Alliance & Corporation Recruitment Center

Have you ever finished typing up your latest manufacturing spreadsheet, determining which product to start production on next, or surveying planets out in the boonies of losec for PI, sat back, and wondered:

Why am I doing this? Hasn't someone done this before? Isn't all this hard work just reinventing the wheel?

I have. I don't want to reinvent the wheel ever again, and I don't want you to, either.

I'd like you to join us.

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Who are you? How did you get this number?

Protagonist Ventures is an established and highly successful hisec industrial corp. We're very good at what we do: between our start in mid-February and our latest audit in mid-August, we've soared from a net worth of roughly 1B to roughly 45B. We earned this, not by scamming chumps in Jita local, but by providing what people want, where they want it, at prices they can afford, better and more reliably than the competition.

We're bumping into the most fundamental bottleneck of any EVE player, though: time. We'd like to progress from executing our own industry to overseeing a team of like-minded individuals. That's where you come in.

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What's your pitch? What's your alliance going to do? What makes you different from the billion other indy corp ads?

Most indy-friendly ads you'll see on this forum go along the lines of:

"Hi! We're a middling-sized group of people that sometimes do manufacturing/mining/research/whatever. If we get MORE people, we can do MORE of what we already do, and it'll be ever so much fun to chat while we do it. Join us!"

There's nothing wrong with this - EVE needs mining ops - but this sort of vaguely-defined indy-oriented grouping isn't what we're shooting for. A better comparison might be to a real-life research coalition. By joining us, you pledge to regularly contribute research to the alliance as a whole. Not "improving ME and PE" research, but real research - improved spreadsheets, comparing the profitability of various markets, how to lay out a planetary network for optimal PI, that kind of thing. In exchange, you get access to the alliance's collective knowledgebase.

By pooling information this way, we hope to cut down the up-front research and effort that characterizes most industry in EVE. (For a more in-depth discussion of the thinking behind launching this alliance, check out this thread of mine in the old forums.)

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I might be interested. What are you looking for in prospective members?

We're interested in five key characteristics in potential recruits:

1) You're intelligent. EVE industry is a battle of IQs. We intend to win.

2) You're numerically literate. It's called Spreadsheets Online for a reason. You need to be comfortable with spreadsheets, modeling, and math in general.

3) You're active. This doesn't necessarily mean being online all the time, though. There are plenty of ways to contribute without logging in, like tweaking your latest spreadsheet or reading up on the competition.

4) You're ethical. We believe it's more enjoyable - and more rewarding - to profit through making New Eden a better place, not a worse one. We do not, have not, and will not scam.

5) You're primarily focused on industry. Done properly, alliance membership will take up a big chunk of your EVE time. We'd prefer that you not have competing distractions vying for your attention.

Beyond that, I'd only add that our vetting process puts most governmental agencies to shame. As an applicant, you should appreciate the importance of maintaining an extremely high bar for membership, and thus have the patience required to survive us putting you through your paces.

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Okay, I'm in. Who should I contact?

Mail Kethas Protagonist ingame, and/or post here. (Definitely and. We do love free bumps.)

I'm looking forward to talking to you.

The McCollum memo was a memorandum, dated October 7, 1940 (more than a year before the Pearl Harbor attack), sent by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, in his capacity as director of the Office of Naval Intelligence's Far East Asia section. It was sent to Navy Captains Dudley Knox, who agreed with the actions described within the memo, and Walter Stratton Anderson.

The memo outlined the general situation of several nations in World War II and recommended an eight-part course of action for the United States to take in regards to the Japanese Empire in the South Pacific, suggesting the United States provoke Japan into committing an "overt act of war". The memo illustrates several people in the Office of Naval Intelligence promoted the idea of goading Japan into war: "It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado [...] If by [the elucidated eight-point plan] Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better."

Dulce Base is the unofficial name for an alleged secret underground facility under the Archuleta Mesa in Dulce, New Mexico, United States.

The Dulce Base was the subject of an episode of the History Channel program UFO Hunters. In the second episode of the show's third season, the investigators travelled to Dulce to interview residents, witnesses, and fellow investigators, as well as get a closer look at the Archuleta Mesa, under which the base is reportedly hidden. Although there was evidence of cattle mutilation and several witness reports of seeing UFOs in the area, no hard evidence as to the facility's existence was discovered during the investigation.

In a 2011 interview with Jim Harold, Bill Birnes, the creator of UFO Hunters, claimed that shortly after the Dulce Base episode aired, the show was immediately canceled from top level executives at History Channel.

According to Valve, the game Half-Life was based on the Dulce Base lore.

The Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter occurred on July 24, 1948 when two American commercial pilots reported that their Douglas DC-3 had nearly collided with a strange torpedo shaped object flying near them.

It was an important UFO sighting for several reasons:

1) It was perhaps the first that occurred at close distance (allegedly within a few hundred feet).

2) It was reported by two very experienced pilots, Clarence Chiles and John Whitted, both of whom had been decorated for their service as airmen during World War II and were regarded as valuable, respectable employees of their airline, Eastern Airlines.

3) The alleged UFO was independently observed and reported by numerous witnesses, including one passenger on the DC-3, an Air Force grounds-crew chief 150 miles away, and an Air Force pilot.

4) The independent reports of the alleged UFO were strikingly similar, describing a cigar- or torpedo-shaped object, roughly 100 feet in length and three times the diameter of a B-29 bomber, with a completely smooth, finless fuselage and two rows of "windows" along the sides.

5) Observers in The Hague, Netherlands, had reported a similar UFO (rocket-shaped, with two rows of windows along the sides) three days prior. Given the sketchy and incomplete nature of these earlier reports, it's likely they would have been forgotten if not for the Chiles-Whitted encounter, and it's highly unlikely that Chiles and Whitted themselves would have been aware of the alleged UFO's description.

The Estimate of the Situation was a document supposedly written in 1948 by the personnel of United States Air Force's Project Sign - including the project’s director, Captain Robert R. Sneider - which explained their reasons for concluding that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the best explanation for unidentified flying objects. Though Sign investigated earlier UFO reports, the highly-publicized Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter [above] had a great impact in Sign, primarily because the alleged object also closely matched the description of an independent sighting from The Hague a few days earlier.

In late September or early October, 1948, the Estimate was approved by Colonels William Clingerman and Howard McCoy (Sneider's superiors), who then submitted it to the office of General Charles Cabell, the chief of Air Force intelligence. The Pentagon went into an uproar over the Estimate. Cabell was newly-appointed, and found himself in charge of a split house: some were sympathetic and intrigued, if not entirely convinced of the Estimate's accuracy, while others rejected the very idea of interplanetary saucers as impossible.

The Estimate was rejected by Vandenberg primarily due to lack of supporting physical evidence, and was batted back down the chain of command. When Sign personnel refused to abandon the interplanetary hypothesis, many were reassigned, and Sign was renamed Project Grudge in 1949.

In the early 1980s, researcher Kevin D. Randle said he spoke with an unnamed colonel who claimed to have helped write the Estimate when he was a lieutenant. According to the colonel, when Vandenberg was sent a working draft of the report, he allegedly ordered the paragraphs giving physical evidence (metal recovered in New Mexico) removed from the report. After doing so, Vandenberg then rejected the final version as lacking physical evidence. Randle claimed that he realized the significance of this anecdote only a few years later, while investigating the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico crash. According to Randle, the colonel had died by that point, and a follow-up interview was not possible.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, FSB and KGB, who escaped prosecution in Russia and received political asylum in the United Kingdom. He wrote two books, Blowing up Russia: Terror from within and Lubyanka Criminal Group, where he accused the Russian secret services of staging Russian apartment bombings and other terrorism acts to bring Vladimir Putin to power.

On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized. He died three weeks later, becoming the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. Subsequent investigations by British authorities into the circumstances of Litvinenko's death led to serious diplomatic difficulties between the British and Russian governments. Unofficially, British authorities asserted that "we are 100% sure who administered the poison, where and how", but they did not disclose their evidence in the interest of a future trial. The main suspect in the case, a former officer of the Russian Federal Protective Service (FSO), Andrei Lugovoy, remains in Russia. As a member of the Duma, he now enjoys immunity from prosecution. Before he was elected to the Duma, the British government tried to extradite him without success.

A freelance killer would not be able to obtain polonium legally from commercially available products in the amounts used for Litvinenko poisoning, because more than microscopic amounts of polonium can only be produced in state-controlled nuclear reactors. Ninety seven percent of the world's legal polonium-210 production occurs in Russia in RBMK reactors. Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days and decays to the stable daughter isotope of lead, 206Pb. By measuring the proportion of polonium and lead in a sample, one can establish the production date of polonium; in addition, the analysis of impurities in the polonium allows to identify the place of production. It is assumed that British investigators were able to identify the place and time of production of polonium used to poison Litvinenko, but their findings remain unpublished.

Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent ever to defect to Britain, claimed that Litvinenko's assassination was carefully prepared and rehearsed by Russian secret services, but the poisoners were unaware that technology existed to detect traces left by polonium-210: "Did you know that polonium-210 leaves traces? I didn’t. And no one did. ...what they didn’t know was that this equipment, this technology exists in the West – they didn’t know that, and that was where they miscalculated."

On 2 March 2007 Paul Joyal, a former director of security for the U.S. Senate intelligence committee, who the previous weekend alleged on national television that the Kremlin was involved in the poisoning of Litvinenko, was shot near his Maryland home. An FBI spokesman said the agency was "assisting" the police investigation into the shooting.

The Wallace Case was the unsolved murder of a Liverpool housewife, Julia Wallace, on 20 January 1931. Her husband, William Herbert Wallace, was convicted and sentenced to hang, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, the first such instance in British legal history. The chess-like quality of the puzzle has attracted a host of crime writers. Raymond Chandler said ‘The Wallace case is the nonpareil of all murder mysteries ... I call it the impossible murder because Wallace couldn’t have done it, and neither could anyone else. ... The Wallace case is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable.’

Wallace attended a meeting of the Liverpool Chess Club on the evening of Monday 19 January 1931, to play a scheduled chess game. While there he was handed a message, which had been received by telephone about 25 minutes before he arrived. It requested that he call at an address at 25 Menlove Gardens East, Liverpool, at 7.30pm the following evening to discuss insurance with a man who had given his name as "R.M. Qualtrough".

The next night Wallace duly made his way by tramcar to the address in the south of the city at the time requested, only to discover that while there were Menlove Gardens North, South and West, there was no East. Wallace made inquiries in a nearby newsagents and also spoke to a policeman on his beat, but neither were able to help him in his search for the address or the mysterious Qualtrough. He also called at 25 Menlove Gardens West, and asked several other passers-by in the neighbourhood for directions, but to no avail. After searching the district for about 45 minutes he returned home. His next door neighbours, the Johnstons, who were going out for the evening, encountered Wallace in the alley, complaining that he could not gain entry to his home at either the front or the back. While they watched, Wallace tried the back door again, which now opened. Inside he found his wife Julia had been brutally beaten to death in their sitting room.

Forensic examination of the crime scene had revealed that Julia Wallace's attacker was likely to have been heavily contaminated with her blood, given the brutal and frenzied nature of the assault. Wallace's suit, which he had been wearing on the night of the murder, was examined closely but no trace of bloodstaining was found. The Police formed the theory that a mackintosh, which was unexplainedly found under Julia's corpse, had in fact been used by a naked Wallace to shield himself from blood spatter while committing the crime. Examination of the bath and drains revealed that they had not been recently used, and there was no trace of blood there either.

The Great American streetcar scandal (also known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy and the National City Lines conspiracy) refers to allegations and convictions in relation to a program by General Motors (GM) and a number of other companies to purchase and dismantle streetcars (trams/trolleys) and electric trains in many cities across the United States and replace them with bus services; a program which has been blamed by some for the virtual elimination of effective public transport in nearly all American cities by the 1970s. The lack of hard information about what occurred has led to intrigue, uncertainty, inaccuracy and conspiracy theories. The story has been explored many times in print, film and other media, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Taken for a Ride and The End of Suburbia.

During the period from 1936 to 1950, National City Lines and Pacific City Lines were involved in the conversion of over 100 electric surface-traction systems into bus systems in 45 cities including Baltimore, Newark, Los Angeles (mainly the "Yellow Cars"), New York City, Oakland and San Diego. In 1946, Edwin J. Quinby, a retired naval lieutenant commander, alerted transportation officials across the country to what he called "a careful, deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public utilities—your Electric Railway System". GM and other companies were subsequently convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products via a complex network of linked holding companies including National City Lines and Pacific City Lines. They were also indicted, but acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the ownership of these companies.

By the time of the 1973 oil crisis, controversial new testimony was presented to a United States Senate inquiry into the causes of the decline of transit car systems in the US. This alleged that there was a wider conspiracy—by GM in particular—to destroy effective public transport systems in order to increase sales of automobiles and that this was implemented with great effect to the detriment of many cities.

On May 7, 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Operation Allied Force), five US JDAM bombs hit the People's Republic of China embassy in the Belgrade district of New Belgrade, killing three Chinese reporters and outraging the Chinese public. President Bill Clinton later apologized for the bombing, stating it was accidental.

Acting on a tip-off, Jens Holsoe of Danish newspaper Politiken contacted UK paper The Observer with a view to conducting a joint investigation. Holsoe, together with John Sweeney and Ed Vulliamy of The Observer, interviewed numerous sources including a NATO officer "serving in an operational capacity at the four-star level", a staff-officer at two-star level, a "very high-ranking" former US intelligence officer, a NATO flight controller at the Naples HQ for Kosovo air operations, and a US NIMA official.

According to the journalists' investigation the embassy bombing was a deliberate attack, a claim consistent with the pattern of strikes that night where, according to NATO's official briefing of May 8, "the focus was wholly on disrupting the national leadership" of Yugoslavia. Apart from "the FDSP weapons warehouse", every target that night was a command and control center.

The joint investigation reported the embassy had housed a communications center and suspected electronic eavesdropping (SIGINT) facility gathering intelligence on NATO weapons and equipment. NATO had been monitoring Serbian signals coming from Slobodan Milosevic's residence. Those signals went silent for 24 hours when that was bombed. When they re-emerged on April 24 "they came from the embassy compound". An intelligence officer told the investigators "the Chinese embassy had an electronic profile which NATO located and pinpointed".

A scene at the Combined Air Operations Center (COAC) at Vicenza on the morning of May 8 was described: "British, Canadian and French air targeteers rounded on an American colonel on the morning of May 8. Angrily they denounced the '****-up'. The US colonel was relaxed. 'Bullshit,' he replied to the complaints. 'That was great targeting ... we put two JDAMs down into the attache's office and took out the exact room we wanted ... they (the Chinese) won't be using that place for rebro (re-broadcasting radio transmissions) any more.'"

The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the early 15th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. Although many possible authors have been proposed, the author, script, and language remain unknown. It has been described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript".

Generally presumed to be some kind of ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Yet it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a historical cryptology cause célèbre. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels.

In 2009, University of Arizona researchers performed C14 dating on the manuscript's vellum, which they assert (with 95% confidence) was made between 1404 and 1438. In addition, the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago found that much of the ink was added not long afterwards, confirming that the manuscript is an authentic medieval document.

The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. Following are the sections and their conventional names:

1. Herbal: Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section (below). None of the plants depicted are unambiguously identifiable.


2. Astronomical: Contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.


3. Biological: A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.


4. Cosmological: More circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages and contains a map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected by "causeways", castles, and what may be a volcano.


5. Pharmaceutical: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars drawn along the margins; and a few text paragraphs.


6. Recipes: Many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower- or star-like "bullet".