title: Hammock

text: The United States Army eventually adopted their own version of the jungle hammock, complete with rain proof fly and sandfly netting for use by U.S. and Allied forces in tropical jungle regions such as Burma during World War II. While at first reluctant to accept the idea of its men sleeping in hammocks, the United States Marine Corps later employed jungle hammocks in New Britain and later Pacific island campaigns where heavy rain and insects were prevalent; concerns over injuries from machine gun and artillery fire were overcome by first digging a slit trench, then staking the hammock's support lines to suspend the hammock beneath ground level.


title: Hammock

text: Later U.S. Army hammocks issued during the Vietnam War, such as the M1966 Jungle Hammock, were mistakenly fitted with waterproof bottom panels, which often became filled with water overnight. On the other side, North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) forces regularly employed jungle hammocks fabricated from scavenged or captured US parachute cloth and shroud lines. Hung well off jungle trails, the hammocks kept down the incidence of disease and illness, which NVA commanders generally regarded as a greater threat than shrapnel injuries caused by sleeping above ground.


title: Hammock

text: Ceiling mounted hammocks for babies are traditional to south India. The textile used is the woven 5 meter Sari, which is long enough to be hung high, yet reach low enough to be safe for toddlers. The light material allows perspiration and cooling in the hot climate native to this region.


title: Hammock

text: The first two men to walk on the moon, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, spent their rest periods on the Apollo lunar module floor and reported being too cold to sleep comfortably.


title: Hammock

text: From the mission Apollo 12 until the last Apollo lunar mission, hammocks designed to attach to the interior of the lunar module ascent stage were provided. They helped reduce the cooling effects of contact with the cabin floor as well as a softer support. They enabled astronauts from the last missions to spend complete nights of sleep on the moon.


title: Hammock

text: There are currently a wide variety of hammocks available. There are hammocks that are designed specifically for backpacking and include mosquito netting along with pockets for nighttime storage. There are hammocks made out of thin and lightweight material which makes them ideal for taking on daytrips. Other hammocks include self-standing metal or wood structures that support the hammock. Given that hammocks are commonly similar lengths to accommodate for an average adult's height, most hammock stands are universal in design, typically featuring a spreader bar that runs along the ground, feet for stability at each end, and a diagonal arm at each end to provide two hanging points. Although they are usually bought premade, it is also possible to make your own hammock.


title: Hammock

text: Hammocks are very popular in the Brazilian northeast region, but not only as sleeping devices: in the poorest areas of the sertão, if there is not a cemetery in a settlement, hammocks may be used to carry the dead to a locale where there is one; also, they frequently serve as a low-cost alternative to coffins. This custom inspired Candido Portinari's 1944 painting "Enterro na Rede" ("burial in the hammock"). Traditionally the sailors who have died at sea were buried at sea in their hammocks.


title: Hammock

text: Medical research suggests the gentle rocking motion of the hammock allows users to fall asleep faster and sleep more deeply compared to a traditional, stationary mattress.


title: Hammock

text: Current popular hammock styles include the spreader-bar, Mayan, Brazilian, naval, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan (jungle), and travel hammocks. Each style is distinctive and has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Many hammocks come in a variety of colors, patterns, and sizes ranging from a one-person (250 – 350 lbs / 110 – 160 kg) to two or three person (400 lbs – 600 lbs / 180 – 270 kg). Common dimensions for unslung hammocks fall in a range between 3'/0.9m to 14'/4.2m across and 6'/1.8m to 11'/3.3m long.


title: Hammock

text: The spreader-bar hammock is easily recognized by wooden or metal bars at the head and foot of the hammock, spreading its width and allowing for easy access for casual use, such as in a backyard. Unfortunately, the spreader bars also make the hammock unsteady since the metacenter of the hammock when sleeping is very high. This style is generally considered less stable and less comfortable for sleeping than other styles. A subset of this style is the single-spreader bar hammock, which uses a spreader bar on only one end and is much more stable. A variation of the single-spreader bar hammock has three attachment points, one at each corner of the spreader bar and one at the non-spreader bar end, and is nearly untippable.


title: Hammock

text: While the various styles of hammocks available today are similar in form, they differ significantly in materials, purpose, and construction.


title: Hammock

text: Mayan and Nicaraguan hammocks are made from either cotton or nylon string that is woven to form a supportive net. Mayan Hammocks have a looser weave than Nicaraguan hammocks, and the supportiveness of the hammock "bed" depends on the number of strings and quality of the weave.


title: Hammock

text: Brazilian hammocks are made from cotton fabric and usually more durable than the string varieties. While Mayan and Nicaraguan hammocks are considered by some to have the potential to be more comfortable, the Brazilian hammock's comfort is less dependent on its construction and therefore less likely to vary as highly from manufacturer to manufacturer.


title: Hammock

text: Naval hammocks are usually made from canvas or strong cotton. They are intended to be durable and stand well the hardships of shipboard use. They usually are simple and undecorated but robust.


title: Hammock

text: Venezuelan or jungle hammocks made today are generally of breathable nylon or polyester, and use dacron or similar non-stretch suspension lines. They are "inline" hammocks; like the canvas naval hammocks of old, the occupant sleeps along the length of the hammock, rather than across it. With their breathable false bottoms, drip strings, sandfly netting, and optional rainfly, they are one of the most secure hammocks against not only water entry, but also insect stings or bites.


title: Hammock

text: Travel or camping hammocks are popular among leave no trace and ultra-light campers, hikers, and sailing enthusiasts for their reduced impact on the environment and their lightness and lack of bulk compared to tents. They are typically made of sturdy nylon parachute fabric which may use ripstop techniques to improve durability. Some hammocks feature a mosquito net and storage pockets. Some types offer a ridgeline to make set up easier, and may also include a slit for entry through the bottom of the hammock. Special webbing straps (called "treehuggers") are used to loop around trees in order to create attachment points for the hammock.


title: Hammock

text: For non spreader-bar styles, the way in which they are hung is critical for comfort. Generally, a higher attachment point is preferred as well as sufficient length between points, though these two dimensions can be adjusted to compensate for a lack in one or the other. The optimal angle of the attaching lines to the post / wall / tree is usually about 30 degrees. Hammocks can be attached to the anchor points using a variety of suspension systems, including ropes and webbing straps.


title: Hammock

text: Though one can lie in a hammock lengthwise or across its width, most hammocks are best used with a diagonal position, as it provides the most room and support. Users with back and joint pains often report some relief from these problems when sleeping in a hammock in this manner.


title: Arnica montana

text: Arnica montana, also known as wolf's bane, leopard's bane, mountain tobacco and mountain arnica, is a moderately toxic European flowering plant in the daisy family Asteraceae. It is noted for its large yellow flower head. The names "wolf's bane" and "leopard's bane" are also used for another plant, aconitum, which is extremely poisonous.


title: Arnica montana

text: "Arnica montana" is used as an herbal medicine for analgesic and anti-inflammatory purposes, but there is insufficient high-quality clinical evidence for such effects, and it is toxic when taken internally or applied to injured skin.


title: Arnica montana

text: "Arnica montana" is a flowering plant about tall aromatic fragrant, herbaceous perennial. Its basal green ovate leaves with rounded tips are bright coloured and level to the ground. In addition, they are somewhat downy on their upper surface, veined and aggregated in rosettes. By contrast, the upper leaves are opposed, spear-shaped and smaller which is an exception within the Asteraceae. The chromosome number is 2n=38.


title: Arnica montana

text: The flowering season is between May and August (Central Europe). The hairy flowers are composed of yellow disc florets in the center and orange-yellow ray florets at the external part. The achenes have a one-piece rough pappus which opens in dry conditions. "Arnica montana" is a hemicryptophyte, which helps the plant to survive the extreme overwintering condition of its habitat. In addition, "Arnica" forms rhizomes, which grow in a two-year cycle: the rosette part grows at its front while its tail is slowly dying.


title: Arnica montana

text: "Arnica montana" is widespread across most of Europe. It is absent from the Celtic Isles and the Italian and Balkan peninsulas. In addition, it is considered extinct in Hungary and Lithuania. "Arnica montana" grows in nutrient-poor siliceous meadows or clay soils. It mostly grows on alpine meadows and up to nearly . In more upland regions, it may also be found on nutrient-poor moors and heaths. However Arnica does not grow on lime soil, thus it is an extremely reliable bioindicator for nutrient poor and acidic soils. It is rare overall, but may be locally abundant. It is becoming rarer, particularly in the north of its distribution, largely due to increasingly intensive agriculture and commercial wildcrafting (foraging). Nevertheless, it is cultivated on a large scale in Estonia.


title: Arnica montana

text: The main constituents of "Arnica montana" are essential oils, fatty acids, thymol, pseudoguaianolide sesquiterpene lactones and flavanone glycosides. Pseudoguaianolide sesquiterpenes constitute 0.2–0.8% of the flower head of "Arnica montana". They are the toxin helenalin and their fatty esters. 2,5-Dimethoxy-p-cymene and thymol methyl ether are the primary components of essential oils from both the plant's roots and rhizomes. The quality and chemical constitution of the plant substance Arnicae flos can be monitored by near-infrared spectroscopy.


title: Arnica montana

text: "Arnica montana" is propagated from seed. Generally, 20% of seeds do not germinate. For large scale planting, it is recommended to raise plants first in a nursery and then to transplant them in the field. Seeds sprout in 14–20 days but germination rate depends highly on the seed quality. Planting density for "Arnica montana" is of 20 plants/m such that the maximum yield density will be achieved in the second flowering season. While "Arnica montana" has high exigencies of soil quality, analyses should be done before any fertilizer input.


title: Arnica montana

text: The flowers are harvested when fully developed and dried without their bract nor receptacles. The roots can be harvested in autumn and dried as well after being carefully washed.


title: Arnica montana

text: Historically, "Arnica montana" has been used as an herbal medicine for centuries, with it generally being employed for analgesic and anti-inflammatory purposes.


title: Arnica montana

text: "A. montana" has also been the subject of studies of homeopathic preparations. A 1998 systematic review of homeopathic "A. montana" conducted at the University of Exeter found that there are no rigorous clinical trials that support the claim that it is efficacious beyond a placebo effect at the concentrations used in homeopathy.


title: Arnica montana

text: The US Food and Drug Administration has classified "Arnica montana" as an unsafe herb because of its toxicity. It should not be taken orally or applied to broken skin where absorption can occur. "Arnica" irritates mucous membranes and may elicit stomach pain, diarrhea, and vomiting. It may produce contact dermatitis when applied to skin.


title: Arnica montana

text: "Arnica montana" contains the toxin helenalin, which can be poisonous if large amounts of the plant are eaten or small amounts of concentrated Arnica are used. Consumption of "A. montana" can produce severe gastroenteritis, internal bleeding of the digestive tract, raised liver enzymes (which can indicate inflammation of the liver), nervousness, accelerated heart rate, muscular weakness, and death if enough is ingested. Contact with the plant can also cause skin irritation. In the Ames test, an extract of "A. montana" was found to be mutagenic.


title: Arnica montana

text: The demand for "A. montana" is 50 tonnes per year in Europe, but the supply does not cover the demand. The plant is rare; it is protected in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and in some regions of Switzerland. France and Romania produce "A. montana" for the international market. Changes in agriculture in Europe during the last decades have led to a decline in the occurrence of "A. montana". Extensive agriculture has been replaced by intensive management.


title: Joyce Jameson

text: Joyce Jameson (born Joyce Beverly Kingsley; September 26, 1932 – January 16, 1987) was an American actress, known for many television roles, including recurring guest appearances as Skippy, one of the "fun girls" in the 1960s television series "The Andy Griffith Show" as well as "the Blonde" in the Academy Award-winning "The Apartment" (1960).


title: Joyce Jameson

text: Jameson was born Joyce Beverly Kingsley on September 26, 1932 in Chicago. She graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts degree.


title: Joyce Jameson

text: Jameson began work in the early 1950s with numerous uncredited roles in films and television. She made her film debut in 1951 playing a chorus girl dancer in the motion picture "Show Boat". Other notable film credits of that early period included "Problem Girls" (1953), "Tip on a Dead Jockey" (1957) and "The Apartment" (1960).


title: Joyce Jameson

text: In 1962, she starred with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in the Roger Corman horror film "Tales of Terror" as Annabel Herringbone. She played Lorre's vulgar, unfaithful wife, and during the course of the film, she and her paramour (Price) were locked up in Lorre's wine cellar. One year later, she again starred with Lorre and Price in the raucous comedy "The Comedy of Terrors" (released in 1964). In 1964, she appeared as a hotel hooker in the comedy "Good Neighbor Sam", starring Jack Lemmon and Romy Schneider.


title: Joyce Jameson

text: In 1966, she starred as Abigail in the Elvis Presley film "Frankie and Johnny" and in "Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!" with Bob Hope and Elke Sommer. She also appeared in 1968's "The Split", a crime film with Jim Brown and Warren Oates, and in an unsold comedy pilot for CBS titled "The Mouse That Roared".


title: Joyce Jameson

text: Jameson had roles in "Death Race 2000" (1975) playing Grace Pander, "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (1976) as Rose, "Every Which Way but Loose" (1978), and "Hardbodies" (1984).


title: Joyce Jameson

text: Jameson was also a television actress. She was a regular member of the cast on "Club Oasis". She made two appearances on "Perry Mason": first as Lorraine Iverson who killed her husband in the 1963 episode "The Case of the Floating Stones", then as Dolly Jameson in the 1965 episode, "The Case of the Feather Cloak". She also had roles on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (in the episode "A Day in the Life of Alan Brady"), "Gunsmoke", "Stagecoach West", "The Twilight Zone", "The Man from U.N.C.L.E" (The Dippy Blonde Affair), "McHale's Navy", "My Favorite Martian", "The New Phil Silvers Show", "The Munsters", and "F-Troop". Also, in 1966, she was Irene in the Gomer Pyle episode, "Vacation in Las Vegas". And not long after, she had a couple of roles in "Hogan's Heroes" (in the January 1967 episode "The Great Brinksmeyer Robbery" as Mady Pleiffer, and again later that same year in "Sgt. Schultz Meets Mata Hari" as Gestapo agent Eva Mueller), "Alias Smith and Jones", "Emergency!" and "Barney Miller". She appeared in "The Rockford Files" (in the 1974 episode "The Dexter Crisis" as Marge White). Later she appeared in "Charlie's Angels", "The Feather and Father Gang", and "The Love Boat".


title: Joyce Jameson

text: Her ongoing role as Skippy paired with Daphne (played by Jean Carson) in "The Andy Griffith Show" established The Fun Girls.


title: Joyce Jameson

text: Jameson's Broadway credits include "The Billy Barnes Revue" (1959), "Venus at Large" (1961) and "The Billy Barnes People" (1961).


title: Joyce Jameson

text: She married actor/songwriter Billy Barnes in the 1950s, and they had one child together, son Tyler, before their divorce. Subsequently, Jameson was a longtime girlfriend of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." star Robert Vaughn. She acted opposite Vaughn as the guest star on a 1966 "U.N.C.L.E". episode "The Dippy Blond Affair".


title: Joyce Jameson

text: According to Vaughn's autobiography, "A Fortunate Life", Jameson suffered from depression. She was also an insomniac and regularly took Miltown to help her sleep.


title: Joyce Jameson

text: On January 16, 1987, Jameson died by suicide by overdosing on pills at the age of 54. Her body was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: War and Peace () is a 1956 epic historical drama film based on Leo Tolstoy's 1869 novel of the same name. It is directed and co-written by King Vidor and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti for Paramount Pictures. The film stars Audrey Hepburn as Natasha, Henry Fonda as Pierre, and Mel Ferrer as Andrei, along with Oskar Homolka, Vittorio Gassman, Herbert Lom, Jeremy Brett, John Mills and Anita Ekberg in one of her first breakthrough roles. The musical score was composed by Nino Rota and conducted by Franco Ferrara.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: "War and Peace" opened on August 21, 1956 to a mixed reception, with some reviewers critical with the film truncating much of Tolstoy's novel, and the casting of 50-year-old Henry Fonda as the 20-year-old Pierre Bezukhov. It received Academy Awards nominations for Best Director, Best Cinematography (Color), and Best Costume Design (Color). It was also nominated for four Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama (Audrey Hepburn), and won Best Foreign Film.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: In February 2020, the film was shown at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, as part of a retrospective dedicated to King Vidor's career.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: In 1805, most of Europe is torn apart by Napoleon Bonaparte's drive to conquer more and more territory. In Moscow, many young men have joined the army, including Nicholas Rostov, the son of Count Ilya Rostov and his wife Nataly, and the brother of young Petya and the flighty but devoted Natasha. The Rostovs' friend Pierre, the illegitimate son of the ailing, wealthy Count Bezukhov, has recently returned from Paris and believes that Napoleon is a "cleansing force" who can establish equality and liberty.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Despite his pacifism, Pierre wishes Nicholas well and then visits his friend, army officer Dolokhov, a notorious rake. There, the comrades indulge in drinking games but are interrupted by Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, an officer of much finer character than Dolokhov. Andrei informs Pierre that his estranged father, who is near death, is calling for him, and Pierre goes to his father's mansion, where various relatives snub him. Their derision changes to hypocritical concern, however, after the old count dies and it is discovered that he has accepted Pierre as legitimate and named him his sole heir.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: The scheming Hélène Kuragina immediately sets her sights on Pierre and soon he falls in love with her, while her father, Prince Vasily Kuragin, insinuates himself as the administrator of Pierre's vast estates. One day, Pierre runs into Andrei in the country as Andrei is escorting his pregnant wife Lise to his father's house. Andrei, who feels trapped by the clinging Lise, had earlier advised Pierre never to marry, and now Pierre refuses to accept his warnings. After Andrei takes Lise to live with his sister Mary and gruff father, Prince Nicholas Bolkonsky, he leaves for the front and is made an adjutant to the commander of the army, Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov. At the Battle of Austerlitz, Andrei attempts to rally the retreating men by grabbing their banner and rushing the enemy, but he is wounded and left for dead. While surveying the battlefield, Napoleon comes across Andrei and, admiring his courage, orders that he be tended to by his personal physician.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: In Moscow, when Pierre learns that the Russians are suing for peace, Hélène persuades him to return to the country alone so that she can spend the season in the city, welcoming the soldiers. Nicholas comes home safely, much to the delight of Natasha. Meanwhile, Andrei returns to his family, just as Lise goes into labor. Although their son Kolya survives, Lise dies after giving birth, and the grieving Andrei blames himself for not offering her enough comfort and love. As time passes, Hélène begins a flirtation with Dolokhov, and when Pierre learns of the rumors about them, he insults Dolokhov and accepts his challenge of a duel. Although Pierre is woefully unskilled with firearms, he manages to shoot and wound Dolokhov, while the soldier's shot goes wide and Pierre is unharmed. Infuriated that he was provoked into acting in such an uncivilized manner, Pierre separates from Hélène and agrees to accompany the Rostovs to their country estate.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: One day, while they are hunting, they meet Andrei, who is enchanted by Natasha. Later, Andrei dances with Natasha when she attends her first ball and realizes that he wants to marry her. Prince Bolkonsky urges Andrei to wait a year, as Natasha is so young and the Rostovs are not their social equals, but promises to consent if Andrei still wishes to marry her then. With Natasha's promise to wait for him, Andrei then joins the mission to Prussia, where Czar Alexander and Napoleon sign a peace treaty in June 1807. While Andrei is gone, however, Natasha is seduced by Anatole Kuragin, Hélène's brother, who is as cold-hearted and debauched as his sister. Even though he is secretly married, Anatole persuades Natasha to elope with him, but their plans are foiled by Natasha's cousin Sonya and Pierre, who threatens Anatole with exposure of his marriage if he ruins Natasha's reputation. Pierre's threats come too late, however, and soon all of Moscow is gossiping about Natasha, who falls ill after Andrei ends their relationship. After several months, she begs Pierre to convey her regret to Andrei, and Pierre, who is in love with her, assures her that she is blameless, and that if he were free, he would ask for her hand.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: In 1812, Napoleon crosses the River Neman into Russia, despite the peace treaty. Faced with the superiority of the French Army, Kutuzov orders his men to retreat, and as they fall back, the soldiers and peasants set fire to the countryside so that the French will be without provisions. Although his officers protest his strategy, Kutuzov insists that the only way to save Russia is by letting the French wear themselves out. Soon the city of Smolensk is abandoned and Kutuzov decides to make a stand at Borodino. Determined to see war firsthand, to decide if his hatred of it is valid, Pierre travels to Borodino, where he finds Andrei's camp on the eve of the battle. Although Pierre urges Andrei to forgive Natasha, Andrei states that he cannot. The next morning, Pierre watches with mounting horror as the fighting rages around him and the French slaughter the Russians. Finally realizing that his hero is just a tyrant, Pierre damns Napoleon. Kutuzov then decides to fall back beyond Moscow, leaving the ancient capital city to the French.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: In Moscow, the Rostovs are among the many families preparing to flee when some wounded Russian soldiers arrive, hoping to be billeted at their home after their departure. Natasha insists that the men cannot be left behind to be captured, however, and they are loaded into the Rostov wagons and taken to a distant village. Napoleon is infuriated to learn that the government has fled, leaving no one behind to surrender to him. Although Pierre lies in wait one day, hoping to assassinate the French emperor, he cannot do it and is taken prisoner. Meanwhile, Natasha has learned that Andrei is among the wounded in their care and reunites with him. While Pierre is befriended by a fellow prisoner, the peasant Platon, the Rostovs take Andrei to a monastery to convalesce. Andrei's wounds prove fatal, however, and he dies just after Mary and Kolya arrive to bid him farewell.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Napoleon realizes that he has been outmaneuvered by Kutuzov, and, fearing being trapped in Russia during the winter, orders his men to retreat. The prisoners, including Pierre and Platon, are forced to accompany the soldiers during their 2,000-mile march, and many of them die. The Russian soldiers follow behind the French, allowing them little rest and picking off stragglers. Petya, who has joined the army against his parents' wishes, is sent with a dispatch to Dolokhov, ordering his platoon to join the main regiment. Eager for one last fight, Dolokhov insists on attacking the French the next morning and allows Petya to accompany him. Petya is killed during the engagement, and although Pierre is freed, he is too overcome by the boy's death to rejoice. Dolokhov informs Pierre that Hélène has died, and later, joins the other Russian soldiers as they attack the French, who are fleeing back across the Niemen.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: The Rostovs return to Moscow and find their mansion a burned-out shell, with only one wing remaining intact. Natasha rallies her family to make the best of what they have, however, and as the others settle in, Natasha sadly remembers happier times. She then sees Pierre in the doorway and rushes to embrace him. Telling him that he is like their house, which suffers and shows its wounds but still stands, Natasha kisses Pierre, and they walk together in the garden.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: The film script had to be greatly condensed from the extensive original novel. It is primarily focused on Natasha, Pierre, and Andrei, their complex relationship and personal maturation on the backdrop of the historical events of the Napoleonic invasion.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: British producer Alexander Korda announced interest in adapting Tolstoy’s novel for the screen as early as 1941, with Orson Welles directing, Merle Oberon and Agnes Moorehead, with a screenplay by Lillian Hellman. Korda's production was never realized, due to an inability to strike a deal with the Soviet government. In the 1950s, Mike Todd began actively pursuing a film adaptation, even arranging with Soviet and Yugoslavian officials for filming locations and the massive number of required extras, and hiring Fred Zinnemann to direct. The production was abandoned by Todd in order to focus on "Around the World in Eighty Days".


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Italian producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti announced their film in October 1954. Initially, they approached Elia Kazan to direct and Gérard Philipe and Marlon Brando to star. When a deal with Kazan couldn’t be reached, De Laurentiis tentatively announced Mario Camerini as his replacement, before King Vidor was eventually hired.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Audrey Hepburn, who was one of the biggest female film stars in the world at the time, was cast as Natasha after previous favorite Jean Simmons turned it down. Todd had previously attempted to hire her for his failed adaptation, but she signed with De Laurentiis and Ponti after they offered a record salary of $350,000. The contract gave Hepburn a fair amount of creative control, including the hiring of costume fitter Hubert de Givenchy and makeup artist Grazia De Rossi. She also facilitated the hiring of her husband Mel Ferrer as Andrei, the only time the couple would co-star on-screen together. Because Hepburn was under contract to Paramount Pictures and Associated British Picture Corporation at the time, the two companies were given the respective US and UK distribution rights in exchange for Hepburn’s services.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Vidor wanted either Paul Scofield or Peter Ustinov as Pierre, but both suggestions were rejected by De Laurentiis, who thought neither actor was “marketable”. Gregory Peck, Montgomery Clift, Stewart Granger, Richard Burton, and Marlon Brando were all considered. Henry Fonda, who was eventually cast in the part, was widely thought to be too old to play the role (he was 50 at the time, playing a character 30 years his junior). He later stated he regretted taking the part, only doing so because of the money and because he was a fan of the novel. He claimed that the script he was given was very different from the one used during filming, which was heavily revised by Vidor.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Arlene Dahl was originally cast as Helene, but she fell ill shortly before filming and was replaced by Anita Ekberg, who was borrowed from Batjac Productions. The film proved to be Ekberg’s breakthrough and helped lead to her international stardom.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Fredric March was originally cast as Field Marshal Kutuzov, but was replaced before filming by Oskar Homolka, who would be nominated for a BAFTA for his performance. Valentina Cortese, Gino Cervi, and Massimo Serato were all attached in 1955 but were dropped at some point before filming started.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: "War and Peace" has six credited screenwriters, an unusually high number for a mainstream film, even in 1956. The first draft of the screenplay was five hundred six pages, roughly five times the size of an average screenplay.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Contemporaneous sources claim that Irwin Shaw was one of the writers, but insisted his name be stricken from the credits after he learned that Vidor’s wife, Elizabeth Hill, rewrote much of the dialogue. Vidor also made extensive rewrites during filming. Uncredited contributors to the final script included Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Sergio Amidei, Gian Gaspare Napolitano, and second-unit director Mario Soldati.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: The film was shot primarily at Ponti-De Laurentiis and Cinecittà Studios in Rome, as well as at locations in Rome, Turin, and Sardinia. More than 100,000 uniforms, costumes and hairpieces required for the film were reproduced from original, contemporary drawings. About 18,000 Italian military personnel were used as extras in the film’s large-scale battle scenes, which caused some controversy in parliamentary circles. The battle scenes, which were primarily directed by Mario Soldati, employed sixty-five physicians, dressed as soldiers and scattered throughout the location, to take care of any extras or stuntmen who might get injured during filming of the scenes.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Fonda repeatedly clashed with De Laurentiis during filming over the characterization of Pierre. De Laurentiis, who had apparently never read the novel, insisted Pierre be played as a more conventional romantic, heroic lead and insisted he not wear eyeglasses. Fonda claimed that De Laurentiis would go into fits of screaming rage whenever he saw him wearing glasses, which led to him only wearing them whenever De Laurentiis wasn’t present on-set.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Swedish actresses Anita Ekberg and May Britt had all their dialogue re-dubbed during editing, due to their accents being considered too strong. Several of the supporting Italian actors were likewise dubbed.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: By January 1957, "War and Peace" had earned $6.25 million in box office rentals from the United States and Canada.


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Abel Green of "Variety" praised the film as a "rich contribution to the art form of the picture business in the best tradition. It is an entertainment and educational force and a production powerhouse on size and stature values alone. It is big in the biggest sense of the cinematurgical art and, in this alone, there is a payoff." "Harrison's Reports" wrote the "picture, technically, is a masterpiece. The massiveness of the sets, the gigantic cast of thousands, the costuming, the surge of vast military forces in conflict, the burning of Moscow, the disastrous retreat of Napoleon's conquering hordes in the midst of a brutal and paralyzing Russian winter --- all this and more is depicted in a way that impresses one with the fact that millions of dollars had gone into the making." Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" praised the film as "massive, colorful and exciting as anything of this sort we've ever seen". However, he felt the characters were "second-rate people, hackneyed and without much depth. You view them with an objective interest as they do their parade across the screen, giving off little more personal vibrance than the nameless soldiers in the massive scenes of war."


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: "Time" magazine wrote that the film adaptation was not faithful enough of Tolstoy's novel, and the "inevitable result is a telescoping of scenes and a hopscotching through the plot that scatters attention from one leading character to another." Of the actors, the magazine praised Audrey Hepburn, and remarked "Henry Fonda's leanness at first seems all wrong for the massive, moonfaced, soul-tortured Pierre. But Fonda builds beautifully into his part, using a physical clumsiness as a counterpoise to his soaring spirit, making his rages seem the more terrible since they flash out from passivity." Alternately, Edwin Schallert of the "Los Angeles Times" felt Fonda was miscast because "he seems like an anti character in his behavior on the battlefields. He is actually the symbolic figure of peaceful thinking in the story, and represents the heroine's lasting romance." Hollis Alpert, reviewing for "Saturday Review", stated the adaptation "is only intermittently interesting and that aside from making a sort of pictorial sour-mash of the original work it is not particularly good movie-making."


title: War and Peace (1956 film)

text: Upon its release on August 1959, the 1956 film inspired the Soviet Union to produce a film adaptation of Tolstoy's novel directed by Sergei Bondarchuk (who played Pierre Bezukhov) and co-starred with Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Ludmila Savelyeva as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova. This 4-part film adaptation is critically-acclaimed for its realistic battle scenes, which it won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.


title: Regular language

text: In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular language (also called a rational language) is a formal language that can be defined by a regular expression, in the strict sense in theoretical computer science (as opposed to many modern regular expressions engines, which are augmented with features that allow recognition of non-regular languages).


title: Regular language

text: Alternatively, a regular language can be defined as a language recognized by a finite automaton. The equivalence of regular expressions and finite automata is known as Kleene's theorem (after American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene). In the Chomsky hierarchy, regular languages are the languages generated by Type-3 grammars.


title: Regular language

text: All finite languages are regular; in particular the empty string language {ε} = Ø* is regular. Other typical examples include the language consisting of all strings over the alphabet {"a", "b"} which contain an even number of "a"s, or the language consisting of all strings of the form: several "a"s followed by several "b"s.


title: Regular language

text: A simple example of a language that is not regular is the set of strings { "a""b" | "n" ≥ 0 }. Intuitively, it cannot be recognized with a finite automaton, since a finite automaton has finite memory and it cannot remember the exact number of a's. Techniques to prove this fact rigorously are given below.


title: Regular language

text: Properties 10. and 11. are purely algebraic approaches to define regular languages; a similar set of statements can be formulated for a monoid "M" ⊆ Σ. In this case, equivalence over "M" leads to the concept of a recognizable language.


title: Regular language

text: Some authors use one of the above properties different from "1." as an alternative definition of regular languages.


title: Regular language

text: Some of the equivalences above, particularly those among the first four formalisms, are called "Kleene's theorem" in textbooks. Precisely which one (or which subset) is called such varies between authors. One textbook calls the equivalence of regular expressions and NFAs ("1." and "2." above) "Kleene's theorem". Another textbook calls the equivalence of regular expressions and DFAs ("1." and "3." above) "Kleene's theorem". Two other textbooks first prove the expressive equivalence of NFAs and DFAs ("2." and "3.") and then state "Kleene's theorem" as the equivalence between regular expressions and finite automata (the latter said to describe "recognizable languages"). A linguistically oriented text first equates regular grammars ("4." above) with DFAs and NFAs, calls the languages generated by (any of) these "regular", after which it introduces regular expressions which it terms to describe "rational languages", and finally states "Kleene's theorem" as the coincidence of regular and rational languages. Other authors simply "define" "rational expression" and "regular expressions" as synonymous and do the same with "rational languages" and "regular languages".


title: Regular language

text: Apparently, the term ""regular"" originates from a 1951 technical report where Kleene introduced ""regular events"" and explicitly welcomed ""any suggestions as to a more descriptive term"". Noam Chomsky, in his 1959 seminal article, used the term ""regular"" in a different meaning at first (referring to what is called ""Chomsky normal form"" today), but noticed that his ""finite state languages"" were equivalent to Kleene's ""regular events"".


title: Regular language

text: The regular languages are closed under various operations, that is, if the languages "K" and "L" are regular, so is the result of the following operations:


title: Regular language

text: Given two deterministic finite automata "A" and "B", it is decidable whether they accept the same language.


title: Regular language

text: As a consequence, using the above closure properties, the following problems are also decidable for arbitrarily given deterministic finite automata "A" and "B", with accepted languages "L" and "L", respectively:


title: Regular language

text: For larger alphabets, that problem is PSPACE-complete. If regular expressions are extended to allow also a "squaring operator", with ""A"" denoting the same as ""AA"", still just regular languages can be described, but the universality problem has an exponential space lower bound, and is in fact complete for exponential space with respect to polynomial-time reduction.


title: Regular language

text: For a fixed finite alphabet, the theory of the set of all languages — together with strings, membership of a string in a language, and for each character, a function to append the character to a string (and no other operations) — is decidable, and its minimal elementary substructure consists precisely of regular languages. For a binary alphabet, the theory is called S2S.


title: Regular language

text: In computational complexity theory, the complexity class of all regular languages is sometimes referred to as REGULAR or REG and equals DSPACE(O(1)), the decision problems that can be solved in constant space (the space used is independent of the input size). REGULAR ≠ AC, since it (trivially) contains the parity problem of determining whether the number of 1 bits in the input is even or odd and this problem is not in AC. On the other hand, REGULAR does not contain AC, because the nonregular language of palindromes, or the nonregular language formula_1 can both be recognized in AC.


title: Regular language

text: If a language is "not" regular, it requires a machine with at least Ω(log log "n") space to recognize (where "n" is the input size). In other words, DSPACE(o(log log "n")) equals the class of regular languages. In practice, most nonregular problems are solved by machines taking at least logarithmic space.


title: Regular language

text: To locate the regular languages in the Chomsky hierarchy, one notices that every regular language is context-free. The converse is not true: for example the language consisting of all strings having the same number of "a"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s as "b"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s is context-free but not regular. To prove that a language is not regular, one often uses the Myhill–Nerode theorem and the pumping lemma. Other approaches include using the closure properties of regular languages or quantifying Kolmogorov complexity.


title: Regular language

text: Let formula_2 denote the number of words of length formula_3 in formula_4. The ordinary generating function for "L" is the formal power series


title: Regular language

text: The generating function of a language "L" is a rational function if "L" is regular. Hence for every regular language formula_4 the sequence formula_7 is constant-recursive; that is, there exist an integer constant formula_8, complex constants formula_9 and complex polynomials formula_10


title: Regular language

text: Thus, non-regularity of certain languages formula_16 can be proved by counting the words of a given length in


title: Regular language

text: formula_16. Consider, for example, the Dyck language of strings of balanced parentheses. The number of words of length formula_18


title: Regular language

text: witnessing the non-regularity of the Dyck language. Care must be taken since some of the eigenvalues formula_21 could have the same magnitude. For example, the number of words of length formula_3 in the language of all even binary words is not of the form formula_20, but the number of words of even or odd length are of this form; the corresponding eigenvalues are formula_24. In general, for every regular language there exists a constant formula_25 such that for all formula_26, the number of words of length formula_27 is asymptotically formula_28.


title: Regular language

text: The zeta function of a regular language is not in general rational, but that of an arbitrary cyclic language is.


title: Regular language

text: The notion of a regular language has been generalized to infinite words (see ω-automata) and to trees (see tree automaton).


title: Regular language

text: Rational set generalizes the notion (of regular/rational language) to monoids that are not necessarily free. Likewise, the notion of a recognizable language (by a finite automaton) has namesake as recognizable set over a monoid that is not necessarily free. Howard Straubing notes in relation to these facts that “The term "regular language" is a bit unfortunate. Papers influenced by Eilenberg's monograph often use either the term "recognizable language", which refers to the behavior of automata, or "rational language", which refers to important analogies between regular expressions and rational power series. (In fact, Eilenberg defines rational and recognizable subsets of arbitrary monoids; the two notions do not, in general, coincide.) This terminology, while better motivated, never really caught on, and "regular language" is used almost universally.”


title: Regular language

text: Rational series is another generalization, this time in the context of a formal power series over a semiring. This approach gives rise to weighted rational expressions and weighted automata. In this algebraic context, the regular languages (corresponding to Boolean-weighted rational expressions) are usually called "rational languages". Also in this context, Kleene's theorem finds a generalization called the Kleene-Schützenberger theorem.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polycrystalline silicon, or multicrystalline silicon, also called polysilicon, poly-Si, or mc-Si, is a high purity, polycrystalline form of silicon, used as a raw material by the solar photovoltaic and electronics industry.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polysilicon is produced from metallurgical grade silicon by a chemical purification process, called the Siemens process. This process involves distillation of volatile silicon compounds, and their decomposition into silicon at high temperatures. An emerging, alternative process of refinement uses a fluidized bed reactor. The photovoltaic industry also produces upgraded metallurgical-grade silicon (UMG-Si), using metallurgical instead of chemical purification processes. When produced for the electronics industry, polysilicon contains impurity levels of less than one part per billion (ppb), while polycrystalline solar grade silicon (SoG-Si) is generally less pure. A few companies from China, Germany, Japan, Korea and the United States, such as GCL-Poly, Wacker Chemie, OCI, and Hemlock Semiconductor, as well as the Norwegian headquartered REC, accounted for most of the worldwide production of about 230,000 tonnes in 2013.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The polysilicon feedstock – large rods, usually broken into chunks of specific sizes and packaged in clean rooms before shipment – is directly cast into multicrystalline ingots or submitted to a recrystallization process to grow single crystal boules. The boules are then sliced into thin silicon wafers and used for the production of solar cells, integrated circuits and other semiconductor devices.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polysilicon consists of small crystals, also known as crystallites, giving the material its typical metal flake effect. While polysilicon and multisilicon are often used as synonyms, multicrystalline usually refers to crystals larger than one millimetre. Multicrystalline solar cells are the most common type of solar cells in the fast-growing PV market and consume most of the worldwide produced polysilicon. About 5 tons of polysilicon is required to manufacture one 1 megawatt (MW) conventional solar modules. Polysilicon is distinct from monocrystalline silicon and amorphous silicon.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: In single-crystal silicon, also known as monocrystalline silicon, the crystalline framework is homogeneous, which can be recognized by an even external colouring. The entire sample is one single, continuous and unbroken crystal as its structure contains no grain boundaries. Large single crystals are rare in nature and can also be difficult to produce in the laboratory (see also recrystallisation). In contrast, in an amorphous structure the order in atomic positions is limited to short range.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polycrystalline and paracrystalline phases are composed of a number of smaller crystals or "crystallites." Polycrystalline silicon (or semi-crystalline silicon, polysilicon, poly-Si, or simply "poly") is a material consisting of multiple small silicon crystals. Polycrystalline cells can be recognized by a visible grain, a "metal flake effect". Semiconductor grade (also solar grade) polycrystalline silicon is converted to single-crystal silicon – meaning that the randomly associated crystallites of silicon in polycrystalline silicon are converted to a large single crystal. Single-crystal silicon is used to manufacture most Si-based microelectronic devices. Polycrystalline silicon can be as much as 99.9999% pure. Ultra-pure poly is used in the semiconductor industry, starting from poly rods that are two to three meters in length. In microelectronic industry (semiconductor industry), poly is used both at the macroscale and microscale (component) level. Single crystals are grown using the Czochralski method, zone melting and Bridgman techniques.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: At the component level, polysilicon has long been used as the conducting gate material in MOSFET and CMOS processing technologies. For these technologies it is deposited using low-pressure chemical-vapour deposition (LPCVD) reactors at high temperatures and is usually heavily doped n-type or p-type.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: More recently, intrinsic and doped polysilicon is being used in large-area electronics as the active and/or doped layers in thin-film transistors. Although it can be deposited by LPCVD, plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD), or solid-phase crystallization of amorphous silicon in certain processing regimes, these processes still require relatively high temperatures of at least 300 °C. These temperatures make deposition of polysilicon possible for glass substrates but not for plastic substrates.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The deposition of polycrystalline silicon on plastic substrates is motivated by the desire to be able to manufacture digital displays on flexible screens. Therefore, a relatively new technique called laser crystallization has been devised to crystallize a precursor amorphous silicon (a-Si) material on a plastic substrate without melting or damaging the plastic. Short, high-intensity ultraviolet laser pulses are used to heat the deposited a-Si material to above the melting point of silicon, without melting the entire substrate.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The molten silicon will then crystallize as it cools. By precisely controlling the temperature gradients, researchers have been able to grow very large grains, of up to hundreds of micrometers in size in the extreme case, although grain sizes of 10 nanometers to 1 micrometer are also common. In order to create devices on polysilicon over large-areas however, a crystal grain size smaller than the device feature size is needed for homogeneity of the devices. Another method to produce poly-Si at low temperatures is metal-induced crystallization where an amorphous-Si thin film can be crystallized at temperatures as low as 150 °C if annealed while in contact of another metal film such as aluminium, gold, or silver.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polysilicon has many applications in VLSI manufacturing. One of its primary uses is as gate electrode material for MOS devices. A polysilicon gate's electrical conductivity may be increased by depositing a metal (such as tungsten) or a metal silicide (such as tungsten silicide) over the gate. Polysilicon may also be employed as a resistor, a conductor, or as an ohmic contact for shallow junctions, with the desired electrical conductivity attained by doping the polysilicon material.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: One major difference between polysilicon and a-Si is that the mobility of the charge carriers of the polysilicon can be orders of magnitude larger and the material also shows greater stability under electric field and light-induced stress. This allows more complex, high-speed circuitry to be created on the glass substrate along with the a-Si devices, which are still needed for their low-leakage characteristics. When polysilicon and a-Si devices are used in the same process this is called hybrid processing. A complete polysilicon active layer process is also used in some cases where a small pixel size is required, such as in projection displays.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polycrystalline silicon is the key feedstock in the crystalline silicon based photovoltaic industry and used for the production of conventional solar cells. For the first time, in 2006, over half of the world's supply of polysilicon was being used by PV manufacturers. The solar industry was severely hindered by a shortage in supply of polysilicon feedstock and was forced to idle about a quarter of its cell and module manufacturing capacity in 2007. Only twelve factories were known to produce solar-grade polysilicon in 2008; however, by 2013 the number increased to over 100 manufacturers. Monocrystalline silicon is higher priced and a more efficient semiconductor than polycrystalline as it has undergone additional recrystallization via the Czochralski method.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polysilicon deposition, or the process of depositing a layer of polycrystalline silicon on a semiconductor wafer, is achieved by the chemical decomposition of silane (SiH) at high temperatures of 580 to 650 °C. This pyrolysis process releases hydrogen.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polysilicon layers can be deposited using 100% silane at a pressure of or with 20–30% silane (diluted in nitrogen) at the same total pressure. Both of these processes can deposit polysilicon on 10–200 wafers per run, at a rate of 10–20 nm/min and with thickness uniformities of ±5%. Critical process variables for polysilicon deposition include temperature, pressure, silane concentration, and dopant concentration. Wafer spacing and load size have been shown to have only minor effects on the deposition process. The rate of polysilicon deposition increases rapidly with temperature, since it follows Arrhenius behavior, that is deposition rate = A·exp(–qE/kT) where q is electron charge and k is the Boltzmann constant. The activation energy (E) for polysilicon deposition is about 1.7 eV. Based on this equation, the rate of polysilicon deposition increases as the deposition temperature increases. There will be a minimum temperature, however, wherein the rate of deposition becomes faster than the rate at which unreacted silane arrives at the surface. Beyond this temperature, the deposition rate can no longer increase with temperature, since it is now being hampered by lack of silane from which the polysilicon will be generated. Such a reaction is then said to be 'mass-transport-limited.' When a polysilicon deposition process becomes mass-transport-limited, the reaction rate becomes dependent primarily on reactant concentration, reactor geometry, and gas flow.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: When the rate at which polysilicon deposition occurs is slower than the rate at which unreacted silane arrives, then it is said to be surface-reaction-limited. A deposition process that is surface-reaction-limited is primarily dependent on reactant concentration and reaction temperature. Deposition processes must be surface-reaction-limited because they result in excellent thickness uniformity and step coverage. A plot of the logarithm of the deposition rate against the reciprocal of the absolute temperature in the surface-reaction-limited region results in a straight line whose slope is equal to –qE/k.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: At reduced pressure levels for VLSI manufacturing, polysilicon deposition rate below 575 °C is too slow to be practical. Above 650 °C, poor deposition uniformity and excessive roughness will be encountered due to unwanted gas-phase reactions and silane depletion. Pressure can be varied inside a low-pressure reactor either by changing the pumping speed or changing the inlet gas flow into the reactor. If the inlet gas is composed of both silane and nitrogen, the inlet gas flow, and hence the reactor pressure, may be varied either by changing the nitrogen flow at constant silane flow, or changing both the nitrogen and silane flow to change the total gas flow while keeping the gas ratio constant. Recent investigations have shown that e-beam evaporation, followed by SPC (if needed) can be a cost-effective and faster alternative for producing solar-grade poly-Si thin films. Modules produced by such method are shown to have a photovoltaic efficiency of ~6%.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Polysilicon doping, if needed, is also done during the deposition process, usually by adding phosphine, arsine, or diborane. Adding phosphine or arsine results in slower deposition, while adding diborane increases the deposition rate. The deposition thickness uniformity usually degrades when dopants are added during deposition.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The Siemens process is the most commonly used method of polysilicon production, especially for electronics, with close to 75% of the world's production using this process as of 2005.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The process converts MG Si to SiHCl and then to silicon in a reactor, thus removing transition metal and dopant impurities. The process is relatively expensive and slow.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Upgraded metallurgical-grade (UMG) silicon (also known as UMG-Si) solar cell is being produced as a low cost alternative to polysilicon created by the Siemens process. UMG-Si greatly reduces impurities in a variety of ways that require less equipment and energy than the Siemens process. It is about 99% pure which is three or more orders of magnitude less pure and about 10 times less expensive than polysilicon ($1.70 to $3.20 per kg from 2005 to 2008 compared to $40 to $400 per kg for polysilicon). It has the potential to provide nearly-as-good solar cell efficiency at 1/5 the capital expenditure, half the energy requirements, and less than $15/kg.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: In 2008 several companies were touting the potential of UMG-Si in 2010, but the credit crisis greatly lowered the cost of polysilicon and several UMG-Si producers put plans on hold. The Siemens process will remain the dominant form of production for years to come due to more efficiently implementing the Siemens process. GT Solar claims a new Siemens process can produce at $27/kg and may reach $20/kg in 5 years. GCL-Poly expects production costs to be $20/kg by end of 2011. Elkem Solar estimates their UMG costs to be $25/kg, with a capacity of 6,000 tonnes by the end of 2010. Calisolar expects UMG technology to produce at $12/kg in 5 years with boron at 0.3 ppm and phosphorus at 0.6 ppm. At $50/kg and 7.5 g/W, module manufacturers spend $0.37/W for the polysilicon. For comparison, if a CdTe manufacturer pays spot price for tellurium ($420/kg in April 2010) and has a 3 μm thickness, their cost would be 10 times less, $0.037/Watt. At 0.1 g/W and $31/ozt for silver, polysilicon solar producers spend $0.10/W on silver.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Q-Cells, Canadian Solar, and Calisolar have used Timminco UMG. Timminco is able to produce UMG-Si with 0.5 ppm boron for $21/kg but were sued by shareholders because they had expected $10/kg. RSI and Dow Corning have also been in litigation over UMG-Si technology.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Currently, polysilicon is commonly used for the conducting gate materials in semiconductor devices such as MOSFETs; however, it has potential for large-scale photovoltaic devices. The abundance, stability, and low toxicity of silicon, combined with the low cost of polysilicon relative to single crystals makes this variety of material attractive for photovoltaic production. Grain size has been shown to have an effect on the efficiency of polycrystalline solar cells. Solar cell efficiency increases with grain size. This effect is due to reduced recombination in the solar cell. Recombination, which is a limiting factor for current in a solar cell, occurs more prevalently at grain boundaries, see figure 1.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The resistivity, mobility, and free-carrier concentration in monocrystalline silicon vary with doping concentration of the single crystal silicon. Whereas the doping of polycrystalline silicon does have an effect on the resistivity, mobility, and free-carrier concentration, these properties strongly depend on the polycrystalline grain size, which is a physical parameter that the material scientist can manipulate. Through the methods of crystallization to form polycrystalline silicon, an engineer can control the size of the polycrystalline grains which will vary the physical properties of the material.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The use of polycrystalline silicon in the production of solar cells requires less material and therefore provides higher profits and increased manufacturing throughput. Polycrystalline silicon does not need to be deposited on a silicon wafer to form a solar cell, rather it can be deposited on other-cheaper materials, thus reducing the cost. Not requiring a silicon wafer alleviates the silicon shortages occasionally faced by the microelectronics industry. An example of not using a silicon wafer is crystalline silicon on glass (CSG) materials


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: A primary concern in the photovoltaics industry is cell efficiency. However, sufficient cost savings from cell manufacturing can be suitable to offset reduced efficiency in the field, such as the use of larger solar cell arrays compared with more compact/higher efficiency designs. Designs such as CSG are attractive because of a low cost of production even with reduced efficiency. Higher efficiency devices yield modules that occupy less space and are more compact; however, the 5–10% efficiency of typical CSG devices still makes them attractive for installation in large central-service stations, such as a power station. The issue of efficiency versus cost is a value decision of whether one requires an "energy dense" solar cell or sufficient area is available for the installation of less expensive alternatives. For instance, a solar cell used for power generation in a remote location might require a more highly efficient solar cell than one used for low-power applications, such as solar accent lighting or pocket calculators, or near established power grids.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The polysilicon manufacturing market is growing rapidly. According to Digitimes, in July 2011, the total polysilicon production in 2010 was 209,000 tons. First-tier suppliers account for 64% of the market while China-based polysilicon firms have 30% of market share. The total production is likely to increase 37.4% to 281,000 tons by end of 2011. For 2012, EETimes Asia predicts 328,000 tons production with only 196,000 tons of demand, with spot prices expected to fall 56%. While good for renewable energy prospects, the subsequent drop in price could be brutal for manufacturers. As of late 2012, SolarIndustryMag reports a capacity of 385,000 tons will be reached by yearend 2012.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: But as established producers (mentioned below) expand their capacities, additional newcomers – many from Asia – are moving into the market. Even long-time players in the field have recently had difficulties expanding plant production. It is yet unclear which companies will be able to produce at costs low enough to be profitable after the steep drop in spot-prices of the last months.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Wacker's projected its total hyperpure-polysilicon production capacity to increase to 67,000 metric tons by 2014, due to its new polysilicon-production facility in Cleveland, Tennessee (USA) with an annual capacity of 15,000 metric tons.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Prices of polysilicon are often divided into two categories, contract and spot prices, and higher purity commands higher prices. While in booming installation times, price rally occurs in polysilicon. Not only spot prices surpass contract prices in the market; but it is also hard to acquire enough polysilicon. Buyers will accept down payment and long-term agreements to acquire a large enough volume of polysilicon. On the contrary, spot prices will be below contract prices once the solar PV installation is in a down trend. In late 2010, booming installation brought up the spot prices of polysilicon. In the first half of 2011, prices of polysilicon kept strong owing to the FIT policies of Italy. The solar PV price survey and market research firm, PVinsights, reported that the prices of polysilicon might be dragged down by lack of installation in the second half of 2011. As recently as 2008 prices were over $400/kg spiking from levels around $200/kg, while seen falling to $15/kg in 2013.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: The Chinese government accused United States and South Korean manufacturers of predatory pricing or "dumping". As a consequence, in 2013 it imposed import tariffs of as much as 57 percent on polysilicon shipped from these two countries in order to stop the product from being sold below cost.


title: Polycrystalline silicon

text: Due to the rapid growth in manufacturing in China and the lack of regulatory controls, there have been reports of the dumping of waste silicon tetrachloride. Normally the waste silicon tetrachloride is recycled but this adds to the cost of manufacture as it needs to be heated to .


Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop is the third studio album by American rock band Stone Temple Pilots, released on March 26, 1996, on Atlantic Records. After a brief hiatus in 1995, the band regrouped to record "Tiny Music," living and recording the album together on a ranch located in Santa Ynez, California.


title: Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop

text: "Tiny Music..." saw Stone Temple Pilots moving away from the grunge sound present on their first two records and incorporating a wide variety of different influences. After debuting at No. 4 on the "Billboard" 200 in 1996, "Tiny Music" initially received mixed reviews, similar to the band's earlier work, but in the years since, the record has been acclaimed for radically reinventing the band's image. "Tiny Music" spawned three singles that reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart: "Big Bang Baby", "Lady Picture Show", and "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart".


text: In early 1995, shortly after the band was forced to scrap two weeks' worth of recorded material, lead singer Scott Weiland was arrested for heroin and cocaine possession and sentenced to one year's probation. In the months following this incident, Weiland formed his own side-band, the Magnificent Bastards, and recorded songs for the "Tank Girl" soundtrack and for a John Lennon tribute album.


text: During this time the rest of the band decided to put together their own side project, which would later become the band Talk Show with Dave Coutts singing. In the fall of 1995, when Stone Temple Pilots regrouped to record again for "Tiny Music", Robert and Dean got together to figure out which songs should be "Tiny Music" songs and which songs should be Talk Show songs. Dean would later say "Robert and I had about 30 songs, and we sat in the room one night and basically went down the list and marked next to every song: Scott, Scott, Dave, Scott, Dave, Dave, Scott... It's really weird, because in all reality it was like 'Big Bang Baby' could've been on [the] Talk Show record and 'Everybody Loves My Car' could've been on "Tiny Music"."


text: Weiland's drug use continued after his sentence, and STP cancelled some of their 1996-1997 tour for "Tiny Music" so that he could go to rehab.


text: "Tiny Music" displays a drastic change in the band's sound, featuring music strongly influenced by '60s rock and bands such as The Beatles. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic stated in his review of the album that ""Tiny Music" illustrates that the band aren't content with resting on their laurels" and "STP have added a new array of sounds that lend depth to their immediately accessible hooks," naming shoegaze and jangle pop as two examples of genres explored on the album. Erlewine also wrote that the album "showcases the band at their most tuneful and creative."


text: Doug McCausland of Alternative Nation said ""Tiny Music" really gelled the individual band members' musical tastes together into a new sound: vocalist Weiland's underground punk and glam sensibilities, guitarist Dean DeLeo's upbringing in sixties and seventies rock, and bassist Robert DeLeo's interest in genres like jazz and bossa nova."


text: The album cover, created to resemble a 70s-style LP cover and based on an idea from Weiland, features a woman in a swimsuit standing in a pool with a crocodile in it. The cover was made by John Eder, The cover model was a family friend of art director John Heiden. Said John Eder, "The little altar in the background was a last minute addition Scott wanted to put in, and it actually existed in his house, where I went to shoot it."


text: "Rolling Stone" favored the album, regarding it as the group's best effort to date. They expressed surprise, however, at "the clattering, upbeat character of the music" given Weiland's much-publicized run-ins with drugs and the law. The magazine also featured STP on its cover of issue No. 753 in February 1997.


text: David Browne of "Entertainment Weekly", however, was less favorable of the album, writing that "none of it... has a distinct personality."


text: Band photographer John Eder recounts of the mixed reception, "I remember [Tiny Music] getting totally trashed critically, for example in Entertainment Weekly, with the critic even singling out and making fun of the bands' physical appearances – like, their actual body types – in the little snapshot fold-out thing that came in the CD."


text: Following Weiland's death, Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins posited, "It was STP's 3rd album that had got me hooked, a wizardly mix of glam and post-punk, and I confessed to Scott, as well as the band many times, how wrong I'd been in assessing their native brilliance. And like Bowie can and does, it was Scott's phrasing that pushed his music into a unique, and hard to pin down, aesthetic sonicsphere. Lastly, I'd like to share a thought which though clumsy, I hope would please Scott In Hominum. And that is if you asked me who I truly believed were the great voices of our generation, I'd say it were he, Layne, and Kurt."


text: In 2016, "The A.V. Club" noted that Tiny Music "was an almost shocking leap forward in creative ambition" and that "[STP] got weirder and better than anyone gives them credit for."


text: In 2021, "Pitchfork" published a positive review of the 25th anniversary reissue of "Tiny Music", observing that it is "primarily an album of expansion" and acknowledged their original 1996 review (in which writer Ryan Schreiber wished that Weiland would "tie [himself] off and fall directly into space forever") as "genuinely deplorable." "Pitchfork" critic Marty Sartini Garner also praised the band's 1997 Panama City Beach concert included in the reissue, stating that it "captures Stone Temple Pilots' power as a live band."


text: In the United States, the album debuted at number four on the "Billboard" 200 albums chart on the issue dated April 13, 1996, with 162,500 copies sold. This was a significant decline when compared to the bands previous efforts and can in part be attributed to the decline of grunge in the mid-90’s. Because of the tour cancellation, "Tiny Music" did not receive as much exposure as initially intended. The album was certified 2× platinum but was not as commercially successful as STP's first two albums.


title: Po Valley

text: The Po Valley, Po Plain, Plain of the Po, or Padan Plain ( , or "Val Padana") is a major geographical feature of Northern Italy. It extends approximately in an east-west direction, with an area of including its Venetic extension not actually related to the Po river basin; it runs from the Western Alps to the Adriatic Sea. The flatlands of Veneto and Friuli are often considered apart since they do not drain into the Po, but they effectively combine into an unbroken plain, making it the largest in Southern Europe. It has a population of 17 million, or a third of Italy's total population.


title: Po Valley

text: The plain is the surface of an in-filled system of ancient canyons (the "Apennine Foredeep") extending from the Apennines in the south to the Alps in the north, including the northern Adriatic. In addition to the Po and its affluents, the contemporary surface may be considered to include the Savio, Lamone and Reno to the south, and the Adige, Brenta, Piave and Tagliamento of the Venetian Plain to the north, among the many streams that empty into the north Adriatic from the west and north.


title: Po Valley

text: Geo-political definitions of the valley depend on the defining authority. The Po Basin Water Board (""), authorized in 1989 by Law no. 183/89 to oversee "protection of lands, water rehabilitation, the use and management of hydro resources for the national economic and social development, and protection of related environment" within the Po basin, has authority in several administrative regions of north Italy, including the plain north of the Adriatic and the territory south of the lower Po, as shown in the regional depiction included with this article. The law defines the Po basin as "the territory from which rainwater or snow and glacier melt flows on the surface, gathers in streams of water either directly or via tributaries...". The United Nations Environment Program includes the Alps and Apennines as far as the sources of the tributaries of the Po but excludes Veneto and that portion of Emilia-Romagna south of the lower Po; that is, it includes the region drained by the Po but only the Po and its tributaries.


title: Po Valley

text: The altitude of the valley through which the Po flows, exclusive of its tributaries, varies from approximately below sea level in the Polesine subregion (the delta around Ferrara) to about at the river's origin in the southern Piedmontese province of Cuneo, also known as the "Provincia granda". The valley is crossed by a number of affluents running down from the Alps in the north and from the Apennines in the south. The Po's major affluents include the Tanaro, Scrivia, Trebbia, Panaro and Secchia in the south, Dora Riparia, Dora Baltea, Sesia, Ticino (draining Lake Maggiore), Lambro, Adda (draining Lake Como), Oglio (draining Lake Iseo) and Mincio (draining Lake Garda and called Sarca in its upper reaches) in the north.


title: Po Valley

text: The Po Valley and the Adriatic overlay a foreland basin and a system of deeply buried ancient canyons surviving from the tectonic collision of an offshore land mass, Tyrrhenis, with the mainland, an incident within the collision of the African and Eurasian plates. Since the Messinian (7–5 mya) the system has been filling with sediment mainly from the older Apennines but also from the Alps. The shoreline of the Adriatic depends on a balance between the sedimentation rate and isostatic factors. Until about 1950, the Po delta was prograding into the Adriatic. After that time due to human alteration of geologic factors, such as the sedimentation rate, the delta has been degrading and the coastline subsiding, resulting in ongoing contemporaneous crises in the city of Venice, where much irreplaceable art and architecture is likely to be lost due to soaring sea level in the next centuries. Where the land surface now dips below sea level the river must run at a relative elevation between dikes.


title: Po Valley

text: The Malossa gas condensate field was discovered in 1973 and produces at depths of from the Upper Triassic Dolomia Principale dolomite and the Lower Jurassic Zandobbio dolomite, capped by the Lower Cretaceous Marne di Bruntino marl.


title: Po Valley

text: The Po Valley is often regarded as a syncline, or dip in the crust due to compression at the edges. Regardless of whether this concept accurately describes its geology, the valley is manifestly a sediment-filled trough, or virtual syncline, continuous with the deeps of the Adriatic Sea. The surface terrain is therefore divided into two overall types of landform: the plain, or flat surface of the fill, and the anticline at the edges, taking the form of hilly country in which the outcrops of the original rock are visible along with alluvial fans formed from the outwash of the more severe anticlinal terrain; that is, the Apennines and the Alps.


title: Po Valley

text: The valley is broadly divided into an upper, drier part, often not particularly suited for agriculture, and a lower, very fertile, and well-irrigated section, known in Lombardy and western Emilia as "la Bassa", "the low (plain)". The upper areas of the Po valley take local names which reflect in their meanings their being modestly suited for farming. So we have the Piedmontese "vaude" and "baragge", the Lombard "brughiere" and "Groane", or, exiting from the Po valley proper, the Friulian "magredi", areas remote from easily reachable water tables and covered with dense woods or dry soils.


title: Po Valley

text: This specific meaning for "lower plain" derive from a geologic feature called the "fontanili" ("spring") line or zone, a band of springs around the Val Po, heaviest on the north, on the lowermost slopes of the anticline. It varies from a few kilometres to as much as wide. The fontanili line is the outcrop, or intersection, of the anticline's water table with the surface at the edge of the "bassa". The rock above the line is porous. Surface water in the intermittent streams of the mountains tends to disappear below ground only to spring out again in the spring zone. The spring zone is often called "the middle valley."


title: Po Valley

text: Surface runoff water (the Po and its affluents) is not of much value to the valley's dense population for drinking and other immediate uses, being unreliable, often destructive, and heavily polluted by sewage and fertilizers. Its main anthropic value is for hydro-electric power, irrigation, and industrial transport. The cost of purifying it for human consumption makes that process less feasible. The fresh drinking water comes from hundreds of thousands of wells concentrated especially in the fontanili zone. The major settlements, therefore, are also in that zone, which has become the centre of economic development and industry in Italy, and now is an almost continuous megalopolis stretching from Turin to Trieste.


title: Po Valley

text: The "bassa Padana" was settled and farmed earliest, in Etruscan and Roman times. After the collapse of the Roman Empire (5th century AD), lack of maintenance of the irrigation systems associated with a cooling climate phase (i.e. the so-called Migration Period or The Dark Age Cold Period) led to the progressive waterlogging of the Po Valley and the natural depressions on the right side of the Po River turned in vast swamp basins. The waterlogging process of the area continued until the 10th century influencing the human sustenance and settling practices. According to historical-archaeological data, indeed, the wetlands were exploited for fishing as well as for transport by boat while the early medieval sites settled on the fluvial ridges, in topographically higher and strategic position in the surrounding swampy meadows.


title: Po Valley

text: The Po Valley has been completely turned to agriculture since the Middle Ages, when efforts from monastic orders, feudal lords and free communes converged. The older and smaller cities deriving from ancient times are still located there.


title: Po Valley

text: According to historical maps and documents the land reclamation of the Po Valley reached its peak during the Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) and continued in the Modern Age (17th–18th centuries), with the last marsh areas only being reclaimed in the 20th century: channels and drainage system are still active and allow the Po Valley to be drained and be cultivatable.


title: Po Valley

text: The Po Valley has a range from humid continental climate (Köppen: "Dfa") to humid subtropical (Köppen: "Cfa"), or "continental temperate" (cool-humid with fog in winter and warm-moist in summer) climate in other classification. The conformation of the plain, surrounded by the Alps and the Apennines, and the influence of the Adriatic Sea cause high levels of relative humidity throughout the year. The climate of the Po Valley becomes increasingly warmer and more humid farther south and east.


title: Po Valley

text: Winters are cool and damp, with January mean temperatures ranging between (1981–2010 averages). Fog and mist are frequent, although the urban heat effect has made winters less foggy and cold than before in some areas. Snow can occasionally occur and prolonged winter droughts increasingly deny sufficient moisture to the soil. Summers are hot and humid, with July mean temperatures ranging between (1971–2000 averages). Frequent thunderstorms and sudden hailstorms have the potential to produce large hail, dump large quantities of rain, and be highly destructive to crops. The largest hail is produced by intense supercell thunderstorms, with significant agricultural costs. Tornadoes are also not uncommon in the plains of the valley. For these climatological considerations the Friuli Venezia Giulia is an important extension beyond the Po River plain itself, as these are situated downwind of the mountains and upwind of moisture sources from nearby seas. Spring and autumn are well-marked and pleasant. Both winter and summer are less mild in the lower parts along the Po, while the Adriatic Sea and the great lakes moderate the local climate in their proximity.


title: Po Valley

text: Rainfall varies between and is equally distributed during the year, though in recent years the climate tends to become somewhat drier, especially in summer. Rainfall maximums are reached during autumn and spring. Winds are usually weak, although sudden bursts of foehn or thunderstorms can sweep the air clean. The almost enclosed nature of the Padan basin, indeed, added to the crushing weight of road traffic, makes it prone to a high level of pollution in winter, when cold air clings to the soil. The natural potential vegetation of the Po basin is a mixed broadleaf forest of pedunculate oak, poplars, European hornbeam, alders, elderberry, elms, willows, maples, ash, and other central-European trees. The largest remaining fragments of forest are located around the Ticino River and are protected by a Biosphere Reserve.


title: Po Valley

text: The Po Valley has had traces of inhabitation since at least 780,000 years ago, when the first big glaciation of pleistocene took place. Sites like Monte Poggiolo may have served as refuges of human populations fleeing the terribly cold conditions of northern Europe during the subsequent glaciations along pleistocene. The valley was covered by sea level in warm times, but glaciations could cause a lower sea level that allowed big mammals and humans to migrate from Africa and the Middle East to central and western Europe through an empty and open Po valley, avoiding the barrier of the Alps, reaching the Loire Valley, and Iberian Peninsula, and then, when glaciation retreated, the rest of continental Europe.


title: Po Valley

text: Urban development began in the Po Valley much later than in southern Italy or Greece. The first known ancient inhabitants of the thick forests and swamps were the Ligurians, an Indo-European people. After the progressive immigration in the 7th century BC of Celtic peoples known as the Insubres (hence the name of Insubria sometimes being given to northwestern Lombardy), the southern and central regions were conquered and colonised here and there by a pre-Indo-European people, the Etruscans, who left names such as Parma, Ravenna and Felsina, the ancient name of Bologna. The Etruscan domination left significant marks and introduced urban civilisation, but was short-lived.


title: Po Valley

text: Its inhabitants, the Venetics, likely being a distinct group who, being skillful merchants, were, in time, also culturally influenced by both Etruscans and Greeks.


title: Po Valley

text: By 196 BC, Rome was master of the woody plains and soon displaced the Etruscans, dotting the region with bustling colonies, clearing the land, fighting the last rebel tribes and gradually imposing its own civilisation.


title: Po Valley

text: The Gothic War and Justinian's plague devastated the Padan population. In this scenario of desolation, from which many people had fled to the mountains for safety (making them fairly populated till the 20th century) came the Germanic Lombards, a warrior people who gave their name to almost the whole of the Po valley: Lombardy. In the Middle Ages the term was used to indicate all of northern Italy. The Lombards divided their domain in duchies, often contending for the throne; Turin and Friuli, in the extreme west and east end respectively, seem to have been the most powerful, whereas the capital soon shifted from Verona to Pavia. Monza also was an important town in that time, more so than ruined Milan. The Lombards' harsh, caste-like rule over the natives softened somewhat with their conversion from Arianism to Catholicism.


title: Po Valley

text: The Lombard kingdom was overthrown in 774 by Charlemagne and his Frankish armies, becoming a prized part of the Carolingian Empire, forming the kingdom of Italy, always with its capital in Pavia. The affirmation of large landownership from the eighth/ninth centuries accelerated the process of land reclamation and intensified land use, transforming the landscape of the Po Valley. After the chaotic feudal dissolution of the empire and much fighting among pretenders to the imperial crown, Otto I of Saxony set the stage for the following phase of the region's history by adding the Po Valley to the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic nation in 962. In Veneto, the lagoon capital of Venice, emerged a great sea power in alliance with its old master, the Byzantine Empire. In time the Comuni emerged, as towns thrived in commerce. Soon Milan became the most powerful city of the central plain of Lombardy proper, and despite being razed in 1162, it was a Milan-driven Lombard League with Papal benediction that defeated emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano in 1176.


title: Po Valley

text: Between the 10th and 13th centuries, concurrent with the Medieval Warm Period climate phase, the European population grew substantially, almost tripling (in Northern and Central Italy, the urban population doubled), and increasing the demand for cultivated lands. Cereals became a more significant constituent in the average diet and in the agrarian regime compared to the centuries before, leading populations to reconfigure the medieval natural landscape for agricultural purposes. In creating new land for cultivation and settlement, the European communities triggered a massive landscape transformation through woodland clearance, arable intensification, the development of irrigation systems and the drainage of wetlands. Land reclamations works profoundly modified many European regions. In Central Po Plain the earliest evidence of attempts to clear the forests and drain the wetlands is mentioned in historical documents from the late 8th century, but only from the 10th to 13th centuries were land and water management activities actually carried out widely.


title: Po Valley

text: Further civil wars escalated in the Guelph-Ghibelline reciprocate bloodbath of the 13th and 14th centuries. The Signorie came from spent out Communal institutions. With Venice's expansion on the eastern mainland in the first half of the 15th century and Milan's supremacy in the center and west the region (not significantly diminished by the Black Death of 1348) reached unprecedented peaks of prosperity. Vast areas were irrigated and cultivated with the most modern techniques available. The population averaged some 50 people per square kilometer, a very high standard for those times.


title: Po Valley

text: In 1494, the ruinous Italian Wars began between France and Spain, which lasted for decades. Land changed hands frequently. Even Switzerland received some Italian-speaking lands in the north (Canton Ticino, not technically a part of the Padan region), and the Venetian domain was invaded, forcing Venice into neutrality as an independent power. In the end, Spain prevailed with Charles V's victory over Francis I of France at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.


title: Po Valley

text: The Spanish domination was oppressive, adding its burden to the Counterreformation imposed by the archbishopric of Milan; Protestantism was prevented from making inroads in the area. Burning at the stake became common practice during witchhunts, especially in the neighboring Alpine lands. During this bleak period, however, Lombard industry recovered, especially the textile branch, its pillar.


title: Po Valley

text: When the War of Spanish Succession traded Milan to Austria, government and administration improved significantly. Though the peasantry began a century-long plunge into misery, cities prospered and grew.


title: Po Valley

text: When Napoleon I entered the Po Valley during some of his brightest campaigns (1796 and 1800, culminating in the historical Battle of Marengo), he found an advanced country and made it into his Kingdom of Italy. With Napoleon's final defeat the Austrians came back, but they were no longer welcome. In the west, in Piedmont, the Savoy dynasty would emerge to serve as a springboard for Italian unification.


title: Po Valley

text: The Risorgimento, after an unsuccessful start in 1848 and 1849, triumphed ten years later in Lombardy, which was conquered by a Franco-Piedmontese army. In 1866 Veneto joined young Italy, thanks to Prussia's defeat of Austria. Poverty in the countryside increased emigration to the Americas, a phenomenon which subsided in the central region towards the end of the 19th century, but persisted in Veneto well into the 20th century. Industry grew rapidly, thanks to an abundance of water and literate manpower.


title: Po Valley

text: The World Wars did not significantly damage the area, despite the destruction caused by Allied aerial bombing of many cities and heavy frontline fighting in Romagna. The Resistance protected the main industries, which the Third Reich was using for war production, preventing their destruction: on 25 April 1945 a general insurrection in the wake of the German defeat was a huge success. Most cities and towns, notably Milan and Turin, were freed by the partisans days before the Allies arrived.


title: Po Valley

text: After the war, the Padan area took the lead in the economic miracle of the 1950s and 60s. Since 1989, Lega Nord, a federation of Northern regionalist parties, has promoted either secession or larger autonomy for the Padan area which they call "Padania".


title: Po Valley

text: The Po Valley is one of the most important industrial and agricultural areas in Europe. Hydroelectricity is produced by the flow of the Po. The river is extensively used for irrigation for the region's agriculture.


title: Po Valley

text: Po valley is considered the worst area in Europe for air quality. In March 2019, the European Space Agency (ESA) published images of nitrogen dioxide concentrations taken from the Sentinel-5P satellite. These images show a big red area, made of nitrogen dioxide and fine particles, situated above the Po Valley area, which incorporates the city of Milan, Turin, and Bologna. Milan and Turin share high levels of ozone and nitrogen oxides, which are mainly produced by cars' diesel and petrol engines. To shed light on the danger for humans living polluted environments, Chicago Energy Policy Institute has developed the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI), a system capable of analyzing air pollution worldwide. According to AQLI findings, Po valley air pollution affects inhabitants so hard that it cuts off about half a year of their life expectancy. The main reasons for the high amount of air pollution over the Po valley are strictly connected to livestock and factories. The so-called "NPK fertilizers", made of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, along with manure emissions from intensive breeding and high levels of nitrogen dioxide released by diesel and petrol engines are all accountable for this disastrous air condition in Northern Italy. The region of Lombardy produces also vast amounts of animal waste, a big contributor to pollution. It delivers more than 40 percent of Italy's milk production, for example, while over half of the Italian pig production is located in the Po Valley.


title: Po Valley

text: According to research published in The Lancet Planetary Health in January 2021, which estimates the death rate associated with fine particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen dioxide (NO) pollution in 1000 European cities, Brescia and Bergamo in Lombardy have the highest death rate from fine particulate matter (PM) in Europe. Vicenza (Veneto) and Saronno (Lombardy) are in fourth and eighth place, respectively, in a top ten of ten cities. Turin and Milan are also at the top of the European ranking – 3rd and 5th respectively – in terms of increased mortality from nitrogen dioxide, a gas that is produced mainly from traffic and in particular from diesel vehicles, while Verona, Treviso, Padova, Como and Venice rank eleventh, fourteenth, fifteenth, seventeenth and twenty-third respectively.


title: Po Valley

text: The data show that many cities in the Po Valley suffer the most serious impact at European level due to poor air quality, first of all the metropolitan area of Milan, thirteenth in the ranking in terms of fine particulate impact, where any year 3967 premature deaths occur – approximately 9% of the total.


title: Angels Flight

text: Angels Flight is a landmark and historic narrow gauge funicular railway in the Bunker Hill district of Downtown Los Angeles, California. It has two funicular cars, named "Olivet" and "Sinai", that run in opposite directions on a shared cable. The tracks cover a distance of over a vertical gain of .


title: Angels Flight

text: The funicular has operated on two different sites, using the same cars and station elements. The original Angels Flight location, with trackage along the side of Third Street Tunnel and connecting Hill Street and Olive Street, operated from 1901 until it was closed in 1969, when its site was cleared for redevelopment.


title: Angels Flight

text: The second Angels Flight location opened one half block south of the original location in 1996, mid-block between 3rd and 4th Streets, with tracks connecting Hill Street and California Plaza. It was shut down in 2001, following a fatal accident, and took nine years to commence operations again. The railroad restarted operations on March 15, 2010. It was closed again from June 10, 2011 to July 5, 2011, and then again after a minor derailment incident on September 5, 2013. The investigation of this 2013 incident led to the discovery of potentially serious safety problems in both the design and the operation of the funicular.


title: Angels Flight

text: Before the 2013 service suspension, the cost of a one-way ride was 50 cents (25 cents for Metro pass holders). Although it was marketed primarily as a tourist novelty, it was frequently used by local workers to travel between the Downtown Historic Core and Bunker Hill. In 2015, the executive director of the nearby REDCAT arts center described the railroad as an important "economic link", and there was pressure for the city to fund and re-open the railroad. After safety enhancements were completed, Angels Flight reopened for public service on August 31, 2017, now charging $1 for a one-way ride (50 cents for TAP card users).


title: Angels Flight

text: Built in 1901 with financing from Colonel J.W. Eddy, as the "Los Angeles Incline Railway", Angels Flight began at the west corner of Hill Street at Third and ran for two blocks uphill (northwestward) to its Olive Street terminus. Angels Flight consisted of two vermillion "boarding stations" and two cars, named "Sinai" and "Olivet", pulled up the steep incline by metal cables powered by engines at the upper Olive Street station. As one car ascended, the other descended, carried down by gravity. An archway labeled "Angels Flight" greeted passengers on the Hill Street entrance, and this name became the official name of the railway in 1912 when the Funding Company of California purchased the railway from its founders.


title: Angels Flight

text: The original Angels Flight was a conventional funicular, with both cars connected to the same haulage cable. Unlike more modern funiculars it did not have track brakes for use in the event of cable breakage, but it did have a separate safety cable which would come into play in case of breakage of the main cable. It operated for 68 years with a good safety record, with three notable exceptions: in 1913 a derailment occurred whereby a car was jumped and one lady with it, in 1937 when a sleeping salesman was dragged several yards by the car, and a fatal accident in 1943 when a pedestrian walking up the tracks was killed.


title: Angels Flight

text: During operation in its original location, the railroad was owned and operated by six additional companies following Colonel Eddy. In 1912 Eddy sold the railroad to Funding Company of Los Angeles who in turn sold it to Continental Securities Company in 1914. Robert W. Moore, an engineer for Continental Securities, purchased Angels Flight in 1946. In 1952 Lester B. Moreland and Byron Linville, a prominent banker at Security First National Bank, purchased it from Moore and the following year Lester B. Moreland's family purchased Byron Linville's interest in the Railway, becoming sole stockholder. In 1962 the city forced Moreland to sell though condemnation and the city's redevelopment agency hired Oliver & Williams Elevator Company to run it until it was shut down on May 18, 1969. The following day the dismantling began and the cars were hauled away to be stored in a warehouse. The railroad's arch, station house, drinking fountain, and other artifacts were taken to an outdoor storage yard in Gardena, California.


title: Angels Flight

text: The only fatality that involved the original Angels Flight occurred in the autumn of 1943, when a sailor attempting to walk up the track itself was crushed beneath one of the cars.