Coral island

A coral island is a type of island formed from coral detritus and associated organic material. They occur in tropical and sub-tropical areas, typically as part of coral reefs which have grown to cover a far larger area under the sea.

Formation

Islands develop from coral reefs through one of two processes, uplift and accretion.

In uplift, part or all of the coral reef becomes Land as a result of the earth's crust rising above sea level.

In accretion, rocks and sand are layered on top of coral reefs during cyclonic storms, and the gradual accumulation of other solid material through the action of wind and waves leads to the development of the island. The process is later enhanced with the remains of plant life which grows on the island.

Where coral islands form from atoll reefs, the result is an island or string of islands in a roughly circular form, surrounding a shallow lagoon.

Distribution

Most of the world's coral islands are in the Pacific Ocean. The American territories of Jarvis, Baker and Howland Islands are clear examples of coral islands. Also, some of the islands belonging to Kiribati are considered coral islands. The Maldives also consist of coral islands.

Islands (Mike Oldfield song)

"Islands" is a single by musician Mike Oldfield and features Bonnie Tyler on vocals. The single was released in 1987 and is from the album of the same name, Islands. Andy Mackay Played the oboe on "Islands".

Track listing

Charts

The single charted around Europe.

References

External links

Islands (regional unit)

Islands (Greek: Περιφερειακή ενότητα Νήσων) is one of the regional units of Greece. It is part of the region of Attica. The regional unit covers the Saronic Islands, a small part of the Peloponnese peninsula, and a few islands off the eastern Peloponnese coast.

Administration

As a part of the 2011 Kallikratis government reform, the regional unit Islands was created out of part of the former Piraeus Prefecture. It is subdivided into 8 municipalities. These are (number as in the map in the infobox):

See also

References

Islands (The Mary Onettes album)

Islands is the second studio album from Swedish dream pop band The Mary Onettes. The album was released on 3 November 2009 in the United States, and a day later in Sweden. The album had to be re-recorded from scratch after lead singer Philip Ekström stated on the band's official website, "...I basically lost every song I've ever recorded with The Mary Onettes. My hard drive with all my music was stolen in my car one fine afternoon in Stockholm, the very same fine afternoon we came home from our US tour, the very same day I was feeling thrilled to come home and start the process of finishing our new album. Of course I had made a backup copy on my computer at home. But for some reason a power failure in the building made that hard drive collapse too. Unbelievable. I was speechless for days." The band played the Primavera Sound Festival in Spain in May 2008, and reconvened in the studio to start the recording process again in September.

The band's Dare EP was released in April 2009, intended as a sampler of the Islands album. It featured two album tracks ("Dare" and "God Knows I Had Plans") and an exclusive non-album track ("Kicks"). Ekström said of the album's name: "The title Islands came up because I see the tracks on the album as small islands in different shapes and forms where every song is like a record of it's [sic] very own. Johan on Labrador Records suggested the same title without having heard me mentioning the idea, so that was a coincidence too good not to pursue. The songs are almost too personal and I've had a hard time playing them for friends. It's like all I want to do is keep them to myself."

Precious coral

Precious coral or red coral is the common name given to Corallium rubrum and several related species of marine coral. The distinguishing characteristic of precious corals is their durable and intensely colored red or pink skeleton, which is used for making jewelry.

Habitat

Red corals grow on rocky seabottom with low sedimentation, typically in dark environments—either in the depths or in dark caverns or crevices. The original species, C. rubrum (formerly Gorgonia nobilis), is found mainly in the Mediterranean Sea. It grows at depths from 10 to 300 meters below sea level, although the shallower of these habitats have been largely depleted by harvesting. In the underwater caves of Alghero, Sardinia (the "Coral Riviera") it grows at depth from 4 to 35 meters. The same species is also found at Atlantic sites near the Strait of Gibraltar, at the Cape Verde Islands and off the coast of Southern Portugal. Other Corallium species are native to the western Pacific, notably around Japan (Corallium japonicum) and Taiwan; these occur at depths of 350 to 1500 meters below sea level in areas with strong currents.

Gala Coral Group

Gala Coral Group Ltd is a British betting shop, bingo and casino operator owned by private equity firms Candover Investments, Cinven and Permira. In October 2005 it merged with Coral Eurobet for £2.18 billion. The acquisition made it the UK's third largest bookmaker and largest bingo operator. It owns over 30 casinos. Coral will remain a brand and trading division of the new group.

The Group headquarters are in Nottingham (Gala Bingo and Casino), Stratford, London (Coral), and Woking (Gala Coral Remote Gaming). However, in 2011, a decision was made to move substantial parts of the business to Gibraltar, including almost all of the remote gaming division.

The group, through acquisitions and new developments have over 1800 licensed betting offices.

In July 2015, it was announced that Ladbrokes would merge with its slightly smaller rival Gala Coral, and that Ladbrokes' CEO, Jim Mullen would become the CEO of the new company, Ladbrokes Coral.

Group divisions

Gala Bingo

Gala Bingo operates 137 clubs throughout the UK, with approximately a 24% share of all clubs and nearly 40% of National Bingo Game ticket sales up until the operator's withdrawal from the National Game in Summer 2008.

Coral Content Distribution Network

The Coral Content Distribution Network, sometimes called Coral Cache or Coral, is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network designed and operated by Michael Freedman. Coral uses the bandwidth of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers to mirror web content, often to avoid the Slashdot Effect or to reduce the load on websites servers in general.

Operation

One of Coral's key goals is to avoid ever creating 'hot spots' of very high traffic, as these might dissuade volunteers from running the software out of a fear that spikes in server load may occur. It achieves this through an indexing abstraction called a distributed sloppy hash table (DSHT); DSHTs create self-organizing clusters of nodes which fetch information from each other to avoid communicating with more distant or heavily-loaded servers.

The sloppy hash table refers to the fact that Coral is made up of concentric rings of distributed hash tables (DHTs), each ring representing a wider and wider geographic range (or rather, ping range). The DHTs are composed of nodes all within some latency of each other (for example, a ring of nodes within 20 milliseconds of each other). It avoids hot spots (the 'sloppy' part) by only continuing to query progressively larger sized rings if they are not overburdened. In other words, if the two top-most rings are experiencing too much traffic, a node will just ping closer ones: when a node that is overloaded is reached, upward progression stops. This minimises the occurrence of hot spots, with the disadvantage that knowledge of the system as a whole is reduced.