Friday, September 22, 2006

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the northeast, Belarus to
the north, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the
southwest and the Black Sea to the south. The famous city of Kiev is the republic's
capital.
From at least the ninth century the territory of present-day Ukraine was a centre of
medieval East Slavic civilization that formed the state that became known as Kievan
Rus and for the following several centuries the territory was separated between a
number of regional powers. After a brief period of independence (1917-1921) following
the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ukraine became one of the founding Soviet Republics
in 1922. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic's territory was enlarged westward after
the Second World War, and again in 1954 with the Crimea transfer. Ukraine became
independent once more after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Dance

Dance from Old French dancier, perhaps from Frankish generally refers to human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting.Dance is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication between humans or animals bee dance, mating dance, motion in inanimate objects the leaves danced in the wind, and certain musical forms or genres.Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this is called a choreographer. Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement to codified, virtuoso techniques such as ballet. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are dance disciplines while Martial arts 'kata' are often compared to dances.

Unlike some early human activities such as the production of stone tools, hunting, cave painting, etc., dance does not leave behind physical artifacts for immediate evidence. Thus, it is impossible to say with any certainty when dance became part of human culture. However, dance has certainly been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archaeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as gyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from circa 3300 BC and the Bhimbetka rock-shelter paintings in India.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Copyright

Copyright is a set of exclusive rights regulating the use of a particular expression of an idea or information. At its most general, it is literally "the right to copy" an original creation. In most cases, these rights are of limited duration. The symbol for copyright is © (Unicode U+00A9), and in some jurisdictions may alternately be written (c).
Copyright may subsist in a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms or "works". These include poems, theses, plays, and other literary works, movies, choreographic works,musical compositions, audio recordings, paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, software, radio and television broadcasts of live and other performances, and, in some jurisdictions, industrial designs. Copyright is a type of intellectual property; designs or industrial designs may be a separate or overlapping form of intellectual property in some jurisdictions.
Copyright law covers only the particular form or manner in which ideas or information have been manifested, the "form of material expression". It is not designed or intended to cover the actual idea, concepts, facts, styles, or techniques which may be embodied in or represented by the copyright work. Copyright law provides scope for satirical or interpretive works which themselves may be copyrighted. See idea-expression divide.
For example, the copyright which subsists in relation to a Mickey Mouse cartoon prohibits unauthorized parties from distributing copies of the cartoon or creating derivative works which copy or mimic Disney's particular anthropomorphic mouse, but does not prohibit the creation of artistic works about anthropomorphic mice in general, so long as they are sufficiently different to not be imitative of the original. Other laws may impose legal restrictions on reproduction or use where copyright does not - such as trademarks and patents.