Serial (podcast)

Serial is a podcast produced by Sarah Koenig, first released in October 2014 as a spin-off of the radio program This American Life. Using investigative journalism, Koenig narrates a nonfiction story over multiple episodes. Episodes vary in length. New episodes were originally available weekly, but partway through the second season the schedule was revised to every other week. Serial ranked number one on iTunes even before its debut and remained there for several weeks.Serial won a Peabody Award in April 2015 for its innovative telling of a long-form nonfiction story.

The series was co-created and is co-produced by Koenig and Julie Snyder, both producers of This American Life.

Serial has been confirmed for two more seasons. The first episode of season two of Serial was released December 10, 2015, and season three will be released in the spring of 2016.

Series overview

Koenig has said that Serial is "about the basics: love and death and justice and truth. All these big, big things." She also has noted, "this is not an original idea. Maybe in podcast form it is, and trying to do it as a documentary story is really, really hard. But trying to do it as a serial, this is as old as Dickens." Episodes are released on Thursdays.

Serial film

A movie serial, film serial or chapter play, was a short subject originally shown in movie theaters in conjunction with a feature film, and derived from pulp magazine serialized fiction. Also known as "chapter plays," they were extended motion pictures broken into a number of segments or parts.

Each chapter was screened at a movie theater for one week, and ended with a cliffhanger, in which characters found themselves in perilous situations with little apparent chance of escape. Viewers had to return each week to see the cliffhangers resolved and to follow the continuing story. Movie serials were especially popular with children, and for many youths in the first half of the 20th century a typical Saturday at the movies included at least one chapter of a serial, along with animated cartoons, newsreels, and two feature films.

Popularity and decline

Many serials were Westerns, since those were the least expensive to film. Besides Westerns, though, there were films covering many genres, including crime fiction, espionage, comic book or comic strip characters, science fiction, and jungle adventures. Although most serials were filmed economically, some were made at significant expense. The Flash Gordon serial and its sequels, for instance, were major productions in their times.

Serial (1980 film)

Serial is a 1980 comedy film produced by Paramount Pictures. The screenplay, by Rich Eustis and Michael Elias, is drawn from the novel The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County by Cyra McFadden, published in 1977. Produced by Sidney Beckerman and directed by Bill Persky, the film stars Martin Mull, Tuesday Weld, Sally Kellerman, Christopher Lee, Bill Macy, Peter Bonerz and Tom Smothers. The original music score was composed by Lalo Schifrin.

Plot

In trendy Marin County, California during the late 1970s, uptight Harvey Holroyd is losing patience fast.

On one hand, his wife Kate and her friends are thoroughly caught up in the sexual revolution and new age consciousness-raising and psychobabble. On the other hand, his rebellious teenage daughter Joanie is about to join a cult.

Harvey’s best friend Sam, meanwhile, is having marital troubles, and Harvey is trying to land a higher-paying job with his corporate recruiter Luckman.

As marital problems persist, Kate and Harvey separate. Each becomes sexually involved with someone else, albeit rather awkwardly. Harvey tries to avoid the advances of his newly hired secretary, Stella, who lures him to an orgy, but he does begin seeing Marlene, a free-spirited, 19-year-old, strictly vegetarian supermarket cashier. Kate links up with Paco, a bisexual Argentinian aspiring to be an artist, whose profession for now is to trim her dog's hair.

Axis (novel)

Axis is a science fiction novel by author Robert Charles Wilson, published in 2007. It is a direct sequel to Wilson's Hugo Award-winning Spin, published two years earlier. The novel was a finalist for the 2008 John W. Campbell Award.

Plot

Axis takes place on the new planet introduced at the end of Spin, a world the Hypotheticals engineered to support human life and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world — and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when showers of cometary dust seed the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world becomes very alien, as the nature of time is once again twisted by entities unknown.

Cartesian coordinate system

A Cartesian coordinate system is a coordinate system that specifies each point uniquely in a plane by a pair of numerical coordinates, which are the signed distances to the point from two fixed perpendicular directed lines, measured in the same unit of length. Each reference line is called a coordinate axis or just axis of the system, and the point where they meet is its origin, usually at ordered pair (0, 0). The coordinates can also be defined as the positions of the perpendicular projections of the point onto the two axes, expressed as signed distances from the origin.

One can use the same principle to specify the position of any point in three-dimensional space by three Cartesian coordinates, its signed distances to three mutually perpendicular planes (or, equivalently, by its perpendicular projection onto three mutually perpendicular lines). In general, n Cartesian coordinates (an element of real n-space) specify the point in an n-dimensional Euclidean space for any dimension n. These coordinates are equal, up to sign, to distances from the point to n mutually perpendicular hyperplanes.

Axis (technical festival)

AXIS is the annual technical festival of the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur. Traditionally held in the month of September or early October, AXIS has grown to become one of the largest technical festivals in India and the largest in Central India. AXIS organises over 40 events, exhibitions and workshops, encompassing multiple engineering disciplines, with an aim to provide a national platform to attract and nurture talent in the fields of science and technology. AXIS also undertakes various social initiatives which strive to bring about a change in the lives of those less fortunate than themselves. Started in 2004 after merging two traditionally held festivals - the IEEE Expressions and Odyssey, AXIS has come a long way from its modest beginnings and annually attracts over 25,000 school and college students from different parts of the country.

Structure and Organisation

AXIS is an entirely student organised event. At its helm are the 12 core committee members, who overlook all the aspects of the techfest and manage the finances, publicity and logistics, among others. Each event has its own (third year) event managers and (second year) organisers, who interact directly with the core team. AXIS also has the assistance of professors-in-charge, who are the professors in VNIT. The strong and well-established VNIT Alumni also assist the coordinators in varied aspects of different events.