title: Radioactive decay

text: This relationship between the half-life and the decay constant shows that highly radioactive substances are quickly spent, while those that radiate weakly endure longer. Half-lives of known radionuclides vary by almost 54 orders of magnitude, from more than years ( sec) for the very nearly stable nuclide Te, to seconds for the highly unstable nuclide H.


title: Radioactive decay

text: The factor of in the above relations results from the fact that the concept of "half-life" is merely a way of selecting a different base other than the natural base for the lifetime expression. The time constant is the -life, the time until only 1/"e" remains, about 36.8%, rather than the 50% in the half-life of a radionuclide. Thus, is longer than . The following equation can be shown to be valid:


title: Radioactive decay

text: Since radioactive decay is exponential with a constant probability, each process could as easily be described with a different constant time period that (for example) gave its "(1/3)-life" (how long until only 1/3 is left) or "(1/10)-life" (a time period until only 10% is left), and so on. Thus, the choice of and for marker-times, are only for convenience, and from convention. They reflect a fundamental principle only in so much as they show that the "same proportion" of a given radioactive substance will decay, during any time-period that one chooses.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Mathematically, the life for the above situation would be found in the same way as aboveby setting "", and substituting into the decay solution to obtain


title: Radioactive decay

text: Carbon-14 has a half-life of years and a decay rate of 14 disintegrations per minute (dpm) per gram of natural carbon.


title: Radioactive decay

text: If an artifact is found to have radioactivity of 4 dpm per gram of its present C, we can find the approximate age of the object using the above equation:


title: Radioactive decay

text: The radioactive decay modes of electron capture and internal conversion are known to be slightly sensitive to chemical and environmental effects that change the electronic structure of the atom, which in turn affects the presence of 1s and 2s electrons that participate in the decay process. A small number of nuclides are affected. For example, chemical bonds can affect the rate of electron capture to a small degree (in general, less than 1%) depending on the proximity of electrons to the nucleus. In Be, a difference of 0.9% has been observed between half-lives in metallic and insulating environments. This relatively large effect is because beryllium is a small atom whose valence electrons are in 2s atomic orbitals, which are subject to electron capture in Be because (like all s atomic orbitals in all atoms) they naturally penetrate into the nucleus.


title: Radioactive decay

text: In 1992, Jung et al. of the Darmstadt Heavy-Ion Research group observed an accelerated β decay of Dy. Although neutral Dy is a stable isotope, the fully ionized Dy undergoes β decay into the K and L shells to Ho with a half-life of 47 days.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Rhenium-187 is another spectacular example. Re normally undergoes beta decay to Os with a half-life of 41.6 × 10 years, but studies using fully ionised Re atoms (bare nuclei) have found that this can decrease to only 32.9 years. This is attributed to "bound-state β decay" of the fully ionised atom – the electron is emitted into the "K-shell" (1s atomic orbital), which cannot occur for neutral atoms in which all low-lying bound states are occupied.


title: Radioactive decay

text: A number of experiments have found that decay rates of other modes of artificial and naturally occurring radioisotopes are, to a high degree of precision, unaffected by external conditions such as temperature, pressure, the chemical environment, and electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields. Comparison of laboratory experiments over the last century, studies of the Oklo natural nuclear reactor (which exemplified the effects of thermal neutrons on nuclear decay), and astrophysical observations of the luminosity decays of distant supernovae (which occurred far away so the light has taken a great deal of time to reach us), for example, strongly indicate that unperturbed decay rates have been constant (at least to within the limitations of small experimental errors) as a function of time as well.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Recent results suggest the possibility that decay rates might have a weak dependence on environmental factors. It has been suggested that measurements of decay rates of silicon-32, manganese-54, and radium-226 exhibit small seasonal variations (of the order of 0.1%). However, such measurements are highly susceptible to systematic errors, and a subsequent paper has found no evidence for such correlations in seven other isotopes (Na, Ti, Ag, Sn, Ba, Am, Pu), and sets upper limits on the size of any such effects. The decay of radon-222 was once reported to exhibit large 4% peak-to-peak seasonal variations (see plot), which were proposed to be related to either solar flare activity or the distance from the Sun, but detailed analysis of the experiment's design flaws, along with comparisons to other, much more stringent and systematically controlled, experiments refute this claim.


title: Radioactive decay

text: An unexpected series of experimental results for the rate of decay of heavy highly charged radioactive ions circulating in a storage ring has provoked theoretical activity in an effort to find a convincing explanation. The rates of weak decay of two radioactive species with half lives of about 40 s and 200 s are found to have a significant oscillatory modulation, with a period of about 7 s.


title: Radioactive decay

text: The observed phenomenon is known as the GSI anomaly, as the storage ring is a facility at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. As the decay process produces an electron neutrino, some of the proposed explanations for the observed rate oscillation invoke neutrino properties. Initial ideas related to flavour oscillation met with skepticism. A more recent proposal involves mass differences between neutrino mass eigenstates.


title: Radioactive decay

text: The neutrons and protons that constitute nuclei, as well as other particles that approach close enough to them, are governed by several interactions. The nuclear force (also known as "residual" strong force), not observed at the familiar macroscopic scale, is the most powerful force over subatomic distances. The electrostatic force is almost always significant, and, in the case of beta decay, the weak nuclear force is also involved.


title: Radioactive decay

text: The combined effects of these forces produces a number of different phenomena in which energy may be released by rearrangement of particles in the nucleus, or else the change of one type of particle into others. These rearrangements and transformations may be hindered energetically so that they do not occur immediately. In certain cases, random quantum vacuum fluctuations are theorized to promote relaxation to a lower energy state (the "decay") in a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. Radioactive decay half-life of nuclides has been measured over timescales of 54 orders of magnitude, from seconds (for hydrogen-5) to seconds (for tellurium-128). The limits of these timescales are set by the sensitivity of instrumentation only, and there are no known natural limits to how brief or long a decay half-life for radioactive decay of a radionuclide may be.


title: Radioactive decay

text: The decay process, like all hindered energy transformations, may be analogized by a snowfield on a mountain. While friction between the ice crystals may be supporting the snow's weight, the system is inherently unstable with regard to a state of lower potential energy. A disturbance would thus facilitate the path to a state of greater entropy; the system will move towards the ground state, producing heat, and the total energy will be distributable over a larger number of quantum states thus resulting in an avalanche. The "total" energy does not change in this process, but, because of the second law of thermodynamics, avalanches have only been observed in one direction and that is toward the "ground state" — the state with the largest number of ways in which the available energy could be distributed.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Such a collapse (a gamma-ray "decay event") requires a specific activation energy. For a snow avalanche, this energy comes as a disturbance from outside the system, although such disturbances can be arbitrarily small. In the case of an excited atomic nucleus decaying by gamma radiation in a spontaneous emission of electromagnetic radiation, the arbitrarily small disturbance comes from quantum vacuum fluctuations.


title: Radioactive decay

text: A radioactive nucleus (or any excited system in quantum mechanics) is unstable, and can, thus, "spontaneously" stabilize to a less-excited system. The resulting transformation alters the structure of the nucleus and results in the emission of either a photon or a high-velocity particle that has mass (such as an electron, alpha particle, or other type).


title: Radioactive decay

text: According to the Big Bang theory, stable isotopes of the lightest three elements (H, He, and traces of Li) were produced very shortly after the emergence of the universe, in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis. These lightest stable nuclides (including deuterium) survive to today, but any radioactive isotopes of the light elements produced in the Big Bang (such as tritium) have long since decayed. Isotopes of elements heavier than boron were not produced at all in the Big Bang, and these first five elements do not have any long-lived radioisotopes. Thus, all radioactive nuclei are, therefore, relatively young with respect to the birth of the universe, having formed later in various other types of nucleosynthesis in stars (in particular, supernovae), and also during ongoing interactions between stable isotopes and energetic particles. For example, carbon-14, a radioactive nuclide with a half-life of only years, is constantly produced in Earth's upper atmosphere due to interactions between cosmic rays and nitrogen.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Nuclides that are produced by radioactive decay are called radiogenic nuclides, whether they themselves are stable or not. There exist stable radiogenic nuclides that were formed from short-lived extinct radionuclides in the early Solar System. The extra presence of these stable radiogenic nuclides (such as xenon-129 from extinct iodine-129) against the background of primordial stable nuclides can be inferred by various means.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Radioactive decay has been put to use in the technique of radioisotopic labeling, which is used to track the passage of a chemical substance through a complex system (such as a living organism). A sample of the substance is synthesized with a high concentration of unstable atoms. The presence of the substance in one or another part of the system is determined by detecting the locations of decay events.


title: Radioactive decay

text: On the premise that radioactive decay is truly random (rather than merely chaotic), it has been used in hardware random-number generators. Because the process is not thought to vary significantly in mechanism over time, it is also a valuable tool in estimating the absolute ages of certain materials. For geological materials, the radioisotopes and some of their decay products become trapped when a rock solidifies, and can then later be used (subject to many well-known qualifications) to estimate the date of the solidification. These include checking the results of several simultaneous processes and their products against each other, within the same sample. In a similar fashion, and also subject to qualification, the rate of formation of carbon-14 in various eras, the date of formation of organic matter within a certain period related to the isotope's half-life may be estimated, because the carbon-14 becomes trapped when the organic matter grows and incorporates the new carbon-14 from the air. Thereafter, the amount of carbon-14 in organic matter decreases according to decay processes that may also be independently cross-checked by other means (such as checking the carbon-14 in individual tree rings, for example).


title: Radioactive decay

text: The Szilard–Chalmers effect is the breaking of a chemical bond as a result of a kinetic energy imparted from radioactive decay. It operates by the absorption of neutrons by an atom and subsequent emission of gamma rays, often with significant amounts of kinetic energy. This kinetic energy, by Newton's third law, pushes back on the decaying atom, which causes it to move with enough speed to break a chemical bond. This effect can be used to separate isotopes by chemical means.


title: Radioactive decay

text: The Szilard–Chalmers effect was discovered in 1934 by Leó Szilárd and Thomas A. Chalmers. They observed that after bombardment by neutrons, the breaking of a bond in liquid ethyl iodide allowed radioactive iodine to be removed.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Radioactive primordial nuclides found in the Earth are residues from ancient supernova explosions that occurred before the formation of the Solar System. They are the fraction of radionuclides that survived from that time, through the formation of the primordial solar nebula, through planet accretion, and up to the present time. The naturally occurring short-lived radiogenic radionuclides found in today's rocks, are the daughters of those radioactive primordial nuclides. Another minor source of naturally occurring radioactive nuclides are cosmogenic nuclides, that are formed by cosmic ray bombardment of material in the Earth's atmosphere or crust. The decay of the radionuclides in rocks of the Earth's mantle and crust contribute significantly to Earth's internal heat budget.


title: Radioactive decay

text: The daughter nuclide of a decay event may also be unstable (radioactive). In this case, it too will decay, producing radiation. The resulting second daughter nuclide may also be radioactive. This can lead to a sequence of several decay events called a "decay chain" (see this article for specific details of important natural decay chains). Eventually, a stable nuclide is produced. Any decay daughters that are the result of an alpha decay will also result in helium atoms being created.


title: Radioactive decay

text: Some radionuclides may have several different paths of decay. For example, % of bismuth-212 decays, through alpha-emission, to thallium-208 while % of bismuth-212 decays, through beta-emission, to polonium-212. Both thallium-208 and polonium-212 are radioactive daughter products of bismuth-212, and both decay directly to stable lead-208.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: Damon Kyle Wayans Jr. (born November 18, 1982) is an American actor and comedian. He is most widely known for starring as Brad Williams in the ABC sitcom "Happy Endings", for which he was nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2012, and as Coach in the Fox sitcom "New Girl." In 2014, he starred in the comedy film "Let's Be Cops", and provided the voice of Wasabi in "Big Hero 6".


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: He is the eldest son of actor and comedian Damon Wayans, and nephew of Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Kim Wayans, and Marlon Wayans.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: Wayans was born on November 18, 1982, in Huntington, Vermont. He is a member of the Wayans family, the son of Lisa Thorner and actor and comedian Damon Wayans. He has three younger siblings: Michael, Cara Mia, and Kyla.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: Wayans made his film debut when he was cast in his father's feature film of 1994, "Blankman", playing Young Kevin. He later appeared on his father's sitcom "My Wife and Kids" as John, one of Junior's friends. He later worked as a staff writer on the series. In fact, the character of Junior was loosely based on Wayans Jr. himself.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: He appeared in and served as a writer on "The Underground". Wayans Jr. also surprised audiences when he garnered a standing ovation during his debut appearance on "Def Comedy Jam". He starred in the Wayans family comedy "Dance Flick" as the film's main character, Thomas.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: From April 2011 to May 2013, Wayans starred as Brad Williams, one of the lead characters in the ABC comedy series "Happy Endings", alongside Eliza Coupe, Elisha Cuthbert, Zachary Knighton, Adam Pally, and Casey Wilson. Despite critical acclaim and a cult following, the show was cancelled by ABC after concluding its third season on May 3, 2013.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: Wayans was nominated for "Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series" at the NAACP Image Awards and Critic's Choice Television Awards for his work on "Happy Endings".


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: On May 16, 2011, the Fox Network announced that it had picked up the Zooey Deschanel anchored comedy "New Girl", which featured Wayans in the supporting role of Coach. However, "Happy Endings" had already been picked up for a second season on rival network ABC. The producers of "New Girl" initially planned to recast Wayans' role, but later decided not to recast nor reshoot the pilot episode in which he appeared. Instead, starting with the second episode, Wayans' character was substituted with Lamorne Morris, playing the role of Winston, a former roommate who had been pursuing a professional basketball career in Latvia.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: With "Happy Endings" cancelled after its third season, it was announced in July 2013 that Wayans would return for at least four episodes of "New Girl" in the upcoming third season. In November 2013, it was announced that Wayans would remain on the show for the rest of Season 3. In May 2014, it was announced Wayans would return as a series regular for season four. In October 2018, it was announced that Wayans Jr. would be starring in a sitcom entitled "Happy Together", alongside Amber Stevens West. It was cancelled after thirteen episodes, due to low ratings.


title: Damon Wayans Jr.

text: Wayans has two daughters, Aniya and Amara, with ex-girlfriend Aja Metoyer. In 2016, Wayans married Samara Saraiva. The couple have one son, Maverick, and two daughters together, Berlyn and Lua.


title: Critical thinking

text: Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgement. The subject is complex; several different definitions exist, which generally include the rational, skeptical, and unbiased analysis or evaluation of factual evidence. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use. It entails effective communication and problem-solving abilities as well as a commitment to overcome native egocentrism and sociocentrism.


title: Critical thinking

text: The earliest records of critical thinking are the teachings of Socrates recorded by Plato. These included a part in Plato's early dialogues, where Socrates engages with one or more interlocutors on the issue of ethics such as question whether it was right for Socrates to escape from prison. The philosopher considered and reflected on this question and came to the conclusion that escape violates all the things that he holds higher than himself: the laws of Athens and the guiding voice that Socrates claims to hear.


title: Critical thinking

text: Socrates established the fact that one cannot depend upon those in "authority" to have sound knowledge and insight. He demonstrated that persons may have power and high position and yet be deeply confused and irrational. Socrates maintained that for an individual to have a good life or to have one that is worth living, he must be a critical questioner and possess an interrogative soul. He established the importance of asking deep questions that probe profoundly into thinking before we accept ideas as worthy of belief.


title: Critical thinking

text: Socrates established the importance of "seeking evidence, closely examining reasoning and assumptions, analyzing basic concepts, and tracing out implications not only of what is said but of what is done as well". His method of questioning is now known as "Socratic questioning" and is the best known critical thinking teaching strategy. In his mode of questioning, Socrates highlighted the need for thinking for clarity and logical consistency. He asked people questions to reveal their irrational thinking or lack of reliable knowledge. Socrates demonstrated that having authority does not ensure accurate knowledge. He established the method of questioning beliefs, closely inspecting assumptions and relying on evidence and sound rationale. Plato recorded Socrates' teachings and carried on the tradition of critical thinking. Aristotle and subsequent Greek skeptics refined Socrates' teachings, using systematic thinking and asking questions to ascertain the true nature of reality beyond the way things appear from a glance.


title: Critical thinking

text: Socrates set the agenda for the tradition of critical thinking, namely, to reflectively question common beliefs and explanations, carefully distinguishing beliefs that are reasonable and logical from those that—however appealing to our native egocentrism, however much they serve our vested interests, however comfortable or comforting they may be—lack adequate evidence or rational foundation to warrant belief.


title: Critical thinking

text: Critical thinking was described by Richard W. Paul as a movement in two waves (1994). The "first wave" of critical thinking is often referred to as


title: Critical thinking

text: a 'critical analysis' that is clear, rational thinking involving critique. Its details vary amongst those who define it. According to Barry K. Beyer (1995), critical thinking means making clear, reasoned judgments. During the process of critical thinking, ideas should be reasoned, well thought out, and judged. The U.S. National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the "<nowiki>intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.</nowiki>"


title: Critical thinking

text: In the term "critical thinking", the word "critical", (Grk. κριτικός = "kritikos" = "critic") derives from the word "critic" and implies a critique; it identifies the intellectual capacity and the means "of judging", "of judgement", "for judging", and of being "able to discern". The intellectual roots of critical thinking are as ancient as its etymology, traceable, ultimately, to the teaching practice and vision of Socrates 2,500 years ago who discovered by a method of probing questioning that people could not rationally justify their confident claims to knowledge.


title: Critical thinking

text: Contemporary critical thinking scholars have expanded these traditional definitions to include qualities, concepts, and processes such as creativity, imagination, discovery, reflection, empathy, connecting knowing, feminist theory, subjectivity, ambiguity, and inconclusiveness. Some definitions of critical thinking exclude these subjective practices.


title: Critical thinking

text: The study of logical argumentation is relevant to the study of critical thinking. Logic is concerned with the analysis of arguments, including the appraisal of their correctness or incorrectness. In the field of epistemology, critical thinking is considered to be logically correct thinking, which allows for differentiation between logically true and logically false statements.


title: Critical thinking

text: In "First wave" logical thinking, the thinker is removed from the train of thought, and the analysis of connections between concepts or points in thought is ostensibly free of any bias. In his essay "Beyond Logicism in Critical Thinking" Kerry S. Walters describes this ideology thus: "A logistic approach to critical thinking conveys the message to students that thinking is legitimate only when it conforms to the procedures of informal (and, to a lesser extent, formal) logic and that the good thinker necessarily aims for styles of examination and appraisal that are analytical, abstract, universal, and objective. This model of thinking has become so entrenched in conventional academic wisdom that many educators accept it as canon". Such principles are concomitant with the increasing dependence on a "quantitative" understanding of the world.


title: Critical thinking

text: In the 'second wave' of critical thinking, authors consciously moved away from the logocentric mode of critical thinking characteristic of the 'first wave'. Although many scholars began to take a less exclusive view of what constitutes critical thinking, rationality and logic remain widely accepted as essential bases for critical thinking. Walters argues that exclusive logicism in the first wave sense is based on "the unwarranted assumption that good thinking is reducible to logical thinking".


title: Critical thinking

text: There are three types of logical reasoning. Informally, two kinds of logical reasoning can be distinguished in addition to formal deduction, which are induction and abduction.


title: Critical thinking

text: Kerry S. Walters, an emeritus philosophy professor from Gettysburg College, argues that rationality demands more than just logical or traditional methods of problem solving and analysis or what he calls the "calculus of justification" but also considers "cognitive acts such as imagination, conceptual creativity, intuition and insight" (p. 63). These "functions" are focused on discovery, on more abstract processes instead of linear, rules-based approaches to problem-solving. The linear and non-sequential mind must both be engaged in the rational mind.


title: Critical thinking

text: The ability to critically analyze an argument—to dissect structure and components, thesis and reasons—is essential. But so is the ability to be flexible and consider non-traditional alternatives and perspectives. These complementary functions are what allow for critical thinking to be a practice encompassing imagination and intuition in cooperation with traditional modes of deductive inquiry.


title: Critical thinking

text: The list of core critical thinking skills includes observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition. According to Reynolds (2011), an individual or group engaged in a strong way of critical thinking gives due consideration to establish for instance:


title: Critical thinking

text: In addition to possessing strong critical-thinking skills, one must be disposed to engage problems and decisions using those skills. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, and fairness.


title: Critical thinking

text: "A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports or refutes it and the further conclusions to which it tends."


title: Critical thinking

text: The habits of mind that characterize a person strongly disposed toward critical thinking include a desire to follow reason and evidence wherever they may lead, a systematic approach to problem solving, inquisitiveness, even-handedness, and confidence in reasoning.


title: Critical thinking

text: According to a definition analysis by Kompf & Bond (2001), critical thinking involves problem solving, decision making, metacognition, rationality, rational thinking, reasoning, knowledge, intelligence and also a moral component such as reflective thinking. Critical thinkers therefore need to have reached a level of maturity in their development, possess a certain attitude as well as a set of taught skills.


title: Critical thinking

text: There is a postulation by some writers that the tendencies from habits of mind should be thought as virtues to demonstrate the characteristics of a critical thinker. These intellectual virtues are ethical qualities that encourage motivation to think in particular ways towards specific circumstances. However, these virtues have also been criticized by skeptics, who argue that there is lacking evidence for this specific mental basis that are causative to critical thinking.


title: Critical thinking

text: Educational programs aimed at developing critical thinking in children and adult learners, individually or in group problem solving and decision making contexts, continue to address these same three central elements.


title: Critical thinking

text: The Critical Thinking project at Human Science Lab, London, is involved in the scientific study of all major educational systems in prevalence today to assess how the systems are working to promote or impede critical thinking.


title: Critical thinking

text: Contemporary cognitive psychology regards human reasoning as a complex process that is both reactive and reflective. This presents a problem which is detailed as a division of a critical mind in juxtaposition to sensory data and memory.


title: Critical thinking

text: The psychological theory disposes of the absolute nature of the rational mind, in reference to conditions, abstract problems and discursive limitations. Where the relationship between critical thinking skills and critical thinking dispositions is an empirical question, the ability to attain causal domination exists, for which Socrates was known to be largely disposed against as the practice of Sophistry. Accounting for a measure of "critical thinking dispositions" is the California Measure of Mental Motivation and the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory. The Critical Thinking Toolkit is an alternative measure that examines student beliefs and attitudes about critical thinking


title: Critical thinking

text: John Dewey is one of many educational leaders who recognized that a curriculum aimed at building thinking skills would benefit the individual learner, the community, and the entire democracy.


title: Critical thinking

text: Critical thinking is significant in the learning process of internalization, in the construction of basic ideas, principles, and theories inherent in content. And critical thinking is significant in the learning process of application, whereby those ideas, principles, and theories are implemented effectively as they become relevant in learners' lives.


title: Critical thinking

text: Each discipline adapts its use of critical thinking concepts and principles. The core concepts are always there, but they are embedded in subject-specific content. For students to learn content, intellectual engagement is crucial. All students must do their own thinking, their own construction of knowledge. Good teachers recognize this and therefore focus on the questions, readings, activities that stimulate the mind to take ownership of key concepts and principles underlying the subject.


title: Critical thinking

text: Historically, the teaching of critical thinking focused only on logical procedures such as formal and informal logic. This emphasized to students that good thinking is equivalent to logical thinking. However, a second wave of critical thinking, urges educators to value conventional techniques, meanwhile expanding what it means to be a critical thinker. In 1994, Kerry Walters compiled a conglomeration of sources surpassing this logical restriction to include many different authors' research regarding connected knowing, empathy, gender-sensitive ideals, collaboration, world views, intellectual autonomy, morality and enlightenment. These concepts invite students to incorporate their own perspectives and experiences into their thinking.


title: Critical thinking

text: In the English and Welsh school systems, "Critical Thinking" is offered as a subject that 16- to 18-year-olds can take as an A-Level. Under the OCR exam board, students can sit two exam papers for the AS: "Credibility of Evidence" and "Assessing and Developing Argument". The full Advanced GCE is now available: in addition to the two AS units, candidates sit the two papers "Resolution of Dilemmas" and "Critical Reasoning". The A-level tests candidates on their ability to think critically about, and analyze, arguments on their deductive or inductive validity, as well as producing their own arguments. It also tests their ability to analyze certain related topics such as credibility and ethical decision-making. However, due to its comparative lack of subject content, many universities do not accept it as a main A-level for admissions. Nevertheless, the AS is often useful in developing reasoning skills, and the full Advanced GCE is useful for degree courses in politics, philosophy, history or theology, providing the skills required for critical analysis that are useful, for example, in biblical study.


title: Critical thinking

text: There used to also be an Advanced Extension Award offered in Critical Thinking in the UK, open to any A-level student regardless of whether they have the Critical Thinking A-level. Cambridge International Examinations have an A-level in Thinking Skills.


title: Critical thinking

text: From 2008, Assessment and Qualifications Alliance has also been offering an A-level Critical Thinking specification.


title: Critical thinking

text: OCR exam board have also modified theirs for 2008. Many examinations for university entrance set by universities, on top of A-level examinations, also include a critical thinking component, such as the LNAT, the UKCAT, the BioMedical Admissions Test and the Thinking Skills Assessment.


title: Critical thinking

text: In Qatar, critical thinking was offered by AL-Bairaq—an outreach, non-traditional educational program that targets high school students and focuses on a curriculum based on STEM fields. The idea behind AL-Bairaq is to offer high school students the opportunity to connect with the research environment in the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM) at Qatar University. Faculty members train and mentor the students and help develop and enhance their critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork skills.


title: Critical thinking

text: In 1995, a meta-analysis of the literature on teaching effectiveness in higher education was undertaken.


title: Critical thinking

text: The study noted concerns from higher education, politicians, and business that higher education was failing to meet society's requirements for well-educated citizens. It concluded that although faculty may aspire to develop students' thinking skills, in practice they have tended to aim at facts and concepts utilizing lowest levels of cognition, rather than developing intellect or values.


title: Critical thinking

text: In a more recent meta-analysis, researchers reviewed 341 quasi- or true-experimental studies, all of which used some form of standardized critical thinking measure to assess the outcome variable. The authors describe the various methodological approaches and attempt to categorize the differing assessment tools, which include standardized tests (and second-source measures), tests developed by teachers, tests developed by researchers, and tests developed by teachers who also serve the role as the researcher. The results emphasized the need for exposing students to real-world problems and the importance of encouraging open dialogue within a supportive environment. Effective strategies for teaching critical thinking are thought to be possible in a wide variety of educational settings. One attempt to assess the humanities' role in teaching critical thinking and reducing belief in pseudoscientific claims was made at North Carolina State University. Some success was noted and the researchers emphasized the value of the humanities in providing the skills to evaluate current events and qualitative data in context.


title: Critical thinking

text: Scott Lilienfeld notes that there is some evidence to suggest that basic critical thinking skills might be successfully taught to children at a younger age than previously thought.


title: Critical thinking

text: Critical thinking is an important element of all professional fields and academic disciplines (by referencing their respective sets of permissible questions, evidence sources, criteria, etc.). Within the framework of scientific skepticism, the process of critical thinking involves the careful acquisition and interpretation of information and use of it to reach a well-justified conclusion. The concepts and principles of critical thinking can be applied to any context or case but only by reflecting upon the nature of that application. Critical thinking forms, therefore, a system of related, and overlapping, modes of thought such as anthropological thinking, sociological thinking, historical thinking, political thinking, psychological thinking, philosophical thinking, mathematical thinking, chemical thinking, biological thinking, ecological thinking, legal thinking, ethical thinking, musical thinking, thinking like a painter, sculptor, engineer, business person, etc. In other words, though critical thinking principles are universal, their application to disciplines requires a process of reflective contextualization. Psychology offerings, for example, have included courses such as Critical Thinking about the Paranormal, in which students are subjected to a series of cold readings and tested on their belief of the "psychic", who is eventually announced to be a fake.


title: Critical thinking

text: Critical thinking is considered important in the academic fields for enabling one to analyze, evaluate, explain, and restructure thinking, thereby ensuring the act of thinking without false belief. However, even with knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, mistakes occur, and due to a thinker's inability to apply the methodology consistently, and because of overruling character traits such as egocentrism. Critical thinking includes identification of prejudice, bias, propaganda, self-deception, distortion, misinformation, etc. Given research in cognitive psychology, some educators believe that schools should focus on teaching their students critical thinking skills and cultivation of intellectual traits.


title: Critical thinking

text: Critical thinking skills can be used to help nurses during the assessment process. Through the use of critical thinking, nurses can question, evaluate, and reconstruct the nursing care process by challenging the established theory and practice. Critical thinking skills can help nurses problem solve, reflect, and make a conclusive decision about the current situation they face. Critical thinking creates "new possibilities for the development of the nursing knowledge". Due to the sociocultural, environmental, and political issues that are affecting healthcare delivery, it would be helpful to embody new techniques in nursing. Nurses can also engage their critical thinking skills through the Socratic method of dialogue and reflection. This practice standard is even part of some regulatory organizations such as the College of Nurses of Ontario's Professional Standards for Continuing Competencies (2006).


title: Critical thinking

text: It requires nurses to engage in Reflective Practice and keep records of this continued professional development for possible review by the college.


title: Critical thinking

text: Critical thinking is also considered important for human rights education for toleration. The Declaration of Principles on Tolerance adopted by UNESCO in 1995 affirms that "education for tolerance could aim at countering factors that lead to fear and exclusion of others, and could help young people to develop capacities for independent judgement, "critical thinking" and ethical reasoning".


title: Critical thinking

text: The advent and rising popularity of online courses have prompted some to ask if computer-mediated communication (CMC) promotes, hinders, or has no effect on the amount and quality of critical thinking in a course (relative to face-to-face communication). There is some evidence to suggest a fourth, more nuanced possibility: that CMC may promote some aspects of critical thinking but hinder others. For example, Guiller et al. (2008) found that, relative to face-to-face discourse, online discourse featured more justifications, while face-to-face discourse featured more instances of students expanding on what others had said. The increase in justifications may be due to the asynchronous nature of online discussions, while the increase in expanding comments may be due to the spontaneity of 'real-time' discussion. Newman et al. (1995) showed similar differential effects. They found that while CMC boasted more important statements and linking of ideas, it lacked novelty. The authors suggest that this may be due to difficulties participating in a brainstorming-style activity in an asynchronous environment. Rather, the asynchrony may promote users to put forth "considered, thought out contributions".


title: Critical thinking

text: Researchers assessing critical thinking in online discussion forums often employ a technique called Content Analysis, where the text of online discourse (or the transcription of face-to-face discourse) is systematically coded for different kinds of statements relating to critical thinking. For example, a statement might be coded as "Discuss ambiguities to clear them up" or "Welcoming outside knowledge" as positive indicators of critical thinking. Conversely, statements reflecting poor critical thinking may be labeled as "Sticking to prejudice or assumptions" or "Squashing attempts to bring in outside knowledge". The frequency of these codes in CMC and face-to-face discourse can be compared to draw conclusions about the quality of critical thinking.


title: Critical thinking

text: Searching for evidence of critical thinking in discourse has roots in a definition of critical thinking put forth by Kuhn (1991), which emphasizes the social nature of discussion and knowledge construction. There is limited research on the role of social experience in critical thinking development, but there is some evidence to suggest it is an important factor. For example, research has shown that 3- to 4-year-old children can discern, to some extent, the differential creditability and expertise of individuals. Further evidence for the impact of social experience on the development of critical thinking skills comes from work that found that 6- to 7-year-olds from China have similar levels of skepticism to 10- and 11-year-olds in the United States. If the development of critical thinking skills was solely due to maturation, it is unlikely we would see such dramatic differences across cultures.


title: Good Time (film)

text: Good Time is a 2017 American crime thriller film directed by Josh and Benny Safdie and written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein. It stars Robert Pattinson as a robber who tries to free his mentally disabled brother, played by Benny Safdie, all while eluding his own capture. Barkhad Abdi, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Buddy Duress co-star. The original soundtrack was by electronic musician Oneohtrix Point Never. The film was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the 2017 Cannes Film Festival's main competition section. The film received critical acclaim for Pattinson's performance, the direction, story, and soundtrack.


title: Good Time (film)

text: Nick Nikas sits uncomfortably in a court-ordered therapy session where he talks about the time he had a violent incident with his grandmother. He is mentally handicapped enough to not fully grasp anger management or the social repercussions of his actions. Nick's brother Connie bursts in and, to the displeasure of the therapist, forces Nick out of the room.


title: Good Time (film)

text: The brothers rob a New York City bank for $65,000. While fleeing in a taxi, a dye pack explodes in a money bag, causing the driver to crash. Connie and Nick flee on foot, washing the dye from their clothes in a fast-food restaurant restroom. Stopped by police, Nick panics and runs but is arrested and sent to Rikers Island while Connie escapes.


title: Good Time (film)

text: Connie attempts to secure a bail bond, but needs $10,000 more to get Nick out of jail. Too much of the robbery money is ruined by the dye to make his bail, so Connie needs another $10,000 as quickly as possible to get his brother out. He convinces his girlfriend, Corey, to pay with her mother's credit cards, but her mother cancels them. Connie learns that Nick has been hospitalized after a fight with an inmate. Connie breaks him out of the hospital, unconscious and bandaged, and convinces a woman to let them stay in her house with her 16-year-old granddaughter Crystal. While they watch TV, the news shows photos of Connie's face; to distract Crystal, he kisses her. Hearing screams from the other room, Connie realizes the man he broke out of the hospital is not Nick but a man released on parole, Ray.


title: Good Time (film)

text: The three drive to the Adventureland amusement park, where Ray stowed a bottle of LSD solution worth several thousand dollars and a bag of stolen money before he ran from police and injured himself. Searching for the money, Connie and Ray uncover the bottle of LSD and are discovered by a security guard; Connie beats him unconscious. As police arrive, Connie steals the man's uniform and Ray pours LSD down the man's throat to make him incoherent. Connie convinces the police that the guard was the intruder and destroys a hard drive containing security footage. Connie denies knowing Crystal as she is arrested while waiting outside.


title: Good Time (film)

text: Ray and Connie break into the guard's high-rise apartment. The guard has a pitbull that Connie lets smell the guard's jacket to get in. Ray begins drinking and Connie tells him he is a leech on society, leading to a heated argument. At Connie's insistence, Ray calls his criminal friend Caliph to buy back the LSD so they can get the bail money. When Caliph arrives, Connie demands $15,000; Caliph agrees, but tells Ray that he is really going to retrieve a firearm and come back to kill Connie. After Caliph leaves, Connie senses danger and leaves with the acid. As he made it to the hallway, Ray attacks him in order to prevent him from leaving, but the dog attacks Ray, giving Connie the opportunity to flee with the drugs. Ray goes back in the room and calls Caliph, but when he looks over the balcony, he sees Connie get caught by police. Ray attempts to escape from a window, but falls to his death. Meanwhile, Connie is put in the back of a police car and thinks about everything that has transpired. The film ends with Nick in a therapy class, beginning to participate in a group activity, with his therapist implying that Connie has confessed and taken responsibility for his role in the bank robbery, promising that he will have a "good time".


title: Good Time (film)

text: On July 9, 2015, it was announced that Ben and Josh Safdie would direct a caper film called "Good Time", and that Pattinson was attached to star. Elara Pictures' Sebastian Bear-McClard and Oscar Boyson produced the film, which Pattinson described as a "really hardcore kind of Queens, New York, mentally damaged psychopath, bank robbery movie."


title: Good Time (film)

text: Oneohtrix Point Never provided the film's score, which won the Soundtrack Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. His work for the film included a collaboration with singer Iggy Pop, "The Pure and the Damned". The score was released as Oneohtrix Point Never's eighth studio album in August 2017. The Safdie brothers also directed a music video for "The Pure and the Damned", featuring Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie reprising their roles as Connie and Nick respectively, as well as a CGI stand-in for Iggy Pop.


title: Good Time (film)

text: In October 2016, A24 acquired distribution rights to the film. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. It began a limited U.S. release on August 11, 2017, and expanded widely two weeks later.


title: Good Time (film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 92%, based on 238 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A visual treat filled out by consistently stellar work from Robert Pattinson, "Good Time" is a singularly distinctive crime drama offering far more than the usual genre thrills." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 80 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Good Time (film)

text: Richard Brody of "The New Yorker" gave the film a glowing review, calling it "an instant crime classic in the age of Trump", and awarding specific praise to Pattinson's performance as well as the Safdies' direction and Sean Price Williams' cinematography. David Rooney of "The Hollywood Reporter" gave the film a positive review, praising Pattinson's performance, and wrote: "Led by Robert Pattinson giving arguably his most commanding performance to date as a desperate bank robber cut from the same cloth as Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik in "Dog Day Afternoon", this is a richly textured genre piece that packs a visceral charge in its restless widescreen visuals and adrenalizing music, which recalls the great mood-shaping movie scores of Tangerine Dream."


title: Good Time (film)

text: Guy Lodge of "Variety" also gave the film a positive review, and said that "Robert Pattinson hits a career high in Benny and Josh Safdie's nervy, vivid heist thriller, which merges messy humanity with tight genre mechanics." "The Economist" praised Pattinson's performance, saying it "establishes him as a capable character actor". Emily Yoshida of "Vulture" said "For all its throttling thrills, "Good Time" is a film about a destructive love—and loving someone despite not having the right kind of love to give them. Ignore the deceptively convivial title: This is the kind of thrill that sticks."


title: Good Time (film)

text: Conversely, Rex Reed of "Observer" criticized the film, calling it "just under two hours of pointless toxicity," populated by brainless characters, filled with ludicrous writing, and laced with mostly over the top acting, "with characters so contrived that the movie defies even the most basic logic. ... At best," Reed wrote, "it's a frenetic, disjointed and totally surreal look at people in crisis, seen through the eyes of other people in crisis. It all takes place in one night, but it seems to last days." Likewise, A. O. Scott of "The New York Times" said: "Sometimes it flaunts its clichés—Nick's disability, and Benny Safdie's slack-jawed portrayal of it, is a big one—and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn't. It's stale, empty and cold."


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Jaya Bachchan ("née" Bhaduri; born 9 April 1948) is an Indian actress and politician. She is a member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from the Samajwadi Party, serving four terms since 2004. Known primarily for her work in Hindi and Bengali cinema, she is noted for reinforcing a natural style of acting in both mainstream and "middle-of-the-road" cinema. She has received several accolades, including nine Filmfare Awards and the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian honour awarded by the Government of India.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Making her film debut as a teenager in Satyajit Ray's "Mahanagar" (1963), Bachchan's first screen role as an adult was in "Guddi" (1971), directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, with whom she collaborated in several films thereafter. She was noted for her refreshing performances in films like "Uphaar" (1971), "Koshish" (1972) and "Kora Kagaz" (1974), among others. She starred alongside her husband Amitabh Bachchan in several films, including "Zanjeer" (1973), "Abhimaan" (1973), "Chupke Chupke" (1975) and "Mili" (1975). The cult film "Sholay" (1975) saw her playing the much-lauded role of a young widow.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Following her marriage to actor Amitabh Bachchan and the birth of their children, she restricted her work in films, notably appearing in "Nauker" (1979) and "Silsila" (1981). After a 17-year sabbatical, she returned to acting with Govind Nihalani's "Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa" (1998). She has since appeared in the critically acclaimed films "Fiza" (2000), "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..." (2001) and "Kal Ho Naa Ho" (2003).


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Jaya Bachchan is an alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India. She first starred in Satyajit Ray's Bengali film, "Mahanagar" (1963) at the age of 15, with Anil Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee.She then appeared in two more Bengali films: a 13-minute short "Suman", and the comedy "Dhanyee Meye" (1971), where she played the role of Uttam Kumar's sister-in-law.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Inspired by her experience with Ray, she joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune and graduated with the gold medal. Hrishikesh Mukherjee cast her in "Guddi" (1971), to play the eponymous role of a petite school-girl obsessed with film star Dharmendra. "Guddi" was a commercial success, and created the girl-next-door image for her, which she was often associated with through the rest of her career. While she did venture out to play glamorous roles as in "Jawani Diwani", (1972) and a semi-negative character of an amnesia-faking heroine in "Anamika" (1973), she was most recognised for her roles epitomising middle-class sensibility, which she played amiably in films of "middle-cinema" directors such as Gulzar, Basu Chatterjee and indeed Hrishikesh Mukherjee. These films include "Uphaar" (1971), "Piya Ka Ghar" (1972), "Parichay" (1972), "Koshish" (1972) and "Bawarchi" (1972). They also made her a superstar.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: In Gulzar's "Koshish" (1973), Bhaduri and Sanjeev Kumar played a deaf couple who struggle through their difficulties as disabled people. She described the film as "a learning experience" which motivated her to do social work in future.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: She first acted with Amitabh Bachchan in "Bansi Birju" (1972), followed by B. R. Ishara's "Ek Nazar" also in the same year. When Amitabh had faced a string of flops and most lead heroines refused to work with him in the Salim–Javed scripted "Zanjeer" (1973), she agreed to step in. The film turned out to be a big hit creating Amitabh Bachchan's angry-young-man image. All their successive films as a pair were huge hits - "Abhimaan" (1973), "Chupke Chupke" (1975), "Mili" (1975) and "Sholay" (1975).


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Her daughter Shweta was born around the time Jaya and Amitabh were working on "Sholay". Following this, she retired from films and focused on raising her children, making an exception for Yash Chopra's "Silsila" (1981), once again opposite her husband. During the late 1980s, she wrote the story for "Shahenshah" (1988), which starred her husband in the lead.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: After a gap of 17 years, she returned to acting with Govind Nihalani's "Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa" (1998), a film about the Naxalite movement. In 2000, she starred in "Fiza" for which she received the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress. She also starred in Karan Johar's ensemble family melodrama "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..." (2001) with her husband. She then starred in Johar's romantic comedy drama, "Kal Ho Naa Ho" (2003), playing Preity Zinta's mother, Jennifer Kapur, both of which also earned her the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress. She starred with her son Abhishek in "Laaga Chunari Mein Daag" (2007) and "Drona" (2008).


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: In 2011, she appeared in the Bangladeshi film "Meherjaan" starring with Victor Banerjee and Humayun Faridi. The film is based on a Bangladesh-Pakistan love story in the backdrop of the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Bachchan was first elected in 2004 as the Member of Parliament from the Samajwadi Party, representing Uttar Pradesh in the Rajya Sabha till March 2006. She got a second term from June 2006 till July 2010 and in February 2010 she stated her intent to complete her term. She was re-elected in 2012 for the third term and again in 2018 for her fourth term in the Rajya Sabha from Samajwadi Party. Also, she campaigned for All India Trinamool Congress during 2021 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Jaya Bhaduri was born into a Bengali Brahmin family and is the daughter of Taroon Kumar Bhaduri, a journalist, author, and poet and his wife, Indira. She studied at St Joseph's Convent School, Bhopal and graduated from Film and Television Institute of India in Pune.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: On 3 June 1973, she married Amitabh Bachchan. The couple have two children: Shweta Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan, who is also an actor. Shweta is married to industrialist Nikhil Nanda, grandson of the Kapoor family in Delhi, and has two children, Navya Naveli and Agastya Nanda, while Abhishek Bachchan is married to actress Aishwarya Rai, and has a daughter, Aaradhya Bachchan.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Bachchan's speech during the musical launch of "Drona" in the second half of 2008 was criticised by some sections of politicians in Maharashtra. In response to the film's director, Goldie Behl, making his introductory speech in English, she said in Hindi, "Hum UP ke log hain, isliye Hindi mein baat karenge, Maharashtra ke log maaf kijiye". (Translation: "We are people from UP, so we will speak in Hindi. People of Maharashtra, please forgive us.") Subsequently, she encouraged actress Priyanka Chopra to speak in Hindi.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) president Raj Thackeray commented that she had no business referring to all the people of Maharashtra in her statement. He threatened to ban all Bachchan films unless she apologised in a public forum for hurting the sentiments of Maharashtrians. MNS workers began to attack theatres screening "The Last Lear", which starred her husband. Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut also criticised her statement, "After making all your success and fortune in Mumbai, if you feel like saying that we are from UP, it's very unfortunate". Amitabh Bachchan tendered an apology for her statement on her behalf.


title: Jaya Bachchan

text: As per the Election affidavit of 2018 (Rajya Sabha), Jaya Bachchan has assets worth ₹1,001.63 crores and liabilities worth ₹105.64 crores.


title: Sudetenland

text: The Sudetenland ( , ; Czech and ) is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. These German speakers had predominated in the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia since the Middle Ages. Sudetenland had been since the 9th century an integral part of the Czech state (first within the Duchy of Bohemia and later the Kingdom of Bohemia) both geographically and politically.


title: Sudetenland

text: The word "Sudetenland" did not come into being until the early part of the 20th century and did not come to prominence until almost two decades into the century, after World War I, when Austria-Hungary was dismembered and the Sudeten Germans found themselves living in the new country of Czechoslovakia. The "Sudeten crisis" of 1938 was provoked by the Pan-Germanist demands of Nazi Germany that the Sudetenland be annexed to Germany, which happened after the later Munich Agreement. Part of the borderland was invaded and annexed by Poland. Afterwards, the formerly unrecognized Sudetenland became an administrative division of Germany. When Czechoslovakia was reconstituted after World War II, the Sudeten Germans were expelled and the region today is inhabited almost exclusively by Czech speakers.


title: Sudetenland

text: The word "Sudetenland" is a German compound of "Land", meaning "country", and "Sudeten", the name of the Sudeten Mountains, which run along the northern Czech border and Lower Silesia (now in Poland). The Sudetenland encompassed areas well beyond those mountains, however.


title: Sudetenland

text: Parts of the now Czech regions of Karlovy Vary, Liberec, Olomouc, Moravia-Silesia, and Ústí nad Labem are within the area called Sudetenland.


title: Sudetenland

text: The areas later known as the Sudetenland never formed a single historical region, which makes it difficult to distinguish the history of the Sudetenland separately from that of Bohemia until the advent of nationalism in the 19th century.


title: Sudetenland

text: The Celtic and Boii tribes settled there and the region was first mentioned on the map of Ptolemaios in the 2nd century AD. The Germanic tribe of the Marcomanni dominated the entire core of the region in later centuries. Those tribes already built cities like Brno, but moved west during the Migration Period. In the 7th century AD Slavic people moved in and were united under Samo's realm. Later in the High Middle Ages Germans settled into the less populated border region.


title: Sudetenland

text: In the Middle Ages the regions situated on the mountainous border of the Duchy and the Kingdom of Bohemia (Crown of Saint Václav) had since the Migration Period been settled mainly by western Slavic Czechs. Along the Bohemian Forest in the west, the Czech lands bordered on the German Slavic tribes (German Sorbs) stem duchies of Bavaria and Franconia; marches of the medieval German kingdom had also been established in the adjacent Austrian lands south of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands and the northern Meissen region beyond the Ore Mountains. In the course of the "Ostsiedlung" (settlement of the east) German settlement from the 13th century onwards continued to move into the Upper Lusatia region and the duchies of Silesia north of the Sudetes mountain range.


title: Sudetenland

text: From as early as the second half of the 13th century onwards these Bohemian border regions were settled by ethnic Germans, who were invited by the Přemyslid Bohemian kings—especially by Ottokar II (1253–1278) and Wenceslaus II (1278–1305). After the extinction of the Přemyslid dynasty in 1306, the Bohemian nobility backed John of Luxembourg as king against his rival Duke Henry of Carinthia. In 1322 King John of Bohemia acquired (for the third time) the formerly Imperial Egerland region in the west and vassalized most of the Piast Silesian duchies, as acknowledged by King Casimir III of Poland by the 1335 Treaty of Trentschin. His son, Bohemian King Charles IV, was elected King of the Romans in 1346 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. He added the Lusatias to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, which then comprised large territories with a significant German population.


title: Sudetenland

text: In the hilly border regions German settlers established major manufactures of forest glass. The situation of the German population was aggravated by the Hussite Wars (1419–1434), though there were also some Germans among the Hussite insurgents.


title: Sudetenland

text: By then Germans largely settled the hilly Bohemian border regions as well as the cities of the lowlands; mainly people of Bavarian descent in the South Bohemian and South Moravian Region, in Brno, Jihlava, České Budějovice and the West Bohemian Plzeň Region; Franconian people in Žatec; Upper Saxons in adjacent North Bohemia, where the border with the Saxon Electorate was fixed by the 1459 Peace of Eger; Germanic Silesians in the adjacent Sudetes region with the County of Kladsko, in the Moravian–Silesian Region, in Svitavy and Olomouc. The city of Prague had a German-speaking majority from the last third of the 17th century until 1860, but after 1910 the proportion of German speakers had decreased to 6.7% of the population.


title: Sudetenland

text: From the Luxembourgs, rule over Bohemia passed through George of Podiebrad to the Jagiellon dynasty and finally to the House of Habsburg in 1526. Both Czech and German Bohemians suffered heavily in the Thirty Years War. Bohemia lost 70% of its population. From the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt that collapsed at the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, the Habsburgs gradually integrated the Kingdom of Bohemia into their monarchy. During the subsequent Counter-Reformation, less populated areas were resettled with Catholic Germans from the Austrian lands. From 1627 the Habsburgs enforced the so-called "Verneuerte Landesordnung" ("Renewed Land's Constitution") and one of its consequences was that German according to mother tongue gradually became the primary and official language while Czech declined to a secondary role in the Empire. Also in 1749 Austrian Empire enforced German as the official language again. Emperor Joseph II in 1780 renounced the coronation ceremony as Bohemian king and unsuccessfully tried to push German through as sole official language in all Habsburg lands (including Hungary). Nevertheless, German cultural influence grew stronger during the Age of Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism.


title: Sudetenland

text: On the other hand, in the course of the Romanticism movement national tensions arose, both in the form of the Austroslavism ideology developed by Czech politicians like František Palacký and Pan-Germanist activist raising the German question. Conflicts between Czech and German nationalists emerged in the 19th century, for instance in the Revolutions of 1848: while the German-speaking population of Bohemia and Moravia wanted to participate in the building of a German nation state, the Czech-speaking population insisted on keeping Bohemia out of such plans. The Bohemian Kingdom remained a part of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary until its dismemberment after the World War I.


title: Sudetenland

text: In the wake of growing nationalism, the name ""Sudetendeutsche" (Sudeten Germans) emerged by the early 20th century. It originally constituted part of a larger classification of three groupings of Germans within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which also included ""Alpine Deutschen" ("Alpine Germans") in what later became the Republic of Austria and ""Balkandeutsche" ("Balkan Germans") in Hungary and the regions east of it. Of these three terms, only the term ""Sudetendeutsche" survived, because of the ethnic and cultural conflicts within Bohemia.


title: Sudetenland

text: During World War I, what later became known as the Sudetenland experienced a rate of war deaths that was higher than most other German-speaking areas of Austria-Hungary and exceeded only by German South Moravia and Carinthia. Thirty-four of each 1,000 inhabitants were killed.


title: Sudetenland

text: Austria-Hungary broke apart at the end of World War I. In late October 1918, an independent Czechoslovak state, consisting of the lands of the Bohemian kingdom and areas belonging to the Kingdom of Hungary, was proclaimed. The German deputies of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the Imperial Council ("Reichsrat") referred to the Fourteen Points of US President Woodrow Wilson and the right proposed therein to self-determination and attempted to negotiate the union of the German-speaking territories with the new Republic of German Austria, which itself aimed at joining Weimar Germany.


title: Sudetenland

text: The German-speaking parts of the former Lands of the Bohemian Crown remained in a newly-created Czechoslovakia, a multi-ethnic state of several nations: Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenians. On 20 September 1918, the Prague government asked the opinion of United States for the Sudetenland. Wilson sent Ambassador Archibald Coolidge into Czechoslovakia. Coolidge insisted on respecting the Germans' right to self-determination and uniting all German-speaking areas with either Germany or Austria, with the exception of northern Bohemia. However, the American delegation at the Paris talks decided not to follow Coolidge's proposal. Allen Dulles was the American's chief diplomat in the Czechoslovak Commission and emphasized preserving the unity of the Czech lands.


title: Sudetenland

text: The U.S. commission to the Paris Peace Conference issued a declaration, which gave unanimous support for "unity of Czech lands". In particular the declaration stated:


title: Sudetenland

text: Several German minorities according to their mother tongue in Moravia, including German-speaking populations in Brno, Jihlava and Olomouc, also attempted to proclaim their union with German Austrial. The Czechs thus rejected the aspirations of the German Bohemians and demanded the inclusion of the lands inhabited by ethnic Germans in their state, despite the presence of more than 90% (as of 1921) ethnic Germans, which led to the presence of 23.4% of Germans in all of Czechoslovakia, on the grounds they had always been part of lands of the Bohemian Crown. The Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 affirmed the inclusion of the German-speaking territories within Czechoslovakia. Over the next two decades, some Germans in the Sudetenland continued to strive for a separation of the German-inhabited regions from Czechoslovakia.


title: Sudetenland

text: According to the February 1921 census, 3,123,000 native German speakers lived in Czechoslovakia, 23.4% of the total population. The controversies between the Czechs and the German-speaking minority lingered on throughout the 1920s and intensified in the 1930s.


title: Sudetenland

text: During the Great Depression, the mostly-mountainous regions populated by the German minority, together with other peripheral regions of Czechoslovakia, were hurt by the economic depression more than the interior of the country was. Unlike the less developed regions (Ruthenia, Moravian Wallachia), the Sudetenland had a high concentration of vulnerable export-dependent industries (such as glass works, textile industry, paper-making and toy-making industry). Sixty percent of the bijouterie and glassmaking industry were located in the Sudetenland, and 69% of employees in the sector were German-speaking according to mother tongue, and 95% of bijouterie and 78% of other glassware was produced for export. The glass-making sector was affected by decreased spending power and by protective measures in other countries, and many German workers lost their work.


title: Sudetenland

text: The high unemployment, as well as the imposition of Czech in schools and all public spaces, made people more open to populist and extremist movements such as fascism, communism and German irredentism. In those years, parties of German nationalists and later the Sudeten German National Socialist Party (SdP), with its radical demands gained immense popularity, among Germans in Czechoslovakia.


title: Sudetenland

text: The increasing aggressiveness of Hitler prompted the Czechoslovak military to start to build extensive border fortifications in 1936 to defend the troubled border region. Immediately after the "Anschluss" of Austria into the German Reich in March 1938, Hitler made himself the advocate of ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia, which triggered the Sudeten Crisis. The following month, Sudeten Nazis, led by Konrad Henlein, agitated for autonomy. On 24 April 1938, the SdP proclaimed the Karlsbader Programm, which demanded in eight points the complete equality between the Sudeten Germans and the Czech people. The government accepted those claims on 30 June 1938.


title: Sudetenland

text: In August, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sent Lord Runciman on a mission to Czechoslovakia to see if he could obtain a settlement between the Czechoslovak government and the Germans in the Sudetenland. Runciman's first day included meetings with President Beneš and Prime Minister Milan Hodža as well as a direct meeting with the Sudeten Germans from Henlein's SdP. On the next day, he met with Dr and Mme Beneš and later met non-Nazi Germans in his hotel.


title: Sudetenland

text: A full account of his report, including summaries of the conclusions of his meetings with the various parties, which he made in person to the Cabinet on his return to the United Kingdom, is found in the Document CC 39(38). Lord Runciman expressed sadness that he could not bring about agreement with the various parties, but he agreed with Lord Halifax that the time that had been gained was important. He reported on the situation of the Sudeten Germans and gave details of four plans that had been proposed to deal with the crisis, each of which had points that, he reported, made it unacceptable to the other parties to the negotiations.


title: Sudetenland

text: The four plans included, first, the transfer of the Sudetenland to the Reich, second, holding a plebiscite on the transfer of the Sudetenland to the Reich, third, organising a Four-Power Conference on the matter and, fourth, creating a federal Czechoslovakia. At the meeting, he said that he was very reluctant to offer his own solution and had not seen that as his task. The most that Halifax said was that the great centres of opposition were in Eger and Asch, in the northwestern corner of Bohemia, where about 800,000 Germans and very few others lived.


title: Sudetenland

text: Halifax said that the transfer of these areas to Germany would almost certainly be a good thing adding that the Czechoslovak army would certainly oppose that very strongly and that Beneš had said that it would fight, rather than accept it.


title: Sudetenland

text: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden on 15 September and agreed to the cession of the Sudetenland. Three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier did the same. No Czechoslovak representative was invited to the discussions. Germany was now able to walk into the Sudetenland without firing a shot.


title: Sudetenland

text: Chamberlain met Hitler in Godesberg on 22 September to confirm the agreements. Hitler, aiming to use the crisis as a pretext for war, now demanded not only the annexation of the Sudetenland but also the immediate military occupation of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, thus giving the Czechoslovak army no time to adapt its defence measures to the new borders.


title: Sudetenland

text: Hitler, in a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin, claimed that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe" and gave Czechoslovakia a deadline of 28 September at 2:00 p.m. to cede the Sudetenland to Germany or face war.


title: Sudetenland

text: To achieve a solution, the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, suggested a conference of the major powers in Munich, and on 29 September, Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain met and agreed to Mussolini's proposal (actually prepared by Hermann Göring) and signed the Munich Agreement. They accepted the immediate occupation of the Sudetenland. The Czechoslovak government, though not party to the talks, submitted to compulsion and promised to abide by the agreement on 30 September.


title: Sudetenland

text: The Sudetenland was assigned to Germany between 1 and 10 October 1938. The Czech part of Czechoslovakia was subsequently invaded by Germany in March 1939, with a portion being annexed and the remainder turned into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Slovak part declared its independence from Czechoslovakia and became the Slovak Republic (Slovak State), a satellite state allied to Germany. (The Ruthenian part, Subcarpathian Rus, made also an attempt to declare its sovereignty as Carpatho-Ukraine but only with ephemeral success since the area was soon annexed by Hungary.)


title: Sudetenland

text: The Sudetenland was initially put under military administration, with General Wilhelm Keitel as military governor. On 14 April 1939, the annexed territories were divided, with the southern parts being incorporated into the neighbouring Reichsgaue "Niederdonau", "Oberdonau" and "Bayerische Ostmark".


title: Sudetenland

text: The northern and the western parts were reorganised as the "Reichsgau Sudetenland", with the city of Reichenberg (present-day Liberec) established as its capital. Konrad Henlein (now openly a NSDAP member) administered the district first as "Reichskommissar" (until 1 May 1939) and then as "Reichsstatthalter" (1 May 19394 May 1945). The Sudetenland consisted of three administrative districts ("Regierungsbezirke"): Eger (with Karlsbad as capital), Aussig (Aussig) and Troppau (Troppau).


title: Sudetenland

text: Before the occupation, Jews in the area had become targeted during the Holocaust in the Sudetenland. Only a few weeks later, the Kristallnacht occurred. As elsewhere in Germany, many synagogues were set on fire and numerous leading Jews were sent to concentration camps. Jews and Czechs were not the only afflicted peoples since German socialists, communists and pacifists were widely persecuted as well. Some of the German socialists fled the Sudetenland via Prague and London to other countries. The "Gleichschaltung" would permanently alter the community in the Sudetenland.


title: Sudetenland

text: However, on 4 December 1938, there were elections in Reichsgau Sudetenland in which 97.32% of the adult population voted for NSDAP. About a half million Sudeten Germans joined the Nazi Party, 17.34% of the total German population in the Sudetenland (the average NSDAP membership participation in Germany was merely 7.85% in 1944). That means the Sudetenland was one of the most pro-Nazi regions of Nazi Germany. Because of their knowledge of the Czech language, many Sudeten Germans were employed in the administration of the ethnic Czech Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as well as in Nazi organizations (Gestapo etc.). The most notable one was Karl Hermann Frank, the SS and police general and Secretary of State in the Protectorate.


title: Sudetenland

text: Shortly after the liberation of Czechoslovakia in May 1945, the use of the term "Sudety" (Sudetenland) in official communications was banned and replaced by the term "pohraniční území" (border territory).


title: Sudetenland

text: In the summer of 1945, the Potsdam Conference decided that Sudeten Germans would have to leave Czechoslovakia (see flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–50)). As a consequence of the immense hostility against all Germans that had grown within Czechoslovakia because many of them had helped the Nazis, the overwhelming majority of Germans were expelled though the relevant Czechoslovak legislation had provided for Germans to remain if they could prove their anti-Nazi affiliation.


title: Sudetenland

text: The number of expelled Germans in the early phase (spring-summer 1945) is estimated to be around 500,000 people. After the Beneš decrees, nearly all Germans were expelled starting in 1946 and in 1950 only 159,938 (from 3,149,820 in 1930) still lived in the Czech Republic. The remaining Germans, who were proven antifascists and skilled laborers, were allowed to stay in Czechoslovakia but were later forcefully dispersed within the country. Some German refugees from Czechoslovakia are represented by the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft.


title: Sudetenland

text: Many of the Germans who stayed in Czechoslovakia later emigrated to West Germany (more than 100,000). As the German population was transferred out of the country, the former Sudetenland was resettled mostly by Czechs but also by other nationalities of Czechoslovakia: Slovaks, Greeks (arriving in the wake of the Greek Civil War 1946–49), Carpathian Ruthenians, Romani people and Jews who had survived the Holocaust, and Hungarians (though the Hungarians were forced into that and later returned home—see Hungarians in Slovakia: Population exchanges).


title: Sudetenland

text: Some areas, such as part of Czech Silesian-Moravian borderland, southwestern Bohemia (Šumava National Park), western and northern parts of Bohemia, remained depopulated for several strategic reasons (extensive mining and military interests) or are now protected national parks and landscapes. Moreover, before the establishment of the Iron Curtain in 1952 to 1955, the so-called "forbidden zone" was established by means of engineer equipment up to 2 km (1.2 mi) from the border in which no civilians could reside. A wider region, or "border zone", existed up to 12 km (7 miles) from the border in which no "disloyal" or "suspect" civilians could reside or work. Thus, the entire Aš-Bulge fell within the border zone, a status that remained until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.


title: Sudetenland

text: There remained areas with noticeable German minorities in the westernmost borderland around Cheb, where skilled ethnic German miners and workers continued in mining and industry, until 1955, as sanctioned under the Yalta Conference protocols; in the Egerland, German minority organizations continue to exist.


title: Sudetenland

text: In the 2021 census, 24,632 people in the Czech Republic claimed German ethnicity, out of which 15,504 in combination with another ethnicity.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Mad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and produced by Byron Kennedy. Mel Gibson stars as "Mad" Max Rockatansky, a police officer turned vigilante in a near-future Australia in the midst of societal collapse. Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley, Tim Burns, and Roger Ward also star. James McCausland and Miller wrote the screenplay from a story by Miller and Kennedy.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Principal photography for "Mad Max" took place in and around Melbourne and lasted for six weeks. The film initially received a polarized reception upon its release in April 1979, although it won four AACTA Awards. Filmed on a budget of A$400,000, it earned more than US$100 million worldwide in gross revenue and set a "Guinness" record for most profitable film. The success of "Mad Max" has been credited for further opening up the global market to Australian New Wave films.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: The film became the first in the "Mad Max" series, giving rise to three sequels: "Mad Max 2" (1981), "Beyond Thunderdome" (1985), and "" (2015). In 2020, a fifth film, to be titled "Furiosa", was announced.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: In a near-future dystopian Australia that is facing a breakdown of civil order primarily due to widespread oil shortages, berserk motorbike gang member Crawford "Nightrider" Montazano kills a rookie officer of the poorly-funded Main Force Patrol (MFP)—one of the last remaining law enforcement agencies—and escapes with his girlfriend in the dead officer's Pursuit Special. Nightrider is able to elude the MFP until the organisation's top pursuit man, Max Rockatansky, manages to break his concentration and steer him into a roadblock, resulting in a fiery crash that kills both Nightrider and his girlfriend.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: At the MFP garage, Max is shown his new police car: a specially-built supercharged V8-powered black Pursuit Special. A conversation between Max's superior, Captain Fred "Fifi" Macaffee, and Police Commissioner Labatouche reveals the Pursuit Special was authorised to bribe Max, who is becoming weary of police work, into staying on the force.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Nightrider's motorbike gang, which is led by Toecutter and Bubba Zanetti, run riot in a town, vandalising property, stealing fuel, and terrorising the populace. A young couple attempts to escape, but the gang destroys their car and rapes them. Max and fellow officer Jim "Goose" Rains arrest Toecutter's young protégé, Johnny the Boy, at the scene. No witnesses appear in court and Johnny is deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, however, so, against Goose's furious objections, he is released into Bubba's custody.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: While Goose visits a nightclub in the city that night, Johnny sabotages his police motorbike, causing it to lock up at high speed the next day and launch Goose off the road. Dazed, but uninjured, Goose borrows a ute to haul his bike back to MFP headquarters. On the way, Johnny throws a brake drum through his windshield, and he crashes again. Toecutter urges, and then forces, a reluctant Johnny to throw a match into the wreck of the ute, burning Goose alive.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: After seeing Goose's charred body in the hospital ICU, Max informs Fifi that he is resigning from the MFP to save what is left of his sanity. Fifi convinces him to take some time off and think it over, so Max goes on a trip in his panel van with his wife, Jessie, and infant son, "Sprog" (Australian slang for a child). When they stop to fix the spare tyre, Jessie takes Sprog to get ice cream and is molested by Toecutter and his gang. She escapes, and the family flees to a remote farm owned by an elderly friend, May Swaisey. The gang follows and chases Jessie through the woods, and they capture Sprog while Max is off looking for them. May helps Jessie free the boy and the trio escapes in the van, but it soon breaks down. Jessie grabs Sprog and runs down the road until the gang catches up and runs them over. Sprog is killed instantly, while a comatose Jessie is brought to the ICU, where she is expected to succumb to her injuries.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Driven into a rage by the loss of his family, Max dons his police uniform and takes the black Pursuit Special without authorisation to pursue and eliminate the gang. He kills several gang members before being caught in a trap set by Toecutter, Bubba and Johnny. Bubba shoots Max in the leg and drives over his arm before Max is able to shoot Bubba with a sawn-off shotgun. Toecutter and Johnny ride away, and Max staggers to his car and chases Toecutter, whom he forces into the path of an approaching semi-truck.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: After a long search, Max finds Johnny stealing boots from a dead motorist. Ignoring Johnny's desperate pleas that he did not kill the man and he is not responsible for what happened to Max's family due to his diagnosed psychopathy, Max handcuffs Johnny's ankle to the corpse's overturned vehicle and creates a crude time-delay fuse using leaking petroleum and Johnny's lighter. He gives Johnny a hacksaw, saying Johnny can either try to saw through the handcuffs, which will take ten minutes, or his ankle, which will take five minutes, to survive. The vehicle explodes as Max drives away.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: George Miller was a medical doctor in Sydney, working in a hospital emergency room where he saw many injuries and deaths of the types depicted in the film. He also witnessed many car accidents growing up in rural Queensland and lost at least three friends to accidents as a teenager.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: While in residency at a Sydney hospital, Miller met amateur filmmaker Byron Kennedy at a summer film school in 1971. The two men produced a short film, "Violence in the Cinema, Part 1", which was screened at a number of film festivals and won several awards. Eight years later, they produced "Mad Max", working with first-time screenwriter James McCausland (who appears early in the film as the bearded man in an apron in front of the diner).


title: Mad Max (film)

text: According to Miller, his interest while writing "Mad Max" was "a silent movie with sound", employing highly kinetic images reminiscent of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd while the narrative itself was basic and simple. Miller believed that audiences would find his violent story more believable if set in a bleak dystopian future. He knew little about writing a script, but he had read Pauline Kael’s essay "Raising Kane" and concluded that most major American scriptwriters, like Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht, were former journalists, so he hired McCausland, the Melbourne finance editor of "The Australian", with whom he had previously bonded at a party as a fellow film buff. McCausland was paid roughly $3,500 for about a year’s worth of writing.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: The basic concept for the film was already established when McCausland was brought on to the project. He worked from a one-page outline prepared by Miller, writing each evening from about 7pm to midnight. Miller would then arrive at 6am to confer on the pages. McCausland had never written a script before and did no formal or informal study in preparation, other than going repeatedly to the cinema with Miller and discussing the dramatic structure of westerns, road movies, and action films. McCausland described taking the lead in writing the dialogue, while Miller was concerned with giving his thoughts on the narrative context of each part and thinking through the visual beats of how things would unfold on screen. The ornate and hyper-verbal speech of Mad Max’s villains, like the manic Nightrider in the opening sequence, which would recur through the subsequent films in the franchise, in this sense stems from McCausland’s work, albeit under Miller’s instruction. McCausland drew heavily from his observations of the effects of the 1973 oil crisis on Australian motorists:


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Kennedy and Miller first took the film to Graham Burke of Roadshow, who was enthusiastic. The producers felt they would be unable to raise money from the government bodies "because Australian producers were making art films, and the corporations and commissions seemed to endorse them whole-heartedly", according to Kennedy. They designed a 40-page presentation, circulated it widely, and eventually raised the money. Kennedy and Miller also contributed funds themselves by doing three months of emergency medical calls, with Kennedy driving the car while Miller did the doctoring. Miller claimed the final budget was between $350,000 and $400,000. His brother Bill Miller was an associate producer on the film.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: George Miller considered casting an American actor to "get the film seen as widely as possible" and even travelled to Los Angeles, but eventually opted to not do so as "the whole budget would be taken up by a so-called American name." Instead, the cast deliberately featured lesser-known actors, so they did not carry past associations with them. Miller's first choice for the role of Max was the Irish-born James Healey, who at the time worked at a Melbourne abattoir and was seeking a new acting job. Upon reading the script, Healey declined, finding the meager, terse dialogue unappealing.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Casting director Mitch Mathews invited a class of recent National Institute of Dramatic Art graduates to audition for "Mad Max", specifically asking a NIDA teacher for "spunky young guys". Among these actors was American-born Mel Gibson, whose audition impressed Miller and Matthews and earned him the role of Max. An apocryphal tale stated that Gibson went to auditions with a beat-up face following a fight, but this has been denied by both Matthews and Miller. Gibson's friend and classmate Steve Bisley, who had worked with him in his only previous screen role, 1976's "Summer City", was cast as Max's partner Jim Goose. A classmate of both, Judy Davis, has been said to have auditioned and been passed over, but Miller has declared she was only in Matthews' studio to accompany Gibson and Bisley.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Most of the biker gang extras were members of actual Australian outlaw motorcycle clubs and rode their own motorcycles in the film. They were even forced to ride the motorcycles from their residence in Sydney to the shooting locations in Melbourne because the budget did not allow for aerial transport. Three of the main cast members (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Roger Ward and Vincent Gil) had previously appeared in "Stone", a 1974 film about biker gangs that is said to have inspired Miller.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Max's yellow "Interceptor" was a 1974 Ford Falcon XB sedan (previously a Victoria police car) with a 351 c.i.d. Cleveland V8 engine.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: The "Big Bopper", driven by Roop and Charlie, was also a 1974 Ford Falcon XB sedan and a former Victoria police car, but was powered by a 302 c.i.d. V8. The "March Hare", driven by Sarse and Scuttle, was an in-line-six-powered 1972 Ford Falcon XA sedan (this car was formerly a Melbourne taxi cab).


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Max's black "Pursuit Special" was a 1973 Ford XB Falcon GT351, a limited edition hardtop (sold in Australia from December 1973 to August 1976), which was primarily modified by Murray Smith, Peter Arcadipane, and Ray Beckerley. The main modifications were the Concorde front end and the supercharger protruding through the bonnet (for looks only; it was not functional). The Concorde front was a fairly new accessory at the time, designed by Peter Arcadipane at Ford Australia as a showpiece, and later became available to the general public because of its popularity. After filming for "Mad Max" was completed, the car went up for sale, but no buyer was found, so it was given to Smith. He kept it until Miller wanted to use it for "Mad Max 2", after which it again found no buyers and was left at a wrecking yard in Adelaide. It was bought and restored by Bob Forsenko, who later sold it to the Cars of the Stars Motor Museum in Cumbria, England. When the museum closed, the car went to a collection in the Dezer Museum in Miami, Florida.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: The Nightrider's vehicle, another Pursuit Special, was a 1972 Holden HQ Monaro coupe. It was also tuned, but was deliberately damaged to make it look like it had been involved in crashes.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: The car driven by the young couple that is vandalised and then finally destroyed by the bikers is a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air Sedan modified to look like a hot rod, with fake fuel injection stacks, fat tires, and a flame-red paint job.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Of the motorcycles that appear in the film, 14 were Kawasaki Kz1000 donated by a local Kawasaki dealer. All were modified in appearance by Melbourne business La Parisienne: one as the MFP bike ridden by Goose, and the balance for members of Toecutter's gang, many of which were portrayed by members of a local Victorian motorcycle club, the Vigilantes.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: By the end of filming, fourteen vehicles had been destroyed in the chase and crash scenes, including the director's personal Mazda Bongo (the small, blue van that spins uncontrollably after being struck by the "Big Bopper" in the film's opening chase).


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Originally, filming was scheduled to take ten weeks: six weeks of first unit, and four weeks on stunt and chase sequences. However, four days into shooting, Rosie Bailey, who was originally cast as Max's wife, was injured in a bike accident. Production was halted, and Bailey was replaced by Joanne Samuel, causing a two-week delay. In the end, the shoot lasted six weeks in November and December 1977, with a further six weeks of second-unit work. The unit reconvened in May 1978 and spent another two weeks doing second-unit shots and re-staging some stunts.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Miller described the whole experience as "guerrilla filmmaking", with the crew closing roads without filming permits and not using walkie-talkies because their frequency coincided with the police radio, and he and Kennedy would even sweep down the roads after filming was done. As filming progressed, however, the Victoria Police became interested in the production, and they began to help the crew by closing down roads and escorting vehicles. Because of the low budget, all but one of the police uniforms in the film were made of vinyl leather, with only one genuine leather uniform made for stunt sequences involving Bisley and Gibson.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Filming took place in and around Melbourne. Many of the car chase scenes were filmed near the town of Little River, northeast of Geelong. The early town scenes with Toecutter's gang were filmed in the main street of Clunes, north of Ballarat; much of the streetscape remains unchanged. The bunker on which Roop was sitting, the site where Goose takes his ride, and the gate Big Bopper slides through are in Point Wilson. The "execution of the mannequin" scene was filmed at Seaford Beach in Seaford, Victoria.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: David Eggby recalled the production as "often fraught with incidents and accidents". Eggby said Miller temporarily quit the production, and Byron contacted Brian Trenchard-Smith. Trenchard-Smith recommended hiring a new first assistant director. Miller completed the film, but Eggby said the crew did not respect him.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Safety control was supervised by Ian Goddard, an internationally known motorcycle racer. Goddard and his four assistants, aided by an extensive radio communications network, were so diligent in their work that not a single accident occurred during filming.


title: Mad Max (film)

text: "Mad Max" was one of the first Australian films to be shot with a widescreen anamorphic lens, although Peter Weir's "The Cars That Ate Paris" (1974) was shot in anamorphic four years earlier. Miller's desire to shoot in anamorphic made him seek out a set of Todd-AO wide-angle lenses that Sam Peckinpah had discarded in Australia after they became damaged while filming "The Getaway" (1972). The only lens that worked properly was a 35mm lens, which Miller employed to shoot the whole of "Mad Max".


title: Mad Max (film)

text: The film's post-production was done at a friend's apartment in North Melbourne, with Miller and Kennedy editing the film in the small lounge room on a home-built editing machine that Kennedy's father, an engineer, had designed for them. Miller and Kennedy also performed sound editing there. Tony Patterson spent four months editing the film, then had to leave because he was contracted to work on "Dimboola" (1979). George Miller took over editing with Cliff Hayes, and they worked for an additional three months. Kennedy and Miller did the final cut, in a process Miller described as "he would cut sound in the lounge room and I’d cut picture in the kitchen."


title: Mad Max (film)

text: Professional sound engineer Roger Savage performed the sound mixing in a studio after finishing his work for Little River Band. He employed timecoding techniques that were previously unseen in Australian cinema.