Hearing

Hearing, auditory perception, or audition is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations, changes in the pressure of the surrounding medium through time, through an organ such as the ear. Sound may be heard through solid, liquid, or gaseous matter. It is one of the traditional five senses; partial or total inability to hear is called hearing loss.

In humans and other vertebrates, hearing is performed primarily by the auditory system: mechanical waves, known as vibrations are detected by the ear and transduced into nerve impulses that are perceived by the brain (primarily in the temporal lobe). Like touch, audition requires sensitivity to the movement of molecules in the world outside the organism. Both hearing and touch are types of mechanosensation.

Hearing mechanism

There are three main components of the human ear: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear.

Outer ear

The outer ear includes the pinna, the visible part of the ear, as well as the ear canal which terminates at the eardrum, also called the tympanic membrane. The pinna serves to focus sound waves through the ear canal toward the eardrum. Because of the asymmetrical character of the outer ear of most mammals, sound is filtered differently on its way into the ear depending on what vertical location it is coming from. This gives these animals the ability to localize sound vertically. The eardrum is an airtight membrane, and when sound waves arrive there, they cause it to vibrate following the waveform of the sound.

Jeff Sessions

Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III (born December 24, 1946) is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. First elected in 1997, Sessions is a member of the Republican Party.

From 1981 to 1993 he served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. President Ronald Reagan nominated him to a judgeship on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama in 1986, but he was not confirmed. Sessions was elected to Attorney General of Alabama in 1994. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996 and easily re-elected in 2002, 2008, and 2014. He and his colleague Richard Shelby are the state's first two-term Republican Senators since Reconstruction.

Sessions was ranked by National Journal in 2007 as the fifth-most conservative U.S. Senator, siding strongly with the Republican Party on political issues. He supported the major legislative efforts of the George W. Bush administration, including the 2001 and 2003 tax cut packages, the Iraq War, and a proposed national amendment to ban same-sex marriage. However, he was one of 25 senators to oppose the establishment of TARP. He has opposed the Democratic leadership since 2007 on most major legislation, including the stimulus bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he opposed both of President Barack Obama's nominees for the Supreme Court.

Judiciary committee

A judiciary committee is a committee of a legislative body that considers issues related to the legal system.

Judiciary committees include:

Attorney general

In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general is the main legal advisor to the government, and in some jurisdictions they may also have executive responsibility for law enforcement, prosecutions or even responsibility for legal affairs generally. In practice, the extent to which the attorney-general personally provides legal advice to the government varies between jurisdictions, and even between individual office-holders within the same jurisdiction, often depending on the level and nature of the office-holder's prior legal experience.

The term was originally used to refer to any person who holds a general power of attorney to represent a principal in all matters. In the common law tradition, anyone who represents the state, especially in criminal prosecutions, is such an attorney. Although a government may designate some official as the permanent attorney general, anyone who comes to represent the state in the same way may, in the past, be referred to as such, even if only for a particular case. Today, however, in most jurisdictions the term is largely reserved as a title of the permanently appointed attorney general of the state, sovereign or other member of the royal family. The term is pluralized attorneys general or attorneys-general.

Sleeping at Last

Sleeping at Last is an alternative rock musical project led by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ryan O'Neal. The project initially began in Wheaton, Illinois as a three-piece band with Ryan O'Neal as the lead singer and guitarist, his brother Chad O'Neal as the drummer, and Dan Perdue as the bassist. The band independently recorded their debut album, Capture in 2000, which they used to attract the attention of Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, who helped them get signed to a major record label Interscope Records. The band released their first and only major label album, Ghosts in 2003, before going independent again and releasing Keep No Score in 2006, and Storyboards in 2009.

In the years following the release of their first four albums, both Chad O'Neal and Purdue would both leave the band to pursue other interests. Ryan O'Neal chose to retain the use of the band's name for his solo work from that point on, but opted to focus on single songs and short EPs than any further traditional albums.