title: Tempted (TV series)

text: The series had a mixed reception in South Korea, but was well-received internationally. The drama had an overall Nationwide average audience share of 3.2% according to TNmS and 2.2% according to Nielsen Korea. Internationally, "Tempted" recorded the highest figure in individual programs since the US-based subscription service Kocowa launched with a peak daily market share of 14.9%, and achieved a rating of 9.3/10 on the global premium licensed streaming site Viki. In South Korea the main criticisms were stated to be the failure of the writer and director to set the genre and script issues. According to the Good Data Corporation survey of TV, "Tempted" was ranked first place in online video consumption of all dramas airing in South Korea, first in the list of top 10 most talked about dramas, and Park Soo-young and Woo Do-hwan were ranked second and third respectively in the list of top 10 most talked about actors and actresses in South Korea. Despite the question of idol singers in lead roles, Park Soo-young was subsequently praised for her improvement and potential in acting after erasing her idol color as lead actress. Woo Do-hwan was also praised for his ability to express a wide range of emotions in the drama, with the first and second leads commended for inhabiting their characters with the material given.


title: Third-person shooter

text: Third-person shooter (TPS) is a subgenre of 3D shooter games in which the gameplay consists primarily of shooting. It is closely related to first-person shooters, but with the player character visible on-screen during play. While 2D shoot 'em up games also employ a third-person perspective, the TPS genre is distinguished by having the game presented with the player's avatar as a primary focus of the camera's view.


title: Third-person shooter

text: A third-person shooter is a game structured around shooting, and in which the player can see the avatar on-screen in a third-person view. Third-person shooters are distinguished from other shooter games that may present the game from a third-person view such as shoot 'me ups, as the game is presented with the player's avatar as a primary focus of the camera's view. Third-person shooters are analogous to first-person shooters in terms of immersion, but simply displace the camera from being at the eyes of the character to a point slightly above and behind them in most cases.


title: Third-person shooter

text: It is a 3D genre that grew to prominence during the 2000s, especially on game consoles. It features shooter game elements, sometimes combining these with the jumping and climbing elements of puzzle-based games and brawlers. Third-person shooter games sometimes incorporate an aim-assist feature to compensate for the difficulty of aiming from a third-person camera. Many include some form of first-person view, which allows precise shooting and looking around at environment features that are otherwise hidden from the default camera. In early examples of the genre, the player would often be required to stand still to use first-person view, but newer titles allow the player to play like a FPS.


title: Third-person shooter

text: These games are closely related to first-person shooters, which also tie the perspective of the player to an avatar, distinguished only in a minor change of position of the player camera. While the first-person perspective allows players to aim and shoot without their avatar blocking their view, the third-person shooter shows the protagonist from an "over the shoulder shot" or "behind the back" perspective. Thus, the third-person perspective allows the game designer to create a more strongly characterized avatar and directs the player's attention as in watching a film. In contrast, a first-person perspective provides the player with greater immersion into the game universe.


title: Third-person shooter

text: Third-person shooters allow players to see the area surrounding the avatar more clearly. This viewpoint facilitates more interaction between the character and their surrounding environment, such as the use of a tactical system in "Gears of War", or navigating tight quarters. As such, the third-person perspective is better for interacting with objects in the game world, such as jumping on platforms, engaging in close combat, or driving a vehicle. However, the third-person perspective can interfere with tasks that require fine aiming.


title: Third-person shooter

text: Third-person shooters sometimes compensate for their distinct perspective by designing larger, more spacious environments than first-person shooters.


title: Third-person shooter

text: The boundaries between third-person and first-person shooters are not always clear. For example, many third-person shooters allow the player to use a first-person viewpoint for challenges that require precise aiming, while others simply allow a player to freely switch between first and third-person perspectives at will. The first-person shooter "" was actually designed as a third-person shooter, but added a first-person perspective to improve the interface for aiming and shooting. The game switches to a third-person viewpoint when the avatar is piloting a vehicle, and this combination of first-person for aiming and third-person for driving has since been used in other games. "Metroid Prime" is another first-person shooter that switches to a third-person perspective when rolling around the environment using the morph ball. Many games in the genre such as the ARMA series and its descendants (including the popular battle-royale shooter PUBG) allow players to freely transition between first and third-person perspectives at will.


title: Third-person shooter

text: Alexander R. Galloway writes that the "real-time, over-the-shoulder tracking shots of Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" evoke third-person shooter games like "Max Payne", a close cousin of the FPS".


title: Third-person shooter

text: 2D third-person shooters have existed since the earliest days of video games, dating back to "Spacewar!" (1962); third-person perspective shooting is also featured in its clones, "Galaxy Game" (1971) and "Computer Space" (1971). Arcade shooters with a 3D third-person perspective include Nintendo's "Radar Scope" (1979), Atari's "Tempest" (1981), Nihon Bussan's "Tube Panic" (1983), Sega's "Space Harrier" (1985), Atari's "Xybots" (1987), and Square's "3-D WorldRunner" (1987). and "JJ" (1987) Third-person shooters for home computers include Dan Gorlin's "Airheart" (1986) and Paul Norman's "Beyond Forbidden Forest" (1986).


title: Third-person shooter

text: Konami's run & gun shooter "Contra" (1987) featured several third-person shooter levels where the player trudges through indoor enemy bases. Konami's "Devastators" (1988) is a third-person shooter where, rather than moving forward automatically, the player walks forward by holding the Up direction, as the background slowly scales toward the screen. "Devastators" also featured various obstacles that could be used to take cover from enemy fire, as well as two-player cooperative gameplay. A similar shooter released that same year was "Cabal" (1988), which inspired many of its own ""Cabal" clones," such as "NAM-1975" (1990) and "Wild Guns" (1994). Kurt Kalata of Hardcore Gaming 101 cites Sega's "Last Survivor" (1988), released for arcades and then ported to the FM Towns and FM Towns Marty, featuring eight-player deathmatch. He notes that it has a perspective and split-screen similar to "Xybots", but with entirely different gameplay and controls.


title: Third-person shooter

text: In 1993, Namco released a two-player competitive 3D third-person shooter vehicle combat game, "Cyber Sled". A year later, Elite Systems Ltd. released "Virtuoso" on the 3DO. This was an early example of a home console third-person shooter which featured a human protagonist on-foot, as opposed to controlling a vehicle, and made use of polygonal 3D graphics along with sprites in a 3D environment. "Fade to Black" (1995) was also a fully 3D third-person shooter released around this time, but as well as featuring an on-foot protagonist rather than a vehicle, utilised entirely polygonal 3D graphics.


title: Third-person shooter

text: "Tomb Raider" (1996) by Eidos Interactive (now Square Enix Europe) is claimed by some commentators as a third-person shooter, and Jonathan S. Harbour of the University of Advancing Technology argues that it's "largely responsible for the popularity of this genre". Other commentators have considered it influential on later third person shooters such as "BloodRayne" (2002), "The Contra Adventure" (1998), "MDK" (1997), "" (1998), "Burning Rangers" (1998), and "" (2000). The game eschewed the popular first person perspective of games such as "Doom", instead making use of "third person" viewpoints, wide 3D environments and a control system inspired by "Prince of Persia". "Mega Man Legends" (1997) by Capcom is another early 3D third person shooter which took a different approach to the genre, mixing this with a role-playing game influence. Around the same time, "Deathtrap Dungeon" (1998) by Eidos Interactive and "MediEvil" (1998) by SCE Cambridge Studio (then "Millennium Interactive") were some of the first 3D games in the genre to include third person shooter influences in a fantasy setting, with fictional or alternative weapons achieving the same effect as a gun for the player. "Die Hard Trilogy" (1998) by Fox Interactive was met with critical acclaim at the time of its release, and the section of the game based around the first "Die Hard" film in the trilogy was another early take on a 3D third person shooter.


title: Third-person shooter

text: "Syphon Filter" (1999) by Eidetic (now Bend Studio) combined the perspective of "Tomb Raider" with action elements of games such as "GoldenEye 007" (1997) and "Metal Gear Solid" (1998). Richard Rouse III wrote in GamaSutra that the game was the most popular third person shooter for the PlayStation. The Nintendo 64 version of "" by The 3DO Company was released the same year as Syphon Filter, and is an early example of a popular third person shooter which introduced the player being allowed to control aiming of their weapon themselves by means of two control sticks. In "Tomb Raider" and "Syphon Filter", on the other hand, the protagonists automatically aimed at antagonists. Forcing or allowing the player to control aiming themselves, either using control sticks or a mouse, would go on to become commonplace in later games in the genre, such as "Oni" (2001), "Max Payne" (2001) and "SOCOM" (2002). "Max Payne" (2001) was acclaimed as a superlative third person shooter, inspired by Hong Kong action cinema. Several platform games with third-person shooter elements were also released during that time; examples included "Ratchet & Clank" and most of the games in the "Jak and Daxter" series, both of which were designed for younger audiences than most third-person shooters.


title: Third-person shooter

text: "Resident Evil 4" (2005) was influential in helping to redefine the third-person shooter genre, with its use of "over the shoulder" offset camera angles, where the camera is placed directly over the right shoulder and therefore doesn't obscure the action. An important gameplay mechanic that helped revolutionize third-person shooters in the past decade was the cover system. Koei's "WinBack" (1999) has a cover system. "Kill Switch" (2003) features the cover system as its core game mechanic, along with a blind fire mechanic. "Gears of War" (2006) and "" (2007) employed tactical elements such as taking cover, influenced by "Kill Switch", using off-center viewpoints inspired by "Resident Evil 4". The game also employed grittier themes than other titles and used a unique feature which rewarded the player for correctly reloading weapons. "Gears of War", as well as games such as "Army of Two" (2008), place a greater emphasis on two player cooperative play, as does "Resident Evil 5" (2009). As of 2009, the third-person shooter genre has a large audience outside Japan, particularly in North America. "Vanquish" (2010) by PlatinumGames featured a gameplay style reminiscent of bullet hell shooters, with bullets and missiles coming from all directions.


title: Third-person shooter

text: The third-person shooter genre is still quite popular in contemporary gaming circles. In 2012, Rockstar Games released "Max Payne 3", which was praised for its refined gameplay. In 2015, Nintendo published multiplayer third-person shooter game "Splatoon" for the Wii U, which was followed by a sequel for Nintendo Switch in 2017, which has become one of the console's highest selling games. In the late 2010s, the third-person shooter battle royale game "Fortnite Battle Royale" saw huge popularity. The survival horror games "Resident Evil 2" and "" were remade in 2019 and 2020 respectively, featuring third-person shooter gameplay similar to "Resident Evil 4".


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire ( ; postal abbreviation Leics.) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East Midlands, England. The county borders Nottinghamshire to the north, Lincolnshire to the north-east, Rutland to the east, Northamptonshire to the south-east, Warwickshire to the south-west, Staffordshire to the west, and Derbyshire to the north-west. The border with most of Warwickshire is Watling Street, the modern A5 road.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire takes its name from the city of Leicester located at its centre and administered separately from the rest of the county. The ceremonial county – the non-metropolitan county plus the city of Leicester – has a total population of just over 1 million (2016 estimate), more than half of which lives in the Leicester Urban Area.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire was recorded in the Domesday Book in four wapentakes: Guthlaxton, Framland, Goscote, and Gartree. These later became hundreds, with the division of Goscote into West Goscote and East Goscote, and the addition of Sparkenhoe hundred. In 1087, the first recorded use of the name was as "Lægrecastrescir".


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire's external boundaries have changed little since the Domesday Survey. The Measham-Donisthorpe exclave of Derbyshire has been exchanged for the Netherseal area, and the urban expansion of Market Harborough has caused Little Bowden, previously in Northamptonshire to be annexed.


title: Leicestershire

text: In 1974, the Local Government Act 1972 abolished the county borough status of Leicester city and the county status of neighbouring Rutland, converting both to administrative districts of Leicestershire. These actions were reversed on 1 April 1997, when Rutland and the City of Leicester became unitary authorities. Rutland became a distinct Ceremonial County once again, although it continues to be policed by Leicestershire Constabulary.


title: Leicestershire

text: The symbol of the county council, Leicestershire County Cricket Club and Leicester City FC, is the fox. Leicestershire is considered to be the birthplace of fox hunting as it is known today. Hugo Meynell, who lived in Quorn, is known as the father of fox hunting. Melton Mowbray and Market Harborough have associations with fox hunting, as has neighbouring Rutland.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire was the last historic county of England to get a registered flag, the design being officiated in July 2021. The new flag features a fox and a cinquefoil – both symbols often associated with Leicestershire.


title: Leicestershire

text: The River Soar together with its tributaries and canalisations constitutes the principal river basin of the county, although the River Avon and River Welland through Harborough and along the county's southern boundaries are also significant. The Soar rises between Hinckley and Lutterworth, towards the south of the county near the Warwickshire border, and flows northwards, bisecting the county along its north–south axis, through 'Greater' Leicester and then to the east of Loughborough where its course within the county comes to an end. It continues north marking the boundary with Nottinghamshire in the Borough of Rushcliffe for some before joining the River Trent at the point where Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire meet.


title: Leicestershire

text: The geographical centre of England is in Leicestershire, near Fenny Drayton in the southwest of the county. In 2013, the Ordnance Survey calculated that the point was on land at Lindley Hall Farm; Meriden, around 10 miles (16 km) to the southwest, had been considered the traditional centre for more than 500 years.


title: Leicestershire

text: A large part of the north-west of the county, around Coalville, forms part of the new National Forest area extending into Derbyshire and Staffordshire. The highest point of the county is Bardon Hill at , which is also a Marilyn; with other hilly/upland areas of c. and above in nearby Charnwood Forest and also to the east of the county around Launde Abbey. The lowest point, at an altitude of about , is located at the county's northernmost tip close to Bottesford where the River Devon flowing through the Vale of Belvoir leaves Leicestershire and enters Nottinghamshire. This results in an altitude differential (AΔ|vertical) of around and a mean altitude of .


title: Leicestershire

text: The population of Leicestershire (excluding Leicester Unitary Authority) is 609,578 people (2001 census). The county covers an area of 2,084 km (804 sq mi). Its largest population centre is the city of Leicester, followed by the town of Loughborough. Other large towns include Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Coalville, Hinckley, Lutterworth, Market Harborough, Melton Mowbray, Oadby, Shepshed and Wigston.


title: Leicestershire

text: Some of the larger of villages are: Burbage (population estimated around 16,500 in 2014), Birstall (population 11,400 in 2004), Broughton Astley, Castle Donington, Kibworth Beauchamp (along with Kibworth Harcourt), Great Glen, Ibstock, Countesthorpe and Kegworth. One of the most rapidly expanding villages is Anstey, which has recently seen many development schemes.


title: Leicestershire

text: The United Kingdom Census 2001 showed a total resident population for Leicester of 279,921, a 0.5% decrease from the 1991 census (this trend since reversing at the 2011 census). Approximately 62,000 were aged under 16, 199,000 were aged 16–74, and 19,000 aged 75 and over. 76.9% of Leicester's population claim they have been born in the UK, according to the 2001 UK Census. Mid-year estimates for 2006 indicate that the population of the City of Leicester stood at 289,700 making Leicester the most populous city in East Midlands.


title: Leicestershire

text: The population density is and for every 100 females, there were 92.9 males. Of those aged 16–74 in Leicester, 38.5% had no academic qualifications, significantly higher than 28.9% in all of England. 23.0% of Leicester's residents were born outside of the United Kingdom, more than double than the English average of 9.2%.


title: Leicestershire

text: Engineering has long been an important part of the economy of Leicestershire. John Taylor Bellfounders continues a history of bellfounding in Loughborough since the 14th century. In 1881 John Taylors cast the largest bell in Britain, "Great Paul", for St Paul's Cathedral in London. Norman & Underwood have been making sand cast sheet lead roofing and stained glass since 1825 working on many of England's major cathedrals and historic buildings, including Salisbury Cathedral, Windsor Castle, Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court Palace, and Chatsworth House. There were three coal mines that operated in Coalville from the 1820s until 1986. Abbey Pumping Station houses four enormous steam powered beam engines built in Leicester in the 1890s in the Vulcan factory owned by Josiah Gimson, whose son Ernest Gimson was an influential furniture designer and architect of the English arts and crafts movement.


title: Leicestershire

text: Engineering companies today include sports car makers Noble Automotive Ltd in Barwell and Ultima Sports Ltd in Hinckley, Triumph Motorcycles in Hinckley, Jones & Shipman (machine tools), Caterpillar Redford (Plant machinery), Plant manufacturers Metalfacture Ltd (sheet metal work), Richards Engineering (foundry equipment), Transmon Engineering (materials handling equipment), Trelleborg Industrial AVS in Beaumont Leys (industrial suspension components), Parker Plant (quarrying equipment), Aggregate Industries UK (construction materials), Infotec in Ashby-de-la-Zouch (electronic information display boards), Alstec in Whetstone, Leicestershire (airport baggage handling systems), and Brush Traction (railway locomotives) in Loughborough. Local commitment to nurturing the upcoming cadre of British engineers includes apprenticeship schemes with local companies, and academic-industrial connections with the engineering departments at Leicester University, De Montfort University, and Loughborough University.


title: Leicestershire

text: The Systems Engineering Innovation Centre and Centre for Excellence for low carbon and fuel cell technologies are both based at Loughborough University. Private sector research and development organisations include PERA – the technology based consultancy in Melton Mowbray, and MIRA – the automotive research and development centre based on the outskirts of Hinckley. Automotive and aerospace engineers use the test facilities at Mallory Park, and Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome and proving ground. On 18 October 2007, the last airworthy Avro Vulcan was flown from Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome after 10 years of restoration there by aerospace engineers of the Vulcan Operating Company.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire has a long history of livestock farming which continues today. Robert Bakewell (1725–1795) of Dishley, near Loughborough, was a revolutionary in the field of selective breeding. Bakewell's Leicester Longwool sheep was much prized by farmers across the British Empire and is today a heritage breed admired. Commercial and rare breeds associated with the descendants of Bakewell's sheep include the English Leicester, Border Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester, Scotch mule, and Welsh halfbred.


title: Leicestershire

text: The Leicestershire County Show is held on the first Bank Holiday in May each year and includes animal showings, trade exhibitions, and show jumping. Melton Mowbray Market is an important regional livestock market.


title: Leicestershire

text: Field sports remain an important part of the rural economy of Leicestershire, with stables, kennels, and gunsmiths based in the county.


title: Leicestershire

text: Stilton and Red Leicester cheeses and the pork pie are the three most famous contributions to English cuisine from Leicestershire.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire food producers include Claybrooke mill, one of the very few commercially working watermills left in Britain producing a range of over 40 flours; meat from rare and minority breeds from Brockleby's; and Christmas turkey and goose from Seldom Seen Farm. Two dairies produce Red Leicester cheese in the county, Long Clawson and the Leicestershire Handmade Cheese Company.


title: Leicestershire

text: All-natural non-alcoholic fruit cordials and pressed drinks are made by Belvoir Fruit Farms and sold in supermarkets across Britain. Swithland Spring Water is sourced from the Charnwood hills. Breweries in Leicestershire and Rutland are listed on the Leicester CAMRA website. The county's largest beer brewer is Everards, and there are several microbreweries such as Belvoir Brewery in Old Dalby, Parish Brewery in Burrough on the Hill, Wicked Hathern Brewery in Loughborough, the Gas Dog Brewery at Somerby near Melton, Ellis Wood brewery in Hinckley, and the Pig Pub Brewery in Claybrooke Magna near Lutterworth. Vineyards in Leicestershire include Chevelswarde Vineyard (Lutterworth), Welland Valley Vineyard (Market Harborough), Eglantine (Loughborough) and Rothley Wines (Rothley). Melton Mowbray Sloe Gin is a liqueur with a distinctive flavour.


title: Leicestershire

text: Various markets are held across the county. Leicester Market is the largest outdoor covered marketplace in Europe and among the products on sale are fruit and vegetables sold by market stallholders, and fresh fish and meat in the Indoor Market.


title: Leicestershire

text: The annual East Midlands Food & Drink Festival held in Melton Mowbray had over 200 exhibitors and 20,000 visitors attending in 2007 making it the largest British regional food festival.


title: Leicestershire

text: Food processing in the city and county includes popular British fish and chip shop pie Pukka Pies who are based in Syston. Walkers Midshire Foods, part of the Samworth Brothers group, makes sausages and pies in its Beaumont Leys factories. Samworth Brothers has operations in Leicestershire and Cornwall (Ginsters), making a range of products from sandwiches to desserts for UK retailers under their brands as well the company's own portfolio of brands including Dickinson & Morris, producers of pork pies and Melton Hunt Cake. Walkers crisps are made in Beaumont Leys using Lincolnshire potatoes. United Biscuits have their distribution centre in Ashby-de-la-Zouch as well as a snacks factory producing brands such as Hula Hoops, Skips, Nik Naks and Space Raiders and they also have a biscuit factory in Wigston. The Masterfoods UK factory at Melton Mowbray produces petfood for brands such as Cesar, Kitekat, PAL, Pedigree, Sheba, Whiskas, Aquarian and Trill. Hand made chocolates are produced by Chocolate Perfection in Ashby-de-la-Zouch.


title: Leicestershire

text: Some 15 major Indian food manufacturers are based in Leicester including Sara Foods, Mayur Foods, Cofresh Snack Foods Ltd, Farsan, Apni Roti, and Spice n Tice. The 'Mithai' Indian sweet market is catered for by award-winning Indian restaurants – for instance the vegetable samosas approved by the Vegetarian Society sold at The Sharmilee on Belgrave Road in the Belgrave area of Leicester. The growing market for Indian food has afforded new opportunities to long-standing local companies, for example the Long Clawson dairy, a co-operative manufacturer of Stilton (cheese) now also makes Paneer cheese used in the Indian dish Mattar Paneer.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire food exported abroad includes cheese from the Long Clawson dairy, which is sold in supermarkets in Canada and the United States via a network of distributors coordinated by Taunton-based company Somerdale. Belvoir Fruit Farms cordials and pressé drinks are sold on the United States east coast in Wegmans Food Markets, World Market, Harris Teeter, Dean & DeLuca, and in specialised British food stores such as Myers of Keswick (New York City), and the British Pantry (near Washington, D.C.).


title: Leicestershire

text: The annual Leicestershire & Rutland Restaurant Awards has several categories including Leicestershire & Rutland Restaurant of the Year, Best Asian Restaurant, Best Service, Best Newcomer, Best Fine Dining Restaurant, Best Value for Money, Best Drinks/Wine List, Best Local Produce Menu, Best Gastro Pub, Best Neighbourhood Restaurant, Best Business Lunch, and Leicestershire & Rutland Young Chef of the Year.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicester and Leicestershire has had a traditional industry of knitwear, hosiery and footwear, and the sheep on the county's coat of arms is recognition of this. The local manufacturing industry, which began with hand knitting in the Middle Ages, and was fully industrialised by the end of the 19th century, survived until the end of the 20th century through retailers buying UK sourced products, and government measures such as the protection of the Multi Fibre Arrangement which ended in 2004. Cheaper global competition, coupled with the 1999 slump in the UK fashion retail sector, led to the end of much of the cheaper clothing manufacturing industry. Today Leicestershire companies focus on high quality clothing and speciality textiles.


title: Leicestershire

text: Other local companies manufacture knitwear such as Commando Knitwear of Wigston, and others specialise in technical textiles for industrial or medical purposes. Clothing and fabric for the British Asian community is made here – for example the shop Saree Mandir sells silk saree's and salwar suits for women whose design patterns closely follow contemporary Indian trends. The Knitting Industries' Federation continues to be based in Leicestershire. On the creative side the design centre for next is headquartered in Enderby, and the design centre for George Clothing (Asda/Walmart) is in Lutterworth. De Montfort University has, in the form of its Fashion and Contour Design course a leading design department for female underwear. It also has the only UK University courses in Footwear Design providing future designers for local shoemakers Shoefayre, Stead and Simpson, and Shoe Zone, who all have their headquarters in the county.


title: Leicestershire

text: University Hospitals Leicester NHS Trust employs around 11,000 at its three hospitals in the city and county, the Glenfield, the General and the Royal Infirmary. Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust employs over 5,500 staff providing mental health, learning disability and community health services in the city and county. These services are commissioned by the three Clinical Commissioning Groups, led by local GPs.


title: Leicestershire

text: The British Psychological Society, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) based in Wigston, and the National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health (NEBOSH) have their head offices in Leicestershire.


title: Leicestershire

text: Pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical instrument manufacturing companies include 3M, Bridgehead International in Melton, Fisher Scientific in Loughborough, and Ashfield Healthcare in Ashby-de-la-Zouch.


title: Leicestershire

text: Transportation links are good. East Midlands Airport is one mile (1.6 km) south of Castle Donington, next to the M1 in north-west Leicestershire, and is the second largest freight airport in the United Kingdom after London Heathrow. DHL Aviation have a large purpose built facility at EMA, and courier companies UPS and TNT also use the airport as a base. Lufthansa Cargo is also a regular user of East Midlands, and the airport is a primary hub for Royal Mail. The M1 is Leicestershire's other important transport hub. The start of the M6, and part of the A14 briefly intersect with the southern tip of Leicestershire. Many large retail companies have huge warehouses at the Magna Park complex near Lutterworth. The Widdowson Group make use of J21a of the M1 to provide warehousing, transportation, freight forwarding, garage services and LGV/HGV training. Pall-Ex of Ellistown provide automated palletised freight distribution services from their location off Junction 22 of the M1. The Midland Main Line provides important connections to Yorkshire and London, and the Birmingham–Stansted Line is essentially Leicestershire's east–west connection from Hinckley to Melton.


title: Leicestershire

text: Ibstock-based developer Wilson Bowden was bought in 2007 by Barratt Developments plc in a GBP2.2 billion deal. Charles Street Buildings (Leicester) and Jelson Homes are two other successful Leicester-based property companies.


title: Leicestershire

text: Hamilton-based Sofidel Group manufactures more than 600 million toilet rolls and kitchen towel rolls per year in its Leicestershire factories.


title: Leicestershire

text: Toy car company Corgi have their European operation at the Meridian Business Park, although the toys are now manufactured in China and the company is owned by Margate-based Hornby.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicester's Cultural Quarter is an ambitious plan to drive the regeneration of a large run-down area of the city. It has delivered: a new venue for the performing arts, Curve; creative workspaces for artists and designers, LCB Depot; and a Digital Media Centre. Many creative and media businesses have thrived in the region.


title: Leicestershire

text: As part of a 2002 marketing campaign, the plant conservation charity Plantlife chose the foxglove as the county flower.


title: Leicestershire

text: Financial and business service companies with operations in Leicestershire include Alliance & Leicester, Cambridge & Counties Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Bank of India, HSBC, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.


title: Leicestershire

text: Pension provision company Mattioli Woods employs 170 people at its Grove Park, Enderby, HQ and has a reputation for employing graduates directly from Leicestershire Universities.


title: Leicestershire

text: The Institute of Credit Management, the European Association of Trade Mark Owners, and the Point of Purchase Advertising International (POPAI) are based in Leicestershire.


title: Leicestershire

text: Key stakeholders promoting economic development formed Leicester & Leicestershire Economic Partnership in 2011. Leicestershire Chamber of Commerce is another good source for business advice.


title: Leicestershire

text: The Leicestershire Business Awards has categories including Investing in Leicestershire, Contribution to the Community, and Entrepreneur of the Year.


title: Leicestershire

text: Recent Leicestershire winners of the Queen's Award for Enterprise are listed on the Lord Lieutenant's website.


title: Leicestershire

text: This is a chart of trend of regional gross value added of the non-metropolitan county of Leicestershire and Rutland (it does not include the City of Leicester) at current basic prices published (pp. 240–253) by "Office for National Statistics" with figures in millions of British Pounds Sterling.


title: Leicestershire

text: For lieutenancy purposes, Leicestershire consists of the non-metropolitan county and the City of Leicester.


title: Leicestershire

text: For administrative purposes, most of the county is run by the Leicestershire County Council, though the City of Leicester is run independently by the Leicester City Council. The non-metropolitan county is divided into seven districts ran by district councils: The seven district councils in Leicestershire are Blaby, Charnwood, Harborough, Hinckley & Bosworth, Melton, North West Leicestershire and Oadby & Wigston. It has been proposed by the Leicestershire County Council in 2018 to get rid of the district councils.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire County Council consists of 55 elected members, from 52 wards. The most recent election was the May 2017 elections, where all seats were up for re-election. Following these elections the current political composition of the council is 42 Conservatives, 9 Liberal Democrats and 4 Labour councillors.


title: Leicestershire

text: County Hall, in Glenfield, some north-west of central Leicester and a little over from Leicester railway station, is the seat of Leicestershire County Council and the headquarters of the county authority. Below the County Council, there are seven district councils, Blaby, Charnwood, Harborough, Hinckley and Bosworth, Melton, North West Leicestershire and Oadby and Wigston. The City of Leicester is a unitary authority which is separate from the county for local government, and provides all services in its area; the City Council meets at Leicester Town Hall.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire is represented by ten members of parliament (MPs). Three seats within the City of Leicester were won by Labour Party MPs at the last general election, though Claudia Webbe currently represents Leicester East as an independent having been suspended by the party following a criminal conviction; the other seven Leicestershire seats are represented by Conservative MPs.


title: Leicestershire

text: Publicly funded secondary schools in Leicestershire are comprehensive. The schools are segregated by age in some areas to ages 10–14 (middle schools), and 14–16 (upper schools) or 14–18 (upper schools which also provide sixth form education). The schools, compared with other LEAs, have large numbers on the roll with school enrolment often 2000 and more. For Melton and Blaby districts, although there is division by middle and upper schools, there is only one upper school in either district, giving no choice of school. However, many students of Lutterworth College in Harborough district actually hail from Blaby district.


title: Leicestershire

text: Charnwood has the largest school population – four times the size of the Melton district. In 2007, the best-performing state school at GCSE was Beauchamp College in Oadby. No comprehensives in Leicestershire LEA were rated as poor performers, unlike in some neighbouring counties. In 2007, 7,800 pupils took GCSE exams.


title: Leicestershire

text: For A-levels, the best comprehensive school in the county was the De Lisle College in Loughborough. The best schools overall at A-level were the two private single-sex schools in Loughborough, Loughborough Grammar School and Loughborough High School.


title: Leicestershire

text: % of pupils gaining 5 grades A–C in 2007 including English and Maths (46.8% was the England average compared to Leicestershire's 48.9%).


title: Leicestershire

text: Independent schools in Leicestershire include Leicester Grammar School (mixed), Leicester High School for Girls (girls), Loughborough Grammar School (boys), Loughborough High School (girls), Fairfield Preparatory School (primary school – mixed), Welbeck College (military 6th form college – mixed), Ratcliffe College (Roman Catholic – mixed), Grace Dieu Manor School (Roman Catholic – mixed), Stoneygate school (primary school – mixed), and Stoneygate College (mixed), Our Lady's Convent School (OLCS) (Roman Catholic – girls).


title: Leicestershire

text: There are four general further education colleges operating in Leicestershire; Leicester College, Loughborough College, South Leicestershire College and Stephenson College. All offer various vocational courses as well as apprenticeships and some academic courses.


title: Leicestershire

text: Brooksby Melton College provides apprenticeships and further education training courses in animal care, countryside, equine, fisheries, and land based service engineering, at their Brooksby campus.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicestershire has three universities, the University of Leicester, Loughborough University and De Montfort University.


title: Leicestershire

text: Several educational associations have their head offices in Leicestershire, including the Mathematical Association, the Association of School and College Leaders, the Association for College Management, the Girls Schools Association, the National Adult School Association, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education and the Headmasters & Headmistresses Conference.


title: Leicestershire

text: A number of UK sporting bodies have their head offices in Leicestershire, including the Institute of Sports & Recreation Management, the Institute of Swimming, Volleyball England, the Great Britain Wheelchair Basketball Association, the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, the British Judo Association, the British Parachute Association, the British Triathlon Federation, the Amateur Swimming Association, the British Gliding Association, the British Motorcycle Federation, the English Indoor Bowls Association, the Youth Sport Trust and the British Isles Bowls Council.


title: Leicestershire

text: The full range of music is performed in the county, from early medieval, European and Asian classical music, folk, jazz, blues, rock, and pop. Download Festival, a major hard rock and metal festival, is hosted at Donington Park and 110 Above Festival takes place in the north west of the county near to Twycross.


title: Leicestershire

text: The Leicester Symphony Orchestra and the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra are two of the larger orchestras based in the county. The Philharmonia Orchestra, though based in London, holds annual residencies in Leicester.


title: Leicestershire

text: Amateur orchestras include the Leicestershire Sinfonia, Loughborough Orchestra, Charnwood Orchestra, Coalville Light Orchestra and Soar Valley Music Centre Orchestra.


title: Leicestershire

text: Leicester-based choirs include the Leicester Cathedral Choir, Leicester Bach Choir, Broom Leys Choral Society Whitwick, Cantamici, the Cecilian Singers, Charnwood Choral Society, Coalville and District Male Voice Choir, Coro Nostro Chamber Choir, Humberstone Choral Society, Kainé Gospel Choir, Kingfisher Chorale, Leicester Church Music Consort, Leicester City Male Voice Choir, Leicester Philharmonic Choir, Leicestershire Chorale, Loughborough Ladies Choir, Loughborough Male Voice Choir, Meridian Singers, Newtown Linford mixed voice choir, Red Leicester choir, the Scarlet choir, Shepshed Singers, Synergy Community Choir, Wigston and district male voice choir, Unity Community Choir, and the Peepul Choir.


title: Leicestershire

text: The Longsdale Consort perform music of the renaissance and baroque periods. Leicester Recorder Society.


title: Leicestershire

text: Stores selling sheet music and musical instruments in Leicestershire include Music Junkie Ltd, Sona Rupa (Indian), Intasound Music Ltd and MH Music (MH Music are actually in the centre of Market Harborough).


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The Affair of the Diamond Necklace (, "Affair of the Queen's Necklace") was an incident from 1784 to 1785 at the court of King Louis XVI of France that involved his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The Queen's reputation, already tarnished by gossip, was further sullied by the false accusation that she had participated in a crime to defraud the Crown's jewellers in acquiring a very expensive diamond necklace she then refused to pay for. In reality, she rejected the idea of buying it only to have her signature forged by Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy. Although Jeanne was later convicted, the event remains historically significant as one of many that led to the French disillusionment with the monarchy, in that it was one of the contemporary scandals that gave moral weight and popular support for the French Revolution.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: In 1772, Louis XV of France decided to make Madame du Barry, one of his mistresses, a special gift at the estimated cost of 2,000,000 livres (approximately US$15.1 million in 2021). He requested that Parisian jewelers Charles Auguste Boehmer and Paul Bassange create a diamond necklace that would surpass all others in grandeur.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: It would take the jewellers several years and a great deal of money to amass an appropriate set of diamonds. In the meantime, Louis XV died of smallpox and his grandson and successor banished Madame du Barry from the court.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: It was described as "a row of seventeen glorious diamonds, as large almost as filberts... a three-wreathed festoon, and pendants enough (simple pear shaped, multiple star-shaped, or clustering amorphous) encircle it... around a very Queen of Diamonds". The jewellers hoped it would be a product that the new Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, would buy and indeed in 1778 the new king, Louis XVI, offered it to his wife as a present, but she refused. The queen initially turned it down stating, "We have more need of Seventy-Fours [ships] than of necklaces." Some said that Marie Antoinette refused the necklace because it was created for du Barry, whom she strongly disliked. According to others, Louis XVI himself changed his mind.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: After having vainly tried to place the necklace outside France, the jewellers again attempted to sell it to Marie Antoinette after the birth of Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, in 1781. The Queen again refused.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: A confidence trickster who called herself Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, also known as Jeanne de la Motte, made a plan to use the necklace to gain wealth and possibly power and royal patronage. A descendant of an out-of-wedlock son of Henry II of France, Jeanne had married an officer of the gendarmes, Nicholas de la Motte, the self-proclaimed "Comte de la Motte". She was living on a small pension that had been granted to her by the King.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: In March 1785, Jeanne became the mistress of the Cardinal de Rohan, a former French ambassador to the court of Vienna. The Cardinal was regarded with displeasure by Queen Marie Antoinette for having spread rumors about the Queen's behavior to her formidable mother, Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. The Queen had also learned of a letter in which the Cardinal spoke of Maria Theresa in a manner that the Queen found offensive.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The Cardinal was then trying to regain the Queen's favor to become one of the King's ministers. Jeanne de la Motte, having entered court utilizing a lover named Rétaux de Villette, persuaded Rohan that she had been received by the Queen and enjoyed her favor. On hearing of that, Rohan resolved to use Jeanne to regain the Queen's goodwill. Jeanne assured the Cardinal that she was making efforts on his behalf.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: Thus began an alleged correspondence between Rohan and the Queen. Jeanne de la Motte returned the replies to Rohan's notes, which she affirmed came from the Queen. As the tone of the letters became very warm, the Cardinal, convinced that Marie Antoinette was in love with him, became enamored of her. He begged Jeanne to arrange a secret night-time interview with the Queen on his behalf; the supposed meeting took place in August 1784. In the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, the Cardinal met with a woman whom he believed to be Marie Antoinette. In fact, the woman was a prostitute, Nicole Le Guay d'Oliva, whom Jeanne had hired because of her resemblance to the Queen. Rohan offered her a rose. In her role as the Queen, she promised him that she would forget their past disagreements.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: Jeanne de la Motte took advantage of the Cardinal's belief in her by borrowing large sums of money from him, telling him that they were for the Queen's charity work. With that money, Jeanne could make her way into respectable society. As she openly boasted about her mythical relationship with the Queen, many assumed that the affair was genuine.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The jewelers Boehmer and Bassenge resolved to use her to sell their necklace. She, at first, refused a commission, but then changed her mind and accepted it. According to Madame Campan, Jeanne, pretending to be the Queen, sent several letters to the Cardinal, including an order to buy the necklace. They were signed "Marie Antoinette de France", but the Cardinal did not know or remember that French royals signed only with their given names.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: On 21 January 1785, Jeanne told the Cardinal that Marie Antoinette wanted to buy the necklace but, not wishing to purchase such an expensive item publicly during a time of need, the Queen wanted the Cardinal to act as a secret intermediary. A little while later, Rohan negotiated the purchase of the necklace for 2,000,000 livres, to be paid in installments. He claimed to have the Queen's authorization for the purchase and showed the jewelers the conditions of the bargain in the Queen's handwriting. Rohan took the necklace to Jeanne's house, where a man, whom Rohan believed to be a valet of the Queen, came to fetch it. The diamond necklace "was promptly picked apart, and the gems sold on the black markets of Paris and London" by Madame de la Motte.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: When the time came to pay, Jeanne de la Motte presented the Cardinal's notes, but they were insufficient. Boehmer complained to the Queen, who told him that she had neither ordered nor received the necklace. She had the story of the negotiations repeated for her. Then followed a "coup de théâtre".


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The controversy of the event stems from the arrest of the Cardinal in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and the trial that declared him innocent and Jeanne de la Motte Valois and her accomplices guilty.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: On 15 August 1785, the feast of the Assumption of Mary, while the court was awaiting the King and the Queen to go to the chapel, the Cardinal de Rohan, who was to officiate, was taken before the King, the Queen, the Minister of the Court Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil and the Keeper of the Seals Armand Thomas Hue de Miromesnil to explain himself. Rohan produced a letter signed "Marie Antoinette de France". Royalty signed with only the baptismal name, but that fact was missed by Rohan and brought up during his trial and "prejudiced the King against Rohan" as he "breath[ed] royal etiquette since birth... and could not understand how a courtier, and above all a Rohan, a member of a family so keen on the details of status, could make such a mistake".


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: Rohan was arrested and taken to the Bastille. On the way, he sent home a note ordering the destruction of his correspondence. Jeanne was not arrested until three days later, giving her a chance to destroy her papers.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The police arrested the prostitute Nicole Le Guay as well as Rétaux de Villette, who confessed that he had written the letters given to Rohan in the queen's name and had imitated her signature. The noted Freemason and occultist Alessandro Cagliostro was also arrested although it is doubtful whether he had any part in the affair.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The Cardinal de Rohan accepted the Parlement de Paris as judges. Pope Pius VI was incensed, since he believed that the cardinal should be tried by his natural judge (himself). However, his notes remained unanswered. A sensational trial resulted in the acquittal of the Cardinal, Leguay and Cagliostro on 31 May 1786. "Rohan's choice of the Parliament, whatever the verdict, both prolonged matters and took them into the political arena". Jeanne de La Motte was condemned to whipping, branding with a V (for "voleuse", 'thief') on each shoulder, and sent to life imprisonment in the prostitutes' prison at the Salpêtrière. In June the following year, she escaped from prison by being disguised as a boy. Meanwhile, her husband was tried "in absentia" and condemned to be a galley slave. The forger Villette was banished. That made the event into a matter of public interest, rather than being handled quietly and privately.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: Public opinion was much excited by the trial. The Paris Parliament did not comment on the alleged actions of the Queen. The trial found Marie Antoinette blameless in the matter, Rohan an innocent dupe, and that the La Mottes deceived both for their own ends.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: Despite findings to the contrary, many people in France persisted in the belief that the Queen used the La Mottes as an instrument to satisfy her hatred of the Cardinal de Rohan. Various circumstances fortified that belief: the Queen's disappointment at Rohan's acquittal and the fact that he was afterwards deprived by the King of his charges and exiled to the Abbey of la Chaise-Dieu. In addition, the people assumed that the Parliament of Paris's acquittal of Rohan implied that Marie Antoinette had somehow been in the wrong. All of those factors led to a huge decline in the Queen's popularity and impressed an image of her to the public as a manipulative spendthrift who was more interested in vanity than in the welfare of her people.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: Jeanne de la Motte took refuge in London, and in 1789, she published her "Mémoires Justificatifs" in which she once again libelled Queen Marie Antoinette.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The affair of the diamond necklace was important in discrediting the Bourbon monarchy in the eyes of the French people four years before the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette became even more unpopular, and malicious gossip about her made her a greater liability to her husband.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: After the affair broke out to the general public there was an increase in literature defaming the Queen. Her "unpopularity was so great after the Diamond Necklace Affair that it could no longer be ignored by either the queen or the government. Her appearances in public all but ceased." As she was associated with the scandal and already considered by some to be an enemy of the French people, her reputation was irreversibly destroyed.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: Marie Antoinette's reputation never recovered from this incident. Her early history of excessive spending had already blemished her popularity, but the Diamond Necklace Affair catapulted public opinion of her into near-hatred, since she appeared to have plotted to misuse more of the kingdom's depleting money for personal trinkets.


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: The Diamond Necklace Affair heightened the French general public's hatred and disdain for Marie Antoinette since it was "designed to leave the queen in a state of scandal, with the impossibility of claiming any truth for herself". The public relations nightmare led to an increase in salacious and degrading pamphlets, which would serve as kindling for the oncoming French Revolution. It could be said that "she symbolized, among other things, the lavishness and corruption of a dying regime" and served as "the perfect scapegoat of the morality play that the revolution in part became", which made her a target for the hatred of the French Republic and groups like the Jacobins and the "sans-culottes".


title: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

text: She was never able to shake off the idea in public imagination that she had perpetrated an extravagant fraud for her own frivolous ends. Nonetheless, the affair prompted Louis XVI to become closer to his wife and may have inclined him to be more defensive of and more responsive to her before and during the Revolution.


title: Panchatantra

text: The Panchatantra (IAST: Pañcatantra, ISO: Pañcatantra, , "Five Treatises") is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. The surviving work is dated to about 200 BCE, but the fables are likely much more ancient. The text's author is unknown, but it has been attributed to Vishnu Sharma in some recensions and Vasubhaga in others, both of which may be fictitious pen names. It is likely a Hindu text, and based on older oral traditions with "animal fables that are as old as we are able to imagine".


title: Panchatantra

text: It is "certainly the most frequently translated literary product of India", and these stories are among the most widely known in the world. It goes by many names in many cultures. There is a version of "Panchatantra" in nearly every major language of India, and in addition there are 200 versions of the text in more than 50 languages around the world. One version reached Europe in the 11th century. To quote :


title: Panchatantra

text: The earliest known translation into a non-Indian language is in Middle Persian (Pahlavi, 550 CE) by Burzoe. This became the basis for a Syriac translation as Kalilag and Damnag and a translation into Arabic in 750 CE by Persian scholar Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa as Kalīlah wa Dimnah. A New Persian version by Rudaki, from the 3rd century Hijri, became known as "Kalīleh o Demneh". Rendered in prose by Abu'l-Ma'ali Nasrallah Monshi in 1143 CE, this was the basis of Kashefi's 15th-century "Anvār-i Suhaylī" (The Lights of Canopus), which in turn was translated into "Humayun-namah" in Turkish. The book is also known as The Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpai in various European languages, Vidyapati in Sanskrit) or "The Morall Philosophie of Doni" (English, 1570). Most European versions of the text are derivative works of the 12th-century Hebrew version of "Panchatantra" by Rabbi Joel. In Germany, its translation in 1480 by has been widely read. Several versions of the text are also found in Indonesia, where it is titled as Tantri Kamandaka, "Tantravakya" or "Candapingala" and consists of 360 fables. In Laos, a version is called Nandaka-prakarana, while in Thailand it has been referred to as Nang Tantrai.


title: Panchatantra

text: The prelude section of the "Panchatantra" identifies an octogenarian Brahmin named Vishnusharma (IAST: Viṣṇuśarman) as its author. He is stated to be teaching the principles of good government to three princes of Amarasakti. It is unclear, states Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian religions, if Vishnusharma was a real person or himself a literary invention. Some South Indian recensions of the text, as well as Southeast Asian versions of "Panchatantra" attribute the text to Vasubhaga, states Olivelle. Based on the content and mention of the same name in other texts dated to ancient and medieval era centuries, most scholars agree that Vishnusharma is a fictitious name. Olivelle and other scholars state that regardless of who the author was, it is likely "the author was a Hindu, and not a Buddhist, nor Jain", but it is unlikely that the author was a devotee of Hindu god Vishnu because the text neither expresses any sentiments against other Hindu deities such as Shiva, Indra and others, nor does it avoid invoking them with reverence.


title: Panchatantra

text: Various locations where the text was composed have been proposed but this has been controversial. Some of the proposed locations include Kashmir, Southwestern or South India. The text's original language was likely Sanskrit. Though the text is now known as "Panchatantra", the title found in old manuscript versions varies regionally, and includes names such as "Tantrakhyayika", "Panchakhyanaka", "Panchakhyana" and "Tantropakhyana". The suffix "akhyayika" and "akhyanaka" mean "little story" or "little story book" in Sanskrit.


title: Panchatantra

text: The text was translated into Pahlavi in 550 CE, which forms the latest limit of the text's existence. The earliest limit is uncertain. It quotes identical verses from "Arthasastra", which is broadly accepted to have been completed by the early centuries of the common era. According to Olivelle, "the current scholarly consensus places the "Panchatantra" around 300 CE, although we should remind ourselves that this is only an educated guess". The text quotes from older genre of Indian literature, and legends with anthropomorphic animals are found in more ancient texts dated to the early centuries of the 1st millennium BCE such as the chapter 4.1 of the "Chandogya Upanishad". According to Gillian Adams, Panchatantra may be a product of the Vedic period, but its age cannot be ascertained with confidence because "the original Sanskrit version has been lost".


title: Panchatantra

text: The "Panchatantra" is a series of inter-woven fables, many of which deploy metaphors of anthropomorphized animals with human virtues and vices. Its narrative illustrates, for the benefit of three ignorant princes, the central Hindu principles of "nīti". While "nīti" is hard to translate, it roughly means prudent worldly conduct, or "the wise conduct of life".


title: Panchatantra

text: Apart from a short introduction, it consists of five parts. Each part contains a main story, called the frame story, which in turn contains several embedded stories, as one character narrates a story to another. Often these stories contain further embedded stories. The stories operate like a succession of Russian dolls, one narrative opening within another, sometimes three or four deep. Besides the stories, the characters also quote various epigrammatic verses to make their point.


title: Panchatantra

text: The first treatise features a jackal named Damanaka, as the unemployed minister in a kingdom ruled by a lion. He, along with his moralizing sidekick named Karataka, conspire to break up alliances and friendships of the lion king. A series of fables describe the conspiracies and causes that lead to close and inseparable friends breaking up.


title: Panchatantra

text: The Book 1 contains over thirty fables, with the version Arthur Ryder translated containing 34: The Loss of Friends, The Wedge-Pulling Monkey, The Jackal and the War-Drum, Merchant Strong-Tooth, Godly and June, The Jackal at the Ram-Fight, The Weaver's Wife, How the Crow-Hen Killed the Black Snake, The Heron that Liked Crab-Meat, Numskull and the Rabbit, The Weaver Who Loved a Princess, The Ungrateful Man, Leap and Creep, The Blue Jackal, Passion and the Owl, Ugly's Trust Abused, The Lion and the Carpenter, The Plover Who Fought the Ocean, Shell-Neck Slim and Grim, Forethought Readywit and Fatalist, The Duel Between Elephant and Sparrow, The Shrewd Old Gander, The Lion and the Ram, Smart the Jackal, The Monk Who Left His Body Behind, The Girl Who Married a Snake, Poor Blossom, The Unteachable Monkey, Right-Mind and Wrong-Mind, A Remedy Worse than the Disease, The Mice That Ate Iron, The Results of Education, The Sensible Enemy, The Foolish Friend.


title: Panchatantra

text: The second treatise is quite different in structure than the remaining books, states Olivelle, as it does not truly embed fables. It is a collection of adventures of four characters: a crow (scavenger, not a predator, airborne habits), a mouse (tiny, underground habits), a turtle (slow, water habits) and a deer (a grazing animal viewed by other animals as prey, land habits). The overall focus of the book is the reverse of the first book. Its theme is to emphasize the importance of friendships, team work, and alliances. It teaches, "weak animals with very different skills, working together can accomplish what they cannot when they work alone", according to Olivelle. United through their cooperation and in their mutual support, the fables describe how they are able to outwit all external threats and prosper.


title: Panchatantra

text: The second book contains ten fables: The Winning of Friends, The Bharunda Birds, Gold's Gloom, Mother Shandilee's Bargain, Self-defeating Forethought, Mister Duly, Soft, the Weaver, Hang-Ball and Greedy, The Mice That Set Elephant Free, Spot's Captivity.


title: Panchatantra

text: The third treatise discusses war and peace, presenting through animal characters a moral about the battle of wits being a strategic means to neutralize a vastly superior opponent's army. The thesis in this treatise is that a battle of wits is a more potent force than a battle of swords. The choice of animals embeds a metaphor of a war between good versus evil, and light versus darkness. Crows are good, weaker and smaller in number and are creatures of the day (light), while owls are presented as evil, numerous and stronger creatures of the night (darkness). The crow king listens to the witty and wise counsel of Ciramjivin, while the owl king ignores the counsel of Raktaksa. The good crows win.


title: Panchatantra

text: The fables in the third book, as well as others, do not strictly limit to matters of war and peace. Some present fables that demonstrate how different characters have different needs and motives, which is subjectively rational from each character's viewpoint, and that addressing these needs can empower peaceful relationships even if they start off in a different way. For example, in the fable "The Old Man the Young Wife", the text relates a story wherein an old man marries a young woman from a penniless family. The young woman detests his appearance so much that she refuses to even look at him let alone consummate their marriage. One night, while she sleeps in the same bed with her back facing the old man, a thief enters their house. She is scared, turns over, and for security embraces the man. This thrills every limb of the old man. He feels grateful to the thief for making his young wife hold him at last. The aged man rises and profusely thanks the thief, requesting the intruder to take whatever he desires.


title: Panchatantra

text: The third book contains eighteen fables in Ryder translation: Crows and Owls, How the Birds Picked a King, How the Rabbit Fooled the Elephant, The Cat's Judgment, The Brahmin's Goat, The Snake and the Ants, The Snake Who Paid Cash, The Unsocial Swans, The Self-sacrificing Dove, The Old Man with the Young Wife, The Brahmin, the Thief and the Ghost, The Snake in the Prince's Belly, The Gullible Carpenter, Mouse-Maid Made Mouse, The Bird with Golden Dung, The Cave That Talked, The Frog That Rode Snakeback, The Butter-blinded Brahmin.


title: Panchatantra

text: The book four of the "Panchatantra" is a simpler compilation of ancient moral-filled fables. These, states Olivelle, teach messages such as "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush". They caution the reader to avoid succumbing to peer pressure and cunning intent wrapped in soothing words. The book is different from the first three, in that the earlier books give positive examples of ethical behavior offering examples and actions "to do". In contrast, book four presents negative examples with consequences, offering examples and actions "to avoid, to watch out for".


title: Panchatantra

text: The fourth book contains thirteen fables in Ryder translation: Loss of Gains, The Monkey and the Crocodile, Handsome and Theodore, Flop-Ear and Dusty, The Potter Militant, The Jackal Who Killed No Elephants, The Ungrateful Wife, King Joy and Secretary Splendor, The Ass in the Tiger-Skin, The Farmer's Wife, The Pert Hen-Sparrow, How Supersmart Ate the Elephant, The Dog Who Went Abroad.


title: Panchatantra

text: Book 4, along with Book 5, is very short. Together the last two books constitute about 7% of the total text.


title: Panchatantra

text: Book five of the text is, like book four, a simpler compilation of moral-filled fables. These also present negative examples with consequences, offering examples and actions for the reader to ponder, avoid, and watch out for. The lessons in this last book include "get facts, be patient, don't act in haste then regret later", "don't build castles in the air". The book five is also unusual in that almost all its characters are humans, unlike the first four where the characters are predominantly anthropomorphized animals. According to Olivelle, it may be that the text's ancient author sought to bring the reader out of the fantasy world of talking and pondering animals into the realities of the human world.


title: Panchatantra

text: The fifth book contains twelve fables about hasty actions or jumping to conclusions without establishing facts and proper due diligence. In Ryder translation, they are: Ill-considered Action, The Loyal Mongoose, The Four Treasure-Seekers, The Lion-Makers, Hundred-Wit Thousand-Wit and Single-Wit, The Musical Donkey, Slow the Weaver, The Brahman's Dream, The Unforgiving Monkey, The Credulous Fiend, The Three-Breasted Princess, The Fiend Who Washed His Feet.


title: Panchatantra

text: One of the fables in this book is the story of a woman and a mongoose. She leaves her child with a mongoose friend. When she returns, she sees blood on the mongoose's mouth, and kills the friend, believing the animal killed her child. The woman discovers her child alive, and learns that the blood on the mongoose mouth came from it biting the snake while defending her child from the snake's attack. She regrets having killed the friend because of her hasty action.


title: Panchatantra

text: The fables of "Panchatantra" are found in numerous world languages. It is also considered partly the origin of European secondary works, such as folk tale motifs found in Boccaccio, La Fontaine and the works of Grimm Brothers. For a while, this had led to the hypothesis that popular worldwide animal-based fables had origins in India and the Middle East. According to Max Muller,


title: Panchatantra

text: This monocausal hypothesis has now been generally discarded in favor of polygenetic hypothesis which states that fable motifs had independent origins in many ancient human cultures, some of which have common roots and some influenced by co-sharing of fables. The shared fables implied morals that appealed to communities separated by large distances and these fables were therefore retained, transmitted over human generations with local variations. However, many post-medieval era authors explicitly credit their inspirations to texts such as "Bidpai" and "Pilpay, the Indian sage" that are known to be based on the "Panchatantra".


title: Panchatantra

text: According to Niklas Bengtsson, even though India being the exclusive original source of fables is no longer taken seriously, the ancient classic "Panchatantra", "which new folklore research continues to illuminate, was certainly the first work ever written down for children, and this in itself means that the Indian influence has been enormous [on world literature], not only on the genres of fables and fairy tales, but on those genres as taken up in children's literature". According to Adams and Bottigheimer, the fables of "Panchatantra" are known in at least 38 languages around the world in 112 versions by Jacob's old estimate, and its relationship with Mesopotamian and Greek fables is hotly debated in part because the original manuscripts of all three ancient texts have not survived. Olivelle states that there are 200 versions of the text in more than 50 languages around the world, in addition to a version in nearly every major language of India.


title: Panchatantra

text: Scholars have noted the strong similarity between a few of the stories in "The Panchatantra" and "Aesop's Fables". Examples are "The Ass in the Panther's Skin" and "The Ass without Heart and Ears". "The Broken Pot" is similar to Aesop's "The Milkmaid and Her Pail", "The Gold-Giving Snake" is similar to Aesop's "The Man and the Serpent" and "Le Paysan et Dame serpent" by Marie de France ("Fables") Other well-known stories include "The Tortoise and The Geese" and "The Tiger, the Brahmin and the Jackal". Similar animal fables are found in most cultures of the world, although some folklorists view India as the prime source. The "Panchatantra" has been a source of the world's fable literature.


title: Panchatantra

text: The French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine acknowledged his indebtedness to the work in the introduction to his Second Fables:


title: Panchatantra

text: "The Panchatantra" is the origin also of several stories in "Arabian Nights", "Sindbad", and of many Western nursery rhymes and ballads.


title: Panchatantra

text: In the Indian tradition, "The Panchatantra" is a . "Nīti" can be roughly translated as "the wise conduct of life" and a "śāstra" is a technical or scientific treatise; thus it is considered a treatise on political science and human conduct. Its literary sources are "the expert tradition of political science and the folk and literary traditions of storytelling". It draws from the Dharma and Artha "śāstra"s, quoting them extensively. It is also explained that "nīti" "represents an admirable attempt to answer the insistent question how to win the utmost possible joy from life in the world of men" and that "nīti" is "the harmonious development of the powers of man, a life in which security, prosperity, resolute action, friendship, and good learning are so combined to produce joy".


title: Panchatantra

text: "The Panchatantra" shares many stories in common with the Buddhist Jataka tales, purportedly told by the historical Buddha before his death around 400 BCE. As the scholar Patrick Olivelle writes, "It is clear that the Buddhists did not invent the stories. [...] It is quite uncertain whether the author of [the Panchatantra] borrowed his stories from the "Jātaka"s or the "Mahābhārata", or whether he was tapping into a common treasury of tales, both oral and literary, of ancient India." Many scholars believe the tales were based on earlier oral folk traditions, which were finally written down, although there is no conclusive evidence. In the early 20th century, W. Norman Brown found that many folk tales in India appeared to be borrowed from literary sources and not vice versa.


title: Panchatantra

text: An early Western scholar who studied "The Panchatantra" was Dr. Johannes Hertel, who thought the book had a Machiavellian character. Similarly, Edgerton noted that "the so-called 'morals' of the stories have no bearing on morality; they are unmoral, and often immoral. They glorify shrewdness and practical wisdom, in the affairs of life, and especially of politics, of government." Other scholars dismiss this assessment as one-sided, and view the stories as teaching , or proper moral conduct. Also:


title: Panchatantra

text: According to Olivelle, "Indeed, the current scholarly debate regarding the intent and purpose of the 'Pañcatantra' — whether it supports unscrupulous Machiavellian politics or demands ethical conduct from those holding high office — underscores the rich ambiguity of the text". Konrad Meisig states that the "Panchatantra" has been incorrectly represented by some as "an entertaining textbook for the education of princes in the Machiavellian rules of "Arthasastra"", but instead it is a book for the "Little Man" to develop "Niti" (social ethics, prudent behavior, shrewdness) in their pursuit of "Artha", and a work on social satire. According to Joseph Jacobs, "... if one thinks of it, the very "raison d'être" of the Fable is to imply its moral without mentioning it."


title: Panchatantra

text: The Panchatantra, states Patrick Olivelle, tells wonderfully a collection of delightful stories with pithy proverbs, ageless and practical wisdom; one of its appeal and success is that it is a complex book that "does not reduce the complexities of human life, government policy, political strategies, and ethical dilemmas into simple solutions; it can and does speak to different readers at different levels." In the Indian tradition, the work is a Shastra genre of literature, more specifically a "Nitishastra" text.


title: Panchatantra

text: The text has been a source of studies on political thought in Hinduism, as well as the management of Artha with a debate on virtues and vices.


title: Panchatantra

text: The Sanskrit version of the "Panchatantra" text gives names to the animal characters, but these names are creative with double meanings. The names connote the character observable in nature but also map a human personality that a reader can readily identify. For example, the deer characters are presented as a metaphor for the charming, innocent, peaceful and tranquil personality who is a target for those who seek a prey to exploit, while the crocodile is presented to symbolize dangerous intent hidden beneath a welcoming ambiance (waters of a lotus flower-laden pond). Dozens of different types of wildlife found in India are thus named, and they constitute an array of symbolic characters in the "Panchatantra". Thus, the names of the animals evoke layered meaning that resonates with the reader, and the same story can be read at different levels.


title: Panchatantra

text: The work has gone through many different versions and translations from the sixth century to the present day. The original Indian version was first translated into a foreign language (Pahlavi) by Borzūya in 570CE, then into Arabic in 750. This Arabic version was translated into several languages, including Syriac, Greek, Persian, Hebrew and Spanish, and thus became the source of versions in European languages, until the English translation by Charles Wilkins of the Sanskrit "Hitopadesha" in 1787.


title: Panchatantra

text: The "Panchatantra" approximated its current literary form within the 4th–6th centuries CE, though originally written around 200 BCE. No Sanskrit texts before 1000 CE have survived. Buddhist monks on pilgrimage to India took the influential Sanskrit text (probably both in oral and literary formats) north to Tibet and China and east to South East Asia. These led to versions in all Southeast Asian countries, including Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, Javanese and Lao derivatives.


title: Panchatantra

text: The "Panchatantra" also migrated into the Middle East, through Iran, during the Sassanid reign of Anoushiravan. Around 550 CE his notable physician Borzuy (Burzuwaih) translated the work from Sanskrit into the Pahlavi (Middle Persian language). He transliterated the main characters as "Karirak ud Damanak".


title: Panchatantra

text: According to the story told in the "Shāh Nāma" ("The Book of the Kings", Persia's late 10th-century national epic by Ferdowsi), Borzuy sought his king's permission to make a trip to Hindustan in search of a mountain herb he had read about that is "mingled into a compound and, when sprinkled over a corpse, it is immediately restored to life." He did not find the herb, but was told by a wise sage of "a different interpretation. The herb is the scientist; science is the mountain, everlastingly out of reach of the multitude. The corpse is the man without knowledge, for the uninstructed man is everywhere lifeless. Through knowledge man becomes revivified."


title: Panchatantra

text: The sage pointed to the book, and the visiting physician Borzuy translated the work with the help of some Pandits (Brahmins). According to Hans Bakker, Borzuy visited the kingdom of Kannauj in north India during the 6th century in an era of intense exchange between Persian and Indian royal courts, and he secretly translated a copy of the text then sent it to the court of Anoushiravan in Persia, along with other cultural and technical knowledge.


title: Panchatantra

text: Borzuy's translation of the Sanskrit version into Pahlavi arrived in Persia by the 6th century, but this Middle Persian version is now lost. The book had become popular in Sassanid, and was translated into Syriac and Arabic whose copies survive. According to Riedel, "the three preserved New Persian translations originated between the 10th and 12th century", and are based on the 8th-century Arabic translation by Ibn al-Muqaffa of Borzuy's work on "Panchatantra". It is the 8th-century "Kalila wa Demna" text, states Riedel, that has been the most influential of the known Arabic versions, not only in the Middle East, but also through its translations into Greek, Hebrew and Old Spanish.


title: Panchatantra

text: The Persian Ibn al-Muqaffa' translated the "Panchatantra" (in ) from Middle Persian to Arabic as "Kalīla wa Dimna". This is considered the first masterpiece of "Arabic literary prose."


title: Panchatantra

text: The introduction of the first book of "Kalila wa Demna" is different from "Panchatantra", in being more elaborate and instead of king and his three sons studying in the Indian version, the Persian version speaks of a merchant and his three sons who had squandered away their father's wealth. The Persian version also makes an abrupt switch from the story of the three sons to an injured ox, and thereafter parallels the "Panchatantra".


title: Panchatantra

text: The two jackals' names transmogrified into Kalila and Dimna in the Persian version. Perhaps because the first section constituted most of the work, or because translators could find no simple equivalent in Zoroastrian Pahlavi for the concept expressed by the Sanskrit word 'Panchatantra', the jackals' names, "Kalila and Dimna," became the generic name for the entire work in classical times.


title: Panchatantra

text: After the first chapter, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ inserted a new one, telling of Dimna's trial. The jackal is suspected of instigating the death of the bull "Shanzabeh", a key character in the first chapter. The trial lasts for two days without conclusion, until a tiger and leopard appear to bear witness against Dimna. He is found guilty and put to death.


title: Panchatantra

text: Ibn al-Muqaffa' inserted other additions and interpretations into his 750CE "re-telling" (see Francois de Blois' Burzōy's voyage to India and the origin of the book "Kalīlah wa Dimnah"). The political theorist Jennifer London suggests that he was expressing risky political views in a metaphorical way. (Al-Muqaffa' was murdered within a few years of completing his manuscript). London has analysed how Ibn al-Muqaffa' could have used his version to make "frank political expression" at the 'Abbasid court (see J. London's "How To Do Things With Fables: Ibn al-Muqaffa"s Frank Speech in Stories from Kalila wa Dimna," "History of Political Thought" XXIX: 2 (2008)).


title: Panchatantra

text: Borzuy's 570 CE Pahlavi translation ("Kalile va Demne", now lost) was translated into Syriac. Nearly two centuries later, it was translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa around 750 CE under the Arabic title, "Kalīla wa Dimna". After the Arab invasion of Persia (Iran), Ibn al-Muqaffa's version (two languages removed from the pre-Islamic Sanskrit original) emerged as the pivotal surviving text that enriched world literature. Ibn al-Muqaffa's work is considered a model of the finest Arabic prose style, and "is considered the first masterpiece of Arabic literary prose."


title: Panchatantra

text: Some scholars believe that Ibn al-Muqaffa's translation of the second section, illustrating the Sanskrit principle of "Mitra Laabha" (Gaining Friends), became the unifying basis for the Brethren of Purity ("Ikwhan al-Safa") — the anonymous 9th-century CE encyclopedists whose prodigious literary effort, "Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Sincerity", codified Indian, Persian and Greek knowledge. A suggestion made by Goldziher, and later written on by Philip K. Hitti in his "History of the Arabs", proposes that "The appellation is presumably taken from the story of the ringdove in "Kalilah wa-Dimnah" in which it is related that a group of animals by acting as faithful friends ("ikhwan al-safa") to one another escaped the snares of the hunter." This story is mentioned as an exemplum when the Brethren speak of mutual aid in one "risaala" (treatise), a crucial part of their system of ethics.


title: Panchatantra

text: Almost all pre-modern European translations of the Panchatantra arise from this Arabic version. From Arabic it was re-translated into Syriac in the 10th or 11th century, into Greek (as "Stephanites and Ichnelates") in 1080 by the Jewish Byzantine doctor Simeon Seth, into 'modern' Persian by Abu'l-Ma'ali Nasrallah Munshi in 1121, and in 1252 into Spanish (old Castilian, "Calila e Dimna").


title: Panchatantra

text: Perhaps most importantly, it was translated into Hebrew by Rabbi Joel in the 12th century. This Hebrew version was translated into Latin by John of Capua as "Directorium Humanae Vitae", or "Directory of Human Life", and printed in 1480, and became the source of most European versions.


title: Panchatantra

text: A German translation, "Das Buch der Beispiele", of the Panchatantra was printed in 1483, making this one of the earliest books to be printed by Gutenberg's press after the Bible.


title: Panchatantra

text: The Latin version was translated into Italian by in 1552. This translation became the basis for the first English translation, in 1570: Sir Thomas North translated it into Elizabethan English as "The Fables of Bidpai: The Morall Philosophie of Doni" (reprinted by Joseph Jacobs, 1888). La Fontaine published "The Fables of Bidpai" in 1679, based on "the Indian sage Pilpay".


title: Panchatantra

text: It was the Panchatantra that served as the basis for the studies of Theodor Benfey, the pioneer in the field of comparative literature. His efforts began to clear up some confusion surrounding the history of the Panchatantra, culminating in the work of Hertel (, , , ) and . Hertel discovered several recensions in India, in particular the oldest available Sanskrit recension, the "Tantrakhyayika" in Kashmir, and the so-called North Western Family Sanskrit text by the Jain monk Purnabhadra in 1199 CE that blends and rearranges at least three earlier versions. Edgerton undertook a minute study of all texts which seemed "to provide useful evidence on the lost Sanskrit text to which, it must be assumed, they all go back", and believed he had reconstructed the original Sanskrit Panchatantra; this version is known as the Southern Family text.


title: Panchatantra

text: Among modern translations, Arthur W. Ryder's translation (), translating prose for prose and verse for rhyming verse, remains popular. In the 1990s two English versions of the "Panchatantra" were published, Chandra Rajan's translation (like Ryder's, based on Purnabhadra's recension) by Penguin (1993), and Patrick Olivelle's translation (based on Edgerton's reconstruction of the ur-text) by Oxford University Press (1997). Olivelle's translation was republished in 2006 by the Clay Sanskrit Library.


title: Panchatantra

text: Recently Ibn al-Muqaffa's historical milieu itself, when composing his masterpiece in Baghdad during the bloody Abbasid overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty, has become the subject (and rather confusingly, also the title) of a gritty Shakespearean drama by the multicultural Kuwaiti playwright Sulayman Al-Bassam. Ibn al-Muqqafa's biographical background serves as an illustrative metaphor for today's escalating bloodthirstiness in Iraq — once again a historical vortex for clashing civilisations on a multiplicity of levels, including the obvious tribal, religious and political parallels.


title: Panchatantra

text: The novelist Doris Lessing notes in her introduction to Ramsay Wood's 1980 "retelling" of the first two of the five Panchatantra books, that


title: Contact lens

text: Contact lenses, or simply contacts, are thin lenses placed directly on the surface of the eyes. Contact lenses are ocular prosthetic devices used by over 150 million people worldwide, and they can be worn to correct vision or for cosmetic or therapeutic reasons. In 2010, the worldwide market for contact lenses was estimated at $6.1 billion, while the US soft lens market was estimated at $2.1 billion. Multiple analysts estimated that the global market for contact lenses would reach $11.7 billion by 2015. , the average age of contact lens wearers globally was 31 years old, and two-thirds of wearers were female.


title: Contact lens

text: People choose to wear contact lenses for many reasons. Aesthetics and cosmetics are main motivating factors for people who want to avoid wearing glasses or to change the appearance or color of their eyes. Others wear contact lenses for functional or optical reasons. When compared with spectacles, contact lenses typically provide better peripheral vision, and do not collect moisture (from rain, snow, condensation, etc.) or perspiration. This can make them preferable for sports and other outdoor activities. Contact lens wearers can also wear sunglasses, goggles, or other eyewear of their choice without having to fit them with prescription lenses or worry about compatibility with glasses. Additionally, there are conditions such as keratoconus and aniseikonia that are typically corrected better with contact lenses than with glasses.


title: Contact lens

text: Leonardo da Vinci is frequently credited with introducing the idea of contact lenses in his 1508 "Codex of the eye, Manual D", wherein he described a method of directly altering corneal power by either submerging the head in a bowl of water or wearing a water-filled glass hemisphere over the eye. Neither idea was practically implementable in da Vinci's time. He did not suggest his idea be used for correcting vision; he was more interested in exploring mechanisms of accommodation.


title: Contact lens

text: Descartes proposed a device for correcting vision consisting of a liquid-filled glass tube capped with a lens. However, the idea was impracticable, since the device was to be placed in direct contact with the cornea and thus would have made blinking impossible.


title: Contact lens

text: In 1801, Thomas Young fashioned a pair of basic contact lenses based on Descartes' model. He used wax to affix water-filled lenses to his eyes, neutralizing their refractive power, which he corrected with another pair of lenses.


title: Contact lens

text: Sir John Herschel, in a footnote to the 1845 edition of the "Encyclopedia Metropolitana", posed two ideas for the visual correction: the first "a spherical capsule of glass filled with animal jelly", the second "a mould of the cornea" that could be impressed on "some sort of transparent medium". Though Herschel reportedly never tested these ideas, they were later advanced by independent inventors, including Hungarian physician Joseph Dallos, who perfected a method of making molds from living eyes. This enabled the manufacture of lenses that, for the first time, conformed to the actual shape of the eye.


title: Contact lens

text: Although Louis J. Girard invented a scleral contact lens in 1887, it was German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick who in 1888 fabricated the first successful afocal scleral contact lens. Approximately in diameter, the heavy blown-glass shells rested on the less sensitive rim of tissue surrounding the cornea and floated on a dextrose solution. He experimented with fitting the lenses initially on rabbits, then on himself, and lastly on a small group of volunteers, publishing his work, ""Contactbrille"", in the March 1888 edition of "Archiv für Augenheilkunde". Large and unwieldy, Fick's lens could be worn only for a couple of hours at a time. August Müller of Kiel, Germany, corrected his own severe myopia with a more convenient blown-glass scleral contact lens of his own manufacture in 1888.


title: Contact lens

text: The development of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) in the 1930s paved the way for the manufacture of plastic scleral lenses. In 1936, optometrist William Feinbloom introduced a hybrid lens composed of glass and plastic, and in 1937 it was reported that some 3,000 Americans were already wearing contact lenses. In 1939, Hungarian ophthalmologist Dr.István Györffy produced the first fully plastic contact lens. The following year, German optometrist Heinrich Wöhlk produced his own version of plastic lenses based on experiments performed during the 1930s.


title: Contact lens

text: In 1949, the first "corneal" lenses were developed. These were much smaller than the original scleral lenses, as they sat only on the cornea rather than across all of the visible ocular surface, and could be worn up to 16 hours a day. PMMA corneal lenses became the first contact lenses to have mass appeal through the 1960s, as lens designs became more sophisticated with improving manufacturing technology. On October 18, 1964, in a television studio in Washington, D.C., Lyndon Baines Johnson became the first President in the history of the United States to appear in public wearing contact lenses, under the supervision of Dr. Alan Isen, who developed the first commercially viable soft-contact lenses in the United States.


title: Contact lens

text: Early corneal lenses of the 1950s and 1960s were relatively expensive and fragile, resulting in the development of a market for contact lens insurance. Replacement Lens Insurance, Inc. (now known as RLI Corp.) phased out its original flagship product in 1994 after contact lenses became more affordable and easier to replace.


title: Contact lens

text: One major disadvantage of PMMA lenses is that they allow no oxygen to get through to the conjunctiva and cornea, causing a number of adverse and potentially serious clinical effects. By the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s and 1990s, a range of oxygen-permeable but rigid materials were developed to overcome this problem. Chemist Norman Gaylord played a prominent role in the development of these new oxygen-permeable contact lenses. Collectively, these polymers are referred to as "rigid gas permeable" or RGP materials or lenses. Though all the above contact lens types—sclerals, PMMAs and RGPs—could be correctly referred to as "rigid" or "hard", the latter term is now used to the original PMMAs, which are still occasionally fitted and worn, whereas "rigid" is a generic term for all these lens types; thus hard lenses (PMMAs) are a subset of rigid contact lenses. Occasionally, the term "gas permeable" is used to describe RGPs, which is somewhat misleading as soft contact lenses are also gas permeable in that they allow oxygen to get through to the ocular surface.


title: Contact lens

text: The principal breakthrough in soft lenses was made by Czech chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lím, who published their work ""Hydrophilic gels for biological use"" in the journal "Nature" in 1959. In 1965, National Patent Development Corporation (NPDC) bought the American rights to produce the lenses and then sublicensed the rights to Bausch & Lomb, which started to manufacture them in the United States. The Czech scientists' work led to the launch of the first soft (hydrogel) contact lenses in some countries in the 1960s and the first approval of the Soflens material by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1971. These soft lenses were soon prescribed more often than rigid ones, due to the immediate and much greater comfort (rigid lenses require a period of adaptation before full comfort is achieved). Polymers from which soft lenses are manufactured improved over the next 25 years, primarily in terms of increasing oxygen permeability, by varying the ingredients. In 1972, British optometrist Rishi Agarwal was the first to suggest disposable soft contact lenses.


title: Contact lens

text: In 1998, the first silicone hydrogel contact lenses were released by Ciba Vision in Mexico. These new materials encapsulated the benefits of silicone which has extremely high oxygen permeability—with the comfort and clinical performance of the conventional hydrogels that had been used for the previous 30 years. These contact lenses were initially advocated primarily for extended (overnight) wear, although more recently, daily (no overnight) wear silicone hydrogels have been launched.


title: Contact lens

text: In a slightly modified molecule, a polar group is added without changing the structure of the silicone hydrogel. This is referred to as the Tanaka monomer because it was invented and patented by Kyoichi Tanaka of Menicon Co. of Japan in 1979. Second-generation silicone hydrogels, such as galyfilcon A (Acuvue Advance, Vistakon) and senofilcon A (Acuvue Oasys, Vistakon), use the Tanaka monomer. Vistakon improved the Tanaka monomer even further and added other molecules, which serve as an internal wetting agent.


title: Contact lens

text: Comfilcon A (Biofinity, CooperVision) was the first third-generation polymer. Its patent claims that the material uses two siloxy macromers of diverse sizes that, when used in combination, produce very high oxygen permeability (for a given water content). Enfilcon A (Avaira, CooperVision) is another third-generation material that is naturally wettable; its water content is 46%.


title: Contact lens

text: Contact lenses are classified in diverse ways: by their primary function, material, wear schedule (how long a lens can be worn), and replacement schedule (how long before a lens needs to be discarded).


title: Contact lens

text: Corrective contact lenses are designed to improve vision, most commonly by correcting refractive error. This is done by directly focusing light so it enters the eye with the proper power for clear vision.


title: Contact lens

text: A spherical contact lens bends light evenly in every direction (horizontally, vertically, etc.). They are typically used to correct myopia and hypermetropia.


title: Contact lens

text: There are two ways that contact lenses can correct astigmatism. One way is with toric soft lenses that work essentially the same way as eyeglasses with cylindrical correction; a toric lens has a different focusing power horizontally than vertically, and as a result can correct for astigmatism. Another way is by using a rigid gas permeable lens; since most astigmatism is caused by the shape of the cornea, rigid lenses can improve vision because the front surface of the optical system is the perfectly spherical lens. Both approaches have advantages and drawbacks. Toric lenses must have the proper orientation to correct for astigmatism, so such lenses must have additional design characteristics to prevent them from rotating out of alignment. This can be done by weighting the bottom of the lens or by using other physical characteristics to rotate the lens back into position, but these mechanisms rarely work perfectly, so some misalignment is common and results in somewhat imperfect correction, and blurring of sight after blinking rotates the lens. Toric soft lenses have all the advantages of soft lenses in general, which are low initial cost, ease of fitting, and minimal adjustment period. Rigid gas permeable lenses usually provide superior optical correction, but have become less popular relative to soft lenses due to higher initial costs, longer initial adjustment period, and more involved fitting.


title: Contact lens

text: Correction of presbyopia (a need for a reading prescription different from the prescription needed for distance) presents an additional challenge in the fitting of contact lenses. Two main strategies exist: multifocal lenses and monovision.


title: Contact lens

text: Multifocal contact lenses (e.g. bifocals or progressives) are comparable to spectacles with bifocals or progressive lenses because they have multiple focal points. Multifocal contact lenses are typically designed for constant viewing through the center of the lens, but some designs do incorporate a shift in lens position to view through the reading power (similar to bifocal glasses).


title: Contact lens

text: Monovision is the use of single-vision lenses (one focal point per lens) to focus an eye (typically the dominant one) for distance vision and the other for near work. The brain then learns to use this setup to see clearly at all distances. A technique called modified monovision uses multifocal lenses and also specializes one eye for distance and the other for near, thus gaining the benefits of both systems. Care is advised for persons with a previous history of strabismus and those with significant phorias, who are at risk of eye misalignment under monovision. Studies have shown no adverse effect to driving performance in adapted monovision contact lens wearers.


title: Contact lens

text: For those with certain color deficiencies, a red-tinted "X-Chrom" contact lens may be used. Although such a lens does not restore normal color vision, it allows some color-blind people to distinguish colors better. Red-filtering contact lenses can also be an option for extreme light sensitivity in some visual deficiencies such as achromatopsia.