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Radio Weak Lensing Shear Measurement in the Visibility Domain - II. Source Extraction
M. Rivi1, L. Miller2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
2Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3RH, UK E-mail:
This paper extends the method introduced in Rivi et al. (2016b) to measure galaxy ellipticities in the visibility domain for radio weak lensing surveys. In that paper we focused on the development and testing of the method for the simple case of individual galaxies located at the phase centre, and proposed to extend it to the realistic case of many sources in the field of view by extracting visibilities of each source with a faceting technique, taking into account the contamination from the other sources. In this second paper we present a detailed algorithm for source extraction in the visibility domain and show its effectiveness as a function of the source number density by running simulations of SKA1-MID observations in the band 950-1150 MHz and comparing original and measured values of galaxies' ellipticities. Shear measurements from a realistic population of 104 galaxies randomly located in a field of view of 1 deg2 (i.e. the source density expected for the current radio weak lensing survey proposal with SKA1) are also performed. At SNR ≥ 10, the multiplicative bias is only a factor 1.5 worse than what found when analysing isolated sources, and is still comparable to the bias values reported for similar measurement methods at optical wavelengths. The additive bias is unchanged from the case of isolated sources, but is significantly larger than typically found in optical surveys. This bias depends on the shape of the Point Spread Function (PSF) and we suggest that a uv-plane weighting scheme to produce a more isotropic PSF could reduce and control additive bias.
gravitational lensing: weak - cosmology: observations - methods: statistical - techniques: interferometric
Cosmological or targeted surveys of weak gravitational lensing at radio wavelengths may have a relevant role in the next years, when the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)111https://www.skatelescope.org radio telescope will start to operate, providing a density of detected galaxies sufficient for shear measurement and a resolution to reliably measure their shapes. Radio observations have the advantage of a deterministic knowledge of the PSF and will provide unique approaches that are not available at the optical band, such as concurrent measurements of polarization and galaxy rotation velocities, that may be used to mitigate some of the astrophysical systematic effects such as intrinsic alignments. They may also be able to probe to higher redshifts given the different redshift distributions compared to the optical band (Brown et al., 2015) . Being subject to different systematics, cross-correlation with optical surveys will also allow suppression of systematic errors (Brown et al., 2015) , improving shear measurement accuracy. Precursor radio weak lensing surveys such as SuperCLASS222http://www.e-merlin.ac.uk/legacy/projects/superclass.html and VLASS333https://science.nrao.edu/science/surveys/vlass (Brown et al., 2013) are already underway and will soon provide data that may be used to test new methods required for galaxy shape measurement in the radio band. A natural approach for such methods is working in the visibility domain where the data originates and the noise is Gaussian, avoiding non-linear data manipulation of the imaging process. SKA simulations have already shown that current imaging methods produce images with structures in the residuals which may dominate the cosmological signal (Patel et al., 2015) . Also cross-correlation analysis using real data images shows that no evidence of correlation is found between the optical and radio intrinsic shape of the matched objects (Patel et al., 2010; Tunbridge et al., 2016) . This result suggests the presence of systematics in the procedure adopted for turning the visibility data into images, although a significant percentage of AGN sources in the observed population may be another possible explanation.
Currently, cosmic shear in the radio band has been successfully detected only working in the visibility domain but obtaining sources position from the image (Chang et al., 2004) . Galaxies' ellipticities from the VLA FIRST survey (Becker et al., 1995) were measured by decomposing them into shapelets, an orthonormal basis of functions corresponding to perturbations around a circular Gaussian invariant under Fourier transform (Chang & Refregier, 2002) . Since the number of resolved sources per beam is very small: ∼20−30deg−2, a joint fitting of the shapelet coefficients was possible by solving normal equations. Such an approach, computationally convenient, becomes very difficult when dealing with 104 sources per square degree, as expected from SKA Phase 1 continuum surveys (Brown et al., 2015) . Moreover shapelets introduce a shear bias as they cannot accurately model steep brightness profiles and highly elliptical galaxy shapes (Melchior et al., 2010) .
In Rivi et al. (2016b) , we presented RadioLensfit, an alternative method working in the visibility domain where model fitting is performed on a single source at a time using an exponential profile as model for the galaxy. It is an adaptation of the optical Bayesian lensfit method (Miller et al., 2013) to radio data, where model visibilities are defined analytically and the likelihood is marginalised over uninteresting parameters. The method was tested and the shear bias estimated as function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the simple case of individual galaxy visibilities, simulated with the SKA1-MID baseline configuration.
In this paper we extend this work implementing the method for extracting source visibilities from realistic data, i.e. when many galaxies are in the field of view. We estimate its effectiveness in terms of ellipticity fitting and shear measurement by running SKA1-MID simulations as we did in the previous paper. We finally investigate the effect of the PSF shape on the additive shear bias. This paper is organised as follows. In Section 2 we summarise RadioLensfit and present the extraction algorithm. In Section 3 details of SKA1 simulations are provided, while in Sections 4 and 5 results for galaxy ellipticity and shear measurements are presented respectively. Finally we discuss the shear additive noise bias in Section 6.
2 Overview of RadioLensfit
RadioLensfit is a method for measuring radio galaxy ellipticities in the visibility domain. The idea is to adapt the approach used in the optical case to radio data, i.e. extracting from visibilities and model fitting a single source at a time. Source extraction is difficult in the Fourier domain because signals from all sources in the beam are mixed altogether in the visibilities and sources are no longer localised. For this reason a joint analysis with the image domain may be needed: it allows us to identify sources and measure their position and flux with sufficient accuracy. With such information we can also compute a model of the observed sky and use it to approximate the signal from the other galaxies that must be removed when extracting each source. The extraction is completed using a faceting technique that phase shifts the phase centre to the source position and further reduces its signal contamination by averaging visibilities in a coarse grid. Finally the model fitting can be performed as for the simple case of a single galaxy in the beam located at the phase centre as summarised in Section 2.1. This way we can largely reduce the computational time when a huge number of sources are in the field of view (as for SKA) instead of trying a challenging joint fitting of all sources. A detailed algorithm for the fitting of many sources in the beam visibilities is presented in Section 2.2.
2.1 Galaxy ellipticity fitting
In Rivi et al. (2016b) we introduced this method as an adaptation of lenfit (Miller et al., 2013) by performing the chi-square fitting of single source visibilities. They are evaluated at the uv points, that are defined by the baselines formed between two antennae projected on the plane orthogonal to the pointing direction. Model visibilities of a star-forming (SF) galaxy are computed analytically as the Fourier transform of the exponential brightness profile (Sérsic index n=1):
V(u,v)=(λrefλ)βSλrefe2πi(ul+vm)(1+4π2α2|{A}−Tk|2)3/2, (1)
where k=(u,v)T is measured in wavenumber units, β=−0.7 is the assumed spectral index for the synchrotron radiation emitted by the galaxy disc, (l,m) and α are the source position and scalelength respectively, Sλref is the source flux at reference wavelength λref. The ellipticity parameters (e1,e2) are contained in the matrix A that linearly transforms the circular exponential profile to an ellipse:
{A}=(1−e1−e2−e21+e1). (2)
We assume the following ellipticity definition:
e=e1+ie2=a−ba+be2iθ, (3)
where a and b are the galaxy major and minor axes respectively, and θ is the galaxy orientation.
The likelihood is marginalised over non-interesting parameters such as flux, scalelength and position, adopting uniform priors for the flux and position and a lognormal prior dependent on the flux for the scalelength (Rivi et al., 2016a) . This way we get a likelihood function of only the ellipticity parameters. The galaxy ellipticity measurement is given by the likelihood mean point and 1D standard deviation (defined as the square root of the covariance matrix determinant), obtained after sampling the likelihood with an adaptive grid covering a neighbourhood around the maximum point.
In real observations the finite channel bandwidth and sampling time introduce smearing effects that are dependent on the source position (Bridle & Schwab, 1999) . These effects may be approximated analytically and included in the visibilities model (Chang et al., 2004; Smirnov, 2011) . For example for frequency smearing:
~V(u,v)=V(u,v)sinc[π(ul+vm)Δν/(ν0c)], (4)
where uv coordinates are taken at the mid-channel frequency ν0, Δν is the channel bandwidth and sinc(x)=sin(x)/x. Another option is to make the observation with very tiny frequency channels and sampling time intervals. Harrison & Brown (2015) proposed to use ∼30 kHz channel bandwidth and 0.5 s sampling time to make smearing tolerable, but meaning a huge number of uv points. In this case, raw visibilities may be averaged into a single uv grid without jeopardizing ellipticity measurements. In fact, observations from the same pair of antennae at different frequencies (resp. times) correspond to visibilities evaluated at different uv points along a radial (resp. tangential) direction, therefore these visibilities can be treated as the ones evaluated at uv points related to different baselines. Depending on the grid size, data volume and then computational time may be considerably reduced.
2.2 Source extraction
We assume flux and source positions are provided, for example they may be estimated from a cleaned image of the same data that are analysed, or applying MC methods to the visibilities (e.g. MultiNest444https://ccpforge.cse.rl.ac.uk/gf/project/multinest/). From this information we define an initial sky model where the visibilities of each source s in the field of view are computed according to equation (1) with ellipticity e=(0,0), i.e. circular source, and scalelength provided by the linear relation between the log of the median scalelength αmed and flux density S (Rivi et al., 2016a) :
ln[αmed/arcsec]=−0.93+0.33ln[S/μJy]. (5)
The sky visibilities are obtained adding the model visibilities of each source in the beam:
Vsky(u,v)=N∑s=1Vs(u,v). (6)
Starting from this sky model, the source extraction and fitting procedure is performed according to decreasing flux order, i.e. decreasing SNR, as follows:
Given the position of the source (l,m), remove the corresponding circular source model visibilities from the sky model and then take the difference between the data and the sky model, so that the visibilities of the current source (with a reduced contamination from the others) are extracted.
Apply faceting (Cornwell & Perley, 1992) : phase shift these visibilities in order to move the phase centre to the location of the source, by multiplying each visibility by the factor exp(−2πi(ul+vm)), and average them in a coarse grid (facet). This way we reduce the field of view to a small patch around the source, with the advantage of reducing the number of visibilities used for the model fitting and therefore accelerating the computation. On the other hand this procedure limits the maximum wavelength of Fourier mode that can be measured because of the finite spacing of the facet uv points.
Use the extracted source visibilities for measuring the corresponding source ellipticity as in Section 2.1.
Use the estimated ellipticity to improve model visibilities of the current source and remove them from the data.
Repeat from step 1 until all sources are fitted.
Note that in this algorithm the sky model is improved after each source fitting by replacing circular sources with the elliptical source that has been fitted. Moreover, by ordering the source extraction by decreasing flux, the source fitting is performed with a better approximation of the sky model for sources at low SNR.
In case of likelihoods that are too noisy555By noisy likelihood we mean likelihood functions not sufficiently smooth to provide a reliable measurement, due to PSF sidelobes or too noise in the data., corresponding sources are not removed in the first instance from the data and sky model visibilities, but they are re-fit at the end of the procedure when the ellipticities of all the other sources are measured and a better sky model is obtained. This happens when the computed likelihood has a too small standard deviation to be realistic. We refer to them as bad measurements.
3 SKA1 Simulations
As in the first paper, we simulate SKA-MID 8-hour observations of 1 square degree at declination δ=−30∘ by using the SKA-MID666SKA-MID latitude is -30°49′48.00″ S. Phase 1 antennae configuration provided in Heystek (2015) . This integration time provides a complete circular coverage, i.e. without large gaps (because of the 3 telescope arms), and allow to reach a sensitivity of 10μJy at 10σ. It would allow a targeted area of 800deg2 to be observed with such sensitivity in 10,000 hours in a forthcoming SKA1 radio weak lensing survey, sufficient for measuring cluster lensing.
Visibilities are sampled every τacc=60 s in the first 30% of Band 2, i.e. 950 - 1190 MHz, considering one large channel as we don't include smearing effects on shorter time and bandwidth scales. The observations are simulated by using equations (1) and (6) and adding an uncorrelated Gaussian noise whose variance is given by Wrobel & Walker (1999) :
σ2=SEFD22η2Δντacc, (7)
where Δν is the frequency channel bandwidth, SEFD = 400 Jy is the system equivalent flux density for SKA-MID antennas and η=0.9 is the system efficiency (Braun, 2014) . For simplicity we assume that the SKA1-MID core is composed of only SKA dish antennae even if part of it actually contains 64 MeerKAT dishes.
Source flux and scalelength are generated according to the distributions estimated in Rivi et al. (2016a) from the VLA-SWIRE radio source catalog. The modulus e of the intrinsic ellipticities is generated according to a function proposed by Miller et al. (2013) :
P(e)=Ne(1−exp[e−emaxc])(1+e)(e2+e20)1/2, (8)
but with the following parameter values: c=0.2298, e0=0.0732 and normalisation factor N=2.595, obtained by fitting data from the VLA-COSMOS 1.4 GHz survey (Tunbridge et al., 2016) . We generate SF galaxy populations with flux densities ranging between 10μJy and 200μJy. According to our flux distribution we obtain a source number density of 2.7 gal/arcmin2. To be consistent, we adopt this source number density in our simulation, although more accurate modellings from recent radio continuum surveys suggest that a higher source number density should be detected at such a flux density cut in real observations (Condon et al., 2012; Mancuso et al., 2017) .
4 Galaxy shape measurement
In this section, first we select the facet size to be used in the source extraction by simulating visibilities of individual sources. Then we simulate populations of galaxies located simultaneously in the field of view in order to show the efficacy of our source extraction algorithm as a function of the source number density.
4.1 Facet size
To minimise the number of sources falling in the same facet, we define a facet size dependent on source flux, as it is related to the size of the source. We split the flux total range of the simulated population, i.e. 10-200 μJy, in 7 bins. Facet uv point coordinates have to be re-computed only once per bin as the model fitting is performed according to source flux order. We chose larger bins at large fluxes because the sizes of such sources increase more gradually with the flux compared to the ones with low flux (see equation (5)). To estimate the facet size for each bin, we simulate raw visibilities of a single galaxy in the beam in order to avoid any source contamination effects, and vary the noise added to the visibilities (to have SNR ≥100) in order to see the effect of the source size only. We measure the galaxy ellipticity after averaging visibilities in the facet. A relatively large facet size is expected even for covering a single galaxy because of the source convolution with a large sized PSF (see Fig. 1). In fact the PSF corresponding to the original uv coverage, where uv points have natural weighting, has a broad, low-level plateau because uv points have short spacings close to zero, as they tend to spend more time per unit area near the uv origin. This means that a large contribution to the signal is from short baselines which must be adequately sampled.
Figure 1: Image of the PSF corresponding to our SKA1 uv coverage. Its FWHM is about 9 arcsec.
S [μJy]
n. cells
best-fit slope
600 0.9774±0.0025 0.9675±0.0025
Table 1: Facet size dependent on source flux range and corresponding best-fit slope for 1000 sources.
Figure 2: Best-fit line slopes for binned measurements of the ellipticity first component of 1000 individual galaxies randomly located in the field of view and with flux ranging between 10 μJy and 200 μJy. Left: facet size 600×600 for all sources. Right: facet size dependent on source flux.
The best-fit line slope for the ellipticity measurements of 1000 galaxies is computed for different facet sizes and source flux ranging between the flux bin bounds. We select the facet size when a fixed best-fit slope threshold of about 0.97 is reached, as listed in Tab. 1. Notice that the fitting for the first ellipticity component is better than the second one because of a slightly anisotropy of the PSF as discussed in Sect. 6. The selected facets size are consistent with the relation between the uv grid cell size Δu (in units of wavelengths) and the related field of view (in radians): f.o.v. = 1/Δu (Briggs et al., 1999) . We also noticed that for small sources (low flux) it is actually better to use smaller facet even in the case of single source in the field of view. This is shown in Fig. 2 where binned measurements of the first ellipticity component of 1000 galaxies, with realistic flux distribution in the range 10-200 μJy, are plotted both for the case where the facet size is constant and equal to 600 (top panel) and when the facet has a variable size dependent on the source flux (bottom panel). Similar plots are obtained for the second component. In the latter the number of bad measurements is about 3 times smaller and the best-fit slope of the two ellipticity components are 0.9552±0.0057 and 0.9426±0.0061 respectively, whereas for the case of 600×600 facet the best-fit lines slopes for the same galaxy population and noise is 0.9360±0.0056 and 0.9094±0.0059.
These results are due to the fact that we do not model exactly the beam because the model visibilities are directly sampled on the uv facet points. This means that in the image domain the sidelobes of the source model are not suppressed by any apodisation, whereas the gridding of the original uv coverage causes the full image to be apodised by a broad 2D sinc function which has the effect in the data of suppressing background sources that are a long way from the phase centre and the distant sidelobes from the primary source. The grid sampling causes the resulting image domain facet to become a small, but aliased version of the apodised image. The aliased model is an incorrect description of the apodised and aliased data, and the discrepancy will get worse for smaller facets. The bias this introduces might coincidentally offset some other bias such as noise bias, but such offsetting of biases is not robust to changes in the galaxy population or observing setup, so it is not desirable. We could improve the model by applying the same gridding operations as in the data (sampling on the original uv coverage and then averaging in the facet), but this will add a large amount of computational time. Our results show that the adopted model approximation is acceptable, provided that the facet sizes are sufficiently large to not affect the significant sidelobes in the image domain. Otherwise we expect the discrepancy between data and model to become severe and the biases may become less robust and hence less calibratable.
4.2 Dependency on source number density
We estimate the efficacy of the source extraction method by measuring the slope of the best-fit lines of galaxy ellipticity measurements as a function of the source number density. For each measurement we simulate sources located simultaneously in the primary beam according to a uniform distribution. Results are plotted in Fig. 3 and show reliable fits, independent of the source density up to 2.8 gal/arcmin2. In this case the best-fit line slope of the two ellipticity components are 0.9365±0.0017 and 0.9262±0.0017 respectively and the number of bad measurements is about 1%. At higher densities galaxy ellipticity measurement starts to deteriorate, as residuals of nearby galaxies affect the model fitting, but may still be good enough for shear measurement. Otherwise galaxies within facets, which will be a relatively small number, may be jointly fitted, making this approach more feasible. Joint fitting can be performed by applying the HMC technique (Neal, 2011) . Preliminary results with this method show a better accuracy in the galaxy ellipticity fitting, although requiring a much larger computational time (Rivi et al., in preparation). Results obtained with RadioLensfit can be used as starting points for the Markov chains in order to reduce the burn-in phase and accelerate convergence.
Figure 3: Best-fit line slope for both galaxy ellipticity components as a function of the source number density.
5 Shear
Following Rivi et al. (2016b) , for shear measurement we simulate a SKA1 source density as described in Sect. 3, corresponding to a population of 104 galaxies in a field of view of 1 deg2. We generate a population free of shape noise ( Nakajima & Bernstein (2007) ; Massey et al. (2007) ): for each ellipticity modulus, 10 equally-spaced galaxy orientations are generated so that the corresponding ellipticity values are distributed uniformly on a circle, and galaxies whose ellipticity is on the same ring are given the same size and flux. We generate sources randomly located according to a uniform distribution and compare results with the optimal case where each galaxy is at the phase centre and the only one contained in the field of view. All measurements are performed with faceting size dependent on the source flux as defined in Table 1.
Figure 4: Comparison of shear measurements: input values are blu points, measured values from single sources at the phase centre are green crosses, measured values from sources simultaneously in the f.o.v are black crosses. Left: SNR ≥10. Right: SNR ≥25.
single source
0.00932±0.00233 0.00497±0.00200
multiple sources
Table 2: Measured shear components for input g=0.
We measure the reduced shear g=g1+ig2 as the weighted average of the galaxies' ellipticities using weights that approximate the inverse-variance of each ellipticity measurement. Error bars are given by the standard deviation of the shear values estimated from 1000 bootstrap resamples. When no shear is applied, i.e. g1=g2=0, the shear measured in the optimal case of individual source visibilities and the real case of multiple sources in the field of view is showed in Table 2, considering the same galaxy population.
We repeat such a comparison for other input reduced shear values with amplitude g=0.04 and eight different orientations. The input shear g action on the intrinsic galaxy ellipticity es is simulated following Seitz & Schneider (1997) :
e=es+g1+g∗es, (9)
where g∗ is the shear complex conjugate. Results are plotted in Fig. 4, both for SNR ≥10 and SNR ≥25, where measurements from individual source visibilities are green crosses and the ones from the same population but with all sources simultaneously in the beam are black crosses. Clearly error bars (cross arms) are larger at SNR ≥10.
The measured shear bias, defined as
gmi−gi=migi+ci,i=1,2, (10)
is showed in Table 3. At SNR ≥10, the multiplicative biases mi for the two shear components are respectively 1.6 and 1.4 times the ideal case of a single source in the field of view, while additive bias ci are almost consistent.
SNR ≥10
−0.0904±0.0186 0.00655±0.00050 −0.1297±0.0171 0.00632±0.00046
−0.0348±0.0091 −0.00064±0.00024 −0.0473±0.0088 0.00076±0.00023
Table 3: Shear noise bias.
The source signal contamination by residuals of nearby galaxies is a new contribution to the shear bias that seems to have a larger effect on the multiplicative term, in fact it does not decrease much at higher SNR. This effect may be mitigated by refining ellipticity measurements by joint fitting within larger facets, as explained in Sect. 4.2. These bias values are comparable to the ones obtained from optical surveys using lensfit (Fenech Conti et al., 2017) and im3shape (Zuntz et al., 2017) ), where measurements calibration is required as discussed in Rivi et al. (2016b) . Currently the best method in the optical domain designed to calibrate standard shear estimators is Metacalibration ( Huff & Mandelbaum (2017) ; Sheldon & Huff (2017) ) which is used in the analysis of the Dark Energy Survey777https://www.darkenergysurvey.org (DES) (Zuntz et al., 2017) . This method applies a self-calibration at the time of the measurement which reduces the multiplicative bias in simulations to well below the percent level. It also isotropises the PSF to remove any additive bias. A similar approach may be implemented quite easily in the interferometer data analysis, with the advantage that for the additive bias at radio wavelengths we know the PSF much better than at optical wavelengths and we can make the PSF isotropic directly by weighting the uv-plane (as discussed in Sect. 6).
6 Additive bias dependence on the PSF shape
Figure 5: Left: PSF corresponding to the original declination (zenith). Right: PSF corresponding to a declination increased by 50∘, neglecting the earth rotation.
Figure 6: Shear additive bias as a function of the source declination. The zenith corresponds to δ=−30∘. Facet size fixed at 800×800. Left: SNR ≥10. Right: SNR ≥25.
It is well known from weak lensing optical surveys that shear additive bias is dependent on the PSF shape ( Miller et al. (2013) ). For radio interferometers the PSF is deterministically defined by the uv coverage of the telescope (i.e. antennae locations and pointing direction). For example, if we increase the antenna pointing declination of a given angle the PSF shape turns to be compressed along the y-axis (see Fig. 5).
We measure the additive noise bias for different source declinations at different SNR values. Starting from our uv coverage, we simulate the phase centre declination increment of an angle ϕ by rotating the uv plane about the u axis, therefore only v coordinates change as v′=vcos(ϕ). This is a simple and pessimistic approximation of this effect on the beam ellipticity because we should have also considered that in such a long integration time the source position is moving because of the rotation of the earth. We simulate individual source visibilities, to avoid nearby source contamination effects, and assume a constant maximum facet size 800×800 to ensure that the galaxy convolved with the PSF is entirely contained in the facet even when the PSF becomes highly anisotropic.
We observe that the additive bias is dependent on source sizes. In fact measurements at the same SNR obtained by lowering the noise instead of increasing the source flux cut, produce larger bias values, meaning that the additive bias worsens when source sizes decreases. This is consistent with the analysis presented in Massey et al. (2013) . Noise bias causes a correlation between measured shear and PSF ellipticity even when we correct for the PSF in the model fitting. This becomes noticeable at low SNR, where the first ellipticity component increases significantly towards larger negative values, as the PSF becomes more and more compressed along the y direction (see left panel of Fig. 6). At large SNR the additive bias almost disappears independently of the PSF shape (see right panel of Fig. 6). This is in good agreement with what we should expect. Because of our long integration time the PSF is not isotropic even when the declination equals the observatory latitude, as in the baseline simulation, besides the fact that the distribution of the SKA-MID baselines on the ground may not be circularly symmetric. Therefore a large additive bias is still measured at declination values closed to the zenith. Usually the PSF isotropy is controlled by the choice of the observation times, which are small time intervals distributed along the year. However this may not be sufficient to reach an additive bias acceptable for weak lensing surveys. To further reduce the noise bias at low SNR we also need to weight the uv plane to ensure that the PSF is more isotropic. A standard technique in radio imaging to improve PSF shape is to use tapering functions (Briggs et al., 1999) to define uv points weights, although a more specific weighting scheme may be required. Moreover, as for the multiplicative bias, we can calibrate the additive shear bias with simulations. This is more feasible than in optical surveys because the PSF is deterministic at radio wavelengths. However, any such calibration would be strongly dependent on distributions of source properties, so isotropising the PSF is a much better option.
Notice that when using variable size faceting, the facet size must be dependent not only on the source size but also on the PSF shape. In fact as the PSF becomes anisotropic the facet size may become too small relative to the size of the source modifying the effective shape of the source. For example the left panel of Fig. 7 shows what happens at SNR ≥10 when we maintain the same flux dependent facets size (Table 1) for all pointing declinations: at large zenith distances the shortest baselines occupy smaller uv frequencies and therefore can measure wavelengths longer than the limit imposed by a the small facet size used to extract the majority of the galaxy population. If we increase the facets size according to the source declination we obtain consistent results with the case of one single large facet (see right panel of Fig. 7).
Figure 7: Shear additive bias at SNR ≥10 as a function of the source declination. The zenith corresponds to δ=−30∘. Left: facets size dependent on source flux according to Table 1 for all declinations. Right: facets size increased with source declination.
We have extended the presentation of the RadioLensfit method, introduced in Rivi et al. (2016b) for the simple case of individual galaxies located at the phase centre, to the real case where many galaxies are randomly located in the field of view. This has been done by extracting the visibilities of each source and shifting the phase centre to the source position so that a coarse grid can still be used to accelerate ellipticity measurement computation. Source extraction has been performed by removing from the data the simulated visibilities of the sky model, but the source of interest, given position and flux of all sources in the beam from the image, and down-weighting what remains of nearby sources contamination by averaging visibilities in the coarse grid (facet). For gridding we adopted a natural weighting to maximise sensitivity and estimated the smallest facet size dependent on source flux thresholds in order to minimise the number of nearby galaxy included in the grid.
We tested the source extraction procedure simulating visibilities of SF galaxy populations observed by SKA1-MID in the 30 per cent of frequency Band 2. We adopted flux and scalelength parameters distributions estimated from the VLA SWIRE catalog and used lensfit ellipticity prior with coefficients fitted from VLA COSMOS catalog.
We showed the efficacy of our source extraction algorithm as a function of the source number density, obtaining a reliable galaxy ellipticity fitting for the density expected from the current proposal of the SKA1 radio weak lensing survey. Shear measurements from 8-hour observation of one square degree show that the bias due to the extraction procedure mainly affects the multiplicative bias as no significant change has been observed for the additive bias when comparing with the bias obtained for the ideal case of a single source at the phase centre at a time. This bias may be mitigated by a second step in the galaxy ellipticity measurement, where a joint fitting within the facets is performed with HMC, starting from the values obtained with RadioLensfit. However multiplicative shear calibration is also required as for the optical domain.
We finally observed that because of our uv coverage the PSF is slightly anisotropic even if pointing close to the zenith, therefore we obtain a large additive bias. Although a suitable choice of the integration time (split and distributed along a longer period of time) actually reduces the PSF anisotropy, a uv weighting scheme may still be required to satisfy weak lensing requirements.
We thank Tom Kitching for useful discussions and Ben Tunbridge for providing the distribution parameters of our ellipticity prior, obtained by fitting VLA-COSMOS data as for the prior function presented in his paper.
MR acknowledges the support of the Science and Technology Facilities Council via an SKA grant. LM acknowledges STFC grant ST/N000919/1.
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What Exactly is Book Art?
The number of personal and public libraries found scrolling through our blog will tell you: Rakks is a huge supporter of books. We are art supporters, too and we are proud to be in many of the countries most prestigious museums, in both public spaces and playing a supporting role in their offices and workspaces.
This latest project is the Minnesota Center for Book Arts retail shop. When designer Katy Dale (Associate AIA) contacted us about this project, we knew it was right up our alley.
Book Art is a genre that capitalizes on the artistry found in centuries of bookmaking and creates an interdisciplinary form of modern art. Book Art is what the title says it is—art composed of books. Though, defining it any further proves just as complicated as finding a definition for art itself. The book is a contained narrative that serves as a multi-faceted method of communication. Turning a book into Book Art involves utilizing the form of the book.
While its roots reflect the avant-garde movements of Constructionism, Futurism, and Surrealism, the form began to reach recognition as a distinct genre in the 1970s. The Center for Book Arts in New York opened around this time, becoming the first institution to study and teach Book Art. The genre's lack of concrete definition has rendered it limitless. Book artists are incredibly skilled and, in the art world, their work is unfortunately underrepresented.
What is the Minnesota Center for Book Arts?
The founders of the MCBA aimed to elevate Book Art in the art world so it could receive the recognition it deserved. They dreamed of providing an accessible space for existing book artists to practice their craft while educating the next generation about process and history. So, in 1985, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts opened. Minnesota Center for Book Arts joined with The Loft Literary Center and Milkweed Editions to become a founding tenant of Open Book, the first comprehensive literary and book arts facility in the nation. The renovated and reinvigorated century-old building was the first cultural landmark of the Minneapolis downtown riverfront, which is now also home to the Guthrie Theatre, Mill City Museum, MacPhail Center for Music and Gold Medal Park. Open Book creates a lively destination for a diverse public interested in books, book arts and literary endeavors of all kinds.
The center's vision is to create the world where "book art is created, cultivated, celebrated, and understood as a vital and lasting expression of culture." Equipped with everything from studios to a reference library, the MCBA serves upwards of 70,000 patrons a year. The center leaves no demographic untapped; all walks of life and skill levels are welcome. The classes found at the MCBA are truly one-of-a-kind, allowing for everyone from K-12 students to "life long learners".
In the spirit of keeping Book Art accessible, artists' books are available for purchase at the Shop at MCBA. The shop offers utterly unique gifts for the book-lover or writer in your life. Designer, Katy Dale (Associate AIA) from Christian Dean Architecture, specified the Rakks Shelving System for the shop.


Likely all four sets are produced by the same artist.
Do you see something strange on stamps of Mauritius ?
The Mauritius stamps don't have the QEII effigy, but then they have been a republic since the late 60's, even though still part of the Commonwealth, I think.
www.norvic-philatelics.co.uk/2009/02a-charles_darwin_200.htm I still have some of that issue for use (I am primarily a stamp user)... I really should treat myself to a new scanner (last one died in spring or earlier, I can't remember).
Both sent inside of water protected bag, e.g.
These stamps. as well as many others issued in 2009 in order to commemorate both the 200th Anniversary or bicentenary of the birth of the greatest naturalist in history, Charles Robert Darwin, and the 150th Anniversary of the publication of his most famous work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
beautiful! Thank you for posting them!
All four sets above are commemorate Darwin's visit on these islands and shows various occasions of Darwin's journey on HMS Beagle.
The unusual on the stamp of R2.50 is the face of Darwin. If you look closer, you can see the white man seating on the elephant - I suppose he is C. Darwin.
However at the time when he made his journey he didn't had any beard and mustache - looks much younger, as depicted on stamps from another 3 sets.
Moreover, look on the form of the beard and moustache there. It different from well known face of Darwin, depicted on 25c stamp.
I think Darwin went many other places in the world besides the Galapagos, and I think he made several trips there.
paleophilately as a major interest!
And yes, I believe his beard looks much fuller and fluffier - with sideburns - in the first of the four stamps.
Thank you for the enlargement!
Darwin has indeed a trip on an elephant by his stay on Mauritius island. The elephant was provided him by governor of the islands who got the elephants as present from some Indian Maharaja.
Louis Braille, who born on the same year as Darwin (1809), and who was the inventor of a system used by the blind people for reading and writing, on the second.
I wonder if there is any "Wedgwood" pottery commemorating Darwin! Or how about a cover with Josiah Wedgwood and Darwin together....? Related!
He looks to gloomy, isn't it ?


Got a Party to Throw? Can We Come!?
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Bright Pinks comparison: Jeweled Magenta, Pink Paradise, Raspberry Glo, Vintage Pink Paris Pink, and Pow Pink.
Pink Paradise to Paradise Move Tank. The pinks look similar. I need to remember to take this tank to the store with me to compare to the other solid Pink Paradise tanks.


text:
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A Hallucinatory Travelogue: Ahmad Saidullah on Mohamed Mansi Qandil's Moon Over Samarqand
Posted on January 1, 2010 by Daniel Casey
Mohamed Mansi Qandil, Moon Over Samarqand, trans. Jennifer Peterson, The American University in Cairo Press
Mohamed al-Mansi Qandil was born in 1949 in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, a town in the Nile delta. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine at Mansoura University in Egypt who has written short stories, novels and children's books. One of his short story collections won the State Incentive Award in 1988. His Moon Over Samarqand, which won the Sawiris Foundation Award in 2006, sweeps the reader into a whirlwind of adventures and stories that lead to a discovery of the truth and histories of the protagonists and their countries.
Qandil works as a literary critic and travel writer for the pan-Arabist magazine al-'Arabi in Kuwait. He had visited Uzbekistan to develop travel features on Central Asia for al-'Arabi. The trip yielded materials for what in the beginning of Moon Over Samarqand reads like a hallucinatory travelogue. This quest novel, which is made up of three parts, moves forward like a detective story by going back in time.
In the opening pages, Ali, a young Egyptian man, has hired a taxi to Samarqand where he hopes to meet General Rashidov, a family friend, to get some answers about his father's death. The taxi driver Nurallah, modelled on a real cabbie that Qandil met on his travel assignment, turns out to be a sufi from Mir Arab, the largest madrassah in Central Asia that's been raided and closed by the Soviet authorities. This "Don Juan from Mir Arab," as a Soviet commissioner calls him, is on the run. The taxi ride is highly eventful and Ali despairs of reaching his destination.
Ali's and Nurullah's stories have parallels. Both have survived armed raids. In Ali's case, it was a purge of an islamicist militant cell in the Cairene university where he was a student. Planned by Ali's father, a high-ranking military intelligence officer in Sadat's government, the raid resulted in Selma, one of Ali's closest friends, being arrested.
For a few decades, Egypt and the USSR had shared close economic and military ties which find expression in the novel. Ali's father's ideals had been betrayed by the realpolitik of the Egyptian president who had him killed but not before he had confided in an Uzbeki army colleague. Ali goes to Uzbekistan to speak to this confidante, the Soviet general Rashidov, the starting point of the novel. We also learn that the taxi sheikh Nurallah had served under Ali's father in Egypt.
This is not surprising. Like many African and Asian countries that emerged from the shadows of monarchism, feudalism and colonialism, Egypt had marched with the Soviets and nonaligned movement on a socialist path to nationhood. Qandil has set his novel in the "sad, dilapidated remains of those long days of socialism, and the dreams of equality that became a nightmare." Ali's and Nurallah's journeys are microcosms of the USSR and Egypt where religion, particularly Islam, has been at odds with the state for a long time. (Lenin had dismissed yearning for a religious state as "bourgeois nationalism.")
The novel explores the power struggles between authoritarian states and oppositional currents during the Uzbeki Soviet era and Nasser's and Sadat's reigns in Egypt. Although Russia had claims over Central Asia as early as 868, the Soviet annexations were supported by specious Marxist arguments about oriental despotism, the Asiatic mode of production, and the backward nature of Islam. During World War II, Stalin moved factories from western USSR to the Uzbek SSR to protect them. He also exiled certain ethnic groups thought to have collaborated with the Axis powers from other parts of the USSR to the Uzbek SSR which shifted the balance of the population. Although much of the Silk Road came under Stalinist and Maoist rule, vibrant cultures survived and flourished.
The Russian thinker Vitaly Naumkin noted that "Islam has served as a symbol of identity, a force for mobilization, and a pressure for democracy" in that region. Moon Over Samarqand's opening pages reminded me of the great Yugoslavian writer Meša Selimovič's novel Death and the Dervish, which commented on the suffering under the Turkish occupation. Unlike Selimovič, though, Qandil is taken with the figure of Sayyid Qutb who began his career in literature — he helped Naguib Mahfouz with his writing — before he became an Islamic ideologue and scholar and an inspiration to the extremists that Ali's father seeks to eradicate.
It is important to understand the context of Qandil's fascination for this multifaceted figure. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the failure of pan-Arabism under Nasser, and the impoverishment of the state accompanied by widespread corruption among the elite led to mass disillusionment in Egypt. Disaffection grew sharpest among the militant followers of Qutb, who was executed by General Nasser. Qutb's followers have been preparing for a takeover of a state that they think has become too westernized and beholden to western interests.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt was spurred by the growing westernization of Egypt which, under Sadat and Mubara'k, has become for many of the disaffected a US client state. Qandil's preamble, with its elegies on idealistic faith and dogma crushed by brutal regimes, includes a lament for Qutb who founded the Muslim Brotherhood and inspired al-Qaeda terrorists. I almost stopped reading what seemed to be an uncomfortably tractarian Ikhwan apology but, happily, the novel turns out differently.
Part of its success may have to do with the diversity of the various locales and the cultures and stories that emerge. In Qandil's book, a character asks someone: "I know you're a Soviet Muslim, but which kind are you Tatar, Kazakh, Bashkir, Chechen, Uzbek, Tajik, Circassian, or a Russian in disguise?" It would be interesting to study how Tolstoi, Pushkin, Lermontov and other writers used Central Asian lore and stories, how they depicted those cultures, and the orientalizing role Russian literature played in legitimizing Soviet occupation of the region, particularly over the Muslim republics. The leading Soviet cultural theorist Plekhanov valorized the culture of the White race, views that were certainly used to justify the subjugation of different Central Asian cultures.
In his Memoirs of the Aksakov Family, Sergei Aksakov wrote about a housekeeper who had returned after a long gap: "Pelagéya brought with her a remarkable gift for fairy tales, of which she knew an immense number. It is obvious that natives of the East have imparted to the Russians at Astrakhan a strong taste for hearing and telling these stories." These are the fund of stories Qandil re-presents in his opening section. We encounter legendary tales and exotica about gypsies, Jews, Mongol khans, criminals, islamic activists, and madmen, of magic, treasure, and love all blended with the modern-day telling. While the mix is interesting, the novel is on surer ground when the book shrugs off its religious garb and when the action shifts to a grounded present or later to Cairo.
The writing is most effective in family scenes and stories. The old general Rashidov and his wife ask Ali to rescue their runaway daughter Nadia but he is unable to prevent the death of the Nadia he's met, a prostitute and a drug user. Fortunately, Rashidov's daughter turns up safe. In Cairo, Ali learns that Fayza al-Tuhami, a girl that he is attracted to and who paints mutilated figures, is being sexually abused by her father while her mother refuses to acknowledge the rapes. The last days of Ali's father are similarly powerfully told.
Ultimately, Qandil's book is about fathers, strong leaders and patriarchs, which in autocratic countries is often a political allegory, who betray their sons and daughters. Ali feels he has not done enough to save his father who had also exploited him and put him and his university friends at risk in the raid. Nurallah is similarly ambivalent about his friend and mentor Lutfullah from Mir Arab whom he tries to protect. Ali's own quest comes at the end when he rescues Nurallah. He bribes the policemen who are bent on beating Nurallah to death and, with his redemption, they "drive onward, without a windshield, without headlights, through the pitch-black night and the open steppe lands, not knowing to which city we're heading."
The Egyptian novelist Mohamed Al-Makhzangi wrote: "When I read the manuscript of Qamar 'Ala Samarqand [Moon Over Samarqand], I found myself carried away by the lyricism of this astonishing work of fiction, which weaves past with present in a manner resembling that of the cinema. Nurallah, the novel's protagonist, in particular is unforgettable, dealing in extreme emotions but showing a wisdom that comes from the heart. This novel is written with real distinction." Perhaps, some of the lyricism has been lost in English but, despite a few bumps in the beginning, Moon Over Samarqand occupies a worthy place among AUCP's distinguished list of novels translated from the Arabic.
This entry was posted in Fiction Review and tagged Ahmad Saidullah, American University in Cairo Press, Jennifer Peterson, Mohamed Mansi Qandil, Moon Over Samarqand. Bookmark the permalink.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Jayadeva fou un poeta en sànscrit del segle XIII que forma part del cànon literari de la literatura hindú. La seva obra més famosa, Gita Govinda ("el cant del pastor"), narra els amors dels déus del panteó hinduista en un text que inspira les danses rituals per honorar-los. Escrigué també himnes sacres. La inspiració general és la natura i recorda l'aire bucòlic dels poemes llatins clàssics o les novel·les pastorils europees, ja que el paisatge provoca encontres amorosos i l'exaltació de la bellesa del món.

Biografia
Jayadeva era de casta brahman. La data exacta del seu naixement es desconeix.

Lloc de naixement
Al Guita-govinda, Jayadeva diu que va néixer al poble de Kindubilva. A l'Índia hi ha tres localitats amb el nom Kenduli:

 Kenduli Sasan, prop de Puri (a l'actual Estat d'Orissa).
 Mithila Kenduli (a Mithila)
 Jayadeva Kenduli, no trobat (a Bengala Occidental).

La vida de Jayadeva està relacionada amb els reis del segle XII de l'Estat d'Orissa.

Al segle XIX, el poeta bengalí Banamali Das va afirmar que Jayadeva havia nascut a un poble anomenat Kenduli, a Birbhum (Bengala Occidental). S'ha demostrat que no existeix cap poble anomenat Kenduli en aquesta zona.

El poeta singalès George Keyt, en el seu llibre Song of love (publicat a Nova Delhi per Hindi Books) afirmava que Jayadeva va ser el poeta de la cort de Laksman Sen, un rei de Bengala que va regnar entre el 1178 i el 1206.

Aquestes dades contradiuen l'opinió de la majoria dels escriptors i estudiosos indis, que opinen que el poeta va néixer a un poble anomenat Kenduli o Kenduvillva, situat a la vora del riu Prachi -a pocs quilòmetres de Puri, la famosa seu krixnaísta de l'Índia, i famosa també pel temple del Senyor Jáganat-. Els estudiosos es basen en les següents evidències:

 Késhava Misra, un erudit maithili, en el seu llibre Alankar Sekhar, va afirmar que Jayadeva era el més gran dels poetes i erudits que havien adornat l'Utkal Bhupati Sabha (l'associació de la regió de Odissa).
 El poeta maithili Chandradutta, en el seu llibre Bhakti-mala, escrit en sànscrit, va afirmar que Jayadeva era un utkal braman (un sacerdot) i vivia a prop de Puri.
 El 1585, Navoyí de Gwalior va escriure un llibre anomenat Bhakti-mala en hindíi on esmenta que Jayadeva era un poeta de l'antiga Utkal (Orissa).
 El poeta Majipati de Majarastra, en el seu llibre titulat Bhakti Vijaya, esmenta que Jayadeva va néixer a Kenduvilla (Kendubillwa), prop de Puri.
 El Kula-Dipak, un llibre escrit en assamès, afirma que Jayadeva era d'Utkal.
 Pandit Mallagi Suryanarayan Shastri, un estudiós d'Andhra Pradesh, al seu llibre titulat Sanskrit poets biography esmenta que Jayadeva va néixer a Kendubillwa, prop de Jagannath Kshetra Utkal.
 En 1365, Jaridás Jirachanda de Maharashtra va admetre en el pròleg d'un llibre editat per ell en maratí, que Jayadeva havia nascut prop de Srikshetra (Puri), al poble de Kendubilwa.
 El Dr. Parasuram Chaturvedi, un crític de la literatura hinduista, en el seu llibre Uttar Bharat Ki Santh Parampara (escrit en hindí) va esmentar que el poeta Jayadeva pertanyia a Utkal.
 Un temple de Bardhaman (a Bengala Occidental) es diu que és el lloc de naixement de Jayadeva. No obstant això actualment s'ha descobert que va ser construït durant el govern de la reina de Burdhaman el 1683; Jayadeva va viure cinc segles abans.
 Al temple de Jagannath Puri hi ha una inscripció del segle XII que esmenta clarament que abans de retirar-se a dormir, el Senyor Jagannath escoltava el Guita-govinda del poeta Jayadeva.
 Segons l'almanac Madala, el poeta Narasinja Dev va ser qui va introduir la recitació del Guita-govinda al temple de Jagannath.
 Durant el regnat del rei Purusottama Dev es va intentar canviar el Guita-govinda-seva (servei de [lectura del] Guita-govinda) en el temple de Jagannath. No obstant això aquest canvi no es va dur a terme perquè no va obtenir prou reconeixement. Llavors el rei Prataparudra Dev, que va viure en l'època de Chaitania a principis del segle XVI, va fer registrar una inscripció a la porta Jaia-Viyaia del temple.

Registres històrics sobre la vida de Jayadeva
Recentment s'han descobert inscripcions als temples de Linga Rash, Madhukésuar i Simja-Chal. Han estat llegits i interpretats pel Dr. Satyanarayan Rajaguru i han aportat informació sobre la vida de Jayadeva. Aquestes inscripcions narren com Jayadeva va ser un dels mestres de l'escola de Kurmapataka, i que podria haver estudiat allà. Sembla que després de l'educació primerenca a Kenduli Sasan se'n va anar a Kurmapataka, on va adquirir experiència en la poesia, la música i el ball.

El primer esment que trobem de Jayadeva fora d'Orissa el va escriure Chand Bardaï, el poeta de la cort del rei Prithviraj Chauhan. La següent referència més antiga fora d'Orissa es troba en una inscripció del rei Sarangadev de l'any 1201. Aquests registres estableixen que el Guita-govinda es va fer popular a tota l'Índia poc després de la seva composició, potser perquè es va representar regularment al temple de Jágannath, a Puri (Orissa).

Alguns detalls addicionals sobre Jayadeva s'han obtingut a partir d'un llibre del poeta orissa krisnaísta Madhava Patnaik, que va ser contemporani del sant ballarí Chaitania (1486-1534). El llibre de Madhava Patnaik (que va ser trobat en tres fulles de palma a principis dels anys 80) dona compte clara de la visita de Chaitania a Puri. Esmenta que Chaitania va visitar Kenduli Sasan, prop de Puri, per retre homenatge a Jayadeva i per cantar passatges del Guita-govinda. El llibre esmenta que Kenduli Sasan era, de fet, el lloc de naixement de Jayadeva. El llibre de Madhava Patnaik també dona compte de la vida primerenca de Jayadeva i de les llegendes al voltant de Puri. Esmenta que Jayadeva va sobresortir en el seu estudi dels Purana des de la primera infància.

Vida i obres
Els pares del poeta eren Bhoyadeva i Ramadevi. A partir de les inscripcions en els temples ara se sap que Jayadeva va rebre la seva educació en la poesia sànscrita en un lloc anomenat Kurmapataka, possiblement prop de Konark, a Orissa.

Jayadeva es va convertir en braman mendicant vagabund, i probablement va visitar Puri en algun moment. Allà, segons la tradició, es va casar amb una ballarina anomenada Padmavati. Aquesta versió, però, no l'admeten ni els primers comentaristes ni els estudiosos moderns.

Guitá-Govinda
La seva obra més important és el Guita-govinda (c. 1180), sobre les aventures amoroses del déu adolescent hinduista Krixna amb la pastora Radha. La importància del text rau en el fet que Radha apareix com a més important que el propi Krishná. Aquesta doctrina va penetrar en els moviments Bhakti a partir d'aquest moment.

Contribucions literàries
En el seu poema Dasa-Kriti-krite, Jayadeva va popularitzar el concepte dels Dasavatara (10 encarnacions' del déu Vixnu), que ja existien a Orissa des del segle VII aproximadament, i es tornarien immensament populars dins l'hinduisme. Va prendre aquesta idea de la llista de 24 avatars principals que apareixen en el Vixnu-purana.

També va popularitzar la clàssica postura Tribhangi ( "tres doblecs" a les cames, la cintura i els braços) de Krixna tocant la flauta.

Ell també va institucionalitzar el sistema devadasi. Les devadasis ("esclaves de Déu") eren ballarines que realitzaven danses eròtiques especialment dedicades a l'estàtua de Krixna al temple. Com a conseqüència de les obres del gran poeta, els temples orissa van començar a incorporar dins dels seus recintes un nata-mandir (saló de dansa) separat, per a espectacles odissi. Aquest sistema va existir en els temples d'Orissa fins a 1955.

Llegat
Tres segles després de la seva mort, el religiós sikh Guru Nanak (1469-1539) va conèixer les seves obres a Puri, i va decidir incloure dos himnes religiosos atribuïts a Jayadeva al Guru-granth-sajib, el llibre sagrat de la religió sikh, compost entre finals del segle XV i 1708.

Referències

Escriptors indis
Poetes indis
Literatura sànscrita
Persones de Bengala Occidental
Persones d'Orissa

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Every once in a while, a nation chooses to display its strength as a reassurance to the citizens it houses, aptly called a flag march, where various streams of security forces parade in all their glory and finesse. These times of recession urged six artists to display their show of strength titled, 'Flag March' with a similar intent of reassuring the art world, at the newly opened Art Gate gallery, reviews Sushma Sabnis.
Conceptualized and organized by artist Tathi Premchand, the show he believes is a 'flag march for safe investment in art'. Six eminent and upcoming artists from Mumbai came together to display an array of their works at the newly opened art gallery, Art Gate. This was the gallery's debut show and its intent at showcasing these six specific artists was more than just a launch of their new space in an age when gallerists are closing shop. Owned and managed by Runish Chedda and at 3000 sq ft of display space and well equipped, the gallery is not just reassuring for the artists displaying their works, but anyone who walks through their doors and is connected to the art world. The show 'Flag March' displayed the works of six contemporary artists of our times, Archana Mishra, Gajanan Kabade, Pradeep Nerurkar, Prakash Waghmare, Rahul Vajale and Tathi Premchand. With an eclectic mix of the range of works on display, from abstracts to contemporary art and drawings, the show had a little something for everyone. The participating artists have been working in their chosen field and medium for the past 10-20 years and the works on display are a testament to theireffort and evolution of their art practices.
Artist Archana Mishra, reaches deep within her mind and heart to depict her abstractions on large scaled canvases. In this show however, along with her large format works, were a selection of small format works named, 'Moon series'. Fluid and lyrical in form and colours, the abstracts descended over the viewer like a comforting gaze. The palette, unlike Archana's earlier works, was replete with cool blues, pale yellows and luminous ochres. Archana believes in the influence of nature in everything and it reflected in her works as well.
Artist Gajanan Kabade employed a very unique method to layer his canvases or paper works. He used coloured cellophane tape. Multiple hued and varying in different width as per the necessity of the artist's vision, the works were bit by bit layered. The translucency of these cellophane pieces ensured the textures and luminosity of the works. Contrasting the shades used the artist left minute crevices between the layering like lighted windows to peep into his art process and his thought processes. Some portions displayed a water colour treatment and appeared to be meshed behind the translucent tape. Raising the ordinary cello tape from a mere material to a medium of art, Gajanan aimed to show beauty in the mundane to the viewer. Once in a while an artist becomes so influenced by nature that instead of just depicting it through the paint medium, they engage in a seemingly tactile depiction of it, like artist Pradeep Nerurkar. One had to only look at the acrylic painted surfaces that were on display at the show to imagine the stages of art processes that went into creating the art work. The artist engaged in nearly covering the white of the canvas with another sharply emerging cotton mesh element which leapt out at the viewer in absolute boldness. There was little of gradual merging of the contrasting textures of the canvas and the treated, coloured, hardened cotton mesh which stood out almost as a pedestal. The artist drew inspiration from nature and its diverse secrets and his choice of cotton, a natural fabric cementedthe reliance and faith he harbours in nature.
The works of artist Prakash Waghmare were intense colour fields, reflecting depth of the artist's art practice and thought process. An ardent practitioner of Yoga, this artist based his meditative and soulful canvases on the silence he experienced during those moments of practice. If one were to observe a silent river, one would encounter bits of floating elements now and then, which float and sink as the river ebbs and flows. Prakash's canvases displayed a similar essence to that river in flow. Fluid, deep and hinting at the elements it encompassed, the canvases were large format colour fields with the occasional geometric shapes which surfaced only on closer observation by the viewer. Like the wind playing with a window grill and a curtain, the possibilities of the objects behind thescreen seem more hypnotic than the directly visible.


Words and images from family and friends, a personal editorial piece as a journey of grief. Typography plays an important role on the publication, as it sits and floats on a flexible layout that aims to resemble the flow of water on a river. Printed on different paper stocks, it is a silent piece.


text:
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Full STEAM Ahead: How One High School Senior Shares His Love of 3D Printing with the Community
Cheri Fiory
Adult Post Feature Friends Kids Post Library news Teen Post
When Upper Dublin High School (UDHS) senior Jacob McCauley wanted to share his love of 3D printing with kids, he wasn't shy about asking. Jacob has more experience with 3D printers than probably most high school students. He helped set up the ones in the high school media center and was even permitted to use one at Princeton University after he took the initiative to connect with a professor there. So when Jacob learned about the Upper Dublin Public Library's 3D printers at a presentation given by Upper Dublin Librarian Molly Kane on one of her visits to the high school, he had found his opportunity.
"By doing things [like teaching 3D printing], I can have an impact on people," said Jacob when asked why he wanted to present Introductions to 3D printing lessons for elementary through middle school students at the Upper Dublin Public Library. "You have to make people excited about it [3D printing], and that's what I want to do."
From what I could tell when I attended Jacob's recent class on December 26, he certainly excited a group of 3rd to 5th graders about 3D printing. Having begun with a brief presentation about what 3D printing is and how it is being used (the kids got a kick out of seeing an image of a 3D-printed 3D printer), the participants spent most of the time creating a design in Tinkercad, "a free online collection of software tools that help people all over the world think, create and make."
David has fun creating in TinkerCad.
It was 5th grader David's first experience with 3D printing design. He had designed a building, a person and an "alphabet toy." David said it was "fun to explore 3D printing," and when asked what he wished he could design, he said, "a ginormous skyscraper."
Jacob's Introductions to 3D Printing for elementary and middle school students are presented as part of the offerings from the UDPL STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) Lab, which was launched with a Library Services and Technology Act grant in 2015. Recognizing technological literacy as a real and necessary skill in today's world, the UDPL STEAM Lab was created to help build skills and spark imaginations by introducing residents to cutting-edge technology. The UDPL's five 3D printers, including a recently purchased Toybox printer designed specifically for elementary aged students, are part of the UDPL STEAM Lab initiative.
Since its inception, high school students, like Jacob, have helped the Library further the vision for the UDPL STEAM Lab by supporting and even sometimes creating and facilitating programs for younger students. According to Molly Kane, Head of Teen Services and Emerging Technologies, "UDPL's original LSTA grant funds were used, in part, to develop programs for students in grades 6-12. Even though we now offer programs for people of all age groups, it's the middle and high school students who always take our programs and technology to the next level. Our volunteers who work on STEAM Lab projects are the ones who teach me!" It's a win-win situation where a carefully selected group of students have the opportunity to make a difference while also earning credit towards honor societies, school assignments or other service projects.
Jacob shows 3rd to 5th graders a recently printed dog pencil holder.
Although Jacob's programs at the Library also served as his senior year culminating project, it was clear to me that having an impact was what mattered most. Said Jacob, "I just want to be a part of it; I want to help a lot of people, help out the world."
Of his students, he had the most to say about the youngest ones. He recognized that the elementary school students asked more questions and took more risks than the middle school students. One young student even taught Jacob about a button in the software he wasn't aware of. Jacob's advice for learning about 3D printing design also resonates as a life lesson for taking chances "Click all the buttons and see what happens."
See Jacob's upcoming Introduction to 3D Printing classes here.
To learn more about the UDPL STEAM Lab go here.
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Established as of now...the proposed warp date is now Sunday, June 11th, 2006.
After Mayfest, Fae and I joined Derick and Jes at the coolest coffeehouse in Tulsa, Saffron at the 11th and Harvard area. We sipped iced coffee drinks amidst music and a complete lack of drama. The reason for our meeting was simple: the film!
Bret is still unable to pursue much of his cinematography duties due to scheduling and personal issues, so that is where Derick has come in. I want and need this film's completion. With recent events, our exodus from the confines of Tulsa Hell may soon be over. I wanted to make plans and set things in motion, acquire dates and from that, make my schedule. Once again, Derick will act and become D.P. for portions of the film.
My new goal for Sunday evening? Write that schedule.


text:
Decembrists
Title: Decembrists
Subject: Omsk Oblast, Sochi, Alexander Radishchev, List of duels, Katorga, Borisov, Peter and Paul Fortress, Sergey Nechayev, Alexey Fyodorovich Orlov, Vasily Zhukovsky
"Decembrist revolution" redirects here. For the 1828 coup in Argentina, see Decembrist revolution (Argentina).
"Decemberist" redirects here. For the rock band, see The Decemberists. For the unfinished Tolstoy novel, see The Decembrists.
Decembrist Revolt
Decembrists at the Senate Square
26 December [O.S. 14 December] 1825
Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Government victory
Decembrists deported to Siberia
Decembrists Russian Empire
Army officers Nicholas I of Russia
about 3,000 soldiers of Imperial Russian Army Imperial Russian Army
The Decembrist revolt or the Decembrist uprising (Russian: Восстание декабристов, translit: Vosstanie dekabristov) took place in Imperial Russia on 26 December [O.S. 14 December] 1825. Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against Nicholas I's assumption of the throne after his elder brother Constantine removed himself from the line of succession. Because these events occurred in December, the rebels were called the Decembrists (Dekabristy, Russian: Декабристы). This uprising, which was suppressed by Nicholas I, took place in the Senate Square in Saint Petersburg. In 1925, to mark the centenary of the event, the square was renamed as Decembrist Square, but in 2008 it reverted to its original name.
1 The Union of Salvation
2 At the Senate Square
3 Arrests and trial
4 Decembrists in Siberia
5 Assessment
6 "Constantine and Constitution" anecdote
The Union of Salvation
In 1816, several officers of the Imperial Russian Guard founded a society known as the Union of Salvation, or of the Faithful and True Sons of the Motherland. The society acquired a more Liberal cast after it was joined by the idealistic Pavel Pestel. After a mutiny in the Semenovsky Regiment in 1820, the society decided to suspend activity in 1821. Two groups, however, continued to function secretly: a Southern Society, based at Tulchin, a small garrison town in Ukraine, in which Pestel was the outstanding figure, and a Northern Society, based at St Petersburg, led by Guard officers Nikita Muraviev, Prince S. P. Trubetskoy and Prince Eugene Obolensky.[1] The political aims of the more moderate Northern Society were a British style constitutional monarchy with a limited franchise, the abolition of serfdom and equality before the law. The Southern Society, under Pestel's influence, was more radical and wanted to abolish the monarchy, establish a republic and redistribute land: taking half into state ownership and dividing the rest among the peasants.[1]
At first, many officers were encouraged by Tsar Alexander's early liberal reformation of Russian society and politics. In 1819 Speransky was appointed as the Governor of Siberia, with the task of reforming local government. Equally, in 1818 the Tsar asked Novosiltsev to draw up a constitution.[2] However, internal and external unrest, which the Tsar believed stemmed from political liberalisation, led to a series of repressions and a return to a former government of restriction and conservatism.
Meanwhile, spurred by their experiences of the Napoleonic Wars, and realising many of the harsh indignities through which the peasant soldiers were forced,[3] Decembrist officers and sympathisers displayed their contempt for the ancien régime by rejecting court lifestyle, wearing their cavalry swords at balls (indicating their unwillingness to dance), and committing themselves to academic study. This new lifestyle captured the spirit of the times, as a willingness to embrace both the peasant (i.e., the 'Russian way of life') and ongoing reformative movements abroad.
The motivations for the reformist movement are outlined, in part, by Pavel Pestel:
Template:Cquote
At the Senate Square
When Tsar Alexander I died on 1 December [O.S. 19 November] 1825, the royal guards swore allegiance to the presumed heir, Alexander's brother Constantine. When Constantine made his renunciation public, and Nicholas stepped forward to assume the throne, the Northern Society acted. With the capital in temporary confusion, and one oath to Constantine having already been sworn, the society scrambled in secret meetings to convince regimental leaders not to swear allegiance to Nicholas. These efforts would culminate in the Decembrist Revolt. The leaders of the society (many of whom belonged to the high aristocracy) elected Prince Sergei Trubetskoy as interim dictator.
On the morning of 26 December [O.S. 14 December], a group of officers commanding about 3,000 men assembled in Senate Square, where they refused to swear allegiance to the new tsar, Nicholas I, proclaiming instead their loyalty to Constantine and the Constitution. They expected to be joined by the rest of the troops stationed in Saint Petersburg, but they were disappointed. The revolt was further hampered when it was deserted by its supposed leader Prince Trubetskoy, who had a last minute change of heart, and failed to turn up at the Square. His second in command, Colonel Bulatov also vanished from the scene. After a hurried consultation the rebels appointed Prince Eugene Obolensky as a replacement leader.[4]
For long hours there was a stand-off between the 3,000 rebels and the 9,000 loyal troops stationed outside the Senate building, with some desultory shooting from the rebel side. Also on the scene was a vast crowd of civilian on-lookers who began fraternizing with the rebels but who were not called on to participate in the action by the leaders of the revolt.[5] Eventually Nicholas, the new Tsar, appeared in person, at the square, and sent Count Mikhail Miloradovich, a military hero who was greatly respected by ordinary soldiers, to parley with the rebels. While delivering a speech, Miloradovich was fatally the victim of one of several shots and one of the shooters was Pyotr Kakhovsky. At the same time, a rebelling grenadier squad, led by lieutenant Nikolay Panov, entered the Winter Palace but failed to seize it and retreated.
After spending most of the day in fruitless attempts to parley with the rebel force, Nicholas ordered a cavalry charge which, however, slipped on the icy cobbles and retired in disorder. Eventually, at the end of the day, Nicholas ordered three artillery pieces to open fire, with devastating effect. To avoid the slaughter the rebels broke and ran. Some attempted to regroup on the frozen surface of the river Neva, to the north. However, here, also, they were targeted by the artillery and suffered many casualties. As the ice was broken by the cannon fire, many of the dead and dying were cast into the river. After a nighttime mopping-up operation by loyal army and police units, the revolt in the north came to an end.[6]
Arrests and trial
Further information: Chernigov Regiment revolt
While the Northern Society scrambled in the days leading up to the revolt, the Southern Society (based in Tulchin) took a serious blow. The day before (25 December [O.S. 13 December]), acting on reports of treason, the police arrested Pavel Pestel. It took two weeks for the Southern Society to learn of the events in the capital. Meanwhile, other members of the leadership were arrested. The Southern Society, and a nationalistic group called the United Slavs discussed revolt. When learning of the location of some of the arrested men, the United Slavs freed them by force. One of the freed men, Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, assumed leadership of the revolt. After converting the soldiers of Vasilkov to the cause, Muraviev-Apostol easily captured the city. The rebelling army was soon confronted by superior forces armed with artillery loaded with grapeshot, and with orders to destroy the rebels.
On 15 January [O.S. 3 January] 1826, the rebels met defeat and the surviving leaders were sent to Saint Petersburg to stand trial with the northern leaders. The Decembrists were taken to the Winter Palace to be interrogated, tried, and convicted. Kakhovsky was executed by hanging together with four other leading Decembrists: Pavel Pestel; the poet Kondraty Ryleyev; Sergey Muravyov-Apostol; and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Other Decembrists were exiled to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Far East.
When the five Decembrists were hanged something unusual happened. The ropes that were being used to hang them parted before any of them actually died.[7] This caused a sigh of relief in the crowd because, according to a centuries-old tradition, any condemned prisoner who survived a botched execution would be set free. Nevertheless, rather than free these prisoners, Nicholas ordered new ropes and the prisoners were hanged again. This was the last public execution in Russian imperial history.
Suspicion also fell on several eminent persons who were on friendly terms with the Decembrist leaders and could have been aware of their clandestine organizations, notably Alexander Pushkin, Aleksander Griboyedov, and Aleksey Yermolov. Wives of many Decembrists followed their husbands into exile. The expression Decembrist wife is a Russian symbol of the devotion of a wife to her husband. Maria Volkonsky, the wife of the Decembrist leader Sergei Volkonsky, notably followed her husband to his exile in Irkutsk. Despite the spartan conditions of this banishment, Sergei Volkonsky and his wife, Maria, took opportunities to celebrate the liberalising mode of their exile. Sergei took to wearing an untrimmed beard (rejecting Peter the Great's reforms[8] and salon fashion), wearing peasant dress and socialising with many of his peasant associates with whom he worked the land at his farm in Urik. Maria, equally, established schools, a foundling hospital and a theater for the local population.[9] Sergei returned after thirty years of his exile had elapsed, though his titles and land remained under royal possession. Other exiles preferred to remain in Siberia after their sentences were served, preferring its relative freedom to the stifling intrigues of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and after years of exile there was not much for them to return to. Many Decembrists throve in exile, in time becoming landowners and farmers. In later years, they would become idols of the populist movement of the 1860s and the 1870s, as the Decembrists' advocacy of reform (including the abolition of serfdom) won them many admirers, the writer Leo Tolstoy among them.
Decembrists in Siberia
On 25 July [O.S. 13 July] 1826, the first party of Decembrist convicts began its exodus to Siberia. Among this group, were Prince Trubetskoi, Prince Obolensky, Peter and Andrei Borisov, Prince Volkonsky, and Artamon Muraviev, all of them bound for the mines at Nerchinsk.[10] The journey eastward was fraught with hardship, yet for many, it offered refreshing changes in scenery and peoples, following imprisonment. Decembrist Nikolay Vasil'yevich Basargin was unwell when he set out from St. Petersburg, but he recovered his strength on the move; his memoirs depict the journey to Siberia in a cheerful light, full of praise for the "common people" and commanding landscapes.[11]
Not all Decembrists could identify with Basargin's positive experience. Because of their lower social standing, "soldier-Decembrists" experienced the Emperor's vengeance in full. Sentenced by court martial, many of these "commoners" received thousands of lashes. Those that survived journeyed to Siberia on foot, chained alongside common criminals.[12]
Fifteen out of 124 Decembrists were convicted of "state-crimes" by the Supreme Criminal Court, and sentenced to "exile-to-settlement." [13] These men were sent directly to isolated locales, such as Berezov, Narym, Surgut, Pelym, Irkutsk, Yakutsk, and Viliuisk, among others. Few Russians inhabited these places: the populations consisted mainly of Siberian aborigines, Tunguses, Yakuts, Tartars, Ostiaks, Mongols, and Buriats.[14]
Of all those exiled, the largest group of prisoners was sent to Chita, to be transferred three years later to Petrovsky Zavod, near Nerchinsk.[15] This group, sentenced to hard labor, included principal leaders of the Decembrist movement, as well as Polish revolutionaries. Siberian Governor-General Lavinsky argued that it would be easiest to control a large, concentrated group of convicts,[14] and Emperor Nicholas I pursued this policy in order to maximize surveillance and to limit revolutionaries' contact with local populations.[16] Concentration facilitated the guarding of prisoners, but it also allowed the Decembrists to continue to exist as a community.[14] This was especially true at Chita. The move to Petrovsky Zavod, however, forced Decembrists to divide into smaller groups; the new location was compartmentalized, with an oppressive sense of order. Convicts could no longer congregate casually. Although nothing could destroy the Decembrists' conception of fraternity, Petrovsky Zavod forced them to live more private lives.[17] Due to a number of imperial sentence reductions, exiles started to complete their labor terms years ahead of schedule. The labor itself was of minimal travail; Stanislav Leparsky, commandant of Petrovsky Zavod, failed to enforce Decembrists' original labor sentences, and criminal convicts carried out much of the work in place of the revolutionaries. Most Decembrists left Petrovsky Zavod between 1835 and 1837, settling in or near Irkutsk, Minusinsk, Kurgan, Tobol'sk, Turinsk, and Yalutorovsk.[16] Those Decembrists who had already lived in or visited Siberia, such as Dimitri Zavalishin, prospered upon leaving Petrovsky Zavod's confines, but most found it physically arduous and more psychologically enervating than prison life.[18]
The Siberian population met the Decembrists with great hospitality. Natives played central roles in keeping lines of communication open among Decembrists, friends, and relatives. Most merchants and state employees were also sympathetic. To the masses, the Decembrist exiles were "generals who had refused to take the oath to Nicholas I." They were great figures that had suffered political persecution for their loyalty to the people. On the whole, indigenous Siberian populations greatly respected the Decembrists, and were extremely hospitable in their reception of them.[19]
Upon arrival at places of settlement, exiles had to comply with extensive regulations under a strict governmental regime. Local police watched, regulated, and notated every move that Decembrists attempted to make. Dimitri Zavalishin was thrown into prison for failing to remove his hat before a lieutenant. Not only were political and social activities carefully monitored and prevented, there was also interference regarding religious convictions. Local clergy accused Prince Shakhovskoi of "heresy", due to his interest in natural sciences. Authorities investigated and restrained other Decembrists for not attending church.[20] The regime thoroughly censored all correspondences, especially communication with relatives. Messages were scrupulously reviewed by both officials in Siberia and the Third Division of the political intelligence service at St. Petersburg. This screening process necessitated dry, careful wording on the part of Decembrists. In the words of Bestuzhev, correspondence bore a "lifeless…imprint of officiality." [21] Under the settlement regime, allowances were extremely meager. Certain Decembrists, including the Volkonskys, the Murav'yovs, and the Trubetskoys, were rich, but the majority of exiles had no money, and were forced to live off a mere fifteen desyatins of land, the allotment granted to each settler. Decembrists, with little to no knowledge of the land, attempted to eke out a living on wretched soil with next to no equipment. Financial aid from relatives and wealthier comrades saved many; others perished.[22]
Despite extensive restrictions, limitations, and hardships, Decembrists believed that they could improve their situation through personal initiative. A constant stream of petitions came out of Petrovsky Zavod addressed to General Leparskii and Emperor Nicholas I.[23] Most of the petitions were written by Decembrists' wives who had nobly cast aside social privileges and comfort to follow their husbands into exile.[24] These wives joined under the leadership of Princess Mariia Volkonskaia, and by 1832, through relentless petitions, managed to secure for their men formal cancellation of labor requirements, and several privileges, including the right of husbands to live with their wives in privacy.[23] Decembrists managed to gain transfers and allowances through persuasive petitions as well as through the intervention of family members. This process of petitioning, and the resultant concessions made by the tsar and officials, was and would continue to be a standard practice of political exiles in Siberia. The chain of bureaucratic procedures and orders linking St. Petersburg to Siberian administration was often circumvented or ignored. These breaks in bureaucracy afforded exiles a small capacity for betterment and activism.[25]
During their time in exile, the Decembrists fundamentally influenced Siberian life. Their presence was most definitely felt culturally and economically, political activity being so far removed from the "pulse of national life" so as to be negligible.[26] While in Petrovsky Zavod, Decembrists taught each other foreign languages, arts and crafts, and musical instruments. They established "academies" made up of libraries, schools, and symposia.[16] In their settlements, Decembrists were fierce advocates of education, and founded many schools for natives, the first of which opened at Nerchinsk. Schools were also founded for women, and soon exceeded capacity. Decembrists contributed greatly to the field of agriculture, introducing previously unknown crops such as vegetables, tobacco, rye, buckwheat, and barley, and advanced agricultural methods such as hothouse cultivation. Trained doctors among the political exiles promoted and organized medical aid. The homes of prominent exiles like Prince Sergei Volkonsky and Prince Sergei Trubetskoi became social centers of their locales. All throughout Siberia, the Decembrists sparked an intellectual awakening: literary writings, propaganda, newspapers, and books from European Russia began to circulate the eastern provinces, the local population developing a capacity for critical political observation.[27] The Decembrists even held a certain influence within Siberian administration; Dimitry Zavalishin played a critical role in developing and advocating Russian Far East policy. Although the Decembrists lived in isolation, their scholarly activities encompassed Siberia at large, including its culture, economy, administration, population, geography, botany, and ecology.[28] Despite restricted circumstances, the Decembrists accomplished an extraordinary amount, and their work was deeply appreciated by Siberians.
On August 26, 1856, with the ascent of Alexander II to the throne, the Decembrists received amnesty, their rights, privileges, and titles restored. Not all chose to return to the West, however. Some were financially inhibited, others had no family to return to, and many were weak with old age. To many, Siberia had become home. Those that did return to European Russia did so with enthusiasm for the enforcement of the Emancipation Reforms of 1861.[29]
The exile of the Decembrists led to the permanent implantation of an intelligentsia in Siberia. For the first time, a cultural, intellectual, and political elite came to Siberian society as permanent residents; they integrated with the country and participated alongside natives in its development. The customary practices of elites in Siberia were oppression and extortion. The Decembrists were a phenomenon in that they earned the trust and respect of local peoples through their sympathy and good deeds. They were entirely approachable. Through constant, open communication with natives, they saw Siberia in its true light. The Decembrists' presence left definite traces that would prove positive in a material sense, as well as a cultural and moral one. They overcame extreme want, administrative tyranny, and hardship, and educated not just themselves, but an entire generation. In exile, the Decembrists remained a positive force of progress.[30]
With the failure of the Decembrists, Russia's autocracy would continue for almost a century, although serfdom would be officially abolished in 1861. Though defeated, the Decembrists did effect some change on the regime. Their dissatisfaction forced Nicholas to turn his attention inward to address the issues of the empire. In 1826, a rehabilitated Speransky began the task of codifying Russian law, a task that continued throughout Nicholas's reign. Anecdotally, after being defeated in the Crimean War, Nicholas is said to have lamented that his own entourage had treated him worse than the Decembrists ever had.
Although the revolt was a proscribed topic during Nicholas' reign, Alexander Herzen placed the profiles of executed Decembrists on the cover of his radical periodical Polar Star. Alexander Pushkin addressed poems to his Decembrist friends, Nikolai Nekrasov wrote a long poem about the Decembrist wives, and Leo Tolstoy started writing a novel on that liberal movement, which would later evolve into War and Peace. In the Soviet era Yuri Shaporin produced an opera entitled Dekabristi (The Decembrists), about the revolt, with the libretto written by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. It premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre on 23 June 1953.[31]
To some extent, the Decembrists were in the tradition of a long line of palace revolutionaries who wanted to place their candidate on the throne, but because the Decembrists also wanted to implement classical liberalism, their revolt has been considered the beginning of a revolutionary movement. The uprising was the first open breach between the government and reformist elements of the Russian nobility, which would subsequently widen.
"Constantine and Constitution" anecdote
There's a historical anecdote that soldiers in Saint Petersburg were said to chant "Constantine and Constitution", but when questioned, many of them professed to believe that "Constitution" (Russian konstitutsiya) was Constantine's wife.[32]
Pyotr Kakhovsky in a letter to General Levashev, mentioned the anecdote and denied it:
"The story told to Your Excellency that, in the uprising of 14 December the rebels were shouting 'Long live the Constitution!' and that the people were asking 'What is Constitution, the wife of His Highness the Grand Duke?' is not true. It is an amusing invention."[33]
Figes, Orlando (2002) Natasha's Dance: a Cultural History of Russia. London. ISBN 0-7139-9517-3
Mazour, A.G. 1937. The First Russian Revolution, 1825: the Decembrist movement; its origins, development, and significance. Stanford University Press
Sherman, Russell & Pearce, Robert (2002) Russia 1815-81, Hodder & Stoughton
Eidelman, Natan (1985) Conspiracy against the tsar, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 294 p. (Translation from the Russian by Cynthia Carlile.)
Crankshaw, E. (1976). The Shadow of the Winter Palace : Russia's Drift to Revolution, 1825-1917. New York: Viking Press.
Decembrist exile in Irkutsk
Decembrist exile in Siberia (Russian)
Online Museum of the Decembrist movement (Russian)
Russia, Tyumen Oblast, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Atheism, Omsk
Canada, France, United States, Austria, Italy
Alexander Radishchev
Russian Empire, Adam Smith, Science, Socialism, Isaac Newton
List of duels
St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Hyde Park, London, Joseph Conrad, Mikhail Lermontov, Harry Potter
Katorga
Russian Empire, Russian Far East, Siberia, Soviet Union, Gulag


School District 150 will take place at McKinley Junior High School.
within the boundary of our District.
you may contact Dr. Denise Julius, Superintendent at 708-339-8655.
Do you want to delete all occurrences of the recurring appointment "Public Meeting (Special Education)", or just this one?