title: Indianapolis Colts

text: Matt Taylor is the team's play-by-play announcer, succeeding Bob Lamey in 2018. Lamey held the job from 1984 to 1991 and again from 1995 to 2018. Former Colts backup quarterback Jim Sorgi serves as the "color commentator". Mike Jansen serves as the public address announcer at all Colts home games. Jansen has been the public address announcer since the 1998 season.


title: Indianapolis Colts

text: The team's local TV carriage rights were shaken up in mid-2014 when WTTV's owner Tribune Media came to terms with CBS to become the network's Indianapolis affiliate as of January 1, 2015, replacing WISH-TV. With the deal, both Tribune Media stations, including WXIN (channel 59) carry the bulk of the team's regular-season games starting with the 2015 NFL season. Also as of the 2015 season, WTTV and WXIN became the official Colts stations and air the team's preseason games, along with official team programming and coach's shows, and have a signage presence along the fascia of Lucas Oil Stadium.


title: Indianapolis Colts

text: WISH's sister station WNDY-TV aired preseason games from 2011 to 2014, having replaced WTTV at that time.


title: London Has Fallen

text: London Has Fallen is a 2016 American action thriller film directed by Babak Najafi and written by Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt, Chad St. John and Christian Gudegast. It is the second installment in the "Has Fallen" film series, the sequel to Antoine Fuqua's 2013 film "Olympus Has Fallen" and stars Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart and Morgan Freeman, with Alon Moni Aboutboul, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Jackie Earle Haley, Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, Sean O'Bryan, Waleed Zuaiter and Charlotte Riley in supporting roles. The film follows a plot to assassinate the world leaders of the G7 as they attend the British Prime Minister's funeral in London and Secret Service agent Mike Banning's efforts to protect United States President Benjamin Asher from being killed by terrorists.


title: London Has Fallen

text: Filming began in London on October 24, 2014. A Christmas break started in November with filming resuming in February 2015. The film was released by Focus Features under their recently revived Gramercy Pictures label on March 4, 2016, and grossed $205 million worldwide.


title: London Has Fallen

text: G7 intelligence services locate Pakistani arms trafficker and terrorist mastermind Aamir Barkawi at his compound, and authorize a US Air Force drone strike during his daughter's wedding, killing Barkawi's family and seemingly Barkawi himself.


title: London Has Fallen

text: Two years later, British Prime Minister James Wilson suddenly dies, and the G7 prepare to attend his funeral in London. Secret Service Director Lynne Jacobs assigns Agent Mike Banning to lead American President Benjamin Asher's overseas security detail, even though Banning's wife Leah is due to give birth in a few weeks. The entourage arrives via Air Force One at Stansted Airport, and Banning arranges an earlier arrival at Somerset House in London via Marine One.


title: London Has Fallen

text: As Asher's Presidential State Car arrives at St Paul's Cathedral, a large army of mercenaries led by Barkawi's son Kamran launch coordinated attacks on the city disguised as Metropolitan Police, the Queen's Guardsmen, and other first responders, killing five world leaders, damaging major landmarks and generating mass panic. Asher's early arrival throws off the St. Paul's attack, and Banning returns him and Jacobs to Marine One. The terrorists destroy the helicopter's escorts with Stinger missiles, forcing the damaged helicopter to crash-land in Hyde Park. Fatally injured, Jacobs makes Banning promise to stay alive for his unborn child, and to punish those responsible for the attack. Banning escorts Asher into the London Underground as the city's power is lost and residents shelter indoors.


title: London Has Fallen

text: In Washington, D.C., American Vice President Allan Trumbull investigates the incident with British authorities while trying to track down the President. He receives a call from Barkawi, still alive and operating in Sanaa. Seeking revenge for the drone strike that killed his daughter, and having poisoned Wilson to lure the G7 to London, Barkawi promises to broadcast Asher's execution online if Kamran captures him. Trumbull orders his staff to locate Barkawi's known terrorist operatives and find any connection to the attack, while British authorities stand down all first responders so any left in the open can be identified as terrorists.


title: London Has Fallen

text: After leaving a sign to be picked up by satellite, Banning leads Asher to an MI6 safe-house, where MI6 Agent Jacquelin "Jax" Marshall briefs them. Marshall receives a voice message from Trumbull that they saw Banning's sign and an extraction team is en route. Security monitors display an approaching Delta Force team, but Banning realizes they have arrived too soon and are actually Barkawi's mercenaries. He fights and kills all of them and drives away with Asher, but their car is struck before they can reach the United States Embassy, and Asher is taken. Banning is rescued by the combined Delta/SAS extraction team, who suspect a spy in the British government.


title: London Has Fallen

text: Trumbull's staff identify a building owned by one of Barkawi's front companies, drawing massive power despite being unoccupied, and realize it is Kamran's headquarters. Banning joins the extraction team to infiltrate the building, arriving seconds before Kamran can decapitate Asher on camera. Kamran escapes when his hacker Sultan Mansoor drops a grenade with his dying breath, forcing Banning to protect Asher from the blast. Banning and Asher escape just before the building is destroyed by the Delta Force/SAS squad using an explosive that Mike had planted earlier, killing Kamran and the remaining terrorists. Marshall helps British authorities restore London's security system and confronts MI5 Intelligence Chief John Lancaster, learning that he was Barkawi's mole, having left his security fingerprints in the system. Lancaster claims his motive was to prove that the current military budget left the country vulnerable to terrorism and attempts to convince Marshall to join his cause, but she kills him. Trumbull tells Barkawi that his plan failed, moments before United States federal authorities attack his base with another drone strike, killing Barkawi and every other member of his terrorist group.


title: London Has Fallen

text: Two weeks later, as London recovers, Banning is home spending time with Leah and their newborn child Lynne, named after Jacobs. As Banning contemplates sending a letter of resignation, he watches Trumbull speak on television regarding the recent events, with a message that the U.S. will prevail. Inspired, Banning deletes the letter.


title: London Has Fallen

text: In addition, the MSNBC news anchor Lawrence O'Donnell appears, uncredited, as an unnamed news anchor reporting on the developments in London.


title: London Has Fallen

text: In October 2013, it was announced that Butler, Eckhart, Freeman, Bassett, Leo, Forster and Mitchell would reprise their roles from "Olympus Has Fallen". Production had been scheduled to begin in May 2015 in London, with Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt returning to write the script. Director Antoine Fuqua, however, did not return, due to his commitments with "The Equalizer". On May 1, 2014, it was announced Focus Features had acquired distribution rights to the sequel, and would release the film on October 2, 2015. On August 18, 2014, it was announced that "Charlie Countryman" director Fredrik Bond would take over direction from Fuqua, but Bond left the film on September 18, six weeks before the shooting was to begin. On September 28, director Babak Najafi signed on to direct the film. On October 10, Jackie Earle Haley joined the film to play Deputy Chief Mason. On November 4, 2014, in a press release confirming that filming had started, it was also confirmed that Sean O'Bryan was reprising his role from the first film, while Alon Aboutboul, Charlotte Riley and Waleed Zuaiter were also in the cast. On November 12, Mehdi Dehbi joined the film to play Sultan Mansoor, the youngest of three brothers whose life has been forever changed after a drone strike. Scotsman Bryan Larkin, who plays SAS Commander Will Davies, joined the cast as a "posh English guy", but Najafi and Butler made an on-set decision to have him use his natural Scottish accent.


title: London Has Fallen

text: Principal photography began on October 24, 2014, in London. Four weeks of shooting were to take place, involving actors Freeman, Eckhart, Bassett and Melissa Leo, before a break for Christmas. Butler and Angela Bassett were seen filming in Somerset House. Production also took place at Pinewood Studios. Butler stated in an interview that the movie was also filmed in India and was to continue in Bulgaria. Then President of Bulgaria, Rosen Plevneliev, visited the set of "London Has Fallen" during filming at the Boyana Film Studios in Bulgaria. Filming lasted through April 2015.


title: London Has Fallen

text: The music was composed and conducted by Trevor Morris, who provided the score for the first film. The record was released on March 4, 2016, by Back Lot Music. The score was recorded at Abbey Road Studios with The Chamber Orchestra of London.


title: London Has Fallen

text: On May 20, 2015, Focus Features relaunched their Gramercy Pictures label for action, horror, and science fiction releases, with "London Has Fallen" being one of Gramercy's first titles. The film was planned for an October 2, 2015 release; however, on June 12, 2015, it was announced that the film had been moved back to January 22, 2016, to avoid competition with "The Martian", which swapped its original November 25 release date with "Victor Frankenstein". The timing of the release was criticized as "insensitive" by the Chair of the Tavistock Square Memorial Trust, Philip Nelson, as it coincided with the week of the 10th anniversary of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, in which 52 people were killed, and with the 2015 Sousse attacks, in which 30 British nationals were killed. On September 16, 2015, the film's release was moved back again to March 4, 2016, because the studios needed more time to finish the film's visual effects.


title: London Has Fallen

text: "London Has Fallen" grossed $62.7 million in North America and $143.2 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $205.8 million, against a budget of $60 million. The film outgrossed its predecessor's total of $170 million.


title: London Has Fallen

text: In the United States and Canada, pre-release tracking suggested the film would gross $20–23 million from 3,490 theaters in its opening weekend, alongside "Zootopia" and "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot". The film made $850,000 from its Thursday night previews and $7.6 million on its first day. It went on to gross $21.6 million in its opening weekend, finishing second at the box office behind "Zootopia" ($75 million).


title: London Has Fallen

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 28% based on 197 reviews, with an average rating of 4.10/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""London Has Fallen" traps a talented cast—and all who dare to see it—in a mid-1990s basic-cable nightmare of a film loaded with xenophobia, and threadbare action-thriller clichés." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 28 out of 100, based on reviews from 35 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, the same score as the first film.


title: London Has Fallen

text: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of "The A.V. Club" wrote: "A murky, brain-dead stab-a-thon packed with so many inane chases, laughable special effects, and mismatched stock footage shots that it begs to be made into a drinking game, "London Has Fallen" is one of those rare films that is good at absolutely nothing." "The A.V. Club" later picked it as their worst film of the year.


title: London Has Fallen

text: "Variety" described "London Has Fallen" as "effortlessly racist" invoking "familiar Islamophobia", a "terrorsploitation" fantasy designed to spread fear after the November 2015 Paris attacks, and "ugly, reactionary fear-mongering."


title: London Has Fallen

text: Meanwhile, "The Hollywood Reporter" styled it as "major world capitals destruction porn sub-genre" that feeds a "paranoia".


title: London Has Fallen

text: The film has been called "extremely insensitive" by families of the victims of the 7/7 bombings after an early trailer was released ahead of the 10th anniversary of the attacks.


title: London Has Fallen

text: On October 26, 2016, it was announced that a sequel titled "Angel Has Fallen" was in development, with Gerard Butler reprising his role, as well as once again acting as a producer on the film.


title: London Has Fallen

text: On July 25, 2017, Ric Roman Waugh was announced as director for "Angel Has Fallen". On January 10, 2018, Holt McCallany joined the cast as Wade Jennings, an ex-military turned head of a technology company, but was replaced later by Danny Huston. On January 18, 2018, Jada Pinkett Smith and Tim Blake Nelson were confirmed to appear in "Angel Has Fallen". On February 13, 2018, Piper Perabo joined the cast. Filming started on February 7, 2018 in Virginia Water Lake.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The Goo Goo Dolls are an American rock band formed in 1986 in Buffalo, New York, by guitarist/vocalist John Rzeznik, bassist/vocalist Robby Takac, and drummer George Tutuska.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: After starting off as a cover band and then developing a punk sound, The Goo Goo Dolls experienced mainstream success following the 1995 release of their breakthrough single, "Name". The band is renowned for its biggest hit, "Iris", released in 1998. The song spent nearly 12 straight months on the "Billboard" charts and held the number one position on the Hot 100 Airplay chart for 18 weeks. In October 2012, "Iris" was ranked #1 on "Billboard"s "Top 100 Pop Songs 1992–2012" chart. Other notable singles include "Slide", "Black Balloon", and "Broadway" from 1998's "Dizzy Up the Girl"; "Here Is Gone" from 2002's "Gutterflower"; and "Better Days", "Give a Little Bit", and "Stay with You" from 2006's "Let Love In".


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The band has had 19 top ten singles on various charts, has sold 15 million records worldwide, and has been nominated for four Grammy Awards.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The band's original lineup included John Rzeznik (guitar, vocals), Robby Takac (bass, vocals), and George Tutuska (drums, percussion). Takac and Tutuska had been long-time friends in school and met Rzeznik while he was playing in the band The Beaumonts with Takac's cousin, Paul Takac and close friend Michael Harvey who was the inspiration for the band. In 1999 Rolling Stone reported the trio picked their name from a "True Detective" ad for a toy called a Goo Goo Doll. In 2022 Rzeznik said he didn't remember how they picked the name. "We had a gig and so we had to come up with some kind of a name just to play the show," Rzeznik said. "It's kind of a stupid name."


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The band started out playing covers, but went on to develop a punk sound. With Takac as their lead singer, the band released their first album, "Goo Goo Dolls," in 1987 on Mercenary Records, but was picked up in 1988 by Celluloid Records, a larger record company. They played around Buffalo's underground music circuit and across the country opening for punk bands such as Gang Green, SNFU, Dag Nasty, Bad Religion, Motörhead, ALL, The Dead Milkmen, Doughboys, Big Drill Car, The Gun Club, Uniform Choice, The Dickies, and DRI and playing with fellow Buffalo bands. The band released its second album, "Jed", in 1989.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The band released its third album, "Hold Me Up", in 1990 and featured Rzeznik as the lead vocalist on five tracks, including the single "There You Are"—as well as their then-concert favorite, "Two Days in February". After being embraced by local college radio and punk scenes (including such venues as CBGB), the Goo Goo Dolls incorporated elements of heavy metal, pop rock, and punk rock into the album. In 1991, the song "I'm Awake Now" was recorded for the soundtrack of "".


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: "Superstar Car Wash", released in 1993, received significant media attention. The critical success and encouraging sales of their last album resulted in a larger budget from Metal Blade Records. The album was partially recorded at Metalworks Studios in Mississauga, Ontario. The single "We Are the Normal" received a major push toward play on college and independent radio, and its video was displayed on MTV's 120 Minutes program. "Fallin' Down" made it onto the 1993 soundtrack of Pauly Shore's hit film "Son in Law".


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: Just before "A Boy Named Goo"'s release, Tutuska was fired from the band and replaced by Mike Malinin. Prior to Tutuska's departure, there was a payment dispute between him and Rzeznik over Tutuska's contribution to the writing of the "Superstar Car Wash" single "Fallin' Down". During the completion of "A Boy Named Goo", Tutuska had told band management that he would not tour behind the album unless royalties were to be split evenly among the three members, a practice Tutuska said had been the band's standard practice ever since the release of its self-titled debut in 1987. Tutuska has said that when he told Rzeznik he had not received royalties from "Fallin' Down", Rzeznik admitted that he had been receiving such royalties for two years.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: "A Boy Named Goo", released in 1995, had a catchy rock sound, and became one of the most successful alternative rock albums of the mid-1990s. "A Boy Named Goo" became the first album in Metal Blade history to achieve double-platinum status. This success, however, proved bittersweet, as the band found themselves in a legal battle with Metal Blade records. The band filed suit against Metal Blade, claiming they had not earned any royalties from their album's sales, which was attributed to a "grossly unfair, one-sided and unenforceable contract" which had been signed by the band in 1987. The two sides reached a settlement which had the band signed to the Metal Blade's distributing label, Warner Bros. Records, under which the band released their sixth album, "Dizzy Up the Girl", in 1998.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The Goo Goo Dolls experienced mainstream success following the 1995 release of their breakthrough single, "Name". The success of "Name" marked a fundamental change in the band's sound from alternative rock to a more mainstream, adult-oriented direction; this disappointed many of the original fans of the band. "Name" made the band popular, and led to guest appearances on "Beverly Hills, 90210" and "Charmed.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: Rzeznik was approached to write a song for the "City of Angels" soundtrack, and the end product was "Iris". This song continued the band's fame, as it stayed on top of "Billboard" Hot 100 Airplay charts for a record-breaking 18 weeks and spent 4 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Pop Songs chart. Iris held the record for the most weeks on the radio for almost 22 years before The Weeknd released "Blinding Lights" and broke the long-standing record on August 22, 2020. Shortly after Iris was released in 1998, it was nominated for three Grammys. According to several interviews with Rzeznik, he was experiencing serious bouts of writer's block when he was approached, and was on the verge of quitting the band days before he wrote the song.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: "Iris" was included on the quadruple-platinum "Dizzy Up the Girl", considered their most successful album, and was among top-ten hits "Slide", "Black Balloon", "Broadway", and "Dizzy" from the same album. In 2001, the Goos released their first ever compilation CD, "What I Learned About Ego, Opinion, Art & Commerce". Next, "Gutterflower" (2002) achieved gold certification, producing the hits "Here Is Gone", "Sympathy", and "Big Machine". On July 4, 2004, the band performed a free concert in Buffalo, playing through a deluge of rain that can be seen on the DVD released later that year. The DVD also contained a studio version of the Goo Goo Dolls' cover of "Give a Little Bit" by Supertramp. The single reached the top of the Adult Top 40 chart in 2005. July 4, 2004 has been proclaimed "Goo Goo Dolls Day" in their native Buffalo, New York.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: In 2006, the Goo Goo Dolls marked their 20th anniversary with their new album "Let Love In", which included the studio recording of "Give a Little Bit" as well as other top 10 radio singles "Better Days", "Stay with You", and "Let Love In". With their third consecutive single ("Let Love In") from the album, the Goo Goo Dolls hit a record 12 top 10 hits in Adult Top 40 history; upon the release of "Before It's Too Late", that total increased to 13. Goo Goo Dolls performed on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" on June 8, 2007, and at "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" on June 22, 2007.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: On June 27, 2007, the Goo Goo Dolls performed to a sold-out crowd at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. The entire concert was released as a DVD on the limited edition version of their 2008 release, "Vol.2". Though the album has not (as of 2007) been certified by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), various music sites have asserted that it has gone gold.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: On November 13, 2007, the Goo Goo Dolls released a greatest hits album entitled "", which includes a new version of "Name" recorded and mixed by Paul David Hager, and a remix of "Feel the Silence" by Michael Brauer.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The band performed "Better Days" and "Stay With You" at the halftime of the Detroit Lions' 2007 Thanksgiving Day game at Ford Field, which focused on the United Way and the NFL's commitment to youth health and fitness.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The Goo Goo Dolls announced recording sessions for a new album, on their official website, unrelated to their "Volume Two" in 2008. In addition, the band performed as part of the O2 Wireless Festival in London's Hyde Park in the summer of 2008.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: "Something for the Rest of Us" was released on August 31, 2010. While the album was full of the pop-rock that has sustained the band for decades, lead singer/guitarist Rzeznik's songwriting took on a more somber, serious tone. "Something for the Rest of Us" included the single "Home", which extended the band's record to 14 top ten hits at the Hot AC radio format (more than any other artist in the history of that format).


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The band performed a live mini-concert at the Apple Store in Manhattan, New York on December 2, 2010.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The album "Magnetic" was released on June 11, 2013 and debuted at #8 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. On July 19, 2013, the band released the second single off of "Magnetic", "Come to Me".


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: In December 2013, Malinin announced his departure from the band. In November 2014, Malinin sued the band for wrongful termination, claiming that he was fired after requesting paternity leave.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The Goo Goo Dolls contributed to the soundtrack of the broadway musical "Finding Neverland" in 2015. The soundtrack, released June 9, 2015, contained the song "If the World Turned Upside Down."


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The band spent the majority of 2015 in the studio writing and recording their eleventh studio album, "Boxes", at Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, Washington. The album was released on May 6, 2016.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: The Goo Goo Dolls celebrated the 20th anniversary of the release of "A Boy Named Goo" by releasing a special edition of the album on November 27, 2015.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: Goo Goo Dolls released an exclusive vinyl box set for Record Store Day on April 22, 2017 entitled "Pick Pockets, Petty Thieves, and Tiny Victories (1987–1995)".


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: On May 12, 2017, Goo Goo Dolls released a five-song EP entitled "You Should Be Happy". In support of the EP, the band toured throughout the summer of 2017 on the "Long Way Home" tour with Phillip Phillips. With 2018 marking the 20th anniversary of "Dizzy Up the Girl", the band embarked on a commemorative tour where they performed the album in its entirety. Also in 2018, the band released two live albums: "The Audience is This Way" in June, and "The Audience is That Way" in November.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: At the beginning of 2019, the Goo Goo Dolls announced that they were working on a twelfth studio album. On record store day (April 13, 2019), a vinyl box limited to 1000 copies under the name "Topography" was released.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: On August 24, 2020, the band announced its first Christmas album: "It's Christmas All Over", which was released on October 30. Later that year, Rzeznik sat down with "Atwood Magazine" to discuss the band's 35th anniversary.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: In May 2021, the band announced that "Rarities", a double compilation featuring rare and unheard songs spanning from 1995 to 2007, would be released on June 25, 2021.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: In a June 2021 interview published on YouTube, singer John Rzeznik revealed that the band was working on their 14th studio album, which would be released sometime in 2022. When asked about how the album differs from the band's previous work, Rzeznik claimed that the band had decided to approach both writing and recording in an alternative way. Specifically, the band used earlier forms of production which they utilized prior to the digital era in the music industry.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: In a November 2021 Spin interview, Rzeznik stated that he produced most of the album himself. He added that the album would sound more experimental than the band's past releases, hinting that he did not believe it would receive much radio airplay. It was later confirmed that the album was entirely produced by Rzeznik.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: On June 27th 2022, the band officially announced on their Facebook page the title of their new album, "Chaos in Bloom", as well as the first single off it, "Yeah, I Like You". The latter premiered on July 1st 2022.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: "Iris", the band's 1998 hit single, enjoyed critical acclaim. At the 41st Grammy Awards, "Iris" received nominations for "Record of the Year" and "Pop Performance by a Duo or Group." The song also garnered John Rzeznik a "Song of the Year" nomination. The song was ranked at number 39 on "Rolling Stone"s list of the 100 greatest pop songs.


title: Goo Goo Dolls

text: In October 2012, "Iris" was ranked number one on "Billboard"s "Top 100 Pop Songs 1992–2012" chart, which ranked the top songs of the first 20 years of the Mainstream Top 40/Pop Songs chart. The list also featured the Goo Goo Dolls' hits "Slide", ranking at number nine, and "Name" at number 24. The Goo Goo Dolls are the only musicians to have three songs on the list, two breaking the top 10 and all three falling within the top 25. They are also the only musicians that have back to back singles (Iris, 1998 and Slide, 1999) featured on the list.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Considering free will to be an illusion, Skinner saw human action as dependent on consequences of previous actions, a theory he would articulate as the "principle of reinforcement": If the consequences to an action are bad, there is a high chance the action will not be repeated; if the consequences are good, the probability of the action being repeated becomes stronger.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner developed behavior analysis, especially the philosophy of "radical behaviorism", and founded the experimental analysis of behavior, a school of experimental research psychology. He also used operant conditioning to strengthen behavior, considering the rate of response to be the most effective measure of response strength. To study operant conditioning, he invented the operant conditioning chamber (aka the Skinner box), and to measure rate he invented the cumulative recorder. Using these tools, he and Charles Ferster produced Skinner's most influential experimental work, outlined in their 1957 book "Schedules of Reinforcement".


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner was a prolific author, publishing 21 books and 180 articles. He imagined the application of his ideas to the design of a human community in his 1948 utopian novel, "Walden Two", while his analysis of human behavior culminated in his 1958 work, "Verbal Behavior".


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner, John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov, are considered to be the pioneers of modern behaviorism. Accordingly, a June 2002 survey listed Skinner as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to Grace and William Skinner, the latter of whom was a lawyer. Skinner became an atheist after a Christian teacher tried to assuage his fear of the hell that his grandmother described. His brother Edward, two and a half years younger, died at age 16 of a cerebral hemorrhage.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner's closest friend as a young boy was Raphael Miller, whom he called Doc because his father was a doctor. Doc and Skinner became friends due to their parents' religiousness and both had an interest in contraptions and gadgets. They had set up a telegraph line between their houses to send messages to each other, although they had to call each other on the telephone due to the confusing messages sent back and forth. During one summer, Doc and Skinner started an elderberry business to gather berries and sell them door to door. They found that when they picked the ripe berries, the unripe ones came off the branches too, so they built a device that was able to separate them. The device was a bent piece of metal to form a trough. They would pour water down the trough into a bucket, and the ripe berries would sink into the bucket and the unripe ones would be pushed over the edge to be thrown away.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. He found himself at a social disadvantage at the college because of his intellectual attitude. He was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: He wrote for the school paper, but, as an atheist, he was critical of the traditional mores of his college. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1926, he attended Harvard University, where he would later research and teach. While attending Harvard, a fellow student, Fred S. Keller, convinced Skinner that he could make an experimental science of the study of behavior. This led Skinner to invent a prototype for the Skinner box and to join Keller in the creation of other tools for small experiments.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: After graduation, Skinner unsuccessfully tried to write a novel while he lived with his parents, a period that he later called the "Dark Years". He became disillusioned with his literary skills despite encouragement from the renowned poet Robert Frost, concluding that he had little world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write. His encounter with John B. Watson's "behaviorism" led him into graduate study in psychology and to the development of his own version of behaviorism.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher for some years. In 1936, he went to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis to teach. In 1945, he moved to Indiana University, where he was chair of the psychology department from 1946 to 1947, before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained at Harvard for the rest of his life. In 1973, Skinner was one of the signers of the "Humanist Manifesto II".


title: B. F. Skinner

text: In 1936, Skinner married Yvonne "Eve" Blue. The couple had two daughters, Julie (later Vargas) and Deborah (later Buzan; married Barry Buzan). Yvonne died in 1997, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner's public exposure had increased in the 1970s, he remained active even after his retirement in 1974, until his death. In 1989, Skinner was diagnosed with leukemia and died on August 18, 1990, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ten days before his death, he was given the lifetime achievement award by the American Psychological Association and gave a talk concerning his work.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner referred to his approach to the study of behavior as "radical behaviorism", which originated in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally. This philosophy of behavioral science assumes that behavior is a consequence of environmental histories of reinforcement (see applied behavior analysis). In his words:


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner's ideas about behaviorism were largely set forth in his first book, "The Behavior of Organisms" (1938). Here, he gives a systematic description of the manner in which environmental variables control behavior. He distinguished two sorts of behavior which are controlled in different ways:


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Both of these sorts of behavior had already been studied experimentally, most notably: respondents, by Ivan Pavlov; and operants, by Edward Thorndike. Skinner's account differed in some ways from earlier ones, and was one of the first accounts to bring them under one roof.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The idea that behavior is strengthened or weakened by its consequences raises several questions. Among the most commonly asked are these:


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner's answer to the first question was very much like Darwin's answer to the question of the origin of a 'new' bodily structure, namely, variation and selection. Similarly, the behavior of an individual varies from moment to moment; a variation that is followed by reinforcement is strengthened and becomes prominent in that individual's behavioral repertoire. "Shaping" was Skinner's term for the gradual modification of behavior by the reinforcement of desired variations. Skinner believed that 'superstitious' behavior can arise when a response happens to be followed by reinforcement to which it is actually unrelated.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The second question, "how is operant behavior controlled?" arises because, to begin with, the behavior is "emitted" without reference to any particular stimulus. Skinner answered this question by saying that a stimulus comes to control an operant if it is present when the response is reinforced and absent when it is not. For example, if lever-pressing only brings food when a light is on, a rat, or a child, will learn to press the lever only when the light is on. Skinner summarized this relationship by saying that a discriminative stimulus (e.g. light or sound) sets the occasion for the reinforcement (food) of the operant (lever-press). This three-term contingency (stimulus-response-reinforcer) is one of Skinner's most important concepts, and sets his theory apart from theories that use only pair-wise associations.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Most behavior of humans cannot easily be described in terms of individual responses reinforced one by one, and Skinner devoted a great deal of effort to the problem of behavioral complexity. Some complex behavior can be seen as a sequence of relatively simple responses, and here Skinner invoked the idea of "chaining". Chaining is based on the fact, experimentally demonstrated, that a discriminative stimulus not only sets the occasion for subsequent behavior, but it can also reinforce a behavior that precedes it. That is, a discriminative stimulus is also a "conditioned reinforcer". For example, the light that sets the occasion for lever pressing may also be used to reinforce "turning around" in the presence of a noise. This results in the sequence "noise – turn-around – light – press lever – food." Much longer chains can be built by adding more stimuli and responses.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: However, Skinner recognized that a great deal of behavior, especially human behavior, cannot be accounted for by gradual shaping or the construction of response sequences. Complex behavior often appears suddenly in its final form, as when a person first finds his way to the elevator by following instructions given at the front desk. To account for such behavior, Skinner introduced the concept of rule-governed behavior. First, relatively simple behaviors come under the control of verbal stimuli: the child learns to "jump," "open the book," and so on. After a large number of responses come under such verbal control, a sequence of verbal stimuli can evoke an almost unlimited variety of complex responses.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Reinforcement, a key concept of behaviorism, is the primary process that shapes and controls behavior, and occurs in two ways: "positive" and "negative". In "The Behavior of Organisms" (1938), Skinner defines "negative reinforcement" to be synonymous with "punishment", i.e. the presentation of an aversive stimulus. This definition would subsequently be re-defined in "Science and Human Behavior" (1953).


title: B. F. Skinner

text: In what has now become the standard set of definitions, "positive" reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior by the occurrence of some event (e.g., praise after some behavior is performed), whereas "negative" reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior by the removal or avoidance of some aversive event (e.g., opening and raising an umbrella over your head on a rainy day is reinforced by the cessation of rain falling on you).


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Both types of reinforcement strengthen behavior, or increase the probability of a behavior reoccurring; the difference being in whether the reinforcing event is something applied (positive reinforcement) or something removed or avoided (negative reinforcement). Punishment can be the "application" of an aversive stimulus/event (positive punishment or punishment by contingent stimulation) or the "removal" of a desirable stimulus (negative punishment or punishment by contingent withdrawal). Though punishment is often used to suppress behavior, Skinner argued that this suppression is temporary and has a number of other, often unwanted, consequences. Extinction is the absence of a rewarding stimulus, which weakens behavior.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Writing in 1981, Skinner pointed out that Darwinian natural selection is, like reinforced behavior, "selection by consequences." Though, as he said, natural selection has now "made its case," he regretted that essentially the same process, "reinforcement", was less widely accepted as underlying human behavior.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner recognized that behavior is typically reinforced more than once, and, together with Charles Ferster, he did an extensive analysis of the various ways in which reinforcements could be arranged over time, calling it the "schedules of reinforcement".


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The most notable schedules of reinforcement studied by Skinner were continuous, interval (fixed or variable), and ratio (fixed or variable). All are methods used in operant conditioning.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: "Skinnerian" principles have been used to create token economies in a number of institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals. When participants behave in desirable ways, their behavior is reinforced with tokens that can be changed for such items as candy, cigarettes, coffee, or the exclusive use of a radio or television set.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Challenged by Alfred North Whitehead during a casual discussion while at Harvard to provide an account of a randomly provided piece of verbal behavior, Skinner set about attempting to extend his then-new functional, inductive approach to the complexity of human verbal behavior. Developed over two decades, his work appeared in the book "Verbal Behavior". Although Noam Chomsky was highly critical of "Verbal Behavior", he conceded that Skinner's "S-R psychology" was worth a review. (behavior analysts reject the "S-R" characterization: operant conditioning involves the emission of a response which then becomes more or less likely depending upon its consequence.)


title: B. F. Skinner

text: "Verbal Behavior" had an uncharacteristically cool reception, partly as a result of Chomsky's review, partly because of Skinner's failure to address or rebut any of Chomsky's criticisms. Skinner's peers may have been slow to adopt the ideas presented in "Verbal Behavior" because of the absence of experimental evidence—unlike the empirical density that marked Skinner's experimental work.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: An operant conditioning chamber (also known as a "Skinner box") is a laboratory apparatus used in the experimental analysis of animal behavior. It was invented by Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. As used by Skinner, the box had a lever (for rats), or a disk in one wall (for pigeons). A press on this "manipulandum" could deliver food to the animal through an opening in the wall, and responses reinforced in this way increased in frequency. By controlling this reinforcement together with discriminative stimuli such as lights and tones, or punishments such as electric shocks, experimenters have used the operant box to study a wide variety of topics, including schedules of reinforcement, discriminative control, delayed response ("memory"), punishment, and so on. By channeling research in these directions, the operant conditioning chamber has had a huge influence on course of research in animal learning and its applications. It enabled great progress on problems that could be studied by measuring the rate, probability, or force of a simple, repeatable response. However, it discouraged the study of behavioral processes not easily conceptualized in such terms—spatial learning, in particular, which is now studied in quite different ways, for example, by the use of the water maze.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The cumulative recorder makes a pen-and-ink record of simple repeated responses. Skinner designed it for use with the operant chamber as a convenient way to record and view the rate of responses such as a lever press or a key peck. In this device, a sheet of paper gradually unrolls over a cylinder. Each response steps a small pen across the paper, starting at one edge; when the pen reaches the other edge, it quickly resets to the initial side. The slope of the resulting ink line graphically displays the rate of the response; for example, rapid responses yield a steeply sloping line on the paper, slow responding yields a line of low slope. The cumulative recorder was a key tool used by Skinner in his analysis of behavior, and it was very widely adopted by other experimenters, gradually falling out of use with the advent of the laboratory computer and use of line graphs. Skinner's major experimental exploration of response rates, presented in his book with Charles Ferster, "Schedules of Reinforcement", is full of cumulative records produced by this device.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The air crib is an easily cleaned, temperature- and humidity-controlled box-bed intended to replace the standard infant crib. After raising one baby, Skinner felt that he could simplify the process for parents and improve the experience for children. He primarily thought of the idea to help his wife cope with the day-to-day tasks of child rearing. Skinner had some specific concerns about raising a baby in the rough environment where he lived in Minnesota. Keeping the child warm was a central priority (Faye, 2010). Though this was the main goal It also was designed to reduce laundry, diaper rash, cradle cap, while still allowing the baby to be more mobile and comfortable, and less prone to cry. Reportedly it had some success in these goals and was used with an estimate of 300 children who were raised in the air crib.   The notorious crib was advertised commercially, Psychology Today tracked down 50 children and ran a short piece on the effects of the air crib. The reports came back positive and that these children and parents enjoyed using the crib (Epstein, 2005). One of these air cribs resides in the gallery at the Center for the History of Psychology in Akron, Ohio (Faye, 2010).


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The air crib was designed with three solid walls and a safety-glass panel at the front which could be lowered to move the baby in and out of the crib. The floor was stretched canvas to inhibit comfort for the child and be an easy material to clean if needed. Sheets were intended to be used over the canvas and were easily rolled off when soiled. Addressing Skinners’ concern for temperature, he created a control box on top of the crib to regulate the temperature and humidity. The control panel also made sure to filter clean air through the crib from below. This crib was higher than most standard cribs to allow for easier access to the child without the need to bend over (Faye, 2010).


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The air crib was a controversial invention. It was popularly characterized as a cruel pen, and it was often compared to Skinner's operant conditioning chamber (aka the "Skinner box"). An article went public and caught the eye of many which was titled, “Baby in a Box,” which contributed to the skepticism about the device (Bjork, 1997). The picture tied to the article was damaging, it showed Skinners’ daughter Deborah in the crib, peering out with her hands and face pressed upon the glass. Skinner also would use the term, “experiment” which likely induced a bad reputation as well.  This association with laboratory animal experimentation discouraged its commercial success, though several companies attempted production.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: In 2004, therapist Lauren Slater repeated unfounded rumors that Skinner had used his baby daughter in some of his experiments His outraged daughter publicly accused Slater of giving new life to old lies about her and her father and of inventing new ones, and faulted her not making a good-faith effort to check her facts before publishing. Deborah has spoken positively about her childhood and has no issues about the air crib.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: The teaching machine was a mechanical device whose purpose was to administer a curriculum of programmed learning. The machine embodies key elements of Skinner's theory of learning and had important implications for education in general and classroom instruction in particular.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: In one incarnation, the machine was a box that housed a list of questions that could be viewed one at a time through a small window. (see picture.) There was also a mechanism through which the learner could respond to each question. Upon delivering a correct answer, the learner would be rewarded.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner advocated the use of teaching machines for a broad range of students (e.g., preschool aged to adult) and instructional purposes (e.g., reading and music). For example, one machine that he envisioned could teach rhythm. He wrote:The instructional potential of the teaching machine stemmed from several factors: it provided automatic, immediate and regular reinforcement without the use of aversive control; the material presented was coherent, yet varied and novel; the pace of learning could be adjusted to suit the individual. As a result, students were interested, attentive, and learned efficiently by producing the desired behavior, "learning by doing."


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Teaching machines, though perhaps rudimentary, were not rigid instruments of instruction. They could be adjusted and improved based upon the students' performance. For example, if a student made many incorrect responses, the machine could be reprogrammed to provide less advanced prompts or questions—the idea being that students acquire behaviors most efficiently if they make few errors. Multiple-choice formats were not well-suited for teaching machines because they tended to increase student mistakes, and the contingencies of reinforcement were relatively uncontrolled.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Not only useful in teaching explicit skills, machines could also promote the development of a repertoire of behaviors that Skinner called self-management. Effective self-management means attending to stimuli appropriate to a task, avoiding distractions, reducing the opportunity of reward for competing behaviors, and so on. For example, machines encourage students to pay attention before receiving a reward. Skinner contrasted this with the common classroom practice of initially capturing students' attention (e.g., with a lively video) and delivering a reward (e.g., entertainment) before the students have actually performed any relevant behavior. This practice fails to reinforce correct behavior and actually counters the development of self-management.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner pioneered the use of teaching machines in the classroom, especially at the primary level. Today computers run software that performs similar teaching tasks, and there has been a resurgence of interest in the topic related to the development of adaptive learning systems.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: During World War II, the US Navy required a weapon effective against surface ships, such as the German "Bismarck" class battleships. Although missile and TV technology existed, the size of the primitive guidance systems available rendered automatic guidance impractical. To solve this problem, Skinner initiated Project Pigeon, which was intended to provide a simple and effective guidance system. Skinner trained pigeons through operant conditioning to peck a camera obscura screen showing incoming targets on individual screens (Schultz-Figueroa, 2019). This system divided the nose cone of a missile into three compartments, with a pigeon placed in each. Within the ship, the three lenses projected an image of distant objects onto a screen in front of each bird. Thus, when the missile was launched from an aircraft within sight of an enemy ship, an image of the ship would appear on the screen. The screen was hinged, which connected the screens to the bomb’s guidance system. This was done through four small rubber pneumatic tubes that were attached to each side of the frame, which directed a constant airflow to a pneumatic pickup system that controlled the thrusters of the bomb. Resulting in the missile being guided towards the targeted ship, through just the peck coming from the pigeon (Schultz-Figueroa, 2019).


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Despite an effective demonstration, the project was abandoned, and eventually more conventional solutions, such as those based on radar, became available. Skinner complained that "our problem was no one would take us seriously." Before the project was completely abandoned it was tested extensively in the laboratory. After the United States Army ultimately denied it the United States Naval Research Laboratory picked up Skinner’s Research and renamed it Project ORCON, which was a contraction of “organic” and “control”. Skinner worked closely with the US Naval Research Laboratory continuously testing the pigeon’s tracking capacity for guiding missiles to their intended targets. In the end, the pigeons’ performance and accuracy relied on so many uncontrollable factors that Project ORCON, like Project Pigeon before it, was again discontinued. It was never used in the field (Schultz-Figueroa, 2019)


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Early in his career Skinner became interested in "latent speech" and experimented with a device he called the "verbal summator". This device can be thought of as an auditory version of the Rorschach inkblots. When using the device, human participants listened to incomprehensible auditory "garbage" but often read meaning into what they heard. Thus, as with the Rorschach blots, the device was intended to yield overt behavior that projected subconscious thoughts. Skinner's interest in projective testing was brief, but he later used observations with the summator in creating his theory of verbal behavior. The device also led other researchers to invent new tests such as the tautophone test, the auditory apperception test, and the Azzageddi test.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Along with psychology, education has also been influenced by Skinner's views, which are extensively presented in his book "The Technology of Teaching", as well as reflected in Fred S. Keller's "Personalized System of Instruction" and Ogden R. Lindsley's "Precision Teaching".


title: B. F. Skinner

text: He recommended bringing students' behavior under appropriate control by providing reinforcement only in the presence of stimuli relevant to the learning task. Because he believed that human behavior can be affected by small consequences, something as simple as "the opportunity to move forward after completing one stage of an activity" can be an effective reinforcer. Skinner was convinced that, to learn, a student must engage in behavior, and not just passively receive information.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner believed that effective teaching must be based on positive reinforcement which is, he argued, more effective at changing and establishing behavior than punishment. He suggested that the main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid punishment. For example, if a child is forced to practice playing an instrument, the child comes to associate practicing with punishment and thus develops feelings of dreadfulness and wishes to avoid practicing the instrument. This view had obvious implications for the then widespread practice of rote learning and punitive discipline in education. The use of educational activities as punishment may induce rebellious behavior such as vandalism or absence.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Because teachers are primarily responsible for modifying student behavior, Skinner argued that teachers must learn effective ways of teaching. In "The Technology of Teaching" (1968), Skinner has a chapter on why teachers fail: He says that teachers have not been given an in-depth understanding of teaching and learning. Without knowing the science underpinning teaching, teachers fall back on procedures that work poorly or not at all, such as:


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner is popularly known mainly for his books "Walden Two" (1948) and "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," (for which he made the cover of "Time" magazine). The former describes a fictional "experimental community" in 1940s United States. The productivity and happiness of citizens in this community is far greater than in the outside world because the residents practice scientific social planning and use operant conditioning in raising their children.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: "Walden Two", like Thoreau's "Walden", champions a lifestyle that does not support war, or foster competition and social strife. It encourages a lifestyle of minimal consumption, rich social relationships, personal happiness, satisfying work, and leisure. In 1967, Kat Kinkade and others founded the Twin Oaks Community, using" Walden Two" as a blueprint. The community still exists and continues to use the Planner-Manager system and other aspects of the community described in Skinner's book, though behavior modification is not a community practice.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: In "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", Skinner suggests that a technology of behavior could help to make a better society. We would, however, have to accept that an autonomous agent is not the driving force of our actions. Skinner offers alternatives to punishment, and challenges his readers to use science and modern technology to construct a better society.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner's political writings emphasized his hopes that an effective and human science of behavioral control – a technology of human behavior – could help with problems as yet unsolved and often aggravated by advances in technology such as the atomic bomb. Indeed, one of Skinner's goals was to prevent humanity from destroying itself. He saw political activity as the use of aversive or non-aversive means to control a population. Skinner favored the use of positive reinforcement as a means of control, citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel "" as an example of literature that "did not fear the power of positive reinforcement."


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner's book, "Walden Two", presents a vision of a decentralized, localized society, which applies a practical, scientific approach and behavioral expertise to deal peacefully with social problems. (For example, his views led him to oppose corporal punishment in schools, and he wrote a letter to the California Senate that helped lead it to a ban on spanking.) Skinner's utopia is both a thought experiment and a rhetorical piece. In "Walden Two", Skinner answers the problem that exists in many utopian novels – "What is the Good Life?" The book's answer is a life of friendship, health, art, a healthy balance between work and leisure, a minimum of unpleasantness, and a feeling that one has made worthwhile contributions to a society in which resources are ensured, in part, by minimizing consumption.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior." He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals", and that this experiment shed light on human behavior:Modern behavioral psychologists have disputed Skinner's "superstition" explanation for the behaviors he recorded. Subsequent research (e.g. Staddon and Simmelhag, 1971), while finding similar behavior, failed to find support for Skinner's "adventitious reinforcement" explanation for it. By looking at the timing of different behaviors within the interval, Staddon and Simmelhag were able to distinguish two classes of behavior: the "terminal response", which occurred in anticipation of food, and "interim responses", that occurred earlier in the interfood interval and were rarely contiguous with food. Terminal responses seem to reflect classical (as opposed to operant) conditioning, rather than adventitious reinforcement, guided by a process like that observed in 1968 by Brown and Jenkins in their "autoshaping" procedures. The causation of interim activities (such as the schedule-induced polydipsia seen in a similar situation with rats) also cannot be traced to adventitious reinforcement and its details are still obscure (Staddon, 1977).


title: B. F. Skinner

text: American linguist Noam Chomsky published a review of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" in the linguistics journal "Language" in 1959. Chomsky argued that Skinner's attempt to use behaviorism to explain human language amounted to little more than word games. Conditioned responses could not account for a child's ability to create or understand an infinite variety of novel sentences. Chomsky's review has been credited with launching the cognitive revolution in psychology and other disciplines. Skinner, who rarely responded directly to critics, never formally replied to Chomsky's critique, but endorsed Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1972 reply.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Many academics in the 1960s believed that Skinner's silence on the question meant Chomsky's criticism had been justified. But MacCorquodale points out that Chomsky's criticism did not focus on Skinner's "Verbal Behavior", but rather attacked a confusion of ideas from behavioral psychology. MacCorquodale also regretted Chomsky's aggressive tone. Furthermore, Chomsky had aimed at delivering a definitive refutation of Skinner by citing dozens of animal instinct and animal learning studies. On the one hand, he argued that the studies on animal instinct proved that animal behavior is innate, and therefore Skinner was mistaken. On the other, Chomsky's opinion of the studies on learning was that one cannot draw an analogy from animal studies to human behavior—or, that research on animal instinct refutes research on animal learning.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Chomsky also reviewed Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", using the same basic motives as his "Verbal Behavior" review. Among Chomsky's criticisms were that Skinner's laboratory work could not be extended to humans, that when it was extended to humans it represented "scientistic" behavior attempting to emulate science but which was not scientific, that Skinner was not a scientist because he rejected the hypothetico-deductive model of theory testing, and that Skinner had no science of behavior.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: Skinner has been repeatedly criticized for his supposed animosity towards Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and psychodynamic psychology. Some have argued, however, that Skinner shared several of Freud's assumptions, and that he was influenced by Freudian points of view in more than one field, among them the analysis of defense mechanisms, such as repression. To study such phenomena, Skinner even designed his own projective test, the "verbal summator" described above.


title: B. F. Skinner

text: As understood by Skinner, ascribing "dignity" to individuals involves giving them credit for their actions. To say "Skinner is brilliant" means that Skinner is an originating force. If Skinner's determinist theory is right, he is merely the focus of his environment. He is not an originating force and he had no choice in saying the things he said or doing the things he did. Skinner's environment and genetics both allowed and compelled him to write his book. Similarly, the environment and genetic potentials of the advocates of freedom and dignity cause them to resist the reality that their own activities are deterministically grounded. J. E. R. Staddon has argued the compatibilist position; Skinner's determinism is not in any way contradictory to traditional notions of reward and punishment, as he believed.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Andrew John Ridgeley (born 26 January 1963) is an English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer, best known for his work in the 1980s in the musical duo Wham!.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Ridgeley was born in Windlesham, Surrey, England, to parents Jennifer John (née Dunlop) and Alberto Mario Zacharia (who later changed his surname to Ridgeley); his mother is Scottish and his father is of Italian/Egyptian descent. Ridgeley grew up in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and attended Bushey Meads School. His mother was a schoolteacher at Bushey Heath Primary School while his father worked for Canon. When George Michael enrolled at school, Ridgeley volunteered to take him under his wing.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: After years of playing in various music groups, most notably The Executive, Michael and Ridgeley formed the duo Wham! in 1981. Michael was the lead vocalist and primary songwriter, and played keyboards, while Ridgeley played guitar and performed backing vocals. They approached various record labels with a homemade demo tape–which took 10 minutes to record in Ridgeley's living room–and signed with Innervision Records (distributed by CBS Records). After one album, the duo signed with Epic Records/CBS.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Wham! enjoyed worldwide success from 1982 to 1986, selling more than 35 million records worldwide. They made their U.S. debut on Dick Clark's "American Bandstand", becoming the only 1980s British act to have three No. 1 singles on both the U.K. and U.S. charts.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: In 1984, Ridgeley underwent surgery to have his septum straightened to improve his breathing after having broken his nose as a child of nine. After photos were published in British newspapers showing Ridgeley's bandaged face, Wham!'s manager, Simon Napier-Bell, fabricated a story that the bandages were the result of Ridgeley having been hit in the nose in a nightclub. After days of tabloid headlines, the true reason was revealed.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: In 1984, Wham! charted two U.K. No. 1 singles, and were competing that year with pop rivals Duran Duran to be Britain's biggest pop act. Toward this end, Napier-Bell devised a publicity scheme that he believed would turn them into major international stars: In April 1985, he took Wham! to China for a 10-day visit. They gained huge worldwide media attention when Wham! became the first Western pop group to play in China, first in Hong Kong for two warm-up shows, then a show in Beijing in front of 15,000 people at the Worker's Gymnasium, and finally, one show in Canton. The visit was recorded for a documentary film titled "". In 1985, Ridgeley performed at the Live Aid charity concert with other backing singers, while Michael performed with Elton John.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: By 1985, Ridgeley had developed a reputation in the tabloid press as a drunken party animal at nightclubs; the British tabloids referred to him as "Animal Andy" and "Randy Andy". He was ordered to leave the official party at the end of the Live Aid concert in 1985 for his wild behaviour.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: In 1986, "The Edge of Heaven" became Wham!'s fourth and final U.K. No. 1 single. With Michael keen to move into a more adult market, the duo broke up after a farewell concert dubbed "The Final" in front of 72,000 people at Wembley Stadium on Saturday, 28 June 1986.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Shortly after the breakup, Ridgeley moved to Monaco and tried his hand at Formula Three motor racing. Meeting with little success, he moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of a career in acting. He returned to Britain permanently in 1990.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: CBS Records (later Sony Music), having taken up the option on Wham!'s contract that specified solo albums from Michael and Ridgeley, released a guitar- and drum-driven solo recording from Ridgeley, "Son of Albert", in 1990. His brother Paul, an occasional percussionist for Bananarama, played drums on the album. The first single from the album was "Shake"; it reached No. 16 on the Australian singles chart and No. 58 in the UK Singles Chart. "Shake" was the 81st highest-selling single of 1990 in Australia. The second single, "Red Dress", charted in Australia but peaked outside the top 100. "Son of Albert" sold poorly, failing to make the top 75 in the UK Albums Chart. It was also one of the worst received albums of 1990 among critics, achieving only half a star in a savage "Rolling Stone" magazine review. As a result, CBS passed up the option of a second album. Ridgeley later said, "It was disappointing and depressing to receive quite such a beating over that album."


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: On 27 January 1991, Ridgeley joined Michael on stage for a few songs at the encore of his Rock in Rio event at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Since 1991, Ridgeley has generally shunned publicity, but he did agree to give an on-camera interview for the first time since the split in a 2005 documentary, "", about the life of George Michael. Ridgeley also appeared as a studio guest on the first series of the BBC 2 programme "Fantasy Football League" in 1994.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: In 2005, Ridgeley and Michael made plans to reunite as Wham! for Live 8, but Ridgeley reportedly pulled out at the last minute. In 2012, Michael dismissed rumours that they were set for a reunion to mark the 30th anniversary of their first record. Michael said that there was no truth in speculation the group would reform for a one-off concert.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Upon hearing of Michael's death on 25 December 2016, Ridgeley paid his respects on Twitter, saying, "Heartbroken at the loss of my beloved friend Yog."


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Ridgeley performed a cameo role in "Last Christmas", a 2019 film that featured many songs by "Wham!".


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Since 1982, Ridgeley has reportedly amassed £10 million from sales and royalties of records. Much of his income comes from the 1984 single "Careless Whisper", which has sold six million copies worldwide and, as of 2020, was the 37th best-selling single of all time in the United Kingdom, having sold over 1.3 million copies. Ridgeley still receives thousands of pounds a year from his share of "Careless Whisper" royalties.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: Ridgeley has several times participated in the Dallaglio Cycle Slam, a charity bike ride for the Dallaglio Rugby Works, established in 2009 by former England rugby captain Lawrence Dallaglio, which helps young people tackle life in a positive way with the help of rugby.


title: Andrew Ridgeley

text: From 1990 to 2017, Ridgeley was in a relationship with Keren Woodward, a member of the group Bananarama. They lived with her son in a restored 15th-century farm property near Wadebridge, Cornwall, England. In 2022, Ridgeley began dating socialite Amanda Cronin.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-54 and T-55 tanks are a series of Soviet main battle tanks introduced in the years following the Second World War. The first T-54 prototype was completed at Nizhny Tagil by the end of 1945. From the late 1950s, the T-54 eventually became the main tank for armoured units of the Soviet Army, armies of the Warsaw Pact countries, and many others. T-54s and T-55s have been involved in many of the world's armed conflicts since their introduction in the second half of the 20th century.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-54/55 series is the most-produced tank in history. Estimated production numbers for the series range from 96,500 to 100,000. They were replaced by the T-62, T-64, T-72, T-80 and T-90 tanks in the Soviet and Russian armies, but remain in use by up to 50 other armies worldwide, some having received sophisticated retrofitting.


title: T-54/T-55

text: During the Cold War, Soviet tanks never directly faced their NATO adversaries in combat in Europe. However, the T-54/55's first appearance in the West around the period of the 1950s (then the beginning of the Cold War) spurred the United Kingdom to develop a new tank gun, the Royal Ordnance L7, and the United States to develop the M60 tank.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The Soviet T-34 medium tank of the 1940s is CONSIDERED to have the best balance of firepower (F-34 tank gun 76.2 mm gun), protection and mobility for its cost of any tank of its time in the world. Its development never stopped throughout the Second World War and it continued to perform well; however, the designers could not incorporate the latest technologies or major developments as vital tank production could not be interrupted during wartime.


title: T-54/T-55

text: In 1943, the Morozov Design Bureau resurrected the pre-war T-34M development project and created the T-44 tank. Thanks to a space-efficient torsion-bar suspension, a novel transverse engine mount, and the removal of the hull machine-gunner's crew position, the T-44 had cross country performance at least as good as the T-34, but with substantially superior armour and a much more powerful 85 mm gun.


title: T-54/T-55

text: By the time the T-44 was ready for production, the T-34 had also been modified to fit the same gun. Although the T-44 was superior in most other ways, by this time T-34 production was in full swing and the massive numbers of T-34s being built offset any advantage to smaller numbers of a superior design. The T-44 was produced in only small numbers, around 2,000 being completed during the war. Instead, the designers continued to use the design as the basis for further improved guns, experimenting with a 122 mm design, but later deciding a 100 mm gun was a better alternative.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Efforts to fit the 100 mm gun to the T-44 demonstrated that small changes to the design would greatly improve the combination. The main issue was a larger turret ring, which suggested slightly enlarging the hull. A prototype of the new design, about longer and only 10 cm wider, was completed in 1945. This model looked almost identical to the original T-44, albeit with a much larger gun.


title: T-54/T-55

text: In testing, there were several drawbacks that needed correcting and many alterations that had to be made to the vehicle's design. It was decided to begin serial production of the new vehicle and the vehicle officially entered service in April 1946. It would go into production in Nizhny Tagil in 1947 and Kharkiv in 1948.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Production of the initial series of T-54s began slowly as 1,490 modifications were made. The Red Army received a tank that was superior to World War II designs and theoretically better than the newest tanks of potential opponents. The 100 mm gun fired BR-412 series full-calibre APHE ammunition, which had superior penetration ability when compared to the T-34 that it replaced.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The serial production version, designated T-54-1, differed from the second T-54 prototype. It had thicker hull armour (80 mm on the sides, 30 mm on the roof and 20 mm on the bottom). As production ramped up, quality problems emerged. Production was stopped and an improved T-54-2 ("Ob'yekt" 137R) version was designed. Several changes were made and a new turret was fitted. The new dome-shaped turret with flat sides was inspired by the turret from the IS-3 heavy tank; it is similar to the later T-54 turret but with a distinctive overhang at the rear. It also had a shorter bustle.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The fender machine guns were removed in favour of a single bow-mounted machine gun. The transmission was modernised and the track was widened to 580 mm. The T-54-2 entered production in 1949, at Stalin Ural Tank Factory No. 183 (Uralvagonzavod). In 1951, a second modernization was made, designated T-54-3 ("Ob'yekt" 137Sh), which had a new turret without side undercuts, and the new TSh-2-22 telescopic gunner's sight instead of the TSh-20. The tank featured the TDA smoke generating system. A command version was built, the T-54K ("komandirskiy"), with a second R-113 radio.


title: T-54/T-55

text: In the beginning of the 1950s, the personnel of the OKB-520 design bureau of the Stalin Ural Tank Factory No. 183 (Uralvagonzavod) had been changed considerably. Morozov was replaced by Kolesnikow, who in turn was replaced by Leonid N. Kartsev in March 1953. The first decision of the new designer was to fit the 100 mm D-10T tank gun with the STP-1 "Gorizont" vertical stabilizer. The new tank gun received the designation D-10TG and was fitted into the T-54's turret.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The new tank received night vision equipment for the driver and was designated T-54A ("Ob'yekt" 137G). Originally, this had a small muzzle counter-weight, which was later replaced with a fume extractor. It was equipped with an OPVT wading snorkel, the TSh-2A-22 telescopic sight, TVN-1 infrared driver's periscope and IR headlight, a new R-113 radio, multi-stage engine air filter and radiator controls for improved engine performance, an electrical oil pump, a bilge pump, an automatic fire extinguisher and extra fuel tanks.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The tank officially entered production in 1954 and service in 1955. It served as a basis for T-54AK command tank, with additional R-112 radio set (front line tanks were equipped with R-113 radio set), TNA-2 navigational device, ammunition load for the main gun decreased by 5 rounds and the AB-1-P/30 charging unit, which was produced in small numbers. In October 1954 a T-54A tank, designated as T-54M ("Ob'yekt" 139) served as a testbed for new D-54T and D-54TS 100 mm smoothbore guns and "Raduga" and "Molniya" stabilization systems, which were later used in the T-62. These were not completely successful, so further T-55 development continued to use the D-10 series guns. It was fitted with V-54-6 engine developing 581 hp (433 kW). It never went into production.


title: T-54/T-55

text: A new version, based on T-54A, designated T-54B ("Ob'yekt" 137G2), was designed in 1955. It was fitted with a new 100 mm D-10T2S tank gun with STP-2 "Tsyklon" 2-plane stabilizer. It entered production in 1957. During the last four months of production, the new tanks were equipped with an L-2 "Luna" infrared searchlight, a TPN-1-22-11 IR gunner's sight, and an OU-3 IR commander's searchlight. Modern APFSDS ammunition was developed, dramatically enhancing the penetrative performance of the gun to keep it competitive with NATO armour developments. T-54B served as the basis for T-54BK command tank, which had exactly the same additional equipment as the T-54AK command tank.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Trials with nuclear weapons showed that a T-54 could survive a 2–15 kt nuclear charge at a range of more than from the epicentre, but the crew had a chance of surviving at a minimum of . It was decided to create an NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) protection system which would start working 0.3 seconds after detecting gamma radiation.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The task of creating a basic PAZ ("Protivoatomnaya Zashchita") NBC protection system offering protection against the blast of a nuclear weapon and (radioactive) particulate filtration, but not against external gamma radiation or gas, was given to the KB-60 design bureau in Kharkiv and was completed in 1956. The documentation was sent to Uralvagonzavod. It was decided to increase the tank's abilities by changing its construction and introducing new production technologies. Many of those changes were initially tested on the T-54M ("Ob'yekt" 139).


title: T-54/T-55

text: The tank was fitted with the new V-55 12-cylinder four-stroke one-chamber, 38.88-litre water-cooled diesel engine developing 581 hp (433 kW). Engine power was increased by raising the pressure of the fuel delivery and charging degree. The designers planned to introduce a heating system for the engine compartment and MC-1 diesel fuel filter. The engine was to be started pneumatically with the use of an AK-150S charger and an electric starter. This eliminated the need for the tank to carry a tank filled with air. To allow easier access during maintenance and repairs, it was decided to change hatches over the engine compartment. To increase the operational range, fuel tanks were added to the front of the hull, increasing the overall fuel capacity to .


title: T-54/T-55

text: The ammunition load for the main gun was increased from 34 to 45, with 18 shells stored in so-called "wet containers" located in hull fuel tanks (the concept for which came from Kartsev's cancelled "Ob'yekt" 140). The ammunition load included high explosive-fragmentation and anti-tank rounds and designers also planned to introduce the BK5M high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds which penetrated thick armour. The TPKU commander's vision device was replaced by either the TPKUB or TPKU-2B. The gunner received a TNP-165 vision device.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The loader's hatch-mounted 12.7 mm DShK anti-aircraft heavy machine gun was dropped, because it was deemed worthless against high-performance jets. The tank was supposed to be equipped with the "Rosa" fire protection system. The tank had a thicker turret casting and the improved two-plane gun stabilization system from the T-54B, and night vision fighting equipment. To balance the weight of the new equipment, the armour on the back of the hull was thinned slightly.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-55 was superior to the IS-2, IS-3, and T-10 heavy tanks in many respects, including the rate of fire of the gun (at least four compared to fewer than three rounds per minute). Despite somewhat thinner frontal turret armour ( instead of ) it compared favourably with the IS-3, due to its improved antitank gun and better mobility. Heavy tanks soon fell from favour, with only 350 IS-3s produced.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The old model of highly mobile medium tanks and heavily armoured heavy tanks was replaced by a new paradigm: the "main battle tank". Parallel developments in the West would produce similar results. Kartsev combined all the ongoing improvements being offered, or planned, on the T-54 into one design. This became the "Ob'yekt" 155, and entered production at Uralvagonzavod 1 January 1958 as the T-55. It was accepted for service with the Red Army on 8 May. It suffered a significant lapse in one area: there was no antiaircraft machine gun, which had been present on the T-54.


title: T-54/T-55

text: After 1959, it served as a basis for the T-55K command tank which was equipped with an additional R-112 radio set, an AB-1-P/30 fuel powered accumulator charging unit, and TPN-1-22-11 night vision sight. All this additional equipment made it necessary to decrease the ammunition load for the main gun to 37 rounds and eliminate the bow machine gun. In the beginning of the 1960s, a T-55K was experimentally fitted with a "Uran" TV relay apparatus for battlefield surveillance. The tank was fitted with an external camera, the picture from which was relayed to a receiver in a BTR-50PU command vehicle. There was an observation camera mounted on a folding mast which was in turn mounted on a UAZ 69 car. The range within which the picture could be relayed varied between .


title: T-54/T-55

text: In 1961, a T-55 tank was used to test the "Almaz" TV complex, which was supposed to replace the standard observation devices right after a nuclear explosion or while fording a body of water. There was a camera mounted on the hull for the driver and two cameras mounted on the turret, one for aiming and one for observation, and the picture from the cameras was relayed to two control screens. The tank had the front hull fuel tanks and bow machine gun removed. The commander was seated in the driver's usual position while the driver sat next to him.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The cameras allowed battlefield observation and firing during daytime at ranges between . Because of the low quality of the equipment, the trials gave negative results. In the beginning of the 1960s, the OKB-29 design bureau in Omsk was working on adapting the tank to use a GTD-3T gas turbine engine developing 700 hp (522 kW). One T-55 tank fitted with this gas turbine engine passed trials but was deemed unsatisfactory and the design did not go into production.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The Omsk OKB-29 group tested three experimental T-55 tanks (designated "Ob'yekt" 612) between 1962 and 1965 that were fitted with an automatic gearbox controlled by electro-hydraulic systems. The trials found that such gearboxes were prone to frequent breakdowns in tanks. At the same time the "Ob'yekt" 155ML, a T-55 fitted with a launcher for three 9M14 ""Malyutka"" (NATO code: AT-3 Sagger) ATGMs mounted on the rear of the turret, was tested. Along with standard tanks a flamethrower-armed version was designed (designated TO-55 ("Ob'yekt" 482)), which was produced until 1962. It was fitted with 460-litre tanks filled with flammable liquid instead of the frontal hull fuel tanks. The flamethrower replaced the coaxial machine gun. This was a much better way to mount a flamethrower than in the experimental "Ob'yekt" 483, based on the T-54 tank, where the flamethrower replaced the main gun. TO-55 flamethrower tanks were withdrawn from service in 1993.


title: T-54/T-55

text: In 1961, development of improved NBC protection systems began. The goal was to protect the crew from fast neutrons; adequate protection against gamma radiation was provided by the thick armour and a PAZ basic NBC protection system.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The POV plasticized lead antiradiation lining was developed to provide the needed protection. It was installed in the interior, requiring the driver's hatch and the coamings over the turret hatches to be noticeably enlarged. This liner had the added benefit of protecting the crew from fragments of penetrated armour.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The tank was equipped with a full PAZ/FVU chemical filtration system. The coaxial 7.62 mm SGMT machine gun was replaced by a 7.62 mm PKT machine gun. The hull was lengthened from 6.04 m to 6.2 m. The hull machine gun was removed, making space for six more main gun rounds. These changes increased the weight of the vehicle to 38 tonnes.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The design work was done by OKB-520 design bureau of Uralvagonzavod under the leadership of Leonid N. Kartsev. The T-55A served as the basis for the T-55AK command tank.


title: T-54/T-55

text: In its long service life, the T-55 has been upgraded many times. Early T-55s were fitted with a new TSh-2B-32P sight. In 1959, some tanks received mountings for the PT-55 mine clearing system or the BTU/BTU-55 plough. In 1967, the improved 3BM-8 APDS round, which could penetrate 275 mm thick armour at a range of 2 km, was introduced. In 1970, new and old T-55 tanks had the loader's hatch modified to mount the 12.7 mm DShK machine gun, to deal with the threat of attack helicopters. Starting in 1974, T-55 tanks received the KTD-1 or KTD-2 laser rangefinder in an armoured box over the mantlet of the main gun, and the R-123 or R-123M radio set. Simultaneously, efforts were made to modernize and increase the lifespan of the drive train.


title: T-54/T-55

text: During production, the T-55A was frequently modernised. In 1965, a new track was introduced that could be used for between 2,000 km and 3,000 km, which was twice the range of the old track. It needed a new drive sprocket, with 14 teeth instead of 13. Since 1974, T-55A tanks were equipped with a KTD-1 "Newa" rangefinder and a TSzS-32PM sight. All T-55A tanks were equipped with the TPN-1-22-11 night sight. The R-113 radio set was replaced by a R-123 radio set. Late production models had rubber side skirts and a driver's windshield for use during longer stints.


title: T-54/T-55

text: T-54 and T-55 tanks continued to be upgraded, refitted, and modernised into the 1990s. Advances in armour-piercing and high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) shaped charge ammunition would improve the gun's antitank abilities in the 1960s and 1980s.


title: T-54/T-55

text: A wide array of upgrades in different price ranges are provided by many manufacturers in different countries, intended to bring the T-54/55 up to the abilities of newer MBTs, at a lower cost. Upgrades include new engines, explosive reactive armour, new main armament such as 120 mm or 125 mm guns, active protection systems, and fire control systems with range-finders or thermal sights. These improvements make it a potent main battle tank (MBT) for the low-end budget, even to this day.


title: T-54/T-55

text: One of these upgrade packages was produced by Cadillac Gage Textron and a prototype named the Jaguar was produced. The Jaguar looked quite different from its predecessors. A newly designed turret was formed by flat armour plates installed at different angles. The hull top was new. The engine compartment and fuel tanks on the shelves over the tracks were armour-protected. The Soviet-made 100 mm gun was replaced with the American M68 105 mm rifled gun fitted with a thermal sleeve. A Marconi fire control system which was originally developed for the American light tank Stingray was fitted. The vehicle incorporated a Cadillac-Gage weapon stabilizer and gunner's sight equipped with an integral laser rangefinder. The power pack inherited by the Jaguar from the Stingray underwent only minor alterations and comprised the Detroit Diesel 8V-92TA engine and XTG-411 automatic transmission. In 1989, two Jaguar tanks were manufactured. The chassis were provided by PRC, while the hull tops, turrets and powerplants were manufactured by Cadillac Gage Textron.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Another prototype upgrade package was produced by Teledyne Continental Motors (now General Dynamics Land Systems) for the Egyptian Army and was known as the T-54E. After further modifications and trials it was sent into mass production and received the designation Ramses II.


title: T-54/T-55

text: As late as 2013, Ukrainian companies were reportedly developing T-55 main battle tank upgrades targeting the export market. The Type 59 is still in production, in several variants.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-54 and T-55 have a cabin layout shared with many post-World War II tanks, with the fighting compartment in the front, engine compartment in the rear, and a dome-shaped turret in the center of the hull. The driver's hatch is on the front left of the hull roof. In the turret, the commander is seated on the left, with the gunner to his front and the loader on the right. The tank has a "flat track", meaning no support rollers, the suspension has the drive sprocket at the rear, and dead track. Engine exhaust is on the left fender. There is a prominent gap between the first and second road wheel pairs, a distinguishing feature from the T-62, which has progressively larger spaces between road wheels towards the rear.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-54 and T-55 tanks are outwardly very similar and difficult to distinguish visually. Many T-54s were also updated to T-55 standards, so the distinction is often downplayed with the collective name "T-54/55". Soviet tanks were factory-overhauled every 7,000 km and often given minor technology updates. Many states have added or modified the tank's equipment; India, for example, affixed fake fume extractors to its T-54s and T-55s so that its gunners would not confuse them with Pakistani Type 59s.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The older T-54 can be distinguished from the T-55 by a dome-shaped ventilator on the front right of the turret and a driver-operated SGMT 7.62 mm machine gun mounted to fire through a tiny hole in the center of the hull's front. Early T-54s lacked a gun fume extractor, had an undercut at the turret's rear, and a distinctive "pig-snout" gun mantlet.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-54/55 tanks are mechanically simple and robust. They are very simple to operate compared to Western tanks, and do not require a high level of training or education in their crewmen. The T-54/55 is a relatively small main battle tank, presenting a smaller target for its opponents to hit. The tanks have good mobility thanks to their relatively light weight (which permits easy transport by rail or flatbed truck and allows crossing of lighter bridges), wide tracks (which give lower ground pressure and hence good mobility on soft ground), a good cold-weather start-up system and a snorkel that allows river crossings.


title: T-54/T-55

text: According to Zaloga, "By the standards of the 1950s, the T-54 was an excellent tank combining lethal firepower, excellent armour protection and good reliability" while remaining a significantly smaller and lighter tank than its NATO contemporaries—the US M48 Patton tank and the British Centurion tank. The 100 mm D-10T tank gun of the T-54 and the T-55 was also more powerful than its Western counterparts at that time (the M48 Patton initially carried a 90 mm tank gun and the Centurion Mk. 3 carried the 20-pounder (84 mm) tank gun).


title: T-54/T-55

text: This advantage lasted until the T-54 began to be countered by newer Western developments like the M60 main battle tank and upgraded Centurions and M48 Pattons using the 105 mm rifled Royal Ordnance L7 or M68 gun. Due to the lack of a sub-caliber round for the 100 mm gun, and the tank's simple fire-control system, the T-54/55 was forced to rely on HEAT ammunition to engage tanks at long range well into the 1960s, despite the relative inaccuracy of this ammunition at long ranges. The Soviets considered this acceptable for a potential European conflict, until the development of composite armour began reducing the effectiveness of HEAT warheads and kinetic energy penetrator sabot rounds were developed for the D-10T gun.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Nevertheless, T-54/55 tanks had their drawbacks. Small size is achieved at the expense of interior space and ergonomics, which causes practical difficulties, as it constrains the physical movements of the crew and slows operation of controls and equipment. This is a common trait of most Soviet tanks and hence height limits were set for certain tank crew positions in the Soviet Army, whereas other armies may not include crew member height limits as standards.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The low turret profile of the tanks prevents them from depressing their main guns by more than 5° since the breech would strike the ceiling when fired, which limits the ability to cover terrain by fire from a hull-down position on a reverse slope. As in most tanks of that generation, the internal ammunition supply is not shielded, increasing the risk that any enemy penetration of the fighting compartment could cause a catastrophic secondary explosion. The T-54 lacks NBC protection, and a turret basket, which meant that crewmen had to physically rotate and keep up with a rotating turrent as the hull in which they stood didn't move with the turret. Additionally, early models also lacked gun stabilization. Most of these problems were corrected in the otherwise largely identical T-55 tank.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Together, the T-54/55 tanks have been manufactured in the tens of thousands, and many still remain in reserve, or even in front-line use among lower-technology fighting forces. Abundance and age together make these tanks cheap and easy to purchase.


title: T-54/T-55

text: T-54-1 production was slow at first, as only 3 vehicles were built in 1946 and 22 in 1947. 285 T-54-1 tanks were built in 1948 by Stalin Ural Tank Factory No. 183 (Uralvagonzavod); by then it had completely replaced T-44 production at Uralvagonzavod, and Kharkiv Diesel Factory No. 75 (KhPZ). Production was stopped because of a low level of production quality and frequent breakdowns. The T-54-2 entered production in 1949 at Uralvagonzavod, which produced 423 tanks by the end of 1950. It replaced the T-34 in production at the Omsk Factory No. 183 in 1950. In 1951, over 800 T-54-2 tanks were produced. The T-54-2 remained in production until 1952. The T-54A was produced between 1955 and 1957. The T-54B was produced between 1957 and April 1959. The T-55 was produced by Uralvagonzavod between 1958 and 1962. The T-55K command tank was produced from 1959. The TO-55 ("Ob'yekt" 482) flamethrower tank was produced until 1962.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Overall 35,000 T-54-1, T-54-2, T-54 (T-54-3), T-54A, T-54B, T-54AK1, T-54AK2, T-54BK1 and T-54BK2 tanks were produced between 1946 and 1958 and 27,500 T-55, T-55A, T-55K1, T-55K2, T-55K3, T-55AK1, T-55AK2 and T-55AK3 tanks were produced between 1955 and 1981.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Poland produced 3,000 T-54, T-54A, T-54AD and T-54AM tanks between 1956 and 1964 and 7,000 T-55 (between 1964 and 1968), T-55L, T-55AD-1 and T-55AD-2 tanks (between 1968 and 1979).


title: T-54/T-55

text: Czechoslovakia produced 2,700 T-54A, T-54AM, T-54AK, T-54AMK tanks (between 1957 and 1966) and 8,300 T-55 and T-55A tanks (between 1964 and 1983; T-55A was probably produced since 1968). Most of them were for export.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-54/55 and the T-62 were the two most common tanks in Soviet inventory—in the mid-1970s the two tank types together comprised approximately 85% of the Soviet Army's tanks.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Soviet T-54 tanks served in combat during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and a few were successfully knocked out by the defending anti-Soviet Hungarian resistance-fighters and rebels using Molotov cocktails and several anti-tank guns. The local anti-communist revolutionaries delivered one captured T-54A to the British Embassy in Budapest, the analyses and studies of which helped and spurred the development of the Royal Ordnance L7 105 mm tank gun.


title: T-54/T-55

text: At the initial stage of the war in Afghanistan in 1979–1980, about 800 Soviet tanks were used, consisting of 39 battalions, mainly armed with T-54s and T-55s. In 1979, only one T-55 tank was lost. Since the beginning of 1980, they began to be replaced by modern T-62 and T-64 tanks.


title: T-54/T-55

text: The T-62 and the T-55 were auctioned off in 2012, with all Russian active-duty military units mainly operating the T-72, the T-80 and the T-90. However, T-62s were spotted in Melitopol in the 2022 Ukraine War.


title: T-54/T-55

text: During the 1967 Six-Day War, U.S.-supplied M48 Patton tanks, British Centurion tanks, and even upgraded World War II–era Sherman tanks faced T-55s. This mix of Israeli tanks, combined with superior planning of operations and superior airpower, proved to be more than capable of dealing with the T-54/T-55 series.


title: T-54/T-55

text: During the 1970 Jordanian Civil War, Syrian tanks inflicted heavy losses on Jordanian Centurions. In one case, a squadron of T-55s stopped the advance of a large Jordanian column, with 19 Centurions destroyed and up to 10 Syrian T-55s lost in the battle. According to Israeli intelligence, Jordan lost 75 to 90 tanks out of 200 involved, most to Syrian T-55 fire at ar-Ramtha. In turn total Syrian tank losses accounted to 62 T-55 mostly breakdowns left on enemy territory.


title: T-54/T-55

text: By the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the T-54A and T-55's gun was starting to lose its competitive effectiveness relative to the 105 mm Royal Ordnance L7 gun mounted in Israeli Centurion Mk V and M60A1 tanks. Israeli tanks fitted with the L7 105mm gun suffered greatly from the new Soviet HEAT 3BК5 ammunition fired by the T-55s.


title: T-54/T-55

text: Israel captured many from Egypt in 1967, along with a few T-55s from Syria, and kept some of them in service. They were upgraded with a 105 mm NATO-standard L7 or M68, a US version of the L7, replacing the old Soviet 100 mm D-10, and a General Motors diesel replacing the original Soviet diesel engine. The Israelis designated these "Tiran-5" medium tanks, and they were used by reserve units until the early 1990s. Most of these were then sold to assorted Third World countries, some of them in Latin America, and the rest were heavily modified, converted into the "Achzarit" heavy armoured personnel carrier.