Blu

Blu or BLU may refer to:

Blu (Monica's Gang)

Blu (Bidu) is a character in the Brazilian comic strip Monica's Gang, created in 1959. He was the first character created by Maurício de Sousa, along with his owner Franklin (Franjinha). The character appears in the logo and is the mascot of Mauricio de Sousa Produções, the company founded by Sousa to release his works.

Blu is the only character who appears in two different kinds of stories. In one, he is a normal dog, owned by Franklin, who fears taking baths (but is invariably forced to take them by Franklin), does anything in exchange for a bone, and plays around with the other dogs from the neighborhood. In the other type of stories, he is a director-actor of his own stories, is highly personified (walking with two feet behind the sets, and walking like a normal dog when acting), and is famous for the strips in which he talks to objects, especially the rock called Mrs. Stone.

History

Mauricio says he based both Blu and Franklin on himself and Cuíca, the dog he had when he was a child. His first appearance was in 1959 in the comic strip "Bidu e Franjinha" published in the newspaper Folha da Manhã. His first stories had as protagonist the kid Franklin (the Blu's owner) and his friends Bucky, Jeremiah, Manezinho and Hummer. In 1960 through a partnership with the publisher Editora Outubro, Mauricio de Sousa collaborated making stories of his characters to children's magazine Zás Trás, while in the same year he created an own magazine for Blu and Franklin, titled Bidu by the publisher Editora Continental. But his comic was canceled in the same year with only 8 issues.

Blu (rapper)

Johnson Barnes (born April 15, 1983), better known by his stage name Blu, is an American West Coast rapper and producer from Los Angeles, California. Following the success of his 2007 debut album, Below the Heavens, Blu was named HipHopDX's "Rookie of the Year". Since then, Blu has released six full-length albums. In September 2011, he released the album Open, his 4th solo project. His fifth solo studio album Good to Be Home was released on May 20, 2014 by Nature Sounds.

Early life

Johnson Barnes was born on April 15, 1983 in San Pedro, California. Raised by his mother and stepfather who was a pastor, Barnes was highly influenced by gospel and Christian rap when he was growing up. However, Barnes' was also influenced by gangsta rap that he received from his father, contributing to his delivery of conscious yet raw lyrics. In his early days in the music business, Johnson worked as a hype man for underground rap and soul artists such as Slum Village, Steve Spacek, Platinum Pied Pipers, and Emanon. However, taking influence from Common, Barnes began turning from freestyle rhyming to crafting songs. In an interview with HipHopDx, Barnes talks about what it was like to listen to Common's 1994 song "I Used to Love H.E.R.": "When I heard it, it really changed my life. I felt like I had heard Hip Hop for the first time. It made me change my content and my whole approach. It made me serious about writing and wanting to say something." Blu is also close friends with singer Miguel, who also lived in San Pedro.

Operation Sigma Sigma

The Sigma is an experimental glider developed in Britain from 1966 by a team led by Nicholas Goodhart. After disappointing performance during flight testing the Sigma was passed on to a Canadian group which carried out modifications, making the Sigma more competitive.

Design and development

Designed to compete in the 1970 World Championships, the team aimed to develop a wing that would climb well through a high lift coefficient and a large wing area, but equally had the "maximum possible reduction of area for cruise at low lift coefficients". At the same time for the minimum possible drag they aimed for "extensive" laminar flow. To achieve this they employed flaps that would alter both wing area and wing camber. Based on analysis of the nature of thermals encountered in cross-country flying, they reasoned that by having a slow turning circle, their sailplane could stay close to the central (and strongest) part of the thermal and gain maximum benefit.

Its unusual feature is its ability to vary its wing area using Fowler flaps. It had been tried before by the Hannover Akaflieg in 1938 with their AFH-4, the South African Beatty-Johl BJ-2 Assegai and the SZD Zefir gliders.

Sigma baryon

The Sigma baryons are a family of subatomic hadron particles which have a +2, +1 or −1 elementary charge or are neutral. They are baryons containing three quarks: two up and/or down quarks, and one third quark, which can be either a strange (symbols Σ+, Σ0, Σ−), a charm (symbols Σ++
c, Σ+
c, Σ0
c), a bottom (symbols Σ+
b, Σ0
b, Σ−
b) or a top (symbols Σ++
t, Σ+
t, Σ0
t) quark. However, the top Sigmas are not expected to be observed as the Standard Model predicts the mean lifetime of top quarks to be roughly 6975500000000000000♠5×10⁻²⁵ s. This is about 20 times shorter than the timescale for strong interactions, and therefore it does not form hadrons.

List

The symbols encountered in these lists are: I (isospin), J (total angular momentum), P (parity), u (up quark), d (down quark), s (strange quark), c (charm quark), t (top quark), b (bottom quark), Q (charge), B (baryon number), S (strangeness), C (charmness), B′ (bottomness), T (topness), as well as other subatomic particles (hover for name).

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1986.Jack Welch made it central to his business strategy at General Electric in 1995. Today, it is used in many industrial sectors.

Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly empirical, statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization, who are experts in these methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has specific value targets, for example: reduce process cycle time, reduce pollution, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and increase profits.

The term Six Sigma originated from terminology associated with statistical modeling of manufacturing processes. The maturity of a manufacturing process can be described by a sigma rating indicating its yield or the percentage of defect-free products it creates. A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of all opportunities to produce some feature of a part are statistically expected to be free of defects (3.4 defective features per million opportunities). Motorola set a goal of "six sigma" for all of its manufacturing operations, and this goal became a by-word for the management and engineering practices used to achieve it.

Blk71

Block 71, commonly known as "Blk71", is a factory building located in Singapore's Ayer Rajah Industrial Estate located at 71 Ayer Rajah Crescent or one-north. The Economist referred to Blk71 as the heart of Singapore's technology start-up ecosystem and the world's most tightly packed entrepreneurial ecosystem. Blk71 has built up a strong innovation and entrepreneurship community, where entrepreneurs, investors, developers and mentors within the interactive digital media space are within close proximity to each other. Blk71 is home to more than 100 start-ups, venture capital firms and tech incubators. It is also located near other technology hubs within Singapore, including the Fusionopolis, Biopolis and National University of Singapore (NUS).

History

The Ayer Rajah Industrial Estate was built in the 1970s by the Jurong Town Corporation, as a series of flatted factories for manufacturing-based activities. A few blocks within this industrial estate, including Blk71, were initially planned for demolition. However, in 2011, NUS Enterprise, the Media Development Authority and SingTel Innov8 collaborated to turn Blk71 into a start-up hub, by setting up a strategic incubation programme at Blk71, known as Plug-In@Blk71. The intention was to pull together the interactive digital media/ info-communications start-up cluster, which was previously dispersed around Singapore, to one common location, for increased synergy and economies of scale. With this development, Blk71 rapidly transformed from an old, deserted industrial estate into a thriving start-up hub.