text:
Corsair Vengeance K70 Keyboard Review
by E. Fylladitakis on June 9, 2014 11:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Keyboard
- Corsair
- Cherry MX
- mechanical
Mechanical keyboards are far from a new technology; they are decades old and some of the first mass produced personal computers came with mechanical keyboards back in the 1980's. However, due to their high production cost, they were soon replaced by keyboards other types of electronic switches that were considerably less expensive. Over the years however, the production cost of the mechanical key switches also came down, making them more and more affordable by the day. Today, PC users can find a good selection of mechanical keyboards from numerous manufacturers available at (generally) reasonable prices.
Today we will be having a look at the Vengeance K70 from Corsair, a full size keyboard designed for gaming. It is an upgrade of the popular Vengeance K60 and it is remains strikingly similar visually; however, aside from the various upgrades that we will discuss in this review, Corsair also offers the K70 in various color and switch combinations. In this review we will be looking at the black US layout version of the Vengeance K70, which features red backlighting and comes in three switch types (red, blue or brown), as well as in various layouts. Corsair recently launched the RGB LED backlit model at Computex, but that was not available when we started this review.
The Corsair Vengeance K70 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
The first upgrade over the Vengeance K60 can be found in the bundled items. With the Vengeance K70, Corsair supplies a set of ten textured red keys (1-6, W, A, S, D—the standard gaming keys for FPS games) and a full-size wrist rest, where the older K60 only came with a small 5" wide wrist rest for your left hand while gaming.
Corsair supplied us with the three black US layout versions they produce, each featuring a different Cherry MX switch. The three keyboards are aesthetically the same and no one will be able to tell the difference between them before a keycap is removed. Once a keycap is removed or an experienced user presses a key, the difference between the Blue, Brown and Red switches become apparent. Corsair, at least for the time being, does not offer the Vengeance K70 with Cherry MX Black, Green or other switches.
Visually, the Vengeance K70 stands out from the crowd by following the same design that made the Vengeance K60/K90 popular. The keyboard is built on a brushed aluminum chassis, with the keys levitating over it rather than being embedded into it. Aesthetics are a subjective matter and some people like this design while others hate it. From a practical point of view however, this design is extremely helpful to those that like to keep their keyboards clean, as a simple blow can remove all debris from the surface of the keyboard. A primary aesthetic flaw however is the black company logo at the middle top part of the chassis. Although the logo looks very good on a silver keyboard, I feel it was a poor choice to keep the same logo on the black version of the Vengeance K70. A less important flaw are the screws that keep the motherboard together; most of them are behind keys and invisible, but a few are at places that are somewhat noticeable, such as beneath the Esc key.
Corsair installed multimedia control buttons and a volume knob at the upper right side of the keyboard. There are four keys for playback control (Play/Pause, Stop, Forward and Back) and a volume mute key next to the metallic volume knob. Three smaller keys can be found towards the top center of the Vengeance K70; one that controls the lighting, one that switches the backlight into the "gaming" mode, and one that renders the Windows keys inactive. Between these and the multimedia keys, there are three tiny white LED lights serving as the three standard key lock indicators (Caps Lock, Num Lock, Scroll Lock).
Although the installation of the textured red keys gives the Vengeance K70 a nice, aggressive gaming appearance, we found that these keys are more than just useless to any user that will not play a game using these specific keys. The keys are contoured, which gives them a nice feeling while gaming, but they feel terrible when doing anything else, especially typing. Therefore, unless you are planning to use the keyboard exclusively for playing games that are making use of these exact keys, replacing them each time you want to play a game feels like too much of a hassle.
Corsair installed a single USB 2.0 port at the top back side of the Vengeance K70. Right next to the USB port there is a switch that allows the user to change the polling rate. This function is not needed for any modern system but it increases the keyboard's compatibility with older motherboards and cheap KVM switches, which cannot operate properly when the polling rate is too high. The default polling rate of the Vengeance K70 is 1 ms (or 1 kHz). Beneath the keyboard are four feet for height adjustment, two at the rear and two at the front of the keyboard. Although stands at the rear of the keyboard are quite common, very few designs have the ability to adjust the tilt at the front.
61 Comments
View All Comments
EzioAs - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
I have the silver + MX Blue and I love it. Much more when you looked at it in person compared to pictures and dedicated media keys are just what keyboards at this price point should have (instead of dopey Fn). The only thing I have to complain is the LEDs, they're dying very quickly.
The first dead LED was about 2 weeks after I bought it. Fast forward 7 months later (today), 34 of the LEDs are dead (I counted it). Not a deal breaker for me (since LEDs are just extra), but a lot of people complain about this in their forums.
So, I'd like to advise those who are interested in buying these models, if backlighting is important to you, be prepared to lose some (it may happen to you too). Early adopters of the upcoming MX RGB should probably consider this as well. -
CuriousMike - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
Dead LEDs. I bought this keyboard for my wife in February 2014, and in light use, we have 6 dead LEDs.
Don't throw away your receipt, you'll need it for RMA. -
olderkid - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
I've had mine for a little over 9 months - keyboard stays lit 24x7 and I haven't lost a single LED yet.
Great keyboard for doing a lot of typing. -
xdeadzx - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link
Had my first for ~16 months, no dead LEDs (fried during a storm, keys stopped pressing)
My second is on ~10 months, no dead LEDs. I did however have to RMA the second once to get all my LEDs, the RMA'd was missing an LED while one flickered at low light.
I think it's more of getting them dead than it is them going dead later. *k90 for reference. -
FaaR - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link
My K70 had about two dead LEDs - which I thought was because I once thumped it pretty hard in a fit of TF2-induced rage but now realize might have been part of a larger pattern - until it died completely, spontaneously all by itself.
Woke up one morning months after first discovering the dead LEDs, PC had bluescreened overnight, having been running Folding@Home constantly. Oh well, I thought. Such is the overclocker's lot. However, keyboard would not respond anymore, no matter what. I realize this (keyboard dying) is probably what crashed the computer.
I never bothered to try and return the keyboard, seeing as I thumped it (there's no visible damage at all - it's surprisingly solid despite the seemingly delicate-looking mechanical switches), but now I'm thinking maybe I should. *shrug* I have a K60 as reserve, which works okay now after the firmware flash. It every once in a blue moon burps out double keystrokes, but at least no longer produces those stuck buttons that were so annoying/dangerous, especially when typing and hitting backspace... -
kmi187 - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link
Same here, for a period of about 7 months now, they are lit 24/7, not a single dead LED. It even fell off my desk once while the girlfriend was cleaning and it survived. The wooden floor has a little pit and scratch from the corner of the keyboard hitting it though. -
Antronman - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
RGB shouldn't have that problem. -
Joeypogs - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
I too had the same problem with the LED's on my 1st Corsair K70-- Cherry mxbrown with blue LED's. It was after a month that LED's started dying first it was 3 then the next day 7 and so on.. So i RMA'd it (which took more than a month to be replaced poor customer support really) and got the mxblue with red LED's variant and so far it's been holding out without a single dead LED.
I believe there have been quality control problems with the blue LED variants because as what i have read in corsair forums most of the owners got dead LED's and the red LED owners are not complaining. and when i RMA'd my blue led the support people told me that blue LED's are no longer available which lead me to believe that Corsair is issuing a silent recall for the blue LED's just my theory i suppose. -
Evilkoala13 - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
I think you're right about the blue LEDs having quality issues. I got the mx brown and blue LEDs version and some of the LEDs failed after 3 weeks. I RMAed it and got the replacement quickly. Then, the replacement started losing LEDs and I RMAed it again, but this time the mx brown with blue LEDs was no longer in stock. I kept checking every few weeks but it never came in. Last month I was informed that Corsair has discontinued the blue LEDs model and now is only shipping the reds. Corsair has been great with customer service though and is replacing my broken keyboard with the MX Brown and red LED model. -
dyc4ha - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
yup i love the keyboard, but 3 dead LEDs in within the first 2 months.. =/


text:
Monday-Friday 8am-5pm EST
Available via chat
Welcome to the A Taste Of Africa blog! This blog is another way for us to keep our customers up to date on the latest store information. This blog will feature information on our store events, specials and product related news.
Who we are :
A Taste Of Africa specializes in African Art Sculpture from different parts of Africa. We have a large selection of artwork and gift items including stone and wooden sculptures, musical instruments, paintings, jewelry, and personal care products such as Shea Butter, Black Soaps and Perfume Body Oils etc.
Our artwork includes the world famous Shona Stone Sculptures from Zimbabwe, Soapstone and Wooden Sculptures from countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, and many more. Each item is handcrafted and unique. Our sculptures and other products make wonderful, one of a kind special gifts for any occasion. We carry gift items for any occasion and have prices suited to any budget.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
SeaVGABIOS is a sub-project of the SeaBIOS project - it is an open source implementation of a 16bit X86 VGA BIOS. SeaVGABIOS is the default VGA BIOS on QEMU. SeaVGABIOS can also run natively on some X86 VGA hardware with coreboot.
Building SeaVGABIOS
To build SeaVGABIOS, obtain the code, run make menuconfig
and select the type of VGA BIOS to build in the "VGA ROM" menu. Once selected, run make
and the final VGA BIOS binary will be located in "out/vgabios.bin".
The choice of available VGA BIOSes within "make menuconfig" is dependent on whether CONFIG_QEMU, CONFIG_COREBOOT, or CONFIG_CSM is selected. Also, the debug options under the "Debugging" menu apply to SeaVGABIOS. All other options found in "make menuconfig" apply only to SeaBIOS and will not impact the SeaVGABIOS build.
If SeaVGABIOS is needed for multiple different devices (eg, QEMU's cirrus emulation and QEMU's "dispi" emulation), then one must compile SeaVGABIOS multiple times with the appropriate config for each build.
SeaVGABIOS code
The source code for SeaVGABIOS is located in the SeaBIOS git repository. The main VGA BIOS code is located in the "vgasrc/" directory. The VGA BIOS code is always compiled in 16bit mode.
The SeaVGABIOS builds to a separate binary from the main SeaBIOS binary, and much of the VGA BIOS code is separate from the main BIOS code. However, much of the SeaBIOS developer documentation applies to SeaVGABIOS. To contribute, please join the SeaBIOS mailing list.


text:
White potatoes not linked to obesity, diabetes
07 May 2012: A new study has demonstrated that habitual consumption of white potatoes (baked, boiled and mashed) is not associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes or levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of systemic inflammation once potential confounding factors are controlled for (e.g., age, gender, and education).
Previous studies examining the association between potato consumption and disease states have failed to consider demographic factors that could potentially confound the relationships such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, and education.
"One of the purposes of this study was that we hypothesized demographic factors - particularly socio-economic status - might be associated with both potato consumption and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Therefore we controlled for these factors," said lead researcher Adam Drewnowski, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Nutritional Sciences Program at the University of Washington.
Dr. Drewnowski and colleagues examined dietary intake and health data in a representative sample of 5,800 adults using two cycles (2003-2004 and 2005-2006) of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
After controlling for demographic variables, the researchers found no association between the frequency of potato consumption and obesity, diabetes or C-reactive protein.
Dr. Drewnowski and colleagues further analysed the NHANES survey data to look at different potato preparations in Americans' diet including French fries, home fries, tater tots, chips, baked, mashed, boiled and salad.
They found that although Americans may eat fried potatoes at restaurants, relatively few Americans were preparing fried potatoes at home: only 26 percent of fried potato servings were sourced from the grocery store.
The results were presented at The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Conference in San Diego.


text:
- Avondale Elementary School
- Homepage
Columbus City Schools Staff Wellness Initiative Awarded Healthy Worksite Platinum Honors
The Healthy Business Council of Ohio Honors Local Employers Statewide
November 28, 2022 -- Columbus City Schools' Staff Wellness Initiative has received the 2022 Healthy Worksite Platinum Level Award distinction from the Healthy Business Council of Ohio (HBCO) in recognition of its healthy worksite practices. The District is among 96 Ohio employers recognized by the HBCO for their healthy worksite initiatives within the state-wide organization's tiered designation program, the Healthy Worksite Award.
The Healthy Worksite Award recognizes Ohio employers who demonstrate a commitment to employee wellness through comprehensive worksite health promotion and wellness programs. Applicants are scored on how their wellness programs facilitate and encourage employee health, enhance productivity, and ensure a healthy work environment.
All applications were reviewed and evaluated using objective criteria. As a result, four levels of high achievement were awarded in 2022 —Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum, in addition to an entry-level tier of "recognition." Additionally, a Pandemic Response Section was included in this year's extensive award application to celebrate the accomplishments of Ohio worksites and their efforts to pivot and adapt during the pandemic.
"We are excited and honored to earn the 2022 Healthy Worksite Platinum Level distinction from the Healthy Business Council of Ohio, said Wellness Initiative Coordinator Jacqueline Broderick Patton, MA, BSN, RN. "It is a privilege to work to support the health and well-being of all CCS staff. We look forward to continuing to grow our staff wellness initiative to meet the future needs of our great employees!"
The Healthy Business Council of Ohio added the Platinum Award Level in 2020, which Columbus City Schools' Wellness Team earned for 2020, 2021, and again this year. In previous years, CCS earned a Silver Award in 2016 and 2017 and a Gold in 2018 and 2019.
The online award application is available to all Ohio-based worksites from mid-August through late October each year. While the 2022 application deadline has passed, the HBCO would like to encourage all worksites, large and small, public and private, for-profit and nonprofit, to consider applying for the Healthy Worksite Award in 2023.
"Our Media/Award committee will be making some exciting changes to the 2023 award application," explained Award Committee member Lindsay Madaras. "As the landscape of worksite well-being continues to evolve, we want to ensure that the application reflects those changes. Moving forward, the award will have a stronger emphasis on how organizations support the holistic well-being of their employees with a greater focus on topics like mental health, financial wellness, and more. In addition, the application will better align with organizations that have shifted to a remote and/or hybrid work environment."
Award winners will be recognized during an awards ceremony at a later date.
For a complete list of 2022 award winners, please visit HBCO's Healthy Worksite Award website.


text:
Their drive to change the way health care is administered and extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans took on a growing sense of inevitability, picking up endorsements from a longtime liberal holdout and from a retired Roman Catholic bishop and nuns who broke with church leaders over the bill's abortion provisions.
At the same time, last-minute snags related to costs delayed formal release of the legislation and an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office at least until Thursday. Democratic lawmakers had hoped to see those details last week.
Since Democrats are promising 72 hours for lawmakers and the public to review the legislation once it's released, that would push a House vote on the bill until Sunday at the earliest - the same day Obama plans to leave for an overseas trip. Obama already has delayed the trip once so he can be present for the vote and help with the 11th-hour arm-twisting that inevitably will precede it.
"You've got to realize how complicated this is and how focused we are on getting it right," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Wednesday near the end of a long day of meetings on the legislation. "We're waiting to get a real confidence level."
Obama expressed optimism in an interview with Fox News Channel. "I'm confident it will pass," he said. "And the reason I'm confident that it's going to pass is because it's the right thing to do."
Democrats are seeking to make sure the legislation would reduce federal deficits annually over the next decade and are revisiting details of a planned tax on high-cost insurance plans that's been a sticking point for organized labor. Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, met with Obama at the White House on Wednesday, and officials said the labor leader raised concerns. Obama has proposed significantly softening the tax in keeping with an earlier deal with organized labor, and labor leaders want to preserve that accord, at a minimum.
Trumka was to brief members of the AFL-CIO's executive council on Thursday, and the federation was expected to announce whether it would support the legislation.
The long-anticipated measure is actually the second of two bills that Obama hopes lawmakers will send him in coming days, more than a year after he urged Congress to remake the U.S. health care system. The first cleared the Senate late last year but went no further because House Democrats demanded significant changes - the very types of revisions now being packaged into the second bill.
Together, the measures are designed to extend coverage to more than 30 million who now lack it and prohibit insurance industry practices such as denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions. Obama also has asked lawmakers to slow the growth of medical spending generally, a far more difficult goal to achieve. The total cost is around $1 trillion over 10 years.
After heavy lobbying from Obama, liberal Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, announced his support Wednesday, becoming the first Democrat to declare he would vote in favor of the legislation after opposing an earlier version. Shortly after Kucinich's announcement, a letter was released from 60 leaders of religious orders urging lawmakers to vote for the legislation.
The endorsement reflected a division within the Catholic Church. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the Senate-passed legislation, contending it would permit the use of federal funds for elective abortions.
Late Wednesday, however, retired Bishop John E. McCarthy of Austin, Texas, told The Associated Press he was urging approval of the legislation.
"The bill guards against the use of federal money for abortion," McCarthy said in an interview. "This is an extraordinarily important bill, providing health care for 30 to 40 million people who don't have it. It's not perfect; we can come back later and improve it. But let's not kill it at this crucial moment." McCarthy, 80, served as bishop of the Austin diocese from 1986-2001.
Reflecting growing opposition among states to the health care bill, Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, a Republican, signed a measure Wednesday requiring the state attorney general to sue the federal government if residents are forced to buy health insurance. Similar legislation is pending in 37 other states.


text:
Creating a Terrain
You should upgrade to
The Landscape Tool allows creating a terrain based on ordinary raster images (with no geodata). Follow the steps described in the chapters below to generate the terrain.
See Also
- Creating a Geo-Referenced Terrain article if you need to:
- Create a terrain based on the real geodata sources.
- Create a terrain based on both the ordinary images and geodata sources.
1. Specifying Data Sources#
The data sources should be specified before proceeding.
They are divided into five types (layers), however, only the following support loading the raster images with no geodata:
- Height (Elevation) (optional) - this type of data is used to generate terrain geometry. Here the height maps of the R8, R16 or R32f format should be loaded.The indexed black-and-white data sources are interpreted as RGB images, so they cannot be used for the elevation data sources.
- Albedo (Imagery) - this type of data is used to generate textures for the terrain surface. Here the albedo textures of the RGB8/16/32f and RGBA8/16/32f formats should be loaded. Alpha-channel in the second case is used to mark "no data" areas.
- Masks (Landcover) (optional) - this type of data is used to generate natural features of the landscape (details, grass, trees, etc.). Here the detail masks the R8/16/32f or RGB8/16/32f formats should be loaded.
To add a new source, click the Add Source button.
In the opened window, specify the following fields:
Layer | The albedo, height, masks or procedural layer of the data source. | ||||
Name | The name of the layer that will be displayed in the Sources panel. | ||||
Path | The path to the data source file(s). The data source can be represented as a single raster image or as a source tileset (a set of raster images). In the second case, the first file of the source tileset should be specified: the other files will be detected in the same folder automatically according to the Naming Type and Expression values. The following formats are supported: .png, .tif, .jpg, .psd, .dds, .tga. To specify the path, click the ... button.
The source tileset isn't related to the tileset used for the generated terrain. Do not store the data source files in the data folder of the project as it will cause the following issues:
Naming Type | The source tileset layout type. The following values are available:
Expression | A regular expression string used to find files that should be loaded for the source tileset and to determine its indices (or rows and columns, depending on the Naming Type):
Preview | Shows the index (or the row and column) of the first file and the total number of the files added to the source tileset. |
The files of the source tileset (except the first one specified in the Path field) will be automatically detected and loaded according to the values described above.
For example, to load the source tileset that contains 4 tiles, you can name them as follows: Tile_0-0.png, Tile_1-0.png, Tile_0-1.png, Tile_1-1.png. And then perform the following:
- Specify the Tile_0-0.png as the first file of the source tileset.
- Choose the row column layout.
- Specify the _%X-%Y expression.
When you add the imagery, elevation, landcover or procedural data sources to the Landscape tool, their areas will be highlighted on the Preview panel with corresponding colors: blue for elevation, green for imagery, red for landcover and magenta for procedural. Area size of procedural sources is adjustable.
The minus sign button deletes selected data source.
2. Specifying Data Source Parameters#
When you select the loaded data source, you can see its parameters in the Parameters panel.
Elevation Parameters#
Imagery Parameters#
The parameters are the same as for the elevation source (except Tileset Elevation Settings). You can also specify the following parameter:
No data color | The color to be used for areas with no data available. |
Landcover Parameters#
Landcover data source parameters are described here. This type of data source is optional and should be added when generation of terrain details or vegetation is needed.
Procedural Parameters#
Procedural data source parameters are described here. This type of data source is optional and should be added when it is necessary to refine data from elevation, landcover or other procedural data sources.
3. Setting Up Natural Layer#
At this step you can check out the parameters of Terrain LODs to be generated for all data layers (elevation, imagery, normal, and detail masks) and determine the natural features of the landscape.
LOD Settings#
To access LOD settings of the particular data layer of your terrain, select the data source group in the list: all available settings will be displayed on the Parameters panel.
The Landscape Tool sets the number of LODs, their visibility distances and densities automatically. You can change these settings when necessary. To modify LOD settings for the desired data layer you should set Manual mode by checking the corresponding option located just under the list of LODs (see the picture below).
In the manual mode you can modify density and visibility distance values by simply double-clicking on the corresponding cell and entering the desired value. Use + (plus) button to add a LOD, or - (minus) to remove one.
Natural Features#
You can also determine, which natural features of the landscape are to be generated: select the Masks (Landcover) data source type and get access to the following settings on the Parameters panel:
Terrain detail masks - the tags specified for landcover data sources that determine the areas for terrain details to be placed.
Workflow: Generating Detail Masks.
Vegetation (grass, trees, etc.) - Grass, Mesh Clutter, and World Clutter objects will be generated and placed in certain areas of the terrain according to specified landcover tags.
Workflow: Generating Vegetation.
4. Specifying Settings#
Landscape tool generates a terrain according to the specified settings. Set the following parameters before starting terrain generation:
Modes and Projections#
To generate the terrain based on the raster images with no geodata, the Flat mode should be set. In this mode, no reprojection is performed for the loaded data sources.
Play Area#
Play Area is a rectangular area of a landscape to be generated.
Play Area represents a gray outlined rectangular area in the Preview panel.
Click on the Play Area settings. In the Parameters panel the available parameters for Play Area will appear:
You can specify the following parameters:
Center | The central point coordinates of the Play Area. |
Size (km) | The size of the Play Area: width x height. The size should coincide the Largest size values set for the data sources. If the Play Area too large, the generated terrain may be outlined with the grey area. |
Max visibility distance (km) | The maximum visibility distance of the Play Area in kilometres. |
Processing Priority#
Here you can specify the order in which data sources will be processed. By default, data sources are processed in the order from the most detailed to the less detailed ones (e.g. a data source having the density of 3 meters/pixel will be processed before a data source having the density of 30 meters/pixel). But in some cases it might be necessary to change the order of processing for certain types of data sources. To do so, pefrorm the following actions:
- On the Parameters panel select a tab, corresponding to a group of data sources, for which the processing order is to be changed.
- For each item in the list of data sources displayed click a cell in the Order column and set the desired processing priority value.A data source having the priority value of 2 will be processed before the one that has the priority value of 3.
- After setting new processing priorities for data sources click Apply.
Let us consider an example of a case when you need to change default priority. Suppose You have the following data sources:
- A coarse 100 m/px elevation data source Elev1.
- A procedural data source Proc1 with the density of 10 m/px which refines the data from Elev1.
- A procedural data source Proc2 with the same density of 10 m/px which operates with the data refined by Proc1.
So, the expected data flow diagram would be: Elev1 -> Proc1 -> Proc2.
But generally, as both procedural data sources have the same density, default prioritization may result in the following data flow diagram: Elev1 -> Proc2 -> Proc1.
Which definitely is not the same. This situation can be avoided by setting the priority of the Proc1 source equal to 2 (as the default priority value for Houdini assets is 1).
Distributed Computing#
Here you can set up distributed computing to be used for terrain generation. For details, check the Distributed Computing article.
Output File Locations#
Here you can specify the output path for your terrain data and cache parameters. When the Landscape tool faces a large amount of source data, it automatically cuts the data to small tiles and uses them as cache. The cache is used to speed up subsequent terrain re-generation.
- Landscape tool doesn't clear the cache automatically, you should do it manually if necessary.
- When clearing the cache remember, that next terrain re-generation will require more time.
Output path | Output path for generated terrain files. By default, a new folder in your project's data folder will be created. |
Cache path | Path to cache files. |
Generating a Terrain#
The Landscape Tool stores the paths to all data sources as well as all generation parameters in an asset. So, after setting up all these parameters, you should save them by choosing File -> Save Asset and specifying the name and path for your asset.
Now you can generate the terrain by clicking the Generate button. In the Steps window, that appears, you can select what is to be generated.
Generate all | The whole terrain with detail masks, landcover objects and vector objects (spline, vector, and point) will be generated. This option is selected by default. |
Terrain | Only terrain will be generated. Here you can select parts of terrain data used for generation (Elevation, Imagery, Details) |
Imagery previews | The flag indicating if imagery previews are to be generated and placed at the corresponding location on the area displayed on the Preview panel. |
Also you can specify or change the output path for your terrain data and cache parameters.
If you have any unsaved changes, then after clicking OK in the Generation Steps window, you will see the window for saving the asset. Specify the name and the path for your asset and click Save.
The generation status window will appear.
After successful generation process, the Landscape tool may offer your world settings optimizations. We recommend you to apply them, however, you can ignore.
If you open the World Hierarchy window, you can see that the Landscape tool created the following instances:
- TerrainGlobal Landscape object.
- Beacons - NodeDummy objects generated for all elevation sources in the Play Area. These beacons can be used to quickly move to certain terrain location.
- The Landscape Camera camera object which is placed in the center point of the terrain with specified all the necessary parameters (far and near clipping planes).


text:
Polaris Ranger Lift Kit, Full Size, Mid Size, 800, 500, 400, EV, Ranger 6X6, by MARSHALL MOTOART Models year 2010
2010 Polaris Ranger Lift Kit 2.5"
Polaris Ranger Lift Kit- (Please specify in buyer notes what year & CC machine you have so we can make sure you receive correct parts.) Easy bolt on application. Our Lift Kit is a welded kit. Many of the lifts out there are bolt together. We weld our kit so you get the maximum in strength and Performance. Our lift kit is designed to work well within the factory suspensions articulation. There are some lift kits out there that give too much lift and this can destroy Cv's and make your ranger ride stiff. This is what is sometimes talked about on the forums. This lift works within the angle limits of the stock Cv's and it does not change the ride quality. You do not need wheel spacer or after market wheels with my kit but you can run them if you want to. View MARSHALL MOTOART products on YouTube or website including installation instructions. Please contact us with any questions. 801-791-4616 HAND MADE IN THE USA


text:
NEWS RELEASE: Equality Florida Applauds Sobel & Jenne for Domestic Partnership Bills
Monday, January 11th, 2016
Carlos Guillermo Smith / [email protected]
Equality Florida Applauds Sobel & Jenne for Domestic Partnership Bills
Statewide Domestic Partner Registry offers basic protections for all families even after marriage equality
Tallahassee, FL – Senator Eleanor Sobel (D-Hollywood) and Representative Evan Jenne (D-Hollywood) filed legislation Friday (HB 1275 & SB 1666) that would create a statewide domestic partnership registry offering a defined set of legal rights and protections to unmarried couples who participate. Even as marriage has finally become an option for all couples, there are many practical reasons for why many decide not to marry. Rights and protections offered in the legislation include: advanced health care and end-of-life decisions; facility visitation; emergency notification; joint property, estate and inheritance; funeral and burial; and wrongful death. Similar versions of the legislation have been introduced in previous sessions.
Equality Florida's CEO Nadine Smith offered the following statement:
"Equality Florida applauds Senator Sobel and Rep. Jenne for standing firm in their support of domestic partner registries. Even as marriages are now taking place for same-sex couples, domestic partner benefits continue to ensure that all Florida's families will be treated fairly. By offering a domestic partner registry, our state can demonstrate its respect for the broad diversity of families that exists here. Expanding domestic partnership protections statewide is a matter of fundamental fairness and inclusion."
Senator Eleanor Sobel offered the following statement:
"Domestic partnerships are an important legal tool that provide protections for unmarried couples, both same-sex and opposite-sex. In fact, two-thirds of those who rely on domestic partner benefits are opposite-sex couples. Many of them seniors who do not wish to remarry. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and what is right for some may not be right for others- but all families deserve to be able to care for one another."
Representative Evan Jenne offered the following statement:
"Expanding domestic partnership laws honor the many family structures that exist today and respect the important personal and practical considerations that factor into a couple's decision not to marry. It ensures that families are not cut off from essential benefits like health insurance and vital legal protections like the right to make health care decisions for an incapacitated partner."
Equality Florida Institute is the largest civil rights organization dedicated to securing full equality for Florida's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. www.eqfl.org


text:
In a Nutshell
- In Application Express 4.2.2, if your image prefix application attribute equals the instance-wide image prefix attribute, it will be set to null in your application.
- At runtime, if the image prefix application attribute is null, the APEX engine will use the instance-wide image prefix attribute as your application's image prefix.
- This was done to facilitate ease of movement of applications across varying instances.
Every instance of Oracle Application Express has an instance-wide image prefix. This image prefix is used by Oracle Application Express to specify the directory location of the Application Express images directory. This image prefix ultimately correlates to a virtual directory or equivalent on the Web server, and this virtual directory directly maps to the 'images' directory shipped with an APEX distribution and staged on the Web server. This image prefix is specified at APEX installation time, but it can be adjusted later if necessary. This image prefix is usually always /i/.
For example, if you go to the Login page of apex.oracle.com and look at the source of that page, you'll see numerous references to images and files of the form /i/... The HTML for the logo in the upper left is:
<img alt="Application Express" height="20" src="/i/apex_ui/apexlogo.png" width="280" />
There is a virtual directory on the Web server of apex.oracle.com, which maps /i/ to a virtual directory. This virtual directory maps to a physical directory on the Web server, which contains the entire 'apex/images' directory from the APEX distribution.
The 'apex/images' directory changes from release to release. The 'apex/images' directory from an APEX 4.1 release is only usable with APEX 4.1. The 'apex/images' directory fron an APEX 4.2 release is only usable with APEX 4.2. You can try and use it with APEX 4.1, but you'll definitely see odd results, if anything at all.
The image prefix is also an attribute of the user interface of an application. This image prefix is used during the runtime of the APEX application, and is used to determine the image prefix for that application. 99% of the time, this image prefix application attribute equals the instance-wide image prefix (typically, /i/), but it could be different too. It could even be wrong! If you change your image prefix attribute to '/foobar/' and then run your application, you'll see that all the references to images and static files in the HTML source of your application all reference '/foobar/'. I suspect you'd get a page with broken images and references everywhere, and in the worst case, you may get what appears to be a blank page.
Using the Image Prefix
Now here's where it gets interesting. Even though the documentation recommends an image prefix of /i/, it isn't absolutely mandatory. So let's say that for my APEX 4.1 instance, I use an image prefix of /i_old/, and for my APEX 4.2.2 instance, I use an image prefix of /i_new/. And also let's assume that these instances use totally distinct Web servers. If I export an application from my APEX 4.1 instance and import it into my APEX 4.2.2 instance, I will need to update the image prefix application attribute before I can run it in the APEX 4.2.2 instance. Why is that? Because my application image prefix is /i_old/, and that isn't defined on the Web server for my APEX 4.2.2 instance.
For those who have participated in the Application Express Early Adopter program before, you'll remember that the image prefix was /i_ea/ or something like that. When you imported your existing APEX application into the Early Adopter instance, you had to adjust the image prefix of your application to be equal to the instance-wide image prefix, /i_ea/.
For enterprises which host multiple APEX instances via one Web server, they have an equally difficult problem. They may have image prefixes of /i40/, /i41/, /i42, and wish to freely move and test applications without having to adjust the image prefix attribute every time they import an application. It's cumbersome and unnecessary.
What has changed in APEX 4.2.2 and Later
Upon upgrade to Application Express 4.2.2 or application of the 4.2.2 patch set, the image prefix attribute of applications will be set to null if their value is equal to the instance-wide image prefix. In the simplest example, if the instance-wide image prefix is /i/ and your application's image prefix attribute is /i/, the application attribute will be set to null in 4.2.2.
If you try to edit the image prefix application attribute and set it to the instance-wide image prefix (e.g., /i/), it won't be saved and it will be null. Only if you change it to something other than the instance-wide image prefix will a non-null value be saved.
The utility script to adjust the image prefix instance-wide setting, apex/utilities/reset_image_prefix.sql, now only adjusts the instance setting and nothing more. No image prefix application attributes are touched. It's unnecessary, because a null image prefix application attribute means "use the setting of the APEX instance".
Now, if you use a non-standard image prefix for your APEX instance, you can import your application into any other instance without having to be aware of what the image prefix is on the target instance.
Now with that said.....I wish you a nice Memorial Day.


text:
Product Description
Product description
SANA chicken burgers are made from pure chicken meat and carefully air-dried without the nasty ingredients (no additives such as corn, wheat, soy, colorings, preservatives, meat flour or other fillers).
The chicken burgers are refined with a dash of glycerin (a fat component) from rapeseed oil. With the Sanadog treats, your dog gets healty and delicious snack at the same time.
Carefully selected chicken meat is 100% traceable and locally sourced.
All product statements have not been evaluated by the FDA or by the Ministry of Health.
These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Additional Information
Instructions | Instructions: Store in a cool, dry place, away from direct sunlight. A resealable bag, allowing you to preserve their natural quality. Please always supervise your dog while feeding, and make sure fresh, clean water is available. |
Ingredients | Ingredients:
Selection and Mission Statement
We strive to offer only the best of the best products worldwide. Most online shops always state the same:"We have the best, most natural products!", so what makes us different?
Please check our Beyond Natural Fitopets Selection Standard:
1) our selection of supplements are searched and verified by our Naturopaths, which are the most appassionate professionals in natural and organic ingredients. Naturopaths love herbs and whatever no side effect treatments Mother Nature has to offer. They study ingredients with passion. It's connnected with their life mission, with their soul, therefore it's effortless and not money driven.
2) We only choose brands that have high ethic values, which invest a lot in research and in sourcing the purest ingredients. We also have our ways of "verifying" the company owner or director – if he/she has whatever attitude we do not feel in alignment with our core values, we will not sell his products, even if they are very good. We believe that every aspect of a company is an extension of the people who own it and who manage it, therefore also the products.
3) we avoid as much as possible any synthetic ingredient that can be harmful or toxic to our bodies. We sell products free of GMOs, synthetic substances, gluten, dairy, conservatives, stimulants, additives, synthetics perfumes, and animal testing. 99% of our products are truly natural.
In very few cases we allow, for example, a flowing agent called magnesium stearate which is present in many supplements, and is considered generally safe, when it's not. Magnesium stearate is frequently made with low quality vegetable oils (it's cheaper) which can be loaded with heavy metals. When we do rarely accept such product in our Fitopets Selection, it is because at this moment, we cannot find worldwide a better alternative. Better for us doesn't mean only more natural, but it also has to produce results.
When we sell a product with magnesium stearate, we ask the manufacturer the heavy metal lab analysis of the vegetable oils they use to produce magnesium stearate. If it is ok, we accept the product – this is how far we go to ensure safety to our clients.
4) we obviously cannot check personally the ingredients and the production processes of all facilities worldwide, but instead we do choose brands with GMP (Good Manufacturing Policy) certification or HACCP certification, which guarantees maximum safety and quality. Where GMP certification is not necessary, we request the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheets).
5) we always verify how does the manufacturer extract the ingredient, what is the technological process he uses, because it can downgrade the ingredient or considerably enhance it. The final result is the rate of cellular absorption of the ingredient. Everything depends on whether your cells can access and use the supplements you take, and at what percentage. If your absorption rate is low, you are literally throwing away your money through the window. We passionately focus on offering products with the highest possible absorption rate at a cellular level.
6) we constantly verify the market in search of new products which could be superior than the ones we already sell. When we do, we frequently switch to the new product, letting go of the previous one, even if we were selling it well. That is how badly we want to offer only the best of the best, at the cost of even losing some clients, because not everyone likes changing to a new and better solution, even if vastly superior.
Another reason why we do this is because we want to minimize your "stress of choice". Choosing between five liver cleanse products is more time consuming, than choosing the only one available. When you see that one and only product for a symptom or discomfort, you already know you're choosing the best, and no extra search and evaluation is needed, even though we always encourage it.
7) our Fitopets Selection is not based on trends, but on our experience we build through our free Naturopath Consultings Service. We only sell products we personally use and that we suggest to our clients, who are people. And people are not numbers.


text:
1965 Diver's Watch Reinterpretation. Designed for those who treat life as the ultimate adventure, the Seiko Prospex line meets every challenge with technological excellence and style. Part of a rich legacy of innovation in high-intensity timekeeping, Prospex continues to celebrate a long history of sports watch excellence with recreations and reinterpretations of landmark achievements. This versatile timepiece reimagines Seiko's 1965 first diver's watch, an automatic timepiece with a then exceptional water resistance of 150 meters. Offering an extraordinarily legible dial and durable enough to become standard equipment on the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE), this landmark timepiece propelled Seiko into the forefront of dive watch design. With contemporary styling and upgraded specifications, this new reinterpretation reflects the look of the 1965 original, but with a sleeker and thinner case designed to fit more comfortably on the wrist. The charcoal dial, framed by a black one-way rotating elapsed timing bezel, includes a date calendar and LumiBrite hands and markers. Upgraded from the original, the 24-jewel automatic movement beats at a frequency of 21,600 vibrations per hour, with a power reserve of approximately 70 hours, and can be wound manually or automatically. Crafted of stainless steel with super-hard coating, this superbly functional timepiece features a dual-curved anti-reflective sapphire crystal, screwdown crown and caseback, and tri-fold push button release clasp with secure lock and extender, and follows ISO standards for scuba diving to depths of up to 200 meters. 200m Water Resistant.
THICKNESS: 13mm
DIAMETER: 40.5mm
LENGTH: 47.6mm
Caliber 6R35
21,600 vibrations per hour
24 jewels
Power reserve: approximately 70 hours


text:
Sat, 03 Jun
Paddleboarding and Afternoon Tea at The Kingfisher
Enjoy a Paddleboarding Lesson and River Tour with Afternoon Tea at The Kingfisher, Bedford for just £40.00pp
Time & Location
03 Jun 2023, 14:00 – 15:30
Bedford, The Kingfisher, The Barns Hotel, Cardington Rd, Bedford MK44 3SA, UK
About the event
Come and enjoy the enchanting beauty of The River Great Ouse with a Paddleboarding Lesson and Tour and Afternoon Tea package at The Kingfisher Riverside pub and Rooms
Your 90 minute Paddleboarding session will be instructed and led by an experienced and fully qualified Paddleboard Instructor
Learn effective paddle stroke and SUP saftey on the jetty before you set off with Lesley, your friendly Instructor, for a tour along The River Great Ouse, the jewel in Bedford's crown. Sit on the terrace or in the cosy dining room and enjoy a quintessential Afternoon Tea to complete your riverside experience.
On-site changing facilities are available for this package.
This offer is subject to availability and is valid from 29th April to 30th September 2023. Times specified are for Paddleboarding Lesson and Tour times and duration.
email: firstname.lastname@example.com
If you would like to make a booking outside of the provided date, please enquire for availability.
We look forward to seeing you on the water.


text:
Computers & Writing Systems
You are here: Glossary Glossary Comments or suggestions? Please use the comment mechanism at the end of this page. You can comment on existing definitions, or suggest additions along with a draft definition! Jump to: abjad — a form of writing in which the vowels are omitted or optional, such as Hebrew and Arabic scripts. abstract character — a unit of information used for the organization, control or representation of textual data. Abstract characters may be non-graphic characters used in textual information systems to control the organization of textual data (e.g. U+FFF9 INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION ANCHOR), or to control the presentation of textual data (e.g. U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER). abstract character repertoire — a collection of abstract characters compiled for the purposes of encoding. See also charset. abugida — a form of writing in which the consonants and vowels in a syllable are treated as a cluster or unit; typical of scripts from South Asia. advance height — the amount by which the current display position is adjusted vertically after rendering a given glyph. This number is generally only meaningful for vertical writing systems, and is usually zero within fonts used for horizontal writing systems. advance width — the amount by which the current display position is adjusted horizontally after rendering a given glyph. affrication — the phonological process by which a simple stop, such as [t], is converted to an affricate, such as [tʃ]. For example, in some dialects of British English the word "tuna" is pronounced [tʃu:na], the first consonant having been affricated. allophone — a variant of a phoneme. It is not distinctive, that is, substituting one allophone for another of the same phoneme will not change the meaning of the word, although it will sound unnatural. Broadly speaking, the test to determine whether two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme, or separate phonemes, is to see whether they are in complementary distribution, that is, when two phonological elements are found only in two complementary environments. For example, in English /ph/ only occurs syllable-initially when followed by a stressed vowel, but /p/ occurs in all other environments. This is illustrated by the words pin /phin/ and spin /spin/. Therefore, /ph/ and /p/ are seen to be in complementary distribution, and therefore allophones of the phoneme [p]. This test is not foolproof; some sounds are in complementary distribution but are not considered to be allophones. For example, in English /h/ only occurs syllable-initially and /ŋ/ only occurs syllable-finally. However they are phonetically so different that they are still considered to be separate phonemes. One allophone can be assigned to more than one phoneme, as illustrated in some North American English dialects, where the phonemes /t/ and /d/ can both be changed into the allophone [ɾ]. alphabet — a segmental writing system having symbols for individual sounds, rather than for syllables or morphemes. In a true alphabet, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters, in contrast to an abugida or an abjad. In a perfectly phonemic alphabet, phonemes and letters would be predictable in both directions; that is, the sound of a word could be predicted from its spelling and vice-versa. A phonetic alphabet is also predictable in this way, however it uses separate letters for separate allophones, whereas a phonemic alphabet may describe allophones of the same phoneme using a single letter. anchor point — see attachment point. ASCII — a standard that defines the 7-bit numbers (codepoints) needed for most of the U.S. English writing system. The initials stand for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Also specified as ISO 646-IRV. ascent — the distance between the top of the line of text and the baseline, or the distance from the baseline to the top of the highest glyph in a font. attachment point — a point defined relative to a glyph outline such that if two attachment points on two glyphs are positioned on top of each other, the glyphs are positioned correctly relative to each other. For example, a base character may have an attachment point used to position a diacritic, which would also have an attachment point. Also called anchor point. baseline — the vertical point of origin for all the glyphs rendered on a single line. Roman scripts have a baseline on which the glyphs appear to "sit," with occasional descenders below. Many Indic scripts have a "hanging" baseline, in which the bulk of the letters are placed below the baseline, with occasional ascenders above the line. Some scripts, such as Chinese, use a centered baseline, where the glyphs are all positioned with their centers on the baseline. Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) — the portion of Unicode's codespace in which all of the most commonly used characters are encoded, corresponding to codepoints U+0000 to U+FFFF, abbreviated as BMP. Also known as Plane 0. See also Supplementary Planes. bicameral — describes a script with two sets of symbols that correspond to each phoneme, most often upper- and lower-case. See also unicameral. Examples of bicameral scripts include Roman (or Latin), Greek, and Cyrillic. bidirectionality — the characteristic of some writing systems to contain ranges of text that are written left-to-right as well as ranges that are written right-to-left. Specifically, in Arabic and Hebrew scripts, most text is written right-to-left, but numbers are written left-to-right. This can also be used to refer to text containing runs in multiple writing systems, some RTL and some LTR. BMP — see Basic Multilingual Plane. BOM — see byte order mark. bounding box — the rectangular area containing the entire visual portion of a glyph but excluding the side-bearings and advance width (or height). boustrophedon — a way of writing in which successive lines of text alternate between left-to-right and right-to-left directionality. byte order mark (BOM) — the Unicode character U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE when used as the first character in a UTF-16 or UTF-32 plain text file to indicate the byte serialization order, i.e. whether the least significant byte comes first (little-endian) or the most significant byte comes first (big-endian). Byte order is not an issue for UTF-8, though the byte order mark is sometimes added to the beginning of UTF-8 encoded files as an encoding signature that applications can look for to detect that the file is encoded in UTF-8. See http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html. cascading style sheets (CSS) — one of two stylesheet languages used in Web-based protocols (the other is XSL). CSS is mainly used for rendering HTML, but can also be used for rendering XML. It is much less complex than XSL, i.e., it can only be used when the structure of the source document is already very close to what is desired in the final form. character — (1) a symbol used in writing, distinguished from others by its meaning, not its specific shape; similar to grapheme. It relates to the domain of orthographies and writing. See orthographic character. (2) specific to the implementation of computers and other information systems. See also abstract character and encoded character. character encoding form — a system for representing the codepoints associated with a particular coded character set in terms of code values of a particular datatype or size. For many situations, this is a trivial mapping: codepoints are represented by bytes with the same integer value as the codepoint. Some encoding forms may represent codepoints in terms of 16- or 32-bit values, though, and some 8-bit encoding forms may be able to represent a codespace that has more than 256 codepoints by using multiple-byte sequences. Most encoding forms are designed specifically for use in connection with a particular coded character set; e.g. UTF-8 is used specifically for encoded representation of the Universal Character Set defined by Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. Some encoding forms may be designed for use with multiple repertoires, however. For example, the ISO 2022 encoding form supports an open collection of coded character sets and specifies changes between character sets in a data stream using escape sequences. character encoding scheme — a character encoding form with a specific byte order serialization (relevant mainly for 16- or 32-bit encoding forms). character set encoding — a system for encoded representation of textual data that specifies the following: (1) a coded character set, (2) one or more character encoding forms and (3) one or more character encoding schemes. charset — an identifier used to specify a set of characters. Used particularly in Microsoft Windows and TrueType fonts, and in HTML and other Internet or Web protocols to refer to identifiers for particular subsets of the Universal Character Set. CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) — the significance of this grouping of languages is that all have writing systems that use Han ideographic characters. cmap — character-glyph map: the table within a font containing a mapping of codepoints (characters) to glyph ID numbers. In an Unicode-based font the codepoints are Unicode values; in other fonts they correspond to other encodings. coded character set — an abstract character repertoire together with an assignment of numeric codepoints for each character; a collection of encoded characters. Also called a codepage. codepage — (1) synonym for coded character set. (2) synonym for character set encoding; i.e. In some contexts, codepage is used to refer to a specification of a character repertoire and an encoding form for representing that repertoire. (3) In some systems, a mapping between encoded characters in Unicode and a non-Unicode encoding form; e.g. Microsoft Windows codepage 1252. codepoint — a numeric value used as an encoded representation of some abstract character within a computer or information system. Codepoints are integer values used to represent particular characters within a particular encoding. codespace — the full range of numeric codepoint values allowed in a coded character set. colometry — in writing, the distribution of text into sense lines, so that a new clause starts on new line. complex script — a script characterized by one or more of the following: a very large set of characters, right-to-left or vertical rendering, bidirectionality, contextual glyph selection (shaping), use of ligatures, complex glyph positioning, glyph reordering, and splitting characters into multiple glyphs. conjunct — a ligature, in particular, a ligature representing a consonant cluster in an Indic script. CSS — see cascading style sheets. dead key — a key in a particular keyboard layout that does not generate a character, but rather changes the character generated by a following keystroke. Dead keys are commonly used to enter accented forms of letters in writing systems based on Roman script. deep encoding — see semantic encoding. defective — with regard to writing systems, a writing system which does not represent all the distinctive sounds of the language it represents. descent — the distance between the bottom of the line of text and the baseline, or the distance from the baseline to the bottom of the lowest glyph in a font. determinative — in semantics, a class of words that indicates, specifies or limits a noun, such as the definite or indefinite article, the genitive (possessive) marker, or cardinal numbers. diacritic — a written symbol which is structurally dependent upon another symbol; that is, a symbol that does not occur independently, but always occurs with and is visually positioned in relation to another character, usually above or below. Diacritics are also sometimes referred to as accents. For example, acute, grave, circumflex, etc. digraph — a multigraph composed of two components. diphthong — in phonetics, a complex speech sound occupying one syllable, which begins with one vowel and ends with another. For example [eɪ̯] in British (RP) pronunciation of the word lane. See also monophthong. display encoding — See presentation-form encoding. distinctive — also contrastive. An element which makes a distinction between units. In phonology, a process or a pair of sounds, the alternation of which changes the meaning of a word. See also phoneme, minimal pair. For example, voicing is distinctive in most non-tonal languages, as illustrated by the difference between English fan and van, or German Kern and gern. document — a collection of information. This includes the common sense of the word, i.e. an organisation of primarily textual information that can be produced by a word processing or data processing application. It goes beyond this, however, to include structured information held within an XML file. Each XML file is considered to contain one document, whatever the structure and type of that information. Document Type Definition (DTD) — a markup declaration used by SGML and XML that contains the formal specifications, or grammar, of an SGML or XML document. One use of the DTD is to run a validation process over an XML file, which indicates if it matches the DTD, or if not, provides a listing of each line at which the file fails some part of the required structure. DTD — see Document Type Definition. em square — the square grid which is the basis for the design of all glyphs within a given font; so called because it historically corresponded to the size of the letter M. When rendering, the requested point size specifies the size of the font's em square to which all glyphs are scaled. em units — the coordinates in which points in a glyph are defined. An important number is the number of em units in the em square. encoded character — an abstract character in some repertoire together with a codepoint to which it is assigned within a coded character set. Encoded characters do not necessarily correspond to graphemes. encoding — (1) synonym for a character encoding form. (2) synonym for a character set encoding. This usage is common, especially in cases in which distinctions between a coded character set and a character encoding form is not important (i.e. 8-bit, single-byte implementations). Someone might think of an encoding as simply a mapping between byte sequences and the abstract characters they represent, though this model is not adequate to describe some implementations, particularly CJKV standards, or Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. Extensible Markup Language (XML) — a standard for marking up data so as to clearly indicate its structure, generally in a way that indicates the meaning of different parts of it rather than how they will be displayed. See http://www.w3.org/XML/ for details. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) — a language for expressing stylesheets. It consists of two parts: XSL transformations (XSLT) and an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics. See http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL for full details. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) — a language used to convert one XML document into another. See http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt for full specifications. featural writing system — a writing system in which phonetic features, rather than phones (sounds), are represented. For example, there might be a symbol to represent the feature "bilabial" (a sound produced with both lips), a symbol to represent the feature "voiced", and a symbol to represent the feature "stop". These could be combined to represent the sound [b]. The closest functioning writing system to this is the Korean Hangul, in which many of the strokes making up the symbols represent place or manner of articulation. Some writing systems used for representing signed languages also contain symbols which stand for particular features of signs. In this case, the symbol often visually resembles the feature it represents, such as direction of movement. feature — a way of indicating variant renderings for a particular string using the same font; for example, enabling some ligature replacements or not. font — a file containing a collection of glyphs and related supporting information used to render text. GDL — See Graphite. gemination — in phonetics, consonant lengthening, usually by about a time-and-a-half of the length of a "short" consonant. Geminated fricatives, trills, nasals and approximants are simply prolonged. In geminated stops, the "hold" is prolonged. In some languages, such as Japanese, Hungarian, Arabic, Italian and Finnish, gemination is distinctive, but in most it is not. In languages where it is distinctive, it is usually restricted to certain consonants. English contains very few words in which gemination affects the meaning; among these are unnamed vs. unaimed or, in some dialects sixths/sıks:/ vs. six} /sıks/ (source: John Lawler, University of Michigan). In some languages, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. For example in Swedish and Italian a short vowel must be followed by a long consonant (geminate), whereas a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. glyph — a shape that is the visual representation of a character. It is a graphic object stored within a font. Glyphs are objects that are recognizably related to particular characters and which are dependent on particular design (i.e. g, g and g are all distinct glyphs). Glyphs may or may not correspond to characters in a one-to-one manner. For example, a single character may correspond to multiple glyphs that have complementary distributions based upon context (e.g. final and non-final sigma in Greek), or several characters may correspond to a single glyph known as a ligature (e.g. conjuncts in Devanagari script). (For more information on glyphs and their relationship to characters, see ISO/IEC TR 15285.) glyph ID — the unique number within a font identifying a single glyph. glyph outline — a series of curves describing the shape of a glyph. The renderer will fill in this outline to make a solid glyph appear. grapheme — anything that functions as a distinct unit within an orthography. A grapheme may be a single character, a multigraph, or a diacritic, but in all cases graphemes are defined in relation to the particular orthography. Graphite — a package developed by SIL to provide "smart rendering" for complex writing systems in an extensible way. It is programmable using a language called Graphite Description Language (GDL). Because it is extensible, it can be used to provide rendering for minority languages not supported by Uniscribe. heteronym — homographs which, although spelled the same way, are pronounced differently and have different meanings. For example, in English "wind" (noun, as in weather) and "wind" (verb, to coil something). homograph — one of multiple words having the same spelling but different meanings. They may be pronounced differently (for example in English "tear: rip" and "tear: secreted when crying"), in which case they are also heteronyms, or they may be pronounced the same (for example in American English "tire: cause to be fatigued" and "tire: wheel of a car"), in which case they are also homophones. homophone — one of multiple words having the same pronunciation but different meanings. They may be spelled differently (for example in English "write" and "right"), in which case they are called heterographs, or the same (for example in English "bark: on a tree" and "bark: of a dog"), in which case they are also homographs. ideograph — see logograph IME — see input method editor. input method — any mechanism used to enter textual data, such as keyboards, speech recognition or handwriting recognition. The most common form of input method is the keyboard. The term "input method" is intended to include all forms of keyboard handling, including but not limited to input methods that are available for Chinese and other very-large-character-set languages and that are commonly known as input method editors (IMEs). An IME is taken to be a specific type of the more general class of input methods. input method editor (IME) — a special form of keyboard input method that makes use of additional windows for character editing or selection in order to facilitate keyboard entry of writing systems with very large character sets. internationalization — a process for producing software that can easily be adapted for use in (almost) any cultural environment; i.e. a methodology for producing software that can be script-enabled and is localisable. Sometimes abbreviated as "I18N". kern — to adjust the display position whilst rendering in order to visually improve the spacing between two glyphs. For instance, kerning might be used on the word WAVE to reduce the illusion of white space between the diagonal strokes of the W, A, and V. Keyman — an input method program which changes and rearranges incoming characters to allow easy ways of typing data in writing systems that would otherwise be difficult or inconvenient to type. See https://keyman.com/desktop/. LANGID — in the Microsoft Win32 API, a 16-bit integer used to identify a language or locale. A LANGID is composed of a 10-bit primary language identifier together with a 6-bit sub-language identifier (the latter being used to indicate regional distinctions for locales that use the same language). language ID — a constant value within some system used for metadata identification of the language in which information is expressed. May be numeric or character based, depending on the system. Latin script — see Roman script. left side-bearing — the white space at the left edge of a glyph's visual representation, or more specifically, the distance between the current horizontal display position and the left edge of the glyph's bounding box. A positive left side-bearing indicates white space between the glyph and the previous one; a negative left side-bearing indicates overlap or overhang between them. ligature — a single shape or glyph that represents two or more underlying characters. See also conjunct. locale — a collection of parameters that affect how information is expressed or presented within a particular group of users, generally distinguished from one another on the basis of language or location (usually country). Locale settings affect things such as number formats, calendrical systems and date and time formats, as well as language and writing system. localisability — the extent to which the design and implementation of a software product allows potential for localisation of the software. localisation — the process of adapting software for use by users of different languages or in different geographic regions. For purposes of this document, localisation has to do with the language and script of users, and is distinct from script enabling, which has to do with the script in which language data is written. The localisation process may include such modifications as translating user-interface text, translating help files and documentation, changing icons, modifying the visual design of dialog boxes, etc. Sometimes abbreviated "L10N". logograph — also called a logogram or ideograph. A written symbol representing a whole word. Technically, this is distinct from an ideogram, which represents a concept independently of words, although the two are often used interchangeably. logographic writing system — also known as an ideographic writing system. A writing system in which each symbol represents a complete word or morpheme. The symbols do not indicate the word's pronunciation, only its meaning. Historically, Sumerian cuneform and Egyptian hieroglyphics were logographic, but today Chinese is the only known writing system in the world that remains logographic. See also logosyllabary. logosyllabary — a writing system in which each sign is used primarily to represent words or morphemes, with some subsidiary usage to represent syllables. Most natural logosyllabaries employ the rebus principle to extend the character set so that syllables as well as morphemes can be represented. Logosyllabaries may also include determinatives to mark semantic categories which would otherwise be ambiguous. The extent to which syllabic sounds are represented varies from one writing system to another. In instances where a relatively large number of symbols represent syllabic sounds, a logosyllabary may evolve into an abugida or an abjad as the syllabic use overtakes the logographic use. metathesis — a phonological change in which the order of segments, particularly successive sounds, in a word is reversed. For example, the English word 'ask' was pronounced [æks] between the 5th and 12th centuries, and some dialects have reverted back to this pronunciation in modern times. mnemonic keyboard — a keyboard layout based on the characters appearing on the keytops of the keyboard. See also positional keyboard. monophthong — a vowel sound which does not change in quality as it is articulated. (Contrast with diphthong.) It can be short, as in English bed [bɛd], or long, as in English bead[bi:d]. A single short monophthong is the shortest syllable in any language. The process by which monophthongs change to diphthongs or vice versa is an important factor in language change. Diphthongization in the 15th or 16th century changed the long German monophthong [iː] to [aɪ], as in Eis 'ice', and long [uː] to [aʊ] as in Haus 'house'. A characteristic of Southern American English is the monophthongization of certain dipthongs such as [aɪ] to long [a:] in words such as kite. (source: Wikipedia) mora — a unit of rhythmic measurement based syllable weight, which is distinctive in some languages. Japanese is one of the most well-documented of these languages. Short (or light) syllables are monomoraic, consisting of one mora. Long (or heavy) syllables are bimoraic, consisting of two morae. Some languages contain superheavy syllables, for example Hindi, in which a long vowel can be followed by a geminate consonant. These syllables are said to be trimoraic. The first consonant of a syllable does not represent any morae, as it does not constitute a syllable in itself. Syllable-final consonants can either form the final part of a bi- or trimoraic syllable, as is the case in Goidelic Irish, or they can represent a mora in themselves, as is the case in Japanese. Although there is a relation between syllables and morae, they are not necessarily interchangeable. For example, the Japanese word for "photograph", [sjasin], consists of 2 syllables: sja + sin, but 3 morae: sja + si + n. (source: Jouji Miwa at Mora and Syllable) multigraph — a combination of two or more written symbols or orthographic characters (e.g. letters) that are used together within an orthography to represent a single sound. (Combinations consisting of two characters are also known as digraphs.) multi-language enabling — see script enabling. multi-script encoding — an encoding implementation for some particular language that is designed to enable input to and rendering from that encoding using more than one writing system. When such an implementation is used, the different writing systems are normally based on different scripts. multi-script enabling — see script enabling. non-Roman script — a script using a set of characters other than those used by the ancient Romans. Non-Roman scripts include relatively simple ones such as Cyrillic, Georgian, and Vai, and complex scripts such as Arabic, Tamil, and Khmer. normalization — transformation of data to a normal form. For historical reasons, the Unicode standard allows some characters to have more than one encoded representation. For example, á may be represented as a single codepoint, U+00E1 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE, or two codepoints, U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A and U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. A normalization scheme is used to standardize the codepoints so that every character is always represented by the same sequence of codepoints. Normalization is described in the Unicode Standard Section 5.7, Normalization. OpenType — A smart font rendering technology developed by Microsoft and Adobe; an extension to the TrueType font specification. See also Uniscribe. orthographic character — a written symbol that is conventionally perceived as a distinct unit of writing in some writing system or orthography. PDF — see Portable Document Format. PERL — see Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. phone — a speech sound which is identified as the audible realization of a phoneme. phoneme — the smallest distinctive segment of sound in any language. It is actually comprised of a group of similar sounds, called allophones, which native speakers of a language may perceive as being all the same. If a pair of words exist which differ only in one phonological element (known as a minimal pair), the element in which they differ is distinctive, and represents two phonemes in the language. For example, in English, bit and pit are a minimal pair; [b] and [p] are distinct phonemes. Phonemes are not consistent across languages; two sounds may be separate phonemes in one language and allophones in another. phonemic inventory — an inventory of all the distinctive sounds (phonemes) in a given language, also called a phoneme inventory.. A language's phonemic inventory is not fixed over time; as the language changes, sounds which were previously allophones may become phonemes. The smallest documented phoneme inventory belongs to the Rotokas language, which uses only 11 phonemes. The largest belongs to !Xóõ, with an estimated 112 phonemes. The number of phonemes used in speech does not necessarily correspond to the number of symbols used in writing for a given language. For example, the English alphabet contains 26 letters, but the phonemic inventory numbers between 35 and 47 depending on the dialect used (source: Wikipedia). In a true phonemic script the symbols should map on a one-to-one basis to the sounds in the phonemic inventory. phonemic script — a writing system in which each symbol tends to correspond to one phoneme. For example, the N'ko alphabet assigns one symbol to each phoneme. Also sometimes called a phonetic script although technically this is not accurate, as a true phonetic script should represent every allophone in a language. phonetization — see the rebus principle. plain text — textual data that contains no document-structure or format markup, or any tagging devices that are controlled by a higher-level protocol. The meaning of plain text data is determined solely by the character encoding convention used for the data. plane — in Unicode, a range of 64K codepoints. Plane zero is the original 64K codepoints that can be represented in a single 16-bit character. See also Basic Multilingual Plane, supplementary planes, and surrogate pair. Portable Document Format (PDF) — a particular file format for the storage of electronic documents in a paged form. Created by Adobe around their Adobe Acrobat product. Usually created from a Postscript page description. positional keyboard — a keyboard layout defined in terms of the relative positions of keys rather than what they have printed on them. See also mnemonic keyboard. Postscript — a page description language defined by Adobe. Originally implemented in laser printers so pages were described in terms of line drawing commands rather than as a bitmap. Postscript font — a font in a format suitable for use within a Postscript document. There are many types. Type 1 is the most common and is what is meant most commonly when people refer to Postscript fonts. There are also ways of embedding other font formats into a Postscript document. For example a Type 42 font is a TrueType font formatted for use within a Postscript document. Type 1 fonts differ in the way their outlines are described from TrueType fonts. Postscript name — a name associated with a glyph by the font's designer. Originally a name assigned by Adobe to certain standard glyphs. Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (PERL) — an interpreted programming language particularly strong for text processing. presentation-form encoding — a character encoding system in which the abstract characters that are encoded match one-for-one with the glyphs required for text display. Such encodings allow correct rendering of writing systems on "dumb" rendering systems by having distinct codepoints for contextual forms, positional variants, etc. and are designed on the basis of rendering needs rather than on the basis of character semantics (the linguistically relevant information). Also known as glyph encoding, display encoding or surface encoding; distinguished from semantic encoding. Private Use Area (PUA) — a range of Unicode codepoints (E000 - F8FF and planes 15 and 16) that are reserved for private definition and use within an organisation or corporation for creating proprietary, non-standard character definitions. For more information see The Unicode Consortium, 1996, pp. 619 ff. PUA — see Private Use Area. rasterising — converting a graphical image described in terms of lines and fills into a bitmap for display on an imaging device. rebus principle — also known as phonetization. The use of a pre-existing logograph to represent a syllabic sound having the same sound as, but a different meaning from, that of the word originally represented. The rebus principle is especially useful for representing function words, proper names, and other words which would otherwise be difficult to depict. A well-known example is the Egyptian use of the symbol representing "swallow" (pronounced wr) also being used ro represent the word "big" (which was also pronounced wr). A symbol used in this way is called a rebus. The rebus strengthens the phonetic aspect of a logographic writing system by exploiting the phonetic similarities between words. If a logographic writing system is fully (or almost fully) phonetized, it may become an abugida or an abjad. Other times, it is only partially phonetized and develops into a logosyllabary. regression test — a test (usually a whole set of tests, often automated) designed to check that a program has not "regressed", that is, that previous capabilities have not been compromised by introducing new ones. render — to display or draw text on an output device (usually the computer screen or paper). This usually consists of two processes: transforming a sequence of characters to a set of positioned glyphs and rasterising those glyphs into a bitmap for display on the output device. right side-bearing — the white space at the right edge of a glyph's visual representation, or more specifically, the distance between the display position after a glyph is rendered and the right edge of the glyph's bounding box. A positive right side-bearing indicates white space between the glyph and the following one; a negative right side-bearing indicates overlap or overhang between them. Roman script — the script based on the alphabet developed by the ancient Romans ("A B C D E F G ..."), and used by most of the languages of Europe, including English, French, German, Czech, Polish, Swedish, Estonian, etc. Also called Latin script. schema — in markup, a set of rules for document structure and content. script — a maximal collection of characters used for writing languages or for transcribing linguistic data that share common characteristics of appearance, share a common set of typical behaviours, have a common history of development, and that would be identified as being related by some community of users. Examples: Roman (or Latin) script, Arabic script, Cyrillic script, Thai script, Devanagari script, Chinese script, etc. Script Description File (SDF) — a file describing certain kinds of complex script behaviour, used to control a rendering engine to which it has given its name. Created by Tim Erickson and used in Shoebox, LinguaLinks, and ScriptPad. script enabling — providing the capability in software to allow documents to include text in multiple languages or scripts, and to handle input, display, editing and other text-related operations of text data in multiple languages and scripts. Script enabling has to do with the script in which language data is written, as opposed to localisation, which has to do with the language and script of the user interface. SDF — see Script Description File. semantic encoding — an encoding that has the property of one codepoint for every semantically distinct character (the linguistically relevant units). In general, such encodings require the use of "smart" rendering systems for correct appearance to be achieved, but are more appropriate for all other operations performed on the text, especially for any form of analysis. Also known as deep encoding; distinguished from presentation-form encoding. SFM — see Standard Format Marker. SGML — See Standard Generalized Markup Language. side bearing — the white space at the edge of a glyph; see left side-bearing, right side-bearing. There can also be top and bottom side bearings, of use when rendering text vertically. sort key — a sequence of numbers that when appropriately processed using a particular standard algorithm will position the corresponding string in the correct sort position in relation to other strings. The sort key need not correspond one number to one codepoint in the input string. Standard Format Marker (SFM) — SIL has a proprietary format called "standard format markers" (SFM). It is possible (and even probable) that SFMs in a single document have different character encodings. When converting to one encoding (Unicode) these must be converted with different mapping files. A standard format marker begins with a backslash (). For example, p would represent a paragraph tag. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) — a notation for generalized markup developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It separates textual information from the processing function used for formatting. It was found difficult to parse, due to the many variants possible, and so XML was developed as a subset to resolve the ambiguities and to make parsing easier. smart font — a font capable of performing transformations on complex patterns of glyphs, above and beyond the simple character-to-glyph mapping that is a basic function of font rendering (see cmap). The information specifying the smart behavior is typically in the form of extra tables embedded in the font, and will generally allow layered transformations involving one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many mappings of glyphs. smart rendering — a rendering process that uses a smart font. supplementary planes — Unicode Planes 1 through 16, consisting of the supplementary code points, corresponding to codepoints U+10000 to U+10FFFF. In The Unicode Standard 3.1, characters were assigned in the supplementary planes for the first time, in Planes 1, 2 and 14. See also Basic Multilingual Plane. surface encoding — see presentation form encoding. surrogate pair — a mechanism in the UTF-16 encoding form of Unicode in which two 16-bit code unites from the range 0xD800 to 0xDFFF are used to encode Unicode supplementary plane characters, i.e. with Unicode scalar values in the range U+10000 to U+10FFFF. syllabary — a form of writing in which the symbols represent syllables--most commonly a vowel-and-consonant combination. A syllabary differs from an abugida in that there are no distinct elements of the symbols to correspond to the syllable's phonemes. symbol-encoded font — Windows supports two types of Unicode fonts: standard and symbol. Symbol-encoded fonts are used for either non-orthographic collections of shapes (such as Wingdings) or for legacy orthographies (e.g., SIL Ezra, SIL Galatia, SIL IPA) created prior to availablility of Unicode-based solutions. Symbol-encoded fonts encode characters in the Private Use Area, typically U+F020 .. U+F0FF tokenisation — the process of analysing a string into a contiguous sequence of smaller units: for example, word breaking or syllable breaking or the creation of a sort key. TrueType font — font format used primarily in Windows and on the Mac, allows for glyph scaling and hinting. unicameral — describes a script with only one set of symbols per phoneme. See also bicameral. Unicode — an industry-wide character set encoding standard that aims eventually to provide a single standard that supports all the scripts of the world. Unicode is closely related to ISO/IEC 10646. Unicode Scalar Value (USV) — a number written as a hexadecimal (base 16) value that serves as the codepoint for Unicode characters. Characters in the BMP are written with four hex digits, eg: U+0061, U+AA32. Characters in supplementary planes use five or six digits. Uniscribe (Unicode Script Processor) — due to technical limitations in OpenType, it is necessary to pre-process strings before applying OpenType smart behaviour. Microsoft uses a particular DLL (Dynamic Link Library) called Uniscribe to do this pre-processing. Uniscribe does all of the script specific, font generic processing of a string (such as reordering) leaving the font specific processing (such as contextual forms) to the OpenType lookups of a font. Universal Character Set (UCS) — the coded character set defined by Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, intended to support all commonly used characters from all writing systems, current and past. USV — see Unicode Scalar Value. UTF-8 — an encoding form for storing Unicode codepoints in terms of 8-bit bytes. Characters are encoding listing sequences of 1-4 bytes. Characters in the ASCII character set are all represented using a single byte. See http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html. UTF-16 — an encoding form for storing Unicode codepoints in 16-bit words. It includes the concept of surrogate pairs to encode values from U+10000 - U+10FFFF as two 16-bit words. UTF-32 — an encoding form for storing Unicode codepoints in 32-bit words. Since 32 bits encompasses the entire range of Unicode, every codepoint is encoded as a single 32-bit word. See Unicode Technical Report #19. virama — the generic name for a written symbol, particularly common in Brahmic abugidas, having the function of silencing the inherent vowel in every consonant character. The virama can be used either to represent a word-final consonant or the first consonant(s) in a consonant cluster. The shape of the symbol varies from script to script, but it is often a diacritic, written above, below or alongside the consonant which it modifies. Visual OpenType Layout Tool (VOLT) — a tool to build OpenType tables and add them to a font. VOLT — See Visual OpenType Layout Tool. writing system — an implementation of one or more scripts to form a complete system for writing a particular language. Most writing systems are based primarily upon a single script; writing systems for Japanese and Korean are notable exceptions. Many languages have multiple writing systems, however, each based on different scripts; e.g. the Mongolian language can be written using Mongolian or Cyrillic scripts. A writing system uses some subset of the characters of the script or scripts on which it is based with most or all of the behaviours typical to that script and possibly certain behaviours that are peculiar to that particular writing system. x-height — the distance from the baseline of a line of text to the top of the main body of lower-case letters, that is, without ascenders or descenders. It is the height of a lower-case x, as well as a lower-case u, v, w, and z. Curved letters such as a, e, n, and s tend to be slightly taller than the x-height for aesthetic purposes. XML — see Extensible Markup Language. XSL — see Extensible Stylesheet Language. XSLT — see Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. Note: the opinions expressed in submitted contributions below do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our website.
"jim albright", Tue, Dec 14, 2010 15:31 (EST) I would add samples of the different things you talk about .... so Hebrew text, Arabic text, ....
"Hugh Paterson", Sat, Dec 29, 2012 22:25 (EST) I might also suggest that it might be helpful to have a taxonomy to which the glossary words belong. That is they are not all equally confusing to learners and readers. A reader-learner might more easily confuse a grapheme, a glyph and a character. But "kern" is less likely to be confuse with these previous terms. (Mostly because it is in a different semantic set.) So the terms in the glossary are related, and a reader of the glossary is likely not only to want to understand the specific term but what differentiates it from other terms (concepts) in its semantic group.
"Hugh Paterson", Mon, Dec 15, 2014 08:20 (EST) Above the entry for Phonetization says : phonetization — see the rebus principle. However there does not seem to be an entry for"rebus principle".
martinpk, Mon, Dec 15, 2014 09:25 (EST) Thanks, Hugh. I've restored the missing entry on the rebus principle. © 2003-2024 SIL International, all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted elsewhere on this page. |


text:
According to HitWise, Twitter accounted for 1 in every 170 UK Internet visits yesterday; by their estimates, there were over 3.4 million visits to the Twitter homepage from the UK population alone. This is the world that we live in now. WE are the media. We create the content, we share the content and we consume the content-CONSTANTLY.
I can't pinpoint the exact date where we started to leverage the medium of social media for world wide causes, but I can cite some recent events such as the terrorist attacks in India and the uprisings and revolutions in Iran and Egypt respectively as moments where cultures took social media platforms to such scales as a way to augment, support, discuss, share and or fuel what was happening IRL.
It is the nature of the world that we live in today. we are one digital culture. But look at what organizations and institutes now have to deal with…
Yes there are other digital platforms that are in play during all of this but it is Twitter which seems to be the primary conduit for real time conversations, and updates during the riots in London. The real-time aspect of sharing information through Twitter has made the platform ideal for updates on what has been happening. In fact because of the riots, it has been Twitter's biggest ever spike in UK traffic online. Beyond the role that social media has been playing in the UK riots, there's a larger question that needs to be asked…Has the disruptive nature of social media now become the fuel for anarchy?