title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: His father carefully oversaw his business training, starting him out at age 19 as a clerk in a New York banking house. After joining as an executive of the Staten Island Railway, he was made its president in 1862 and three years later was appointed vice-president of the Hudson River railway.


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: In 1869, he was made vice-president of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, becoming its president in 1877. He took over for his father as president of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, the Canada Southern Railway, and the Michigan Central Railroad at the time of the Commodore's death.


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: Vanderbilt's railroad holdings included Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, the Chicago and Canada Southern Railway, the Detroit and Bay City Railroad, the Hudson River Railroad, the Hudson River Bridge, the Joliet and Northern Indiana Railroad, the Michigan Midland and Canada Railroad, the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, the New York Central Sleeping Car Company, the New York and Harlem Rail Road, the Spuyten Duyvil and Port Morris Railroad, and the Staten Island Rail-Road.


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: In 1883, reporter John Dickinson Sherman questioned him about why he ran the limited express train: "Do your limited express trains pay or do you run them for the accommodation of the public?" Vanderbilt responded with: "Accommodation of the public? The public be damned! We run them because we have to. They do not pay. We have tried again and again to get the different roads to give them up; but they will run them and, of course, as long as they run them we must do the same." The interview was then published in the "Chicago Daily News", but Vanderbilt's words were modified. Several accounts of the incident were then disseminated; the accounts vary in terms of who conducted the interview, under what circumstance and what was actually said. William received bad publicity and clarified his response with a subsequent interview by the "Chicago Times". In that interview he was quoted saying: "Railroads are not run for the public benefit, but to pay. Incidentally, we may benefit humanity, but the aim is to earn a dividend."


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: In 1884 the firm "Grant & Ward" went bankrupt and ruined the investments of both Ulysses S. Grant and Vanderbilt, whom Grant had convinced to invest $150,000. Ferdinand Ward, known as the "Napoleon of Wall Street," had, unknowingly to both Grant and Vanderbilt, operated the company as a Ponzi scheme that resulted in financial ruin for many. The other associate, Buck Grant, apparently was unaware of Ward's Ponzi scheme swindle. Ward was later prosecuted. To pay Vanderbilt back, Grant mortgaged his Civil War memorabilia, including his sword. Although this did not fully cover the $150,000 debt, Vanderbilt accepted the memorabilia as payment and wiped out the $150,000 debt owed by Grant. Vanderbilt later recouped Grant's other mortgaged war memorabilia, including the memorabilia given by Grant, and returned them to Ulysses S. Grant's wife, Julia Grant, after Grant's death in 1885.


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: In 1841, Billy married Maria Louisa Kissam (1821–1896), daughter of the Reverend Samuel Kissam and Margaret Hamilton Adams. Together, they had nine children:


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: In 1883, he resigned all his company presidencies and had his sons appointed as important chairmen but left the day-to-day running of the businesses to experienced men appointed president.


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: He died on December 8, 1885, in Manhattan, New York City. He was interred in the Vanderbilt Family Mausoleum that he had commissioned in New Dorp on Staten Island, New York. His estate was divided among his eight children and his wife, the bulk of the estate going to his eldest two sons, Cornelius and William. His youngest son George inherited his Staten Island mansion and farm, which became Miller Field airbase and parkland.


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: Vanderbilt was an active philanthropist who gave extensively to a number of philanthropic causes including the YMCA; funding to help establish the Metropolitan Opera (which was not an entirely selfless act; his and other New York "new money" families had been socially excluded from the New York Academy of Music and set up the Metropolitan as competition); and an endowment for the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1880, he provided the money for Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, to construct the Wesley Hall building for use as the Biblical Department and library and included 160 dormitory rooms for students and professors, lecture halls, as well as a cafeteria. The building was destroyed by fire in 1932 and his son Frederick made another donation to help cover the insurance shortfall and allow a new building to be constructed.


title: William Henry Vanderbilt

text: Vanderbilt was an avid art enthusiast; his collection included some of the most valuable works of the Old Masters, and over his lifetime Vanderbilt acquired more than 200 paintings, which he housed in his lavish and palatial Fifth Avenue mansion.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Diffusion of innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. Everett Rogers, a professor of communication studies, popularized the theory in his book "Diffusion of Innovations"; the book was first published in 1962, and is now in its fifth edition (2003). Rogers argues that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system. The origins of the diffusion of innovations theory are varied and span multiple disciplines.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Rogers proposes that five main elements influence the spread of a new idea: the innovation itself, adopters, communication channels, time, and a social system. This process relies heavily on social capital. The innovation must be widely adopted in order to self-sustain. Within the rate of adoption, there is a point at which an innovation reaches critical mass. In 1989, management consultants working at the consulting firm Regis Mckenna Inc. theorized that this point lies at the boundary between the early adopters and the early majority. This tipping point between niche appeal and mass (self-sustained) adoption was originally labeled "the marketing chasm"


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: The categories of adopters are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Diffusion manifests itself in different ways and is highly subject to the type of adopters and innovation-decision process. The criterion for the adopter categorization is innovativeness, defined as the degree to which an individual adopts a new idea.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: The concept of diffusion was first studied by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in late 19th century and by German and Austrian anthropologists and geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel and Leo Frobenius. The study of diffusion of innovations took off in the subfield of rural sociology in the midwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Agriculture technology was advancing rapidly, and researchers started to examine how independent farmers were adopting hybrid seeds, equipment, and techniques. A study of the adoption of hybrid corn seed in Iowa by Ryan and Gross (1943) solidified the prior work on diffusion into a distinct paradigm that would be cited consistently in the future. Since its start in rural sociology, Diffusion of Innovations has been applied to numerous contexts, including medical sociology, communications, marketing, development studies, health promotion, organizational studies, knowledge management, conservation biology and complexity studies, with a particularly large impact on the use of medicines, medical techniques, and health communications. In organizational studies, its basic epidemiological or internal-influence form was formulated by H. Earl Pemberton, such as postage stamps and standardized school ethics codes.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: In 1962, Everett Rogers, a professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University, published his seminal work: "Diffusion of Innovations". Rogers synthesized research from over 508 diffusion studies across the fields that initially influenced the theory: anthropology, early sociology, rural sociology, education, industrial sociology and medical sociology. Rogers applied it to the healthcare setting to address issues with hygiene, cancer prevention, family planning, and drunk driving. Using his synthesis, Rogers produced a theory of the adoption of innovations among individuals and organizations. "Diffusion of Innovations" and Rogers' later books are among the most often cited in diffusion research. His methodologies are closely followed in recent diffusion research, even as the field has expanded into, and been influenced by, other methodological disciplines such as social network analysis and communication.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Studies have explored many characteristics of innovations. Meta-reviews have identified several characteristics that are common among most studies. These are in line with the characteristics that Rogers initially cited in his reviews.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Potential adopters evaluate an innovation on five characteristics: Relative advantage (the perceived efficiencies gained by the innovation relative to current tools or procedures), its compatibility with the pre-existing system, its complexity or difficulty to learn, its trialability or testability, its potential for reinvention (using the tool for initially unintended purposes), and its observed effects. Relative advantage is subjective, and it only matters that the potential adopter perceives the benefits of the advantage. The greater the perceived advantage, the quicker the innovation will be adopted. With the compatibility condition, the potential adopter takes into account his or her own beliefs, values, and experiences. Slower adoption sprouts from innovations that are outside of societal norms.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: These qualities interact and are judged as a whole. For example, an innovation might be extremely complex, reducing its likelihood to be adopted and diffused, but it might be very compatible with a large advantage relative to current tools. Even with this high learning curve, potential adopters might adopt the innovation anyway.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Studies also identify other characteristics of innovations, but these are not as common as the ones that Rogers lists above. The fuzziness of the boundaries of the innovation can impact its adoption. Specifically, innovations with a small core and large periphery are easier to adopt. Innovations that are less risky are easier to adopt as the potential loss from failed integration is lower. Innovations that are disruptive to routine tasks, even when they bring a large relative advantage, might not be adopted because of added instability. Likewise, innovations that make tasks easier are likely to be adopted. Closely related to relative complexity, knowledge requirements are the ability barrier to use presented by the difficulty to use the innovation. Even when there are high knowledge requirements, support from prior adopters or other sources can increase the chances for adoption.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Like innovations, adopters have been determined to have traits that affect their likelihood to adopt an innovation. A bevy of individual personality traits have been explored for their impacts on adoption, but with little agreement. Ability and motivation, which vary on situation unlike personality traits, have a large impact on a potential adopter's likelihood to adopt an innovation. Unsurprisingly, potential adopters who are motivated to adopt an innovation are likely to make the adjustments needed to adopt it. Motivation can be impacted by the meaning that an innovation holds; innovations can have symbolic value that encourage (or discourage) adoption. First proposed by Ryan and Gross (1943), the overall connectedness of a potential adopter to the broad community represented by a city. Potential adopters who frequent metropolitan areas are more likely to adopt an innovation. Finally, potential adopters who have the power or agency to create change, particularly in organizations, are more likely to adopt an innovation than someone with less power over his choices.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Complementary to the diffusion framework, behavioral models such as Technology acceptance model (TAM) and Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) are frequently used to understand individual technology adoption decisions in greater details.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Organizations face more complex adoption possibilities because organizations are both the aggregate of its individuals and its own system with a set of procedures and norms. Three organizational characteristics match well with the individual characteristics above: tension for change (motivation and ability), innovation-system fit (compatibility), and assessment of implications (observability). Organizations can feel pressured by a tension for change. If the organization's situation is untenable, it will be motivated to adopt an innovation to change its fortunes. This tension often plays out among its individual members. Innovations that match the organization's pre-existing system require fewer coincidental changes and are easy to assess and more likely to be adopted. The wider environment of the organization, often an industry, community, or economy, exerts pressures on the organization, too. Where an innovation is diffusing through the organization's environment for any reason, the organization is more likely to adopt it. Innovations that are intentionally spread, including by political mandate or directive, are also likely to diffuse quickly.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Unlike individual decisions where behavioral models (e.g. TAM and UTAUT) can be used to complement the diffusion framework and reveal further details, these models are not directly applicable to organizational decisions. However, research suggested that simple behavioral models can still be used as a good predictor of organizational technology adoption when proper initial screening procedures are introduced.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Diffusion occurs through a five–step decision-making process. It occurs through a series of communication channels over a period of time among the members of a similar social system. Ryan and Gross first identified adoption as a process in 1943. Rogers' five stages (steps): awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption are integral to this theory. An individual might reject an innovation at any time during or after the adoption process. Abrahamson examined this process critically by posing questions such as: How do technically inefficient innovations diffuse and what impedes technically efficient innovations from catching on? Abrahamson makes suggestions for how organizational scientists can more comprehensively evaluate the spread of innovations. In later editions of "Diffusion of Innovation", Rogers changes his terminology of the five stages to: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. However, the descriptions of the categories have remained similar throughout the editions.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: The rate of adoption is defined as the relative speed at which participants adopt an innovation. Rate is usually measured by the length of time required for a certain percentage of the members of a social system to adopt an innovation. The rates of adoption for innovations are determined by an individual's adopter category. In general, individuals who first adopt an innovation require a shorter adoption period (adoption process) when compared to late adopters.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Within the adoption curve at some point the innovation reaches critical mass. This is when the number of individual adopters ensures that the innovation is self-sustaining.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Rogers outlines several strategies in order to help an innovation reach this stage, including when an innovation adopted by a highly respected individual within a social network and creating an instinctive desire for a specific innovation. Another strategy includes injecting an innovation into a group of individuals who would readily use said technology, as well as providing positive reactions and benefits for early adopters.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Adoption is an individual process detailing the series of stages one undergoes from first hearing about a product to finally adopting it. Diffusion signifies a group phenomenon, which suggests how an innovation spreads.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Rogers defines an adopter category as a classification of individuals within a social system on the basis of innovativeness. In the book "Diffusion of Innovations", Rogers suggests a total of five categories of adopters in order to standardize the usage of adopter categories in diffusion research. The adoption of an innovation follows an S curve when plotted over a length of time. The categories of adopters are: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards In addition to the gatekeepers and opinion leaders who exist within a given community, change agents may come from outside the community. Change agents bring innovations to new communities– first through the gatekeepers, then through the opinion leaders, and so on through the community.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Failed diffusion does not mean that the technology was adopted by no one. Rather, failed diffusion often refers to diffusion that does not reach or approach 100% adoption due to its own weaknesses, competition from other innovations, or simply a lack of awareness. From a social networks perspective, a failed diffusion might be widely adopted within certain clusters but fail to make an impact on more distantly related people. Networks that are over-connected might suffer from a rigidity that prevents the changes an innovation might bring, as well.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Sometimes, some innovations also fail as a result of lack of local involvement and community participation.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: For example, Rogers discussed a situation in Peru involving the implementation of boiling drinking water to improve health and wellness levels in the village of Los Molinas. The residents had no knowledge of the link between sanitation and illness. The campaign worked with the villagers to try to teach them to boil water, burn their garbage, install latrines and report cases of illness to local health agencies. In Los Molinas, a stigma was linked to boiled water as something that only the "unwell" consumed, and thus, the idea of healthy residents boiling water prior to consumption was frowned upon. The two-year educational campaign was considered to be largely unsuccessful. This failure exemplified the importance of the roles of the communication channels that are involved in such a campaign for social change. An examination of diffusion in El Salvador determined that there can be more than one social network at play as innovations are communicated. One network carries information and the other carries influence. While people might hear of an innovation's uses, in Rogers' Los Molinas sanitation case, a network of influence and status prevented adoption.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Lazarsfeld and Merton first called attention to the principles of homophily and its opposite, heterophily. Using their definition, Rogers defines homophily as "the degree to which pairs of individuals who interact are similar in certain attributes, such as beliefs, education, social status, and the like". When given the choice, individuals usually choose to interact with someone similar to themselves. Homophilous individuals engage in more effective communication because their similarities lead to greater knowledge gain as well as attitude or behavior change. As a result, homophilous people tend to promote diffusion among each other. However, diffusion requires a certain degree of heterophily to introduce new ideas into a relationship; if two individuals are identical, no diffusion occurs because there is no new information to exchange. Therefore, an ideal situation would involve potential adopters who are homophilous in every way, except in knowledge of the innovation.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Promotion of healthy behavior provides an example of the balance required of homophily and heterophily. People tend to be close to others of similar health status. As a result, people with unhealthy behaviors like smoking and obesity are less likely to encounter information and behaviors that encourage good health. This presents a critical challenge for health communications, as ties between heterophilous people are relatively weaker, harder to create, and harder to maintain. Developing heterophilous ties to unhealthy communities can increase the effectiveness of the diffusion of good health behaviors. Once one previously homophilous tie adopts the behavior or innovation, the other members of that group are more likely to adopt it, too.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Not all individuals exert an equal amount of influence over others. In this sense opinion leaders are influential in spreading either positive or negative information about an innovation. Rogers relies on the ideas of Katz & Lazarsfeld and the two-step flow theory in developing his ideas on the influence of opinion leaders.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Opinion leaders have the most influence during the evaluation stage of the innovation-decision process and on late adopters. In addition opinion leaders typically have greater exposure to the mass media, more cosmopolitan, greater contact with change agents, more social experience and exposure, higher socioeconomic status, and are more innovative than others.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Research was done in the early 1950s at the University of Chicago attempting to assess the cost-effectiveness of broadcast advertising on the diffusion of new products and services. The findings were that opinion leadership tended to be organized into a hierarchy within a society, with each level in the hierarchy having most influence over other members in the same level, and on those in the next level below it. The lowest levels were generally larger in numbers and tended to coincide with various demographic attributes that might be targeted by mass advertising. However, it found that direct word of mouth and example were far more influential than broadcast messages, which were only effective if they reinforced the direct influences. This led to the conclusion that advertising was best targeted, if possible, on those next in line to adopt, and not on those not yet reached by the chain of influence.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Research on actor-network theory (ANT) also identifies a significant overlap between the ANT concepts and the diffusion of innovation which examine the characteristics of innovation and its context among various interested parties within a social system to assemble a network or system which implements innovation.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Other research relating the concept to public choice theory finds that the hierarchy of influence for innovations need not, and likely does not, coincide with hierarchies of official, political, or economic status. Elites are often not innovators, and innovations may have to be introduced by outsiders and propagated up a hierarchy to the top decision makers.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Prior to the introduction of the Internet, it was argued that social networks had a crucial role in the diffusion of innovation particularly tacit knowledge in the book "The IRG Solution – hierarchical incompetence and how to overcome it". The book argued that the widespread adoption of computer networks of individuals would lead to much better diffusion of innovations, with greater understanding of their possible shortcomings and the identification of needed innovations that would not have otherwise occurred. The social model proposed by Ryan and Gross is expanded by Valente who uses social networks as a basis for adopter categorization instead of solely relying on the system-level analysis used by Ryan and Gross. Valente also looks at an individual's personal network, which is a different application than the organizational perspective espoused by many other scholars.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Recent research by Wear shows, that particularly in regional and rural areas, significantly more innovation takes place in communities which have stronger inter-personal networks.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Innovations are often adopted by organizations through two types of innovation-decisions: collective innovation decisions and authority innovation decisions. The collective decision occurs when adoption is by consensus. The authority decision occurs by adoption among very few individuals with high positions of power within an organization. Unlike the optional innovation decision process, these decision processes only occur within an organization or hierarchical group. Research indicated that, with proper initial screening procedures, even simple behavioral model can serve as a good predictor for technology adoption in many commercial organizations. Within an organization certain individuals are termed "champions" who stand behind an innovation and break through opposition. The champion plays a very similar role as the champion used within the efficiency business model Six Sigma. The process contains five stages that are slightly similar to the innovation-decision process that individuals undertake. These stages are: agenda-setting, matching, redefining/restructuring, clarifying and routinizing.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: In the case of political science and administration, policy diffusion focuses on how institutional innovations are adopted by other institutions, at the local, state, or country level. An alternative term is 'policy transfer' where the focus is more on the agents of diffusion and the diffusion of policy knowledge, such as in the work of Diane Stone. Specifically, policy transfer can be defined as "knowledge about how policies administrative arrangements, institutions, and ideas in one political setting (past or present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions, and ideas in another political setting".


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: The first interests with regards to policy diffusion were focused in time variation or state lottery adoption, but more recently interest has shifted towards mechanisms (emulation, learning and coercion) or in channels of diffusion where researchers find that regulatory agency creation is transmitted by country and sector channels. At the local level, examining popular city-level policies make it easy to find patterns in diffusion through measuring public awareness. At the international level, economic policies have been thought to transfer among countries according to local politicians' learning of successes and failures elsewhere and outside mandates made by global financial organizations. As a group of countries succeed with a set of policies, others follow, as exemplified by the deregulation and liberalization across the developing world after the successes of the Asian Tigers. The reintroduction of regulations in the early 2000s also shows this learning process, which would fit under the stages of knowledge and decision, can be seen as lessons learned by following China's successful growth.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Peres, Muller and Mahajan suggested that diffusion is "the process of the market penetration of new products and services that is driven by social influences, which include all interdependencies among consumers that affect various market players with or without their explicit knowledge".


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Eveland evaluated diffusion from a phenomenological view, stating, "Technology is information, and exists only to the degree that people can put it into practice and use it to achieve values".


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Diffusion of existing technologies has been measured using "S curves". These technologies include radio, television, VCR, cable, flush toilet, clothes washer, refrigerator, home ownership, air conditioning, dishwasher, electrified households, telephone, cordless phone, cellular phone, per capita airline miles, personal computer and the Internet. These data can act as a predictor for future innovations.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Diffusion curves for infrastructure reveal contrasts in the diffusion process of personal technologies versus infrastructure.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Both positive and negative outcomes are possible when an individual or organization chooses to adopt a particular innovation. Rogers states that this area needs further research because of the biased positive attitude that is associated with innovation. Rogers lists three categories for consequences: desirable vs. undesirable, direct vs. indirect, and anticipated vs. unanticipated.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Public consequences comprise the impact of an innovation on those other than the actor, while private consequences refer to the impact on the actor. Public consequences usually involve collective actors, such as countries, states, organizations or social movements. The results are usually concerned with issues of societal well-being. Private consequences usually involve individuals or small collective entities, such as a community. The innovations are usually concerned with the improvement of quality of life or the reform of organizational or social structures.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Benefits of an innovation obviously are the positive consequences, while the costs are the negative. Costs may be monetary or nonmonetary, direct or indirect. Direct costs are usually related to financial uncertainty and the economic state of the actor. Indirect costs are more difficult to identify. An example would be the need to buy a new kind of pesticide to use innovative seeds. Indirect costs may also be social, such as social conflict caused by innovation. Marketers are particularly interested in the diffusion process as it determines the success or failure of a new product. It is quite important for a marketer to understand the diffusion process so as to ensure proper management of the spread of a new product or service.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: The diffusion of innovations theory has been used to conduct research on the unintended consequences of new interventions in public health. In the book multiple examples of the unintended negative consequences of technological diffusion are given. The adoption of automatic tomato pickers developed by Midwest agricultural colleges led to the adoption of harder tomatoes (disliked by consumers) and the loss of thousands of jobs leading to the collapse of thousands of small farmers. In another example, the adoption of snowmobiles in Saami reindeer herding culture is found to lead to the collapse of their society with widespread alcoholism and unemployment for the herders, ill-health for the reindeer (such as stress ulcers, miscarriages) and a huge increase in inequality.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: The diffusion of an innovation typically follows an S shaped curve which often resembles a logistic function. Mathematical programming models such as the S-D model apply the diffusion of innovations theory to real data problems. In addition to that, agent-based models follow a more intuitive process by designing individual-level rules to model diffusion of ideas and innovations.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Complex network models can also be used to investigate the spread of innovations among individuals connected to each other by a network of peer-to-peer influences, such as in a physical community or neighborhood.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Such models represent a system of individuals as "nodes" in a network (or graph). The interactions that link these individuals are represented by the edges of the network and can be based on the probability or strength of social connections. In the dynamics of such models, each node is assigned a current state, indicating whether or not the individual has adopted the innovation, and model equations describe the evolution of these states over time.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: In threshold models, the uptake of technologies is determined by the balance of two factors: the (perceived) usefulness (sometimes called utility) of the innovation to the individual as well as barriers to adoption, such as cost. The multiple parameters that influence decisions to adopt, both individual and socially motivated, can be represented by such models as a series of nodes and connections that represent real relationships. Borrowing from social network analysis, each node is an innovator, an adopter, or a potential adopter. Potential adopters have a threshold, which is a fraction of his neighbors who adopt the innovation that must be reached before he will adopt. Over time, each potential adopter views his neighbors and decides whether he should adopt based on the technologies they are using. When the effect of each individual node is analyzed along with its influence over the entire network, the expected level of adoption was seen to depend on the number of initial adopters and the network's structure and properties. Two factors emerge as important to successful spread of the innovation: the number of connections of nodes with their neighbors and the presence of a high degree of common connections in the network (quantified by the clustering coefficient). These models are particularly good at showing the impact of opinion leaders relative to others. Computer models are often used to investigate this balance between the social aspects of diffusion and perceived intrinsic benefit to the individuals.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Even though there have been more than four thousand articles across many disciplines published on Diffusion of Innovations, with a vast majority written after Rogers created a systematic theory, there have been few widely adopted changes to the theory. Although each study applies the theory in slightly different ways, this lack of cohesion has left the theory stagnant and difficult to apply with consistency to new problems.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Diffusion is difficult to quantify because humans and human networks are complex. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to measure what exactly causes adoption of an innovation. This is important, particularly in healthcare. Those encouraging adoption of health behaviors or new medical technologies need to be aware of the many forces acting on an individual and his or her decision to adopt a new behavior or technology. Diffusion theories can never account for all variables, and therefore might miss critical predictors of adoption. This variety of variables has also led to inconsistent results in research, reducing heuristic value.


title: Diffusion of innovations

text: Rogers placed the contributions and criticisms of diffusion research into four categories: pro-innovation bias, individual-blame bias, recall problem, and issues of equality. The pro-innovation bias, in particular, implies that all innovation is positive and that all innovations should be adopted. Cultural traditions and beliefs can be consumed by another culture's through diffusion, which can impose significant costs on a group of people. The one-way information flow, from sender to receiver, is another weakness of this theory. The message sender has a goal to persuade the receiver, and there is little to no reverse flow. The person implementing the change controls the direction and outcome of the campaign. In some cases, this is the best approach, but other cases require a more participatory approach. In complex environments where the adopter is receiving information from many sources and is returning feedback to the sender, a one-way model is insufficient and multiple communication flows need to be examined.


title: Jan Pol (veterinarian)

text: Jan-Harm Pol (born September 4, 1942) is a Dutch-American veterinarian known for his starring role on the reality television show "The Incredible Dr. Pol" on Nat Geo Wild.


title: Jan Pol (veterinarian)

text: Jan-Harm Pol was born on September 4, 1942, in Wateren, Drenthe, in the Netherlands. Pol grew up on his family's dairy farm. Pol met his wife Diane Dalrymple as a foreign exchange student at Mayville High School in 1961.


title: Jan Pol (veterinarian)

text: In 1970, Pol graduated with a degree in veterinary medicine at Utrecht University. Pol and his wife Diane moved to Harbor Beach, Michigan, where Pol worked for another veterinarian practice for 10 years and then moved to Weidman, Michigan, where he and his wife started their own practice, Pol Veterinary Services, in 1981. The practice is made up of a mix of large and small animals. Due to the unavailability of emergency care animal hospitals in the rural area in which Pol's practice is located, emergencies make up a large portion of the practice.


title: Jan Pol (veterinarian)

text: In 2013, Pol testified before the Michigan House of Representatives in favor of a bill seeking to prohibit authorities from investigating reports of misconduct or allegations "based upon information obtained from viewing the broadcast of a reality program," but the bill died in committee.


title: Jan Pol (veterinarian)

text: Pol's style has received a mixed reception by veterinarians, and in 2014, Pol was fined $500 and had his license put on probation by the Michigan Board of Veterinary Medicine for not wearing proper surgical attire during treatment of a Boston terrier. However, a year later, the sentencing was overturned by the Michigan Court of Appeals, which reversed and remanded, holding "inter alia" that there was no competent evidence that there was a breach of the standard of care and citing the fact that "the owners of the dog were happy with the care it has been given."


title: Jan Pol (veterinarian)

text: Pol is married to Diane Pol and has three children. All of the Pol children are adopted: daughter Kathy and son Charles at birth and daughter Diane Jr at age 17, after having been the Pols' foster child for eight years. Pol is color blind, unable to correctly distinguish certain colors like green and red.


title: Intuition

text: Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning. Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate.


title: Intuition

text: The word "intuition" comes from the Latin verb "intueri" translated as "consider" or from the late middle English word "intuit", "to contemplate". Use of intuition is sometimes referred to as responding to a "gut feeling" or "trusting your gut".


title: Intuition

text: According to Sigmund Freud, knowledge could only be attained through the intellectual manipulation of carefully made observations and rejected any other means of acquiring knowledge such as intuition, and his findings could have been an analytic turn of his mind towards the subject.


title: Intuition

text: In Carl Jung's theory of the ego, described in 1916 in "Psychological Types", intuition is an "irrational function", opposed most directly by sensation, and opposed less strongly by the "rational functions" of thinking and feeling. Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious": using sense-perception only as a starting point, to bring forth ideas, images, possibilities, ways out of a blocked situation, by a process that is mostly unconscious.


title: Intuition

text: Jung said that a person in whom intuition is dominant, an "intuitive type", acts not on the basis of rational judgment but on sheer intensity of perception. An extraverted intuitive type, "the natural champion of all minorities with a future", orients to new and promising but unproven possibilities, often leaving to chase after a new possibility before old ventures have borne fruit, oblivious to his or her own welfare in the constant pursuit of change. An introverted intuitive type orients by images from the unconscious, ever exploring the psychic world of the archetypes, seeking to perceive the meaning of events, but often having no interest in playing a role in those events and not seeing any connection between the contents of the psychic world and him- or herself. Jung thought that extraverted intuitive types were likely entrepreneurs, speculators, cultural revolutionaries, often undone by a desire to escape every situation before it becomes settled and constraining—even repeatedly leaving lovers for the sake of new romantic possibilities. His introverted intuitive types were likely mystics, prophets, or cranks, struggling with a tension between protecting their visions from influence by others and making their ideas comprehensible and reasonably persuasive to others—a necessity for those visions to bear real fruit.


title: Intuition

text: In more recent psychology, intuition can encompass the ability to know valid solutions to problems and decision making. For example, the recognition-primed decision (RPD) model explains how people can make relatively fast decisions without having to compare options. Gary Klein found that under time pressure, high stakes, and changing parameters, experts used their base of experience to identify similar situations and intuitively choose feasible solutions. Thus, the RPD model is a blend of intuition and analysis. The intuition is the pattern-matching process that quickly suggests feasible courses of action. The analysis is the mental simulation, a conscious and deliberate review of the courses of action.


title: Intuition

text: Instinct is often misinterpreted as intuition and its reliability is considered to be dependent on past knowledge and occurrences in a specific area. For example, someone who has had more experiences with children will tend to have a better instinct about what they should do in certain situations with them. This is not to say that one with a great amount of experience is always going to have an accurate intuition.


title: Intuition

text: Intuitive abilities were quantitatively tested at Yale University in the 1970s. While studying nonverbal communication, researchers noted that some subjects were able to read nonverbal facial cues before reinforcement occurred. In employing a similar design, they noted that highly intuitive subjects made decisions quickly but could not identify their rationale. Their level of accuracy, however, did not differ from that of non-intuitive subjects.


title: Intuition

text: According to the works of Daniel Kahneman, intuition is the ability to automatically generate solutions without long logical arguments or evidence. He mentions two different systems that we use to approach making decisions and judgements, with the first being in charge of automatic or unconscious thoughts, and the second being in charge of more intentional thoughts. The first system is an example of intuition, and Kahneman believes people overestimate this system, using it as a source of confidence for knowledge people may not truly possess. These systems are connected with two versions of ourselves called the remembering and experiencing self, relating to the creation of memories in "System 1". Its automatic nature also will occasionally lead people to experience cognitive illusions, assumptions that our intuition gives us and are usually trusted without a second thought.


title: Intuition

text: Gerd Gigerenzer described the idea of intuition as processes and thoughts that are void of typical logic. He described that there are two primary characteristics to intuition, basic rules of thumb(that are heuristic in nature) and "evolved capacities of the brain". The two work in tandem to give people thoughts and abilities that individuals do not actively think about as they are performed, and cannot explain their formation or effectiveness. He also does not believe that intuitions actively correlate to knowledge, stating having too much information makes individuals overthink, and that some intuitions will actively defy known information.


title: Intuition

text: Intuition has also been seen as a figurative launch pad for logical thinking, as intuition's automatic nature tends to always precede more thoughtful logic. Even when based on moral or subjective standpoints, intuition will provide a base, one that individuals will usually start to back up with logical thinking as a defense or justification instead of using a more unbiased viewpoint. The confidence in whether it is an intuition or not comes from how quickly they happen, because they are instantaneous feelings or judgments that we have surprising confidence in.


title: Intuition

text: Both Eastern and Western philosophers have studied the concept in great detail. Philosophy of mind deals with the concept.


title: Intuition

text: In the East intuition is mostly intertwined with religion and spirituality, and various meanings exist from different religious texts.


title: Intuition

text: In Hinduism, various attempts have been made to interpret how the Vedic and other esoteric texts regard intuition.


title: Intuition

text: For Sri Aurobindo, intuition comes under the realm of knowledge by identity. He describes the human psychological plane (often referred to as mana in Sanskrit) as having two natures: The first being its role in interpreting the external world (parsing sensory information), and the second being its role in generating consciousness. He terms this second nature "knowledge by identity." Aurobindo finds that, as the result of evolution, the mind has accustomed itself to using certain physiological functions as its means of entering into relations with the material world; when people seek to know about the external world, they default to arriving at truths via their senses. Knowledge by identity, which currently only explains self-awareness, may extend beyond the mind and explain intuitive knowledge.


title: Intuition

text: He finds this intuitive knowledge was common to older humans (Vedic) and later was taken over by reason which currently organises our perception, thoughts and actions resulting from Vedic to metaphysical philosophy and later to experimental science. He finds that this process, which seems to be decent, is actually a circle of progress, as a lower faculty is being pushed to take up as much from a higher way of working. He finds when self-awareness in the mind is applied to one's self and the outer (other) -self, results in luminous self-manifesting identity; the reason also converts itself into the form of the self-luminous intuitional knowledge.


title: Intuition

text: Osho believed consciousness of human beings to be in increasing order from basic animal instincts to intelligence and intuition, and humans being constantly living in that conscious state often moving between these states depending on their affinity. He also suggests living in the state of intuition is one of the ultimate aims of humanity.


title: Intuition

text: Advaita vedanta (a school of thought) takes intuition to be an experience through which one can come in contact with and experience Brahman.


title: Intuition

text: Buddhism finds intuition to be a faculty in the mind of immediate knowledge and puts the term intuition beyond the mental process of conscious thinking, as the conscious thought cannot necessarily access subconscious information, or render such information into a communicable form. In Zen Buddhism various techniques have been developed to help develop one's intuitive capability, such as koans – the resolving of which leads to states of minor enlightenment (satori). In parts of Zen Buddhism intuition is deemed a mental state between the Universal mind and one's individual, discriminating mind.


title: Intuition

text: In the West, intuition does not appear as a separate field of study, but the topic features prominently in the works of many philosophers.


title: Intuition

text: Early mentions and definitions of intuition can be traced back to Plato. In his book "Republic" he tries to define intuition as a fundamental capacity of human reason to comprehend the true nature of reality. In his works "Meno" and "Phaedo", he describes intuition as a pre-existing knowledge residing in the "soul of eternity", and a phenomenon by which one becomes conscious of pre-existing knowledge. He provides an example of mathematical truths, and posits that they are not arrived at by reason. He argues that these truths are accessed using a knowledge already present in a dormant form and accessible to our intuitive capacity. This concept by Plato is also sometimes referred to as anamnesis. The study was later continued by his intellectual successors, the Neoplatonists.


title: Intuition

text: In Islam there are various scholars with varied interpretations of intuition (often termed as hadas (Arabic: حدس), hitting correctly on a mark), sometimes relating the ability of having intuitive knowledge to prophethood.


title: Intuition

text: Siháb al Din-al Suhrawadi, in his book "Philosophy Of Illumination" (ishraq), from following influences of Plato he finds that intuition is knowledge acquired through illumination, is mystical in nature, and also suggests mystical contemplation (mushahada) to bring about correct judgment. Also influenced by Platonic ideas, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) finds the ability of having intuition as a "prophetic capacity" and describes it as knowledge obtained without intentionally acquiring it. He finds that regular knowledge is based on imitation while intuitive knowledge is based on intellectual certitude.


title: Intuition

text: In his book "Meditations on First Philosophy", Descartes refers to an "intuition" (from the Latin verb "intueor", which means "to see") as a pre-existing knowledge gained through rational reasoning or discovering truth through contemplation. This definition states that "whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be true is true", and it is commonly referred to as rational intuition It deals with a potential mistake called the Cartesian circle. Intuition and deduction are the unique possible sources of knowledge of the human intellect, while the latter is intended as a "connected sequence of intuitions", each of which is singularly intended "a priori" as a self-evident, clear and distinct idea, before being connected with the other ideas within a logical demonstration.


title: Intuition

text: Later philosophers, such as Hume, have more ambiguous interpretations of intuition. Hume claims intuition is a recognition of relationships (relation of time, place, and causation) while he states that "the resemblance" (recognition of relations) "will strike the eye" (which would not require further examination) but goes on to state, "or rather in mind"—attributing intuition to power of mind, contradicting the theory of empiricism.


title: Intuition

text: Immanuel Kant’s notion of "intuition" differs considerably from the Cartesian notion, and consists of the basic sensory information provided by the cognitive faculty of sensibility (equivalent to what might loosely be called perception). Kant held that our mind casts all of our external intuitions in the form of space, and all of our internal intuitions (memory, thought) in the form of time.


title: Intuition

text: Intuitions are customarily appealed to independently of any particular theory of how intuitions provide evidence for claims, and there are divergent accounts of what sort of mental state intuitions are, ranging from mere spontaneous judgment to a special presentation of a necessary truth. In recent years a number of philosophers, such as George Bealer, have tried to defend appeals to intuition against Quinean doubts about conceptual analysis. A different challenge to appeals to intuition has recently come from experimental philosophers, who argue that appeals to intuition must be informed by the methods of social science.


title: Intuition

text: The metaphilosophical assumption that philosophy ought to depend on intuitions has recently been challenged by experimental philosophers (e.g., Stephen Stich). One of the main problems adduced by experimental philosophers is that intuitions differ, for instance, from one culture to another, and so it seems problematic to cite them as evidence for a philosophical claim. Timothy Williamson has responded to such objections against philosophical methodology by arguing that intuition plays no special role in philosophy practice, and that skepticism about intuition cannot be meaningfully separated from a general skepticism about judgment. On this view, there are no qualitative differences between the methods of philosophy and common sense, the sciences or mathematics. Others like Ernest Sosa seek to support intuition by arguing that the objections against intuition merely highlight a verbal disagreement.


title: Intuition

text: Intuitionism is a position advanced by Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer in philosophy of mathematics derived from Kant's claim that all mathematical knowledge is knowledge of the pure forms of the intuition—that is, intuition that is not empirical.


title: Intuition

text: Intuitionistic logic was devised by Arend Heyting to accommodate this position (and has been adopted by other forms of constructivism in general). It is characterized by rejecting the law of excluded middle: as a consequence it does not in general accept rules such as double negation elimination and the use of reductio ad absurdum to prove the existence of something.


title: Intuition

text: Researchers in artificial intelligence are trying to add intuition to algorithms; as the "fourth generation of AI", this can be applied to many industries, especially finance. One example of artificial intuition is AlphaGo Zero, which used neural networks and was trained with reinforcement learning from a blank slate. In another example, ThetaRay partnered with Google Cloud to use artificial intuition for anti-money laundering purposes.


title: Intuition

text: In a 2022 article published in the Harvard Business Review, Melody Wilding explores "how to stop overthinking and start trusting your gut", noting that "intuition ... is frequently dismissed as mystical or unreliable". She suggests that there is a scientific basis for using intuition and refers to "surveys of top executives [which] show that a majority of leaders leverage feelings and experience when handling crises". However, an earlier Harvard Business Review article ("Don't Trust Your Gut") advises that, although "trust in intuition is understandable" ... "anyone who thinks that intuition is a substitute for reason is indulging in a risky delusion".


title: Intuition

text: Intuition was assessed by a sample of 11 Australian business leaders as a gut feeling based on experience, which they considered useful for making judgments about people, culture and strategy. Such an example likens intuition to "gut feelings", which - when viable - illustrate preconscious activity.


title: Intuition

text: Intuition Peak in Antarctica is so named "in appreciation of the role of scientific intuition for the advancement of human knowledge".


title: Willie Aames

text: Willie Aames, also credited as Willie Ames, (born Albert William Upton, July 15, 1960) is an American actor, film and television director, television producer, and screenwriter. He is best known for playing Tommy Bradford, one of the children of Tom Bradford (played by Dick Van Patten), on the 1970s television series "Eight Is Enough", Buddy Lembeck on the 1980s sitcom "Charles in Charge" and the title character in the direct-to-video series "Bibleman" (1995–2003).


title: Willie Aames

text: Aames was born in Newport Beach, California, in 1960. He attended Edison High School in Huntington Beach, California, and was in both the choir and the Madrigal Ensemble.


title: Willie Aames

text: Aames began acting in the late 1960s as a child, appearing in shows such as "Gunsmoke", "The Wonderful World of Disney", "Adam-12", and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father". In 1971, he originated the role of Leonard Unger, the son of Felix Unger (Tony Randall), on the ABC-TV series "The Odd Couple", a part that was later played by Leif Garrett. The following year, he voiced the character of Jamie Boyle in the animated series "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home".


title: Willie Aames

text: He guest-starred on various television series, including "The Waltons". In 1974, he portrayed a 12-year-old Benjamin Franklin in the miniseries "Benjamin Franklin". The next year, he co-starred in the series "Swiss Family Robinson".


title: Willie Aames

text: In 1977, he landed the role of Tommy Bradford in the comedy-drama "Eight Is Enough". During this period, he played in a band called Willie Aames & Paradise, in which he was lead singer/guitarist. Formed while Aames was in junior high school, the group eventually landed a recording contract with CBS Custom Label. During this time, Aames appeared in his first movie role, "Scavenger Hunt". After the series ended in 1981, Aames appeared in more film roles, including "Zapped!" opposite Scott Baio and "Paradise" with Phoebe Cates.


title: Willie Aames

text: Before portraying the role of Buddy Lembeck in "Charles in Charge" in 1984, Aames played the character of Robbie Hamlin on the ABC soap opera "The Edge of Night". From 1983 to 1985, he was the voice of Hank on the cartoon "Dungeons & Dragons". After the end of "Charles in Charge" in 1990, Aames hosted the game show "The Krypton Factor".


title: Willie Aames

text: Aames starred as Bibleman in the direct-to-video Christian superhero series from 1995 to 2003, before leaving to spend more time with his family. He was replaced by Robert T. Schlipp.


title: Willie Aames

text: In 2010, Aames' career changed direction when he began working as a Cruise Director for Regent Seven Seas Cruises. He subsequently worked for Oceania Cruises and Viking (Ocean) Cruises, before returning to acting in 2016.


title: Willie Aames

text: Aames has been married three times. Aames married Vicki Weatherman in 1979, having one child, Christopher. He married Maylo McCaslin in 1986, having one child, Harleigh Jean. Aames married Winnie Hung in 2014.


title: Three-point field goal

text: A three-point field goal (also 3-pointer, three, or trey) is a field goal in a basketball game made from beyond the three-point line, a designated arc surrounding the basket. A successful attempt is worth three points, in contrast to the two points awarded for field goals made within the three-point line and the one point for each made free throw.


title: Three-point field goal

text: The distance from the basket to the three-point line varies by competition level: in the National Basketball Association (NBA) the arc is from the center of the basket; in the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) (all divisions), and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the arc is from the center of the basket; and in the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) the arc is from the center of the basket. Every three-point line becomes parallel to each sideline at the points where each arc is a specified distance from the sideline. In both the NBA and WNBA, this distance is from the sideline; as a result, the distance from the center of the basket gradually decreases to a minimum of . FIBA specifies the arc's minimum distance from the sideline as , resulting in a minimum distance from the center of the basket of . The NCAA and NAIA arc is the same distance from the center of the basket as the FIBA arc, but is from each sideline because the North American court is slightly wider than the FIBA court.


title: Three-point field goal

text: In 3x3, a FIBA-sanctioned variant of the half-court 3-on-3 game, the same line exists, but shots from behind it are only worth 2 points with all other shots worth 1 point.


title: Three-point field goal

text: The three-point line was first tested at the collegiate level in 1945, with a 21-foot line, in a game between Columbia and Fordham, but it was not kept as a rule. There was another one-game experiment in 1958, this time with a 23-foot line, in a game between St. Francis (NY) and Siena. In 1961, Boston University and Dartmouth played one game with an experimental rule that counted all field goals as three points. In 1962, the St. Francis (NY) head coach, Daniel Lynch, once again made the suggestion of a 3pt line to the New York Basketball Writers Association.


title: Three-point field goal

text: At the direction of Abe Saperstein, the American Basketball League (ABL) became the first basketball league to institute the rule in 1961. As commissioner of the new league, Saperstein wanted to add excitement to the game and distinguish the league from the bigger NBA. He hoped the three-pointer would become basketball's equivalent of the home run. “We must have a weapon,” Saperstein said, “and this is ours.”


title: Three-point field goal

text: To determine the distance the new shot line should be from the basket, Saperstein and longtime DePaul University coach Ray Meyer went onto a court one day with tape and selected 25 feet as the right length. “They just arbitrarily drew lines,” his son Jerry Saperstein said. “There’s really no scientific basis. Just two Hall of Fame coaches getting together and saying: ‘Where would we like to see the line?’” Not long after, in June 1961, Saperstein was traveling when the other seven ABL owners voted 4-3 to officially shorten the line, to 22 feet. Saperstein, who had significant power in the league as owner of the popular Globetrotters, disagreed with this and simply ignored the ruling. Games continued with the shot. Saperstein eventually acknowledged there was one problem with the 25-foot arc and solved it by adding a 22-foot line in the corners. “It made for interesting possibilities,” he wrote.


title: Three-point field goal

text: After the ABL shut down in 1963, the three-point shot was adopted by the Eastern Professional Basketball League in its 1963–64 season. It was also popularized by the American Basketball Association (ABA), which introduced it in its inaugural 1967–68 ABA commissioner George Mikan stated that the three-pointer "would give the smaller player a chance to score and open up the defense to make the game more enjoyable for the fans". During the 1970s, the ABA used the three-point shot, along with the slam dunk, as a marketing tool to compete with the NBA. Its ninth and final season concluded in the spring


title: Three-point field goal

text: Three years later in June 1979, the NBA adopted the three-point line (initially on a one-year trial) for the despite the view of many that it was a gimmick. Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics is credited with making the first three-point shot in NBA history on October 12, 1979. The season opener at Boston Garden was more remarkable for the debut of Larry Bird (and two new Rick Barry of the Houston Rockets, in his final season, also made one in the same game, and Kevin Grevey of the Washington Bullets made one that Friday night


title: Three-point field goal

text: The sport's international governing body, FIBA, introduced the three-point line in 1984, and it made its Olympic debut in 1988 in Seoul, South Korea.


title: Three-point field goal

text: The NCAA's Southern Conference became the first collegiate conference to use the three-point rule, adopting a line for the 1980–81 season. Ronnie Carr of Western Carolina was the first to score a three-point field goal in college basketball history on November 29, 1980. Over the following five years, NCAA conferences differed in their use of the rule and distance required for a three-pointer. The line was as close as in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and as far away as in the


title: Three-point field goal

text: Used only in conference play for several years, it was adopted by the NCAA in April 1986 for the 1986–87 season at and was first used in the NCAA tournament in March 1987. The NCAA adopted the three-pointer in women's basketball on an experimental basis for that season at the same distance, and made its use mandatory beginning In 2007, the NCAA lengthened the men's distance by a foot to , effective with the season, and the women's line was moved to match the men's in 2011–12. The NFHS, along with elementary and middle schools, adopted a line nationally in 1987, a year after the NCAA. The NCAA experimented with the FIBA three-point line distance in the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) then adopted that distance for all men's play with a phased conversion that began with Division I in the 2019–20 season. The NAIA and other American associations also adopted the new NCAA distance for their respective men's play. In that same 2019–20 season, the NCAA planned to experiment with the FIBA arc in women's postseason events other than the NCAA championships in each division, most notably the Women's National Invitation Tournament and Women's Basketball Invitational; these events were ultimately scrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NCAA announced on June 3, 2021 that the FIBA three-point distance would be extended to the women's game starting in 2021–22.


title: Three-point field goal

text: For three seasons beginning in 1994–95, the NBA attempted to address decreased scoring by shortening the distance of the line from ( at the corners) to a uniform around the basket. From the 1997–98 season on, the NBA reverted the line to its original distance of ( at the corners, with a 3-inch differential).


title: Three-point field goal

text: In 2008, FIBA announced that the distance would be increased by to , with the change being phased in beginning in October 2010. In December 2012, the WNBA announced that it would use the FIBA distance, starting in 2013; by 2017, the distance at the corners was lengthened to match the NBA. The NBA has discussed adding a four-point line, according to president Rod Thorn.


title: Three-point field goal

text: In the NBA, three-point field goals became increasingly more frequent along the years, especially by mid-2015 onward. The increase in latter years has been attributed to NBA player Stephen Curry, who is credited with revolutionizing the game by inspiring teams to regularly employ the three-point shot as part of their winning strategy. Curry is ranked highest in "Off Ball" average attention drawn. Calculated by the average attention each player receives as the total amount of time guarded by each defensive player divided by the total time playing, Curry's was ranked at 1.064, with Kevin Durant coming in second at 1.063.


title: Three-point field goal

text: A three-point line consists of an arc at a set radius measured from the point on the floor directly below the center of the basket, and two parallel lines equidistant from each sideline extending from the nearest end line to the point at which they intersect the arc. In the NBA, WNBA, NCAA or NAIA, and FIBA standards, the arc spans the width of the court until it is a specified minimum distance from each sideline. The three-point line then becomes parallel to the sidelines from those points to the baseline. The unusual formation of the three-point line at these levels allows players some space from which to attempt a three-point shot at the corners of the court; the arc would be less than from each sideline at the corners if it was a continuous arc. In American high school standards, the arc spans 180° around the basket, then becomes parallel to the sidelines from the plane of the basket center to the baseline (). During the period in which the NCAA/NAIA arc was at from the center of the basket, the arc was from the sideline in that area.


title: Three-point field goal

text: The high school corner minimum is taken as a requirement for newer high school gymnasiums and fieldhouses built in the three-point era. Courts built in older eras before state high school sanctioning bodies issued rules regarding court sizes have narrower markings, requiring home court ground rules where there is less space behind the three-point arc, the space on the sides of the arc can barely accommodate the shooter's feet due to lack of room, or it may be marked closer than the suggested minimum.


title: Three-point field goal

text: A player's feet must be completely behind the three-point line at the time of the shot or jump in order to make a three-point attempt; if the player's feet are on or in front of the line, it is a two-point attempt. A player is allowed to jump from outside the line and land inside the line to make a three-point attempt, as long as the ball is released in mid-air.


title: Three-point field goal

text: An official raises his/her arm with three fingers extended to signal the shot attempt. If the attempt is successful, he/she raises his/her other arm with all fingers fully extended in manner similar to a football official signifying successful field goal to indicate the three-point goal. The official must recognize it for it to count as three points. Instant replay has sometimes been used, depending on league rules. The NBA, WNBA FIBA and the NCAA specifically allow replay for this purpose. In NBA, WNBA & FIBA games, video replay does not have to occur immediately following a shot; play can continue and the officials can adjust the scoring later in the game, after reviewing the video. However, in late game situations, play may be paused pending a review.


title: Three-point field goal

text: If a shooter is fouled while attempting a three-pointer and subsequently misses the shot, the shooter is awarded three free-throw attempts. If a player completes a three-pointer while being fouled, the player is awarded one free-throw for a possible 4-point play. Conceivably, if a player completed a three-pointer while being fouled, and that foul was ruled as either a Flagrant 1 or a Flagrant 2 foul, the player would be awarded two free throws for a possible 5-point play.


title: Three-point field goal

text: Major League Lacrosse (MLL) featured a two-point line which forms a arc around the front of the goal. Shots taken from behind this line count for two points, as opposed to the standard one point. The Premier Lacrosse League, which absorbed MLL in a December 2020 merger, plays under MLL rules, including the two-point arc.


title: Three-point field goal

text: In gridiron football, a standard field goal is worth three points; various professional and semi-pro leagues have experimented with four-point field goals. NFL Europe and the Stars Football League adopted a rule similar to basketball's three-point line in which an additional point was awarded for longer field goals; in both leagues any field goal of or more was worth four points. The Arena Football League awarded four points for any successful drop kicked field goal (like the three-point shot, the drop kick is more challenging than a standard place kick, as the bounce of the ball makes a kick less predictable, and arena football also uses narrower goal posts for all kicks than the outdoor game does).


title: Three-point field goal

text: During the existence of the World Hockey Association (WHA) in the 1970s, there were proposals for two-point hockey goals for shots taken beyond an established distance (one proposal was a 44-foot (13.4m) arc, which would have intersected the faceoff circles), but this proposal gained little support and faded after the WHA merged with the National Hockey League. It was widely believed that long-distance shots in hockey had little direct relation to skill (usually resulting more from goalies' vision being screened or obscured), plus with the lower scoring intrinsic to the sport a two-point goal was seen as disruptive of the structure of the game.


title: Three-point field goal

text: The super goal is a similar concept in Australian rules football, in which a arc determines the value of a goal; within the arc, it is the usual 6 points, but 9 points are scored for a "super goal" scored from outside the arc. To date the super goal is only used in pre-season games and not in the season proper.


title: Three-point field goal

text: The National Professional Soccer League II, which awarded two points for all goals except those on the power play, also used a three-point line, drawn from the goal. It has since been adopted by some other indoor soccer leagues.


title: Three-point field goal

text: The 2020 Suncorp Super Netball league season saw the addition of the two-goal Super Shot. The Super Shot provides goal attacks and goal shooters the opportunity to score two goals by shooting from a 1.9m designated zone within the goal circle and will be active in the final five minutes of each quarter.


title: Iranian languages

text: The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau.


title: Iranian languages

text: The Iranian languages are grouped in three stages: Old Iranian (until 400 BCE), Middle Iranian (400 BCE–900 CE) and New Iranian (since 900 CE). The two directly-attested Old Iranian languages are Old Persian (from the Achaemenid Empire) and Old Avestan (the language of the Avesta). Of the Middle Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Middle Persian (from the Sasanian Empire), Parthian (from the Parthian Empire), and Bactrian (from the Kushan and Hephthalite empires).


title: Iranian languages

text: , there were an estimated 150–200 million native speakers of the Iranian languages. "Ethnologue" estimates that there are 86 languages in the group, with the largest among them being Persian (Farsi, Dari, and Tajik dialects), Pashto, Kurdish, Luri, and Balochi.


title: Iranian languages

text: The term "Iranian" is applied to any language which descends from the ancestral Proto-Iranian language.


title: Iranian languages

text: Some scholars such as John R. Perry prefer the term "Iranic" as the anthropological name for the linguistic family and ethnic groups of this category, and "Iranian" for anything about the modern country of Iran. He uses the same analogue as in differentiating German from Germanic or differentiating Turkish and Turkic.


title: Iranian languages

text: This use of the term for the Iranian language family was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen. Robert Needham Cust used the term "Irano-Aryan" in 1878, and Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller contrasted "Irano-Aryan" (Iranian) and "Indo-Aryan" (Indic). Some recent scholarship, primarily in German, has revived this convention.


title: Iranian languages

text: According to modern scholarship, the Avestan languages are not considered to fall under these categories, and are instead sometimes classified as Central Iranian, since they diverged from Proto-Iranian before the east-west division rose to prominence. It has traditionally been viewed as Eastern Iranian; however, it lacks a large number of Eastern Iranian features and thus is only "Eastern Iranian" in the sense that it is not Western.


title: Iranian languages

text: The Iranian languages all descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Iranian, which itself evolved from Proto-Indo-Iranian. This ancestor language is speculated to have origins in Central Asia, and the Andronovo culture of the Bronze Age is suggested as a candidate for the common Indo-Iranian culture around 2000 BCE.


title: Iranian languages

text: The language was situated precisely in the western part of Central Asia that borders present-day Russia and Kazakhstan. It was thus in relative proximity to the other satem ethno-linguistic groups of the Indo-European family, such as Thracian, Balto-Slavic and others, and to common Indo-European's original homeland (more precisely, the Eurasian Steppe to the north of the Caucasus), according to the reconstructed linguistic relationships of common Indo-European.


title: Iranian languages

text: Proto-Iranian thus dates to some time after the Proto-Indo-Iranian breakup, or the early-2nd millennium BCE, as the Old Iranian languages began to break off and evolve separately as the various Iranian tribes migrated and settled in vast areas of southeastern Europe, the Iranian Plateau, and Central Asia.


title: Iranian languages

text: Proto-Iranian innovations compared to Proto-Indo-Iranian include: the turning of sibilant fricative *s into non-sibilant fricative glottal *h; the voiced aspirated plosives *bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ yielding to the voiced unaspirated plosives *b, *d, *g resp.; the voiceless unaspirated stops *p, *t, *k before another consonant changing into fricatives *f, *θ, *x resp.; voiceless aspirated stops *pʰ, *tʰ, *kʰ turning into fricatives *f, *θ, *x, resp.


title: Iranian languages

text: The multitude of Middle Iranian languages and peoples indicate that great linguistic diversity must have existed among the ancient speakers of Iranian languages. Of that variety of languages/dialects, "direct" evidence of only two have survived. These are:


title: Iranian languages

text: Old Persian was an Old Iranian dialect as it was spoken in southwestern Iran (the modern-day province of Fars) by the inhabitants of Parsa, Persia or Persis who also gave their name to their region and language. Genuine Old Persian is best attested in one of the three languages of the Behistun inscription, composed circa 520 BCE, and which is the last inscription (and only inscription of significant length) in which Old Persian is still grammatically correct. Later inscriptions are comparatively brief, and typically simply copies of words and phrases from earlier ones, often with grammatical errors, which suggests that by the 4th century BCE the transition from Old Persian to Middle Persian was already far advanced, but efforts were still being made to retain an "old" quality for official proclamations.


title: Iranian languages

text: The other directly attested Old Iranian dialects are the two forms of Avestan, which take their name from their use in the Avesta, the liturgical texts of indigenous Iranian religion that now goes by the name of Zoroastrianism but in the Avesta itself is simply known as "vohu daena" (later: "behdin"). The language of the Avesta is subdivided into two dialects, conventionally known as "Old (or 'Gathic') Avestan", and "Younger Avestan". These terms, which date to the 19th century, are slightly misleading since 'Younger Avestan' is not only much younger than 'Old Avestan', but also from a different geographic region. The Old Avestan dialect is very archaic, and at roughly the same stage of development as Rigvedic Sanskrit. On the other hand, Younger Avestan is at about the same linguistic stage as Old Persian, but by virtue of its use as a sacred language retained its "old" characteristics long after the Old Iranian languages had yielded to their Middle Iranian stage. Unlike Old Persian, which has Middle Persian as its known successor, Avestan has no clearly identifiable Middle Iranian stage (the effect of Middle Iranian is indistinguishable from effects due to other causes).


title: Iranian languages

text: In addition to Old Persian and Avestan, which are the only "directly" attested Old Iranian languages, all Middle Iranian languages must have had a predecessor "Old Iranian" form of that language, and thus can all be said to have had an (at least hypothetical) "Old" form. Such hypothetical Old Iranian languages include Carduchian (the hypothetical predecessor to Kurdish) and Old Parthian. Additionally, the existence of unattested languages can sometimes be inferred from the impact they had on neighbouring languages. Such transfer is known to have occurred for Old Persian, which has (what is called) a "Median" substrate in some of its vocabulary. Also, foreign references to languages can also provide a hint to the existence of otherwise unattested languages, for example through toponyms/ethnonyms or in the recording of vocabulary, as Herodotus did for what he called "Scythian" and in one instance, Median ("σπάκα" "dog").


title: Iranian languages

text: Conventionally, Iranian languages are grouped in "western" and "eastern" branches. These terms have little meaning with respect to Old Avestan as that stage of the language may predate the settling of the Iranian peoples into western and eastern groups. The geographic terms also have little meaning when applied to Younger Avestan since it isn't known where that dialect (or dialects) was spoken either. Certain is only that Avestan (all forms) and Old Persian are distinct, and since Old Persian is "western", and Avestan was not Old Persian, Avestan acquired a default assignment to "eastern". Further confusing the issue is the introduction of a western Iranian substrate in later Avestan compositions and redactions undertaken at the centers of imperial power in western Iran (either in the south-west in Persia, or in the north-west in Nisa/Parthia and Ecbatana/Media).


title: Iranian languages

text: Two of the earliest dialectal divisions among Iranian indeed happen to not follow the later division into Western and Eastern blocks. These concern the fate of the Proto-Indo-Iranian first-series palatal consonants, *ć and *dź:


title: Iranian languages

text: As a common intermediate stage, it is possible to reconstruct depalatalized affricates: *c, *dz. (This coincides with the state of affairs in the neighboring Nuristani languages.) A further complication however concerns the consonant clusters *ćw and *dźw:


title: Iranian languages

text: A division of Iranian languages in at least three groups during the Old Iranian period is thus implied:


title: Iranian languages

text: It is possible that other distinct dialect groups were already in existence during this period. Good candidates are the hypothetical ancestor languages of Alanian/Scytho-Sarmatian subgroup of Scythian in the far northwest; and the hypothetical "Old Parthian" (the Old Iranian ancestor of Parthian) in the near northwest, where original *dw > *b (paralleling the development of *ćw).


title: Iranian languages

text: What is known in Iranian linguistic history as the "Middle Iranian" era is thought to begin around the 4th century BCE lasting through the 9th century. Linguistically the Middle Iranian languages are conventionally classified into two main groups, Western and Eastern.


title: Iranian languages

text: The Western family includes Parthian (Arsacid Pahlavi) and Middle Persian, while Bactrian, Sogdian, Khwarezmian, Saka and Old Ossetic (Scytho-Sarmatian) fall under the Eastern category. The two languages of the Western group were linguistically very close to each other, but quite distinct from their eastern counterparts. On the other hand, the Eastern group was an areal entity whose languages retained some similarity to Avestan. They were inscribed in various Aramaic-derived alphabets which had ultimately evolved from the Achaemenid Imperial Aramaic script, though Bactrian was written using an adapted Greek script.


title: Iranian languages

text: Middle Persian (Pahlavi) was the official language under the Sasanian dynasty in Iran. It was in use from the 3rd century CE until the beginning of the 10th century. The script used for Middle Persian in this era underwent significant maturity. Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian were also used as literary languages by the Manichaeans, whose texts also survive in various non-Iranian languages, from Latin to Chinese. Manichaean texts were written in a script closely akin to the Syriac script.


title: Iranian languages

text: Following the Arab conquest of Persia, there were important changes in the role of the different dialects within the Persian Empire. The old prestige form of Middle Iranian, also known as Pahlavi, was replaced by a new standard dialect called Dari as the official language of the court. The name Dari comes from the word "darbâr" (دربار), which refers to the royal court, where many of the poets, protagonists and patrons of the literature flourished. The Saffarid dynasty in particular was the first in a line of many dynasties to officially adopt the new language in 875 CE. Dari may have been heavily influenced by regional dialects of eastern Iran, whereas the earlier Pahlavi standard was based more on western dialects. This new prestige dialect became the basis of Standard New Persian. Medieval Iranian scholars such as Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa (8th century) and Ibn al-Nadim (10th century) associated the term "Dari" with the eastern province of Khorasan, while they used the term "Pahlavi" to describe the dialects of the northwestern areas between Isfahan and Azerbaijan, and "Pârsi" ("Persian" proper) to describe the dialects of Fars (Persia). They also noted that the unofficial language of the royalty itself was yet another dialect, "Khuzi", associated with the western province of Khuzestan.


title: Iranian languages

text: The Islamic conquest also brought with it the adoption of the Arabic script for writing Persian and much later, Kurdish, Pashto and Balochi. All three were adapted to the writing by the addition of a few letters. This development probably occurred some time during the second half of the 8th century, when the old middle Persian script began dwindling in usage. The Arabic script remains in use in contemporary modern Persian. Tajik script, used to write the Tajik language, was first Latinised in the 1920s under the then Soviet nationality policy. The script was however subsequently Cyrillicized in the 1930s by the Soviet government.


title: Iranian languages

text: The geographical regions in which Iranian languages were spoken were pushed back in several areas by newly neighbouring languages. Arabic spread into some parts of Western Iran (Khuzestan), and Turkic languages spread through much of Central Asia, displacing various Iranian languages such as Sogdian and Bactrian in parts of what is today Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Eastern Europe, mostly comprising the territory of modern-day Ukraine, southern European Russia, and parts of the Balkans, the core region of the native Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans had been decisively taken over as a result of absorption and assimilation (e.g. Slavicisation) by the various Proto-Slavic population of the region, by the 6th century CE. This resulted in the displacement and extinction of the once predominant Scythian languages of the region. Sogdian's close relative Yaghnobi barely survives in a small area of the Zarafshan valley east of Samarkand, and Saka as Ossetic in the Caucasus, which is the sole remnant of the once predominant Scythian languages in Eastern Europe proper and large parts of the North Caucasus. Various small Iranian languages in the Pamir Mountains survive that are derived from Eastern Iranian.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book "Tristes Tropiques" (1955) that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in Brussels at the time, where his father was working as a portrait painter. He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the upscale 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and later wrote about. During the First World War, from age 6 to 10, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the rabbi of (the synagogue of) Versailles. Despite his religious environment early on, Claude Lévi-Strauss was an atheist or agnostic, at least in his adult life.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly middle school, receiving a baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16). In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant, and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist). From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take the exam. In 1926, he went to Sorbonne in Paris, studying law and philosophy, as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism. In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the "agrégation" in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor. In 1931, he passed the agrégation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time, the Great Depression had hit France, and Lévi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself, but his parents as well.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompanied Dina, a trained ethnographer in her own right, who was also a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, where they conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. They first studied the Guaycuru and Bororó Indian tribes, staying among them for a few days. In 1938, they returned for a second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. At this time, his wife suffered an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experience cemented Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. Edmund Leach suggests, from Lévi-Strauss's own accounts in "Tristes Tropiques", that he could not have spent more than a few weeks in any one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language, which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatory interaction with subjects to gain a full understanding of a culture.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: In the 1980s, he discussed why he became vegetarian in pieces published in Italian daily newspaper "La Repubblica" and other publications anthologized in the posthumous book "Nous sommes tous des cannibales" (2013):A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travelers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America, Oceania, Asia or Africa.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a "lycée" in Montpellier, but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws (Lévi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry). By the same laws, he was denaturalized, of his French citizenship and forced to escape persecution.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: Around that time, his first wife and he separated. She stayed behind and worked in the French resistance, while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique, from where he was finally able to continue traveling. (Victor Serge describes conversations with Lévi-Strauss aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle from Marseilles to Martinique in his Notebooks.).


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico, where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University. In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC, Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. At this time, he received his state doctorate from the Sorbonne by submitting, in the French tradition, both a "major" and a "minor" doctoral thesis. These were ("The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians") and ("The Elementary Structures of Kinship").


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie française to reach the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. On the death of Maurice Druon on 14 April 2009, he became the Dean of the "Académie", its longest-serving member.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: He died on 30 October 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday. The death was announced four days later.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time". Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said Lévi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity ... At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalization, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lévi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly". In a similar vein, a statement by Lévi-Strauss was broadcast on National Public Radio in the remembrance produced by "All Things Considered" on 3 November 2009: "There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. Andglobalization which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like." "The Daily Telegraph" said in its obituary that Lévi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences". Permanent secretary of the Académie française Hélène Carrère d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher... We will not find another like him".


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: "The Elementary Structures of Kinship" was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, who saw it as an important statement of the position of women in non-Western cultures. A play on the title of Durkheim's famous "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", Lévi-Strauss' "Elementary Structures" re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one group married men from another.


title: Claude Lévi-Strauss

text: Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the CNRS and the Musée de l'Homme before finally becoming professor () of the fifth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previously professor, the title of which chair he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples".