Pamela Gillies

Pamela Gillies (born 1953) is a Scottish academic and educator, appointed as Principal/Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in March 2006.
Education.
The first in her family to go to university, Gillies attended the University of Aberdeen graduating in 1976 with a BSc in Physiology, a PGCE and a Masters in Education and Philosophy. In 1976 she was awarded a competitive Scottish Home and Health Department Fellowship to train in community health in England and graduated first with an MMedSci and then subsequently with a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Nottingham.
Career.
Gillies began her research career in 1978 as a research officer with the Department of Education in Sheffield evaluating health promotion initiatives and moved back to Nottingham in 1984 to take up a Lectureship in Public Health Medicine. She first became a Senior Lecturer, Professor of Public Health and Head of the School of Community Health Sciences before being promoted to a Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham in 2001.
During her career, Pamela Gillies has worked in San Francisco on an Abbott Fellowship for AIDS Research (1988), in Geneva at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS (1989), at Harvard as a Harkness Fellow and Visiting Professor in Health and Human Rights (1992–93) and in London on a seconded post as the first Executive Director of Research at the Health Education Authority for England (1996–99).
Gillies is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was elected a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, Royal College of Physicians of London in 2002. She was elected as an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2005. In March 2015, Gillies was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Amongst other roles, Gillies has served on ESRC Committees on Evidence Based Policy and on People at the Centre of Information and Communication Technologies and has acted as Chair of the Peckam Pulse Healthy Living Centre, the Government's Task Force on Unintended Conceptions in Young People and the European Commission's Working Group on HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Discrimination.
Gillies has researched and written widely on cross-cultural perspectives on HIV/AIDS, sexuality and health, partnership responses to health improvement and community development responses to inequalities in health focusing on the potential of social action for health. She was involved in a Gates Foundation funded research project in Kolkata, India, to prevent HIV transmission in sex workers and their families.
Gillies was installed as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in March 2006 after a career in higher education. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to education and public health.
External links.


Barry Trimmer

Barry Andrew Trimmer is an English scientist, professor at Tufts University. His research primarily focuses on neurobiology, biomechanics / neuromechanics and soft-bodied locomotion.
Biography.
Trimmer received both his B.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University, concentrating in neurobiology. Since 2005 he is professor of biology, Henry Bromfield Pearson Professor of Natural Sciences, and director of the Biomimetic Devices Laboratory (BDL) at Tufts University.
Trimmer and his Tufts colleague David L. Kaplan gained international attention in 2007 upon successfully creating the world's first soft-bodied robot. The robot, or SoftBot, is composed of silicone elastomers and resembles a tobacco hornworm, a caterpillar that Trimmer has studied since 1990.
Currently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York City, Trimmer and Kaplan hope the SoftBot will help "spark revolutions in medicine, the military and even outer-space exploration." Kaplan believes that, among other medical applications, soft-bodied robots could replace tiny cameras that patients swallow to help diagnose diseases.


Carol Harrison

Carol Harrison (born 8 February 1955 in West Ham, Essex) is an English actress and writer. She is known mostly for her work on British television, in particular in recent years her role as Louise Raymond in BBC's "EastEnders".
Career.
Harrison made her acting debut in 1976, in the BBC police drama, "Softly Softly", which was a spin-off from the hugely popular "Z-Cars". In 1980 she made her film debut, securing a minor role in the 1980 adaptation of "The Elephant Man". She went on to appear in many successful television programmes including "The Gentle Touch" (1982); "Q.E.D." (1982); "The Cleopatras" (1983); "Minder" (1984); "Casualty" (1987, 1996 & 2008); Dorothy in "London's Burning" from 1988–1989; "Kavanagh QC" (1995) and ITV's "A Touch of Frost" (1997).
One of her most notable and long running roles, was playing the part of Gloria in the BBC sitcom "Brush Strokes" (1986–1991); remaining in the role for five series. However, it is her role in the BBC soap opera "EastEnders" (1998–1999) that she is most remembered for. Harrison played Louise Raymond, the selfish mother of Tiffany (Martine McCutcheon) and Simon (Andrew Lynford). Harrison's character was involved in several storylines, including an affair with her daughter's husband Grant (Ross Kemp). This role was not the first time Harrison had appeared in the soap. She had previously had a minor role in 1986, playing the mother of a young boy who was rescued from a speeding lorry by Andy O'Brien (Ross Davidson).
Harrison left "EastEnders" in 1999 so she could take a Master's degree in screenwriting. In 2006 she began teaching Script and Screen, a five-week course offered through the adult and community non-accredited provision, at Brighton and Hove College.
Harrison's other acting credits include the cult films "Tank Malling" (1989) and "Human Traffic" (1999), and the ITV police drama "The Bill" (2002). In 2005 she also took part in the Channel 4 series "Extreme Celebrity Detox".
She took part in TV series "Celebrity Coach Trip" partnered with friend Ingrid Tarrant.
In 2016, Harrison wrote and produced the mod musical "All or Nothing", based on the life of Steve Marriott, of whom she had been a fan since 1965 when he appeared with the Small Faces at a concert in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Her musical toured around the country in 2016 and 2017, receiving positive reviews, before closing early after a short run at the Ambassadors Theatre in London's West End.
Personal life.
Harrison was born in West Ham to a working class, single parent family. She failed her 11-plus exams in her youth, but has since discovered that she is dyslexic. Harrison was once married to the actor Jamie Foreman, son of the 1960s London gangster Freddie Foreman. They have one son named Alfie.


Belle Howard

Louisa Belle Howard (August 27, 1857 - November 4, 1947) was a dramatic reader and music teacher.
Early life.
Louisa Belle Howard was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1857. She was the only daughter of Samuel Gill and Mary Spencer (1834-1906), and granddaughter of William Spencer, Emporia pioneer.
With her parents, at the age of eight years, she moved to Emporia, Kansas, where she was placed in the model department of the State Normal School, and remained a student in that institution for ten years.
Howard inherited from her father musical talent of a high order, and literary talent from her mother. Her musical studies have gone hand in hand with her literary work.
Career.
At the age of eighteen years Belle Howard began to teach.
She gave lessons in music with her school-teaching. After seven years of successful work in the public schools of Lyon County, Kansas, in the vicinity of Emporia, Howard moved with her family to El Dorado, Kansas, teaching in the El Dorado city schools with marked success for a period of three years.
She resigned her position in El Dorado to devote her energies exclusively to musical and literary work, and organized a prosperous music school at her home. When Garfield University was opened in Wichita, Kansas, she moved there from El Dorado for further study and development for herself and children. She obtained a position in the Wichita schools with a salary sufficient to meet all her expenses, tuition in the University and support of her family.
Twenty-five years of Howard's life have been spent in the school-room, as student and teacher. She was connected with the Mozart Conservatory of Music and the Western School of Elocution and Oratory. She also taught at Guthrie, Oklahoma, the college at Waitsburg, Washington, and the Grandview School near Emporia.
Her entertainments were generally given in churches, and she was assisted by her daughter.
Personal life.
Soon after starting a career as teacher, Belle Howard married Dr. Ervin P. Howard (died in 1917), but it was an unfortunate marriage, and after three years, she was left alone with her two infant children. Among other duties the care of an invalid mother fell to her. After years of struggles she failed in health and was forced to abandon labor of all kinds. After two years of rest she gained strength enough to take up again life's duties, and with her twelve-year-old daughter, May Belle, began to give musical and elocutionary entertainments.
Many painful experiences came to her, accompanied by the serious and protracted illness of her mother, herself, and lastly of her son, but she persevered in the work of her life's effort and ambition. Her daughter became at the same time a violinist, elocutionist and vocalist of marked skill.
Later in life she lived in Wichita with her daughter May Belle Howard (1879-1968) and son Guello/Guy Payne Howard.
She died on November 11, 1947, at her home at 1425 Lawrence, Emporia, Kansas, and was buried at Maplewood Cemetery.


University Laboratory High School (Urbana, Illinois)

The University of Illinois Laboratory High School, also known as Uni High or just Uni, was established in 1921 and is a laboratory school located on the engineering section of the University of Illinois campus in Urbana, Illinois. Its enrollment is approximately 300 students, spanning five years (the traditional grades 9–12, preceded by an 8th grade year known as the "subfreshman" year). The school is notable for the achievements of its alumni, including three Nobel laureates and a Pulitzer Prize winner. In 2006 and 2008 it was recognized as a "public elite" school by "Newsweek" because of its students' high scores on the SAT. Before the recent change in the SAT's format, the average SAT score was 2045, and now varies from 1400 to 1600. As of 2019, the average SAT was a 1470. The average ACT score is a 32.
Funding and relationship to the University of Illinois.
Although Uni is located within the Urbana School District, it is not operated by the school district, nor does it receive any property tax revenue from this or any other district. Public funding comes only through the statewide per-pupil distribution financed in the Illinois state budget. Additional funding comes from donations by alumni and parents of current students. Enrollment is competitive, rather than being dependent upon residency in a particular district.
For many years, the school was funded by the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as an institution to experiment with educational curricula and to teach university students majoring in education, but the University of Illinois withdrew most of its support in the early 1980s. The school currently gets its money from state aid, allocation from the University of Illinois Provost's office, fundraising, and fees from students. The "laboratory" aspect persists in certain classes. An experimental math course was taught in the early 2000s and teachers continue to experiment in small, creative ways with their courses to adapt to each grade of around sixty students. The relationship to the University also provides a number of other benefits to the school's students. The proximity to the University campus provides a stimulating political climate, and access to the University's library system is equivalent to that of any undergraduate. The high school library is a branch of the University library system and for this reason has been called "the largest high school library in the world." Additionally, Kenney Gym, the University's former men's gymnasium, is used by Uni for both physical education and as practice and game space for the volleyball and basketball teams. While access to certain facilities that are supported by student fees – such as the ARC recreation center – is not granted to Uni students, who are not assessed these fees, the school's relationship with the University of Illinois allows students over the age of 15 with sufficiently high grades to enroll in courses at the University. Credit earned in this manner may then be applied to future study at the university level.
Financial deficit.
In September 2014, faculty, parents, and students were made aware of a $1 million-plus deficit the school had discovered. An accounting error had caused Uni to take money out of a closed bank account, resulting in the huge deficit.
Admissions and academics.
Students apply to enter Uni as part of the incoming "subfreshmen" class which, although composed of seventh and eighth grade aged students, completes a year at eighth grade level before continuing on to the ninth grade. Roughly 65 students are admitted each year, keeping the school's total enrollment near 320 students. Admission decisions are based on previous academic history, extracurriculars, teacher recommendations, a personal statement, and a student's scores on the Secondary School Admission Test. Students may apply during their sixth or seventh grade years. Whether immediately after graduation, or a year later, the vast majority of students go on to enter a four-year college or university, although some choose to defer a year to study abroad, volunteer, or work.
Extracurriculars.
Uni has had numerous successes in interscholastic competitions, including competitive chess (administered by the Illinois High School Association) and academic competitions. Students also participate in many clubs through the school, both for fun and to give back to their community.
Chess.
The school's chess team has won the IHSA's team chess tournament seven times (1978, 1979, 1986, 1991, 1992, 1994, and 2009) and has been runner-up three times (1976, 1980, 1989). They came in second in the US National Championship in 1978 on a tiebreak. Members of that team included Thomas Krause, Robert Sah, Mark Zvilius, Jonathan Atkin, and Steven Schran. The team was coached by David Sprenkle, a Uni alum and ranked chess master. Currently, the school has no competitive chess program.
Academic teams.
Uni High has several academic teams that compete each year and typically place highly in their respective competitions. These include Science Olympiad, Scholastic Bowl, WYSE Academic Challenge, Japan Bowl, and various math competitions.
The Uni High Scholastic Bowl team has qualified for the IHSA State Competition in four consecutive years, placing 4th in 2014 and 1st in 2015 in Class A before being bumped to Class AA and finishing 2nd in 2017. Throughout the season, which roughly runs from September to March, the team participates in a variety of tournaments and competitions. The program was started as a club in 2013 by Bruce Li and members of the Class of 2015, who then secured sponsorship from the school's administration to begin competing as a team in the 2013-2014 season. Uni has since grown into one of the strongest teams in the state, winning the NAQT State Championship in 2018 and the IHSA Class AA State Championship in 2019. In 2019, Uni placed second at the National Academic Quiz Tournaments High School Championship and third at the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence National Scholastic Championship.
Since 1997, Uni has been an annual participant in the Academic Challenge , which consists of a series of tests in various academic fields, including biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering design, English, mathematics, and physics. The competition is open to high schools in Illinois and Missouri. For nine consecutive years from 1998 to 2006, as well as in 2008, 2009 and 2011, Uni was the state champion in the smallest division (enrollment under 300). In 2007, Uni competed in the next larger division and placed 2nd, despite the school's smaller enrollment in the 9th through 12th grades.
Service clubs.
Uni High's Habitat for Humanity club works with the Clarksdale, MS Habitat affiliate. They hold several fundraisers throughout the year in order to send money to Clarksdale, as well as having an annual trip to Clarksdale every February where students work on houses. The club was founded by history teacher Bill Sutton and run by him until his retirement in 2017. The club is now run by history teacher Ben Leff. Several Uni alums have moved to the Clarksdale area to work with Habitat for Humanity or to work in various schools and after-school programs. Uni High's connection to Clarksdale allowed Uni High alumna Anja Theissen and Bianca Zarahescu to found Spring Initiative, a program which mentors students and prepares them for greater academic success, personal growth, and an opportunity to overcome poverty.
Uni has a Food Pantry club that volunteers at and raises money for the Wesley Food Pantry. The school also has a club called United for Uganda, which raises money for a grassroots organization in Uganda called Come Let's Dance. During the 2013-2014 school year, the club started a program through Come Let's Dance to sponsor a child in Uganda's education each year.
School traditions.
X-Week.
X-Week is an annual fundraising tradition at the school. Members of Student Council choose one or two charities, which are usually local, to donate the money to. Each day, a different class hosts a fundraiser. The senior class hosts the annual Senior Auction during the Friday of X-Week every year. They auction off a wide variety of items, which usually include class notes and baked goods, as well as more eccentric options such as a movie night at a teacher's house or the opportunity to go on a safari with a few members of the senior class. The culminating event of X-Week is Big Show, a comedic, student-led production. In recent years, the multiple events of X-Week have been discarded in favor of a joint X-Dinner leading up to Big Show.
The Wylde Q. Chicken Award.
The Wylde Q. Chicken Award, sponsored by the graduating class of 1972, was first awarded in 1998 and is meant to recognize "spontaneous creativity," "unbidden originality," and "extraordinary acts in ordinary circumstances." It is awarded annually at the end of the school year; recipients are chosen by a panel of judges from the class of 1972 along with past winners of the award. Previous winners have included a series of promotional posters for the 50 states in the first floor restrooms, the staging of the American Revolution in comic strip form, and a Gilbert and Sullivan-style adaptation of Shakespeare's "Macbeth".
Senior Project.
The Senior Project is a program that began at Uni in the Spring of 2014. The project was developed by Assistant Director of Student Life Karl Radnitzer, who got the idea from a similar program at New Trier High School in Winnetka, IL. The project's goal is to allow second semester seniors to explore interests in a more career-oriented way than they would in a typical classroom setting. The project connects students with mentors in the Champaign-Urbana community who can help them explore their academic interests outside of the school building. Students come up with ideas for projects and submit them for approval to a Senior Project committee. If a project is approved, students then spend their second semester doing work for their project around three times a week. Students have worked in various labs at the University of Illinois, at the Crisis Nursery, at Carle Hospital, and at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
Agora Days.
Another example of creative freedom is Agora Days, a four-day school week in late February when students, parents, faculty, alumni and friends of the school can teach hour-long classes about a wide range of topics, which have included popular cake decorating and massage classes. Students are required to take a number of academic-oriented classes, but classes based on playing sports, watching films or TV series, and studying video games also exist. Students have the same eight-hour schedule on each of the four days. Agora Days has been a Uni tradition since 1977.
Subfreshman Oral History Project.
Every year, the subfreshman social studies class spends part of the second semester working on an oral history project. Social Studies teacher Melissa Schoeplein's class works with WILL radio station to conduct interviews on a certain topic, which varies by year. Past topics have included inside views of the military, people with disabilities, counterculture, the right to marry, and affirmative action in education. Subfreshmen are split into groups to conduct interviews. Each group member is assigned a role (either interviewer, team captain, technician, or scribe) in the interview, and the groups spend several weeks researching relevant information on their subject's life before conducting the interview. A group of older students, called WILL Interns, work with the interview material produced by the subfreshmen and turn it into an hour-long documentary published on the WILL Illinois Youth Media page.
Athletics.
Despite the school's small enrollment, Uni offers five no-cut sports for boys (Cross Country, Soccer, Basketball, Track & Field and Tennis) and six no-cut sports for girls (Cross Country, Swimming, Volleyball, Basketball, Soccer, and Track & Field), which all usually compete in the IHSA 1A division. Members of the subfreshman class also have the opportunity to participate in Cross Country, Track & Field, and Basketball.
Building.
The building which houses University Laboratory High School was constructed from 1917 through 1918 and was designed by Holabird & Roche in the Late Gothic Revival style, with James M. White as the supervising architect. An earlier design for an "H"-shaped structure with two wings had been rejected in 1914, and it was not until May 1916 that the go-ahead was given to begin construction on the new design, which was estimated to cost $143,500.
When the building was completed, it was almost immediately converted into a general hospital for the Students’ Army Training Corp and School of Military Aeronautics for the duration of World War I. It was turned over to the high school in time for the beginning of the 1921-22 school year.
Notable alumni and faculty.
Three alumni are Nobel Prize laureates:
Other major award winners include:
Other notable alumni include (sorted by class year):
Notable faculty include:
References.
Notes


Shawn Carlson

Shawn Carlson (born 1960) is an American physicist, science writer, and a STEM educator.
Early life.
Carlson received his inspiration to become a scientist as well as his first lessons in how to do science from his grandfather, George Donald Graham. Carlson describes his grandfather as "a free-spirited wild man, a person with incredible scientific creativity. But he was one of those personalities who couldn't go through the standard course of instruction. So he pursued his passion for mathematics and geology and biology on his own and he would frequently write really interesting papers that he couldn't get published because he didn't have 'Ph.D.' after his name."
Education.
Carlson graduated from U.C. Berkeley with Bachelor of Science degrees in both Applied Mathematics and Physics in 1981. He graduated from UCLA with a master's degree in Physics in 1983, and with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics in 1989. As a post doc, Carlson ran the Leuschner Observatory for the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and was chief observer for the Berkeley Automated Supernovae Search.
Astrology test.
While an undergraduate, Carlson carried out what is widely regarded to be the most comprehensive test of astrologer's abilities to extract information about their clients from the apparent positions of celestial objects as seen from the places and times of their clients' births.
Carlson's experiment involved twenty-eight astrologers who were held in high esteem by their peers. They agreed to match over 100 natal charts to psychological profiles that were generated by the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), a standard and well accepted personality test, which the astrologers themselves identified as the scientific instrument that was best aligned with type of information they believed they could divine from their art. The astrologers agreed that the experimental protocol provided a "fair test" of astrology prior to taking part in it.
The participating astrologers were nominated by the National Council for Geocosmic Research (NCGR), which acted as the astrological advisors to ensure that the test was fair. NCGR chose 26 of the 28 astrologers, the other two being interested astrologers who were vetted by NCGR after they heard about the experiment. The astrologers came from Europe and the United States. The astrologers also identified the central proposition of natal astrology to be tested. To avoid possible bias from either the scientist performing the study or the participating astrologers, the experiment was performed double-blind.
The results were published in the highly prestigious journal "Nature" on December 5, 1985. The study found that astrologers were unable to match natal charts to their corresponding personality tests better than chance. Moreover, astrologers were no more likely to be correct even when they had high confidence that they had made a match correctly. Carlson concluded that the result "clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis".
Society for Amateur Scientists.
Inspired by his grandfather's example, Carlson left academia in 1994 and became a founder of the modern citizen science movement when he created the Society for Amateur Scientists. Readers enjoyed his monthly column "The Amateur Scientist" in "Scientific American" from 1995 to 2001. He was also one of the first columnists for "Make" magazine.
LabRats Science Education Program.
Starting in 2002, Carlson began turning his attention away from creating opportunities for adults to participate in authentic science projects to focus on, "inspiring the next generation to love learning about science and technology." After years of development which involved thousands of students online and hundreds of students in various pilot studies, in 2010 Carlson applied for and was granted non-profit status from the IRS to found a new organization known as the LabRats Science Education Project.
According to the organization's website, LabRats is largely inspired by the Boy Scout model. The program features weekly meetings, a rank-based system of advancement, and a strong focus on ethics and community service.
Carlson is currently the organization's Executive Director.
Engagement Education.
In 2013, Carlson introduced "Engagement Education", a new system of teaching STEM. The goal of Engagement Education is to create strong positive emotional connections between the learner and what is being learned, their peers, and their adult caregivers, to "inspire young people to love learning about science and technology". According to the LabRats website, Engagement Education is the foundation of the LabRats system of instruction.


Mike Figgis

Michael Figgis (born 28 February 1948) is an English film director, screenwriter, and composer. He was nominated for two Academy Awards for his work in "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995). Figgis was the founding patron of the independent filmmakers online community "Shooting People".
Early life.
Figgis was born in Carlisle, Cumberland, and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya until he was eight. The rest of his childhood was spent in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Career.
Figgis's early interest was in music. He played trumpet and guitar in The People Band and is audible in their first record (produced by Charlie Watts) in 1968. He also played keyboards for Bryan Ferry's first band. In 1983 he directed a theatre play, produced in Theatre Gerard-Philipe (Saint-Denis, Paris). This play performed with great success at Festival de Grenada and in Theater der Welt (Munich).
After working in theatre (he was a musician and performer in the experimental group People Show) Figgis made his feature film debut with the low budget "Stormy Monday" in 1988. The film earned him attention as a director who could get interesting performances from established Hollywood actors. His first American film was "Internal Affairs", which helped to revive the career of Richard Gere. His next Hollywood feature, "Mr. Jones", was misunderstood by the studio, who attempted to market the downbeat story as a feelgood film, resulting in a box office flop. Figgis poured his disenchantment with the film industry into "Leaving Las Vegas", which starred Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, which earned Figgis Academy Award nominations for Best Directing and Best Screenplay. He followed this up with the romantic drama "One Night Stand", starring Wesley Snipes and Nastassja Kinski, but the movie received a poor response from critics and was a commercial failure. His most ambitious film to date is the low-budget film "The Loss of Sexual Innocence", a loosely based autobiographical film of the director himself.
In 2007, Figgis shot his newest feature "Love Live Long" set between Istanbul and Bratislava on the infamous Gumball 3000 Rally, starring Sophie Winkleman and Daniel Lapaine. In 2008, he was called upon by Transport for London to help shoot a PIF entitled "A Little Thought From Each of Us, A Big Difference For Everyone", encouraging more considerate behaviour on London's public transport systems, which was then shown in London cinemas. The ad comprised the screen split into four sections, each section showing one of four scenarios all on the same double-decker bus. At the end of the ad, the friction-creating scenarios were resolved and the ad ended on "A little thought from each of us. A big difference for everyone."
Digital video.
Forays into digital video technology led Figgis to conceive of and direct "Timecode", which took advantage of the technology to create an ensemble film shot simultaneously with four cameras all in one take and also presented simultaneously and uncut, dividing the screen into four-quarters. He returned to the "Timecode" quad-screen approach for his section of "Ten Minutes Older", but has also worked on documentary pieces including a segment of "The Blues (called Red, White, and Blues)" and a short piece on flamenco. His curiosity with the cinematic use of time has led him to cite Robert Enrico's 1962 film version of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" as an influential film for him. Figgis has a well-documented love-hate relationship with the Hollywood system which leads him to often be an outspoken critic of the system while also despairing the lack of a better alternative, in his mind, at the moment. At an appearance at Camerimage in 2005, he expressed the view that filmmaking had become "boring and perhaps need[ed] to become even worse before anything better can emerge" successfully at least in reaction.
At one of the "Shooting People" events in 2005 he said that filmmaking with a small digital camera made the experience more like painting or novel writing than the movie industry. His fascination with camera technology has also led him to create a camera stabilisation rig for smaller video cameras, called the Fig Rig which places the camera on a platform held within a steering wheel-like system and has since been released by Manfrotto Group.
To promote a new camera phone, Sony Ericsson commissioned Figgis to create "Life Captured", a short film made out of mobile phone snapshots taken by 14 people from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, who were selected to submit a series of photos after winning the global competition.
Educational career.
Figgis, since 2008, has been professor of film studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he conducts intensive summer seminars.
Figgis was made an Honorary Associate of London Film School.


Wes Moore

Westley "Wes" Watende Omari Moore (born October 15, 1978) is an American author, entrepreneur, television producer, and retired United States Army officer. From 2017 to 2021 Moore served as the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation.
Moore is the author of "The Other Wes Moore" and "The Work", both of which are New York Times Bestsellers. He was also the host for "Beyond Belief" on the Oprah Winfrey Network, as well as the executive producer and a writer for "Coming Back with Wes Moore" on PBS.
Moore is the founder and CEO of BridgeEdU, a social enterprise dedicated to reinventing the freshman year and creating a smoother transition to higher education for students entering their freshman year of college.
Early life and education.
Moore was born in Baltimore on October 15, 1978, to father William Westley Moore Jr., a 1971 Bard College graduate and highly respected black American broadcast news journalist, and mother Joy Thomas Moore, a daughter of immigrants from Lowe River, Jamaica and a media professional.
When Moore was nearly four years old, his father died on April 16, 1982 from acute epiglottitis. In the summer of 1984, Moore's mother took him and his two sisters to live in the Bronx, New York, with their grandparents. His grandmother, Winell Thomas, a Cuban immigrant, was a retired school teacher. His grandfather, Rev. Dr. James Thomas, a Jamaican immigrant, was the first black minister in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church.
Moore attended Riverdale Country School. At Riverdale, he encountered academic and disciplinary struggles. When Moore's grades declined and he became involved in petty crime, his mother enrolled him in Valley Forge Military Academy.
After high school, Moore graduated Phi Theta Kappa from Valley Forge Military College, a junior college in Pennsylvania. He went on to attend Johns Hopkins University where he studied International Relations and Economics and graduated Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa in 2001. Immediately after, he attended the Wolfson College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar where he earned a master's degree in International Relations.
Career.
While living in London, Moore started a career in finance at Deutsche Bank in the international trade and finance division, but in 2005 he left to use his skills as a paratrooper and joined the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army in Afghanistan. Moore led a team of paratroopers and special operators who were trained in civil affairs, psychological operations, information operations, and various other special operations command disciplines. Among the many awards he received was the Combat Action Badge.
Upon his return to the United States, Moore was accepted as a White House Fellow. He placed within the State Department's Office of U.S. Foreign Assistance Resources where he tracked foreign aid to ensure it was being used properly. He served at the White House for one year, then returned to New York to work in finance at Citigroup.
Literary work.
Moore's first book, "The Other Wes Moore", was published in 2010. This book and "The Work" are "New York Times" Bestsellers. Additionally, "Discovering Wes Moore" is a Young Adult edition of his bestselling book, and "This Way Home", his first Young Adult novel, was released in the Fall of 2015.
"The Other Wes Moore".
"The Other Wes Moore" is the story of two young Baltimore boys that share the same name and race, but largely different familial histories and they travel down very different paths. While both grew up without the consistent presence of their biological father and got into trouble as youth, one, who was raised by his grandmother and grandfather and was born to two parents with college degrees, became a Rhodes scholar and leader, and the other, who was raised by a single mother who dropped out of college, was convicted of murder and is currently serving a life sentence. Wes Moore sets out to answer what made the difference through telling the story of young men trying to find their way in a seemingly broken world. "The Other Wes Moore" has been on both "The New York Times" and "Wall Street Journal" bestseller list.
"Discovering Wes Moore".
"Discovering Wes Moore" is the Young Adult adaption to "The Other Wes Moore". This book acts as a cautionary tale that is more accessible to a younger audience while maintaining the powerful message and story that was set out in "The Other Wes Moore".
"The Work".
"The Work" provides a tale of finding purpose and passion through the work a person does. This book retraces Moore's experiences around the globe that have led him to find his passion. Additionally, he tells the stories of a dozen other "change makers" and how they found their paths to purpose.
"This Way Home".
"This Way Home" is a Young Adult novel about a high school star basketball player. Elijah faces a struggle that emerges from a standoff with a local gang after they attempt to recruit him to their basketball team. Elijah refuses to play for them and is faced with the consequences. Taking place in a pivotal time of a young adult's journey, this story is about discovering what truly matters in life.
Productions.
Moore is also involved in a variety of productions. He has hosted, directed and produced programs on OWN as well as CNN.
"Future City".
"Future City" is a series on Baltimore's WYPR station. In this interview based talk show, Wes Moore examines systemic issues in Baltimore. In each episode, Wes looks at bright ideas that are working in other cities.  And he asks the question: Can those ideas work for Baltimore?
"Coming Back with Wes Moore".
"Coming Back with Wes Moore", a series executive produced by author and former Army combat veteran Wes Moore, aired in three parts on consecutive Tuesdays beginning May 13, 2014, on PBS. The three episode series tells the story of Wes Moore's search for answers to some of the most difficult questions related to returning home from war. The show follows the personal lives of different soldiers as they attempt to reintegrate back into society, establish new identities, and find new missions. Each episode focuses on a different stage of coming home: "Coming Back", "Fitting In" and "Moving Forward".
"All the Difference".
"All the Difference" is a documentary which seeks to understand why many boys of color have difficulty transitioning in higher education and what can be done about it. The program has been filmed over a period of five years and tells the stories of two young boys and their efforts to avoid the pitfalls of growing up in low-income, high risk Chicago communities and navigate higher education. The film is being made in cooperation with PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Media.
Moore is a news contributor to various publications including "The Wall Street Journal", "The Huffington Post", "The Baltimore Sun", "The New York Times" and many other publications. Moore regularly appears on various MSNBC programs including "Hardball with Chris Matthews", "Now with Alex Wagner", "The Rachel Maddow Show", "PoliticsNation", "Meet The Press" and "Morning Joe"
He has also made appearances on various notable programs including: "Face the Nation", "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart", "The Colbert Report", and "Real Time with Bill Maher"
Veterans activism.
Moore is a vocal advocate for serving those who served in the military overseas. He has worked with various veterans groups, including Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America and Things We Read, and is a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).
Moore has also presented a TED talk at TEDSalon NY2014 titled How to Talk to Veterans About the War.
Robin Hood Foundation.
In April 2017, it was announced Moore would be appointed CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization which attempts to alleviate problems caused by poverty in New York City. Founded in 1988, Robin Hood was conceived by hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones and co-founded with Peter Borish and Glenn Dubin.
The foundation combines investment principles and philanthropy to assist programs that target poverty in New York City. This is accomplished mainly by funding schools, food pantries and shelters, however they also administer a relief fund for disasters.
Beginning the position in June 2017, he is the organization's first chief executive officer in its 30-year history. Guidestar reports he earns over $800,000 per year in this role. He stepped down from the position in May 2021 after announcing his intention to do so in February 2021.
Honors and awards.
On May 27, 2020, Moore was invited to and gave special remarks at his alma mater Johns Hopkins University's 2020 Commencement ceremony. Other notable guest speakers during the virtual ceremony included Reddit co-founder and Commencement speaker Alexis Ohanian; philanthropist and former New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg; Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force; and senior class president Pavan Patel.


A. R. Taylor

Arnold Rodgers Taylor (1913–93) was a scholar of medieval English, Old Norse, and modern Icelandic.
Early life.
Taylor was the youngest of the four children of Arthur Harry Taylor, from Burnham in Norfolk, and Elizabeth Rodgers, from Stockton. After graduating from high school in Stockton, Taylor read English at the University of Manchester (St. Anselm Hall), graduating in 1934. Under the influence of E. V. Gordon, he spent the spring of 1933 as an exchange student in Iceland. In 1934 he took his MA at Manchester, writing on "Droplaugarsona saga", and then spent a further year there gaining a teaching certificate. During these years, he continued to spend much of his time in Iceland, meeting his future wife Sigríður Ásgeirsdóttir (1911–91) there in 1935.
After holding a substitute teaching position in Ashton under Lyne in 1937, Taylor went to Germany as an assistant professor of English at the University of Jena from 1937 to 1939, followed by a year of high-school teaching at Darlington.
Second World War.
With the outbreak of war, Arnold volunteered his German skills to the British army, but with an even greater lack of soldiers knowing Icelandic, he was posted to Iceland in 1940. In 1941 he met Sigríður again, and they married in Reykjavík in March 1942, moving to England later that year. Arnold continued both to fight and translate in North Africa, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands until the summer of 1946, when he returned to high-school teaching in County Durham.
University of Leeds.
In January 1947 Arnold began the career which dominated his life, gaining a lectureship in the English Department at the University of Leeds, where he succeeded Bruce Dickins (who had himself succeeded Arnold's tutor E. V. Gordon when Gordon left Leeds for Manchester) in teaching medieval English, Old Norse and modern Icelandic Studies. He became a senior lecturer in 1956 and retired in 1978 (when he was succeeded by Rory McTurk). From 1952 to 1954 he was President of The Viking Society for Northern Research. He became a Knight of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon in 1963, and in 1978 a Knight Commander of the order.
Taylor is best known for his 1957 revision of Gordon's "An Introduction to Old Norse", which remained the main textbook in Old Norse in the Anglophone world into the twenty-first century. He also produced an "Icelandic-English Pocket Dictionary" (Reykjavík: Orðabókarútgáfan, 1956) and a number of articles, though ill health hampered his writing.
Death.
Taylor died in England 30 May 1993. In accordance with his last wishes, he was granted burial in Icelandic soil beside his wife, at Blönduós.


Mangbai language

Mangbai (Mamgbay, Mambai) is an Mbum language of northern Cameroon and southern Chad.


39th Writers Guild of America Awards

The 39th Writers Guild of America Awards honored the best television, and film writers of 1986. Winners were announced in 1987.
Winners & Nominees.
Film.
Winners are listed first highlighted in boldface.


Leo M. Chalupa

Leo M. Chalupa (born 28 March 1945) is a Ukrainian-American Neuropsychologist who was Vice President for Research and is Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology at George Washington University. He was previously a Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology at the University of California, Davis and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior where he also served as the Director of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience and Interim Dean of the College of Biological Sciences.
Early life.
Chalupa was born in Germany to Ukrainian parents. They brought him to the United States as a child seeking asylum from the Soviet Union. He grew up in the Bronx, New York, graduated from Queens College with a bachelor’s degree in Physiological Psychology in 1966, earned his doctorate in Neuropsychology at the City University of New York in 1970, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1975.
Works.
His research involves trying to understand how humans and other animals are able to perceive our surroundings and translate that into brain function which in turn leads to some action. For example, an animal identifying a predator and fleeing. Consequently, his research involves studying the retina, the visual system, and the development of visual perception. Using a combination of physiological, anatomical and molecular techniques his research has helped redefine the way we think about the visual system, by demonstrating how genetic and environmental factors play complementary roles in shaping the proper wiring of the visual system.
Specifically, his work has shown that neuronal activity does not instruct the formation of specific connections in the developing visual system, a view widely held in the field of developmental neurobiology. This involved performing the first ever recordings from the primate fetal retina and the manufacture of a novel neurotoxin that selectively depletes cholinergic neurons from the developing retina.
He is a co-editor of Development and Organization of the Retina: From Molecules to Function (1998)
, The Visual Neurosciences Vol. 1&2 (2004)
, Eye, Retina, and Visual System of the Mouse (2008)
, and Cerebral Plasticity: New Perspectives (2011)
He is a Fellow of the AAAS and of the Association for Psychological Science, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. He has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy) and the University of Pisa as well as Osaka University. He attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City, graduated from Queens College, City University of New York with a bachelor's degree in physiological psychology, earned his doctorate in neuropsychology at the City University of New York, and served a post-doctoral fellowship at the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received an honorary doctorate from Queens College in 2011. He co-founded two companies, Immunotox Inc and SciVee.
Personal life.
Chalupa and his wife Tanya have two children, Alexandra and Andrea.
When Alexandra was 2–1/2, her life was saved by a child car seat when her parent's car spun out of control and crashed while traversing the Alps in Italy. The incident led her mother to single-handedly wage a successful 2-year lobbying campaign in the California legislature for a mandatory child safety seat law that passed in 1982.


Poorna Learning Centre, Sahakarnagar

Poorna Learning Centre, Satnur is a small alternative school in Bangalore in the state of Karnataka, India. It started as an effort in home schooling the children of the founder. Saira Banu is the current Principal of the school. The school is very inclusive and open and teacher-student relations are very relaxed, where students call the teachers by their first names.
About 140 children, 32 teachers (including special education teachers), and four support staff make up the Poorna community. As some children may have learning disabilities, Poorna has always been involving and employing special education teachers as and when the need arises. Poorna also strives to support children from all economic backgrounds.
Poorna does not follow any particular syllabus, rather, the syllabus is developed taking into consideration the ages, abilities and interests of the children in each group. Overall learning goals are planned for each group of children, however, there is room for working outside of these when children are interested to do so.
At the age of fifteen or whenever they are ready for it, students are helped to take the National Open School (NOS) Secondary Level Examination. This examination is conducted directly by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, New Delhi. Students may sit the exam at the Bangalore centre after registering for the NOS. Thus, in order to appear for the NOS exam, NOS requirements for syllabi are followed in standards 9 and 10. Students may also take the IGCSE exam in their tenth instead of NOS and sit for the exam in school.
The National Open School (NOS) exam is recognised as equivalent to the 10th standard examination by the various State Boards of Education, and also by the IITs and other such institutions. After passing the examination students have the following options for further studies:


Bruce Metcalf

Bruce Metcalf (born September 30, 1949 in Amherst, Massachusetts) is an American artist who uses different materials including wood, metal, and plexiglass for his works.
Education.
He received his B.F.A. in Crafts/Metalsmithing in 1972 at Syracuse University. He also majored in Architecture at Syracuse from 1968-1970. From 1972-73 he attended Montana State University and from 1973-74 attended State University of New York at New Paltz. In 1977 he received his Master of Fine Arts in Metalsmithing and Jewelry at Tyler School of Art at Temple University.


Stuart L. Shapiro

Stuart Louis Shapiro (born December 6, 1947 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American theoretical astrophysicist, who works on numerical relativity with applications in astrophysics, specialising in compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes.
Career.
Shapiro studied at Harvard University and graduated with a BSc. in 1969, completed his Master's degree in 1971 at Princeton, and completed his PhD in 1973. He became a professor in 1975 at Cornell University. In 1996 he became a professor of physics and astrophysics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an expert in the numerical simulation of astrophysical phenomena in general relativity and has written two standard works on the subject.
In 1979 he was a Sloan Fellow and in 1989 became a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1998 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
In 2017, he received the Hans Bethe Prize for his "seminal and sustained contributions to understanding physical processes in compact object astrophysics, and advancing numerical relativity."
Research.
His research concerns the physics of black holes and neutron stars, gravitational collapse and the development of black holes, gravitational waves from the inspiral of neutron stars and black holes in binary systems, the dynamics of large N-body, cosmological questions (big bang nucleosynthesis), and neutrino astrophysics. He has simulated the spectrum of the radiation that develops when gas from an accretion disk falls onto a black hole or neutron star and the destruction and swallowing up of stars by a supermassive black hole in the galaxy. Additionally, the collision and merging of black holes and the development of black holes in galaxies from a relativistic, shock-free gas and the collapse of an unstable relativistic cluster. He showed that toroidal black holes as a transient state in gravitational collapse can develop and that the possibility for the development of a naked singularity exists in the collision of shock-free matter from otherwise normal initial conditions, which violates the cosmic censorship hypothesis.
He has also worked on the detection of gravitational wave signals and their observation in gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO.
Personal life.
He has been married since 1971 and has a son and a daughter.


9th Writers Guild of America Awards

The 9th Writers Guild of America Awards honored the best film writers of 1956. Winners were announced in 1957.
Winners & Nominees.
Film.
Winners are listed first highlighted in boldface.


Walter Eugene Clark

Walter Eugene Clark (September 8, 1881 – September 30, 1960), was an American philologist. He was the second Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and editor of the volumes 38-44 of the Harvard Oriental Series. He translated the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata with critical notes which was published in 1930, by the University of Chicago Press.
Education.
Clark was born on September 8, 1881 in Digby, Nova Scotia and came to the United States in 1883.
Clark received his A.B. in 1903, A.M. in 1904 from Harvard. After receiving his Doctorate from Harvard in 1906, with the dissertation titled "Quid de rebus Indicis scirent Graeci prisci quaeritur" he went to Germany to Berlin to receive further training under the Indologist Richard Pischel.
He joined the "Department of Comparative Philology" at University of Chicago as the "Instructor in Sanskrit". In 1915, he was promoted to Assistant Professor of the "Department of Comparative
Philology, General Linguistics, and Indo-Iranian Philology" and from 1923 to 1927 as Associate Professor of Sanskrit.
In 1927 he became the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard. He held the position until his retirement in 1950. He was the editor of the volumes 38-44 of the Harvard Oriental Series after Charles Lanman.
He was a member of the American Oriental Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Société Asiatique. Among his other positions he was appointed the second Master of the Kirkland House (1935–46) on September 1, 1935 succeeding Edward A. Whitney.


Thomas Daniel (biologist)

Thomas Daniel is an American biologist, Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair of Biology at University of Washington, and leads the Daniel Lab. He was the interim director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. Since 2006, he has served on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Thomas graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a BS and MS, and from Duke University with a PhD, where he studied with Steven Vogel and Stephen Wainwright.
He was the Bantrell Postdoctoral Fellow in Engineering Sciences at California Institute of Technology where he studied with Ted Wu until 1984.


Heather J. Sharkey

Heather J. Sharkey (born 1967) is an American historian of the Middle East and Africa, and of the modern Christian and Islamic worlds. Her books and articles have covered topics relating to nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial studies, missionary movements, religious communities, and language politics, especially in Egypt and Sudan. She is currently Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
Career.
Heather J. Sharkey was born and raised in New Jersey. She graduated from Peddie School, and then won a scholarship from the English-Speaking Union to attend Culford School in Bury St. Edmunds, England, for one year. As an undergraduate, she attended Yale, where she received a bachelor's degree in Anthropology, "summa cum laude" and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She won a Marshall Scholarship from the British government and attended Durham University, where she earned an MPhil degree in Modern Middle East Studies. She pursued her PhD in History at Princeton University, where she specialized in the study of modern Africa and modern Islamic thought. Her dissertation, supervised by Robert L. Tignor, received Honorable Mention for the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the humanities from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, Sharkey taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1997–98); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1998-2000); and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (2000-2). She was a visiting professor (Professeur Invité) at the Institut d’études de l’Islam et des sociétés du monde musulman (IISMM) of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (2012–13).
Scholarship.
Sharkey's first book, "Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan", appeared from the University of California Press in 2003, and received Honorable Mention for the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). This book examines how nationalism emerged among a generation of Sudanese Muslim thinkers who worked by day for the British colonial regime, holding mundane jobs, and who gathered by night to compose Arabic poetry and to write essays that enabled them to imagine the Sudan as a land and nation. The book shows how everyday experiences of colonial rule gave rise to cultures of nationalism.
Sharkey's second book, "American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire", appeared from Princeton University Press in 2008. This book studies the history of the American Presbyterian missionaries who, from 1854 to 1967, operated the largest Protestant mission in Egypt, while operating schools, hospitals, and other institutions that appealed to Egyptians Christians and Muslims alike. Sharkey shows how these American missionaries influenced Egyptian society in far-reaching ways, even in the absence of conversions, and how experiences in Egypt reciprocally influenced the missionaries and the church that sent them, with consequences for American Protestant culture and U.S.-Egyptian relations more broadly.
Cambridge University Press published Sharkey's third book, "A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East", in 2017. Written for Cambridge's Contemporary Middle East series, this book appeals to an audience of general educated readers as well as Middle East history specialists. This book shows how Islamic states – and especially the modern Ottoman state – managed religious diversity while devising specific policies towards Muslims, Christians, Jews and members of other religious groups. Sharkey closely studies Ottoman policies towards non-Muslims as "dhimmi"s – protected people subordinate to Muslims in Islamic societies. She considers how these policies evolved or persisted amid social changes and reforms of the nineteenth century, some of which ostensibly tried to promote religious equality while advancing ideas about citizenship. Ultimately, she considers how religion “worked” as a framework for government and society, and how it shaped social attitudes and expectations in the years leading up to World War I – with consequences for the Middle East in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Sharkey has also published two volumes of essays. The first, co-edited with Mehmet Ali Doğan of Istanbul Technical University, is A"merican Missionaries in the Modern Middle East: Foundational Encounters". This book appeared from the University of Utah Press in 2011. The second, "Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia", appeared from Syracuse University Press in 2013. Building on this work, Sharkey has written many articles on the history of Christian missions and world Christianity.
With Elena Vezzadini (CNRS, Institut des mondes africaines [IMAF], Paris) and Iris Seri-Hersch (Université d’Aix-Marseille), she edited in 2015 a special issue of the "Canadian Journal of African Studies", on the theme of “Rethinking Sudan Studies” after the 2011 secession of South Sudan. Her own article in this collection traces the life and “afterlives” of a giraffe who went from Sudan to France in 1826 (and whose skeleton still stands on display in the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle de La Rochelle). This article contributes to the study of Franco-Sudanese relations and environmental history in the Nile Valley.
Awards and Distinctions.
Upon graduating from Yale, Sharkey became a Marshall Scholar to the United Kingdom, where she attended Durham University and earned an MPhil degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. She studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo, first, when she was an undergraduate at Yale, in the summer program of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) and years later, when she was an assistant professor at Trinity College, in the CASA III summer program for faculty members. She has received research grants from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and other organizations. She is a past recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, Josephine De Kármán Fellowship, and Carnegie Scholars Fellowship. She won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania in 2011.


Vitalia Pavlicenco

Vitalia Pavlicenco (born October 29, 1953 in Grinăuţi) is a Moldavian politician. She was the head of the National Liberal Party (Moldova).
Biography.
She served as member of the Parliament of Moldova (1998–2001, 2005–2009).


Dalbir Bindra

Dalbir Bindra FRSC (June 11, 1922 - December 31, 1980) was a Canadian neuropsychologist and a professor in the psychology department at McGill University (1949-1980). He is known for his contributions to the neurobiological study of motivation and behaviour and his two books on these topics; "Motivation: A Systematic Reinterpretation" (1959), and "A Theory of Intelligent Behaviour" (1976). He also served as chair of the McGill University Psychology Department (1975 - 1980).
Early life.
Dalbir Bindra was born in Rawalpindi, India (now Pakistan). He had three brothers, all of whom found success in military careers: two became generals and one became an admiral.
Dalbir Bindra, known as D.B. to his close friends and students, developed an interest in experimental psychology early on while completing his B.A. at Punjab University in Lahore. He continued his studies at Harvard University, completing his M.A. in 1946 and his Ph.D. in 1948, both under the supervision of J.C.R. Licklider
At Harvard, Bindra took classes under J.G. Beebe-Center, and was influenced by other members of the faculty including Edwin Boring, Gordon Allport, and Stanley Smith Stevens. His fellow students included Virginia Sanders, Mark Rosenzweig, Jim Egan, Davis Howes, George Miller, and Leo Postman.
Bindra's Ph.D. thesis research and first publications examined motivation and hoarding behaviour in rats.
Career.
Bindra taught for two years at American University in Washington, D.C., before joining the Psychology Department at McGill University in 1949, when Donald O. Hebb was the Department Chair of Psychology. At McGill, the core of Bindra's research examined the neurophysiology of fear and motivation and the role of the former in the latter.
Bindra's research interests included the human threshold of pain, psychopharmacology, and neuropsychology, with a specific focus on the neural correlates of intelligent behaviour. He published his second book, "A Theory of Intelligent Behaviour", in 1976, describing the integration of neural processes underlying motivation and sensory-motor coordination to produce intelligent behaviour.
Bindra's Ph.D. students include Lynn Nadel, psychologist and co-author of the widely cited book, "The Hippocampus As a Cognitive Map" (Nadel & O'Keefe, 1978).
Bindra was elected President of the Canadian Psychological Association in 1958. His presidential address described the relationship between experimental psychology and behaviour disorders. Bindra also served as chair of the Associate Committee on Experimental Psychology of the National Research Council of Canada from 1962 to 1968. In 1975, he was appointed the Chair of the Psychology Department of McGill, a position he held for five years until his death on December 31, 1980 from a heart attack
Research.
Motivation.
Bindra applied research in pharmacology and neurology to human executive functioning. He defined motivation as a dynamic interaction between biological, social, internal, and external factors. Internal factors included physiological and driving cues, and external factors included environmental stimuli. Bindra strongly felt that motivation, as a topic in psychology, could unify diverse psychological subfields that typically held conflicting ideas. Bindra was a forerunner in integrating methods and findings from both sides of the nature vs. nurture debate to support his research in motivation.
His research combined a diverse set of theories and topics, including goal direction, sensory cues, arousal, blood chemistry, and reinforcement. This work culminated in the publication of his first book in 1959, "Motivation: A Systematic Reinterpretation", which attempted to systematize the contemporary motivation literature within a new framework. Based on evidence from human experimental data and animal paradigms, the book explored the underlying explanations for goal-directed motivation in humans.
Methods in neuropsychology.
In the late 1950s, Bindra developed novel pharmacological and neuropsychological experimental techniques for use in rats. He applied these methods to study a range of topics including intelligence, learning, exploratory behaviour, emotion, disinhibition, and habituation. These methods varied from Pavlovian conditioning paradigms to drug injections of methylphenidate and chlorpromazine in rat models. For example, one of his experiments examined the differing effects methylphenidate, chlorpromazine, and imipramine had on freezing and immobility in rats. Bindra found that these drugs decreased and altered the pattern of this response in rats, indicating a type of induced avoidance behaviour.
Other aspects of research.
In his second book, 'A Theory of Intelligent Behaviour' (1976), Bindra defined intelligence as a set of adaptive, directed, anticipative, and creative behaviours intended to bring about desired outcomes. This book highlighted the many neural connections enabling cognitive knowledge, motivational arousal, and sensory motor coordination. Bindra argued that together, their interactions produced intelligence.
In a similar vein, Bindra had radical ideas regarding human learning: he rejected the typical operant conditioning theory of response-reinforcement. Instead, he argued that learning was produced by our cognitive representations of our external environments; these schemas could be influenced by context, incentive, and motivation.
Towards the end of his career, Bindra expanded his research to include psychological disorders manifesting in behavioural problems. He published papers about human weeping and language in apes in 1972 and 1981, respectively.
Honours and awards.
Bindra's contribution to the field of psychology has been recognized through the conferral of several honours. Elected president of the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) from 1958-1959, Bindra was also a Fellow of both the CPA and the American Psychological Association. He was awarded the Canadian Centennial Medal in 1967, and in 1973 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a rare honour for a psychologist.
In recognition of his teaching and research contributions to McGill's Department of Psychology, the Dalbir Bindra Fellowship was established, valued at $10,000. The Fellowship is awarded to a student in a program at the graduate level, with preference for students from developing countries


Angela Davis Johnson

Angela Davis Johnson is an American painter, mixed-media artist, and ritual performance artist. She currently lives Atlanta, Georgia. She is the mother of two children.
Her work revolves around the evolving identity of African Americans throughout history, especially African-American women. Davis Johnson's work has shown in numerous exhibitions including the Delta Exhibition at Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, Texarkana Regional Arts Center in Texarkana, Texas, and Baton Rouge Center for Contemporary Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her pieces can be seen in galleries and private collections throughout the United States.
Early life.
Angela Davis Johnson was born in Orlando, Florida. She and her family later moved to Virginia, where she attended Governor's School for the Arts, an art magnet school in Norfolk, Virginia. Davis Johnson's interest in art began at a young age. She was first inspired to create art by her mother, who had returned to school for fashion design when Angela was 4 and would share what she had learned with Angela and her siblings. When Angela was 14, she, along with her mother and three siblings, were evicted from their home in Norfolk and moved to Lambrook, Arkansas. Despite being impoverished, her mother encouraged Angela and her siblings to embrace and explore their creativity through singing songs, reading, and whittling, and would purchase art supplies.
Style.
A self-taught artist, Davis Johnson explores "universal connections, identity and historical occurrences through personal symbols" in her work. Davis Johnson's work addresses several issues facing black women including trauma, domestic violence, poverty, gentrification, state-sanctioned violence, the silencing of black women, and displacement.
When asked what she hoped people will take away from her body of work, she responded:I want people to feel the complexity of the embodied experience of black womanhood. I want people to feel that when they see my work. We’re not just superheroes. We are all things. We are souls living this life. I want people to experience that in my work, feel the depths of that. I want people to recognize and feel their soul. See the thing beyond the construct, which is light, you know. To me it’s like the past, present and future. It’s all happening right now in this moment. I want people to feel that when they come by my work, when they’re away from it. I want people to witness all of that in all of our [black women artists'] works. She incorporates scraps of paper and fabric into many of her oil paintings, as an homage to her seamstress mother and in an effort to introduce humble materials into fine arts spaces.
Personal life.
Davis Johnson is a single mother of two children.


Pittsburgh Gifted Center

Pittsburgh Gifted Center (PGC) is a special school that provides gifted education, to students in Pittsburgh.
Until May 2006, the Pittsburgh Gifted Center was located at the McKelvy building in the Pittsburgh Hill District.
In September 2006, the Pittsburgh Gifted Center was made part of a school in Pittsburgh's West End called Greenway. The move to Greenway was made with the understanding that it was only a one-year shift of location. The location for 2007-08 was cancelled and instead moving to 2016.
The early draft of the "Rightsizing Plan" of Superintendent Mark Roosevelt called for the Pittsburgh Gifted Center to move to Pittsburgh's North Side on Ridge Avenue. That plan was nixed as the facility was not well suited to accommodate the programs. A shift to Greenway was accomplished after some political wrangling by school officials.
The Ridge Avenue facility owned by the Pittsburgh Public Schools was put up for sale from 2006 until 2008.
Goals.
The Center is to provide students to interact with students from other parts of the city and provide academic and enrichment opportunities not available in normal schools.
Programs.
Students attend once every week on a particular day, with small classes of about 12 students. All students attending are from Pittsburgh Public Schools. Until 2010, the Gifted Center accepted students from local parochial schools.
There is a variety of academic courses, and the Gifted Center provides students the opportunities to choose which ones they wish to attend. They include subjects related to basic courses, like English, Math, Language Arts, and Science.
Students can also choose interest and technological courses, including JavaScript, business planning, and Web Design. The Gifted Center has also integrated technology into classes, with all rooms containing computers for student research and projects. Some of these classes may further expand on a subject for traditional school (for example, there is a Genetics class that goes into greater depth in the study of DNA than normal school classes) or they may deal with a radically different subject (for example, one teacher has trigonometry course).
Information on the Gifted Center:
Along with its weekly classes, the PGC allows students to participate in extracurricular activities and competitions, usually on Saturdays. The Gifted Center has participated in National History Day, in which two of its students attended the state competition at Penn State University. PGC also had a team that entered English Festival, a reading competition sponsored by Duquesne University, and Math Counts. The Gifted Center is also considering offering additional competitions for students to join.
The goal of the school participation is to improve public relations, boast school spirit, and to gain support to preserve the school. Mr. Peglow, the school's Social Studies teacher who administered National History Day for the school this year, is also planning to offer the competition as a class to boast the number of students participating and allowing larger group projects.
The PGC was in the news when it was considered to be closed under the Superintendent Mark Roosevelt's school reform agenda. In an attempt to conserve financial resources, the superintendent wanted to return gifted education to the home schools, which could exclude smaller schools from participating in the program. However, the proposal faced stiff opposition from parents and students (some students organized a petition to save the Gifted Center; another wrote a letter opposing the closing of the Gifted Center which was published in Post-Gazette). Eventually, the board agreed to move the Center to the Ridge Avenue building, where the program existed for several years. Some people still suspect that the School Board is still considering closing the Center and it is unclear whether renovations to the Ridge Avenue building will be completed before the next school year.
The PGC has a bimonthly newsletter, the Gifted Gazette.


Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay

The Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay is one of the three film writing awards given by the Writers Guild of America.


Pamela Ronald

Pamela C. Ronald (born 1961) is an American plant pathologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Genome Center and the Department of Plant Pathology, and founding director of the Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy (IFAL), at the University of California, Davis. She also serves as Key Scientist at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. In 2018 she served as a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Center on Food Security and the Environment.
Her laboratory has genetically engineered rice for resistance to diseases and tolerance to flooding, which are serious problems of rice crops in Asia and Africa. Ronald's research has been published in "Science", "Nature" and other leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, and has also been featured in "The New York Times", "Organic Gardening Magazine", "Forbes Magazine", "The Wall Street Journal", "The Progressive Farmer", CNN, "Discover Magazine", "The Scientist", "Popular Mechanics", Bill Gates blog, National Public Radio and "National Geographic".
Early life and education.
Pamela Ronald was born in 1961 to Patricia (née Fobes) and Robert Ronald of San Mateo, California. Robert Ronald, a Jewish refugee who was born Robert Rosenthal, wrote a memoir entitled "Last Train to Freedom". From an early age, Ronald spent time backpacking in the Sierra Nevada wilderness, sparking her love for plant biology. Ronald realized that analyzing and studying plants could be a profession after witnessing botanists in the field during a summer time hike with her brother. She already knew she loved plants after time spent helping her mother tend to them in the garden.
As a student at Reed College with Helen Stafford (1922–2011), Ronald became intrigued by the interactions of plants with other organisms. For her senior thesis, she studied the recolonization of Mount St. Helens. Ronald received a B.A. in Biology from Reed College in 1982.
She went on to earn an M.A. in Biology from Stanford University in 1984 and an M.S. from Uppsala University, Sweden in plant physiology in 1985. As a Fulbright Scholar in Sweden she visited Nils Fries and studied how plants interact with mycorrhizal fungi.
As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, she began to study plant-bacterial interactions in the laboratory of Brian Staskawicz, working with peppers and tomatoes. Because rice is the most important food staple in the world, she switched her studies to rice, hoping to contribute to the well-being of farmers in impoverished regions of the world. She received her Ph.D. in molecular and physiological plant biology in 1990. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University from 1990 to 1992 in the laboratory of Steven Tanksley.
In 1996 she married Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer. They have two children, Cliff and Audrey.
Career and research.
In 1992, Ronald joined UC Davis as a faculty member. From 2003 to 2007 Ronald chaired the UC Davis Distinguished Women in Science seminar series, an event designed to support women's professional advancement in the sciences. She served as Faculty Assistant to the Provost from 2004 to 2007.
In addition to being a professor in the Genome Center and the Department of Plant Pathology at UC Davis, Ronald is the founding director of the Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy (IFAL) at the University of California, Davis. She also serves as Key Scientist at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California.
Ronald is a vocal advocate for science and for sustainable agriculture. Her laboratory has been instrumental in the development of rice that is disease-resistant and flood-tolerant.
Xa21: Pattern recognition receptor-mediated immunity.
The Ronald laboratory studies the innate immune response, using the host organism rice and the agriculturally important pathogen "Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo)". In the 1990s, through conversations with rice geneticist Gurdev Khush, Ronald became interested in the rice XA21 genetic locus, which conferred broad-spectrum resistance to "Xoo". She hypothesized that "Xa21" encoded a single protein that recognized a conserved microbial determinant.
In 1995, the Ronald laboratory isolated and characterized the rice XA21 pattern recognition receptor. Subsequent discoveries in flies, humans, mice, and "Arabidopsis" revealed that animals and other plant species also carry membrane-anchored receptors with striking structural similarities to XA21 and that these receptors also play key roles in the immune response. For their discoveries of the fly and mice receptors, Jules Hoffman and Bruce Beutler received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (jointly with Ralph Steinman), indicating the importance of such research.
This work resulted in part from the identification of a blight-resistant rice strain from Mali, "Oryza longistaminata", in the late 1970s. The strain was studied and bred at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. Ronald's group subsequently mapped, sequenced, and cloned the Xa21 gene from this rice strain. When US patent 5859339 was granted to the University of California for the XA21 gene, Ronald and law professor John Barton established a benefit-sharing model for the source countries of genetically important plant varieties called the Genetic Resources Recognition Fund. Ronald also launched a project with CGIAR to allow noncommercial use of the gene for nonprofit purposes and released the gene to IRRI for the development of rice strains to be grown in developing nations.
Paper retraction.
In 2009 and 2011, Ronald's laboratory reported on the discovery of a bacterial protein that they believed was the activator of Xa21-mediated immunity. These reports were described by "ScienceWatch" as "hot" and "highly cited". In 2013, Ronald retracted both scientific papers, notifying the scientific community that two bacterial strains, Ax21 and RaxSt, had been confused. The error was discovered when new laboratory members Rory Pruitt and Benjamin Schwessinger were unable to replicate previous results. As a result, the laboratory carried out a lengthy and painstaking process, re-confirming the genotypes of all the laboratory strains in their collection. Examination of the bacterial strains and rice seed stocks indicated that one of the bacterial strains involved in key experiments had been mislabeled. Researchers also discovered that results of one of the tests that had been performed were highly variable. In a blog post at "Scientific American", Ronald describes the 18-month process leading to the retraction. The retractions were also reported on by "The Scientist". Retraction watch, a website that shines light on problems with papers and educates and celebrates research ethics and good practices stated, "that this was a case of scientists doing the right thing". As part of a story about the importance of setting the record straight, in 2014, "Nature" magazine also covered the Ronald retraction.
RaxX as a mediator of Xa21.
For two more years Ronald's laboratory repeated critical experiments and carried out new ones. In redoing their work, they introduced new procedures and controls to ensure that they were getting it right. Ronald reports that she was amazed not only by the perseverance and loyalty of her team, but also by the community support that she received during this difficult time. In 2015, Ronald published the discovery of the predicted ligand of XA21, a sulfated peptide called RaxX, correcting their mistake and bringing the research team full circle.
Genetic Resources Recognition Fund.
Ronald has sought ways to recognize source nations and institutions that have contributed to important scientific advances, such as . Working with law professor John Barton, Ronald tried to establish a benefit-sharing model for the source countries of genetically important plant varieties. In 1996, Ronald founded the Genetic Resources Recognition Fund (GRRF) at UC Davis. The intention of the fund was to collect payments from the licensing of academic discoveries that utilized plant materials from developing countries, and to redistribute those monies to source countries through fellowships, land conservation efforts, or other projects of benefit to nation partners.
Sub1: Tolerance to abiotic stress.
In 1996, Ronald began a project with rice breeder David Mackill who had recently demonstrated that tolerance to complete submergence mapped to the Submergence tolerance 1 (Sub1) Quantitative trait locus (QTL). In 1997, the USDA awarded Ronald and Mackill a grant to isolate the Sub1 locus. Ronald's laboratory led the positional cloning of the Sub1 QTL, revealed that it carried three ethylene response transcription factors (ERF) and demonstrated that one of the ERFs, which she designated Sub1A, was upregulated rapidly in response to submergence and conferred robust tolerance to submergence in transgenic plants . This work revealed an important mechanism with which plants control tolerance to abiotic stress and set the stage for in-depth molecular-genetic analyses of Sub1A-mediated processes with her collaborator Julia Bailey-Serres, who joined the project in 2003. Mackill's team at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) generated and released several Sub1A varieties (developed through marker-assisted breeding) in seven countries including India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, where submergence destroys four million tons of rice each year, enough to feed 30 million people. With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Sub1 rice has reached over six million farmers as of 2017.
Public engagement.
Ronald co-authored the book "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food" with her husband, Raoul Adamchak. "Tomorrow's Table" was selected as one of the best books of 2008 by "Seed Magazine" and the "Library Journal". Bill Gates calls the book "a fantastic piece of work" and "important for anyone that wants to learn about the science of seeds and challenges faced by farmers." This book describes new ideas about genetically engineered crops, helpful tips about crop production in general, and evidence for why genetically engineered crops are hard to consistently produce. Ronald talks about the importance of organic farming while also explaining that genetically engineered crops are also a good option if organic farming fails.
In addition to her scholarly publications, Ronald has written for "The New York Times", "The Boston Globe", "Forbes Magazine", "Scientific American", "The Harvard International Review", "The Economist", the "Boston review" and the "MIT Technology Review".
The song "Sierra Bound", from Rita Hosking's 2013 CD "Little Boat", is dedicated to Pamela Ronald.
Awards and honors.
Ronald was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2006.
She and her colleagues have received a number of awards for their work on submergence tolerant rice. They were recipients of the USDA National Research Initiative Discovery Award in 2008, and finalists for the World Technology Award for Environment in 2009. In 2009, Ronald was nominated for the Biotech Humanitarian Award. In 2012, Ronald, Mackill, and postdoctoral fellow Xu received the Tech Award 2012.


Domingo Alzugaray

Domingo Cecílio Alzugaray (22 November 1932 – 24 July 2017) was an Argentine-born Brazilian actor and journalist who was the founding editor of ISTOÉ, established in 1976.


Ivor Dent

Ivor Graham Dent, (February 7, 1924 – March 29, 2009) was a politician from Alberta, Canada, a mayor of Edmonton, and a former candidate for the House of Commons of Canada and the Legislative Assembly of Alberta.
Early life.
Ivor Dent was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan on February 7, 1924. During World War II, he attempted to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, but was rejected. He subsequently took work as an office boy for Canadian Pacific until he was accepted to the air force a year later; he served as a bombardier for three years.
After the war, he married his wife, Aileen, in 1948 while he was studying science at the University of Saskatchewan; the couple would have four children. Ivor Dent graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in science in 1949.
Three years later, he and his wife moved to Edmonton and Dent enrolled at the University of Alberta, from which he earned a Bachelor of Education. After earning his second degree, he moved to Enchant, Alberta, where he taught for a year before returning to Edmonton to teach. He earned his third university degree, a Master of Administration, from the University of Alberta in 1956 and continued to teach.
Early political career.
Dent's first bid for office took place during the 1955 Alberta election, when he ran in Edmonton for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. He placed twenty-fifth of thirty candidates in the first ballot (the multi-seat constituency used a single transferable vote electoral system at the time) and was eliminated from contention on subsequent ballots.
Dent turned his attention to municipal politics; In the 1957 municipal election, he ran for alderman on Edmonton City Council. He finished seventh out of nineteen, falling short of the top five placing needed to be elected. Efforts during the 1959 and 1960 elections (in which he placed tenth of seventeen and eighth of fifteen, respectively) were similarly unsuccessful, and Dent took a two-year hiatus from politics, to earn his doctorate in educational administration from the University of Oregon.
Upon his return to Edmonton, he took up a position as a school vice principal. He ran for the leadership of the newly formed Alberta New Democratic Party in January 1962, losing to Neil Reimer, but was elected party president.
Dent ran in the 1963 federal election in Edmonton East for the New Democratic Party. He finished fourth of five candidates, defeating only Communist W.A. Tuomi, as incumbent Progressive Conservative William Skoreyko was handily re-elected.
Dent was finally elected to office in the 1963 municipal election, when he was elected to a one-year aldermanic term (he placed fourth of sixteen). He was re-elected to a two-year term in the 1964 municipal election, in which he placed fifth of forty-six candidates, and in the 1966 election, in which he placed second out of forty-four candidates.
Mayor.
After five years as an alderman, Dent ran for mayor in the 1968 election, in which he defeated his fellow aldermen Reginald Easton and John Leslie Bodie in a close three-way race (he was the first mayor elected to a three-year, rather than a two-year, term). He was re-elected in 1971, when he survived a challenge from alderman Julian Kinisky, but his second term didn't go as smoothly as the first. A damaging transit strike cost Dent support from all sides.
In the 1974 election, Dent faced credible challenges from former mayor William Hawrelak (who had returned to municipal politics after vowing never to do so) and alderman Cec Purves. He wound up losing to both of them, as Hawrelak was elected and Dent relegated to third place in a seven candidate field.
Although he was out of office by the time they occurred, Dent is credited by many with bringing the 1978 Commonwealth Games to Edmonton.
Further elections, awards, and retirement.
After his defeat, Dent went to Oxford University to study public administration. Upon his return to Canada, he became the principal of Rundle Elementary School, where he stayed until his retirement in 1980. In 1995 he joined the Board of Directors of SOS Children's Villages Canada until 2001.
He attempted to reclaim his old office in the 1977 election, but finished in fourth place after the victor Purves, alderman Laurence Decore (himself a future mayor), and Terry Cavanagh (the alderman Council had selected to complete the deceased Hawrelak's term). He would not return to municipal politics, but ran in a 1986 federal by-election in Pembina for the New Democratic Party. Although he entered the race as the favourite, he was narrowly defeated by Progressive Conservative Walter van de Walle.
He was admitted as a Member to the Order of Canada in 1984, and was awarded the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005. He was defeated in a 1990 bid for the chairmanship of the Commonwealth Games Federation.
Death.
On March 29, 2009 Ivor Dent died from Alzheimer's disease.


Edith Skinner

Edith Skinner (22 September 1902 – 25 July 1981) was a vocal coach and a consultant to actors. Her book, "Speak With Distinction", has been reprinted several times.
Life.
Skinner was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, on 22 September 1902, to Herbert Havelock Warman and his wife Agnes Lynn, "née" Orr. She attended the Leland Powers School for the Spoken Word in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and graduated in 1923. There she met Margaret Prendergast McLean, and through her, William Tilly, whose assistant she became in 1926. She studied at Columbia University, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in 1930 and a master's in 1931.
From 1937 to 1974, Skinner was on the faculty of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. She also taught at the Juilliard Theater Center in New York, the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and at the University of Wisconsin.
She died in Milwaukee on 25 July 1981.
Writings.
Skinner wrote "Speak with Distinction: Exercises", which was published in 1942 and has been reprinted several times. Collections of her papers are held by the New York Public Library in New York City, and by the University of Pittsburgh.


Emmy Heim

Emmy Heim (Emilie Heim: 10 September 1885 – 13 October 1954) was an Austrian soprano singer and voice teacher. In her later career she lived in England and Canada.
Life.
Early life and career.
Heim was born in Vienna in 1885. She studied singing there with her mother and with Frances Mütter. She made her debut in 1911 in the , and became well known as a concert singer in Austria, appearing many times at the Wiener Konzerthaus, and making tours in Germany, France and Switzerland.
She performed songs by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, and also sang contemporary works by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and others. In 1915 she gave the first performance of Schoenberg's songs "Waldsonne" (Op. 2 No. 4) and "Verlassen" (Op. 6 No. 4). She sang in large orchestral works, and took part in Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1919.
In 1915 Heim married the writer ; through him she met well known writers including Rainer Maria Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In 1916 Oskar Kokoschka made a lithograph of her.
In 1921 she married the architect . They separated after a few years of marriage. They had a son, Michael; two further children died in childhood.
In England and Canada.
Heim made her debut in England in 1929, and moved to London in the early 1930s. She oocasionally returned to Vienna to give recitals; she also maintained a singing studio in Salzburg where she taught during summers.
In 1934, visiting her brother in Canada, she met Sir Ernest MacMillan, which led to an informal concert, and a subsequent concert debut at Hart House Theatre in Toronto later that year. She then spent a few months each year in Canada until 1939, teaching and giving recitals.
During the Second World War she lived in England. She sang at Red Cross hospitals and in military camps; she gave concert recitals in London and was a guest lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. After the war she moved to Canada, and taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Her pupils included Frances James, Jan Simons and Lois Marshall. Heim died in Toronto in 1954.