title: Kaththi

text: Jeeva was a communist ideologue and post-graduate in hydrology from the arid village of Thanoothu in Tirunelveli district who had discovered groundwater under some lands of the village which could be used as an irrigation source not only for the village, but for the entire Tirunelveli district and the neighbouring Thoothukudi district. However, a greedy entrepreneur named Chirag cheated the villagers into giving their lands for the construction of a factory. Jeeva got arrested, and six villagers committed suicide to bring this news to the media forefront and get Jeeva released.


title: Kaththi

text: Moved by Jeeva's past, Kathir decides to fight for the villagers' cause while still posing as Jeeva. The people of the old home and Kathir go to the jury and try to convince him to go in favour of them, but Kathir starts stating rules and scares the main jury person (whom Chirag had bribed). Kathir then sends a person (disguised as a hairdresser) to Chirag and makes him lay a fingerprint on Chirag's neck. After that, Chirag sends 50 men to kill Kathir, but he defeats them. Meanwhile, Jeeva finds himself in the Kolkata prison. With the help of Vivek, who has heard his story and plans to kill Kathir, he escapes with Vivek's henchmen. Unaware that Jeeva is headed for Chennai with Vivek's henchmen, Kathir makes efforts to convince the media to bring the plight of the villagers to national consciousness, but the media is uninterested as they feel it is not a sensational news.


title: Kaththi

text: A few days later, at the Madras High Court, the judge declares the verdict in favour of Jeeva and the villagers, but adds that Chirag has claimed that certain villagers working abroad have shown their support for the factory. If they cannot prove that their support was faked by Chirag within the next five days, the verdict will go in Chirag's favour. Since the villagers who have denied supporting the factory are abroad and cannot come to Chennai so soon to rebut Chirag's claims as their passports are held by their contractors, Kathir decides on drastic measures to sensationalise the issue. He, Ankitha, Ravi, and the old-age home inmates block water supply to Chennai by sitting on the pipelines which carry water to Chennai from five lakes. With the plight of Chennai people due to no water supply having gained national attention, Kathir comes out of the pipeline after a few days and highlights the villagers' plight to the media. His speech is telecast nationwide.


title: Kaththi

text: By now, Kathir has discovered that Jeeva has escaped and is searching for him. Meanwhile, Jeeva and Vivek's henchmen reach Chennai, but Jeeva is kidnapped by Chirag's henchmen. While in Chirag's custody, he sees Kathir's speech on television and is moved by his efforts to help the villagers. On the night before the verdict, Kathir's bluff is exposed, but he promises the villagers that he will surely help them. He tells them that Jeeva is alive, that he will rescue him from Chirag and hand him back to the villagers with the assurance of a positive verdict. Kathir goes to Chirag's office, rescues Jeeva and kills Chirag. The next day, the verdict is declared in favour of Jeeva and the villagers. Despite the success, Kathir does not take part in the ensuing celebrations. Instead, he surrenders to the police and returns to the Kolkata prison after promising Ankitha, who has now fallen in love with him, that he will marry her once he is released.


title: Kaththi

text: In February 2013, sources reported that A. R. Murugadoss will collaborate with Vijay again, after the success of "Thuppakki" (2012). The director had pitched three scripts for the film, with the first one being a romantic drama script, an action film which has Vijay playing a dual role (also being planned as a multi-starrer), and a sequel to "Thuppakki". Later, Vijay chose the second script and asked Murugadoss to work on the project. Ayngaran International was reported to produce the film, whose shooting has been planned to begin in late-2013, after Vijay completing the shooting for "Jilla", and Murugadoss' completion on the Hindi remake of "Thuppakki", titled "".


title: Kaththi

text: The project was officially confirmed by Murugadoss on mid-November 2013, through his Twitter page. Subaskaran Allirajah, a British-Sri Lankan based Tamil entrepreneur, agreed to become the major investor in the film, by producing it under his newly backed film distribution and production company Lyca Productions. The film eventually became the first production of the company, with Ayngaran International and Eros International jointly distributing the film.


title: Kaththi

text: Murugadoss replaced his usual music director Harris Jayaraj with Anirudh Ravichander signing for the project. George C. Williams, who worked on the director's production "Raja Rani" (2013), was signed as the cinematographer. Art director Lalgudi N. Ilayaraja was selected to handle the production design. The film was earlier rumoured to be titled as "Dheeran" and "Vaal". However, in March 2014, Murugadoss confirmed that the film would be titled "Kaththi" and that it was scheduled to be released on Diwali. In June 2014, Murugadoss speaking in an interview, dismissed claims of being a gangster film, and Vijay playing father-son role in the film, and added that the film will be set in Chennai.


title: Kaththi

text: Murugadoss stated that Vijay will play dual roles in the film, and his character names were revealed as Kathiresan and Jeevanantham. Even before the film was officially announced, Samantha Ruth Prabhu was selected as the female lead in September 2013, whose character was named Ankita. Speaking about her role in the film, Murugadoss stated that "Samantha has exceeded my expectations for the role [...] She always carries a smiling face and bring a lot of energy on the sets and has added more flavor to every scene."


title: Kaththi

text: Bengali actor Tota Roy Chowdhury was signed for a pivotal role in the film. According to "The Times of India", he was reported to play an international gangster named Vivek Banerjee. In March 2014, Neil Nitin Mukesh was selected to play the antagonist, thereby making his début in Tamil cinema through the film. Neil was inspired by his look in his début film, "Johnny Gaddaar" (2007). He described his character as one who does not "fight the hero with physical power, but with intelligence". He learned Tamil for his role, as he did not want to speak his dialogues without understanding their meaning. Neil had lost weight for the role and modelled his looks to be along the lines of Brad Pitt and David Beckham. Sathish was chosen to play a supporting role.


title: Kaththi

text: The film was launched in Kolkata on 3 February 2014 by Lyca Productions with a pooja ceremony in front of the Kalighat Kali Temple, after which principal photography began. A fight sequence was canned in this schedule for 7 days, and later the team returned to Chennai on 10 February 2014, for a song shoot which took place at Chennai International Airport from 14 to 17 February, with special permissions being procured to shoot at the runway. On 20 February, the team headed to Hyderabad for shooting a major 30-day schedule at Rajahmundry and Begumpet. After a break for two-weeks, shooting resumed on 13 March in Hyderabad with another song being shot at Ramoji Film City.


title: Kaththi

text: A climax sequence featuring Vijay and Neil, made at a cost of was shot at Nellore in mid-April. The film was then shot in Pushpa Gardens in Chennai, where a huge set which costed around was erected and most of the indoor scenes were completed in this set. Shooting continued for a 40-day-long schedule in and around the city by 2 June 2014. In between, Murugadoss, took a break to promote his then upcoming Bollywood film, "Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty" (2014) in Mumbai. After Murugadoss returned to Chennai on 8 June, followed by location scouting, shooting of the film resumed, the following day. On 26 June 2014, the team headed to Kadapa for a 12-day schedule, by July 2014, 60% of the shooting.


title: Kaththi

text: The final leg of the film began on 1 August 2014 at Chennai. In late August 2014, 15 days of filming, including patch-work and a few fight sequences, remained. Filming moved back to Hyderabad, where the rest of the fight sequences were canned. On 1 September 2014, the second half of the film was nearly completed. Additional filming took place at the Chennai Central railway station. On 4 September 2014, Neil Nitin Mukesh dubbed in Tamil himself for his role and completed his dubbing portions for the first half of the film. The climax sequences were shot in Nellore on 23 September 2014 and talkie portions have also been completed within two days. The song "Selfie Pulla" was shot in Mumbai, with about 100 dancers participated in the song sequence. Filming of that track was completed on 30 September 2014, with the filming of the entire film also being completed as a result.


title: Kaththi

text: As similar to the actor-director's previous film "Thuppakki" (2012), which is based on terrorism caused by sleeper cells, "Kaththi", deals with the suicide of farmers due to corporate encroachment. The film also deals with several themes such as water scarcity, corruption, communism, the ill-effects of capitalism and industralisation and problems faced by farmers in daily lives. The character Jeevanantham, is named after a social activist, whom Murugadoss had inspired. An article published by "Behindwoods", listed its similarities with that of Rajinikanth's "Lingaa", which was released on the same year, that highlighted the main plot and character traits of the protagonists. Rockline Venkatesh, the producer of "Lingaa", denied the connection of the film's script with that of "Kaththi".


title: Kaththi

text: In the film, the character Jeevanantham (Vijay), in a single dialogue, illustrates about the basic tenets of communism using idlies. In the press meet scene, Kathiresan (Vijay) spoke dialogues about several political incidents, that included 2G spectrum case, and encroachment of Pepsi company in the banks of river Thamirabharani. In October 2014, a petition was filed against Vijay and Murugadoss regarding the 2G spectrum case, and slammed them for defamation. The complainant R. Ramasubramanian questioned how a film can conclude that all those involved in the 2G spectrum case are corrupt when the case is still being heard in court, adding that the dialogue portrayed all those people in poor light and damaged their dignity. The court however, dismissed those claims later.


title: Kaththi

text: Sowmya Rajendran of "The News Minute" called "Kaththi" as what "Kollywood likes to call a "message" film made in a mainstream format" and the enormous success of the film "coupled with the general public mood (on social media especially) after the jallikattu protests of 2017, which have made the "farmer sentiment" so popular on screen".


title: Kaththi

text: The soundtrack and film score is composed by Anirudh Ravichander, in his first collaboration with Vijay and Murugadoss. Before signing the project, Anirudh had composed the theme music of the film, which was accompanied with the motion poster was released on YouTube on 22 June 2014, coinciding with actor Vijay's birthday. The album was under production from late-2013 and continued until September 2014. The soundtrack album consists of seven tracks, with lyrics written by Madhan Karky, Yugabharathi, Pa. Vijay and Hiphop Tamizha. The album, in its entirety was released on 24 September 2014, at the audio launch event held at The Leela Palace Hotel in Chennai. The songs as well as the film score was widely appreciated; On 28 January 2015, the crew released the film's original background score through YouTube, to coincide with the film's 100-day celebration.


title: Kaththi

text: Murugadoss roped in creative designer Gopi Prasanna to work on the promotional materials of the film. The first look and motion poster was released on 21 June 2014, coinciding with the eve of Vijay's birthday (22 June 2014). The first look featured a still of Vijay being made with a collage of newspaper headlines. The motion poster featured a creative design of prominent places in Chennai, and the entire city itself recreated and draped in the form of news headlines, and the final image, the still from the poster, in the end. According to Prasanna, "Kaththi" became the first mainstream Tamil film to introduce first looks. He did not use the photograph of actor Vijay in the design, and created a newspaper collage to resemble Vijay's face. The production team being sceptical of the idea, but after the release, he was later appreciated for his creative efforts. Within a week, the motion poster, crossed more than 1 million views.


title: Kaththi

text: The official teaser of the film was released on 24 September 2014, coinciding with the film's audio launch event. An Android game based on the film was launched during early-October, with the 3D and 2D versions of the game being released through Google Play Store and Windows Store. The trailer of the film was unveiled on 19 October 2014, three days ahead of the film's release, and got positive response from viewers. Before the theatrical release, the film's posters were branded in the AC coaches of Parasuram Express which travels through Nagercoil to Mangalore via Kerala, and at inter-state buses in Kerala and Karnataka. Post release, two events were held to commemorate the film's successful theatrical run; one being held at Coimbatore on 27 October 2014, and another event at Tirunelveli on 14 December 2014, to coincide the film's 50th day theatrical run.


title: Kaththi

text: "Kaththi" was released on 22 October 2014, coinciding with the Diwali festival. The film was released in more than 1300 screens worldwide. The film released in 400 screens in Tamil Nadu, and 200 screens in Kerala, setting a record at screen count. In overseas, the film was released in US in 105 screens, which is considered as the biggest Tamil release in the country, and in Canada, the film released on 21 screens. The film released in United Kingdom on 70 screens, and in France on 24 screens. The film released in Sri Lanka, on 28 screens, and in Australia on 16 screens. The film was released in Malaysia on 120 screens, which is highest for a Tamil film at that time.


title: Kaththi

text: The satellite rights of the film were sold to Jaya TV. Shibu Thameens purchased the Kerala theatrical rights. The theatrical rights in Tiruchirappalli and Thanjavur were sold to T. Siva of Boss Films. Prominent film producer Tagore Madhu acquired the theatrical rights in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. MM Media, previously known as GK Media, acquired the film's theatrical rights in the USA. Goldie Films acquired the theatrical distribution rights in Karnataka. The film was sold out in all the territories, nine days before the film's theatrical release.


title: Kaththi

text: The Telugu-dubbed version, which was planned to release along with the Tamil version, was pushed to 31 October 2014 and later to 21 November. The dubbed version was dropped, in favour of a Telugu remake titled "Khaidi No. 150", which was planned by the producer. The film was also dubbed and released in Hindi under the title "Khaki Aur Khiladi". and was released through YouTube in 2017.


title: Kaththi

text: The 41-second first-look motion poster drew comparisons with the popular minute-long advertisement campaign run by a Turkish newspaper, "Sabah", to announce their distribution of the "New York Times" as a supplement. The original advertisement features iconic images of the cities of New York City and Istanbul, designed using news articles and headlines from the newspaper to show the two cities in the form of newspaper clippings. The motion poster of the film showed prominent places in Chennai and the entire city itself in the form of newspaper clippings and headlines, just like the advertisement campaign, without an acknowledgement to the makers of the original.


title: Kaththi

text: Minjur Gopi Nayinar filed a case against Murugadoss, claiming that the plot of the film was copied from his novel "Mootha Kudi". Responding to the issue, Murugadoss said that he was neither aware of Minjur nor that his story was a copy, further citing the allegation as a tactic by the plaintiff to garner free publicity. He, in turn, requested the court to dismiss the petition. In late-September 2014, the court declared the case in Murugadoss's favour, citing lack of proper evidence found against him.


title: Kaththi

text: Anbu Rajasekar, a short film director also claimed the plagiarism allegation, levied against Murugadoss saying that the plot was lifted from his 2013 short film "Thaaga Bhoomi", which was selected at the Norway Tamil Film Festival and also won second prize in a short film contest judged by Director Balu Mahendra. He further shared a scene-to-scene comparison of the short film with "Kaththi" to further substantiate his claim and wrote a letter to Murugadoss on late-October, claiming that his story was used in the film without permission. Since, there was no favourable reply from the director, he filed a case in the Thanjavur High Court against Vijay, Murugadoss, Lyca Productions and the cinematographer George C. Williams. The case went on for four years, and since there is no development, Anbu with his family, subjected to a 10-day hunger strike from 31 October to 10 November 2018, and also filed a petition signed by over 100 villagers, which was submitted to the office of Edappadi K. Palaniswami, the then-Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. In December 2019, the Madras High Court dismissed the proceedings against Vijay, Lyca and three others, saying that "there was no material against them about the allegations of plagiarism and the short film had not been registered under the Copyright Act, 1957".


title: Kaththi

text: Subaskaran Allirajah, chairman of Lyca Mobiles, whose company Lyca Productions co-produced the film along with Ayngaran International, was claimed to have had business links with the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Murugadoss and Karunamoorthy of Ayngaran International met pro-Eelam leaders – Pazha Nedumaran, director Seeman and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi's (VCK) Thol. Thirumavalavan — to explain their position regarding the allegation, but the talks proved to be inconclusive at that time. A collective of four student bodies – Maatram Maanavar Ilaiyor Iyakkam, Free Tamil Eelam Students Organisation, Tamil Youth and Students Association, and Progressive Students Front – in Tamil Nadu called for a ban on the film, stating that the film promoted the economic and political interests of Sri Lanka. The students were willing to reconsider their position on the film if Lyca Productions formally withdrew as producer. In August 2014, directors Seeman and Vikraman showed support for the film.


title: Kaththi

text: Despite clarifications, as many as 65 Tamil groups came together to oppose the film, leading to speculations regarding Lyca stepping down as producer and handing the reins to another production group. Karunamoorthy, however, again denied that Allirajah had business links with either Mahinda Rajapaksa or his family in any way, further saying that a press meet would be held where all doubts and suspicions regarding Lyca Productions would be clarified and that the film would be released under the Lyca Productions banner. As per Karunamoorthy's statement, a press meet was held on 16 September 2014, where the vice-chairman of Lyca Productions, Premananthan Sivasamy, Subaskaran and Karunamoorthy were present. A statement with a detailed clarification was shown in which it was mentioned that Lyca did not have any business links with Rajapaksa or anyone else related to him, thereby confirming the planned release of the film on Diwali.


title: Kaththi

text: A meeting with the pro-Tamil groups, with Tamil Nadu Theatre Owners Association, exhibitors and distributors was held, three days before the release and after a favourable response, the theatre owners officially confirmed the planned release. However, on 20 October, few members from the Tamil groups had damaged the properties and glass panes at Sathyam cinemas and Woodlands Cinemas, which resulted in huge trouble before its release. Later, actor Vijay confirmed that the issues with the pro-Tamils' have been resolved and Lyca Productions' name being removed from the film and its promotional materials, thereby meeting their demands. He also thanked the then-Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa for extending the support towards the film's release.


title: Kaththi

text: "Kaththi" netted around worldwide on the opening day of its release (22 October 2014). The film collected in Tamil Nadu alone on its opening day, and registered the best opening collections in Trichy, Thanjavur, Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari and Madurai. It reported a full 100% occupancy on the film's opening day, despite the controversies, delayed advance bookings and low-key promotions. The film also collected in Kerala and in Karnataka, thereby collecting an estimated at the domestic box office. At Bangalore (Karnataka), the film had earned in the second day of the release (23 October 2014) and another in the state, thereby bringing the two-day collections to .


title: Kaththi

text: In the extended-five day weekend, the film collected at the worldwide box office, and became the actor's first film to cross the mark worldwide, in a quick-span of time. At the domestic box-office, the film collected around in Tamil Nadu, in Karnataka and in Kerala, to achieve a net collection of in five days. In Chennai city alone, the film netted in the first week with an average theatre occupancy of 97% and stood in the first position. The second week witnessed an occupancy of 85% in the city and netted around . The film still stood at the number one position in Chennai by the third week resulting in a total collection of . It surpassed the collections of "Velaiilla Pattadhari", "Maan Karate", "Veeram" and "Jilla" at Chennai box-office.


title: Kaththi

text: "Kaththi" reached the mark in 12 days of its release. The film took a worldwide distributor share of within twelve days of its release. The film was bought for a record price in Karnataka by a leading distributor, and opened well at the box-office there. The film collected around in Tamil Nadu, in Karnataka and in Kerala in five days. After a long run for nine weeks at the Chennai box office, the film netted around . "Kaththi" completed a 100 days theatrical run on 29 January 2015. In its final theatrical run, the film grossed an estimated worldwide, making it one of the highest grossing Tamil films of all time and the second highest-grossing Tamil film of 2014, behind "Lingaa".


title: Kaththi

text: The film earned $142,805 in its USA premiere on 21 October 2014. It is considered to be an "all-time record for a non-Rajinikanth film in the US" and became the second Tamil-film to gross $100,000 besides and surpassing "Enthiran" (2010). Within five days of its release, the film surpassed the $5,00,000 mark. "Kaththi" became the highest grossing Tamil film of 2014 in US. In France, "Kaththi" opened with about which is a new record for an Indian film. The distributor Ayngaran International stated that "Kaththi" had the biggest opening for a Tamil film in UK since it released in over 70 screens there and also topped the weekend box office in Malaysia. It also has set new records in Singapore grossing over $201,408. In the UK box office it grossed £319,310 in 12 days. In Australia, "Kaththi" collected $160,890 and has surpassed the opening weekend collection of "Kochadaiyaan" ($119,597) and "Anjaan" ($107,013) for 2014. The film had a lifetime business of over A$194,341 in Australia and became the highest grossing Tamil film of the year there. The film made approximately $1.86 million in Malaysia and has emerged as the third highest Tamil grosser.


title: Kaththi

text: "Kaththi" received critical acclaim from critics. Prakash Upadhyaya of "International Business Times" gave the film 4 out of 5 and called it as "a message-oriented and highly entertaining commercial movie" and further wrote "Vijay, in two roles, steals the show in "Kaththi". His strong screen presence adds a huge value to the project. His co-star Samantha is just his an arm candy but Neil Nitin Mukesh looks rich in stylish costumes. Rest other characters have played their parts well. And the director himself appears in one scene and it gets huge applause from the audience." Critic based at "Sify" gave it 4 out of 5 and stated, "the movie is a well made entertainer with a powerful message". "Behindwoods" gave it 3 out of 5 and stated, "Murugadoss delivers a strong commercial movie with a nice social angle, in true Vijay style". M. Suganth of "The Times of India" gave 3.5 stars out of 5 and wrote, ""Kaththi" will definitely be picked up by a big Bollywood star for a remake, for the knife was bang on target".


title: Kaththi

text: S. Saraswathi of "Rediff" stated, ""Kaththi" attempts to highlight the pathetic condition of farmers, whose lives are being destroyed by callous multinational corporations" and rated it 3/5 as well. Baradwaj Rangan of "The Hindu" wrote "The ideas are snappy – the reveal of the person injured in a shootout; the identity of a couple of television reporters – but the staging is shockingly flat." Writing for "India Today", Haricharan Pudipeddi gave 2.5 out of 5 and summarised "Kaththi is a commercial film and naturally audiences except some heroism, action and romance in it. But here Murugadoss has portrayed his hero as a messiah, a man of the masses willing to even sacrifice his life." Umesh Punwani of "Koimoi" gave 2.5 out of 5 and stated that "Kaththi picks up slowly, but delivered a power packed performance." "Ananda Vikatan" rated the film 42 out of 100.


title: Kaththi

text: Anupama Subramanian of "Deccan Chronicle" gave 3.5 out of 5 stars and stated, "Vijay as Kathiresan in an author backed role does a neat job to satiate his fans playing his role packing with punches, humor, romance , right emotions and of course his forte – breezy dance movements. Vijay’s lengthy speech with the press towards the end earns lot of appreciation. On the contrary, the director has etched a weak characterization for Jeevanandham, who fights for a cause, but beyond that he is projected neither brainy nor brawny. Murugadoss brings to the fore critical social issues like farmers suicide, water scarcity, etc, but at times it looks too preachy. Wish Murugadoss could have opted for a tauter screenplay." "Indiaglitz" gave 3.25 out of 5 and stated "Vijay & Murugadoss have redefined the term ‘commercial’ once again and delivered a perfect diwali treat for the Tamil audience." "Moviecrow" gave 3.25 out of 5 and stated "The movie deserves a lot of credit for taking a social cause and delivering it sincerely with just the right amount of commercial elements."


title: Kaththi

text: "Kaththi" received eight nominations at the 62nd edition of Filmfare Awards South and won three — Best Film, Best Director (Murugadoss) and Best Dance Choreographer (Shobi). It was nominated at ten categories at the 9th Vijay Awards, winning two — Favourite Film and Favourite Director (Murugadoss), and seven categories at the 4th South Indian International Movie Awards and won four awards: Best Film, Best Actor in a Negative Role (Neil), Best Fight Choreographer (Anal Arasu) and Best Dance Choreographer (Shobi). It was nominated in three categories at the inaugural IIFA Utsavam awards, where it fetched the award for Best Music Director (Ravichander), the only win in that ceremony. Among other wins, the film received three Edison Awards and one Ananda Vikatan Cinema Awards. It also received a nomination for Best Social Awareness at the Norway Tamil Film Festival Awards, but it lost to "Sigaram Thodu" (2014).


title: Kaththi

text: The film's Telugu remake was eventually planned by few distributors before the release, but in November 2014, the distributor B. Madhu had claimed that there will not be a Telugu remake of this film. In April 2015, plans for adapting the film in Telugu-language eventually processed with N. T. Rama Rao Jr. playing the lead role. In October, it was announced that Chiranjeevi will star in the remake, which will be directed by V. V. Vinayak and will be his 150th film as a lead actor, and was officially confirmed in December 2015, with Chiranjeevi's son Ram Charan making his debut as a producer, by financing the project under Konidela Production Company. The film titled "Khaidi No. 150", was directed by V. V. Vinayak and released in January 2017. In July 2019, it was reported that the film will be remade in Hindi as "Ikka" (2021), starring Akshay Kumar and will be directed by Jagan Shakti. The film expected to beigin production in late-2019, was shelved in December 2020, after the co-producer Fox Star Studios exit from film production in India.


title: Kaththi

text: "Kaththi" eventually featured in the list of "Best Tamil Films of 2014" by various publications including "The Hindu" and "Sify". According to Nivedita Mishra of "Hindustan Times", the film "set records through box-office and social media". Srivatsan S. of "The Hindu" called it as one of the "best masala films of the decade in Tamil cinema" and one of the "films with best 'mass' music being featured in the last decade in Tamil cinema". "Kaththi" which became the first in mainstream Tamil cinema to introduce the concept of "first look" and "motion poster", became one of the "best first looks designed for Vijay's films" according to "Times News Network". Kaththi was also the first Tamil film that did not contain disclaimer about smoking and drinking, as there were no smoking or drinking scenes being featured in the film. Other films which followed the similar pattern, were "Miruthan" (2016), "Spyder" (2017), "Thaanaa Serndha Koottam" (2018) and "Hero" (2019).


title: Kaththi

text: Social media and news articles cited that "Kaththi" became one of Vijay's films that elevated him to the path of super-stardom, that eventually continued after the success of "Mersal" (2017), "Sarkar" (2018) and "Bigil" (2019). Irrespective of the controversies, the film became a profitable venture for its producers Lyca Productions. The film's success also led Lyca Productions' to become one of the popular film production and distribution studios in Tamil cinema, and had produced several Tamil films, whose notable ventures include "Naanum Rowdy Dhaan" (2015), "Visaranai" (2016), "Kolamaavu Kokila", "Vada Chennai" and "2.0" (2018), which was considered to be the most expensive Indian film to date.


title: Kaththi

text: "Kaththi"'s success led several filmmakers to direct films based on agriculture and problems faced by farmers. The interest eventually shown a steeping growth after the 2017 pro-jallikattu protests and the month-long Tamil Nadu Farmers protest happened in the same year, with film-makers covering the subject to cope up with the general sentiments of the public. As a result, several Tamil films based on farming and agriculture were produced in the last few years. Sowmya Rajendran of "The News Minute" had said that "From 'mother sentiment', films have now moved to ‘farmer sentiment’". In its article to "The Hindu", about the "decade’s top 10 trends in Tamil cinema", editors Srinivasa Ramanujam, Srivatsan S., Pradeep Kumar and Gautam Sunder opined that the farmer's issue is "the hottest sub-genre in Tamil cinema, and has become an easy gateway for filmmakers to package 'valuable' messages". This eventually became a subject of criticism from cinephiles, as the trope being felt "repetitive" and "formulaic" and the commercial factors divert the "message regarding the problems faced by farmers in India".


title: Kaththi

text: The scene where Kathiresan (Vijay) visualises a floor plan in three-dimensions was parodied by Neeraj Madhav in "Adi Kapyare Kootamani" (2015) and Sivakarthikeyan in "Rajinimurugan" (2016). Kathiresan's introduction in the pipeline was spoofed by Vishal in "Kaththi Sandai". In the 2017 film "Balloon", actor Jai walks with an iron rod to beat up a group of goons, which was similar to the coin fight scene in the film, and the instrumental theme "The Sword of Destiny" was mimicked in the background. Jai's character in the film was named Jeevandhanam, similar to one of the characters played by Vijay. The extended press conference scene featured in the film was spoofed in "Tamizh Padam 2" (2018).


title: Kaththi

text: The 2019 Tamil film "Boomerang", was said to be heavily inspired from the film, as the lead actor Atharvaa played dual roles and it also dealt with farmers' issue, similar to this film. The Telugu film "Maharshi", which was released on the same year, starring Mahesh Babu has said to be influenced by "Kaththi" as both the film's focus on agriculture. Janani K. of "India Today" gave a mixed review for the film and wrote: "Mahesh Babu gets his own underwhelming "Kaththi"".


title: A Hero

text: A Hero () is a 2021 Iranian–French drama film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, and starring Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh and Sahar Goldoost. In June 2021, the film was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or. At the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, the film won the Grand Prix. It was selected as the Iranian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, but was not nominated.


title: A Hero

text: Rahim Soltani is temporarily released from prison for a two-day period in order to settle an unpaid debt of 150,000 tomans to his brother-in-law, Bahram. Rahim’s lover, Farkondeh, has acquired a lost handbag containing several gold coins, which they both attempt to sell in order to repay the debt, but find that gold has lost value to the point where Rahim cannot repay Bahram in full. In the meantime, he moves in with his sister Malileh and her husband Hossein.


title: A Hero

text: Malileh discovers the handbag and coins and confronts Rahim about it, leading Rahim to pursue the original owner of the handbag and return it to them. After the original owner comes to claim the bag (which Rahim claims he found), Rahim is praised for his selfless act and his story is covered by the media before he returns to prison and becomes a local celebrity. Bahram is immediately suspicious of Rahim’s story, believing he is trying to restore his image and leave prison to stop the impending second marriage of his ex-wife. The prison begins to arrange for Rahim’s release.


title: A Hero

text: At a charity event to raise money and provide employment for Rahim, Bahram is incensed to learn that less than a quarter of the debt’s total has been raised. He explains to the organizers that Rahim, then unable to take out a loan from a bank, received the money from Bahram that he acquired from a loan shark, who he eventually had to repay when Rahim failed to make payments. Despite this, Bahram agrees to have Rahim released for the sake of his estranged son, Siavash.


title: A Hero

text: While applying for his new job, Rahim learns that rumors have begun to spread disputing his supposed discovery and returning of the handbag, prompting Rahim to locate the woman in order for her to confirm his story, though his search is fruitless. Rahim and Malileh plot to have Farkondeh pose as the woman, using details from the actual encounter to validate Rahim’s story. The hiring manager produces a text from Rahim to Bahram offering to pay half the debt a week before the day he claimed to have found the bag, leading him to reject Rahim’s application.


title: A Hero

text: Certain that Bahram forwarded the incriminating text exchange, Rahim confronts him at his printing shop, but Bahram denies it. After Bahram accuses Rahim of using his son for sympathy, Rahim physically attacks him, and nearby shopkeepers help restrain Rahim while the police arrive. Farkondeh arrives and manages to convince Bahram to let Rahim go.


title: A Hero

text: Rahim is called by the charity organization to inform him of a video made by Bahram’s daughter Nazanin, which shows footage of his fight with Bahram while also unveiling his and Farkondeh’s relationship. Nazanin threatens to release the video publicly if Rahim doesn’t pay his debt in full by the next day. In light of this evidence, Rahim is forced to unveil the truth about the bag. Fearing a scandal, the organization decides to withhold the money raised for Rahim. On the last day of his leave, Rahim is informed by the charity organizer that the funds raised for him will instead be used toward the release of a man scheduled to be executed, and Farkondeh convinces her to tell the media that it was Rahim’s idea in order to help him retain some of his honor.


title: A Hero

text: Nazanin’s video is released, and Farkondeh’s family forbids her from seeing Rahim again. While filming a video about Rahim’s most recent “act” of charity to soften the backlash, Siavash is coached into crying on camera by Rahim’s parole officer, Salehi, and Rahim, wanting to protect his son, relents and wishes for the video to not be released. When Salehi refuses, Rahim fights him outside until he eventually deletes it. The following morning, Farkondeh and Siavash accompany Rahim back to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.


title: A Hero

text: Memento Films shopped the rights to the script by Farhadi during the 2020 European Film Market in Berlin. The film entered pre-production in June 2020 and filmed through December 2020. Production took place in Shiraz. In April 2021, it was revealed that Amazon Studios had acquired rights to distribute the film in the United States.


title: A Hero

text: The film had its premiere at 2021 Cannes Film Festival on 13 July 2021, as it was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the festival. It is also selected as closing film of the 52nd International Film Festival of India to be screened on 28 November 2021.


title: A Hero

text: "A Hero" was inspired by the story of Mohammad Reza Shokri, a man who returned a bag of cash he found while on a leave from a debtors' prison in Shiraz, although Farhadi has stated in interviews that it "was not inspired by a specific news item". Azadeh Masihzadeh made a documentary about Shokri from 2014 to 2015, when she attended a workshop taught by Farhadi on documentary filmmaking at the Karnameh Institute in Tehran. In the course, Farhadi assigned his students to research and film a documentary about people who had found and returned valuable objects to their original owners. According to Masihzadeh, while most students in the class took subjects from a list of excerpts from news media Farhadi provided them with, she decided to work in her hometown of Shiraz to save expenses, and an acquaintance told her that she saw a news story about Shokri on local television. Masihzadeh then went to a local newspaper and the TV station that aired the news, obtained permission to film in prison, and met Shokri. Farhadi saw rushes and gave her notes at five sessions over six months. Five projects in the workshop, including Masihzadeh's, were to be consolidated into one film, with Farhadi's involvement obscured so as not to raise too much expectation. Masihzadeh obtained permission from Farhadi to screen her film by itself. Under the title "All Winners, All Losers", the film screened at the Shiraz Arts Festival in 2018, where it won the Special Jury Prize. Later, Masihzadeh was told that the collective film had finally been completed and that her segment would not be included if she continued screening her film. With the understanding that Farhadi's name would appear in the credits, she agreed to withdraw her film from festivals.


title: A Hero

text: In August 2019, when Masihzadeh was enrolled in a screenwriting workshop by Farhadi at the Bamdad Institute in Tehran, Farhadi asked Masihzadeh to sign a document stating that the idea for "All Winners, All Losers" belonged to Farhadi. In the presence of Parisa Bakhtavar, his wife and director of the institute, and secretary Farideh Shafiei, Masihzadeh obliged, which she has since said she did under pressure. A lawyer for Memento Films, the French producer and distributor of "A Hero", later pointed out that the document had no legal value as "ideas and concepts are not protected by copyright".


title: A Hero

text: In late 2020, Masihzadeh learned that Farhadi was making a film in Shiraz, and tried, in vain, to contact him in the city. After learning the plot of "A Hero" when it was announced to be in Cannes competition, Masihzadeh sent five people to watch the film at Cannes and report back. She estimated a 70% resemblance based on their report and began posting similarities they spotted on Instagram under the hashtag #a_hero.


title: A Hero

text: In September 2021, Masihzadeh's lawyer sent Farhadi a message stating that her intellectual property rights had been violated and requesting "dialogue and negotiation". A month later, a meeting was held at the , where Farhadi's lawyer told Masihzadeh that she had committed the crime of defamation and that a complaint would be filed against her if she did not delete her Instagram posts. Another meeting took place two days later, this time with Farhadi in attendance, and he accused Masihzadeh of lying and being ungrateful. Farhadi offered to mention her in the end credits as a researcher and pay her roughly $1,600, while she requested that opening credits state "A Hero" was based on her film and that she share in the film's revenue. The House of Cinema's arbitration council issued a decision concluding that Masihzadeh's claim was false.


title: A Hero

text: In early November 2021, Farhadi filed a criminal complaint with the , accusing Masihzadeh of defamation and spreading misinformation. On November 30, 2021, Masihzadeh filed a counterclaim, accusing Farhadi of plagiarism, intellectual property theft, and "illegitimate gains by fraud or abuse of privilege". In January 2022, Farhadi filed another complaint accusing Masihzadeh of defamation and misinformation, in regard to her claim that she was coerced to sign a statement. Masihzadeh claimed that she discovered the story herself and that it had not been reported in national media at the time, while Farhadi's lawyer argued that the story had already been reported in media. The manager of the workshop has told media that she shares Masihzadeh's recollection. A fellow student who attended the workshop also testified in support of Masihzadeh in court, while some other students have signed a statement in support of Farhadi denying the allegation. Masihzadeh faced up to one year in prison or 74 lashes, though corporal punishment is rare for first offenders and the prison time may be avoided by paying fines.


title: A Hero

text: Masihzadeh found 56 similarities between her film and "A Hero", 49 of which had not been reported in the press, such as the original owner of the money discovering the notice at a bank, her husband's unawareness of the loss of the money, and prison staff's improved treatment of Shokri after he returned the money.


title: A Hero

text: In March 2022, the magistrate for the case issued an opinion finding merit in Masihzadeh's claims, and indicted Farhadi and referred the case to a criminal court, while dismissing Farhadi's complaints and Masizadeh's claim to revenue. On 4 April 2022, "The Hollywood Reporter" erroneously reported that Farhadi had been convicted, which he could not appeal, only to issue a correction stating that he had been merely indicted and that the case would now move to a second judge, whose ruling may still be appealed. Farhadi has denied the charges in the criminal proceedings.


title: A Hero

text: In November 2021, Masihzadeh met Shokri in prison in Shiraz and, with permission, took him to a screening of "A Hero", which she had bought out. Shokri saw the film in shackles and handcuffed. He was particularly offended by the film's inclusion of the protagonist's son with stuttering, as he had a brother who had difficulty speaking, who had died after the making of the documentary and whom Shokri had asked Masihzadeh not to film so as not to arouse pity. Shokri filed a complaint against Farhadi for defamation and revelation of personal information, among other charges, stating that he had granted Masihzadeh an exclusive permission to depict his story. The magistrate dismissed the complaint.


title: Cognitive science

text: Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."


title: Cognitive science

text: The goal of cognitive science is to understand and formulate the principles of intelligence with the hope that this will lead to a better comprehension of the mind and of learning.


title: Cognitive science

text: The cognitive sciences began as an intellectual movement in the 1950s often referred to as the cognitive revolution.


title: Cognitive science

text: The cognitive sciences began as an intellectual movement in the 1950s, called the cognitive revolution. Cognitive science has a prehistory traceable back to ancient Greek philosophical texts (see Plato's "Meno" and Aristotle's "De Anima"); Modernist philosophers such as Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Cabanis, Leibniz and John Locke, rejected scholasticism while mostly having never read Aristotle, and they were working with an entirely different set of tools and core concepts than those of the cognitive scientist.


title: Cognitive science

text: The modern culture of cognitive science can be traced back to the early cyberneticists in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who sought to understand the organizing principles of the mind. McCulloch and Pitts developed the first variants of what are now known as artificial neural networks, models of computation inspired by the structure of biological neural networks.


title: Cognitive science

text: Another precursor was the early development of the theory of computation and the digital computer in the 1940s and 1950s. Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann were instrumental in these developments. The modern computer, or Von Neumann machine, would play a central role in cognitive science, both as a metaphor for the mind, and as a tool for investigation.


title: Cognitive science

text: The first instance of cognitive science experiments being done at an academic institution took place at MIT Sloan School of Management, established by J.C.R. Licklider working within the psychology department and conducting experiments using computer memory as models for human cognition.


title: Cognitive science

text: In 1959, Noam Chomsky published a scathing review of B. F. Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior". At the time, Skinner's behaviorist paradigm dominated the field of psychology within the United States. Most psychologists focused on functional relations between stimulus and response, without positing internal representations. Chomsky argued that in order to explain language, we needed a theory like generative grammar, which not only attributed internal representations but characterized their underlying order.


title: Cognitive science

text: The term "cognitive science" was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of artificial intelligence research. In the same decade, the journal "Cognitive Science" and the Cognitive Science Society were founded. The founding meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was held at the University of California, San Diego in 1979, which resulted in cognitive science becoming an internationally visible enterprise. In 1972, Hampshire College started the first undergraduate education program in Cognitive Science, led by Neil Stillings. In 1982, with assistance from Professor Stillings, Vassar College became the first institution in the world to grant an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science. In 1986, the first Cognitive Science Department in the world was founded at the University of California, San Diego.


title: Cognitive science

text: In the 1970s and early 1980s, as access to computers increased, artificial intelligence research expanded. Researchers such as Marvin Minsky would write computer programs in languages such as LISP to attempt to formally characterize the steps that human beings went through, for instance, in making decisions and solving problems, in the hope of better understanding human thought, and also in the hope of creating artificial minds. This approach is known as "symbolic AI".


title: Cognitive science

text: Eventually the limits of the symbolic AI research program became apparent. For instance, it seemed to be unrealistic to comprehensively list human knowledge in a form usable by a symbolic computer program. The late 80s and 90s saw the rise of neural networks and connectionism as a research paradigm. Under this point of view, often attributed to James McClelland and David Rumelhart, the mind could be characterized as a set of complex associations, represented as a layered network. Critics argue that there are some phenomena which are better captured by symbolic models, and that connectionist models are often so complex as to have little explanatory power. Recently symbolic and connectionist models have been combined, making it possible to take advantage of both forms of explanation. While both connectionism and symbolic approaches have proven useful for testing various hypotheses and exploring approaches to understanding aspects of cognition and lower level brain functions, neither are biologically realistic and therefore, both suffer from a lack of neuroscientific plausibility. Connectionism has proven useful for exploring computationally how cognition emerges in development and occurs in the human brain, and has provided alternatives to strictly domain-specific / domain general approaches. For example, scientists such as Jeff Elman, Liz Bates, and Annette Karmiloff-Smith have posited that networks in the brain emerge from the dynamic interaction between them and environmental input.


title: Cognitive science

text: A central tenet of cognitive science is that a complete understanding of the mind/brain cannot be attained by studying only a single level. An example would be the problem of remembering a phone number and recalling it later. One approach to understanding this process would be to study behavior through direct observation, or naturalistic observation. A person could be presented with a phone number and be asked to recall it after some delay of time; then the accuracy of the response could be measured. Another approach to measure cognitive ability would be to study the firings of individual neurons while a person is trying to remember the phone number. Neither of these experiments on its own would fully explain how the process of remembering a phone number works. Even if the technology to map out every neuron in the brain in real-time were available and it were known when each neuron fired it would still be impossible to know how a particular firing of neurons translates into the observed behavior. Thus an understanding of how these two levels relate to each other is imperative. Francisco Varela, in "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience", argues that "the new sciences of the mind need to enlarge their horizon to encompass both lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience". On the classic cognitivist view, this can be provided by a functional level account of the process. Studying a particular phenomenon from multiple levels creates a better understanding of the processes that occur in the brain to give rise to a particular behavior.


title: Cognitive science

text: Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field with contributors from various fields, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology and biology. Cognitive scientists work collectively in hope of understanding the mind and its interactions with the surrounding world much like other sciences do. The field regards itself as compatible with the physical sciences and uses the scientific method as well as simulation or modeling, often comparing the output of models with aspects of human cognition. Similarly to the field of psychology, there is some doubt whether there is a unified cognitive science, which have led some researchers to prefer 'cognitive sciences' in plural.


title: Cognitive science

text: Many, but not all, who consider themselves cognitive scientists hold a functionalist view of the mind—the view that mental states and processes should be explained by their function – what they do. According to the multiple realizability account of functionalism, even non-human systems such as robots and computers can be ascribed as having cognition.


title: Cognitive science

text: The term "cognitive" in "cognitive science" is used for "any kind of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). This conceptualization is very broad, and should not be confused with how "cognitive" is used in some traditions of analytic philosophy, where "cognitive" has to do only with formal rules and truth conditional semantics.


title: Cognitive science

text: The earliest entries for the word ""cognitive"" in the OED take it to mean roughly ""pertaining to the action or process of knowing"". The first entry, from 1586, shows the word was at one time used in the context of discussions of Platonic theories of knowledge. Most in cognitive science, however, presumably do not believe their field is the study of anything as certain as the knowledge sought by Plato.


title: Cognitive science

text: Cognitive science is a large field, and covers a wide array of topics on cognition. However, it should be recognized that cognitive science has not always been equally concerned with every topic that might bear relevance to the nature and operation of minds. Classical cognitivists have largely de-emphasized or avoided social and cultural factors, embodiment, emotion, consciousness, animal cognition, and comparative and evolutionary psychologies. However, with the decline of behaviorism, internal states such as affects and emotions, as well as awareness and covert attention became approachable again. For example, situated and embodied cognition theories take into account the current state of the environment as well as the role of the body in cognition. With the newfound emphasis on information processing, observable behavior was no longer the hallmark of psychological theory, but the modeling or recording of mental states.


title: Cognitive science

text: Below are some of the main topics that cognitive science is concerned with. This is not an exhaustive list. See List of cognitive science topics for a list of various aspects of the field.


title: Cognitive science

text: Artificial intelligence (AI) involves the study of cognitive phenomena in machines. One of the practical goals of AI is to implement aspects of human intelligence in computers. Computers are also widely used as a tool with which to study cognitive phenomena. Computational modeling uses simulations to study how human intelligence may be structured. (See .)


title: Cognitive science

text: There is some debate in the field as to whether the mind is best viewed as a huge array of small but individually feeble elements (i.e. neurons), or as a collection of higher-level structures such as symbols, schemes, plans, and rules. The former view uses connectionism to study the mind, whereas the latter emphasizes symbolic artificial intelligence. One way to view the issue is whether it is possible to accurately simulate a human brain on a computer without accurately simulating the neurons that make up the human brain.


title: Cognitive science

text: Attention is the selection of important information. The human mind is bombarded with millions of stimuli and it must have a way of deciding which of this information to process. Attention is sometimes seen as a spotlight, meaning one can only shine the light on a particular set of information. Experiments that support this metaphor include the dichotic listening task (Cherry, 1957) and studies of inattentional blindness (Mack and Rock, 1998). In the dichotic listening task, subjects are bombarded with two different messages, one in each ear, and told to focus on only one of the messages. At the end of the experiment, when asked about the content of the unattended message, subjects cannot report it.


title: Cognitive science

text: Embodied cognition approaches to cognitive science emphasize the role of body and environment in cognition. This includes both neural and extra-neural bodily processes, and factors that range from affective and emotional processes, to posture, motor control, proprioception, and kinaesthesis, to autonomic processes that involve heartbeat and respiration, to the role of the enteric gut microbiome. It also includes accounts of how the body engages with or is coupled to social and physical environments. 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) cognition includes a broad range of views about brain-body-environment interaction, from causal embeddedness to stronger claims about how the mind extends to include tools and instruments, as well as the role of social interactions, action-oriented processes, and affordances. 4E theories range from those closer to classic cognitivism (so-called "weak" embodied cognition) to stronger extended and enactive versions that are sometimes referred to as radical embodied cognitive science.


title: Cognitive science

text: The ability to learn and understand language is an extremely complex process. Language is acquired within the first few years of life, and all humans under normal circumstances are able to acquire language proficiently. A major driving force in the theoretical linguistic field is discovering the nature that language must have in the abstract in order to be learned in such a fashion. Some of the driving research questions in studying how the brain itself processes language include: (1) To what extent is linguistic knowledge innate or learned?, (2) Why is it more difficult for adults to acquire a second-language than it is for infants to acquire their first-language?, and (3) How are humans able to understand novel sentences?


title: Cognitive science

text: The study of language processing ranges from the investigation of the sound patterns of speech to the meaning of words and whole sentences. Linguistics often divides language processing into orthography, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Many aspects of language can be studied from each of these components and from their interaction.


title: Cognitive science

text: The study of language processing in "cognitive science" is closely tied to the field of linguistics. Linguistics was traditionally studied as a part of the humanities, including studies of history, art and literature. In the last fifty years or so, more and more researchers have studied knowledge and use of language as a cognitive phenomenon, the main problems being how knowledge of language can be acquired and used, and what precisely it consists of. Linguists have found that, while humans form sentences in ways apparently governed by very complex systems, they are remarkably unaware of the rules that govern their own speech. Thus linguists must resort to indirect methods to determine what those rules might be, if indeed rules as such exist. In any event, if speech is indeed governed by rules, they appear to be opaque to any conscious consideration.


title: Cognitive science

text: Learning and development are the processes by which we acquire knowledge and information over time. Infants are born with little or no knowledge (depending on how knowledge is defined), yet they rapidly acquire the ability to use language, walk, and recognize people and objects. Research in learning and development aims to explain the mechanisms by which these processes might take place.


title: Cognitive science

text: A major question in the study of cognitive development is the extent to which certain abilities are innate or learned. This is often framed in terms of the nature and nurture debate. The nativist view emphasizes that certain features are innate to an organism and are determined by its genetic endowment. The empiricist view, on the other hand, emphasizes that certain abilities are learned from the environment. Although clearly both genetic and environmental input is needed for a child to develop normally, considerable debate remains about "how" genetic information might guide cognitive development. In the area of language acquisition, for example, some (such as Steven Pinker) have argued that specific information containing universal grammatical rules must be contained in the genes, whereas others (such as Jeffrey Elman and colleagues in Rethinking Innateness) have argued that Pinker's claims are biologically unrealistic. They argue that genes determine the architecture of a learning system, but that specific "facts" about how grammar works can only be learned as a result of experience.


title: Cognitive science

text: Memory allows us to store information for later retrieval. Memory is often thought of as consisting of both a long-term and short-term store. Long-term memory allows us to store information over prolonged periods (days, weeks, years). We do not yet know the practical limit of long-term memory capacity. Short-term memory allows us to store information over short time scales (seconds or minutes).


title: Cognitive science

text: Memory is also often grouped into declarative and procedural forms. Declarative memory—grouped into subsets of semantic and episodic forms of memory—refers to our memory for facts and specific knowledge, specific meanings, and specific experiences (e.g. "Are apples food?", or "What did I eat for breakfast four days ago?"). Procedural memory allows us to remember actions and motor sequences (e.g. how to ride a bicycle) and is often dubbed implicit knowledge or memory .


title: Cognitive science

text: Cognitive scientists study memory just as psychologists do, but tend to focus more on how memory bears on cognitive processes, and the interrelationship between cognition and memory. One example of this could be, what mental processes does a person go through to retrieve a long-lost memory? Or, what differentiates between the cognitive process of recognition (seeing hints of something before remembering it, or memory in context) and recall (retrieving a memory, as in "fill-in-the-blank")?


title: Cognitive science

text: Perception is the ability to take in information via the senses, and process it in some way. Vision and hearing are two dominant senses that allow us to perceive the environment. Some questions in the study of visual perception, for example, include: (1) How are we able to recognize objects?, (2) Why do we perceive a continuous visual environment, even though we only see small bits of it at any one time? One tool for studying visual perception is by looking at how people process optical illusions. The image on the right of a Necker cube is an example of a bistable percept, that is, the cube can be interpreted as being oriented in two different directions.


title: Cognitive science

text: The study of haptic (tactile), olfactory, and gustatory stimuli also fall into the domain of perception.


title: Cognitive science

text: Action is taken to refer to the output of a system. In humans, this is accomplished through motor responses. Spatial planning and movement, speech production, and complex motor movements are all aspects of action.


title: Cognitive science

text: Many different methodologies are used to study cognitive science. As the field is highly interdisciplinary, research often cuts across multiple areas of study, drawing on research methods from psychology, neuroscience, computer science and systems theory.


title: Cognitive science

text: In order to have a description of what constitutes intelligent behavior, one must study behavior itself. This type of research is closely tied to that in cognitive psychology and psychophysics. By measuring behavioral responses to different stimuli, one can understand something about how those stimuli are processed. Lewandowski & Strohmetz (2009) reviewed a collection of innovative uses of behavioral measurement in psychology including behavioral traces, behavioral observations, and behavioral choice. Behavioral traces are pieces of evidence that indicate behavior occurred, but the actor is not present (e.g., litter in a parking lot or readings on an electric meter). Behavioral observations involve the direct witnessing of the actor engaging in the behavior (e.g., watching how close a person sits next to another person). Behavioral choices are when a person selects between two or more options (e.g., voting behavior, choice of a punishment for another participant).


title: Cognitive science

text: Brain imaging involves analyzing activity within the brain while performing various tasks. This allows us to link behavior and brain function to help understand how information is processed. Different types of imaging techniques vary in their temporal (time-based) and spatial (location-based) resolution. Brain imaging is often used in cognitive neuroscience.


title: Cognitive science

text: Computational models require a mathematically and logically formal representation of a problem. Computer models are used in the simulation and experimental verification of different specific and general properties of intelligence. Computational modeling can help us understand the functional organization of a particular cognitive phenomenon.


title: Cognitive science

text: Approaches to cognitive modeling can be categorized as: (1) symbolic, on abstract mental functions of an intelligent mind by means of symbols; (2) subsymbolic, on the neural and associative properties of the human brain; and (3) across the symbolic–subsymbolic border, including hybrid.


title: Cognitive science

text: All the above approaches tend either to be generalized to the form of integrated computational models of a synthetic/abstract intelligence (i.e. cognitive architecture) in order to be applied to the explanation and improvement of individual and social/organizational decision-making and reasoning or to focus on single simulative programs (or microtheories/"middle-range" theories) modelling specific cognitive faculties (e.g. vision, language, categorization etc.).


title: Cognitive science

text: Research methods borrowed directly from neuroscience and neuropsychology can also help us to understand aspects of intelligence. These methods allow us to understand how intelligent behavior is implemented in a physical system.


title: Cognitive science

text: Cognitive science has given rise to models of human cognitive bias and risk perception, and has been influential in the development of behavioral finance, part of economics. It has also given rise to a new theory of the philosophy of mathematics (related to denotational mathematics), and many theories of artificial intelligence, persuasion and coercion. It has made its presence known in the philosophy of language and epistemology as well as constituting a substantial wing of modern linguistics. Fields of cognitive science have been influential in understanding the brain's particular functional systems (and functional deficits) ranging from speech production to auditory processing and visual perception. It has made progress in understanding how damage to particular areas of the brain affect cognition, and it has helped to uncover the root causes and results of specific dysfunction, such as dyslexia, anopia, and hemispatial neglect.


title: Cognitive science

text: Some of the more recognized names in cognitive science are usually either the most controversial or the most cited. Within philosophy, some familiar names include Daniel Dennett, who writes from a computational systems perspective, John Searle, known for his controversial Chinese room argument, and Jerry Fodor, who advocates functionalism.


title: Cognitive science

text: Others include David Chalmers, who advocates Dualism and is also known for articulating the hard problem of consciousness, and Douglas Hofstadter, famous for writing "Gödel, Escher, Bach", which questions the nature of words and thought.


title: Cognitive science

text: In the realm of linguistics, Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff have been influential (both have also become notable as political commentators). In artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, Herbert A. Simon, and Allen Newell are prominent.


title: Cognitive science

text: Popular names in the discipline of psychology include George A. Miller, James McClelland, Philip Johnson-Laird, Lawrence Barsalou, Vittorio Guidano, Howard Gardner and Steven Pinker. Anthropologists Dan Sperber, Edwin Hutchins, Bradd Shore, James Wertsch and Scott Atran, have been involved in collaborative projects with cognitive and social psychologists, political scientists and evolutionary biologists in attempts to develop general theories of culture formation, religion, and political association.


title: Cognitive science

text: Computational theories (with models and simulations) have also been developed, by David Rumelhart, James McClelland and Philip Johnson-Laird.


title: Cognitive science

text: Epistemics is a term coined in 1969 by the University of Edinburgh with the foundation of its School of Epistemics. Epistemics is to be distinguished from epistemology in that epistemology is the philosophical theory of knowledge, whereas epistemics signifies the scientific study of knowledge.


title: Cognitive science

text: Christopher Longuet-Higgins has defined it as "the construction of formal models of the processes (perceptual, intellectual, and linguistic) by which knowledge and understanding are achieved and communicated."


title: Cognitive science

text: In his 1978 essay "Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition", Alvin I. Goldman claims to have coined the term "epistemics" to describe a reorientation of epistemology. Goldman maintains that his epistemics is continuous with traditional epistemology and the new term is only to avoid opposition. Epistemics, in Goldman's version, differs only slightly from traditional epistemology in its alliance with the psychology of cognition; epistemics stresses the detailed study of mental processes and information-processing mechanisms that lead to knowledge or beliefs.


title: Cognitive science

text: In the mid-1980s, the School of Epistemics was renamed as The Centre for Cognitive Science (CCS). In 1998, CCS was incorporated into the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics.


title: Cognitive science

text: One of the core aims of cognitive science is to achieve an integrated theory of cognition. This requires integrative mechanisms explaining how the information processing that occurs simultaneously in spatially segregated (sub-)cortical areas in the brain is coordinated and bound together to give rise to coherent perceptual and symbolic representations. One approach is to solve this "Binding problem" (that is, the problem of dynamically representing conjunctions of informational elements, from the most basic perceptual representations ("feature binding") to the most complex cognitive representations, like symbol structures ("variable binding")), by means of integrative synchronization mechanisms. In other words, one of the coordinating mechanisms appears to be the temporal (phase) synchronization of neural activity based on dynamical self-organizing processes in neural networks, described by the Binding-by-synchrony (BBS) Hypothesis from neurophysiology. Connectionist cognitive neuroarchitectures have been developed that use integrative synchronization mechanisms to solve this binding problem in perceptual cognition and in language cognition. In perceptual cognition the problem is to explain how elementary object properties and object relations, like the object color or the object form, can be dynamically bound together or can be integrated to a representation of this perceptual object by means of a synchronization mechanism ("feature binding", "feature linking"). In language cognition the problem is to explain how semantic concepts and syntactic roles can be dynamically bound together or can be integrated to complex cognitive representations like systematic and compositional symbol structures and propositions by means of a synchronization mechanism ("variable binding") (see also the "Symbolism vs. connectionism debate" in connectionism).


title: Pornography (album)

text: Pornography is the fourth studio album by English Gothic rock band The Cure, released on 3 May 1982 by Fiction Records. Preceded by the non-album single "Charlotte Sometimes", it was the band's first album with new producer Phil Thornalley, and was recorded at RAK Studios from January to April 1982. The sessions saw the band on the brink of collapse, with heavy drug use, band in-fighting, and frontman Robert Smith's depression fueling the album's musical and lyrical content. "Pornography" represents the conclusion of the Cure's early dark, gloomy musical phase, which began with their second album "Seventeen Seconds" (1980).


title: Pornography (album)

text: Following its release, bassist Simon Gallup left the band, and the Cure switched to a much brighter and more radio-friendly new wave sound. Although it was poorly received by critics at the time of release, "Pornography" was the Cure's most popular album to date, reaching number eight on the UK Albums Chart. It has since gone on to gain acclaim from critics, and is now considered an important milestone in the development of the style of music known as gothic rock.


title: Pornography (album)

text: Following the band's previous album, 1981's "Faith", the non-album single "Charlotte Sometimes" was released. The single, in particular its nightmarish and hallucinatory B-side "Splintered in Her Head", would hint at what was to come in "Pornography".


title: Pornography (album)

text: In the words of Robert Smith, regarding the album's conception, "I had two choices at the time, which were either completely giving in [committing suicide] or making a record of it and getting it out of me". He also claims he "really thought that was it for the group. I had every intention of signing off. I wanted to make the ultimate 'fuck off' record, and then sign off [the band]". Smith was mentally exhausted during that period of time: "I was in a really depressed frame of mind between 1981 and 1982". The band "had been touring for about 200 days a year and it all got a bit too much because there was never any time to do anything else".


title: Pornography (album)

text: The band, Smith in particular, wanted to make the album with a different producer than Mike Hedges, who had produced "Seventeen Seconds" and "Faith". According to Lol Tolhurst, Smith and Tolhurst briefly met with the producer Conny Plank at Fiction's offices in the hopes of having him produce the album since they were both fans of his work with Kraftwerk, however, the group soon settled on Phil Thornalley. "Pornography" is the last Cure album to feature Tolhurst as the band's drummer (he then became the band's keyboardist), and also marked the first time he played keyboards on a Cure release. The album was recorded at RAK Studios from January to April 1982.


title: Pornography (album)

text: On the album's recording sessions, Smith noted "there was a lot of drugs involved". The band took LSD and drank a lot of alcohol, and to save money, they slept in the office of their record label. The musicians usually turned up at eight, and left at midday looking "fairly deranged". Smith related: "We had an arrangement with the off-licence up the road, every night they would bring in supplies. We decided we weren't going to throw anything out. We built this mountain of empties in the corner, a gigantic pile of debris in the corner. It just grew and grew". According to Tolhurst, "we wanted to make the ultimate, intense album. I can't remember exactly why, but we did". The recording sessions commenced and concluded in three weeks. Smith noted, "At the time, I lost every friend I had, everyone, without exception, because I was incredibly obnoxious, appalling, self-centred". He also noted that with the album, he "channelled all the self-destructive elements of my personality into doing something".


title: Pornography (album)

text: Polydor Records, the company in charge of Fiction, was initially displeased with the album's title, which it saw as being potentially offensive.


title: Pornography (album)

text: Regarding the album's musical style, "NME" reviewer Dave Hill wrote, "The drums, guitars, voice and production style are pressed scrupulously together in a murderous unity of surging, textured mood". Hill further described it as "Phil Spector in Hell". "Trouser Press" said about the track "A Short Term Effect": it "stresses ephemeralness with Smith's echo-laden voice decelerating at the end of each phrase". Ira Robbins observed that "the song closest to basic pop" is "A Strange Day": It "has overdubbed backing vocals plus a delineated verse and chorus wrapped in some strangely consonant guitar figures". The journalist also commented: the song "Cold" "gets the full gothic treatment", with "grandiose minor-mode organ swells". Describing the title track, writer Dave McCullough said that it "tries to copy Cabaret Voltaire, all shuddering tape noise".


title: Pornography (album)

text: Smith said that "the reference point" for "Pornography" was the Psychedelic Furs' self-titled debut album, which he noted "had, like, a density of sound, really powerful". Smith also cited Siouxsie and the Banshees as "a massive influence on me [...] They were the group who led me towards doing "Pornography". They drew something out of me". In 1982, Smith also said that the "records he'd take into the bunker after the big bang", were "Desertshore" by Nico, "Music for Films" by Brian Eno, "" / "Are You Experienced" by Jimi Hendrix, "Twenty Golden Greats" by Frank Sinatra and "The Early Piano Works" by Erik Satie.


title: Pornography (album)

text: "Pornography" was released on 3 May 1982. The album debuted and peaked at No. 8 on the UK Albums Chart, staying on the chart for nine weeks. Fiction owner Chris Parry found "The Hanging Garden" to be the album's only potential single, and after being "polished" by Thornalley and Smith, it was released as a single on 12 July, reaching No. 32 on the UK Singles Chart.


title: Pornography (album)

text: Despite the commercial performance of the album, "Pornography" was not well received by most music critics upon its release. "NME" reviewer Dave Hill was ambivalent towards the album, writing that while he found the lyrics "tiresomely self-analytical," the album "portrays and parades its currency of exposed futility and utterly naked fear with so few distractions or adornments, and so little sense of shame. It really piles it on. The Cure have applied themselves to catching a related collection of the very purest feelings endemic to their age, and holding them right on the spot in their intangible, unspecified, unmanageable and most unpleasantly real form." Adam Sweeting of "Melody Maker" wrote: "It's downhill all the way, into ever-darkening shadows... passing through chilly marbled archways to the final rendezvous with the cold comfort of the slab". Dave McCullough of "Sounds" felt that despite a "genuine talent still at work", "Pornography" "has too much music too cluttered a backing for Smith's well-intended observance [...] Robert Smith seems locked in himself, a spiralling nightmare that leaves The Cure making a pompous sounding music that is, when all's said and done, dryly meaningless". Robert Christgau, writing in "The Village Voice", derided Smith's "glum" lyrics: "Cheer up; look on the bright side. You got your contract, right? And your synthesizers, bet you'll have fun with them. Believe me, kid, it will pass." "Rolling Stone" critic J. D. Considine commented that the lyrics seem "stuck in the terminal malaise of adolescent existentialism", concluding, ""Pornography" comes off as the aural equivalent of a bad toothache. It isn't the pain that irks, it's the persistent dullness". "Trouser Press" Charles McCardell, on the other hand, found that the Cure "imposes an order that at first seems contrary to the basic preconceptions of rock 'n' roll" – noting that "for them, lyrics are everything" and that instruments had been relegated to "merely creating atmosphere" – and hailed "Pornography" as an "uncompromising and challenging" work.


title: Pornography (album)

text: Retrospective views of "Pornography" have been more favourable. In his biography of the Cure, "Never Enough: The Story of the Cure", Jeff Apter wrote that it "turned out to be the kind of album—just like Lou Reed's "Berlin" or Bowie's coke-fueled "Low"—that required some distance and a good few years of music history to be really appreciated". In 1995, Mark Coleman of "Rolling Stone" noted that "Pornography" had come to be "revered by Cureheads as a masterstroke", while noting that "normal listeners will probably find it impenetrable". Stewart Mason of AllMusic found it to be "much better than most mainstream critics of the time thought", but at the same time "not the masterpiece some fans have claimed it to be" and "just a bit too uneven to be considered a classic". In 2004, Jaime Gill of BBC Music singled out the album's "sonic depth and sheer relentless conviction" for praise, adding that without these qualities, its "extraordinary misanthropy would be laughable". "Uncut" called "Pornography" "a masterpiece of claustrophobic self-loathing."


title: Pornography (album)

text: In 2000, "Pornography" was voted No. 183 in Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums". In 2005, "Spin" cited the album as a "high-water mark for goth's musical evolution". "NME" described "Pornography" as "arguably the album that invented goth". "Slant Magazine" listed the album at No. 79 on its list of the best albums of the 1980s. In 2011, "NME" listed "Pornography" at No. 6 on its "50 Darkest Albums Ever" list. "Mojo" placed it at No. 83 on its list of "100 Records That Changed the World". In his review for AllMusic, Stewart Mason also described the record as "one of the key goth rock albums of the '80s".


title: Pornography (album)

text: According to Apter, "Pornography" would prove to be "enormously influential", and has been cited as an influence by bands such as Deftones and System of a Down.


title: Pornography (album)

text: In 2017, Damnation A.D. released a cover version of the entire album. Xiu Xiu and Chelsea Wolfe covered "One Hundred Years" on Xiu Xiu's 2021 album "Oh No".


title: Pornography (album)

text: In the period preceding and following the release of "Pornography", the band started to develop their trademark image of big hair, smudged makeup and black clothes. Smith applied lipstick smeared around the eyes and the mouth. Under the lights, the lipstick melted, making it look, as Smith later put it "like we'd been smacked in the face". It was supposed to symbolise the violence of the new material but backstage, another kind of violence had begun to surface from the first dates of the tour.


title: Pornography (album)

text: The band performed in the UK in April 1982. "NME" considered that the show "was all very skillfully deployed: a bruisingly clear sound of scathing force, a clockwork, Pavlovian lightshow, a variegation of light and shade in the song order that builds to the unmitigating force of 'Pornography' itself as the climax". However, the mood on stage was not good: The journalist noted that Smith looked "dejected and tired" for his birthday. Behind the scene, Smith's relationship with Gallup was deteriorating. When the tour reached Europe, tension was so high between the two musicians that they had a fight after a concert in Strasbourg. Tolhurst found out the next day that his two partners "had both gone back to England". At home, Smith heard his father telling him: "Get right back out on that tour! People have bought tickets!" After two more weeks of touring, the band played their final show in Brussels. Tolhurst later related: "I remember sitting in the dressing room thinking, 'oh well, that's the end of the band, then' [...] I went off to France for a bit. I guess I ran away. Escaping from the reality of The Cure". Back in England, Smith took a rest with a month's camping holiday to the Lake District to "clean up".


title: Printing

text: Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The earliest known form of printing as applied to paper was woodblock printing, which appeared in China before 220 AD for cloth printing. However, it would not be applied to paper until the seventh century. Later developments in printing technology include the movable type invented by Bi Sheng around 1040 AD and the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. The technology of printing played a key role in the development of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.


title: Printing

text: Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns that was used widely throughout East Asia. It originated in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later on paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 A.D.


title: Printing

text: The earliest surviving woodblock printed fragments are from China. They are of silk printed with flowers in three colours from the Han Dynasty (before 220 A.D.). The earliest examples of woodblock printing on paper appear in the mid-seventh century in China.


title: Printing

text: By the ninth century, printing on paper had taken off, and the first extant complete printed book containing its date is the Diamond Sutra (British Library) of 868. By the tenth century, 400,000 copies of some sutras and pictures were printed, and the Confucian classics were in print. A skilled printer could print up to 2,000 double-page sheets per day.


title: Printing

text: Printing spread early to Korea and Japan, which also used Chinese logograms, but the technique was also used in Turpan and Vietnam using a number of other scripts. This technique then spread to Persia and Russia. This technique was transmitted to Europe by around 1400 and was used on paper for old master prints and playing cards.


title: Printing

text: Block printing, called "tarsh" in Arabic, developed in Arabic Egypt during the ninth and tenth centuries, mostly for prayers and amulets. There is some evidence to suggest that these print blocks made from non-wood materials, possibly tin, lead, or clay. The techniques employed are uncertain. Block printing later went out of use in Islamic Timurid Renaissance. The printing technique in Egypt was embraced reproducing texts on paper strips and supplying them in different copies to meet the demand.


title: Printing

text: Block printing first came to Europe as a method for printing on cloth, where it was common by 1300. Images printed on cloth for religious purposes could be quite large and elaborate. When paper became relatively easily available, around 1400, the technique transferred very quickly to small woodcut religious images and playing cards printed on paper. These prints produced in very large numbers from about 1425 onward.


title: Printing

text: Around the mid-fifteenth-century, "block-books", woodcut books with both text and images, usually carved in the same block, emerged as a cheaper alternative to manuscripts and books printed with movable type. These were all short heavily illustrated works, the bestsellers of the day, repeated in many different block-book versions: the Ars moriendi and the Biblia pauperum were the most common. There is still some controversy among scholars as to whether their introduction preceded or, the majority view, followed the introduction of movable type, with the range of estimated dates being between about 1440 and 1460.


title: Printing

text: Movable type is the system of printing and typography using movable pieces of metal type, made by casting from matrices struck by letterpunches. Movable type allowed for much more flexible processes than hand copying or block printing.


title: Printing

text: Around 1040, the first known movable type system was created in China by Bi Sheng out of porcelain. Bi Sheng used clay type, which broke easily, but Wang Zhen by 1298 had carved a more durable type from wood. He also developed a complex system of revolving tables and number-association with written Chinese characters that made typesetting and printing more efficient. Still, the main method in use there remained woodblock printing (xylography), which "proved to be cheaper and more efficient for printing Chinese, with its thousands of characters".


title: Printing

text: Copper movable type printing originated in China at the beginning of the 12th century. It was used in large-scale printing of paper money


title: Printing

text: Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal type movable printing using bronze. The Jikji, published in 1377, is the earliest known metal printed book. Type-casting was used, adapted from the method of casting coins. The character was cut in beech wood, which was then pressed into a soft clay to form a mould, and bronze poured into the mould, and finally the type was polished. Eastern metal movable type was spread to Europe between the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The Korean form of metal movable type was described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as "extremely similar to Gutenberg's". Authoritative historians Frances Gies and Joseph Gies claimed that "The Asian priority of invention movable type is now firmly established, and that Chinese-Korean technique, or a report of it traveled westward is almost certain."


title: Printing

text: Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the first movable type printing system in Europe. He advanced innovations in casting type based on a matrix and hand mould, adaptations to the screw-press, the use of an oil-based ink, and the creation of a softer and more absorbent paper. Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin, antimony, copper and bismuth – the same components still used today. Johannes Gutenberg started work on his printing press around 1436, in partnership with Andreas Dritzehen – whom he had previously instructed in gem-cutting – and Andreas Heilmann, the owner of a paper mill.


title: Printing

text: Compared to woodblock printing, movable type page setting and printing using a press was faster and more durable. Also, the metal type pieces were sturdier and the lettering more uniform, leading to typography and fonts. The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible (1455) established the superiority of movable type for Western languages. The printing press rapidly spread across Europe, leading up to the Renaissance, and later all around the world.


title: Printing

text: Time Life magazine called Gutenberg's innovations in movable type printing the most important invention of the second millennium.


title: Printing

text: The rotary printing press was invented by Richard March Hoe in 1843. It uses impressions curved around a cylinder to print on long continuous rolls of paper or other substrates. Rotary drum printing was later significantly improved by William Bullock. There are multiple types of rotary printing press technologies that are still used today: sheetfed offset, rotogravure, and flexographic printing.


title: Printing

text: After the information has been prepared for production (the prepress step), each printing process has definitive means of separating the image from the non-image areas.


title: Printing

text: To print an image without a blank area around the image, the non-printing areas must be trimmed after printing. Crop marks can be used to show the printer where the printing area ends, and the non-printing area begins. The part of the image which is trimmed off is called bleed.


title: Printing

text: Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing. A worker composes and locks movable type into the bed of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type which creates an impression on the paper.


title: Printing

text: Letterpress printing was the normal form of printing text from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century and remained in wide use for books and other uses until the second half of the 20th century, when offset printing was developed. More recently, letterpress printing has seen a revival in an artisanal form.


title: Printing

text: Offset printing is a widely used modern printing process. This technology is best described as when a positive (right-reading) image on a printing plate is inked and transferred (or "offset") from the plate to a rubber blanket. The blanket image becomes a mirror image of the plate image. An offset transfer moves the image to a printing substrate (typically paper), making the image right-reading again. Offset printing uses a lithographic process which is based on the repulsion of oil and water. The offset process employs a flat (planographic) image carrier (plate) which is mounted on a press cylinder. The image to be printed obtains ink from ink rollers, while the non-printing area attracts an (acidic) film of water, keeping the non-image areas ink-free. Most offset presses use three cylinders: Plate, blanket, impression. Currently, most books and newspapers are printed using offset lithography.


title: Printing

text: Gravure printing is an intaglio printing technique, where the image being printed is made up of small depressions in the surface of the printing plate. The cells are filled with ink, and the excess is scraped off the surface with a doctor blade. Then a rubber-covered roller presses paper onto the surface of the plate and into contact with the ink in the cells. The printing cylinders are usually made from copper plated steel, which is subsequently chromed, and may be produced by diamond engraving; etching, or laser ablation.


title: Printing

text: Gravure printing is used for long, high-quality print runs such as magazines, mail-order catalogues, packaging and printing onto fabric and wallpaper. It is also used for printing postage stamps and decorative plastic laminates, such as kitchen worktops.


title: Printing

text: The process is used for flexible packaging, corrugated board, labels, newspapers and more. In this market it competes with gravure printing by holding 80% of the market in USA, 50% in Europe but only 20% in Asia.


title: Printing

text: It is estimated that following the innovation of Gutenberg's printing press, the European book output rose from a few million to around one billion copies within a span of less than four centuries.


title: Printing

text: Samuel Hartlib, who was exiled in Britain and enthusiastic about social and cultural reforms, wrote in 1641 that "the art of printing will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression".


title: Printing

text: In the Muslim world, printing, especially in Arabic scripts, was strongly opposed throughout the early modern period, partially due to the high artistic renown of the art of traditional calligraphy. However, printing in Hebrew or Armenian script was often permitted. Thus, the first movable type printing in the Ottoman Empire was in Hebrew in 1493, after which both religious and non-religious texts were able to be printed in Hebrew. According to an imperial ambassador to Istanbul in the middle of the sixteenth century, it was a sin for the Turks, particularly Turkish Muslims, to print religious books. In 1515, Sultan Selim I issued a decree under which the practice of printing would be punishable by death. At the end of the sixteenth century, Sultan Murad III permitted the sale of non-religious printed books in Arabic characters, yet the majority were imported from Italy. Ibrahim Muteferrika established the first press for printing in Arabic in the Ottoman Empire, against opposition from the calligraphers and parts of the Ulama. It operated until 1742, producing altogether seventeen works, all of which were concerned with non-religious, utilitarian matters. Printing did not become common in the Islamic world until the 19th century.


title: Printing

text: Hebrew language printers were banned from printing guilds in some Germanic states; as a result, Hebrew printing flourished in Italy, beginning in 1470 in Rome, then spreading to other cities including Bari, Pisa, Livorno, and Mantua. Local rulers had the authority to grant or revoke licenses to publish Hebrew books, and many of those printed during this period carry the words 'con licenza de superiori' (indicating their printing having been officially licensed) on their title pages.


title: Printing

text: It was thought that the introduction of printing 'would strengthen religion and enhance the power of monarchs.' The majority of books were of a religious nature, with the church and crown regulating the content. The consequences of printing 'wrong' material were extreme. Meyrowitz used the example of William Carter who in 1584 printed a pro-Catholic pamphlet in Protestant-dominated England. The consequence of his action was hanging.