Miley Cyrus

Miley Ray Cyrus (born Destiny Hope Cyrus; November 23, 1992) is an American actress and recording artist. The daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, she held minor roles in the television series Doc and the film Big Fish in her childhood. In 2006, Cyrus rose to prominence as a teen idol after being cast in the Disney Channeltelevision series Hanart. After signinah Montana, in which she portrayed the starring character Miley Stewng a recording contract with Hollywood Records in 2007, Cyrus released her debut studio album Meet Miley Cyrus. It was certified quadruple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for exceeding four million shipments, and produced the hit single "See You Again". In 2008, Cyrus released her second album Breakout, which featured the successful track "7 Things", and launched her film career as the voice actress in the animated film Bolt. In 2009, Cyrus starred in the feature film Hannah Montana: The Movie, whose soundtrack produced the hit single "The Climb".

Cyrus developed a maturing image with her extended play The Time of Our Lives (2009), which featured the successful track "Party in the U.S.A.". The transition continued with her third album Can't Be Tamed (2010); however, it made little commercial impact and became the lowest-selling record of her career. Later that year, Cyrus starred in the coming-of-age film The Last Song. During its production, she was involved in an on-again, off-again relationship with her co-star Liam Hemsworth; the couple ultimately separated after ending their year-long engagement in 2013. Cyrus focused on her acting career with several television and film appearances throughout 2011 and 2012. Cyrus later signed a recording contract with RCA Records, and generated controversy by cultivating a sexually explicit public image while promoting her fourth studio albumBangerz (2013). Its singles "We Can't Stop" and "Wrecking Ball" were promoted with provocative music videos; the latter became her first number-one hit on the U.S.Billboard Hot 100.

Cyrus is recognized as among the most successful artists to originate from The Walt Disney Company. She has five non-consecutive number-one albums on the U.S.Billboard 200, two of which are soundtracks credited to her titular character Hannah Montana, and has earned numerous awards and nominations. In 2010, Cyrus ranked number thirteen on Forbes' Celebrity 100, and was named the "Most Charted Teenager" in the 2011 Guinness World Records with twenty-nine Billboard Hot 100 entries as of November 2009.^[1] In 2013, she was recognized as the "Artist of the Year" by MTV.^[2]

                                Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (/ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He developed thegeneral theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics).^[2][3] While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formulaE = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"),^[4] he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".^[5] The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory.

Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of theelectromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended togravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe.^[6]

He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming an American citizen in 1940.^[7] On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Rooseveltalerting him to the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the U.S. begin similar research. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein supported defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced the idea of using the newly discovered nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.

Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works.^[6][8] His great intellectual achievements and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with genius.^[9]

Minecraft is a sandbox indie game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang. It was publicly released for the PC on May 17, 2009, as a developmental alpha version and, after gradual updates, was published as a full release version on November 18, 2011. A version for Android was released a month earlier on October 7, and an iOS version was released on November 17, 2011. On May 9, 2012, the game was released onXbox 360 as an Xbox Live Arcade game, co-developed by 4J Studios. All versions of Minecraft receive periodic updates.

The creative and building aspects of Minecraft allow players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world. Other activities in the game include exploration, gathering resources, crafting, and combat. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: survival, which requires players to acquire resources and maintain their health and hunger; and creative, where players have an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no health or hunger. A third gameplay mode named hardcore is the same as survival, differing only in difficulty; it is set to the most difficult setting and respawning is disabled, forcing players to delete their worlds upon death.

Minecraft received five awards from the 2011 Game Developers Conference: it was awarded the Innovation Award, Best Downloadable Game Award, and the Best Debut Game Award from the Game Developers Choice Awards; and the Audience Award, as well as the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, from the Independent Games Festival in 2011. In 2012, Minecraft was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the category Best Downloadable Game. As of February 3, 2014, the game has sold over 14 million copies on PC and over 35 million copies across all platforms.

On April 1st, 2014, Mojang changed every player's skin to a villager's and used Element Animation's sound pack in place of the default pack because they claimed villagers had taken over Minecraft. When a player stepped on a block, a villager would say, "Wood!" or "Stone!" and the breaking sound was replaced with "break!"^{[citation needed]}

Facebook is an online social networking service. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to students at some American universities.^[5] Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitzand Chris Hughes.^[6] The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before it opened to high-school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.^[7]

Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and receive automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users,^[8] of which approximately 9% are fake.^[9] Facebook (as of 2012) has about 180 petabytes of data per year and grows by over half a petabyte every 24 hours.^[10]

In May 2005, Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and Jim Breyer^[11] added $1 million of his own money. A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.^[12] Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"^[13]Facebook eventually filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012; it is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.^[14] Facebook Inc. began selling stock to the public and trading on the NASDAQ on May 18, 2012.^[15] Based on its 2012 income of US$5 billion, Facebook joined the Fortune 500 list for the first time on the list published in May 2013, being placed at position 462.^[16]

In 2012, Facebook was valued at $104 billion, and by January 2014 its market capitalization had risen to over $134 billion.^[17][18] At the end of January 2014, 1.23 billion users were active on the website every month, while on December 31, 2013, 945 million of this total were identified by the company as mobile users. The company celebrates its tenth anniversary in the week beginning February 3, 2014.^[19]

On January 2014, during the week previous to the company's tenth anniversary, chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, clarified: "He [Mark] always said Facebook was started not just to be a company, but to fulfill a vision of connecting the world".

                           Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird is a 2013 mobile game, developed by Vietnam-based developer Nguyễn Hà Đông^[3][4] (Dong Nguyen) and published by .GEARS Studios, a small, independent game developer also based in Vietnam.^[5] The game has a side-scrolling format and the player controls a bird, attempting to fly between rows of green pipes without coming into contact with them. The developer created the game over several days, using a bird protagonist which he had designed for a cancelled game in 2012.

The game was released on May 24, 2013 but received a sudden rise in popularity in early 2014. It was criticized for its level of difficulty and alleged plagiarism in graphics and game mechanics, while other reviewers found it addictive. At the end of January 2014, it was the most downloaded free game in the iOS App Store. During this period, its developer claimed that Flappy Bird was earning $50,000 a day from in-app advertisements.

Flappy Bird was removed from both Apple's App Store and Google Play by its creator on February 10, 2014, due to guilt over what he considered to be its addictive nature. The game's popularity and sudden removal caused phones with it pre-installed to be put up for sale for high prices over the Internet.^[6][7][8] Games similar to Flappy Birdbecame popular on the iTunes App Store in the wake of its removal, and both Apple and Google have removed games from their app stores for being too similar to the original. The game has also been distributed through unofficial channels on multiple platforms.

                      Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V is an open world, action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It was released on 17 September 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It is the fifteenth title in the Grand Theft Auto series and the first main entry since Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008. Set within the fictional state of San Andreas, based on Southern California, the game's single-player story follows three criminals and their efforts to execute a number of heists while under pressure from a government agency. The game's use of open world design allows players to freely roam the state's countryside and the city of Los Santos, based on Los Angeles.

The game is played from a third-person perspective and allows players to navigate the world on-foot or by utilising a number of vehicles. Off-mission, players is free to interact with the game world at their leisure, however illegal actions may incite a response from the game's law enforcement agencies. Throughout the game, players simultaneously controls the three lead protagonists, switching between them both during and outside of missions. The story is framed by the heist sequences, and many of the missions make use of shooting and driving gameplay. The game's online multiplayer mode allows up to 16 players to roam the open world, and engage in co-operative and competitive game matches.

Development began shortly following the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. The development team envisioned Grand Theft Auto V as a spiritual successor to many of their previous projects, such as Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3. To innovate on the core structure of its predecessors, the team designed Grand Theft Auto V's gameplay and story around three lead characters instead of one. Creating the game's open world required extensive research; the developers conducted field research around California throughout development, capturing footage to be sent to the design team. Development effort was shared between many of Rockstar's studios around the world and required five years' work.

As one of the last titles to be released for the seventh generation of video game consoles, Grand Theft Auto V was widely anticipated preceding its release. The game was acclaimed by many reviewers upon its release, with praise particularly directed at the multiple protagonist design and open-ended gameplay. A scene depicting protagonistTrevor Philips using torture, and the game's treatment of women, polarised critics. Some labelled the game as inherently violent and misogynistic. A commercial success,Grand Theft Auto V broke industry sales records by earning US$800 million in the first 24 hours of its release and US$1 billion within its first three days, making it the fastest selling entertainment product in history. Grand Theft Auto V has earned several year-end accolades, including Game of the Year awards from several gaming publications.

Steam (software)

Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer, and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses. In October 2012, Valve expanded the service to include non-gaming software. Steam provides the user with installation and automatic management of software across multiple computers, as well as community features such as friends lists and groups, cloud saving, and in-game voice and chat functionality. The software provides a freely available application programming interface (API), Steamworks, that developers can take advantage of to integrate many of Steam's functions within their software products, including copy protection, networking and matchmaking, in-game achievements and micro-transactions, and support for user-created content through Steam Workshop.

Though initially developed for use on Microsoft Windows, the client has expanded to include OS X and Linux versions, a gaming client with limited functionality on thePlayStation 3 console, and apps for chatting and shopping on iOS and Android mobile devices. In addition to being a central hub for gaming software, Valve has created a version of Steam with altered functionality to be used in schools for educational software, including a modified version of Portal 2 for teaching science and critical thinking lessons. Valve has also built SteamOS, a freely-available Linux-based operating system built around the Steam client, designed for its line of Steam Machine microconsoles as well as any personal computer meeting minimum specifications.

As of January 2014, there are over 3000 games available through Steam^[6] and 75 million "active" users.^[7] In February 2014, it was announced that Steam had surpassed 7.5 million concurrent users.^[7] In October 2013, it was estimated that 75% of purchased games downloaded for the PC are through Steam.^[8][9]