America³

America³ (pronounced "America Cubed") is the name of both a syndicate that vied for the America's Cup in 1992 and 1995 and its boats.

1992 Cup victory

The program was operated by Bill Koch and Harry "Buddy" Melges in the 1992 America's Cup. After winning the Defender Series, America³ defeated the Italian challenger Il Moro di Venezia to successfully defend the Cup.

The yacht was built by Goetz Custom Sailboats Inc. in Rhode Island and the carbon fiber mast package was built by the Offshore Spars Co. in Michigan.

1995 Cup defense

In 1995, Bill Koch revamped the program to begin the first all-female, America's Cup boat. America³'s successor, Mighty Mary, was on her way to the 1995 America's Cup, in the lead of the last race of the Defender Series over Stars & Stripes. But with a commanding lead of nearly 5 minutes, Dave Dellenbaugh (the only man on the otherwise all-female crew) committed a crucial tactical error and Stars & Stripes skipper Dennis Conner made a series of moves to beat Mighty Mary to the finish line by scant seconds. After winning the Defender Series, Conner opted to use the third syndicate that year, Young America, to defend the cup, losing to Team New Zealand, 5-0.

America (Dan Deacon album)

America is a studio album by American electronic musician Dan Deacon, released August 27, 2012 on Domino Records. The album cover is a photo of Lake Placid.

Recording

Production

America was recorded using both electronic sounds and live recordings. An anechoic chamber was built in Baltimore to record the orchestral track "Rail." The reason Deacon decided to incorporate live instruments onto the album was that Deacon felt that electronic beats were limited by its lack of flaws and that he wanted the "slight imperfection in timing" human musicians have. Because he wanted the album to sound "more like a rock record" than an electronic one, Deacon enlisted King Crimson engineer Simon Heyworth to master the album.

Themes

In an interview with NPR, Deacon said that the album was inspired by the politics and geography of the United States, saying:

Deacon described the album as "political," saying that the lyrics were "[..] inspired by my frustration, fear and anger towards the country and world I live in and am a part of." However, Deacon also said that he did not want the political nature to be overt, arguing that people do not respond to overt political messages.

America (Frank novel)

America is a young adult novel written by E.R. Frank. It tells the story of America, a fifteen-year-old biracial boy who had gotten lost in the system.

The author of the book, E.R. Frank, is herself a social worker. In an author's note at the end of the book, she says she has worked with many Americas over the years.

The book was made into a 2009 TV movie on the Lifetime Television network, starring Philip Johnson as America and Rosie O'Donnell as his therapist. Although Dr. B is a female in the movie, Dr. B is portrayed as a male in the novel.

Plot

Born to a crack addict, America was given to a rich white family. They decided they didn't want him any more after his skin started to darken at the age of five years. The family's nanny, Sylvia Harper, adopts/fosters America. She had a "man-friend" named Clark Poignant, and a half-brother named Browning. Clark Poignant befriended America. After a year, America gets sent back to his biological mother by the state. Browning tells America to be as bad as he possibly can, so he will get sent back to them. America's mother lived in a shoddy house in New York City with America's two older brothers, named Brooklyn and Lyle.

Helix (comics)

Helix was a short-lived, science fiction and science fantasy imprint of DC Comics, launched in 1996 and discontinued in 1998. In early promotional materials prior to the release of the first title, the imprint was called Matrix instead of Helix. It was renamed because of the then-upcoming film, The Matrix. It featured a handful of ongoing monthly series, several limited series, and one short graphic novel.

Despite the involvement of successful science fiction/fantasy novelists Michael Moorcock, Lucius Shepard and Christopher Hinz, and established comics creators Howard Chaykin, Elaine Lee, Matt Howarth, Warren Ellis, Walt Simonson, and Garth Ennis, sales of the comic books were low, and most of the ongoing titles were cancelled after 12 or fewer issues. Ellis' Transmetropolitan was switched to the Vertigo imprint, where it continued for several more years before reaching its planned conclusion. Ennis' Bloody Mary mini-series and Michael Moorcock's Multiverse were later collected in Vertigo-label paperbacks and Moeller's Sheva's War was released as a graphic novel paperback by Dark Horse.

Phelix

Phelix is a high-speed stream cipher with a built-in single-pass message authentication code (MAC) functionality, submitted in 2004 to the eSTREAM contest by Doug Whiting, Bruce Schneier, Stefan Lucks, and Frédéric Muller. The cipher uses only the operations of addition modulo 2³², exclusive or, and rotation by a fixed number of bits. Phelix uses a 256-bit key and a 128-bit nonce, claiming a design strength of 128 bits. Concerns have been raised over the ability to recover the secret key if the cipher is used incorrectly.

Performance

Phelix is optimised for 32-bit platforms. The authors state that it can achieve up to eight cycles per byte on modern x86-based processors.

FPGA Hardware performance figures published in the paper "Review of stream cipher candidates from a low resource hardware perspective" are as follows:

Helix

Phelix is a slightly modified form of an earlier cipher, Helix, published in 2003 by Niels Ferguson, Doug Whiting, Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey, Stefan Lucks, and Tadayoshi Kohno; Phelix adds 128 bits to the internal state.

Helix (database)

Helix is a pioneering database management system for the Apple Macintosh platform, created in 1983. Helix uses a graphical "programming language" to add logic to its applications, allowing non-programmers to construct sophisticated applications. It never grew beyond being a niche product. As of 2015, Helix is thirty-one years old, but still has a dedicated, if small, following.

Despite being the first multiuser database on any PC platform, the first object-based, visual programming tool, and, perhaps, the first relational database on a PC platform, Helix's marketing and ownership problems led it to a life as a niche product on an OS with a small market share.

History

Originally created by Odesta Corporation in 1983 on the original Macintosh, Helix received rave reviews when it was released the next year. At the time the Mac only supported 440kB floppy disks as storage, shared with the operating system and leaving little room for applications or data. It was assumed that users would add a second floppy for any sort of real-world use, with the OS and Helix on one floppy, and data on another. Leaving room for a maximum database size of under 500k, Helix's data management capabilities did not need to be all that strong. Nevertheless it was a full relational database.