Magic (paranormal)

Magic or sorcery is the use of rituals, symbols, actions, gestures and language with the aim of exploiting supernatural forces. Belief in and practice of magic has been present since the earliest human cultures and continues to have an important spiritual, religious, and medicinal role in many cultures today.

Magic is sometimes practiced in isolation and secrecy and often viewed with suspicion by the wider community. In non-scientific societies, perceived magical attack is sometimes employed to explain personal or societal misfortune.

The concept of magic, as distinct from religion was first widely recognized in Judaism, which defined the practices of pagan worship designed to appease and receive benefits from gods other than Yahweh as magic.Wouter Hanegraaff argues that magic is in fact "a largely polemical concept that has been used by various religious interest groups either to describe their own religious beliefs and practices or – more frequently – to discredit those of others."

Magia (Toque Profundo album)

Magia is a 2002 album by the Dominican rock band Toque Profundo and their fourth. The album was independently released and funded by the band. Toque Profundo produced a rock re-make of Tabaco Y Ron popularized in Merengue by Fernando Villalona and written by Roldofo Aicardi originally to be released in compilation album Rockero Hasta La Tambora

Track listing

Magia (Shakira album)

Magia (English: Magic) is the debut studio album by Colombian singer-songwriter Shakira. It was released in June 1991 by Sony Music Colombia, with whom she signed a three-album recording contract. The record is a collection of dance songs and ballads Shakira wrote since she was eight years old, with themes inspired from the experience hanging out with males, adventure stories, and dreams of living on the coast.

The album's live performances helped Shakira receive attention on Colombian media, and the LP earned her an award at the Viña del Mar International Song Festival. However, it was not a commercial success, with sales of only 1,200 copies. By Shakira's request, Magia and its follow-up Peligro (1993) were removed from music markets. "Magia" was released as promotional single in 1990.

Development and composition

Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, Shakira began writing songs at the age of eight years, her first one being "Tus Gafas Oscuras". Her performances at local competitions led to a meeting with local theater producer Monica Ariza, who later held an audition for her in Bogotá. She performed three songs for executives of Sony Music Columbia, who were impressed enough to sign her, at the age of 13, to record three albums, which were Magia, Peligro and Pies Descalzos.

Kana

Kana (仮名) are syllabic Japanese scripts, a part of the Japanese writing system contrasted with the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji (漢字). There are three kana scripts: modern cursive hiragana (ひらがな) that in past time known as a women script (women handwriting), modern angular katakana (カタカナ), and the old syllabic use of kanji known as man’yōgana (万葉仮名) that was ancestral to both. Hentaigana (変体仮名, "variant kana") are historical variants of modern standard hiragana. In modern Japanese, hiragana and katakana have directly corresponding character sets (different sets of characters representing the same sounds).

Katakana with a few additions is also used to write Ainu. Kana was used in Taiwanese as a gloss (furigana) for Chinese characters during the Japanese administration of Taiwan. See Taiwanese kana.

Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language. This is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus), such as ka, ki, etc., or V (vowel), such as a, i, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. This structure had some scholars label the system moraic instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (i.e. CVn, CVm, CVng), a CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV).

Kanał

Kanał (Polish pronunciation: [ˈkanaw], Sewer) is a 1956 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It was the first film made about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, telling the story of a company of Home Army resistance fighters escaping the Nazi onslaught through the city's sewers. Kanał is the second film of Wajda's War Trilogy, preceded by A Generation and followed by Ashes and Diamonds.

The film was the winner of the Special Jury Award at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot

It is 25 September 1944, during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising. Lieutenant Zadra leads a unit of 43 soldiers and civilians to a new position amidst the ruins of the now isolated southern Mokotów district of Warsaw.

The composer Michał manages to telephone his wife and child in another part of the city that is being overrun by the Germans. After a few words, she tells him that the Germans are clearing the building and that they are coming for her. Then the line goes dead. The next morning, 23-year-old Officer Cadet Korab apologizes after walking into a room to find the second in command, Lieutenant Mądry, and messenger girl Halinka in bed together (Halinka later reveals that Mądry is her first lover). A German attack is beaten off, but Korab is wounded while disabling a Goliath tracked mine.

Kana Software

KANA Software, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT) and provides on-premises and cloud computing hosted customer engagement optimization (CEO) products to many of the Fortune 500, mid-market businesses and government agencies.

History

Mark Gainey founded KANA in 1996 to market a software package designed to help businesses manage email and Web-based communications. It grew around this core offering. In 1999, KANA Communications (as it was then known) acquired Connectify followed by Business Evolution and NetDialog. In 2000, KANA made its then-largest acquisition, Silknet Software. The purchase price was $4.2 billion, despite the fact that both companies were relatively small. Silknet was an early multichannel marketing software company. Industry analysts were generally cool to the purchase though some said it made sense strategically. In 2001, KANA merged with BroadBase software. KANA was a major stock market success during the dot-com bubble, and while it contracted significantly during the following downturn, it remained in business as an independent company through the following decade.