title: Paulina Porizkova

text: Porizkova appeared in Emir Kusturica's 1993 film "Arizona Dream", with Johnny Depp and Jerry Lewis, in a minor role as Lewis's young Polish fiancée. She had the main female role in the 1998 film "Thursday". Porizkova wrote and directed the 2001 film, "Roommates". She also starred in the 2001 thriller film "Dark Asylum", alongside Judd Nelson. In 2004, she starred in the romantic comedy "Knots". She appeared in an episode of the Starz comedy series "Head Case" which aired on 24 April 2009. She appeared in a 6th-season episode of "Desperate Housewives", "Chromolume No. 7", alongside model Heidi Klum. She appeared on the ABC Family drama-comedy series "Jane by Design" in an episode which aired on 6 March 2012, and made a guest appearance on "The Mysteries of Laura" in February 2015.


title: Paulina Porizkova

text: Porizkova co-authored a children's book, "The Adventures of Ralphie the Roach" () with British model Joanne Russell and illustrated by her stepson Adam Ocasek, that was published in September 1992. She published her first novel, "A Model Summer" (; "Modellsommar" in Swedish), in 2007, which is about a 15-year-old Swedish girl (Jirina) chosen by a modeling agent to spend a summer working in Paris in 1980. Porizkova is a blogger for Modelinia and "The Huffington Post".


title: Paulina Porizkova

text: Porizkova is the subject of three songs: "Friends of P" by The Rentals, "Paulina" by No Doubt, and "Dear Paulina" (written for the film "Thursday" in which she appeared) by Luna. She is one of several women referenced in Sonic Youth's song "Swimsuit Issue", from the 1992 album "Dirty". She was the inspiration of the late transgender model and ballroom performer Octavia St. Laurent who spoke glowingly about her in the documentary film "Paris is Burning". She has said that St. Laurent's praise and idolization in the documentary was the favorite moment of her modeling career.


title: Paulina Porizkova

text: Porizkova holds dual Swedish and U.S. citizenship. In 1984, she met Ric Ocasek, lead singer of the rock band The Cars, during the filming of The Cars' music video "Drive". The two married on 23 August 1989. They had two sons, Jonathan Raven Ocasek (born 4 November 1993). and Oliver Ocasek (born 1999). In May 2018, Porizkova announced she and Ocasek had separated a year earlier.


title: Paulina Porizkova

text: In September 2019, while caring for Ocasek following an unspecified surgery, Porizkova found him dead in his home. At the time of his death, they were still in the process of their divorce, though he had disinherited her as well as his two eldest sons in a new will, alleging that before his recent surgery she had "abandoned" him, a legally significant term. In 2021, her dispute with Ocasek's estate was settled. Porizkova commented, "They gave me what is mine under New York state law, and we’re done."


title: Paulina Porizkova

text: In "America Made Me a Feminist", an article she wrote for "The New York Times" in 2017, Porizkova stated that she considered herself a feminist.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: Sarileru Neekevvaru () is a 2020 Indian Telugu-language action comedy film written and directed by Anil Ravipudi. It is produced by Sri Venkateswara Creations, G. Mahesh Babu Entertainment and AK Entertainments. The film stars Mahesh Babu, Rashmika Mandanna and Vijayashanti while Prakash Raj and Rajendra Prasad play supporting roles. Devi Sri Prasad composed the music while R. Rathnavelu handled the cinematography.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: Production began on 31 May 2019 in Hyderabad. Shooting began on 5 July 2019 at Kashmir and lasted till mid-November 2019. The film released on 11 January 2020 on 2050 screens worldwide coinciding with Sankranti. Produced on a budget of 75 crore, upon release, it received praise for its humor, performances, cinematography, and action sequences, but criticism aimed at screenplay, and excessive length, and the film was commercially successful grossing more than 260 crore worldwide. According to box-office tracking portal Box Office Mojo, the film has grossed 37.39 million, making it the forty-first-highest-grossing film of 2020 worldwide.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: Ajay Krishna is a Major in Para SF of the Indian Army, where another person, also named Ajay joins his regiment (Parachute Regiment). During a shootout in a rescue operation, Ajay gets severely injured. Ajay's Brigadier sends Ajay Krishna and his colleague Siva Prasad to inform the news to Ajay's family by ensuring that Ajay's sister's wedding preparations are not disturbed. On the way to Kurnool on a train, they come across Samskruthi, who is an irritating-comic girl. Samskruthi sees Ajay Krishna and falls in love with him. She tries to impress Ajay unusually, but to no avail.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: In Kurnool, Ajay's mother, Bharathi went into hiding with her family to escape from MLA Yeddula Nagendra. When they are caught by Nagendra's men who threaten to kill them, Ajay Krishna arrives and thrashes the men with a warning that he would deal with Nagendra in the same way. Nagendra's main henchman narrates this to Nagendra. Meanwhile, Bharathi reveals to Ajay Krishna that she lodged a case against Nagendra for planning the murder of her brother's son, which was covered up as a suicide. When Nagendra threatens her to withdraw the case, she stood her ground.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: Consequently, Bharathi is suspended from the college on the allegation of leaking the exam paper and her daughter's marriage gets called off. Ajay Krishna, along with Bharathi leaves for Nagendra's house and challenges him, stating that he will change him into a responsible citizen, by making him surrender after fetching all the evidence. Ajay Krishna learns that Nagendra has been involved in a scam through Ramakrishna, a government officer, who along with a bank officer (Bharathi's brother's son) tried to uncover the scam with the help of a techie, who works in Nagendra Technologies (which is founded by Nagendra and is running his scams).


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: At the same time, Ajay Krishna re-arranges Bharathi's daughter's marriage with the same person. Meanwhile, Ajay is declared dead and Ajay Krishna informs the family after the wedding. After performing his last rites, Ajay Krishna and Prasad decide to return to Kashmir, while Ajay Krishna also accepts Samskruthi's proposal in between. Despite gathering the evidence, Ajay Krishna spares Nagendra from being jailed as he might use sympathy to leave prison and resume his corrupt activities. Instead, Ajay Krishna tells Nagendra that he is appointed to the Indian Army so that he will be disciplined and lead an honest life thereafter. Three months later, Nagendra is a reformed leader who believes in discipline and respects everyone and Ajay Krishna is marrying Samskruthi.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: After many speculations Mahesh Babu was announced as a lead hero with movie name titled as "Sarileru Neekevvaru." Opening ceremony of the movie was conducted on May 31, 2019.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: Rashmika Mandanna was signed to play the leading lady in the movie opposite Mahesh Babu. Vijayashanti was signed in for this film, which marked her comeback after 13 years. Tamannaah was signed in for a party song. The film also marks the comeback of Sangeetha and Bandla Ganesh into movies after many years.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: The first schedule was shot in Kashmir from July 5 to July 20, 2019. For the second schedule, a replica set of Konda Reddy Buruju was constructed in Ramoji Film City with an estimated cost of . On 8 November 2019, with the Kerala schedule the talkie part of the film wrapped up.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: The music is composed by Devi Sri Prasad, collaborating with Mahesh Babu for the fifth time and with Anil Ravipudi for the second time after "". The lyrics were written by Devi Sri Prasad, Sri Mani and Ramajogayya Sastry. Composer Devi worked with a special orchestra in Europe for recording the film's soundtrack and score. The makers announced that the film features five songs and all of them will be released as singles, on five consecutive Mondays of the December month. The hashtag #MassMBMondays was trending on social media.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: The first single track titled "Mind Block" was released on 2 December 2019, which was sung by Ranina Reddy with Blaaze singing the rap versions. Devi recorded this song while he was recording two other songs for his upcoming two films, on the same day. The second single track "Suryudivo Chandrudivo" was released on 9 December 2019, which was rendered by B Praak. The song resembles numbers, like "Idhe Kadha Nee Katha" from "Maharshi" (2019) and "Srimanthuda" from "Srimanthudu" (2015), which were composed by Devi Sri Prasad. The lyrics talk about the protagonist's kindness and greatness. The third single track "He's So Cute" was released on 16 December 2019, which was sung by Madhu Priya. It is termed as a teasing-romantic number. The fourth single "Sarileru Neekkevvaru Anthem" was released on 23 December 2019. Sung by Shankar Mahadevan, it features an orchestra from Europe, which recorded the film's score. The fifth single track "Daang Daang" was released on 30 December 2019, which was sung by Nakash Aziz and Lavita Lobo. The full album was released on 5 January 2020.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: The satellite rights of the film were sold to Gemini TV, which premiered it on 25 March 2020 for the first time on eve of Ugadi and in its first Television premier movie recorded a TRP of 23.4. The film's digital rights were acquired by Amazon Prime Video and made available for streaming since 1 March 2020.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: The film was dubbed and released in Tamil as "Ivanukku Sariyana Aal Illai" in 2020. The Tamil version was released across 200 plus theaters in Tamil Nadu. The Hindi dubbed version titled "Sarileru" was directly premiered on Goldmines TV channel on 15 August 2022. The film was also dubbed and released in Kannada as "Major Ajay Krishna" and in Malayalam as "Krishnan".


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: "The Times of India" critic Neeshita Nyayapati, rated the film 3/5 stars and stated, ""Sarileru Neekevvaru" definitely has its moments but Anil Ravipudi’s bloated narrative that tries too hard." On performances, Nyayapati noted that Babu did a "good job of playing a man who will serve the country, crack jokes and protect," while also appreciating Vijayashanthi's role. She felt that DSP's music was "okay" and action by Ram-Lakshman was "engaging", but Ratnavelu's cinematography was "unfortunately overshadowed by subpar VFX shots." The editor of "India Today", Janani K, rated the film 2/5 stars and wrote, "Mahesh Babu film is utterly disappointing." She stated that "Screenplay is replete with disjointed stories that are forced together." Janani also criticized the fake rape scene in the film, "The audacity to involve the heroine’s mother in faking a rape scene should be called out," she added.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: "First post" editor Hemanth Kumar rated the film 3.25/5 stars and stated: "Mahesh Babu hits it out of the park in Anil Ravipudi's fine blend of heroism and comedy." In a review for "The Indian express", Manoj Kumar rated the film 3.5/5 stars and wrote "Mahesh Babu shines in mind bending popcorn fare." "Sify" gave the film 3/5 and called it a "A commercial action-entertainer." Sangeetha Devi of "The Hindu" wrote "Mahesh Babu's film is a partly entertaining mixed bag." A reviewer of "The Hans India" rated the film 3/5 stars and wrote, "The movie will be like an eye feast for the audience who have been waiting to see Mahesh Babu in a complete entertaining role"


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: Nagarjuna Rao of "Gulf News" felt that Mahesh Babu has nothing to offer and quoted that "Story about an Army Major loses the plot and veers into inane comedy. The less said about Rashmika the better. She’s been reduced to a dumb femme who swoons at the sight of Mahesh and mouths her catchphrase ‘Neeku artham autunda?’"


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: "Sarileru Neekevvaru" on the opening day collected gross, beating Mahesh Babu's previous best "Maharshi" gross worldwide.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: The film grossed in three days, and in 10 days. After a run of 50 days, the film grossed more than ₹2.64 billion (US$38 million) at worldwide box office, becoming on the one of the highest-grossing Telugu films.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: In Telugu-speaking states (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), the film collected a share of on the opening day. Collecting over share in Telugu states in 10 days.


title: Sarileru Neekevvaru

text: At the USA box office movie collected 759,000 through premiere shows. On the opening day movie collected 236,754 in Australia, 20,757 in New Zealand and 55,234 in United Kingdom and in two days the movie collected 1.31 million in United States of America. In three days the movie collected 6,454 (457,000) from Canada, 1,624,974 (115.1 million) from USA and 70,689 (6.51 million) from UK. In nine days the movie collected 2 million (142.1 million) from USA, 349,258 (17.1 million) from Australia 96,218 (8.88 million) from UK and 35,566 (1.67 million) from New Zealand. And it crossed over $2.3 million in United States and marked as 3rd film to collect $2 million in Mahesh Babu's career after "Srimanthudu" and "Bharat Ane Nenu".


title: The Cuphead Show!

text: The Cuphead Show! is an animated slapstick comedy streaming television series developed by Dave Wasson for Netflix, loosely based on the 2017 Canadian video game "Cuphead" by Studio MDHR. Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, the creators of "Cuphead", serve as executive producers, along with Wasson and CJ Kettler from King Features Syndicate, and Cosmo Segurson serving as co-executive producer. The show served as a TV prequel to the game.


title: The Cuphead Show!

text: The series was released worldwide on February 18, 2022, and received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise for its animation, voice acting, music, humor and tone, but some felt it lacked in substance, with the episodes' plots being criticized for being "too fragmented" and "often repetitive". The second season was released on August 19, 2022, followed, soon after, by the third season released on November 18, 2022.


title: The Cuphead Show!

text: Set in the 1930s-style world of the Inkwell Isles, "The Cuphead Show!" follows the misadventures of Cuphead and Mugman, a pair of anthropomorphic cup brothers who live with their elderly grandfather and caretaker, Elder Kettle, in a teapot-shaped cottage. The brothers' stories often center around them trying to find their way out of various issues, occasionally meeting and interacting with characters from its video game source material. While the series is mainly episodic, one recurring plot is the Devil hunting Cuphead for his soul, as he believes it is rightfully his after Cuphead lost a soul-harvesting game called "Soul Ball," only to be always foiled by Cuphead and Mugman.


title: The Cuphead Show!

text: In July 2019, it was announced that Netflix had green-lit the series. Chad and Jared Moldenhauer from Studio MDHR are executive producers, along with C.J. Kettler from King Features Syndicate, Dave Wasson, and co-executive produced by Cosmo Segurson. Clay Morrow and Adam Paloian are supervising directors. The series is animated by Lighthouse Studios, a Kilkenny-based division between Mercury Filmworks and Cartoon Saloon, and stop motion animation was provided by Screen Novelties. In an effort to meet streaming series deadlines, the show's production crew were unable to utilize hand-drawn animation like in the game, instead choosing to use puppet-based methods while also putting in various elements to match the 1930s rubber hose style. The series was first revealed at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2020, with the announcement that the show's music will be composed by Ego Plum.


title: The Cuphead Show!

text: The first season was released on February 18, 2022, and consisted of twelve episodes. Netflix ordered a total of 36 episodes to be produced, that would end up getting released as three seasons. The second season was released on August 19, 2022, and consisted of thirteen episodes, with the third and eighth episodes being close to 25 minutes long. The third season was released on November 18, 2022, and consisted of eleven episodes, with the first, and the finale episodes being 20 minutes long, and the sixth episode being the longest episode in the series, lasting for 30 minutes long.


title: The Cuphead Show!

text: On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, 69% of 16 critics gave the first season a positive review, with an average rating of 7.0/10. The site's critical consensus is: "While "The Cuphead Show!" fluidly recreates its video game forebear's eye-popping animation, this good-looking vessel is still waiting for some substance to fill it." According to Metacritic, which calculated a weighted average score of 69 based on reviews from 4 critics, the season received "generally favorable reviews".


title: The Cuphead Show!

text: "The Escapist" noted that "fans and critics have been left disappointed by the series due to its lack of substance and short nature" but the target audience that is children and "kids will discover a bouncy and energetic cartoon and probably find what's here incredibly entertaining."


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The ocean sunfish or common mola (Mola mola) is one of the largest bony fish in the world. It was misidentified as the heaviest bony fish, which was actually a different species, "Mola alexandrini". Adults typically weigh between . The species is native to tropical and temperate waters around the world. It resembles a fish head without a tail, and its main body is flattened laterally. Sunfish can be as tall as they are long when their dorsal and ventral fins are extended.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Sunfish are generalist predators that consume largely small fish, fish larvae, squid, and crustaceans. Sea jellies and salps, once thought to be the primary prey of sunfish, make up only 15% of a sunfish's diet. Females of the species can produce more eggs than any other known vertebrate, up to 300,000,000 at a time. Sunfish fry resemble miniature pufferfish, with large pectoral fins, a tail fin, and body spines uncharacteristic of adult sunfish.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Adult sunfish are vulnerable to few natural predators, but sea lions, killer whales, and sharks will consume them. Sunfish are considered a delicacy in some parts of the world, including Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In the European Union, regulations ban the sale of fish and fishery products derived from the family Molidae. Sunfish are frequently caught in gillnets.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: A member of the order Tetraodontiformes, which also includes pufferfish, porcupinefish, and filefish, the sunfish shares many traits common to members of this order. The ocean sunfish, "Mola mola", is the type species of the genus.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Many of the sunfish's various names allude themselves to its flattened shape. Its scientific name, "mola", is Latin for "millstone", which the fish resembles because of its gray color, rough texture, and rounded body. Its common English name, sunfish, refers to the animal's habit of sunbathing at the surface of the water. Its common names in Dutch, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Russian, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, and German ("maanvis", "peixe lua", "Poisson lune", "pez luna", "peix lluna", "Pesce luna", "рыба-луна", "φεγγαρόψαρο", "holdhal", "månefisk" and "Mondfisch", respectively) mean "moon fish", in reference to its rounded shape. In German, the fish is also known as "Schwimmender Kopf", or "swimming head". In Polish, it is named "samogłów", meaning "head alone" or "only head", because it has no true tail. In Swedish, Danish and Norwegian it is known as "klumpfisk", in Dutch "klompvis", in Finnish "möhkäkala", all of which mean "lump fish". The Chinese translation of its academic name is , meaning "toppled wheel fish".


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The ocean sunfish has various superseded binomial synonyms, and was originally classified in the pufferfish genus, as "Tetraodon mola".


title: Ocean sunfish

text: It is now placed in its own genus, "Mola", with three species: "Mola mola, Mola tecta" and "Mola alexandrini" (previously known as "Mola ramsayi"). The ocean sunfish, "Mola mola", is the type species of the genus.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The genus "Mola" belongs to the family Molidae. This family comprises three genera: "Masturus", "Mola" and "Ranzania". The common name "sunfish" without qualifier is used to describe the marine family Molidae and the freshwater sunfish in the family Centrarchidae, which is unrelated to Molidae. On the other hand, the name "ocean sunfish" and "mola" refer only to the family Molidae.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The family Molidae belongs to the order Tetraodontiformes, which includes pufferfish and filefish. It shares many traits common to members of this order, including the four fused teeth that form the characteristic beak and give the order its name ('=four, '=tooth, and ""=shape). Indeed, sunfish fry resemble spiky pufferfish more than they resemble adult molas.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The caudal fin of the ocean sunfish is replaced by a rounded clavus, creating the body's distinct truncated shape. The body is flattened laterally, giving it a long oval shape when seen head-on. The pectoral fins are small and fan-shaped, while the dorsal fin and the anal fin are lengthened, often making the fish as tall as it is long. Specimens up to in height have been recorded.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The mature ocean sunfish has an average length of and a fin-to-fin length of . The weight of mature specimens can range from , but even larger individuals are not unheard of. The maximum size recorded is in length, and maximum weight recorded is .


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The spinal column of "M. mola" contains fewer vertebrae and is shorter in relation to the body than that of any other fish.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Although the sunfish descended from bony ancestors, its skeleton contains largely cartilaginous tissues, which are lighter than bone, allowing it to grow to sizes impractical for other bony fishes. Its teeth are fused into a beak-like structure, which prevents them from being able to fully close their mouths, while also having pharyngeal teeth located in the throat.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The sunfish lacks a swim bladder. Some sources indicate the internal organs contain a concentrated neurotoxin, tetrodotoxin, like the organs of other poisonous tetraodontiformes, while others dispute this claim.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: In the course of its evolution, the caudal fin (tail) of the sunfish disappeared, to be replaced by a lumpy pseudotail, the clavus. This structure is formed by the convergence of the dorsal and anal fins, and is used by the fish as a rudder. The smooth-denticled clavus retains 12 fin rays and terminates in a number of rounded ossicles.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Ocean sunfish often swim near the surface, and their protruding dorsal fins are sometimes mistaken for those of sharks. However, the two can be distinguished by the motion of the fin. Unlike most fish, the sunfish swings its dorsal fin and anal fin in a characteristic sculling motion.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Adult sunfish range from brown to silvery-grey or white, with a variety of region-specific mottled skin patterns. Coloration is often darker on the dorsal surface, fading to a lighter shade ventrally as a form of countershading camouflage. "M. mola" also exhibits the ability to vary skin coloration from light to dark, especially when under attack. The skin, which contains large amounts of reticulated collagen, can be up to thick on the ventral surface, and is covered by denticles and a layer of mucus instead of scales. The skin on the clavus is smoother than that on the body, where it can be as rough as sandpaper.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: More than 40 species of parasites may reside on the skin and internally, motivating the fish to seek relief in a number of ways. One of the most frequent ocean sunfish parasites is the flatworm "Accacoelium contortum".


title: Ocean sunfish

text: In temperate regions, drifting kelp fields harbor cleaner wrasses and other fish which remove parasites from the skin of visiting sunfish. In the tropics, "M. mola" solicits cleaning help from reef fishes. By basking on its side at the surface, the sunfish also allows seabirds to feed on parasites from its skin. Sunfish have been reported to breach, clearing the surface by approximately , in an apparent effort to dislodge embedded parasites.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Ocean sunfish are native to the temperate and tropical waters of every ocean in the world. "Mola" genotypes appear to vary widely between the Atlantic and Pacific, but genetic differences between individuals in the Northern and Southern hemispheres are minimal.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Although early research suggested sunfish moved around mainly by drifting with ocean currents, individuals have been recorded swimming in a day at a cruising speed of .


title: Ocean sunfish

text: While this might be the case most of the time, they are also capable of moving rapidly when feeding or avoiding predators, to the extent that they can vertically leap out of water. Contrary to the perception that sunfish spend much of their time basking at the surface, "M. mola" adults actually spend a large portion of their lives actively hunting at depths greater than , occupying both the epipelagic and mesopelagic zones.Sunfish are most often found in water warmer than ; prolonged periods spent in water at temperatures of or lower can lead to disorientation and eventual death. Surface basking behavior, in which a sunfish swims on its side, presenting its largest profile to the sun, may be a method of "thermally recharging" following dives into deeper, colder water in order to feed. Sightings of the fish in colder waters outside of its usual habitat, such as those southwest of England, may be evidence of increasing marine temperatures, although the proximity of England's southwestern coast to the Gulf Stream means that many of these sightings may also be the result of the fish being carried to Europe by the current.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The diet of the ocean sunfish was formerly thought to consist primarily of various jellyfish. However, genetic analysis reveals that sunfish are actually generalist predators that consume largely small fish, fish larvae, squid, and crustaceans, with jellyfish and salps making up only around 15% of the diet. Occasionally they will ingest eel grass. This range of food items indicates that the sunfish feeds at many levels, from the surface to deep water, and occasionally down to the seafloor in some areas.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Ocean sunfish may live up to ten years in captivity, but their lifespan in a natural habitat has not yet been determined. Their growth rate remains undetermined. However, a young specimen at the Monterey Bay Aquarium increased in weight from and reached a height of nearly in 15 months.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The sheer size and thick skin of an adult of the species deters many smaller predators, but younger fish are vulnerable to predation by bluefin tuna and mahi mahi. Adults are consumed by orca, sharks and sea lions.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The mating practices of the ocean sunfish are poorly understood, but spawning areas have been suggested in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, and Indian oceans. Females are estimated to be carrying as many as 300 million eggs, more than any other known vertebrate. Sunfish eggs are released into the water and externally fertilized by sperm.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Newly hatched sunfish larvae are only long and weigh less than one gram. They develop into fry, and those which survive can grow up to 60 million times their original weight before reaching adult proportions, arguably the most extreme size growth of any vertebrate animal.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Sunfish fry, with large pectoral fins, a tail fin, and body spines uncharacteristic of adult sunfish, resemble miniature pufferfish, their close relatives.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: In 2016, researchers from China National Genebank and A*STAR Singapore, including Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner, sequenced the genome of the ocean sunfish and discovered several genes which might explain its fast growth rate and large body size. As member of the order Tetraodontiformes, like fugu, the sunfish has quite a compact genome, at 730 Mb in size. Analysis from this data suggests that sunfish and pufferfishes diverged approximately 68 million years ago, which corroborates the results of other recent studies based on smaller datasets.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Despite their size, ocean sunfish are docile and pose no threat to human divers. Injuries from sunfish are rare, although a slight danger exists from large sunfish leaping out of the water onto boats; in one instance, a sunfish landed on a 4-year-old boy when the fish leaped onto the boy's family's boat. Areas where they are commonly found are popular destinations for sport dives, and sunfish at some locations have reportedly become familiar with divers. They are more of a problem to boaters than to swimmers, as they can pose a hazard to watercraft due to their large size and weight. Collisions with sunfish are common in some parts of the world and can cause damage to the hull of a boat,


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The flesh of the ocean sunfish is considered a delicacy in some regions, the largest markets being Taiwan and Japan. All parts of the sunfish are used in cuisine, from the fins to the internal organs.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Some parts are used in some areas of traditional medicine. Fishery products derived from sunfish are forbidden in the European Union according to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council as they contain toxins that are harmful to human health.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Sunfish are accidentally but frequently caught in drift gillnet fisheries, making up nearly 30% of the total catch of the swordfish fishery employing drift gillnets in California. The bycatch rate is even higher for the Mediterranean swordfish industry, with 71% to 90% of the total catch being sunfish.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The fishery bycatch and destruction of ocean sunfish are unregulated worldwide. In some areas, the fish are "finned" by fishermen who regard them as worthless bait thieves; this process, in which the fins are cut off, results in the eventual death of the fish, because it can no longer propel itself without its dorsal and anal fins.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The species is also threatened by floating litter such as plastic bags which resemble jellyfish, a common prey item. Bags can choke and suffocate a fish or fill its stomach to the extent that it starves.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Many areas of sunfish biology remain poorly understood, and various research efforts are underway, including aerial surveys of populations, satellite surveillance using pop-off satellite tags, genetic analysis of tissue samples, and collection of amateur sighting data. A decrease in sunfish populations may be caused by more frequent bycatch and the increasing popularity of sunfish in human diet.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Sunfish are not widely held in aquarium exhibits, due to the unique and demanding requirements of their care. Some Asian aquaria display them, particularly in Japan. The Kaiyukan Aquarium in Osaka is one of few aquariums with "M. mola" on display, where it is reportedly as popular an attraction as the larger whale sharks.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: The Lisbon Oceanarium in Portugal has sunfish showcased in the main tank, and in Spain, the Valencia Oceanogràfic has specimens of sunfish. The Ocean sunfish is also on display at the Denmark Nordsøen Oceanarium.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: In Kamogawa Sea World the ocean sunfish named Kukey, who started captivity in 1982, set a world record for captivity for 2,993 days, living for eight years. Kukey was at the time of delivery, but was in size at the time of death.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: While the first ocean sunfish to be held in an aquarium in the United States is said to have arrived at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in August 1986, other specimens have previously been held at other locations. Marineland of the Pacific, closed since 1987 and located on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, California, held at least one ocean sunfish by 1961, and in 1964 held a specimen, said to be the largest ever captured at that time. However, another specimen was brought alive to Marineland Studios Aquarium, near St. Augustine, Florida, in 1941.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Because sunfish had not been kept in captivity on a large scale before, the staff at Monterey Bay was forced to innovate and create their own methods for capture, feeding, and parasite control. By 1998, these issues were overcome, and the aquarium was able to hold a specimen for more than a year, later releasing it after its weight increased by more than 14 times. "Mola mola" has since become a permanent feature of the Open Sea exhibit. Monterey Bay Aquarium's largest sunfish specimen was euthanized on February 14, 2008, after an extended period of poor health.


title: Ocean sunfish

text: A major concern to curators is preventive measures taken to keep specimens in captivity from injuring themselves by rubbing against the walls of a tank, since ocean sunfish cannot easily maneuver their bodies. In a smaller tank, hanging a vinyl curtain has been used as a stopgap measure to convert a cuboid tank to a rounded shape and prevent the fish from scraping against the sides. A more effective solution is simply to provide enough room for the sunfish to swim in wide circles. The tank must also be sufficiently deep to accommodate the vertical height of the sunfish, which may reach .


title: Ocean sunfish

text: Feeding captive sunfish in a tank with faster-moving, more aggressive fish can also present a challenge. Eventually, the fish can be taught to respond to a floating target to be fed, and to take food from the end of a pole or from human hands.


title: Power (physics)

text: In physics, power is the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time. In the International System of Units, the unit of power is the watt, equal to one joule per second. In older works, power is sometimes called "activity". Power is a scalar quantity.


title: Power (physics)

text: Power is related to other quantities; for example, the power involved in moving a ground vehicle is the product of the aerodynamic drag plus traction force on the wheels, and the velocity of the vehicle. The output power of a motor is the product of the torque that the motor generates and the angular velocity of its output shaft. Likewise, the power dissipated in an electrical element of a circuit is the product of the current flowing through the element and of the voltage across the element.


title: Power (physics)

text: If a constant force F is applied throughout a distance x, the work done is defined as formula_2. In this case, power can be written as:


title: Power (physics)

text: If instead the force is variable over a three-dimensional curve C, then the work is expressed in terms of the line integral:


title: Power (physics)

text: From the fundamental theorem of calculus, we know that formula_5 Hence the formula is valid for any general situation.


title: Power (physics)

text: The dimension of power is energy divided by time. In the International System of Units (SI), the unit of power is the watt (W), which is equal to one joule per second. Other common and traditional measures are horsepower (hp), comparing to the power of a horse; one "mechanical horsepower" equals about 745.7 watts. Other units of power include ergs per second (erg/s), foot-pounds per minute, dBm, a logarithmic measure relative to a reference of 1 milliwatt, calories per hour, BTU per hour (BTU/h), and tons of refrigeration.


title: Power (physics)

text: As a simple example, burning one kilogram of coal releases much more energy than detonating a kilogram of TNT, but because the TNT reaction releases energy much more quickly, it delivers far more power than the coal.


title: Power (physics)

text: If is the amount of work performed during a period of time of duration , the average power over that period is given by the formula:


title: Power (physics)

text: It is the average amount of work done or energy converted per unit of time. The average power is often simply called "power" when the context makes it clear.


title: Power (physics)

text: The instantaneous power is then the limiting value of the average power as the time interval approaches zero.


title: Power (physics)

text: In the case of constant power , the amount of work performed during a period of duration is given by:


title: Power (physics)

text: Power in mechanical systems is the combination of forces and movement. In particular, power is the product of a force on an object and the object's velocity, or the product of a torque on a shaft and the shaft's angular velocity.


title: Power (physics)

text: Mechanical power is also described as the time derivative of work. In mechanics, the work done by a force on an object that travels along a curve is given by the line integral:


title: Power (physics)

text: If the force is derivable from a potential (conservative), then applying the gradient theorem (and remembering that force is the negative of the gradient of the potential energy) yields:


title: Power (physics)

text: In fluid power systems such as hydraulic actuators, power is given by formula_15 where is pressure in pascals, or N/m and is volumetric flow rate in m/s in SI units.


title: Power (physics)

text: If a mechanical system has no losses, then the input power must equal the output power. This provides a simple formula for the mechanical advantage of the system.


title: Power (physics)

text: Let the input power to a device be a force acting on a point that moves with velocity and the output power be a force acts on a point that moves with velocity . If there are no losses in the system, then


title: Power (physics)

text: The similar relationship is obtained for rotating systems, where and are the torque and angular velocity of the input and and are the torque and angular velocity of the output. If there are no losses in the system, then


title: Power (physics)

text: These relations are important because they define the maximum performance of a device in terms of velocity ratios determined by its physical dimensions. See for example gear ratios.


title: Power (physics)

text: In the case of a periodic signal formula_26 of period formula_27, like a train of identical pulses, the instantaneous power formula_28 is also a periodic function of period formula_27. The "peak power" is simply defined by:


title: Power (physics)

text: The peak power is not always readily measurable, however, and the measurement of the average power formula_31 is more commonly performed by an instrument. If one defines the energy per pulse as:


title: Power (physics)

text: Power is related to intensity at a radius formula_37; the power emitted by a source can be written as:


title: False memory

text: In psychology, a false memory is a phenomenon where someone recalls something that did not happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation, and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory.


title: False memory

text: The false memory phenomenon was initially investigated by psychological pioneers Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud.


title: False memory

text: Freud was fascinated with memory and all the ways it could be understood, used, and manipulated. Some claim that his studies have been quite influential in contemporary memory research, including the research into the field of false memory. Pierre Janet was a French neurologist also credited with great contributions into memory research. Janet contributed to false memory through his ideas on dissociation and memory retrieval through hypnosis.


title: False memory

text: In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted a study to investigate the effects of language on the development of false memory. The experiment involved two separate studies.


title: False memory

text: In the first test, 45 participants were randomly assigned to watch different videos of a car accident, in which separate videos had shown collisions at , and . Afterwards, participants filled out a survey. The survey asked the question, "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" The question always asked the same thing, except the verb used to describe the collision varied. Rather than "smashed", other verbs used included "bumped", "collided", "hit", or "contacted". Participants estimated collisions of all speeds to average between to just below . If actual speed was the main factor in estimate, it could be assumed that participants would have lower estimates for lower speed collisions. Instead, the word being used to describe the collision seemed to better predict the estimate in speed rather than the speed itself.


title: False memory

text: The second experiment also showed participants videos of a car accident, but the phrasing of the follow-up questionnaire was critical in participant responses. 150 participants were randomly assigned to three conditions. Those in the first condition were asked the same question as the first study using the verb "smashed". The second group was asked the same question as the first study, replacing "smashed" with "hit". The final group was not asked about the speed of the crashed cars. The researchers then asked the participants if they had seen any broken glass, knowing that there was no broken glass in the video. The responses to this question had shown that the difference between whether broken glass was recalled or not heavily depended on the verb used. A larger sum of participants in the "smashed" group declared that there was broken glass.


title: False memory

text: In this study, the first point brought up in discussion is that the words used to phrase a question can heavily influence the response given. Second, the study indicates that the phrasing of a question can give expectations to previously ignored details, and therefore, a misconstruction of our memory recall. This indication supports false memory as an existing phenomenon.


title: False memory

text: Replications in different contexts (such as hockey games instead of car crashes) have shown that different scenarios require different framing effects to produce differing memories.


title: False memory

text: A presupposition is an implication through chosen language. If a person is asked, "What shade of blue was the wallet?", the questioner is, in translation, saying, "The wallet was blue. What shade was it?" The question's phrasing provides the respondent with a supposed "fact". This presupposition creates one of two separate effects: true effect and false effect.


title: False memory

text: Regardless of the effect being true or false, the respondent is attempting to conform to the supplied information, because they assume it to be true.


title: False memory

text: Loftus' meta-analysis on language manipulation studies suggested the misinformation effect taking hold on the recall process and products of the human memory. Even the smallest adjustment in a question, such as the article preceding the supposed memory, could alter the responses. For example, having asked someone if they had seen "the" stop sign, rather than "a" stop sign, provided the respondent with a presupposition that there was a stop sign in the scene. This presupposition increased the number of people responding that they had indeed seen the stop sign.


title: False memory

text: The strength of verbs used in conversation or questioning also has a similar effect on the memory; for example – the words met, bumped, collided, crashed, or smashed would all cause people to remember a car accident at different levels of intensity. The words bumped, hit, grabbed, smacked, or groped would all paint a different picture of a person in the memory of an observer of sexual harassment if questioned about it later. The stronger the word, the more intense the recreation of the experience in the memory is. This in turn could trigger further false memories to better fit the memory created (change how a person looks or how fast a vehicle was moving before an accident).


title: False memory

text: One can trigger false memories by presenting subjects a continuous list of words. When subjects were presented with a second version of the list and asked if the words had appeared on the previous list, they found that the subjects did not recognize the list correctly. When the words on the two lists were semantically related to each other (e.g. sleep/bed), it was more likely that the subjects did not remember the first list correctly and created false memories (Anisfeld & Knapp, 1963).


title: False memory

text: In 1998 Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger III conducted a similar experiment. Their goal was to intentionally trigger false memories through word lists. They presented subjects with lists to study all containing a large number of words that were semantically related to another word that was not found on the list. For example, if the word that they were trying to trigger was “river” the list would contain words such as flow, current, water, stream, bend, etc. They would then take the lists away and ask the subjects to recall the words on the lists. Almost every time the false memory was triggered and the subjects would end up recalling the target word as part of the list when it was never there. McDermott and Roediger even went as far as informing the subjects of the purpose and details of the experiment, and still the subjects would recall the non listed target word as part of the word list they had studied.


title: False memory

text: Subjects were invited into an office and were told to wait there. After this they had to recall the inventory of the visited office. Subjects recognized objects consistent with the “office schema” although they did not appear in the office. (Brewer & Treyens, 1981)


title: False memory

text: In another study, subjects were presented with a situation where they witnessed a staged robbery. Half of the subjects witnessed the robbery live while the other half watched a video of the robbery as it took place. After the event, they were sat down and asked to recall what had happened during the robbery. The results surprisingly showed that those who watched the video of the robbery actually recalled more information more accurately than those who were live on the scene. Still false memory presented itself in ways such as subjects seeing things that would fit in a crime scene that were not there, or not recalling things that did not fit the crime scene. This happened with both parties, displaying the idea of staged naturalistic events.


title: False memory

text: Memory retrieval has been associated with the brain's relational processing. In associating two events (in reference to false memory, say tying a testimony to a prior event), there are verbatim and gist representations. Verbatim matches to the individual occurrences (e.g., I do not like dogs because when I was five a chihuahua bit me) and gist matches to general inferences (e.g., I do not like dogs because they are mean). Keeping in line with the fuzzy-trace theory, which suggests false memories are stored in gist representations (which retrieves both true and false recall), Storbeck & Clore (2005) wanted to see how change in mood affected the retrieval of false memories. After using the measure of a word association tool called the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm (DRM), the subjects' moods were manipulated. Moods were either oriented towards being more positive, more negative, or were left untouched. Findings suggested that a more negative mood made critical details, stored in gist representation, more accessible.


title: False memory

text: False memories can sometimes be shared by multiple people. This phenomenon was dubbed the "Mandela Effect" by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who reported having vivid and detailed memories of news coverage of South African anti-Apartheid leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. (Mandela actually died in 2013, after serving as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.) Broome reported that since 2010 "perhaps thousands" of other people had written online about having the same memory of Mandela's death, and she speculated that the phenomenon could be evidence of parallel realities.


title: False memory

text: One well-documented example of shared false memories comes from a 2010 study that examined people familiar with the clock at Bologna Centrale railway station, which was damaged in the Bologna massacre bombing in August 1980. In the study, 92% of respondents falsely remembered the clock had remained stopped since the bombing when, in fact, the clock was repaired shortly after the attack. Years later the clock was again stopped and set to the time of the bombing, in observance and commemoration of the bombing.


title: False memory

text: Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled "Berenstein", the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia, Darth Vader saying "Luke, I am your father" in the climax of "The Empire Strikes Back" (he actually says "No. I am your father."), Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle, and the existence of a 1990s movie titled "Shazaam" starring comedian Sinbad as a genie. The false memories of "Shazaam" have been explained as a confabulation of real memories, possibly including: the comedian wearing a genie-like costume during a TV marathon of Sinbad the Sailor movies in 1994, the 1996 film "Kazaam" featuring a genie played by basketball star Shaquille O'Neal, and a late 1960s animated series about a genie called "Shazzan". Likewise, false memories of Mandela's death could be explained as the subject confabulating him with Steve Biko, another prominent South African anti-Apartheid activist who died in prison in 1977.


title: False memory

text: Scientists suggest that these are examples of false memories shaped by similar cognitive factors affecting multiple people and families, such as social and cognitive reinforcement of incorrect memories or false news reports and misleading photographs that influence the formation of memories based on them.


title: False memory

text: The strength hypothesis states that in strong situations (situations where one course of action is encouraged more than any other course of action due to the objective payoff) people are expected to demonstrate rational behavior, basing their behavior on the objective payoff.


title: False memory

text: An example of this is the laws of a country. Most of its citizens, no matter how daring, will conform to these laws, because the objective payoff is personal safety.


title: False memory

text: The construction hypothesis says that if a true piece of information being provided can alter a respondent's answer, then so can a false piece of information.


title: False memory

text: Construction hypothesis has major implications for explanations on the malleability of memory. Upon asking a respondent a question that provides a presupposition, the respondent will provide a recall in accordance with the presupposition (if accepted to exist in the first place). The respondent will recall the object or detail.


title: False memory

text: Loftus developed what some refer to as "the skeleton theory" after having run an experiment involving 150 subjects from the University of Washington. Loftus noticed that when a presupposition was one of false information it could only be explained by the construction hypothesis and not the strength hypothesis. Loftus then stated that a theory needed to be created for complex visual experiences where the construction hypothesis plays a significantly more important role than situational strength. She presented a diagram as a "skeleton" of this theory, which later became referred to by some as the skeleton theory.


title: False memory

text: The skeleton theory explains the procedure of how a memory is recalled, which is split into two categories: the acquisition processes and the retrieval processes.


title: False memory

text: The acquisition processes are in three separate steps. First, upon the original encounter, the observer selects a stimulus to focus on. The information that the observer can focus on compared to all of the information occurring in the situation as a whole, is very limited. In other words, a lot is going on around us and we only pick up on a small portion. This forces the observer to begin by selecting a focal point for focus. Second, our visual perception must be translated into statements and descriptions. The statements represent a collection of concepts and objects; they are the link between the event occurrence and the recall. Third, the perceptions are subject to any "external" information being provided before or after the interpretation. This subsequent set of information can reconstruct the memory.


title: False memory

text: The retrieval processes come in two steps. First, the memory and imagery are regenerated. This perception is subject to what foci the observer has selected, along with the information provided before or after the observation. Second, the linking is initiated by a statement response, "painting a picture" to make sense of what was observed. This retrieval process results in either an accurate memory or a false memory.


title: False memory

text: Greater creative imagination and dissociation are known to relate to false memory formation. Creative imagination may lead to vivid details of imagined events. High dissociation may be associated with habitual use of lax response criteria for source decisions due to frequent interruption of attention or consciousness. Social desirability and false memory have also been examined. Social desirability effects may depend on the level of perceived social pressure.


title: False memory

text: Individuals who feel under greater social pressure may be more likely to acquiesce. Perceived pressure from an authority figure may lower individuals' criteria for accepting a false event as true. The new individual difference factors include preexisting beliefs about memory, self-evaluation of one's own memory abilities, trauma symptoms, and attachment styles. Regarding the first of these, metamemory beliefs about the malleability of memory, the nature of trauma memory, and the recoverability of lost memory may influence willingness to accept vague impressions or fragmentary images as recovered memories and thus, might affect the likelihood of accepting false memory. For example, if someone believes that memory once encoded is permanent, and that visualization is an effective way to recover memories, the individual may endorse more liberal criteria for accepting a mental image as true memory. Also, individuals who report themselves as having better everyday memories may feel more compelled to come up with a memory when asked to do so. This may lead to more liberal criteria, making these individuals more susceptible to false memory.


title: False memory

text: There is some research that shows individual differences in false memory susceptibility are not always large (even on variables that have previously shown differences—such as creative imagination or dissociation), that there appears to be no false memory trait, and that even those who have highly superior memory are susceptible to false memories.


title: False memory

text: A history of trauma is relevant to the issue of false memory. It has been proposed that people with a trauma history or trauma symptoms may be particularly vulnerable to memory deficits, including source-monitoring failures.


title: False memory

text: Possible associations between attachment styles and reports of false childhood memories were also of interest. Adult attachment styles have been related to memories of early childhood events, suggesting that the encoding or retrieval of such memories may activate the attachment system. It is more difficult for avoidant adults to access negative emotional experiences from childhood, whereas ambivalent adults access these kinds of experiences easily. Consistent with attachment theory, adults with avoidant attachment styles, like their child counterparts, may attempt to suppress physiological and emotional reactions to activation of the attachment system. Significant associations between parental attachment and children's suggestibility exist. These data, however, do not directly address the issue of whether adults' or their parents' attachment styles are related to false childhood memories. Such data nevertheless suggest that greater attachment avoidance may be associated with a stronger tendency to form false memories of childhood.


title: False memory

text: Sleep deprivation can also affect the possibility of falsely encoding a memory. In two experiments, participants studied DRM lists (lists of words [e.g., bed, rest, awake, tired] that are semantically associated with a non-presented word) before a night of either sleep or sleep deprivation; testing took place the following day. One study showed higher rates of false recognition in sleep-deprived participants, compared with rested participants.


title: False memory

text: Sleep deprivation can increase the risk of developing false memories. Specifically, sleep deprivation increased false memories in a misinformation task when participants in a study were sleep deprived during event encoding, but did not have a significant effect when the deprivation occurred after event encoding.


title: False memory

text: False memory syndrome is defined as false memory being a prevalent part of one's life in which it affects the person's mentality and day-to-day life. False memory syndrome differs from false memory in that the syndrome is heavily influential in the orientation of a person's life, while false memory can occur without this significant effect. The syndrome takes effect because the person believes the influential memory to be true. However, its research is controversial and the syndrome is not included in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders". False memory is an important part of psychological research because of the ties it has to a large number of mental disorders, such as PTSD. False memory can be declared a syndrome when recall of a false or inaccurate memory takes great effect on a person's life. Such a false memory can completely alter the orientation of one's personality and lifestyle.


title: False memory

text: Therapists who subscribe to recovered memory theory point to a wide variety of common problems, ranging from eating disorders to sleeplessness, as evidence of repressed memories of sexual abuse. Psychotherapists tried to reveal “repressed memories” in mental therapy patients through “hypnosis, guided imagery, dream interpretation and narco-analysis”. The reasoning was that if abuse couldn't be remembered, then it needed to be recovered by the therapist. The legal phenomena developed in the 1980s, with civil suits alleging child sexual abuse on the basis of “memories” recovered during psychotherapy. The term “repressed memory therapy” gained momentum and with it social stigma surrounded those accused of abuse. The “therapy” led to other psychological disorders in persons whose memories were recovered.


title: False memory

text: Memories recovered through therapy have become more difficult to distinguish between simply being repressed or having existed in the first place.


title: False memory

text: Therapists have used strategies such as hypnotherapy, repeated questioning, and bibliotherapy. These strategies may provoke the recovery of nonexistent events or inaccurate memories. A recent report indicates that similar strategies may have produced false memories in several therapies in the century before the modern controversy on the topic which took place in the 1980s and 1990s.


title: False memory

text: According to Loftus, there are different possibilities to create false therapy-induced memory. One is the unintentional suggestions of therapists. For example, a therapist might tell their client that, on the basis of their symptoms, it is quite likely that they had been abused as a child. Once this "diagnosis" is made, the therapist sometimes urges the patient to pursue the recalcitrant memories. It is a problem resulting from the fact that people create their own social reality with external information.


title: False memory

text: The "lost-in-the-mall" technique is another recovery strategy. This is essentially a repeated suggestion pattern. The person whose memory is to be recovered is persistently said to have gone through an experience even if it may have not happened. This strategy can cause the person to recall the event as having occurred, despite its falsehood.


title: False memory

text: Laurence and Perry conducted a study testing the ability to induce memory recall through hypnosis. Subjects were put into a hypnotic state and later woken up. Observers suggested that the subjects were woken up by a loud noise. Nearly half of the subjects being tested concluded that this was true, despite it being false. However, by therapeutically altering the subject's state, they may have been led to believe that what they were being told was true. Because of this, the respondent has a false recall.


title: False memory

text: A 1989 study focusing on hypnotizability and false memory separated accurate and inaccurate memories recalled. In open-ended question formation, 11.5% of subjects recalled the false event suggested by observers. In a multiple-choice format, no participants claimed the false event had happened. This result led to the conclusion that hypnotic suggestions produce shifts in focus, awareness, and attention. Despite this, subjects do not mix fantasy up with reality.


title: False memory

text: Therapy-induced memory recovery has made frequent appearances in legal cases, particularly those regarding sexual abuse. Therapists can often aid in creating a false memory in a victim's mind, intentionally or unintentionally. They will associate a patient's behavior with the fact that they have been a victim of sexual abuse, thus helping the memory occur. They use memory enhancement techniques such as hypnosis dream analysis to extract memories of sexual abuse from victims. In "Ramona v. Isabella", two therapists wrongly prompted a recall that their patient, Holly Ramona, had been sexually abused by her father. It was suggested that the therapist, Isabella, had implanted one of the sexual abuse memories in Ramona after use of the hypnotic drug sodium amytal. After a nearly unanimous decision, Isabella had been declared negligent towards Holly Ramona. This 1994 legal issue played a massive role in shedding light on the possibility of false memories' occurrences.


title: False memory

text: In another legal case where false memories were used, they helped a man to be acquitted of his charges. Joseph Pacely had been accused of breaking into a woman's home with the intent to sexually assault her. The woman had given her description of the assailant to police shortly after the crime had happened. During the trial, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus testified that memory is fallible and there were many emotions that played a part in the woman's description given to police. Loftus has published many studies consistent with her testimony. These studies suggest that memories can easily be changed around and sometimes eyewitness testimonies are not as reliable as many believe.


title: False memory

text: Another notable case is Maxine Berry. Maxine grew up in the custody of her mother, who opposed the father having contact with her (Berry & Berry, 2001). When the father expressed his desire to attend his daughter's high school graduation, the mother enrolled Maxine in therapy, ostensibly to deal with the stress of seeing her father. The therapist pressed Maxine to recover memories of sex abuse by her father. Maxine broke down under the pressure and had to be psychiatrically hospitalized. She underwent tubal ligation, so she would not have children and repeat the cycle of abuse. With the support of her husband and primary care physician, Maxine eventually realized that her memories were false and filed a suit for malpractice. The suit brought to light the mother's manipulation of mental health professionals to convince Maxine that she had been sexually abused by her father. In February 1997 Maxine Berry sued her therapists and clinic that treated her from 1992 to 1995 and, she says, made her falsely believe she had been sexually and physically abused as a child when no such abuse ever occurred. The lawsuit, filed in February 1997 in Minnehaha Co. Circuit Court South Dakota, states that therapist Lynda O'Connor-Davis had an improper relationship with Berry, both during and after her treatment. The suit also names psychologist Vail Williams, psychiatrist Dr. William Fuller and Charter Hospital and Charter Counseling Center as defendants. Berry and her husband settled out of court


title: False memory

text: Although there have been many legal cases in which false memory appears to have been a factor, this does not ease the process of distinguishing between false memory and real recall. Sound therapeutic strategy can help this differentiation, by either avoiding known controversial strategies or to disclosing controversy to a subject.


title: False memory

text: Harold Merskey published a paper on the ethical issues of recovered-memory therapy. He suggests that if a patient had pre-existing severe issues in their life, it is likely that "deterioration" will occur to a relatively severe extent upon memory recall. This deterioration is a physical parallel to the emotional trauma being surfaced. There may be tears, writhing, or many other forms of physical disturbance. The occurrence of physical deterioration in memory recall coming from a patient with relatively minor issues prior to therapy could be an indication of the recalled memory's potential falsehood.


title: False memory

text: If a child experienced abuse, it is not typical for them to disclose the details of the event when confronted in an open-ended manner. Trying to indirectly prompt a memory recall can lead to the conflict of source attribution, as if repeatedly questioned the child might try to recall a memory to satisfy a question. The stress being put on the child can make recovering an accurate memory more difficult. Some people hypothesize that as the child continuously attempts to remember a memory, they are building a larger file of sources that the memory could be derived from, potentially including sources other than genuine memories. Children that have never been abused but undergo similar response-eliciting techniques can disclose events that never occurred.


title: False memory

text: One of children's most notable setbacks in memory recall is source misattribution. Source misattribution is the flaw in deciphering between potential origins of a memory. The source could come from an actual occurring perception, or it can come from an induced and imagined event. Younger children, preschoolers in particular, find it more difficult to discriminate between the two. Lindsay & Johnson (1987) concluded that even children approaching adolescence struggle with this, as well as recalling an existent memory as a witness. Children are significantly more likely to confuse a source between being invented or existent.


title: False memory

text: Shyamalan, Lamb and Sheldrick (1995) partially re-created a study that involved attempted memory implanting in children. The study comprised a series of interviews concerning a medical procedure that the children may have undergone. The data was scored so that if a child made one false affirmation during the interview, the child was classified as inaccurate. When the medical procedure was described in detail, "only 13% of the children answered 'yes' to the question 'Did you ever have this procedure?'". As to the success of implantation with false 'memories', the children "assented to the question for a variety of reasons, a false memory being only one of them. In sum, it is possible that no false memories have been created in children in implanted-memory studies".


title: False memory

text: A 2016 study surveyed the public's attitude regarding the ethics of planting false memories as an attempt to influence healthy behavior. People were most concerned with the consequences, with 37% saying it was overly manipulative, potentially harmful or traumatic. Their reasons against are that the ends do not justify the means (32%), potential for abuse (14%), lack of consent (10%), practical doubts (8%), better alternative (7%), and free will (3%). Of those who thought implanting false memories would be acceptable, 36% believed the end justified the means, with other reasons being increasing treatment options (6%), people need support (6%), no harm would be done (6%), and it's no worse than alternatives (5%).


title: False memory

text: Several possible benefits associated with false memory arrive from fuzzy-trace theory and gist memory. Valerie F. Reyna, who coined the terms as an explanation for the DRM paradigm, explains that her findings indicate that reliance on prior knowledge from gist memory can help individuals make safer, well informed choices in terms of risk taking. Other positive traits associated with false memory indicate that individuals have superior organizational processes, heightened creativity, and prime solutions for insight based problems. All of these things indicate that false memories are adaptive and functional. False memories tied to familiar concepts can also potentially aid in future problem solving in a related topic, especially when related to survival.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Visa Inc. (; stylized as VISA) is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards. Visa is one of the world's most valuable companies.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Visa does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers; rather, Visa provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they then use to offer credit, debit, prepaid and cash access programs to their customers. In 2015, the Nilson Report, a publication that tracks the credit card industry, found that Visa's global network (known as VisaNet) processed 100 billion transactions during 2014 with a total volume of US$6.8 trillion.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Visa was founded in 1958 by Bank of America (BofA) as the BankAmericard credit card program. In response to competitor Master Charge (now Mastercard), BofA began to license the BankAmericard program to other financial institutions in 1966. By 1970, BofA gave up direct control of the BankAmericard program, forming a consortium with the other various BankAmericard issuer banks to take over its management. It was then renamed Visa in 1976.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Nearly all Visa transactions worldwide are processed through the company's directly operated VisaNet at one of four secure data centers, located in Ashburn, Virginia; Highlands Ranch, Colorado; London, England; and Singapore. These facilities are heavily secured against natural disasters, crime, and terrorism; can operate independently of each other and from external utilities if necessary; and can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations every second.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Visa is the world's second-largest card payment organization (debit and credit cards combined), after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015, based on annual value of card payments transacted and number of issued cards. However, because UnionPay's size is based primarily on the size of its domestic market in China, Visa is still considered the dominant bankcard company in the rest of the world, where it commands a 50% market share of total card payments.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On September 18, 1958, Bank of America (BofA) officially launched its BankAmericard credit card program in Fresno, California. In the weeks leading up to the launch of BankAmericard, BofA had saturated Fresno mailboxes with an initial mass mailing (or "drop", as they came to be called) of 65,000 unsolicited credit cards. BankAmericard was the brainchild of BofA's in-house product development think tank, the Customer Services Research Group, and its leader, Joseph P. Williams. Williams convinced senior BofA executives in 1956 to let him pursue what became the world's first successful mass mailing of unsolicited credit cards (actual working cards, not mere applications) to a large population.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Williams' pioneering accomplishment was that he brought about the successful implementation of the all-purpose credit card (in the sense that his project was not canceled outright), not in coming up with the idea. By the mid-1950s, the typical middle-class American already maintained revolving credit accounts with several different merchants, which was clearly inefficient and inconvenient due to the need to carry so many cards and pay so many separate bills each month. The need for a unified financial instrument was already evident to the American financial services industry, but no one could figure out how to do it. There were already charge cards like Diners Club (which had to be paid in full at the end of each billing cycle), and "by the mid-1950s, there had been at least a dozen attempts to create an all-purpose credit card." However, these prior attempts had been carried out by small banks which lacked the resources to make them work. Williams and his team studied these failures carefully and believed they could avoid replicating those banks' mistakes; they also studied existing revolving credit operations at Sears and Mobil Oil to learn why they were successful. Fresno was selected for its population of 250,000 (big enough to make a credit card work, small enough to control initial startup cost), BofA's market share of that population (45%), and relative isolation, to control public relations damage in case the project failed. According to Williams, Florsheim Shoes was the first major retail chain which agreed to accept BankAmericard at its stores.


title: Visa Inc.

text: The 1958 test at first went smoothly, but then BofA panicked when it confirmed rumors that another bank was about to initiate its own drop in San Francisco, BofA's home market. By March 1959, drops began in San Francisco and Sacramento; by June, BofA was dropping cards in Los Angeles; by October, the entire state of California had been saturated with over 2 million credit cards and BankAmericard was being accepted by 20,000 merchants. However, the program was riddled with problems, as Williams (who had never worked in a bank's loan department) had been too earnest and trusting in his belief in the basic goodness of the bank's customers, and he resigned in December 1959. Twenty-two percent of accounts were delinquent, not the 4% expected, and police departments around the state were confronted by numerous incidents of the brand new crime of credit card fraud. Both politicians and journalists joined the general uproar against Bank of America and its newfangled credit card, especially when it was pointed out that the cardholder agreement held customers liable for all charges, even those resulting from fraud. BofA officially lost over $8.8 million on the launch of BankAmericard, but when the full cost of advertising and overhead was included, the bank's actual loss was probably around $20 million.


title: Visa Inc.

text: However, after Williams and some of his closest associates left, BofA management realized that BankAmericard was salvageable. They conducted a "massive effort" to clean up after Williams, imposed proper financial controls, published an open letter to 3 million households across the state apologizing for the credit card fraud and other issues their card raised and eventually were able to make the new financial instrument work. By May 1961, the BankAmericard program became profitable for the first time. At the time, BofA deliberately kept this information secret and allowed then-widespread negative impressions to linger in order to ward off competition. This strategy worked until 1966, when BankAmericard's profitability had become far too big to hide.


title: Visa Inc.

text: The original goal of BofA was to offer the BankAmericard product across California, but in 1966, BofA began to sign licensing agreements with a group of banks outside of California, in response to a new competitor, Master Charge (now MasterCard), which had been created by an alliance of several regional bankcard associations to compete against BankAmericard. BofA itself (like all other U.S. banks at the time) could not expand directly into other states due to federal restrictions not repealed until 1994. Over the following 11 years, various banks licensed the card system from Bank of America, thus forming a network of banks backing the BankAmericard system across the United States. The "drops" of unsolicited credit cards continued unabated, thanks to BofA and its licensees and competitors until they were outlawed in 1970, but not before over 100 million credit cards had been distributed into the American population.


title: Visa Inc.

text: During the late 1960s, BofA also licensed the BankAmericard program to banks in several other countries, which began issuing cards with localized brand names. For example:


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 1968, a manager at the National Bank of Commerce (later Rainier Bancorp), Dee Hock, was asked to supervise that bank's launch of its own licensed version of BankAmericard in the Pacific Northwest market. Although Bank of America had cultivated the public image that BankAmericard's troubled startup issues were now safely in the past, Hock realized that the BankAmericard licensee program itself was in terrible disarray because it had developed and grown very rapidly in an "ad hoc" fashion. For example, "interchange" transaction issues "between" banks were becoming a very serious problem, which had not been seen before when Bank of America was the sole issuer of BankAmericards. Hock suggested to other licensees that they form a committee to investigate and analyze the various problems with the licensee program; they promptly made him the chair of that committee.


title: Visa Inc.

text: After lengthy negotiations, the committee led by Hock was able to persuade Bank of America that a bright future lay ahead for BankAmericard — outside Bank of America. In June 1970, Bank of America gave up control of the BankAmericard program. The various BankAmericard issuer banks took control of the program, creating National BankAmericard Inc. (NBI), an independent Delaware corporation which would be in charge of managing, promoting and developing the BankAmericard system within the United States. In other words, BankAmericard was transformed from a franchising system into a jointly controlled consortium or alliance, like its competitor Master Charge. Hock became NBI's first president and CEO.


title: Visa Inc.

text: However, Bank of America retained the right to directly license BankAmericard to banks outside the United States and continued to issue and support such licenses. By 1972, licenses had been granted in 15 countries. The international licensees soon encountered a variety of problems with their licensing programs, and they hired Hock as a consultant to help them restructure their relationship with BofA as he had done for the domestic licensees. As a result, in 1974, the International Bankcard Company (IBANCO), a multinational member corporation, was founded in order to manage the international BankAmericard program.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 1976, the directors of IBANCO determined that bringing the various international networks together into a single network with a single name internationally would be in the best interests of the corporation; however, in many countries, there was still great reluctance to issue a card associated with Bank of America, even though the association was entirely nominal in nature. For this reason, in 1976, BankAmericard, Barclaycard, Carte Bleue, Chargex, Sumitomo Card, and all other licensees united under the new name, "Visa", which retained the distinctive blue, white and gold flag. NBI became Visa USA and IBANCO became Visa International.


title: Visa Inc.

text: The term "Visa" was conceived by the company's founder, Dee Hock. He believed that the word was instantly recognizable in many languages in many countries and that it also denoted universal acceptance.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In October 2007, Bank of America announced it was resurrecting the BankAmericard brand name as the "BankAmericard Rewards Visa".


title: Visa Inc.

text: Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, in March 2022, Visa announced that it would suspend all business operations in Russia.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Prior to October 3, 2007, Visa comprised four non-stock, separately incorporated companies that employed 6,000 people worldwide: the worldwide parent entity Visa International Service Association (Visa), Visa USA Inc., Visa Canada Association, and Visa Europe Ltd. The latter three separately incorporated regions had the status of group members of Visa International Service Association.


title: Visa Inc.

text: The unincorporated regions Visa Latin America (LAC), Visa Asia Pacific and Visa Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) were divisions within Visa.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Initially, signed copies of sales drafts were included in each customer's monthly billing statement for verification purposes—an industry practice known as "country club billing". By the late 1970s, however, billing statements no longer contained these enclosures, but rather a summary statement showing posting date, purchase date, reference number, merchant name, and the dollar amount of each purchase. At the same time, many issuers, particularly Bank of America, were in the process of changing their methods of finance charge calculation. Initially, a "previous balance" method was used—calculation of finance charge on the unpaid balance shown on the prior month's statement. Later, it was decided to use "average daily balance" which resulted in increased revenue for the issuers by calculating the number of days each purchase was included on the prior month's statement. Several years later, "new average daily balance"—in which transactions from previous and current billing cycles were used in the calculation—was introduced. By the early 1980s, many issuers introduced the concept of the annual fee as yet another revenue enhancer.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On October 11, 2006, Visa announced that some of its businesses would be merged and become a publicly traded company, Visa Inc.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Under the IPO restructuring, Visa Canada, Visa International, and Visa USA were merged into the new public company. Visa's Western Europe operation became a separate company, owned by its member banks who will also have a minority stake in Visa Inc. In total, more than 35 investment banks participated in the deal in several capacities, most notably as underwriters.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On October 3, 2007, Visa completed its corporate restructuring with the formation of Visa Inc. The new company was the first step towards Visa's IPO. The second step came on November 9, 2007, when the new Visa Inc. submitted its $10 billion IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). On February 25, 2008, Visa announced it would go ahead with an IPO of half its shares. The IPO took place on March 18, 2008. Visa sold 406 million shares at US$44 per share ($2 above the high end of the expected $37–42 pricing range), raising US$17.9 billion in what was then the largest initial public offering in U.S. history. On March 20, 2008, the IPO underwriters (including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs & Co., Bank of America Securities LLC, Citi, HSBC, Merrill Lynch & Co., UBS Investment Bank and Wachovia Securities) exercised their overallotment option, purchasing an additional 40.6 million shares, bringing Visa's total IPO share count to 446.6 million, and bringing the total proceeds to US$19.1 billion. Visa now trades under the ticker symbol "V" on the New York Stock Exchange.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Visa Europe Ltd. was a membership association and cooperative of over 3,700 European banks and other payment service providers that operated Visa branded products and services within Europe. Visa Europe was a company entirely separate from Visa Inc. having gained independence of Visa International Service Association in October 2007 when Visa Inc. became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Visa Inc. announced the plan to acquire Visa Europe on November 2, 2015, creating a single global company. On April 21, 2016, the agreement was amended in response to the feedback of European Commission. The acquisition of Visa Europe was completed on June 21, 2016.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On January 13, 2020, Plaid announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Visa for $5.3 billion. The deal was double the company's most recent Series C round valuation of $2.65 billion, and was expected to close in the next 3–6 months, subject to regulatory review and closing conditions. According to the deal, Visa would pay $4.9 billion in cash and approximately $400 million of retention equity and deferred equity, according to a presentation deck prepared by Visa.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On November 5, 2020, the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit seeking to block the acquisition, arguing that Visa is a monopolist trying to eliminate a competitive threat by purchasing Plaid. Visa said it disagrees with the lawsuit and "intends to defend the transaction vigorously."


title: Visa Inc.

text: On February 3, 2021, Visa announced a partnership with First Boulevard, a neobank promoting cryptocurrency, which has been touted as a means of building generational wealth for Black Americans. The partnership would allow their users to buy, sell, hold, and trade digital assets through Anchorage Digital.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On March 29, 2021, Visa announced the acceptance of stable coin USDC to settle transactions on its network.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3) entity, the Visa Foundation was created with the mission of supporting inclusive economies. In particular, economies in which individuals, businesses and communities can thrive with the support of grants and investments. Supporting resiliency, as well as the growth, of micro and small businesses that benefit women is a priority of the Visa Foundation. Furthermore, the Foundation prioritizes providing support to the community from a broad standpoint, as well as responding to disasters during crisis.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In December 2020, Visa Announced the launch of a new accelerator program across Asia Pacific to further develop the region's financial technology ecosystem. The accelerator program aims to find and partner with startup companies providing financial and payments technologies that could potentially leverage on Visa's network of bank and merchant partners in the region.


title: Visa Inc.

text: For the fiscal year 2022, Visa reported earnings of US$14.96 billion, with an annual revenue of US$29.31 billion, an increase of 21.6% over the previous fiscal cycle. As of 2022, the company ranked 147th on the "Fortune" 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue. Visa's shares traded at over $143 per share, and its market capitalization was valued at over US$280.2 billion in September 2018.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Visa Europe began suspending payments to WikiLeaks on December 7, 2010. The company said it was awaiting an investigation into 'the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules' – though it did not go into details. In return DataCell, the IT company that enables WikiLeaks to accept credit and debit card donations, announced that it would take legal action against Visa Europe. On December 8, the group Anonymous performed a DDoS attack on visa.com, bringing the site down. Although the Norway-based financial services company Teller AS, which Visa ordered to look into WikiLeaks and its fundraising body, the Sunshine Press, found no proof of any wrongdoing, "Salon" reported in January 2011 that Visa Europe "would continue blocking donations to the secret-spilling site until it completes its own investigation".


title: Visa Inc.

text: The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated that Visa may be "violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of expression" by withdrawing their services.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In July 2012, the Reykjavík District Court decided that Valitor (the Icelandic partner of Visa and MasterCard) was violating the law when it prevented donations to the site by credit card. It was ruled that the donations be allowed to return to the site within 14 days or they would be fined in the amount of US$6,000 per day.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 2015, the Australian Federal Court ordered Visa to pay a pecuniary penalty of $20 million (including legal fees) for engaging in anti-competitive conduct against dynamic currency conversion operators, in proceedings brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 2011, MasterCard and Visa were sued in a class action by ATM operators claiming the credit card networks' rules effectively fix ATM access fees. The suit claimed that this is a restraint on trade in violation of US federal law. The lawsuit was filed by the National ATM Council and independent operators of automated teller machines. More specifically, it is alleged that MasterCard's and Visa's network rules prohibit ATM operators from offering lower prices for transactions over PIN-debit networks that are not affiliated with Visa or MasterCard. The suit says that this price-fixing artificially raises the price that consumers pay using ATMs, limits the revenue that ATM-operators earn, and violates the Sherman Act's prohibition against unreasonable restraints of trade.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Johnathan Rubin, an attorney for the plaintiffs said, "Visa and MasterCard are the ringleaders, organizers, and enforcers of a conspiracy among U.S. banks to fix the price of ATM access fees in order to keep the competition at bay."


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 2017, a US district court denied the ATM operators' request to stop Visa from enforcing the ATM fees.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 1996, a class of U.S. merchants, including Walmart, brought an antitrust lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard over their "Honor All Cards" policy, which forced merchants who accepted Visa and MasterCard branded credit cards to also accept their respective debit cards (such as the "Visa Check Card"). Over 4 million class members were represented by the plaintiffs. According to a website associated with the suit, Visa and MasterCard settled the plaintiffs' claims in 2003 for a total of $3.05 billion. Visa's share of this settlement is reported to have been the larger.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 1998, the Department of Justice sued Visa over rules prohibiting its issuing banks from doing business with American Express and Discover. The Department of Justice won its case at trial in 2001 and the verdict was upheld on appeal. American Express and Discover filed suit as well.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In October 2010, Visa and MasterCard reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in another antitrust case. The companies agreed to allow merchants displaying their logos to decline certain types of cards (because interchange fees differ), or to offer consumers discounts for using cheaper cards.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In 2002, the European Commission exempted Visa's multilateral interchange fees from Article 81 of the EC Treaty that prohibits anti-competitive arrangements. However, this exemption expired on December 31, 2007. In the United Kingdom, Mastercard has reduced its interchange fees while it is under investigation by the Office of Fair Trading.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In January 2007, the European Commission issued the results of a two-year inquiry into the retail banking sector. The report focuses on payment cards and interchange fees. Upon publishing the report, Commissioner Neelie Kroes said the "present level of interchange fees in many of the schemes we have examined does not seem justified." The report called for further study of the issue.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On March 26, 2008, the European Commission opened an investigation into Visa's multilateral interchange fees for cross-border transactions within the EEA as well as into the "Honor All Cards" rule (under which merchants are required to accept all valid Visa-branded cards).


title: Visa Inc.

text: The antitrust authorities of EU member states (other than the United Kingdom) also investigated Mastercard's and Visa's interchange fees. For example, on January 4, 2007, the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection fined twenty banks a total of PLN 164 million (about $56 million) for jointly setting Mastercard's and Visa's interchange fees.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In December 2010, Visa reached a settlement with the European Union in yet another antitrust case, promising to reduce debit card payments to 0.2 percent of a purchase. A senior official from the European Central Bank called for a break-up of the Visa/Mastercard duopoly by creation of a new European debit card for use in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). After Visa's blocking of payments to WikiLeaks, members of the European Parliament expressed concern that payments from European citizens to a European corporation could apparently be blocked by the US, and called for a further reduction in the dominance of Visa and Mastercard in the European payment system.


title: Visa Inc.

text: On November 27, 2012, a federal judge entered an order granting preliminary approval to a proposed settlement to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2005 by merchants and trade associations against Mastercard and Visa. The suit was filed due to alleged price-fixing practices employed by Mastercard and Visa. About one-quarter of the named class plaintiffs have decided to opt "out of the settlement". Opponents object to provisions that would bar future lawsuits and even prevent merchants from opting out of significant portions of the proposed settlement.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Plaintiffs allege that Visa and Mastercard fixed interchange fees, also known as swipe fees, that are charged to merchants for the privilege of accepting payment cards. In their complaint, the plaintiffs also alleged that the defendants unfairly interfere with merchants from encouraging customers to use less expensive forms of payment such as lower-cost cards, cash, and checks.


title: Visa Inc.

text: A settlement of US$6.24 billion has been reached and a court is scheduled to approve or deny the agreement on November 7, 2019.


title: Visa Inc.

text: Very high interchange fee for Visa (1.5–1.6% from every transaction's final price, which also includes VAT) in Poland started discussion about legality and need for government regulations of interchange fees to avoid high costs for business (which also block electronic payment market and acceptability of cards). This situation also led to the birth of new methods of payment in the year 2013, which avoid the need for go-between (middleman) companies like Visa or Mastercard, for example mobile application issued by major banks, and system by big chain of discount shops, or older public transport tickets buying systems.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In June 2016, the "Wall Street Journal" reported that Walmart threatened to stop accepting Visa cards in Canada. Visa objected saying that consumers should not be dragged into a dispute between the companies. In January 2017, Walmart Canada and Visa reached a deal to allow the continued acceptance of Visa.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In March 2019, U.S. retailer Kroger announced that its 250-strong Smith's chain would stop accepting Visa credit cards as of April 3, 2019, due to the cards’ high ‘swipe’ fees. Kroger's California-based Foods Co stores stopped accepting Visa cards in August 2018. Mike Schlotman, Kroger's executive vice president/chief financial officer, said Visa had been “misusing its position and charging retailers excessive fees for a long time.” In response, Visa issued a statement saying it was “unfair and disappointing that Kroger is putting shoppers in the middle of a business dispute.” As of October 31, 2019, Kroger has settled their dispute with Visa and is now accepting the payment method.


title: Visa Inc.

text: In March 2021, the United States Justice Department announced its investigation with Visa to discover if the company is engaging in anticompetitive practices in the debit card market. The main question at hand is whether or not Visa is limiting merchants' ability to route debit card transactions over card networks that are often less expensive, focusing more so on online debit card transactions. The probe highlights the role of network fees, which are invisible to consumers and place pressure on merchants, who mitigate the fees by raising prices of goods for customers. The probe was confirmed through a regulatory filing on March 19, 2021, stating they will be cooperating with the Justice Department. Visa's shares fell more than 6% following the announcement.