Birth of the Internet

A The story of the internet commences with two computers which were kept miles apart and were intended to send a message. The first-ever characters sent by the internet are recorded as 'LO'. The original message attempted was 'LOG IN', but the computer crashed just after sending LO, and the remaining letters were never sent. The world has been ever-changing since 29th October 1969 as the internet was born in Stanford Research Institute by establishing the first-ever link between computers on the ARPANET. The entire team of engineers was led by Leonard Kleinrock. At that time, he never thought that this discovery would change things forever connecting machines and thereby, people sitting right across the desk or across continents.

B  Experiments with computer networks started in the late 1960s with four computers. It was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). The project was initiated by the U.S. government to compete with Soviets who launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The four ARPANET computers were stationed at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, SRI International and the University of Utah.

C  In July 1961, Leonard Kleinrock published a paper on the Packet switching theory and then a book on the same subject in 1964. Both were the earliest documents on the subject. He also convinced Lawrence G. Roberts, an MIT researcher, to apply packet connectivity in place of conventional circuits for effective computer communication. In August 1962, J.C.R. Licklider of MIT was the first to give the idea of a worldwide computer network through a series of memos while discussing his concept of ‘Galactic Network’. This concept was the predecessor of the Internet of today.

D The other crucial step was to make computers ‘communicate’ with each other. To experiment this, Roberts and Thomas Merrill worked together in 1965. They established a connection between the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts and the Q-32 computer in California with the help of a low-speed dial-up telephone line. It was a small setup, but it gave birth to the first-ever computer network covering a large geographical area (WAN- wide area network).

E As a result of the experiment, Roberts realised that the time-shared computers could work reasonably well together, retrieving data and running programs as necessary on the remote machines, but the telephone system based on circuit switching was inefficient for completion of the job. This confirmed Kleinrock’s conviction of the requirement for the packet switching technique.

Most research of animal navigation

Most research on animal navigation has been carried out with homing pigeons, and this research over many decades has served only to deepen the problem of understanding their direction-finding ability. Navigation is goal-directed and implies that the animals know where their home is even when they are in an unfamiliar place, and have to cross unfamiliar terrain.

Homing pigeons can find their way back to their loft over hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain. Migrating European swallows travel thousands of miles to their feeding grounds in Africa, and in the spring return to their native place. Some dogs, cats, horses and other domesticated animals also have a good sense of direction and can make their way home from unfamiliar places many miles away.

Pigeons do not know their way home by remembering the twists and turns of the outward journey. Birds taken in closed vans by devious routes find their way home perfectly well. Similarly, birds that have been anaesthetized on the outward journey, or transported in rotating drums can also find their way home. Furthermore, they do not navigate by the sun, because pigeons can fly home on cloudy days and can even be trained to navigate at night. However, they may use the sun as a simple compass to keep their bearings. Although they use landmarks in familiar terrain, they can fly home from unfamiliar places hundreds of kilometres from their home, with no familiar landmarks. The sense of smell also does not aid navigation from a long distance, particularly when the wind is downward; but, it does play a part in their homing ability when they are near the familiar territory. 

Some biologists hope that the homing of pigeons might turn out to be explicable in terms of a magnetic sense. But even if pigeons have a compass-sense (which is not proven), this could not explain their ability to navigate. If you were taken blindfolded to an unknown destination and given a compass, you would know where north was, but not the direction of your home.

Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Have you ever thought about teaching the English language in a foreign country? It certainly is a feasible option for those who would like to spend an extended amount of time in a certain country, whose jobs require overseas experience, or who need to move to a country due to a family situation.

If you have ever wanted to spend some time in a foreign country, yet lack the funds to make this a reality, teaching English on the side can make your sojourn a kind of "working vacation". Suppose a family situation has resulted in you taking residence in another country. In that case, you can use this time to your advantage, gaining teaching experience while building up a small nest egg for such necessities as food, lodging, and possibly the return trip home.

Getting started is relatively easy, but does require that the candidate obtain either a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) or the more involved TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate in order to demonstrate the ability to speak and instruct students in the English language. There is also something called the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults), which is the Cambridge University equivalent of the TEFL.

The cost is about $US 2,300 for the TEFL. Much like with university degrees, cheaper options abound, especially online. However, as more and more overseas schools become aware of these buy-it-online certificate programs, it will not be worth even the paltry sum paid to these Websites if you cannot find employment later.

It will take approximately five weeks (about 130 hours) of classroom instruction time in order to obtain one of the aforementioned certificates. Most universities and community colleges offer TEFL or TEFL equivalent certificates. The courses address proper oral (speaking and listening) and non-oral (reading and writing) communication. You will not be required to know the language of the country to which you apply, and some foreign schools even forbid that the instructor speaks the local language.

Once you obtain your certificate, the fun begins. First, decide in which countries you would like to teach. You may already have a few candidates in mind; if so, research how much the respective schools pay per course and how adequately they handle such matters as housing, class-to-class transportation, teaching time slots, and work visas. Then, send out several resumes. Some certificate-granting colleges and universities will even help you out in this regard, offering career advice and resume writing workshops, for example.

At this point, acceptances to various overseas institutions may start coming in. However, before you sign on for a 10-month stint in Rome, read all the fine print. Find out just how much you will be paid for your services, whether your housing will be subsidized, and whether or not any travel will be required. Find out just how many rupees, or lire, or zloty you will spend just to do your job. If too many of these coins are required, then not only will you never make back the investment on your certificate, but working will actually put you in debt!

Many overseas English schools are notorious for underpaying their staff and for having draconian work policies. Some instructors report being paid as little as $US 15,000 a year, all while being required to teach, plan lessons, grade papers, travel from class-to-class (with gas in some countries costing over $US 5/gallon), and purchase and wear professional clothing.

The alternative to working under a school is to teach privately. However, you must have a loyal client base (or be able to set one up). This will require time and money for the making and posting of ads, both online and on paper. Your success (or lack thereof) will also depend a lot upon prior clients who give good referrals, as well as on current clients who actually show up to class.

When all is said and done, teaching English as a foreign language is a (semi) lucrative way to pay for an extended stay in a foreign country. You will need to be creative if you plan on making any additional money for yourself or others, however. Workload will vary depending upon how savvy you are in finding and negotiating with private clients. While teaching English will not necessarily make you rich, it will allow you to experience the world, appreciate different cultures, and not break your own bank account in the process.

Endangered Languages

To understand the terms ‘revival’ and ‘revitalisation’, first you have to understand the current state of these languages. Linguists have a variety of grim-sounding terms for languages with few or no native speakers. A language which has no native speakers (people who grew up speaking the language as a child) is called dead or extinct. A language which has no native speakers in the youngest generation is called moribund. A language which has very few native speakers is called endangered or imperilled.

Language revival and language revitalisation are attempts to preserve endangered languages. Of the 800 plus Amerindian languages, five hundred are endangered or worse. Most of the others are in Central and South America; in North America, only Navajo usage is increasing, and even the relatively healthy languages like Cherokee - spoken by 22,000 people - are threatened by low percentages of children learning the languages.

It is true that in the natural course of things, languages, like everything else, sometimes die. People choose, for a variety of valid social reasons, not to teach their children their own mother tongue. In the case of American Indian languages, however, the language drop-off has been artificially induced and precipitous, and just as with the human-caused endangered species crisis, it is worth doing something about it. Amerindian languages were deliberately destroyed, particularly in North America.

In the earlier days of European contact, Indians were separated from their linguistic kin and resettled hundreds of miles away with individuals from other tribes who couldn't understand each other. Historically, this is the single most effective way to eliminate minority languages (for obvious reasons). Even as recently as the 50s, Indian children were forcibly removed from non-English-speaking households and sent to boarding schools to be socialised. They were routinely punished there for speaking their languages, and Indian-speaking parents began hiding their languages in the hope of keeping their children in their houses or at least making school life easier for them. The percentage of Cherokee children being raised bilingually fell from 75% to 5% during the US boarding-school-policy days.

Other languages, with smaller user bases and no literary tradition like the Cherokees to buoy them, have died entirely. This was not a natural death. Existing linguistic communities do not normally lose their languages after losing a war, even after being conquered and colonised, the way immigrant groups do. The usual pattern is bilingualism, which may be stably maintained indefinitely. Most West Africans have been raised bilingually ever since colonisation there; so have many natives in South America, where the linguistically destructive policies used by the US and Canada were never implemented. In Paraguay, for example, more than 90% of the population is bilingual in Spanish and Guarani and has been for centuries.

Now that the Amerindian languages of North America are in the precarious situation simply leaving them alone will not cause their extinction trends to end. Once the majority of the young people in a community don't understand a language any more, its usage declines rapidly. This is where language revival is the resurrection of a dead language, one with no existing native speakers. Language revitalisation is the rescue of a dying language.

There has only been one successful instance to date of a complete language revival, creating a new generation of native speakers without even one living native speaker to help. That instance was the reincarnation of Hebrew in modern Israel, and there were many extenuating circumstances associated with it. However, there have been successful partial revivals, where a no-longer-spoken language has been revived as a second language sufficiently for religious, cultural, and literary purposes. There have also been successful language revitalisations, where languages in decline have recovered.

It may sound silly to say that the prestige of a language and the self-esteem of its speakers plays a pivotal role in revitalisation, but it has been proven again and again. Navajo, for instance, was in steep decline until the 40s, when the language, once deemed worthless, was used by the Navajo code talkers to thwart the Germans and Japanese in World War II. With Navajo's validity as a real, complex, and useful language suddenly nationally acknowledged, its usage shot up, and today this language, once on the brink of extinction, is in good health.

By inspiring the younger generations to take an interest and pride in their ancestral languages, and by providing the means for them to learn it, it becomes possible to reverse downward linguistic trends. However, the true revival of a dead language is something people are more reluctant to raise hopes about. Nevertheless, it is possible to revive such a language enough for children to have access to traditional literature, to use it for cultural and religious purposes, and even to speak it as a second language in a limited fashion.

It may be true that once a language is dead, it is gone forever, but some kinds of dead are clearly preferable to others. If the lost languages of the Americas can all be as dead as Latin, then that would be enough.

Changes in Industrial Britain 

The spread of railways stimulated communication, and Rowland Hill’s standardisation of postal charges in 1839 saw a boom in mail services. But this was nothing compared to the revolution of the telegraph. If you think the Internet is big then just imagine how much bigger it would seem if you had never before seen a computer or telephone. That’s what the telegraph was to the Victorians. If rail travel shrank the country, the telegraph crushed it. It opened in the 1840s and soon went stratospheric – within ten years exchanging telegrams had become part of everyday life. By the mid-1860s London was connected with New York, and ten years later messages could be exchanged between London and Bombay in minutes. 

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) 

The Penny Black

In 1840, the United Kingdom introduced the penny black, the first adhesive postage stamp issued anywhere in the world.

For many years the postal service in the U.K. had been a very expensive service for ordinary people to use. The costs were prohibitive, a single letter sometimes costing a working person’s full day’s wage. The postal system also had many strange anomalies, such as certain categories of mail going free (and therefore being paid for by the charges on others), newspapers going for nothing, most mail being paid for by the addressee rather than by the sender, and so on.

There were moves for postal reform for many years, until eventually these moves started gathering some force through the attention of many, amongst whom Rowland Hill is the best known, and Robert Wallace, MP for Greenock, was instrumental. The story is long and involved, but eventually, The Penny Postage Bill was passed by Parliament on 17 August 1839. Some basic elements of the plan were the lowering of postage rates for basic letters to one penny, the removal of certain idiosyncrasies, that prepayment would become normal, and the availability of printed envelopes, letter sheets, and labels to show prepayment. The “labels” were the penny black and twopence blue.

A bookseller and printer from Dundee, James Chalmers, holds a strong claim to be the actual inventor of the adhesive postage stamp. He is said to have been interested in postal reform from about 1822, and to have printed samples of his idea for printed gummed labels in August 1834. It seems that, although Hill also presented the idea of adhesive stamps, he was probably keener on the use of standard prepaid letter folders, such as were issued in 1840 using a design by William Mulready.

The new stamps went on sale on 1st May 1840 and were valid for postage from 6th May 1840 (although some were used during the 1st-5th May period). The Mulreadies were issued at the same time. Public reaction to these new items was quite the opposite to Rowland Hill’s expectations. The labels were well-received and admired; the Mulready design was lambasted and ridiculed. Initial supplies of the stamps were rushed through the printing and distribution process, but supplies soon caught up with requirements.

The stamps were printed in sheets of 240, engraved on steel plates, on gummed paper with a single small crown watermark on each stamp. Eleven different printing plates were used, and it is possible in almost every case to work out which plate any individual stamp was printed from by a few characteristics. Things like the positioning of the corner letters within their squares, the presence of the “O flaw”, which rays of the stars in the upper corners are broken at what points, and so on, can point to a correct plate identification, but more specialised literature is required in order to do this. Some plates are scarcer than others, plate 11 being the scarcest.

Every penny black stamp has letters in the lower two corners. These simply identify what sheet position the stamp occupied. When the printing plates were produced the lower squares were blank, and the letters were punched in by hand. The left square letter shows which horizontal row the stamp was in – the first row being A, the second B, and so on down to the twentieth row with T. The right square letter indicates the vertical column, again with A for the first column, B, C, and so on across to L for the last (twelfth) column. It should be noted therefore that each letter combination is just as common or as scarce as any other.

There were 68,158,080 penny blacks issued (yes, 68 million!), and even with only a 2% survival rate, there are likely to be about 1.3 million still in existence. The survival rate may well be considerably higher than 2%, as it should be remembered that in 1840 the use of envelopes was unusual, most letters being written, folded, and sealed with sealing wax; this meant that whenever a letter was filed in a lawyer’s office, bank, etc., the whole thing would be kept – letter and outer cover including the adhesive stamp.

From collector’s perspective, the physical condition of the stamp – any fault such as a thin, tear, crease, or stain will lower the value, and the number, size, and regularity of the margins make a big difference to value. The stamps were not perforated and had to be separated using scissors or a knife. As there was only about 1mm between one stamp and another, it was very easy to stray just a little and cut into the printed design of the stamp. A stamp with two full margins and perhaps a couple of other part margins is about average. Collectors will pay higher prices for examples with four good, wide, and even margins.

The Origin of Language

The question of the origin of language is one that has been raised and discussed repeatedly at least since the eighteenth century. Before that, it was supposed that language must have been part of God’s gift to Adam. There was a tradition of linguistic inquiry that sought to discover what original tongue it was that Adam spoke, but the question of how he came to be able to speak at all was not really raised

In the eighteenth century, especially in France, the idea that human characteristics could be accounted for by nature rather than by Divine gift, was widely discussed, and such figures as Rousseau, Condillac and Maupertuis, among others, attempted to show that language could have had natural beginnings or could have been invented by natural reason. There were some who countered this – for example, the Lutheran pastor Sussmilch who, in 1756, attempted to refute the arguments of Maupertuis that language was an invention by showing that its intricate and systematic patterning could not be the product of human reason alone but must have been the creation of God.

However, it was the German philosopher Herder who in 1772 won the competition set by the Berlin Academy of Sciences with an essay that refuted all arguments for a Divine origin of language. For a long time, his statement was considered to have settled the question

The nineteenth century saw the development of historical linguistics and, for a time, this seemed to give new life to the question of language origins. It was found that careful and systematic comparison of related languages could lead to a reconstruction of older languages of which they were descendants. In particular, much effort was expended in the reconstruction of Indo-European, the language proposed as ancestral to many languages of Europe and some of India. For a time it was thought that such historical work could lead to an understanding of the nature of earlier forms of language and perhaps, eventually, to an insight into its earliest form.

However, it soon became apparent that this was impossible. In reconstructing the ancestors of languages presently spoken it was realized that all you could do was to reconstruct versions of language which, though precedents for contemporary forms, were no different in principle from those that could be directly observed. It was realized that such reconstructions, whatever they might tell us about how specific languages change with time, could throw no light on the issue of how language came about in the first place.

Furthermore, as historical work proceeded and more and more languages were carefully examined, it appeared that the changes languages undergo with time, though to some degree lawful, were neither consistent nor progressive. It was not found, for instance, that older languages were simpler than contemporary languages, nor was it found possible to show that any of the various types of language proposed — such as ‘isolating’, ‘agglutinating’ or ‘inflecting’ — represented earlier or later stages in language development. In other words, the changes that languages were found to undergo with time were manifestly not to be accounted for by any clear process of evolution. The practitioners of historical linguistics, accordingly, abandoned any quest for a general theory of language development, and they gave up the idea that their work could throw light on language origins.

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the emphasis in linguistics had shifted from historical analysis to the analysis of the synchronic structure of languages. De Saussure’s argument that historical (diachronic) analysis was not relevant for understanding the organisation of a given linguistic system when considered in its use by a community of speakers had an important influence. In addition, Franz Boas and his pupil Edward Sapir, working in North America, showed that the languages of the Native Americans had to be understood in their own terms since they had grammars and sound systems that could not be comprehended in terms of systems derived from European languages.

This work helped to show that the languages of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples were just as complicated as the most sophisticated and modern of European languages and that there was no evidence for the preservation of earlier forms of language. The development of methods for describing the diversity of human languages became a major preoccupation for linguistics, and questions about the origin of the human capacity for language, or of how languages had evolved from earlier forms to those of the present, seemed less and less relevant. Speculation about language origins thus appeared worthless, for there was no evidence on which it could be based. Anyone’s guess was as good as another’s. The wastepaper baskets of London were perhaps, after all, the best destination for such imaginings.

The Halifax Explosion

Before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the largest-ever non-natural explosion had taken place in 1917 in the eastern Canadian port city of Halifax. With the outbreak of World War I, Halifax was effectively transformed into a boomtown. Convoys gathered weekly in Bedford Basin (the north-western end of Halifax Harbour) in order to traverse the Atlantic, and Halifax Harbour became heavy with vessels of one variety or another. This spike in boat traffic was not dealt with efficiently, and collisions became almost normal.

On December 1st, 1917, the French vessel Mont Blanc left New York in order to join a convoy in Halifax after being loaded with 226,797 kilograms of TNT (an explosive), 223,188 kilograms of benzol (a type of gasoline), 1,602,519 kilograms of wet picric acid (an explosive), and 544,311 kilograms of dry picric acid (another explosive). On December 6th, the Mont Blanc was ushered into Halifax’s harbour after the U-boat nets had been raised.

At the same time, the cargoless Norwegian ship, Imo, left Bedford Basin en route to New York in order to pick up relief items for transport to war-torn Belgium. Imo was behind schedule and attempting to remedy that. She passed a boat on the wrong side before sending a tugboat retreating to port. By the time she reached the Narrows, she was in the wrong channel and going too fast. The Mont Blanc sounded her whistle, but the Imo sounded back twice, refusing to alter course. At the last moment, the Mont Blanc veered, and the Imo reversed, but it was too late. From the gash formed in the French boat’s hull seeped a noxious spiral of oily, orange-dappled smoke. Mont Blanc’s crew rowed to shore on the Dartmouth side, but no one could decipher their warnings. Their fiery vessel then casually drifted toward the Halifax side where it came to rest against one of the piers.

This spectacle drew thousands of onlookers. People crowded docks and windows filled with curious faces. As many as 1,600 died instantly when the boat exploded. Around 9,000 were injured, 6,000 seriously so. Approximately 12,000 buildings were severely damaged; virtually every building in town was damaged to some extent; 1,630 were rendered nonexistent. Around 6,000 people were made homeless, and 25,000 people (half the population) were left without suitable housing.

The Halifax Explosion, as it became known, was the largest manmade detonation to date, approximately one fifth the ferocity of the bomb later dropped on Hiroshima. It sent up a column of smoke reckoned to be 7,000 metres in height. It was felt more than 480 kilometres away. It flung a ship gun barrel some 5.5 kilometres, and part of an anchor, which weighed 517 kilograms, around 3 kilometres. The blast absolutely flattened a district known as Richmond. It also caused a tsunami that saw a wave 18 metres above the high-water mark depositing the Imo onto the shore of the Dartmouth side. The pressure wave of air that was produced snapped trees, bent iron rails, and grounded ships. That evening, a blizzard commenced, and it would continue until the next day, leaving 40 centimetres of snow in its wake. Consequently, many of those trapped within collapsed structures died of exposure. Historians put the death toll of the Halifax Explosion at approximately 2,000.

Vancouver

Vancouver is quite different from virtually any other city in North America. Despite the fact it is a large modern cosmopolitan city, it seems to have a relaxed, small-town, close-to-nature feel about it. There is little comparison with other large Canadian cities such as Toronto or Montreal, which are more akin to the large eastern US centres like New York and Chicago. Vancouver, like all large North American cities, is a conglomerate of high-rise cubic office towers, although urban planners have kept the heights down. There are, however, some notable exceptions such as the Marine Building at the north foot of Burrard Street, once the tallest structure in the British Empire, the courthouse at Howe & Robson, and the library at Georgia & Hamilton.

Vancouver offers a wide range of attractions catering to all tastes but those with only a day to spare cannot be better advised than to take one of the many organised excursions recommended by the Vancouver Tourist Office.

Stanley Park, a 1,000-acre nature preserve, is Vancouver’s best-known landmark and a must for any visitor. It was established in 1887 and, in the opinion of many, is the most beautiful urban park in the world. Contrary to popular belief, this park was not established through the foresight of the city council of the day, but at the urging of a real estate developer called Oppenheimer. He is now considered the father of Stanley Park. All areas of the park are accessible to the public except for Dead Man’s Island, which has a small naval base.

The Eco Walk is a fun and informative way to see the park. The guide gives information on the trees, plants, birds and animals as well as on the rich aboriginal culture and legends of the park. The walking is medium paced, taking 3 hours to complete and covering 5 miles of relatively flat paved and gravelled trails over the selected seawall and forest paths. This walk is suitable for families, including active seniors.

There is also a world-class aquarium in the park and was the first to have killer whales in captivity and probably the first one to stop making them into a side-show. The aquarium feels the purpose of keeping the whales, namely re-educating the public and stopping the hunting of them, has been accomplished. In 2000, the last remaining killer whale at the aquarium was sold to Sealand in California, where it died shortly after arriving. The main threat to the park is the sheer volume of people who want to be in it. Efforts are being made to restrict the amount of automobile traffic passing through it. One of the ultimate goals is to eliminate the causeway leading to Lions Gate Bridge, but this will not likely occur until well into the 21st century.

Beaches are also a big attraction and temperatures are usually high enough to tempt most people to have a swim. However, one of the biggest days on these beaches is on New Year’s Day when the annual “Polar Bear Swim” attracts several hundred die-hard individuals out to prove that Vancouver is a year-round swimming destination.

Chinatown is North America’s third largest, in terms of area, after San Francisco and New York. It is steeped in history and is well worth walking around. It is most active on Sundays when people head to any of a wide selection of restaurants that offer dim sum. Chinatown also contains the world’s thinnest building at only 1.8 metres wide.