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A brief history of graffiti - Kelly Wall

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Spray-painted subway cars, tagged bridges, mural-covered walls - graffiti pops up boldly throughout our cities. And it turns out: it's nothing new. Graffiti has been around for thousands of years. And across that span of time, it's raised the same questions we debate now: Is it art? Is it vandalism?

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Is graffiti a vibrant urban art form or senseless vandalism? When did graffiti first become popular? Read this article to find out about the history of street art and hear from both sides of the debate.

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Do you want more Instagram followers? To become Instagram famous, you need to focus on ways to get your photos noticed. When I first signed up to Instagram, I struggled to get my first 30 followers. Even my best photos were getting only a few like. And I wasn't getting any feedback on my pictures. That's when I decided it was time to get popular on Instagram... and now I have over 128,000 followers. In this tutorial you'll discover how to become Instagram famous in three easy steps.
My @iPhonePS Instagram Account
It can take a lot of work to get thousands of followers. But I can tell you that Instagram gets a lot more fun when more people are following you!

So let's take a look at the three steps you need to take to become Instagram famous.

Step 1: Build A Stunning Instagram Feed

First you need to make your Instagram profile look great. Nobody is going to follow a profile that has poor quality images.

If your goal is to showcase your photography, your photos must look good. It's better to post nothing than to post a bad photo.

The first thing to do is upload about 15 - 20 of your best images. If you don't have that many, keep working on it. Make sure you only post high quality eye-catching photos.

If you're starting out on Instagram, it's a good idea to improve your iPhone photography first. People only like to follow photographers with interesting photos.

To improve your photography, work on creating images with excellent composition. And learn how to use light to create more stunning and dramatic photos.

Learn how to use your camera's settings. You might also consider using a more advanced iPhone camera app. Edit your Instagram photos with a photo editor app to ensure they look their best before sharing.

Taking time to improve your photography will more than pay off when you try to get Instagram famous. Check out my free video... 7 little-known tricks for taking incredible iPhone photos that everyone adores.

Keep in mind that certain types of photos do particularly well on Instagram. In my experience beach photos, reflections, silhouettes and sunsets get the most likes. Portrait photos are generally not as popular.

This sunset reflection photo got more likes than a lot of my other photos that I've posted on Instagram.

If you want to get popular on Instagram, post the kind of photos your followers want to see. This is why I often share beach and sunset photos.

If you want more followers on Instagram, it's a good idea to post the kind of photos that get more likes.

If you share photos of you hanging out with friends, don't expect people to start following you. These aren't the kind of photos any serious photographer would want to share.

Never post text images or jokes, no matter how cool you think the text is. Also avoid posting random screenshots as most people don't like them.

Before you go to the next step, make sure your Instagram account is public. If your photos aren't public, you'll have a much harder time attracting new followers.

To make your Instagram feed public, go to your profile and tap the Settings icon near the top right of the screen. Go to Account Privacy and make sure the Private Account slider is off.

Finally, write a profile description that will motivate people to follow you. Describe yourself in a meaningful way to attract the right kind of followers. Don't overcomplicate this step. Something like "iPhone landscape photographer and surfer" is all you need.

Step 2: Get Your Instagram Photos Noticed

Once you've uploaded some great photos, it's time to attract everyone's attention. Your aim is to get more Instagram followers, as well as more likes and comments on your photos.

There are several ways to get your photos noticed and gain more followers. I'm going to discuss them in this section.

First, reach out to your existing friends and followers from other social networks. Since those people already know you, they're more likely to become a follower. You can send a message or share a post inviting your friends to follow you.

To get your Instagram photos in front of more people, consider using hashtags. Adding hashtags when you post a photo means your image will show up in Instagram's hashtag feeds.

To add a hashtag, use the caption box when you're posting a photo. Type the hashtag symbol # followed by an appropriate word to describe your image.

Ensure you only add relevant hashtags to your photos. There's no need to spam your posts with dozens of irrelevant hashtags. That will only make you look like a spammer.

Are you posting a sunset beach photo with silhouettes? Use the hashtags #beach, #silhouette, #sunset. If you've used a particular app to edit your photo, you could use the app name as your hashtag.

Another easy way to get your photos in front of other Instagramers is to follow a lot of people.

Find someone with photos like yours, and start following the followers of that person. They'll get notified that you're following them, and many will check out your profile.

But following people isn't enough. You also need to interact with people that you follow. If you follow someone and don't like or comment on any of their photos, you're considered to be a ghost follower.

You'll get better results if you comment on the photos of people you're following. That way they'll know you're a real person.

You might find that following lots of people is impractical. If so, you can still get a lot of exposure by leaving meaningful comments on photos - even if you're not following them.

If you leave a positive comment, the photographer may check out your profile. And if your profile is good, you'll get a new follower.

Your comments are more likely to get noticed by people who don't have lots of likes or followers. You'll also have more chance of getting noticed if you comment on recent photos.

Leaving comments on the iPhone can be slow and tedious. So you might want to use a web service such as IconoSquare. This allows you to leave comments from your computer.

Ensure you only leave comments for people who have a high chance of becoming your followers.

So how do you find such people? It's easy! All you need to do is use hashtags to search for people who do the same kind of photography as you. You can do this in the Tags section of Instagram's search facility.

Are you a landscape photographer? Search for hashtags such as #landscapes, #landscapephotography or #mountains. People using these hashtags are more likely to enjoy your profile and follow you.

You can also browse through photos with a particular hashtag using IconoSquare.

Step 3: Engage With Your Instagram Followers

Everyone gets obsessed with the number of Instagram followers. But keeping your followers happy and engaged is important too. Your aim is to build a relationship with them and get the most out of your Instagram experience.

Post photos on a regular basis so people don't forget who you are. I aim to share a photo every day on my @iPhonePS account. I've built a large and responsive community of people who look forward to seeing more photos from me.

But at the same time, you don't want to post too often. Sharing lots of photos at once since will take up a lot of space in the feed of your followers.

If somebody doesn't like one of your photos, the chances are they'll still keep following you. But when you post three photos in a row, you're more likely to lose a follower.

For this reason I don't recommend posting more than once every six hours. Remember that quality always beats quantity. It's better to share only great photos, even if that means posting less often.

Interacting with your followers is a great way to keep them happy and engaged. There's nothing more rewarding than building lasting relationships with your Instagram followers.

How To Become Instagram Famous: Recap

The tips in this tutorial will help you gain more genuine Instagram followers. Remember, the most important followers are those who appreciate your photos. Here's a quick recap of how you can become Instagram famous in three easy steps:

1. Build a stunning Instagram feed with only your very best photos.

2. Get noticed by following other people and commenting on their images. Use relevant hashtags to get your pictures seen by more people.

3. Engage with your Instagram followers. Post photos on a regular basis and respond to comments and questions.

You can see how I apply these tips and techniques at my @iPhonePS Instagram account.

The 7 Best iPhone Photography Apps

There are thousands of excellent photo apps on the App Store, and the things you can do with apps are absolutely incredible. With that said, the number of photo apps out there is overwhelming, and it's really hard to know which apps are worth getting.

That's why we created this free report revealing the 7 best iPhone photography apps that you should start using straight away. Click here to download this free report.

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How To Become Instagram Famous In 3 Easy Steps

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Do you want more Instagram followers? To become Instagram famous, you need to focus on ways to get your photos noticed. When I first signed up to Instagram, I struggled to get my first 30 followers. Even my best photos were getting only a few like.

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If you want to step up your Instagram game, take better photos and curate an enviable feed, who better to ask for advice than professional photographers acing the game? Which is why we've reached out to 29 Insta kings and queens and asked for foolproof tips and tricks. Their priceless advice is below.

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29 Instagram Hacks From People Who Take Really Good Photos

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If you want to step up your Instagram game, take better photos and curate an enviable feed, who better to ask for advice than professional photographers acing the game? Which is why we've reached out to 29 Insta kings and queens and asked for foolproof tips and tricks.

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Despite the fact that 79 percent of statistics are completely made up, I'm going to tell you that only one out of every 50 smartphone users doesn't have an Instagram account. Or, at least, the other 49 did before Facebook acquired Instagram last year. Yet, I know very few smartphone users who don't use the photo app. Is there just something about those hipster filters that makes us unable to stop uploading photos of our lattes and cats? Maybe. But it's also definitely about the people. Social apps are always about the people. And sharing. We live in a World Wide Web of over-sharing. We want to share what we did, what we're doing, and what we will do. We share photos and words and links and products. We're a walking advertisement for the things we love. Although Instagram is pretty good at helping us share photos, there are a lot of new features that could make the experience even better.

iPad Optimization: D'uh!

This is number one for a reason: Make the app universal already. How long have you been around, Instagram? This should go without saying. I definitely find myself browsing Instagram photos more than posting most times. In fact, I know a good number of users who have accounts for browsing purposes only. We already have Instagram on the Web. Where's the iPad version? Sure, 2x mode on the newer iPads isn't that bad, and there may be plenty of iPad apps that you can use to view your Instagram timeline, and interact with photos, but making the app universal is a must. This would even bring in another set of users: those who just have an iPad and no iPhone.

iCloud Sync

And what would a universal app be without iCloud sync? Exactly. Once the app is universal, integrating iCloud sync to always remember where you left off, and what notifications you've already viewed, is.

Multiple Accounts

Some of us have multiple Instagram accounts. Right now, there is no way for us to manage them simultaneously. Instead, we must log out and log back in and log out and back in. There should be an easy way to add multiple accounts, so that we can quickly toggle between them when needed. Logging on and off just to post one photo on your company account, for example, and then going back to your personal account, is too much of a pain. We have better ways to spend our time - like actually posting photos on Instagram.

Lists

Anyone who knows me will tell you how much I like lists: to do lists, bucket lists, hit lists - I have them all. And one of my favorite types of lists is the Twitter list. Mind you, only in Tweetbot does it do me much good, but Twitter lists are indispensable to me. Following people on Instagram can get messy. Just like Twitter, we follow people for different reasons. Maybe you follow some people that are complete strangers because they post beautiful landscape photos. And then you probably follow people you actually know because, well, you know them. But what if the people you actually know take crappy photos? What if you want to only see the photos from certain people at certain times? Maybe I don't care to see the numerous photos of your weekend in Las Vegas plastered all over Instagram, but I do enjoy your other photos. Sometimes I may just want to make lists of people I follow for different reasons. People I follow solely because they post great nature shots would be a list, websites and companies I follow would be a list, people I work with ... I could go on, but you get the point. I like lists.

Limiting Captions

Okay. This may not bother some of you, but it irks me: Some users tend to post very long captions on their photos. Placing a character limit on captions would allow us to view more photos and less blocks of text - and, after all, isn't that the point of Instagram? Alternatively, if a caption is longer than a set character count, the rest could be hidden, so we're not burdened with a giant explanation and, instead, can focus on the photo itself. Then we could tap "More" or "Read More" if, you know, we actually wanted to read more.

Clickable Links

Although Instagram is about sharing photos, sometimes there may be links we want to accompany them. As it stands, you can freely post whatever URLs you want, but there really isn't a point as they are not clickable. We can already easily click on usernames and hashtags, let's add some linkage into the mix. Even if there is no browser in Instagram, opening the link up in mobile Safari would be a huge step forward.

Copy+Paste

This feature could also replace linking for the time being. If we were able to copy and paste links from Instagram, at least we could easily navigate to them in a browser elsewhere. Also, sometimes I may want to paste something in: like a username (because the Instagram user search is hit or miss) or a quote. These features will not only make Instagram better for its current users, but even bring a new group of users to the photo sharing app. I've mapped out your battle plan for you, Zuck. Step it up!

Mentioned apps

Related articles

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Seven Features To Make Instagram Instantly Better

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Despite the fact that 79 percent of statistics are completely made up, I'm going to tell you that only one out of every 50 smartphone users doesn't have an Instagram account. Or, at least, the other 49 did before Facebook acquired Instagram last year.

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1. Make your point quickly

Businesses creating content for YouTube need to realise the first few seconds count most, so as not to risk the viewer moving on to the next shiny thing in the playlist. Online audiences like to "snack" on content, so the message must appear succinctly and early.

2. Get the title right

Catchy and relevant, not only to pull the viewer in but because water-cooler chat may reference a video, and it's vital it can be found easily. It's worth knowing YouTube is the world's second largest search engine.

3. Create an eye-catching thumbnail

Thumbnails are one of the basic elements of solid YouTube SEO. YouTube users scroll quickly and an eye-catching thumbnail can be the difference in them choosing your video.

4. Get your content seen

With the immense volume uploaded every minute, it's impossible to get noticed without luck or a good distribution strategy. Consider breaking your content into parts and distributing it via a range of platforms.

5. Select the right video channel

The demographics across platforms differ. Some platforms, such as Vine, barely see audiences aged over 16; others, like YouTube, sit more firmly in the 18-35 range.

6. Consider using successful YouTubers for endorsement/product placement

Creators with their own following can be an effective way to reach a wider audience. But finding the right influencer channel is not easy, so expert help can be useful.

7. Don't just post your TV ads

An online audience is not the same as for TV, and engages differently. I have seen many big brands whose YouTube channels consist solely of their TV ads, and it doesn't work. In fact, it can alienate the new audience.

8. Consider the purpose of the content

Content produced with a short-term goal (e.g. to promote a project) may differ from that with a medium to long-term aim (to raise your profile and/or build an owned audience to whom you can continue to feed video.

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How to create YouTube videos people will watch

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Businesses creating content for YouTube need to realise the first few seconds count most, so as not to risk the viewer moving on to the next shiny thing in the playlist. Online audiences like to "snack" on content, so the message must appear succinctly and early.

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Oh, YouTube. The video-sharing beast that knows no bounds. Since 2005, the website has been churning out a steady stream of cuddly cats, cute kids, and overly-dramatized rants about how we should just leave Britney alone (don't act like you haven't seen it). The video diversity spans countless topics including how-to shorts, comedy routines, news reports gone wrong, music videos, sports recaps, and pretty much anything and everything in between. The sheer amount of video data being uploaded amounts to more than 100 hours of video a minute, representing more than 50 countries from around the globe, a never-ending contribution to the six billion hours of video watched each month on the Google-owned phenomenon. To say it hasn't changed the Web, and the world, would be an understatement given it's profound imprint and integration into society.

Considering you've landed on this page however, there's good chance this is your first time tackling your own video. The basics for making a YouTube Video - deciding content, recording, editing, uploading, etc. - are easy tasks to perform, but difficult ones to master. Perhaps you want to start up your video blog series like Japanese-American comedian Ryan Higa, AKA Nigahiga, or launch your own cooking channel to combat the Heavy Metal Vegan Cooking. Or maybe you want a viable avenue to show the world just how adorable your 3-year-old daughter is, or a place to showcase your latest flamenco rendition of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" or blistering cut of "Canon in D."

Here's our overarching guide on how to make a YouTube video. We can't guarantee a sizable two billion views like the always-rollicking " Gangnam Style," but at least your creation will be on the Web for all the world to see - or you know, not. Also, check our our guide on how to make money on YouTube if you're looking to hone those entrepreneurial chops without leaving your home.

The process:

Step 1: Choosing your YouTube video's content

The first step in creating a YouTube video is deciding its content or purpose. Are you seeking to inform or entertain? What type of audience are you aiming at? How long do you want the video to be? These questions elicit some of the countless factors you should consider regardless of whether your goal is to be the next YouTube sensation or you're merely trying to showcase your work in a vast public forum. If you want your video to catch on, do something original and buck the trend, or mull over an ongoing series if you think monetization will be key down the line. If you're looking to go viral, try to grab your audience's attention within the opening moments to combat the overwhelming amount of audience ADD that seemingly proliferates with every passing year.

Try to keep your goals reasonable and within your capabilities considering you may not have the prowess of big-name producers (or big-name budgets). A YouTube video doesn't have to be of the highest-caliber as far as technical design goes because the content itself will likely speak volumes more than your potentially poor audio or sub-par video ever could. Also, depending on how intricate or complex you plan on making your video, consider scripting, storyboarding, or other pre-production tasks outlined in YouTube's stripped-down production guidebook.

It all starts with an idea - so make it one worthwhile.

Next Page: Recording your YouTube video

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From start to finish, DT's definitive guide to creating and uploading YouTube videos

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Oh, YouTube. The video-sharing beast that knows no bounds. Since 2005, the website has been churning out a steady stream of cuddly cats, cute kids, and overly-dramatized rants about how we should just leave Britney alone (don't act like you haven't seen it).

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Ready to learn how to make YouTube videos? It's easy, fun and a great way to share your movies with the world. All you need is a video to upload and an account to log on with.

Note: Keep in mind that it's really easy for anyone to download videos from YouTube, so if you don't want your original content to get stolen, you might reconsider whether it's a good idea to make YouTube videos.

The very first step in making a YouTube video is, of course, to have footage. This can be something original that you shoot with your phone, camera or webcam; it might be commercial, an old home movie from your past or a montage of photos you've taken.

Important: Make sure that the video content is yours and not owned by someone else. YouTube has a process that's put into place when you upload content to make sure it doesn't violate known copyrights, but you should be aware of those rights yourself, too.

Editing is optional but a good idea if you want to make your video more compelling or easy to follow along with. There will most certainly be portions of your video that you want to keep but also other (even tiny) sections that you don't want.

YouTube accepts a wide variety of video formats and resolution sizes, so you don't have to be too picky about export settings. A larger, higher quality file will look better on YouTube, but a smaller file will upload quicker.

Since YouTube uses 16:9 aspect ratio video players, any other video size will still work but will have black boxes on either side to make up for that incorrect ratio. Encode your video in one of these resolutions to make it work best.

The maximum file size you upload to YouTube is 128 GB. This is really, really big and shouldn't be a problem for most people.

You need to have a free user account with Google before you can upload videos to YouTube. If you already use Gmail, Google Photos or any of Google's other services, you can use the same information to get on YouTube.

You're now ready to upload your video! Just log on to your account on YouTube and click the upload button at the top of the screen.

Depending on the size of your video file, the process may be quick or slow. While you're waiting, you can enter information about your videos such as the title, description, and keywords. The more information you include, the easier it will be for people to find your video.

YouTube's video editor makes it easy to split your uploaded videos and add captions or notations. It also includes lots of free audio you can add to your videos, plus transitions and titles.

The easiest way to share your video is to copy its URL. You can also put your videos into playlists for an easy way to categorize your videos and even share multiple videos at the same time.

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Do You Want to Make a Video for YouTube?

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Ready to learn how to make YouTube videos? It's easy, fun and a great way to share your movies with the world. All you need is a video to upload and an account to log on with.

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Apple's iPhone: a definitive history in pictures

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The first ever iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco in January 2007. Its limited functionality in its early days - including not being able to connect to the internet independently of WiFi, meant it was effectively an entire computer that happened to make phone calls.

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on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs put sneaker to stage for what was the most incredible keynote presentations of his life-a life filled with incredible keynote presentations-and in the history of consumer electronics.

The company had been working for over two years on the Purple Experience Project. It had gone from a tablet to a phone. From a dream to reality. And just before he stepped out in front of the crowd, Jobs assembled his team and told them to remember the moment: The moment before iPhone. Because, in the next moment, everything would change.

During the keynote, Steve Jobs said it was rare enough for a company to revolutionize even one product category. Apple had already revolutionized two: Computers with the Mac and personal music players with the iPod. With the iPhone they'd be going for three.

He set up and knocked down the physical keyboard and the stylus, features that dominated the BlackBerry, Motorola, and Palm smartphones of the day. Then Jobs introduced the multitouch interface that let the iPhone smoothly pinch-to-zoom, the physics-based interactivity that included inertial scrolling and rubberbanding, and the multitasking that let him move seamlessly from music to call to web to email and back.

They were technologies that would one day become commonplace across the industry but back then looked like science-fiction. From Apple:

iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone. We are all born with the ultimate pointing device-our fingers-and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.

Technology alone wasn't enough

The original iPhone, based on the P2 device of the Project Experience Purple (PEP) team, code-named M68 and device number iPhone1,1, had a 3.5-inch LCD screen at 320x480 and 163ppi, a quad-band 2G EDGE data radio, 802.11b.g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, and a 2-megapixel camera.

It was powered by an ARM-based 1176JZ(F)-S processor and PowerVR MBX Lite 3D graphics chip, manufactured by Samsung, with a 1400 mAh battery, and had 128MB of onboard RAM. Two NAND Flash-based storage tiers were available at launch: 4GB or 8GB.

More importantly, iPhone also included several sensors to enhance the experience, like an accelerometer that could automatically rotate the screen to match device orientation, a proximity sensor that could automatically turn off the screen when close to the face, and an ambient light sensor that could automatically adjust brightness.

And it could also be charged-and critically, synced to iTunes-by the same 30-pin Dock connector as Apple's already exceedingly popular iPod.

What the original iPhone didn't have was CDMA and EVDO rev A network compatibility. That meant it couldn't work on two of the U.S.' big four carriers, Verizon and Sprint. Not that it mattered; the original iPhone was exclusive to AT&T.

It also lacked GPS, or support for faster 3G UTMS/HSPA data speeds. In addition to no hardware keyboard or stylus, the iPhone also didn't have a removable, user-replaceable battery or SD card support. None of that pleased existing power users of the time. Nor did the absence of an exposed file system, copy and paste or any form of advanced text editing, and, critically to many, support for third-party apps. Likewise, since the iPhone had a real web browser instead of a WAP browser, which was required to display carrier-based multimedia messages, the original iPhone didn't support MMS either.

All of this was wrapped in bead-blasted aluminum with a black plastic band around the back to allow for RF transparency.

Then there was the price. The iPhone debuted at $499 for the 4GB and $599 for the 8GB model on-contract. Those prices weren't unheard of at the time-early Motorola RAZR flip phones were incredibly expensive as well-but it meant Apple couldn't penetrate the mainstream market.

Race to launch

Macworld wasn't a finish line, it was a shot from the starting pistol. Jony Ive, Richard Howarth, and the industrial design teams' work had largely been completed already but hardware engineering still faced challenges.

Steve Jobs scratched the pre-release iPhone screen with the keys in his pocket, he asked the team to come up with a better solution. They turned to Corning, which had invented a new, chemically hardened material, but had yet to find a commercial application for it. The team spun on a dime and got Gorilla Glass onto the iPhone.

The software team, under the auspices of Scott Forstall, was still racing as well. Greg Christie, Bas Ording, Mike Matas and others had been working on the human interface and interactivity for a long time already, but things were still being tweaked. Split screen for email, for example, got pulled after Jobs felt it was too crowded on the small screen.

Likewise Henri Lamiraux's software engineering and frameworks team, including Nitin Ganatra's native apps team, and Richard' Williamson's mobile web team. They had to make sure all the apps and all the features performed not only reliably but delightfully.

They'd already gotten a relatively full version of Safari, based on the same WebKit rendering engine developed by Don Melton and team for the Mac, up and running. They'd also taken Google's location data and created the best Maps implementation ever seen on mobile, but they were then tasked with adding a YouTube app as well.

On June 6, 2007 Steve Jobs again took to the stage at Moscone West, this time for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. He announced web 2.0 apps as the development platform but also announced something more: the launch date.

Go for launch

On June 28, 2007, Apple shipped the original iPhone. Lineups had already formed at Apple Stores, especially flagship stores like the glass cube in New York City. People had been waiting outside for days. The lines went around the block. And then around again. Anticipation was stratospheric. Competitors were dismissing it. Media was calling it the Jesus Phone.

And then the doors opened.

The initial reaction was positive. Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.

Ryan Block, writing for Engadget:

It's easy to see the device is extraordinarily simple to use for such a full-featured phone and media player. Apple makes creating the spartan, simplified UI look oh so easy -- but we know it's not, and the devil's always in the details when it comes to portables. To date no one's made a phone that does so much with so little, and despite the numerous foibles of the iPhone's gesture-based touchscreen interface, the learning curve is surprisingly low. It's totally clear that with the iPhone, Apple raised the bar not only for the cellphone, but for portable media players and multifunction convergence devices in general.

The novelty and experience were so good, many people simply didn't care about missing features or high price tags. But the price did prevent iPhone from getting into as many hands and lives as Apple wanted.

So, at the September 5, 2007 "The Beat Goes On" music event, Steve Jobs not only introduced the first iPod touch, he announced they were dropping the 4GB iPhone entirely, and dropping the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399. From Apple:

The surveys are in and iPhone customer satisfaction scores are higher than we've ever seen for any Apple product. We've clearly got a breakthrough product and we want to make it affordable for even more customers as we enter this holiday season.

On February 5, 2008, Greg Joswiack, then vice president of Worldwide iPod and iPhone Product Marketing, now in charge of all product marketing, announced a 16GB model. From Apple:

For some users, there's never enough memory. Now people can enjoy even more of their music, photos and videos on the most revolutionary mobile phone and best Wi-Fi mobile device in the world.

There was still no subsidized price, even on contract, but there was movement.

Competitive contempt

The vast majority of smartphones back in 2007 had hardware keyboards and, if they touch screens at all, those screens were almost all resistive and came with a stylus pen to aid in usability. Mobile apps were inconsistent and the mobile web was pretty much limited to WAP browsers.

While the iPhone certainly wasn't universally adored, the entrenched incumbents in the smartphone space were some of its harshest critics. That was, after all, their jobs.

Ed Coligan, former CEO of Palm:

We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.

Mike Lazaridis, former CEO of RIM (now BlackBerry):

Talk -- all I'm [hearing] is talk about [the iPhone's chances in Enterprise]. I think it's important that we put this thing in perspective. [...] Apple's design-centric approach [will] ultimately limit its appeal by sacrificing needed enterprise functionality. I think over-focus on one blinds you to the value of the other. [...] Apple's approach produced devices that inevitably sacrificed advanced features for aesthetics.

Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft:

You can get a Motorola Q for $99. [...] [Apple] will have the most expensive phone, by far, in the marketplace. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

It was a very different world in 2007. Phone were just beginning to hit usable data speeds but bandwidth was still limited and expensive. The appeal of smartphones was also limited primarily to early adopters and enterprise, and hadn't yet approached mainstream adoption.

Palm and BlackBerry were both wrong. Smartphones would give way to pocket computers and "PC guys"-if they worked for Apple-were absolutely the ones to figure it out. And for consumers, the interface is the feature, so by tackling interface Apple was beginning to make those pocket computers accessible to everyone.

Microsoft, however, was at least half right. The iPhone was too expensive. That was something Apple could and would change.

Google, an original iPhone launch partner, was both more perceptive, and more agile. They'd already bought Danger, the next generation phone platform created by Sidekick mastermind - and former Apple employee - Andy Rubin. They'd originally focused on making a Windows Mobile/BlackBerry-style competitor, determined to make sure Microsoft could never dominate the market and cut them out of the mobile future they so clearly recognized would be the next big thing.

Google's then-CEO, Eric Schmidt was on Apple's Board of Director's-and on stage for the iPhone event. He hadn't told Rubin what Apple was doing, however, or that Google would be giving the iPhone Maps and YouTube. Rubin was shocked. Collectively they realized Microsoft might not dominate mobile at all. Apple might. So, much to their credit, they spun around and refocused Android at the iPhone.

Changing everything... again

The original iPhone ended up selling over 6 million units in its first year on four carriers in four countries. Now, iPhone sells hundreds of millions a year on almost every carrier in almost every country. It's also been followed up by iPad, Apple TV and Apple Watch, HomeKit and HeathKit, CarPlay and AirPlay, AirPods and, soon, HomePod. And, with iPhone X, we've seen the beginning of what's next.

Steve Jobs told his team the world would never be the same. How utterly right he was.

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11 years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone

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on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs put sneaker to stage for what was the most incredible keynote presentations of his life-a life filled with incredible keynote presentations-and in the history of consumer electronics. The company had been working for over two years on the Purple Experience Project.

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As regularly as clockwork, our thoughts have already started to turn towards the new 2018 iPhone - but before we get too excited about what Apple's got in store for us this year, let's take a moment to reflect on what it's released since the very first iPhone back in 2007 over a decade back.

How many of these iconic handsets and new, innovative features can you remember?

iPhone (2007)

It's difficult to overstate the impact the iPhone has had on the smartphone market: by eschewing the keypad for a touchscreen and adding advanced computer-like capabilities that hadn't been seen before, it set the standard for this modern device. "Apple is going to reinvent the phone," said Steve Jobs at the time, and he was right - but the original iPhone had no third-party apps, no GPS and no video recording.

iPhone 3G (2008)

Also missing from the original iPhone was 3G support, the top data speed of the time, though this was added to the second generation the following year (along with GPS). The first iPhone had been warmly received but by the 3G model people were really starting to see its long-term potential - and the concurrent launch of the App Store was a huge part of that, a true watershed moment in smartphone history.

iPhone 3GS (2009)

And so began the Apple tradition of adding an 'S' to the end of the name for a minor iPhone upgrade. The 2009 model of the iPhone did bring with it video recording capabilities for the first time, and the camera itself got an upgrade too. The "S" ostensibly stood for speed and reflected the improvements in the internal components, and Voice Control (not yet called Siri) was added to the iPhone too.

iPhone 4 (2010)

If the iPhone 3GS was a smaller step forward, the iPhone 4 was a big one - it had a new, sleeker, more modern look, and massively increased the pixel count while keeping the same 3.5-inch display size (this was the first Retina display). It was the first iPhone with a front-facing camera, the first iPhone with some level of multitasking, and one of the most significant iPhones Apple has ever made.

iPhone 4S (2011)

Apple swung back to the minor "S" upgrade for 2011's iPhone 4S, so there's not too much to write home about in terms of new specs and new features. The camera did get an upgrade up to 8 megapixels and perhaps the biggest improvement on the software side (we're up to iOS 5.0 now) was the arrival of Siri, the digital assistant that now plays such a major role on the iPhone.

iPhone 5 (2012)

True to the earlier pattern set down by previous generations, the iPhone 5 was a major upgrade. It added an extra row of icons with an extra-tall screen (remember that?), introduced the Lightning connector and had a lighter, aluminium casing. It really did usher in the modern iPhone era. On the iOS side, we got our first look at a rather buggy Apple Maps, taking over from Google Maps as the default option.

iPhone 5C (2013)

In 2013 Apple decided to start releasing not one but two iPhones every September. The iPhone 5C was very much a rebadged iPhone 5 with a few cosmetic changes, giving iPhone buyers an option that was cheaper but still brand new for the first time. iOS 7 was launched at the same time, bringing true multitasking for apps and introducing the Control Centre for more convenient access to the iPhone's settings.

iPhone 5S (2013)

The iPhone 5S was the flagship model for 2013, with a revamped design and a little feature called Touch ID introduced to the iPhone line-up for the first time. Another first was the 64-bit A7 processor inside the phone, an architecture change that other manufacturers have since followed. iOS 7 had a visual overhaul as well, introducing the bright icons and translucent menus that are still in place today.

iPhone 6 (2014)

We're back up to date with the iPhone 6 Apple launched last year and the one still currently on sale as the flagship. As well as another design revamp, the iPhone 6 extended the display size to 4.7 inches and added in more pixels to boot. Also worth noting is the introduction of NFC for Apple Pay and other services, plus a significant upgrade for the camera, giving better photo and video results than ever before.

iPhone 6 Plus (2014)

For a long time Apple resisted the temptation to follow the industry trend for bigger and bigger smartphone screens, but it finally bowed to the pressure with the iPhone 6 and particularly the iPhone 6 Plus. With a display of 5.5 inches from corner to corner, it's the biggest iPhone ever and gets close to iPad mini territory. The handset has certainly come a long way since 2007.

iPhone 6S (2015)

Apple's iPhone 6S didn't come as much of a surprise to many. Every odd-numbered year has yielded an 'S' variant of the previous year's phone, offering a few upgrades to the handset but largely keeping the same design and chassis.

The iPhone 6S is almost identical to 2014's iPhone 6, to the point that we could barely tell the difference between the two in the hand, with a little extra thickness and weight to give you the clue that you're holding a next-gem phone in your hand. But while the outside is identical, the stuff that Cook's Crew crammed inside is a change - hence Apple's decision to give this phone the tagline: 'The Only Thing That's Changed Is Everything'.

With Force Touch there was a new way of touching the phone, plus an improved chassis and a pseudo-magical way at viewing your photos (Live Photos),

iPhone SE (2016)

This one was a bit of a surprise. We'd expected a smaller iPhone with a lower price tag, but we didn't expect it to look like the iPhone 5 but with completely whizz-bang up-to-date innards. In our iPhone SE review we said "you won't buy this phone - but you will tell someone else to". Compared with its bigger screened bretheren it represented genuine value for money - although not compared to the huge number of Android alternatives of course.

iPhone 7 (2016)

The iPhone 7 was what we expected - one of the best phones of the year and a strong match for the rival Galaxy S7 almost punch for punch. It was priced at a premium level - though Apple still sold bucketloads of course. Make sure you check out T3's full iPhone 7 review to see what we thought at the time.

iPhone X (2017)

Was the iPhone X the best phone of 2017? Yes. But only by a whisker. The Galaxy Note 8 was so close, while Apple's own iPhone 8 Plus gave you so much of the iPhone X benefit without such super expense. In the end though, it was the marriage of software and hardware that's so effective here and that's especially the case when it comes to Face ID. Read our full iPhone X review now.

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History of the iPhone 2007-2017: the journey to iPhone X

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As regularly as clockwork, our thoughts have already started to turn towards the new 2018 iPhone - but before we get too excited about what Apple's got in store for us this year, let's take a moment to reflect on what it's released since the very first iPhone back in 2007 over a decade back.

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Since the age of five, Christian von Koenigsegg knew he wanted to create the world's fastest car.

Mr Koenigsegg says the inspiration came from an unlikely source: a Norwegian movie about a bicycle repairman.

"He built with his friends on a mountaintop this incredible racing machine and competed against the established brands and won," he told the BBC at the New York International Auto Show.

"I remember walking out of the cinema and saying 'That's what I want to do when I grow up'."

And, unlike most of us, who shed dreams of becoming firemen or astronauts pretty soon into our teenage years, Mr Koenigsegg stayed true to his childhood ambition.

Now, more than 20 years after he founded his namesake car firm at the age of 22, Mr Koenigsegg has created the world's fastest road car: the One:1, which can go from zero to 400km/h in just under 20 seconds.

It was a lot of bread and water for many years but I just had this relentless passion to get it done
Christian von Koenigsegg

But in the increasingly competitive world of so-called "hypercars" - where million dollar price tags are the norm - how has Mr Koenigsegg managed to stand out from the pack?

Bread and water

Although displays of the latest supercars, hypercars and now megacars have become fixtures at car shows around the globe, when Koenigsegg was founded in 1994 in Sweden, the country was just coming out of a recession and building an expensive fast car seemed like a questionable endeavour.

"I knew when I set out that it was an impossible task," says Mr Koenigsegg.

To get ideas for his first car, he tore pages out of old car magazines and studied technical manuscripts, searching for ways to build his dream car on a tight budget.

But even though his vision was clear - he wanted to create a lightweight, mid-engine car with a detachable roof - finding financing was difficult at first.

"It was a lot of bread and water for many years but I just had this relentless passion to get it done," he says.

What is a supercar?

Although there is some debate about the exact definition of a supercar, here are a few parameters:

Supercars are exotic, high performance cars that typically are produced in small numbers

Despite their speed and performance, supercars are not racecars: they're typically built to safety specifications that allow them to be driven on normal roads

For some, a subset known as "hypercars" are the best of the best of the supercars - more expensive, rarer and faster

With its One:1, Koenigsegg says it has created a new class of car: the megacar

After releasing several prototypes, Koenigsegg sold its first car in 2002, and a year after that, its CC8S model was deemed the most powerful production car by the Guinness Book of World Records.

That same year, the car also made the record books, when a driver of its CC model in Texas was given the fastest speeding ticket ever after going 242 miles per hour.

3D printed cars

Koenigsegg uses several innovative strategies to make production feasible and fast.

On the floor of the car show, he showed the BBC around the Agera R - the car the company has just introduced to the US market, at an eye-watering price of $1.6m (£953,000).

Low to the ground, it features a carbon-fibre body, an engine in the back middle of the car, and "a dihedral syncro-helix actuation door system", which essentially looks like the Back to the Future Delorean doors on steroids (they rotate forward and up).

As for actually sitting in the car?

"It's almost like fitting a glove to your hand - it's really quite compact but still roomy enough for large persons - but there's no extra space anywhere because the car has to be compact and light," says Mr Koenigsegg.

To build it, the car was "designed in computer programmes to make it as sleek as possible and as slippery in the wind as possible," he says.

To save costs and speed up production, the firm used 3D printers and laser scanners at their factory to manufacture test car components like seats.

They've also experimented with building actual car parts using a 3D metal printer, because when building just a handful of cars a year, it doesn't make sense to invest in specific tools for component parts.

Mega car, mega competition

However crazy it may seem, Koenigsegg is not alone in the uber-expensive, uber-fast supercar market.

Established players like Bugatti, Porsche and Lamborghini create a couple special supercars each year to appeal to wealthy car enthusiasts, which are then shown off at car shows like those in Geneva and Beijing.

Add to the mix smaller manufacturers like UK firm McLaren, Italy's Pagani and even Lebanon's W Motors (which produced the Middle East's first supercar, the LykanHypersport, last year), and it is actually quite difficult to stand out from the pack, even when trying to sell just a few dozen cars a year.

Mr Koenigsegg says that in order to succeed, his cars have to be "extreme and competitive".

"We got really efficient at developing unique extreme technology and low volume and that's our forte," he says.

Mr Koenigsegg says another Agera R model is on the way, and the company has already sold out of its One:1 car.

But as for the car that Mr Koenigsegg drives himself?

"A Tesla Model S - an electric car," he says with a laugh.

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Since the age of five, Christian von Koenigsegg knew he wanted to create the world's fastest car. Mr Koenigsegg says the inspiration came from an unlikely source: a Norwegian movie about a bicycle repairman. "He built with his friends on a mountaintop this incredible racing machine and competed against the established brands and won," he told the BBC at the New York International Auto Show.

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According to the laws of the business cosmos, Koenigsegg, the Swedish supercar manufacturer, should not exist. Nor should the company--with essentially one product every few years--have been allowed to come into existence.

Consider its 2016 release, the 1,500hp hybrid Regera. For a starting price of $2 million--slightly less outside the United States--Koenigsegg will deliver a bespoke, barely tamed race car to a rarefied clientele. This is hard enough to do even if, like Ferrari, one has nearly a century of manufacturing, racing triumph and automotive innovation as a buttress. Neither Koenigsegg nor its charismatic 43-year-old founder, Christian von Koenigsegg, has any such thing. To begin with, Koenigseggs don't race. The cars are made for a very small number of millionaires who simply want to scorch the road.

Then there's Koenigsegg's location: Its factory is in a former hangar on a demobilized air base once used by the Swedish Air Force's "Ghost Squadron," nestled in the remote western fishing village of Angelholm. It's not exactly a region known for turning out cars.

Finally, there's the fundamental madness of manufacturing one very expensive item by hand. Over its 22-year history the company has produced fewer than 135 automobiles--some models have had production runs of about 20 vehicles. Koenigsegg crafts its own seats, sculpts its own manifolds, builds its own engines--and all of that is surgically fitted onto its infamously tight, low-slung chassis. There's just one lovably grouchy perfectionist who assembles the engines, but things are looking up for Mats Pettersson. With about 40 orders for the new Regera since it was announced at the 2015 Geneva auto show, and with Koenigsegg's drive to meet the 80-car production limit, Pettersson just got an assistant. One assistant. Last year the company had about 65 employees. Some 35 have since been added.

"Was I schooled in engineering?" Christian von Koenigsegg asks as he merrily ticks off the list of his disadvantages. "No. Did I have a manufacturing background? No. Did I have access to unlimited funds or a factory that could turn out my designs? No. What I had was a friend with a garage and a passion for cars. Basically, I had no choice but to build what I thought was the best car I could make by hand."

For a company that makes cars capable of reaching 270mph, its early years were excruciatingly slow. In 1994 von Koenigsegg used $200,000 of his own as seed money. The next year his father, an industrial-heating-tech executive, loaned him another $300,000. "My father didn't know it then, but he would over the next few years invest his life savings, or about $2 million," says von Koenigsegg. "Naturally my mother freaked out."

Then in 1999, after the first wave of Swedish tech and telecom entrepreneurs had begun to rake in their millions, von Koenigsegg put together a group of 20 investors who injected another $2 million. He also gave shares of the company to some suppliers. And that finally got the first Koenigsegg, the CC8S, off the production line--in 2003. (Since then Koenigsegg has engineered other long-term investment rounds, totaling about $25 million.)

"I wasn't making anything imaginary, like the digital entrepreneurs did," von Koenigsegg says. "I was making something that went really fast and made a lot of noise. They liked that."

Bolstered by the supercars' success, in 2009 von Koenigsegg put together a consortium to buy Sweden's Saab from General Motors. The deal, which was worth an estimated $1.5 billion, fell apart at the 11th hour when the Swedish government dragged its feet on a $600 million loan, causing Koenigsegg to pull out. Along the way he and his team have revolutionized a considerable amount of automotive tech that's being closely watched by the industry. The Regera, for example, has a "continuous" drivetrain, meaning no gearbox. And von Koenigsegg's R&D team are working their next trick: a camshaft-free engine. Koenigsegg holds some 30 patents for its technology and has pending deals with international automakers.

The cost of such engineering falls under the rubric of "if you have to ask ...," but it's clear that the prices do not instill wallet-panic among the brand's acolytes. For instance, popular options for the Regera--which include all-carbon rims and robotic doors--can boost its cost by as much as $400,000. The all-carbon rims alone run $15,000 each, if you have to ask.

Koenigsegg says it had revenue of $17 million in 2015 and projects $25 million this year. Asked about the average profit per vehicle, von Koenigsegg puzzles for a minute. "We don't really work with that thought in mind. We have a general idea of what we make, but the costs vary so much from car to car that an average profit is not a metric we can use as a guideline." With the profits, however, he has bought back shares from his investors, and his holding company owns just over 80% of the car brand that bears his name.

To walk out on the factory floor of the Ghost Squadron hangar is to understand the peculiar dynamics of Koenigsegg's operation. For one thing, there isn't a rivet-wielding robot in sight. The cars' destinations reveal much about the global passion that Koenigsegg has inspired: Two were headed to Japan, one to Malaysia and two to the Middle East. With some required emissions fittings, Koenigseggs have been street legal in the United States for some time, as evidenced by Floyd Mayweather's purchase of a CCXR Trevita for $4.8 million last year on the robust secondary market. Because of their extreme exoticism even within the exotic world of supercars, older Koenigseggs hold their value better than, say, Bugatti Veyrons.

But at the moment, Christian von Koenigsegg can't appreciate that for himself. He doesn't actually own one of his extraordinary vehicles. He prefers to make them and put them on the road. One supercar at a time.

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Christian von Koenigsegg On His New $2 Million Supercar

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According to the laws of the business cosmos, Koenigsegg, the Swedish supercar manufacturer, should not exist. Nor should the company--with essentially one product every few years--have been allowed to come into existence. Consider its 2016 release, the 1,500hp hybrid Regera.

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With extraordinary determination and vision, Christian explored the limits of both technology and innovation to create the Supercar of his dreams - the Koenigsegg CC. The Koenigsegg CC was the manifestation of a dream and its successful completion gave Christian the courage to continue, and to share his quest for perfection with others.

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Explore El Bosque Nuevo's 172 photos on Flickr!

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With a shortage in qualified applicants for in-demand tech positions, IT pros have the luxury of being selective about the jobs they choose.

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Tech companies' perks and benefits have long been the envy of a number of industries, but what about the actual work itself? It turns out that tech jobs accounted for nearly half of Glassdoor's "25 Best Jobs in America" report. You may be surprised by the tech jobs that made the list.

When it comes to landing a cool job, it turns out the odds are higher if you aim for a tech job, according to a recently released report by jobs and recruiting site Glassdoor. Of the "25 Best Jobs in America for 2016," 10 of them were tech jobs, according to the Glassdoor report.

"Companies across all industries are hiring tech positions -- not just tech companies, which means that tech jobs are in extremely high demand," said Scott Dobroski, Glassdoor career trends analyst. "The reason why is because companies worldwide must now maintain an online and mobile presence to stay competitive, requiring them to invest in employees with deep tech skills."
[See 10 Best Tech Companies To Work For In 2016.]
The report ranked the companies based on the highest overall Glassdoor Job Score. That score is comprised of three components. One is salary, according to at least 75 salary reports submitted to Glassdoor in the past 12 months for a given job listed on the site, as well as at least 75 career opportunity ratings per job listed. Career opportunities include such things as career advancement potential for a given job to access to a mentorship program and skills-based training. A third component, job openings, is based on the number of open positions listed on Glassdoor for a given job title as of Jan. 8. The scores rate on a 5-point scale, with 5 being the highest.

"Of the 600 job titles that met our methodology criteria, these...10 tech jobs....stood out across all three factors," Dobroski said. "We wouldn't be surprised to see many of these jobs on our 2017 list next year."

The following slides list the top 10 best tech jobs along with their job score, number of openings, median base salary and careers opportunities rating.

Did you job make the list? If so, tell us in the comments section it's ranking is deserved. If not, let us know if this list make you consider a career change.

Dawn Kawamoto is an Associate Editor for Dark Reading, where she covers cybersecurity news and trends. She is an award-winning journalist who has written and edited technology, management, leadership, career, finance, and innovation stories for such publications as CNET's ... View Full Bio

We welcome your comments on this topic on our social media channels, or [contact us directly] with questions about the site.

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10 Best Tech Jobs For 2016 - InformationWeek

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Tech companies' perks and benefits have long been the envy of a number of industries, but what about the actual work itself? It turns out that tech jobs accounted for nearly half of Glassdoor's 25 Best Jobs in America report. You may be surprised by the tech jobs that made the list.

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El Bosque Nuevo Butterfly Farm, a rainforest conservation project

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El Bosque Nuevo Butterfly Farm, a rainforest conservation project

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A butterfly and conservation project with the purpose to preserve the rainforest and support the rural community growth in Costa Rica, each purchased pupae...

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Fear Factor forces contestants to face their worst fears in the quest for cold, hard cash.

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Pitch Perfect Pipes
by Jackie Tortora
There aren't too many hard and fast rules when it comes to singing. Most singers can feel and hear their problem spots. "If your voice feels good and sounds good it probably is good. If it feels bad and sounds good, something is wrong," says Jeannette LoVetri, director of The Voice Workshop in New York City.

As a voice instructor for more than 35 years, LoVetri knows a thing or two about getting the most out of your voice. Similar to musicians play an instrument, singers must make sure their technique is correct to avoid injury. "If you can't make yourself sound good and feel good, go get help from a skilled singer or teacher," says LoVetri. "If that doesn't help, seek out an otolaryngologist or throat specialist and get examined right away. Vocal problems that are ignored can lead to serious issues down the road, both vocal and in general health."

If you're confident your voice is where you want it to be, there are still plenty of exercises you can do on your own to get optimum sound. LoVetri shares 12 tips to become a better singer by ensuring vocal health and improving pitch and range:

1) Breathe Easy. In order to breathe efficiently for singing, a vocalist has to have excellent postural alignment. The rib cage needs to be open, lifted, and strong, and the inhalation needs to go deep into the torso, as the lungs inflate downward and outward. The abdominal muscles should work to keep the chest lifted and open but not be locked and hard and should release slightly forward and down during inhalation. During exhalation, the ribs should maintain their lifted and open position through the sung sounds, while the abdominal muscles contract and lift in a slow steady way.

2) Heads up. The head should be level, not in front of the torso. The legs should be shoulder width apart with the knees unlocked. The weight should be slightly forward over the balls of the feet and the spine should feel stretched long. The neck should be loose and the upper chest should remain lifted and open at all times, but not rise during inhalation.

3) About Face. Your face works best when your mouth and jaw can open and close easily and freely, your facial muscles can move without tension, and your eyes are relaxed and alive.

4) Relax, Just Do It. Your throat should never squeeze, tighten, or feel tired or choked up when you sing.

5) Practice Makes Perfect. A good singer should practice for 30 to 45 minutes at least five times a week. The best way to avoid abusing your voice is to get some singing lessons with a qualified teacher who has a track record of success and solid knowledge of vocal function and health. The teacher should sound good when he or she sings.

6) Eat, Drink, and Be Wary. There are no hard and fast rules regarding what a singer should or should not eat just prior to performing. It's best not to eat too much just before singing because having a full stomach will interfere with inhalation. Generally, singers should be well hydrated at all times, which means drinking at least six to eight glasses of water per day. It might be possible to substitute herbal tea or flavored waters, but soda, coffee, and tea should be limited as they can have a diuretic effect. Why? The vocal folds need to be well lubricated to function properly.

7) Start your engines. Singers should warm up about an hour before going to the theater or venue, and hum lightly while at the venue until they go on stage. The warm-up depends on what the person is singing. For example, singers should warm up with and in the sounds they expect to sing in the performance.

8) Timing is everything. If the vocalist is in good shape, 20 minutes is enough to warm up. Less would be possible in an experienced singer and more might be necessary in someone who is not very skilled. A warm-up should consist of varied musical patterns that cover the full pitch range, using various vowels and consonants, long and short patterns of notes, and varied volume levels.

9) Play it cool. It's useful to sing soft "cooing" OOs and AHS on low pitches for about five minutes after a performance as a cool down.

10) Reach for the stars. If a singer wants to improve his vocal range, he should sing lightly, in an easy sound, allowing his throat to relax on the way up, gently putting more pressure on the muscles of the abdomen at the same time. If this is done carefully, it can help raise the vocal range. If he wants to develop the lower range, he should relax his throat as much as possible, allow the jaw to fall down and sing sustained sounds like AH or OH at the lowest pitches he can sustain, taking care not to strain, until he can make them louder by pressing harder on the belly muscles. Long slides on lip trills or tongue trills are helpful both going up and down. Since it is possible to squeeze high notes, just singing them without some care and attention to comfort would be a bad idea. Low notes can be swallowed or pushed, if done incorrectly, and that can cause other problems. It's best to do development of range slowly, a little at a time.

11) Tune up. Most people who have difficulty matching pitch have coordination problems within the vocal system. Singers learn to tune the throat and mouth as a resonating tube to the pitch being sung on various vowels at various volume levels. It is easy to have poor control over all of these ingredients, particularly in specific pitch ranges, and that will effect intonation. Training and practice should take care of this unless the problem is severe.

12) Picking Up Good Vibrations. Vibrato is a side effect of a freely balanced vocal system that is neither very tight nor loose. It arises naturally after about two years of vocal training in most singers, as long as the singer does not suppress it. If the vibrato is too fast, too wide, or uneven, it is because something is not balanced in the vocal system of the body. Something is too tight or too loose and the vibrato is reflecting that. A good singing teacher ought to be able to correct any vocal problems that are having an impact on the vibrato, but the correction should be indirect.

--

Jeannette LoVetri is director of The Voice Workshop in NY City, artist in residence at Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Virginia, and guest teacher at the University of Michigan in the medical center in the Department of Speech Language Pathology, and at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the Department of Jazz Studies. She is also on faculty as a lecturer at Drexel University College of Medicine, Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. She is author of many articles on singing and has been teaching singing since 1971. (www.thevoiceworkshop.com)

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12 Tips to Become a Better Singer | Making Music Magazine

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by Jackie Tortora There aren't too many hard and fast rules when it comes to singing. Most singers can feel and hear their problem spots. "If your voice feels good and sounds good it probably is good. If it feels bad and sounds good, something is wrong," says Jeannette LoVetri, director of The Voice Workshop in New York City.

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The fact that you're here right now, trying to learn how to sing better, is the very first step in improving your voice.

So congrats on at least taking this much action. I know it might not sound like much, but trust me, the first step is always the hardest.
"Those who don't jump will never fly".
You can't become a better singer without taking action, and the first action step is figuring out what you need to do. That's why you're here right now.
"The first step is you have to say you can."
The truth is, anyone can improve their voice, but you have to believe you can. You might not become a star by tomorrow, but you'll never get good unless you believe you can.

Belief, plus the 7 steps I've outlined below is all you need to start seeing results right away.

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How to Sing Better in 7 Steps - Voices Inc

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The fact that you're here right now, trying to learn how to sing better, is the very first step in improving your voice. So congrats on at least taking this much action. I know it might not sound like much, but trust me, the first step is always the hardest.

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While some people seem to be born with inherently beautiful voices, even professional singers have to work hard and practice often to maintain their singing abilities. There are plenty of tools and steps you can take to become a better...

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By visiting this page you have become a member of the Performance Academy. Reach out to your team-mates and our experts with the hashtag #performanceacademy. Then, share your expertise and tips with your team-mates as you begin your journey to football's top table.
1 UNDERSTAND WHAT IT TAKES
"At 13," says Arsene Wenger, "you would have needed about one minute to know that Lionel Messi was the real thing. Most players aren't so obvious." This, in other words, is where the real work starts. You've got talent, that much is clear, but knowing what else you need to make it as a professional footballer - and there's a lot - is vital. "Dedication" and "sacrifice" are the words used most often by FourFourTwo Performance's panel of experts, but what do they mean in real terms?
Pay careful attention to the following advice - it could be about to change your life...2 STAY MOTIVATED
Keep the fire burning inside courtesy of FFT...3 DISCOVER THAT INNER CONFIDENCE
To find how The Ox and others retain their self-belief, read on...4 GET FOOTBALL FIT
Following our extensive set of drills and tips will help you get in shape like a pro...5 PUT THE RIGHT FUEL IN YOUR ENGINE
FFT has broken down the nitty-gritty of football nutrition, so you don't have to...6 THE RULES OF RECOVERY
Follow these links and learn how to recuperate, re-charge an be ready to go again...
How to avoid injury 7 HONE YOUR TACTICAL AWARENESS Pro tips
Some tips to help you understand and carry out your team's masterplan...8 PERFECT YOUR SKILLS
Make sure your technique is on point with this selection of drills...
Look like you belong at football's top table with our guide to grooming and garments...10 HAVE THE COMPLETE KITBAG
Step out on to the pitch in match-winning equipment with our guide to the kitbag essentials...11 GET IN THE ZONE
Listen to FFT's experts and learn to think a good game...12 IMPRESS AT A TRIAL
We've given you the tools; time to make a final checklist before your trial...
Dealing with nerves
How to impress at a trial
Asmir Begovic: How to impress at a trial
Man United's guide to preparing for a trial
Joe Hart: How to impress at trial
Shake off those pre-game nerves
Tom Ince: Overcome crippling pre-match nerves Control
Explaining and understanding tactics
Harry Kane: Understanding tactics
How to explain tactics
Watch and learn
The camera phone coach
Gareth Southgate: Simplifying tactics Pro diets
Stamina
Eden Hazard: Rise to the top
Charlie Austin: Climb the football ladder How to catch Wenger's eye
Aaron Cresswell: Bouncing back from rejection
Harry Kane: How to make it pro
Toni Duggan: How to make it pro
Kieran Gibbs: How to make it pro

"If you want to be great, you have work hard. It doesn't just happen overnight." It may sound clichéd, but England and Liverpool striker Daniel Sturridge is not alone among FFT's experts in believing a constant quest for self-improvement is the only way to be the best. But, says England striker Charlie Austin, never "lose sight of what made you start playing football in the first place". Or, as the Premier League's best player, Eden Hazard, puts it, "keep smiling and enjoy it". Work hard, have fun, and you've got every chance.

Now you know what it takes to become a pro, it's vital you believe you have what it takes. "If you haven't got that confidence, there's no point playing the game," explains Derby County star, Tom Ince. Such self-belief comes in many forms: body language, preparation, positive thinking. Nothing breeds confidence like success, though, and to be successful in the future you need to have to confidence to do what has brought you success in the past, something Alex Oxlaide-Chamberlain calls a "no fear" approach.

Now your head is in the right place, it's time to build the key cornerstone of every professional player: a match-ready body. And gone are the days of cross-country runs and bulk-building weight sessions. As elite strength and conditioning coach Nick Grantham explains, football is "characterised by a high number of brief, high-intensity movements". For this, you'll need stamina and leg power, core strength and agility, raw pace and a prodigious leap, not to mention the ability to speed up, slow down and change direction. Over and over again. Nobody said it would be easy.

When the man who scored the winning goal in the World Cup final speaks, you'd better listen. "Diet is an important part of the professional game," says Bayern Munich and Germany playmaker Mario Gotze. "A healthy and balanced diet helps me stay physically and mentally fit, which of course reflects in my performances on the pitch." But, as our experts reveal, it's not just about what you eat - and drink - but when you eat it - and in what quantities.

As a professional footballer, you will sometimes be expected to play three games a week, running anything up to 12 kilometres per 90 minutes, so it's safe to say drinking the pain away down the pub with your mates is not an option. Welcome to a world of protein shakes and ice baths; injury-prevention exercises and bespoke warm-down routines; sleep training, recovery tights, foot care and even a little pampering. For a footballer, resting is as important as running.

Injury prevention
Injury prevention training explained
How to prevent injury: 3 essential rules

Individual talent is one thing, but from ages 16 to 18, Arsene Wenger starts to look at whether a footballer "understands how to connect with other players". This is a team game, after all, and as you step up a level, understanding your role as part of an 11-man framework becomes increasingly important. And while England U21 manager Gareth Southgate says "simplicity is genius" when it comes to tactics, believing few players respond well to complicated strategic instructions, becoming a student of the game will help make you a more complete player.

"Unless you're dedicated, you'll never be a better player," says Eric Harrison, revered coach of Manchester United's Class of '92. "Practise, practise, then practise some more." Only then will all the basics become second nature and you'll you be able to put them all together under pressure. We all know football's fundamentals: first touch, passing, shooting, crossing, heading, tackling. But the use of these skills varies hugely depending on your position and the game situation. And are you really going to make it to the top with just one good foot?

It's no secret that in order to feel the part, many top footballers need to look the part - even away from the pitch. "It's all about the way you carry yourself," says body language expert, Robert Phipps. Whether you aspire to be a Champagne Charlie, Solid Citizen or Stylish Swashbuckler, your hair, skin and clothes will all need attention if you want to present the right image and feel good about yourself.

Now football is a career rather than a hobby, just making do is no longer an option when it comes to being equipped for matchday and training. From boots to baselayer clothing, music to medical extras, toiletries to tape - nothing is too insignificant if it puts you in the right frame of mind and body to perform. Do you have everything you need at home now you're a full-time athlete? Is it worth investing in a TRX, medicine ball or plyometic ladder? It's almost time...

Think you're ready? Think again. In fact, thinking is exactly what you should be doing at this point. Wayne Rooney, like most top players these days, practises visualisation techniques to get him in the zone. "It's something I've always done, from when I was a young boy," says the England captain. "It helps to train your mind to situations that might happen [on the pitch]." Just one example of how having the right mentality doesn't happen overnight. Like everything else, it can be coached.

Having prepared meticulously for this moment, it's now all about making sure nerves don't get in the way of you. "The most important thing is to make sure you do the basics right," reckons Rene Meulensteen, the former Manchester United first-team coach. "Don't be afraid to show initiative, but sometimes players try so hard that they make mistakes and it snowballs into a poor performance." In other words, play the game, not the occasion. That's what will get you noticed. As well as using visualisation and breathing techniques, it's important to take confidence from knowing you have prepared as well as is humanly possible. Focus on putting that preparation into practise and your destiny awaits.

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By visiting this page you have become a member of the Performance Academy. Reach out to your team-mates and our experts with the hashtag #performanceacademy. Then, share your expertise and tips with your team-mates as you begin your journey to football's top table.

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How to Become a Professional Soccer Player

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Football (or soccer as it is known in Canada, the United States, and AustraliaEtymology, Association Football, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football# Etymology) is one of the most popular sports in the world. People love...

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Playing a video game nowadays is like entering another world, one with its own unique sights, sounds and realities. Game playing is also growing in frequency -- users spend up to four hours a day playing games. But how many players stop and think abo

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After a long day of school and an after-school club, you finally get home. You tackle your homework while you gobble down a healthy dinner. When you finally have some free time to , you grab a controller and get ready to go for a virtual drive or defend a planet from an invasion.

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The Video Game Revolution: How a Game is Made | PBS

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Video Game Revolution is the companion site to the PBS program.

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How do you make money as an artist? Many people who aren't artists wonder this, and many seasoned artists wonder the same thing!

Of course artists know that to make money, you must sell work. But there other methods of making money that you may not be aware of.

Here are the top 10 ways artists can make money. Each has a short description and a link to an article full of expert advice.
Guest author: Originally posted on ArtBistro
1. Commercial Galleries

Commercial galleries typically sell artists' works at a commission. The typical commission that galleries take is somewhere between 40% and 50% of the sale of the work. This is determined by the contract. Whether you submit your work for sale by consignment or enter into an ongoing relationship with a gallery, the parameters should all be written down in a contract.

2. Nonprofit Galleries

Nonprofit galleries typically show work that is young, edgier, and cutting edge. Depending on the gallery, they will take a commission - usually not more than 30%. Nonprofit galleries typically do not "represent" artists or enter into contractual relationships with them.

4. Out of Studio

Many artists sell their work out of their studio by arranged visits oropen studios arranged with other artists. If you are represented by a gallery, that agreement may extend to "studio sales" or all sales of your work. If you do not have a formal relationship with a gallery, you obviously retain 100% of the sale.

5. Online

More artists are selling their work online, this is a great way for artists to make money! Any commission from an online website would be determined by the terms of use contract that you agreed to. Different sites charge a different percentage of a commission. Anywhere between 1-5% is normal; 10% is on the high end.

6. Private Commissions

Artists will do work on a commission basis to make money. If collectors want a personalized work of art like a portrait, they will commission an artist. The artist sets the price and usually asks for a percentage of the price up front.

If you have a formal relationship with a gallery, they will likely take a cut of any commissioned work that they bring to you. Terms of commissions will be stated in your contract. Artists who do a lot of commission work have been interviewed to give you.

Public Commissions

Artists are commissioned for public art usually in connection with a new building or construction project. Many states have a law that specifies that 1% of the total building cost go to art for the building. Usually state and city art groups have the latest information of what program is currently accepting applications.

There are also private funds for public art like The Public Art Fund and Percent for Art. When artists get a public work commission, they typically get 20% of the total cost of the project as an artist's fee.

7. Grants

There are many grants for artists. They are very competitive to get, but as one mentor of mine advised me, "Don't give up until you have applied ten times." Grants vary in how much money they award. Some grants are privately funded and some are publicly funded. Some are given for a specific project that you propose and some are given outright for the work that you do.

8. Residencies

There are many residencies for artist to get "away from the world" and focus on their work. The length of the residency varies and the amount of money granted to the artist varies too. Some residencies actually charge money. But many will cover at least some if not all costs. You must apply for these residencies and have a flexible work schedule to go.

Many times the most valuable asset of a residency is not the money granted, but the professional network an artist forms while there. The network may include other artists, guests, curators, and other influential people in the art word.

9. Museums and Art Centers

Artists generally don't see a cent from exhibits in a museum. In some cases, however, they do make money. Installation artists are typically given an artist fee for creating a temporary installation. The fee can be set by you or the museum. Find other ways that museums can help an artist's career and hear what a curator has to say about the business of museums.

10. Teaching / Guest Artist Programs

One of the most popular ways to make money as an artist is to teach. Teaching opportunities at a college level are competitive, but don't overlook guest artist programs. There may be ways to get a teaching job that you have not thought of.

How do YOU sell your work? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

*****

Thanks for visiting Fine Art Tips. I hope this article helps you with some new ideas so you can make money with your art!

Let's meet on Twitter, Facebook and now on Google Plus! http://gplus.to/lorimcnee
...and if you want to see my own paintings, please visit LoriMcNee.com ~Lori

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Guest author: Originally posted on ArtBistro 1. Commercial Galleries Commercial galleries typically sell artists' works at a commission. The typical commission that galleries take is somewhere between 40% and 50% of the sale of the work. This is determined by the contract.

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Contemporary artist Sharon Louden graduated with her MFA from Yale in 1991 with $115,000 worth of debt.

She has since settled all her student loans by selling her own art work, but it wasn't easy. As a professional artist, there was no roadmap to follow as she tried to pursue her craft and keep a roof over her head.

Enter " Living and Sustaining a Creative Life," the book Louden edited featuring candid essays by 40 working artists on how they make a living.

"Artists used to come up under other famous artists," EFA Studios director Bill Carroll said at this week's book release event at Morgan Lehman Gallery in Chelsea. "Reubens wasn't just teaching you how to paint, but how to get commissions and work with clients."

That kind of commercial talk is largely absent in today's art curriculum. Dozens of MFA students are pushed into the real world without a clue as to how to sell their work and themselves.

"It feels kind of like bathroom talk," contributing artist David Humphry said of the business side of art. "It's very intimate."

The contributing artists shared their stories of doing everything from teaching and painting houses to working Craigslist jobs and investing in real estate to sustain their creative practices.

1. Network with artists, writers, and buyers

As uncomfortable as it may be for an artist to leave the sanctity of the studio, nothing gets sold without interacting with writers who will bring attention to the art, the 500 or so well-to-do people who are interested in buying art, and the other artists who can give introductions to their art world connections.

"When you're young, you talk to everybody," contributing artist Ellen Harvey told Business Insider. "Your career gets its own momentum once you start meeting people. Artists rely a lot on other artists and you can't overlook that generosity. I think it's also important to buy other artists' work."

When times get tough, artists can sell the work in their collections or trade on the goodwill of being an active participant in the marketplace.

2. Pay attention to your finances and make a budget

"Honestly, looking at my finances was the best thing for me," contributing artist Erik Hanson told Business Insider.

"My goal has always been to have an art career. When I got money and I was presented with the option of paying my rent or going to Miami for Art Basel, I would go to Miami," he said. "I got into some really scary financial situations because I thought I had to sacrifice everything for the art. It forced me to soberly look at my money and ask if I'm spending it the best I can."

"I've really tried to be more responsible," Hanson said, "and get jobs that pay well."

He primarily makes money by selling his art work, but also works odd jobs he thinks will fulfill his creative practice. Over the summer, he got a job on Craigslist to work with antique carousels at a carnival on Governors Island, south of Manhattan.

3. Plan ahead and take internships that count

"If you wait to think about your career until you first graduate, you're way behind," contributing artist Tony Ingrisano told Business Insider.

"I interned with three galleries and got a lot of experience with the behind-the-scenes work like art selling and handling, even down to things that are good for the website and marketing. When you're working for free [at an internship], you want to make sure you learn something."

Ingrisano, the youngest contributor to "Living and Sustaining a Creative Life," teaches drawing at Briarcliff College in Long Island when he's not making massive ink drawings in his own studio.

"People just assume that if you're in a gallery, all that work is sold and you're living well, but that's not the case. A lot of that art goes back to that person's studio. Having gallery representation is not the answer to economic stability," he said.

4. Commit to working as an artist

"I decided at a certain point that all money had to be made in the studio," contributing artist Kate Shepherd told Business Insider. She relies wholly on selling her artwork to make an income.

"I did art jobs on an as-needed basis like copying paintings and doing portrait paintings. After a commercial piece, I'd make a work for myself based on that commercial piece. Had I had a waitressing or paralegal job, my hand wouldn't have been moving in the same constructive way."

5. Open a gallery, treat it like a business

Contributing artist Austin Thomas started investing in real estate in Brooklyn, and a year and a half ago, she opened a gallery space in Manhattan called Pocket Utopia.

"Owning your own business gives you the most flexibility of all," Thomas told Business Insider. "You decide when you're open and closed. I feel like I'm even more influential in the art world because I sell other artists' works and try to make money for myself and them. Some of the people [here for the book event] I've sold their work for the highest price it's ever gotten."

6. Get used to playing the real estate game

"I had to move my studio after so many years there because Etsy started taking over in the heart of Dumbo," contributing artist Jenny Marketou told Business Insider.

"Etsy is willing to pay twice the rent, so I had to move," she said, "Luckily I travel so much that I could move to a smaller space in the same building. Space is the biggest issue for an artist based in New York City. In a few years I'll be completely out of Dumbo. I still have to pay the rent for where I live."

Marketou has an apartment in the East Village, and moving into a smaller studio actually lowered her overhead. She works in a lot of different countries where her work has been commissioned for biennials, after creating an international network of curators since she came to the city for art school in the 1980s.

7. Only go into teaching if you love it

"If you don't have a passion for teaching," contributing artist Carson Fox told Business Insider, "absolutely don't go into it. The college level is outrageously competitive."

"I was on a search committee for one sculpture instructor position. We received 300 applications and 80% of the people were right out of grad school. The people with little to no experience like that just don't stand a chance."

Fox works as an associate professor of art and art history at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. She advised applying for grants and residencies to diversify an artist's income outside of teaching.

8. Take advantage of the down economy

"The art market crashed in 1986 along with the economy," contributing artist Brian Tolle told Business Insider. "It wasn't a great time to graduate, but the depressed economy meant the market was looking for cheap talent, and young artists benefitted as a result. The expectations were so low that it was easier to break in and when the economy started to recover, we were already in place."

Now Tolle routinely manages to create work on the budgets of public art work committees. He often gets a flat fee that has to cover his time and expenses in generating these massive projects. Tolle has three public works he will install this spring: one in Canada, one in Houston, Tex., and one in Brooklyn.

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Artists Share How They Make Money While Doing What They Love

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Contemporary artist Sharon Louden graduated with her MFA from Yale in 1991 with $115,000 worth of debt. She has since settled all her student loans by selling her own art work, but it wasn't easy. As a professional artist, there was no roadmap to follow as she tried to pursue her craft and keep a roof over her head.

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Despite the old adage, living as an artist-yes, a real fingers-in-the-paint kind of artist-is indeed a viable career option today.

The recession and low employment rate have left many Americans with no other option but to stray from conventional 9-5 jobs and forge alternative career paths. For some, this may be a blessing in disguise, encouraging contemplation of a broader range of possibilities when it comes to generating income. Working as a professional artist, getting the rent paid on time and going to sleep with a full stomach every night is feasible; it just takes some planning and preparedness.

Here are three keys to getting there, based on the expertise of seasoned artists:

1. Be Okay With Using Various Revenue Streams:

What feeds an artist's income varies from case to case. For instance, Sculptor A and Sculptor B technically have the same job title, but they may make money in completely different ways. Perhaps Sculptor A plans to earn all of her income through public art commissions, while Sculptor B strives to rely exclusively on Web sales.

Artist and ArtBistro blogger Valerie Atkisson offers evidence that neither Sculptor A nor B are working toward the most cushy financial situation. In her post, " How do Artists Make Money? " Atkisson shows how in a profession that often lacks traditional benefits and job security, it's useful to rely on multiple sources of income, such as gallery showings, teaching positions, Web sales, commission projects and grants.

According to photographer Ken Gonzales-Day, dabbling in such an array of moneymaking pools allows artists to discover which methods are the most lucrative. "It's very difficult for artists to make a living purely off artwork sales. Sometimes they can get away with this for five years or so, but the demand is extremely unpredictable," he said. Gonzales-Day is a professor of photography but he doesn't rely solely on that salary. "I make about 25-30% of my income from other sources such as speaking gigs, public art commissions and publishing. None of these generates a huge amount of money, but it all adds up," he explained.

Although it may be tempting to put all the eggs in one basket and go full throttle from the get-go-by opening a gallery, let's say-it's safer for starting artists to invest a little in a lot. This way, if the gallery sales are weak, he or she still has multiple other sources of income to fall back on. The downside? The artist will have a much fuller plate. The upside? The artist has way more options. If the potatoes are unpalatably undercooked, at least there's still the turkey, stuffing and pie.

2. Be Weird:

Being outlandish is probably a bad idea at most jobs, but it's an asset in this profession. In her post "Why Weird Is Wonderful (And Bankable)," Forbes Contributor Jessica Hagy rather artistically draws, graphs and writes about the value in abnormality. Hagy explains that the less normal something is, the more memorable it tends to be.

To sell art, it helps to grab the viewer's attention by creating works that are distinctly different from what already exists. It's also smart for an artist to cultivate an aesthetic that is markedly his or her own. Famed artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, Warhol, and Close all have one thing in common: their works look nothing alike. After seeing a few Picasso pieces, it's easy to select which is the Picasso out of a bunch. Such cohesiveness shows a level of control and deliberation that can be visually enticing.

As Gonzales-Day explained, "Artists who work to create a brand around their names will have more opportunities to engage in various projects." If someone associates an artist's name with his or her distinguished style, invitations to work, speak and teach are more likely to ensue.

In a recent lecture entitled " How to Succeed as an Artist," artist and career advisor Paul Klein emphasized the importance of being different. He insinuated that distinctiveness generates sales-even more so than quality. "Can't all of us name artists who are doing really well monetarily, whose work we think sucks?" The branded artist doesn't necessarily produce better work, but more bankable work.
3. Have the Right Mindset

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3 Keys To Making It As An Artist (Without Starving)

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Despite the old adage, living as an artist-yes, a real fingers-in-the-paint kind of artist-is indeed a viable career option today. The recession and low employment rate have left many Americans with no other option but to stray from conventional 9-5 jobs and forge alternative career paths.

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While YouTube stars often share the intimate details of their lives to millions of fans, there's one thing they usually leave out: money.

We hear conflicting mumblings. We hear that YouTube star PewDiePie has reportedly made $12 million, and that he's not the only one to score a big payday.

But we also hear that stars with half a million subscribers can sometimes struggle to make ends meet. There's a disconnect that comes from both the complicated nature of how these stars actually make money, and the lack of standardization in the industry.

We talked to Scott Fisher and Adam Wescott, who manage YouTube stars like MyLifeAsEva ( 5 million subscribers) and LaurDIY ( 2.6 million subscribers), to get a sense of how the industry is evolving, and where the money is coming from.

The money

While revenue from Google's ads provide a baseline income YouTube stars can count on, Fisher and Wescott say that the key to success right now is being ready for any opportunity: brands, shows, books, appearances - the list goes on.

There is no set place all the money comes from.

One area that's exploded in recent months is selling content to premium streaming video services, like Verizon's Go90 or YouTube Red. To take advantage of this, Wescott says he's worked with each of his clients to develop a handful of original short-form ideas, two or three half-hour ones, and at least one feature-length concept. "We're ready all the time," he says. He never knows when the right call will come.

This might seem like overkill, but Wescott explains that it's increasingly valuable for YouTubers to jump on a blockbuster opportunity. Brands, in particular, are starting to look for longer-term deals with stars - the type of opportunities that don't come around twice.

"They want to work with one person per year," Fisher says, to sign someone to be a spokesperson a brand. Brands, in general, are less focused than they once were on one-time promotional videos on YouTube. In May 2015, one of his clients, Gigi Gorgeous ( 2.1 million subscribers), became the face of a Crest toothpaste line in Canada (she's Canadian).

This has driven a change in the way Fisher thinks about management.

"It's not just signing people willy nilly," he says, and hoping that one will work out. "It's about helping to create that big star that you can do so much with, that generates the revenue 50 clients would." Brands have begun to come back, not just to their management company, but to specific stars. And if you become one of those stars, it can be incredibly lucrative.

"[For brands] it used to be, round up a bunch of influencers and see what happens," Fisher says. Not anymore.

The logical extension of this is a divide between the haves and have-nots, even among YouTubers with high subscriber counts.

Who is a superstar?

When Fisher and Wescott assess whether a YouTuber has a potential to be a star in the wider world, they look at both traditional "star quality" and what the market needs.

"Brands have a huge need for mothers," Wescott says. "There are less than a dozen successful moms on YouTube," he continues. "There are 'mommy bloggers,' yes, but as far as video, no." And brands want the spending dollars of moms who relate to a YouTube personality.

But does the deep intertwining of corporate brands with the income of YouTubers threaten their audiences?

Gaby Dunn ( 529,000 subscribers) wrote a compelling article for Fusion about her experiences with sponsored videos angering some of her fans.

"Every time Allison and I post a branded video - a YouTuber's bread and butter - we make money but lose subscribers," she explains.

"A video we created for a skincare line, for instance, drew ire from fans writing 'ENOUGH WITH THE PRODUCT PLACEMENT,' despite this being our third branded video ever."

I asked Fisher and Wescott whether their clients experienced this, or whether fans understood that this was simply a reality of the business - and of them getting to enjoy content for free.

"I don't think the fans worry about the talent making a living," Fisher says. 'They are more concerned about if they are being entertained or not. As long as the content is exciting for them, if they get to see Eva go to Hawaii on this amazing trip, they don't mind if she is wearing Sperrys the whole time. It's a primal instinct: are you having fun, are you liking this content or not."

The trick, then, seems to be becoming one of the superstars who is able to score brand deals with favorable terms. Indeed, having a star wear Sperrys is not particularly invasive. But to do this you need to be in a position of relative power, which is easier said than done.

"We say no to a lot of incoming stuff," Fisher says.

The big question mark

Westcott says the focus moving forward is going to be on conversion - translating eyeballs watching YouTube into dollars.

In the past, stars, managers, and brands have relied on sheer numbers to make money.

"These books, these independent films. Just because there is an influencer attached they get made," Wescott says. The thought is, "If I get 2% [of my YouTube] audience to buy a book it warrants a bestseller." That's part of the reason there is such a glut of YouTuber books on the market.

"You have some YouTubers that are putting out 'memoirs' and they are 21 years old," Wescott laughs. "How much of a life story do you have to tell at 21, I don't know."

But those audiences haven't always translated. Wescott points to Verizon's Go90 app.

"Even they have started to take a step back and say, 'Wow, we invested all these millions of dollars, and we forgot about the paid media and marketing component. We assumed that by attaching all these creatives and influencers, the eyeballs would come.' Now that they've got the content, there is this second wave of how do [they] better market it."

Figuring out how to pull audiences into other places is the next challenge. Part of that burden is on services like Go90, or corporate brands, but some will need to be figured out by the stars themselves.

If you want to be one of the "haves" in this superstar economy, you will have to prove not just that you have an audience, but that it will follow you with its dollars.

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While YouTube stars often share the intimate details of their lives to millions of fans, there's one thing they usually leave out: money. We hear conflicting mumblings. We hear that YouTube star PewDiePie has reportedly made $12 million, and that he's not the only one to score a big payday.

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How to Be a YouTube Star. Want to become YouTube famous? The good news is that today's laptops and tablets come with webcams, mics, and cool video editing software already built in. Unfortunately, there's also some bad news: the hundreds...

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Luzu used to work at a TV production company, but in 2011 he launched his own YouTube channel called LuzuVlogs. Four years on, the Spanish-language vlogging channel has nearly 1.6 million subscribers, with Luzu now running two others.

"I actually have a bigger audience in my channel than the TV company I used to work for," he said in an appearance at the MIPTV conference in Cannes, in a session that aimed to provide practical advice to any creator trying to build their audience on YouTube.

"The greatest thing about this is we are defining a lot of things. The way people consume content is changing, and this way of doing content responds to the needs that they have rather than telling them how they should do it," he said. Here are the highlights of his advice.

Don't just follow trends

A lot of budding YouTubers look at what's popular on the online video service, and copy it. Luzu suggested that there might be a much better starting point based on what they're not watching.

"For me, from the beginning it was 'What am I missing? What would I like to see?'," he said. "A lot of people were concentrating on 'What do people watch? What is the most famous and cool thing right now? Maybe that's not the way to go because there is someone really good doing it already."

Be patient in the early days

Almost no one uploads their first video to YouTube and becomes a massive success straight away - and when they do, that doesn't mean they can repeat it. Luzu encouraged creators to be patient and keep plugging away.

"You have to keep in mind that it takes a long time. I spent a lot of time having 30 people watching my videos!" he said. "And then there is one moment where everybody shares it, and they go back to your old videos. So there isn't a moment wasted along the way."

He was being interviewed at MIPTV by YouTube's David Ripert, who had similar advice. "We think it's best to start consistently with a show, and be patient and start building the audience from zero," said Ripert.

It's worth investing in equipment

With a background in TV production, Luzu started with an advantage over the average bedroom vlogger. Even so, he noted that nowadays, people can get up and running at zero cost if they have a decent smartphone already in their pocket.

"Flip it and you can do video. You are spending zero dollars and you can monetise those videos and when you grow you get money," he said. However, once that money comes in, it may be worth investing in a proper camera, which may be more affordable than you think.

"Nowadays it's not expensive to have equipment that will make your content look good," he said. "My vlogs looked a little bit better because they had depth of field and a little bit more texture."

You don't necessarily need a large crew

Luzu runs his channel with one other person, his girlfriend. As he has grown, he has resisted the temptation to start hiring a large crew.

"We don't need crews," he said. "You really just need one or two people. I could do some of these formats by myself, but it still reaches hundreds of thousands of people and that's because it's based on personality and what you're saying."

He added that he relishes the ability to write, present but also market and even handle the accounting. "We get to wear all these hats that in a production company different people on the team would wear," he said earlier in the day, during a separate session.

Invest time in social media

A common theme for YouTubers is that they don't just interact with their fans on YouTube: most spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms and apps - it's as important a part of the job as making the videos in the first place

"I definitely spend a lot of time on social media. There is a constant dialogue with the audience," said Luzu. "Here people are looking at someone in the eye when they are watching a vlogger, they are feeling connected and they want to talk to that person."

Earlier, he'd expressed similar sentiments. "It's something that comes with YouTube: people feel extremely connected with content creators. Creators are connected with people who watch their videos, and you want them to feel like that," he said.

"It's very different to traditional media: you keep a constant conversation. Social media is a great way to engage with the audiences when you're not uploading videos, to help them feel part of what you're doing."

Collaborate, but bring something original to the table

One of the proven ways for YouTubers to build their audiences is by collaborating with one another, with emerging channels able to quickly pick up subscribers through a canny collab with a bigger star. Luzu said one key to finding collaborators is to look for people at your level who are also on their way up.

He also suggested that it's not enough just to want to collaborate: YouTubers need to think what they have that's original to bring to a new video with someone else, rather than sitting in on whatever they do already. For example: animation or musical skills, or access to an interesting location.

Luzu also suggested that email may not be the best way to contact a popular YouTuber about a collaboration: "I have about 200,000 unread emails!" he said, before noting that when he was growing, he'd found Twitter useful for connecting with other creators.

Consider multiple channels as you grow

All YouTube creators start with a single channel, but Luzu said that as his had got more popular, he felt the need to launch the others to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to his videos.

"Depending on the target that you're trying to get to there might be a different language to get to them. Kids like certain things, and teenagers other things, and adults different things," he said.

That's why Luzu has one channel focused on gaming, which reaches a younger audience, and another with more of a question-and-answer format, which appeals more to teenagers. "And then adults want more content and more meat. That's why I have three channels," he said.
Topics

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How to become a YouTube star: seven tips from Luzu

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Luzu used to work at a TV production company, but in 2011 he launched his own YouTube channel called LuzuVlogs. Four years on, the Spanish-language vlogging channel has nearly 1.6 million subscribers, with Luzu now running two others.

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The forward pass was legalized. The first authenticated pass completion in a pro game came on October 27, when George (Peggy) Parratt of Massillon threw a completion to Dan (Bullet) Riley in a victory over a combined Benwood-Moundsville team.

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harpaston.Harpaston is mentioned frequently in classical literature, where it is often referred to as a "very rough and brutal game".The rules of this ancient sport were quite simple:Points were awarded when a player would cross a goal line by either kicking the ball, running with it across the goal line, or throwing it across the line to another player.

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Birth of Pro Football | Pro Football Hall of Fame Official Site

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Discover the stories and interesting history behind the birth of pro football here at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: September 24, 2017.

There's no warning. None at all. One minute you're happily walking down the street. The next minute the street seems to be walking all by itself! There's a deafening, rumbling, roaring noise. The buildings start to shake. Brick and glass rains down around you. A huge crack appears in the pavement. Fire hydrants burst open. Cars are crushed by falling masonry. People are screaming. It feels like the end of the world.

There's not much we can do to stop natural disasters like earthquakes: they're an inevitable part of living on a planet like Earth, seething inside with hidden power. What we can do, however, is monitor changes in the ground beneath our feet so we can predict when earthquakes will happen. We can design our buildings much more cleverly so they absorb the power of sudden shocks. And we can prepare ourselves for the inevitable by planning for the time when (and not if) the next quake will strike.

Photo: Our classic idea of what an earthquake looks like. The Earth has literally split apart in this quake, because ground shaking made the fine-grained soil behave like a liquid that drained away, leaving the road above unsupported. This quake, which happened in 1989 at Loma Prieta in San Francisco, California, measured 6.9 on the Richter scale. Photo by courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).

What causes earthquakes?

You might think Earth is a giant lump of rock, but you'd be wrong-it's more like a freshly boiled egg: there's a hot, molten core bubbling away inside a surprisingly thin outer crust. The countries we live in feel like they're safely anchored on solid rocky foundations, but really they're fixed to enormous rocky slabs called tectonic plates that can slide around on the molten rock beneath. Imagine living your life on an eggshell!

Earthquakes happen at places called faults (or fault lines) where the jagged edges of two tectonic plates grind against one another. Most earthquake activity happens in the middles of the oceans where plates are pushing apart on the floor of the sea. Some of the most violent earthquakes happen around the edges of a huge tectonic plate in the Pacific Ocean, forming an intense area of activity known as the Ring of Fire (so-called because there are many active volcanoes there too).

Tectonic plates are constantly moving-in incredibly slow motion-and we don't even notice most of the time. But every once in a while two grinding plates will suddenly jolt into a new position. The energy released by this movement creates an earthquake. It starts at a point inside Earth called the focus where the moving plates are in contact, then travels through the ground as very low-frequency sounds called shock waves or seismic waves. The greatest damage happens at a place called the epicenter, which is the point on Earth's surface above the focus. Earthquakes continue until all the energy released at the focus has been safely dissipated. Even then, there's still a chance that further earthquakes, known as aftershocks, will happen for some hours or even days afterward.

Seismic waves travel in two very different ways. Some of them, known as primary waves (or p-waves), vibrate the ground in the direction in which the waves themselves are moving. They travel in a similar way to ordinary sound waves by alternately squeezing and stretching the ground in patterns known as compressions and rarefactions. Waves like this are called longitudinal waves and travel at incredible speeds of around 25,000 km/h (15,500 mph). There's another kind of seismic wave known as a secondary wave (s-wave) that travels only half as fast. Unlike p-waves, s-waves travel by making the ground vibrate up and down as they move forward. It's because seismic waves travel at such amazing speeds-broadly speaking, as fast as a rocket taking off-that we get so little time to avoid quakes. Earth's diameter is a little under 13,000 km (8,000 miles) at the equator, so a really fast p-wave can theoretically shoot from one side of the planet to the other in less than half an hour!

Artwork: As s-waves travel forward, they shake the Earth up and down or from side to side (at right angles to the direction of motion). P-waves shake the Earth back and forth in the same direction in which they're moving. An s-wave is an example of a transverse wave; a p-wave is an example of a longitudinal or compression wave.

Non-stop quakes!

Photo: Housing damage caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco, California. Photo by courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).

Earthquakes are happening all the time. According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), there are several million earthquakes each year.

We don't notice most of them, because many are really tiny and others release their energy in the middle of the oceans. That's not to say that earthquakes aren't a huge problem. Look at the USGS statistics and you'll see that, most years, around 20,000-30,000 people are killed in earthquake disasters around the world.

Photo: The 1,200-km (800-mile) San Andreas fault is one of the longest in the United States. It's some 15km (9.3 miles) deep and 20 million years old. A major quake in the fault in 1857 (known as the Fort Tejon earthquake) was equivalent to magnitude 8.0 on the Richter scale and caused this striking, 350-km (220-mile) surface rupture in the Carrizo Plain. Photo by courtesy of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL).

Earthquakes don't always happen to someone else. You might be surprised to learn that there are several thousand earthquakes each year in the United States. Californians are well aware that they are long overdue for a major strike from a huge earthquake, because their part of the United States is directly above a major plate boundary known as the San Andreas fault.

Measuring earthquakes

It's important to be able to distinguish between minor earthquakes that cause no damage or fatalities and major earthquakes that result in horrific loss of life. That's why we usually describe earthquakes by giving them a number called magnitude, where a bigger magnitude means a more powerful quake. There are various different ways of calculating magnitude; two of the best known are the the Richter scale (one of the oldest) and the Moment Magnitude Scale (one of the newest). You might also come across the Mercalli intensity scale, which doesn't describe the magnitude of earthquakes but compares their effects on the world around us.

Richter scale

The Richter scale is a scientific way of measuring the strength of earthquakes that was developed in 1935 by US geologist Charles F. Richter. A minor quake that rates less than 2.0 on the Richter scale is known as a micro earthquake and isn't generally strong enough to worry people. A major quake will reach something like 8.0 on the Richter scale and is likely to cause widespread damage and casualties.

You figure out the magnitude of an earthquake on the Richter scale by measuring the logarithm of how much the ground moves (in other words, the logarithm of the amplitude of the seismic waves). Because the scale is logarithmic, every increase of one whole point on the scale means another 10-fold increase in ground movement. In other words, an earthquake that measures 8.0 on the Richter scale involves 10 times more movement than an earthquake that measures 7.0-and 100 times more movement than a quake that measures 6.

MMS (Moment Magnitude Scale)

The Richter scale has now largely been replaced by the MMS (Moment Magnitude Scale), though you still often hear the Richter spoken about in popular science and the news. Earthquake values on the MMS scale are broadly similar to values on the Richter (for bigger quakes, anyway).

Why bigger earthquakes are much more destructive

The Richter scale is logarithmic, not linear. The further up the scale you go, the more significant every new step up the scale becomes. You can see what this means in practice by looking at a graph of how the amplitude (height) of the seismic waves in an earthquake increases as you go up the Richter scale. That's the curved, climbing gray line.

Suppose you start with an earthquake of magnitude 2.0. If the next earthquake you feel is magnitude 3.0, the shock waves have increased in height by an amount shown by the little blue arrow. But if you start with an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 and then increase to magnitude 8.0, the amplitude has increased by a great deal more (shown by the brown arrow) even though you've only gone up one more step on the scale.

So when you hear people talking about earthquakes that measure 8.0 on the Richter scale, they're not four times worse than earthquakes that measure 2.0: the waves they create are ten to the power six or one million times greater in amplitude!

The amplitude of the seismic waves in an earthquake isn't necessarily a good measure of how much damage it will cause. A magnitude 8.0 earthquake releases 32 times more energy than a magnitude 7.0. The higher magnitude earthquakes release hugely more energy than the lower magnitude ones and that's why they cause such immense destruction: it's the energy (which all has to go somewhere) that causes the damage. (There are some interesting calculations on the USGS website.)

Mercalli scale

Although the Richter scale is the most common way of comparing earthquakes, you might also see quakes described using the older Mercalli scale. While the Richter scale has no upper limit, the Mercalli has a fixed range from I ("Instrumental"-barely even noticed) to XII ("Catastrophic"-with almost total destruction). The Richter scale is based on a scientific measurement of an earthquake's amplitude, while the Mercalli scale is more of a description based on the apparent damage that an earthquake causes. That makes the Mercalli more like the Beaufort scale of wind measurement.

Shaking all over

Scientists who study earthquakes are called seismologists. They use instruments called seismometers to record earth tremors and draw charts on graph paper known as seismographs. A seismometer is little more than a weighted pen on a spring suspended over a piece of paper that's slowly wound underneath it at constant speed by an electric motor. If an earthquake (or something like a mining explosion or a building collapse) makes the ground vibrate, the pen jiggles about. The greater the earth movement, the more the pen moves. Seismometers are usually set up with three separate traces so they can record ground movements in all three directions at once. (Note the similarity between seismometers and accelerometers.)

Photo: A seismometer drawing three charts (one of them shown in closeup) of the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco, California as it happened on October 17, 1989. Photo by courtesy of
US Geological Survey Photo Library.

Protecting buildings

We can't stop earthquakes and we can't prevent their energy from traveling through the Earth. So how can we protect buildings and people in areas where earthquakes are common? Although it's impossible to secure a building completely, it is possible to reduce the chances of earthquake damage by designing the structure in such a way that it can absorb and dissipate the energy from seismic waves. One way to do this is to separate the building from its foundation using what are known as base isolators. In effect, instead of making the building a rigid extension of the foundations, you stand the upper part of the building on lots of very sturdy rubber feet so it can move about more freely. The University of Southern California (USC) University Hospital in Los Angeles is an eight-story building supported by 149 of these isolators. When a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck the building in 1994, scientists found that the isolators helped to reduce shaking of the building by about two thirds, and stopped it from collapsing.

Photo: The mass damper in the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan. Photo © Guillaume Paumier by courtesy of Wikimedia Commons published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 licence. See more of Guillaume's photos on Flickr.

Other buildings are mounted on giant hydraulic devices called dampers, a bit like car shock absorbers, that soak up the ground's shaking motion before it can be transmitted to the upper floors. Some dampers work like gas springs; others rock back and forth like pendulums in clocks; the most complex ones are like pendulums mounted on top of one or two other pendulums to provide huge amounts of shock-absorbing. Possibly the world's most famous building shock absorber is a giant, 660-tonne ball inside the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan. If an earthquake (or high wind) makes the tower sway in one direction, the ball (mounted on hydraulic rams) moves the other way, effectively canceling out the movement.

Animation: How the Taipei 101 mass damper works: The hydraulic rams (red and gray) that support the damper (yellow ball) help to slow the skyscraper's sway in a similar way to the dampers (shock absorbers) in a car's suspension. If the wind or an earthquake wobbles the building one way, the damper tries to stay where it is, dragging on the hydraulics and effectively pulling the building back again. Note that the sway of the building is greatly exaggerated in this artwork.

Saving people

We don't always have to take such elaborate steps to protect ourselves against the power of earthquakes: sometimes very simple precautions are equally effective. If you live in a small apartment in California, you probably don't have the means to install a huge mass damper in your home. But you could still prepare your family for what to do in the event of an earthquake.

Photo: Are you prepared? Earthquakes can destroy everything you own in a matter of seconds. This quake, which measured 8.1 in magnitude, happened at Gizo in the Solomon Islands in 2007. Photo by Andrew Meyers courtesy of US Navy.

Find out more

On this website

On other sites

BBC News: Animated guide: Earthquakes has a very clear animation showing you how earthquakes are formed and travel through Earth.

US Geological Survey Earthquakes website includes superb live maps showing exactly where earthquakes are currently happening!

Earthquakes for Kids, from the USGS, includes pictures of quakes, activities, ideas for science fair projects, puzzles, games, and loads more great stuff. It even tells you how to build your own seismometer!

Books

For older readers

Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction by Susan Elizabeth Hough. Princeton University Press, 2010. A very readable, popular-science account of the scientists who try to predict when and where quakes will happen next. Hough is, herself, a scientist at the USGS and well-qualified to write the book.

Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man by Susan Elizabeth Hough. Princeton University Press, 2007. An accessible biography of Charles Richter and the world-changing, earthquake-measuring scale he created.

Earthquake Seismology by Hiroo Kanamori. Elsevier, 2009. A detailed, comprehensive guide to the physics of earthquakes.

Earthquakes by Bruce A. Bolt. W.H. Freeman, 2005. A classic introduction suitable for older teenagers, college students, and adults.

For younger readers

Forces of Nature: Earthquakes by S.L. Hamilton. ABDO, 2012. A 32-page introduction covering the basic science of earthquakes and the Richter scale, followed by accounts of famous quakes from 1960-2011. Suitable for ages 8-10.

Earthquakes by Sally Walker. Lerner, 2007. A good introduction for young readers living (or having family members) in earthquake zones. Explains the geological processes inside Earth that lead to quakes, what quakes are like when they happen, and how they impact people's lives. Suitable for ages 6-8.

Articles

Are Earthquakes in Japan and Ecuador Related? The Science Says No by Henry Fountain. The New York Times, April 17, 2016. Earthquakes happening at the same time in different parts of the world may be completely unconnected.

Cheap Earthquake Warning Systems by Prachi Patel and Tekla S. Perry. IEEE Spectrum, May 20, 2015. What's stopping us building low-cost, portable earthquake alarms?

Earthquakes: Patterns and Predictions by Erik Klemetti, Wired, May 30, 2013. Humans try to see patterns where none exist, which makes earthquake prediction even harder than it might otherwise be.

Earthquakes' Many Mysteries Stymie Efforts to Predict Them by Kenneth Chang, The New York Times, April 13, 2009. Why is it so hard for earth scientists to figure out when earthquakes will strike?

More to explore on our website...

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: September 24, 2017. There's no warning. None at all. One minute you're happily walking down the street. The next minute the street seems to be walking all by itself! There's a deafening, rumbling, roaring noise. The buildings start to shake. Brick and glass rains down around you.

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On September 19, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake rocked central Mexico, with fatalities estimated in the hundreds -the largest, most serious earthquake of at least 19 that the U.S. Geological Survey detected across the world that day.

Earthquakes all spring from faults deep underground, but what kind? The impact and severity of each quake depends on the answer to that question. ( Learn more about earthquakes.)

The Earth's crust is made of a jigsaw puzzle of continental and oceanic plates that are constantly ramming each other, sliding past each other, or pulling apart. Along the Ring of Fire girding the Pacific Ocean, for example, the seafloor plunges beneath Asia and the Americas, building mountains, feeding volcanoes, and triggering earthquakes.

The September 19, 2017, earthquake in Mexico released strain pent up from the ongoing collision between the Cocos plate, which carries the Pacific ocean floor south of Mexico, and the North American plate to the northeast.

Most earthquakes arise along such fault zones. The ground first bends and then snaps-an earthquake-to release energy along faults. Here are a list of the various ways Earth can shake.

Strike-Slip

When portions of the Earth's crust moves sideways, the result is a horizontal motion along a "strike-slip" fault.

The most famous example is California's San Andreas Fault, which stretches some 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from southern California to north of San Francisco. The sideways motion of the fault's branches is caused by the Pacific Ocean's crustal plate moving to the northwest under North America's continental crust.

Up-and-down motions in earthquakes occur over so-called " dip-slip" faults, where the ground above the fault zone either drops (a normal fault) or is pushed up (a reverse fault). A normal fault occurs where the deeper part of the crust is pulling away from an overlying part. A reverse is, well, just the reverse.

An example of a normal fault is the 240-mile (150-kilometer) long Wasatch Fault underlying parts of Utah and Idaho, again caused by the Pacific plate driving under western North America. One magnitude 7.0 quake along the fault perhaps 550 years ago dropped the ground on one side of the fault by three feet (a meter). The U.S. Geological Survey sees the fault as posing a risk of more magnitude 7.0 earthquakes.

Faults that combine sideways with up-and-down motions are called oblique by seismologists. The Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco holds a fault prone to oblique motions, for example, seen in a 1999 quake.

Human-Induced

It really takes the movement of crustal plates to uncork a massive earthquake, such as the magnitude 9.0 quake off the coast of Japan in 2011, which was caused by the Pacific plate moving under Asia. But humanity has figured out ways to trigger small quakes as well.

Temblors can be triggered by pumping wastewater onto faults in deep disposal wells, as seen in quakes that occurred in Oklahoma, Texas, and Ohio in recent years.

And football fans in Seattle have gained their own notoriety with the NFL playoffs upon us, triggering " Beast Quakes" detected by seismologists across the Pacific Northwest. The height of their seismic activity in last week's game came during a touchdown run.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on January 15, 2014. It was last updated on September 20, 2017.

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What Caused the Mexico Earthquake? Faults Explained

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On September 19, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake rocked central Mexico, with fatalities estimated in the hundreds -the largest, most serious earthquake of at least 19 that the U.S. Geological Survey detected across the world that day. Earthquakes all spring from faults deep underground, but what kind?

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Earthquakes are usually caused when rock underground suddenly breaks along a fault. This sudden release of energy causes the seismic waves that make the ground shake. When two blocks of rock or two plates are rubbing against each other, they stick a little. They don't just slide smoothly; the rocks catch on each other. The rocks are still pushing against each other, but not moving. After a while, the rocks break because of all the pressure that's built up. When the rocks break, the earthquake occurs. During the earthquake and afterward, the plates or blocks of rock start moving, and they continue to move until they get stuck again. The spot underground where the rock breaks is called the focus of the earthquake. The place right above the focus (on top of the ground) is called the epicenter of the earthquake.

1. Break a block of foam rubber in half.

2. Put the pieces on a smooth table.

3. Put the rough edges of the foam rubber pieces together.

4. While pushing the two pieces together lightly, push one piece away from you along the table top while pulling the other piece toward you. See how they stick?

5. Keep pushing and pulling smoothly.

Soon a little bit of foam rubber along the crack (the fault) will break and the two pieces will suddenly slip past each other. That sudden breaking of the foam rubber is the earthquake. That's just what happens along a strike-slip fault.

Earthquake-like seismic waves can also be caused by explosions underground. These explosions may be set off to break rock while making tunnels for roads, railroads, subways, or mines. These explosions, however, don't cause very strong seismic waves. You may not even feel them. Sometimes seismic waves occur when the roof or walls of a mine collapse. These can sometimes be felt by people near the mine. The largest underground explosions, from tests of nuclear warheads (bombs), can create seismic waves very much like large earthquakes. This fact has been exploited as a means to enforce the global nuclear test ban, because no nuclear warhead can be detonated on earth without producing such seismic waves.

2007 Michigan Technological Univeristy. Permission granted for reproduction for non-commercial uses.

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Earthquakes are usually caused when rock underground suddenly breaks along a fault. This sudden release of energy causes the seismic waves that make the ground shake. When two blocks of rock or two plates are rubbing against each other, they stick a little. They don't just slide smoothly; the rocks catch on each other.

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Almost 20 years ago Microsoft was working to ensure its next operating system, Windows 95, would be a haven for PC gamers. At the time most thought DOS was the way to go for gaming; after all, it worked spectacularly for Doom and Quake.

So Microsoft created DirectX, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that made it easy for game developers to work with Windows. It debuted in September 1995 as the Windows Games Software Development Kit (SDK) and later became integral to Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT. But developers stayed away from Windows, believing the platform couldn't be trusted. Microsoft threw a Roman-themed game developer conference in 1996 to convince them otherwise. It helped turn the tide.

In fact, it worked so well that by 1998 Microsoft decided to build an entire game console around DirectX. A four-man team formed out of the DirectX team created the device, then called DirectX Box. Considering how bad the last American-created game console-Atari Jaguar-did in the market (sales were crushed by the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn in 1995), Microsoft's decision to go console was a brave move by a company known for software, not hardware.

The goal was based in part on a typical Microsoft strategy: seeing someone else do something successful, mimicking it, and hopefully crushing the competition at its own game. This time it hoped to crush Sony, poised to announce the PlayStation 2 in March 1999. Bill Gates, then chairman of Microsoft, was quoted in Upside saying, "Our game designer likes the Sony machine," when asked about the Sega Saturn. And if Gates thought it worked, he'd go after it.

The four men on the DirectX Box team (Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley, Ted Hase, and Otto Berkes) went to work disassembling Dell laptops and constructing a "console" to play games. They got Ed Fries, the head of Microsoft's game publishing division, on board as well. By late 1999 Gates was talking a lot about the console-dubbed Xbox after taking a hint from market testing.

By March 2000 the PS2 was on sale in Japan and the Sega Dreamcast was faltering. At that month's Game Developers Conference, Gates officially announced the Xbox console, though the actual box wouldn't be released to the public for another 18 months.

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Almost 20 years ago Microsoft was working to ensure its next operating system, Windows 95, would be a haven for PC gamers. At the time most thought DOS was the way to go for gaming; after all, it worked spectacularly for Doom and Quake.

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The next generation of Microsoft's Xbox gaming console will have its official debut later this month, and it's hard to believe it's been just over 13 years since Bill Gates announced the very first system's arrival.

We still don't have any official word on what the new Xbox will be called or exactly how Microsoft is planning to make the system the new must-have console, but we do know there's been no shortage of highs, lows, and Halo-filled moments keeping things interesting for Xbox fans over the last decade or so.

In order to provide some additional perspective on what it has taken to get to this point in the evolution of the Xbox, we've compiled a brief history of Microsoft's celebrated consoles.

The Early Years

The notion that Microsoft should develop its own gaming console began gaining traction way back in 1998, with Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley, Otto Berkes, and Ted Hase forming the software giant's first console team after successfully pitching their idea to Bill Gates. Originally dubbed the " DirectX Box," the console was intended to be the first game system built like a PC and to bring all of the flexibility and power of a gaming rig to the console market. The system would run on Windows 2000, making it easy for traditional PC software developers to work within the console's architecture, and feature more than twice the processing power of the industry-leading PlayStation 2. Despite the marketing team's belief that the abbreviated "Xbox" name wouldn't fly, the label went over well with focus groups, providing the company with one of the final elements it needed to pull back the curtain on its creation: a catchy name.

Just two years later, Microsoft was ready to go public with its console, and that's exactly what Bill Gates did at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2000. Teasing the system's vastly improved specs and the potential for both online play and internal storage of downloaded content - whether games or media - Gates managed to get the world's attention, though many remained skeptical of what they saw as nothing more than a fancy PC dressed up like a gaming console.

Microsoft continued to push the envelope with both the console itself and its marketing budget, with more demonstrations at the Electronic Entertainment Expo a few months later. And it was there that the Xbox developer first connected with Bungie Studios, the creators of a third-person shooter titled Halo: Combat Evolved. Microsoft's $30 million purchase of Bungie a short time later made headlines in the game industry, but it was Bungie's decision to adapt Halo in order to make the best use of the new console's abilities (and turn it into a first-person shooter) that helped make history.

Nearly a full year later, Bill Gates - with help from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - revealed the final design of the Xbox at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, along with the system's official release date.

The Big Day Arrives

On November 14, the Times Square branch of Toys 'R' Us played host to the official launch of the Xbox, with Bill Gates dropping by to kick off his company's grand experiment in gaming. Concerns regarding the system's look and design - as well as the $299 price tag - fell by the wayside with over 1 million Xbox consoles flying off shelves in the next three weeks.

One key component to the console's success was the popularity of its flagship game, Halo, which offered the one-two punch of being both exclusive to the Xbox and one of the first-person shooter genre's most compelling, groundbreaking titles to hit shelves in years. Sales of Halo shattered all previous records, with more than 1 million copies of the game sold in the first few months of its release. (It might not seem like much by today's standards, but hitting the million-units mark back then was unheard of. How times change, eh?)

Rough Waters

Xbox release dates in Japan (February 22, 2002) and Europe (March 14, 2002) soon followed, though the system failed to catch fire in either of the two regions with the same energy that fueled its arrival in North America. In Japan, only 123,000 Xbox units sold in the first week of release, validating Microsoft's fear that the system would have a tough time breaking into the notoriously difficult overseas marketplace.

While the Xbox seemingly sold well in North America, the overall launch proved troubling for Microsoft, whose expectations for the system were lofty by any console's standards - let alone a brand-new system. The high cost of manufacturing the Xbox didn't do its creator any favors, making the next big event in the system's timeline even more surprising.

On April 18, 2002, Microsoft slashed the price of the Xbox from $299 to $199. While the dramatic reduction in price made it nearly impossible for the company to earn any profit whatsoever from sales of the system, the move succeeded in encouraging more households to bring home an Xbox. It also enabled the Xbox to outsell the just-released Nintendo GameCube in the years that followed, further establishing the Xbox as a force to be reckoned with in the console wars.

It's A-Live!

Arguably the most important event in the evolution of the Xbox and the growth of Microsoft's place in the gaming industry occurred on the console's first birthday with the launch of Xbox Live.

Microsoft's long-rumored online gaming network had already begun its beta testing phase in August 2002, but the system went public in November with the Xbox Live Starter Kit. Early adopters were treated to a multiplayer gaming experience that was entirely new to the console industry, pitting players against competitors from all around the world in a communal environment. Along with being able to connect with friends (and strangers), Xbox Live also made it possible to download new content and take multiplayer interaction to a new level.

With over 150,000 subscribers in its first week, Xbox Live was an unmitigated success, and the numbers continued to grow exponentially for Microsoft's online gaming network in the years to follow.

An End In Sight

While the Xbox fanbase continued to grow with the addition of Xbox Live, it wasn't all sunshine and sales in the years to follow. By February 2003, Microsoft had already begun planning for the next generation of Xbox, codenamed "Xenon" at the time.

Popular game developer Electronic Arts took issue with the subscription-based structure of Xbox Live and opted out of releasing their popular Madden football games for the Xbox in 2003, only to cut a deal with Microsoft a year later. On top of everything else, the company continued to lose money on each console sold, and by 2004, the technology that had once been the system's biggest selling point had become one of its most frustrating limitations.

Still, Microsoft pushed forward with new features aimed at making the Xbox - and its heirs - the all-purpose online media hub that it was supposed to be all along, with Xbox Live Arcade launching in November 2004.

Not Done Yet

Despite reports of the next big thing arriving any day, the launch of Halo 2 proved that rumors of the Xbox's demise had been greatly exaggerated - to the tune of more than 2.5 million units sold in the first 24 hours the game was available. The much-anticipated sequel's $125 million in sales made it the most successful launch of any entertainment product - whether game, movie, or music album - in consumer history up to that point.

The success of Halo 2 stood in stark contrast to the floundering sales of the Xbox itself, which continued to cost Microsoft significantly more to produce than it could ever rake in with sales.

The Next X & the End Of An Era

On May 12, 2005, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox 360, the next generation of its gaming console. With plans to release the 360 in November, the company clearly hoped that an early debut - almost a full year before the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii were scheduled to arrive - would put the 360 in a good position to dominate the market. It also meant the writing was on the wall for the original Xbox.

Later that year, production of the Xbox officially ceased, with the final tally of sold consoles sitting at around 24 million units. While this was nothing to scoff at, the number fell far short of Microsoft's initial prediction of 50 million Xbox consoles in households around the world. It was nowhere near the sales totals of the PS2, which went on to sell over 153 million units, but the Xbox did outsell both Nintendo's GameCube (which sold 21. million), and Sega's Dreamcast (which sold just 10.6 million). The last game produced for the Xbox in North America, Madden 09, was released August 2008, and support for the system was discontinued in March 2009. The final nail in the console's coffin was hammered April 14, 2010, with Xbox Live access eliminated for the original Xbox.

Mo' Sales, Mo' Problems

The release of the Xbox 360 in the U.S. on November 22, 2005, and in Europe and Japan the following month, resulted in sellouts in nearly every market except Japan, where the system still struggled to find an audience. By the end of 2005, more than 1.5 million consoles had shipped, putting the system well on its way to becoming the new master of the console castle. But in the rush to get the 360 into households, some serious problems with the system got a pass.

Not long after the 360 arrived on the market, the term "Red Ring of Death" began sending shivers down the spines of Xbox gamers. Among the various hardware and software issues that plagued early models of the 360, one particularly nasty problem caused the entire system to encounter a fatal error and give owners a red ring of light around the console's power button. The various flaws in these early models forced Microsoft to repair and replace countless systems, and eventually led to an extension of the console's warranty to account for all of the issues.

Even with all of the problems for early adopters of the system, the 360 sold amazingly well. And by January 2010, more than 39 million units had found their way into households.

A New Toy & A New Look

In both 2009 and 2010, June proved to be an important month for the 360. First, the motion- and voice-control peripheral that would eventually become Kinect was announced in June 2009 at that year's E3 convention. Originally labeled "Project Natal" (Microsoft frequently used cities as codenames, and the Brazilian city of Natal was chosen in honor of Brazilian born project director Alex Kipman), the device was expected to revolutionize the way 360 owners interacted with both their console and the media connected with it. The Kinect arrived on shelves in November of that year.

One year after the Kinect was announced, Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 would be getting a major redesign, with a thinner body, upgraded internal specs, additional USB ports, and built-in Wi-Fi. The "Xbox 360 S" hit shelves a few days later on June 18, 2010.

Everything New Is Old Again

Given the four years between the release of the first Xbox and the arrival of its successor, it's no surprise that after six years rumors began circulating in March 2011 that the 360 was on its way out and Microsoft was already hard at work on its next console. The first set of reports surfaced on (of all places) LinkedIn, where several designers and developers added vague descriptions of a mysterious new project they were working on with Microsoft. There was no stopping the Internet rumor train once it started chugging along, and before long the new console even had an unofficial codename: "Xbox 720."

Even with the next-generation rumors, sales of the 360 continued to assert Microsoft's powerful position in the console-gaming industry, and by September 2012 the company announced that it had hit the 70-million mark in units sold, and by December that number had jumped to 75 million. Although the sales of the 360 trailed behind Nintendo's Wii, which sold close to 100 million, it outsold the Ps3 by around 5 million. This news was followed a month later by the debut of Xbox Music and Xbox Video, Microsoft's new media services that not only replaced the existing services on the Xbox but also offered an attractive, Apple-style integration across all devices running Windows software.

Deja Vu All Over Again

After months of speculation, Microsoft finally revealed that something was indeed in the works just last month when the company confirmed that the future of the Xbox would be addressed at a May 21 event. In an official statement released April 24, Microsoft promised to offer "a real taste of the future" at the event, which will take place in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft Campus.

While it's unknown how much we'll learn about the next generation of Xbox at the event (though we're hoping to at least learn the console's official name), one thing is certain: there won't be any shortage of interest in what the new system has to offer.

Given how much the Xbox has evolved since its debut more than a decade ago, the next console has a lot to live up to - and with any luck, a few more chapters to add to its already impressive history.

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The next generation of Microsoft's Xbox gaming console will have its official debut later this month, and it's hard to believe it's been just over 13 years since Bill Gates announced the very first system's arrival.

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The gaming world was a very different place back in 2001; the home console market was dominated by the mighty PlayStation 2, Nintendo was launching the GameCube and the Dreamcast was proving to be a lead weight for Sega.

But it was November of that year that will be listed in the annals of gaming as a month that redefined consoles for a decade to come - bringing the launch of Microsoft's Xbox.

When Microsoft launched its Xbox on 15 November 2001, it was far from a guaranteed success; the software giant did have some gaming experience through the PC, but despite some impressive hardware, few believed that the console could truly compete with a brand like PlayStation.

However, Microsoft had a few tricks up its sleeve that would convert an idea they had first publicly touted back in 1999 into one its best known products.

The first was the acquisition of games developers Bungie, securing a launch title called Halo: Combat Evolved - a game that would become synonymous with the Xbox.

The second was the arrival, a year on from Xbox, of Xbox Live - a service that took the increasingly popular world of online gaming that had been flourishing on PC, and brought it to the US console.

Of course, Microsoft had not only the financial clout but also the links to hardware manufacturers and developers that were required to make a success of a console, but the Xbox project - evolving out of the work being done on DirectX at the company, represented a huge risk.

A collaboration with Sega on the Dreamcast was already looking ignominious and the decision to try to crack the traditionally Western-averse Japanese market was widely derided as it came at the expense of a speedy European launch.

And yet, Microsoft's console performed admirably, with consumers flocking to buy a console with nifty features like a built-in hard drive, the capability to rip CDs to create custom soundtracks and support for Dolby audio in actual gameplay.

By the time the console arrived in Europe in March 2002, it was already shaping up to be a key new area for Microsoft, and the arrival of Windows Live in November of that year brought the kind of online gaming that began to define the Xbox.

There were, somewhat inevitably, mis-steps; the original controller was mocked for its expansive size and was eventually replaced with a more svelte version but by and large the Xbox had shown the world that PlayStation's position was not guaranteed, despite the deserved runaway success of the PS2.

Just four years on from the launch of its predecessor, the Xbox 360 arrived - beating the PS3 to market by an entire year and, perhaps most importantly, showing that Microsoft had learned its lessons from its first foray into the console world.

Aside from taking advantage of the major strides forward in technology the Xbox 360 focus was on Xbox Live, and the remarkable success that this had brought with it.

The Xbox 360 was an immediate hit - not only bringing upgrades from the fans of the original, but also tapping into the wider gaming market and making huge inroads into the European market.

Sony's PlayStation 3 was on the way, but delayed by the need for the integration of Sony's Blu-ray, whereas Xbox 360 neatly sidestepped the whole problem of format war by sticking to DVD as its spinning media (an HD DVD add-on was an extra, not integrated).

Rushing to market may well have been a calculated risk, however, with the Xbox 360 beset by major hardware problems through the early part of its life-cycle.

Indeed, the now infamous red-ring of death became so problematic that Microsoft had to swallow a huge financial hit by offering to replace bricked consoles - at a cost of around $1 billion.

However, despite the hiccups, few would argue that the Xbox has been anything but an unmitigated triumph for Microsoft in the last ten years.

The launch of Kinect for the console, a motion and voice-sensor which Microsoft is touting as the fastest ever selling consumer electronics device, brought a major overhaul in design and the promise that this console was not being replaced any time soon.

Indeed the launch of the Xbox 720 is still one of the most widely discussed secrets in gaming, with Microsoft hinting at 2015 and many pundits suggesting that it could be just a year or so away.

But one thing's for sure, the Xbox brand is not going to be disappearing for some time to come, and few would bet against it still being around for its 20th birthday in 2021.

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The gaming world was a very different place back in 2001; the home console market was dominated by the mighty PlayStation 2, Nintendo was launching the GameCube and the Dreamcast was proving to be a lead weight for Sega.

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Origami is the Japanese name for the art of paper folding. However, it has now become a beloved artform for people around the world. This site is the most comprehensive collection of origami materials available on the World Wide Web.

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ORI means to fold and KAMI means paper. Together, they form the word, "origami." It is an art form that has been handed down from parent to child through many generations. Origami involves the creation of paper forms usually entirely by folding.

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The history of origami is under debate. Unlike other art forms, paper degrades quickly leaving no artifacts to suggest where origami originated and who first invented it. The information listed here provides a good overview of origami but is not an authoritative analysis of the subject. For detailed information regarding the history of paper folding, consult the works of John Smith, David Lister, and Koshiro Hatori.

Textbooks will say that paper was first invented in China by Cai Lun (also written Ts'ai Lun) in 105 A.D. However, archeological evidence suggest that paper was invented even early than this. One can imagine that if there's paper, then the paper may have been folded as well. There is no evidence of this but, if it was true, then paper folding would have started in China. [Photo: Cai Lun (Ts'ai Lun); inventor of paper]

That being said, there is very little examples of origami or paper folding in China. The " yuanbao" is probably the oldest example: these are paper folded to look like gold nuggets. The pieces are burnt as offering to the deceased. It is not clear when the tradition of folding yuanboa started (possibly near 1000 AD) but it continues even today.

Another example of paper folding in China is Golden Venture Folding (Chinese Paper Folding or 3D Origami). Here, small pieces of paper are folded into triangular units which are then assembled into large models. No one knows when these triangular units were first made, but they do appear to be of Chinese origin since they were introduced to the USA via illegal Chinese immigrants on the ship, Golden Venture (1993). Read more

Paper Folding in the Japan
During the 6th century, paper was introduced into Korea and then into Japan by Buddhist monks (sometimes attributed to one monk in particular, named Dokyo). It is in Japan that paper folding became an art form and evolved into what we know today as "origami".

In Japan, paper was expensive and not available to the general public. Paper and paper folding was limited to religious rituals and formal ceremonies. [Photo: Gohei with two strips of Shide]

Some of earliest examples of paper folding (with cutting) are "Shide"; these are zig-zag shaped paper used in purification rituals. Shide can be attached to straw ropes to designate sacred locations (Shimenawa), attached to alters, or attached to a wooden staff and used as purification wands (Gohei). It should be noted that Shide were probably made with fabric, but then later switched to paper. See how to fold Shide here

Mecho

Ocho

In traditional Shinto weddings, paper butterflies were used to adorn sake (Japanese wine) bottles. These butterflies, called "Mecho" and "Ocho", are probably the earliest form of representational origami. Mecho (female) & Ocho (male) precede the paper crane which is synonymous with current day origami. More about Mecho & Ocho here.

In Japan, there are rules of etiquette when it comes to the giving and receiving of gifts. Paper adornments were folded in different ways to symbolize different things. For example:

"Origami Tsuki" was a folded piece of paper that accompanied a valuable gift and it served as a certificate of authenticity.

"Noshi" was a folded piece of paper that accompanied a gift and functioned as a token of good fortune. More information about noshi here.

"Tsutsumi" was a formal gift wrapper. These ceremonial folds were simple and symbolized sincerity and purity. [Photo: Noshi]

There is very little evidence of recreational origami prior to the 1600's but by the 17th century, play-origami was prevalent in Japanese culture so much so that you could find kimonos decorated with paper cranes.

A print showing ranma with origami models. From mfa; Enlarge.

This shows a ranma (decorative wood paneling) with six origami models including the paper crane, the classic boat, and a modular cube (1734, see analysis by Koshiro Hatori). These elements suggest that origami was well established in Japan by the 1700's.

The first book published about paper folding was the " Tsutsumi-no Ki" by Sadatake Ise (1764). It contained instructions to fold 13 ceremonial folds such as the noshi and Tsutsumi described above. [Image from Tsutsumi-no Ki.]

The first published book documenting recreational paper folding came in 1797 with the book called "Folding of 1000 Cranes" (Senbazuru Orikata). This book contained brief instructions on how to fold 49 interconnect cranes. See originals here and here (Paula Versnick). [Image from Senbazuru Orikata.]

Next, a series of books called "Window on Midwinter" (Kayaragusa, 1845) was printed. These books were about Japanese customs and there are two sections dedicated to paper folding. [Note: due to an error in translation, these books are sometimes mistakenly called Kan No Mado.] There was only one copy of this collection made; it is currently owned by the Asahi Newspaper in Osaka.

After this point, origami was well on its way. The Europeans also practiced paper folding: ideas and methods started to be mixed and developed until origami is what we see today.

Paper Folding in Europe
The history of paper folding in Europe is a story in itself. Most origami historians believe that early paper folding in Europe developed more-or-less independently from that of Japan. The main reason for this is that the origami models found in Europe tend to have a "grid" crease pattern (squares, rectangle, diagonals). In contrast, the ceremonial folds from old Japan tend to have judgement folds where the exact location of the cease is up to personal taste & interpretation. See Koshiro Hatori's article which compares the development of origami in the East and West in the conference proceedings, Origami 5

.

Through battle and conquest, the secrets of paper and paper-making left China in 750 AD and began their journey into Central Asia and then to Europe.

The earliest published evidence of paper folding in Europe is probably from the 1490 printing of the book " De Sphaera Mundi" (On the Sphere of the World) by Johannes de Sacrobosco. In this book is a woodcut print of two boats, one of the boats looks very much like the classic origami boat which is sometimes used as a paper hat. [Photo from here]

This is a (small) picture of a boat and some historians are not convinced that this is an origami boat. However, if this is indeed an origami boat, then it would suggest that paper folding developed in Europe independent of paper folding in Japan because in 1490, Japan would not have this type of recreational folds.

In Act IV of the play "The Duchess of Malfi" by John Webster (1614), character Bosola refers to paper prisons which boys use to imprison flies.

"Our bodies are weaker than those paper-
prisons boys use to keep flies in;"
Historians believe that this is in reference to the classic Waterbomb model.
In Germany and other parts of Europe, baptism certificates called "Patenbriefs" were given to babies by their godparents. These Patenbriefs were folded in a 3 x 3 or a 4 x 4 grid. Patenbriefs existed in the 17th, and 18th century; though, the oldest ones found on the internet are from the 1750's. [ Patenbrief (1831) 3 x 3 fold with twist closure.]

Image from "Hanenpoot". Image from here.

Traditional Chinese Junk from Origami From Around the World (Vincente Palacios).

The next textual evidence of origami in the west would be a drawing from a picture-book of a boy sitting in a paper boat floating in a tea cup. This image is from the book "Hanenpoot" by Willem Bilderchijk (1806). The boat is identified as the traditional Chinese Junk.

Interestingly, historians think that the traditional Chinese Junk was not invented in China because it is made with a 4 x 4 grid consistent with the other origami models found in European made with the same windmill base. As well, there is no evidence of the Chinese Junk in the history of paper folding in China or Japan.

By this time, origami was quite common across parts of Europe. There is mention of people folding paper into various shapes such as kites, boats, and birds. One origami model which is almost definitely from Europe is " Pajarita" (little bird). Origami historian, Vicente Palacios, has accumulated a mass of evidence suggesting that Pajarita was first created in Spain. The same model exists across Europe under different names.

You can see Pajarita in European paintings from the 1800's such as "The Merrymakers" by French painter, Carolus-Duran (circa 1870). The lady in black is holding Pajarita. See more examples here. To this day, Pajarita is used as the logo for Asociación Española de Papiroflexia (Spanish Paper Folding Association).

From Europe, origami then spread to South America and then to North America. In the 1950, Akira Yoshizana and Sam Randlett developed a standard set of origami symbols to describe how to fold paper into models. These symbols remained essentially the same and is used in origami diagrams today. [Note: David Lister suggests that it was Sam Randlett and Robert Harbin who formalized the use of the origami symbols.]

Currently, there are thousands of origami books, free origami diagrams on the internet, and origami videos. The art form continues to evolve and develop. Origami styles and techniques include: complex origami, mathematical origami, modular origami, wet folding origami, origami tessellations, and more.

To see a timeline, or different perspectives on the history of origami, please visit these sites:

end of History of Origami page

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The history of origami is under debate. Unlike other art forms, paper degrades quickly leaving no artifacts to suggest where origami originated and who first invented it. The information listed here provides a good overview of origami but is not an authoritative analysis of the subject.

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The NFL Draft begins on Thursday night to signal the biggest even in the off-season calendar, with quarterbacks set to dominate the headlines with both the Los Angeles Rams and the Philadelphia Eagles trading up in the hope of landing big name entries Jared Goff and Carson Wentz.

However, not everyone may be accustomed to the NFL Draft, despite its increased coverage year-by-year and mass fan interaction - something that will see the Jacksonville Jaguars announce their fifth pick through a fan in London for the second year running.

So what is the NFL Draft and how does it work?

Each of the 32 NFL teams receives a 'pick' in each of the seven rounds, meaning they can select seven new players for next season.

The order of picks is sorted by the team records from last season, with the first 20 filled by those who did not make the play-offs, starting with the worst team and ending with the team that held the best record. The remaining 12 are filled by those who made the play-offs, with the Super Bowl champions, the Denver Broncos, going 32nd and last in each round.

What about trades?

Teams can trade places in any of the Draft rounds by offering other teams picks, players or money. This is known as 'Trading Up' and can take place ahead of the Draft as well as during it. Some trades will already have been agreed, with teams able to trade future picks for Drafts in the next few years. One example of this is the Tennessee Titans, who have swapped their No 1 overall pick with the LA Rams in return for a 5th overall pick in this year's draft, two second-round picks (43 and 45), and a third-rounder (76) in 2016, plus a first and third-round pick in the 2017 Draft.

When does the Draft start and how long does it last?

The Draft begins at midnight on Thursday and runs for three days until Saturday night. Each team has 10 minutes to make their first-round pick which takes up all of Thursday night/Friday morning, with the second and third round picks taking place on Friday night/Saturday morning with seven minutes on the clock for the second round. Rounds three, four, five and six allow teams five minutes to make their selection, while the seventh round offers just four minutes to make a selection.

What if a team lets the clock expire?

They will still be allowed to take their pick, but the next team is allowed to start their turn and could take the player that the previous team wanted to select.

How do the picks work?

Each team has a table set up in the draft venue, which for the second consecutive year takes place at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. They remain in constant communication with a club's headquarter, and once a selection has been made they write the player's name, position and school on a card and give it to an NFL runner. As soon as the runner has the card, the selection is made official and the clock restarts, with the next team informed which player has gone.

The selection is made known via radio to the head table, before it is announced publicly.

What is the Draft first-round order?

1 Los Angeles Rams (from Tennessee)

2 Philadelphia Eagles (from Cleveland)

3 San Diego Chargers

4 Dallas Cowboys

5 Jacksonville Jaguars

6 Baltimore Ravens

7 San Francisco 49ers

8 Cleveland Browns (from Philadephia through Miami)

9 Tampa Bay Buccaneers

10 New York Giants

11 Chicago Bears

12 New Orleans Saints

13 Miami Dolphins (from Philadelphia)

14 Oakland Raiders

15 Tennessee Titans (from Los Angeles)

16 Detroit Lions

17 Atlanta Falcons

18 Indianapolis Colts

19 Buffalo Bills

20 New York Jets

21 Washington Redskins

22 Houston Texans

23 Minnesota Vikings

24 Cincinnati Bengals

25 Pittsburgh Steelers

26 Seattle Seahawks

27 Green Bay Packers

28 Kansas City Chiefs

29 Arizona Cardinals

30 Carolina Panthers

31 Denver Broncos

Note: The New England Patriots have lost their first-round pick at No 29 as part of their punishment for the Deflategate scandal.
Follow the Independent Sport on Instagram here, for all of the best images, videos and stories from around the sporting world.

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Everything you need to know about the 2016 NFL Draft

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The NFL Draft begins on Thursday night to signal the biggest even in the off-season calendar, with quarterbacks set to dominate the headlines with both the Los Angeles Rams and the Philadelphia Eagles trading up in the hope of landing big name entries Jared Goff and Carson Wentz.

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The rules of the NFL Draft | NFL Football Operations

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Which team will go first? How long does each team have to make its pick? Who is eligible to be drafted? The NFL has specific rules for each part of the draft process.

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Every year, the 32 teams of America's National Football League meet to share out newly available players via the draft.

The majority of these players come from the college game and the teams take it in turns to select the men they want.

Interest in the draft is incredibly high. In 1960 the draft took place in a one-storey motel with only a handful of journalists present, but it begins on Saturday at Radio City Music Hall in New York City and is televised live across the world.

How does the draft work?

Each of the 32 NFL teams gets one selection per round (there are seven rounds) to select a player.

The teams are placed in order of worst regular-season record last year to best with the worst team selecting first. The team that won last year's Super Bowl selects last in each round.

This year, the top pick goes to the Detroit Lions, who failed to win a single game last season, while Super Bowl champions the Pittsburgh Steelers pick last.

Draft choices may be exchanged for current players or for other draft picks, so the order often changes.

How does trading work?

Unlike the European soccer leagues, where players are quite frequently transferred simply for money, NFL teams almost always trade for draft picks, players, or a combination of the two.

For example, this year the Chicago Bears traded their 2009 first and third round selections, their 2010 first round selection and a player to the Denver Broncos in order to ensure quarterback Jay Cutler joined them.

In the build-up to the draft, many NFL commentators and pundits attempt to guess which players will go to which teams, but it is very difficult to do due to the complex trading going on behind the scenes.

Andy Ross, agent for linebacker Aaron Curry - a top prospect this year - says that the teams become "a league of Pinocchios" as they attempt to wheel and deal their way to the player or trade they want.

Who are the big stars this year and which teams might they join?

Matthew Stafford, quarterback - Many experts believe that the Detroit Lions will select Stafford with the first overall pick as they attempt to rebuild.

Jason Smith, offensive tackle - Weighing in at a massive 140kg, Smith is widely expected to be taken as the second overall pick by the St Louis Rams, to protect their quarterback.

Aaron Curry, linebacker - The pundits see Curry as the best defender in the draft, who should have an immediate impact. The Cleveland Browns are said to be very interested.

How much can a new player expect to earn?

It depends upon how high up in the draft the player is chosen, but those that are drafted with one of the first 10 picks can expect an enormous payout.

Last year, Jake Long was drafted by the Miami Dolphins with the first pick of the draft. He signed a deal worth $57.5m (£39.4m) over five years.

But being drafted towards the end of the first round does not guarantee anywhere near that kind of money, but it's still pretty good!

Kenny Phillips, who was picked by the New York Giants 31st last year, earned a contract worth a maximum of $11.5m (£7.9m) over five years.

Is a player obliged to join the team that picks him?

Essentially yes. However, players often do not sign contracts until months after the draft and will refuse to play for a team before securing the deal they want.

Gil Brandt, former vice president of player personnel for the Dallas Cowboys, says, "Holdouts are almost always a case of money. The player wants to get as much as he can, and the franchise wants to pay what's fair."

Occasionally a player will be drafted by a team he does not want to play for which can cause big problems.

In 2004, quarterback Eli Manning did not want to play for the San Diego Chargers, who had the first overall pick of the draft and did indeed select him, despite being fully aware of the situation.

After some very awkward moments and a lot of behind-the-scenes talks, Manning was traded to the Giants in return for several top draft picks and fellow quarterback Phillip Rivers.

If matters get really desperate, a player can refuse to sign for a year and enter the draft again the following year, but this very rarely happens.

How long do players have to stick with the team that drafted them?

An NFL rookie must sign a contract of a minimum of four years when signing for a franchise.

If he gets to the end of his contract without extending it or being traded, he becomes an unrestricted free agent and is free to sign for whoever wants him.

What if no one wants to sign a player?

Undrafted free agents can still end up on an NFL team's roster if they impress during a tryout or do well on a franchise's practice squad, and are free to sign for whoever they like.

Kurt Warner, who led the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl this year, played for several years in the now defunct NFL Europe before signing for the St Louis Rams, who he led to Super Bowl glory.

Other very successful undrafted free agents include wide receiver Wes Welker of the New England Patriots and linebacker James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

What else should I look out for?

The player drafted with the very last pick has gained cult status as he is awarded the Lowsman Trophy (an irreverent dig at the Heisman Trophy, which is awarded to the top college player).

The recipient of the trophy is feted during 'Irrelevant Week', a week-long celebration held each year in California.

Winners rarely make it onto the field of play, but last year's beneficiary, outside linebacker David Vobara, actually started a game in 2008 for the St. Louis Rams.

Why can't the NFL do the same as other sports, signing youngsters and bringing them through youth teams?

College football was strong before the formation of the NFL in the 1920s, so the system by which young players developed was already in place.

As well as this, the competitive balance of the NFL would be compromised if the bigger teams were able to poach young talent with more frequency than the less successful sides.

Could a draft system work like this in British football?

It would be difficult but not impossible. The NFL draft relies entirely upon the college programme in the United States and without a similar setup in Britain it would be tough to replicate.

However, in the US, baseball and ice hockey teams are able to draft from minor league semi-professional teams, which could feasibly happen in the UK.

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Every year, the 32 teams of America's National Football League meet to share out newly available players via the draft. The majority of these players come from the college game and the teams take it in turns to select the men they want. Interest in the draft is incredibly high.

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The answer to the question 'What is Hip Hop dance?' is not as simple as you might suppose.

Funk & Rock breaks were more up-tempo and lent themselves to what the dancers would refer to as "going off"

Hip Hop dance includes a wide range of "street dance" styles that are associated with the Hip Hop culture born in New York City in the mid-'70s. Traditionally, the original dance of Hip Hop was Breaking, which was the predominant style from the 1970s until the mid-'80s.

Beginning in the Bronx, Breaking spread worldwide via movies such as Wild Style, Beat Street and Breakdance - The Movie, as well as through tours like the New York City Rap and Wild Style Tours, which showed off the new culture and dance styles in the 80s.

Originally performed to Funk and Rock "breaks", the music was more up-tempo and lent itself to what the dancers would refer to as "going off".

Breaking increasingly began to die out in the mid to late '80s as the culture changed. The music was slowing down, being replaced by more of a "head nod" or "boom bap" sound.

This led to the emergence of a new style of Hip Hop dance expression, more correctly termed Hip Hop Freestyle, and led to movements more suited to the music. Club or Party dancing took over with the style and steps named or influenced by what was happening in popular culture.

The Prep, Fila (after the sports shoes), Roger Rabbit, Steve Martin, Cabbage Patch, Humpty Dance, Robocop, Pee Wee Herman, Running Man and many other steps spread around the scene. Often, a simple movement performed by a movie star, comedian or other character was exaggerated or mocked, harking back to other African-American dances like the Cakewalk from a century earlier.

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BBC Arts - The History of Hip-Hop Dance - BBC Arts

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The answer to the question 'What is Hip Hop dance?' is not as simple as you might suppose. Funk & Rock breaks were more up-tempo and lent themselves to what the dancers would refer to as "going off" Hip Hop dance includes a wide range of "street dance" styles that are associated with the Hip Hop culture born in New York City in the mid-'70s.

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Compared to many other dance forms, hip hop has a relatively short history. The beginnings of this dance form date back to the 1960s and 70s, but of course the movements and the music have roots dating back much further in time.

Early History of Hip Hop Dance

Hip hop dancing is thought to have officially begun in New York City during the late 1960s and early 70s. During this time, individuals without professional dance training but with a natural instinct for movement brought dancing to the streets. A dance form meant to be popular in the original sense of the word, meaning that it was for the people and not for the academy, hip hop moves were inspired by complex rhythms and the down-to-earth movement style of African dancing. Music and movement came together to form a new art. While vestiges of modern, tap, swing, and African dancing can all be found in hip hop, this dance style is really in a class of its own when it comes to improvisation and an edge of competition.

The roots of hip hop on the East Coast are widely known, but there is also a West Coast hip hop history from which many of the most well-known hip hop moves originated.

East Coast Hip Hop

Hip hop didn't develop only on the East Coast, but New York City artists invented a musical style and a dance culture that went viral decades before there was an internet. While it wasn't yet called hip hop dance, this art form really began to develop when DJ Herc moved to Brooklyn at the age of 12, and started an informal performance career that would quickly turn him into one of the most popular DJs in New York City.

Moving to New York City from Jamaica, Kool DJ Herc was the first DJ to make unique music by playing two record machines with the same record on both. The rhythms he created were one of the important founding elements of hip hop; he also extended the dance section of songs so the dancers could show off their moves for a longer interlude, laying the foundation for a significant dance culture.

West Coast Hip Hop

On the West Coast, hip hop dancing borrowed from the Bronx but developed its own style. The Jackson Five's music and performance is the '60s and '70s was one inspiration for roboting. Robotic moves were based on popular TV shows and films about aliens and robots. While the East Coast b-boys were Freezing in power moves in their breaks, West Coast hip hoppers were mimicking department store mannequins in theirs. Wanting to replicate the movement of artificial life, the following pioneers shaped hip hop on the West Coast.

Boogaloo Sam: The creator of popping, Boogaloo Sam was an important influence in hip hop evolution. Contributing to the early West Coast hip hop scene in the 1970s, he had an innate gift for music and movement and was the founder of the dance group Electric Boogaloo.

Don Campbellock: While his real name was Don Campbell, his invention, locking, influenced his name. Known as Don Campbellock, this important figure in hip hop dancing created the dance group The Lockers, and his iconic dance shaped the early West Coast scene.

American Hip Hop

While for hip hop dancers, the popping and locking of the West Coast and the breaking of the East Coast are two very separate dance styles, the two regional variants often get blended and grouped into the genre 'hip hop.' As the dance form continued to evolve, many dancers retained the original styles respective to each region, while other artists brought in not only several different styles of hip hop dancing, but also additional existing dance styles such as swing.

1980s Evolution of Hip Hop

When hip hop first started it was a performative, but informal, dance culture. B-boys and b-girls (terms introduced by DJ Herc) would be invited to show off their moves by other people on the street, on the basketball court, or wherever the group happened to be. As the moves became more institutionalized (for example, breaking, popping, and locking), and more and more dancers got caught up in the rhythms of the music, the street scene shifted to more formal dance venues. The choreography developed recognizable moves, but the innovative and competitive nature of hip hop remained. It was often danced as a "battle" or one-on-one face-off in a circle of cheering fans.

In the 1980s and 90s more clubs featured hip hop DJs, especially in the larger cities, and dancers of all skill levels would hit the dance floor. Both informal and formal competitions often arose. Informal competitions started when a few truly exceptional dancers were noticed on the dance floor; the rest of the people would back off and allow the leaders to duke it out. As these informal competitions became increasingly common and popular, announced competitions became part of a night out at hip hop clubs. Whether they arose organically or they were advertised in advance, this competitive nature helped hip hop retain the battle culture that has existed since the beginning. This type of competition can also be seen in other dance forms, perhaps most notably in tap dancing of the early 20th century.

Now You See 'Em

There are so many innovators in the dance form it's hard to keep track of them. Famous names include Dan Karaty, Brian Friedman, Chucky Klapow, Robert Hoffman, Michael Jackson (early adopter and memorable moves), Comfort Fedoke, tWitch Boss, Soulja Boy, Cyrus "Glitch" Spencer, and Napoleon and Tabitha D'umo -- choreographers who work as Nappytabs for high profile shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Cirque Du Soleil.

21st Century Hip Hop

Nowadays, street hip hop is likely to be an orchestrated flash mob, and hip hop fusion wins Tony's on Broadway.

The roots of hip hop were informal and group-based instead of audience-based, but that's evolved, too. Hip hop is so powerful it jumped from the curb to center stage in the 1990s and just keeps gobbling up performance turf. Popular hip hop dancers can rock a club scene, but they can also mesmerize a competition jury of dance experts or wow national television audiences. Choreographer Wade Robson created his television show, The Wade Robson Project, to select upcoming hip hop dance talent, while dance crews like Diversity and iCONic Boyz were busy impressing television audiences with their moves and styles.

Since the advent of music television and social media, hip hop has dominated music videos. 21st-century hip hop is a compilation of classic b-boy breaking, popping, locking, tutting and other refinements, and freestyle forms such as the animatronic hip hop of performers like tWitch and Fik Shun.

Hip Hop Pop

Hip hop may be the new kid on the block, but it owns the block. Little kids pop and lock at kindergarten recess -- fitting, as DJ Herc and his boys used to steal electricity from light poles and set up their neighborhood dance parties in Bronx schoolyards. You can tick off that See-Venice bucket list item as you visit Piazza San Marco and catch a flash mob hip hopping in between the acqua altas. It's New Year's Eve in Times Square, back-up for Beyonce, cheerleading squad at your high school homecoming, happening in 5-inch stilettos at Senior Prom. Just surrender. Work on your pelvic isolations, your shoulder rolls, and your take-no-prisoners game face. You can't waltz your way out of this one. But you can throw up your fists, stick out your chest, step fast and fancy in your sneakers, and just add hip hop to your party repertoire. You know how it's done now -- so get down and make a little dance history of your own.

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Compared to many other dance forms, hip hop has a relatively short history. The beginnings of this dance form date back to the 1960s and 70s, but of course the movements and the music have roots dating back much further in time.

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Dreamer. Innovator. Researcher. Problem Solver. Inventor. Creator. All are terms that aptly describe the characteristics of an engineer. As an engineer you might develop the next generation of the iPad, or a medical device that will help doctors treat an illness, or a spacecraft that will carry humans to Mars, or a system that can bring clean water to an underdeveloped region, or a new power source that is sustainable and provides clean energy, or a device that can detect toxic agents and chemicals, or a new building that is earthquake safe. Using basic foundations in mathematics and science, engineers apply their technical knowledge to conceive, design and implement new processes, products and systems that make our everyday lives possible. Engineers are those at the cutting edge of technology who through innovation, creativity and change provide for our safety, health, security, comfort and recreation. Being an engineer is challenging and rewarding. Being an engineer is coming up with solutions to problems that no one else knows the answer. Being an engineer is being part of a profession that makes life better for humanity. Being an engineer is finding the answers to the challenges that confront society. Being an engineer is about making a difference and if that sounds exciting it might be the right career choice for you. To learn more, explore the following TryEngineering resources:

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Dreamer. Innovator. Researcher. Problem Solver. Inventor. Creator. All are terms that aptly describe the characteristics of an engineer.

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Engineers use science and math to come up with practical solutions to problems.

Credit: Ollyy | Shutterstock

Engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems. Engineers figure out how things work and find practical uses for scientific discoveries. Scientists and inventors often get the credit for innovations that advance the human condition, but it is engineers who are instrumental in making those innovations available to the world.

In his book, " Disturbing the Universe" (Sloan Foundation, 1981), physicist Freeman Dyson wrote, "A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."

The history of engineering is part and parcel of the history of human civilization. The Pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge, the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower stand today as monuments to our heritage of engineering. Today's engineers not only build huge structures, such as the International Space Station, but they are also building maps to the human genome and better, smaller computer chips.

Engineering is one of the cornerstones of STEM education, an interdisciplinary curriculum designed to motivate students to learn about science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Engineers design, evaluate, develop, test, modify, install, inspect and maintain a wide variety of products and systems. They also recommend and specify materials and processes, supervise manufacturing and construction, conduct failure analysis, provide consulting services and teach engineering courses in colleges and universities.

The field of engineering is divided into a large number of specialty areas:

Mechanical engineering involves design, manufacturing, inspection and maintenance of machinery, equipment and components as well as control systems and instruments for monitoring their status and performance. This includes vehicles, construction and farm machinery, industrial installations and a wide variety of tools and devices.

Electrical engineering involves design, testing, manufacturing, construction, control, monitoring and inspection of electrical and electronic devices, machinery and systems. These systems vary in scale from microscopic circuits to national power generation and transmission systems.

Civil engineering involves design, construction, maintenance and inspection of large infrastructure projects such as highways, railroads, bridges, tunnels, dams and airports.

Aerospace engineering involves design, manufacturing and testing of aircraft and spacecraft as well as parts and components such as airframes, power plants, control and guidance systems, electrical and electronic systems, and communication and navigation systems.

Nuclear engineering involves design, manufacturing, construction, operation and testing of equipment, systems and processes involving the production, control and detection of nuclear radiation. These systems include particle accelerators and nuclear reactors for electric power plants and ships, radioisotope production and research. Nuclear engineering also includes monitoring and protecting humans from the potentially harmful effects of radiation.

Structural engineering involves design, construction and inspection of load-bearing structures such large commercial buildings, bridges and industrial infrastructure.

Biomedical engineering is the practice of designing systems, equipment and devices for use in the practice of medicine. It also involves working closely with medical practitioners, including doctors, nurses, technicians, therapists and researchers, in order to determine, understand and meet their requirements for systems, equipment and devices.

Chemical engineering is the practice of designing equipment, systems and processes for refining raw materials and for mixing, compounding and processing chemicals to make valuable products.

Computer engineering is the practice of designing computer hardware components, computer systems, networks and computer software.

Industrial engineering is the practice of designing and optimizing facilities, equipment, systems and processes for manufacturing, material processing, and any number of other work environments.

Environmental engineering is the practice of preventing, reducing and eliminating sources of pollution that affect air, water and land. It also involves detecting and measuring pollution levels, determining sources of pollution, cleaning up and rehabilitating polluted sites and ensuring compliance with local, state and federal regulations.

Chemical engineer Norma Alcantar uses the prickly pear cactus in her work to create an inexpensive, sustainable way to purify drinking water.

Credit: Norma A. Alcantar, Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, University of South Florida

There is often considerable overlap among the different specialties. For this reason, engineers need to have a general understanding of several areas of engineering besides their specialty. For example, a civil engineer needs to understand concepts of structural engineering, an aerospace engineer needs to apply principles of mechanical engineering, and nuclear engineers need a working knowledge of electrical engineering.

Particularly, engineers require in-depth knowledge of mathematics, physics and computer applications such as simulations and computer-aided design. This is why most college programs include basic engineering courses in a wide range of topics before students choose to specialize in a particular area.

Many employers require engineers to obtain state certification as Professional Engineers. Additionally, many engineers belong to the American Society of Professional Engineers and other engineering societies for their areas of specialization.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has information on various specialized fields of engineering, including educational requirements, job descriptions, work environments and job outlooks. Another source of information on job descriptions, educational requirements and required skills and knowledge for different areas of engineering can be found at MyMajors.com.

Engineers work in many different settings, according to the BLS, including research laboratories, factories, construction sites, nuclear power plants, offshore oil rigs and even on the International Space Station. Additionally, many engineers work in businesses related to their areas of specialization; for example, an HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) engineer might own a heating and air conditioning company, and a structural engineer might own a construction company.

Most engineering jobs require at least a bachelor's degree in engineering. State certification as a Professional Engineer, which requires passing a rigorous and comprehensive test, is also required by many employers and to work as a consultant. Senior engineering positions and professorships generally require a master's degree or a doctorate.

Employment of engineers is projected to grow from 4 to 27 percent between now and 2022, depending on the field of specialization, according to the BLS. According to Salary.com, a newly graduated engineer with a bachelor's degree can expect to earn from $50,817 to $78,487 per year; a mid-level engineer with a master's degree and five to 10 years of experience can earn $68,628 to $114,426; and a senior engineer with a master's degree or doctorate and more than 15 years of experience can earn $91,520 to $156,895. Many experienced engineers are promoted to management positions or start their own consulting businesses where they can earn even more. Additionally, some engineers go on to law school to become patent attorneys, where they can earn upward of $250,000 per year.

Engineering has matured and expanded over the centuries along with our knowledge and understanding of science, mathematics and the laws of physics and their applications. Today, engineers apply both well-established scientific principles and cutting-edge innovations in order to design, build, improve, operate and maintain complex devices, structures, systems and processes.

It was engineering that brought us out of the caves; it was engineering that took us to the moon; and if we ever make it to the stars, it will be engineering that takes us there. As our knowledge continues to advance, engineers will have new opportunities to find practical uses for scientific discoveries.

As the novelist James A. Michener aptly put it in his novel " Space" (Fawcett, 1983), "Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them."

Jim Lucas is a freelance writer and editor specializing in physics, astronomy and engineering. He is general manager of Lucas Technologies.

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What is Engineering? | Types of Engineering

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Engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems. Engineers figure out how things work and find practical uses for scientific discoveries. Scientists and inventors often get the credit for innovations that advance the human condition, but it is engineers who are instrumental in making those innovations available to the world.