#1201
Leni Riefenstahl
1902 - 2003 (101 years)
Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was a German director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer and actress known for producing Nazi propaganda. A talented swimmer and an artist, Riefenstahl became interested in dancing during her childhood, taking lessons and performing across Europe. After seeing a promotional poster for the 1924 film Mountain of Destiny, she was inspired to move into acting and between 1925 and 1929 starred in five successful motion pictures. Riefenstahl became one of the few women in Germany to direct a film during the Weimar era when, in 1932, she decided to try dir...
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Chris Hayes
1979 - Present (45 years)
Christopher Loffredo Hayes is an American political commentator, television news anchor, activist, and author. Hayes hosts All In with Chris Hayes, a weekday news and opinion television show on MSNBC. Hayes also hosts a weekly MSNBC podcast, Why Is This Happening? Hayes formerly hosted a weekend MSNBC show, Up with Chris Hayes. He is an editor-at-large of The Nation magazine.
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Christiane Fellbaum
1950 - Present (74 years)
Christiane D. Fellbaum is an American linguist and computational linguistics researcher who is Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Program in Linguistics and the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. The co-developer of the WordNet project, she is also its current director.
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James Blades
1901 - 1999 (98 years)
James Blades OBE was an English percussionist. He was one of the most distinguished percussionists in Western music, with a long and varied career. His book Percussion Instruments and their History is a standard reference work on the subject.
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Myrna Gopnik
1935 - Present (89 years)
Myrna Lee Gopnik is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor emerita of linguistics at McGill University. She is known for her research on the KE family, an English family with several members affected by specific language impairment.
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Tony Richardson
1928 - 1991 (63 years)
Cecil Antonio Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer whose career spanned five decades. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film Tom Jones. Early life Richardson was born in Shipley, West Riding of Yorkshire in 1928 to Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist, and his wife, Elsie Evans . He was Head Boy at Ashville College, Harrogate and attended Wadham College, University of Oxford. His Oxford contemporaries included Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher, Kenneth Tynan, Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. He had the unprecedented distinction of bein...
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Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
1963 - Present (61 years)
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an American journalist whose works focus on the marginalized members of society: adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, women in prison, etc. She is best known for her 2003 non-fiction book Random Family. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship—popularly known as the "Genius Grant"—in 2006.
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James Ivory
1928 - Present (96 years)
James Francis Ivory is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. For many years, he worked extensively with Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, his domestic as well as professional partner, and with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. All three were principals in Merchant Ivory Productions, whose films have won seven Academy Awards; Ivory himself has been nominated for four Oscars, winning one.
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André Previn
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
André George Previn was a German-American pianist, composer, and conductor. His career had three major genres: Hollywood films, jazz, and classical music. In each he achieved success, and the latter two were part of his life until the end. In movies, he arranged and composed music. In jazz, he was a celebrated trio pianist, a piano-accompanist to singers of standards, and pianist-interpreter of songs from the "Great American Songbook". In classical music, he also performed as a pianist but gained television fame as a conductor, and during his last thirty years created his legacy as a compose...
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Barry Gibb
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sir Barry Alan Crompton Gibb is a British musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He rose to worldwide fame as a member of the Bee Gees, with his younger brothers, Robin and Maurice Gibb, one of the most commercially successful groups in the history of popular music.
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Laurence R. Horn
1945 - Present (79 years)
Laurence Robert Horn is an American linguist. He is professor emeritus of linguistics in the department of linguistics at Yale University with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. He received his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA and formerly served as director of undergraduate studies, director of graduate studies, and chair of Yale's department of linguistics. In 2021, he served as president of the Linguistic Society of America.
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Joan Bresnan
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects of the theoretical framework of lexical functional grammar.
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Olivier Assayas
1955 - Present (69 years)
Olivier Assayas is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. Assayas is known for his eclectic filmography, consisting of slow-burning period pieces, psychological thrillers, neo-noirs, and comedies. He has directed French, Spanish, and English-language films with international casts. The son of filmmaker Jacques Rémy, Assayas began his career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. There he wrote about world cinema and its film auteurs, who later influenced his work. Assayas made several short films, and made his feature debut with Disorder in 1986.
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Donna Jo Napoli
1948 - Present (76 years)
Donna Jo Napoli is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist. She currently is a professor at Swarthmore College teaching Linguistics in all different forms .She has also taught linguistics at Smith College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Pennsylvania,
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György Ligeti
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
György Sándor Ligeti was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" and "one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time".
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Robbins Burling
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Robbins Burling was an American professor of anthropology and sociolinguistics. Early life and career Burling was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Dr. F. Temple and Katherine White Burling, and was the eldest of three siblings. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1950 and his Ph.D in Anthropology from Harvard University in 1958. His teaching career began as a teaching fellow in Anthropology at Harvard University in the fall of 1953, the spring of 1954 and the spring of 1957.
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Brian Higgins
1966 - Present (58 years)
Brian Thomas Higgins is a British record producer and songwriter, who has written and produced albums and tracks for several successful pop music singers and groups, including Girls Aloud, S Club 7, Sugababes, and the Saturdays through his Xenomania production team. Miranda Cooper is a key collaborator who shares co-writing credits in nearly all Xenomania-written tracks.
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Lann Hornscheidt
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lann Hornscheidt is a German academic active in the fields of gender studies and linguistics. Hornscheidt is non-binary. Academic career Lann Hornscheidt obtained a PhD degree at the University of Kiel. From 2007 to 2016, Hornscheidt was professor for Gender Studies and Language Analysis at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Hornscheidt has had visiting professorships and periods of research at the universities of Örebro, Lund, Turku, Uppsala, Graz, Innsbruck and Södertörn . Hornscheidt received the habilitation in Scandinavian Linguistics at...
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Boris Uspenskij
1937 - Present (87 years)
Boris Andreevich Uspenskij is a Russian linguist, philologist, semiotician, historian of culture. Biography Uspenskij graduated from Moscow University in 1960. He delivered lectures in Moscow until 1982, but later moved on to work in Harvard University, Cornell University, Vienna University, and the University of Graz. Full professor of Russian literature at the Naples Eastern University, he was elected to many scholarly societies and academies of Europe.
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Christopher Priest
1943 - Present (81 years)
Christopher Priest is a British novelist and science fiction writer. His works include Fugue for a Darkening Island, The Inverted World, The Affirmation, The Glamour, The Prestige, and The Separation.
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Bernard Sumner
1956 - Present (68 years)
Bernard Sumner is an English musician and record producer. He is a founding member of the bands Joy Division, New Order, Electronic and Bad Lieutenant. Sumner was an early force in several areas, including the post-punk, synthpop, and techno music scenes, as well as their various related genres, and was an early influence on the Manchester music scene that presaged the "Madchester" movement of the late 1980s centred on Factory Records and The Haçienda club in Manchester.
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Mia Michaels
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mia Michaels Melchiona is an American choreographer and judge on the television show So You Think You Can Dance. She has worked with Tom Cruise, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Madonna, Ricky Martin, Prince, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In 2005 she choreographed Cirque du Soleil's world tour Delirium and Celine Dion's A New Day..., for which she received an Emmy Award nomination. In 2007 she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Choreography for her routine on "Calling You" during season two of So You Think You Can Dance. She won another Emmy Award during season five in 2010. She was a judge during season 7 with Adam Shankman and Nigel Lythgoe.
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Luca Serianni
1947 - 2022 (75 years)
Luca Serianni was an Italian linguist and philologist. Biography Serianni was professor of Italian language at Sapienza Università di Roma. A student of Arrigo Castellani’s, he conducted research about Italian linguistic history from the Middle Ages to the present day.
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Janet Pierrehumbert
1954 - Present (70 years)
Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar of intonation patterns and an explicit algorithm for calculating pitch contours in speech, as well as an account of intonational meaning. It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning. Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the Universit...
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Mark Baker
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mark Cleland Baker is an American linguist. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1985 and has taught at Rutgers University since 1998. Baker frequently was a faculty member at the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute and, prior to coming to Rutgers, was a faculty member at McGill University . He worked with the Mohawk language for several years, also serving as a consultant on language revitalization for the Mohawk. Working within generative grammar, he has written several books about the formal analysis of polysynthetic languages.
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Greg Costikyan
1959 - Present (65 years)
Greg Costikyan , sometimes known under the pseudonym "Designer X", is an American game designer and science fiction writer. Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including: hex-based wargames, role-playing games, boardgames, card games, computer games, online games, and mobile games. Several of his games have won Origins Awards. He co-founded Manifesto Games, now out of business, with Johnny Wilson in 2005.
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Fred Zinnemann
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Alfred Zinnemann was an American film director born in Austria-Hungary. He won four Academy Awards for directing and producing films in various genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir and play adaptations. He began his career in Europe before emigrating to the US, where he specialized in shorts before making 25 feature films during his 50-year career.
Go to ProfileClemencia Rodriguez is a Colombian US-based media and communication scholar recognized for her role in establishing and promoting the field of alternative media studies in English language media studies, notably through her work on 'citizens' media,' a term she coined in her 2001 book Fissures in the Mediascape and through co-founding and facilitating OURMedia/NUESTROSMedios, a global network of researchers and practitioners of alternative media, community media and citizens' media, currently the biggest network of its kind with over 500 members in over 40 countries.
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Shuntaro Torigoe
1940 - Present (84 years)
Shuntaro Torigoe is a Japanese journalist and political activist. Journalism career Torigoe was born in present-day Ukiha, Fukuoka and graduated from Kyoto University. He began his reporting career with the Mainichi Shimbun in 1965. He served at one point as the Mainichi correspondent in Tehran, and traveled to the front lines of the Iran–Iraq War in 1984, becoming the only Japanese journalist to do so. He left Mainichi in 1989 and thereafter was known for his role as a commentator on TV Asahi news programs. He was named editor-in-chief of OhMyNews Japan in 2006.
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Patrice Leconte
1947 - Present (77 years)
Patrice Leconte is a French film director, actor, comic strip writer, and screenwriter. Life and career Leconte grew up in Tours, and began making little amateur films at 15. He went to Paris in 1967 and studied at Institut des hautes études cinématographiques. While attending film school in the late 1960s, Leconte also worked as a cartoonist, in particular for the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote. He directed his first feature film in 1976, and had a number of major successes with comedy films that were barely distributed outside France. He first came to international attention in 198...
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Chris Blackwell
1937 - Present (87 years)
Christopher Percy Gordon Blackwell OJ is a Jamaican-British former record producer and the founder of Island Records, which has been called "one of Britain's great independent labels". According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to which Blackwell was inducted in 2001, he is "the single person most responsible for turning the world on to reggae music." Variety describes him as "indisputably one of the greatest record executives in history".
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Guy Deutscher
1969 - Present (55 years)
Guy Deutscher is an Israeli linguist. Career Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester and was a professor in the department of languages and cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics at University of Cambridge, before going on to earn a Ph.D. in linguistics there. After that he undertook research in historical linguistics at St John's College, Cambridge.
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Harry Lindgren
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Harry Lindgren was a British-Australian engineer, linguist and amateur mathematician. Early life Lindgren was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. In 1935 he emigrated to join his family in Perth, Australia. He received a BSc degree from the University of Western Australia and later became a Commonwealth Patent Officer. He married Eve Spokone, whom he had met at university, on 30 May 1941, the couple went on to have one daughter. Lindgren played violin in the Canberra Symphony Orchestra for a number of years.
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Ornette Coleman
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was an American jazz saxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, and composer. He was best known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His pioneering works often abandoned the harmony-based composition, tonality, chord changes, and fixed rhythm found in earlier jazz idioms. Instead, Coleman emphasized an experimental approach to improvisation, rooted in ensemble playing and blues phrasing. AllMusic called him "one of the most beloved and polarizing figures in jazz history," noting that wh...
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Fats Domino
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Antoine Dominique Domino Jr. , known as Fats Domino, was an American pianist, singer and songwriter. One of the pioneers of rock and roll music, Domino sold more than 65 million records. Born in New Orleans to a French Creole family, Domino signed to Imperial Records in 1949. His first single "The Fat Man" is cited by some historians as the first rock and roll single and the first to sell more than 1 million copies. Domino continued to work with the song's co-writer Dave Bartholomew, contributing his distinctive rolling piano style to Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and scoring a string of mainstream hits beginning with "Ain't That a Shame" .
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Vytautas Mažiulis
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Vytautas Juozapas Mažiulis was a highly distinguished Lithuanian Balticist, an expert on the Old Prussian language and Indo-European languages. Biography He studied classical philology at the Vilnius University in 1947–1952, receiving his Ph.D. in 1956 at the Lomonosov Moscow State University with his thesis on Lithuanian numerals. In 1955 he started working at the Vilnius University, holding a Chair of Lithuanian Language in 1968–1973.
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Igor Mel'čuk
1932 - Present (92 years)
Igor Aleksandrovič Mel'čuk, sometimes Melchuk is a Soviet and Canadian linguist, a retired professor at the Department of Linguistics and Translation, Université de Montréal. Biography He graduated from the Moscow State University's Philological department and worked from 1956 till 1976 for the Institute of Linguistics in Moscow. He is known as one of the developers of Meaning–text theory with the seminal book published in 1974. He is also the author of Cours de morphologie générale in 5 volumes.
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Richard Dixon
1956 - Present (68 years)
Richard Dixon is an English translator of Italian literature. He translated the last works of Umberto Eco, including his novels The Prague Cemetery, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012, and Numero Zero, commended by the judges of the John Florio Prize, 2016. He has also translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Roberto Calasso and Antonio Moresco.
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Luigi Colani
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Luigi Colani was a German industrial designer. His long career began in the 1950s when he designed cars for companies including Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Volkswagen, and BMW. In 1957, he dropped his first name Lutz using the name Luigi. In the 1960s, he began designing furniture, and as of the 1970s, he expanded in numerous areas, ranging from household items such as ballpoint pens and television sets to uniforms and trucks and entire kitchens. A striking grand piano created by Colani, the Pegasus, is manufactured and sold by the Schimmel piano company.
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Georges Lautner
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Georges Lautner was a French film director and screenwriter, known primarily for his comedies created in collaboration with screenwriter Michel Audiard. Lautner's ventures into other genres were less successful though the thriller Le Professionnel starring Jean-Paul Belmondo was a big commercial hit in France in 1981.
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John Frankenheimer
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
John Michael Frankenheimer was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films. Among his credits were Birdman of Alcatraz , The Manchurian Candidate , Seven Days in May , The Train , Seconds , Grand Prix , French Connection II , Black Sunday , The Island of Dr. Moreau , and Ronin .
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Bernard Holland
1933 - Present (91 years)
Bernard Holland is an American music critic. He served on the staff of The New York Times from 1981 until 2008 and held the post of chief music critic from 1995, contributing 4,575 articles to the newspaper. He then became the National Music Critic, reviewing concerts, festivals and hall openings worldwide.
Go to ProfileRoberta Baskin is an American journalist and nonprofit director. She co-founded and served as Executive Director of the AIM2Flourish global learning initiative, hosted at Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
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Martha Ratliff
1946 - Present (78 years)
Martha Ratliff is an American linguist and Professor Emerita at Wayne State University. She is a leading specialist in Hmong–Mien languages and also notable for her reconstruction of Proto-Hmong–Mien.
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Gennaro Chierchia
1953 - Present (71 years)
Gennaro Chierchia is an Italian linguist and educator. Chierchia is currently the Haas Foundation Professor of Linguistics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His work and study focus on areas including semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and language pathology.
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Carl Rowan
1925 - 2000 (75 years)
Carl Thomas Rowan was a prominent American journalist, author and government official who published columns syndicated across the U.S. and was at one point the highest ranking African American in the United States government.
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Fred Householder
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Fred Walter Householder, Jr. was an American linguist and professor of classics and linguistics at Indiana University. His best known works include Linguistic Speculations and his contributions to Readings in Linguistics II .
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Nicky Hopkins
1944 - 1994 (50 years)
Nicholas Christian Hopkins was an English pianist and organist. He performed on many popular and enduring British and American rock music recordings from the 1960s to the 1990s, most notably on songs recorded by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Beatles, the Steve Miller Band, Jefferson Airplane, Rod Stewart, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, The Hollies, Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, Harry Nilsson, Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, Jerry Garcia, Jeff Beck, Joe Cocker, Art Garfunkel, Badfinger, Graham Parker, Gary Moore, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Donovan. He is...
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Norbert Schmitt
1956 - Present (68 years)
Norbert Schmitt is an American applied linguist and Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He is known for his work on second-language vocabulary acquisition and second-language vocabulary teaching. He has published numerous books and papers on vocabulary acquisition.
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John Denver
1943 - 1997 (54 years)
Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. , known professionally as John Denver, was an American singer and songwriter. He is known for popularizing acoustic folk music in the 1970s as part of the ongoing singer-songwriter movement of the mid-to-late 20th century. Denver is widely recognized as a cultural icon of the American West.
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