Swatch Internet Time

Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of "Beat" watches.

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.

There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.

History

Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98, attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country (supposedly) created and run by children.

Beat (1997 film)

Beat (Hangul: 비트; RR: Biteu) is 1997 South Korean gangster film directed by Kim Sung-su and written by Sam Shin about a high school dropout who is forced into gang life. Jung Woo-sung played the lead Min and Ko So-young his love interest Romy. The plot is based on a bestselling graphic novel by Huh Young-man.

The role solidified Jung as a leading Korean actor and was also based on his real-life experience as a high school dropout. This was the third and final film pairing Jung and Ko, but the director would later work with Jung again in Musa (2001).

Plot

Three friends in Korea all drop out of high school. Min is a feared brawler whose widowed mother is a drunk. The story traces his journey from high school to the underworld as his best friend introduces him to life in the mob. Complicating Min's life further is his love for the volatile Romy, a girl from an upper-class family with dreams of going to a prestigious college.

Cast

Beat (police)

In police terminology, a beat is the territory and time that a police officer patrols. Beat policing is based on traditional policing (late 19th century) and utilises the close relationship with the community members within the assigned beat to strengthen police effectiveness and encourage cooperative efforts to make a safer community. Beat police typically patrol on foot or bicycle which provides more interaction between police and community members.

Before the advent of personal radio communications, beats were organised in towns and cities to cover specific areas, usually shown on a map in the police station and given some sort of name or number. Officers reporting on duty would be allocated a beat by their sergeant and sometimes given a card indicating that the officer should be at a particular point at set times, usually half an hour, or forty-five minutes apart. The points would usually be telephone kiosks, police pillars or boxes, or perhaps public houses where it would be possible to phone the officer should he be needed to respond to an incident. The officer would remain at the point for five minutes and then patrol the area gradually making his way to the next point.

Positive

Positive is a property of positivity and may refer to:

Mathematics and science

Philosophy and humanities

Positive (1990 film)

Positive is a 1990 documentary film directed, written and produced by Rosa von Praunheim. The film follows Silence = Death as the second part of von praunheim and Phil Zwickler’s trilogy about AIDS and activism.

This film documents New York City’s gay community’s response to the AIDS crisis during the 1980s as they were forced to organize themselves after the government’s slow response to stem the epidemic. Activist who are interviewed include New York filmmaker and journalist Phil Zwickler, playwright and gay activist Larry Kramer and musician Michael Callen who co-founded people with AIDS Coalition. Framing the individual stories of these three men is a chronicle of the creation of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, ACT- UP and Queer Nation as the gay community confronted the AIDS epidemic.

Notes

References

Comparison (grammar)

Comparison is a feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages, whereby adjectives and adverbs are inflected or modified to indicate the relative degree of the property defined by the adjective or adverb.

The grammatical category associated with comparison of adjectives and adverbs is degree of comparison. The usual degrees of comparison are the positive, which simply denotes a property (as with the English words big and fully); the comparative, which indicates greater degree (as bigger and more fully); and the superlative, which indicates greatest degree (as biggest and most fully). Some languages have forms indicating a very large degree of a particular quality (called elative in Semitic linguistics). Other languages (e.g. English) can express lesser degree, e.g. beautiful, less beautiful, least beautiful.

Formation of comparatives and superlatives

Comparatives and superlatives may be formed morphologically, by inflection, as with the English and German -er and -(e)st forms, or syntactically, as with the English more... and most... and the French plus... and le plus... forms. Common adjectives and adverbs often produce irregular forms, such as better and best (from good) and less and least (from little/few) in English, and meilleur (from bon) and mieux (from the adverb bien) in French.

Van

A van is a kind of vehicle used for transporting goods or people. Depending on the type of van it can be bigger or smaller than a truck and SUV, and bigger than an automobile. There is some varying in the scope of the word across the different English-speaking countries. The smallest vans, minivans, are commonly used for transporting people from a family. Larger vans with passenger seats are used for institutional purposes, such as transporting students. Larger vans with only front seats are often used for business purposes, to carry goods and equipment. Specially-equipped vans are used by television stations as mobile studios. Postal services and courier companies use large step vans to deliver packages.

Word origin and usage

Van meaning a type of vehicle arose as a contraction of the word caravan. The early records of van as a vehicle in English are in the mid 19th century meaning a covered wagon for transporting goods (earliest reported record 1829). Caravan with the same meaning has records since the 1670s. A caravan, meaning one wagon, had arisen as an extension or corruption of caravan meaning a convoy of multiple wagons.