title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: On 19 December 2013, president Vladimir Putin said he intended to pardon Khodorkovsky in the near future. He did so on the following day, stating that Khodorkovsky's mother was ill and Khodorkovsky had asked for clemency. Putin also felt that ten years in jail was still "a significant punishment". Some opposition leaders suggested that the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi might have played a role in the granting of the pardon. His guards told him to pack his things and he was flown at once to St. Petersburg, where he was given "a parka and a passport" and, switching planes on the tarmac, put on a flight to Berlin. "The Guardian" reported in December 2014 that Khodorkovsky had "promised Putin three things in a handwritten letter" in which he asked to be freed: "that he would leave Russia to spend time with his family, would stay away from politics, and would not attempt to win back his shares in Yukos ... or get involved in any court cases." However Khodorkovsky maintains that he had made no such promise.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: After gaining his freedom, Khodorkovsky released a written statement in which he thanked former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who had played a critical role in diplomatic negotiations, for securing his release.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: On 22 December 2013, two days after his release, he appeared at a news conference at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin. Reporting on his comments, the Associated Press stated that "The 50-year-old appeared composed at his first public appearance since his release, saying he shouldn't be viewed as a symbol that there are no more political prisoners in Russia. He added that he would do 'all I can do' to ensure the release of others." He again thanked Genscher, as well as the media, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, for their roles in securing his release. On 24 December, Khodorkovsky was interviewed in his Berlin hotel room on the BBC television program "Hardtalk".


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: After his release Khodorkovsky acknowledged the support he had received from the Swiss Federal Court which ruled in 2008 against the release of documents to the Russian authorities, that tied him and Yukos, the largest Russian oil company at the time, to prominent banks and financial institutions. The Swiss court argued that handing over the documents would endanger his chance for a fair trial. Khodorkovsky also has personal ties to Switzerland where his wife Inna and two of his children reside. Soon after his step to freedom, he applied for a Swiss visa, which would allow him to travel to most European countries. This visa was approved by Swiss authorities, and Khodorkovsky arrived in Basel, Switzerland, on 5 January 2014. Yukos shareholders were awarded $50 billion in compensation by the Permanent Arbitration Court in The Hague in July 2014, however Khodorkovsky was not a party to the legal action. In 2015, he moved to London.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: On 23 December 2015, a Russian court issued an international arrest warrant for Khodorkovsky whom the Investigative Committee of Russia charged with ordering the murder of Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, who was murdered in June 1998. Speaking on the same day on BBC, which claimed Khodorkovsky "spent much of his time in London", he said he was "definitely considering" applying for political asylum in the UK and felt safe in London.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: Following his pardon and release from prison on 20 December 2013, Mikhail Khodorkovsky made only a few public appearances until the revolution broke out in Ukraine. On 9 March 2014, Khodorkovsky spoke at Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv, where he accused the Russian government of complicity in the killing of protesters.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: In March 2014, Khodorkovsky was presented with the "Man of the Year" award by the Polish newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza". Khodorkovsky also delivered keynote speeches at the Le Monde Festival, the Freedom House Awards Dinner, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Oslo Freedom Forum, Forum 2000, the Vilnius Forum, Chatham House, the World Economic Forum, Stanford University, and the Atlantic Council.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: In July 2014, Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled the Russian government deliberately bankrupted Yukos to seize its assets and ordered it to repay Yukos shareholders a sum of roughly $50 billion. Roughly 30,000 former Yukos employees were to receive a large pension from the government. As of January 2015 the Russian government has not made any payments to Yukos shareholders or employees. On 20 April 2016 the District Court of The Hague quashed the decisions of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, ruling that it had no jurisdiction as provisional application of the Energy Charter Treaty arbitration clause violated Russian law.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: On 20 September 2014, Khodorkovsky officially relaunched the Open Russia movement, with a live teleconference broadcast featuring groups of civil society activists and pro-democracy opposition in Kaliningrad, St Petersburg, Voronezh and Ekaterinburg, among others. According to media around the time of the launch event, Open Russia was intended to unite pro-European Russians in a bid to challenge Putin's grip on power. Khodorkovsky said that the organization would promote independent media, political education, rule of law, support for activists and journalists, free and fair elections, and a program to reform law enforcement and the Russian judicial system. He said that Putin's actions were “clearly leading Russia along the patriarchal Asian path to development” and called the State Duma “a bulwark of reactionaries”. He said that Open Russia was willing to support any candidate that sought to develop Russia along the European model.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: In October 2014, Khodorkovsky visited the U.S., delivering the keynote address at a Washington, D.C., meeting of Freedom House and giving a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In the latter speech he among other things lamented the fact that "a picture of the West as a sort of moral example for ourselves" had "in the past ten to twenty years become much, much more blurry." He also said at Freedom House that "Russia has been wasting time these past 10 years... Now is when we must begin to make up this lost time."


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: A 3 October 2014, article in the "Wall Street Journal" stated that Khodorkovsky planned "to bring about a constitutional conference that would shift power away from the Russian presidency and toward the legislature and judiciary." During his U.S. trip, he said, "The question of Russian power won't be decided by democratic elections—forget about this. ... This is why, when we speak of strategic tasks, I speak of a constitutional conference that will redistribute power from the president" to other branches of government.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: In December 2014, "The Guardian" reported that Khodorkovsky, living in Zurich, was "plotting the downfall of the man who put him behind bars for a decade." The newspaper cited him as claiming that Russian intelligence services were monitoring his communications. In early 2015, he told CNN that he held no desire to run for the presidency, or had any political ambition, although he still held ambitions of social changes; he called his efforts "civic activity" and not politics.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: In March 2015, Khodorkovsky, along with other opposition figures, was a subject of attacks by a shadow organization known as "Glavplakat". The attacks included anonymous posters and banners flown across Russian cities likening opposition figures to unsavoury characters from history or labeling them as traitors to Russia. It has yet to be determined who is behind the organization, and opposition figures are concerned over the attacks.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: In August 2015, the Kremlin summoned Khodorkovsky's father for questioning. On 7 December 2015, Khodorkovsky received an official summons from the Russian Investigative Committee.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: In September 2016, Khodorkovsky launched an "Instead of Putin" website where visitors can vote for alternatives to Putin.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: On 20 May 2022, Khodorkovsky was designated as 'foreign agent' by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. Also in May 2022, Khodorkovsky participated in the 8th "Russia Forum" in Vilnius, together with former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the head of the US-thinktank Freedom House, the head of the US-government funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe and others. The aim of the "anti-Putin summit" was to develop a strategy on how to "deputise" Russia and "slay the Russian bear", meaning Vladimir Putin. The parliament, and not the president, should exercise power in Russia, Khodorkovsky said in Vilnius, adding that the end of Putin’s government “will not be long in coming”.


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: in October 2022 Khodorkovsky published on the internet, a book in both Russian and English languages entitled "How to slay a dragon" suggesting a number of options for both Russians and Westerners


title: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

text: Khodorkovsky's book "My Fellow Prisoners", a collection of sketches about his life in prison, was published in 2014. John Lloyd of the "Financial Times" called it "vivid, humane and poignant".


title: Yash Chopra

text: Yash Raj Chopra (27 September 1932 21 October 2012) was an Indian film director and film producer who worked in Hindi cinema. The founding chairman of the film production and distribution company Yash Raj Films, Chopra was the recipient of several awards, including 6 National Film Awards and 8 Filmfare Awards. He is considered among the best Indian filmmakers. For his contributions to film, the Government of India honoured him with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2001, and the Padma Bhushan in 2005. In 2006, British Academy of Film and Television Arts presented him with a lifetime membership, making him the first Indian to receive the honour.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra began his career as an assistant director to I. S. Johar and his elder brother, B.R. Chopra. He made his directorial debut with "Dhool Ka Phool" in 1959, a melodrama about illegitimacy, and followed it with the social drama "Dharmputra" (1961). Chopra rose to prominence after directing the critically and commercially successful family drama "Waqt" (1965), which pioneered the concept of ensemble casts in Bollywood. In 1970, he founded his own production company, Yash Raj Films, whose first production was "Daag: A Poem of Love" (1973), a successful melodrama about polygamy. His success continued in the seventies, with some of Indian cinema's most successful and iconic films, including the action-thriller "Deewaar" (1975), which established Amitabh Bachchan as a leading actor in Bollywood; the ensemble romantic drama "Kabhi Kabhie" (1976) and the ensemble family drama "Trishul" (1978).


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra collaborated with Sridevi in two of what has been considered to be his finest films; the romantic musical "Chandni" (1989), which became instrumental in ending the era of violent films in Bollywood and rejuvenating the romantic musical genre, and the intergenerational musical romantic drama "Lamhe" (1991), considered by critics and Chopra himself to be his best work, but underperformed at the domestic box-office, although bringing major profits overseas. After helming the critically-panned "Parampara" (1993), Chopra directed the romantic psychological thriller "Darr" (1993), the first of his collaborations with Shahrukh Khan. Chopra directed three more romantic films, all starring Khan; "Dil To Pagal Hai" (1997), "Veer-Zaara" (2004) and "Jab Tak Hai Jaan" (2012), before announcing his retirement from direction in 2012. He died of dengue fever during "Jab Tak Hai Jaan"s production in 2012. He is considered one of the all-time best directors in Bollywood industry.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra was born on 27 September 1932 in Lahore, Punjab Province, British India into a Punjabi Hindu Khatri family. His father was an accountant in the PWD division of the British Punjab administration. He was the youngest of eight children, the oldest of whom was almost 30 years his senior. The eminent film-maker B. R. Chopra is one of his brothers.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra was largely brought up in the Lahore house of his second brother, B. R. Chopra, then a film journalist. Chopra lived in Jalandhar in 1945 to continue his education, where he studied at Doaba College and originally sought to pursue a career in engineering. He later moved to Ludhiana, East Punjab (in India) after the Partition of India.


title: Yash Chopra

text: His passion for film-making led him to travel to Bombay, where he initially worked as an assistant director to I. S. Johar, and then for his director-producer brother, B. R. Chopra, while another brother, Dharam Chopra, worked as his cameraman.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra received his first directorial opportunity in 1959 with the social drama "Dhool Ka Phool", produced by his elder brother B.R. Chopra and starring Mala Sinha, Rajendra Kumar and Leela Chitnis. The film revolved around a Muslim bringing up an "illegitimate" Hindu child. The film was well received by critics and became the fourth highest-grossing film of the year. Encouraged by their success, the Chopras made another hard-hitting social drama, "Dharmputra" (1961). It was one of the first films to depict the Partition of India and Hindu fundamentalism. The film marked the debut of Shashi Kapoor in a fully fledged role and was awarded with the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra's collaboration with his brother continued in the form of the 1965 film "Waqt", which featured an ensemble cast including Sunil Dutt, Raaj Kumar, Shashi Kapoor, Sadhana, Balraj Sahni, Madan Puri, Sharmila Tagore, Achala Sachdev and Rehman. The film became a critical and commercial success. It is acknowledged as a "found film" of the "lost-and-found" genre. Setting many other trends, it was one of Indian cinema's first multi-starrers, a mode which became increasingly popular among the producers during the 1970s. It also began the now-obligatory style of depicting wealth and social class. Chopra received his first Filmfare Award for Best Director for the film.


title: Yash Chopra

text: In 1969, Chopra directed two films produced by his brother. The first was "Aadmi Aur Insaan", which featured Dharmendra and Saira Banu in the lead roles. He directed "Ittefaq" (1969), a suspense movie based on a Gujarati play, depicting the events of a single night, with Rajesh Khanna and Nanda in the lead roles. Shot in a month and on a low budget, the film was deemed unusual by critics. It was one of the first Hindi films which did not have any songs or an interval. It was eventually declared a semi-hit at the box-office and won Chopra his second Filmfare Award for Best Director.


title: Yash Chopra

text: In 1970, Chopra founded the independent Yash Raj Films, terminating his creative collaboration with his brother. His first independently-produced film, "Daag: A Poem of Love" (1973), a melodrama about polygamy, starring Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore and Raakhee was a major critical and commercial success and Chopra won his third Filmfare Award for Best Director for the film.


title: Yash Chopra

text: He directed a number of classic cult films starring Amitabh Bachchan and scripted by Salim–Javed, notably "Deewaar" and "Trishul", which were huge commercial success and remain popular even today. These films set the trend for the late-'70s and '80s, establishing Bachchan as the "angry young man". Chopra won his fourth Filmfare Award for Best Director for "Deewaar". Chopra produced, directed and scripted 2 more films starring Bachchan. Unlike his earlier action-oriented films, these 2 were musical romantic dramas: "Kabhi Kabhie" (1976), co-starring Raakhee, Shashi Kapoor, Waheeda Rehman, Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh, followed by "Silsila" (1981), co-starring Jaya Bachchan, Rekha and Sanjeev Kumar. Chopra suggested Javed Akhtar to become a lyricist, starting from this film.


title: Yash Chopra

text: The '80s marked a professional setback in Chopra's career, as several films he directed and produced in that period failed to leave a mark at the Indian box-office. His film "Mashaal" (1984) was his first collaboration with the legendary actor, Dilip Kumar. The action-oriented film, which was based on the well-known Marathi play titled "Ashroonchi Zhali Phule", received critical acclaim, but fared only average at the box-office. A year later, he made "Faasle", a romantic drama starring Sunil Dutt, Rekha, Rohan Kapoor and Farah, which proved to be a critical and commercial disaster. He and critics consider it his worst film. "Vijay" (1988) was also a box-office failure. The film received mixed reviews from critics and was dubbed a remake of "Trishul".


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra's lean phase ended in 1989 with the highly successful romantic musical "Chandni", a film with all the hallmarks of what has come to be known as the "Yash Chopra style": heroine-oriented, romantic, emotional, depicting the lifestyle of the elite, with melodic music used in songs picturized in foreign locations. It marked the first collaboration between Chopra and Sridevi. The huge success of its soundtrack was instrumental in ending the era of violence in Bollywood films and bringing back music into Hindi films. After a string of critically and commercially movies, the success of "Chandni" consolidated Sridevi's position as the top female Bollywood star of the era. Though it was not the first time Chopra shot a film in Switzerland, the extensive scenes shot there made it a popular tourist destination for Indians. The film won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment for 1989.""


title: Yash Chopra

text: He followed it with "Lamhe" (1991), an intergenerational musical romantic drama starring frequent collaborators Sridevi and Anil Kapoor. The film received widespread critical acclaim, had exceptional music, and was one of the biggest Bollywood hits in the overseas market; however, it was a moderate box-office success in India due to its controversial storyline. The film won five Filmfare awards, including the Filmfare Award for Best Film. Over the years, "Lamhe" has been hailed as a cult classic; it is regarded as a modern masterpiece and possibly his finest film to date. It was featured in "Outlook" magazine's list of All-Time Great Indian films. It has been cited by Chopra as his personal favourite of his films. In 1992, Chopra directed "Parampara". Despite an all-star cast of Ramya Krishnan, Aamir Khan, Raveena Tandon, Sunil Dutt, Anupam Kher, Vinod Khanna, Ashwini Bhave and Saif Ali Khan (In his film debut), the film was a commercial failure and was panned by critics for its weak storyline and soundtrack, although Chopra's direction was commended.


title: Yash Chopra

text: In 1993, Chopra directed the newcomer Shahrukh Khan along with Juhi Chawla and Sunny Deol in the romantic psychological thriller "Darr". The film depicted the story of an obsessed lover (Khan) and the lengths to which he goes to get the girl (Chawla) who is already happily engaged to another man (Deol). The film was a runaway success and is considered a cult classic today. "Darr" emerged as one of the highest grossing Hindi movie of 1993. It also established Khan as a bankable star. 4 years later, Chopra then directed, produced and co-wrote the highly successful 1997 musical romantic drama "Dil To Pagal Hai", starring yet again Shahrukh Khan in a love quadrangle with Madhuri Dixit, Karisma Kapoor and Akshay Kumar. It was the first Bollywood movie to be shot in Germany. The film became the highest grosser for the year. It won many awards, including 8 Filmfare Awards and 3 National Awards, including the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment. Chopra then took a sabbatical from directing and focused solely on producing films for over 7 years.


title: Yash Chopra

text: In 2004, he returned to direction with the epic love saga "Veer-Zaara". Starring Shahrukh Khan again, Preity Zinta and Rani Mukerji in the lead roles, the film was the biggest hit of 2004 in both India and overseas, with a worldwide gross of over 940 million and was screened at the Berlin Film Festival to critical appreciation. The film which narrated the love story of an Indian air-force officer Veer Pratap Singh (Khan) and a Pakistani woman, Zaara Hayaat Khan (Zinta) was highly appreciated by critics. Rama Sharma from "The Tribune" wrote: "Giving love its due, Chopra has understandably linked the script to the life of a common man. The pace is exacting. Drawing from the best of the two countries, the story is made more colorful by a spray of the Punjabi culture— be it celebrating Lohri in India or visiting a dargah in Pakistan. He has handled the script cleverly. Whenever the pace begins to slacken, he introduces a new character and a twist."


title: Yash Chopra

text: In September 2012, in a special interview with actor Shahrukh Khan on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Chopra announced that "Jab Tak Hai Jaan" (2012) would be his last directorial venture and that he would opt to focus on his production company and his personal life. For the shoot of the last remaining song in "Jab Tak Hai Jaan," director Yash Chopra wanted to shoot a scene with a sari-clad Katrina Kaif romancing Shahrukh Khan in the lush meadows of the Swiss Alps. But his illness, caused by a bout of dengue, stymied the plan for the song, which would have reflected his trademark directorial style.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Yash Raj Films (YRF) is the most dominant production company in Hindi filmmaking. Yash Raj Chopra has continuously featured in the top five hit Indian movies of the year since 2000. The Indian film director and producer used a range of directors. He repetitively used the star power of Bollywood's most popular actors, Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Yash Raj Films has grown to be the forefront of the global rise of Bollywood cinema. Yash Raj Films have expanded their company from locally based Hindi films to global achievements. They have managed to attract home based and diasporic Indians. Yash Raj Films have used a smart technique by incorporating foreign locations as a site which succeeded.


title: Yash Chopra

text: Chopra was known to often cast the same actors in his films, his most famous collaborations being with Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjeev Kumar, Madan Puri, Amrish Puri, Prem Chopra, Nirupa Roy, Aruna Irani, Bindu, Manmohan Krishna, Poonam Dhillon, Parikshit Sahni, Shashi Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Neetu Singh, Raakhee, Rajesh Khanna, Sunil Dutt, Anil Kapoor, Waheeda Rehman, Hema Malini, Anupam Kher, Iftekhar, Achala Sachdev, Vikas Anand and more recently, Shahrukh Khan.


title: Yash Chopra

text: In 1970, Chopra married Pamela Singh and together they have two sons Aditya Chopra and Uday Chopra, born in 1971 and 1973, respectively. Aditya Chopra is also a film director and producer and holds the position of chairman and managing director of Yash Raj Films, while Uday is an assistant director turned actor who made his acting debut in 2000 in his brother's directorial, "Mohabbatein". He is currently the Director – Yash Raj Films, CEO – YRF Entertainment.


title: Yash Chopra

text: On 13 October 2012, Chopra was diagnosed with dengue fever and was admitted to Lilavati Hospital in Bandra, Mumbai. On 21 October, Yash Chopra succumbed to death following multiple organ failure. He was 80 years of age. The Chautha ceremony for Yash Chopra was held on 25 October 2012 at Yash Raj Films studio. Yash Chopra's final rites took place at Pawan Hans crematorium on 22 October 2012.


title: Yash Chopra

text: The Yash Chopra Memorial Award ceremonies were instituted by the TSR Foundation of T. Subbarami Reddy, which carries Rs 10.00 lakhs cash and citation. These awards ceremonies started in 2013, on the eve of Chopra's death and are dedicated to his memory. The ceremonies are held annually in Mumbai, and feature awards to people in recognition of their outstanding contribution in the field of art and culture.


title: Love bombing

text: Love bombing is an attempt to influence a person by demonstrations of attention and affection. It can be used in different ways and for either positive or negative purposes. Psychologists have identified love bombing as a possible part of a cycle of abuse and have warned against it. It has also been described as psychological manipulation in order to create a feeling of unity within a group against a society perceived as hostile. In 2011, clinical psychologist Oliver James advocated love bombing in his book "Love Bombing: Reset Your Child's Emotional Thermostat", as a means for parents to rectify emotional problems in their children.


title: Love bombing

text: The expression "love bombing" was coined by members of the Unification Church of the United States during the 1970s and was also used by members of the Family International. Psychology professor Margaret Singer reported on the concept. In her 1996 book, "Cults in Our Midst," she writes:


title: Love bombing

text: Modern social media can intensify the effect of love bombing since it gives the abuser nearly constant contact and communication with the victim. One of the signs of love bombing in the start of a relationship is intense attention during a short period of time and pressure for very rapid commitment.


title: Love bombing

text: Psychologist Dale Archer identifies the phases of love bombing with the acronym IDD: "Intense Idealization, Devaluation, Discard (Repeat)", and the process of identifying this behavior pattern as SLL: "Stop, Look, and Listen", after which breaking off contact with the abuser can become more possible by also seeking support from family and friends.


title: Love bombing

text: Another sign of love bombing is being intensely showered with affection, gifts, and promises for the future with the predator so that the victim feels or is made to believe that all this is a sign of "love at first sight". Since such signs of affection and affirmation may meet felt needs and not look harmful at the surface, the excitement of such a new relationship often does not appear as cause for alarm. However, after the initial excitement, when the victim shows interest or care about anything beyond their new partner, the manipulator may show anger, passive-aggressive behavior, or accuse the victims of selfishness. If the victim does not comply to demands, the devaluation stage begins: the abuser withdraws all affection or positive reinforcement and instead punishes the victim with whatever they feel is appropriate—shouting, beratement, mind games, silent treatment, or even physical abuse.


title: Love bombing

text: The expression has been used to describe the tactics used by pimps and gang members to control their victims.


title: Love bombing

text: Excessive attention and affection does not constitute love bombing if there is no intent or pattern of further abuse. Archer explains:


title: Love bombing

text: British author and psychologist Oliver James recommended love bombing as a technique for parents to help their troubled children. He described it as, "dedicating one-on-one time spoiling and lavishing your child with love, and, within reason, pandering to their every wish." In 2011 Heidi Scrimgeour, a reporter for "The Daily Express", tried the technique with her son and reported:


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Cynicism () is a school of thought of ancient Greek philosophy as practiced by the Cynics (; ). For the Cynics, the purpose of life is to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people can gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which is natural for themselves, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, and fame, and even flouting conventions openly and derisively in public. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: The first philosopher to outline these themes was Antisthenes, who had been a pupil of Socrates in the late 400 BC. He was followed by Diogenes, who lived in a ceramic jar on the streets of Athens. Diogenes took Cynicism to its logical extremes, and came to be seen as the archetypal Cynic philosopher. He was followed by Crates of Thebes, who gave away a large fortune so he could live a life of Cynic poverty in Athens.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Cynicism gradually declined in importance after the 3rd century BC, but it experienced a revival with the rise of the Roman Empire in the 1st century. Cynics could be found begging and preaching throughout the cities of the empire, and similar ascetic and rhetorical ideas appeared in early Christianity. By the 19th century, emphasis on the negative aspects of Cynic philosophy led to the modern understanding of cynicism to mean a disposition of disbelief in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: The term "cynic" derives (genitive: "kynos"). One explanation offered in ancient times for why the Cynics were called "dogs" was because the first Cynic, Antisthenes, taught in the Cynosarges gymnasium at Athens. The word "cynosarges" means the "place of the white dog". It seems certain, however, that the word "dog" was also thrown at the first Cynics as an insult for their shameless rejection of conventional manners, and their decision to live on the streets. Diogenes, in particular, was referred to as the "Dog", a distinction he seems to have revelled in, stating that "other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends to save them." Later Cynics also sought to turn the word to their advantage, as a later commentator explained:


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Cynicism is one of the most striking of all the Hellenistic philosophies. It claimed to offer people the possibility of happiness and freedom from suffering in an age of uncertainty. Although there was never an official Cynic doctrine, the fundamental principles of Cynicism can be summarized as follows:


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Thus a Cynic has no property and rejects all conventional values of money, fame, power and reputation. A life lived according to nature requires only the bare necessities required for existence, and one can become free by unshackling oneself from any needs which are the result of convention. The Cynics adopted Heracles as their hero, as epitomizing the ideal Cynic. Heracles "was he who brought Cerberus, the hound of Hades, from the underworld, a point of special appeal to the dog-man, Diogenes." According to Lucian, "Cerberus and Cynic are surely related through the dog."


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: The Cynic way of life required continuous training, not just in exercising judgments and mental impressions, but a physical training as well:


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: [Diogenes] used to say, that there were two kinds of exercise: that, namely, of the mind and that of the body; and that the latter of these created in the mind such quick and agile impressions at the time of its performance, as very much facilitated the practice of virtue; but that one was imperfect without the other, since the health and vigour necessary for the practice of what is good, depend equally on both mind and body.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: None of this meant that a Cynic would retreat from society. Cynics were in fact to live in the full glare of the public's gaze and be quite indifferent in the face of any insults which might result from their unconventional behaviour. The Cynics are said to have invented the idea of cosmopolitanism: when he was asked where he came from, Diogenes replied that he was "a citizen of the world, ("kosmopolitês")."


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: The ideal Cynic would evangelise; as the watchdog of humanity, they thought it their duty to hound people about the error of their ways. The example of the Cynic's life (and the use of the Cynic's biting satire) would dig up and expose the pretensions which lay at the root of everyday conventions.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Although Cynicism concentrated primarily on ethics, some Cynics, such as Monimus, addressed epistemology with regard to "tuphos" (τῦφος) expressing skeptical views.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Cynic philosophy had a major impact on the Hellenistic world, ultimately becoming an important influence for Stoicism. The Stoic Apollodorus, writing in the 2nd century BC, stated that "Cynicism is the short path to virtue."


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: The classical Greek and Roman Cynics regarded virtue as the only necessity for happiness, and saw virtue as entirely sufficient for attaining it. Classical Cynics followed this philosophy to the extent of neglecting everything not furthering their perfection of virtue and attainment of happiness, thus, the title of "Cynic", derived from the Greek word "κύων" (meaning "dog") because they allegedly neglected society, hygiene, family, money, etc., in a manner reminiscent of dogs. They sought to free themselves from conventions; become self-sufficient; and live only in accordance with nature. They rejected any conventional notions of happiness involving money, power, and fame, to lead entirely virtuous, and thus happy, lives.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: The ancient Cynics rejected conventional social values, and would criticise the types of behaviours, such as greed, which they viewed as causing suffering. Emphasis on this aspect of their teachings led, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, to the modern understanding of cynicism as "an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others." This modern definition of cynicism is in marked contrast to the ancient philosophy, which emphasized "virtue and moral freedom in liberation from desire."


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Various philosophers, such as the Pythagoreans, had advocated simple living in the centuries preceding the Cynics. In the early 6th century BC, Anacharsis, a Scythian sage, had combined plain living together with criticisms of Greek customs in a manner which would become standard among the Cynics. Perhaps of importance were tales of Indian philosophers, known as "gymnosophists", who had adopted a strict asceticism. By the 5th century BC, the sophists had begun a process of questioning many aspects of Greek society such as religion, law and ethics. However, the most immediate influence for the Cynic school was Socrates. Although he was not an ascetic, he did profess a love of virtue and an indifference to wealth, together with a disdain for general opinion. These aspects of Socrates' thought, which formed only a minor part of Plato's philosophy, became the central inspiration for another of Socrates' pupils, Antisthenes.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Cynics were often recognized in the ancient world by their apparel—an old cloak and a staff. The cloak came as an allusion to Socrates and his manner of dress, while the staff was to the club of Heracles. These items became so symbolic of the Cynic vocation that ancient writers accosted those who thought that donning the Cynic garb would make them suited to the philosophy.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: In the social evolution from the archaic age to the classical, the public ceased carrying weapons into the "poleis". Originally it was expected that one carried a sword while in the city. However, a transition to spears and then to staffs occurred until wearing any weapon in the city became a foolish old custom. Thus, the very act of carrying a staff was slightly taboo itself. According to modern theorists, the symbol of the staff was one which both functions as a tool to signal the user's dissociation from physical labour, that is, as a display of conspicuous leisure, and at the same time it also has an association with sport and typically plays a part in hunting and sports clothing. Thus, it displays active and warlike qualities, rather than being a symbol of a weak man's need to support himself. The staff itself became a message of how the Cynic was free through its possible interpretation as an item of leisure, but, just as equivalent, was its message of strength—a virtue held in abundance by the Cynic philosopher.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: The story of Cynicism traditionally begins with Antisthenes (c. 445–365 BC), who was an older contemporary of Plato and a pupil of Socrates. About 25 years his junior, Antisthenes was one of the most important of Socrates' disciples. Although later classical authors had little doubt about labelling him as the founder of Cynicism, his philosophical views seem to be more complex than the later simplicities of pure Cynicism. In the list of works ascribed to Antisthenes by Diogenes Laërtius, writings on language, dialogue and literature far outnumber those on ethics or politics, although they may reflect how his philosophical interests changed with time. It is certainly true that Antisthenes preached a life of poverty:


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: I have enough to eat till my hunger is stayed, to drink till my thirst is sated; to clothe myself as well; and out of doors not [even] Callias there, with all his riches, is more safe than I from shivering; and when I find myself indoors, what warmer shirting do I need than my bare walls?


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Diogenes (c. 412–323 BC) dominates the story of Cynicism like no other figure. He originally went to Athens, fleeing his home city, after he and his father, who was in charge of the mint at Sinope, got into trouble for falsifying the coinage. (The phrase "defacing the currency" later became proverbial in describing Diogenes' rejection of conventional values.) Later tradition claimed that Diogenes became the disciple of Antisthenes, but it is by no means certain that they ever met. Diogenes did however adopt Antisthenes' teachings and the ascetic way of life, pursuing a life of self-sufficiency ("autarkeia"), austerity ("askēsis"), and shamelessness ("anaideia"). There are many anecdotes about his extreme asceticism (sleeping in a tub), his shameless behaviour (eating raw meat), and his criticism of conventional society ("bad people obey their lusts as servants obey their masters"), and although it is impossible to tell which of these stories are true, they do illustrate the broad character of the man, including an ethical seriousness.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Crates of Thebes (c. 365–c. 285 BC) is the third figure who dominates Cynic history. He is notable because he renounced a large fortune to live a life of Cynic poverty in Athens. He is said to have been a pupil of Diogenes, but again this is uncertain. Crates married Hipparchia of Maroneia after she had fallen in love with him and together they lived like beggars on the streets of Athens, where Crates was treated with respect. Crates' later fame (apart from his unconventional lifestyle) lies in the fact that he became the teacher of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. The Cynic strain to be found in early Stoicism (such as Zeno's own radical views on sexual equality spelled out in his "Republic") can be ascribed to Crates' influence.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: There were many other Cynics in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, including Onesicritus (who sailed with Alexander the Great to India), the skeptic Monimus, the moral satirist Bion of Borysthenes, the diatribist Teles and Menippus of Gadara. However, with the rise of Stoicism in the 3rd century BC, Cynicism as a serious philosophical activity underwent a decline, and it is not until the Roman era that Cynicism underwent a revival.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: There is little record of Cynicism in the 2nd or 1st centuries BC; Cicero (c. 50 BC), who was much interested in Greek philosophy, had little to say about Cynicism, except that "it is to be shunned; for it is opposed to modesty, without which there can be neither right nor honor." However, by the 1st century CE, Cynicism reappeared with full force. The rise of Imperial Rome, like the Greek loss of independence under Philip and Alexander three centuries earlier, may have led to a sense of powerlessness and frustration among many people, which allowed a philosophy which emphasized self-sufficiency and inner-happiness to flourish once again. Cynics could be found throughout the empire, standing on street corners, preaching about virtue. Lucian complained that "every city is filled with such upstarts, particularly with those who enter the names of Diogenes, Antisthenes, and Crates as their patrons and enlist in the Army of the Dog," and Aelius Aristides observed that "they frequent the doorways, talking more to the doorkeepers than to the masters, making up for their lowly condition by using impudence." The most notable representative of Cynicism in the 1st century CE was Demetrius, whom Seneca praised as "a man of consummate wisdom, though he himself denied it, constant to the principles which he professed, of an eloquence worthy to deal with the mightiest subjects." Cynicism in Rome was both the butt of the satirist and the ideal of the thinker. In the 2nd century CE, Lucian, whilst pouring scorn on the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus Proteus, nevertheless praised his own Cynic teacher, Demonax, in a dialogue.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Cynicism came to be seen as an idealised form of Stoicism, a view which led Epictetus to eulogise the ideal Cynic in a lengthy discourse. According to Epictetus, the ideal Cynic "must know that he is sent as a messenger from Zeus to people concerning good and bad things, to show them that they have wandered." Unfortunately for Epictetus, many Cynics of the era did not live up to the ideal: "consider the present Cynics who are dogs that wait at tables, and in no respect imitate the Cynics of old except perchance in breaking wind."


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Unlike Stoicism, which declined as an independent philosophy after the 2nd century CE, Cynicism seems to have thrived into the 4th century. The emperor, Julian (ruled 361–363), like Epictetus, praised the ideal Cynic and complained about the actual practitioners of Cynicism. The final Cynic noted in classical history is Sallustius of Emesa in the late 5th century. A student of the Neoplatonic philosopher Isidore of Alexandria, he devoted himself to living a life of Cynic asceticism.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Some historians have noted the similarities between the teachings of Jesus and those of the Cynics. Some scholars have argued that the Q document, a hypothetical common source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke, has strong similarities to the teachings of the Cynics. Scholars on the quest for the historical Jesus, such as Burton L. Mack and John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar, have argued that 1st-century AD Galilee was a world in which Hellenistic ideas collided with Jewish thought and traditions. The city of Gadara, only a day's walk from Nazareth, was particularly notable as a centre of Cynic philosophy, and Mack has described Jesus as a "rather normal Cynic-type figure." For Crossan, Jesus was more like a Cynic sage from a Hellenistic Jewish tradition than either a Christ who would die as a substitute for sinners or a messiah who wanted to establish an independent Jewish state of Israel. Other scholars doubt that Jesus was deeply influenced by the Cynics and see the Jewish prophetic tradition as of much greater importance.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: Many of the ascetic practices of Cynicism may have been adopted by early Christians, and Christians often employed the same rhetorical methods as the Cynics. Some Cynics were martyred for speaking out against the authorities. One Cynic, Peregrinus Proteus, lived for a time as a Christian before converting to Cynicism, whereas in the 4th century, Maximus of Alexandria, although a Christian, was also called a Cynic because of his ascetic lifestyle. Christian writers would often praise Cynic poverty, although they scorned Cynic shamelessness, Augustine stating that they had, "in violation of the modest instincts of men, boastfully proclaimed their unclean and shameless opinion, worthy indeed of dogs." The ascetic orders of Christianity (such as the Desert Fathers) also had direct connection with the Cynics, as can be seen in the wandering mendicant monks of the early church, who in outward appearance and in many of their practices differed little from the Cynics of an earlier age. Emmanuel College scholar Leif E. Vaage compared the commonalities between the Q document and Cynic texts, such as the Cynic epistles. The epistles contain the wisdom and (often polemical) ethics preached by Cynics along with their sense of purity and aesthetic practices.


title: Cynicism (philosophy)

text: During the 2nd century, Crescens the Cynic clashed with Justin Martyr, recorded as claiming the Christians were "atheotatous" (“the most without a god”), in reference to their rejection of the pagan gods and their absence of temples, statues, or sacrifices. This was a popular criticism of the Christians and it continued on into the 4th century.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Joseph Hillström King (born June 4, 1972), better known by the pen name Joe Hill, is an American writer. His work includes the novels "Heart-Shaped Box" (2007), "Horns" (2010), "NOS4A2" (2013), and "The Fireman" (2016); the short story collections "20th Century Ghosts" (2005) and "Strange Weather" (2017); and the comic book series "Locke & Key" (2008–2013). He has won awards including Bram Stoker Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and an Eisner Award.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Joe Hill was born in 1972 to authors Tabitha King (née Spruce) and Stephen King. He was born and grew up in Bangor, Maine. His younger brother Owen King is also a writer. He has an older sister, Naomi King.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: At age 9, he appeared in the 1982 film "Creepshow", directed by George A. Romero, which co-starred and was written by his father.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Hill chose to use an abbreviated form of his middle name for his professional surname in 1997, out of a desire to succeed based solely on his own merits rather than as the son of one of the world's best-selling and most-recognized living novelists. After achieving a degree of independent success, Hill publicly confirmed his identity in 2007, the year his first novel came out, after an article the previous year in "Variety" reported his identity.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Hill is a recipient of the Ray Bradbury Fellowship. He has also received the William L. Crawford award for best new fantasy writer in 2006, the A. E. Coppard Long Fiction Prize in 1999 for "Better Than Home" and the 2006 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella for "Voluntary Committal". His stories have appeared in a variety of magazines, such as "Subterranean Magazine", "Postscripts" and "The High Plains Literary Review", and in many anthologies, including "The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror" (ed. Stephen Jones) and "The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror" (ed. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant).


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Hill's first book, the limited edition collection "20th Century Ghosts" (published in 2005 by PS Publishing), showcases fourteen of his short stories and won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection, together with the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection and Best Short Story for "Best New Horror". In October 2007, Hill's mainstream US and UK publishers reprinted "20th Century Ghosts", without the extras published in the 2005 slipcased versions, but including one new story.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Hill's first novel, "Heart-Shaped Box", was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins on February 13, 2007 and by Victor Gollancz Ltd in UK in March 2007. The novel reached number eight on the "New York Times" bestseller list on April 1, 2007.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: On September 23, 2007, at the thirty-first Fantasycon, the British Fantasy Society awarded Hill the first ever Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award. Hill's first professional sale was in 1997.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Among Hill's unpublished works is one partly completed story with his father ("But Only Darkness Loves Me"), which is held with the Stephen King papers at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Hill is the writer of "Locke & Key", a comic book series published by IDW Publishing. The first issue, released on February 20, 2008, sold out of its initial publication run in one day. A collection of the series in limited form from Subterranean Press sold out within 24 hours of being announced.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Hill's second novel, "Horns", was published in February 2010. A film based on the novel was released in 2014, directed by Alexandre Aja and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: "NOS4A2", his third novel, was published in April 2013. The novel peaked at number five on the "New York Times" Best Seller list.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Hill's fourth novel, "The Fireman," was released in May 2016. It entered the "New York Times" Best Seller list at number one, making it his highest-ranked novel.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: In 2019, "In the Tall Grass", co-written with his father Stephen King, was released as a Netflix Original film. Filming for the "Locke & Key" TV series, also by Netflix, began in the middle of January 2019 and the first season aired in February 2020. Also, AMC began broadcasting a TV series of "NOS4A2" in July 2019.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Shudder announced in 2017 that their upcoming series reboot of "Creepshow" would contain an adaptation of Hill's short story "By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain". The series aired its first season in September 2019 and was renewed for a second season as well.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: Following DC Comics's announcement in June 2019 that it would suspend publication of its Vertigo Comics imprint, they announced that Hill would oversee and share the writing for a new horror line, Hill House Comics. Hill started talking about the Hill House line in 2017 with editor Mark Doyle. The line was originally to be titled Vertigo Fall, then Joe Hill's Vertigo Fall, before eventually being renamed.


title: Joe Hill (writer)

text: In 1999, Joe Hill married Leanora Legrand, whom he had met at Vassar College. They had three children, the eldest among them being Ethan King. The couple divorced in 2010. In 2018, he married publisher Gillian Redfearn of Gollancz Publishing. They had twins in 2022.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: A transformer is a deep learning model that adopts the mechanism of self-attention, differentially weighting the significance of each part of the input data. It is used primarily in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV).


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Like recurrent neural networks (RNNs), transformers are designed to process sequential input data, such as natural language, with applications towards tasks such as translation and text summarization. However, unlike RNNs, transformers process the entire input all at once. The attention mechanism provides context for any position in the input sequence. For example, if the input data is a natural language sentence, the transformer does not have to process one word at a time. This allows for more parallelization than RNNs and therefore reduces training times.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Transformers were introduced in 2017 by a team at Google Brain and are increasingly the model of choice for NLP problems, replacing RNN models such as long short-term memory (LSTM). The additional training parallelization allows training on larger datasets. This led to the development of pretrained systems such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which were trained with large language datasets, such as the Wikipedia Corpus and Common Crawl, and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Before transformers, most state-of-the-art NLP systems relied on gated RNNs, such as LSTMs and gated recurrent units (GRUs), with added attention mechanisms. Transformers also make use of attention mechanisms but, unlike RNNs, do not have a recurrent structure. This means that provided with enough training data, attention mechanisms alone can match the performance of RNNs with attention.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Gated RNNs process tokens sequentially, maintaining a state vector that contains a representation of the data seen prior to the current token. To process the formula_1th token, the model combines the state representing the sentence up to token formula_2 with the information of the new token to create a new state, representing the sentence up to token formula_1. Theoretically, the information from one token can propagate arbitrarily far down the sequence, if at every point the state continues to encode contextual information about the token. In practice this mechanism is flawed: the vanishing gradient problem leaves the model's state at the end of a long sentence without precise, extractable information about preceding tokens.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The dependency of token computations on results of previous token computations also makes it hard to parallelize computation on modern deep learning hardware. This can make the training of RNNs inefficient.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: These problems were addressed by attention mechanisms. Attention mechanisms let a model draw from the state at any preceding point along the sequence. The attention layer can access all previous states and weight them according to a learned measure of relevance, providing relevant information about far-away tokens.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: A clear example of the value of attention is in language translation, where context is essential to assign the meaning of a word in a sentence. In an English-to-French translation system, the first word of the French output most probably depends heavily on the first few words of the English input. However, in a classic LSTM model, in order to produce the first word of the French output, the model is given only the state vector after processing the "last" English word. Theoretically, this vector can encode information about the whole English sentence, giving the model all necessary knowledge. In practice, this information is often poorly preserved by the LSTM. An attention mechanism can be added to address this problem: the decoder is given access to the state vectors of every English input word, not just the last, and can learn attention weights that dictate how much to attend to each English input state vector.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: When added to RNNs, attention mechanisms increase performance. The development of the Transformer architecture revealed that attention mechanisms were powerful in themselves and that sequential recurrent processing of data was not necessary to achieve the quality gains of RNNs with attention. Transformers use an attention mechanism without an RNN, processing all tokens at the same time and calculating attention weights between them in successive layers. Since the attention mechanism only uses information about other tokens from lower layers, it can be computed for all tokens in parallel, which leads to improved training speed.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The input text is parsed into tokens by a byte pair encoding tokenizer, and each token is converted via a word embedding into a vector. Then, positional information of the token is added to the word embedding.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Like earlier seq2seq models, the original Transformer model used an encoder–decoder architecture. The encoder consists of encoding layers that process the input iteratively one layer after another, while the decoder consists of decoding layers that do the same thing to the encoder's output.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The function of each encoder layer is to generate encodings that contain information about which parts of the inputs are relevant to each other. It passes its encodings to the next encoder layer as inputs. Each decoder layer does the opposite, taking all the encodings and using their incorporated contextual information to generate an output sequence. To achieve this, each encoder and decoder layer makes use of an attention mechanism.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: For each part of the input, attention weighs the relevance of every other part and draws from them to produce the output. Each decoder layer has an additional attention mechanism that draws information from the outputs of previous decoders, before the decoder layer draws information from the encodings.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Both the encoder and decoder layers have a feed-forward neural network for additional processing of the outputs and contain residual connections and layer normalization steps.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The transformer building blocks are scaled dot-product attention units. When a sentence is passed into a transformer model, attention weights are calculated between every token simultaneously. The attention unit produces embeddings for every token in context that contain information about the token itself along with a weighted combination of other relevant tokens each weighted by its attention weight.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: For each attention unit the transformer model learns three weight matrices; the query weights formula_4, the key weights formula_5, and the value weights formula_6. For each token formula_7, the input word embedding formula_8 is multiplied with each of the three weight matrices to produce a query vector formula_9, a key vector formula_10, and a value vector formula_11. Attention weights are calculated using the query and key vectors: the attention weight formula_12 from token formula_7 to token formula_14 is the dot product between formula_15 and formula_16. The attention weights are divided by the square root of the dimension of the key vectors, formula_17, which stabilizes gradients during training, and passed through a softmax which normalizes the weights. The fact that formula_4 and formula_5 are different matrices allows attention to be non-symmetric: if token formula_7 attends to token formula_14 (i.e. formula_22 is large), this does not necessarily mean that token formula_14 will attend to token formula_7 (i.e. formula_25 could be small). The output of the attention unit for token formula_7 is the weighted sum of the value vectors of all tokens, weighted by formula_12, the attention from token formula_7 to each token.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The attention calculation for all tokens can be expressed as one large matrix calculation using the softmax function, which is useful for training due to computational matrix operation optimizations that quickly compute matrix operations. The matrices formula_29, formula_30 and formula_31 are defined as the matrices where the formula_7th rows are vectors formula_15, formula_34, and formula_35 respectively.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: One set of formula_37 matrices is called an "attention head", and each layer in a transformer model has multiple attention heads. While each attention head attends to the tokens that are relevant to each token, with multiple attention heads the model can do this for different definitions of "relevance". In addition the influence field representing relevance can become progressively dilated in successive layers. Many transformer attention heads encode relevance relations that are meaningful to humans. For example, some attention heads can attend mostly to the next word, while others mainly attend from verbs to their direct objects. The computations for each attention head can be performed in parallel, which allows for fast processing. The outputs for the attention layer are concatenated to pass into the feed-forward neural network layers.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Each encoder consists of two major components: a self-attention mechanism and a feed-forward neural network. The self-attention mechanism accepts input encodings from the previous encoder and weighs their relevance to each other to generate output encodings. The feed-forward neural network further processes each output encoding individually. These output encodings are then passed to the next encoder as its input, as well as to the decoders.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The first encoder takes positional information and embeddings of the input sequence as its input, rather than encodings. The positional information is necessary for the transformer to make use of the order of the sequence, because no other part of the transformer makes use of this.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The encoder is bidirectional. Attention can be placed on tokens before and after the current token. Tokens are used instead of words to account for polysemy.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The positional encoding is defined as a function of type formula_38, where formula_39 is a positive even integer, byformula_40where formula_41. Here, formula_42 is a free parameter that should be significantly larger than the biggest formula_43 that would be input into the positional encoding function. In the original paper, the authors chose formula_44.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The function is in a simpler form when written as a complex function of type formula_45formula_46where formula_47.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The main reason the authors chose this as the positional encoding function is that it allows one to perform shifts as linear transformations:formula_48where formula_49 is the distance one wishes to shift. This allows the transformer to take any encoded position, and find the encoding of the position 1-step-ahead, or 1-step-behind, etc, by a matrix multiplication.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: formula_50for any constants formula_51. This allows the transformer to take any encoded position and find a linear sum of the encoded locations of its neighbors. This sum of encoded positions, when fed into the attention mechanism, would create attention weights on its neighbors, much like what happens in a convolutional neural network language model. In the author's words, "we hypothesized it would allow the model to easily learn to attend by relative position".


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: In typical implementations, all operations are done over the real numbers, not the complex numbers, but since complex multiplication can be implemented as real 2-by-2 matrix multiplication, this is a mere notational difference.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Each decoder consists of three major components: a self-attention mechanism, an attention mechanism over the encodings, and a feed-forward neural network. The decoder functions in a similar fashion to the encoder, but an additional attention mechanism is inserted which instead draws relevant information from the encodings generated by the encoders. This mechanism can also be called the "encoder-decoder attention".


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Like the first encoder, the first decoder takes positional information and embeddings of the output sequence as its input, rather than encodings. The transformer must not use the current or future output to predict an output, so the output sequence must be partially masked to prevent this reverse information flow. This allows for autoregressive text generation. For all attention heads, attention can't be placed on following tokens. The last decoder is followed by a final linear transformation and softmax layer, to produce the output probabilities over the vocabulary.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Training transformer-based architectures can be expensive, especially for long inputs. Alternative architectures include the Reformer (which reduces the computational load from formula_52 to formula_53), or models like ETC/BigBird (which can reduce it to formula_54) where formula_42 is the length of the sequence. This is done using locality-sensitive hashing and reversible layers.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Ordinary transformers require a memory size which is quadratic in the size of the context window. Attention Free Transformers reduce this to a linear dependence while still retaining the advantages of a transformer by linking the key to the value.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: Transformers typically undergo self-supervised learning involving unsupervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning. Pretraining is typically done on a larger dataset than fine-tuning, due to the limited availability of labeled training data. Tasks for pretraining and fine-tuning commonly include:


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The transformer has had great success in natural language processing (NLP), for example the tasks of machine translation and time series prediction. Many pretrained models such as GPT-2, GPT-3, BERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa demonstrate the ability of transformers to perform a wide variety of such NLP-related tasks, and have the potential to find real-world applications. These may include:


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: In 2020, it was shown that the transformer architecture, more specifically GPT-2, could be tuned to play chess. Transformers have been applied to image processing with results competitive with convolutional neural networks.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: The transformer model has been implemented in standard deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.


title: Transformer (machine learning model)

text: "Transformers" is a library produced by Hugging Face that supplies transformer-based architectures and pretrained models.


title: Royal Rumble

text: The Royal Rumble is a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreaming event, produced annually since 1988 by WWE, the world's largest professional wrestling promotion. It is named after the Royal Rumble match, a modified battle royal in which the participants enter at timed intervals instead of all beginning in the ring at the same time. The event is held in late January. After the initial 1988 event was broadcast as a television special on the USA Network, the Royal Rumble has been shown on PPV since the 1989 event. It also became available to livestream on the WWE Network in 2015 and on Peacock in 2022. It is one of WWE's five biggest events of the year, along with WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Survivor Series, and Money in the Bank, referred to as the "Big Five".


title: Royal Rumble

text: The Royal Rumble match is generally contested as the main event match of the annual event. There are some exceptions, such as the 1988, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2006, and 2013 events. In most of these cases, the main event was a world championship match. While originally only for men, a women's version of the Royal Rumble match was held as the main event at the 2018 event, which was also the first event to have two Rumble matches on one card. It is now standard for the event to include both a men's and women's Rumble match on the card.


title: Royal Rumble

text: The Royal Rumble is a pay-per-view (PPV) consisting of the Royal Rumble match, title matches, and various other matches. The titular match was created by wrestler and WWE Hall of Famer Pat Patterson and the event was established by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE). After the match was first tested at a house show in October 1987, the first Royal Rumble event took place on January 24, 1988, and was broadcast live as a television special on the USA Network. The following year, the event started to be broadcast on pay-per-view, and thus became one of the "Big Four" annual pay-per-views, along with WrestleMania, Survivor Series, and SummerSlam, the promotion's four biggest shows of the year. From 1993 to 2002, it was considered one of the "Big Five", including King of the Ring, but that PPV event was discontinued after 2002. In August 2021, Money in the Bank became recognized as one of the "Big Five".


title: Royal Rumble

text: In May 2002, the WWF was renamed to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) following a lawsuit with the World Wildlife Fund over the "WWF" initialism. In April 2011, the promotion ceased using its full name with the "WWE" abbreviation becoming an orphaned initialism. Also in March 2002, the promotion introduced the brand extension, in which the roster was divided between the Raw and SmackDown brands where wrestlers were exclusively assigned to perform—ECW became a third brand in 2006. The first brand extension was dissolved in August 2011, but it was reintroduced in July 2016 (other brands, including NXT, NXT UK, and 205 Live, would also be active during this second brand split). The Royal Rumble, along with the other original "Big Four" events, were the only PPVs to never be held exclusively for one brand during either brand split periods. The 2008 Royal Rumble was the first WWE pay-per-view to be available in high-definition. In 2015, the Royal Rumble began to air on WWE's online streaming service, the WWE Network, which launched in February 2014, and in 2022, the event became available on Peacock as the American version of the WWE Network merged under Peacock in March 2021.


title: Royal Rumble

text: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that began affecting the industry in March 2020, WWE had to hold its events behind closed doors. The 2021 event was in turn held in WWE's bio-secure bubble called the WWE ThunderDome, which at the time was hosted at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. WWE resumed live touring in July 2021 and the 2022 event was held at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis, Missouri.


title: Royal Rumble

text: Due to the Rumble matches taking up a large amount of time (most Rumble matches last roughly one hour), the Rumble event tends to have a smaller card than most other pay-per-view events, which routinely have six to eight matches per card though with the Royal Rumble expanding to a five-hour show as well as a two-hour kickoff show starting in 2018, the card now mainly features anywhere from nine to twelve matches with two or three of those matches taking place on the kickoff show. The men's Royal Rumble match is usually located at the top of the card, though there have been exceptions, such as the 1988, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2006, 2013, and 2018 events. In these cases, 1988's main event was a tag team match, while the others were world championship matches, except in 2018. The 2018 Royal Rumble was the first to include a women's Royal Rumble match, which was the main event for that year. It was subsequently the first in which two Rumble matches were contested on one card and it is now standard for the event to include both a men's and women's Rumble match.


title: Royal Rumble

text: The Royal Rumble match is based on the classic battle royal, in which a number of wrestlers (traditionally 30) aim at eliminating their competitors by tossing them over the top rope, with both feet touching the floor. The difference between a Royal Rumble and a standard battle royal is that in a standard battle royal, all participants start the match in the ring at the same time, where in a Royal Rumble match, participants enter at timed intervals. The winner of the match is the last wrestler remaining after all others have been eliminated. Since 1993, the prize for winning is a world championship match at WrestleMania (with the exception of 2016, where the prize of the match was the championship itself as the reigning champion defended the title in the match). According to Hornswoggle, who worked for WWE from 2006 until 2016 and participated in two Rumbles, participants may learn their eliminations by knowing the two wrestlers who are eliminated before them and which wrestlers are entering the Royal Rumble before and after their elimination.


title: Royal Rumble

text: In March 2007, WWE released a complete DVD box set titled "Royal Rumble: The Complete Anthology", which showcases every Royal Rumble event in its entirety, up to the 2007 Royal Rumble.


title: Ella Balinska

text: Ella Balinska (born 4 October 1996) is an English actress. She is known for starring in the action comedy film "Charlie's Angels" (2019) and the Netflix original series "Resident Evil" (2022).


title: Ella Balinska

text: Balinska was born on 4 October 1996 in London to entrepreneur Kaz Balinski-Jundzill and chef Lorraine Pascale. She has described her background as being a mix of "British, Polish and Caribbean". Her parents divorced in 2000. Her father is married to model Sophie Anderton.


title: Ella Balinska

text: Balinska played county-level netball and competed in track and field at a national level, having been the javelin thrower for Team London. She went to James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich and left in 2015 to attend Arts Educational School (ArtsEd) in Chiswick for Sixth Form. She then went on to train at the Guildford School of Acting. She left during her final semester in 2018 for work and returned in 2020 to complete her degree, officially graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Acting in 2021. The Ella Balinska Scholarship was established in her name.


title: Ella Balinska

text: In 2017, Balinska obtained the lead role in the Sky Kids series "The Athena" (2019) as Nyela Malik. She starred alongside Kristen Stewart and Naomi Scott in the action comedy "Charlie's Angels", a continuation of the 1976 television series of the same name and two previous theatrical films. It was released in November 2019, garnering mixed critical reviews.


title: Ella Balinska

text: Balinska starred in the thriller film "Run Sweetheart Run", which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. She will portray and voice Frey Holland, the protagonist of the action role-playing video game "Forspoken". Balinska starred in "Resident Evil", a Netflix live-action television series based on the video game series of the same name. It was released in July 2022. She is set to appear in "The Occupant", a science fiction thriller film.


title: Karl Popper

text: Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".


title: Karl Popper

text: In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible. His political philosophy embraced ideas from major democratic political ideologies, including socialism/social democracy, libertarianism/classical liberalism and conservatism, and attempted to reconcile them.


title: Karl Popper

text: Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to upper-middle-class parents. All of Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but they were not devout and as part of the cultural assimilation process the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before he was born and so he received a Lutheran baptism. His father, Simon Siegmund Carl Popper (1856-1932), was a lawyer from Bohemia and a doctor of law at the Vienna University. His mother, Jenny Schiff (1864-1938), was an accomplished pianist, of Silesian and Hungarian descent. Popper's uncle was the Austrian philosopher Josef Popper-Lynkeus. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society, as Popper's father became a partner in the law firm of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimund Grübl, and after Grübl's death in 1898 took over the business. Popper received his middle name after Raimund Grübl. (In his autobiography, Popper erroneously recalls that Grübl's first name was Carl). His parents were close friends of Sigmund Freud's sister Rosa Graf. His father was a bibliophile who had 12,000–14,000 volumes in his personal library and took an interest in philosophy, the classics, and social and political issues. Popper inherited both the library and the disposition from him. Later, he would describe the atmosphere of his upbringing as having been "decidedly bookish".


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper left school at the age of 16 and attended lectures in mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology and the history of music as a guest student at the University of Vienna. In 1919, Popper became attracted by Marxism and subsequently joined the Association of Socialist School Students. He also became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria, which was at that time a party that fully adopted the Marxist ideology. After the street battle in the Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919, when police shot eight of his unarmed party comrades, he turned away from what he saw as the philosopher Karl Marx's historical materialism, abandoned the ideology, and remained a supporter of social liberalism throughout his life.


title: Karl Popper

text: He worked in street construction for a short time but was unable to cope with the heavy labour. Continuing to attend university as a guest student, he started an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker, which he completed as a journeyman. He was dreaming at that time of starting a daycare facility for children, for which he assumed the ability to make furniture might be useful. After that, he did voluntary service in one of psychoanalyst Alfred Adler's clinics for children. In 1922, he did his matura by way of a second chance education and finally joined the university as an ordinary student. He completed his examination as an elementary teacher in 1924 and started working at an after-school care club for socially endangered children. In 1925, he went to the newly founded "Pädagogisches Institut" and continued studying philosophy and psychology. Around that time he started courting Josefine Anna Henninger, who later became his wife.


title: Karl Popper

text: In 1928, Popper earned a doctorate in psychology, under the supervision of Karl Bühler—with Moritz Schlick being the second chair of the thesis committee. His dissertation was titled "Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie" ("On Questions of Method in the Psychology of Thinking"). In 1929, he obtained an authorisation to teach mathematics and physics in secondary school and began doing so. He married his colleague Josefine Anna Henninger (1906–1985) in 1930. Fearing the rise of Nazism and the threat of the "Anschluss", he started to use the evenings and the nights to write his first book "Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie" ("The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge"). He needed to publish a book to get an academic position in a country that was safe for people of Jewish descent. In the end, he did not publish the two-volume work; but instead, a condensed version with some new material, as "Logik der Forschung" ("The Logic of Scientific Discovery") in 1934. Here, he criticised psychologism, naturalism, inductivism, and logical positivism, and put forth his theory of potential falsifiability as the criterion demarcating science from non-science. In 1935 and 1936, he took unpaid leave to go to the United Kingdom for a study visit.


title: Karl Popper

text: In 1937, Popper finally managed to get a position that allowed him to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote his influential work "The Open Society and Its Enemies". In Dunedin he met the Professor of Physiology John Carew Eccles and formed a lifelong friendship with him. In 1946, after the Second World War, he moved to the United Kingdom to become a reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics (LSE), a constituent School of the University of London, where, three years later, in 1949, he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method. Popper was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active for the rest of his life. In 1985, he returned to Austria so that his wife could have her relatives around her during the last months of her life; she died in November that year. After the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft failed to establish him as the director of a newly founded branch researching the philosophy of science, he went back again to the United Kingdom in 1986, settling in Kenley, Surrey.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper died of "complications of cancer, pneumonia and kidney failure" in Kenley at the age of 92 on 17 September 1994. He had been working continuously on his philosophy until two weeks before when he suddenly fell terminally ill. After cremation, his ashes were taken to Vienna and buried at Lainzer cemetery adjacent to the ORF Centre, where his wife Josefine Anna Popper (called "Hennie") had already been buried. Popper's estate is managed by his secretary and personal assistant Melitta Mew and her husband Raymond. Popper's manuscripts went to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, partly during his lifetime and partly as supplementary material after his death. Klagenfurt University has Popper's library, including his precious bibliophilia, as well as hard copies of the original Hoover material and microfilms of the supplementary material. The remaining parts of the estate were mostly transferred to The Karl Popper Charitable Trust. In October 2008 Klagenfurt University acquired the copyrights from the estate.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper and his wife had chosen not to have children because of the circumstances of war in the early years of their marriage. Popper commented that this "was perhaps a cowardly but in a way a right decision".


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper won many awards and honours in his field, including the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, the Sonning Prize, the Otto Hahn Peace Medal of the United Nations Association of Germany in Berlin and fellowships in the Royal Society, British Academy, London School of Economics, King's College London, Darwin College, Cambridge, Austrian Academy of Sciences and Charles University, Prague. Austria awarded him the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria in 1986, and the Federal Republic of Germany its Grand Cross with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit, and the peace class of the Order Pour le Mérite. He received the Humanist Laureate Award from the International Academy of Humanism. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. He was invested with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982.


title: Karl Popper

text: Other awards and recognition for Popper included the City of Vienna Prize for the Humanities (1965), Karl Renner Prize (1978), Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1980), Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize of the University of Tübingen (1980), Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna (1983) and the Premio Internazionale of the Italian Federico Nietzsche Society (1988). In 1989, he was the first awarded the Prize International Catalonia for "his work to develop cultural, scientific and human values all around the world". In 1992, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for "symbolising the open spirit of the 20th century" and for his "enormous influence on the formation of the modern intellectual climate".


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper's rejection of Marxism during his teenage years left a profound mark on his thought. He had at one point joined a socialist association, and for a few months in 1919 considered himself a communist. Although it is known that Popper worked as an office boy at the communist headquarters, whether or not he ever became a member of the Communist Party is unclear. During this time he became familiar with the Marxist view of economics, class conflict, and history. Although he quickly became disillusioned with the views expounded by Marxists, his flirtation with the ideology led him to distance himself from those who believed that spilling blood for the sake of a revolution was necessary. He then took the view that when it came to sacrificing human lives, one was to think and act with extreme prudence.


title: Karl Popper

text: The failure of democratic parties to prevent fascism from taking over Austrian politics in the 1920s and 1930s traumatised Popper. He suffered from the direct consequences of this failure since events after the "Anschluss" (the annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1938) forced him into permanent exile. His most important works in the field of social science—"The Poverty of Historicism" (1944) and "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945)—were inspired by his reflection on the events of his time and represented, in a sense, a reaction to the prevalent totalitarian ideologies that then dominated Central European politics. His books defended democratic liberalism as a social and political philosophy. They also represented extensive critiques of the philosophical presuppositions underpinning all forms of totalitarianism.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper believed that there was a contrast between the theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, which he considered non-scientific, and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity which set off the revolution in physics in the early 20th century. Popper thought that Einstein's theory, as a theory properly grounded in scientific thought and method, was highly "risky", in the sense that it was possible to deduce consequences from it which differed considerably from those of the then-dominant Newtonian physics; one such prediction, that gravity could deflect light, was verified by Eddington's experiments in 1919. In contrast he thought that nothing could, even in principle, falsify psychoanalytic theories. He thus came to the conclusion that they had more in common with primitive myths than with genuine science.


title: Karl Popper

text: This led Popper to conclude that what was regarded as the remarkable strengths of psychoanalytical theories were actually their weaknesses. Psychoanalytical theories were crafted in a way that made them able to refute any criticism and to give an explanation for every possible form of human behaviour. The nature of such theories made it impossible for any criticism or experiment—even in principle—to show them to be false. When Popper later tackled the problem of demarcation in the philosophy of science, this conclusion led him to posit that the strength of a scientific theory lies in its both being susceptible to falsification, and not actually being falsified by criticism made of it. He considered that if a theory cannot, in principle, be falsified by criticism, it is not a scientific theory.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper coined the term "critical rationalism" to describe his philosophy. Popper rejected the empiricist view (following from Kant) that basic statements are infallible; rather, according to Popper, they are descriptions in relation to a theoretical framework. Concerning the method of science, the term "critical rationalism" indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings.


title: Karl Popper

text: Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive; it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is, and is not, genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that their theories are not falsifiable.


title: Karl Popper

text: To say that a given statement (e.g., the statement of a law of some scientific theory)—call it "T"—is "falsifiable" does not mean that "T" is false. It means only that the background knowledge about existing technologies, which exists before and independently of the theory, allows the imagination or conceptualization of observations that are in contradiction with the theory. It is only required that these contradictory observations can potentially be observed with existing technologies—the observations must be inter-subjective. This is the material requirement of falsifiability. Alan Chalmers gives "The brick fell upward when released" as an example of an imaginary observation that shows that Newton's law of gravitation is falsifiable.


title: Karl Popper

text: In "All Life is Problem Solving", Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge—that is, how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time. This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified. With only falsifications being possible logically, how can we explain the growth of knowledge? In Popper's view, the advance of scientific knowledge is an "evolutionary" process characterised by his formula:


title: Karl Popper

text: In response to a given problem situation (formula_2), a number of competing conjectures, or tentative theories (formula_3), are systematically subjected to the most rigorous attempts at falsification possible. This process, error elimination (formula_4), performs a similar function for science that natural selection performs for biological evolution. Theories that better survive the process of refutation are not more true, but rather, more "fit"—in other words, more applicable to the problem situation at hand (formula_2). Consequently, just as a species' biological fitness does not ensure continued survival, neither does rigorous testing protect a scientific theory from refutation in the future. Yet, as it appears that the engine of biological evolution has, over many generations, produced adaptive traits equipped to deal with more and more complex problems of survival, likewise, the evolution of theories through the scientific method may, in Popper's view, reflect a certain type of progress: toward more and more interesting problems (formula_6). For Popper, it is in the interplay between the tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation) that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems; in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper also wrote extensively against the famous Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He strongly disagreed with Niels Bohr's instrumentalism and supported Albert Einstein's realist approach to scientific theories about the universe. Popper's falsifiability resembles Charles Peirce's nineteenth-century fallibilism. In "Of Clocks and Clouds" (1966), Popper remarked that he wished he had known of Peirce's work earlier.


title: Karl Popper

text: Among his contributions to philosophy is his claim to have solved the philosophical problem of induction. He states that while there is no way to prove that the sun will rise, it is possible to formulate the theory that every day the sun will rise; if it does not rise on some particular day, the theory will be falsified and will have to be replaced by a different one. Until that day, there is no need to reject the assumption that the theory is true. Nor is it rational according to Popper to make instead the more complex assumption that the sun will rise until a given day, but will stop doing so the day after, or similar statements with additional conditions. Such a theory would be true with higher probability because it cannot be attacked so easily:


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper held that it is the least likely, or most easily falsifiable, or simplest theory (attributes which he identified as all the same thing) that explains known facts that one should rationally prefer. His opposition to positivism, which held that it is the theory most likely to be true that one should prefer, here becomes very apparent. It is impossible, Popper argues, to ensure a theory to be true; it is more important that its falsity can be detected as easily as possible.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper agreed with David Hume that there is often a psychological belief that the sun will rise tomorrow and that there is no logical justification for the supposition that it will, simply because it always has in the past. Popper writes,


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper held that rationality is not restricted to the realm of empirical or scientific theories, but that it is merely a special case of the general method of criticism, the method of finding and eliminating contradictions in knowledge without ad-hoc measures. According to this view, rational discussion about metaphysical ideas, about moral values and even about purposes is possible. Popper's student W.W. Bartley III tried to radicalise this idea and made the controversial claim that not only can criticism go beyond empirical knowledge but that everything can be rationally criticised.


title: Karl Popper

text: To Popper, who was an anti-justificationist, traditional philosophy is misled by the false principle of sufficient reason. He thinks that no assumption can ever be or needs ever to be justified, so a lack of justification is not a justification for doubt. Instead, theories should be tested and scrutinised. It is not the goal to bless theories with claims of certainty or justification, but to eliminate errors in them. He writes,


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper's principle of falsifiability runs into "prima facie" difficulties when the epistemological status of mathematics is considered. It is difficult to conceive how simple statements of arithmetic, such as "2 + 2 = 4", could ever be shown to be false. If they are not open to falsification they can not be scientific. If they are not scientific, it needs to be explained how they can be informative about real world objects and events.


title: Karl Popper

text: Popper's solution was an original contribution in the philosophy of mathematics. His idea was that a number statement such as "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" can be taken in two senses. In its pure mathematics sense, "2 + 2 = 4" is logically true and cannot be refuted. Contrastingly, in its applied mathematics sense of it describing the physical behaviour of apples, it can be falsified. This can be done by placing two apples in a container, then proceeding to place another two apples in the same container. If there are five, three, or a number of apples that is not four in said container, the theory that "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" is shown to be false. On the contrary, if there are four apples in the container, the theory of numbers is shown to be applicable to reality.


title: Karl Popper

text: In "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The Poverty of Historicism", Popper developed a critique of historicism and a defence of the "Open Society". Popper considered historicism to be the theory that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end. He argued that this view is the principal theoretical presupposition underpinning most forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He argued that historicism is founded upon mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of scientific law and prediction. Since the growth of human knowledge is a causal factor in the evolution of human history, and since "no society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge", it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism go hand in hand.