title: Larry Niven

text: Laurence van Cott Niven (; born April 30, 1938) is an American science fiction writer. His best-known works are "Ringworld" (1970), which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards, and, with Jerry Pournelle, "The Mote in God's Eye" (1974) and "Lucifer's Hammer" (1977). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him the 2015 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. It also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes the series "The Magic Goes Away", rational fantasy dealing with magic as a non-renewable resource.


title: Larry Niven

text: Niven was born in Los Angeles. He is a great-grandson of Edward L. Doheny, an oil tycoon who drilled the first successful well in the Los Angeles City Oil Field in 1892, and also was subsequently implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. Niven briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas in 1962. He also completed a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. On September 6, 1969, he married Marilyn Wisowaty, a science fiction and Regency literature fan.


title: Larry Niven

text: Niven is the author of numerous science fiction short stories and novels, beginning with his 1964 story "The Coldest Place". In this story, the coldest place concerned is the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun (it was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance after Niven received payment for the story, but before it was published).


title: Larry Niven

text: Algis Budrys said in 1968 that Niven becoming a top writer despite the New Wave was evidence that "trends are for second-raters". In addition to the Nebula Award in 1970 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1971 for "Ringworld", Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Neutron Star" in 1967. He won the same award in 1972, for "Inconstant Moon", and in 1975 for "The Hole Man". In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "The Borderland of Sol".


title: Larry Niven

text: Niven has written scripts for two science fiction television series: the original "Land of the Lost" series and "", for which he adapted his early story "The Soft Weapon." For "The Outer Limits", his story "Inconstant Moon" was adapted into an episode of the same name by Brad Wright.


title: Larry Niven

text: Niven has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern, including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect.


title: Larry Niven

text: Many of Niven's stories—sometimes called the Tales of Known Space—take place in his Known Space universe, in which humanity shares the several habitable star systems nearest to the Sun with over a dozen alien species, including the aggressive feline Kzinti and the very intelligent but cowardly Pierson's Puppeteers, which are frequently central characters. The "Ringworld" series is part of the Tales of Known Space, and Niven has shared the setting with other writers since a 1988 anthology, "The Man-Kzin Wars" (Baen Books, jointly edited with Jerry Pournelle and Dean Ing). There have been several volumes of short stories and novellas.


title: Larry Niven

text: Niven has also written a logical fantasy series "The Magic Goes Away", which utilizes an exhaustible resource called "mana" to power a rule-based "technological" magic. "The Draco Tavern" series of short stories take place in a more light-hearted science fiction universe, and are told from the point of view of the proprietor of an omni-species bar. The whimsical "Svetz" series consists of a collection of short stories, "The Flight of the Horse", and a novel, "Rainbow Mars", which involve a nominal time machine sent back to retrieve long-extinct animals, but which travels, in fact, into alternative realities and brings back mythical creatures such as a roc and a unicorn. Much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, but also Brenda Cooper and Edward M. Lerner.


title: Larry Niven

text: One of Niven's best known humorous works is "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", in which he uses real-world physics to underline the difficulties of Superman and a human woman (Lois Lane or Lana Lang) mating.


title: Larry Niven

text: In Niven's novel "Ringworld", he envisions a Ringworld: a band of material, roughly a million miles or 1.6 million kilometers wide, of approximately the same diameter as Earth's orbit, rotating around a star. The idea originated in Niven's attempts to imagine a more efficient version of a Dyson sphere, which could produce the effect of surface gravity through rotation. Given that spinning a Dyson sphere would result in the atmosphere pooling around the equator, the Ringworld removes all the extraneous parts of the structure, leaving a spinning band landscaped on the sun-facing side, with the atmosphere and inhabitants kept in place through centrifugal force and high perimeter walls (rim walls). After publication of "Ringworld" two friends, Dan Alderson and Ctein, told Niven that the Ringworld was dynamically unstable: if the center of rotation drifts away from the central sun, gravitational forces will not "re-center" it, thus allowing the ring to eventually contact the sun and be destroyed. Niven used this as a core plot element in the sequel novel, "The Ringworld Engineers".


title: Larry Niven

text: This idea proved influential, serving as an alternative to a full Dyson sphere that required fewer assumptions (such as artificial gravity) and allowed a day/night cycle to be introduced (through the use of a smaller ring of "shadow squares", rotating between the ring and its sun). This was further developed by Iain M. Banks in his Culture series, which features about ringworld–size megastructures called Orbitals that orbit a star rather than encircling it entirely (actual "Rings" and Dyson "Spheres" are also mentioned but are much rarer). Alastair Reynolds also uses ringworlds in his 2008 novel "House of Suns". The Ringworld-like namesake of the "Halo" video game series is the eponymous Halo megastructure/superweapon.


title: Larry Niven

text: In the "" trading card game, the card Nevinyrral's Disk uses his name, spelled backwards. This tribute was paid because the game's system where mana from lands is used to power spells was inspired by his book "The Magic Goes Away". The card Nevinyrral, Urborg Tyrant was added in Commander Legends, adding the Niven's namesake character fully to the game.


title: Larry Niven

text: According to author Michael Moorcock, in 1967, Niven, despite being a staunch conservative, voiced opposition to the Vietnam War. However, in 1968 he signed the famous prowar advertisement in "Galaxy Science Fiction".


title: Larry Niven

text: Niven was an adviser to Ronald Reagan on the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative antimissile policy, as part of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy—as covered in the BBC documentary "Pandora's Box" by Adam Curtis.


title: Larry Niven

text: In 2007, Niven, in conjunction with a think tank of science fiction writers known as SIGMA, founded and led by Dr. Arlan Andrews, Sr., began advising the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as to future trends affecting terror policy and other topics. Among those topics was reducing costs for hospitals to which Niven offered the solution to spread rumors in Latino communities that organs were being harvested illegally in hospitals.


title: Larry Niven

text: Larry Niven is also known in science fiction fandom for "Niven's Law": "There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it." Over the course of his career Niven has added to this first law a list of Niven's Laws which he describes as "how the Universe works" as far as he can tell.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Joseph Pujol (June 1, 1857 – August 8, 1945), better known by his stage name Le Pétomane (, ), was a French flatulist (professional farter) and entertainer. He was famous for his remarkable control of the abdominal muscles, which enabled him to seemingly fart at will. His stage name combines the French verb "péter", "to fart" with the -"mane", "-maniac" suffix, which translates to "fartomaniac". The profession is referred to as "flatulist", "farteur", or "fartiste".


title: Le Pétomane

text: It was a common misconception that Pujol passed intestinal gas as part of his stage performance. Rather, he was allegedly able to "inhale" or move air into his rectum and then control the release of that air with his anal sphincter muscles. Evidence of his ability to control those muscles was seen in the early accounts of demonstrations of his abilities to fellow soldiers.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Joseph Pujol was born in Marseille, one of five children of stonemason and sculptor François Pujol and his wife Rose, in a family of Catalan origin. Soon after he left school, he had a strange experience while swimming in the sea. He put his head under the water and held his breath, whereupon he felt an icy cold penetrating his rear. He ran ashore in fright and was amazed to sense water pouring from his anus.


title: Le Pétomane

text: While serving in the army, he told his fellow soldiers about his special ability, and repeated it for their amusement, sucking up water from a pan into his rectum and then projecting it up to several yards. He found that he could suck in air as well. A baker, Pujol would sometimes entertain his customers by imitating musical instruments and claim to be playing them behind the counter. Pujol decided to try the stage, and debuted in Marseilles in 1887. When his act was well received, he moved to Paris, where he appeared at the Moulin Rouge in 1892.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Some of the highlights of his stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing "'O Sole Mio" and "La Marseillaise" on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. His audience included Edward, Prince of Wales; King Leopold II of the Belgians; and Sigmund Freud.


title: Le Pétomane

text: In 1894, the managers of the Moulin Rouge sued Pujol for an impromptu exhibition he gave to aid a friend struggling with economic difficulties. Pujol was fined 3,000 francs, and the Moulin Rouge lost their star attraction as the disagreement led him to set up his own travelling show called the Theatre Pompadour.


title: Le Pétomane

text: In the following decade Pujol tried to 'refine' and make his acts 'gentler'; one of his favourite numbers became a rhyme about a farm which he himself composed, and which he punctuated with anal renditions of the animals' sounds.


title: Le Pétomane

text: With the outbreak of World War I, Pujol retired from the stage and returned to his bakery in Marseilles. Later he opened a biscuit factory in Toulon. He died in 1945, aged 88, and was buried in the cemetery of La Valette-du-Var, where his grave can still be seen today.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Le Pétomane left an enduring legacy and has inspired a number of artistic works. These include several musicals based on his life, such as "The Fartiste" (awarded Best Musical at the 2006 New York International Fringe Festival) and Seth Rozin's "A Passing Wind" which was premiered at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts in 2011. In addition, Le Pétomane was added to David Lee's 2007 reworked revival of the 1953 Broadway play "Can-Can", which had originally been written by Abe Burroughs and Cole Porter. The updated play, staged at the Pasadena Playhouse, featured musical theatre actor Robert Yacko as the fartiste, with sound effects provided by the band's trombone and piccolo players. More recently, the re-released works of English toilet humour specialist Ivor Biggun include "Southern Breeze", a song about a "Famous French Farteur" who describes in rhyme a stroll through a farmyard, accompanied by appropriate farting noises.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Los Angeles-based Sherbourne Press published Jean Nohain and F. Caradec's "Le Pétomane" as a small hardcover English language edition in 1967. Due to its ‘sensitive’ nature, the usual national publicity venues shied away, some claiming that an author was needed for interviews (both elderly writers lived in France). However, ‘behind the curtain’ acceptance created a buzz within the national radio/TV promotional circuit and word-of-mouth discussion kept the book in stores for several years. Dorset Press, a division of Barnes & Noble, reissued the book in 1993.


title: Le Pétomane

text: The character has been portrayed several times in film. In 1979 Ian MacNaughton made a short humorous film, written by Galton and Simpson called "Le Pétomane", based on Joseph Pujol's story and starring veteran comic actor Leonard Rossiter. The 1983 Italian movie "Il Petomane", directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile and starring Ugo Tognazzi, gives a poetic rendition of the character, contrasting his deep longing for normality with the condition of 'freak' to which his act relegated him. The 1998 documentary "Le Pétomane" by Igor Vamos examines Joseph Pujol's place in history through archival films (none of which actually include him), historical documents, photographs, recreations and fake or tongue-in-cheek interviews.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Le Pétomane is also referenced in "Blazing Saddles", a 1974 satirical Western comedy film directed by Mel Brooks. Brooks appears in multiple supporting roles, including the dim-witted Governor William J. Le Petomane, whose name suggests he is full of hot air.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Lepetomane University is the name of the educational establishment in "Up the Creek", a 1984 college movie starring Tim Matheson involving a white water rafting race.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Le Pétomane is also a character in the novel "The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy" by Jacopo della Quercia.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Le Pétomane also appears as a character in the 2001 Australian-American jukebox musical romantic comedy film "Moulin Rouge!", played by Keith Robinson.


title: Le Pétomane

text: 'Le Petoman' (without the e, because English-speaking audiences will pronounce -mane differently from -man) was adapted for the theatre in 2001 by Tony Stowers, from the book 'Le Petomane 1857–1945' by J. Nohain & F. Caradec. It was turned down by Hull Truck, Salisbury Playhouse and the National Theatre in the UK on the grounds that they felt their audiences would be 'too sophisticated' for the subject matter. Instead it has been read in English in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2005, in Paris in 2010 and again in Nantes in 2018, and to this day remains unperformed but often read. In 2010, it was translated into French by Tony Stowers and Kester Lovelace and appears in 'French Collection' and 'Plays: Volume Three' by Tony Stowers.


title: Le Pétomane

text: Danish comedian group "Ørkenens Sønner" ("Sons of the Desert") have among their acts around 2010 a rendition of "Otto Fjærtoman" ("Otto the Fart-Maniac"), a little perpetually-smiling man with a nice suit and open-buttocks trousers, and a surprising ability to do various things fart-related, like inflating balloons or pushing himself across the stage on a skateboard.


title: Punyashlok Ahilyabai

text: Punyashlok Ahilyabai is an Indian Hindi-language historical drama television series that premeried on 4 January 2021 on Sony Entertainment Television. It digitally streams on Sony LIV. It is based on the life of queen Ahilyabai Holkar, who reigned over the region of Malwa from 1767 to 1795. Produced by Dashami Creations, it stars Aetashaa Sansgiri, Rajesh Shringarpure and Gaurav Amlani.


title: Punyashlok Ahilyabai

text: Ahilya Bai blossoms under the guidance of her father-in-law, Malhar Rao Holkar. She takes on the reign of the Malwa territory after the death of her husband and son and leads her kingdom efficiently.


title: Punyashlok Ahilyabai

text: Marathi actress Aetashaa Sansgiri was cast to portray the elder version of Ahilya Bai. Kinshuk Vaidya was supposed to play the elder version of Khanderao, but he opted out and was replaced by Gaurav Amlani.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: Mark Metcalf (born March 11, 1946) is an American television and film actor often playing the role of an antagonistic and aggrieved authority figure.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: He is best known for his role as sadistic ROTC officer Douglas C. Neidermeyer in the 1978 American comedy film "Animal House", a character he later emulated in the 1984 music videos for the songs "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock" by the heavy metal band Twisted Sister.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: He is also known for playing the role of The Maestro on two episodes of the sitcom "Seinfeld" as well as for his recurring role as The Master on the supernatural drama series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and its spin-off series "Angel".


title: Mark Metcalf

text: Metcalf was born in Findlay, Ohio. His father was a civil engineer. Metcalf was raised in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. In 1959, he moved with his family to New Jersey where he attended Westfield High School, graduating in 1964.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: Metcalf enrolled in the engineering program at the University of Michigan. It was at university that he performed in his first stage play, which was a production of Shakespeare's "Henry VI". His first professional acting job was with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in 1971. In the early 1970s, he moved to New York City performing in both classical and modern theater, eventually moving westward to work in film.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: Metcalf's first major Hollywood film role was that of ROTC cadet officer Douglas Neidermeyer in the 1978 comedy "Animal House." Metcalf had originally auditioned for the role of ladies' man Eric "Otter" Stratton (played by Tim Matheson in the film). In 1984, Metcalf played characters similar to Neidermeyer in the Twisted Sister music videos for the songs "We're Not Gonna Take It", where he played an authoritarian father, and "I Wanna Rock", where he played an authoritarian high school teacher.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: In the 1980s and 1990s, Metcalf landed guest roles on multiple television shows including "Miami Vice", "Walker, Texas Ranger" and "Party of Five". He also played recurring roles on shows such as "Hill Street Blues", "Teen Angel", "", "Ally McBeal" and "JAG". In 1993 he moved to Hollywood.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: One of Metcalf's more memorable television characters was his role in an episode during the seventh season of "Seinfeld" titled "The Maestro". In the episode he played a self-absorbed conductor who was dating character Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and who insisted on being referred to as "Maestro". Metcalf reprised the role in an episode later that same season titled "The Doll".


title: Mark Metcalf

text: From 1997 to 2002, Metcalf played the vampire known as The Master on several episodes of the series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and its spin-off series "Angel".


title: Mark Metcalf

text: In 2000, Metcalf left Los Angeles and moved to Bayside, Wisconsin with his then wife, Elizabeth "Libby" Wick and their son, Julius. Metcalf had moved to Wisconsin to start a restaurant with his wife and with no intent on continuing with acting, due to raising a child with special needs. However, Metcalf was approached by the director of First Stage Children's Theater in Milwaukee to act in one of their plays and Metcalf went on to act in several of their productions. In conjunction with the Milwaukee Film Festival, Metcalf produced a short film each year based on a screenplay written by a high school student enrolled in the Student Screenwriting Competition, a program developed by Metcalf to teach the craft of screenwriting to young people. Metcalf also contributed articles about film as a correspondent for the online magazine OnMilwaukee.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: In 2009, Metcalf played the role of Mayor Johnson on an episode of the third season of "Mad Men" titled "Souvenir".


title: Mark Metcalf

text: After moving to Missoula, Montana in 2013, Metcalf once again became involved in local theatre, playing the role of Scrooge in a production of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" presented by the University of Montana School of Theatre and Dance.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: In 2019, Metcalf played the role of Sheriff Roy in Tate Bunker's film "The Field" alongside Barry Bostwick and Veronica Cartwright. Metcalf was the subject of Vera Brunner-Sung's documentary short "Character" that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. Metcalf met Brunner-Sung through a mutual friend after moving to Columbus, Ohio.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: Metcalf has one son, Julius, with Elizabeth "Libby" Wick. The couple moved from Los Angeles, California to Bayside, Wisconsin in 2000. They owned and operated a restaurant in nearby Mequon, Wisconsin called Libby Montana. Metcalf filed for divorce in 2003 and since 2006 Wick has been the sole owner of the restaurant.


title: Mark Metcalf

text: In 2013, Metcalf moved to Missoula, Montana, to be closer to Julius, who was a student at the University of Montana.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The 2015–16 UEFA Europa League was the 45th season of Europe's secondary club football tournament organised by UEFA, and the seventh season since it was renamed from the UEFA Cup to the UEFA Europa League.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The 2016 UEFA Europa League Final was played between Liverpool and Sevilla at the St. Jakob-Park in Basel, Switzerland, and won by Sevilla, their fifth title (extending their own record) and third win in a row (also a tournament record).


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: Sevilla initially started the 2015–16 European club season in the Champions League as the Europa League title holders, but qualified for the Europa League by finishing third in the Champions League group stage, and successfully defended their title. As the winners of the 2015–16 UEFA Europa League, they qualified for the 2016–17 UEFA Champions League, and also earned the right to play against the winners of the 2015–16 UEFA Champions League, Real Madrid, in the 2016 UEFA Super Cup.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The UEFA Executive Committee held in May and September 2013 approved the following changes to the UEFA Europa League starting from the 2015–16 season (for the three-year cycle until the 2017–18 season):


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: A total of 191 teams from all 54 UEFA member associations participated in the 2015–16 UEFA Europa League. The association ranking based on the UEFA country coefficients was used to determine the number of participating teams for each association:


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: For the 2015–16 UEFA Europa League, the associations were allocated places according to their 2014 UEFA country coefficients, which took into account their performance in European competitions from 2009–10 to 2013–14.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: Apart from the allocation based on the country coefficients, associations may have additional teams participating in the Europa League, as noted below:


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: In the default access list, Sevilla enter the group stage (as the fifth-placed team of the 2014–15 La Liga). However, since they qualified for the Champions League as the Europa League title holders, the spot which they qualified for in the Europa League group stage is vacated, and the following changes to the default allocation system are made:


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: A Europa League place is vacated when a team qualifies for both the Champions League and the Europa League, or qualifies for the Europa League by more than one method. When a place is vacated, it is redistributed within the national association by the following rules (regulations Articles 3.03 and 3.04):


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: Notably two teams took part in the competition that were not playing in their national top-division. They were Go Ahead Eagles (2nd tier) and UCD (2nd tier).


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The schedule of the competition is as follows (all draws are held at UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland, unless stated otherwise).


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: Matches in the qualifying, play-off, and knockout rounds may also be played on Tuesdays or Wednesdays instead of the regular Thursdays due to scheduling conflicts.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: In the qualifying rounds and the play-off round, teams are divided into seeded and unseeded teams based on their 2015 UEFA club coefficients, and then drawn into two-legged home-and-away ties. Teams from the same association cannot be drawn against each other.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the first and second qualifying round was held on 22 June 2015. With 102 teams involved, it was UEFA's biggest ever tournament draw. The first legs were played on 30 June and 2 July, and the second legs were played on 7 and 9 July 2015.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the third qualifying round was held on 17 July 2015. The first legs were played on 29 and 30 July, and the second legs were played on 6 August 2015.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the play-off round was held on 7 August 2015. The first legs were played on 20 August, and the second legs were played on 27 August 2015.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the group stage was held in Monaco on 28 August 2015. The 48 teams were drawn into twelve groups of four, with the restriction that teams from the same association could not be drawn against each other. For the draw, the teams were seeded into four pots based on their 2015 UEFA club coefficients.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: In each group, teams played against each other home-and-away in a round-robin format. The group winners and runners-up advanced to the round of 32, where they were joined by the eight third-placed teams of the 2015–16 UEFA Champions League group stage. The matchdays were 17 September, 1 October, 22 October, 5 November, 26 November, and 10 December 2015.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: A total of 24 national associations were represented in the group stage. Augsburg, Belenenses, Gabala, Groningen, Midtjylland, Monaco, Sion and Skënderbeu Korçë made their debut appearances in the group stage (although Monaco have appeared in the UEFA Cup group stage). Skënderbeu Korçë were the first team from Albania to play in the group stage of any UEFA club competition.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: In the knockout phase, teams played against each other over two legs on a home-and-away basis, except for the one-match final. The mechanism of the draws for each round was as follows:


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the round of 32 was held on 14 December 2015. The first legs were played on 16 and 18 February, and the second legs were played on 24 and 25 February 2016.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the round of 16 was held on 26 February 2016. The first legs were played on 10 March, and the second legs were played on 17 March 2016.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the quarter-finals was held on 18 March 2016. The first legs were played on 7 April, and the second legs were played on 14 April 2016.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The draw for the semi-finals was held on 15 April 2016. The first legs were played on 28 April, and the second legs were played on 5 May 2016.


title: 2015–16 UEFA Europa League

text: The final was played on 18 May 2016 at the St. Jakob-Park in Basel, Switzerland. The "home" team (for administrative purposes) was determined by an additional draw held after the semi-final draw.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Byrraju Ramalinga Raju (born 16 September 1954) is an Indian businessman. He is the founder of Satyam Computer Services and served as its chairman and CEO from 1987 until 2009. Raju stepped down following his admission to embezzlement from the company to the tune of ₹7,136 crores (approximately US$1.5 billion), including ₹5040 crores (approximately US$1 billion) of non-existent cash and bank balances. In 2015, he was convicted of corporate fraud, which led to the collapse of Satyam Computers.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Ramalinga Raju, the eldest of four children, was born on 16 September 1954. He earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Andhra Loyola College at Vijayawada and subsequently earned an MBA from Ohio University in the United States. After returning to India in 1977, Raju married at the age of twenty two. He ventured into many businesses including Dhanunjaya Hotels; and a cotton spinning mill named Sri Satyam Spinning, funded by Andhra Pradesh Industrial Development Corporation (APIDC), with an investment of 9 crore (worth almost $7 million in 1983 prices). As the businesses failed Raju moved into real estate and started a construction company named Maytas Infra Limited.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Ramalinga Raju is married to Nandini and the couple had two children Teja Raju, and Rama Raju. Teja Raju is married to Divya, a Bharatanatyam dancer. Younger son Ramaraju married Sandhya Raju, daughter of P. R. Venkatarama Raju, managing director of Ramco Cements.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: In 1987, Raju incubated Satyam Computer Services along with one of his brothers-in-law, DVS Raju at P&T colony in Secunderabad and 20 employees. In 1991, Satyam won its first fortune 500 client – John Deere. Raju navigated Indian bureaucracy to obtain the required clearance to transmit data from India. The company went public in 1992. Raju was enrolled in the Owner/President Management (OPM) program at Harvard Business School in the 1990s. In an interview with Deccan Chronicle way back in 1998, Raju was talking about Satyam's ambition of operating out of 50 countries with an employee count of more than 50,000. In 1999, Raju launched Satyam Infoway (Sify) as Satyam's internet subsidiary, thereby becoming an early participant in the Indian internet service market. Sify was later sold to Raju Vegesna.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: In September 1995, as Raju was building Satyam, Andhra Pradesh had a new Chief Minister, Chandra Babu Naidu, who wanted to bring in change. Naidu saw IT as a strategic industry to focus on and Raju became instrumental in shaping the state's information technology initiatives like 'Mee Kosam' ("For you" in Telugu). Raju had unfettered access to the chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh at a very personal level. Research into his life has exposed close links between business and politics.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: The major philanthropic foundations he has founded and grown to large scale between 2000 and 2008 are:


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: The Byrraju Foundation, a family run philanthropic organization, was started in July 2001 by him and his 2 brothers in the memory of his father Late Byrraju Satyanarayana Raju. The Foundation adopted 200 villages in 6 districts of Andhra Pradesh namely East Godavari, West Godavari, Krishna, Guntur, Ranga Reddy and Visakhapatnam. The foundation built progressive self-reliant rural communities by adopting a holistic approach. It provided 40 different programs like healthcare, environment improvement, sanitation, primary education, adult literacy and skills development ., GramIT etc. which impacted over 3 million people. Some significant achievements of the foundation are: Over 7 million patient visits, 53,250 persons made literate, 89,000 toilets built in rural homes, Livelihood skill training and certification for over 26,000 unemployed rural youth, setting up 61 drinking water plants and 4 GramIT Centres which employed 500 rural youth.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Currently, after the Satyam episode, the foundation has 117 adopted villages where it runs 110 health centers with the help of CARE foundation and operates 18 water plants.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: The local people across the region hail the development works undertaken by the Byrraju Foundation and are appreciative of the positive impact it had on them.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Raju also set up a state of the art and first of its kind 24X7 emergency service named Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI 108) in August 2005. It was modelled after the 911 service in America and had an aim of giving citizens in an emergency the benefit of getting timely attention and support. This was done by providing a single toll-free number accessible from mobile and land line. Recently Forbs magazine has published an Article about the "Emergency Management System in US" (see in the External Link below).


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Initially started with just 75 ambulances, EMRI has currently expanded to 10,697 ambulances covering 15 states and 2 union territories, serving over 26,710 emergencies per day, covering a population of 75 Crores (increasing reach of health care in rural, hilly & tribal areas). EMRI has more than 45,000 employees on its rolls. Till date 4.7 crore beneficiaries have availed these services, 4.38 lakh deliveries were assisted, and 18.56 lakh lives were saved since inception.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: All the call-centre activities and support activities for emergency handling were automated. While state Governments were providing most of the funding, EMRI part funded and managed the services in PPP mode. After the Satyam episode, Raju resigned from the Board of Directors. The GVK group then took responsibility to run the institute. It now runs as a free service as a very successful public private partnership (PPP) model.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Raju was instrumental in launching a public private partnership (PPP) model between Satyam and The Government of Andhra Pradesh in 2007, termed as Health Management and Research Institute (HMRI 104). Before its launch, Andhra Pradesh faced a massive shortage in Primary Healthcare Centres (PHC) and Community Healthcare Centres (CHC). This resulted in a stressed public healthcare system in the state which meant lower quality care for its citizens. By providing a helpline for all types of health-related queries and telemedicine, HMRI was able to lessen the burden on the public health system.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: The program was aimed at the rural poor who had little to no access to qualified doctors and healthcare information. It also constituted a training program for Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs) and ran mobile health clinics.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Naandi Foundation: in 1998, the Naandi foundation was set up by the then CM of Andhra Pradesh Mr. N. Chandrababu Naidu, along with the heads of the 4 major business houses in the state: Dr K. Anji Reddy - Dr Reddy's Labs, Mr. Ramesh Gelli - founder of Global Trust Bank, Mr. B. Ramalinga Raju – Chairman of Satyam Computer Services, and Mr. K. S. Raju-Chairman of the Nagarjuna group of companies.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: The aim of the foundation was to increase literacy among the poor and marginalized sections of society by increasing their enrollment in primary school. The students were also provided 1 full meal during the day. The foundation was able to reach 880 schools in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad and feed 150000 children daily.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Raju resigned from the Satyam board after Satyam Scandal, admitting to falsifying revenues, margins and over 5,000 crore of cash balances at the company. The Indian affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company's auditors, appears to have certified the company had $1.1 Billion in cash when the real number was $78 million.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Just a few months before the scandal broke out, Raju tried to persuade investors by claiming that the company is sound and that past October he surprised analysts with better-than-expected results, claiming that "the company had achieved this in a challenging global macroeconomic environment, and amidst the volatile currency scenario that became reality"


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: A botched acquisition attempt involving Maytas in December 2008 led to corporate governance concerns among Indian investors and plunge in the share price of Satyam. In January 2009, Raju indicated that Satyam's accounts had been falsified over a number of years. Total assets on Satyam's balance sheet tripled during 2003–07 to $2.2 billion. He confessed to an accounting fraud to the tune of 7,000 crore or $1.5 billion and resigned from the Satyam board on 7 January 2009. Satyam was purchased by Tech Mahindra in April 2009 and renamed Mahindra Satyam.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: In his letter, Raju explained his modus operandi to something that started as a single lie but led to another as "What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of the company's operations grew over the years.". Raju described how an initial cover-up for a poor quarterly performance escalated: "It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten."


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: Raju and his brother, B Rama Raju, were then arrested by the CID Andhra Pradesh police headed by V S K Kaumudi, IPS on charges of breach of trust, conspiracy, cheating, falsification of records. Raju may face life imprisonment if convicted of misleading investors. Raju had also used dummy accounts to trade in Satyam's shares, violating the insider trading norm.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: The Government of Andhra Pradesh attached 44 properties belonging to the family members of the promoters of Satyam Computers in the case against Raju.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: It has now been alleged that these accounts may have been the means of siphoning off the missing funds. Raju has admitted to overstating the company's cash reserves by USD$ 1.5 billion. Raju was hospitalized in September 2009 following a minor heart attack and underwent angioplasty. Raju was granted bail on condition that he should report to the local police station once a day and that he should not attempt to tamper with the current evidence. This bail was revoked on 26 October 2010 by the Supreme Court of India and he has been ordered to surrender by 8 November 2010.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: In November 2010, Raju surrendered after the Supreme Court in August cancelled the bail granted to him by a lower court in Hyderabad, where Satyam is based.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: The Supreme Court on 4 November 2011 granted bail to Raju since the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) failed to file charges on time. According to Indian law, if a chargesheet is not filed within 90 days, then the accused person has a right to obtain Default Bail.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: On 28 October 2013, the Enforcement directorate filed a chargesheet against Raju and 212 others. The filed report states that "it transpires that the accused resorted to inter-connected transactions, so as to ensure that crime proceeds were distanced from its initial beneficiaries, and laundered the said proceeds under the cover of the corporate veil, with an ulterior motive to project the properties so acquired as untainted ones".


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: On 9 April 2015, Ramalinga Raju and his brothers were sentenced to 7 years in jail, fined ₹5.5 crore.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: On 11 May 2015, within a month of being convicted, Ramalinga Raju and all others who were found guilty were granted bail by a special court in Hyderabad. The bail amount for R. Raju and his brother was set at ₹10,00,000 and the other convicts was set at ₹50,000 only.


title: Ramalinga Raju

text: On 10 January 2018 India's capital market regulator has banned global auditing firm Price Waterhouse (PW) from auditing listed companies in India for two years for its alleged role of collusion with the directors and employees of erstwhile Satyam Computer Services, in perpetrating the country's biggest corporate accounting scandal.


title: Dorset culture

text: The Dorset was a Paleo-Eskimo culture, lasting from to between and , that followed the Pre-Dorset and preceded the Thule people (proto-Inuit) in the North American Arctic. The culture and people are named after Cape Dorset (now Kinngait) in Nunavut, Canada, where the first evidence of its existence was found. The culture has been defined as having four phases due to the distinct differences in the technologies relating to hunting and tool making. Artifacts include distinctive triangular end-blades, oil lamps () made of soapstone, and burins.


title: Dorset culture

text: The Dorset were first identified as a separate culture in 1925. The Dorset appear to have been extinct by 1500 at the latest and perhaps as early as 1000. The Thule people, who began migrating east from Alaska in the 11th century, ended up spreading through the lands previously inhabited by the Dorset. There is no strong evidence that the Inuit and Dorset ever met. Modern genetic studies show the Dorset population were distinct from later groups and that "[t]here was virtually no evidence of genetic or cultural interaction between the Dorset and the Thule peoples."


title: Dorset culture

text: Inuit legends recount them encountering people they called the (singular ). According to legend, the first inhabitants were giants, taller and stronger than the Inuit but afraid to interact and "easily put to flight."


title: Dorset culture

text: In 1925 anthropologist Diamond Jenness received artifacts from Cape Dorset. As they were quite different from those of the Inuit, he speculated that they were indicative of an ancient, preceding culture. Jenness named the culture "Dorset" after the location of the find. These artifacts showed a consistent and distinct cultural pattern that included sophisticated art distinct from that of the Inuit. For example, the carvings featured uniquely large hairstyles for women, and figures of both sexes wearing hoodless parkas with large, tall collars. Much research since then has revealed many details of the Dorset people and their culture.


title: Dorset culture

text: The origins of the Dorset people are not well understood. They may have developed from the previous cultures of Pre-Dorset, Saqqaq or (less likely) Independence I. There are, however, problems with this theory: these earlier cultures had bow and arrow technology which the Dorsets lacked. Possibly, due to a shift from terrestrial to aquatic hunting, the bow and arrow became lost to the Dorset. Another piece of technology that is missing from the Dorset are drills: there are no drill holes in Dorset artifacts. Instead, the Dorset gouged lenticular holes. For example, bone needles have long, narrow holes that were painstakingly carved or gouged. Both the Pre-Dorset and Thule (Inuit) had drills.


title: Dorset culture

text: Dorset culture and history is divided into periods: the Early (), Middle (), and Late phases (), as well as perhaps a Terminal phase (from onwards). The Terminal phase, if it existed, would likely be closely related to the onset of the Medieval Warm Period, which started to warm the Arctic considerably around the mid-10th century. With the warmer climates, the sea ice became less predictable and was isolated from the High Arctic.


title: Dorset culture

text: The Dorset were highly adapted to living in a very cold climate, and much of their food is thought to have been from hunting sea mammals that breathe through holes in the ice. The massive decline in sea-ice which the Medieval Warm Period produced would have strongly affected the Dorset. They could have followed the ice north. Most of the evidence suggests that they disappeared some time between 1000 and 1500. Radiocarbon dating has shown the Dorset were living in the Cambridge Bay area as late as 1350 CE, while the Thule Inuit moved into the area around 1200 CE. Scientists have suggested that they disappeared because they were unable to adapt to climate change or that they were vulnerable to newly introduced disease.


title: Dorset culture

text: The Dorset adaptation was different from that of the whaling-based Thule Inuit. Unlike the Inuit, they rarely hunted land animals, such as polar bears and caribou. They did not use bows or arrows. Instead, they seem to have relied on seals and other sea mammals that they apparently hunted from holes in the ice. Their clothing must have been adapted to the extreme conditions.


title: Dorset culture

text: Triangular end-blades and burins are diagnostic of the Dorset. The end-blades were hafted onto harpoon heads. They primarily used the harpoons to hunt seal, but also hunted larger sea mammals such as walrus and narwhals. They made lamps, called qulliq, from soapstone and filled them with seal oil. Burins were a type of stone flake with a chisel-like edge. They were probably either used for engraving or for carving wood or bone. Burins were also used by Pre-Dorset groups and had a distinctive mitten shape.


title: Dorset culture

text: The Dorset were highly skilled at making refined miniature carvings, and striking masks. Both indicate an active shamanistic tradition. The Dorset culture was remarkably homogeneous across the Canadian Arctic, but there were some important variations which have been noted in both Greenland and Newfoundland / Labrador regions.


title: Dorset culture

text: There appears to be no genetic connection between the Dorset and the Thule who replaced them. Archaeological and legendary evidence is often thought to support some cultural contact, but this has been questioned. The Dorset people, for instance, engaged in seal-hole hunting, a method which requires several steps and includes the use of dogs. The Thule apparently did not use this technique in the time they had previously spent in Alaska. Settlement pattern data has been used to claim that the Dorset also extensively used a breathing-hole sealing technique and perhaps they would have taught this to the Inuit. But this has been questioned on the grounds that there is no evidence that the Dorset had dogs.


title: Dorset culture

text: Scholars had thought that the Sadlermiut, a people living in near isolation mainly on and around Coats Island, Walrus Island, and Southampton Island in Hudson Bay up until 1902–03, might have been the last remnants of the Dorset culture, as they had a culture and dialect distinct from the mainland Inuit. Encounters with Europeans and exposure to infectious disease caused the deaths of the last members of the Sadlermiut.


title: Dorset culture

text: A 2002 paper suggested that the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of Sadlermiut people was related to that of both the Dorset and Thule peoples, perhaps suggesting local admixture. However a subsequent 2012 genetic analysis showed no genetic link between the Sadlermiut and the Dorset.


title: Dorset culture

text: A genetic study published in "Science" in August 2014 examined the remains of nineteen Dorset people buried in Canada and Greenland between ca. and . The sixteen samples of mtDNA extracted were determined to belong to haplogroup D2a1 (twelve samples), D2a (three samples) and D. These haplogroups also predominate in the preceding Saqqaq culture, suggesting genetic continuity between the two. The authors of the study suggested that the ancestors of the Saqqaq and Dorset entered North America from Siberia in a single distinct migration about , after which they remained genetically largely isolated for thousands of years. The Dorset were genetically distinct from the Thule people who, after expanding out of Siberia, completely replaced the Dorset people around . The study also found no evidence of genetic mixing between Dorset people and the Greenlandic Norse people.


title: SodaStream

text: SodaStream International Ltd. () is an Israel-based manufacturing company best-known as the maker of the consumer home carbonation product of the same name. The company's soda machines, in the style of soda siphons, add carbon dioxide to water from a pressurized cylinder in order to create carbonated water for drinking. It also sells more than 100 types of concentrated syrups and flavourings that are used in the process of making carbonated drinks. SodaStream now distributes its products in 80,000 individual retail stores across 45 countries.


title: SodaStream

text: The company was founded in 1903 in England. After it merged with Soda-Club in 1998, it was relaunched with an emphasis on healthier drinks, and went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in November 2010. SodaStream is headquartered in Kfar Saba, Israel, and has 13 production plants. In August 2018, the company was acquired by PepsiCo for US$3.2 billion. PepsiCo was attracted to the company due to its technological innovations and a desire to move into providing more healthy products; SodaStream has since launched a variety of PepsiCo flavours into their range.


title: SodaStream

text: Until 2015, the company's principal manufacturing facility was located in Mishor Adumim, an industrial park within the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim in the West Bank, which generated controversy and a boycott campaign. In October 2015, under growing pressure from activists of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, SodaStream closed its facility in Mishor Adumim and relocated it to the town of Lehavim in Israel proper.


title: SodaStream

text: The SodaStream Sparkling Water Maker is a device that forces carbon dioxide (CO) gas (stored under pressure in a cylinder) into water, making it sparkling (fizzy). The product includes a machine, a carbon dioxide cylinder, and one or more reusable beverage bottles. The bottle, filled with water, is inserted into the machine, and with a button push or two, compressed CO from the cylinder is injected, creating carbonated water. Varieties of concentrated syrups are available, to create regular or diet soft drinks by adding a small amount of concentrate to the bottle after carbonation.


title: SodaStream

text: Different flavours are created by adding fruit-flavoured concentrates. During its heyday, several famous brands were available in SodaStream concentrate form including Tizer, Fanta, Sunkist and Irn-Bru. SodaStream and Kraft Foods entered into a partnership in January 2012 involving the use of the Crystal Light and Country Time brand flavours with the SodaStream home carbonation system. That July, the two companies expanded their partnership to include the Kool-Aid flavour line. In 2013, SodaStream partnered with Ocean Spray to market three Ocean Spray flavours for use with the SodaStream home soda maker.


title: SodaStream

text: In February 2013, SodaStream and Samsung announced that Samsung refrigerators with built-in SodaStream sparkling water dispensers would be available in the United States beginning in April.


title: SodaStream

text: Excluding the purchase price of the machine, typical cost to the end user (2015, United States dollars) is 25 cents per litre of carbonated water generated plus another 50 cents per litre for the soda syrup.


title: SodaStream

text: The forerunner of the machine, the "apparatus for aerating liquids", was created in 1903 by Guy Hugh Gilbey of the London gin distillers, W & A Gilbey Ltd., and was sold to the upper classes (including the royal household). Flavoured concentrates such as cherry ciderette and sarsaparilla were introduced in the 1920s, along with commercial carbonation machines, and the first machine for home carbonation of drinks was produced in 1955.


title: SodaStream

text: SodaStream machines were popular during the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and are associated with nostalgia for that period. Their slogan, "Get busy with the fizzy", started as an advertising jingle in 1979 and proved so popular that they added it to their logo. The slogan was dropped in 1996 after 17 years.


title: SodaStream

text: In 1985, after various changes of ownership, SodaStream became a wholly owned subsidiary of Cadbury Schweppes, although it operated as an autonomous business within the group. In 1998, SodaStream was bought by Soda-Club, an Israeli company founded in 1991 by Peter Wiseburgh, who from 1978 to 1991 had been Israel's exclusive distributor for SodaStream, creating the world's largest home carbonation systems supplier. In 2003 Soda-Club closed the SodaStream factory in Peterborough, moving the company's gas cylinder refilling and refurbishment department to Germany. Under the ownership of Soda-Club, the brand has been relaunched in many markets, with new machines and new flavours available in 41 countries. In 2012, SodaStream teamed with Yves Béhar to introduce SodaStream Source, a line of soda machines designed with a special emphasis on sustainability. Béhar's design earned SodaStream a Good Housekeeping Institute seal of approval in 2013.


title: SodaStream

text: SodaStream International Ltd. went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in November 2010. The stock offering was jointly led by J.P. Morgan Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities. At the time, the IPO was the eighth largest for an Israeli company on the NASDAQ and during the year 2010 one of the top-performing IPOs generally. To celebrate SodaStream's listing on the NASDAQ, CEO Daniel Birnbaum was invited to ring the exchange's closing bell on 3 November 2010. By August 2011, SodaStream's market capitalisation had risen from $367 million to $1.46 billion. During 2012, the stock experienced aggressive growth, with earnings per share growing 57%. In June 2013, Israeli financial newspaper "Calcalist" incorrectly predicted a $2 billion Pepsi takeover of SodaStream, sending SODA stock higher before the rumours were promptly debunked by PepsiCo.


title: SodaStream

text: Analysts had expected another 27% growth in 2013 with earnings projected to grow 30% over the next 5 years. 2013's actual net earnings were down relative to 2012 despite an increase in sales; in 2014, the company's stock dropped to its lowest value since 2012. Barclays PLC analyst David Kaplan cited US Secretary of State John Kerry's warnings about the economic effects of boycotts and the company's failure to clarify the reasons for missed earning targets as causes for the drop.


title: SodaStream

text: In October 2014, SodaStream announced its revenue for 2014 was expected to decline to $562.7 million, a 9% decrease from the previous year, while a report by Zacks Equity Research stated that net income for 2014 is expected to be 42% lower than in 2013. Zacks Equity Research cited declining sales in the United States, where an increasing number of consumers are choosing "more natural, less caloric and water based beverages" as opposed to traditional carbonated soft drinks.


title: SodaStream

text: Some 20% of households in Sweden owned SodaStream machines as of 2010. In January 2011, the company marked the sale of its millionth soda maker in the country. Europe accounts for 45% of SodaStream's sales.


title: SodaStream

text: Since May 2012, SodaStream has been sold in over 2,900 Walmart locations in the United States. In June equity research firm Monness Crespi Hardt & Co. stated that SodaStream's machines were selling out at Walmart. SodaStream's U.S. sales grew from in 2007 to in 2011. Despite record sales, profit margins are declining. SodaStream's estimated 2013 net income ($41.5 million on an annual revenue of $562 million in 2013, compared to 2012's $43.86 million of net income on $436.32 million of revenue) fell short of targets and investor expectations. Sodastream also sells its product at most Bed Bath & Beyond stores.


title: SodaStream

text: In its marketing, the company focuses on environmental attractiveness of using tap water and returnable gas cylinders. SodaStream has been involved in environmental projects, including waste reduction, beach cleanup and reforestation.


title: SodaStream

text: In 2011, SodaStream partnered with the Israel Union for Environmental Defense to launch an initiative promoting waste reduction and an improvement in the quality of tap water. Also in 2011, SodaStream launched a campaign with Erin O'Connor to raise awareness to the effects of plastic bottle waste on the environment. As part of the company's support for Climate Week, in 2012 SodaStream donated £1,000 to a school in Crediton, Devon in the United Kingdom to fund an educational beach cleaning initiative. SodaStream partnered with Trees for the Future in 2012 to launch the Replant Our Planet initiative: for each home beverage carbonation system sold from its Rethink Your Soda product line, SodaStream committed to planting hundreds of thousands of trees in Brazil. SodaStream Italy and the Municipality of Venice partnered in 2012 to organize "Join the Stream: fight the bottle", a cleanup initiative with its starting point at the Lido di Venezia. Actress Rosario Dawson launched the first annual Unbottle the World Day in New York City in July 2012. The campaign, initiated by SodaStream to raise awareness to the impact of cans and plastic bottles on the environment, calls on the United Nations to designate one day of the year a "Bottle Free Day".


title: SodaStream

text: In 2010, SodaStream launched an international campaign to raise awareness of bottle and can consumption. The campaign involves the display of cages in various countries, each containing 10,657 empty bottles and cans. Begun in Belgium, the Cage campaign has since visited 30 countries with the message that the waste produced by one family over the course of five years from beverage containers – 10,657 bottles and cans – can be replaced by a single SodaStream bottle. When a cage went on display in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2012, Coca-Cola demanded that SodaStream remove its products from the cages and threatened to sue SodaStream. SodaStream responded by dismissing the threats and announcing that it would display the cage outside Coca-Cola's headquarters in Atlanta.


title: SodaStream

text: A 30-second television commercial promoting sustainability, showing soda bottles exploding each time a person makes a drink using a SodaStream machine, was banned in the United Kingdom in 2012. Clearcast, the organization that approves TV advertising in the UK, explained that they "thought it was a denigration of the bottled drinks market". The same ad, crafted by Alex Bogusky, ran in the United States, Sweden, Australia, and other countries. An appeal by SodaStream to reverse Clearcast's decision to censor the commercial was rejected. A similar advertisement, which featured a pair of Coca-Cola and Pepsi deliverymen reacting to the exploding bottles, was expected to air during Super Bowl XLVII in February 2013, but was rejected by CBS for its direct references to Coke and Pepsi. The previous SodaStream ad was shown in its place. SodaStream CEO said "The banned ad was a win because of the quality as well as the quantity of the exposure we received".


title: SodaStream

text: The company's 2020 advertising campaign featured Snoop Dogg in the United States and Priyanka, the first season winner of "Canada's Drag Race", in Canada.


title: SodaStream

text: SodaStream has 13 production facilities worldwide. From 2016, SodaStream's principal manufacturing facility is in Idan HaNegev Industrial Park north of Beersheba, Israel. The plant provides employment for around 1,400 workers, many of them Negev Bedouins. The cornerstone for the plant was laid in 2011, it opened in 2015. An additional plant, which began operating in 2011 in Ashkelon, produces SodaStream syrups and flavours. Another plant operated in the Alon Tavor industrial zone near the Israeli city of Afula, between 2011 and 2015, but was closed once the Idan HaNegev facility was opened.


title: SodaStream

text: In Europe, the company employs 250 people, in two main sites; at SodaStream's European commercial and logistics center, which is located in Rijen, Netherlands and at a manufacturing facility in Limburg an der Lahn, Germany. SodaStream's US headquarters is at Mount Laurel, New Jersey.


title: SodaStream

text: As part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activist campaign launched in 2005 to pressure Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, SodaStream was criticized for operating its primary manufacturing plant in the Mishor Adumim industrial zone in the West Bank.


title: SodaStream

text: The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2010 that SodaStream was not entitled to claim a "Made in Israel" exemption from EU customs payments for products manufactured in the West Bank because Israeli settlements in the West Bank are outside the territorial scope of the EC-Israel Agreement.


title: SodaStream

text: In January 2014, Oxfam accepted the resignation of Scarlett Johansson, a Jewish-American actress, as ambassador for that organisation, a role she had held for eight years, after she became a brand ambassador for SodaStream. Oxfam has stated that "businesses, such as SodaStream, that operate in settlements further the ongoing poverty and denial of rights of the Palestinian communities that we work to support" and opposes all trade with the settlements citing their illegality under international law. Johansson reportedly resigned because of "a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement". In her statement she described SodaStream as "not only committed to the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbours working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights". SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum also accused Oxfam of supporting the BDS movement against Israel as a whole, a charge Oxfam denied, saying that "this is about trade from the settlements" and specific to settlements outside Israel's pre-1967 border. which Oxfam states, due to their location, pose an obstacle to any future two-state solution.


title: SodaStream

text: According to Birnbaum, the boycott had no impact on the growth rate of SodaStream, and he said, all SodaStream products sold in Norway, Sweden and Finland are manufactured in China.


title: SodaStream

text: In January 2014 a Paris court ruled that Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), a group campaigning to remove SodaStream from stores, must compensate SodaStream €6500 because the group falsely claimed the products are sold "illegally and fraudulently" due to their use of the "Made in Israel" label while being partly manufactured in the West Bank.


title: SodaStream

text: Human Rights Watch stated that "It is impossible to ignore the Israeli system of unlawful discrimination, land confiscation, natural resource theft, and forced displacement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where SodaStream is located". The United Church of Canada launched a campaign to boycott SodaStream products manufactured in the West Bank.


title: SodaStream

text: In July 2014, UK department store John Lewis removed all SodaStream products from its stores, amidst growing BDS pressure and declining sales. Its Oxford Street, London store had been the site of biweekly protests against the sale of SodaStream products. In July 2014, after two years of weekly BDS protests, SodaStream also closed its Brighton store.


title: SodaStream

text: Birnbaum said that the factories are apolitical. "We don't take sides in this conflict. He described the factory as "building bridges between us and the Palestinian population, and we provide our Palestinian employees with respectable employment opportunities and an appropriate salary and benefits". SodaStream employed 500 West Bank Palestinians. Addressing the location of SodaStream's Ma'ale Adumim plant, Birnbaum said "we're here for historical reasons." The choice was made by company founder Peter Weissburgh, back in the 1990s, long before SodaStream was taken over by the current owners, who appointed Birnbaum in 2007. Birnbaum said that factory presence was a reality and he would not bow to political pressure to close it: "We will not throw our employees under the bus to promote anyone’s political agenda...I just can't see how it would help the cause of the Palestinians if we fired them."


title: SodaStream

text: Supporters of the factory cited the West Bank's high unemployment rate and low GDP as evidence the jobs were badly needed. Opponents argued that the small number of jobs provided by the factories in the settlements did not outweigh the effect the Israeli presence had on the Palestinian economy. Others argued that SodaStream was exploiting local cheap labour. Workers' incomes at the factory were substantially above the 1450 shekel/month Palestinian Authority minimum wage.


title: SodaStream

text: All but one of the Palestinian employees interviewed by "The Christian Science Monitor" supported Johansson's stance and opposed a boycott of SodaStream, stating that a boycott would only hurt them. One Palestinian employee said he was ashamed to work for SodaStream and felt like a "slave" working on an assembly line for twelve hours a day. Another Palestinian employee interviewed by Reuters reported that: "Most of the managers are Israeli, and West Bank employees feel they can't ask for pay rises or more benefits because they can be fired and easily replaced."


title: SodaStream

text: In December 2014, Harvard University Dining Services halted SodaStream machine purchases for its dining facilities due to demonstrations by the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Harvard Islamic Society. A few days later, however, Harvard's President Drew Faust reversed the decision, claiming she had not been aware of it in the first place.


title: SodaStream

text: When French host Cyril Hanouna aired a homophobic prank on French TV in May 2017, SodaStream first refused to stop advertising and supporting Hanouna's program, but eventually decided to withdraw its advertising.


title: SodaStream

text: In July 2014, SodaStream fired 60 Palestinian workers after they had complained about not receiving sufficient food to break Ramadan fasts during night shifts. The workers were not allowed to bring their own food into the plant due to Jewish dietary restrictions being enforced. According to SodaStream the workers had called for a wildcat strike. According to the workers they were fired after filing a formal complaint. SodaStream claimed that the workers were given a hearing and that they were not denied severance pay.


title: SodaStream

text: SodaStream announced that its factory in Ma'ale Adumim would be closed by the end of 2015 in order to save $9 million in production costs. The plant's operations were transferred to a new factory in Lehavim, where it reportedly "employ a significant number of Bedouin Arabs". The move laid off 500 Palestinian workers, although 74 Palestinian workers moved with SodaStream when it relocated. However, the Israeli government initially refused to renew the Palestinians' work permits. SodaStream protested the government decision. Around a year later, the Israeli government renewed the working permits of the 74 Palestinian workers and they returned to SodaStream.


title: SodaStream

text: Some news sources reported that SodaStream blamed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) for the closing of its plant. Mahmoud Nawajaa, the BDS coordinator in Ramallah, called the loss of Palestinian jobs at SodaStream "part of the price that should be paid in the process of ending the occupation". SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum blamed Benjamin Netanyahu for the Palestinian job losses. According to Birnbaum, all of the Palestinian employees had passed Israeli security clearance, but were denied permits to work after Netanyahu intervened. Birnbaum claimed that Netanyahu wanted the Palestinians fired so he could then blame BDS. Netanyahu's office denied Birnbaum's claims.


title: Panaji

text: Panaji (; also known as Panjim) is the capital of the Indian state of Goa and the headquarters of North Goa district. Previously, it was the territorial capital of the former Portuguese India. It lies on the banks of the Mandovi river estuary in the Tiswadi sub-district "(tehsil)". With a population of 114,759 in the metropolitan area, Panaji is Goa's largest urban agglomeration, ahead of Margao and Mormugao.


title: Panaji

text: Panaji has terraced hills, concrete buildings with balconies and red-tiled roofs, churches, and a riverside promenade. There are avenues lined with gulmohar, acacia and other trees. The baroque Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church is located overlooking the main square known as Praça da Igreja. Panaji has been selected as one of hundred Indian cities to be developed as a smart city under the Smart Cities Mission.


title: Panaji

text: The city was built with stepped streets and a seven kilometre long promenade on a planned grid system after the Portuguese relocated the capital from Velha Goa in the 17th century. It was elevated from a town to a city on 22 March 1843.


title: Panaji

text: The city was renamed from "Panjim" in English to "Panaji", its present official name in the 1980s. The Portuguese name is "Pangim". The city is sometimes written as "पणजें" in (देवनागरी) कोंकणी or "Ponnjé" in Romi Konkani. The city had been renamed "Nova Goa" (Portuguese for "New Goa") when it officially replaced the city of Goa (now Old Goa) as the capital of Portuguese India, though the Viceroy had already moved there in 1759.


title: Panaji

text: The justification of the modern word "Panaji" is derived from the words "panjani" and "khali", which mean "a boat" and "a small creek" respectively, in Sanskrit. Thus the modern word Panjim is believed to be a corruption of the old word "Panjanakhani" as inscribed on the discovered Panjim copper-plates dated 1059 CE, belonging to the rule of Kadamba king Jayakesi I. According to legend, this northern capital city was mentioned in a stone inscription of Kadamba king Jayakesi I dated 1054 CE as 'Panjanakhani', giving him the epithet of "Padavalendra" which is Kannada for "lord of the western ocean".


title: Panaji

text: Some historians state that it was named after a Shia Muslim shrine also called a "Panja" on one of the coastal hill tops.


title: Panaji

text: Panaji was made the capital of Portuguese India, after a devastating epidemics decimated the population of the City of Goa in the mid 18th Century.


title: Panaji

text: Panaji was annexed by India with the rest of Goa and the former Portuguese territories after the Indian annexation of Portuguese India in 1961. It became a state-capital on Goa's elevation to statehood in 1987. Between 1961 and 1987, it was the capital of the Union Territory of Goa, Daman and Diu. A new Legislative Assembly complex was inaugurated in March 2000, across the Mandovi River, in Alto Porvorim. Panaji is also the administrative headquarters of North Goa district.


title: Panaji

text: Besides lying on the banks of the Mandovi River, Panaji is bound by two creeks called "pői" by the locals, namely Ourém creek and Santa Inêz creek.


title: Panaji

text: During the 2011 census of India, Panaji had a population of 114,405. Males constituted 52% of the population and females 48%. It had an average literacy rate of 90.9%; male literacy was 94.6% and female literacy 86.9%. In Panaji, 9.6% of the population was under 7 years of age.


title: Panaji

text: Panaji comprises three major religions, with Hinduism being the majority with 64.08% followers, Christianity with 26.51% followers, and the smallest being Islam with 8.84% followers. 0.4% of the population count as other which include Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh followers.


title: Panaji

text: Panaji features a tropical monsoon climate (Köppen climate classification "Am"). The climate in Panaji is hot in summer and equable in winter. During summers (from March to May) the temperature reaches up to and in winters (from November to February) it is usually between and .


title: Panaji

text: The monsoon period is from June to October with heavy rainfall and gusty winds. The annual average rainfall is .


title: Panaji

text: The heart of the city is the "Praça da Igreja" (Church Square) where the Jardim Garcia de Orta (municipal garden) with the Portuguese Baroque "Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Imaculada Conceição", originally built in 1541. Other tourist attractions include the old and rebuilt Adilshahi Palace (or "Idalç"ão Palace), dating from the sixteenth century, the Institute Menezes Braganza, the Chapel of St. Sebastian and the Fontainhas area—which is considered to be the old Latin Quarter—as well as the nearby beach of Miramar. Panaji hosted the relics of Saint John Bosco (also known as Don Bosco) until 21 August 2011 at the Don Bosco Oratory.


title: Panaji

text: One of the capital city's most discerning assets is the Mahalaxmi Temple. Located on the Dada Vaidya road (Rua de Saudade during the Portuguese times), the Mahalaxmi deity is the chief object of veneration for all Panjimites, irrespective of caste, class, sex or creed.


title: Panaji

text: The carnival celebrations in February include a colourful parade on the streets. This is followed by the Shigmo / Xigmo, or Holi. The Narkāsūr parade on the night before Diwali in the city is very colourful.


title: Panaji

text: Well-known places in Panaji are the 18th June Road (a busy thoroughfare in the heart of the town and a shopping area for tourists and locals), Mala area, Miramar beach and the Kala Academy (a cultural centre known for its structure built by architect Charles Correa). Kala Academy is a place where Goa showcases its art and culture.


title: Panaji

text: Situated on the banks of Mandovi River in the heart of Panaji is ‘Old Secretariat’ building popularly known as ‘Adil Shah's Palace’. It was built by Yusuf Adil Shah of the Bijapur Sultanate in around 1500, as a summer residence and fortress. The building was armed with 55 cannons and surrounded by a moat. The Palace was besieged by Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510 and in the mid-1500s the Portuguese conquerors renamed it as ‘Idalcao's Palace’ and was the temporary residence of the first ‘Viceroy of Goa’. In 1963 this ancient structure was renovated by Goa government to house Goa Legislative Assembly. This structure today is 'The Goa State Museum'.


title: Panaji

text: Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary is a bird sanctuary named after the ornithologist Dr. Salim Ali. The sanctuary, located in the village of Chorão, near Panaji, plays host to rare and endangered bird species—both migratory and resident.


title: Panaji

text: Goa is famous for its beaches, and Miramar, Bambolim, and Dona Paula are three popular beaches located near Panaji.


title: Panaji

text: Dona Paula is the meeting point for two of Goa's famous rivers, Zuari and Mandovi. These two rivers meet at the Arabian Sea. The official residence of the governor of Goa, known as Cabo Raj Bhavan, is situated on the westernmost tip of Dona Paula.


title: Panaji

text: Miramar Beach is one of the more crowded beaches in Goa, which remains full with local and international tourists throughout the year.


title: Panaji

text: Also located near Panaji, is the Goa Science Centre which was opened to the public in December 2001. The Caculo Mall is also located in St. Inez near Panaji. Also Madhuban Complex, at St.inez is very popular among Panjimites.


title: Panaji

text: Goa's only university, the Goa University, is situated at Taleigão on the outskirts of Panaji. Some other educational institutes in Panaji are:


title: Panaji

text: The National Institute of Oceanography (CSIR-NIO) is situated at Dona Paula, on the outskirts of Panaji city. It specialises in marine science research.


title: Panaji

text: State-owned All India Radio has a local station in Panaji which transmits various programs of mass interest. The annual International Film Festival of India (IFFI), is held in Panaji.


title: Panaji

text: The Goa Legislative Assembly is situated at Alto Porvorim, about from Panaji. The hillock called Altinho houses some major central government offices and the residences of prominent officials and politicians.


title: Panaji

text: The current Chief Minister of Goa, Pramod Sawant, resides here. The Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) administers the city and its Mayor is Rohit Monserrate. Vasant Agshikar is the Deputy Mayor.


title: Panaji

text: The Governor of Goa stays at the Cabo Raj Bhavan at Dona Paula, about from Panaji. The current Governor is S. Pillai.


title: Panaji

text: Two of Goa's premier association football clubs Dempo S.C. and Sporting Clube de Goa are based in Panaji and they both compete in India's top-tier league I-League. Clube Tennis de Gaspar Dias in Miramar was founded in the year 1926 and remains among the most sought after Tennis clubs in Goa. The multipurpose Campal Indoor Complex is planned in Campal besides the existing football ground. The Don Bosco college football grounds on General Bernardo Guedes road has been long a long established sports field in the city. It also has a football club named FC Goa in Indian Super League.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: Virginia Anne McKenna, OBE (born 7 June 1931) is a British stage and screen actress, author and wildlife campaigner. She is best known for the films "A Town Like Alice" (1956), "Carve Her Name with Pride" (1958), "Born Free" (1966), and "Ring of Bright Water" (1969), as well as her work with The Born Free Foundation.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna was born in Marylebone to a theatrical family and was educated at Heron's Ghyll School, a former independent boarding school near the market town of Horsham in Sussex. She spent six years in South Africa before returning to the school at the age of fourteen, after which she attended the Central School of Speech and Drama, at that time based at the Royal Albert Hall, London.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: Aged 19, McKenna spent six months at Dundee Repertory Theatre. She worked on stage in London's West End theatre, making her debut in "Penny for a Song". She attracted attention on TV appearing in "Winter's Tale" with John Gielgud and "Shout Aloud Salvation".


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna's first film was "The Second Mrs Tanqueray" (1952), followed by a comedy, "Father's Doing Fine" (1952). She had a small role in the popular war film "The Cruel Sea" (1953) and a better part in the low budget comedy "The Oracle" (1953). She received excellent reviews for her stage performance in "The River Line".


title: Virginia McKenna

text: From 1954 to 1955 she was a member of the Old Vic theatre company, appearing in "Henry IV" and "Richard II", and was married for a few months in 1954 to actor Denholm Elliott, whom she met on the set of "The Cruel Sea". Their marriage ended owing to his affairs with men. In 1957, she married actor Bill Travers, with whom she had four children and to whom she remained married until his death in 1994.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna returned to films with "Simba" (1955), a drama about the Mau Mau, playing Dirk Bogarde's love interest. Rank signed her to a long term contract and director Brian Desmond Hurst said "She has a terrific future, properly handled. She has all the qualities of a young


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna was given the lead role in the war time drama "A Town Like Alice" (1956), opposite Peter Finch. The movie was a big hit at the box office and McKenna won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her performance. Exhibitors voted her the fourth most popular British star.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: Travers and McKenna received an offer to go to Hollywood to appear in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" (1957). Travers played Robert Browning and McKenna had the support part of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sister. The movie flopped at the box office. The same year, Travers and McKenna, along with Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers, co-starred in the comedy "The Smallest Show on Earth", made back in Britain.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna had another hit with "Carve Her Name with Pride" (1958), playing Second World War SOE agent Violette Szabo. She was nominated for another BAFTA Award and was voted the fifth most popular British star of 1958 (and the ninth most popular regardless of nationality).


title: Virginia McKenna

text: She and Travers were reunited in "Passionate Summer" (1959), then she had a support part in MGM's "The Wreck of the Mary Deare" (1959). McKenna and Travers were also in "Two Living, One Dead" (1961), shot in Sweden. She was in an adaptation of "A Passage to India" for the BBC in 1965.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna is best remembered for her 1966 role as Joy Adamson in the true-life film "Born Free" for which she received a nomination for a Golden Globe. It was not only a huge success at the box office but a life changing experience for her and her husband Bill Travers who co-starred with her, portraying game warden and conservationist George Adamson. The experience led them to become active supporters for wild animal rights as well as the protection of their natural habitat.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna and Travers starred in another animal-themed story, "Ring of Bright Water" (1969), but it failed to match "Born Free"'s success.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna appeared in "An Elephant Called Slowly". The film features her close friend conservationist George Adamson and also elephants Eleanor (brought up by conservationist Daphne Sheldrick) and young Pole Pole. The subsequent premature death of Pole Pole in London Zoo led to McKenna and her husband to establish Zoo Check in 1984 with their eldest son Will Travers. Zoo Check was renamed Born Free Foundation in 1991. In 1984 McKenna was involved with a protest against the poor conditions at Southampton Zoo which was closed a year later.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna occasionally acted in films, notably "Waterloo" (1970), "Swallows and Amazons" (1974), "The Gathering Storm" (1974), and "Beauty and the Beast" (1976).


title: Virginia McKenna

text: On the stage, in 1979 she won the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a British musical for her performance opposite Yul Brynner in "The King and I". Over the years she appeared in more films but was also very active with television roles and on stage where she continues to make occasional appearances.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna has also been responsible for helping create and furnish the Gavin Maxwell Museum on Eilean Bàn, the last island home of Maxwell, an author and naturalist, most famous for his book "Ring of Bright Water". McKenna and husband Bill Travers starred in the 1969 film adaptation of the book.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2004 New Year Honours for services to wildlife and to the arts. Her autobiography, "The Life in My Years", was published by Oberon Books in March 2009.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: In 1975 she released an album of twelve songs called "Two Faces of Love", which included two of her own compositions and a sung version of the poem "The Life That I Have" from the film "Carve Her Name with Pride". The record was released on the Gold Star label with two line drawings of McKenna by her sister-in-law Linden Travers, but these were replaced by a photograph when the album was reissued on the Rim label in 1979.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: Her audiobook work includes "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and narration of "The Lonely Doll" by Dare Wright.


title: Virginia McKenna

text: McKenna and Travers had four children together, one of whom is Will Travers. She is the grandmother of actress Lily Travers.


title: Acting

text: Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor or actress who adopts a character—in theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode.


title: Acting

text: Acting involves a broad range of skills, including a well-developed imagination, emotional facility, physical expressivity, vocal projection, clarity of speech, and the ability to interpret drama. Acting also demands an ability to employ dialects, accents, improvisation, observation and emulation, mime, and stage combat. Many actors train at length in specialist programs or colleges to develop these skills. The vast majority of professional actors have undergone extensive training. Actors and actresses will often have many instructors and teachers for a full range of training involving singing, scene-work, audition techniques, and acting for camera.


title: Acting

text: Most early sources in the West that examine the art of acting (, "hypokrisis") discuss it as part of rhetoric.


title: Acting

text: One of the first known actors was an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria in Athens. Writing two centuries after the event, Aristotle in his "Poetics" () suggests that Thespis stepped out of the dithyrambic chorus and addressed it as a separate character. Before Thespis, the chorus narrated (for example, "Dionysus did this, Dionysus said that"). When Thespis stepped out from the chorus, he spoke as if he were the character (for example, "I am Dionysus, I did this"). To distinguish between these different modes of storytelling—enactment and narration


title: Acting

text: —Aristotle uses the terms "mimesis" (via enactment) and "diegesis" (via narration). From Thespis' name derives the word "thespian".


title: Acting

text: Conservatories and drama schools typically offer two- to four-year training on all aspects of acting. Universities mostly offer three- to four-year programs, in which a student is often able to choose to focus on acting, whilst continuing to learn about other aspects of theatre. Schools vary in their approach, but in North America the most popular method taught derives from the 'system' of Konstantin Stanislavski, which was developed and popularised in America as method acting by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and others.


title: Acting

text: Other approaches may include a more physically based orientation, such as that promoted by theatre practitioners as diverse as Anne Bogart, Jacques Lecoq, Jerzy Grotowski, or Vsevolod Meyerhold. Classes may also include psychotechnique, mask work, physical theatre, improvisation, and acting for camera.


title: Acting

text: Regardless of a school's approach, students should expect intensive training in textual interpretation, voice, and movement. Applications to drama programmes and conservatories usually involve extensive auditions. Anybody over the age of 18 can usually apply. Training may also start at a very young age. Acting classes and professional schools targeted at under-18s are widespread. These classes introduce young actors to different aspects of acting and theatre, including scene study.


title: Acting

text: Increased training and exposure to public speaking allows humans to maintain calmer and more relaxed physiologically. By measuring a public speaker's heart rate maybe one of the easiest ways to judge shifts in stress as the heart rate increases with anxiety . As actors increase performances, heart rate and other evidence of stress can decrease. This is very important in training for actors, as adaptive strategies gained from increased exposure to public speaking can regulate implicit and explicit anxiety. By attending an institution with a specialization in acting, increased opportunity to act will lead to more relaxed physiology and decrease in stress and its effects on the body. These effects can vary from hormonal to cognitive health that can impact quality of life and performance


title: Acting

text: Some classical forms of acting involve a substantial element of improvised performance. Most notable is its use by the troupes of the "commedia dell'arte", a form of masked comedy that originated in Italy.


title: Acting

text: Improvisation as an approach to acting formed an important part of the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski's 'system' of actor training, which he developed from the 1910s onwards. Late in 1910, the playwright Maxim Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar" of acting. Inspired by a popular theatre performance in Naples that utilised the techniques of the "commedia dell'arte", Gorky suggested that they form a company, modelled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation. Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski's use was extended further in the approaches to acting developed by his students, Michael Chekhov and Maria Knebel.


title: Acting

text: In the United Kingdom, the use of improvisation was pioneered by Joan Littlewood from the 1930s onwards and, later, by Keith Johnstone and Clive Barker. In the United States, it was promoted by Viola Spolin, after working with Neva Boyd at a Hull House in Chicago, Illinois (Spolin was Boyd's student from 1924 to 1927). Like the British practitioners, Spolin felt that playing games was a useful means of training actors and helped to improve an actor's performance. With improvisation, she argued, people may find expressive freedom, since they do not know how an improvised situation will turn out. Improvisation demands an open mind in order to maintain spontaneity, rather than pre-planning a response. A character is created by the actor, often without reference to a dramatic text, and a drama is developed out of the spontaneous interactions with other actors. This approach to creating new drama has been developed most substantially by the British filmmaker Mike Leigh, in films such as "Secrets & Lies" (1996), "Vera Drake" (2004), "Another Year" (2010), and "Mr. Turner" (2014).


title: Acting

text: Acting in front of an audience many times can cause "stage fright", a form of stress in which someone becomes anxious in front of an audience. This is common among actors, especially new actors, and can cause symptoms such as increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, and sweating.


title: Acting

text: In a 2017 study on American university students, actors of various experience levels all showed similarly elevated heart rates throughout their performances; this agrees with previous studies on professional and amateur actors' heart rates. While all actors experienced stress, causing elevated heart rate, the more experienced actors displayed less heart rate variability than the less experienced actors in the same play. The more experienced actors experienced less stress while performing, and therefore had a smaller degree of variability than the less experienced, more stressed actors. The more experienced an actor is, the more stable their heart rate will be while performing, but will still experience elevated heart rates.


title: Acting

text: The semiotics of acting involves a study of the ways in which aspects of a performance come to operate for its audience as signs. This process largely involves the production of meaning, whereby elements of an actor's performance acquire significance, both within the broader context of the dramatic action and in the relations each establishes with the real world.


title: Acting

text: Following the ideas proposed by the Surrealist theorist Antonin Artaud, however, it may also be possible to understand communication with an audience that occurs 'beneath' significance and meaning (which the semiotician Félix Guattari described as a process involving the transmission of "a-signifying signs"). In his "The Theatre and its Double" (1938), Artaud compared this interaction to the way in which a snake charmer communicates with a snake, a process which he identified as "mimesis"—the same term that Aristotle in his "Poetics" () used to describe the mode in which drama communicates its story, by virtue of its embodiment by the actor enacting it, as distinct from "diegesis", or the way in which a narrator may describe it. These "vibrations" passing from the actor to the audience may not necessarily precipitate into significant elements as such (that is, consciously perceived "meanings"), but rather may operate by means of the circulation of "affects".


title: Acting

text: The approach to acting adopted by other theatre practitioners involve varying degrees of concern with the semiotics of acting. Konstantin Stanislavski, for example, addresses the ways in which an actor, building on what he calls the "experiencing" of a role, should also shape and adjust a performance in order to support the overall significance of the drama—a process that he calls establishing the "perspective of the role". The semiotics of acting plays a far more central role in Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, in which an actor is concerned to bring out clearly the socio historical significance of behaviour and action by means of specific performance choices—a process that he describes as establishing the "not/but" element in a performed physical ""gestus"" within context of the play's overal ""Fabel"". Eugenio Barba argues that actors ought not to concern themselves with the significance of their performance behaviour; this aspect is the responsibility, he claims, of the director, who weaves the signifying elements of an actor's performance into the director's dramaturgical "montage".


title: Acting

text: The theatre semiotician Patrice Pavis, alluding to the contrast between Stanislavski's 'system' and Brecht's demonstrating performer—and, beyond that, to Denis Diderot's foundational essay on the art of acting, "Paradox of the Actor" (–78)—argues that:


title: Acting

text: Elements of a semiotics of acting include the actor's gestures, facial expressions, intonation and other vocal qualities, rhythm, and the ways in which these aspects of an individual performance relate to the drama and the theatrical event (or film, television programme, or radio broadcast, each of which involves different semiotic systems) considered as a whole. A semiotics of acting recognises that all forms of acting involve conventions and codes by means of which performance behaviour acquires significance—including those approaches, such as Stanislvaski's or the closely related method acting developed in the United States, that offer themselves as "a natural kind of acting that can do without conventions and be received as self-evident and universal." Pavis goes on to argue that:


title: Acting

text: The conventions that govern acting in general are related to structured forms of play, which involve, in each specific experience, "rules of the game." This aspect was first explored by Johan Huizinga (in "Homo Ludens", 1938) and Roger Caillois (in "Man, Play and Games", 1958). Caillois, for example, distinguishes four aspects of play relevant to acting: "mimesis" (simulation), "agon" (conflict or competition), "alea" (chance), and "ilinx" (vertigo, or "vertiginous psychological situations" involving the spectator's identification or catharsis). This connection with play as an activity was first proposed by Aristotle in his "Poetics", in which he defines the desire to imitate in play as an essential part of being human and our first means of learning as children:


title: Acting

text: This connection with play also informed the words used in English (as was the analogous case in many other European languages) for drama: the word "play" or "game" (translating the Anglo-Saxon "plèga" or Latin "ludus") was the standard term used until William Shakespeare's time for a dramatic entertainment—just as its creator was a "play-maker" rather than a "dramatist", the person acting was known as a "player", and, when in the Elizabethan era specific buildings for acting were built, they was known as "play-houses" rather than "theatres."


title: Acting

text: Actors and actresses need to make a resume when applying for roles. The acting resume is very different from a normal resume; it is generally shorter, with lists instead of paragraphs, and it should have a head shot on the back. Sometimes, a resume also contains a short 30 second to 1 minute reel displaying the actors ability's, so that the casting director can see your previous performances, if any. An actors resume should list projects they have acted in before such as plays, movies, or shows, as well as special skills and their contact information.


title: Acting

text: Auditioning is the act of performing either a monologue or sides (lines for one character) as sent by the casting director. Auditioning entails showing the actor's skills to present themselves as a different person; it may be as brief as two minutes. For theater auditions it can be longer than two minutes, or they may perform more than one monologue, as each casting director can have different requirements for actors. Actors should go to auditions dressed for the part, to make it easier for the casting director to visualize them as the character. For television or film they will have to undergo more than one audition. Oftentimes actors are called into another audition at the last minute, and are sent the sides either that morning or the night before. Auditioning can be a stressful part of acting, especially if one has not been trained to audition.


title: Acting

text: Rehearsal is a process in which actors prepare and practice a performance, exploring the vicissitudes of conflict between characters, testing specific actions in the scene, and finding means to convey a particular sense. Some actors continue to rehearse a scene throughout the run of a show in order to keep the scene fresh in their minds and exciting for the audience.


title: Acting

text: A critical audience with evaluative spectators is known to induce stress on actors during performance, (see Bode & Brutten). Being in front of an audience sharing a story will makes the actors intensely vulnerable. Shockingly, an actor will typically rate the quality of their performance higher than their spectators. Heart rates are generally always higher during a performance with an audience when compared to rehearsal, however what's interesting is that this audience also seems to induce a higher quality of performance. Simply put, while public performances cause extremely high stress levels in actors (more so amateur ones), the stress actually improves the performance, supporting the idea of "positive stress in challenging situations"