title: Guadalajara

text: Guadalajara is home to Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (UAG), which was founded in 1935 and is the oldest private university in Mexico, and Universidad del Valle de Atemajac (UNIVA), and the Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education.


title: Guadalajara

text: Guadalajara is well connected by a number of modern highways. These include Fed 15D, which connects the city northwestward to Nogales, Sonora, via Tepic, Nayarit and eastwards to Mexico City via Morelia; Fed 80D which runs northwest toward Aguascalientes; and Fed 54D which runs southward to the coast via Colima. The city's well-connected transportation infrastructure allows easy access to Mexico City, to the southeast, and to the major beach resorts of Manzanillo, Mazatlán and Puerto Vallarta to the southwest, northwest, and west, respectively.


title: Guadalajara

text: The Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla Guadalajara International Airport, also known as Guadalajara International Airport (ICAO code: MMGL) opened in 1966. It is located south of downtown Guadalajara, and it was built on the Tlajomulco de Zuñiga city, near Chapala. The airport is the third most active in the country (after Mexico City and Cancún) with direct flights to many Mexican and American cities.


title: Guadalajara

text: Within the city itself, there are many forms of public transportation. The Guadalajara light rail system, named SITEUR (Sistema de Tren Eléctrico Urbano), Spanish for Urban Electrical Train System, provides rapid transit service within Guadalajara and the neighboring municipalities of Zapopan and Tlaquepaque. It consists of 3 lines: line 1, running from north to south, with 19 stations, line 2, running from downtown to the east, with 10 stations and line 3. The trains are electric and have a top speed of . The 48 articulated cars currently in service were built in Mexico by Concarril/Bombardier. Construction on a third line began in 2014. Line 3 will run from Zapopan, in the northwest, to Tlaquepaque and Tonalá, in the southeast, via the city center.


title: Guadalajara

text: The Guadalajara Macrobús is a public transportation system based on the concept of bus rapid transit, where each bus has a single route and boarding station. Phase I of the Macrobús project opened in 2009 with a corridor following Calzada Independencia and serving 27 stations. The Guadalajara trolleybus system has been operating since the 1970s, along with many city buses run by private companies and a bustling network of pedestrianized streets.


title: Guadalajara

text: Mi Bici Pública, PBSC Urban Solutions-based public bike share system, was launched in 2014. In 2016, the city implemented 242 docking stations and 2116 bikes. As of September 2018 Mi Bici has 19,664 annually subscribed users.


title: Guadalajara

text: In Guadalajara, a person spends an average of 82 minutes per weekday commuting with public transportation. 23% of public transit riders, ride for more than 2 hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 15 min, while 22% of riders wait for an average of over 20 minutes each day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is 8 km, and 16% travel for over 12 km in a single direction.


title: Guadalajara

text: Guadalajara hosts the presence of numerous diplomatic missions, as well as numerous honorary consulates:


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: Munich – The Edge of War is a 2021 German-British period spy thriller film directed by Christian Schwochow, from a screenplay by Ben Power. It is based upon the 2017 novel "Munich" by Robert Harris. The film stars Jeremy Irons, George MacKay and Jannis Niewöhner.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: "Munich – The Edge of War" had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 13 October 2021, and was released in select cinemas on 14 January 2022, before its streaming release on 21 January 2022, by Netflix.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: In 1932, Hugh Legat, and his German friends Paul von Hartmann and Paul's girlfriend Lena celebrate their graduation from Oxford University. Hartmann insists Legat visit him in Munich to experience the "New Germany".


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: Six years later, Legat is on secondment from the British Foreign Office; working as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's private secretary. Europe is on the brink of war. Chamberlain strives to obtain peace with Adolf Hitler at any cost, even if that means allowing Germany to seize control of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain writes to Benito Mussolini in an effort to halt military action; it seemingly works and Hitler agrees, inviting Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier to Munich for a conference.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: Meanwhile, Hartmann is working as a translator in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin while secretly plotting with a Wehrmacht general in an effort to overthrow Hitler if top army officials agree to arrest him and seize control. The general believes this cannot be accomplished unless Hitler is allowed to invade the Sudetenland, while Hartmann doubts the collective resolve of the generals. Hartmann is given a stolen document by his lover, Helen Winter, that indicates Hitler intends to conquer Europe. Hartmann and the others reconvene and agree that getting the information to Chamberlain while he is in Munich is their best option; Hartmann reveals he has a trusted former classmate, Legat, who can likely help. Hartmann is handed a revolver to assassinate Hitler should the opportunity arise.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: In London, Legat is approached by Sir Alexander Cadogan and Sir Stewart Menzies of MI6 regarding the document in Hartmann's possession. It is suggested that Legat accompany Chamberlain to the conference, rendezvous with Hartmann, and retrieve the document. He agrees to help, despite the dangers associated with espionage. Legat convinces Chamberlain to bring him along to Munich as a translator.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: Hartmann boards Hitler's train to Munich where he shares his compartment with a childhood friend, Franz Sauer. Upon discovering that Sauer has become a "Schutzstaffel" officer, Hartmann hides the documents and gun in the compartment washroom. Hartmann catches Sauer rummaging through his suitcase, and realizes that Sauer has become suspicious of him. Later, Hartmann meets with Hitler, who chastises him for his Oxford education.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: In Munich, Legat and Hartmann reunite, a flashback reveals they had a falling out in 1932 after a heated verbal argument related to Hartmann's then-support of the Nazi Party. Legat agrees to take possession of the document, but is unable to pass it along to Chamberlain. With the signing of the agreement imminent, Hartmann insists that they immediately present the argument to Chamberlain and convince him to not sign the Munich Agreement. Legat and Hartmann meet with Chamberlain, who scoffs at the idea of not signing based on vague German military plans for a coup d'état and refuses to take action. Hartmann takes Legat to a local nursing home to see Lena, revealing that in 1935 she attended an anti-Nazi rally, only to have a Star of David carved in her back and be thrown out of a window after she was found to be Jewish, resulting in paralysis and an inability to speak. Hartmann reveals he intends to assassinate Hitler, much to Legat's dismay. When Legat returns to his hotel, he finds his room has been ransacked by Sauer, who attacks him. Legat discovers the document is gone and panics, but he is able to get a discreet message to Hartmann informing him. Hartmann meets with Hitler but cannot bring himself to shoot him. The Munich Agreement is signed.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: As Legat enters the car bound for the airport, typist Joan Menzies reveals she is the niece of Colonel Sir Stewart Menzies, the then Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service [SIS], that she has been assigned to help Legat in his espionage activity, and that she took possession of the document to prevent Sauer from finding it. Chamberlain returns to Britain and gives his famous "Peace for our time" speech. Legat returns home to his wife and son, revealing that he plans to leave the diplomatic service and join the RAF. The Munich Agreement ultimately fails and World War II begins. Chamberlain resigns several months later, dying soon after. But because of the signed agreement, the start of the war is postponed, allowing Britain more time to prepare for the war.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: In November 2020, it was announced Jeremy Irons, George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner, Sandra Hüller, Liv Lisa Fries and August Diehl had joined the cast of the film, with Christian Schwochow directing the film, from a screenplay by Ben Power, based upon the novel of the same name by Robert Harris, with Netflix set to distribute.


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: Principal photography began in October 2020 and ended in December 2020. Filming took place in Berlin, Potsdam, Munich and Liverpool. The working title was "Munich 38".


title: Munich – The Edge of War

text: Although the main characters are fictionalized for plot development, the author and film have given Prime Minister Chamberlain a more sympathetic role in the developments of World War 2. Often deemed a coward for his "appeasement" of Hitler, modern historians have taken the view that the Munich Conference was a stalling tactic to allow for the British Military to prepare to the eventual expansion of Nazi Germany. The film itself portrays the conference as a "best case, worst case" scenario; The best case being Hitler ceases his invasion of Czechoslovakia and the worst case scenario being that the letter of agreement would give the British time to consolidate allies, rebuild the military and perhaps get the United States involved.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Springtime of the Peoples or the Springtime of Nations, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe starting in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history to date.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The revolutions were essentially democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states, as envisioned by romantic nationalism. The revolutions spread across Europe after an initial revolution began in France in February. Over 50 countries were affected, but with no significant coordination or cooperation among their respective revolutionaries. Some of the major contributing factors were widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership, demands for more participation in government and democracy, demands for freedom of the press, other demands made by the working class for economic rights, the upsurge of nationalism, the regrouping of established government forces, and the European Potato Failure, which triggered mass starvation, migration, and civil unrest.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The uprisings were led by temporary coalitions of reformers, the middle classes, the upper classes (the bourgeoisie) and workers; however, the coalitions did not hold together for long. Many of the revolutions were quickly suppressed, as tens of thousands of people were killed, and many more were forced into exile. Significant lasting reforms included the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark, and the introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands. The revolutions were most important in France, the Netherlands, Italy, the Austrian Empire, and the states of the German Confederation that would make up the German Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the United Kingdom didn't see any notable actions at home, in British Ceylon there was a parallel


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The revolutions arose from such a wide variety of causes that it is difficult to view them as resulting from a coherent movement or set of social phenomena. Numerous changes had been taking place in European society throughout the first half of the 19th century. Both liberal reformers and radical politicians were reshaping national governments.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Technological change was revolutionizing the life of the working classes. A popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as popular liberalism, nationalism and socialism began to emerge. Some historians emphasize the serious crop failures, particularly those of 1846, that produced hardship among peasants and the working urban poor.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Large swaths of the nobility were discontented with royal absolutism or near-absolutism. In 1846, there had been an uprising of Polish nobility in Austrian Galicia, which was only countered when peasants, in turn, rose up against the nobles. Additionally, an uprising by democratic forces against Prussia, planned but not actually carried out, occurred in Greater Poland.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The middle and working classes thus shared a desire for reform, and agreed on many of the specific aims. Their participation in the revolutions, however, differed. While much of the impetus came from the middle classes, the physical backbone of the movement came from the lower classes. The revolts first erupted in the cities.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The population in French rural areas had risen rapidly, causing many peasants to seek a living in the cities. Many in the bourgeoisie feared and distanced themselves from the working poor. Many unskilled laborers toiled from 12 to 15 hours per day when they had work, living in squalid, disease-ridden slums. Traditional artisans felt the pressure of industrialization, having lost their guilds.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The liberalization of trade laws and the growth of factories had increased the gulf between master tradesmen, and journeymen and apprentices, whose numbers increased disproportionately by 93% from 1815 to 1848 in Germany. Significant proletarian unrest had occurred in Lyon in 1831 and 1834, and Prague in 1844. Jonathan Sperber has suggested that in the period after 1825, poorer urban workers (particularly day laborers, factory workers and artisans) saw their purchasing power decline relatively steeply: urban meat consumption in Belgium, France and Germany stagnated or declined after 1830, despite growing populations. The economic Panic of 1847 increased urban unemployment: 10,000 Viennese factory workers lost jobs, and 128 Hamburg firms went bankrupt over the course of 1847. With the exception of the Netherlands, there was a strong correlation among the countries that were most deeply affected by the industrial shock of 1847 and those that underwent a revolution in 1848.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The situation in the German states was similar. Parts of Prussia were beginning to industrialize. During the decade of the 1840s, mechanized production in the textile industry brought about inexpensive clothing that undercut the handmade products of German tailors. Reforms ameliorated the most unpopular features of rural feudalism, but industrial workers remained dissatisfied with these reforms and pressed for greater change.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Urban workers had no choice but to spend half of their income on food, which consisted mostly of bread and potatoes. As a result of harvest failures, food prices soared and the demand for manufactured goods decreased, causing an increase in unemployment. During the revolution, to address the problem of unemployment, workshops were organized for men interested in construction work. Officials also set up workshops for women when they felt they were excluded. Artisans and unemployed workers destroyed industrial machines when they threatened to give employers more power over them.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Rural population growth had led to food shortages, land pressure, and migration, both within and from Europe, especially to the Americas. Peasant discontent in the 1840s grew in intensity: peasant occupations of lost communal land increased in many areas: those convicted of wood theft in the Rhenish Palatinate increased from 100,000 in 1829–30 to 185,000 in 1846–47. In the years 1845 and 1846, a potato blight caused a subsistence crisis in Northern Europe, and encouraged the raiding of manorial potato stocks in Silesia in 1847. The effects of the blight were most severely manifested in the Great Irish Famine, but also caused famine-like conditions in the Scottish Highlands and throughout continental Europe. Harvests of rye in the Rhineland were 20% of previous levels, while the Czech potato harvest was reduced by half. These reduced harvests were accompanied by a steep rise in prices (the cost of wheat more than doubled in France and Habsburg Italy). There were 400 French food riots during 1846 to 1847, while German socio-economic protests increased from 28 during 1830 to 1839, to 103 during 1840 to 1847. Central to long-term peasant grievances were the loss of communal lands, forest restrictions (such as the French Forest Code of 1827), and remaining feudal structures, notably the robot (labor obligations) that existed among the serfs and oppressed peasantry of the Habsburg lands.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Aristocratic wealth (and corresponding power) was synonymous with the ownership of farm lands and effective control over the peasants. Peasant grievances exploded during the revolutionary year of 1848, yet were often disconnected from urban revolutionary movements: the revolutionary Sándor Petőfi's popular nationalist rhetoric in Budapest did not translate into any success with the Magyar peasantry, while the Viennese democrat Hans Kudlich reported that his efforts to galvanize the Austrian peasantry had "disappeared in the great sea of indifference and phlegm".


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Despite forceful and often violent efforts of established and reactionary powers to keep them down, disruptive ideas gained popularity: democracy, liberalism, radicalism, nationalism, and socialism. They demanded a constitution, universal manhood suffrage, press freedom, freedom of expression and other democratic rights, the establishment of civilian militia, liberation of peasants, liberalization of the economy, abolition of tariff barriers and the abolition of monarchical power structures in favour of the establishment of republican states, or at least the restriction of the prince power in the form of constitutional monarchies.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In the language of the 1840s, 'democracy' meant replacing an electorate of property-owners with universal male suffrage. 'Liberalism' fundamentally meant consent of the governed, restriction of church and state power, republican government, freedom of the press and the individual. The 1840s had seen the emergence of radical liberal publications such as "Rheinische Zeitung" (1842); "Le National" and "La Réforme" (1843) in France; Ignaz Kuranda's "Grenzboten" (1841) in Austria; Lajos Kossuth's "Pesti Hírlap" (1841) in Hungary, as well as the increased popularity of the older "Morgenbladet" in Norway and the "Aftonbladet" in Sweden.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: 'Nationalism' believed in uniting people bound by (some mix of) common languages, culture, religion, shared history, and of course immediate geography; there were also irredentist movements. Nationalism had developed a broader appeal during the pre-1848 period, as seen in the František Palacký's 1836 "History of the Czech Nation", which emphasised a national lineage of conflict with the Germans, or the popular patriotic "Liederkranz" (song-circles) that were held across Germany: patriotic and belligerent songs about Schleswig had dominated the Würzburg national song festival in 1845.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: 'Socialism' in the 1840s was a term without a consensus definition, meaning different things to different people, but was typically used within a context of more power for workers in a system based on worker ownership of the means of production.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: These concepts together - democracy, liberalism, nationalism and socialism, in the sense described above - came to be encapsulated in the political term radicalism.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Every country had a distinctive timing, but the general pattern showed very sharp cycles as reform moved up then down.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The world was astonished in spring 1848 when revolutions appeared in so many places and seemed on the verge of success everywhere. Agitators who had been exiled by the old governments rushed home to seize the moment. In France, the monarchy was once again overthrown and replaced by a republic. In a number of major German and Italian states, and in Austria, the old leaders were forced to grant liberal constitutions. The Italian and German states seemed to be rapidly forming unified nations. Austria gave Hungarians and Czechs liberal grants of autonomy and national status.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In France, bloody street battles exploded between the middle class reformers and the working class radicals. German reformers argued endlessly without finalizing their results.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The revolutions suffer a series of defeats in summer 1849. Reactionaries returned to power and many leaders of the revolution went into exile. Some social reforms proved permanent, and years later nationalists in Germany, Italy, and Hungary gained their objectives.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Although few noticed at the time, the first major outbreak came in Palermo, Sicily, starting in January 1848. There had been several previous revolts against Bourbon rule; this one produced an independent state that lasted only 16 months before the Bourbons came back. During those months, the constitution was quite advanced for its time in liberal democratic terms, as was the proposal of an Italian confederation of states. The revolt's failure was reversed 12 years later as the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies collapsed in 1860–61 with the Risorgimento.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The "February Revolution" in France was sparked by the suppression of the "campagne des banquets." This revolution was driven by nationalist and republican ideals among the French general public, who believed the people should rule themselves. It ended the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and led to the creation of the French Second Republic. After an interim period, Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected as president. In 1852, he staged a coup d'état and established himself as a dictatorial emperor of the Second French Empire.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his "Recollections" of the period, "society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror."


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The "March Revolution" in the German states took place in the south and the west of Germany, with large popular assemblies and mass demonstrations. Led by well-educated students and intellectuals, they demanded German national unity, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. The uprisings were poorly coordinated, but had in common a rejection of traditional, autocratic political structures in the 39 independent states of the German Confederation. The middle-class and working-class components of the Revolution split, and in the end, the conservative aristocracy defeated it, forcing many liberal Forty-Eighters into exile.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Denmark had been governed by a system of absolute monarchy (King's Law) since the 17th century. King Christian VIII, a moderate reformer but still an absolutist, died in January 1848 during a period of rising opposition from farmers and liberals. The demands for constitutional monarchy, led by the National Liberals, ended with a popular march to Christiansborg on 21 March. The new king, Frederick VII, met the liberals' demands and installed a new Cabinet that included prominent leaders of the National Liberal Party.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The national-liberal movement wanted to abolish absolutism, but retain a strongly centralized state. The king accepted a new constitution agreeing to share power with a bicameral parliament called the Rigsdag. It is said that the Danish king's first words after signing away his absolute power were, "that was nice, now I can sleep in the mornings". Although army officers were dissatisfied, they accepted the new arrangement which, in contrast to the rest of Europe, was not overturned by reactionaries. The liberal constitution did not extend to Schleswig, leaving the Schleswig-Holstein Question unanswered.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The Duchy of Schleswig, a region containing both Danes (a North Germanic population) and Germans (a West Germanic population), was a part of the Danish monarchy, but remained a duchy separate from the Kingdom of Denmark. Spurred by pan-German sentiment, the Germans of Schleswig took up arms in protest at a new policy announced by Denmark's National Liberal government which would have fully integrated the duchy into Denmark.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The German population in Schleswig and Holstein revolted, inspired by the Protestant clergy. The German states sent in an army, but Danish victories in 1849 led to the Treaty of Berlin (1850) and the London Protocol (1852). They reaffirmed the sovereignty of the King of Denmark, while prohibiting union with Denmark. The violation of the latter provision led to renewed warfare in 1863 and the Prussian victory in 1864.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: From March 1848 through July 1849, the Habsburg Austrian Empire was threatened by revolutionary movements, which often had a nationalist character. The empire, ruled from Vienna, included Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Ukrainians/Ruthenians, Romanians, Serbs and Italians, all of whom attempted in the course of the revolution to achieve either autonomy, independence, or even hegemony over other nationalities. The nationalist picture was further complicated by the simultaneous events in the German states, which moved toward greater German national unity.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The Hungarian revolution of 1848 was the longest in Europe, crushed in August 1849 by Austrian and Russian armies. Nevertheless, it had a major effect in freeing the serfs. It started on 15 March 1848, when Hungarian patriots organized mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda (today Budapest) which forced the imperial governor to accept their 12 points of demands, which included the demand for freedom of press, an independent Hungarian ministry residing in Buda-Pest and responsible to a popularly elected parliament, the formation of a National Guard, complete civil and religious equality, trial by jury, a national bank, a Hungarian army, the withdrawal of foreign (Austrian) troops from Hungary, the freeing of political prisoners, and the union with Transylvania. On that morning, the demands were read aloud along with poetry by Sándor Petőfi with the simple lines of "We swear by the God of the Hungarians. We swear, we shall be slaves no more". Lajos Kossuth and some other liberal nobility that made up the Diet appealed to the Habsburg court with demands for representative government and civil liberties. These events resulted in Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian prince and foreign minister, resigning. The demands of the Diet were agreed upon on 18 March by Emperor Ferdinand. Although Hungary would remain part of the monarchy through personal union with the emperor, a constitutional government would be founded. The Diet then passed the April laws that established equality before the law, a legislature, a hereditary constitutional monarchy, and an end to the transfer and restrictions of land use.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The revolution grew into a war for independence from the Habsburg monarchy when Josip Jelačić, Ban of Croatia, crossed the border to restore their control. The new government, led by Lajos Kossuth, was initially successful against the Habsburg forces. Although Hungary took a national united stand for its freedom, some minorities of the Kingdom of Hungary, including the Serbs of Vojvodina, the Romanians of Transylvania and some Slovaks of Upper Hungary supported the Habsburg Emperor and fought against the Hungarian Revolutionary Army. Eventually, after one and a half years of fighting, the revolution was crushed when Russian Tsar Nicholas I marched into Hungary with over 300,000 troops. As result of the defeat, Hungary was thus placed under brutal martial law. The leading rebels like Kossuth fled into exile or were executed. In the long run, the passive resistance following the revolution, along with the crushing Austrian defeat in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, led to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867), which marked the birth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The center of the Ukrainian national movement was in Galicia, which is today divided between Ukraine and Poland. On 19 April 1848, a group of representatives led by the Greek Catholic clergy launched a petition to the Austrian Emperor. It expressed wishes that in those regions of Galicia where the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) population represented the majority, the Ukrainian language should be taught at schools and used to announce official decrees for the peasantry; local officials were expected to understand it and the Ruthenian clergy was to be equalized in their rights with the clergy of all other denominations.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: On 2 May 1848, the Supreme Ruthenian (Ukrainian) Council was established. The council (1848–1851) was headed by the Greek-Catholic Bishop Gregory Yakhimovich and consisted of 30 permanent members. Its main goal was the administrative division of Galicia into Western (Polish) and Eastern (Ruthenian/Ukrainian) parts within the borders of the Habsburg Empire, and formation of a separate region with a political self-governance.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: During 18–19 March, a series of riots known as the March Unrest ("Marsoroligheterna") took place in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Declarations with demands of political reform were spread in the city and a crowd was dispersed by the military, leading to 18 casualties.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Switzerland, already an alliance of republics, also saw an internal struggle. The attempted secession of seven Catholic cantons to form an alliance known as the "Sonderbund" ("separate alliance") in 1845 led to a short civil conflict in November 1847 in which around 100 people were killed. The "Sonderbund" was decisively defeated by the Protestant cantons, which had a larger population. A new constitution of 1848 ended the almost-complete independence of the cantons, transforming Switzerland into a federal state.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Polish people mounted a military insurrection against the Prussians in the Grand Duchy of Posen (or the Greater Poland region), a part of Prussia since its annexation in 1815. The Poles tried to establish a Polish political entity, but refused to cooperate with the Germans and the Jews. The Germans decided they were better off with the status quo, so they assisted the Prussian governments in recapturing control. In the long-term, the uprising stimulated nationalism among both the Poles and the Germans and brought civil equality to the Jews.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: A Romanian liberal and Romantic nationalist uprising began in June in the principality of Wallachia. Its goals were administrative autonomy, abolition of serfdom, and popular self-determination. It was closely connected with the 1848 unsuccessful revolt in Moldavia, it sought to overturn the administration imposed by Imperial Russian authorities under the "Regulamentul Organic" regime, and, through many of its leaders, demanded the abolition of boyar privilege. Led by a group of young intellectuals and officers in the Wallachian military forces, the movement succeeded in toppling the ruling Prince Gheorghe Bibescu, whom it replaced with a provisional government and a regency, and in passing a series of major liberal reforms, first announced in the Proclamation of Islaz.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Despite its rapid gains and popular backing, the new administration was marked by conflicts between the radical wing and more conservative forces, especially over the issue of land reform. Two successive abortive coups weakened the new government, and its international status was always contested by Russia. After managing to rally a degree of sympathy from Ottoman political leaders, the Revolution was ultimately isolated by the intervention of Russian diplomats. In September 1848 by agreement with the Ottomans, Russia invaded and put down the revolution. According to Vasile Maciu, the failures were attributable in Wallachia to foreign intervention, in Moldavia to the opposition of the feudalists, and in Transylvania to the failure of the campaigns of General Józef Bem, and later to Austrian repression. In later decades, the rebels returned and gained their goals.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Belgium did not see major unrest in 1848; it had already undergone a liberal reform after the Revolution of 1830 and thus its constitutional system and its monarchy survived.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: A number of small local riots broke out, concentrated in the "sillon industriel" industrial region of the provinces of Liège and Hainaut.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The most serious threat of revolutionary contagion, however, was posed by Belgian émigré groups from France. In 1830 the Belgian Revolution had broken out inspired by the revolution occurring in France, and Belgian authorities feared that a similar 'copycat' phenomenon might occur in 1848. Shortly after the revolution in France, Belgian migrant workers living in Paris were encouraged to return to Belgium to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic. Belgian authorities expelled Karl Marx himself from Brussels in early March on accusations of having used part of his inheritance to arm Belgian revolutionaries.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Around 6,000 armed émigrés of the "Belgian Legion" attempted to cross the Belgian frontier. There were two divisions which were formed. The first group, travelling by train, were stopped and quickly disarmed at Quiévrain on 26 March 1848. The second group crossed the border on 29 March and headed for Brussels. They were confronted by Belgian troops at the hamlet of Risquons-Tout and defeated. Several smaller groups managed to infiltrate Belgium, but the reinforced Belgian border troops succeeded and the defeat at Risquons-Tout effectively ended the revolutionary threat to Belgium.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The situation in Belgium began to recover that summer after a good harvest, and fresh elections returned a strong majority to the governing party.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: A tendency common in the revolutionary movements of 1848 was a perception that the liberal monarchies set up in the 1830s, despite formally being representative parliamentary democracies, were too oligarchical and/or corrupt to respond to the urgent needs of the people, and were therefore in need of drastic democratic overhaul or, failing that, separatism to build a democratic state from scratch. This was the process that occurred in Ireland between 1801 and 1848.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Previously a separate kingdom, Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1801. Although its population was made up largely of Catholics, and sociologically of agricultural workers, tensions arose from the political over-representation, in positions of power, of landowners of Protestant background who were loyal to the United Kingdom. From the 1810s a conservative-liberal movement led by Daniel O'Connell had sought to secure equal political rights for Catholics "within" the British political system, successful in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. But as in other European states, a current inspired by Radicalism criticized the conservative-liberals for pursuing the aim of democratic equality with excessive compromise and gradualism.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In Ireland a current of nationalist, egalitarian and Radical republicanism, inspired by the French Revolution, had been present since the 1790s being expressed initially in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. This tendency grew into a movement for social, cultural and political reform during the 1830s, and in 1839 was realized into a political association called Young Ireland. It was initially not well received, but grew more popular with the Great Famine of 18451849, an event that brought catastrophic social effects and which threw into light the inadequate response of authorities.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The spark for the Young Irelander Revolution came in 1848 when the British Parliament passed the "Crime and Outrage Bill". The Bill was essentially a declaration of martial law in Ireland, designed to create a counter-insurgency against the growing Irish nationalist movement.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In response, the Young Ireland Party launched its rebellion in July 1848, gathering landlords and tenants to its cause.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: But its first major engagement against police, in the village of Ballingarry, South Tipperary, was a failure. A long gunfight with around 50 armed police ended when police reinforcements arrived. After the arrest of the Young Ireland leaders, the rebellion collapsed, though intermittent fighting continued for the next year,


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: While no revolution occurred in Spain in the year 1848, a similar phenomenon occurred. During this year, the country was going through the Second Carlist War. The European revolutions erupted at a moment when the political regime in Spain faced great criticism from within one of its two main parties, and by 1854 a radical-liberal revolution and a conservative-liberal counter-revolution had both occurred.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Since 1833, Spain had been governed by a conservative-liberal parliamentary monarchy similar to and modelled on the July Monarchy in France. In order to exclude absolute monarchists from government, power had alternated between two liberal parties: the center-left Progressive Party, and the center-right Moderate Party. But a decade of rule by the center-right Moderates had recently produced a constitutional reform (1845), prompting fears that the Moderates sought to reach out to Absolutists and permanently exclude the Progressives. The left-wing of the Progressive Party, which had historical links to Jacobinism and Radicalism, began to push for root-and-branch reforms to the constitutional monarchy, notably universal male suffrage and parliamentary sovereignty.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: The European Revolutions of 1848 and particularly the French Second Republic prompted the Spanish radical movement to adopt positions incompatible with the existing constitutional regime, notably republicanism. This ultimately led the Radicals to exit the Progressive Party to form the Democratic Party in 1849.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Over the next years, two revolutions occurred. In 1854, the conservatives of the Moderate Party were ousted after a decade in power by an alliance of Radicals, Liberals and liberal Conservatives led by Generals Espartero and O'Donnell. In 1856, the more conservative half of this alliance launched a second revolution to oust the republican Radicals, leading to a new 10-year period of government by conservative-liberal monarchists.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Taken together, the two revolutions can be thought of as echoing aspects of the French Second Republic: the Spanish Revolution of 1854, as a revolt by Radicals and Liberals against the oligarchical, conservative-liberal parliamentary monarchy of the 1830s, mirrored the French Revolution of 1848; while the Spanish Revolution of 1856, as a counter-revolution of conservative-liberals under a military strongman, had echoes of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup against the French Second Republic.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Russian Empire (including Poland and Finland), and the Ottoman Empire did not encounter major national or Radical revolutions in 1848. Sweden and Norway were also little affected. Serbia, though formally unaffected by the revolt as it was a part of the Ottoman state, actively supported Serbian revolutionaries in the Habsburg Empire.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In some countries, uprisings had already occurred demanding similar reforms to the Revolutions of 1848, but little success. This was the case for the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had seen a series of uprisings before or after but not during 1848: the November Uprising of 1830–31; the Kraków Uprising of 1846 (notable for being quelled by the anti-revolutionary Galician slaughter), and later on the January Uprising of 1863–65.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In other countries, the relative calm could be attributed to the fact that they had already gone through revolutions or civil wars in the preceding years, and therefore already enjoyed many of the reforms which Radicals elsewhere were demanding in 1848. This was largely the case for Belgium (the Belgian Revolution in 1830–1); Portugal (the large Liberal Wars of 1828–1834, and the minor civil war of Patuleia in 1846–1847); and Switzerland (the Sonderbund War of 1847)


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In yet other countries, the absence of unrest was partly due to governments taking action to prevent revolutionary unrest, and pre-emptively grant some of the reforms demanded by revolutionaries elsewhere. This was notably the case for the Netherlands, where King William II decided to alter the Dutch constitution to reform elections and voluntarily reduce the power of the monarchy. The same might be said of Switzerland, where a new constitutional regime was introduced in 1848: the Swiss Federal Constitution was a revolution of sorts, laying the foundation of Swiss society as it is today.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: While no major political upheavals occurred in the Ottoman Empire as such, political unrest did occur in some of its vassal states. In Serbia, feudalism was abolished and the power of the Serbian prince was reduced with the Constitution of Serbia in 1838.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In Britain, while the middle classes had been pacified by their inclusion in the extension of the franchise in the Reform Act 1832, the consequential agitations, violence, and petitions of the Chartist movement came to a head with their peaceful petition to Parliament of 1848. The repeal in 1846 of the protectionist agricultural tariffscalled the "Corn Laws"had defused some proletarian fervour.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In the Isle of Man, there were ongoing efforts to reform the self-elected House of Keys, but no revolution took place. Some of the reformers were encouraged by events in France in particular.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In the United States, opinions were polarized, with Democrats and reformers in favour, although they were distressed at the degree of violence involved. Opposition came from conservative elements, especially Whigs, southern slaveholders, orthodox Calvinists, and Catholics. About 4,000 German exiles arrived and some became fervent Republicans in the 1850s, such as Carl Schurz. Kossuth toured America and won great applause, but no volunteers or diplomatic or financial help.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Following rebellions in 1837 and 1838, 1848 in Canada saw the establishment of responsible government in Nova Scotia and The Canadas, the first such governments in the British Empire outside Great Britain. John Ralston Saul has argued that this development is tied to the revolutions in Europe, but described the Canadian approach to the revolutionary year of 1848 as "talking their way...out of the empire's control system and into a new democratic model", a stable democratic system which has lasted to the present day. Tory and Orange Order in Canada opposition to responsible government came to a head in riots triggered by the Rebellion Losses Bill in 1849. They succeeded in the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal, but, unlike their counterrevolutionary counterparts in Europe, they were ultimately unsuccessful.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In Spanish Latin America, the Revolution of 1848 appeared in New Granada, where Colombian students, liberals, and intellectuals demanded the election of General José Hilario López. He took power in 1849 and launched major reforms, abolishing slavery and the death penalty, and providing freedom of the press and of religion. The resulting turmoil in Colombia lasted three decades; from 1851 to 1885, the country was ravaged by four general civil wars and 50 local revolutions.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In Brazil, the Praieira Revolt, a movement in Pernambuco, lasted from November 1848 to 1852. Unresolved conflicts from the period of the regency and local resistance to the consolidation of the Brazilian Empire that had been proclaimed in 1822 helped to plant the seeds of the revolution.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In Mexico, the conservative government led by Santa Anna lost California and half of the territory to the United States in the Mexican–American War of 1845–1848. Derived from this catastrophe and chronic stability problems, the Liberal Party started a reformist movement. This movement, via elections, led liberals to formulate the "Plan of Ayutla". The Plan written in 1854 aimed at removing conservative, centralist President Antonio López de Santa Anna from control of Mexico during the Second Federal Republic of Mexico period. Initially, it seemed little different from other political plans of the era, but it is considered the first act of the Liberal Reform in Mexico. It was the catalyst for revolts in many parts of Mexico, which led to the resignation of Santa Anna from the presidency, never to vie for office again. The next Presidents of Mexico were the liberals, Juan Álvarez, Ignacio Comonfort, and Benito Juárez. The new regime would then proclaim the 1857 Mexican Constitution, which implemented a variety of liberal reforms. Among other things, these reforms confiscated religious property, aimed to promote economic development and to stabilize a nascent republican government. The reforms led directly to the so-called Three Years War or Reform War of 1857. The liberals won this war but the conservatives solicited the French Government of Napoleon III for a European, conservative Monarch, deriving into the Second French intervention in Mexico. Under the puppet Habsburg government of Maximilian I of Mexico, the country became a client state of France (1863-1867).


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Historian Priscilla Robertson posits that many goals were achieved by the 1870s, but the credit primarily goes to the enemies of the 1848 revolutionaries, commenting: "Most of what the men of 1848 fought for was brought about within a quarter of a century, and the men who accomplished it were most of them specific enemies of the 1848 movement. Thiers ushered in a third French Republic, Bismarck united Germany, and Cavour, Italy. Deák won autonomy for Hungary within a dual monarchy; a Russian czar freed the serfs; and the British manufacturing classes moved toward the freedoms of the People's Charter."


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Liberal democrats looked to 1848 as a democratic revolution, which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity. For nationalists, 1848 was the springtime of hope, when newly emerging nationalities rejected the old multinational empires, but the end results were not as comprehensive as many had hoped. Communists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat. The view of the Revolutions of 1848 as a bourgeois revolution is also common in non-Marxist scholarship. Middle-class anxiety and different approaches between bourgeois revolutionaries and radicals led to the failure of revolutions. Many governments engaged in a partial reversal of the revolutionary reforms of 1848–1849 as well as heightened repression and censorship. The Hanoverian nobility successfully appealed to the Confederal Diet in 1851 over the loss of their noble privileges, while the Prussian Junkers recovered their manorial police powers from 1852 to 1855. In the Austrian Empire, the Sylvester Patents (1851) discarded Franz Stadion's constitution and the Statute of Basic Rights, while the number of arrests in Habsburg territories increased from 70,000 in 1850 to one million by 1854. Nicholas I's rule in Russia after 1848 was particularly repressive, marked by an expansion of the secret police (the Tretiye Otdeleniye) and stricter censorship; there were more Russians working for censorship organs than actual books published in the period immediately after 1848. In France, the works of Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were confiscated.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: In the post-revolutionary decade after 1848, little had visibly changed, and many historians considered the revolutions a failure, given the seeming lack of permanent structural changes. More recently, Christopher Clark has characterised the period that followed 1848 as one dominated by a revolution in government. Karl Marx expressed disappointment at the bourgeois character of the revolutions. Marx elaborated in his 1850 "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" a theory of permanent revolution according to which the proletariat should strengthen democratic bourgeois revolutionary forces until the proletariat itself is ready to seize power. The Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Manteuffel declared that the state could no longer be run like the landed estate of a nobleman. In Prussia, August von Bethmann-Hollweg's "Preußisches Wochenblatt" newspaper (founded 1851) acted as a popular outlet for modernising Prussian conservative statesmen and journalists against the reactionary Kreuzzeitung faction. The Revolutions of 1848 were followed by new centrist coalitions dominated by liberals nervous of the threat of working-class socialism, as seen in the Piedmontese "Connubio" under Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Governments after 1848 were forced into managing the public sphere and popular sphere with more effectiveness, resulting in the increased prominence of the Prussian "Zentralstelle für Pressangelegenheiten" (Central Press Agency, established 1850), the Austrian "Zensur-und polizeihofstelle", and the French "Direction Générale de la Librairie" (1856). Nevertheless, there were a few immediate successes for some revolutionary movements, notably in the Habsburg lands. Austria and Prussia eliminated feudalism by 1850, improving the lot of the peasants. European middle classes made political and economic gains over the next 20 years; France retained universal male suffrage. Russia would later free the serfs on 19 February 1861. The Habsburgs finally had to give the Hungarians more self-determination in the "Ausgleich" of 1867. The revolutions inspired lasting reform in Denmark as well as the Netherlands. has described the 1848 Revolutions as a turning point in the development of modern antisemitism through the development of conspiracies that presented Jews as representative both of the forces of social revolution (apparently typified in Joseph Goldmark and Adolf Fischhof of Vienna) and of international capital, as seen in the 1848 report from Eduard von Müller-Tellering, the Viennese correspondent of Marx's "Neue Rheinische Zeitung", which declared that "tyranny comes from money and the money belongs to the Jews".


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: About 4,000 exiles came to the United States fleeing the reactionary purges. Of these, 100 went to the Texas Hill Country as German Texans. More widely, many disillusioned and persecuted revolutionaries, in particular (though not exclusively) those from Germany and the Austrian Empire, left their homelands for foreign exile in the New World or in the more liberal European nations; these emigrants were known as the Forty-Eighters.


title: Revolutions of 1848

text: Steven Brust and Emma Bull's 1997 epistolary novel "Freedom & Necessity" is set in England in the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848.


title: Zoolander

text: Zoolander is a 2001 American comedy film directed by and starring Ben Stiller. The film contains elements from a pair of short films directed by Russell Bates and written by Drake Sather and Stiller for the "VH1 Fashion Awards" television specials in 1996 and 1997. The earlier short films and this film feature Derek Zoolander (Stiller), a dimwitted supermodel. It is the last film from Paramount Pictures with the involvement of Village Roadshow Pictures.


title: Zoolander

text: In the film, top people in the fashion industry, Jacobim Mugatu (Will Ferrell) and Derek's agent Maury Ballstein (Jerry Stiller), are hired by other executives to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia (Woodrow Asai), who will pass progressive laws that would harm their businesses. Mugatu and Ballstein plan to brainwash Zoolander into killing him. Meanwhile, Zoolander has several personal and career issues, including declining popularity, disappointment in his career choice from his family, and trying to find his true purpose which he suspects is not being a model. Through much research, journalist Matilda Jeffries (Christine Taylor) becomes aware of the planned assassination and informs Derek about it. After Derek reconciles with the competing male model Hansel (Owen Wilson), the three try to stop the Prime Minister's assassination from happening.


title: Zoolander

text: A satire on the fashion industry, the film received mixed reviews from critics, though it was a box-office success. A sequel, "Zoolander 2", was released in February 2016, to negative reviews. An animated film, "", was released on Netflix UK in August 2016.


title: Zoolander

text: In New York City, male model Derek Zoolander is at a low point; he is ousted as the top male fashion model by the rising star Hansel, his roommates and colleagues are killed in a "freak gasoline-fight accident", and an attempt to reconnect with his southern New Jersey working class relatives ends with the family rejecting him. Meanwhile, fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu and Derek's agent Maury Ballstein are charged by the fashion industry with finding a model who can be brainwashed into assassinating the new progressive-leaning Prime Minister of Malaysia, whose policies will prohibit them from retaining cheap child labor in the country. Mugatu hires Derek, whom he had never worked with, to star in the next runway show for his brainwashing plan. It involves Derek being conditioned to attempt the assassination when the song "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is played.


title: Zoolander

text: Matilda Jeffries, feeling responsible for Derek's downfall as she wrote a critical "Time" article about him, becomes suspicious of Mugatu's offer. She tells her concerns to Derek, but he ignores her. After receiving info through calls from former hand model J.P. Prewett, Matilda and Derek meet him in a cemetery. Prewett reveals that the fashion industry has been behind several of history's political assassinations, including Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy and the brainwashed models are soon killed after they have completed their task. Mugatu's cronies attack the group, forcing Derek and Matilda to flee. They go to Hansel's home, the last place they believe Mugatu will think to look. Derek, Hansel, and Matilda bond, the two male models resolving their differences while partaking of Hansel's collection of narcotics and participating in group sex with Matilda and others. Derek and Hansel break into Maury's office to find evidence of the assassination plot, but they cannot operate his computer to find them.


title: Zoolander

text: Derek goes to the runway, and Mugatu's disc jockey plays a remix version of "Relax". This activates Derek's mental programming, only for it to stop after Hansel breaks into the DJ booth and shuts off the turntable. Despite Hansel bringing the computer with him and smashing the computer on the floor (which he does out of taking Matilda's words of the files being in the computer literally), Maury admits to the conspiracy. Mugatu then attempts to kill the Prime Minister himself by throwing a shuriken, but Derek stops it by unleashing his ultimate model look, "Magnum". In Derek's rural hometown, his father Larry watches the event on television, and proudly acknowledges Derek as his son. A few years later, Derek, Hansel, and Maury start ""The Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too"". Derek and Matilda have a son named Derek Zoolander Jr., who has already developed his first modeling look.


title: Zoolander

text: David Bowie and Billy Zane made prominent cameos as themselves, with Bowie acting as judge for a "walk-off", and Zane appearing as a friend of Derek. Comedian Godfrey and Taj Crown appear as janitor disguises for Derek and Hansel respectively. Also making cameos were Lance Bass, Tyson Beckford, Victoria Beckham, Emma Bunton, Stephen Dorff, Shavo Odadjian, Fred Durst, Tom Ford, Cuba Gooding Jr., Fabio Lanzoni, Theo Kogan, Lukas Haas, Tommy Hilfiger, Paris Hilton, Carmen Kass, Heidi Klum, Lenny Kravitz, Karl Lagerfeld, Lil' Kim, James Marsden, Anne Meara, Natalie Portman, Frankie Rayder, Mark Ronson, Gavin Rossdale, Winona Ryder, Garry Shandling, Christian Slater, Gwen Stefani, Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Donatella Versace, Sandra Bernhard, Amanda Lepore and Veronica Webb.


title: Zoolander

text: Ben Stiller first created the character for a skit at the 1996 VH1 Fashion Awards. The name "Derek Zoolander" was invented by Bates while he was editing the first short film, and was inspired by the names of two male models who both worked for Calvin Klein: the Dutchman Mark Vanderloo and the American Johnny Zander.


title: Zoolander

text: Owen Wilson was Stiller's first choice for the role of Hansel but it was uncertain if he would be available and auditions were held. Jake Gyllenhaal auditioned for the role. Andy Dick was going to play Mugatu, but was unavailable due to a previous commitment to the TV show "Go Fish". Stiller had originally intended to play Derek's agent Maury as well, but was already set to play the lead role and direct the film, leading him to cast his father Jerry Stiller as Maury instead.


title: Zoolander

text: Wilson could not use a yo-yo as depicted in the film, so a skilled user named Steve Brown was hired to double for Wilson with a yo-yo.


title: Zoolander

text: David Bowie appeared as himself as the judge of the walk-off scene, filming his cameo in September 2000. He later stated, "It was just too funny a script to walk past. An absolute hoot!" With his entrance accompanied by a freeze-frame and a snippet of his song "Let's Dance" (1983), biographer Nicholas Pegg describes Bowie's appearance as "willingly sending up the media's image of him as the ultimate arbiter of cool."


title: Zoolander

text: The opening scenes were filmed at the real life 2000 VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards during commercial breaks.


title: Zoolander

text: "Derelicte" is the name given to the fashion line designed by Mugatu and is a parody of a real fashion line created by John Galliano in 2000. It is described by Mugatu in the film as "a fashion, a way of life inspired by the very homeless, the vagrants, the crack whores that make this wonderful city so unique." The fashion line in the film consists of clothing made from everyday objects that could be found on the streets of New York. Galliano used clothing worn by the destitute as an inspiration for a real-life fashion line in 2000.


title: Zoolander

text: During the scene in which David Duchovny, as J.P. Prewett, explains the conspiracy to Derek, he finishes answering Derek's original question "Why male models?" only for Stiller, in character, to ask again, "But why male models?" Stiller improvised this line because he had forgotten what he was actually supposed to say, but Duchovny allowed it, replying in character, "You serious? I just... I just told you that a moment ago."


title: Zoolander

text: The original ending to the film would have entailed Derek getting fatally struck by a train and ascending to heaven, but the idea was scrapped as the producers feared they could not fit it into the film's original budget.


title: Zoolander

text: "Zoolander" was never shown in Malaysia, as the film depicts an attempted assassination of the Malaysian prime minister. Malaysia's censorship board deemed it "definitely unsuitable". The film was also banned in neighboring Singapore due to bilateral sensitivities and the movie's depiction of using the drug peyote. It was subsequently made available in Singapore in 2006, with an NC-16 rating. In the United States, the film was originally rated R for its sexual content, profanity, and drug references, but was later re-rated PG-13 on appeal.


title: Zoolander

text: In the Asian release, all references to the country of Malaysia were changed to Micronesia, the subregion which Hansel mistook for Malaysia at one point in the western version.


title: Zoolander

text: In the United States, since the film was released on September 28, 2001 (about two weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center), Stiller made the executive decision to digitally remove any backgrounds that originally contained the Twin Towers in the background skyline. Stiller defended his decision to erase images of New York's World Trade Center Towers from the film, saying he did what he thought was appropriate at the time.


title: Zoolander

text: "Glamorama", a 1998 satirical novel by Bret Easton Ellis, tells the story of a vacuous male model who becomes involved in a plot concocted by international terrorists who recruit from within the fashion industry. In 2005, Ellis stated that he was aware of the similarities between "Zoolander" and "Glamorama" and said that he attempted to take legal action. Ellis was later asked about the similarities in a 2009 BBC interview but said that he is unable to discuss the topic due to an out-of-court settlement.


title: Zoolander

text: "Zoolander" grossed $45.2 million in the U.S. and Canada and $15.6 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $60.8 million against a budget of $28 million.


title: Zoolander

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 65% based on 141 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A wacky satire on the fashion industry, "Zoolander" is one of those deliberately dumb comedies that can deliver genuine laughs." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100 based on reviews from 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Zoolander

text: Reviews appreciated "Zoolander" as an escapist, upbeat satire on New York fashion. BBC film critic Nev Pierce labeled it 'sharply observed", specifically with its parody magazine covers and dialogue.


title: Zoolander

text: "The Hollywood Reporter"s Kirk Honeycutt felt the film mostly achieved the difficult goal of being "silly and smart" as the same time. However, its humor was generally considered hit-and-miss. Honeycutt wrote it had both predictable "low-grade gags" and "weirdly hip and even witty ones". Pierce thought "the frenetic buffoonery does score several big laughs" but could take time for some viewers to adapt to, such as in the first hour, "where several jokes fail to click and Ferrell's camp villainy".


title: Zoolander

text: Some reviews criticized the incorporation of child labor law themes; Roger Ebert criticized the portrayal as insensitive. McCarthy, while finding the assassin subplot clever, also found it too serious for the comical vibe.


title: Zoolander

text: McCarthy praised the performances and highlighted its many cameos. He called Stiller's performance "constantly amusing" if overplaying his "look" a little, but stated "the character's intentional superficiality wears a little thin at feature length". The journalist exclaimed Wilson "gets far more comic mileage than one could have imagined possible overlaying ruthless careerism with an affably vacant grunge/Eastern veneer". Pierce wrote how the actors contributed to the film's style; he argued Wilson's "impeccable timing in the climax elevates the sometimes bizarre material to moments that border comedy genius", and the cameos "lend[] an air of authenticity to the idiocy".


title: Zoolander

text: Although praising the production design, costumes, and choice of pop songs, McCarthy felt the film did not have "truly confident visual stylization" to make comic book-esque villains like Mugatu enjoyable, and that long conversations were not fluidly written and edited. He also went after the removal of the Twin Towers as "disruptive" and offending the audience's intelligence.


title: Zoolander

text: Roger Ebert added that "to some degree, "Zoolander" is a victim of bad timing", referencing the film's release two weeks after September 11, 2001 and the presidential assassination plot point which he found to be in bad taste. He found some parts of the film funny and gave it a rating of 1 out of 4. According to Stiller, years later in private, Ebert admitted that he had changed his mind and now thought that the film was funny, and apologized to him for going "overboard".


title: Zoolander

text: The film received votes from two critics at the Sight & Sound's Poll of the greatest films of all time.


title: Zoolander

text: Fashion journalist Hadley Freeman categorized "Zoolander" as unique to other mainstream fashion films such as "Designing Woman" (1957), "Funny Face" (1957), and "The Devil Wears Prada" (2006); whereas they usually employ the same critiques of unintelligent models, silly clothing, and insipid business practices, "Zoolander" is much more surreal in how it puts these cliches together, as shown in its premise of male models being hypnotized to kill a prime minister.


title: Zoolander

text: The Kruder & Dorfmeister remix of David Holmes' song "Gone" is in the movie when Zoolander is in the day spa, shortly before his brainwashing.


title: Zoolander

text: In 2008, Stiller said he intended to make a sequel to "Zoolander", and by January 2011 a script had been completed. Filming commenced at Cinecittà studios in Rome in early 2015, and on March 10 Stiller and Wilson appeared at the Paris Fashion Week in character as Derek Zoolander and Hansel McDonald. "Zoolander 2" was released on February 12, 2016, to negative reviews.


title: Technological singularity

text: The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I.J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.


title: Technological singularity

text: The first person to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context was John von Neumann. Stanislaw Ulam reports a discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue". Subsequent authors have echoed this viewpoint.


title: Technological singularity

text: The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole", and later in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. Another significant contributor to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book "The Singularity is Near", predicting singularity by 2045.


title: Technological singularity

text: Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction. The consequences of the singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated.


title: Technological singularity

text: Prominent technologists and academics dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity and the associated artificial intelligence explosion, including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, and Gordon Moore. One claim made was that the artificial intelligence growth is likely to run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones, as was observed in previously developed human technologies.


title: Technological singularity

text: Although technological progress has been accelerating in most areas, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not, according to Paul R. Ehrlich, changed significantly for millennia. However, with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is significantly more intelligent than humans.


title: Technological singularity

text: If a superhuman intelligence were to be invented—either through the amplification of human intelligence or through artificial intelligence—it would vastly improve over human problem-solving and inventive skills. Such an AI is referred to as Seed AI because if an AI were created with engineering capabilities that matched or surpassed those of its human creators, it would have the potential to autonomously improve its own software and hardware to design an even more capable machine, which could repeat the process in turn. This recursive self-improvement could accelerate, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in. It is speculated that over many iterations, such an AI would far surpass human cognitive abilities.


title: Technological singularity

text: I. J. Good speculated in 1965 that artificial general intelligence might bring about an intelligence explosion:


title: Technological singularity

text: One version of intelligence explosion is one whether the computing power approaches infinity in a finite amount of time. In this version, once AIs are doing the research to improve themselves, speed doubles e.g. after 2 years, then 1 year, then 6 months, then 3 months, then 1.5 months, etc., where the infinite sum of the doubling periods is 4 years. Unless prevented by physical limits of computation and time quantization, this process would literally achieve infinite computing power in 4 years, properly earning the name "singularity" for the final state. This form of intelligence explosion is described in Yudkowsky (1996).


title: Technological singularity

text: A superintelligence, hyperintelligence, or superhuman intelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to the form or degree of intelligence possessed by such an agent. John von Neumann, Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil define the concept in terms of the technological creation of super intelligence, arguing that it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what human beings' lives would be like in a post-singularity world.


title: Technological singularity

text: Technology forecasters and researchers disagree regarding when, or whether, human intelligence will likely be surpassed. Some argue that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will probably result in general reasoning systems that bypass human cognitive limitations. Others believe that humans will evolve or directly modify their biology so as to achieve radically greater intelligence. A number of futures studies scenarios combine these possibilities, suggesting that humans are likely to interface with computers, or upload their minds to computers, in a way that enables substantial intelligence amplification. The book "The Age of Em" by Robin Hanson outlines a future in which uploads of human brains emerge instead of or on the way to the emergence of superintelligence.


title: Technological singularity

text: Some writers use "the singularity" in a broader way to refer to any radical changes in our society brought about by new technologies such as molecular nanotechnology, although Vinge and other writers specifically state that without superintelligence, such changes would not qualify as a true singularity.


title: Technological singularity

text: A speed superintelligence describes an AI that can function like a human mind, only much faster. For example, with a million-fold increase in the speed of information processing relative to that of humans, a subjective year would pass in 30 physical seconds. Such a difference in information processing speed could drive the singularity.


title: Technological singularity

text: As per Chalmers, "Good (1965) predicts an ultraintelligent machine by 2000, Vinge (1993) predicts greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030, Yudkowsky (1996) predicts a singularity by 2021, and Kurzweil (2005) predicts human-level artificial intelligence by 2030." Moravec (1988) predicts human-level artificial intelligence in supercomputers by 2010 by extrapolating past trend using a chart, while Moravec (1998/1999) predicts human-level artificial intelligence by 2040, and intelligence far beyond human by 2050. Per 2017 interview, Kurzweil predicts human-level intelligence by 2029 and billion fold intelligence and singularity by 2045.


title: Technological singularity

text: Four polls of AI researchers, conducted in 2012 and 2013 by Nick Bostrom and Vincent C. Müller, suggested a confidence of 50% that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would be developed by 2040–2050.


title: Technological singularity

text: Prominent technologists and academics dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity, including Paul Allen, Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Theodore Modis, and Gordon Moore, whose law is often cited in support of the concept.


title: Technological singularity

text: Most proposed methods for creating superhuman or transhuman minds fall into one of two categories: intelligence amplification of human brains and artificial intelligence. The many speculated ways to augment human intelligence include bioengineering, genetic engineering, nootropic drugs, AI assistants, direct brain–computer interfaces and mind uploading. These multiple possible paths to an intelligence explosion, all of which will presumably be pursued, makes a singularity more likely.


title: Technological singularity

text: Robin Hanson expressed skepticism of human intelligence augmentation, writing that once the "low-hanging fruit" of easy methods for increasing human intelligence have been exhausted, further improvements will become increasingly difficult. Despite all of the speculated ways for amplifying human intelligence, non-human artificial intelligence (specifically seed AI) is the most popular option among the hypotheses that would advance the singularity.


title: Technological singularity

text: The possibility of an intelligence explosion depends on three factors. The first accelerating factor is the new intelligence enhancements made possible by each previous improvement. Contrariwise, as the intelligences become more advanced, further advances will become more and more complicated, possibly outweighing the advantage of increased intelligence. Each improvement should generate at least one more improvement, on average, for movement towards singularity to continue. Finally, the laws of physics may eventually prevent further improvement.


title: Technological singularity

text: There are two logically independent, but mutually reinforcing, causes of intelligence improvements: increases in the speed of computation, and improvements to the algorithms used. The former is predicted by Moore's Law and the forecasted improvements in hardware, and is comparatively similar to previous technological advances. But there are some AI researchers, who believe software is more important than hardware.


title: Technological singularity

text: A 2017 email survey of authors with publications at the 2015 NeurIPS and ICML machine learning conferences asked about the chance that "the intelligence explosion argument is broadly correct". Of the respondents, 12% said it was "quite likely", 17% said it was "likely", 21% said it was "about even", 24% said it was "unlikely" and 26% said it was "quite unlikely".


title: Technological singularity

text: Both for human and artificial intelligence, hardware improvements increase the rate of future hardware improvements. An analogy to Moore's Law suggests that if the first doubling of speed took 18 months, the second would take 18 subjective months; or 9 external months, whereafter, four months, two months, and so on towards a speed singularity. Some upper limit on speed may eventually be reached. Jeff Hawkins has stated that a self-improving computer system would inevitably run into upper limits on computing power: "in the end there are limits to how big and fast computers can run. We would end up in the same place; we'd just get there a bit faster. There would be no singularity."


title: Technological singularity

text: It is difficult to directly compare silicon-based hardware with neurons. But notes that computer speech recognition is approaching human capabilities, and that this capability seems to require 0.01% of the volume of the brain. This analogy suggests that modern computer hardware is within a few orders of magnitude of being as powerful as the human brain.


title: Technological singularity

text: The exponential growth in computing technology suggested by Moore's law is commonly cited as a reason to expect a singularity in the relatively near future, and a number of authors have proposed generalizations of Moore's law. Computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec proposed in a 1998 book that the exponential growth curve could be extended back through earlier computing technologies prior to the integrated circuit.


title: Technological singularity

text: Ray Kurzweil postulates a law of accelerating returns in which the speed of technological change (and more generally, all evolutionary processes) increases exponentially, generalizing Moore's law in the same manner as Moravec's proposal, and also including material technology (especially as applied to nanotechnology), medical technology and others. Between 1986 and 2007, machines' application-specific capacity to compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers has doubled every 18 months; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; and the world's storage capacity per capita doubled every 40 months. On the other hand, it has been argued that the global acceleration pattern having the 21st century singularity as its parameter should be characterized as hyperbolic rather than exponential.


title: Technological singularity

text: Kurzweil reserves the term "singularity" for a rapid increase in artificial intelligence (as opposed to other technologies), writing for example that "The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains ... There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine". He also defines his predicted date of the singularity (2045) in terms of when he expects computer-based intelligences to significantly exceed the sum total of human brainpower, writing that advances in computing before that date "will not represent the Singularity" because they do "not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence."


title: Technological singularity

text: Some singularity proponents argue its inevitability through extrapolation of past trends, especially those pertaining to shortening gaps between improvements to technology. In one of the first uses of the term "singularity" in the context of technological progress, Stanislaw Ulam tells of a conversation with John von Neumann about accelerating change:


title: Technological singularity

text: Kurzweil claims that technological progress follows a pattern of exponential growth, following what he calls the "law of accelerating returns". Whenever technology approaches a barrier, Kurzweil writes, new technologies will surmount it. He predicts paradigm shifts will become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history". Kurzweil believes that the singularity will occur by approximately . His predictions differ from Vinge's in that he predicts a gradual ascent to the singularity, rather than Vinge's rapidly self-improving superhuman intelligence.


title: Technological singularity

text: Oft-cited dangers include those commonly associated with molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering. These threats are major issues for both singularity advocates and critics, and were the subject of Bill Joy's April 2000 "Wired" magazine article "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us".


title: Technological singularity

text: Some intelligence technologies, like "seed AI", may also have the potential to not just make themselves faster, but also more efficient, by modifying their source code. These improvements would make further improvements possible, which would make further improvements possible, and so on.


title: Technological singularity

text: The mechanism for a recursively self-improving set of algorithms differs from an increase in raw computation speed in two ways. First, it does not require external influence: machines designing faster hardware would still require humans to create the improved hardware, or to program factories appropriately. An AI rewriting its own source code could do so while contained in an AI box.


title: Technological singularity

text: Second, as with Vernor Vinge’s conception of the singularity, it is much harder to predict the outcome. While speed increases seem to be only a quantitative difference from human intelligence, actual algorithm improvements would be qualitatively different. Eliezer Yudkowsky compares it to the changes that human intelligence brought: humans changed the world thousands of times more rapidly than evolution had done, and in totally different ways. Similarly, the evolution of life was a massive departure and acceleration from the previous geological rates of change, and improved intelligence could cause change to be as different again.


title: Technological singularity

text: There are substantial dangers associated with an intelligence explosion singularity originating from a recursively self-improving set of algorithms. First, the goal structure of the AI might self-modify, potentially causing the AI to optimise for something other than what was originally intended.


title: Technological singularity

text: Secondly, AIs could compete for the same scarce resources humankind uses to survive. While not actively malicious, AIs would promote the goals of their programming, not necessarily broader human goals, and thus might crowd out humans completely.


title: Technological singularity

text: Carl Shulman and Anders Sandberg suggest that algorithm improvements may be the limiting factor for a singularity; while hardware efficiency tends to improve at a steady pace, software innovations are more unpredictable and may be bottlenecked by serial, cumulative research. They suggest that in the case of a software-limited singularity, intelligence explosion would actually become more likely than with a hardware-limited singularity, because in the software-limited case, once human-level AI is developed, it could run serially on very fast hardware, and the abundance of cheap hardware would make AI research less constrained. An abundance of accumulated hardware that can be unleashed once the software figures out how to use it has been called "computing overhang."


title: Technological singularity

text: Some critics, like philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and philosopher John Searle, assert that computers or machines cannot in principle achieve true human intelligence. Others, like physicist Stephen Hawking, object that whether machines can achieve a true intelligence or merely something similar to intelligence is irrelevant if the net result is the same.


title: Technological singularity

text: Psychologist Steven Pinker stated in 2008: "There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems. ..."


title: Technological singularity

text: Martin Ford postulates a "technology paradox" in that before the singularity could occur most routine jobs in the economy would be automated, since this would require a level of technology inferior to that of the singularity. This would cause massive unemployment and plummeting consumer demand, which in turn would destroy the incentive to invest in the technologies that would be required to bring about the Singularity. Job displacement is increasingly no longer limited to those types of work traditionally considered to be "routine."


title: Technological singularity

text: Theodore Modis and Jonathan Huebner argue that the rate of technological innovation has not only ceased to rise, but is actually now declining. Evidence for this decline is that the rise in computer clock rates is slowing, even while Moore's prediction of exponentially increasing circuit density continues to hold. This is due to excessive heat build-up from the chip, which cannot be dissipated quickly enough to prevent the chip from melting when operating at higher speeds. Advances in speed may be possible in the future by virtue of more power-efficient CPU designs and multi-cell processors.


title: Technological singularity

text: Theodore Modis holds the singularity cannot happen. He claims the "technological singularity" and especially Kurzweil lack scientific rigor; Kurzweil is alleged to mistake the logistic function (S-function) for an exponential function, and to see a "knee" in an exponential function where there can in fact be no such thing. In a 2021 article, Modis pointed out that no milestones – breaks in historical perspective comparable in importance to the Internet, DNA, the transistor, or nuclear energy – had been observed in the previous twenty years while five of them would have been expected according to the exponential trend advocated by the proponents of the technological singularity.


title: Technological singularity

text: AI researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber stated that the frequency of subjectively "notable events" appears to be approaching a 21st-century singularity, but cautioned readers to take such plots of subjective events with a grain of salt: perhaps differences in memory of recent and distant events could create an illusion of accelerating change where none exists.


title: Technological singularity

text: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen argued the opposite of accelerating returns, the complexity brake; the more progress science makes towards understanding intelligence, the more difficult it becomes to make additional progress. A study of the number of patents shows that human creativity does not show accelerating returns, but in fact, as suggested by Joseph Tainter in his "The Collapse of Complex Societies", a law of diminishing returns. The number of patents per thousand peaked in the period from 1850 to 1900, and has been declining since. The growth of complexity eventually becomes self-limiting, and leads to a widespread "general systems collapse".


title: Technological singularity

text: Hofstadter (2006) raises concern that Ray Kurzweil is not sufficiently scientifically rigorous, that an exponential tendency of technology is not a scientific law like one of physics, and that exponential curves have no "knees". Nonetheless, he does not rule out the singularity in principle in the distant future.


title: Technological singularity

text: Jaron Lanier denies that the singularity is inevitable: "I do not think the technology is creating itself. It's not an autonomous process." Furthermore: "The reason to believe in human agency over technological determinism is that you can then have an economy where people earn their own way and invent their own lives. If you structure a society on "not" emphasizing individual human agency, it's the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination ... to embrace [the idea of the Singularity] would be a celebration of bad data and bad politics."


title: Technological singularity

text: Economist Robert J. Gordon points out that measured economic growth has slowed around 1970 and slowed even further since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and argues that the economic data show no trace of a coming Singularity as imagined by mathematician I. J. Good.


title: Technological singularity

text: Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett said in 2017: "The whole singularity stuff, that’s preposterous. It distracts us from much more pressing problems", adding "AI tools that we become hyper-dependent on, that is going to happen. And one of the dangers is that we will give them more authority than they warrant."


title: Technological singularity

text: In addition to general criticisms of the singularity concept, several critics have raised issues with Kurzweil's iconic chart. One line of criticism is that a log-log chart of this nature is inherently biased toward a straight-line result. Others identify selection bias in the points that Kurzweil chooses to use. For example, biologist PZ Myers points out that many of the early evolutionary "events" were picked arbitrarily. Kurzweil has rebutted this by charting evolutionary events from 15 neutral sources, and showing that they fit a straight line on . Kelly (2006) argues that the way the Kurzweil chart is constructed with x-axis having time before present, it always points to the singularity being "now", for any date on which one would construct such a chart, and shows this visually on Kurzweil's chart.


title: Technological singularity

text: Some critics suggest religious motivations or implications of singularity, especially Kurzweil's version of it. The buildup towards the Singularity is compared with Judeo-Christian end-of-time scenarios. Beam calls it "a Buck Rogers vision of the hypothetical Christian Rapture". John Gray says "the Singularity echoes apocalyptic myths in which history is about to be interrupted by a world-transforming event".


title: Technological singularity

text: Dramatic changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past because of technological advancement. Based on population growth, the economy doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution. The new agricultural economy doubled every 900 years, a remarkable increase. In the current era, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the world's economic output doubles every fifteen years, sixty times faster than during the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman intelligence causes a similar revolution, argues Robin Hanson, one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a weekly basis.


title: Technological singularity

text: The term "technological singularity" reflects the idea that such change may happen suddenly, and that it is difficult to predict how the resulting new world would operate. It is unclear whether an intelligence explosion resulting in a singularity would be beneficial or harmful, or even an existential threat. Because AI is a major factor in singularity risk, a number of organizations pursue a technical theory of aligning AI goal-systems with human values, including the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Life Institute.


title: Technological singularity

text: Physicist Stephen Hawking said in 2014 that "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks." Hawking believed that in the coming decades, AI could offer "incalculable benefits and risks" such as "technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand." Hawking suggested that artificial intelligence should be taken more seriously and that more should be done to prepare for the singularity:


title: Technological singularity

text: According to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a significant problem in AI safety is that unfriendly artificial intelligence is likely to be much easier to create than friendly AI. While both require large advances in recursive optimisation process design, friendly AI also requires the ability to make goal structures invariant under self-improvement (or the AI could transform itself into something unfriendly) and a goal structure that aligns with human values and does not automatically destroy the human race. An unfriendly AI, on the other hand, can optimize for an arbitrary goal structure, which does not need to be invariant under self-modification. proposes an AI design that avoids several dangers including self-delusion, unintended instrumental actions, and corruption of the reward generator. He also discusses social impacts of AI and testing AI. His 2001 book "Super-Intelligent Machines" advocates the need for public education about AI and public control over AI. It also proposed a simple design that was vulnerable to corruption of the reward generator.


title: Technological singularity

text: While the technological singularity is usually seen as a sudden event, some scholars argue the current speed of change already fits this description.


title: Technological singularity

text: In addition, some argue that we are already in the midst of a major evolutionary transition that merges technology, biology, and society. Digital technology has infiltrated the fabric of human society to a degree of indisputable and often life-sustaining dependence.


title: Technological singularity

text: A 2016 article in "Trends in Ecology & Evolution" argues that "humans already embrace fusions of biology and technology. We spend most of our waking time communicating through digitally mediated channels... we trust artificial intelligence with our lives through antilock braking in cars and autopilots in planes... With one in three marriages in America beginning online, digital algorithms are also taking a role in human pair bonding and reproduction".


title: Technological singularity

text: The article further argues that from the perspective of the evolution, several previous Major Transitions in Evolution have transformed life through innovations in information storage and replication (RNA, DNA, multicellularity, and culture and language). In the current stage of life's evolution, the carbon-based biosphere has generated a cognitive system (humans) capable of creating technology that will result in a comparable evolutionary transition.


title: Technological singularity

text: The digital information created by humans has reached a similar magnitude to biological information in the biosphere. Since the 1980s, the quantity of digital information stored has doubled about every 2.5 years, reaching about 5 zettabytes in 2014 (5 bytes).


title: Technological singularity

text: In biological terms, there are 7.2 billion humans on the planet, each having a genome of 6.2 billion nucleotides. Since one byte can encode four nucleotide pairs, the individual genomes of every human on the planet could be encoded by approximately 1 bytes. The digital realm stored 500 times more information than this in 2014 (see figure). The total amount of DNA contained in all of the cells on Earth is estimated to be about 5.3 base pairs, equivalent to 1.325 bytes of information.


title: Technological singularity

text: If growth in digital storage continues at its current rate of 30–38% compound annual growth per year, it will rival the total information content contained in all of the DNA in all of the cells on Earth in about 110 years. This would represent a doubling of the amount of information stored in the biosphere across a total time period of just 150 years".