Nebiolo Printech

Nebiolo Printech S.p.A. is a manufacturer of printing presses and paper and formerly a type foundry. Nebiolo & Co. was created when Giovanni Nebiolo bought out the type foundry of G. Narizzano in Turin, Italy, in 1852. In 1908 the company merged with the Urania Company and operated under the name Augustea and began to buy out many smaller foundries. In 1916 it was again renamed Società Nebiolo. Fiat bought the press manufacturing business in 1978, turning the type business over to Italiana Caratteri. In 1992 it became Nebiolo Printech S.p.A. and continues to manufacture presses under that name today.

Type Foundry

Nebiolo created a large library of typefaces, which remain popular today, although the company never entered photocomposition. It also built a type caster that competed with the Ludlow Typograph. Nebiolo types were distributed in the United States by Continental Type Founders Association. The designer Aldo Novarese became art director in 1952. The matrices for Nebiolo types are still being used by Schriften-Service D. Stempel GmbH.

Neon (Chris Young song)

"Neon" is a song recorded by American country music artist Chris Young. It was released in March 2012 as the third single and title track from his album Neon (2011). The song was written by Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne and Trevor Rosen. "Neon" received positive reviews from critics who praised the production, lyrics and Young's vocal performance. It stopped Young's five consecutive number-one hit run on the US Hot Country Songs chart, peaking at number 23. It also peaked at number 92 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Critical reception

Billy Dukes of Taste of Country gave the song four stars out of five, writing that Young "plays with notes high and low like a cat plays with a ball of yarn, sort of batting them back and forth, always in control." Tara Seetharam of Country Universe gave the song an A- grade, saying that Young's voice "sinks into the groove of the song so effortlessly you’d think he was singing in his sleep, skating around the melody with an appropriate blend of conviction and restraint." Jonathan Keefe of Slant Magazine, reviewing the album, called it a strong track that uses "creative imagery to explain the seductive draw of a bar."

Neon (magazine)

Neon was a British film magazine published monthly by Emap Consumer Media from December 1996 to February 1999. It attempted to be a refreshing alternative to other UK film magazines such as Empire.

History and profile

Started in 1996, Neon included latest film news, previews, actor profiles, interviews and contemporary movie profiles all written with a characteristic sense of humor. Each issue featured A Monthly Selection of Ten Favourite Things with a celebrity listing a particular category for their ten favorite films, for example, James Ellroy in the July 1998 issue picked his ten favorite crime movies.

What's your favourite Chevy Chase movie? featured the magazine asking various celebrities from the Beastie Boys to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee their favorite Chase film.

100 Scenes From... was an irreverent Top 100 list that parodied the notion of such lists.

Blow Up was a 12-page insert included in the middle of every issue that featured stills, promotional pictures of posters of movies and movie stars.

Pitch contour

In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the sound over time.

Pitch contour may include multiple sounds utilizing many pitches, and can relate to frequency function at one point in time to the frequency function at a later point.

It is fundamental to the linguistic concept of tone, where the pitch or change in pitch of a speech unit over time affects the semantic meaning of a sound. It also indicates intonation in pitch accent languages.

One of the primary challenges in speech synthesis technology, particularly for Western languages, is to create a natural-sounding pitch contour for the utterance as a whole. Unnatural pitch contours result in synthesis that sounds "lifeless" or "emotionless" to human listeners, a feature that has become a stereotype of speech synthesis in popular culture.

In music, the pitch contour focuses on the relative change in pitch over time of a primary sequence of played notes. The same contour can be transposed without losing its essential relative qualities, such as sudden changes in pitch or a pitch that rises or falls over time.

Contour (linguistics)

In phonetics, contour describes speech sounds which behave as single segments, but which make an internal transition from one quality, place, or manner to another. These sounds may be tones, vowels, or consonants.

Many tone languages have contour tones, which move from one level to another. For example, Mandarin Chinese has four lexical tones. The high tone is level, without contour; the falling tone is a contour from high pitch to low; the rising tone a contour from mid pitch to high, and, when spoken in isolation, the low tone takes on a dipping contour, mid to low and then to high pitch. These are transcribed with series of either diacritics or tone letters, which with proper font support fuse into an iconic shape: [ma˨˩˦].

In the case of vowels, the word diphthong is used instead of 'contour'. These are vowels that glide from one place of articulation to another, as in English boy and bow. These are officially transcribed with a non-syllabic sign under one of the vowel letters: [bɔɪ̯], [baʊ̯], though when there is no chance of confusion, the diacritic is often left off for simplicity.

CONTOUR

The COmet Nucleus TOUR (CONTOUR) was a NASA Discovery-class space probe that failed shortly after its July 2002 launch. It had as its primary objective close flybys of two comet nuclei with the possibility of a flyby of a third known comet or an as-yet-undiscovered comet.

The two comets scheduled to be visited were Encke and Schwassmann-Wachmann-3, and the third target was d'Arrest. It was hoped that a new comet would have been discovered in the inner Solar System between 2006 and 2008, in which case the spacecraft trajectory would have been changed if possible to rendezvous with the new comet. Scientific objectives included imaging the nuclei at resolutions of up to 4 meters (13 ft), performing spectral mapping of the nuclei at resolutions of up to 100 meters (330 ft), and obtaining detailed compositional data on gas and dust in the near-nucleus environment, with the goal of improving knowledge of the characteristics of comet nuclei.

After the solid rocket motor intended to inject the spacecraft into solar orbit was ignited on August 15, 2002, contact with the probe could not be re-established. Ground-based telescopes later found three objects along the course of the satellite, leading to the speculation that it had disintegrated. Attempts to contact the probe were ended on December 20, 2002. The probe thus accomplished none of its primary scientific objectives, but did prove some spaceflight technologies, such as the APL-developed non-coherent spacecraft navigation technique, which was later used on the New Horizons spacecraft.