The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:

Spring (company)

Spring is the Australian arm of FremantleMedia Australia and was formed in 2011.

Current Programmes

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Spring (Rachmaninoff)

Spring (Vesna), Op. 20, is a single-movement cantata for baritone, chorus and orchestra, written by Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1902.

The work was finished after the famous Second Piano Concerto. Rachmaninoff intended to revise the cantata's orchestration but never did so.

Programme

The work is based on a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov and describes the return of the Zelyoniy shum, or "green rustle". The poem tells of a husband who, fraught with murderous thoughts towards his unfaithful wife during the winter season, is ultimately freed from his frustration and choler by the return of spring.

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Ceres (workstation)

The Ceres Workstation was a computer built by Niklaus Wirth's group around 1985. Ceres was a workstation based on the NS320xx a CPU by National Semiconductor. Ceres was a follow-up project to the Lilith, a machine based on AMD bit-slice technology and the programming language Modula-2. The operating system of Ceres, called "The Oberon System" was completely written in the programming language Oberon. It is an early example of an object oriented operating system utilizing garbage collection on the system level.

On the same hardware Clemens Szyperski implemented as part of his PhD an operating system, called ETHOS, which was taking full advantage of object oriented technologies. According to a posting of Clemens Szyperski on usenet the BlackBox Component Builder, formerly known as Oberon/F, incorporates many of his ideas and principles.

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Planetary Resources

Planetary Resources, Inc., formerly known as Arkyd Astronautics, is an American company that was formed in November 2010, and reorganized and renamed in 2012. Their stated goal is to "expand Earth's natural resource base" by developing and deploying the technologies for asteroid mining.

Although the long-term goal of the company is to mine asteroids, its initial plans call for developing a market for small (30–50 kg) cost-reduced space telescopes for both Earth observation and astronomy. These spacecraft would employ a laser-optical system for ground communications, reducing payload bulk and mass compared to conventional RF antennas. The deployment of such orbital telescopes is envisioned as the first step forward in the company's asteroid mining ambitions. The same telescope satellite capabilities that Planetary Resources hopes to sell to customers can be used to survey and intensively examine near-Earth asteroids.

A test satellite named Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) was launched and successfully transported to Earth orbit on 17 April 2015 and was deployed from the International Space Station via the NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer on July 16, 2015. The "Reflight" descriptor was used because Planetary's first satellite, Arkyd 3, was destroyed on October 28, 2014 after an Antares resupply rocket exploded seconds after launch.

Ceres (organization)

Ceres is a non-profit sustainability advocacy organization based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1989, Ceres' mission is to "mobilize investor and business leadership to build a thriving, sustainable global economy". Ceres brings together disparate stakeholders - investors, companies and public interest groups - to accelerate and expand the adoption of sustainable business practices and solutions to build a healthy global economy.

In 2007, Ceres was named one of the 100 most influential players in corporate governance by Directorship magazine. Ceres was a recipient of the Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2006, as well as a recipient of the Fast Company Social Capitalist Awards in 2008. As of January 2014, its president is Mindy Lubber.

History

Ceres was founded in 1989 when Joan Bavaria, then-president of Trillium Asset Management, formed an alliance with leading environmentalists with the goal of changing corporate environmental practices. She named the organization the "Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies", or CERES, after the Roman goddess of fertility and agriculture.