The Voice of Susannah McCorkle

Susannah McCorkle (January 1, 1946 – May 19, 2001) was an American jazz singer much admired for her direct, unadorned singing style and quiet intensity.

McCorkle was born in Berkeley, California. She studied modern languages at the University of California, Berkeley. McCorkle began singing professionally after hearing recordings of Billie Holiday in Paris in the late 1960s. She nearly became an interpreter at the European Commission in Brussels, but moved instead to London in 1972 to pursue a career in singing. While in the UK, she made two albums which, although well received, enjoyed only limited circulation.

In the late 1970s, McCorkle returned to the United States and settled in New York City, where a five-month engagement at the Cookery in Greenwich Village brought her to wider public attention and elicited rave reviews from critics.

During the 1980s, McCorkle continued to record; her maturing style and the darkening timbre of her voice greatly enhanced her performances. In the early 1990s, two of the albums McCorkle made for Concord Records, No More Blues and Sábia, were enormously successful and made her name known to the wider world. She was recorded by the Smithsonian Institution which at the time made her the youngest singer ever to have been included in its popular music series.

McCorkle played Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher and Alice Tully Halls five times and Carnegie Hall three times, and was featured soloist with Skitch Henderson and the 80-piece New York Pops in a concert of Brazilian music.

Thanks to her linguistic skills, McCorkle translated lyrics of Brazilian, French, and Italian songs, notably those for her Brazilian album Sabia. She had a special affinity for Bossa Nova and often cited Antonio Carlos Jobim’s "Waters of March" as her personal favorite. McCorkle also had several short stories published and, in 1991, began work on her first novel. She published fiction in Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and non-fiction in the New York Times and in American Heritage, including lengthy articles on Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Irving Berlin and Mae West.

A survivor of breast cancer, McCorkle suffered for many years from depression and committed suicide at age 55 by leaping off the balcony of her 16th-floor apartment on West 86th Street in Manhattan. She was alone in her home at the time. The police immediately entered her home after identifying her body and found no foul play. Suicide was ruled the manner of death.


One year later, in a New York magazine tribute entitled "Jazz Bird", Gwenda Blair wrote, "Onstage, singer Susannah McCorkle exuded a sultry self-confidence that won her lifelong fans. But in private, she fought depression so deep -- and so well hidden -- that a year after her suicide, even some in her most intimate circle wonder how they missed the cries for help."

Haunted Heart, a biography of Susannah McCorkle written by Linda Dahl, was published in September 2006 by University of Michigan Press.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susannah_McCorkle

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Note from the Blog Author

Susannah McCorkle had an ingenious flair for languages and could have become a translator or interpreter. This talent shows clearly in her brilliant interpretation, partly in Portuguese and partly in English, of Manha de Carnaval. (from Black Orpheus) on her Sabia album. It has been collected in other albums and may be her best song, so it and may prove to be the defining version of Manha de Carnaval.

A Huge Rock Singer No One Knows!

Anthony "Tony" Burrows (born 14 April 1942) is a British session pop singer and recording artist. Though his lead singing voice is easily recognizable to pop music fans, Tony remains relatively unknown in the recording industry to this day. And, yet he has been accredited as the lead singer on pop group hit singles for more groups (the singular career achievement of a total of 5 top-charted "one hit wonders") than any other recording artist in recording industry history, both on the UK Singles Chart and the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Burrows was born in Exeter, Devon. In the early 1960s, he was a member of The Kestrels, a vocal harmony group which also included the future songwriting team Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook. Subsequently he joined The Ivy League. He was still with them when they metamorphosed into The Flower Pot Men. The Flower Pot Men had only one hit, "Let’s Go to San Franisco", which reached number four in the UK Singles Chart in the autumn of 1967. Two founding members of the famous Deep Purple band, Jon Lord and Nick Simper, were also part of this early band.

Later, Burrows sang the lead vocals on several one-hit songs under different group names, Edison Lighthouse’s "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" (February 1970); White Plains’ "My Baby Kloves Lovin’" (March 1970); The Pipkins’ novelty song "Gimme Dat Ding" (April 1970); and The First Class’ "Beach Baby" (July 1974). He also sang lead vocals on The Brotherhood of Man’s "United We Stand", which reached #10 on the UK charts and also reached #13 in the U.S.

On February 26, 1970, he became the first (and still the only) recording artist to appear on BBC Television’s Top of the Pops fronting three different group acts appearing nearly simultaneously (to the delight of the broadcast studio audience, running from stage to stage for the three consecutive vocal performances) in a single broadcast show: Edison Lighthouse (the number one British-charted hit that week), White Plains, and Brotherhood of Man.

He has also recorded as a session harmony singer with Elton John, Cliff Richard, and James Last.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Burrows
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"….I think nowadays far too much is produced in the studio. I think recording techniques have advanced so far that music has become sort of robotically produced now. I don't think there's enough emotion and heart goes into recordings anymore. They certainly used to in our day. I think that's a bit of a shame. But that's probably the old man in me speaking."

-- Tony Burows in a 1999 interview (online at: http://www.popentertainment.com/burrows.htm )

Jazz Piano Great Dave Brubeck Passes Away

David Warren "Dave" Brubeck (December 6, 1920 – December 5, 2012) was an American jazz pianist and composer considered to be one of the foremost exponents of progressive jazz. He wrote a number of jazz standards, including "In Your Own Sweet Way" and "The Duke". Brubeck's style ranged from refined to bombastic, reflecting his mother's attempts at classical training and his improvisational skills. His music is known for employing unusual time signatures, and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities.

His long-time musical partner, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, wrote the saxophone melody for the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s best remembered piece, "Take Five", which is in 5/4 time and has endured as a jazz classic on one of the top-selling jazz albums, Time Out. Brubeck experimented with time signatures throughout his career, recording "Pick Up Sticks" in 6/4, "Unsquare Dance" in 7/4, "World's Fair" in 13/4, and "Blue Rondo a la Turk" in 9/8. He was also a respected composer of orchestral and sacred music, and wrote soundtracks for television such as Mr. Broadway and the animated mini-series This is America, Charlie Brown.

Intending to work with his father on their ranch, Brubeck entered the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, (now the University of the Pacific) studying veterinary science, but transferred on the urging of the head of zoology, Dr. Arnold, who told him "Brubeck, your mind's not here. It's across the lawn in the [music] conservatory. Please go there.
Stop wasting my time and yours". Later, Brubeck was nearly expelled when one of his professors discovered that he could not read music. Several of his professors came forward, arguing that his ability with counterpoint and harmony more than compensated. The college was still afraid that it would cause a scandal, and agreed to let Brubeck graduate only after he had promised never to teach piano.


After graduating in 1942, Brubeck was drafted into the army and served overseas in George Patton’s Third Army. He was spared from service in the Battle of the Bulge when he volunteered to play piano at a Red Cross show; he was such a hit he was ordered to form a band. Thus he created one of the US armed forces' first racially integrated bands, "The Wolfpack". While serving in the military, Brubeck met Paul Desmond in early 1944. He returned to college after serving nearly four years in the army, this time attending Mills College in the San Francisco Bay Area and studying under Darius Milhaud, who encouraged him to study fugue and orchestration, but not classical piano. While on active duty, he received two lessons from Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA in an attempt to connect with High Modernism theory and practice. However, the encounter did not end on good terms since Schoenberg believed that every note should be accounted for, an approach which Brubeck could not accept.

After completing his studies under Milhaud, Brubeck helped to establish Berkeley, California’s Fantasy Records. He worked with an octet (the recording bears his name only because Brubeck was the best-known member at the time), and a trio including Cal Tjader and Ron Crotty. Highly experimental, the group made few recordings and got even fewer paying jobs. The trio was often joined by Paul Desmond on the bandstand, at Desmond's own insistence.

Following a near-fatal swimming accident which incapacitated him for several months, Brubeck organized The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951, with Desmond on alto saxophone. They took up a long residency at San Francisco's Black Hawk nightclub and gained great popularity touring college campuses, recording a series of albums with such titles as Jazz at Oberlin (1953), Jazz at the College of the Pacific (1953), and Brubeck's debut on Columbia Records, Jazz Goes to College, (1954).

When Brubeck signed with Fantasy Records, he thought he had a half interest in the company and he worked as a sort of A&R man for the label, encouraging the Weiss brothers to sign other contemporary jazz performers, including Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Red Norvo. When he discovered that all he owned was a half interest in his own recording, he was more than willing to sign with another label, Columbia Records.

In 1954, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine, the second jazz musician to be so honored (the first was Louis Armstrong on February 21, 1949). Brubeck personally found this accolade embarrassing since he considered Duke Ellington more deserving of it and was convinced that he had been favored for being Caucasian.


Early bassists for the group included Ron Crotty, Bob Bates, and Bob's brother Norman Bates; Lloyd Davis and Joe Dodge also held the drum chair. In 1956 Brubeck hired drummer Joe Morello, who had been working with Marian McPartland; Morello's presence made possible the rhythmic experiments that were to come. In 1958 African-American bassist Eugene Wright joined for the group's US State Department tour of Europe and Asia. Wright became a permanent member in 1959, making the "classic" Quartet's personnel complete. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Brubeck canceled several concerts because the club owners or hall managers continued to resist the idea of an integrated band on their stages. He also canceled a television appearance when he found out that the producers intended to keep Wright off-camera.

In 1959 the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded Time Out, an album about which the record label was enthusiastic but which they were nonetheless hesitant to release. Featuring the album art of S. Neil Fujita, the album contained all original compositions, almost none of which were in common time: 9/8, 5/4, 3/4, and 6/4 were used inspired by Eurasian folk music they experienced during that US State Department sponsored tour.
Nonetheless, on the strength of these unusual time signatures (the album included "Take Five", "Blue Rondo a la Turk", and "Three To Get Ready"), it quickly went. It was the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies.
　

Awards

• Connecticut Arts Award (1987);
• National Medal of Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (1994);
• DownBeat Hall of Fame (1994);
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1996);
• Doctor of Sacred Theology, Doctorate honoris causa, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (2004);
• Laetare Medal (University of Notre Dame) (2006);
• BBC Jazz Lifetime Achievement Award (2007);
• Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy (2008);
• Inducted into California Hall of Fame (2008);
• Eastman School of Music Honorary Degree (2008);
• Kennedy Centre Honour (2009);
• George Washington University Honorary Degree (2010);
• Honorary Fellow of Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey (2011).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Brubeck

Voyager I Approaches Interstellar Space

Dec. 4, 2012: Eleven billion miles from Earth, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a "magnetic highway" that connects our solar system to interstellar space. This could be one of Voyager 1's last steps on its long journey to the stars.

"Although Voyager 1 still is inside the sun's environment, we now can taste what it's like on the outside because the particles are zipping in and out on this magnetic highway," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar space. Our best guess is it's likely just a few months to a couple years away. The new region isn't what we expected, but we've come to expect the unexpected from Voyager."

The new results were described on Dec. 3rd at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

The "magnetic highway" is a place in the far reaches of the solar system where the sun's magnetic field connects to the magnetic field of interstellar space. This connection allows charged particles from inside the heliosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds the sun) to zoom out; and it allows charged particles from outside to stream in. When Voyager 1 is in the magnetic highway, onboard particle sensors can directly sample material from beyond our solar system.

Since December 2004, when Voyager 1 crossed a point in space called the termination shock, the spacecraft has been exploring the heliosphere's outer layer or "heliosheath." In recent years, the speed of the solar wind around Voyager 1 has slowed to zero, and the intensity of the magnetic field has increased.

According to data from two onboard instruments that measure charged particles, Voyager 1 first entered the magnetic highway on July 28, 2012. The region ebbed away and flowed toward Voyager 1 several times. The spacecraft entered the region again Aug. 25 and the environment has been stable since.

Spacecraft data revealed the magnetic field became stronger each time Voyager entered the highway region; however, the direction of the magnetic field lines did not change, as researchers would expect if Voyager 1 had truly entered interstellar space.

"We are in a magnetic region unlike any we've been in before -- about 10 times more intense than before the termination shock -- but the magnetic field data show no indication we're in interstellar space," said Leonard Burlaga, a Voyager magnetometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Voyager 1's exit from the solar system is, apparently, yet to come. But the magnetic highway is giving it a taste of what lies ahead.
　
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/03dec_voyager1

More Information

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched 16 days apart in 1977. After touring the outer planets in the 1980s, the two spacecraft have made a dash for the stars. Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object: 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the sun. The signal from Voyager 1 takes approximately 17 hours to travel to Earth. Voyager 2, the longest continuously operated spacecraft, is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from the sun. While Voyager 2 has seen changes similar to those seen by Voyager 1, the changes are much more gradual. Scientists do not think Voyager 2 has reached the magnetic highway.

The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Voyager missions are a part of NASA's Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

The Mary Celeste

(or Marie Céleste as it is fictionally referred to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others after him) was an American merchant brigantine famous for having been discovered on 4 December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean, unmanned and apparently abandoned (one lifeboat was missing, along with its 7 crew), although the weather was fine and her crew had been experienced and capable seamen. The Mary Celeste was in seaworthy condition and still under sail heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar. She had been at sea for a month and had over six months' worth of food and water on board. Her cargo was virtually untouched and the personal belongings of passengers and crew were still in place, including valuables. The crew was never seen or heard from again. The Mary Celeste crew's disappearance is often cited as the greatest maritime mystery of all time.

The fate of her crew has been the subject of much speculation. Theories range from alcoholic fumes, to underwater earthquakes, to waterspouts, to paranormal explanations involving extraterrestrial life, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), sea monsters, and the phenomenon of the Bermuda Triangle, although the Mary Celeste is not known to have sailed through the Bermuda Triangle area. The Mary Celeste is often described as the archetypal ghost ship, since she was discovered derelict without any apparent explanation, and her name has become a synonym for similar occurrences. The ship was said to be "cursed" and had a long history of disasters and catastrophes, and three captains died on the ship. The ship was destroyed in 1885 when it was intentionally wrecked off the coast of Haiti in an attempted insurance fraud.

The Mary Celeste was a 282-gross ton brigantine. She was built by the shipbuilders of Joshua Dewis in 1861 as the ship Amazon at the village of Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia. She was the first of many large ships that were built in that small community. The Amazon was owned by a group of eight investors from Cumberland County and Kings County, Nova Scotia, led by the shipbuilder Joshua Dewis, and William Henry Bigalow, a local merchant. The Amazon was registered at the nearby Nova Scotia town of Parrsboro, the closest local port of registry.

The Amazon's first captain, Robert McLellan, son of one of the owners, contracted pneumonia nine days after taking command, and he died at the very beginning of her maiden voyage. He was the first of three captains to die aboard her. John Nutting Parker, the next captain of the Amazon, struck a fishing boat, and had to steer her back to the shipyard for repairs. At the shipyard, a fire broke out in the middle of the ship. Her first trans-Atlantic crossing was also disastrous for her next captain, after she collided with another vessel in the English Channel near Dover, England. This resulted in the dismissal of the new captain.

After this awkward beginning, the brigantine had six profitable and uneventful years under her Nova Scotian owners. She travelled to the West Indies, Central America and South America, and transported a wide range of cargoes. In 1867, the ship ran aground during a storm off Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. After she was salvaged, she was sold for $1,750 to Richard Haines of New York, and was repaired at a cost of $8,825.03. In 1868, she was transferred to the American registry, and the following year was renamed the Mary Celeste. The new owners' intention was to take her across the Atlantic and make a profit trading with the Adriatic ports.

On November 5, 1872, under command of Captain Briggs, the Mary Celeste docked on New York City’s East River and took on board a cargo of 1,701 barrels of commercial alcohol intended for fortifying Italian wines on behalf of Meissner Ackermann & Co. It was worth about $35,000; the ship and cargo together were insured for $46,000. The Mary Celeste then set sail from Staten Island for Genoa, Italy.

In addition to her captain and a crew of seven, she carried the captain's wife, who had sailed with her husband many times, and their two-year-old daughter. Thus ten people were aboard. Briggs had spent most of his life at sea, and had captained at least five ships and owned many more. The crew for this voyage included a Dane and four Germans, but all spoke fluent English, had exemplary records, and were considered experienced, trustworthy and capable seamen. The first mate and cook were Americans.

Before the Mary Celeste left New York, Captain Briggs spoke with an old friend, David Reed Morehouse, from Nova Scotia, who was captain of the Canadian merchant ship Dei Gratia, also a brigantine. Briggs, Morehouse, and their wives had dinner together on the evening of November 4. Briggs and Morehouse had served together as sailors when they were young. During the conversation, they discovered they had a similar course across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean.

However, Morehouse was still waiting for his cargo to arrive when the Mary Celeste left port on November 5. Morehouse's cargo eventually arrived and on November 15, the Dei Gratia finally set off with 1,735 barrels (275.8 m³) of petroleum in her hold. The Dei Gratia left New York harbour seven days after the Mary Celeste (some sources say eight days later).

Sporadic bad weather had been reported in the Atlantic throughout October, although the Dei Gratia encountered none and her journey across the ocean in November was uneventful. Just short of a month after leaving port, on December 4, 1872 (some reports give December 5, owing to a lack of standard time zones in the 19th century), at approximately 13:00, the helmsman of the Dei Gratia, John Johnson, sighted a ship about five miles (8 km) off their port bow through his spyglass. The position of the Dei Gratia was approximately 38 degrees 20 minutes north and 17 degrees 15 minutes west, some 600 miles west of Portugal. Johnson's keen, experienced eyes detected almost at once that there was something strangely wrong with the other vessel. She was yawing slightly, and her sails did not look right, being slightly torn. Johnson alerted his second officer, John Wright, who looked and had the same feelings about her. They informed the captain. As they moved closer, they saw the ship was the Mary Celeste. Captain Morehouse wondered why the Mary Celeste had not already reached Italy, as she had a head start on his own ship. According to the account given by the crew of the Dei Gratia, they approached to 400 yards from the Mary Celeste and cautiously observed her for two hours. She was under sail, yet sailing erratically on a starboard tack, and slowly heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar. They concluded she was drifting after seeing no one at the helm or even on deck, though the ship was flying no distress signal.

Oliver Deveau, chief mate of the Dei Gratia, boarded the Mary Celeste. He reported he did not find anyone on board, and said that "the whole ship was a thoroughly wet mess". There was only one operational pump, two apparently having been disassembled, with a lot of water between decks and three and a half feet (1.1 m) of water in the hold. However, the ship was not sinking and was still seaworthy.

All of the ship's papers were missing, except for the captain's logbook. The forehatch and the lazarette were both open, although the main hatch was sealed. The ship's clock was not functioning, and the compass was destroyed; the sextant and marine chronometer were missing. The only lifeboat on the Mary Celeste, a yawl located above the main hatch, was also missing. The peak halyard, used to hoist the main sail, had disappeared. A rope, perhaps the peak halyard, was found tied to the ship very strongly and the other end, very frayed, was trailing in the water behind the ship.

Popular stories of untouched breakfasts with still-warm cups of tea on the cabin table are untrue and most likely originated with fictionalized accounts of the incident, especially one by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At the inquiry, Oliver Deveau stated that he saw no preparations for eating and there was nothing to eat or drink in the cabin.

Deveau returned to his ship and reported to the captain. Two men, Charles Augustus Anderson and Charles Lund, then boarded the Mary Celeste. The cargo of 1,701 barrels of alcohol Deveau reported was in good order. However, when it was eventually unloaded in Genoa, nine barrels were found to be empty.

A six-month supply of uncontaminated food and fresh water was still aboard, and the crew's personal possessions and artifacts were left untouched, making a piracy raid seem extremely unlikely. It appeared the vessel had been abandoned in a hurry. There was no sign of a struggle, or any sort of violence.
As Dei Gratia was a Canadian vessel of British registry, Captain Morehouse sailed the Dei Gratia to Gibraltar, his first mate Oliver Deveau sailed the Mary Celeste to the same destination, arriving a week-and-a-half later. An investigation was held in the Vice Admiralty Court in Gibraltar to determine the circumstances of the Mary Celeste and apportion marine salvage rights.

During the sitting of the Vice Admiralty Court, the judge praised the crew of the Dei Gratia for their courage and skill. The Attorney General of Gibraltar, Frederick Solly—Flood QC, in his role as Queen’s Proctor to the court, deemed it necessary to appoint a commission of inquiry to investigate the vessel and determine the causes of its abandonment in the middle of the ocean. Copies of the several log entries were made. The inquiry lasted three months and attracted media attention worldwide.

The Mary Celeste was visited by John Austin, surveyor of shipping in Gibraltar, assisted by an inspector, John McCabe. A local diver and marine expert named Ricardo Portunato was sent to examine in detail the exterior of the hull on the behalf of the Vice Admiralty Court. Austin discovered what he believed to be a few spots of blood in the captain's cabin, an "uncleaned" ornamental cutlass in Briggs' cabin, a knife (without blood), and a deep gash on a railing that he equated with a blunt object or an axe, but he did not find such a weapon on board. Portunato believed the damage was recent.

The results of the commission of inquiry encouraged the authorities in Washington, D.C. to send instructions to all consuls and officers in their ports to report anybody matching the description of Briggs or other crew members of the Mary Celeste, or any group that could have landed sailors belonging to the Mary Celeste. Word was also sent to look for any of the items missing from the Mary Celeste, such as the two pumps or her navigation equipment. No information was reported. Locals at ports in the Azores were questioned, but none was able to provide assistance.

James Winchester considered selling the Mary Celeste after the mysterious events for which she was now notable. His mind was made up when the vessel claimed the life of his father, Henry Winchester-Vinters, who drowned in an accident in Boston, Massachusetts when she was brought back to America. Winchester sold the Mary Celeste at an enormous loss. Over the next 13 years, the ship changed hands 17 times. By then, the Mary Celeste was in very poor condition.

Her last captain and owner, identified as G. C. Parker, made no profit whatsoever and deliberately wrecked the Mary Celeste in an insurance fraud in the Caribbean Sea on January 3, 1885. She was loaded with an over-insured cargo of scrap, including boots and cat food. The plan did not work, as the ship failed to sink after being run on to Rochelais reef off the western coast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti and south of Gonave Island. Parker then tried to burn the wreck, but even after the fire the vessel remained intact, although the ship's log was destroyed along with Benjamin Briggs' prior entries in it.

Parker then filed an exorbitant insurance claim for a cargo that never existed; a subsequent insurance investigation revealed the fraud. Parker sold the salvage rights for $500, claiming that there were 125 casks of Bass ale on board, 975 barrels of herring and $1000 in cutlery among other items. None of these items were actually on board. The ship and its cargo was insured by five companies for a total of $34,000.

Captain Parker was arrested, and put on trial for barratry, or the intentional destruction of a vessel. At the time, the sentence for doing so was death, so despite the clear evidence of the fraud and of Parker's guilt, the jury deadlocked, with five of the twelve jurors refusing to send him to death. Jurors routinely refused to convict people of this crime due to the death penalty, and three years later, the law was revised so that it was no longer a capital offense.

Despite Parker's acquittal, nearly everyone indicted for actions related to the shipwreck went bust, and Captain Parker himself died three months later.

The partially burnt hulk of the Mary Celeste was deemed beyond repair and she was left to eventually slip off the shoal and sink.

Speculation and Theories about the abandonment of the ship in 1872

• Piracy
• Seaquake
• Explosion
• Mutiny
• Drunkenness
• Premature Abandonment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste

The strange art of computer scheduling

In computer science, scheduling is the method by which threads, processes or data flows are given access to system resources (e.g. processor time, communications bandwidth). This is usually done to load balance a system effectively or achieve a target quality of service. The need for a scheduling algorithm arises from the requirement for most modern systems to perform multitasking (execute more than one process at a time) and multiplexing (transmit multiple flows simultaneously).

The scheduler is concerned mainly with:

• Throughput - The total number of processes that complete their execution per time unit.
• Latency, specifically:
• Turnaround time - total time between submission of a process and its completion.
• Response time - amount of time it takes from when a request was submitted until the first response is produced.
• Fairness / Waiting Time - Equal CPU time to each process (or more generally appropriate times according to each process' priority). It is the time for which the process remains in the ready queue.

In practice, these goals often conflict (e.g. throughput versus latency), thus a scheduler will implement a suitable compromise. Preference is given to any one of the above mentioned concerns depending upon the user's needs and objectives.

In real-time environments, such as embedded systems for automatic control in industry (for example robotics), the scheduler also must ensure that processes can meet deadlines, this is crucial for keeping the system stable. Scheduled tasks are sent to mobile devices and managed through an administrative back end.
　

Types of operating system schedulers

Operating systems may feature up to three distinct types of scheduler, a long-term scheduler (also known as an admission scheduler or high-level scheduler), a mid-term or medium-term scheduler and a short-term scheduler. The names suggest the relative frequency with which these functions are performed. The scheduler is an operating system module that selects the next jobs to be admitted into the system and the next process to run
.

Long-term scheduling

The long-term, or admission scheduler, decides which jobs or processes are to be admitted to the ready queue (in the Main Memory); that is, when an attempt is made to execute a program, its admission to the set of currently executing processes is either authorized or delayed by the long-term scheduler. Thus, this scheduler dictates what processes are to run on a system, and the degree of concurrency to be supported at any one time - i.e.: whether a high or low amount of processes are to be executed concurrently, and how the split between input output intensive and CPU intensive processes is to be handled. In modern operating systems, this is used to make sure that real time processes get enough CPU time to finish their tasks. Without proper real time scheduling, modern GUI interfaces would seem sluggish. The long term queue exists in the Hard Disk or the "Virtual Memory".

Long-term scheduling is also important in large-scale systems such as batch processing systems, computer clusters, supercomputers and render farms. In these cases, special purpose job scheduler software is typically used to assist these functions, in addition to any underlying admission scheduling support in the operating system.
　

Medium-term scheduling

The medium-term scheduler temporarily removes processes from main memory and places them on secondary memory (such as a disk drive) or vice versa. This is commonly referred to as "swapping out" or "swapping in" (also incorrectly as "paging out" or "paging in"). The medium-term scheduler may decide to swap out a process which has not been active for some time, or a process which has a low priority, or a process which is page faulting frequently, or a process which is taking up a large amount of memory in order to free up main memory for other processes, swapping the process back in later when more memory is available, or when the process has been unblocked and is no longer waiting for a resource. [Stallings, 396] [Stallings, 370]

In many systems today (those that support mapping virtual address space to secondary storage other than the swap file), the medium-term scheduler may actually perform the role of the long-term scheduler, by treating binaries as "swapped out processes" upon their execution. In this way, when a segment of the binary is required it can be swapped in on demand, or "lazy loaded". [Stallings, 394]

　

Short-term scheduling

The short-term scheduler (also known as the CPU scheduler) decides which of the ready, in-memory processes are to be executed (allocated a CPU) next following a clock interrupt, an I/O interrupt, an operating system call or another form of signal. Thus the short-term scheduler makes scheduling decisions much more frequently than the long-term or mid-term schedulers - a scheduling decision will at a minimum have to be made after every time slice, and these are very short. This scheduler can be preemptive, implying that it is capable of forcibly removing processes from a CPU when it decides to allocate that CPU to another process, or non-preemptive (also known as "voluntary" or "co-operative"), in which case the scheduler is unable to "force" processes off the CPU. In most cases short-term scheduler is written in assembly because it is a critical part of the operating system. the short term scheduling is also known as cpu scheduling.
　

Dispatcher

Another component involved in the CPU-scheduling function is the dispatcher. The dispatcher is the module that gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short-term scheduler. This function involves the following:

• Switching context
• Switching to user mode
• Jumping to the proper location in the user program to restart that program

The dispatcher should be as fast as possible, since it is invoked during every process switch. The time it takes for the dispatcher to stop one process and start another running is known as the dispatch latency. [Galvin, 155].
　

Scheduling disciplines

Scheduling disciplines are algorithms used for distributing resources among parties which simultaneously and asynchronously request them. Scheduling disciplines are used in routers (to handle packet traffic) as well as in operating systems (to share CPU time among both threads and processes), disk drives (I/O scheduling), printers (print spooler), most embedded systems, etc.

The main purposes of scheduling algorithms are to minimize resource starvation and to ensure fairness amongst the parties utilizing the resources. Scheduling deals with the problem of deciding which of the outstanding requests is to be allocated resources. There are many different scheduling algorithms. In this section, we introduce several of them.

In packet-switched computer networks and other statistical multiplexing, the notion of a scheduling algorithm is used as an alternative to first-come first-served queuing of data packets.

The simplest best-effort scheduling algorithms are round-robin, fair queuing (a max-min fair scheduling algorithm), proportionally fair scheduling and maximum throughput. If differentiated or guaranteed quality of service is offered, as opposed to best-effort communication, weighted fair queuing may be utilized.
In advanced packet radio wireless networks such as HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access ) 3.5G cellular system, channel-dependent scheduling may be used to take advantage of channel state information. If the channel conditions are favourable, the throughput and system spectral efficiency may be increased. In even more advanced systems such as LTE, the scheduling is combined by channel-dependent packet-by-packet dynamic channel allocation, or by assigning IFDMA multi-carriers or other frequency-domain equalization components to the users that best can utilize them.
Scheduling algorithms include

• First in first out
• Shortest remaining time
• Fixed pre-emptive scheduling
• Round-robin scheduling
• Multilevel queue scheduling

　　

How to choose a scheduling algorithm

When designing an operating system, a programmer must consider which scheduling algorithm will perform best for the use the system is going to see. There is no universal "best" scheduling algorithm, and many operating systems use extended or combinations of the scheduling algorithms above. For example, Windows NT/XP/Vista uses a m ultilevel feedback queue, a combination of fixed priority preemptive scheduling, round-robin, and first in first out. In this system, processes can dynamically increase or decrease in priority depending on if it has been serviced already, or if it has been waiting extensively. Every priority level is represented by its own queue, with round-robin scheduling amongst the high priority processes and FIFO among the lower ones. In this sense, response time is short for most processes, and short but critical system processes get completed very quickly. Since processes can only use one time unit of the round-robin in the highest priority queue, starvation can be a problem for longer high priority processes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(computing)

Scientists Study an Immortal Jellyfish

There is this genuinely immortal jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii that lives forever. When threatened or damaged, it reverts to its primal form as a polyp and then regrows itself back into an adult jellyfish.

Nathanial Rich from the New York Times magazine has written a long and fascinating article about this rare phenomenon and the researchers who are looking into it. It was published in the Times on November 28, 2012.

Scientists themselves do not understand how this jellyfish ages in reverse. There aren’t many scientific experts on jellyfish. This particular creature is very hard to keep alive in a laboratory. But there is one Japanese scientist, Shin Kubota, who is able to keep these immortal jellyfish alive in his laboratory in Shirihama, a beach town in Japan.

Shirihama is a spot of natural beauty and curiousity that even includes natural saltwater hot springs. Kubota uses these springs and then heads off to the laboratory to take care of the rare jellyfish. He also writes papers for scientific journals, sings his own kareoke songs, and philosophizes about whether man is ready for immortality. He thinks we are smart enough to learn what these rare jellyfish are doing, but he wonders of the human spirit is still too violent and moody to embrace and profit from immortality.
It’s a fascinating story, found at this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-unlock-the-secret-of-immortality.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0