Mic (media company)

Mic (Formerly PolicyMic) is a media company focused on news for a generation known as the "millennials". The company reaches 19 million unique monthly visitors and has a higher composition of 18- to 34-year-old readers than any other millennial-focused news site, including BuzzFeed and Vice.

Mic received early attention for its on-the-ground coverage during the revolution in Tunisia, and The Hollywood Reporter remarked that Mic features "stories that intelligently cover serious issues important to young people".

History

PolicyMic was founded in 2011 by Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, two high school friends from New York. Since then, they have raised $15 million from investors, including Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape, who said that Altchek and Horowitz "remind me of my younger self". Other investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital, Red Swan Ventures, and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2014, PolicyMic announced they would re-brand their organization to target millennials, and renamed themselves as "Mic". The company will not disclose its valuation. According to The New York Observer, Mic currently does not make a profit and "is in the increasingly rare habit of actually paying each one of its writers, editors and contributors".

Microsoft Comic Chat

Microsoft Comic Chat (later Microsoft Chat, but not to be confused with Windows Chat, or WinChat) is a graphical IRC client created by Microsoft, first released with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. Comic Chat was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander, with Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group and later a group he managed in Microsoft's Internet Division.

Comic Chat's main feature, which set it apart from other IRC clients, is that it enabled comic avatars to represent a user; this character could express a specified emotion, possibly making IRC chatting a more emotive and expressive experience. All of the comic characters and backgrounds were initially created by comic artist Jim Woodring. Later, tools became available that allowed user-created characters and backgrounds.

Comic Chat started out as a research project, and a paper describing the technology was published at SIGGRAPH '96. It was an experiment in automatic illustration construction and layout. The algorithms used in Comic Chat attempted to mimic some basic illustration techniques of comic artists (particularly Jim Woodring). Character placement, the choice of gestures and expressions, and word balloon construction and layout, were all chosen automatically. A widget called the "emotion wheel" allowed users to override the program's choice of expression.

MIC

Mic or MIC may refer to:

Organisations

Business

Government and politics

Rusty

Rusty may refer to something covered with rust or with a rust (color). Rusty is also a nickname for people who have red hair, a rust–hued skin tone, or are named Russell.

Rusty may refer to:

People

Rusty (film series)

The Rusty films were a series of eight children's movies made in America in the 1940s by Columbia Pictures. The films presented stories about a group of young children and their dog named Rusty. Though the films were B-movies primarily shown as the second half of a double-bill, the films usually had a humanist sub-text and subtly promoted positive values on social issues of the era. Among the directors of the series was John Sturges who subsequently became famous for directing The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Among the regular cast members was child actor David Ackles who appeared in six of the eight films. Ackles subsequently achieved critical acclaim as a singer-songwriter in the 1960s and 1970s lionized by Elton John and Elvis Costello.

The films

Narrow gauge engines (Thomas & Friends)

In Thomas & Friends, the Island of Sodor is home to a narrow gauge railway in the hills. These lines and the engines who work on them are some of the oldest on the island. The narrow gauge railway has some contact with The Fat Controller's standard gauge engines, but the location of the railway leaves the little engines in relative isolation.

North Western Railway

Victor

Victor is a dark red Hispanic tank engine in charge of the Sodor Steamworks. He supervises all the engines who journey in and out of the workshops, as well as Kevin, the clumsy yard crane. Victor always has a helpful, constructive disposition and is good-humored with everyone he meets. He speaks with a Cuban accent and spoke Spanish when he first came to Sodor.

Victor was introduced in the feature-length special Hero of the Rails. The show's staff were researching real-life engine workshops as inspiration for the Steamworks when they learned that one had a self-contained narrow-gauge line, used to transport parts internally. The staff decided they wanted an engine with a cab, and chose as a prototype ALCo's #1173, which was specially built for a sugar plantation line in Cuba. Some artistic licence was taken, as the original #1173 is a standard gauge locomotive. Victor made multiple further appearances in the thirteenth series, and has appeared in every series and special since.

Tribute

A tribute (from Latin tributum, contribution) is wealth, often in kind, that a party gives to another as a sign of respect or, as was often the case in historical contexts, of submission or allegiance. Various ancient states exacted tribute from the rulers of land which the state conquered or otherwise threatened to conquer. In case of alliances, lesser parties may pay tribute to more powerful parties as a sign of allegiance and often in order to finance projects that benefited both parties. To be called "tribute" a recognition by the payer of political submission to the payee is normally required; the large sums, essentially protection money, paid by the later Roman and Byzantine Empires to barbarian peoples to prevent them attacking imperial territory, would not usually be termed "tribute" as the Empire accepted no inferior political position. Payments by a superior political entity to an inferior one, made for various purposes, are described by terms including "subsidy".

The ancient Persian Achaemenid Empire is an example of an ancient tribute empire; one that made relatively few demands on its non-Persian subjects other than the regular payment of tribute, which might be gold, luxury goods, animals, soldiers or slaves. However failure to keep up the payments had dire consequences. The reliefs at Persepolis show processions of figures bearing varied types of tribute.