Osman Hamdi Bey

Osman Hamdi Bey (1842 – 24 February 1910) was an Ottoman statesman, intellectual, art expert and also a prominent and pioneering Turkish painter. He was also an accomplished archaeologist, and is considered as the pioneer of the museum curator's profession in Turkey. He was the founder of Istanbul Archaeology Museums and of İstanbul Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi in Turkish), known today as the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts.



The Tortoise Trainer

The painting expresses a sarcastic innuendo on the painter's own view of his style of work compared to those of his collaborators and apprentices, and is also a reference to the historical fact of tortoises having been employed for illuminative and decorative purposes, by placing candles on the shell, in evening outings during the Tulip Era in the early 18th century. The painting was acquired by the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation and is currently on display at the Pera Museum in İstanbul, which was established by this foundation.


Career

Osman Hamdi exhibited three paintings at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. None seem to have survived today, but their titles were Repose of the Gypsies, Black Sea Soldier Lying in Wait, and Death of the Soldier. An important step in his career was his assignment as the director of the Imperial Museum (Müze-i Hümayun) in 1881. He used his position as museum director to develop the museum and rewrite the antiquities laws and to create nationally sponsored archaeological expeditions. In 1882, he instituted and became director of the Academy of Fine Arts, which provided Ottomans with training in aesthetics and artistic techniques without leaving the empire. In 1884, he oversaw the promulgation of a Regulation prohibiting historical artifacts from being smuggled abroad (Asar-ı Atîka Nizamnamesi), a giant step in constituting a legal framework of preservation of the antiquities. Representatives or middlemen of 19th century European Powers routinely smuggled artifacts with historical value from within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire (which then comprised the geographies of ancient Greek and Mesopotamian civilizations, among others), often resorting to shadily obtained licenses or bribes, to enrich museums in European capitals.

He conducted the first scientific based archaeological researches done by a Turkish team. His digs included sites as varied as the Commagene tomb-sanctuary in Nemrut Dağı in southeastern Anatolia (a top tourist's venue in Turkey and a UNESCO World Heritage Site today, within the Adıyaman Province), the Hekate sanctuary in Lagina in southwestern Anatolia (also much visited, and within the Muğla Province today), and Sidon in Lebanon. The sarcophagi he discovered in Sidon (including the one known as the Alexander Sarcophagus, although this sarcophagus is thought to contain the remains of a Persian noble who was also the governor of Babylon. ]]) are considered among the worldwide jewels of archaeological findings. To lodge these, he started building what is today the Istanbul Archaeology Museum in 1881. The museum officially opened in 1891 under his directorship.

Throughout his professional career as museum and academy director, Osman Hamdi continued to paint in the style of his teachers, Gérôme and Boulanger.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (previously known as Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 4) is a video game published by Ubisoft and due for release in early 2011. Excluding expansions, it is the fifth installment in the Ghost Recon series, and was announced to be in development by Ubisoft on January 22, 2009. The game will be a futuristic take on the Ghost Recon series.

The story will take place in Northern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The Ghosts will be fighting an ultra-nationalist force that took control of Russia and are invading neighboring countries.

Initially, the title was revealed to be Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Predator by an OFLC release. However in December 2009, "Ghost Recon: Future Soldier" was trademarked by Ubisoft, raising speculation that this could be the name for the upcoming Ghost Recon 4. This was subsequently confirmed by an official announcement.

The release of Future Soldier was initially targeted for the 2009-2010 fiscal year, however Ubisoft later announced that the release date would be pushed back until the 2010-2011 fiscal year to "strengthen" its video game line-up. In May 2010, Ubisoft announced that the release of Future Soldier would be delayed until the "March quarter of 2011".

Connection Machine

The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. The Connection Machine was originally intended for applications in artificial intelligence and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science.

Danny Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in Waltham, Massachusetts (it was later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 1983 and assembled a team to develop the CM-1 Connection Machine. This was a "massively parallel" hypercubic arrangement of thousands of microprocessors, each with its own 4 kbits of RAM, which together executed in a SIMD fashion. The CM-1, depending on the configuration, had as many as 65,536 processors. The individual processors were extremely simple, processing one bit at a time.

The CM-1 and CM-2 took the form of a cube 1.5 meters on a side, divided equally into eight smaller cubes. Each sub-cube contained 16 printed circuit boards and a main processor called a sequencer. Each printed circuit board contained 32 chips. Each chip contained a communication channel called a router, 16 processors, 16 RAMs. The CM-1 as a whole had a hypercubic routing network, a main RAM, and an input/output processor. It was connected to a switching device called a nexus.

In order to improve its commercial viability, the CM-2, launched in 1987, added Weitek 3132 floating-point numeric co-processors and more RAM to the system. 32 of the original one-bit processors shared each numeric processor. The CM-2 could be configured with up to 512 MB of RAM, and a RAID hard disk array, called a DataVault, of up to 25 GB.

Two later variants of the CM-2 were also produced, the smaller CM-2a with either 4096 or 8192 single-bit processors, and the faster CM-200.
The light panels of FROSTBURG, a CM-5, on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. The panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.

Due to its origins in AI research, the software for the CM-1/2/200 single-bit processor was influenced by the Lisp programming language and a version of Common Lisp, *Lisp (spoken: "Star-Lisp"), was implemented on the CM-1. Other early languages included Karl Sims' IK and Cliff Lasser's URDU. Much system utility software for the CM-1/2 was written in *Lisp.

With the CM-5, announced in 1991, Thinking Machines switched from the CM-2's hypercubic architecture of simple processors to an entirely new MIMD architecture based on a fat tree network of SPARC RISC processors. The later CM-5E replaced the SPARC processors with faster SuperSPARCs.

Qubit

In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is a unit of quantum information —the quantum analogue of the classical bit —with additional dimensions associated to the quantum properties of a physical atom. The physical construction of a quantum computer is itself an arrangement of entangled atoms, and the qubit represents both the state memory and the state of entanglement in a system. A quantum computation is performed by initializing a system of qubits with a quantum algorithm —"initialization" here referring to some advanced physical process that puts the system into an entangled state.

The qubit is described by a state vector in a two-level quantum-mechanical system, which is formally equivalent to a two-dimensional vector space over the complex numbers.

Quantum Computer

A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from traditional computers based on transistors. The basic principle behind quantum computation is that quantum properties can be used to represent data and perform operations on these data. A theoretical model is the quantum Turing machine, also known as the universal quantum computer.

Although quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits (quantum bit). Both practical and theoretical research continues, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.

If large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems much faster than any current classical computers (for example Shor's algorithm). Quantum computers don't allow the computations of functions that are not theoretically computable by classical computers, i.e. they do not alter the Church–Turing thesis. The gain is only in efficiency.

Tetris

Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was created on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (all of the game's pieces, known as Tetrominoes, contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.



The Tetris game is a popular use of tetrominoes, the four element special case of polyominoes. Polyominoes have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907, and the name is given by the mathematician Solomon W. Golomb in 1953. However, even the enumeration of pentominoes is dated to antiquity.

The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs, Network music players and even as an Easter egg on non-media products like oscilloscopes. It has even inspired Tetris serving dishes and been played on the sides of various buildings, with the record holder for the world's largest fully functional game of Tetris being an effort by Dutch students in 1995 that lit up all 15 floors of the Electrical Engineering department at Delft University of Technology.

While versions of Tetris were sold for a range of 1980s home computer platforms, it was the hugely successful handheld version for the Game Boy launched in 1989 that established the reputation of the game as one of the most popular ever. Electronic Gaming Monthly's 100th issue had Tetris in first place as "Greatest Game of All Time". In 2007, Tetris came in second place in IGN's "100 Greatest Video Games of All Time". It has sold more than 70 million copies. In January 2010, it was announced that Tetris has sold more than 100 million copies for cell phones alone since 2005.

Voxel

A voxel (a portmanteau of the words volumetric and pixel) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. This is analogous to a pixel, which represents 2D image data in a bitmap (which is sometimes referred to as a pixmap). As with pixels in a bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (their coordinates) explicitly encoded along with their values. Instead, the position of a voxel is inferred based upon its position relative to other voxels (i.e., its position in the data structure that makes up a single volumetric image). In contrast to pixels and voxels, points and polygons are often explicitly represented by the coordinates of their vertices. A direct consequence of this difference is that polygons are able to efficiently represent simple 3D structures with lots of empty or homogeneously-filled space, while voxels are good at representing regularly-sampled spaces that are non-homogeneously filled.

Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data. Some volumetric displays use voxels to describe their resolution. For example, a display might be able to show 512×512×512 voxels.

Voxel Data

A voxel represents the sub-volume box with constant scalar/vector value inside which is equal to scalar/vector value of the corresponding grid/pixel of the original discrete representation of the volumetric data. The boundaries of a voxel are exactly in the middle between neighboring grids. Voxel data sets have a limited resolution, as precise data is only available at the center of each cell. Under the assumption that the voxel data is sampling a suitably band-limited signal, accurate reconstructions of data points in between the sampled voxels can be attained by low-pass filtering the data set. Visually acceptable approximations to this low pass filter can be attained by polynomial interpolation such as tri-linear or tri-cubic interpolation.

The value of a voxel may represent various properties. In CT scans, the values are Hounsfield units, giving the opacity of material to X-rays.[1]:29 Different types of value are acquired from MRI or ultrasound.

Voxels can contain multiple scalar values - essentially vector data; in the case of ultrasound scans with B-mode and Doppler data, density, and volumetric flow rate are captured as separate channels of data relating to the same voxel positions.

Other values may be useful for immediate 3D rendering, such as a surface normal vector and color.

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access

HSDPA Wikipedia
HSDPA Official Site

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is an enhanced 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, also coined 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity. Current HSDPA deployments support down-link speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2, 14.0 Mbit/s. Further speed increases are available with HSPA+, which provides speeds of up to 42 Mbit/s downlink.

The first phase of HSDPA has been specified in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 5. Phase one introduces new basic functions and is aimed to achieve peak data rates of 14.0 Mbit/s (see above). Newly introduced are the High Speed Downlink Shared Channels (HS-DSCH), the adaptive modulation QPSK and 16QAM and the High Speed Medium Access protocol (MAC-hs) in base station.

The second phase of HSDPA is specified in the upcoming 3GPP release 7 and has been named HSPA Evolved. It can achieve data rates of up to 42 Mbit/s. It will introduce antenna array technologies such as beamforming and Multiple-input multiple-output communications (MIMO). Beam forming focuses the transmitted power of an antenna in a beam towards the user’s direction. MIMO uses multiple antennas at the sending and receiving side. Deployments are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2008.

After HSPA Evolved, the roadmap leads to E-UTRA (Previously "HSOPA"), the technology specified in 3GPP Release 8. This project is called the Long Term Evolution initiative. The first release of LTE offers data rates of over 320 Mbit/s for downlink and over 170 Mbit/s for uplink using OFDMA modulation.