title: British and American keyboards

text: There are two major English language computer keyboard layouts, the United States layout and the United Kingdom layout defined in BS 4822 (48-key version). Both are QWERTY layouts. Users in the United States do not frequently need to make use of the £ (pound) and € (euro) currency symbols, which are common needs in the United Kingdom and Ireland, although the $ (dollar sign) symbol is also provided as standard on UK and Irish keyboards. In other countries which predominantly use English as a common working language, such as Australia, Canada (in English-speaking parts, mostly has fallen out of favour and been replaced with the Canadian Multilingual Standard Layout), and New Zealand, the US keyboard is commonly used.


title: British and American keyboards

text: The UK variant of the Enhanced keyboard commonly used with personal computers designed for Microsoft Windows differs from the US layout as follows:


title: British and American keyboards

text: Early versions of Windows handled both the differences between the two keyboards and the differences between American English and British English by having two English language options — a UK setting and a US setting. While adequate for users in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland, this solution caused difficulty in other English-speaking countries. In many English-speaking jurisdictions (e.g., Canada, Australia, the Caribbean nations, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Singapore, New Zealand, and South Africa), orthography has traditionally conformed more closely to British English usage, while these countries have chosen to use the United States keyboard layout. People in these countries were as a result required to choose a system setting inconsistent with their localised version of English, thereby causing traditional British English to fall out of favour. This is particularly evident with spelling, where words such as "colour" and "centre" are flagged as being spelled incorrectly by word processing software when the operating system is set to the US setting.


title: British and American keyboards

text: However, in more recent editions of Windows, the number of 'settings' options was increased, allowing users to select the correct keyboard and dialect independently. For example, one is given a number of default options for locality that will usually correctly match dialect and keyboard. Further, even if the hardware keyboard layout does not match the region that was pre-selected, it can be changed without changing the regional setting.


title: British and American keyboards

text: Since the standard US keyboard layout in Microsoft Windows offers no way of inputting any sort of diacritic or accent, this makes it unsuitable for all but a handful of languages unless the US International layout is used. The US International layout changes the (grave), (tilde), (circumflex), (double quote, to make diaeresis), and (apostrophe, to make acute accent) keys into dead keys for producing accented characters: thus for example  (release)  will produce . The US International layout also uses the right alt (AltGr) as a modifier to enter special characters.


title: British and American keyboards

text: The equivalent mapping for UK/Irish keyboards is called the "UK Extended" layout which, if activated in settings, will allow the user to enter a wide variety of diacritics (such as grave accents) which are not accommodated by the standard UK/Irish layout. In particular, à,è,ì,ò,ù used in Scots Gaelic can be made (using , release and then the vowel), the ŵ and ŷ used in Welsh (using (^), release, then etc.). Likewise, the Spanish and Portuguese letters ñ and õ can be made (using (~), release, then etc).


title: British and American keyboards

text: For more specialized uses, there is a facility in Windows for users to create a customized layout that may match their needs more precisely.


title: British and American keyboards

text: The non-standard default U.S. layout on Apple Macintosh computers allows input of diacritical characters, whereby the entire MacRoman character set is directly available.


title: British and American keyboards

text: The U.S. layout follows the ANSI convention of having an enter key in the third row, while the U.K. layout follows ISO and has a stepped double-height key spanning the second and third rows.


title: British and American keyboards

text: MacOS provides support for diacritics using either a "press and hold for pop-up menu" or a more extensive 'dead-key' facility.


title: British and American keyboards

text: Other operating systems can optionally re-map the keyboard layout or have different modifier keys (for example the Amiga keyboard has "A" modifier keys and BBC Micro or Acorn keyboards often had a "Shift Lock" as well as a "Caps Lock").


title: British and American keyboards

text: Under Unix/Linux the "Windows" key is often called the "Super" key and can be re-mapped by users for specific functionality but in most programs by default does nothing.


title: British and American keyboards

text: Some older Unix/Linux software, such as Emacs, uses the left Alt key as a "Meta" key, which harks back to older MIT or LISP computers.


title: British and American keyboards

text: ChromeOS uses the US and UK Windows layouts, except that the Caps-Lock key is labelled with a "fisheye" (◉) and by default acts as an "everything" search key. (There is an option in Settings to revert it to convention). The function-key row is also differently labelled. The UK-extended layout for ChromeOS is provided by a Chrome add-on, and provides ready access to a substantially greater (than Windows) repertoire of precomposed characters for western, central and eastern European (Latin alphabet) languages.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Story of Yanxi Palace () is a Chinese historical series recounting the struggles of a palace maid in the court of the Qianlong Emperor. It was created by Yu Zheng, with original screenplay written by Zhou Mo, and later developed into a novel by Xiao Lian Mao. Starring Wu Jinyan, Charmaine Sheh, Qin Lan, Nie Yuan, Tan Zhuo and Xu Kai, the series premiered on iQiyi from July 19, 2018 to August 26, 2018. During its run it was streamed more than 15 billion times.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Distributed in more than 70 markets worldwide, "Story of Yanxi Palace" has become a huge hit, especially in Asia. It was the most Googled TV show in the world in 2018, despite Google being blocked in Mainland China.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: A spinoff and sequel to the series, the 6-episode "Yanxi Palace: Princess Adventures", aired on Netflix December 31, 2019.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: During the Qing Dynasty, in 18th century Beijing, Wei Yingluo enters the court of the Qianlong Emperor, Aisin Gioro Hongli, as one of the palace embroiderers, in order to secretly investigate her beloved sister's mysterious death.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: At first believing the imperial guard Fuca Fuheng to be the prime suspect, Yingluo schemes to approach his sister, the Empress Fuca Rongyin, and succeeds in getting transferred from her embroidery unit to the Empress's Changchun Palace as her maid. She learns that the Fuca siblings are innocent of the crime. Yingluo and Fuheng fall for each other.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Meanwhile, Qianlong's Consort Chun allies herself with Empress Fuca because of her crush on her brother.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Yingluo eventually catches the attention of Qianlong himself. Though Yingluo is not noble by birth and is illiterate, Empress Fuca teaches her how to read and write, and the proper etiquette and mannerisms for noblewomen. The empress saves her several times from punishment for probing too deeply into her sister's death. In turn, Yingluo helps Empress Fuca survive a series of maneuvers by her rivals. The two develop a close friendship.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: In time, Yingluo discovers that her sister was raped by the son of the late Emperor Yongzheng, half-brother to the current emperor. To cover up the shameful act, the Prince's mother murdered Yingluo's sister. Yingluo successfully hatches a plot to kill the culprit. Empress Fuca feigns anger over Yingluo's defiance and banishes her to the palace's workhouse to allow Yingluo to escape a potentially more severe punishment from the Emperor. There, Yingluo befriends a conniving eunuch, Yuan Chunwang.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Without Yingluo, Empress Fuca falls victim to the machinations of Noble Consort Gao that put her in a coma. News reaches Yingluo, who visits Empress Fuca's chamber to sit by her mistress's side and care for her. Yingluo's devotion to Empress Fuca touches Qianlong even more. His own feelings towards her cause him to forbid Fuheng and Yingluo from marrying. Yingluo persists in her love despite various punishments from the emperor, but Fuheng backs down, causing the two to become distant.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Meanwhile, Consort Xian drives Noble Consort Gao to commit suicide. The emperor eventually relents on his tough stance towards Yingluo and allows her to return as maid to the Empress.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Empress Fuca eventually wakes from her coma and becomes pregnant again. She almost loses her life while giving birth to a son, who is immediately the target of assassination by Consort Chun. Consort Chun, stinging at Fuheng's rejection, strives to be the Emperor's new favorite and even bears a son, placing her in direct competition with the Empress. That New Year's Eve, Consort Chun murders the baby and a devastated Empress Fuca commits suicide out of grief. After her death, Yingluo is sent to live and guard over her mistress's grave at the Old Summer Palace. (episode 40) She stays there with Yuan Chunwang until during an imperial visit by Qianlong and his consorts to Empress Fuca's grave, Yingluo learns that Consort Chun was responsible for her late mistress's suicide, and was torturing another friend and fellow maid of the late Empress. She decides once again to enter the Forbidden City and exact retribution on the evildoers.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: In order to achieve her goal, Yingluo skillfully charms Qianlong, becoming part of his harem, and is bestowed a title. She quickly rises through the ranks, toppling her rivals including the now Noble Consort Chun, and exposing her role in Empress Fuca's death, which leads to her death at the hands of the newly named Empress Hoifa-Nara. Yingluo's captivation of Qianlong brings her numerous threats, especially that of her former sworn brother Yuan Chunwang. At Empress Hoifa-Nara's direction, he reveals Yingluo is secretly taking birth control, revealing her true reason for entering the harem. Qianlong, who has fallen for her, instantly brands her out of favor.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Yingluo teams up with the Empress Dowager, whose own relationship with Qianlong has been put to the test because the Empress, who revealed that Qianlong was not the biological son of the Empress Dowager, but the offspring of Lady Qian, a Han Chinese consort of the late Emperor Yongzheng who had died under mysterious circumstances. It is implied that the Empress Dowager had killed Lady Qian out of jealousy for having a son and adopted Qianlong for herself for this reason. The two women once most dear to Qianlong go into self-imposed exile, leading to Qianlong feeling guilty for doubting his adoptive mother, who undeniably was the one who raised him for years.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: A few years later, another threat in the form of newcomer Concubine Shun, a beautiful and cunning woman, calls Yingluo back to the Forbidden City. Yingluo sets out to reclaim Qianlong's favor, but finds herself befriended by her rival. But Concubine Shun has her own agenda. Framing Yingluo for attempted assassination, she teams up with Empress Hoifa-Nara to put Yingluo under house arrest. Nevertheless, Yingluo is able to reverse her situation, reveal Concubine Shun's treachery, and reclaim Qianlong's affections for her. Around the same time, Yingluo is discovered to be pregnant with Qianlong's child, much to the Emperor's happiness. Having reached stalemate at this point, Yingluo negotiates for a truce with the Empress on the condition that they both not harm any children of the palace in spite of the rivalry.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Yingluo, who also raises Fifth Prince Yongqi, goes on to bear two daughters and two sons over the next ten years, but one of her sons dies in infancy, and her health also slowly deteriorates.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: A decade later, however, Yuan Chunwang, now Empress Hoifa-Nara's trusted servant, betrays his new mistress by causing a series of mishaps in the palace that destabilize her rule and affect her sanity. Yuan Chunwang gradually uses Prince He's, the Qianlong's half-brother, affection for the Empress to instigate a rebellion. They plot to sabotage the Southern river tour in order to seize power and, in Prince He's mind, free Empress Hoifa-Nara from her eroding position. One night, a band of rebels suddenly storms onto the royal vessel just as a fire engulfs the Empress Dowager's cabin, prompting Qianlong to charge into the flames to save his mother, seemingly perishing in the process.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: The next morning, as Prince He gallantly appears to restore order from the overnight coup, Qianlong and the Empress Dowager emerge safely from a secret passageway designed by Fuheng and expose the plan of treachery. As it turns out, Prince He is betrayed by the Empress, who always loved Qianlong and wanted to use the rebellion to prove her devotion to her husband. Just then, Yingluo comes out of hiding under the protection of the Emperor's guards, the only consort to receive protection. This clear favoritism after all her years of devotion drives Empress Hoifa-Nara mad. In a fit of jealous rage, she cuts off her hair, a taboo in Manchu tradition, effectively cursing the entire Aisin Gioro clan.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: After Qianlong sentences Prince He to confinement and the Empress is dragged away, Yuan Chunwang proclaims his innocence, only for Yingluo to reveal the real reason Yuan hated Qianlong so much. Yuan believed he was an illegitimate son of the late Yongzheng Emperor, because of the clothes belonging to Yongzheng that were left behind to his family. The Empress Dowager loudly denies this and claimed that he was an offspring of a bandit who killed Qianlong's birth mother Lady Qian and later raped Yuan Chunwang's mother, and asserted that the clothes belonged to Yongzheng were the same ones Lady Qian exchanged with Yongzheng and wore to distract the bandits. Her pity for his "wasted life", which she said Yuan Chunwang would have used to spend as a commoner who could marry and have kids, drives Yuan Chunwang, who instead was misled by a lie and thus chose to be castrated and enter the Forbidden City for revenge, into madness. Although Qianlong desired to execute the now insane Yuan Chunwang by lingchi for his crimes, the Empress Dowager however, suddenly asks for the emperor to spare him. When he protests, the Empress Dowager tells him to trust her this one time and it is implied that the she was lying about Yuan Chunwang's backstory to maintain peace in the family. Yuan Chunwang is banished to the hard labor department for life, never recovering his sanity.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Back when Wei Yingluo was being punished to work in the hard labor department, the then Noble Consort Xian had saved her life by ordering an Imperial Physician to attend to her after she collapsed from illness. To repay this kindness from long ago, Wei Yingluo pleads for leniency for Empress Hoifa-Nara, and she is permitted to keep her title, but loses her managerial authority in the imperial harem and all of the Emperor's affections. Prince He is given poisoned wine by the Emperor, who orders him to go back to his palace after drinking it to make it look like he died of an illness. With Prince He executed for his crimes, Wei Yingluo's revenge for her sister is finally complete.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: She is elevated to the most highest title for a concubine, "Imperial Noble Consort" (second in rank only to the Empress) and given the authority to manage the imperial harem.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Many of the film props and costumes are exquisitely made using traditional Chinese crafts that are dying out with few master-level experts remaining to pass on their skills to the next generation. The acquisition of these skills requires a lifetime commitment to perfect, since they are unsurprisingly labor-intensive, demanding a sharp eye and tireless hands in order to replicate in painstaking detail the exclusive nature of their beauty.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: The velvet flower headwear used by the main characters was designed based on historical documents or antiques housed in the Palace Museum. Each adornment is created according to the characteristics of individual palace women. Zhao Shuxian, one of the few craftsmen still making velvet flowers, created all the headwear in the show using the art of making velvet flower (ronghua). This technique dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and refers to the creation of not only floral displays, but also animal shapes made of silk on a twisted wire frame.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Worn by the Empress and Consorts as status symbols of opulence, these are hairpins of a particular vibrant blue hue, made from the preserved feathers of the wings and back of the kingfisher bird. The technique resembles cloisonné, and when inlaid with pearls and other gemstones, the jewels are especially eye-catching the way a peacock dazzles fanning its tail.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: The original soundtrack was released as an extended play on July 23, 2018. "Willows of the Palace" by Li Chunai was released independently from the album.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: A 70-track studio album titled "The Story of Yanxi Palace TV soundtrack" (延禧攻略 影视剧配乐) was released July 19, 2018, containing the instrumental music of the series composed by Chen Guoliang. The music was recorded in J Productions House, and features flute player: Tan Baoshuo, Violin player: Leslie Ryang, Pipa player: Liu Tuotong, erhu player: Huang Leting, and Li Junzhu as the female voice. A total of 129 pieces were used in the show.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: In the Philippines, "Aahon" sung by JMKO was released under ABS-CBN Star Music and was the show's theme song.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: The series has generated buzz online for its engaging plot of a "Cinderella" tale with Chinese characteristics. It set the single-day online viewership record in China with a total of 530 million views, and has attracted a cumulative over 13 billion views since August 2018. The drama is the most viewed Chinese language drama of 2018.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: Many viewers praised the story, because unlike the amicable heroines they were used to seeing, the main character Wei Yingluo fights fire with fire and outmaneuvers her opponents. It also received praise for its well-developed characters and exciting interpretation by the actors, beautiful cinematography and intricate costume design, as well as its accurate portrayal of history and Qing-dynasty settings. Owing to its success, there has been an increased number of visitors to the Palace Museum in Beijing, which is where all the main characters in the show used to live in times gone by.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: There was uproar in China after a Vietnamese website managed to acquire episodes not yet shown in China and asked visitors to the website to answer questions confirming their Vietnamese identity before the website loads. "This service is for Vietnamese people only. Please answer the following questions: To which country do the Hoàng Sa Islands (Paracel Islands) belong? Vietnam, China, Philippines or Japan?". The only correct answer to the question is "Vietnam". Copies of the episodes were later removed from the platform.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: On January 25, 2019, the Beijing Daily, an official government newspaper, criticized the program for failing to promote socialist values. Four days later, on January 29, the Chinese government cancelled the program and similar programs such as Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace. CNN and other media outlets quickly reported on this incident, calling it Chinese censorship. A Hong Kong professor stated that the show was censored because it became too popular and defied social norms.


title: Story of Yanxi Palace

text: On December 31, 2019, Netflix released a six-episode season, "Yanxi Palace: Princess Adventures", which covers the marriage of Imperial Consort Ling's daughter, Princess Zhaohua, played by Wang Herun.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya (, , ) is a city in Thailand. It is on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand, about southeast of Bangkok, within, but not part of, Bang Lamung district in the province of Chonburi. Pattaya City (, ) is a self-governing municipal area which covers Tambon's Nong Prue and Na Klua and parts of Huai Yai and Nong Pla Lai. The city is in the industrial Eastern Seaboard zone, along with Si Racha, Laem Chabang, and Chonburi. Pattaya is at the center of the Pattaya-Chonburi Metropolitan Area—a conurbation in Chonburi Province—with a population of roughly 1,000,000.


title: Pattaya

text: The name "Pattaya" evolved from the march of Phraya Tak (later King Taksin) and his army from Ayutthaya to Chanthaburi, which took place before the fall of the former capital to Burmese invaders in 1767. When his army arrived in the vicinity of what is now Pattaya, Phraya Tak encountered the troops of a local leader named Nai Klom, who tried to intercept him. When the two met face to face, Nai Klom was impressed by Phraya Tak's dignified manner and his army's strict discipline. He surrendered without a fight and joined his forces. The place the armies confronted each other was thereafter known as "Thap Phraya", which means the "army of the Phraya". This later became Pattaya, the name of the wind blowing from the south-west to the north-east at the beginning of the rainy season.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya was a fishing village until the 1960s. Tourism began during the Vietnam War, when American servicemen began arriving on R&R (rest and relaxation). One large group who arrived from a base in Korat on 29 June 1959 and rented houses from Phraya Sunthorn at the south end of the beach, on what is now known as the "Strip", are credited with recommending Pattaya, whose fame spread by word of mouth.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya has a tropical wet and dry climate, which is divided into the following seasons: hot and dry (December to February), hot and humid (March and April), and "hot and rainy" (May to November).


title: Pattaya

text: The city ("mueang") had 320,262 people resident and counted on census 2010 (National Statistics Office). Most of these people counted are Thai, with most migrant populations not recognized, although the details are quite complex as there are even indigenous Thais without nationality, and migrant workers have since been largely regularized (albeit with due foreign pressure). Therefore, the census population does not represent the total figure. As for Thai nationals and legal permanent residents (very few) registering the city as their hometown, the provincial authority logged population was 107,944 in 2010, modestly rising to 119,530 by 2019. As with the Bangkok Metropolitan Region, registered population figure issued by a different agency than the National Statistics Office hardly captures the scope of the urban transformation that has occurred over the time span – the economy is dependent on the large numbers of casual Thai workers who work in the city yet remain registered in their hometowns, there is much employment turnover and to and from the capital, as well as seasonal farm migration. Migrant workers from neighboring nations, and many long-term expatriates who reside in the city as retirees or self-employed or contracted are traditionally not counted. There has never been a reliably published figure for total population, but its thought to be quite large (on the order of half a million people) given the ubiquity and sheer number of migrant workers taking place of Thai labor. Pattaya city excludes some nearby areas like Nong Prue (73,901 people in 2010 census) and Huay Yai.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya additionally has massive population inflow from short stay tourism, with its 2000 hotels and 136,000 rooms available as of 2015.


title: Pattaya

text: A growing community of foreign retirees live in Pattaya. Thailand immigration has a special visa category for foreigners over age 50 who wish to retire in Thailand. Pattaya is attractive to many retirees from other countries not only because of its climate and lifestyle, but also because living costs are lower than in many countries.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand, is approximately south of the city of Bangkok in Bang Lamung District, Chonburi Province.


title: Pattaya

text: The city of Pattaya is a special municipal area which covers the whole "tambon" Nong Prue (Nongprue) and Na Kluea (Naklua) and parts of Huai Yai and Nong Pla Lai. Bang Lamung township which forms the northern border of Pattaya covers parts of the "tambon" Bang Lamung (Banglamung), Nong Pla Lai and Takhian Tia. Bang Sare (Bang Saray) is on the southern border of Pattaya.


title: Pattaya

text: "Greater Pattaya" occupies most of the coastline of Banglamung (one of the eleven districts that make up Chonburi Province). It is divided into a larger northern section which spans the areas to the east of Naklua Beach (the most northern beach) and Pattaya Beach (the main beach) plus Phra Tamnak Hill (often called "Buddha Hill" because of the temples on top of the hill) headland immediately south of Pattaya Beach, and a smaller southern section covering the area to the east of Jomtien Beach (directly south of Phra Tamnak Hill).


title: Pattaya

text: The main sweep of the bay area is divided into two principal beachfronts. Pattaya Beach lies parallel to the city centre, and runs about 2.7 km long from Pattaya Nuea (North) south along the coast to Pattaya Tai (South) which is the entrance to Walking Street. The beach, which used to be 35 m wide, suffers from erosion and in some places was reduced to a width of only two to three meters. A 429 million baht beach restoration scheme was implemented in 2018. It will take 360,000 m of sand from Ko Rang Kwian offshore to increase the beach width to 50 m. Without intervention Pattaya will likely see its beaches disappear in roughly ten years according to Chulalongkorn University researchers. Within a month of the completion of the restoration of the first 400 m of Pattaya Beach, the work was "seriously damaged" by flooding. The beach is the first in the country to use imported sand to compensate for coastal erosion. An official said, "...the longer it is left without the flood damage being repaired, the worse it will get."


title: Pattaya

text: Phra Tamnak Hill is on the south side of Pattaya and is popular for its viewpoints and the temple (Wat Phra Yai) on top of the hill. Pattaya Park and Pattaya tower are at the south end of Phra Tamnak Hill and the Pattaya Exhibition And Convention Hall (P.E.A.C.H), is positioned at the north end of Phra Tamnak Hill. In recent years, Phra Tamnak Hill has gained in popularity because of its more natural environment, nicer beaches, and its convenient location between Jomtien and Pattaya city.


title: Pattaya

text: Jomtien is divided from Pattaya by Thepprasit Road, the southern route into Pattaya city. It consists of high-rise condominiums, beach side hotels, bungalow complexes, shops, bars, and restaurants.


title: Pattaya

text: Offshore islands include three "near islands": Ko Lan (main island), Ko Sak, and Ko Krok, from the shore of Pattaya. The "far islands" are Ko Phai (main island), Ko Man Wichai, Ko Hu Chang and Ko Klung Badan, located offshore further west of the "near islands". Ko Rin lies offshore to the south-west, south of Ko Phai group. The names "near islands", "far islands", and "Coral Island" are used for marketing purposes only and do not correspond to any naming conventions of the island groups and are not shown on maritime charts published by the Hydrographic Service of the Royal Thai Navy.


title: Pattaya

text: In June 2016 the Regional Environmental Office reported that, "The sea water along the busy central Pattaya beaches is of poor quality and could endanger human and marine life."


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya produces on the order of 450 tonnes of solid waste per day. The city spends more than 300 million baht on waste removal and disposal annually. On average it pays 1,600 baht to process each tonne of garbage. Significant volumes of rubbish are allegedly dumped into the sea by tour boats.


title: Pattaya

text: In July 2017 Pattaya Beach was fouled for a week by raw sewage that poured out of a storm drain. City officials blamed the incident on broken pumps and Pattaya's poorly maintained sewage-treatment plant. The environmental ministry declared it would step up enforcement of pollution laws and push Pattaya for better wastewater-treatment efficiency. According to the ministry, Pattaya has 1,047 identified sources of sewage and garbage pollution, the number increasing as the city grows. The sea water along central Pattaya beaches is of poor quality even in the absence of sewage spills and "could endanger human and marine life", the regional environmental office has said. They deemed sea water quality near central Pattaya beaches as "poor" and deteriorating. They judged water quality near Na Klua in North Pattaya, South Pattaya, Ko Lan, and Jomtien Beach as "fairly good". The city has considered expanding two water management plants to increase capacity for better treatment of wastewater prior to discharge into the ocean. The water treatment plant in Soi Wat Nongyai after expansion would be able to treat around 130,000 cubic metres of waste water a day, up from 80,000 cubic metres at present. The expansion was never implemented.


title: Pattaya

text: In November 2018, the Pattaya City Council approved 188 million baht for the repair of its six wastewater treatment plants. Installed in 2000, the plants can accommodate 65,000 m of wastewater per day. More than a third of plant equipment was found to be 40–50 percent worn out. The system treats waste from a 36 km portion of Pattaya, or 68 percent of its urban area. Earlier plans to increase treatment capacity to 135,000 m were never implemented and existing plants were allowed to fall into disrepair. Pattaya uses more than 200,000 m of water a day, but claims to only discharge about 70,000 m a day. The discrepancy is unexplained. Once treated, there are no tests to measure water quality before it is dumped back into the sea, which may account for foul water discharges.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya is at the center of Thailand's Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC). Investments totaling more than 1.5 trillion baht (US$45 billion) are flowing into EEC infrastructure projects: airports, deep-sea ports, high-speed railways, autoroutes. The result will enhance Pattaya's accessibility. According to the Thai Chamber of Commerce (TCC) the EEC investments, the U-Tapao International Airport and the high-speed train that will link three major airports to Pattaya, will make Pattaya the heart of the eastern region. The TCC view is that, "Plenty of attractions...will lure lots more foreign and domestic tourists in the future." Better connectivity will reduce both the cost and time to travel to Pattaya, with the TCC estimating the number of tourists visiting the EEC region to rise to 46.7 million over the next few years, one and half times the current 29.8 million visitors. Pattaya projects include developing a tram in the city and building a bigger cruise terminal, as well as new tourist attractions: a water park, an ice dome, cultural markets, Thai boxing gyms, theaters, and conference halls. All are under development. "We aimed to get rid of the previous [seedy] image of Pattaya and try to promote a new image to show that Pattaya is a place for everyone with diversity of new tourist attractions," said an official of the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT). He said that the EEC would make Pattaya more competitive compared with other popular Thai beach destinations such as Phuket and Ko Samui, with cheaper transport costs.


title: Pattaya

text: Fourteen million visitors in 2018 contributed 239 billion baht to the city's treasury. That represents more than 70% of Pattaya's total income for the year. The city's leadership plans to reduce Pattaya's reliance on tourism to 60% by 2025 by transforming itself into "Neo Pattaya", an international business center. Key to the plans are infrastructure improvements: 9.5 billion baht for flood management projects and upgrading sewage treatment plants to handle 130,000 m of waste per day, up from 67,000 m per day in 2019.


title: Pattaya

text: A daily service operates on the Eastern Line of the State Railway of Thailand between Pattaya and Hualumphong Station in Bangkok.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya is served by bus services from Bangkok's Northern Bus Terminal (Mo Chit) and the Eastern Bus Terminal (Ekamai), connecting to Pattaya's main bus terminal on Pattaya Nuea (North Pattaya Road) near Sukhumvit Road.


title: Pattaya

text: The 389 Bus airportpattayabus service connects Pattaya with Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK). It uses modern, air-conditioned buses, and takes around hours to reach the airport. The trip from the airport (level 1 gate 8 at arrival hall) to the bus terminal in Pattaya, makes three stops at North, Central, and South Pattaya intersections before going to their last drop off point, the office on Thappraya road (near Jomtien). It can take longer if many hotel stops are negotiated along Sukhumvit Road in Pattaya. The other bus service is the Bell Travel Service (Coach 36) which goes from the airport (Level 1 Between Gate 7 & 8) to the Pattaya Bell office at the North Pattaya Intersection, and then provides transfers to local hotels.


title: Pattaya

text: Buses from a terminal on Sukhumvit Road near Pattaya Klang (near the Central Pattaya intersection) connect Pattaya with many destinations in the north-east (i.e., Isan).


title: Pattaya

text: City and suburban services are mainly provided by "songthaew", popularly nicknamed "baht buses" or "blue taxis".


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya is about by road from Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK), the country's largest international airport. By road, it is accessed from Sukhumvit Road and Motorway 7 from Bangkok. Pattaya is also served by scheduled flights via U-Tapao International Airport (UTP) which is 45-minute drive south of the city.


title: Pattaya

text: A passenger-only ferry service from Pattaya to Hua Hin began operation on 12 January 2017 and is operated by Royal Passenger Liner. By road, the journey takes five to six hours. The ferry shortens travel time to about two hours, subject to sea conditions. The ferry cruises at 27 knots on the 113 km journey across the Gulf of Thailand with a maximum passenger capacity of 150 persons. Larger ferries carrying up to 260 people may be added to the service later. Ferries capable of carrying vehicles are projected for 2020. In November 2018, Hua Hin deputy chief Chareewat Phramanee confirmed the ferry service, suspended due to low tourist numbers during low season, would be up and running again for high season between Hua Hin and Pattaya, a 2.5-hour journey for 1,250 Thai Bhat on a catamaran with a maximum capacity of 340.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya city has been administered under a special autonomous system since 30 October 1978. It has a status comparable to a municipality and is separately administered by the mayor of Pattaya city who is responsible for making policies, organising public services, and supervising the city's workforce for an area that covers 53.4 square kilometers and consists of four subdistricts, 18 villages ("muban").


title: Pattaya

text: Once a fishing town, Pattaya first boomed as an R&R destination for US servicemen stationed at nearby former USAF base at U-Tapao, or other US bases in Thailand during the Vietnam War. In 2018, Pattaya was the 18th most visited city in the world with 9.6 million tourists, and 3rd most in Thailand, after Bangkok (24.1 million) and Phuket (10.5 million).


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya has derived part of its reputation as a tourist destination due to the sex industry and the resulting nightlife, and this notoriety has influenced the city's evolution in many ways. Prostitution in Thailand is technically illegal but tolerated in most cities, including Pattaya. The city's vast numbers of host bars, gogo bars, massage parlours, saunas, and hourly hotels, serve foreign tourists as well as locals. This is especially prominent on Walking Street as well as other areas around the city. Efforts have been made to clean up the city's image.


title: Pattaya

text: An article in the British tabloid the "Daily Mirror" have described Pattaya as "the world's sex capital", a "modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah". This provoked anger from government officials as high up as Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha. Pol Col Apichai Krobpetch, the Pattaya police superintendent, denied that Pattaya is a sex trade paradise. Upset about the British media's stories, he insisted they were fabricated. "There is no such thing as prostitution in Pattaya," said Col Apichai. "Where did they get the figure of 27,000 sex workers in Pattaya? Anyone can make up this information...Thai ladies having sex with foreigners is their personal issue. If they like each other, I don't see anything wrong with what they do behind closed doors." In response, Pattaya social worker Surang Janyam, the director of Service Workers IN Group Foundation, said that estimated number of Pattaya prostitutes published in the "Daily Mirror" is inaccurate: "27,000 sex workers in Pattaya is way too low. We have a lot more sex workers than that." In June 2019, over twenty high ranking Police, Army and Local government officers toured Pattaya and reported the central streets safe and free from illegal activities.


title: Pattaya

text: As evidence of the government's commitment to clean up Pattaya, on 26 February 2017 at 20:00, 60 police officers and soldiers raided Pattaya's notorious Soi 6 to check for violations of the law. When the checks were completed, police announced that all licenses were in order and there was no law breaking of any kind, including prostitution, taking place there.


title: Pattaya

text: Pattaya also has Asia's largest gay scene based around Boyztown, the Jomtien Complex, and Sunee Plaza. The city is also famous for its flamboyant "kathoey" cabaret shows where transsexual and transgender entertainers perform to packed houses.


title: Pattaya

text: In recent years, Pattaya has served as a hideaway for foreigners with connections to organized crime in their home countries, and dozens have been murdered in gang-related disputes.


title: Pattaya

text: People who visit the Pattaya area may encounter petty crime, usually limited to pickpocketing and confidence tricks, particularly in and around major tourist areas such as Jomtien and Pattaya Beaches and on the "baht buses". A special Tourist Police division has been established to aid tourists who are victims of crime. The 2009 British eight-episode TV documentary "Big Trouble in Tourist Thailand" described crimes involving tourists in Pattaya.


title: Pattaya

text: On 11 April 2009, Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency in the areas of Pattaya and Chonburi, in response to Red Shirt anti-government protesters breaking into the conference center of the Royal Cliff Beach Resort hotel complex, the site of an ASEAN Summit. The meeting was immediately cancelled and Asian leaders were evacuated, some by helicopter.


title: Pattaya

text: In 2019 the International Thai Foundation ('ITF') established a Community Legal Centre in Soi Bua Kao, Pattaya. Its objectives are to promote education, protect human rights & relieve poverty for the people in Thailand. This is the third CLC in Thailand


title: Pattaya

text: Several local foreign-language newspapers and magazines are published either weekly or monthly, especially in English, Russian, and German. The English-language newspapers include the "Pattaya Mail" and "Pattaya People". The Pattaya News is an online portal that writes the local news in six languages. "DER FARANG" is a German-language newspaper published every 14 days. "Thailands Tidende" is a Norwegian-language newspaper published monthly.


title: Pattaya

text: The novel "Platform" by French author Michel Houellebecq prominently features the city of Pattaya as well as its nightlife.


title: Pattaya

text: The Thai-Japanese Association School Sriracha, a Japanese international school, is in nearby Si Racha. It is an affiliate of the Thai-Japanese Association School in Bangkok. Si Racha formerly housed the Sriracha-Pattaya Japanese Supplement School, a Japanese weekend school.


title: Andrew Lawrence (actor)

text: Andrew James Lawrence (born January 12, 1988) is an American actor, singer and filmmaker. He is known for his roles as Andy Roman in "Brotherly Love" (starring with his real life brothers Joey and Matthew) and T.J. Detweiler in "Recess". Outside of his acting and music career, Lawrence made his directorial debut with the 2020 film "The Office Mix-Up".


title: Andrew Lawrence (actor)

text: Lawrence was born in Abington, Pennsylvania, to Donna Lynn ("née" Shaw), a personal talent manager, and Joseph Lawrence Mignogna Sr., an insurance broker. He is of Italian, English, and Scottish descent. His family's surname was changed to "Lawrence" from "Mignogna" before he was born. Lawrence is the younger brother of actors Joey Lawrence and Matthew Lawrence.


title: Andrew Lawrence (actor)

text: He started in show business at age three and made his professional acting debut in the television series "Blossom", as Little Joey. In 1998, he became the voice of T.J. Detweiler in Disney's animated television series, "Recess" replacing Ross Malinger after voicing the character for one season. He would reprise the role again in the and in several direct-to-video films, including "" and "". He has also done voice overs for video game characters, such as Pac in "Battlefield 4" and Nick Ramos in "Dead Rising 3". In November 2016, Lawrence released his debut EP, "Kings March". That same year, Lawrence started a band with his brothers, Joey and Matt, named Still 3. The trio released its debut single, "Lose Myself," in February 2017.


title: Kid A

text: Kid A is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 2 October 2000 by Parlophone. It was recorded with their producer, Nigel Godrich, in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and their hometown of Oxford.


title: Kid A

text: After the stress of promoting Radiohead's 1997 album "OK Computer", the songwriter, Thom Yorke, wanted to depart from rock music. Drawing influence from electronic music, ambient music, krautrock, jazz and 20th-century classical music, Radiohead used instruments such as modular synthesisers, the ondes Martenot, brass and strings. They processed guitar sounds, incorporated samples and loops, and manipulated their recordings with software. Yorke wrote impersonal and abstract lyrics, cutting up phrases and assembling them at random.


title: Kid A

text: In a departure from industry practice, Radiohead released no singles or music videos and conducted few interviews and photoshoots. Instead, they released short animated "blips", and became one of the first major acts to use the internet for promotion. Bootlegs of early performances were shared on filesharing services, and "Kid A" was leaked before release. In 2000, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos.


title: Kid A

text: "Kid A" debuted at the top of the UK Albums Chart and became Radiohead's first number-one album on the "Billboard 200" in the US, where it sold more than 207,000 copies in its first week. Its departure from Radiohead's earlier sound divided listeners, and some dismissed it as pretentious, deliberately obscure, or derivative. However, it later attracted acclaim; at the end of the decade, "Rolling Stone", "Pitchfork" and the "Times" ranked "Kid A" the greatest album of the 2000s, and in 2020 "Rolling Stone" ranked it number 20 on its updated list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Like "OK Computer", it won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It has been certified platinum in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the US and the UK.


title: Kid A

text: A second album of material from the sessions, "Amnesiac", was released eight months later. "Kid A Mnesia", an anniversary reissue compiling "Kid A", "Amnesiac" and previously unreleased material, was released in 2021.


title: Kid A

text: Following the critical and commercial success of their 1997 album "OK Computer", the members of Radiohead suffered burnout. The songwriter, Thom Yorke, became ill, describing himself as "a complete fucking mess ... completely unhinged". He was troubled by new acts he felt were imitating Radiohead and became hostile to the music media. He told "The Observer": "I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things, and I sort of felt like that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. And I couldn't handle that."


title: Kid A

text: Yorke suffered from writer's block and could not finish writing songs on guitar. He became disillusioned with the "mythology" of rock music, feeling the genre had "run its course". He began to listen almost exclusively to the electronic music of artists signed to the record label Warp, such as Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin and Autechre. Yorke said: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music." He liked the idea of his voice being used as an instrument rather than having a leading role, and wanted to focus on sounds and textures instead of traditional songwriting.


title: Kid A

text: Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing the grand piano he had recently bought. "Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote. He described himself as a "shit piano player", with little knowledge of electronic instruments: "I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he's using. So everything's a novelty. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant."


title: Kid A

text: The guitarist Ed O'Brien had hoped Radiohead's fourth album would comprise short, melodic guitar songs, but Yorke said: "There was no chance of the album sounding like that. I'd completely had it with melody. I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment." The bassist, Colin Greenwood, said: "We felt we had to change everything. There were other guitar bands out there trying to do similar things. We had to move on."


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead were building their own studio in Oxfordshire, which Yorke wanted to use as the German band Can had used their studio in Cologne, recording everything they played and then editing it down. However, the studio would not be complete until late 1999, so work began in Paris in January 1999.


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead worked with the "OK Computer" producer Nigel Godrich and no deadline. Yorke, who had the greatest control, was still facing writer's block. His new songs were incomplete, and some consisted of little more than sounds or rhythms; few had clear verses or choruses. Yorke's lack of lyrics created problems, as these had provided points of reference and inspiration for his bandmates in the past.


title: Kid A

text: The group struggled with Yorke's new direction. According to Godrich, Yorke did not communicate much, and according to Yorke, Godrich "didn't understand why, if we had such a strength in one thing, we would want to do something else". The lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, feared "awful art-rock nonsense just for its own sake". His brother Colin did not enjoy Yorke's Warp influences, finding them "really cold". The other band members were unsure of how to contribute, and considered leaving. O'Brien said: "It's scary – everyone feels insecure. I'm a guitarist and suddenly it's like, well, there are no guitars on this track, or no drums."


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead experimented with electronic instruments including modular synthesisers and the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument similar to a theremin, and used software such as Pro Tools and Cubase to edit and manipulate their recordings. They found it difficult to use electronic instruments collaboratively; according to Yorke, "We had to develop ways of going off into corners and build things on whatever sequencer, synthesiser or piece of machinery we would bring to the equation and then integrate that into the way we would normally work." O'Brien began using sustain units, which allow guitar notes to be sustained infinitely, combined with looping and delay effects to create synthesiser-like sounds.


title: Kid A

text: In March, Radiohead moved to Medley Studios in Copenhagen for two weeks, which were unproductive. The sessions produced about 50 reels of tape, each containing 15 minutes of music, with nothing finished. In April, Radiohead resumed recording in a mansion in Batsford Park, Gloucestershire. The lack of deadline and the number of incomplete ideas made it hard to focus, and the group held tense meetings. They agreed to disband if they could not agree on an album worth releasing.


title: Kid A

text: In July, O'Brien began keeping an online diary of Radiohead's progress. Radiohead moved to their new studio in Oxfordshire in September. In November, Radiohead held a live webcast from their studio, featuring a performance of new music and a DJ set. By 2000, six songs were complete. In January, at Godrich's suggestion, Radiohead split into two groups: one would generate a sound or sequence without acoustic instruments such as guitars or drums, and the other would develop it. Though the experiment produced no finished songs, it helped convince O'Brien of the potential of electronic instruments.


title: Kid A

text: On 19 April 2000, Yorke wrote on Radiohead's website that they had finished recording. Having completed over 20 songs, Radiohead considered releasing a double album, but felt the material was too dense. Instead, they saved half the songs for their next album, "Amnesiac", released the following year. Yorke said Radiohead split the work into two albums because "they cancel each other out as overall finished things. They come from two different places." He observed that deciding the track list was not just a matter of choosing the best songs, as "you can put all the best songs in the world on a record and they'll ruin each other". He cited the later Beatles albums as examples of effective sequencing: "How in the hell can you have three different versions of 'Revolution' on the same record and get away with it? I thought about that sort of thing." Agreeing on the track list created arguments, and O'Brien said the band came close to breaking up: "That felt like it could go either way, it could break ... But we came in the next day and it was resolved." The album was mastered by Chris Blair in Abbey Road Studios, London.


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead worked on the first track, "Everything in Its Right Place", in a conventional band arrangement in Copenhagen and Paris, but without results. In Gloucestershire, Yorke and Godrich transferred the song to a Prophet-5 synthesiser, and Yorke's vocals were processed in Pro Tools using a scrubbing tool. O'Brien and the drummer, Philip Selway, said the track helped them accept that not every song needed every band member to play on it. O'Brien recalled: "To be genuinely sort of delighted that you'd been working for six months on this record and something great has come out of it, and you haven't contributed to it, is a really liberating feeling." Jonny Greenwood described it as a turning point for the album: "We knew it had to be the first song, and everything just followed after it."


title: Kid A

text: Yorke wrote an early version of "The National Anthem" when the band was still in school. In 1997, Radiohead recorded drums and bass for the song, intending to develop it as a B-side for "OK Computer," but decided to keep it for their next album. For "Kid A", Greenwood added ondes Martenot and sounds sampled from radio stations, and Yorke's vocals were processed with a ring modulator. In November 1999, Radiohead recorded a brass section inspired by the "organised chaos" of "Town Hall Concert" by the jazz musician Charles Mingus, instructing the musicians to sound like a "traffic jam".


title: Kid A

text: The strings on "How to Disappear Completely" were performed by the Orchestra of St John's and recorded in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church about five miles from Radiohead's Oxfordshire studio. Radiohead chose the orchestra as they had performed pieces by Penderecki and Messiaen. Jonny Greenwood, the only Radiohead member trained in music theory, composed the string arrangement by multitracking his ondes Martenot. According to Godrich, when the orchestra members saw Greenwood's score "they all just sort of burst into giggles, because they couldn't do what he'd written, because it was impossible – or impossible for them, anyway". The orchestra leader, John Lubbock, encouraged them to experiment and work with Greenwood's ideas. Concerts director Alison Atkinson said the session was "more experimental" than the orchestra's usual bookings.


title: Kid A

text: "Motion Picture Soundtrack" was written before Radiohead's debut single "Creep", and a version of it was recorded on piano during the "OK Computer" sessions. Yorke recorded it on a pedal organ, influenced by the songwriter Tom Waits; the other band members added sampled harp and double bass, attempting to emulate the soundtracks of 1950s Disney films. Radiohead also worked on several songs that were not completed until recording sessions for future albums, including "Nude", "Burn the Witch" and "True Love Waits".


title: Kid A

text: "Kid A" incorporates influences from electronic artists on Warp Records such as 1990s IDM artists Autechre and Aphex Twin; 1970s Krautrock bands such as Can; the jazz of Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis; and abstract hip hop from the Mo'Wax label, including Blackalicious and DJ Krush. Yorke cited "Remain in Light" (1980) by Talking Heads as a "massive reference point". Björk was another major influence, particularly her 1997 album "Homogenic", as was the Beta Band. Radiohead attended an Underworld concert which helped renew their enthusiasm in a difficult moment.


title: Kid A

text: The string orchestration for "How to Disappear Completely" was influenced by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Jonny Greenwood's use of the ondes Martenot on this and several other "Kid A" songs was inspired by Olivier Messiaen, who popularised the instrument and was one of Greenwood's teenage heroes. Greenwood described his interest in mixing old and new music technology, and during the recording sessions Yorke read Ian MacDonald's "", which chronicles the Beatles' recordings with George Martin during the 1960s. The band also sought to combine electronic manipulations with jam sessions in the studio, stating their model was the German group Can.


title: Kid A

text: "Kid A" has been described as a work of electronica, experimental rock, post-rock, alternative rock, post-prog, ambient, electronic rock, art rock, and art pop. Though guitar is less prominent than on previous Radiohead albums, guitars were still used on most tracks. "Treefingers", an ambient instrumental, was created by digitally processing O'Brien's guitar loops. Many of Yorke's vocals were manipulated with effects; for example, his vocals on the title track were simply spoken, then vocoded with the ondes Martenot to create the melody.


title: Kid A

text: Yorke's lyrics on "Kid A" are less personal than on earlier albums, and instead incorporate abstract and surreal themes. He cut up phrases and assembled them at random, combining cliches and banal observations; for example, "Morning Bell" features repeated contrasting lines such as "Where'd you park the car?" and "Cut the kids in half". He cited David Byrne's approach on "Remain in Light" as an influence: "When they made that record, they had no real songs, just wrote it all as they went along. Byrne turned up with pages and pages, and just picked stuff up and threw bits in all the time. And that's exactly how I approached "Kid A"." Radiohead used Yorke's lyrics "like pieces in a collage ... [creating] an artwork out of a lot of different little things". The lyrics are not included in the liner notes, as Radiohead felt they could not be considered independently of the music, and Yorke did not want listeners to focus on them.


title: Kid A

text: Yorke wrote "Everything in Its Right Place" about the depression he experienced on the "OK Computer" tour, feeling he could not speak. The refrain of "How to Disappear Completely" was inspired by R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, who advised Yorke to relieve tour stress by repeating to himself: "I'm not here, this isn't happening". The refrain of "Optimistic" ("try the best you can / the best you can is good enough") was an assurance by Yorke's partner, Rachel Owen, when Yorke was frustrated with the band's progress. The title "Kid A" came from a filename on one of Yorke's sequencers. Yorke said he liked its "non-meaning", saying: "If you call [an album] something specific, it drives the record in a certain way."


title: Kid A

text: The "Kid A" artwork and packaging was created by Yorke with Stanley Donwood, who has worked with Radiohead since their 1994 EP "My Iron Lung". Donwood painted on large canvases with knives and sticks, then photographed the paintings and manipulated them with Photoshop. While working on the artwork, Yorke and Donwood became "obsessed" with the Worldwatch Institute website, which was full of "scary statistics about ice caps melting, and weather patterns changing"; this inspired them to use an image of a mountain range as the cover art. Donwood said he saw the mountains as "some sort of cataclysmic power".


title: Kid A

text: Donwood was inspired by a photograph taken during the Kosovo War depicting a square metre of snow full of the "detritus of war", such as military equipment and cigarette stains. He said: "I was upset by it in a way war had never upset me before. It felt like it was happening in my street." The red swimming pool on the album spine and disc was inspired by the 1988 graphic novel "Brought to Light" by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, in which the number of people killed by state terrorism is measured in swimming pools filled with blood. Donwood said this image "haunted" him during the recording of the album, calling it "a symbol of looming danger and shattered expectations". Yorke and Donwood cited a Paris exhibition of paintings by David Hockney as another influence.


title: Kid A

text: Yorke and Donwood made many versions of the album cover, with different pictures and different titles in different typefaces. Unable to pick one, they taped them to cupboards of the studio kitchen and went to bed. According to Donwood, the choice the next day "was obvious". In October 2021, Yorke and Donwood curated an exhibition of "Kid A" artwork at Christie's headquarters in London.


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead minimised their involvement in promotion for "Kid A", conducting few interviews or photoshoots. Though "Optimistic" and promotional copies of other tracks received radio play, Radiohead released no singles from the album. Yorke said this was to avoid the stress of publicity, which he had struggled with on "OK Computer", rather than for artistic reasons.


title: Kid A

text: No advance copies of "Kid A" were circulated, but it was played under controlled conditions for critics and fans. Radiohead were careful to present it as a cohesive work rather than a series of separate tracks. Rather than give EMI executives their own copies, they had them listen to the album in its entirety on a bus from Hollywood to Malibu. Rob Gordon, the vice president of marketing at Capitol Records, the American subsidiary of Radiohead's label EMI, praised the album but said promoting it would be a "business challenge". Promotional copies of "Kid A" came with stickers prohibiting broadcast before September 19. At midnight, it was played in its entirety by the London radio station Xfm. MTV2, KROQ, and WXRK also played the album in its entirety.


title: Kid A

text: Rather than agree to a standard magazine photoshoot for "Q", Radiohead supplied digitally altered portraits, with their skin smoothed, their irises recoloured, and Yorke's drooping eyelid removed. The "Q" editor Andrew Harrison described the images as "aggressively weird to the point of taking the piss ... All five of Radiohead had been given the aspect of gawking aliens." Yorke said: "I'd like to see them try to put these pictures on a poster." "Q" projected the images onto the Houses of Parliament, placed them on posters and billboards in the London Underground and on the Old Street Roundabout, and had them printed on key rings, mugs and mouse mats, to "turn Radiohead back into a product".


title: Kid A

text: Instead of releasing traditional music videos for "Kid A", Radiohead commissioned dozens of 10-second videos featuring Donwood artwork they called "blips", which were aired on music channels and distributed online. "Pitchfork" described them as "context-free animated nightmares that radiated mystery", with "arch hints of surveillance". Five of the videos were serviced as exclusives to MTV, and "helped play into the arty mystique that endeared Radiohead to its core audience", according to "Billboard". Much of the promotional material featured pointy-toothed bear characters created by Donwood. The bears originated in stories Donwood made for his young children about teddy bears who came to life and ate the "grown-ups" who had abandoned them.


title: Kid A

text: Though Radiohead had experimented with internet promotion for "OK Computer" in 1997, by 2000 online music promotion was not widespread, with record labels still reliant on MTV and radio. Donwood wrote that EMI was not interested in the Radiohead website, and left him and the band to update it with "discursive and random content".


title: Kid A

text: To promote "Kid A", Capitol created the "iBlip", a Java applet that could be embedded in fan sites. It allowed users to stream the album, and included artwork, photos and links to order "Kid A" on Amazon. It was used by more than 1000 sites, and the album was streamed more than 400,000 times. Capitol also streamed "Kid A" through Amazon, MTV.com and heavy.com, and ran a campaign with the peer-to-peer filesharing service Aimster, allowing users to swap iBlips and Radiohead-branded Aimster skins.


title: Kid A

text: Three weeks before release, "Kid A" was leaked online and shared on the peer-to-peer service Napster. Asked whether he believed Napster had damaged sales, Capitol president Ray Lott likened the situation to unfounded concern about home taping in the 1980s and said: "I'm trying to sell as many Radiohead albums as possible. If I worried about what Napster would do, I wouldn't sell as many albums." Yorke said Napster "encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do".


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead rearranged the "Kid A" songs to perform them live. O'Brien said, "You couldn't do "Kid A" live and be true to the record. You would have to do it like an art installation ... When we played live, we put the human element back into it." Selway said they "found some new life" in the songs when they came to perform them.


title: Kid A

text: In mid-2000, months before "Kid A" was released, Radiohead toured the Mediterranean, performing "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" songs for the first time. Fans shared concert bootlegs online. Colin Greenwood said: "We played in Barcelona and the next day the entire performance was up on Napster. Three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful." Later that year, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos, playing mostly new songs. The tour included a homecoming show in South Park, Oxford, with supporting performances by Humphrey Lyttelton (who performed on "Amnesiac"), Beck and Sigur Rós. According to the journalist Alex Ross, the show may have been the largest public gathering in Oxford history.


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead also performed three concerts in North American theatres, their first in nearly three years. The small venues sold out rapidly, attracting celebrities, and fans camped overnight. In October, Radiohead performed on the American TV show "Saturday Night Live;" the performance shocked viewers expecting rock songs, with Jonny Greenwood playing electronic instruments, the house brass band improvising over "The National Anthem", and Yorke dancing erratically to "Idioteque". "Rolling Stone" described the "Kid A" tour as "a revelation, exposing rock and roll humanity" in the songs. In November 2001, Radiohead released "", comprising performances from the "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" tours.


title: Kid A

text: "Kid A" reached number one on Amazon's sales chart, with more than 10,000 pre-orders. It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, selling 55,000 copies in its first day – the biggest first-day sales of the year and more than every other album in the top ten combined. "Kid A" also debuted at number one on the US "Billboard 200", selling more than 207,000 copies in its first week. It was Radiohead's first US top-20 album, and the first US number one in three years for any British act. "Kid A" also debuted at number one in Canada, where it sold more than 44,000 copies in its first week, and in France, Ireland and New Zealand. European sales slowed on 2 October 2000, the day of release, when EMI recalled 150,000 faulty CDs. By June 2001, "Kid A" had sold 310,000 copies in the UK, less than a third of "OK Computer" sales. It is certified platinum in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Japan and the US.


title: Kid A

text: "Kid A" was widely anticipated; "Spin" described it as the most anticipated rock record since Nirvana's "In Utero". According to Andrew Harrison, the editor of "Q", journalists expected it to provide more of the "rousing, cathartic, lots-of-guitar, Saturday-night-at-Glastonbury big future rock moments" of "OK Computer". Months before its release, Pat Blashill of "Melody Maker" wrote: "If there's one band that promises to return rock to us, it's Radiohead."


title: Kid A

text: After "Kid A" had been played for critics, many bemoaned the lack of guitar, obscured vocals, and unconventional song structures, and some called the album "a commercial suicide note". "The Guardian" wrote of the "muted electronic hums, pulses and tones", predicting that it would confuse listeners. In "Mojo", Jim Irvin wrote that "upon first listen, "Kid A" is just awful ... Too often it sounds like the fragments that they began the writing process with – a loop, a riff, a mumbled line of text, have been set in concrete and had other, lesser ideas piled on top." The "Guardian" critic Adam Sweeting wrote that "even listeners raised on krautrock or Ornette Coleman will find "Kid A" a mystifying experience", and that it pandered to "the worst cliches" about Radiohead's "relentless miserabilism".


title: Kid A

text: Several critics felt "Kid A" was pretentious or deliberately obscure. The "Irish Times" bemoaned the lack of conventional song structures and panned the album as "deliberately abstruse, wilfully esoteric and wantonly unfathomable ... The only thing challenging about "Kid A" is the very real challenge to your attention span." In the "New Yorker", the novelist Nick Hornby wrote that it was "morbid proof that this sort of self-indulgence results in a weird kind of anonymity rather than something distinctive and original". The "Melody Maker" critic Mark Beaumont called it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory, look-ma-I-can-suck-my-own-cock whiny old rubbish ... About 60 songs were started that no one had a bloody clue how to finish." Alexis Petridis of "The Guardian" described it as "self-consciously awkward and bloody-minded, the noise made by a band trying so hard to make a 'difficult' album that they felt it beneath them to write any songs". "Rolling Stone" published a piece by Michael Krugman and Jason Cohen mocking "Kid A" as humourless, derivative and lacking in songs. They wrote: "Because it was decided that Radiohead were Important and Significant last time around, no one can accept the album as the crackpot art project it so obviously is."


title: Kid A

text: Some critics felt the electronic elements were unoriginal. In the "New York Times", Howard Hampton dismissed Radiohead as a "rock composite" and wrote that "Kid A" "recycles Pink Floyd's dark-side-of-the-moon solipsism to Me-Decade perfection". Beaumont said Radiohead were "simply ploughing furrows dug by DJ Shadow and Brian Eno before them"; the "Irish Times" felt the ambient elements were inferior to Eno's 1978 album "Music For Airports" and its "scary" elements inferior to Scott Walker's 1995 album "Tilt". "Select" wrote: "What do they want for sounding like the Aphex Twin circa 1993, a medal?" Rob Sheffield wrote that the "mastery of Warp-style electronic effects" appeared "clumsy and dated". In an "NME" editorial"," James Oldham wrote that the electronic influences were "mired in compromise", with Radiohead still operating as a rock band, and concluded: "Time will judge it. But right now, "Kid A" has the ring of a lengthy, over-analysed mistake." Rob Mitchell, the co-founder of Warp, felt "Kid A" represented "an honest interpretation of [Warp] influences" and was not gratuitously electronic. He predicted it might one day be seen in the same way as David Bowie's 1977 album "Low", which alienated some Bowie fans but was later acclaimed.


title: Kid A

text: AllMusic gave "Kid A" a favourable review, but wrote that it "never is as visionary or stunning as "OK Computer", nor does it really repay the intensive time it demands in order for it to sink in". The "NME" review was also positive, but described some songs as "meandering" and "anticlimactic", and concluded: "For all its feats of brinkmanship, the patently magnificent construct called "Kid A" betrays a band playing one-handed just to prove they can, scared to commit itself emotionally." In "Rolling Stone", David Fricke called "Kid A" "a work of deliberately inky, often irritating obsession ... But this "is" pop, a music of ornery, glistening guile and honest ache, and it will feel good under your skin once you let it get there."


title: Kid A

text: "Spin" said "Kid A" was "not the act of career suicide or feat of self-indulgence it will be castigated as", and predicted that fans would recognise it as Radiohead's "best and bravest" album. "Billboard" described it as "an ocean of unparalleled musical depth" and "the first truly groundbreaking album of the 21st century". Robert Christgau wrote that "Kid A" was "an imaginative, imitative variation on a pop staple: sadness made pretty". "The Village Voice" called it "oblique oblique oblique ... Also incredibly beautiful." Brent DiCrescenzo of "Pitchfork" gave "Kid A" a perfect score, calling it "cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike". He concluded that Radiohead "must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who". The piece was one of the first "Kid A" reviews posted online; shared widely by Radiohead fans, it helped popularise "Pitchfork" and became notorious for its "obtuse" writing.


title: Kid A

text: At Metacritic, which aggregates ratings from critics, "Kid A" has a score of 80 based on 24 reviews, indicating "generally favourable reviews". It was named one of the best albums of 2000 by publications including the "Los Angeles Times", "Spin", "Melody Maker", "Mojo", "NME", "Pitchfork", "Q", the "Times", "Uncut", and the "Wire". At the 2001 Grammy Awards, "Kid A" was nominated for Album of the Year and won for Best Alternative Album.


title: Kid A

text: In the years following its release, "Kid A" attracted acclaim. In 2005, "Pitchfork" wrote that it had "challenged and confounded" Radiohead's audience, and subsequently "transformed into an intellectual symbol of sorts ... Owning it became 'getting it'; getting it became 'anointing it'." In 2015, Rob Sheffield of "Rolling Stone" likened Radiohead's change in style to Bob Dylan's controversial move to rock music, writing that critics now hesitated to say they had disliked it at the time. He described "Kid A" as the "defining moment in the Radiohead legend". A year later, "Billboard" argued that "Kid A" was the first album since Bowie's "Low" to have moved "rock and electronic music forward in such a mature fashion". In an article for "Kid A's" 20th anniversary, the "Quietus" suggested that the negative reviews had been motivated by rockism, the tendency among music critics to venerate rock music over other genres.


title: Kid A

text: In a 2011 "Guardian" article about his critical "Melody Maker" review, Beaumont wrote that though his opinion had not changed, ""Kid A" status as a cultural cornerstone has proved me, if not wrong, then very much in the minority ... People whose opinions I trust claim it to be their favourite album ever." In 2014, Brice Ezell of "PopMatters" wrote that "Kid A" is "more fun to think and write about than it is to actually listen to" and a "far less compelling representation of the band's talents than "The Bends" and "OK Computer"". In 2016, Dorian Lysnkey wrote in "The Guardian": "At times, "Kid A" is dull enough to make you fervently wish that they'd merged the highlights with the best bits of the similarly spotty "Amnesiac" ... Yorke had given up on coherent lyrics so one can only guess at what he was worrying about."


title: Kid A

text: Radiohead denied that they had set out to create "difficult" music. Jonny Greenwood argued that the tracks were short and melodic, and suggested that "people basically want their hands held through 12 'Mull Of Kintyre's". Yorke said: "We're actually trying to communicate but, somewhere along the line, we just seemed to piss off a lot of people ... What we're doing isn't that radical." He recalled that the band had been "white as a sheet" before early performances on the "Kid A" tour, thinking they had been "absolutely trashed". At the same time, the reaction motivated them: "There was a sense of a fight to convince people, which was actually really exciting." He regretted having released no singles, feeling it meant much of the early judgement of the album came from critics.


title: Kid A

text: "Grantland" credited "Kid A" for pioneering the use of internet to stream and promote music, writing: "For many music fans of a certain age and persuasion, "Kid A" was the first album experienced primarily via the internet – it's where you went to hear it, read the reviews, and argue about whether it was a masterpiece ... Listen early, form an opinion quickly, state it publicly, and move on to the next big record by the official release date. In that way, "Kid A" invented modern music culture as we know it." In his 2005 book "Killing Yourself to Live", critic Chuck Klosterman interpreted "Kid A" as a prediction of the September 11 attacks.


title: Kid A

text: Speaking at Radiohead's induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2019, David Byrne of Talking Heads, one of Radiohead's formative influences, said: "What was really weird and very encouraging was that ["Kid A"] was popular. It was a hit! It proved to me that the artistic risk paid off and music fans sometimes are not stupid." In 2020, "Billboard" wrote that the success of "Kid A," despite its "challenging" content, established Radiohead as "heavy hitters in the business for the long run".


title: Kid A

text: In 2020, "Rolling Stone" ranked "Kid A" number 20 on its updated "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list, describing it as "a new, uniquely fearless kind of rock record for a new, increasingly fearful century ... [It] remains one of the more stunning sonic makeovers in music history." In previous versions of the list, "Kid A" ranked at number 67 (2012) and number 428 (2003). In 2005, "Stylus" and "Pitchfork" named "Kid A" the best album of the previous five years, with "Pitchfork" calling it "the perfect record for its time: ominous, surreal, and impossibly millennial".


title: Kid A

text: In 2006, "Time" named "Kid A "one of the 100 best albums, calling it "the opposite of easy listening, and the weirdest album to ever sell a million copies, but ... also a testament to just how complicated pop music can be". At the end of the decade, "Rolling Stone", "Pitchfork" and the "Times" ranked "Kid A" the greatest album of the 2000s. "The Guardian" ranked it second best, calling it "a jittery premonition of the troubled, disconnected, overloaded decade to come. The sound of today, in other words, a decade early." In 2021, "Pitchfork" readers voted "Kid A" the greatest album of the previous 25 years. In 2011, "Rolling Stone" named "Everything in Its Right Place" the 24th-best song of the 2000s, describing it as "oddness at its most hummable". "Idioteque" was named one of the best songs of the decade by "Pitchfork" and "Rolling Stone", and "Rolling Stone" ranked it #33 on its 2018 list of the "greatest songs of the century so far".


title: Kid A

text: After a period of being out of print on vinyl, EMI reissued a double LP of "Kid A" on 19 August 2008 along with "OK Computer, Amnesiac" and "Hail to the Thief" as part of the "From the Capitol Vaults" series. In August 2009, EMI reissued "Kid A" in a two-CD "Collector's Edition" and a "Special Collector's Edition" containing an additional DVD. Both versions feature live tracks, taken mostly from television performances. Radiohead, who left EMI in 2007, had no input into the reissue and the music was not remastered. The "Collector's Editions" were discontinued after Radiohead's back catalogue was transferred to XL Recordings in 2016. In May 2016, XL reissued "Kid A" on vinyl, along with the rest of Radiohead's back catalogue.


title: Kid A

text: An early demo of "The National Anthem" was included in the special edition of the 2017 "OK Computer" reissue "OKNOTOK 1997 2017." In February 2020, Radiohead released an extended version of "Treefingers", previously released on the soundtrack for the 2000 film "Memento", to digital platforms.


title: Kid A

text: On November 5, 2021, Radiohead released "Kid A Mnesia," an anniversary reissue compiling "Kid A" and "Amnesiac". It includes a third album, "Kid Amnesiae", comprising previously unreleased material from the sessions. Radiohead promoted the reissue with singles for the previously unreleased tracks "If You Say the Word" and "Follow Me Around". "Kid A Mnesia Exhibition", an interactive experience with music and artwork from the albums, was released on November 18 for PlayStation 5, macOS and Windows.


title: Kid A

text: All songs written by Radiohead, except "Idioteque", which samples "Mild und Leise" by Paul Lansky and "Short Piece" by Arthur Kreiger.


title: Kid A

text: Note: Track 10 ends at 3:20; includes an untitled hidden track from 4:17 until 5:09, followed by 1:51 of silence. On streaming services, the hidden track is listed as a separate track.


title: Civil service

text: The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. A civil servant, also known as a public servant, is a person employed in the public sector by a government department or agency for public sector undertakings. Civil servants work for central and state governments, and answer to the government, not a political party.


title: Civil service

text: The extent of civil servants of a state as part of the "civil service" varies from country to country. In the United Kingdom (UK), for instance, only Crown (national government) employees are referred to as "civil servants" whereas employees of local authorities (counties, cities and similar administrations) are generally referred to as "local government civil service officers", who are considered public servants but not civil servants. Thus, in the UK, a civil servant is a public servant but a public servant is not necessarily a civil servant.


title: Civil service

text: The study of the civil service is a part of the field of public service (and in some countries there is no distinction between the two). Staff members in "non-departmental public bodies" (sometimes called "QUANGOs") may also be classed as civil servants for the purpose of statistics and possibly for their terms and conditions. Collectively a state's civil servants form its civil service or public service. The concept arose in China and modern civil service developed in Britain in the 18th century.


title: Civil service

text: An international civil servant or international staff member is a civilian employee who is employed by an intergovernmental organization. These international civil servants do not resort under any national legislation (from which they have immunity of jurisdiction) but are governed by internal staff regulations. All disputes related to international civil service are brought before special tribunals created by these international organizations such as, for instance, the Administrative Tribunal of the ILO. Specific referral can be made to the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) of the United Nations, an independent expert body established by the United Nations General Assembly. Its mandate is to regulate and coordinate the conditions of service of staff in the United Nations common system, while promoting and maintaining high standards in the international civil service.


title: Civil service

text: The origin of the modern meritocratic civil service can be traced back to Imperial examination founded in Imperial China. The Imperial exam based on merit was designed to select the best administrative officials for the state's bureaucracy. This system had a huge influence on both society and culture in Imperial China and was directly responsible for the creation of a class of scholar-bureaucrats irrespective of their family pedigree.


title: Civil service

text: Originally appointments to the bureaucracy were based on the patronage of aristocrats; During Han dynasty, Emperor Wu of Han established the xiaolian system of recommendation by superiors for appointments to office. In the areas of administration, especially the military, appointments were based solely on merit. This was an early form of the imperial examinations, transitioning from inheritance and patronage to merit, in which local officials would select candidates to take part in an examination of the Confucian classics. After the fall of the Han dynasty, the Chinese bureaucracy regressed into a semi-merit system known as the nine-rank system.


title: Civil service

text: This system was reversed during the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618), which initiated a civil service bureaucracy recruited through written examinations and recommendation. The first civil service examination system was established by Emperor Wen of Sui. Emperor Yang of Sui established a new category of recommended candidates for the mandarinate in AD 605. The following Tang dynasty (618–907) adopted the same measures for drafting officials, and decreasingly relied on aristocratic recommendations and more and more on promotion based on the results of written examinations. The structure of the examination system was extensively expanded during the reign of Wu Zetian.


title: Civil service

text: In theory, the Chinese civil service system provided one of the main avenues for social mobility in Chinese society, although in practice, due to the time-consuming nature of the study, the examination was generally only taken by sons of the landed gentry. The examination tested the candidate's memorization of the Nine Classics of Confucianism and his ability to compose poetry using fixed and traditional forms and calligraphy. It was ideally suited to literary candidates. Thus, toward the end of the Ming Dynasty, the system attracted the candidature of Tang Xianzu (1550-1616). Tang at 14 passed the imperial examination at the county level; and at 21, he did so at the provincial level; but not until he was 34 did he pass at the national level. However, he had already become a well-known poet at age 12, and among other things he went on to such distinction as a profound literati and dramatist that it would not be far-fetched to regard him as China's answer to William Shakespeare: Wang Rongpei and Zhang Ling (eds), The Complete Works of Tang Xianzu (2018). In the late 19th century, however, the system increasingly engendered internal dissatisfaction, and was criticized as not reflecting candidates' ability to govern well, and for giving undue weight to style over content and originality of thought. Indeed, long before its abandonment, the notion of the imperial system as a route to social mobility was somewhat mythical. In Tang's magnum opus, The Peony Pavilion, sc 13, Leaving Home, the male lead, Liu Mengmei, laments: "After twenty years of studies, I still have no hope of getting into office", and on this point Tang may be speaking through Liu as his alter ego. The system was finally abolished by the Qing government in 1905 as part of the New Policies reform package.


title: Civil service

text: The Chinese system was often admired by European commentators from the 16th century onward. However, the Chinese imperial examination system was hardly universally admired by all Europeans who knew of it. In a debate in the unelected chamber of the UK parliament on March 13, 1854, John Browne 'pointed out [clearly with some disdain ] that the only precedent for appointing civil servants by literary exams was that of the Chinese government': Coolican (2018), ch.5: The Northcote-Trevelyan Report, pp106–107.


title: Civil service

text: In the 18th century, in response to economic changes and the growth of the British Empire, the bureaucracy of institutions such as the Office of Works and the Navy Board greatly expanded. Each had its own system, but in general, staff were appointed through patronage or outright purchase. By the 19th century, it became increasingly clear that these arrangements were falling short. "The origins of the British civil service are better known. During the eighteenth century a number of Englishmen wrote in praise of the Chinese examination system, some of them going so far as to urge the adoption for England of something similar. The first concrete step in this direction was taken by the British East India Company in 1806." In that year, the Honourable East India Company established a college, the East India Company College, near London to train and examine administrators of the company's territories in India. "The proposal for establishing this college came, significantly, from members of the East India Company's trading post in Canton, China." Examinations for the Indian "civil service"—a term coined by the Company—were introduced in 1829.


title: Civil service

text: British efforts at reform were influenced by the imperial examinations system and meritocratic system of China. Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, China argued in his "Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China", published in 1847, that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic. On the other hand, John Browne, in the 1854 debate mentioned above, 'argued that elegant writing had become an end in itself, and the stultifying effect of this on the Chinese civil service had contributed in no small measure to China's failure to develop its early lead over Western civilisations': Coolican, p107.


title: Civil service

text: In 1853 the Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, commissioned Sir Stafford Northcote and Charles Trevelyan to look into the operation and organisation of the Civil Service. Influenced by the Chinese imperial examinations, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 made four principal recommendations: that recruitment should be on the basis of merit determined through competitive examination, that candidates should have a solid general education to enable inter-departmental transfers, that recruits should be graded into a hierarchy and that promotion should be through achievement, rather than "preferment, patronage or purchase". It also recommended a clear division between staff responsible for routine ("mechanical") work, and those engaged in policy formulation and implementation in an "administrative" class.


title: Civil service

text: The report was well-timed, because bureaucratic chaos during the Crimean War was causing a clamour for the change. The report's conclusions were immediately implemented, and a permanent, unified and politically neutral civil service was introduced as Her Majesty's Civil Service. A Civil Service Commission was also set up in 1855 to oversee open recruitment and end patronage, and most of the other Northcote–Trevelyan recommendations were implemented over some years. Or so one version of the story goes.


title: Civil service

text: The same model, the Imperial Civil Service, was implemented in British India from 1858, after the demise of the East India Company's rule in India through the Indian Rebellion of 1857 which came close to toppling British rule in the country.


title: Civil service

text: The Northcote–Trevelyan model remained essentially stable for a hundred years. This was a tribute to its success in removing corruption, delivering public services (even under the stress of two world wars), and responding effectively to political change. It also had a great international influence and was adapted by members of the Commonwealth. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act established a modern civil service in the United States, and by the turn of the 20th century almost all Western governments had implemented similar reforms.


title: Civil service

text: Civil servants in Brazil () are those working in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal, state, Federal District or municipal governments, including congressmen, senators, mayors, ministers, the president of the republic, and workers in government-owned corporations.


title: Civil service

text: Career civil servants (not temporary workers or politicians) are hired only externally on the basis of entrance examinations (). It usually consists of a written test; some posts may require physical tests (such as policemen), or oral tests (such as professors, judges, prosecutors and attorneys). The rank according to the examination score is used for filling the vacancies.


title: Civil service

text: Entrance examinations are conducted by several institutions with a government mandate, such as CESPE (which belongs to the University of Brasília) and the Foundation (which is part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro).


title: Civil service

text: The labor laws and social insurance for civil servants are different from private workers; even between government branches (like different states or cities), the law and insurance differ.


title: Civil service

text: The posts usually are ranked by titles, the most common are "technician" for high school literates and "analyst" for undergraduates. There's also higher post ranks like auditor, fiscal, chief of police, prosecutor, judge, attorney, etc.


title: Civil service

text: The law does not allow servants to upgrade or downgrade posts internally; they need to be selected in separate external entrance examinations.


title: Civil service

text: In Canada, the civil service at the federal level is known as the Public Service of Canada, with each of the ten provincial governments as well as the three territorial governments also having their own separate civil services. The federal civil service consists of all employees of the crown. Ministers' exempt staff and members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Canadian Armed Forces are not civil servants. There are approximately 257,000 federal civil servants (2015), and more than 350,000 employees at the provincial and territorial levels.


title: Civil service

text: In the United States, the federal civil service was established in 1871. The Civil Service is defined as "all appointive positions in the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the Government of the United States, except positions in the uniformed services." (). In the early 19th century, government jobs were held at the pleasure of the president — a person could be fired at any time. The spoils system meant that jobs were used to support the political parties. This was changed in slow stages by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and subsequent laws. By 1909, almost two thirds of the U.S. federal work force was appointed based on merit, that is, qualifications measured by tests. Certain senior civil service positions, including some heads of diplomatic missions and executive agencies, are filled by political appointees. Under the Hatch Act of 1939, civil servants are not allowed to engage in political activities while performing their duties.


title: Civil service

text: The U.S. civil service includes the competitive service and the excepted service. The majority of civil service appointments in the U.S. are made under the competitive service, but the Foreign Service, the FBI, and other National Security positions are made under the excepted service. (U.S. Code Title V)


title: Civil service

text: U.S. state and local government entities often have competitive civil service systems that are modeled on the national system, in varying degrees.


title: Civil service

text: As of January 2007, the federal government, excluding the Postal Service, employed about 1.8 million civilian workers. The federal government is the nation's single largest employer, although it employs only about 12% of all government employees, compared to 24% at the state level and 63% at the local level. Although most federal agencies are based in the Washington, D.C. region, only about 16% (or about 284,000) of the federal government workforce is employed in this region.


title: Civil service

text: The Civil Service () of Brunei. The role of the civil service is as the government's administrative machinery to uphold the supreme authority of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam, uphold the National Philosophy – MIB, Melayu Islam Beraja, ensure the development of the country and ensure the welfare of the people as well as its traditional role as the peacekeeper, law enforcer, regulator and service providers. However, the adjudication system is separate from the civil service to maintain its independence and impartiality.


title: Civil service

text: The Civil Service (, "Sevakamm Civil") of Cambodia is the policy implementing arm of the Royal Government of Cambodia. In executing this important role, each civil servant (, "Montrey Reachkar") is


title: Civil service

text: obligated to act according to the law and is guided by public policy pronouncements. The "Common Statute of Civil Servants" is the primary legislative framework for the Civil Service in Cambodia.


title: Civil service

text: One of the oldest examples of a civil service based on meritocracy is the Imperial bureaucracy of China, which can be traced as far back as the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC).


title: Civil service

text: However, the civil service examinations were practiced on a much smaller scale in comparison to the stronger, centralized bureaucracy of the Song dynasty (960–1279). In response to the regional military rule of jiedushi and the loss of civil authority during the late Tang period and Five Dynasties (907–960), the Song emperors were eager to implement a system where civil officials would owe their social prestige to the central court and gain their salaries strictly from the central government. This ideal was not fully achieved since many scholar officials were affluent landowners and were engaged in many anonymous business affairs in an age of economic revolution in China. Nonetheless, gaining a degree through three levels of examination—prefectural exams, provincial exams, and the prestigious palace exams—was a far more desirable goal in society than becoming a merchant. This was because the mercantile class was traditionally regarded with some disdain by the scholar-official class.


title: Civil service

text: This class of state bureaucrats in the Song period were far less aristocratic than their Tang predecessors. The examinations were carefully structured in order to ensure that people of lesser means than what was available to candidates born into wealthy, landowning families were given a greater chance to pass the exams and obtain an official degree. This included the employment of a bureau of copyists who would rewrite all of the candidates' exams in order to mask their handwriting and thus prevent favoritism by graders of the exams who might otherwise recognize a candidate's handwriting. The advent of widespread printing in the Song period allowed many more examination candidates access to the Confucian texts whose mastery was required for passing the exams.