Watts (producer)

Austin Garrick, better known as Watts, is a Canadian record producer from Toronto, Ontario. He has produced for artists such as Ghostface Killah, Redman, Method Man, and Joe Budden.

Early life and career

Watts grew up in the Oakwood-Vaughan neighbourhood of Toronto. He was born to a Vincentian, musician father and a Polish-born mother (of Greek and Russian descent) who is a doctor. His father, who was a drummer in the reggae band Messenjah, taught him how to play drums when he was two years old, and professionally by the age of five. Nicknamed "Stixs", he opened for the reggae band Third World at a concert when he was seven years old. He also performed in front of a crowd of over 50,000 at the Rogers Centre alongside Nelson Mandela, at the age of 12. After his parents got divorced, he decided to become a producer, and he started making beats.

When Watts became serious about a career as a record producer, he made several trips to New York City. He dropped out of high school in Grade 11 after a meeting with producer/DJ Kevin "K-Cut" McKenzie (of the legendary group Main Source). In New York, K-Cut took Watts under his wing and taught him about making great records, and the music business in the U.S. He currently works with Rashad "Ringo" Smith under the Tumblin' Dice Productions label.

Audio power

Audio power is the electrical power transferred from an audio amplifier to a loudspeaker, measured in watts. The electrical power delivered to the loudspeaker, together with its sensitivity, determines the sound power level generated (with the rest being converted to heat).

Amplifiers are limited in the electrical energy they can amplify, while loudspeakers are limited in the electrical energy they can convert to sound energy without distorting the audio signal or being damaged. These power ratings are important to consumers finding compatible products and comparing competitors.

Power handling

In audio electronics, there are several methods of measuring power output (for such things as amplifiers) and power handling capacity (for such things as loudspeakers). The question has engineering, regulatory (consumer protection and advertising), and psychoacoustical aspects and is, in a serious sense, much more complex than may be imagined.

Amplifiers are valued in part by their power output capacity. And in the interest of being able to advertise a higher power output number, manufacturers in the US (and elsewhere) began to take advantage of the highly variable nature of most audio signals (especially musical sources) and to cite the peak output (quite brief and rarely sustainable for long) as the amplifier power. There being no standards, imaginative approaches came to be so common that the US Federal Trade Commission intervened in the market and required all amplifier manufacturers to use an engineering based measure (root-mean square) in addition to any other value they might cite.

Watts (surname)

Watts is a surname, and may refer to:

Arts and entertainment

Music

Vikings

Vikings (Norwegian and Danish: Vikinger; Swedish and Nynorsk: Vikingar; Icelandic: Víkingar), from Old Norse víkingr, were Germanic Norse seafarers, speaking the Old Norse language, who raided and traded from their Scandinavian homelands across wide areas of northern and central Europe, as well as European Russia, during the late 8th to late 11th centuries. The term is also commonly extended in modern English and other vernaculars to the inhabitants of Viking home communities during what has become known as the Viking Age. This period of Norse military, mercantile and demographic expansion constitutes an important element in the early medieval history of Scandinavia, the British Isles, Ireland, France, Kievan Rus' and Sicily.

Facilitated by advanced seafaring skills, and characterised by the longship, Viking activities at times also extended into the Mediterranean littoral, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Following extended phases of (primarily sea- or river-borne) exploration, expansion and settlement, Viking (Norse) communities and polities were established in diverse areas of north-western Europe, European Russia, the North Atlantic islands and as far as the north-eastern coast of North America. This period of expansion witnessed the wider dissemination of Norse culture, while simultaneously introducing strong foreign cultural influences into Scandinavia itself, with profound developmental implications in both directions.

Vikings (season 4)

The fourth season of the Canadian-Irish historical drama television series Vikings is set to premiere on February 18, 2016 on History in Canada and in the United States. The season will consist of a double order of 20 episodes, which are to be split into two parts of 10 episodes, with the second half set to air later in 2016.

Filmed in Ireland, Vikings is inspired by the tales about the Viking Ragnar Lothbrok, one of the best-known mythological Norse heroes and notorious as the scourge of France and England. It portrays Ragnar as a Viking farmer who pioneers the first daring raids into England with the support of fellow warriors, his brother Rollo, and his ex-wife, the shieldmaiden Lagertha.

Series overview

The series is inspired by the tales of the raiding, trading, and exploring Norsemen of early medieval Scandinavia. It follows the exploits of the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok and his crew and family, as notably laid down in the 13th-century sagas Ragnars saga Loðbrókar and Ragnarssona þáttr, as well as in Saxo Grammaticus' 12th-century work Gesta Danorum. Norse legendary sagas were partially fictional tales based in Norse oral tradition, written down about 200 to 400 years after the events they describe. Further inspiration is taken from historical sources of the period, such as records of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne depicted in the second episode, or Ahmad ibn Fadlan's 10th-century account of the Volga Vikings. The series is set at the beginning of the Viking Age, marked by the Lindisfarne raid in 793.

Vikings (TV documentary series)

Vikings is a 2012 BBC television documentary series written and presented by Neil Oliver charting the rise of the Vikings from prehistoric times to the empire of Canute.

Episodes

Media

A 304-page book authored by Oliver and titled Vikings: A History was published by W&N on 4 October 2012. In addition, a 177-minute PAL region 2 DVD version of the series was released by the BBC on 12 November 2012

References

External links

Raptor (robot)

Raptor is a bipedal robot which was designed and conceived in 2014 by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). It has a top speed of 28.58 miles per hour, making it the second fastest robot after the Cheeath, and the fastest bipedal robot worldwide. Designers at the KAIST took their inspiration from the Velociraptor, a bipedal dinosaur which balances itself with its tail. The robot moves itself with a pair of carbon / epoxy composite blade legs .

Bibliography