Cif

Cif is a brand of household cleaning products by Unilever, known as Jif in Australia, New Zealand, Middle East and the Nordic countries. Cif is the largest selling abrasive cleaner product in the world.

History

Launched in France in 1969, it was marketed against scouring powders as Vim, a creamy and hence protective but powerful domestic cleaner. Initially focused on cream cleansers for the kitchen and bathroom, it was launched using a now famous "skater" advert, which highlighted how scouring powders could "scratch like skates on ice."

Asia is Cif's fastest-growing market, and India its largest.

Name

The Cif product is sold under the names Jif, Vim, Viss and Handy Andy, depending on which of the 51 countries it is sold in.

In Sweden, the United Kingdom, and South Africa the products were sold under the name Vim before this was changed to Jif, the launch name in Ireland, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. In 2001 the name in most of these countries was changed to Cif in order to harmonise marketing and product inventories across the continent. Despite this, many in the UK, and most in Ireland, continue to call the product Jif, as well as in the Netherlands.

Raffaele Ciferri

Raffaele Ciferri (30 May 1897, Fermo – 12 February 1964, Pavia) was an Italian botanist, agriculturalist and mycologist.

He studied agricultural sciences at the University of Bologna. From 1925 to 1932, he was based in the Dominican Republic, where he helped establish an experimental agricultural station in Santiago de los Caballeros for studies of cassava. While in Latin America, he also conducted research of diseases affecting cacao in Ecuador. In 1934-35 he was stationed in Italian Somaliland, performing organizational work involving agrarian services.

In 1936 he was appointed professor of botany to the faculty of agriculture in Florence, and from 1942 onward, served as a professor of botany at the University of Pavia.

A prolific writer, he was the author of well over a 1000 published works on subjects that included mycology, plant pathology and physiology, microbiology, virology, lichenology, the systematics of cultivated plants, agronomy, and the history of botany. Species that contain the epithet of ciferrii are named in his honor.

Common Intermediate Format

CIF (Common Intermediate Format or Common Interchange Format), also known as FCIF (Full Common Intermediate Format), is a format used to standardize the horizontal and vertical resolutions in pixels of YCbCr sequences in video signals, commonly used in video teleconferencing systems. It was first proposed in the H.261 standard.

CIF was designed to be easy to convert to PAL or NTSC standards. CIF defines a video sequence with a resolution of 352 × 288 like PAL Source Input Format, a framerate of 30000/1001 (roughly 29.97) frames like NTSC, with colour encoded using YCbCr 4:2:0.

QCIF means "Quarter CIF". To have one quarter of the area, as "quarter" implies, the height and width of the frame are halved.

Terms also used are SQCIF (Sub Quarter CIF, sometimes subQCIF), 4CIF (4× CIF) and 16CIF (16× CIF). The resolutions for all of these formats are summarized in the table below.

xCIF pixels are not square, instead having a native aspect ratio of ~1.222:1. On older television systems, a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2:1 was the standard for 525-line systems (see CCIR 601). On square-pixel displays (computer screens, many modern televisions) xCIF rasters should be rescaled horizontally by ~109% to 4:3 in order to avoid a "stretched" look: CIF content expanded horizontally by ~109% results in a 4:3 raster of 384 × 288 square pixels.