: During the 2000s, the company worked to reduce the environmental impact of the production of energy and on a progressive internationalization of Enel through a number of mergers and acquisitions. In 2000, Enel signed an agreement with the Italian Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Economic Development in which the company committed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 13.5% before 2002, and by 20% before 2006. That year, Enel acquired CHI Energy, a renewable energy producer operating in the US and Canadian markets, for $170 million. In the following years, Enel continued investing in renewable energy and clean technologies.


title: Enel

text: In 2004, the company was included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, a stock market index that evaluates the financial performance of companies based on economic, environmental, and social performance.


title: Enel

text: In 2008, Enel formed Enel Green Power, a company dedicated to developing and managing the production of power from renewable energy. In 2009, Enel launched the Archilede project, a new urban lighting system chosen by 1600 municipalities. This new intelligent lighting technology resulted in approximately 26 GWh per year of energy saving, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 18,000 tons per year. That same year, the company opened a new photovoltaic power station in the Park of Villa di Pratolino, in Florence. The project - called "Diamante" – was to build a plant capable of storing, as hydrogen, enough of the solar energy accumulated during the day to meet nighttime requirements. In 2010, the Archimede combined cycle power plant became operational at Priolo Gargallo, near Syracuse in Sicily. This was the first thermal solar field to use molten salt–technology integrated with a combined cycle gas facility.


title: Enel

text: Enel had several acquisitions and divestments in this period. In 2001, the company won the tender offer for the purchase of Viesgo—a subsidiary of Endesa—a company active on the Spanish market in the production and distribution of electricity, with a net installed capacity of 2400 megawatts.


title: Enel

text: In 2002, Enel divested Eurogen SpA, Elettrogen SpA, and Interpower SpA in compliance with the Bersani Decree provisions on the liberalization of electricity production.


title: Enel

text: In 2001, Enel acquired Infostrada—previously a subsidiary of Vodafone, at a cost of 7.25 billion euros. Infostrada was later merged with Wind, with 17 million customers. In 2005, Enel assigned 62.75% ownership of Wind to Weather Investments S.a.r.l., a company belonging to the Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris, at the time CEO of Global Telecom Holding (the remaining 37.25% was divested in 2006).


title: Enel

text: In 2008 and 2009, Enel Stoccaggi and Enel Rete Gas were sold to investors, mainly Primo Fondo Italiano per le Infrastrutture. In 2011, Enel opened the first pilot carbon dioxide–capture facility in Italy, in the area of Brindisi, in the existing power plant ENEL Federico II. That year, Enel Distribuzione built its first Smart grid in Isernia, a grid capable of effectively adjusting the two-way flow of electricity generated from renewable sources. The total investment for this project was 10 million.


title: Enel

text: Also in 2011, Enel became part of the United Nations Global Compact, a United Nations initiative to encourage businesses to adopt sustainable policies worldwide, and signed a cooperation framework agreement with the World Food Programme, to fight against world hunger and climate change. The cost of the project was 8 million, which included the production and distribution of high-efficiency cooking stoves, the installation of photovoltaic systems in the all WFP logistical premises, and giving support to humanitarian interventions. In the same year, the company was added to the FTSE4Good Index of the London Stock Exchange which measures businesses' behaviour in terms of environmental sustainability, relationships with stakeholders, human rights, the quality of working conditions, and fighting against corruption.


title: Enel

text: In 2012, Enel sold the remaining 5.1% of Terna in its possession, thus exiting completely from the high-voltage market. In 2013, Enel signed an agreement, in Sochi, for the sale of 40% of Arctic Russia, a joint venture with Eni, which in turn controlled 49% of SeverEnergia, for $1.8 billion. In May 2014, Maria Patrizia Grieco was elected president of the board of directors; and Francesco Starace was appointed CEO.


title: Enel

text: The company's main objectives were set to be the reorganisation of activities in Iberia and Latin America and debt reduction. In 2014, Enel—together with Endesa, Accelerace, and FundingBox—initiated the INCENSe program (Internet Cleantech Enablers Spark), which was co-funded by the European Commission, for the promotion of technological innovation in renewable energy, and was joined by over 250 start-ups from 30 countries in 2015. In 2014 and 2015, Enel was included in the STOXX Global ESG Governance Leaders index, an index that measures a company's environmental, social, and governance practices.


title: Enel

text: With a 29 million investment, as well as building its own pavilion, Enel built a Smart City over the entire Expo area, simulating a city of 100,000 inhabitants with a total energy consumption of 1 GWh per day.


title: Enel

text: The Smart City comprised a smart grid for the distribution of electricity, an operations center for the monitoring and management of the smart grid, an information system that allowed visitors to view in real-time the electricity consumption in each pavilion, charging stations for electric vehicles, and LED lighting of the entire exhibition site.


title: Enel

text: During 2016–2018, Enel carried out a series of operations aimed at digitising and innovating the Group, with particular attention to sustainability. In January 2016, Enel launched the “Open Power” brand, which presented the company with a new visual identity and a new logo. The concept of “openness” became the driver of the Group’s operative and communicative strategy. In June 2016, Enel presented the Enel Open Meter, the 2.0 smart meter designed to replace first-generation electronic meters. Open Meter was designed by Italian designer and architect Michele De Lucchi. In July 2016, Enel launched an Innovation Hub in Tel Aviv to scout 20 start-ups and foster collaboration, while offering a personalized support programme. In December 2016, Open Fiber completed the acquisition of Metroweb Italia for €714 million.


title: Enel

text: In March 2017, Enel inaugurated the Innovation Hub at University of California, Berkeley, an initiative for start-up scouting and collaboration development. In April 2017, in joint venture with Dutch Infrastructure Fund, the company launched the largest “ready-to-build” solar PV project in Australia. In May 2017, Enel launched E-solutions, a new global business line to explore new technologies, as well as to develop innovative products and digital solutions. In July 2017, Enel joined Formula E for the first zero-emission event in the championship’s history in New York. In September 2017, Enel ranked 20th in Fortune’s 2017 “Change the World” list and became one of the top 50 companies in the world – and the only Italian company – to have a positive social impact through business activities. In the same month, Enel and ENAP inaugurated Cerro Pabellón, the first geothermal power plant in South America and the first in the world to be built at 4,500 meters above sea level.


title: Enel

text: In October 2017, the company inaugurated an Innovation Hub in Russia in collaboration with the technological hub of Skolkovo. In the same month, Enel was included in the Top 20 of Forbes World’s Best Employers List 2017 and was confirmed by the non-profit global platform CDP as a global leader in the fight against climate change. In November 2017, Enel presented E-Mobility Revolution, a plan which seeks to install 7000 recharging stations for electric vehicles by 2020. In November 2017, Enel presented the 2018-2020 strategic plan, which was characterised by a focus on digitization and new offers to customers. In December 2017, Enel and Audi signed an agreement to develop electric mobility services. In the same month, the Group launched the Enel X brand, dedicated to the development of innovative products and digital solutions in areas where energy shows the greatest potential for transformation.


title: Enel

text: In January 2018, Enel launched a new green bond in Europe. The issue amounted to a total of €1250 million. In January 2018, Enel was confirmed for the tenth time in the ECPI Sustainability Index series. In February 2018, it received the 2018 Ethical Boardroom Corporate Governance award for sustainability and corporate governance standards. In February 2018, Enel became title sponsor of the FIM MotoE World Cup, as well as Sustainable Power Partner of the MotoGP. In March 2018, it invested $170 million in the construction of Peru’s largest solar PV plant. In May 2018, Enel became a partner of the Osmose project for the development of integrated systems and services in the renewable energy industry. In the same month, the company inaugurated Global Thermal Generation Innovation Hub&Lab in Pisa, a space for the development of innovative technologies of interest to thermal generation. In May 2018, Enel won the final round of the tender offer for the acquisition of Eletropaulo.


title: Enel

text: At the end of March 2019, Enel became the most valuable company on the Italian Stock Exchange, with a capitalisation of over €67 billion. On 23 September, the company was included in the STOXX Europe 50 index. That same year, Enel's CEO Francesco Starace was awarded the "Manager Utility Energia 2019" prize by the Management delle Utilities e delle Infrastrutture (MUI) Italian magazine.


title: Enel

text: In April 2022, Enel X Way was launched. It is the new business line of the Group and aims to accelerate the development of electric mobility and combine decarbonization, digitalization and electrification. The initiative was presented by CEO Elisabetta Ripa at Rome's Formula E Grand Prix.


title: Enel

text: On 11 November 2014, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma filed suit against Enel's subsidiary Osage Wind LLC, an 84-turbine industrial wind project in Osage County, Okla. In the suit, the United States alleges that Enel and Osage Wind are illegally converting minerals owned by the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe that has owned all mineral rights in the county since 1871. The suit says that Osage Wind should have obtained a permit from the Bureau of Indian Affairs before mining rock and other material for the pits in which turbine bases are built. The United States asked that all excavating on the 8,500-acre site cease and that dozens of turbines that are already being erected be removed.


title: Enel

text: Osage Wind has insisted that it is not mining and needs no permit. The company says that it has already spent nearly $300 million on the project, which is being built on privately owned fee land, not land held in trust for American Indians.


title: Enel

text: Osage Wind LLC and a second and adjacent Enel wind project, Mustang Run, are also embroiled in cases pending before the Oklahoma Supreme Court in which the Osage Nation and Osage County, Oklahoma, are challenging the constitutional legitimacy of permits for both projects.


title: Enel

text: Enel had to exit the El Salvador electricity market after a long dispute with the Government of El Salvador.


title: Enel

text: Article 109 of the Constitution of El Salvador states that underground natural resources are the country's property and the government should not allow a foreign company to be the sole proprietor of geothermic generation. Both parties came to a settlement in 2014, but no details have been released.


title: Enel

text: Enel had been demanding over €94 million from the Ministry of Economy of Slovakia in compensation for lost earnings it claims to have incurred as price proposals were rejected by the Slovakian Regulatory Office for Network Industries (URSO).


title: Enel

text: In early 2022, Enel and acting CEO Francesco Starace came under criticism for meeting in person with acting President of Russia Vladimir Putin to discuss massive Russian investments & sanction exemptions, just over a week prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.


title: Enel

text: Enel produces electricity from a number of energy sources including geothermal, wind power, solar power, hydroelectric power, thermal, and nuclear power.


title: Enel

text: In 2021, Enel generated a total of 232 TWh of electricity, distributed 510.3 TWh, and sold 309.4 TWh.


title: Enel

text: Enel is also engaged in research and development activities for the production and transmission of electricity. These include:


title: Enel

text: Enel and its subsidiaries produce and distribute electricity and gas in 31 countries around Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Africa.


title: Enel

text: The company employs around 67,000 people, has more than 69 million customers worldwide (63.4 million in the electricity market, and 6.0 million in the gas market) and a net installed generating capacity of 90 GW. Enel is the largest energy company in Europe by number of customers and the second by capacity, after EdF.


title: Enel

text: For trading on international markets, as well as for the procurement and sale of energy products including gas, Enel owns 100% of Enel Trade, which in turn owns 100% of Enel Trade Romania, Enel Trade Croatia, and Enel Trade Serbia.


title: Enel

text: Through Enel Trade, Enel also owns Nuove Energie, a company that specialises in the construction of regasification plants.


title: Enel

text: In Spain, through its subsidiary Enel Iberia Srl (previously known as Enel Energy Europe), Enel holds 70.1% of Endesa, acquired in 2009 with an initial stake of 92%.


title: Enel

text: It owns 56.4% of Enel Russia (formerly OGK-5) and 49.5% of the electricity supplier RusEnergoSbyt, through Enel Investment Holding BV.


title: Enel

text: In 2013, Rosneft, through NGK Itera, bought 40% of Enel's stake in Arctic Russia BV, a company which owned 19.6% of SeverEnergia. In March 2022, Enel announced it will cease operations in Russia.


title: Enel

text: In Chile, Enel controls 61.99% of Empresa Electrica Panguipulli SA, 56.80% of Enel Américas SA, 61.4% of Distribución Chile SA, 57.9% of Generación Chile SA, 61.9% of Enel Green Power Chile Ltd, 61.9% of Enel Green Power del Sur SpA, and 58.0% of Gas Atacama Chile SA.


title: Enel

text: In Peru, through Enel Perù SAC, Enel controls 47.2% of Enel Distribución Perù SAA and 47.5% of Enel Generación Perú SA.


title: TIOBE index

text: The TIOBE programming community index is a measure of popularity of programming languages, created and maintained by TIOBE Software BV, based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. TIOBE stands for "The Importance of Being Earnest", the title of an 1895 comedy play by Oscar Wilde, to emphasize the organization's "sincere and professional attitude towards customers, suppliers and colleagues".


title: TIOBE index

text: The index is calculated from the number of search engine results for queries containing the name of the language. The index covers searches in Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, Baidu, Wikipedia and YouTube. The index is updated once a month. The current information is free, but the long-term statistical data is for sale. The index authors have stated that it may be valuable when making various strategic decisions. TIOBE focuses on Turing complete languages, so it does not provide information about the popularity of, for instance, HTML.


title: TIOBE index

text: TIOBE index is sensitive to the ranking policy of the search engines on which it is based. For instance, in April 2004 Google performed a cleanup action to get rid of unfair attempts to promote the search rank. As a consequence, there was a large drop for languages such as Java and C++, yet these languages have stayed at the top of the table. To avoid such fluctuations, TIOBE now uses multiple search engines.


title: TIOBE index

text: In August 2016, C reached its lowest ratings score since the index was launched, but was still the second most popular language after Java, while in May 2020, C regained the top, and since then Java has substantially gone down in popularity while still maintaining number two position until November 2020, when Python overtook Java, taking the number two position. In 2021, Java regained its number two position and in 2022, Python overtook both Java and C to become the most popular programming language.


title: TIOBE index

text: The TIOBE "programming language of the year" award goes to the language with the biggest annual popularity gain in the index, e.g., Go was the programming language of the year in 2016, and Python won the award for 2020.


title: TIOBE index

text: Maintainers specify that the TIOBE index is "not about the "best" programming language or the language in which "most lines of code" have been written", but do claim that the number of web pages may reflect the number of skilled engineers, courses and jobs worldwide.


title: TIOBE index

text: Pierre Carbonnelle challenges TIOBE's naming of Objective-C as the "programming language of the year" in 2012, arguing that there may be many Objective-C pages on the web, but they are rarely read. It proposes its own PYPL index instead, based on Google Trends data. It shows popularity trends since 2004, worldwide and for 5 countries.


title: TIOBE index

text: Bjarne Stroustrup thinks TIOBE mostly measures "noise" and should report its findings in decibels rather than "popularity".


title: Mary Alice

text: Mary Alice Smith (December 3, 1936 – July 27, 2022), known professionally as Mary Alice, was an American television, film, and stage actress. Alice was known for her roles as Leticia "Lettie" Bostic on the sitcom "A Different World" (1987–1989) and Effie Williams in the 1976 musical drama "Sparkle", and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress for her recurring role on the series "I'll Fly Away". Alice also performed on the stage, and received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her appearance in the 1987 production of August Wilson's "Fences".


title: Mary Alice

text: Born Mary Alice Smith in Indianola, Mississippi, Alice was the daughter of Ozelar (née Jurnakin/Journakin) and Sam Smith. She showed an early and natural ability for acting, and began her stage career in her hometown. Her family moved from Mississippi to Chicago when she was two years old. She graduated from Chicago Teacher's College (now known as Chicago State University), and taught at an elementary school.


title: Mary Alice

text: Mary Alice returned to acting in the mid-1960s through community theater and appeared in three Douglass Turner Ward's plays, including "Days of Absence" and "Happy Endings". Mary Alice also washed the cast's laundry for a salary of $200 a week. She did some acting in New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, performing in multiple productions at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village between 1969 and 1973. Her first production at La MaMa was Adrienne Kennedy's "A Rat's Mass" in September 1969. She reprised her role as Sister Rat in the October 1969 production, and again in the January 1971 production. All three productions were directed by Seth Allen. In 1970, Mary Alice performed in Ed Bullins' "Street Sounds", directed by Hugh Gittens. She later performed in Lamar Alford's "Thoughts" in December 1972 and January 1973.


title: Mary Alice

text: Mary Alice made her screen début in the 1974 film "The Education of Sonny Carson", and later appeared in the television shows "Police Woman" and "Sanford and Son". She played Ellie Grant Hubbard on the soap opera "All My Children" during the mid-1980s, and the role of Cora in Stan Lathan's 1984 cult-classic Beat Street, as well as co–starred in "A Different World" as Leticia 'Lettie' Bostic from the series' start in 1987 until the end of the second season in 1989. She won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 1993 for "I'll Fly Away". Her other film credits include "Malcolm X" (1992), "The Inkwell" (1994), and "Down in the Delta" (1998).


title: Mary Alice

text: In 2000, she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She replaced Gloria Foster as the Oracle in the sequel "The Matrix Revolutions" (2003) and the video game tie-in "Enter the Matrix" (2003) after Foster, who originated the role, died in 2001. She retired from acting in 2005.


title: Mary Alice

text: Alice never married nor had children. Alice died on July 27, 2022, at her residence in Manhattan at the age of 85 due to natural causes.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: Pope Benedict IX (; c. 1012 – c. 1056), born Theophylactus of Tusculum in Rome, was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States on three occasions between October 1032 and July 1048. Aged approximately 20 at his first election, he is one of the youngest popes in history. He is the only man to have been Pope on more than one occasion and the only man ever to have sold the papacy.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: He was the nephew of his immediate predecessor, John XIX. In October 1032, Benedict's father obtained his election through bribery. However, his reputed dissolute activities provoked a revolt on the part of the Romans. Benedict was driven out of Rome and Sylvester III elected to succeed him. Some months later, Benedict and his supporters managed to expel Sylvester. Benedict then decided to resign in favor of his godfather, Gregory VI, provided he was reimbursed for his expenses. Benedict subsequently had second thoughts and returned, and attempted to depose Gregory VI. A number of prominent clergymen appealed to King Henry III of Germany to restore order. Henry and his forces crossed the Brenner Pass into Italy, where he summoned the Council of Sutri to decide the matter. Benedict IX, Sylvester III, and Gregory VI were all deposed. Henry then had Clement II elected in December 1046.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: While Benedict IX has a bad reputation as pope, historian R. L. Poole suggests that the accusations directed against him be understood in the context that they were perpetrated by virulent political enemies.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: Benedict was the son of Count Alberic III of Tusculum. He was closely related to several popes, being the nephew of Benedict VIII and John XIX and a grandnephew of John XII. His father obtained the papal chair for him by bribing the Romans. According to Horace K. Mann, Benedict IX was about 20 when made pontiff in October 1032. Other sources state 11 or 12, based upon the unsubstantiated testimony of Rupert Glaber, a monk of St. Germanus at Auxerre.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: Benedict IX's reign was scandalous, and factional strife continued. Ferdinand Gregorovius, a historian otherwise severely critical of the papacy, wrote that in Benedict, "It seemed as if a demon from hell, in the disguise of a priest, occupied the chair of Peter and profaned the sacred mysteries of religion by his insolent courses." Horace K. Mann calls him "a disgrace to the Chair of Peter". He was the first pope rumoured to have been primarily homosexual. Pope Victor III, in his third book of Dialogues, referred to "his rapes, murders and other unspeakable acts of violence and sodomy. His life as a pope was so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it."


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: According to Reginald Lane Poole, "In a time of acute political hostility accusations, as we know too well, are made and are believed, which in a calmer time would never have been suggested." He further suggests the credibility of such accusations was determined by probability rather than proof, and a reaction to the Tusculan hegemony. Poole observes that "we have to wait until he had discredited himself by his sale of the Papacy before we hear anything definite about his misdeeds; and the further we go in time and place, the worse his character becomes". Poole considers Benedict "a negligent Pope, very likely a profligate man", but notes that the picture presented of Benedict is drawn at a time when the party opposed to him was in the ascendant, and he had neither friends nor supporters.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: Pope Benedict IX was briefly forced out of Rome in 1036, but returned with the help of Emperor Conrad II, who had expelled the bishops of Piacenza and Cremona from their sees. Bishop Benno of Piacenza accused Benedict of "many vile adulteries and murders". He was accused by Peter Damian in his "Liber Gomorrhianus" of routine sodomy and bestiality and sponsoring orgies. In September 1044, opposition to Benedict IX's dissolute lifestyle forced him out of the city again and elected Sylvester III to replace him.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: Benedict IX's forces returned in April 1045 and expelled his rival, allowing Benedict to resume the papacy. Doubting his own ability to maintain his position, and wishing to marry his cousin, Benedict decided to resign in May 1045. He consulted his godfather, the pious priest John Gratian, about the possibility of resigning. He offered to give up the papacy into the hands of his godfather if he would reimburse him for his election expenses. John Gratian paid him the money and was recognized as pope in his stead, as Gregory VI. Peter Damian hailed the change with joy and wrote to the new pope, urging him to deal with the scandals of the church in Italy, singling out the wicked bishops of Pesaro, of Città di Castello and of Fano.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: Benedict IX soon regretted his resignation and returned to Rome, taking the city and remaining on the throne until July 1046, although Gregory VI continued to be recognized as the true pope. At the time, Sylvester III also reasserted his claim. A number of influential clergy and laity besought Emperor Henry III to cross the Alps and restore order. Henry intervened, and at the Council of Sutri in December 1046, Benedict IX and Sylvester III were declared deposed while Gregory VI was encouraged to resign because the arrangement he had entered into with Benedict was considered simoniacal; that is, to have been paid for. A German, Clement II, was chosen to succeed Gregory VI. Benedict IX had not attended the council and did not accept his deposition. When Clement II died in October 1047, Benedict seized the Lateran Palace in November, again becoming pope, but was driven away by German troops in July 1048. To fill the power vacuum, the German-born Damasus II was elected pope and universally recognized as such. Benedict IX refused to appear on charges of simony in 1049 and was excommunicated.


title: Pope Benedict IX

text: Benedict IX's eventual fate is obscure, but he seems to have given up his claims to the papal throne. Leo IX may have lifted the ban on him. Benedict IX was buried in the Abbey of Grottaferrata c. 1056. According to the abbot, Saint Bartholomew of Grottaferrata, he was penitent and turned away from the sins he committed as pontiff.


title: Robert Bales

text: Robert Bales (born June 30, 1973) is a former United States Army sniper who fatally shot or stabbed 16 Afghan civilians in a mass murder in Panjwayi District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, on March 11, 2012 – an event known as the Kandahar massacre.


title: Robert Bales

text: In order to avoid the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to 16 counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder, and seven counts of assault in a plea deal. On August 23, 2013, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Before sentencing, Bales expressed his regret by referring to the murders as "an act of cowardice". While Bales has exhausted all military appeals, his attorney announced in 2019 that he would be seeking a new trial in civilian court due to possible side effects of mefloquine, an anti-malaria drug Bales claims to have been taking at the time of the shooting.


title: Robert Bales

text: Bales was born on June 30, 1973, and raised in Norwood, Ohio, near the city of Cincinnati, the youngest of five brothers. He attended Norwood High School where he played football and was named class president. After high school Bales briefly enrolled at College of Mount St. Joseph, then transferred to Ohio State University, where he studied economics for three years, but left without graduating in 1996.


title: Robert Bales

text: After leaving college, Bales worked as a stockbroker at five financial services firms in Columbus, Ohio. The firms were related, sharing employees and corporate offices. During that period, while employed with Michael Patterson, Inc., Bales and the firm engaged in fraudulent securities activities. In 2003, an arbitration panel found both Bales and his employer liable for financial fraud related to the handling of a retirement account and ordered them to pay $1.2 million in civil damages. Gary Liebschner, the victim, said he "never got paid a penny" of the award. According to Liebschner's lawyer, they had not pursued legal action against Bales to collect the judgment because they were unable to locate Bales, who had joined the U.S. Army at age 28, just 18 months after the long-running arbitration case was filed.


title: Robert Bales

text: In May 1999, while still employed with a securities firm in Ohio, Bales, his brother Mark, and Marc Edwards co-founded a financial services firm named Spartina Investments in Doral, Florida. The state dissolved Spartina in September 2000, after the company failed to file its annual report in a timely manner.


title: Robert Bales

text: Bales' brother-in-law stated that Bales joined the Army after the September 11 attacks because he "felt it was something he should do because he felt he had to make something right" and that joining the Army was his way of vindicating himself.


title: Robert Bales

text: In 2002 Bales was charged with assaulting his then girlfriend and ordered to undergo anger-management counseling. Also in 2002, after a night out at a Tacoma casino, Bales was arrested for assaulting a security guard.


title: Robert Bales

text: In 2003, Bales met his later to be wife, Kari Primeau, while she was at a bar supporting her friend's band. Kari states that Bales was a man "full of enthusiasm, eager to tell her every little thing he was learning about war and how to wage it," until he deployed to Iraq. Their relationship grew serious while he was overseas.


title: Robert Bales

text: Bales enlisted in the U.S. Army in November 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks. He was initially assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in Fort Lewis. He completed three tours in the Iraq War: twelve months in 2003 and 2004, fifteen months in 2006 and 2007, and ten months in 2009 and 2010. During the 2007 tour he reportedly injured his foot in the Battle of Najaf, and during the 2010 tour he was treated for traumatic brain injury after his vehicle was rolled in an accident.


title: Robert Bales

text: According to public records, Bales had been involved in several incidents while stationed at Fort Lewis which had resulted in the police responding. In 2002, he got into a fight with a security guard at a Tacoma area casino and was charged with misdemeanor criminal assault, but the charge was dismissed after he paid a small fine and attended anger management classes. Another confrontation outside of a bar in 2008 was also reported to police, but no charges were filed.


title: Robert Bales

text: Bales was promoted to staff sergeant (SSG) on April 1, 2008, which made him responsible for nineteen men, who he believed were insufficiently prepared. It was also at this time that he became increasingly skeptical about Special Forces superiors, claiming that they were too passive towards the enemy, accompanied by a hostile attitude and a belief that he was not being granted the respect that he had earned. While in Iraq, Bales was injured twice and sustained 10 IED blasts. In 2010, it is speculated that he may have sustained a traumatic brain injury when a humvee flipped over. He received orders of deployment to Afghanistan in December 2011, which were reported to have caused marital conflict and financial strain because his family was not expecting him to be deployed again. On February 1, 2012, he was assigned to Camp Belambai in the Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, where he was responsible for providing base security for U.S. Army Special Forces and U.S. Navy SEALs who were engaged in village stability operations.


title: Robert Bales

text: On March 10, Bales was posted to guard duty with a private in his unit, with whom he discussed a promotion that he wanted and thought he deserved, since he had already been passed over for the promotion once before. While on watch, Bales saw lights flashing on and off in the nearby villages of Naja Bien and Alikozai, and concluded that Taliban insurgents were communicating with light signals. When he was relieved of guard duty at 9 pm, he claims that he alerted the new guard team of this and that they did not take him seriously, but the Army denies that the conversation ever took place. He then joined SSG David Godwin and Sergeant (SGT) Jason McLaughlin to drink whiskey mixed with diet soda from a plastic water bottle, although drinking alcohol was prohibited on base. Bales says he had had six or seven drinks over the next couple of hours while watching the movie "Man on Fire" – a revenge action film about an ex-military bodyguard who goes on a murderous rampage after the girl he has been hired to protect is kidnapped and presumed dead. According to the Army's investigation, as Bales became increasingly intoxicated, he once again discussed his prospective promotion to Sergeant First Class, the anger he felt about his comrades being seriously injured by insurgent attacks, his complaints about the leadership of the Green Berets, his marriage, and his financial troubles. Around midnight, Bales consumed a handful of over-the-counter sleeping pills, stating that he had not slept in days and wanted to rest. The pills did not move him to sleep, so he took his concerns to Green Beret SGT Clayton Blackshear, emphasizing that he felt he and his men were not doing enough to stop Taliban insurgents from operating freely in the area and targeting US soldiers. Bales also requested to take Blackshear's place and run point when the men were patrolling on foot—a job that Bales had done while in Iraq. Per Blackshear's testimony in the Army's investigation, Bales said that he did not care if he died in the line of duty, because his life did not matter as much as the lives of Blackshear and younger soldiers. Blackshear informed Bales that the Green Berets were short staffed and could not take decisive action until their forces were replenished. Bales then went back to his room and laid awake.


title: Robert Bales

text: In the early morning hours of March 11, 2012, Bales killed 16 Afghan civilians (nine children, some as young as two years old, four women and three men) in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai in the Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province near Camp Belambai. According to official reports, Bales left combat outpost Camp Belamby at 3:00 am local time wearing night vision goggles. Bales was wearing traditional Afghan clothing over his ACU. Government officials with knowledge of the investigation state that the killings were carried out in two phases, with Bales returning to base in between. An Afghan guard reported a soldier returning to base at 1:30 am, and another guard reported a soldier leaving at 2:30 am. Bales is believed to have first gone to Alkozai, about north of Camp Belambay, then to Najiban (called Balandi in earlier reports), located south of the base. Four people were killed and six wounded in Alkozai, and twelve people were killed in Najiban. U.S. sentries at the base heard gunshots in Alkozai, but did not take action besides attempting to view Alkozai from their post inside the base. Until March 22, U.S. authorities recognized 16 people killed, including nine children, four men, and three women. On March 22 that number was revised to 17, but later reduced back to 16. It was initially reported that five others were injured, and that number was eventually increased to six.


title: Robert Bales

text: When Bales returned to the base to resupply his ammunition, he states that he told one of the sergeants that he was drinking with earlier that night that he had "just killed some military-aged males in Alikozai, that he was going to go to Naja Bien to finish it", and that he wanted the Sergeant to "take care of his wife and kids." The Sergeant was reportedly irritated, half asleep, and did not believe him, only relenting to 'take care of Bales' kids' so that he would leave him to go back to sleep. Bales claims that he expected not to come back to the base. He left for the second time after resupplying his ammo, adding grenades and a grenade launcher to his resources.


title: Robert Bales

text: Bales stated in an interview that he went to the homes of suspected insurgents, where insurgent satellite phones, bombs, and rifles had been found. In the same interview, Bales states that he did not find any of the enemy cache that he had been looking for. He also reported being disoriented when he left the last villagers' home, realizing that he was now cold, wearing only a T-shirt and army pants.


title: Robert Bales

text: According to the Army, Bales burned some of the victims' bodies, an act considered desecration under Islamic law. Bales claims that he did not do this, stating that it must have been a lantern that was knocked over. Witnesses said that the eleven corpses from one family were shot in the head, stabbed, then gathered into one room and set on fire. A pile of ashes was found on the floor of one victims' house; at least one child's body was found partially charred. A reporter for "The New York Times" inspected the children's bodies taken to a nearby American military base and reported seeing burns on some of the legs and heads.


title: Robert Bales

text: When Bales exited the last house in Naja Bien, the commanding officer of the Green Berets, CPT Daniel Fields, ordered a rescue team to begin scouring the area around the base for SSG Bales, also dispatching the Persistent Ground Surveillance System, a high tech air balloon with a thermal camera attached to it. At 0430, the camera picked up SSG Bales' signal, walking back to the base. At 0447, Bales approached the base, weapons of his fellow Americans pointed at him. He was then disarmed and turned over to the Green Berets.


title: Robert Bales

text: According to the Army, Bales went back and forth for the next eight hours between confessing and obstructing the investigation. Afghans from the surrounding villages had loaded the bodies of the victims onto trucks and were bringing them to the base.


title: Robert Bales

text: On March 24, U.S. Army investigators said Bales was the sole person responsible for the shootings, which were the result of two separate attacks. Investigators said Bales returned to Camp Belambai after the first attack and left the camp an hour later to commit the second. It was reported that when he finally returned to the camp and surrendered his weapon, it was wrapped in an Afghan shawl. After being arrested, Bales sought out attorney John Henry Browne, well-known in Washington state for reducing his clients' potentially hefty prison sentences and representing Ted Bundy in court.


title: Robert Bales

text: Immediately after the massacre, the Afghan Army's criminal investigation division went to the scene to attempt to investigate but came under enemy fire; one Afghan soldier was killed in the interaction. When the soldiers finally gained access to the crime scene, families had already removed the bodies and buried them. No photos of the bodies were taken, and DNA evidence was scraped off of the walls of Afghan homes for forensic evidence. A page and a half report was written and officially submitted. The lack of forensic evidence prohibited the confirmation of the accuracy of Afghan allegations against Bales. The DNA evidence gathered from the walls of Afghan homes and from the family members of the deceased was never cross referenced against the US database to verify if any of the victims were enemy combatants.


title: Robert Bales

text: A senior military official said Bales had been drinking alcohol with two other soldiers on the night of the shootings, in violation of military rules in combat zones. According to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Bales acknowledged the killings and "told individuals what happened" immediately after being captured. Minutes later, he refused to speak with investigators and asked for an attorney. Bales' civilian Seattle-based attorney, John Henry Browne, later said, "I don't know that the government is going to prove much. There's no forensic evidence. There's no confession." Browne met with Bales on March 19 and claims that his client remembers "very little" of the event. At the time of November 5, 2012, Browne refused to give any concrete information on this topic for fear of the Army kicking him off the case for "disclosing still classified information." However, in May 2013, Browne said his client would confess to the massacre in return for avoiding the death penalty.


title: Robert Bales

text: In an interview about the investigation with an army intelligence officer, it stated that crime scene evidence, specifically that of shot patterns, was being looked at to determine the true nature of the crime. The officer stated that, as a sniper, "Bales is trained to wait for his shot and quietly blend back into his surroundings. But, allegedly, he went contrary to his strongest skillset. He burst into the open, fired up close, and stayed at the scene." The officer deemed this "incomprehensible behavior" and stated that the investigation was ruling out nothing as possible influences in Bales' motivation.


title: Robert Bales

text: In alternative theories to the massacre, villagers said that the crime was committed by more than one soldier. A woman by the name of Bibi Massoma claims that two Americans entered the room- one of them shot her husband while the other shot her six month old baby. Villagers in the area are also confused as to how a lone sniper was responsible for the killings in both the Balandi and Alkozai villages, since they were a 30-minute walk apart, in addition to having to sneak off base, past Special Forces troops, patrols and military surveillance measures.


title: Robert Bales

text: After his arrest, Bales was transferred out of Afghanistan, stopping at a U.S. military base in Kuwait. His stop in Kuwait upset the Kuwaiti government, as they had heard about the Bales case from news reports before being informed by the U.S. government. According to an unnamed official: "When they learned about it, the Kuwaitis blew a gasket and wanted him out of there."


title: Robert Bales

text: On March 16, 2012, Bales was flown from Kuwait to the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. According to U.S. Army Colonel James Hutton, Chief of Media Relations, Bales was being held in special housing in his own cell, and was able to go outside the cell "for hygiene and recreational purposes".


title: Robert Bales

text: On March 19, 2012, Bales met with Seattle-based attorney John Henry Browne at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, prison.


title: Robert Bales

text: On March 23, 2012, the U.S. government charged Bales with seventeen counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder, and six counts of assault.


title: Robert Bales

text: On June 1, 2012, the government dropped one of the murder charges, because one victim had been double counted. Simultaneously, other charges were filed, including abuse of steroids, alcohol consumption, and attempting to destroy evidence. Assault charges were increased from six to seven.


title: Robert Bales

text: In October 2012, Bales was transferred to Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.


title: Robert Bales

text: Civilian attorney John Henry Browne defended Bales with assigned military lawyers. Browne described Bales as "mild-mannered", claiming his client was upset after seeing a friend's leg blown off the day before the killings, but held no animosity toward Muslims. "I think the message for the public in general is that he's one of our boys and they need to treat him fairly." Browne denied the deadly rampage was caused by alcohol intoxication or marital problems and said Bales was "reluctant to serve." According to Browne, Bales did not want to return to the front lines. Browne said, "He wasn't thrilled about going on another deployment ... he was told he wasn't going back, and then he was told he was going." Browne also criticized anonymous reports from government officials, stating "the government is going to want to blame this on an individual rather than blame it on the war."


title: Robert Bales

text: Bales had no documented history of mental disorders, and had undergone an extensive mental health screening to become a sniper in 2008. In 2010, he suffered a concussion in a Humvee accident, underwent traumatic brain injury treatment at Fort Lewis, and was deemed healthy. Although Bales was never diagnosed with a mental disorder, Fort Lewis-McChord has had a history of psychiatric misdiagnosis and may have sent soldiers with PTSD back into combat. Investigators examining his medical history described his ten-year U.S. Army tenure as "unremarkable" and found no evidence of serious traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress. A high-ranking U.S. official told "The New York Times", "When it all comes out, it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues—he just snapped." However, Bales had been taking an anti-malaria medication (mefloquine) now known to cause a wide range of side effects, to include aggression, paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, and suicidal thinking. The Army, as well as the prosecution, deny providing the drug to Bales, although a fellow soldier testified that he had witnessed the distribution. It was also found that Bales had started taking stanozolol three weeks before the massacre.


title: Robert Bales

text: Then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that the United States would seek the death penalty, and President Barack Obama instructed the military to "prosecute" the case aggressively.


title: Robert Bales

text: As part of the legal proceedings, an Article 32 hearing was held November 5–13, 2012, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. The hearing included eyewitnesses testimony from Afghanistan via a live video link; Bales did not testify. Some sources claim that Afghan witnesses may have had ties to the Taliban, including allegations that they were "coached" by the prosecution, but these claims are unverified.


title: Robert Bales

text: On May 29, 2013, it was announced Bales would plead guilty (thereby avoiding the death penalty) and describe the events of March 11, 2012. On June 5, Bales pleaded guilty in a plea deal to 16 counts of murder and six counts of assault and attempted murder. When asked by Judge Col. Jeffery Nance "What was your reason for killing them?", he said he had asked himself that question "a million times" and added, "There's not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did." He maintained he did not recall setting bodies on fire, but admitted the evidence was clear that he had. He said he had taken the steroids solely to be "huge and jacked" and blamed them for "definitely" increasing his irritability and anger.


title: Robert Bales

text: At the sentencing hearing, defense attorneys argued for a sentence of life with the possibility of parole, arguing that he was a troubled man who snapped, not a "cold-blooded murderer". Bales took to the stand to issue an apology to his victims. Lt. Col Jay Morse, a member of the US Army Trial Counsel Assistance Program, was the lead prosecutor in the Bales case. The prosecution, seeking life without the possibility of parole, closed their arguments with: "In just a few short hours, Sgt. Bales wiped out generations. Sgt. Bales dares to ask you for mercy when he has shown none."


title: Robert Bales

text: On August 23, 2013, a six-person panel sentenced Bales to life in prison without parole. He was also demoted to the lowest enlisted rank, dishonorably discharged, and forfeited all pay and allowances. A commanding general overseeing the court-martial has the option of reducing the sentence to life with the possibility of parole. Afghan villagers and the families of Bales' victims were upset by the decision, saying he deserved death. Bales is incarcerated in the maximum security section of the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. In September 2017, the U.S. Army Criminal Appeals Court upheld Bales' conviction and sentencing. The three-judge panel called the allegation of the use of mefloquine by the defense "speculative." The US Supreme Court later refused to hear Bales' appeal. In December 2020 the defense of Bales requested a pardon from President Donald Trump. Bales was not pardoned before Trump left office.


title: Robert Bales

text: During several months of interviews while incarcerated, Bales revealed in depth his recollection of his actions the night of the murders, and why he believed he acted the way he did, to reporter Brendan Vaughan in an article published in "GQ" magazine on October 21, 2015.


title: Robert Bales

text: After the massacre, his family was moved from their home in Lake Tapps, Washington, for their protection.


title: Robert Bales

text: The Bales family was struggling financially and had put its home up for sale three days before the shootings. The property was listed for $229,000, approximately $50,000 less than what they had paid for it in 2005, and was worth $100,000 less than what they owed the bank.


title: Video Game High School

text: Video Game High School (often abbreviated VGHS) is an American action comedy web series from RocketJump Studios. It was written by Matthew Arnold, Will Campos and Brian Firenzi and directed by Matthew Arnold, Brandon Laatsch, and Freddie Wong. RocketJump Studios describes the series as "a show about best friends, first loves, and landing that perfect head shot". The team at RocketJump chose to make a web series because they "strongly believe the foundations for the future of digitally distributed content will be laid by web series".


title: Video Game High School

text: Since its release in 2012, the series has been viewed more than 150 million times on various online platforms.


title: Video Game High School

text: The series is set in the near future where video games elevate their best players to stardom by their position as the world's most popular competitive sport. Video Game High School (VGHS) is an elite and prestigious facility that teaches a curriculum of video games of all genres.


title: Video Game High School

text: The show's protagonist, BrianD, gains entry to the school after unwittingly defeating "The Law", an international first-person shooter star, on live television. The show follows BrianD and the friends and enemies he makes at the school, playing on standard tropes of school dramas with a video game background.


title: Video Game High School

text: The show uses live-action scenes with the characters to show action within the games. The games depicted are inventions of the show, with the most prominent being a first-person shooter named "Field of Fire".


title: Video Game High School

text: "Video Game High School" is co-created by Freddie Wong, Will Campos, Brian Firenzi and Matt Arnold. In addition to acting as showrunner, Arnold is also a writer, as are Campos and Firenzi (founder of 5secondfilms.com). The series is based on a concept by Campos and Chris Pappavaselio.


title: Video Game High School

text: The team was able to fund the series through Kickstarter, where they set a funding goal for $75,000 to be raised in a 30-day period. That amount was quickly pledged in less than 24 hours and continued to climb from there. On October 22, 2011, pledging came to a close, with $273,725 raised for the project from 5,661 backers.


title: Video Game High School

text: Principal photography began on October 25, and ended in late November. The final four days of shooting took place at the Eagle Mountain iron mine and Mojave Desert. Post-production started shortly after and ended in early 2012. The trailer for the series premiered on YouTube on May 11, 2012, on the "Freddiew" channel.


title: Video Game High School

text: Later, the first season of the show was edited into a two-hour movie and released on DVD, Blu-ray, and online.


title: Video Game High School

text: Season 1 episodes were released in May, June, and July 2012, first on the RocketJump website, and a week later on YouTube channel "freddiew". People who pledged to the project's fundraiser received HD digital downloads and DVDs. The Kickstarter fundraiser for season 2 ended in February 2013 with the project more than sufficiently funded. The second season was released in July and August 2013.


title: Video Game High School

text: In July 2013, Freddie Wong said that a third season was being worked on, and filming began in March 2014. Season 3 episodes were being released once per week starting on October 13, or could be purchased for immediate viewing through Vimeo On Demand, which includes 4K HD, HD, and SD downloads of the episode(s) purchased. RocketJump announced on October 30 that season 3 would be the last of the series.


title: Video Game High School

text: Netflix previously streamed all three seasons of the show, but only season 3 was available in 4K UHD, with most episodes doubled up to make individual 30-minute episodes.


title: K.V. Kortrijk

text: Koninklijke Voetbalclub Kortrijk (often simply called KV Kortrijk or KVK) is a Belgian professional football club based in Kortrijk, West Flanders. They play in the Belgian First Division, and they achieved their best ranking ever during the 2009–10 season, finishing fourth after the play-offs. KV Kortrijk was founded in 1971, though their roots can be traced to 1901. They are registered to the Royal Belgian Football Association with matricule number 19. The club colours are red and white. They play their home matches at the Guldensporenstadion, named after the Battle of the Golden Spurs which took place in Kortrijk in 1302.


title: K.V. Kortrijk

text: KV Kortrijk first entered the first division in the early 20th century, between 1906–07 and 1910–11. They eventually had to wait 65 years to return at the highest level, when they spent 15 seasons at the top flight, interrupted by a season in the second division (between 1976–77 and 1978–79 and between 1980–81 and 1991–92). KV Kortrijk also played the 1998–99 season in the first division before they returned to the Belgian Pro League in the 2008–09 season.


title: K.V. Kortrijk

text: In 1901 SC Courtraisien was founded. The club merged with FC Courtraisien in 1918. They received in 1951 the name Koninklijke Kortrijk Sport. They had the matricule n°19 like the oldest club SC Courtraisien. Stade Kortrijk was founded in 1923 with matricule n°161. Because Stade Kortrijk and Koninklijke Kortrijk Sport didn't play well anymore, they merged in 1971. They could play with matricule n°19 and the new name was KV Kortrijk.


title: K.V. Kortrijk

text: Due to bankruptcy, KV Kortrijk had to relegate in 2001 to the third division. From 2004 to 2008 KV Kortrijk played in the second division, however, in the 2007–08 season they managed to get promoted to the first division.


title: K.V. Kortrijk

text: KV Kortrijk's colours are generally red and white. The home kit is usually all red with white trim and red shorts. The away kit is similar, except in blue. The club's logo is a white shield, split into thirds by a red upside-down, V-like shape, and the letters ""KVK"" are split into each third, in a red font. On top of the shield is a crown.


title: K.V. Kortrijk

text: KV Kortrijk plays their home matches at the Guldensporen Stadion. It is located in Kortrijk, Belgium, and the current capacity of the ground is 9,399. In the summer of 2008, the ground's capacity was increased from 6,896 to 9,399, after Kortrijk's elevation into the Belgian First Division. "Guldensporenstadion" literally means "Stadium of the Golden Spurs". The stadium is named after this in reference to the Battle of the Golden Spurs which, in 1302, was fought in Kortrijk. The stadium has a traditional local stadium look about it and is single-tiered all around the ground.


title: Watermill

text: A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses hydropower. It is a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding), rolling, or hammering. Such processes are needed in the production of many material goods, including flour, lumber, paper, textiles, and many metal products. These watermills may comprise gristmills, sawmills, paper mills, textile mills, hammermills, trip hammering mills, rolling mills, wire drawing mills.


title: Watermill

text: One major way to classify watermills is by wheel orientation (vertical or horizontal), one powered by a vertical waterwheel through a gear mechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further divided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and pitchback (backshot or reverse shot) waterwheel mills. Another way to classify water mills is by an essential trait about their location: tide mills use the movement of the tide; ship mills are water mills onboard (and constituting) a ship.


title: Watermill

text: Watermills impact the river dynamics of the watercourses where they are installed. During the time watermills operate channels tend to sedimentate, particularly backwater. Also in the backwater area, inundation events and sedimentation of adjacent floodplains increase. Over time however these effects are cancelled by river banks becoming higher. Where mills have been removed, river incision increases and channels deepen.


title: Watermill

text: There are two basic types of watermills, one powered by a vertical-waterwheel via a gear mechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal-waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further divided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and reverse shot waterwheel mills.


title: Watermill

text: The Greeks invented the two main components of watermills, the waterwheel and toothed gearing, and used, along with the Romans, undershot, overshot and breastshot waterwheel mills.


title: Watermill

text: The earliest evidence of a water-driven wheel appears in the technical treatises "Pneumatica" and "Parasceuastica" of the Greek engineer Philo of Byzantium (ca. 280−220 BC). The British historian of technology M.J.T. Lewis has shown that those portions of Philo of Byzantium's mechanical treatise which describe water wheels and which have been previously regarded as later Arabic interpolations, actually date back to the Greek 3rd century BC original. The sakia gear is, already fully developed, for the first time attested in a 2nd-century BC Hellenistic wall painting in Ptolemaic Egypt.


title: Watermill

text: Lewis assigns the date of the invention of the horizontal-wheeled mill to the Greek colony of Byzantium in the first half of the 3rd century BC, and that of the vertical-wheeled mill to Ptolemaic Alexandria around 240 BC.


title: Watermill

text: The Greek geographer Strabon reports in his "Geography" a water-powered grain-mill to have existed near the palace of king Mithradates VI Eupator at Cabira, Asia Minor, before 71 BC.


title: Watermill

text: The Roman engineer Vitruvius has the first technical description of a watermill, dated to 40/10 BC; the device is fitted with an undershot wheel and power is transmitted via a gearing mechanism. He also seems to indicate the existence of water-powered kneading machines.


title: Watermill

text: The Greek epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica tells of an advanced overshot wheel mill around 20 BC/10 AD. He praised for its use in grinding grain and the reduction of human labour:


title: Watermill

text: The Roman encyclopedist Pliny mentions in his "Naturalis Historia" of around 70 AD water-powered trip hammers operating in the greater part of Italy. There is evidence of a fulling mill in 73/4 AD in Antioch, Roman Syria.


title: Watermill

text: The 2nd century AD multiple mill complex of Barbegal in southern France has been described as "the greatest known concentration of mechanical power in the ancient world". It featured 16 overshot waterwheels to power an equal number of flour mills. The capacity of the mills has been estimated at 4.5 tons of flour per day, sufficient to supply enough bread for the 12,500 inhabitants occupying the town of Arelate at that time. A similar mill complex existed on the Janiculum hill, whose supply of flour for Rome's population was judged by emperor Aurelian important enough to be included in the Aurelian walls in the late 3rd century.


title: Watermill

text: A breastshot wheel mill dating to the late 2nd century AD was excavated at Les Martres-de-Veyre, France.


title: Watermill

text: The 3rd century AD Hierapolis water-powered stone sawmill is the earliest known machine to incorporate a crank and connecting rod mechanism. Further sawmills, also powered by crank and connecting rod mechanisms, are archaeologically attested for the 6th century AD water-powered stone sawmills at Gerasa and Ephesus. Literary references to water-powered marble saws in what is now Germany can be found in Ausonius 4th century AD poem Mosella. They also seem to be indicated about the same time by the Christian saint Gregory of Nyssa from Anatolia, demonstrating a diversified use of water-power in many parts of the Roman Empire.


title: Watermill

text: The earliest turbine mill was found in Chemtou and Testour, Roman North Africa, dating to the late 3rd or early 4th century AD. A possible water-powered furnace has been identified at Marseille, France.


title: Watermill

text: Mills were commonly used for grinding grain into flour (attested by Pliny the Elder), but industrial uses as fulling and sawing marble were also applied.


title: Watermill

text: The Romans used both fixed and floating water wheels and introduced water power to other provinces of the Roman Empire. So-called 'Greek Mills' used water wheels with a horizontal wheel (and vertical shaft). A "Roman Mill" features a vertical wheel (on a horizontal shaft). Greek style mills are the older and simpler of the two designs, but only operate well with high water velocities and with small diameter millstones. Roman style mills are more complicated as they require gears to transmit the power from a shaft with a horizontal axis to one with a vertical axis.


title: Watermill

text: Although to date only a few dozen Roman mills are archaeologically traced, the widespread use of aqueducts in the period suggests that many remain to be discovered. Recent excavations in Roman London, for example, have uncovered what appears to be a tide mill together with a possible sequence of mills worked by an aqueduct running along the side of the River Fleet.


title: Watermill

text: In 537 AD, ship mills were ingeniously used by the East Roman general Belisarius, when the besieging Goths cut off the water supply for those mills. These floating mills had a wheel that was attached to a boat moored in a fast flowing river.


title: Watermill

text: The surviving evidence for watermills sharply increases with the emergence of documentary genres such as monastic charters, Christian hagiography and Germanic legal codes. These were more inclined to address watermilling, a mostly rural work process, than the ancient urban-centered literary class had been. By Carolingian times, references to watermills had become "innumerable" in Frankish records. The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records 5,624 watermills in England alone. Later research estimates a less conservative number of 6,082 that should be considered a minimum as the northern reaches of England were never properly recorded. In 1300, this number had risen to between 10,000 and 15,000. By the early 7th century, watermills were also well established in Ireland. A century later they began to spread across the former Roman Rhine and Danube frontier into the other parts of Germany. Ship mills and tide mills, both of which yet unattested for the ancient period, were introduced in the 6th century.


title: Watermill

text: In recent years, a number of new archaeological finds has consecutively pushed back the date of the earliest tide mills, all of which were discovered on the Irish coast: A 6th century vertical-wheeled tide mill was located at Killoteran near Waterford. A twin flume horizontal-wheeled tide mill dating to c. 630 was excavated on Little Island. Alongside it, another tide mill was found which was powered by a vertical undershot wheel. The Nendrum Monastery mill from 787 was situated on an island in Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland. Its millstones are 830mm in diameter and the horizontal wheel is estimated to have developed 7/8HP at its peak. Remains of an earlier mill dated at 619 were also found at the site.


title: Watermill

text: In a 2005 survey the scholar Adam Lucas identified the following first appearances of various industrial mill types in Western Europe. Noticeable is the preeminent role of France in the introduction of new innovative uses of waterpower. However, he has drawn attention to the dearth of studies of the subject in several other countries.


title: Watermill

text: The waterwheel was found in China from 30 AD onwards, when it was used to power trip hammers, the bellows in smelting iron, and in one case, to mechanically rotate an armillary sphere for astronomical observation (see Zhang Heng). Although the British chemist and sinologist Joseph Needham speculates that the water-powered millstone could have existed in Han China by the 1st century AD, there is no sufficient literary evidence for it until the 5th century AD. In 488 AD, the mathematician and engineer Zu Chongzhi had a watermill erected which was inspected by Emperor Wu of Southern Qi (r. 482–493 AD). The engineer Yang Su of the Sui Dynasty (581–618 AD) was said to operate hundreds of them by the beginning of the 6th century. A source written in 612 AD mentions Buddhist monks arguing over the revenues gained from watermills. The Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) 'Ordinances of the Department of Waterways' written in 737 AD stated that watermills should not interrupt riverine transport and in some cases were restricted to use in certain seasons of the year. From other Tang-era sources of the 8th century, it is known that these ordinances were taken very seriously, as the government demolished many watermills owned by great families, merchants, and Buddhist abbeys that failed to acknowledge ordinances or meet government regulations. A eunuch serving Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (r. 712–756 AD) owned a watermill by 748 AD which employed five waterwheels that ground 300 bushels of wheat a day. By 610 or 670 AD, the watermill was introduced to Japan via Korean Peninsula. It also became known in Tibet by at least 641 AD.


title: Watermill

text: According to Greek historical tradition, India received water-mills from the Roman Empire in the early 4th century AD when a certain Metrodoros introduced "water-mills and baths, unknown among them [the Brahmans] till then".


title: Watermill

text: Engineers under the Caliphates adopted watermill technology from former provinces of the Byzantine Empire, having been applied for centuries in those provinces prior to the Muslim conquests, including modern-day Syria, Jordan, Israel, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Spain (see List of ancient watermills).


title: Watermill

text: The industrial uses of watermills in the Islamic world date back to the 7th century, while horizontal-wheeled and vertical-wheeled watermills were both in widespread use by the 9th century. A variety of industrial watermills were used in the Islamic world, including gristmills, hullers, sawmills, ship mills, stamp mills, steel mills, sugar mills, and tide mills. By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic world had these industrial watermills in operation, from al-Andalus and North Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia. Muslim and Middle Eastern Christian engineers also used crankshafts and water turbines, gears in watermills and water-raising machines, and dams as a source of water, used to provide additional power to watermills and water-raising machines. Fulling mills, and steel mills may have spread from Al-Andalus to Christian Spain in the 12th century. Industrial watermills were also employed in large factory complexes built in al-Andalus between the 11th and 13th centuries.


title: Watermill

text: The engineers of the Islamic world used several solutions to achieve the maximum output from a watermill. One solution was to mount them to piers of bridges to take advantage of the increased flow. Another solution was the ship mill, a type of watermill powered by water wheels mounted on the sides of ships moored in midstream. This technique was employed along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in 10th-century Iraq, where large ship mills made of teak and iron could produce 10 tons of flour from corn every day for the granary in Baghdad.


title: Watermill

text: More than 300 watermills were at work in Iran till 1960. Now only a few are still working. One of the famous ones is the water mill of Askzar and the water mill of the Yazd city, still producing flour.


title: Watermill

text: Typically, water is diverted from a river or impoundment or mill pond to a turbine or water wheel, along a channel or pipe (variously known as a flume, head race, mill race, leat, leet, lade (Scots) or penstock). The force of the water's movement drives the blades of a wheel or turbine, which in turn rotates an axle that drives the mill's other machinery. Water leaving the wheel or turbine is drained through a tail race, but this channel may also be the head race of yet another wheel, turbine or mill. The passage of water is controlled by sluice gates that allow maintenance and some measure of flood control; large mill complexes may have dozens of sluices controlling complicated interconnected races that feed multiple buildings and industrial processes.


title: Watermill

text: Watermills can be divided into two kinds, one with a horizontal water wheel on a vertical axle, and the other with a vertical wheel on a horizontal axle. The oldest of these were horizontal mills in which the force of the water, striking a simple paddle wheel set horizontally in line with the flow turned a runner stone balanced on the rynd which is atop a shaft leading directly up from the wheel. The bedstone does not turn. The problem with this type of mill arose from the lack of gearing; the speed of the water directly set the maximum speed of the runner stone which, in turn, set the rate of milling.


title: Watermill

text: Most watermills in Britain and the United States of America had a vertical waterwheel, one of four kinds: undershot, breast-shot, overshot and pitchback wheels. This vertical produced rotary motion around a horizontal axis, which could be used (with cams) to lift hammers in a forge, fulling stocks in a fulling mill and so on.


title: Watermill

text: However, in corn mills rotation about a vertical axis was required to drive its stones. The horizontal rotation was converted into the vertical rotation by means of gearing, which also enabled the runner stones to turn faster than the waterwheel. The usual arrangement in British and American corn mills has been for the waterwheel to turn a horizontal shaft on which is also mounted a large pit wheel. This meshes with the wallower, mounted on a vertical shaft, which turns the (larger) great spur wheel (mounted on the same shaft). This large face wheel, set with pegs, in turn, turned a smaller wheel (such as a lantern gear) known as a stone nut, which was attached to the shaft that drove the runner stone. The number of runner stones that could be turned depended directly upon the supply of water available. As waterwheel technology improved mills became more efficient, and by the 19th century, it was common for the great spur wheel to drive several stone nuts, so that a single water wheel could drive as many as four stones. Each step in the process increased the gear ratio which increased the maximum speed of the runner stone. Adjusting the sluice gate and thus the flow of the water past the main wheel allowed the miller to compensate for seasonal variations in the water supply. Finer speed adjustment was made during the milling process by "tentering", that is, adjusting the gap between the stones according to the water flow, the type of grain being milled, and the grade of flour required.


title: Watermill

text: In many mills (including the earliest) the great spur wheel turned only one stone, but there might be several mills under one roof. The earliest illustration of a single waterwheel driving more than one set of stones was drawn by Henry Beighton in 1723 and published in 1744 by J. T. Desaguliers.


title: Watermill

text: The overshot wheel was a later innovation in waterwheels and was around two and a half times more efficient than the undershot. The undershot wheel, in which the main water wheel is simply set into the flow of the mill race, suffers from an inherent inefficiency stemming from the fact that the wheel itself, entering the water behind the main thrust of the flow driving the wheel, followed by the lift of the wheel out of the water ahead of the main thrust, actually impedes its own operation. The overshot wheel solves this problem by bringing the water flow to the top of the wheel. The water fills buckets built into the wheel, rather than the simple paddle wheel design of undershot wheels. As the buckets fill, the weight of the water starts to turn the wheel. The water spills out of the bucket on the down side into a spillway leading back to river. Since the wheel itself is set above the spillway, the water never impedes the speed of the wheel. The impulse of the water on the wheel is also harnessed in addition to the weight of the water once in the buckets. Overshot wheels require the construction of a dam on the river above the mill and a more elaborate millpond, sluice gate, mill race and spillway or tailrace.