Pearl

A pearl is a hard object produced within the soft tissue (specifically the mantle) of a living shelled mollusc. Just like the shell of a clam, a pearl is composed of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. The ideal pearl is perfectly round and smooth, but many other shapes (baroque pearls) occur. The finest quality natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones and objects of beauty for many centuries. Because of this, pearl has become a metaphor for something rare, fine, admirable and valuable.

The most valuable pearls occur spontaneously in the wild, but are extremely rare. These wild pearls are referred to as natural pearls. Cultured or farmed pearls from pearl oysters and freshwater mussels make up the majority of those currently sold. Imitation pearls are also widely sold in inexpensive jewelry, but the quality of their iridescence is usually very poor and is easily distinguished from that of genuine pearls. Pearls have been harvested and cultivated primarily for use in jewelry, but in the past were also used to adorn clothing. They have also been crushed and used in cosmetics, medicines and paint formulations.

Pearl River (Mississippi–Louisiana)

The Pearl River is a river in the U.S. states of Mississippi and Louisiana. It forms in Neshoba County, Mississippi from the confluence of Nanih Waiya and Tallahaga creeks. and has a meander length of 444 miles (715 km). The lower part of the river forms part of the boundary between Mississippi and Louisiana. The river contains large areas of bottomland hardwood swamp and cypress swamp, providing habitat for many species of wildlife including sturgeon and black bears. There was once hope that Ivory-billed woodpeckers might survive here, but this now seems unlikely. The mouth of the river provides important marsh habitat along salinity gradients; these marshes have been the subject of many scientific studies. It is considered to be one of the most critical areas of natural habitat remaining in Louisiana.

Tributaries and hydrology

The Yockanookany and Strong rivers are tributaries on the upper section and the Bogue Chitto is a tributary on the lower section. The Bogue Chitto's mean low-water discharge is nearly six times the mean low-water discharge of the Pearl River at Jackson, Mississippi, according to a 1936 government report of the Mississippi Planning Commission. Northeast of Jackson, the Ross Barnett Reservoir is formed by a 1962 dam. Average annual rainfall is about 52 inches in the upper third of the basin, and below Jackson the basin rainfall increases to 64 inches or more. The Yockanookany River along with the Lobutcha, Tuscolameta, and Pelahatchie Creeks are major tributaries to the river north of Jackson.

Pearl (literary magazine)

Pearl was an American literary journal published between 1974 and 2014 in Long Beach, California.

History and profile

Pearl was founded by Joan Jobe Smith in 1974. The first issue appeared in May 1974. It was edited by Joan Jobe Smith, Marilyn Johnson, and Barbara Hauk. Pearl was based in Long Beach. It released an annual fiction issue and an annual poetry issue as well as hosting an annual poetry prize.

After several issues published Pearl went defunct until 1986 when Joan Jobe Smith and Marilyn Johnson relaunched it.

The magazine ceased publication in 2014.

Contributors

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External links

Tutor

A tutor is an instructor who gives private lessons. Shadow education is a name for private supplementary tutoring that is offered outside the mainstream education system.

Normally, a tutor will help a student who is struggling in a subject of some sort. Also, a tutor may be provided for a student who wants to learn at home.

In the United States, the term "tutor" is generally associated with one who gives professional instruction (sometimes within a school setting but often independently) in a given topic or field.

British and Irish secondary schools

In English and Irish secondary schools, form tutors are given the responsibilities of a form or class of students in a particular year group (up to 30 students). They usually work in year teams headed by a year leader, year head, or guidance teacher.

Form tutors will provide parents with most of the information about their child's progress and any problems they might be experiencing. Ordinarily, the form tutor is the person who contacts a parent if there is a problem at school; however, the year leader or guidance teacher may contact the parents, since the form tutor has full-time responsibility as a specialist subject teacher.

TUTOR (programming language)

TUTOR (also known as PLATO Author Language) is a programming language developed for use on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around 1965. TUTOR was initially designed by Paul Tenczar for use in computer assisted instruction (CAI) and computer managed instruction (CMI) (in computer programs called "lessons") and has many features for that purpose. For example, TUTOR has powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics, and features to simplify handling student records and statistics by instructors. TUTOR's flexibility, in combination with PLATO's computational power (running on what was considered a supercomputer in 1972), also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons—that is, games—including flight simulators, war games, dungeon style multiplayer role-playing games, card games, word games, and medical lesson games such as Bugs and Drugs (BND).

Origins and development

TUTOR was originally developed as a special purpose authoring language for designing instructional lessons, and its evolution into a general purpose programming language was unplanned. The name TUTOR was first applied to the authoring language of the PLATO system in the later days of Plato III. The first documentation of the language, under this name, appears to have been The TUTOR Manual, CERL Report X-4, by R. A. Avner and P. Tenczar, Jan. 1969.