Hopscotch

Hopscotch is a children's game that can be played with several players or alone. Hopscotch is a popular playground game in which players toss a small object into numbered spaces of a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces to retrieve the object.

Court and rules

The court

To play hopscotch, a court is first laid out on the ground. Depending on the available surface, the court is either scratched out in dirt, or drawn with chalk on pavement. Courts may be permanently marked where playgrounds are commonly paved, as in elementary schools. Designs vary, but the court is usually composed of a series of linear squares interspersed with blocks of two lateral squares. Traditionally the court ends with a "safe" or "home" base in which the player may turn before completing the reverse trip. The home base may be a square, a rectangle, or a semicircle. The squares are then numbered in the sequence in which they are to be hopped.

Playing the game

Hopscotch (Julio Cortázar novel)

Hopscotch (Spanish: Rayuela) is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Written in Paris, it was published in Spanish in 1963 and in English in 1966. For the first U.S. edition, translator Gregory Rabassa split the inaugural National Book Award in the translation category.

Hopscotch is a stream-of-consciousness novel which can be read according to two different sequences of chapters. This novel is often referred to as a counter-novel, as it was by Cortázar himself.

"Table of Instructions" and structure

Written in an episodic, snapshot manner, the novel has 155 chapters, the last 99 designated as "expendable." Some of these "expendable" chapters fill in gaps that occur in the main storyline, while others add information about the characters or record the aesthetic or literary speculations of a writer named Morelli who makes a brief appearance in the narrative. Some of the "expendable" chapters at first seem like random musings, but upon closer inspection solve questions that arise during the reading of the first two parts of the book.

Hopscotch (Brian Garfield novel)

Hopscotch is a 1975 novel by Brian Garfield, in which a CIA field officer walks away from the Agency in order to keep from being retired in place behind a desk, and invites the Agency to pursue him by writing an exposé and mailing chapters of it piecemeal to all the major intelligence agencies around the world, including the CIA. Hopscotch won the 1976 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

In 1980, the novel was made into a film with the same name, for which Garfield also cowrote the screenplay. The film starred Walter Matthau. Although the novel has a dark, cynical tone, the film is a comedy, but the plot follows that of the novel fairly closely.

Historical context

The book came out during the period of the Church Committee Congressional investigations of the Intelligence community in the mid-1970s. The popular image of the CIA had been under attack before the Committee was convened, and the Agency's image was not helped by the spate of spy novels like Hopscotch, in which the CIA was depicted as a paranoid bureaucracy out to kill any Agency insiders who dared to expose its blunders. In addition to Hopscotch, the same story was told by novels like Dragons at the Gate by Robert Duncan (1975), The Star-Spangled Contract by Jim Garrison (1976) and the movie Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford (1975), based on the novel by James Grady entitled Six Days of the Condor (1974).

Factor

Factor, a Latin word meaning "who/which acts", may refer to:

Commerce

Science and technology

Biology

Computer science and information technology

Factoring (finance)

Factoring is a financial transaction and a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount. A business will sometimes factor its receivable assets to meet its present and immediate cash needs.Forfaiting is a factoring arrangement used in international trade finance by exporters who wish to sell their receivables to a forfaiter. Factoring is commonly referred to as accounts receivable factoring, invoice factoring, and sometimes accounts receivable financing. Accounts receivable financing is a term more accurately used to describe a form of asset based lending against accounts receivable.

Factoring is not the same as invoice discounting (which is called an "Assignment of Accounts Receivable" in American accounting – as propagated by FASB within GAAP). Factoring is the sale of receivables, whereas invoice discounting ("assignment of accounts receivable" in American accounting) is a borrowing that involves the use of the accounts receivable assets as collateral for the loan. However, in some other markets, such as the UK, invoice discounting is considered to be a form of factoring, involving the "assignment of receivables", that is included in official factoring statistics. It is therefore also not considered to be borrowing in the UK. In the UK the arrangement is usually confidential in that the debtor is not notified of the assignment of the receivable and the seller of the receivable collects the debt on behalf of the factor. In the UK, the main difference between factoring and invoice discounting is confidentiality.

Von Neumann algebra

In mathematics, a von Neumann algebra or W*-algebra is a *-algebra of bounded operators on a Hilbert space that is closed in the weak operator topology and contains the identity operator. They were originally introduced by John von Neumann, motivated by his study of single operators, group representations, ergodic theory and quantum mechanics. His double commutant theorem shows that the analytic definition is equivalent to a purely algebraic definition as an algebra of symmetries.

Two basic examples of von Neumann algebras are as follows. The ring L^∞(R) of essentially bounded measurable functions on the real line is a commutative von Neumann algebra, which acts by pointwise multiplication on the Hilbert space L²(R) of square integrable functions. The algebra B(H) of all bounded operators on a Hilbert space H is a von Neumann algebra, non-commutative if the Hilbert space has dimension at least 2.

Von Neumann algebras were first studied by von Neumann (1930) in 1929; he and Francis Murray developed the basic theory, under the original name of rings of operators, in a series of papers written in the 1930s and 1940s (F.J. Murray & J. von Neumann 1936, 1937, 1943; J. von Neumann 1938, 1940, 1943, 1949), reprinted in the collected works of von Neumann (1961).