matthewr's profile

List of Nonprofit Organizations

The American Red Cross helps prepare communities for emergencies and keep people safe every day thanks to caring people who support our work. (http://www.redcross.org/)

List of Nonprofit Organizations

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF) is the largest transparently-operated charitable foundation in the world. Founded by Bill Gates, and named after Gates and his wife, Melinda, the aim of the foundation is to provide lifesaving health care products and technology for the poorest parts of the world. The foundation, based out of Seattle, Washington in the United States, is chaired by Gates' father William H. Gates, Sr. and Patty Stonesifer; as of June 2006, it has an endowment of approximately US$29.2 billion.

List of Nonprofit Organizations

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is a United States non-profit medical research institute based in Chevy Chase, Maryland and originally founded by the aviator and engineer Howard Hughes in 1953.

As of 2005 it is one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research in the United States. According to the institute's current president, Thomas R. Cech, the HHMI spends about $1 million per investigator per year, which amounts to annual investment in biomedical research of about $483 million. As of September 2005 the endowment of the Institute was valued at approximately $14.8 billion, making it the second-wealthiest philanthropic organization in the United States, behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the second best endowed medical research foundation in the world after the United Kingdom's Wellcome Trust.

Initially, the institute was formed with the stated goal of basic research including trying to understand, in Hughes' words, "genesis of life itself". Despite its lofty principles, in the early days it was generally viewed as largely a tax haven for Hughes' huge personal fortune. Hughes was the sole trustee of HHMI and transferred all his stock of Hughes Aircraft to the institute, in effect turning the large defense contractor into a tax-exempt charity. For many years the Institute grappled with maintaining its non-profit status; the Internal Revenue Service challenged its "charitable" status which made it tax exempt. Partly in response to such claims, starting in the late 1950s it began funding 47 investigators researching at eight different institutions; however, it remained a modest enterprise for several decades. In fact it was not until after Hughes' death in 1976 that the Institute's profile increased from an annual budget of $4 million in 1975 to $15 million by 1978. In this period it refocused its mission on genetics, immunology and the rapidly growing field of molecular biology.

Since Hughes died without a will as the sole trustee of the HHMI, the Institute was involved in lengthy court proceedings to determine whether it would benefit from Hughes fortune. In 1984, a court appointed new trustees for the institute's holdings. These trustees sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors and the $5.2 billion proceeds caused the institute to grow dramatically.

Currently, HHMI is involved in building a new research campus in Virginia called Janelia Farm Research Campus. It is modeled after AT&T's Bell Labs and the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

List of Free Search Engines

Google is a search engine owned by Google, Inc. whose mission statement is to, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The largest search engine on the web, Google receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services.

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos, searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online. In 2006, Google has indexed over 25 billion web pages, 1.3 billion images, and over one billion Usenet messages — in total, approximately 12 billion items. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Suggest, Froogle, and Google Desktop Search.

List of Free Search Engines

Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo!. Originally, "Yahoo! Search" merely referred to an interface, Yahoo! provided, which would pass on queries to another search engine "behind the scenes" (most recently Google), and display them to the user, under the Yahoo! brand. Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was done by Yahoo! itself.

Seeking to provide its own search engine results, Yahoo! acquired other companies with their own search engines. In 2002, it bought Inktomi, a "behind the scenes" search engine, whose results are shown on other companies' web sites. In 2003, it bought Overture Services, Inc., which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. Initially, even though it owned multiple search engines, it didn't use them on the main Yahoo.com web site, but kept using Google's search engine for its results.

However, starting in 2004, Yahoo! Search became an original web crawler-based search engine, with a reinvented crawler called Yahoo! Slurp. Yahoo! Search combined the capabilities of search engine companies it had acquired, with its existing research, and put them into a single search engine. Its new search engine results were included in all of Yahoo!'s sites that had a web search function. It also started to sell its search engine results to other companies, to show on their web sites. Its relationship with Google was terminated at that time, with the former partners becoming each other's main competitors.

List of Free Search Engines

MSN Search is a search engine by Microsoft that comprises of a search engine, index, and crawler. This offers one the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local and Microsoft Encarta. MSN Search aims to make its over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month “more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions.” A configuration menu is available to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer, but the selection is sometimes criticized as being limited, and a custom URL cannot be entered without installing an add-on.

In the past the service relied on different search engine companies as sources, such as Inktomi. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own Microsoft-built search engine results (list of web addresses with samples of content that meet a user's query), the index of which is updated weekly or even daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004 (based on several years of research), and came out of beta in February 2005. MSN Search's search engine index now includes more than 5 billion documents, 400 million images, and 3 million instant answers. The service has also recently changed its look and started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.

List of Cartoon Characters

Popeye the Sailor is a famous comic strip character, later featured in popular animated cartoons. He was created by Elzie Crisler Segar and first appeared in the King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929. Popeye quickly became the main focus of the strip, which was one of King Features' most popular strips during the 1930s. Thimble Theatre, carried on after Segar's 1938 death by artists such as Bud Sagendorf, was renamed Popeye in the 1970s. Today drawn by Hy Eisman, Popeye continues to appear in first-run strips in Sunday papers (daily Popeye strips are reruns of older strips).

In 1933, Max and Dave Fleischer's Fleischer Studios adapted the Thimble Theatre characters into a series of Popeye the Sailor theatrical cartoon shorts for Paramount Pictures. These cartoons proved to be among the most popular of the 1930s, and Popeye at one time rivaled Mickey Mouse for popularity among audiences. After Paramount assumed control of the Fleischer Studio in 1942, they continued producing the series until 1957. Future Popeye cartoons were produced for television from 1960 to 1962 by King Features, and from 1978 to 1982 as well as 1987 to 1988 by Hanna-Barbera Productions.

List of Cartoon Characters

Scooby-Doo is a popular and long-running American animated television series produced for Saturday morning television by Hanna-Barbera Productions (now Cartoon Network Studios) in several different versions from 1969 to the present. Though the format of the show and the cast (and ages) of characters have varied significantly over the years, the most familiar versions of the show feature a talking Great Dane named Scooby-Doo and four teenagers : Fred "Freddie" Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Norville "Shaggy" Rogers.

These five characters (officially referred to collectively as "Mystery, Inc.", but never referred to as such in the original series) drive around the world in a van called the "Mystery Machine," and solve mysteries typically involving tales of ghosts and other supernatural forces. At the end of each episode, the supernatural forces turn out to have a rational explanation (usually a criminal of some sort trying to scare people away so that they can commit crimes). Later versions of the show featured different variations on the supernatural theme of the show, and include additional characters, such as Scooby's cousin Scooby-Dum and his nephew Scrappy-Doo, in addition to or instead of some of the original characters.

Scooby-Doo was originally broadcast on CBS from 1969 to 1976, when it moved to ABC. ABC cancelled the show in 1986, but presented a spin-off, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, from 1988 until 1991. A new Scooby-Doo series, What's New, Scooby-Doo?, aired on the WB Network during the Kids WB programming block from 2002 until 2005, with a new Scooby series, Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!, set to take its place on the new CW network in fall 2006. Repeats of the original series, as well as second-run episodes of the current series, are broadcast frequently on the Cartoon Network in the United States and other countries. For one year from 2004 to 2005, Scooby-Doo held the Guinness World Record for having the most episodes of any animated television series ever produced, a record previously held by and later returned to The Simpsons. Scooby-Doo was published as holding this record in the 2006 edition of the Guinness Book of Records.

List of Cartoon Characters

Tom and Jerry were an animated cat (Tom) and mouse (Jerry) team who formed the basis of a massively successful series of theatrical short animated films created, written and directed by animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (later of Hanna-Barbera fame). The series was produced by Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1940 until 1958, when the studio's animation unit was closed down. MGM, in 1960, outsourced the production of Tom and Jerry to Rembrandt Films (led by Gene Deitch) in Eastern Europe. In 1963, production of Tom and Jerry shorts returned to Hollywood with Chuck Jones' Sib-Tower 12 Productions; this series lasted until 1967. Tom and Jerry later resurfaced in TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera (1975 - 1977; 1990 - 1993) and Filmation Studios (1980 - 1982). The original MGM shorts helmed by Hanna and Barbera shorts are notable for having won seven Academy Awards, tying it with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies as the most-awarded theatrical animated series.

List of Cartoon Characters

Inspector Gadget is an animated television series about a clumsy, absent-minded, and oblivious detective, Inspector Gadget, who is a cyborg with various "gadgets" built into his anatomy. Gadget's main nemesis is the mysterious Dr. Claw, leader of an evil organization known as MAD. This was the merchandising company DiC Entertainment's first syndicated show, and ran from 1983 to 1986 in syndication. This article pertains to the original cartoon series and its characters and plots; for information on its later spinoffs, see Inspector Gadget spinoff incarnations.

Don Adams, who voiced the inspector, also played the main character on the hit 1960s American television series Get Smart!; a secret agent named Maxwell Smart. As a result, similarites between the two series' and his characters are often drawn. However, Inspector Gadget has far more in common with the bumbling trench coat–clad Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther movie series than Get Smart!. In fact in the pilot episode of Inspector Gadget, Gadget had a mustache just like Clouseau's. It was removed afterwards apparently because MCA threatened to sue because he was too similar to Clouseau. The episode was even voiced so Gadget could claim the mustache was simply part of a disguise.

The series was later adapted into a movie of the same name, which spawned a direct-to-video sequel.

The name has passed into common parlance to refer to people similarly obsessed with gadgetry.

100 Most Beautiful Italian Women

Sophia Loren was born Sofia Villani Scicolone in Rome, Italy, the illegitimate daughter of married engineer Riccardo Scicolone and aspiring actress and piano teacher, Romilda Villani. Loren grew up impoverished in wartime Pozzuoli, near Naples.

At age 16, Loren began her film career with bit parts in mostly minor Italian films. In 1951, Loren and her mother worked as extras in Quo Vadis, which was filmed in Rome and provided Loren with an early brush with Hollywood. She also appeared as Aida in Aida (1953), in which the singing of Loren's role was dubbed by opera star Renata Tebaldi.

Loren worked as a model in the weekly illustrated romantic stories, called fotoromanzi under the name, Sofia Villani or Sofia Lazzaro. She also took part in regional beauty contests, where she won several prizes. Loren was discovered by her future husband, the much older film producer Carlo Ponti, and they married on September 17, 1957, three days before her 23rd birthday. Their first marriage had to be annulled to keep Ponti from being charged with bigamy, and they remarried on April 9, 1966. They would have two sons together, Carlo Ponti, Jr., and Edoardo Ponti.

Under Ponti's management, Sofia Scicolone changed her name to Sophia Loren and appeared in film roles that emphasized her voluptuous physique, even appearing topless in the films Two Nights with Cleopatra and It's Him, Yes! Yes! Loren's acting career took off upon meeting Vittorio De Sica and Marcello Mastroianni in 1954.

By the late 1950s, Loren's star began to rise in Hollywood, with films such as 1957's Boy on a Dolphin and The Pride and the Passion in which she co-starred with Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant. Loren became romantically attracted to Grant for a time.

Best Open Source Content Management System - CMS

MODx is an open source PHP Application Framework that helps you take control of your online content. It empowers developers and advanced users to give as much control as desired to whomever they desire for day-to-day website content maintenance chores.