The Devastations

Devastations are an indie rock band from Melbourne, Australia. The band was founded in 2002 by the three friends Tom Carlyon, Hugo Cran and Conrad Standish after the end of their former band Luxedo.

The band was signed to Beggars Banquet Records, has released three albums and has toured extensively in Europe, where two of the band members live. Their debut album was named by Rolling Stone Germany as the best debut of 2004.

The band was nominated for an Australian Music Prize for Coal in 2005 and again in 2007 for Yes, U. The album, Yes, U, was also nominated for an Age Newspaper EG Award for Best Album of 2007.

Confirmed to be making an appearance on the upcoming tribute to The Cure on Manimal Vinyl in the Fall 2008. In 2009, the Devastations contributed to the AIDS benefit album Dark Was the Night produced by the Red Hot Organization.

Personnel

Discography

Coal (Kathy Mattea album)

Coal is an album by American country music singer Kathy Mattea, released on April 1, 2008 in the United States on her own label, Captain Potato Records. The album consists of 11 covers of classic coal mining songs by artists such as Merle Travis and Hazel Dickens.

Background

Mattea's decision to make an album about this topic was influenced by the fact that both of her grandfathers were miners, as well as by the Sago Mine disaster in 2006, which, when it occurred, reminded Mattea of the Farmington Mine disaster that had occurred when she was nine years old. She has said that she was expecting a set of stories in the songs she covered on this album, but instead found a connection to her miner ancestors. Her deep interest in this topic was also noted by the album's producer, Marty Stuart, as when they were recording the a cappella song "Black Lung". Stuart said it would be like "trying to repaint the 'Mona Lisa'", in that it requires authentic commitment to the task. Mattea also stated that it was so difficult for her to learn the song that it took her six months to do so. Nevertheless, the first recording of Mattea's version of the song ended up being kept after it made the recording engineer, whose father had died of black lung disease, cry. Stuart reacted by telling Mattea that this was a sign she was performing the song right.

Thomas & Friends (series 1)

Thomas & Friends (previously known as Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends) is a children's television series about the engines and other characters working on the railways of the Island of Sodor, and is based on The Railway Series books written by the Rev. W. Awdry.

This article lists and details episodes from the first series, which was originally broadcast in 1984. This series was initially narrated by Ringo Starr for the U.K. audiences, who re-dubbed 25 episodes for the U.S. audiences; which was later re-dubbed again by George Carlin for the U.S. audiences.

Most episodes in this series have two titles: the original titles from the U.K. broadcasts are shown on top, while the American-adapted titles are shown underneath.

All episodes from this series can be found on the DVD release Thomas: The Early Years, released by Anchor Bay Entertainment/HIT Entertainment in 2004.

It was produced by Clearwater Features Ltd. for Britt Allcroft (Thomas) Ltd.

Production

All of the stories in Series 1 were originally written by the Rev. W. Awdry, including a one-off story commissioned by the staff, Thomas' Christmas Party. The seven engines introduced in this series became the core of the cast in later episodes, with crew member (and from Series 8-12, director) Steve Asquith terming them the "Magnificent Seven". Many settings from the first series would stay with the show for years, even through its 2009 transition to CGI, such as Knapford, Wellsworth, Gordon's Hill, Henry's Tunnel, and Tidmouth Sheds.

Distributive property

In abstract algebra and formal logic, the distributive property of binary operations generalizes the distributive law from elementary algebra. In propositional logic, distribution refers to two valid rules of replacement. The rules allow one to reformulate conjunctions and disjunctions within logical proofs.

For example, in arithmetic:

In the left-hand side of the first equation, the 2 multiplies the sum of 1 and 3; on the right-hand side, it multiplies the 1 and the 3 individually, with the products added afterwards. Because these give the same final answer (8), it is said that multiplication by 2 distributes over addition of 1 and 3. Since one could have put any real numbers in place of 2, 1, and 3 above, and still have obtained a true equation, we say that multiplication of real numbers distributes over addition of real numbers.

Definition

Given a set S and two binary operators ∗ and + on S, we say that the operation:

∗ is left-distributive over + if, given any elements x, y, and z of S,

Probability distribution

In probability and statistics, a probability distribution assigns a probability to each measurable subset of the possible outcomes of a random experiment, survey, or procedure of statistical inference. Examples are found in experiments whose sample space is non-numerical, where the distribution would be a categorical distribution; experiments whose sample space is encoded by discrete random variables, where the distribution can be specified by a probability mass function; and experiments with sample spaces encoded by continuous random variables, where the distribution can be specified by a probability density function. More complex experiments, such as those involving stochastic processes defined in continuous time, may demand the use of more general probability measures.

In applied probability, a probability distribution can be specified in a number of different ways, often chosen for mathematical convenience:

History monoid

In mathematics and computer science, a history monoid is a way of representing the histories of concurrently running computer processes as a collection of strings, each string representing the individual history of a process. The history monoid provides a set of synchronization primitives (such as locks, mutexes or thread joins) for providing rendezvous points between a set of independently executing processes or threads.

History monoids occur in the theory of concurrent computation, and provide a low-level mathematical foundation for process calculi, such as CSP the language of communicating sequential processes, or CCS, the calculus of communicating systems. History monoids were first presented by M.W. Shields.

History monoids are isomorphic to trace monoids (free partially commutative monoids) and to the monoid of dependency graphs. As such, they are free objects and are universal. The history monoid is a type of semi-abelian categorical product in the category of monoids.