Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters.

In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called meddah.

The Assistant Secretary General, Danilo Turk, briefed the Council on new developments since the report was submitted.

This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk named after this guy.

We decided to use the Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for, which is making money.

So the last Mechanical Turk project I'm going to talk to you about is called Bicycle Built for 2000.

The military s incorporation into the state was most prominent in the Ottoman Empire, whose rulers created a new type of military force that drew its manpower mostly from Islamic ruled parts of Europe. These Janissaries (Christian boys conscripted to serve in Ottoman infantry units) were either recruited from Europe or abducted from countries under Ottoman control.

After previewing it and confirming it's what you submitted, you could submit it into the Mechanical Turk with no other context.

The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there.

So we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces, and we fed those into the Mechanical Turk.

So I thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the Mechanical Turk with a drawing tool.

Daisy Bell Daisy, Daisy ... Aaron Koblin And we took all of those individual pieces, and we fed them into another Turk request.

In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized.

So from this small, superstitious, middle class neighborhood of my grandmother, I was zoomed into this posh, international school in Madrid , where I was the only Turk.

Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab and and I forget the third person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay.

Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Participation by minority communities (a priority) increased slightly 26 members of minority communities were recruited over the quarter (18 Serb, 2 Bosniac, 2 Croat, 2 Ashkali, 2 Turk).

And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners by the people in the rest of the world like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire who said in a book published in 1731, Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?

Of the 3,024 active KPC members, 157 are from minority communities (33 Ashkali, 17 Bosniac, 8 Egyptian, 1 Goran, 9 Croat, 14 Muslim, 2 Roma, 43 Serb and 30 Turk).

Likewise, the current turmoil in Turkey is, at least in part, a consequence of neo Ottoman overreach by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan s government. In seeking to establish the type of regional influence that Turks have not had since Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, Erdoğan has fallen prey to some of the Ottoman regime s hubris.

Turkey s successes have deep roots in governmental capacity and its people s skills, reflecting decades of investment and centuries of history dating back to Ottoman times.

Now those of you who have been to Istanbul have probably seen Topkapi Palace, which was the residence of Ottoman sultans for more than 400 years.

And luckily there's a website for that called Mechanical Turk, which is a website where you can post tasks that you don't want to do yourself, such as Please summarize this text for me in six words.

And that's why the Ottoman Empire in its last decades turned into a proto democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time.

It is obvious that long term preservation of cultural heritage in Kosovo, which includes Serbian Orthodox, Ottoman Islamic, Catholic and vernacular sites, must become an increasing priority in the coming months.

Recently, Turkey provided access to the Ottoman archives, inviting researchers, including Armenian scholars, to come and get to know the historical documents dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Instead, Turkey s role inspired reservations among Egyptians after all, the Ottoman Empire had ruled over Egypt. And, on the Turkish side, there was a sense of superiority vis à vis the Arab world.

So, will a Turkish Summer be the first, if not the main, strategic result of the Arab Spring ? Is the Middle East faced with a neo Ottoman Turkey s irresistible rise to regional power?

The frequent description of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as harboring neo Ottoman ambitions for his country clearly implicates this rivalry. It was the Ottomans who brought down two historical Saudi Wahhabi states.

My guess is that we're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years I say 400 years because it's the end of the Ottoman Empire of the hegemony of Western power, Western institutions and Western values.

The fourth scenario is partition, with the old three province, Ottoman style setup commonly mentioned Cyrenaica (east), Fezzan (south), and Tripolitania (west). Cyrenaica is Qaddafi free, Tripolitania is not, and Fezzan did not fully join the revolution.

In seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, the exoticism of the Ottoman Empire was used as a mirror to project Europeans own shortcomings and insecurities. In France, one spoke of Turqueries, such as in Moliere s play The Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Turkey also shows that the supposed clash between democracy and security and, indeed, between democracy and Islam can be reconciled. Other Muslim states seem to grasp this recently, a Turk was chosen for the first time and by a majority vote to be Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Countries.

As Middle East analyst Murtaza Hussain recently observed Syria and Iraq, formerly unified Arab states formed after the defeat of their former Ottoman rulers, exist today only in name. What will emerge could be a fragmented, easily manipulated region.

Turkey was traditionally a bystander in Middle East politics. Its leaders believed that there was little to be contributed or gained by getting involved in the region s problems, and that Turkey s Ottoman legacy would leave its Arab neighbors suspicious.

In the early nineteenth century, the friezes and sculptures were removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, Britain s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803. Elgin sold them to the British government, which put them in the British Museum.

Welcomes also IRCICA's project to organize the international symposium on the Levant in the Ottoman Period to be held in Damascus, Syria on 26 30 September 2005, under the patronage of H.E. Bashar Al Assad, President of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The Middle East has been a hotbed of instability fueled by historical tensions since the fall of the Ottoman Empire almost a century ago. Now it is on fire not least because the West s repeated interventions have been guided by shortsighted tactical concerns.

The first Christian evangelization trips of Saint Peter and Saint Paul were to Turkey. Later, Ottoman Turkey was for centuries considered a part of the concert of Europe, proving indispensable in defining and securing the strategic balance among the European continent s Great Powers.

And that's why actually in the 19th century the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion.

The Sunni tumult has underscored the fragility of almost all Arab countries, while diluting the centrality of the Israel Palestine conflict. The post Ottoman order created by the British, with some help from the French, after World War I is disintegrating, with no viable alternative in sight.

But political thinking in the Middle East is often linked to the second timeline. Indeed, it is impossible to grasp the region s contemporary history and politics without understanding the emergence of the regional state system after World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

Like the Ottoman Empire s fragmentation in 1922 or Nasser s overthrow of King Farouk s regime in 1952, the current transformation, too, must be shaped. And how that future is shaped will determine whether or not Mubarak s end marks the beginning of political transformation throughout the Middle East.

Economic fears are not the only concern for EU citizens. Turkey was the theater of exceptional violence in the twentieth century its participation in WWI fueled hatred and gigantic massacres, with the genocide of the Armenians the last vicious spasm of the Ottoman Empire s brutal demise.

Some of Ukraine s regions have historically been a part of Russia, Poland, or the Ottoman Empire. Peter the Great, whose eighteenth century Westernization of Russia was portrayed in Sochi, fought the Crimean Tatars, many of whose descendants were dispersed by Stalin to other parts of the former Soviet Union.