title: Consultant

text: Consultants work for (consulting) firms or as freelance contractors. A consultant differs from a temporary worker insofar as she or he has, as detailed above, a highly specialized career and domain knowledge. This could be true for a temporary worker too, however, for example a medical consultant is unlikely to suddenly become a hotel receptionist, whereas a temporary worker might change domains and branches more frequently. Furthermore, a consultant usually signs a service-type employee contract (known as fixed-term, full-time, part-time), whereas a temporary worker will only be offered a temporary (and scope limited) contract or a work-results type contract (e. g. in Germany a specific type of contract called "Werksvertrag") to fulfill or create a specific work. Additionally, a temporary worker might be directed and managed by a client, whereas a consultant is employed by a company (or self) and provides services for a client. The consultant may not be provided work-related instruments or tools, but only the necessary infrastructure and accesses the consultant needs to fulfill the statement of work, e. g. access to internal IT networks or client-side laboratory. Moreover, a consultant might engage in multi-project services (matrix organization) for the client or for internal projects/activities at the employer firm.


title: Consultant

text: The consultant's career path is usually not at the client's side, however the consultant will very likely be introduced into the client's organizational program or project structure.


title: Consultant

text: Novel collaborations of expert-contractors or "independent consultants" especially in ICT sector exist, e.g. ThoughtWorks.


title: Consultant

text: A consultant's activity can last anywhere from an hourly consultation, to a one-day service, three months, 12 months or more. For complex projects, a longer period is needed for the consultant to analyze, resolve the root cause, get to know the stakeholders and organizational-situation, etc. Usually the engagement has set legal boundaries under given law to avoid (specifically for freelance-contractors) the problem of false self-employment (see also Umbrella company). The person at client location is sometimes called a "Resident". By spending time at the client's organization, the consultant is able to observe work processes, interview workers, managers, executives, board members, or other individuals, and study how the organization operates to provide hers or his services.


title: Consultant

text: In some settings, a consultant is signing a specific contract and is hired as an interim manager or executive with advanced authority or shared responsibility or decision making of client-side activities, filling a vacant position which could and cannot be filled with an internal candidate. This is often the case by the client-organization due to other constraints, such as corporate compliance and HR-processes, which lead to prolonged hiring paths beyond six months, which is often inacceptable for leadership roles.


title: Consultant

text: Research and analysis can occur at the consultants' offices (sometimes called back office) or home-offices) or via remote work). In the case of smaller consulting firms, consultants typically work at the site of the client for at least some of the time. The governing factor on where a consultant works tends to be the amount of interaction required with other employees of the client. If a management consultant is providing advice to a software firm that is struggling with employee morale, absenteeism and issues with resignation by managers and senior engineers, the consultant will probably spend a good deal of time at the client's office, interviewing staff, engineers, managers and executives, and observing work processes. On the other hand, a legal consultant asked to provide advice on a specific property law issue might only have a few meetings at the client's office, and conduct the majority of his work at the consultant's office and in legal libraries.


title: Consultant

text: Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an increase in remote work and demand for online-work skills to continue business or operations.


title: Consultant

text: Also known as "ICUs - Internal Consulting Units", which are departments or specialists groups created by or maintained by usually larger companies for their own consulting service needs along the business chain. "ICUs" might be internal or own-run businesses.


title: Consultant

text: From Accenture blog, one of the main IT consultancies in the world, the following factors play an important role:


title: Consultant

text: Bronnenmayer et al. investigated, by applying a structural equation model, and due to little empirical research, the management consulting's success factors from a client perspective. It is found that Consultant Expertise, Intensity of Collaboration and Common Vision have strongest performance impact on success.


title: Consultant

text: Sindermann and Sawyer conclude in their book "The Scientist as Consultant", that a [scientific] consultant is successful, if she or he has "achieved a viable mix of technical proficiency and business skills" with "technical proficiency" meaning excellence in competence, credibility, effective networking with colleagues, and ability to negotiate.


title: Consultant

text: According to management consultant Dirk Hartel, the following ten objectives or rules are key to a successful consulting career:


title: Consultant

text: Consultants are often outsiders to the client organization. On one hand, this means their work methods, expertise, behaviors, etc. differ from the client-employees and organizational, and is exactly what the client needs, however it can also be a considerable disadvantage for a successful engagement and may lead to a less intimate cooperation with the client's business.


title: Consultant

text: Next to general challenges, domain-specific challenges for consultants exist. In palliative medicine consulting, emotions, beliefs, sensitive topics, difficulty communicating and prognosis interpretation, or patients expectations despite critical illness are some of the challenges faced by the consultant.


title: Consultant

text: According to Kelman, "One danger is that [the counselor] does not recognize the control that he is exercising over the client's behavior. The other is that he is so convinced that he is doing good for the client that he does not realize the double-edged nature of the control he is exercising." A consultant therefore needs to be aware and in control of her or his manipulative influences in particular couseling settings.


title: Consultant

text: Hartel mentions several challenges that are based on the types of consultants, including a consultant in a short-term role, as integrator, as driver, as project manager or methodology guru, know-how expert, or as scapegoat.


title: Consultant

text: In case of "consultant as integrator", the consultant has the challenging task to resolve, negotiate, facilitate, mediate political situations in companies to move forward, such as different opinions, critical characters (persons), difficult relationships or interfaces, goal conflicts, power games, etc.


title: Consultant

text: In case of "consultant as scapegoat", the consultant, who is external to the company, is the one to announce difficult company decisions such as layoffs or reorganizations, but it is important that the consultant acts professional and competent, not just as "Rambo in suit".


title: Consultant

text: Consultants may face several organizational challenges, e. g. internal consultants are faced with the paradoxes to maintain a good balance between knowing the internal company structure and at the same time staying neutral and objective, keeping a marginal position between the client and the provided service. Further, depending on the hiring company's understanding how to work with a consultant, the consultant might be seen as disruption to the inhouse employees status.


title: Consultant

text: General issues faced by a consultant can be stress, productivity issues with meetings, general "technostresses", high-paced and changing business environments and situations, etc.


title: Consultant

text: In case of corporate and industrial consultants, the role is further challenged to act and become the "translator of information" from various different client-company cultures and procedures (processes) and between her or his employer-side team, managers and leadership team. What is an important goal to the current client is usually not similar for any other client due to multiple variations in company size, history, product, program, organizational structure, leadership, etc. Hence the consultant must be excellent in sensing and communicating between different layers in the organization and further across it, while maintaining authenticity, integrity and trustworthiness with all parties involved.


title: Consultant

text: Independent consultants (contractors or freelancer) usually need to fulfil taxation requirements given by laws, specifically challenging employment status to avoid 'disguised' employment.


title: Consultant

text: Compared to contracting, consulting can be seen as being "in business in your own right", not controlled by your client, etc. placing a consultant "well outside" of e. g. IR35.


title: Consultant

text: Alan Weiss provides 20 "factors" for consultants in the US (IRS), which are similar in other countries, to avoid or understand in terms of their business activity. Amongst those, the consultant is not supposed to be instructed by the client, should not receive similar training as employees, has the right to sub-contract, should not be integrated into the organizational structure, etc. to avoid legal-status and taxation issues.


title: Consultant

text: There is no single qualification to becoming a consultant, other than those laid down in relation to medical, psychological and engineering personnel who have attained this level-degree in it or professional licenses, such as Chartered Engineer.


title: Consultant

text: Consultants may hold undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, professional degrees or professional designations pertaining to their field(s) of expertise. In some fields, a consultant may be required to hold certain professional licenses (e.g., a civil engineer providing consulting on a bridge project may have to be a professional engineer). In other types of consulting, there may be no specific qualification requirements. A legal consultant may have to be a member of the bar or hold a law degree. An accounting consultant may have to have an accounting designation, such as Chartered Accountant status. Some individuals become consultants after a lengthy and distinguished career as an executive or political leader or employee, so their lengthy and exposed experience may be their main asset.


title: Consultant

text: Accredited practitioners in all fields (incl. medical) can be bound by a Code of Ethics or Code of Conduct.


title: Consultant

text: A thorough discussion of ethics in the field of consultation is given in Lippitt & Lippitt (see also 2nd edition in English). Here the authors mention several guidelines and definitions including Shay, the Association of Consulting Management Engineers (1966), American Society for Training and Development (1977), Academy of Management (1976) and conclude their own codex with the following attributes (see below). Additionally, the authors mention the difficulty in applying the codex and scenarios of how to track adherence and how to judge violations in accordance with other bodies, such as APA (American Psychological Association) and CSPEC (or CSCE) (Committee on Scientific and Professional Ethics) and conclude that "The most important aspect in the formulation of a code of conduct however, is the recognition of a fundamental moral standard. Only then is compliance with the rules guaranteed."


title: Consultant

text: There exist various forms, types and areas or industries of consultants. The following list provides some examples:


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Twelve Minutes is an adventure game developed by Luís António and published by Annapurna Interactive, released on August 19, 2021 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with versions for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 released on December 7, 2021. A version for iOS and Android mobile devices was published by Netflix on 13 December 2022.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: The game takes place almost exclusively in a small apartment suite and requires the player to repeatedly play through events of a 10-minute cycle to try to solve a mystery.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: "Twelve Minutes" is played from a top-down perspective and is set in an apartment suite shared by a husband and wife (voiced by James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley, respectively) which includes the main living and kitchen area, their bedroom, a bathroom, and a closet. The player controls the husband during these events in the style of a point-and-click adventure game, where he is free to do various actions. Without taking certain actions, over the course of 12 minutes, the husband learns his wife is pregnant. A self-identified police officer (voiced by Willem Dafoe) arrives at the apartment and accuses the wife of murdering her father several years ago, and in trying to arrest her knocks out the husband and kills the wife and her unborn child.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Time resets at the point where the husband enters the apartment, with the player now free to attempt to work out why the cop suspects the wife of murder, how to prevent her arrest, or several other possible actions in order to find a way to end the loop. If the husband dies or leaves the apartment, time is reset. However, the player is not given any exact information of what this goal is, leaving it up to them to explore how to resolve the situation. The husband is the only character that retains knowledge of the previous cycles – such as knowing about the impending arrest – and this information can be used to perform other actions in future cycles. This gameplay loop has been compared to "". While the main loop lasts only 10 minutes in real time, the game is expected to take a player between 6 and 8 hours to complete.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: "Twelve Minutes" is a decision-driven game involving time loops, however, the order of events will differ depending on how the game plays.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: A husband returns to his apartment after work and is greeted by his wife, who surprises him with the news that she is pregnant.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: As they start to celebrate, a man claiming to be a cop knocks at the door and proceeds to arrest them both. He accuses the wife of murdering her father and stealing an expensive pocket watch eight years ago.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: The cop then strangles the husband to death, only for him to suddenly find himself back to the start of the evening after, trapped in a time loop. If the husband dies, leaves the apartment, or time runs out, he returns to the beginning of the evening.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: After finding the hidden watch in the apartment and proving he is reliving the same evening to his wife, she eventually confesses her secret past.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: The wife tells him that shortly after she was born, her father had an affair with the nanny, resulting in a child being born. The discovery of the affair and the existence of an illegitimate child drove her mother into a deep depression and eventually death. Years later, during a heated argument on Christmas Eve, she accidentally shot her father with a gun and ran away, afraid of the consequences.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: The husband eventually questions the cop and learns he was a close friend of his wife's father. The cop's daughter has cancer, and he wants to sell the pocket watch to pay for her treatment. The cop's version of how the father died is also different: The father survived being shot on Christmas Eve, but someone else returned on New Year and killed him with the same gun. Realizing his wife did not commit murder, the husband finds a way to prove his wife's innocence to the cop. The three characters talk peacefully and deduce the killer was the wife's brother from the affair.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Unfortunately, the loop still repeats, so the husband focuses on finding the brother's identity. By interrogating the cop with this new information, he learns that his mother, whom he had never met, was the nanny.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: In shock, his repressed memories return, and he relives that fateful New Year's evening eight years ago: He confronts the man who took care of him and confesses he has fallen in love with his daughter, only to learn that this man is his father, and the daughter is his half-sister.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Using the watch to reverse time, the husband returns to reality, where he is still talking with his father about falling in love with his half-sister; the time loops are revealed to be the husband imagining a positive future with his wife, and the cop is a manifestation of his father's interference. If the husband refuses his father's proposal to leave his half-sister, the scuffle repeats and he accidentally breaks his father's neck, and the loops continue to repeat. If the husband decides to accept his father's proposal, he enters a loop where the apartment is empty and he is alone. If the husband recites a book that the wife was reading during the loops, the father offers to help him to forget his half-sister, causing the loops to reset and begin anew. Finally, if the husband recites that same book once more then stares at the clock before choosing to forget, the father tells him to end his imaginary future, ending all the time loops.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Luís António is a former artist from Rockstar Games and Ubisoft who left these companies to pursue independent game development. He spent time in 2012 working to help develop "The Witness" before setting out to make his own. For his first game, he wanted a title that would explore the consequences of decision-making and how these choices affected others. António also considered that most video games are built on loops, with the player-character dying and the player using knowledge from the previous deaths to proceed farther in the game, a concept built into the time looping nature of "Twelve Minutes".


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Initially he had envisioned a game that took place in a small neighborhood over the course of 24 hours, but this proved to be too large in scope for himself, and he scaled it back to a single apartment suite and a much shorter period of time. Much of the design of the game is inspired by film director Stanley Kubrick, and as one nod to Kubrick, the lobby area around the apartment includes the iconic carpet pattern Kubrick had used in the Overlook Hotel for "The Shining". Additional inspirations come from the films "Groundhog Day", "Memento", and "Rear Window". António also took inspiration from "Filth", a film starring McAvoy in which the lead character keeps getting into increasingly worse situations while trying to rectify others. Other film directors that helped to establish the psychological thriller alongside Kubrick like Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher were also influential to the game's design, and António, along with advertising firm mOcean, designed the game's poster as a homage to films from these directors.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: António had premiered the game at the 2015 PAX East event, at this point the game using placeholder art but having the gameplay loop completed. The game was given an honorable mention for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival in 2016. António had planned for the game to be released in 2016. However, in the intervening years, António brought on a team of five to help refine the game, as well as obtained publishing support from Annapurna Interactive. The game was re-shown during the Xbox press conference from Microsoft during E3 2019, and with a planned release for 2020. Among final elements to be included are fully voiced lines for the main characters, and improved character animations using motion capture. As he finalized the game's design, António took a reductionist approach, removing gameplay elements to focus on the essentials he wanted. For example, António originally had timepieces within the game world for the player to anticipate when events would happen, but later removed these, leaving it up to the player to follow on conversations and other cues to know when events were to happen and prepare for them.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Voice acting for the game was provided by James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe as the husband, wife, and the officer, respectively. Annapurna Interactive helped with casting as well as finding safe locations for them to record lines which came just as the general world lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic had started.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: António stated an anticipated release by the end of 2020 for Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, with ports to other systems later. In November 2020, Annapurna Interactive confirmed that the game was delayed to 2021, and was released on August 19, 2021. Versions for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were announced on November 23, 2021. They were released on December 7, 2021. A version for iOS and Android mobile devices was published by Netflix on 13 December 2022.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: The game was showcased at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, where it competed for the inaugural Tribeca Games Award.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: "Twelve Minutes" received "generally favorable" reviews for Microsoft Windows but received "mixed or average" reviews for Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5, according to review aggregator Metacritic.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Hideo Kojima praised "Twelve Minutes", stating he hadn't "been into a game this much since "Inside"", and had inspired him to consider making another adventure game.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: Some reviewers expressed strong criticism of the amount of domestic violence, particularly that is forced onto the wife in order to progress in the game. Renata Price of "Kotaku" stated that while it was possible that a story could include this type of violence if it was well crafted, its inclusion within "Twelve Minutes" was "pretentious and exhausting", and considered the twist ending "terrible". According to "Polygon" Samit Sarkar, the staff at "Polygon" were split whether the violence was necessary to serve the game's story, but Sarkar also was concerned with the lack of any disclaimers related to the violence or other troublesome topics at the start of the game. "Twelve Minutes" had been released near the same time as "Boyfriend Dungeon", which on its initial release also had received similar criticism related to darker, mature content that had not been alluded to through pre-release materials or in-game content warnings. Both games were considered examples of where proper in-game content warnings would be necessary to warning players about disturbing content before encountering it. Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation called the game "absorbing, up to a point", but noted that "the game kind of fell apart" past the plot twist and noted that he considered the ending so unsatisfying that it made him unsure if it was the real ending.


title: Twelve Minutes

text: "Twelve Minutes" has been considered a fresh take into the ‘point-and-click’ genre using a very small space for exploration with the ability to tell a story in a unique way. "IGN"'s Ryan McCaffrey compared it to a "fresh twist on the genre" and flipping the traditional point-and-click adventure on its head while GameSpot's Andrew King saw it as "mechanically rich while encouraging creative thinking".


title: Kelly Gale

text: Kelly Olivia Gale (born 14 May 1995) is a Swedish-Australian model of Indian and Australian heritage. Gale is known globally for her work for Victoria's Secret, the "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue", and "Playboy", as well as being featured in the music video of "Duele el Corazón" by Enrique Iglesias.


title: Kelly Gale

text: Gale was born and raised in Gothenburg, Sweden. She also lived in Ghana for four years, and in Australia. Her mother Gita (who is a dentist and former pilot) was born in Pune, Maharashtra, India and was adopted by a Swedish family at age 5. Kelly's father Jeff is a photographer and former footballer from Tatura, Victoria, Australia. Gale has two younger brothers.


title: Kelly Gale

text: Gale has been involved in sports since an early age. She played soccer with Näsets SK in Gothenburg and tennis since she was seven years old. She attended Näsetskolan and Göteborgs Högre Samskola.


title: Kelly Gale

text: At age 13, she was discovered by a model agent outside a coffee shop in Gothenburg. Initially, Gale's parents were opposed to her working as a model but she eventually started modeling one year later. One of her first modelling jobs was for H&M.


title: Kelly Gale

text: In 2013, she was chosen to walk the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show for the first time, she has since walked the show in 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018.


title: Kelly Gale

text: Gale has been in adverts and catalogues of H&M and H-I-G-H. She has walked runways for Azzedine Alaia, Chanel, Monique Lhuillier, Tommy Hilfiger, Band of Outsiders, Narciso Rodriguez, Badgley Mischka, Vivienne Tam, Ralph Lauren, Christopher Kane, Reem Acra, Tom Ford, Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Academy of Arts, Diane von Fürstenberg, Nanette Lepore, L'Wren Scott, Thomas Tait, Houghton, Rag & Bone and Victoria's Secret.


title: Kelly Gale

text: She has been featured on the cover of "French Revue des Modes", and on editorials of "Teen Vogue", "Vogue Italia", "Elle", "Vogue India" and "Lucky".


title: Kelly Gale

text: Gale leads a healthy lifestyle, paying particular attention to the type of food she eats. She trains for 2–3 hours each day and ramps up the tempo in the weeks prior to the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Her fitness regime includes power walking, jogging, boxing, and yoga.


title: Kelly Gale

text: Gale was in a long-term relationship with a Swedish business manager, Johannes Jarl. As of early 2019, she has been in a relationship with Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman. She became engaged to Kinnaman in January 2021.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture. The people and their archaeological culture are often referred to as "Anasazi", meaning "ancient enemies", as they were called by Navajo. Contemporary Puebloans object to the use of this term, with some viewing it as derogatory.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The Ancestral Puebloans lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings for defense. They had a complex network linking hundreds of communities and population centers across the Colorado Plateau. They held a distinct knowledge of celestial sciences that found form in their architecture. The kiva, a congregational space that was used mostly for ceremonies, was an integral part of the community structure.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Archaeologists continue to debate when this distinct culture emerged. The current agreement, based on terminology defined by the Pecos Classification, suggests their emergence around the 12th century BC, during the archaeologically designated Early Basketmaker II Era. Beginning with the earliest explorations and excavations, researchers identified Ancestral Puebloans as the forerunners of contemporary Pueblo peoples. Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites located in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Taos Pueblo.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: "Pueblo", which means "village" and "people" in Spanish, was a term originating with the Spanish explorers who used it to refer to the people's particular style of dwelling. The Navajo people, who now reside in parts of former Pueblo territory, referred to the ancient people as "", an exonym meaning "ancestors of our enemies", referring to their competition with the Pueblo peoples. The Navajo now use the term in the sense of referring to "ancient people" or "ancient ones".


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The Ancestral Puebloans were one of four major prehistoric archaeological traditions recognized in the American Southwest, also known as Oasisamerica. The others are the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Patayan. In relation to neighboring cultures, the Ancestral Puebloans occupied the northeast quadrant of the area. The Ancestral Puebloan homeland centers on the Colorado Plateau, but extends from central New Mexico on the east to southern Nevada on the west.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Areas of southern Nevada, Utah, and Colorado form a loose northern boundary, while the southern edge is defined by the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers in Arizona and the Rio Puerco and Rio Grande in New Mexico. Structures and other evidence of Ancestral Puebloan culture have been found extending east onto the American Great Plains, in areas near the Cimarron and Pecos Rivers and in the Galisteo Basin.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Terrain and resources within this large region vary greatly. The plateau regions have high elevations ranging from . Extensive horizontal mesas are capped by sedimentary formations and support woodlands of junipers, pinyon, and ponderosa pines, each favoring different elevations. Wind and water erosion have created steep-walled canyons, and sculpted windows and bridges out of the sandstone landscape. In areas where resistant strata (sedimentary rock layers), such as sandstone or limestone, overlie more easily eroded strata such as shale, rock overhangs formed. The Ancestral Puebloans favored building under such overhangs for shelters and defensive building sites.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: All areas of the Ancestral Puebloan homeland suffered from periods of drought and erosion from wind and water. Summer rains could be unreliable and produced destructive thunderstorms. While the amount of winter snowfall varied greatly, the Ancestral Puebloans depended on the snow for most of their water. Snow melt allowed the germination of seeds, both wild and cultivated, in the spring.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Where sandstone layers overlay shale, snow melt could accumulate and create seeps and springs, which the Ancestral Puebloans used as water sources. Snow also fed the smaller, more predictable tributaries, such as the Chinle, Animas, Jemez, and Taos Rivers. The larger rivers were less directly important to the ancient culture, as smaller streams were more easily diverted or controlled for irrigation.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The Ancestral Puebloan culture is perhaps best known for the stone and earth dwellings its people built along cliff walls, particularly during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III eras, from about 900 to 1350 CE in total. The best-preserved examples of the stone dwellings are now protected within United States' national parks, such as Navajo National Monument, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Mesa Verde National Park, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Aztec Ruins National Monument, Bandelier National Monument, Hovenweep National Monument, and Canyon de Chelly National Monument.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: These villages, called "pueblos" by Spanish colonists, were accessible only by rope or through rock climbing. These astonishing building achievements had modest beginnings. The first Ancestral Puebloan homes and villages were based on the pit-house, a common feature in the Basketmaker periods.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Ancestral Puebloans are also known for their pottery. Local plainware pottery used for cooking or storage was unpainted gray, either smooth or textured. Pottery used for more formal purposes was often more richly adorned. In the northern portion of the Ancestral Pueblo lands, from about 500 to 1300 CE, the pottery styles commonly had black-painted designs on white or light gray backgrounds. Decoration is characterized by fine hatching, and contrasting colors are produced by the use of mineral-based paint on a chalky background. South of the Anasazi territory, in Mogollon settlements, pottery was more often hand-coiled, scraped, and polished, with red to brown coloring.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Certain tall cylinders were likely ceremonial vessels, while narrow-necked jars, called ollas, were often used for liquids. Pottery from the southern regions of Ancestral Pueblo lands has bold, black-line decoration and the use of carbon-based colorants. In northern New Mexico, the local black-on-white pottery tradition, the Rio Grande white wares, continued well after 1300 CE.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Changes in pottery composition, structure, and decoration are signals of social change in the archaeological record. This is particularly true as the peoples of the American Southwest began to leave their historic homes and migrate south. According to archaeologists Patricia Crown and Steadman Upham, the appearance of the bright colors on Salado Polychromes in the 14th century may reflect religious or political alliances on a regional level. Late 14th- and 15th-century pottery from central Arizona, widely traded in the region, has colors and designs which may derive from earlier ware by both Ancestral Pueblo and Mogollon peoples.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The Ancestral Puebloans also excelled at rock art, which included carved petroglyphs and painted pictographs. Ancestral Pueblo peoples painted Barrier Canyon Style pictographs in locations where the images were protected from the sun yet visible to the public. Designs include human-like forms. The so-called "Holy Ghost panel" in the Horseshoe Canyon is considered to be one of the earliest uses of graphical perspective where the largest figure appears to take on a three-dimensional representation.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Recent archaeological evidence has established that in at least one great house, Pueblo Bonito, the elite family whose burials associate them with the site practiced matrilineal succession. Room 33 in Pueblo Bonito, the richest burial ever excavated in the Southwest, served as a crypt for one powerful lineage, traced through the female line, for approximately 330 years. While other Ancestral Pueblo burials have not yet been subjected to the same archaeogenomic testing, the survival of matrilineal descent among contemporary Pueblo peoples suggests that this may have been a widespread practice among Ancestral Puebloans.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Ancestral Pueblo people in the North American Southwest crafted a unique architecture with planned community spaces. Population centers such as Chaco Canyon (outside Crownpoint, New Mexico), Mesa Verde (near Cortez, Colorado), and Bandelier National Monument (near Los Alamos, New Mexico) have brought renown to the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. They consisted of apartment complexes and structures made of stone, adobe mud, and other local material, or were carved into canyon walls. Developed within these cultures, the people also adopted design details from other cultures as far away as contemporary Mexico.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: These buildings were usually multistoried and multipurposed, and surrounded by open plazas and viewsheds. Hundreds to thousands of people lived in these communities. These complexes hosted cultural and civic events and infrastructure that supported a vast outlying region hundreds of miles away linked by transportation roadways.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Built well before 1492 CE, these towns and villages were located in defensive positions, for example on high, steep mesas such as at Mesa Verde or present-day Acoma Pueblo, called the "Sky City", in New Mexico. Before 900 CE and progressing past the 13th century, the population complexes were major cultural centers. In Chaco Canyon, Chacoan developers quarried sandstone blocks and hauled timber from great distances, assembling 15 major complexes. These ranked as the largest buildings in North America until the late 19th century.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Evidence of archaeoastronomy at Chaco has been proposed, with the Sun Dagger petroglyph at Fajada Butte a popular example. Many Chacoan buildings may have been aligned to capture the solar and lunar cycles, requiring generations of astronomical observations and centuries of skillfully coordinated construction. The Chacoans abandoned the canyon, probably due to climate change beginning with a 50-year drought starting in 1130.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Immense complexes known as "great houses" embodied worship at Chaco. Archaeologists have found musical instruments, jewelry, ceramics, and ceremonial items, indicating people in the Great Houses were elite, wealthier families. They hosted indoor burials, where gifts were interred with the dead, often including bowls of food and turquoise beads.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Over centuries, architectural forms evolved but the complexes kept some core traits, such as their size. They averaged more than 200 rooms each, and some had 700 rooms. Rooms were very large, with higher ceilings than Ancestral Pueblo buildings of earlier periods. They were well-planned: vast sections were built in a single stage.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Most houses faced south. Plazas were almost always surrounded by buildings of sealed-off rooms or high walls. There were often four or five stories, with single-story rooms facing the plaza; room blocks were terraced to allow the tallest sections to compose the pueblo's rear edifice. Rooms were often organized into suites, with front rooms larger than rear, interior, and storage rooms or areas.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Ceremonial structures known as kivas were built in proportion to the number of rooms in a pueblo. A small kiva was built for roughly every 29 rooms. Nine complexes each had a Great Kiva, up to in diameter. T-shaped doorways and stone lintels marked all Chacoan kivas.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Although simple and compound walls were often used, great houses usually had core-and-veneer walls: rubble filled the gap between parallel load-bearing walls of dressed, flat sandstone blocks bound in clay mortar. Walls were covered in a veneer of small sandstone pieces, which were pressed into a layer of binding mud. These surfacing stones were often arranged in distinctive patterns.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The Chacoan structures together required the wood of 200,000 conifer trees, mostly hauledon footfrom mountain ranges up to away.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: One of the most notable aspects of Ancestral Puebloan infrastructure is the Chaco Road at Chaco Canyon, a system of roads radiating from many great house sites such as Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, and Una Vida. They led toward small outlier sites and natural features in the canyon and outside.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Through satellite images and ground investigations, archaeologists have found eight main roads that together run for more than 180 miles (300 km), and are more than 30 feet (10 m) wide. These were built by excavating into a smooth, leveled surface in the bedrock or removing vegetation and soil. Large ramps and stairways in the cliff rock connect the roads above the canyon to sites at the bottom.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The largest roads, built at the same time as many of the great houses (1000 to 1125 CE), are: the Great North Road, the South Road, the Coyote Canyon Road, the Chacra Face Road, Ahshislepah Road, Mexican Springs Road, the West Road, and the shorter Pintado-Chaco Road. Simple structures like berms and walls are sometimes aligned along the roads. Some tracts of the roads lead to natural features such as springs, lakes, mountain tops, and pinnacles.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The longest and best-known of these roads is the Great North Road, which originates from different routes close to Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl. These roads converge at Pueblo Alto and from there lead north beyond the canyon limits. Along roadways were only small, isolated structures.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Archaeological interpretations of the Chaco road system are divided between an economic purpose and a symbolic, ideological or religious role.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The system was discovered in the late 19th century and excavated in the 1970s. By the late 20th century, aerial and satellite photographs helped in the study. Archaeologists suggested that the road's main purpose was to transport local and exotic goods to and from the canyon. The economic purpose of the Chaco road system is shown by the presence of luxury items at Pueblo Bonito and elsewhere in the canyon. Items such as macaws, turquoise and seashells, which are not part of this environment, and imported vessels distinguished by design, prove that the Chaco traded with distant regions. The widespread use of timber in Chacoan constructions required a large system of easy transportation, as timber was not locally available. Analysis of strontium isotopes shows that much of the timber came from distant mountain ranges.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Throughout the southwest Ancestral Puebloan region, the inhabitants built complexes in shallow caves and under rock overhangs in canyon walls. Unlike earlier structures and villages atop mesas, this was a regional 13th-century trend of gathering the growing populations into close, defensible quarters. There were buildings for housing, defense, and storage. These were built mostly of blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar. Constructions had many similarities, but unique forms due to the unique rock topography.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The best-known site is at Mesa Verde, with a large number of well-preserved cliff dwellings. This area included common Pueblo architectural forms, such as kivas, towers, and pit-houses, but the space restrictions of these alcoves resulted in far denser populations. Mug House, a typical cliff dwelling of the period, was home to around 100 people who shared 94 small rooms and eight kivas, built right up against each other and sharing many walls. Builders maximized space use and no area was off-limits.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Not all the people in the region lived in cliff dwellings; many colonized the canyon rims and slopes in multifamily structures that grew to unprecedented size as populations swelled. Decorative motifs for these sandstone/mortar structures, both cliff dwellings and not, included T-shaped windows and doors. This has been taken by some archaeologists, such as Stephen Lekson (1999), as evidence of the continuation of the Chaco Canyon elite system, which had seemingly collapsed a century earlier. Other researchers instead explain these motifs as part a wider Pueblo style or religion.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: During the period from 700 to 1130 CE (Pueblo I and II Eras), the population grew fast due to consistent and regular rainfall which supported agriculture. Studies of skeletal remains show increased fertility rather than decreased mortality. However, this tenfold population increase over a few generations was probably also due to migrations of people from surrounding areas. Innovations such as pottery, food storage, and agriculture enabled this rapid growth. Over several decades, the Ancestral Puebloan culture spread across the landscape.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Ancestral Puebloan culture has been divided into three main areas or branches, based on geographical location:


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Modern Pueblo oral traditions hold that the Ancestral Puebloans originated from , where they emerged from the underworld. For unknown ages, they were led by chiefs and guided by spirits as they completed vast migrations throughout the continent of North America. They settled first in the Ancestral Puebloan areas for a few hundred years before moving to their present locations.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The Ancestral Puebloans left their established homes in the 12th and 13th centuries. The main reason is unclear. Factors discussed include global or regional climate change, prolonged drought, environmental degradation such as cyclical periods of topsoil erosion or deforestation, hostility from new arrivals, religious or cultural change, and influence from Mesoamerican cultures. Many of these possibilities are supported by archaeological evidence.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Current scholarly consensus is that Ancestral Puebloans responded to pressure from Numic-speaking peoples moving onto the Colorado Plateau, as well as climate change that resulted in agricultural failures. The archaeological record indicates that for Ancestral Puebloans to adapt to climatic change by changing residences and locations was not unusual. Early Pueblo I Era sites may have housed up to 600 individuals in a few separate but closely spaced settlement clusters. However, they were generally occupied for 30 years or less. Archaeologist Timothy A. Kohler excavated large Pueblo I sites near Dolores, Colorado, and discovered that they were established during periods of above-average rainfall. This allowed crops to be grown without requiring irrigation. At the same time, nearby areas that suffered significantly drier patterns were abandoned.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Ancestral Puebloans attained a cultural "Golden Age" between about 900 and 1150. During this time, generally classed as Pueblo II Era, the climate was relatively warm and rainfall mostly adequate. Communities grew larger and were inhabited for longer. Highly specific local traditions in architecture and pottery emerged, and trade over long distances appears to have been common. Domesticated turkeys appeared.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: After around 1130, North America had significant climatic change in the form of a 300-year period of aridity called the Great Drought. This also led to the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization around Lake Titicaca in present-day Bolivia. The contemporary Mississippian culture also collapsed during this period. Confirming evidence dated between 1150 and 1350 has been found in excavations of the western regions of the Mississippi Valley, which show long-lasting patterns of warmer, wetter winters and cooler, drier summers.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: In this later period, the Pueblo II became more self-contained, decreasing trade and interaction with more distant communities. Southwest farmers developed irrigation techniques appropriate to seasonal rainfall, including soil and water control features such as check dams and terraces. The population of the region continued to be mobile, abandoning settlements and fields under adverse conditions. There was also a drop in water table due to a different cycle unrelated to rainfall. This forced the abandonment of settlements in the more arid or overfarmed locations.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Evidence suggests a profound change in religion in this period. Chacoan and other structures constructed originally along astronomical alignments, and thought to have served important ceremonial purposes to the culture, were systematically dismantled. Doorways were sealed with rock and mortar. Kiva walls show marks from great fires set within them, which probably required removal of the massive roof – a task which would require significant effort. Habitations were abandoned, and tribes divided and resettled far.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: This evidence suggests that the religious structures were abandoned deliberately over time. Pueblo oral history holds that the ancestors had achieved great spiritual power and control over natural forces. They used their power in ways that caused nature to change and caused changes that were never meant to occur. Possibly, the dismantling of their religious structures was an effort to symbolically undo the changes they believed they caused due to their abuse of their spiritual power, and thus make amends with nature.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Most modern Pueblo peoples (whether Keresans, Hopi, or Tanoans) assert the Ancestral Puebloans did not "vanish", as is commonly portrayed. They say that the people migrated to areas in the southwest with more favorable rainfall and dependable streams. They merged into the various Pueblo peoples whose descendants still live in Arizona and New Mexico. This perspective was also presented by early 20th-century anthropologists, including Frank Hamilton Cushing, J. Walter Fewkes, and Alfred V. Kidder.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Many modern Pueblo tribes trace their lineage from specific settlements. For example, the San Ildefonso Pueblo people believe that their ancestors lived in both the Mesa Verde and the Bandelier areas. Evidence also suggests that a profound change took place in the Ancestral Pueblo area and areas inhabited by their cultural neighbors, the Mogollon. Historian James W. Loewen agrees with this oral tradition in his book, "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong" (1999). No academic consensus exists with the professional archeological and anthropological community on this issue.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Environmental stress may have caused changes in social structure, leading to conflict and warfare. Near Kayenta, Arizona, Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago has been studying a group of Ancestral Puebloan villages that relocated from the canyons to the high mesa tops during the late 13th century. Haas believes that the reason to move so far from water and arable land was a defense against enemies. He asserts that isolated communities relied on raiding for food and supplies, and that internal conflict and warfare became common in the 13th century.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: This conflict may have been aggravated by the influx of less settled peoples, Numic-speakers such as the Utes, Shoshones, and Paiute people, who may have originated in what is today California, and the arrival of the Athabaskan-speaking Diné who migrated from the north during this time and subsequently became the Navajo and Apache tribes most notably. Others suggest that more developed villages, such as that at Chaco Canyon, exhausted their environments, resulting in widespread deforestation and eventually the fall of their civilization through warfare over depleted resources.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: A 1997 excavation at Cowboy Wash near Dolores, Colorado found remains of at least 24 human skeletons that showed evidence of violence and dismemberment, with strong indications of cannibalism. This modest community appears to have been abandoned during the same time period. Other excavations within the Ancestral Puebloan cultural area have produced varying numbers of unburied, and in some cases dismembered, bodies. In a 2010 paper, Potter and Chuipka argued that evidence at Sacred Ridge site, near Durango, Colorado, is best interpreted as warfare related to competition and ethnic cleansing.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: This evidence of warfare, conflict, and cannibalism is hotly debated by some scholars and interest groups. Suggested alternatives include: a community suffering the pressure of starvation or extreme social stress, dismemberment and cannibalism as religious ritual or in response to religious conflict, the influx of outsiders seeking to drive out a settled agricultural community via calculated atrocity, or an invasion of a settled region by nomadic raiders who practiced cannibalism.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: The term "Anasazi" was established in archaeological terminology through the Pecos Classification system in 1927. It had been adopted from the Navajo. Archaeologist Linda Cordell discussed the word's etymology and use:


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Many contemporary Pueblo peoples object to the use of the term Anasazi; controversy exists among them on a native alternative. Some modern descendants of this culture often choose to use the term "Ancestral Pueblo" peoples. Contemporary Hopi use the word in preference to Anasazi.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Archaeological cultural units such as Ancestral Puebloan, Hohokam, Patayan, or Mogollon are used by archaeologists to define material culture similarities and differences that may identify prehistoric sociocultural units, equivalent to modern societies or peoples. The names and divisions are classification devices based on theoretical perspectives, analytical methods, and data available at the time of analysis and publication. They are subject to change, not only on the basis of new information and discoveries, but also as attitudes and perspectives change within the scientific community. It should not be assumed that an archaeological division or culture unit corresponds to a particular language group or to a socio-political entity such as a tribe.


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Defining cultural groups, such as the Ancestral Puebloans, tends to create an image of territories separated by clear-cut boundaries, like border boundaries separating modern states. These did not exist. Prehistoric people traded, worshipped, collaborated, and fought most often with other nearby groups. Cultural differences should therefore be understood as clinal: "increasing gradually as the distance separating groups also increases".


title: Ancestral Puebloans

text: Departures from the expected pattern may occur because of unidentified social or political situations or because of geographic barriers. In the Southwest, mountain ranges, rivers, and most obviously, the Grand Canyon, can be significant barriers for human communities, likely reducing the frequency of contact with other groups. Current opinion holds that the closer cultural similarity between the Mogollon and Ancestral Puebloans, and their greater differences from the Hohokam and Patayan, is due to both the geography and the variety of climate zones in the Southwest.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: Patriot is an American comedy-drama television series created by Steven Conrad. It premiered on November 5, 2015, on Amazon Prime Video, with the remaining first-season episodes released on February 23, 2017. It stars Michael Dorman, Kurtwood Smith, Michael Chernus, Kathleen Munroe, Aliette Opheim, Chris Conrad, Terry O'Quinn and Debra Winger. In April 2017, Amazon announced that it had renewed the series for a second season, which premiered on November 9, 2018. In July 2019, Amazon announced that they had no plans for a third season.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: To prevent Iran from going nuclear, intelligence officer John Tavner must forgo all safety nets and assume a perilous non-official cover ("NOC") of a mid-level employee at a Milwaukee industrial piping firm.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: On May 14, 2015, it was reported that Amazon had given the production, written by Steven Conrad and then titled "The Patriot", a pilot order. On September 23, 2015, the series' pilot order was confirmed and further information regarding the series was released. It was announced that the series had been retitled "Patriot" and that Conrad was confirmed to direct the pilot episode and executive produce alongside Gil Bellows, Glenn Ficarra, Charlie Gogolak, and John Requa.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: On December 18, 2015, it was announced that the production had been given a series order. On January 27, 2017, it was reported that the rest of season one would premiere in its entirety on February 24, 2017.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: On April 18, 2017, it was announced that the series had been renewed for a second season. On October 10, 2018, it was announced that the second season would premiere on November 9, 2018.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: In August 2015, it was announced that Kurtwood Smith, Michael Dorman, Kathleen Munroe, and Terry O'Quinn had been cast in the pilot's lead roles. On March 22, 2016, it was reported that Chris Conrad, previously cast in a guest appearance in the pilot episode, had been upped to a series regular capacity for the remainder of season one.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: On January 4, 2018, it was announced that Debra Winger had been cast in a series regular role for season two.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: The first season met with positive critical response. On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the first season holds an 82% approval rating with an average rating of 6.5 out of 10 based on 28 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, ""Patriot" is dark, quirky, and often funny -- and although its risks don't always pay off, the series is still savvy and inspired enough to watch." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the season a score of 68 out of 100 based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: Many of the first season's Luxembourg based exterior scenes were filmed in Prague. The "Luxemburger Wort"s culture correspondent noted the apparent lack of effort and accuracy in portraying the landmarks and geography that characterize Luxembourg City, with Prague being a poor substitute for their depiction. He recorded that the frequent onscreen appearance of unmistakable famous Prague landmarks, such as the Charles Bridge, throughout Luxembourg shots hinder the suspension of disbelief for viewers familiar with either location. Additionally, he identified certain factual inaccuracies about Luxembourg in the script, including a claim that Brazilian nationals make up a substantial minority of Luxembourg residents, when in fact it is Portuguese nationals. Despite what he labeled as these "absurd inaccuracies" he recommended the series for fans of dark comedy.


title: Patriot (TV series)

text: The second season also received positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 100% approval rating with an average rating of 6.7 out of 10 based on 11 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, ""Patriot"s second season is dark as pitch and ticks along to a slow-burning surreality, but viewers who are willing to invest in the series' moody pleasures will find themselves infiltrated by its scabrous humor and crackerjack dialogue." On Metacritic, it has a score of 80 out of 100 based on 4 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: IDBI Bank

text: The IDBI Bank Limited (IDBI Bank or IDBI) is a development finance institution under the ownership of Life Insurance Corporation of India and Government of India. It was established in 1964 as Industrial Development Bank of India, a development finance institution, which provided financial services to industrial sector. In 2005, the institution was merged with its commercial division, IDBI Bank, forming the present-day banking entity and was categorised as "other development finance institution" category. Later in March 2019, Government of India asked Life Insurance Corporation to infuse capital in the bank due to high NPA and capital adequacy issues and also asked LIC to manage the bank to meet the regulatory norms. IDBI was put under Prompt corrective action of the RBI and on 10th March 2021 IDBI came out of the PCA. At present direct and indirect shareholding of Government of India in IDBI Bank is approximately 95%, which Government of India (GoI) vide its communication F.No. 8/2/2019-BO-II dated December 17, 2019, has clarified and directed all Central/State Government departments to consider IDBI Bank for allocation of Government Business.


title: IDBI Bank

text: The bank has an aggregate balance sheet size of . It has 3,683 ATMs, 1,892 branches, including one overseas branch in Dubai, 58 e-lounges and 1,407 centres . , Life Insurance Corporation holds the 49.24% shareholding and the Central government holds 45.48%, with LIC being in control of the management of the bank.


title: IDBI Bank

text: Development Banking emerged after the Second World War and the Great Depression in the 1930s. The demand for reconstruction funds for the affected nations compelled in setting up of national institutions for reconstruction. At the time of Independence in 1947, India had a fairly developed banking system. The adoption of bank dominated financial development strategy was aimed at meeting the sectoral credit needs, particularly of agriculture and industry. Towards this end, the Reserve Bank concentrated on regulating and developing mechanisms for institution building. The commercial banking network was expanded to cater to the requirements of general banking and for meeting the short-term working capital requirements of industry and agriculture. Specialized Development Financial Institutions (DFIs) such as the IDBI, NABARD, NHB and SIDBI were set up to meet the long-term financing requirements of industry and agriculture.


title: IDBI Bank

text: The Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) was established in 1964 under an Act of Parliament as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of India. In 1976, the ownership of IDBI was transferred to the Union government and it was made the principal financial institution for coordinating the activities of institutions engaged in financing, promoting and developing industry in India. IDBI provided financial assistance, both in rupee and foreign currencies, for green-field projects and also for expansion, modernization, and diversification purposes. In the wake of financial sector reforms unveiled by the government since 1992, IDBI also provided indirect financial assistance by way of refinancing of loans extended by State-level financial institutions and banks and by way of rediscounting of bills of exchange arising out of the sale of indigenous machinery on deferred payment terms.


title: IDBI Bank

text: After the public issue of IDBI in July 1995, the government shareholding in the bank came down from 100% to 75%.


title: IDBI Bank

text: IDBI played a pioneering role, particularly in the pre-reform era (1964–91), in catalyzing broad-based industrial development in India in keeping with its Government-ordained 'development banking' charter. Some of the institutions built with the support of IDBI are the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), National Stock Exchange of India (NSE), the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL), the Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited (SHCIL), the Credit Analysis & Research Ltd, the Exim Bank (India), the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India.


title: IDBI Bank

text: A committee formed by RBI recommended the development financial institution (IDBI) to diversify its activity and harmonize the role of development financing and banking activities by getting away from the conventional distinction between commercial banking and developmental banking. To keep up with reforms in financial sector, IDBI reshaped its role from a development finance institution to a commercial institution. With the "Industrial Development Bank (Transfer of Undertaking and Repeal) Act", 2003, IDBI attained the status of a limited company viz., IDBI Ltd.


title: IDBI Bank

text: Subsequently, in September 2004, the Reserve Bank of India incorporated IDBI as a 'scheduled bank' under the "RBI Act, 1934". Consequently, IDBI formally entered the portals of banking business as IDBI Ltd. from 1 October 2004. The commercial banking arm, IDBI Bank, was merged into IDBI in 2005.


title: IDBI Bank

text: The merger was expected to streamline operations of the bank. However, IDBI continued to base its policy towards industrial sector like the erstwhile IDBI entity did. This resulted in the retail business of the bank to be limited to 13 percent of its total business. , the total Non Performing Assets (NPA) rose to and were about 28 percent of its total loans. This was the highest among Indian banks. The Union government intervened, with Life Insurance Corporation bailing out the bank with an infusion of crores.


title: IDBI Bank

text: On 29 June 2018, LIC got a technical go-ahead from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) to increase stake in IDBI Bank up to 51%. LIC completed the acquisition of 51% controlling stake on 21 January 2019, with a total investment of crores.


title: IDBI Bank

text: In 2006, IDBI Bank acquired United Western Bank (headquartered at Satara) in a rescue. By acquiring UWB, IDBI Bank doubled the number of its branches from 195 to 425.


title: IDBI Bank

text: LIC of India completed the acquisition of 51% controlling stake in the bank in January 2019, making it the majority shareholder. Subsequent to the enhancement of equity stake by LIC of India, Reserve Bank of India has clarified via press release on 14 March 2019, that IDBI Bank stands re-categorised as a private sector bank, with retrospective effect from 21 January 2019. LIC took over the management control of the bank while the Union government, categorised as a promoter.


title: IDBI Bank

text: IDBI Bank's equity shares are listed on Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India. , the Union government held 45.48% shares in IDBI Bank, while LIC held 49.24% and the remaining is held by non-promoters.


title: IDBI Bank

text: As of 31 March 2015, the bank had 16,555 employees, out of which 197 were employees with disabilities. The average age of bank employees on the same date was 34 years. The bank reported a business of ₹25.64 crores per employee and a net profit of ₹12.17 lakhs per employee during the FY 2012–13. The company incurred a loss of ₹1,538 crores towards employee benefit expenses during the same financial year. As promised by the bank's MD and CEO the employees will keep getting the same benefits and enjoy the same job security even after LIC getting the promoter status.


title: IDBI Bank

text: It provides IT related services in the areas of Consultancy, System Integration, System implementation & support, Applications & Server hosting and other IT related managed services and specialized training.


title: IDBI Bank

text: IDBI Intech has been accredited with ISO 9001:2000 certification for IT-related services including Data Centre Management and Call Centre, and also Certified IT Security Auditing Organisation with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).


title: President's rule

text: In India, President's rule is the suspension of state government and imposition of direct Union government rule in a state. Under Article 356 of the Constitution of India, if a state government is unable to function according to Constitutional provisions, the Union government can take direct control of the state machinery. Subsequently, executive authority is exercised through the centrally appointed governor, who has the authority to appoint other administrators to assist them. The administrators are usually nonpartisan retired civil servants.


title: President's rule

text: When a state government is functioning correctly, it is run by an elected Council of Ministers responsible to the state's legislative assembly (Vidhan Sabha). The council is led by the chief minister, who is the chief executive of the state; the Governor is only a constitutional head. However, during President's rule, the Council of Ministers is dissolved, vacating the office of Chief Minister. Furthermore, the Vidhan Sabha is either prorogued or dissolved, necessitating a new election.


title: President's rule

text: Prior to 2019, the constitution of the state of Jammu and Kashmir had a similar system of "Governor's rule", under its Section 92. The state's governor issued a proclamation, after obtaining the consent of the President of India allowing Governor's rule for a period of up to six months after which President's rule under Article 356 of the Constitution of India can be imposed. After the revocation of Article 370, President's rule applies to Jammu and Kashmir under section 73 (since Article 356 of Constitution of India does not apply to union territories) of Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019.


title: President's rule

text: Following the 1994 landmark judgment in "S. R. Bommai v. Union of India", the Supreme Court of India restricted arbitrary impositions of President's rule.


title: President's rule

text: Chhattisgarh and Telangana are the only states where the President's rule has not been imposed so far.


title: President's rule

text: In practice, President's rule has been imposed in a state under any one of the following different circumstances:


title: President's rule

text: If approved by both houses, President's rule can continue for 6 months. It can be extended for a maximum of 3 years with the approval of the Parliament done every 6 months. If the Lok Sabha is dissolved during this time, the rule is valid for 30 days from the first sitting of the Lok Sabha provided that this continuance has already been approved by Rajya Sabha. The 44th Amendment Act of 1978 introduced a new provision to put a restraint on the power of Parliament to extend the President's rule in a state. According to this provision, the president's rule can only be extended over a year every 6 months under the following conditions:


title: President's rule

text: President's rule can be revoked at any time by the President and does not need Parliament's approval.


title: President's rule

text: Until the mid-1990s, President's rule was often imposed in states through the abuse of authority of Governors who were in collusion with the Union government. The Supreme Court of India in March 1994 established a precedent in "S. R. Bommai v. Union of India", due to which such abuse has been drastically reduced.


title: President's rule

text: Article 356 is not applicable to Union territories, so there are many ways by which President's rule can be imposed in different Union territories with a Legislative Assembly.


title: President's rule

text: Until the revocation of Article 370 and bifurcation into two Union territories, President's rule applied after the application of Governor's rule for 6 months.


title: President's rule

text: After the revocation and bifurcation, the reorganized Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is subject to the section 73 of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act, 2019, which is used to impose President's rule as the Article 356 is not applicable to Union Territories. The provision states:


title: President's rule

text: In NCT of Delhi, President's rule is applied on the basis of Article 239AB of the Constitution of India (as the Article 356 is not applicable to Union Territories) which reads thus:


title: President's rule

text: In the Union Territory of Puducherry, President's rule is applied on the basis of Article 51 of the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963. Which thus reads


title: President's rule

text: Article 356 gives wide powers to the Union government to assert its authority over a state if civil unrest occurs and the state government does not have the means to end it. Though the purpose of this article is to give more powers to the Union government to preserve the unity and integrity of the nation, it has often been misused by the ruling parties at the Centre, who used it as a pretext to dissolve state governments ruled by political opponents. Thus, it is seen by many as a threat to the federal state system. Since the adoption of the Indian constitution in 1950, the Union government has used this article several times to dissolve elected state governments by imposing President's rule.


title: President's rule

text: The article was used for the first time in Punjab on 20 June 1951. It was also used in the state of Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU) and during the Vimochana Samaram to dismiss the democratically elected Communist state government of Kerala on 31 July 1959. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was common for the Union government to dismiss state governments led by opposition parties. The Indira Gandhi regime and post-emergency Janata Party were noted for this practice. Indira Gandhi's government between 1966 and 1977 is known to have imposed President's rule 39 times in different states. Similarly, the Janata Party which came to power after the emergency issued President's rule in 9 states which were ruled by Congress.


title: President's rule

text: The practice was limited only after the Supreme Court established strict guidelines for imposing President's rule in its ruling on the "S. R. Bommai v. Union of India" case in 1994. This landmark judgement has helped curtail the widespread abuse of Article 356. The judgement established strict guidelines for imposing President's rule. Subsequent pronouncements by the Supreme Court in Jharkhand and other states have further limited the scope for misuse of Article 356. Only since the early 2000s has the number of cases of imposition of President's rule has been drastically reduced.


title: President's rule

text: Article 356 has always been the focal point of a wider debate of the federal structure of government in Indian polity. The Sarkaria Commission Report on Centre-State Relations 1983 has recommended that Article 356 must be used "very sparingly, in extreme cases, as a measure of last resort, when all the other alternatives fail to prevent or rectify a breakdown of Constitutional machinery in the state". Dr. Ambedkar also said that it would be like a "dead letter" (i.e. would be used rarely).


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa Munda (15 November 1875 – 9 June 1900) was an Indian tribal freedom fighter, and folk hero who belonged to the Munda tribe. He spearheaded a tribal religious millenarian movement that arose in the Bengal Presidency (now Jharkhand) in the late 19th century, during the British Raj, thereby making him an important figure in the history of the Indian independence movement. The revolt mainly concentrated in the Munda belt of Khunti, Tamar, Sarwada and Bandgaon.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa received his education in Salga under the guidance of his teacher Jaipal Nag.Later, Birsa converted into a Christian to join the German Mission School but soon dropped out after finding out that Britishers were aiming to convert tribals to Christianity through education.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Members of the Munda community soon started joining the faith which in turn became a challenge for the British conversion activities.


title: Birsa Munda

text: The cause of the Munda revolt was the 'unfair land grabbing practices by colonial and local authorities that demolished the tribal conventional land system'.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa Munda is known for challenging the Christian missionaries and revolting against the conversion activities along with the Munda and Oraon communities.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa Munda was born on 15 November 1875, at the village of Ulihatu in the Lohardaga district of Bengal Presidency — now in Khunti district of Jharkhand — on a Thursday (Some sources claim he was born on 18 July 1872, and not in 1875) and hence named after that day, according to the then prevalent Munda custom. The folk songs reflect popular confusion and refer to Ulihatu or Chalkad as his birthplace. Ulihatu was the birthplace of Sugana Munda, father of Birsa. The claim of Ulihatu rests on Birsa's elder brother Komta Munda living in the village, where his house still exists albeit in a dilapidated condition.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa's father, mother Karmi Hatu, and younger brother, Pasna Munda, left Ulihatu and proceeded to Kurumbda, near Birbanki, in search of employment as labourers ("sajhedari") or crop-sharers (ryots). At Kurumbda, Birsa's elder brother, Komta, and his sister, Daskir, were born. From there the family moved to Bamba where Birsa's elder sister Champa was born.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa's early years were spent with his parents at Chalkad. His early life could not have been very different from that of an average Munda child. Folklore refers to his rolling and playing in sand and dust with his friends, and his growing up strong and handsome in looks; he grazed sheep in the forest of Bohonda. When he grew up, he shared an interest in playing the flute, in which he became an expert. He went around with the tuila, the one-stringed instrument made from the pumpkin, in his hand and the flute strung to his waist. Exciting moments of his childhood were spent on the akhara (the village wrestling ground). However, one of his ideal contemporaries and who went out with him heard him speak of strange things.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Driven by poverty Birsa was taken to Ayubhatu, his maternal uncle's village. Komta Munda, his eldest brother, who was ten years of age, went to Kundi Bartoli, entered the service of a Munda, married and lived there for eight years, and then joined his father and younger brother at Chalkad. Birsa lived at Ayubhatu for two years. He went to school at Salga, run by one Jaipal Nag. He accompanied his mother's younger sister, Joni, who was fond of him, when she was married, to Khatanga, her new home. He came in contact with a Christian missionary who visited a few families in the village which had been converted to Christianity. Birsa Munda understood very soon that Christian missionaries were converting tribals to Christianity. Birsa soon started to challenge the Christian missionaries and revolted against the conversion activities along with the Munda and Oraon communities.


title: Birsa Munda

text: As Birsa was sharp in his studies, Jaipal Nag recommended him to join the German Mission School and Birsa converted to Christianity and was renamed as Birsa David, which later became Birsa Daud. After studying for a few years, he left the German Mission School.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa's long stay at Chaibasa from 1886 to 1890 constituted a formative period of his life. This period was marked by the German and Roman Catholic Christian agitation. In light of the freedom struggle, Sugana Munda withdrew his son from school. Soon after leaving Chaibasa in 1890 Birsa and his family gave up their membership in the German mission, ceased being Christian, and reverted to his original traditional tribal religious system.


title: Birsa Munda

text: He left Gerbera in the wake of the mounting Sardar agitation. He participated in the agitation stemming from popular disaffection at the restrictions imposed upon the traditional rights of the Mundas in the protected forest, under the leadership of Gideon of Piring in the Porhat area. During 1893–94 all waste lands in villages, the ownership of which was vested in the Government, were constituted into protected forests under the Indian Forest Act VII of 1882. In West Singhbhum as in Lohardaga, the forest settlement operations were launched and measures were taken to determine the rights of the forest-dwelling communities. Villages in forests were marked off in blocks of convenient size consisting of village sites and cultivable wastelands sufficient for the needs of villages. In 1894, Birsa had grown up into a strong young man, shrewd and intelligent, and undertook the work of repairing the Dombari tank at Gerbera damaged by rains.


title: Birsa Munda

text: While on a sojourn in the neighbourhood of village Sankara in West Singhbhum district, he found a suitable companion, presented her parents with jewels, and explained his idea of marriage. Later, on his return from jail, he did not find her faithful to him and left her. Another woman who served him at Chalkad was the sister of Mathias Munda. On his release from prison, the daughter of Mathura Munda of Koensar who was kept by Kali Munda, and the wife of Jaga Munda of Jiuri insisted on becoming wives of Birsa. He rebuked them and referred the wife of Jaga Munda to her husband. Another rather well-known woman who stayed with Birsa was Sali of Burundi.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa stressed monogamy at a later stage in his life. Birsa rose from the lowest ranks of the peasants, the ryots, who unlike their namesakes elsewhere enjoyed far fewer rights in the Mundari khuntkatti system; while all privileges were monopolized by the members of the founding lineage, the ryots were no better than crop-sharers. Birsa's experience as a young boy, driven from place to place in search of employment, gave him insight into the agrarian question and forest matters; he was no passive spectator but an active participant in the movement going on in the neighbourhood.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa is credited for reviving the traditional tribal culture which was mostly negatively affected by Christian missionary works. Many tribals under his sect had already converted to Christianity. He opposed and criticised the Church and its practices such as levying of taxes and religious conversions. He himself became a preacher and a representative of their traditional tribal religion, and soon, he built up a reputation of a healer, a miracle-worker, and a preacher. The Mundas, Oraons, and Kharias flocked to Chalkad to see him and to be cured of their ailments. Both the Oraon and Munda population up to Barwari and Chechari became convinced Birsaities. Contemporary and later folk songs commemorate the tremendous impact of Birsa on his people, their joy, and expectations at his advent. The name of "Dharti Aaba" was on everybody's lips.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa Munda started to advise tribal people to pursue their original traditional tribal religious system. Impressed by his teachings, he became a saintly figure to the tribal people and they sought his blessings.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Birsa Munda's slogan threatening the British Raj—"Abua raj ete jana, maharani raj tundu jana" ("Let the kingdom of the queen be ended and our kingdom be established")—is still remembered in areas of Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.


title: Birsa Munda

text: The British colonial system intensified the transformation of the tribal agrarian system into a feudal state. As the tribals with their primitive technology could not generate a surplus, the non-tribal peasantry was invited by the chiefs in Chhotanagpur to settle on and cultivate the land. This led to the alienation of the lands held by the tribals. The new class of Thikadars was of a more rapacious kind and eager to make the most of their possessions.


title: Birsa Munda

text: In 1856 Jagirs stood at about 600, and they held from a village to 150 villages. But by 1874, the authority of the old Munda or Oraon chiefs had been almost entirely annulled by that of the farmers, introduced by the landlords. In some villages, they had completely lost their proprietary rights and had been reduced to the position of farm labourers.


title: Birsa Munda

text: To the twin challenges of agrarian breakdown and culture change, Birsa along with the Munda responded through a series of revolts and uprisings under his leadership. In 1895, in Chalkad village of Tamar, Birsa Munda renounced Christianity, asked his fellow tribesmen to "worship only one God" and give up the worship of "bongas".


title: Birsa Munda

text: He declared himself a prophet who had come to recover the lost kingdom of his people. He said that the reign of Queen Victoria was over and the Munda Raj had begun. He gave orders to the "raiyats" (tenant farmers) to pay no rents. The Mundas called him "Dharati Baba", the father of earth.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Due to a rumor that those who didn't follow Birsa would be massacred, Birsa was arrested on 24 August 1895 and sentenced to two-year imprisonment. On 28 January 1898, after being released from jail he went with his followers to Chutia to collect the record and to re-establish racial links with the temple. He said that the temple belonged to the Kols. The Christian missionaries wanted to arrest Birsa and his followers, who were threatening their ability to make converts. Birsa went underground for two years but attending a series of secret meetings.


title: Birsa Munda

text: It is said that around 7000 men and women assembled around Christmas of 1899, to herald the "Ulgulaan" (revolution) which soon spread to Khunti, Tamar, Basia, and Ranchi. The Anglican Mission at Murhu and the Roman Catholic Mission at Sarwada were the main targets. The Birsaits openly declared that the real enemies were the British and not Christian Mundas and called for a decisive war against the British. For two years, they attacked places loyal to the British.


title: Birsa Munda

text: On 5 January 1900, Birsa's followers killed two police constables at Etkedih. On 7 January, they attacked the Khunti police station, killing a constable and razing the houses of local shopkeepers. The local commissioner, A. Fobes, and deputy commissioner, H.C. Streattfield, rushed to Khunti with a force of 150 men to suppress the growing rebellion. The colonial administration also set a reward of Rs 500 for Birsa. The troops under the command of Fobes and Streattfield attacked and defeated Munda's guerillas at Dumbari Hill, though Munda himself escaped to the Singhbum hills.


title: Birsa Munda

text: He was arrested at Jamkopai forest in Chakradharpur on 3 February 1900. According to Deputy commissioner Ranchi, vide letter, 460 tribals were made accused in 15 different criminal cases, out of which 63 were convicted. One was sentenced to death, 39 to transportation for life and 23 to imprisoned for terms up to fourteen years. There were six deaths, including that of Birsa Munda in the prison during trials. Birsa Munda died in jail on 9 June 1900.


title: Birsa Munda

text: After his death, the movement faded out. In 1908, the colonial government introduced the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (CNT), which prohibits the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals.


title: Birsa Munda

text: The Union cabinet, at a meeting held on 10 November 2021, voted to observe 15 November, Birsa Munda's birth anniversary, as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas, to remember the contribution of tribal freedom fighters. His birth anniversary is still celebrated by tribal people as far away as Mysore and Kodagu districts in Karnataka. The official celebration takes place at his "samadhi sthal" (mausoleum) in the Kokar neighbourhood of Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Today, there are several organizations, bodies, and structures named after him, notably Birsa Munda Airport Ranchi, Birsa Institute of Technology Sindri, Birsa Munda Vanvasi Chattravas, Kanpur, Sidho Kanho Birsha University, Purulia, and Birsa Agricultural University. The war cry of Bihar Regiment is "Birsa Munda Ki Jai" (Victory to Birsa Munda).


title: Birsa Munda

text: In 2004, a Hindi film, "Ulgulan-Ek Kranti" ("The Revolution") was made by Ashok Saran. Deepraj Rana played Birsa Munda in the film, and 500 "Birsaits" (followers of Birsa) appeared as extras. Another film, "Birsa Munda - The Black Iron Man", by Rajesh Mittal was released the same year.


title: Birsa Munda

text: In 2008, a Hindi film based on the life of Birsa, "Gandhi Se Pehle Gandhi" ("Gandhi Before Gandhi"), was directed by Iqbal Durran, based on his own novel of the same name. "Bhagwan Birsa Munda", an Indian biographical short film by Rajan Khosa, was released in 2020.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, writer-activist Mahasweta Devi's historical fiction, "Aranyer Adhikar" (Right to the Forest, 1977), a novel for which she won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Bengali in 1979, is based on his life and the Munda Rebellion against the British Raj in the late 19th century; she later wrote an abridged version, Birsa Munda, specifically for young readers.


title: Birsa Munda

text: The Statue of Ulgulan is a proposed 150-foot-tall statue of Birsa Munda to be built in Jharkhand with stones collected from households in the region.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Ulgulan, the annual college festival of the National University of Study and Research in Law, in Ranchi, is inspired by the freedom struggle of Birsa Munda.


title: Birsa Munda

text: Gopi Nainar, the director of Aramm, is set to direct a movie, in Tamil, on the life of Birsa Munda. Well known Tamil director and anti-caste activist Pa. Ranjith will direct a Hindi movie which is based on Birsa Munda's life.


title: Spandex

text: Spandex, Lycra, or elastane is a synthetic fiber known for its exceptional elasticity. It is a polyether-polyurea copolymer that was invented in 1958 by chemist Joseph Shivers at DuPont's Benger Laboratory in Waynesboro, Virginia, US.


title: Spandex

text: The generic name "spandex", which is an anagram of the word "expands", is the preferred name in North America. In continental Europe, it is referred to by variants of "elastane", including (France), (Germany, Sweden), (Spain), (Italy), and (Netherlands); and in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand, it is primarily known as "Lycra".


title: Spandex

text: Brand names for spandex include Lycra (made by The Lycra Company, previously a division of DuPont Textiles and Interiors), Elaspan (The Lycra Company), Acepora (Taekwang Group), Creora (Hyosung), INVIYA (Indorama Corporation), ROICA and Dorlastan (Asahi Kasei), Linel (Fillattice), and ESPA (Toyobo).


title: Spandex

text: In the post-World War II era, DuPont Textiles Fibers Department, formed in 1952, became the most profitable division of DuPont, dominating the synthetic fiber market worldwide. At this time, women began to emerge as a significant group of consumers because of their need for underwear and hosiery. After conducting market research to find out what women wanted from textiles, DuPont began developing fibers to meet such needs—including a better fiber for women's girdles, which were commonly made of rubber at the time.


title: Spandex

text: By the 1930s, DuPont became interested in developing a synthetic elastic fiber. DuPont made its first breakthrough in the early 1950s when chemist Joseph C. Shivers used an intermediate substance to modify Dacron polyester, producing a stretchy fiber that could withstand high temperatures. Determined to find a fiber to replace rubber in garments, after nearly a decade of research, Shivers perfected the fiber in 1958 at DuPont's Benger Laboratory in Waynesboro, Virginia. Moreover, the nature of spandex allowed it to be incorporated into other garments besides girdles and undergarments.


title: Spandex

text: To distinguish its brand of spandex fiber, DuPont chose the trade name "Lycra" (originally called "Fiber K"). DuPont launched an extensive publicity campaign for its Lycra brand, taking advertisements and full-page ads in top women's magazines such as "Vogue", "Glamour", "Harper's Bazaar", "Mademoiselle", "McCall's", "Ladies' Home Journal", and "Good Housekeeping". Audrey Hepburn helped catapult the brand on and off-screen during this time; models and actresses like Joan Collins and Ann-Margret followed Hepburn's aesthetic by posing in Lycra clothing for photo shoots and magazine covers.


title: Spandex

text: By the mid-1970s, with the emergence of the women's liberation movement, girdle sales began to drop as they came to be associated with anti-independence and emblematic of an era that was quickly passing away. In response, DuPont reimagined Lycra as the aerobic fitness movement emerged in the 1970s. The association of Lycra with fitness had been established at the 1968 Winter Olympic Games, when the French ski team wore Lycra garments to compete. This popularized the brand as essential athletic wear because of its flexible and lightweight material. The fiber came to be especially popular in mid-thigh-length shorts worn by cyclists.


title: Spandex

text: By the 1980s, the fitness trend had reached its height in popularity and fashionistas began wearing shorts on the street. Spandex proved such a popular fiber in the garment industry that, by 1987, DuPont had trouble meeting worldwide demand. In the 1990s a variety of other items made with spandex proved popular, including a successful line of body-shaping foundation garments sold under the trade name "Bodyslimmers". As the decade progressed, shirts, pants, dresses, and even shoes were being made with spandex blends, and mass-market retailers like Banana Republic were even using it for menswear.


title: Spandex

text: In 2014, it was noted that most clothes containing spandex end up as non-recyclable waste once they have been worn out, because fabric blends containing spandex are difficult to recycle. This contributes to the pollution of the environment.


title: Spandex

text: Spandex fibers are produced in four ways: melt extrusion, reaction spinning, solution dry spinning, and solution wet spinning. All of these methods include the initial step of reacting monomers to produce a prepolymer. Once the prepolymer is formed, it is reacted further in various ways and drawn out to make the fibers.


title: Spandex

text: The solution dry spinning method is used to produce over 94.5% of the world's spandex fibers. The process has five steps:


title: Spandex

text: The exceptional elasticity of spandex fibers increases the clothing's pressure comfort, enhancing the ease of body movements. Pressure comfort is the response towards clothing by the human body's pressure receptors (mechanoreceptors present in skin sensory cells). The sensation response is affected mainly by the stretch, snug, loose, heavy, lightweight, soft, and stiff structure of the material.


title: Spandex

text: The elasticity and strength (stretching up to five times its length) of spandex has been incorporated into a wide range of garments, especially in skin-tight garments. A benefit of spandex is its significant strength and elasticity and its ability to return to the original shape after stretching and faster drying than ordinary fabrics. For clothing, spandex is usually mixed with cotton or polyester, and accounts for a small percentage of the final fabric, which therefore retains most of the look and feel of the other fibers. An estimated 80% of clothing sold in the United States contained spandex in 2010.


title: Richard Manuel

text: Richard George Manuel (April 3, 1943 – March 4, 1986) was a Canadian singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter, best known as a pianist and one of three lead singers in The Band, for which he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.


title: Richard Manuel

text: Manuel's singing alternated between a soul-influenced baritone that drew frequent comparisons to Ray Charles and a delicate falsetto. Though The Band had three vocalists sharing lead and harmony parts, Manuel was sometimes seen as the group's primary vocalist.


title: Richard Manuel

text: Manuel was born in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. His father, Ed, was a mechanic employed at a Chrysler dealership, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He was raised with his three brothers, and the four sang in the church choir. Manuel took piano lessons beginning when he was nine, and enjoyed playing piano and rehearsing with friends at home. Some of his childhood influences were Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, Jimmy Reed and Otis Rush.


title: Richard Manuel

text: In early 1959, when he was fifteen, Manuel joined The Rebels, a local Stratford band featuring guitarist John Till (later of the Full Tilt Boogie Band). With Manuel on piano and vocals and his friend Jimmy Winkler on drums, the band was rounded out by bass player Ken Kalmusky (later a founding member of Great Speckled Bird). In short order, the group changed to its name to the Revols, in deference to Duane Eddy and the Rebels. Although Richard was the primary vocalist, the line up expanded to include original singer Doug 'Bo' Rhodes. Guitarist Till would later be replaced by Garth Pictot.


title: Richard Manuel

text: Manuel first became acquainted with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks in the summer of 1960 when the Revols opened for them at Pop Ivy's in Port Dover, Ontario. According to Levon Helm, Hawkins remarked to him about Manuel: "See that kid playing piano? He's got more talent than Van Cliburn." The following spring, Hawkins found himself opening for The Revols at Stratford Coliseum. After the show, he offered to manage the band, and sent them to play at one of his clubs, The Rockwood, in Fayetteville. In mid-September 1961, after the Revols returned from their southern journey, Hawkins recruited Manuel to his backing band The Hawks, replacing piano player Stan Szelest.


title: Richard Manuel

text: Manuel was 18 when he joined Hawkins's backing group, the Hawks. At this time the band already consisted of 21-year-old Levon Helm on drums, 17-year-old Robbie Robertson on guitar and 17-year-old Rick Danko on bass; 24-year-old organist Garth Hudson joined that Christmas, followed by two temporary members (saxophonist Jerry Penfound and singer Bruce Bruno). Increasingly antagonized by Hawkins's disdain for marijuana and contemporary music trends, the group left the singer's employ in 1964. Initially, they were known as the Levon Helm Sextet (as Helm had accumulated the most time with Hawkins) before changing their name to the Canadian Squires and then to Levon and the Hawks. With Helm serving as nominal leader because of his longevity with the Hawkins group, it was Manuel who sang most of the songs in the group's repertoire. It was as Levon and the Hawks, after the departure of Penfound and Bruno, that they introduced themselves to their blues hero, Sonny Boy Williamson. They planned a collaboration with Williamson, but he died before their plans could be realized.


title: Richard Manuel

text: In 1965, Helm, Hudson, and Robertson helped back American bluesman John Hammond on his album "So Many Roads". Hammond recommended the Hawks to Bob Dylan, who tapped them to serve as his backing band when he switched to an electric sound; through 1966, they toured Europe and the United States with Dylan, enduring the ire of Dylan's folk fans, who subjected the group to hissing and booing.