title: Elettaria cardamomum

text: In addition to its native range, it is grown in Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Central America. In India, the states of Sikkim and Kerala are the main producers of cardamom; they rank highest both in cultivated area and in production.


title: Elettaria cardamomum

text: Recently, a few planters isolated high-yielding plants and started multiplying them on a large scale. The most popular high-yielding variety is 'Njallani', which is a unique high-yielding cardamom variety developed by an Indian farmer, Sebastian Joseph, at Kattappana in the South Indian state of Kerala. K. J. Baby of Idukki District, Kerala, has developed a purely white-flowered variety of Vazhuka type green cardamom having higher yield than 'Njallani'. The variety has high adaptability to different shade conditions and can also be grown in waterlogged areas.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: The Battle of Copenhagen of 1801 (Danish: "Slaget på Reden"), also known as the First Battle of Copenhagen to distinguish it from the Second Battle of Copenhagen in 1807, was a naval battle in which a British fleet fought and defeated a smaller force of the Dano-Norwegian Navy anchored near Copenhagen on 2 April 1801. The battle came about over British fears that the powerful Danish fleet would ally with France, and a breakdown in diplomatic communications on both sides.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: As the British ships entered the harbour of the Danish fleet, several of its ships stationed in the city's inlet forming a blockade. The Danish fleet defended the capital with these ships and bastions on both sides of the harbour inlet. It was the second attempt by the British to try to prevent a Franco-Danish alliance, as the British had already entered Øresund with a fleet in August 1800, in order to persuade Denmark not to ally with France. The Danes agreed to the British terms upon hearing news of the assassination of Tsar Paul I of Russia, as his death meant the end of the Russian-led League of Armed Neutrality of which Denmark was a member.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: The battle was the result of multiple failures of diplomacy in the latter half of the 18th century. At the beginning of 1801, during the French Revolutionary Wars, Britain's principal advantage over France was its naval superiority. The Royal Navy searched neutral ships trading with French ports, seizing their cargoes if they were deemed to be trading with France. It was in the British interest to guarantee its naval supremacy and all trade advantages that resulted from it. The Russian tsar, Paul, having been a British ally, arranged a League of Armed Neutrality comprising Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, and Russia, to enforce free trade with France. The British viewed the League to be very much in the French interest and a serious threat. The league was hostile to the British blockade and, according to the British, its existence threatened the supply of timber and naval stores from Scandinavia.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: In early 1801, the British government assembled a fleet off Great Yarmouth at Yarmouth Roads, with the goal of breaking up the league. The British needed to act before the Baltic Sea thawed and released the Russian fleet from its bases at Kronstadt and Reval (now Tallinn). If the Russian fleet joined with the Swedish and Danish fleets, the combined fleets would form a formidable force of up to 123 ships-of-the-line. The British fleet was under the command of Admiral Hyde Parker, with Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson as second-in-command.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Frustrated by the delay, Nelson sent a letter to Captain Thomas Troubridge, a friend and a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty. This prompted the Earl of St Vincent (First Lord of the Admiralty) to send a private note, which resulted in the fleet sailing from Yarmouth on 12 March. Orders were sent to Parker to go to Copenhagen and detach Denmark from the league by "amicable arrangement or by actual hostilities", to be followed by "an immediate and vigorous attack" on the Russians at Reval and then Kronstadt. The British fleet reached the Skaw (Danish: "Skagen") on 19 March, where they met a British diplomat, Nicholas Vansittart, who told them that the Danes had rejected an ultimatum.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Although the Admiralty had instructed Parker to frustrate the league, by force if necessary, he was a naturally cautious person and moved slowly. He wanted to blockade the Baltic despite the danger of the combination of fleets; Nelson wanted to ignore Denmark and Sweden, who were both reluctant partners in the alliance, and instead sail to the Baltic to fight the Russians. In the end Nelson was able to persuade Sir Hyde to attack the Danish fleet currently concentrated off Copenhagen. Promised naval support for the Danes from Karlskrona, in Sweden, did not arrive, perhaps because of adverse winds. The Prussians had only minimal naval forces and also could not assist. On 30 March, the British force passed through the narrows between Denmark and Sweden, sailing close to the Swedish coast to put themselves as far from the Danish guns as possible; fortunately for the British, the Swedish batteries remained silent.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Attacking the Danish fleet would have been difficult as Parker's delay in sailing had allowed the Danes to prepare their positions well. Most of the Danish ships were not fitted for sea but were moored along the shore with old ships (hulks), no longer fit for service at sea, but still powerfully armed, as a line of floating batteries off the eastern coast of the island of Amager, in front of the city in the King's Channel. The northern end of the line terminated at the Tre Kroner ('Three Crowns' — Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, referring to the Kalmar Union, Three Crowns is also the Swedish coat of arms) forts armed with 68 guns (equal to twice the broadside of a ship-of-the-line). North of the fort, in the entrance to Copenhagen harbour, were two ships-of-the-line, a large frigate, and two brigs, all rigged for sea, and two more hulks. Batteries covered the water between the Danish line and the shore, and further out to sea a large shoal, the Middle Ground, constricted the channel. The British had no reliable charts or pilots, so Captain Thomas Hardy spent most of the night of 31 March taking soundings in the channel up to the Danish line. Even so, the British ships were not able to locate the deepest part of the channel properly and so kept too far to seaward.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Parker gave Nelson the twelve ships-of-the-line with the shallowest drafts, and all the smaller ships in the fleet. Parker himself stayed to the north-east of the battle with the heavier ships – whose deeper drafts did not allow them to safely enter the channel – screening Nelson from possible external interference and moving towards Copenhagen to engage the northern defences. Nelson transferred his command from the large 98-gun to the shallower 74-gun for this reason.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: On 30 March, Nelson, and his second-in-command, Rear Admiral Thomas Graves, accompanied by Captain Domett and the commanding officer of the troops, Lieutenant Colonel William Stewart, sailed in the hired lugger "Lark" to reconnoitre the Danish defences at Copenhagen. They found the defences to be strong and so spent the evening discussing the plan. Fixed batteries had a significant advantage over ship borne cannon owing to their greater stability and larger guns, and the Danes could reinforce their ships during the battle. On the other hand, their ships were a motley collection, many of them small, and out-gunned if engaged by the whole of Nelson's force.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Nelson's plan was for the British ships to approach the weaker, southern end of the Danish defences in a line parallel to the Danish one. As the foremost ship drew alongside a Danish ship, it would anchor and engage that ship. The remainder of the line would pass outside the engagement until the next British ship drew alongside the next Danish ship, and so on. The frigate , together with small gun-brigs, would rake the Danish line from the south, and a force of frigates, commanded by Captain Edward Riou of , would attack the northern end of the line. Troops would land and assault the "Tre Kroner" fortress once the fleet had subdued the Danish line of ships. Bomb vessels would sit outside the British line and bombard the Danes by firing over it. Should the British be unable to subdue the stronger, northern defences, the destruction of the southern ships would be enough to allow the bomb vessels to approach within range of the city and force negotiations to prevent the bombardment of the city.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: With a southerly wind on 2 April, Nelson picked his way through the shoals. However, ran aground before entering the channel, and took no part in the battle. Then and ran aground on the Middle Ground, severely restricting their role in the battle. The loss of the three vessels required hurried changes in the line and weakened the force's northern end.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: The Danish batteries started firing at 10:05 am, the first half of the British fleet was engaged in about half an hour, and the battle was general by 11:30 am. Once the British line was in place there was very little manoeuvring. The British ships anchored by the stern about a cable from the line of Danish ships and batteries, which was relatively long range, and the two exchanged broadsides until a ship ceased firing. The British encountered heavy resistance, partly because they had not spotted the low-lying floating batteries, and partly because of the courage with which the Danes fought. The northern Danish ships, which were rigged and manned, did not enter the battle but remained on station as reserve units, even though the wind direction forced Parker's squadron to approach only slowly.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: At 1:00 pm, the battle was still in full swing. "Prøvesteenen"s heavier fire would have destroyed if it had not been raked by "Desirée", assisted by . suffered badly from the combined fires of "Holsteen" and "Sjælland".


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Admiral Parker could see little of the battle owing to gun smoke, but could see the signals on the three grounded British ships, with "Bellona" and "Russell" flying signals of distress and "Agamemnon" a signal of inability to proceed. Thinking that Nelson might have fought to a stand-still but might be unable to retreat without orders (the Articles of War demanded that all ranks "do their utmost" against the enemy in battle), at 1:30 pm Parker told his flag captain:I will make the signal of recall for Nelson's sake. If he is in condition to continue the action, he will disregard it; if he is not, it will be an excuse for his retreat and no blame can be imputed to him.Nelson ordered that the signal be acknowledged, but not repeated. He turned to his flag captain, Thomas Foley, and said "You know, Foley, I only have one eye — I have the right to be blind sometimes," and then, holding his telescope to his blind eye, said "I really do not see the signal!" Rear Admiral Graves repeated the signal, but in a place invisible to most other ships while keeping Nelson's "close action" signal at his masthead. Of Nelson's captains, only Riou, who could not see Nelson's flagship "Elephant", followed Parker's signal. Riou withdrew his force, which was then attacking the "Tre Kroner" fortress, exposing himself to heavy fire that killed him.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: It was at this time that the battle swung decisively to the British, as their superior gunnery took effect. The guns of the dozen southernmost Danish ships had started to fall silent owing to the damage they had sustained, and the fighting moved northward. According to British eyewitness accounts, much of the Danish line had fallen silent by 2:00 pm. The cessation of firing left the way open for the British bomb vessels to approach Copenhagen. In addition, the reinforcements of the ships from the shore batteries were causing the latter to become ineffective.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: "Nyborg" tried to leave the line with "Aggershuus" in tow, but both sank. The most northerly ship, the frigate "Hjælperen", successfully withdrew. The Danish commander, Commodore Olfert Fischer, moved from "Dannebrog" at 11:30 am, when it caught fire, to "Holsteen". When "Indfødsretten", immediately north of "Holsteen", struck its colours at about 2:30 pm, he moved on to the "Tre Kroner" fortress. There he engaged three of Parker's ships, which had lost their manoeuvrability after being badly damaged and had drifted within range. "Indfødsretten" resumed firing after Captain Schrodersee was ferried to it and took command of the ship.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Perhaps because of inexperienced crews, several Danish ships fired on British boats sent out to them after their officers had signalled their surrender. Nelson said that he "must either send on shore and stop this irregular proceeding, or send in our fire ships and burn them" and went to his cabin to write a note to the Danes. He sent it with a Danish-speaking officer, Captain Sir Frederick Thesiger, under a flag of truce to the Danish-Norwegian regent, Crown Prince Frederik, who had been watching the battle from the ramparts of the Citadel. The note read:


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: All action ceased when Crown Prince Frederick sent his Adjutant General, Hans Lindholm (a Danish member of parliament), asking for the reason for Nelson's letter. He was asked to put it in writing, which he did, in English, while making the joke:


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: which was sent back to the Crown Prince. He then referred Lindholm to Parker on . Following him there at 4:00 pm, a twenty-four-hour ceasefire was agreed.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: After fighting had ended, the Danish flagship "Dannebrog" exploded at 4:30 pm, killing 250 men. By the end of the afternoon, three more badly-damaged British ships ran aground, including "Elephant". The Danish-Norwegian ships had been partly manned by volunteers, many having little or no naval experience, and as they were not all listed after the battle, it is uncertain what the exact Danish-Norwegian losses were. Estimates vary between 1,135 and 2,215 captured, killed or wounded. The official report by Olfert Fischer estimated the Danish-Norwegian casualties to be between 1,600 and 1,800 captured, killed or wounded. According to the official returns recorded by each British ship, and repeated in dispatches from Nelson and forwarded by Parker to the Admiralty, British casualties were 963 killed and wounded.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: Of the Danish ships engaged in the battle, two had sunk, one had exploded, and twelve had been captured. The British could not spare men for manning prizes as they suspected that further battles were to come. They burned eleven of the captured ships, and only one, "Holsteen", was sailed to England with the wounded under surgeon William Fergusson. "Holsteen" was then taken into service with the Royal Navy and renamed (later )..


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: The next day, Nelson landed in Copenhagen to open negotiations. Colonel Stewart reported that "the population showed an admixture of admiration, curiosity and displeasure". In a two-hour meeting with the Crown Prince (who spoke English), Nelson was able to secure an indefinite armistice. He then tried to convince first Fischer (whom he had known in the West Indies), and then the Prince, of British protection against the Russians. Negotiations continued by letter and on 8 April Nelson returned in person with a formal agreement.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: The one sticking point out of the seven articles was a sixteen-week armistice to allow action against the Russians. At this point Stewart claims that one of the Danes turned to another and said in French that disagreement might lead to a renewal of hostilities. "Renew hostilities!" responded Nelson, and turning to his interpreter said "Tell him that we are ready in a moment; ready to bombard this very night!" Hurried apologies followed (the British fleet now occupied positions that would allow the bombardment of Copenhagen) and agreement was reached and signed the next day. The armistice was reduced to fourteen weeks, but during it armed neutrality would be suspended and the British were to have free access to Copenhagen. Danish prisoners were also paroled. In the final hour of negotiations, the Danes found out (but not the British) that Tsar Paul had been assassinated. This resulted in the dissolution of the League of Armed Neutrality and allowed the Danes to accept British terms. The final peace agreement was then signed on 23 October 1801.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: On 12 April, Parker sailed to Karlskrona and on the British approach, the Swedish fleet returned to the port where Parker attempted to persuade them to also leave the League. Parker refused to sail into the eastern Baltic and instead returned to Copenhagen, where he found that news of his lack of vigour had reached London. On 5 May, he was recalled and ordered to hand his command over to Nelson. Nelson sailed eastwards again and, leaving six ships-of-the-line at Karlskrona, he arrived at Reval on 14 May to find that the ice had melted and the Russian fleet had departed for Kronstadt. He also found out that negotiations for ending the armed neutrality had started and so withdrew on 17 May. As a result of the battle, Lord Nelson was created Viscount Nelson of the Nile.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: This was not the end of the Danish-Norwegian conflict with the British. In 1807, similar circumstances led to another British attack, in the Second Battle of Copenhagen.


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: All those listed in the Inner Run, apart from "Elephanten" which was decommissioned later in 1801 and apparently used as a blockship and a powder store (Karduser), were captured by the British at the later Battle of Copenhagen (1807)


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: "These ships did not see action, the list is incomplete. Around 14 modern ships of the line and the same number of smaller ships were kept in the harbour."


title: Battle of Copenhagen (1801)

text: The death of Tsar Paul of Russia changed the diplomatic scene and reduced the political importance of the battle, and material losses in the battle were of little importance to the fighting strength of either navy (the Danish side had taken great care to spare its first-class ships), it did however demonstrate that British determination to ensure continued naval superiority in the war against France was supreme.


title: Forced perspective

text: Forced perspective is a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation between them and the vantage point of the spectator or camera. It has uses in photography, filmmaking and architecture.


title: Forced perspective

text: An example of forced perspective is a scene in an action movie in which dinosaurs are threatening the heroes. By placing a miniature model of a dinosaur close to the camera, the director may make the dinosaur look monstrously tall to the viewer, even though it is just closer to the camera.


title: Forced perspective

text: Forced perspective had been a feature of German silent films and "Citizen Kane" revived the practice. Movies, especially B-movies in the 1950s and 1960s, were produced on limited budgets and often featured forced perspective shots.


title: Forced perspective

text: Forced perspective can be made more believable when environmental conditions obscure the difference in perspective. For example, the final scene of the famous movie "Casablanca" takes place at an airport in the middle of a storm, although the entire scene was shot in a studio. This was accomplished by using a painted backdrop of an aircraft, which was "serviced" by dwarfs standing next to the backdrop. A downpour (created in the studio) draws much of the viewer's attention away from the backdrop and extras, making the simulated perspective less noticeable.


title: Forced perspective

text: Early instances of forced perspective used in low-budget motion pictures showed objects that were clearly different from their surroundings: often blurred or at a different light level. The principal cause of this was geometric. Light from a point source travels in a spherical wave, decreasing in intensity (or "illuminance") as the inverse square of the distance travelled. This means that a light source must be four times as bright to produce the same illuminance at an object twice as far away. Thus to create the illusion of a distant object being at the same distance as a near object and scaled accordingly, much more light is required. When shooting with forced perspective, it's important to have the aperture stopped down sufficiently to achieve proper DOF (depth of field), so that the foreground object and background are both sharp. Since miniature models would need to be subjected to far greater lighting than the main focus of the camera, the area of action, it is important to ensure that these can withstand the significant amount of heat generated by the incandescent light sources typically used in film and TV production.


title: Forced perspective

text: Peter Jackson's film adaptations of "The Lord of the Rings" make extended use of forced perspective. Characters apparently standing next to each other would be displaced by several feet in depth from the camera. This, in a still shot, makes some characters (dwarves and Hobbits) appear much smaller than others. If the camera's point of view were moved, then parallax would reveal the true relative positions of the characters in space. Even if the camera is just rotated, its point of view may move accidentally if the camera is not rotated about the correct point. This point of view is called the 'zero-parallax-point' (or front nodal point), and is approximated in practice as the centre of the entrance pupil.


title: Forced perspective

text: An extensively used technique in "" was an enhancement of this principle, which could be used in moving shots. Portions of sets were mounted on movable platforms which would move precisely according to the movement of the camera, so that the optical illusion would be preserved at all times for the duration of the shot. The same techniques were used in the Harry Potter movies to make the character Hagrid look like a giant. Props around Harry and his friends are of normal size, while seemingly identical props placed around Hagrid are in fact smaller.


title: Forced perspective

text: As with many film genres and effects, forced perspective can be used to visual-comedy effect. Typically, when an object or character is portrayed in a scene, its size is defined by its surroundings. A character then interacts with the object or character, in the process showing that the viewer has been fooled and there is forced perspective in use.


title: Forced perspective

text: The 1930 Laurel and Hardy movie "Brats" used forced perspective to depict Stan and Ollie simultaneously as adults and as their own sons. An example used for comic effect can be found in the slapstick comedy "Top Secret!" in a scene which appears to begin as a close-up of a ringing phone with the characters in the distance. However, when the character walks up to the phone (towards the camera) and picks it up, it becomes apparent that the phone is extremely oversized instead of being close to the camera. Another scene in the same movie begins with a close-up of a wristwatch. The next cut shows that the character actually has a gargantuan wristwatch.


title: Forced perspective

text: The same technique is also used in the Dennis Waterman sketch in the British BBC sketch show "Little Britain". In the television version, larger than life props are used to make the caricatured Waterman look just three feet tall or less. In "The History of the World, Part I", while escaping the French peasants, Mel Brooks' character, Jacques, who is doubling for King Louis, runs down a hall of the palace, which turns into a ramp, showing the smaller forced perspective door at the end. As he backs down into the normal part of the room, he mutters, "Who designed this place?"


title: Forced perspective

text: One of the recurring "The Kids in the Hall" sketches featured Mr. Tyzik, "The Headcrusher", who used forced perspective (from his own point of view) to "crush" other people's heads between his fingers. This is also done by the character Sheldon Cooper in the TV show "The Big Bang Theory" to his friends when they displease him. In the making of Season 5 of "Red vs. Blue", the creators used forced perspective to make the character of Tucker's baby, Junior, look small. In the game, the alien character used as Junior is the same height as other characters. The short-lived 2013 Internet meme "baby mugging" used forced perspective to make babies look like they were inside items like mugs and teacups.


title: Forced perspective

text: In architecture, a structure can be made to seem larger, taller, farther away or otherwise by adjusting the scale of objects in relation to the spectator, increasing or decreasing perceived depth. When forced perspective is supposed to make an object appear farther away, the following method can be used: by constantly decreasing the scale of objects from expectancy and convention toward the farthest point from the spectator, an illusion is created that the scale of said objects is decreasing due to their distant location. In contrast, the opposite technique was sometimes used in classical garden designs and other follies to shorten the perceived distances of points of interest along a path.


title: Forced perspective

text: The Statue of Liberty is built with a slight forced perspective so that it appears more correctly proportioned when viewed from its base. When the statue was designed in the late 19th century (before easy air flight), there were few other angles from which to view the statue. This caused a difficulty for special effects technicians working on the movie "Ghostbusters II", who had to back off on the amount of forced perspective used when replicating the statue for the movie so that their model (which was photographed head-on) would not look top-heavy. This effect can also be seen in Michelangelo's statue of "David".


title: Forced perspective

text: The technique takes advantage of the visual cues humans use to perceive depth such as angular size, aerial perspective, shading, and relative size. In film, photography and art, perceived object distance is manipulated by altering fundamental monocular cues used to discern the depth of an object in the scene such as aerial perspective, blurring, relative size and lighting. Using these monocular cues in concert with angular size, the eyes can perceive the distance of an object. Artists are able to freely move the visual plane of objects by obscuring these cues to their advantage.


title: Forced perspective

text: Increasing the object's distance from the audience makes an object appear smaller, its apparent size decreases as distance from the audience increases. This phenomenon is that of the manipulation of angular and apparent size.


title: Forced perspective

text: A person perceives the size of an object based on the size of the object's image on the retina. This depends solely on the angle created by the rays coming from the topmost and bottommost part of the object that pass through the center of the lens of the eye. The larger the angle an object subtends, the larger the apparent size of the object. The subtended angle increases as the object moves closer to the lens. Two objects with different actual size have the same apparent size when they subtend the same angle. Similarly, two objects of the same actual size can have drastically varying apparent size when they are moved to different distances from the lens.


title: Forced perspective

text: in which "θ" is the subtended angle, "h" is the actual size of the object and "D" is the distance from the lens to the object.


title: Forced perspective

text: Forced perspective has been employed to realize characters in film. One notable example is Hagrid, the half-giant in the "Harry Potter" series.


title: Forced perspective

text: The technique is used in the "Lord of the Rings" series for depicting the apparent heights of the hobbit characters, such as Frodo, who are supposed to be around half the height or less of the humans and wizards, such as Gandalf. In reality, the difference in height between the respective actors playing those roles is only , where Elijah Wood as the hobbit Frodo is tall, and Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf is . The use of camera angles and trick scenery and props creates the illusion of a much greater difference in size and height.


title: Forced perspective

text: Numerous camera angle tricks are played in the comedy film "Elf" (2003) to make the elf characters in the movie appear smaller than the human characters.


title: Forced perspective

text: In his painting entitled "Still life with a curtain", Paul Cézanne creates the illusion of depth by using brighter colors on objects closer to the viewer and dimmer colors and shading to distance the "light source" from objects that he wanted to appear farther away. His shading technique allows the audience to discern the distance between objects due to their relative distances from a stationary light source that illuminates the scene. Furthermore, he uses a blue tint on objects that should be farther away and redder tint to objects in the foreground.


title: Forced perspective

text: Modern museum dioramas may be seen in most major natural history museums. Typically, these displays use a tilted plane to represent what would otherwise be a level surface, incorporate a painted background of distant objects, and often employ false perspective, carefully modifying the scale of objects placed on the plane to reinforce the illusion through depth perception in which objects of identical real-world size placed farther from the observer appear smaller than those closer. Often the distant painted background or sky will be painted upon a continuous curved surface so that the viewer is not distracted by corners, seams, or edges. All of these techniques are means of presenting a realistic view of a large scene in a compact space. A photograph or single-eye view of such a diorama can be especially convincing since in this case there is no distraction by the binocular perception of depth.


title: Forced perspective

text: Carl Akeley, a naturalist, sculptor, and taxidermist, is credited with creating the first ever habitat diorama in the year 1889. Akeley's diorama featured taxidermied beavers in a three-dimensional habitat with a realistic, painted background. With the support of curator Frank M. Chapman, Akeley designed the popular habitat dioramas featured at the American Museum of Natural History. Combining art with science, these exhibitions were intended to educate the public about the growing need for habitat conservation. The modern AMNH Exhibitions Lab is charged with the creation of all dioramas and otherwise immersive environments in the museum.


title: Forced perspective

text: Forced perspective is extensively employed at theme parks and other such architecture as found in Disneyland and Las Vegas, often to make structures seem larger than they are in reality where physically larger structures would not be feasible or desirable, or to otherwise provide an optical illusion for entertainment value. Most notably, it is used by Walt Disney Imagineering in the Disney Theme Parks. Some notable examples of forced perspective in the parks, used to make the objects bigger, are the castles (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Belle). One of the most notable examples of forced perspective being used to make the object appear smaller is The American Adventure pavilion in Epcot.


title: Ramie

text: Ramie (pronounced: , ; from Malay ) is a flowering plant in the nettle family Urticaceae, native to eastern Asia. It is a herbaceous perennial growing to tall; the leaves are heart-shaped, long and broad, and white on the underside with dense, small hairs—this gives it a silvery appearance; unlike stinging nettles, the hairs do not sting. The true ramie or China grass is also called Chinese plant or white ramie.


title: Ramie

text: A second type, known as green ramie or rhea, is believed to have originated in the Malay Peninsula. It has smaller leaves which are green on the underside, and it appears to be better suited to tropical conditions. The word "ramie" is derived from the Malay word "rami".


title: Ramie

text: Ramie is one of the oldest fiber crops, having been used for at least 6,000 years, and is principally used for fabric production. It is a bast fiber, which comes from the inner bark (phloem) of the vegetative stalks and not the woody stem itself or the outer bark. Ramie is normally harvested two to three times a year, but under good growing conditions can be harvested up to six times per year. Unlike other bast crops, ramie requires chemical processing to de-gum the fiber.


title: Ramie

text: When the plant begins flowering, or just before, it signals both a decline in growth and the plant being at its maximum fibre content, and is harvested. Stems are harvested by cutting just above the lateral roots or by bending the stem. This enables the core to be broken and the cortex can be stripped from the plant "in situ".


title: Ramie

text: After harvesting, stems are decorticated while the plants are fresh. If this is not done while the plants are still fresh, the plants dry out and the bark will be difficult to remove. The bark ribbon is then dried as quickly as possible, preventing bacteria and fungi from attacking it.


title: Ramie

text: The dry weight of harvested stem from crops ranges from 3.4 to 4.5 t/ha/year. A 4.5-ton crop yields 1,600 kg/ha/year of dry undegummed fiber. The weight loss during degumming can be up to 25%, giving a yield of degummed fiber of about 1,200 kg/ha/year.


title: Ramie

text: The fiber extraction occurs in three stages. First, the cortex (bark) is removed; this can be done manually or by machine. This process is called decortication. Second, the cortex is scraped to remove most of the outer bark, the parenchyma in the bast layer and some of the gums and pectins. Third, the residual cortex material is washed, dried, and degummed to extract the spinnable fiber.


title: Ramie

text: Ramie has been grown in China for many centuries, and farmers in ancient China are known to have used the fiber to weave clothing. In China, it is called zhù má (苎麻). It may have been used in cloth for wrapping mummies in Egypt. Though ramie and flax are difficult to distinguish from one another in ancient cloth, ramie's resistance to bacteria and mildew would make it appropriate for mummy wrapping.


title: Ramie

text: Taiwan's aboriginal people have used ramie for millennia in fabric production and ramie is still used to create traditional garb which is worn in the festivals which have not been banned (mostly related to decapitation and stabbing enemy captives).


title: Ramie

text: Ramie was used to produce an open-weave fabric called mechera, used for shirts and dressing gowns suitable for warm climates. The French painter Raoul Dufy designed in the early 20th century patterns for prints on mechera used by the French shirtmaker Charvet.


title: Ramie

text: Brazil began production in the late 1930s with production peaking in 1971. Since then, production has steadily declined as a result of competition from alternative crops, such as soybeans, and from synthetic fibers.


title: Ramie

text: Ramie is one of the strongest natural fibers. It exhibits even greater strength when wet. Ramie fiber is known especially for its ability to hold shape, reduce wrinkling, and introduce a silky lustre to the fabric appearance. It is not as durable as other fibers, so is usually used as a blend with other fibers such as cotton or wool. It is similar to linen in absorbency, density, and microscopic appearance. It does not dye as well as cotton. Because of its high molecular crystallinity, ramie is stiff and brittle and will break if folded repeatedly in the same place; it lacks resiliency and is low in elasticity and elongation potential.


title: Ramie

text: Despite its strength, ramie has had limited acceptance for textile use. The fiber's extraction and cleaning are expensive, chiefly because of the several steps—involving scraping, pounding, heating, washing, or exposure to chemicals. Some or all are needed to separate the raw fiber from the adhesive gums or resins. Spinning the fiber is difficult due to its brittle quality and low elasticity; and weaving is complicated by the hairy surface of the yarn, resulting from lack of cohesion between the fibers. Greater utilization of ramie may depend upon development of improved processing methods and the need to find plastic alternatives.


title: Ramie

text: Ramie is used to make such products as industrial sewing thread, packing materials, fishing nets, and filter cloths. It is also made into fabrics for household furnishings (upholstery, canvas) and clothing, frequently in blends with other textile fibers (for instance when used in a mixture with wool, shrinkage is reported to be greatly reduced when compared with pure wool). Shorter fibers and waste are used in paper manufacture. Ramie ribbon is used in fine bookbinding as a substitute for traditional linen tape.


title: Ramie

text: For the 2010 Prius, Toyota began using plant-derived plastics made from the cellulose in wood or grass instead of petroleum. One of the two principal crops used is ramie.


title: Ramie

text: In Vietnam, ramie leaves are called "cây lá gai", which is a main ingredient in making "bánh gai" or "bánh ít lá gai", a Vietnamese glutinous rice cake. The leaves give the cake its distinct color, flavor and fragrance.


title: Ramie

text: In the Chinese Hakka community, ramie leaves are called "chu yap (苧葉)," which is a main ingredient in making pancake-like dumplings with glutinous rice powder, sugar and water. These glutinous rice powder dumplings are known as "ban (粄)" in Hakka or "Cha Kwo (茶棵)" in Cantonese, similar to another Southeast Asian delicacy otherwise known as Kuih. The ramie leaves are picked, cleaned and ground in mortar, mixed into a dough of glutinous rice powder, water and sugar, kneaded thoroughly and placed on palm-sized square- or circular-cut banana leaves and steamed. The ramie leaves give the dumplings a dark green colour and unique aroma.


title: Ramie

text: Ramie is also occasionally used in the construction of high performance rowing oar shafts. Mahe Drysdale used sculling oars made with ramie during the 2016 Rio Olympics where he won Gold in the Men's 1X Scull.


title: Ramie

text: China leads in the production of ramie and exports mainly to Japan and Europe. Other producers include Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Brazil. Only a small percentage of the ramie produced is available on the international market. Japan, Germany, France and the UK are the main importers, the remaining supply is used domestically.


title: Textual criticism

text: Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.


title: Textual criticism

text: The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may lead to the production of a critical edition containing a scholarly curated text. If a scholar has several versions of a manuscript but no known original, then established methods of textual criticism can be used to seek to reconstruct the original text as closely as possible. The same methods can be used to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history, depending on the number and quality of the text available.


title: Textual criticism

text: On the other hand, the one original text that a scholar theorizes to exist is referred to as the urtext (in the context of Biblical studies), archetype or autograph; however, there is not necessarily a single original text for every group of texts. For example, if a story was spread by oral tradition, and then later written down by different people in different locations, the versions can vary greatly.


title: Textual criticism

text: There are many approaches or methods to the practice of textual criticism, notably eclecticism, stemmatics, and copy-text editing. Quantitative techniques are also used to determine the relationships between witnesses to a text, with methods from evolutionary biology (phylogenetics) appearing to be effective on a range of traditions.


title: Textual criticism

text: In some domains, such as religious and classical text editing, the phrase "lower criticism" refers to textual criticism and "higher criticism" to the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text.


title: Textual criticism

text: Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years, as one of the philological arts. Early textual critics, especially the librarians of Hellenistic Alexandria in the last two centuries BC, were concerned with preserving the works of antiquity, and this continued through the Middle Ages into the early modern period and the invention of the printing press. Textual criticism was an important aspect of the work of many Renaissance humanists, such as Desiderius Erasmus, who edited the Greek New Testament, creating the "Textus Receptus". In Italy, scholars such as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini collected and edited many Latin manuscripts, while a new spirit of critical enquiry was boosted by the attention to textual states, for example in the work of Lorenzo Valla on the purported Donation of Constantine.


title: Textual criticism

text: Many ancient works, such as the Bible and the Greek tragedies, survive in hundreds of copies, and the relationship of each copy to the original may be unclear. Textual scholars have debated for centuries which sources are most closely derived from the original, hence which readings in those sources are correct. Although texts such as Greek plays presumably had one original, the question of whether some biblical books, like the Gospels, ever had just one original has been discussed. Interest in applying textual criticism to the Quran has also developed after the discovery of the Sana'a manuscripts in 1972, which possibly date back to the seventh to eighth centuries.


title: Textual criticism

text: In the English language, the works of William Shakespeare have been a particularly fertile ground for textual criticism—both because the texts, as transmitted, contain a considerable amount of variation, and because the effort and expense of producing superior editions of his works have always been widely viewed as worthwhile. The principles of textual criticism, although originally developed and refined for works of antiquity and the Bible, and, for Anglo-American Copy-Text editing, Shakespeare, have been applied to many works, from (near-)contemporary texts to the earliest known written documents. Ranging from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to the twentieth century, textual criticism covers a period of about five millennia.


title: Textual criticism

text: Maas comments further that "A dictation revised by the author must be regarded as equivalent to an autograph manuscript". The lack of autograph manuscripts applies to many cultures other than Greek and Roman. In such a situation, a key objective becomes the identification of the first "exemplar" before any split in the tradition. That exemplar is known as the "archetype". "If we succeed in establishing the text of [the archetype], the "constitutio" (reconstruction of the original) is considerably advanced."


title: Textual criticism

text: The textual critic's ultimate objective is the production of a "critical edition". This contains the text that the author has determined most closely approximates the original, and is accompanied by an "apparatus criticus" or critical apparatus. The critical apparatus presents the author's work in three parts: first, a list or description of the evidence that the editor used (names of manuscripts, or abbreviations called sigla); second, the editor's analysis of that evidence (sometimes a simple likelihood rating),; and third, a record of rejected variants of the text (often in order of preference).


title: Textual criticism

text: Before inexpensive mechanical printing, literature was copied by hand, and many variations were introduced by copyists. The age of printing made the scribal profession effectively redundant. Printed editions, while less susceptible to the proliferation of variations likely to arise during manual transmission, are nonetheless not immune to introducing variations from an author's autograph. Instead of a scribe miscopying his source, a compositor or a printing shop may read or typeset a work in a way that differs from the autograph. Since each scribe or printer commits different errors, reconstruction of the lost original is often aided by a selection of readings taken from many sources. An edited text that draws from multiple sources is said to be "eclectic". In contrast to this approach, some textual critics prefer to identify the single best surviving text, and not to combine readings from multiple sources.


title: Textual criticism

text: When comparing different documents, or "witnesses", of a single, original text, the observed differences are called "variant readings", or simply "variants" or "readings". It is not always apparent which single variant represents the author's original work. The process of textual criticism seeks to explain how each variant may have entered the text, either by accident (duplication or omission) or intention (harmonization or censorship), as scribes or supervisors transmitted the original author's text by copying it. The textual critic's task, therefore, is to sort through the variants, eliminating those most likely to be "un"-original, hence establishing a critical text, or critical edition, that is intended to best approximate the original. At the same time, the critical text should document variant readings, so the relation of extant witnesses to the reconstructed original is apparent to a reader of the critical edition. In establishing the critical text, the textual critic considers both "external" evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and "internal" or "physical" considerations (what the author and scribes, or printers, were likely to have done).


title: Textual criticism

text: The collation of all known variants of a text is referred to as a variorum, namely a work of textual criticism whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication. The Bible and the works of William Shakespeare have often been the subjects of variorum editions, although the same techniques have been applied with less frequency to many other works, such as Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass",


title: Textual criticism

text: In practice, citation of manuscript evidence implies any of several methodologies. The ideal, but most costly, method is physical inspection of the manuscript itself; alternatively, published photographs or facsimile editions may be inspected. This method involves paleographical analysis—interpretation of handwriting, incomplete letters and even reconstruction of lacunae. More typically, editions of manuscripts are consulted, which have done this paleographical work already.


title: Textual criticism

text: Eclecticism refers to the practice of consulting a wide diversity of witnesses to a particular original. The practice is based on the principle that the more independent transmission histories there are, the less likely they will be to reproduce the same errors. What one omits, the others may retain; what one adds, the others are unlikely to add. Eclecticism allows inferences to be drawn regarding the original text, based on the evidence of contrasts between witnesses.


title: Textual criticism

text: Eclectic readings also normally give an impression of the number of witnesses to each available reading. Although a reading supported by the majority of witnesses is frequently preferred, this does not follow automatically. For example, a second edition of a Shakespeare play may include an addition alluding to an event known to have happened between the two editions. Although nearly all subsequent manuscripts may have included the addition, textual critics may reconstruct the original without the addition.


title: Textual criticism

text: The result of the process is a text with readings drawn from many witnesses. It is not a copy of any particular manuscript, and may deviate from the majority of existing manuscripts. In a purely eclectic approach, no single witness is theoretically favored. Instead, the critic forms opinions about individual witnesses, relying on both external and internal evidence.


title: Textual criticism

text: Since the mid-19th century, eclecticism, in which there is no "a priori" bias to a single manuscript, has been the dominant method of editing the Greek text of the New Testament (currently, the United Bible Society, 5th ed. and Nestle-Åland, 28th ed.). Even so, the oldest manuscripts, being of the Alexandrian text-type, are the most favored, and the critical text has an Alexandrian disposition.


title: Textual criticism

text: External evidence is evidence of each physical witness, its date, source, and relationship to other known witnesses. Critics will often prefer the readings supported by the oldest witnesses. Since errors tend to accumulate, older manuscripts should have fewer errors. Readings supported by a majority of witnesses are also usually preferred, since these are less likely to reflect accidents or individual biases. For the same reasons, the most geographically diverse witnesses are preferred. Some manuscripts show evidence that particular care was taken in their composition, for example, by including alternative readings in their margins, demonstrating that more than one prior copy (exemplar) was consulted in producing the current one. Other factors being equal, these are the "best" witnesses. The role of the textual critic is necessary when these basic criteria are in conflict. For instance, there will typically be fewer early copies, and a larger number of later copies. The textual critic will attempt to balance these criteria, to determine the original text.


title: Textual criticism

text: There are many other more sophisticated considerations. For example, readings that depart from the known practice of a scribe or a given period may be deemed more reliable, since a scribe is unlikely on his own initiative to have departed from the usual practice.


title: Textual criticism

text: Internal evidence is evidence that comes from the text itself, independent of the physical characteristics of the document. Various considerations can be used to decide which reading is the most likely to be original. Sometimes these considerations can be in conflict.


title: Textual criticism

text: Two common considerations have the Latin names "lectio brevior" (shorter reading) and "lectio difficilior" (more difficult reading). The first is the general observation that scribes tended to add words, for clarification or out of habit, more often than they removed them. The second, "lectio difficilior potior" (the harder reading is stronger), recognizes the tendency for harmonization—resolving apparent inconsistencies in the text. Applying this principle leads to taking the more difficult (unharmonized) reading as being more likely to be the original. Such cases also include scribes simplifying and smoothing texts they did not fully understand.


title: Textual criticism

text: Another scribal tendency is called homoioteleuton, meaning "similar endings". Homoioteleuton occurs when two words/phrases/lines end with the similar sequence of letters. The scribe, having finished copying the first, skips to the second, omitting all intervening words. "Homoioarche" refers to eye-skip when the "beginnings" of two lines are similar.


title: Textual criticism

text: The critic may also examine the other writings of the author to decide what words and grammatical constructions match his style. The evaluation of internal evidence also provides the critic with information that helps him evaluate the reliability of individual manuscripts. Thus, the consideration of internal and external evidence is related.


title: Textual criticism

text: After considering all relevant factors, the textual critic seeks the reading that best explains how the other readings would arise. That reading is then the most likely candidate to have been original.


title: Textual criticism

text: Various scholars have developed guidelines, or "canons" of textual criticism, to guide the exercise of the critic's judgment in determining the best readings of a text. One of the earliest was Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), who in 1734 produced an edition of the Greek New Testament. In his commentary, he established the rule "Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua", ("the harder reading is to be preferred").


title: Textual criticism

text: Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812) published several editions of the New Testament. In his 1796 edition, he established fifteen critical rules. Among them was a variant of Bengel's rule, "Lectio difficilior potior", "the harder reading is better." Another was "Lectio brevior praeferenda", "the shorter reading is better", based on the idea that scribes were more likely to add than to delete. This rule cannot be applied uncritically, as scribes may omit material inadvertently.


title: Textual criticism

text: Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton Hort (1828–1892) published an edition of the New Testament in Greek in 1881. They proposed nine critical rules, including a version of Bengel's rule, "The reading is less likely to be original that shows a disposition to smooth away difficulties." They also argued that "Readings are approved or rejected by reason of the quality, and not the number, of their supporting witnesses", and that "The reading is to be preferred that most fitly explains the existence of the others."


title: Textual criticism

text: Many of these rules, although originally developed for biblical textual criticism, have wide applicability to any text susceptible to errors of transmission.


title: Textual criticism

text: Since the canons of criticism are highly susceptible to interpretation, and at times even contradict each other, they may be employed to justify a result that fits the textual critic's aesthetic or theological agenda. Starting in the 19th century, scholars sought more rigorous methods to guide editorial judgment. Stemmatics and copy-text editing – while both eclectic, in that they permit the editor to select readings from multiple sources – sought to reduce subjectivity by establishing one or a few witnesses presumably as being favored by "objective" criteria. The citing of sources used, and alternate readings, and the use of original text and images helps readers and other critics determine to an extent the depth of research of the critic, and to independently verify their work.


title: Textual criticism

text: Stemmatics or stemmatology is a rigorous approach to textual criticism. Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) greatly contributed to making this method famous, even though he did not invent it. The method takes its name from the word "stemma". The Ancient Greek word and its loanword in classical Latin may refer to "family trees". This specific meaning shows the relationships of the surviving witnesses (the first known example of such a stemma, albeit without the name, dates from 1827). The family tree is also referred to as a "cladogram". The method works from the principle that "community of error implies community of origin". That is, if two witnesses have a number of errors in common, it may be presumed that they were derived from a common intermediate source, called a "hyparchetype". Relations between the lost intermediates are determined by the same process, placing all extant manuscripts in a family tree or "stemma codicum" descended from a single "archetype". The process of constructing the stemma is called "recension", or the Latin "recensio".


title: Textual criticism

text: Having completed the stemma, the critic proceeds to the next step, called "selection" or "selectio", where the text of the archetype is determined by examining variants from the closest hyparchetypes to the archetype and selecting the best ones. If one reading occurs more often than another at the same level of the tree, then the dominant reading is selected. If two competing readings occur equally often, then the editor uses judgment to select the correct reading.


title: Textual criticism

text: After "selectio", the text may still contain errors, since there may be passages where no source preserves the correct reading. The step of "examination", or "examinatio" is applied to find corruptions. Where the editor concludes that the text is corrupt, it is corrected by a process called "emendation", or "emendatio" (also sometimes called "divinatio"). Emendations not supported by any known source are sometimes called "conjectural" emendations.


title: Textual criticism

text: The process of "selectio" resembles eclectic textual criticism, but applied to a restricted set of hypothetical hyparchetypes. The steps of "examinatio" and "emendatio" resemble copy-text editing. In fact, the other techniques can be seen as special cases of stemmatics in which a rigorous family history of the text cannot be determined but only approximated. If it seems that one manuscript is by far the best text, then copy text editing is appropriate, and if it seems that a group of manuscripts are good, then eclecticism on that group would be proper.


title: Textual criticism

text: Phylogenetics is a technique borrowed from biology, where it was originally named "phylogenetic systematics" by Willi Hennig. In biology, the technique is used to determine the evolutionary relationships between different species. In its application in textual criticism, the text of a number of different witnesses may be entered into a computer, which records all the differences between them, or derived from an existing apparatus. The manuscripts are then grouped according to their shared characteristics. The difference between phylogenetics and more traditional forms of statistical analysis is that, rather than simply arranging the manuscripts into rough groupings according to their overall similarity, phylogenetics assumes that they are part of a branching family tree and uses that assumption to derive relationships between them. This makes it more like an automated approach to stemmatics. However, where there is a difference, the computer does not attempt to decide which reading is closer to the original text, and so does not indicate which branch of the tree is the "root"—which manuscript tradition is closest to the original. Other types of evidence must be used for that purpose.


title: Textual criticism

text: Phylogenetics faces the same difficulty as textual criticism: the appearance of characteristics in descendants of an ancestor other than by direct copying (or miscopying) of the ancestor, for example where a scribe combines readings from two or more different manuscripts ("contamination"). The same phenomenon is widely present among living organisms, as instances of horizontal gene transfer (or lateral gene transfer) and genetic recombination, particularly among bacteria. Further exploration of the applicability of the different methods for coping with these problems across both living organisms and textual traditions is a promising area of study.


title: Textual criticism

text: Software developed for use in biology has been applied successfully to textual criticism; for example, it is being used by the Canterbury Tales Project to determine the relationship between the 84 surviving manuscripts and four early printed editions of "The Canterbury Tales". Shaw's edition of Dante's "Commedia" uses phylogenetic and traditional methods alongside each other in a comprehensive exploration of relations among seven early witnesses to Dante's text.


title: Textual criticism

text: The stemmatic method assumes that each witness is derived from one, and only one, predecessor. If a scribe refers to more than one source when creating her or his copy, then the new copy will not clearly fall into a single branch of the family tree. In the stemmatic method, a manuscript that is derived from more than one source is said to be "contaminated".


title: Textual criticism

text: The method also assumes that scribes only make new errorsthey do not attempt to correct the errors of their predecessors. When a text has been improved by the scribe, it is said to be "sophisticated", but "sophistication" impairs the method by obscuring a document's relationship to other witnesses, and making it more difficult to place the manuscript correctly in the stemma.


title: Textual criticism

text: The stemmatic method requires the textual critic to group manuscripts by commonality of error. It is required, therefore, that the critic can distinguish erroneous readings from correct ones. This assumption has often come under attack. W. W. Greg noted: "That if a scribe makes a mistake he will inevitably produce nonsense is the tacit and wholly unwarranted assumption."


title: Textual criticism

text: Franz Anton Knittel defended the traditional point of view in theology and was against the modern textual criticism. He defended an authenticity of the Pericopa Adulterae (John 7:53–8:11), Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7), and Testimonium Flavianum. According to him, Erasmus in his Novum Instrumentum omne did not incorporate the "Comma" from Codex Montfortianus, because of grammar differences, but used Complutensian Polyglotta. According to him, the "Comma" was known for Tertullian.


title: Textual criticism

text: The stemmatic method's final step is "emendatio", also sometimes referred to as "conjectural emendation". But, in fact, the critic employs conjecture at every step of the process. Some of the method's rules that are designed to reduce the exercise of editorial judgment do not necessarily produce the correct result. For example, where there are more than two witnesses at the same level of the tree, normally the critic will select the dominant reading. However, it may be no more than fortuitous that more witnesses have survived that present a particular reading. A plausible reading that occurs less often may, nevertheless, be the correct one.


title: Textual criticism

text: Lastly, the stemmatic method assumes that every extant witness is derived, however remotely, from a single source. It does not account for the possibility that the original author may have revised her or his work, and that the text could have existed at different times in more than one authoritative version.


title: Textual criticism

text: The critic Joseph Bédier (1864–1938), who had worked with stemmatics, launched an attack on that method in 1928. He surveyed editions of medieval French texts that were produced with the stemmatic method, and found that textual critics tended overwhelmingly to produce bifid trees, divided into just two branches. He concluded that this outcome was unlikely to have occurred by chance, and that therefore, the method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history of the witnesses. He suspected that editors tended to favor trees with two branches, as this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment (as there would be no third branch to "break the tie" whenever the witnesses disagreed). He also noted that, for many works, more than one reasonable stemma could be postulated, suggesting that the method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents had claimed.


title: Textual criticism

text: Bédier's doubts about the stemmatic method led him to consider whether it could be dropped altogether. As an alternative to stemmatics, Bédier proposed a Best-text editing method, in which a single textual witness, judged to be of a 'good' textual state by the editor, is emended as lightly as possible for manifest transmission mistakes, but left otherwise unchanged. This makes a Best-text edition essentially a documentary edition. For an example one may refer to Eugene Vinaver's edition of the Winchester Manuscript of Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur".


title: Textual criticism

text: When copy-text editing, the scholar fixes errors in a base text, often with the help of other witnesses. Often, the base text is selected from the oldest manuscript of the text, but in the early days of printing, the copy text was often a manuscript that was at hand.


title: Textual criticism

text: Using the copy-text method, the critic examines the base text and makes corrections (called emendations) in places where the base text appears wrong to the critic. This can be done by looking for places in the base text that do not make sense or by looking at the text of other witnesses for a superior reading. Close-call decisions are usually resolved in favor of the copy-text.


title: Textual criticism

text: The first published, printed edition of the Greek New Testament was produced by this method. Erasmus, the editor, selected a manuscript from the local Dominican monastery in Basle and corrected its obvious errors by consulting other local manuscripts. The Westcott and Hort text, which was the basis for the Revised Version of the English bible, also used the copy-text method, using the Codex Vaticanus as the base manuscript.


title: Textual criticism

text: The bibliographer Ronald B. McKerrow introduced the term "copy-text" in his 1904 edition of the works of Thomas Nashe, defining it as "the text used in each particular case as the basis of mine". McKerrow was aware of the limitations of the stemmatic method, and believed it was more prudent to choose one particular text that was thought to be particularly reliable, and then to emend it only where the text was obviously corrupt. The French critic Joseph Bédier likewise became disenchanted with the stemmatic method, and concluded that the editor should choose the best available text, and emend it as little as possible.


title: Textual criticism

text: In McKerrow's method as originally introduced, the copy-text was not necessarily the earliest text. In some cases, McKerrow would choose a later witness, noting that "if an editor has reason to suppose that a certain text embodies later corrections than any other, and at the same time has no ground for disbelieving that these corrections, or some of them at least, are the work of the author, he has no choice but to make that text the basis of his reprint".


title: Textual criticism

text: By 1939, in his "Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare", McKerrow had changed his mind about this approach, as he feared that a later editioneven if it contained authorial correctionswould "deviate more widely than the earliest print from the author's original manuscript". He therefore concluded that the correct procedure would be "produced by using the earliest 'good' print as copy-text and inserting into it, from the first edition which contains them, such corrections as appear to us to be derived from the author". But, fearing the arbitrary exercise of editorial judgment, McKerrow stated that, having concluded that a later edition had substantive revisions attributable to the author, "we must accept all the alterations of that edition, saving any which seem obvious blunders or misprints".


title: Textual criticism

text: Anglo-American textual criticism in the last half of the 20th century came to be dominated by a landmark 1950 essay by Sir Walter W. Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text". Greg proposed:


title: Textual criticism

text: Greg observed that compositors at printing shops tended to follow the "substantive" readings of their copy faithfully, except when they deviated unintentionally; but that "as regards accidentals they will normally follow their own habits or inclination, though they may, for various reasons and to varying degrees, be influenced by their copy".


title: Textual criticism

text: Greg's view, in short, was that the "copy-text can be allowed no over-riding or even preponderant authority so far as substantive readings are concerned". The choice between reasonable competing readings, he said:


title: Textual criticism

text: Although Greg argued that editors should be free to use their judgment to choose between competing substantive readings, he suggested that an editor should defer to the copy-text when "the claims of two readings ... appear to be exactly balanced. ... In such a case, while there can be no logical reason for giving preference to the copy-text, in practice, if there is no reason for altering its reading, the obvious thing seems to be to let it stand." The "exactly balanced" variants are said to be "indifferent".


title: Textual criticism

text: Editors who follow Greg's rationale produce "eclectic" editions, in that the authority for the "accidentals" is derived from one particular source (usually the earliest one) that the editor considers to be authoritative, but the authority for the "substantives" is determined in each individual case according to the editor's judgment. The resulting text, except for the accidentals, is constructed without relying predominantly on any one witness.


title: Textual criticism

text: W. W. Greg did not live long enough to apply his rationale of copy-text to any actual editions of works. His rationale was adopted and significantly expanded by Fredson Bowers (1905–1991). Starting in the 1970s, G. Thomas Tanselle vigorously took up the method's defense and added significant contributions of his own. Greg's rationale as practiced by Bowers and Tanselle has come to be known as the "Greg–Bowers" or the "Greg–Bowers–Tanselle" method.


title: Textual criticism

text: In his 1964 essay, "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors", Bowers said that "the theory of copy-text proposed by Sir Walter Greg rules supreme". Bowers's assertion of "supremacy" was in contrast to Greg's more modest claim that "My desire is rather to provoke discussion than to lay down the law".


title: Textual criticism

text: Whereas Greg had limited his illustrative examples to English Renaissance drama, where his expertise lay, Bowers argued that the rationale was "the most workable editorial principle yet contrived to produce a critical text that is authoritative in the maximum of its details whether the author be Shakespeare, Dryden, Fielding, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Stephen Crane. The principle is sound without regard for the literary period." For works where an author's manuscript survived—a case Greg had not considered—Bowers concluded that the manuscript should generally serve as copy-text. Citing the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he noted:


title: Textual criticism

text: Following Greg, the editor would then replace any of the manuscript readings with substantives from printed editions that could be reliably attributed to the author: "Obviously, an editor cannot simply reprint the manuscript, and he must substitute for its readings any words that he believes Hawthorne changed in proof."


title: Textual criticism

text: McKerrow had articulated textual criticism's goal in terms of "our ideal of an author's fair copy of his work in its final state". Bowers asserted that editions founded on Greg's method would "represent the nearest approximation in every respect of the author's final intentions." Bowers stated similarly that the editor's task is to "approximate as nearly as possible an inferential authorial fair copy." Tanselle notes that, "Textual criticism ... has generally been undertaken with a view to reconstructing, as accurately as possible, the text finally intended by the author".


title: Textual criticism

text: Bowers and Tanselle argue for rejecting textual variants that an author inserted at the suggestion of others. Bowers said that his edition of Stephen Crane's first novel, "Maggie", presented "the author's final and uninfluenced artistic intentions." In his writings, Tanselle refers to "unconstrained authorial intention" or "an author's uninfluenced intentions." This marks a departure from Greg, who had merely suggested that the editor inquire whether a later reading "is one that the author can reasonably be supposed to have substituted for the former", not implying any further inquiry as to "why" the author had made the change.


title: Textual criticism

text: Tanselle discusses the example of Herman Melville's "Typee". After the novel's initial publication, Melville's publisher asked him to soften the novel's criticisms of missionaries in the South Seas. Although Melville pronounced the changes an improvement, Tanselle rejected them in his edition, concluding that "there is no evidence, internal or external, to suggest that they are the kinds of changes Melville would have made without pressure from someone else."


title: Textual criticism

text: Bowers confronted a similar problem in his edition of "Maggie". Crane originally printed the novel privately in 1893. To secure commercial publication in 1896, Crane agreed to remove profanity, but he also made stylistic revisions. Bowers's approach was to preserve the stylistic and literary changes of 1896, but to revert to the 1893 readings where he believed that Crane was fulfilling the publisher's intention rather than his own. There were, however, intermediate cases that could reasonably have been attributed to either intention, and some of Bowers's choices came under fire—both as to his judgment, and as to the wisdom of conflating readings from the two different versions of "Maggie".


title: Textual criticism

text: Hans Zeller argued that it is impossible to tease apart the changes Crane made for literary reasons and those made at the publisher's insistence:


title: Textual criticism

text: Bowers and Tanselle recognize that texts often exist in more than one authoritative version. Tanselle argues that:


title: Textual criticism

text: He suggests that where a revision is "horizontal" ("i.e.", aimed at improving the work as originally conceived), then the editor should adopt the author's later version. But where a revision is "vertical" ("i.e.", fundamentally altering the work's intention as a whole), then the revision should be treated as a new work, and edited separately on its own terms.


title: Textual criticism

text: Bowers was also influential in defining the form of critical apparatus that should accompany a scholarly edition. In addition to the "content" of the apparatus, Bowers led a movement to relegate editorial matter to appendices, leaving the critically established text "in the clear", that is, free of any signs of editorial intervention. Tanselle explained the rationale for this approach:


title: Textual criticism

text: Some critics believe that a clear-text edition gives the edited text too great a prominence, relegating textual variants to appendices that are difficult to use, and suggesting a greater sense of certainty about the established text than it deserves. As Shillingsburg notes, "English scholarly editions have tended to use notes at the foot of the text page, indicating, tacitly, a greater modesty about the "established" text and drawing attention more forcibly to at least some of the alternative forms of the text".


title: Textual criticism

text: In 1963, the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) established the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA). The CEAA's "Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures", first published in 1967, adopted the Greg–Bowers rationale in full. A CEAA examiner would inspect each edition, and only those meeting the requirements would receive a seal denoting "An Approved Text."


title: Textual criticism

text: Between 1966 and 1975, the Center allocated more than $1.5 million in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to various scholarly editing projects, which were required to follow the guidelines (including the structure of editorial apparatus) as Bowers had defined them. According to Davis, the funds coordinated by the CEAA over the same period were more than $6 million, counting funding from universities, university presses, and other bodies.


title: Textual criticism

text: The Center for Scholarly Editions (CSE) replaced the CEAA in 1976. The change of name indicated the shift to a broader agenda than just American authors. The Center also ceased its role in the allocation of funds. The Center's latest guidelines (2003) no longer prescribe a particular editorial procedure.


title: Textual criticism

text: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) includes the Book of Mormon as a foundational reference. LDS members typically believe the book to be a literal historical record.


title: Textual criticism

text: Although some earlier unpublished studies had been prepared, not until the early 1970s was true textual criticism applied to the Book of Mormon. At that time BYU Professor Ellis Rasmussen and his associates were asked by the LDS Church to begin preparation for a new edition of the Holy Scriptures. One aspect of that effort entailed digitizing the text and preparing appropriate footnotes; another aspect required establishing the most dependable text. To that latter end, Stanley R. Larson (a Rasmussen graduate student) set about applying modern text critical standards to the manuscripts and early editions of the Book of Mormon as his thesis project—which he completed in 1974. To that end, Larson carefully examined the Original Manuscript (the one dictated by Joseph Smith to his scribes) and the Printer's Manuscript (the copy Oliver Cowdery prepared for the Printer in 1829–1830), and compared them with the first, second, and third editions of the Book of Mormon to determine what sort of changes had occurred over time and to make judgments as to which readings were the most original. Larson proceeded to publish a useful set of well-argued articles on the phenomena which he had discovered. Many of his observations were included as improvements in the 1981 LDS edition of the Book of Mormon.


title: Textual criticism

text: By 1979, with the establishment of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) as a California non-profit research institution, an effort led by Robert F. Smith began to take full account of Larson's work and to publish a Critical Text of the Book of Mormon. Thus was born the FARMS Critical Text Project which published the first volume of the 3-volume Book of Mormon Critical Text in 1984. The third volume of that first edition was published in 1987, but was already being superseded by a second, revised edition of the entire work, greatly aided through the advice and assistance of then Yale doctoral candidate Grant Hardy, Dr. Gordon C. Thomasson, Professor John W. Welch (the head of FARMS), Professor Royal Skousen, and others too numerous to mention here. However, these were merely preliminary steps to a far more exacting and all-encompassing project.


title: Textual criticism

text: In 1988, with that preliminary phase of the project completed, Professor Skousen took over as editor and head of the FARMS Critical Text of the Book of Mormon Project and proceeded to gather still scattered fragments of the Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon and to have advanced photographic techniques applied to obtain fine readings from otherwise unreadable pages and fragments. He also closely examined the Printer's Manuscript (owned by the Community of Christ—RLDS Church in Independence, Missouri) for differences in types of ink or pencil, in order to determine when and by whom they were made. He also collated the various editions of the Book of Mormon down to the present to see what sorts of changes have been made through time.


title: Textual criticism

text: Thus far, Professor Skousen has published complete transcripts of the Original and Printer's Manuscripts, as well as a six-volume analysis of textual variants. Still in preparation are a history of the text, and a complete electronic collation of editions and manuscripts (volumes 3 and 5 of the Project, respectively). Yale University has in the meantime published an edition of the Book of Mormon which incorporates all aspects of Skousen's research.


title: Textual criticism

text: Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible compares manuscript versions of the following sources (dates refer to the oldest extant manuscripts in each family):


title: Textual criticism

text: As in the New Testament, changes, corruptions, and erasures have been found, particularly in the Masoretic texts. This is ascribed to the fact that early "soferim" (scribes) did not treat copy errors in the same manner later on.


title: Textual criticism

text: There are three separate new editions of the Hebrew Bible currently in development: "Biblia Hebraica Quinta", the "Hebrew University Bible", and the "Oxford Hebrew Bible". "Biblia Hebraica Quinta" is a diplomatic edition based on the Leningrad Codex. The "Hebrew University Bible" is also diplomatic, but based on the Aleppo Codex. The "Oxford Hebrew Bible" is an eclectic edition.


title: Textual criticism

text: Early New Testament texts include more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages (including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian). The manuscripts contain approximately 300,000 textual variants, most of them involving changes of word order and other comparative trivialities. As according to Wescott and Hort:


title: Textual criticism

text: With regard to the great bulk of the words of the New Testament, as of most other ancient writings, there is no variation or other ground of doubt, and therefore no room for textual criticism... The proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation, than seven eights of the whole. The remaining eighth therefore, formed in great part by changes of order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism.


title: Textual criticism

text: Thus, for over 250 years, New Testament scholars have argued that no textual variant affects any doctrine. Professor D. A. Carson states: "nothing we believe to be doctrinally true, and nothing we are commanded to do, is in any way jeopardized by the variants. This is true for any textual tradition. The interpretation of individual passages may well be called in question; but never is a doctrine affected."


title: Textual criticism

text: The sheer number of witnesses presents unique difficulties, chiefly in that it makes stemmatics in many cases impossible, because many writers used two or more different manuscripts as sources. Consequently, New Testament textual critics have adopted eclecticism after sorting the witnesses into three major groups, called text-types. the most common division distinguishes:


title: Textual criticism

text: Textual criticism of the Quran is a beginning area of study, as Muslims have historically disapproved of higher criticism being applied to the Quran. In some countries textual criticism can be seen as apostasy.


title: Textual criticism

text: Muslims consider the original Arabic text to be the final revelation, revealed to Muhammad from AD 610 to his death in 632. In Islamic tradition, the Quran was memorised and written down by Muhammad's companions and copied as needed.


title: Textual criticism

text: The Quran is believed to have had some oral tradition of passing down at some point. Differences that affected the meaning were noted, and around AD 650 Uthman began a process of standardization, presumably to rid the Quran of these differences. Uthman's standardization did not eliminate the textual variants.


title: Textual criticism

text: In the 1970s, 14,000 fragments of Quran were discovered in the Great Mosque of Sana'a, the Sana'a manuscripts. About 12,000 fragments belonged to 926 copies of the Quran, the other 2,000 were loose fragments. The oldest known copy of the Quran so far belongs to this collection: it dates to the end of the seventh to eighth centuries.


title: Textual criticism

text: The German scholar Gerd R. Puin has been investigating these Quran fragments for years. His research team made 35,000 microfilm photographs of the manuscripts, which he dated to early part of the eighth century. Puin has not published the entirety of his work, but noted unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography. He also suggested that some of the parchments were palimpsests which had been reused. Puin believed that this implied an evolving text as opposed to a fixed one.


title: Textual criticism

text: For these reasons, some scholars, especially those who are associated with the Revisionist school of Islamic studies, have proposed that the traditional account of the Quran's composition needs to be discarded and a new perspective on the Quran is needed. Puin, comparing Quranic studies with Biblical studies, has stated:


title: Textual criticism

text: In 2015, some of the earliest known Quranic fragments, containing 62 out of 6236 verses of the Quran and with proposed dating from between approximately AD 568 and 645, were identified at the University of Birmingham. David Thomas, Professor of Christianity and Islam, commented:


title: Textual criticism

text: David Thomas pointed out that the radiocarbon testing found the death date of the animal whose skin made up the Quran, not the date when the Quran was written. Since blank parchment was often stored for years after being produced, he said the Quran could have been written as late as 650–655, during the Quranic codification under Uthman.


title: Textual criticism

text: Marijn van Putten, who has published work on idiosyncratic orthography common to all early manuscripts of the Uthmanic text type has stated and demonstrated with examples that due to a number of these same idiosyncratic spellings present in the Birmingham fragment (Mingana 1572a + Arabe 328c), it is "clearly a descendant of the Uthmanic text type" and that it is "impossible" that it is a pre-Uthmanic copy, despite its early radiocarbon dating.


title: Textual criticism

text: Textual criticism of the Talmud has a long pre-history but has become a separate discipline from Talmudic study only recently. Much of the research is in Hebrew and German language periodicals.


title: Textual criticism

text: Textual criticism originated in the classical era and its development in modern times began with classics scholars, in an effort to determine the original content of texts like Plato's "Republic". There are far fewer witnesses to classical texts than to the Bible, so scholars can use stemmatics and, in some cases, copy text editing. However, unlike the New Testament where the earliest witnesses are within 200 years of the original, the earliest existing manuscripts of most classical texts were written about a millennium after their composition. All things being equal, textual scholars expect that a larger time gap between an original and a manuscript means more changes in the text.


title: Textual criticism

text: Scientific and critical editions can be protected by copyright as works of authorship if enough creativity/originality is provided. The mere addition of a word, or substitution of a term with another one believed to be more correct, usually does not achieve such level of originality/creativity. All the notes accounting for the analysis and why and how such changes have been made represent a different work autonomously copyrightable if the other requirements are satisfied. In the European Union critical and scientific editions may be protected also by the relevant neighboring right that protects critical and scientific publications of public domain works as made possible by art. 5 of the Copyright Term Directive. Not all EU member States have transposed art. 5 into national law.


title: Textual criticism

text: Digital textual criticism is a relatively new branch of textual criticism working with digital tools to establish a critical edition. The development of digital editing tools has allowed editors to transcribe, archive and process documents much faster than before. Some scholars claim digital editing has radically changed the nature of textual criticism; but others believe the editing process has remained fundamentally the same, and digital tools have simply made aspects of it more efficient.


title: Textual criticism

text: From its beginnings, digital scholarly editing involved developing a system for displaying both a newly "typeset" text and a history of variations in the text under review. Until about halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, digital archives relied almost entirely on manual transcriptions of texts. Notable exceptions are the earliest digital scholarly editions published in Budapest in the 1990s. These editions contained high resolution images next to the diplomatic transcription of the texts, as well as a newly typeset text with annotations. These old websites are still available at their original location. Over the course of the early twenty-first century, image files became much faster and cheaper, and storage space and upload times ceased to be significant issues. The next step in digital scholarly editing was the wholesale introduction of images of historical texts, particularly high-definition images of manuscripts, formerly offered only in samples.


title: Textual criticism

text: In view of the need to represent historical texts primarily through transcription, and because transcriptions required encoding for every aspect of text that could not be recorded by a single keystroke on the QWERTY keyboard, encoding was invented. Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) uses encoding for the same purpose, although its particulars were designed for scholarly uses in order to offer some hope that scholarly work on digital texts had a good chance of migrating from aging operating systems and/or digital platforms to new ones, and the hope that standardization would lead to easy interchange of data among different projects.


title: Textual criticism

text: Several computer programs and standards exist to support the work of the editors of critical editions. These include


title: Genu valgum

text: Genu valgum, commonly called "knock-knee", is a condition in which the knees angle in and touch each other when the legs are straightened. Individuals with severe valgus deformities are typically unable to touch their feet together while simultaneously straightening the legs. The term originates from the Latin "genu", 'knee', and "valgus" which means "bent outwards", but is also used to describe the distal portion of the knee joint which bends outwards and thus the proximal portion seems to be bent inwards.


title: Genu valgum

text: Mild genu valgum is diagnosed when a person standing upright with the feet touching also shows the knees touching. It can be seen in children from ages 2 to 5, and is often corrected naturally as children grow. The condition may continue or worsen with age, particularly when it is the result of a disease, such as rickets. Idiopathic genu valgum is a form that is either congenital or has no known cause.


title: Genu valgum

text: Other systemic conditions may be associated, such as Schnyder crystalline corneal dystrophy, an autosomal dominant condition frequently reported with hyperlipidemia.


title: Genu valgum

text: Genu valgum can arise from a variety of causes including nutritional, genetic, traumatic, idiopathic or physiologic and infectious.


title: Genu valgum

text: Nutritional rickets is an important cause of childhood genu valgum or knock knees in some parts of the world. Nutritional rickets arises from unhealthy life style habits as insufficient exposure to sun light which is the main source of vitamin D. Insufficient dietary intake of calcium is another contributing factor. Genu valgum may arise from rickets caused by genetic abnormalities, called vitamin D-resistant rickets or X-linked hypophosphatemia.


title: Genu valgum

text: Osteochondrodysplasia are a variable group of genetic bone diseases or genetic skeletal dysplasias that present with generalized bone deformities involving all extremities and the spine. Genu valgum or knock knees is one of the known skeletal manifestations of Osteochondrodysplasias. A complete bone X-ray survey is mandatory to reach a definitive diagnosis.


title: Genu valgum

text: The degree of genu valgum can clinically be estimated by the , which is the angle formed by a line drawn from the anterior superior iliac spine through the center of the patella and a line drawn from the center of the patella to the center of the tibial tubercle. In women, the Q angle should be less than 22 degrees with the knee in extension and less than 9 degrees with the knee in 90 degrees of flexion. In men, the Q angle should be less than 18 degrees with the knee in extension and less than 8 degrees with the knee in 90 degrees of flexion. A typical Q angle is 12 degrees for men and 17 degrees for women.


title: Genu valgum

text: On projectional radiography, the degree of varus or valgus deformity can be quantified by the "hip-knee-ankle angle", which is an angle between the femoral mechanical axis and the center of the ankle joint. It is normally between 1.0° and 1.5° of varus in adults. Normal ranges are different in children.


title: Genu valgum

text: The treatment of genu valgum in children depends on the underlying cause. Developmental also known as idiopathic genu valgum is usually self-limiting and resolves during childhood. Genu valgum secondary to nutritional rickets is typically treated with lifestyle modifications in the form of adequate sun exposure to ensure receiving the daily requirements of vitamin D and nutrition with a rich calcium diet. Additionally, calcium and vitamin D supplementations may be used. If the deformity does not resolve despite the above conservative treatment and the deformity is severe and causing gait impairment, then surgery can be an option. Typically, guided growth surgery is used to straighten the deformed bone. Genu valgum arising from osteochondrodysplasia usually needs repeated guided growth surgical interventions. Genu valgum secondary to trauma depends on the degree of physical damage. Usually, limb reconstruction procedures are needed, especially if trauma occurs in the early years of life where the anticipated remaining longitudinal bone growth is great.


title: Genu valgum

text: The treatment of genu valgum in adults depends on the underlying cause and the degree of joint involvement namely arthritis. Bone corrective osteotomies and prosthetic joint replacement may be used depending upon the patient's age and symptomatology in terms of pain and functional impairment. Weight loss and substitution of high-impact for low-impact exercise can help slow progression of the condition. With every step, the patient's weight places a distortion on the knee toward a knocked knee position, and the effect is increased with increased angle or increased weight. Even in the normal knee position, the femurs function at an angle because they connect to the hip girdle at points much further apart than they connect at the knees.


title: Genu valgum

text: Working with a physical medicine specialist such as a physiatrist, or a physiotherapist may assist a patient in learning how to improve outcomes and use the leg muscles properly to support the bone structures. Alternative or complementary treatments may include certain procedures from Iyengar Yoga or the Feldenkrais Method.


title: Walking catfish

text: The walking catfish ("Clarias batrachus") is a species of freshwater airbreathing catfish native to Southeast Asia. It is named for its ability to "walk" and wiggle across dry land, to find food or suitable environments. While it does not truly walk as most bipeds or quadrupeds do, it has the ability to use its pectoral fins to keep it upright as it makes a wiggling motion with snakelike movements to traverse land. This fish normally lives in slow-moving and often stagnant waters in ponds, swamps, streams, and rivers, as well as in flooded rice paddies, or temporary pools that may dry up. When this happens, its "walking" skill allows the fish to move to other aquatic environments. Considerable taxonomic confusion surrounds this species and it has frequently been confused with other close relatives. One main distinction between the walking catfish and the native North American ictalurid catfish with which it sometimes is confused, is that the walking catfish lacks an adipose fin.


title: Walking catfish

text: The walking catfish has an elongated body shape and reaches almost in length and in weight. Often covered laterally in small white spots, the body is mainly coloured a gray or grayish brown. This catfish has long-based dorsal and anal fins, as well as several pairs of sensory barbels. The skin is scaleless, but covered with mucus, which protects the fish when it is out of water.