title: Pennsylvania-class battleship

text: In 1945, "Pennsylvania" was sent for another refit in San Francisco, and the guns in its main battery, worn out from the frequent shore bombardments, were replaced by those from "Nevada" and . After its completion in July, the ship bombarded Wake Island on 1 August en route to Okinawa, where it was struck by an air-dropped torpedo. It hit near the starboard propeller shaft, killing twenty men and knocking out three of the ship's four shafts. This area was vital, and the opened seals around the shafts led to large amounts of flooding that nearly sank the battleship. "Pennsylvania" was towed to shallower waters, where local repairs were made. The ship's last action was to fire at a "kamikaze" on 13 August; it was then towed to Guam beginning on the 18th, where temporary repairs were effected, before being sent to Navy Yard Puget Sound for a more permanent solution. "Pennsylvania" made it to Puget Sound on 24 October, albeit not without a great deal of trouble caused by temporary repair work.


title: Pennsylvania-class battleship

text: With the Japanese surrender on 2 September, the Puget Sound repairs were limited to those necessary to ensure "Pennsylvania"s delivery to Bikini Atoll for atomic experiments in July 1946. The old battleship survived the tests, but was decommissioned on 29 August and used for radiological studies prior to being sunk as a target ship on 10 February 1948. "Pennsylvania" was struck from the Navy Vessel Register nine days later.


title: Chicago Med (season 6)

text: The sixth season of "Chicago Med", an American medical drama television series with executive producer Dick Wolf, and producers Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, Peter Jankowski, Andrew Schneider and Diane Frolov, was ordered on February 27, 2020. The season premiered on November 11, 2020. This season marks the final appearances of paediatric attending Natalie Manning portrayed by Torrey DeVitto and staff nurse April Sexton portrayed by Yaya DaCosta.


title: Chicago Med (season 6)

text: After shutting down in early March due to COVID-19, production on the new season picked up on Sept. 22. NBC revealed on September 29, 2020, that the series took a two-week hiatus after a crew member tested positive for COVID-19. The positive result was discovered during rapid testing and the unnamed individual was immediately sent home. The temporary shutdown did not affect "Med's" Season 6 premiere or the production schedules for "Chicago Fire" and "Chicago P.D.".


title: Chicago Med (season 6)

text: On September 22, 2020, Tehmina Sunny has been tapped for a multi-episode arc. On May 12, 2021, it was announced that longtime cast members Yaya DaCosta and Torrey DeVitto would depart the series at the end of the sixth season opting not to renew their contracts and new work opportunities.


title: Bill Monroe

text: William Smith "Bill" Monroe (; September 13, 1911 – September 9, 1996) was an American mandolinist, singer, and songwriter, who created the bluegrass music genre. Because of this, he is often called the "Father of Bluegrass".


title: Bill Monroe

text: The genre takes its name from his band, the Blue Grass Boys, who named their group for the bluegrass of Monroe's home state of Kentucky. He described the genre as "Scottish bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin'. It's Methodist and Holiness and Baptist. It's blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound."


title: Bill Monroe

text: Monroe was born on his family's farm near Rosine, Kentucky, the youngest of eight children of James Buchanan "Buck" and Malissa (Vandiver) Monroe. His mother and her brother, James Pendleton "Pen" Vandiver, were both musically talented, and Monroe and his family grew up playing and singing at home.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Bill was of Scottish and English heritage. Because his older brothers Birch and Charlie already played the fiddle and guitar, Bill was resigned to playing the less desirable mandolin. He recalled that his brothers insisted that he remove four of the mandolin's eight strings so he would not play too loudly.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Monroe's mother died when he was ten, and his father died six years later. By and by his brothers and sisters moved away, leaving Monroe to bounce between uncles and aunts until finally settling in with his disabled uncle Pendleton Vandiver, whom he often accompanied when Vandiver played the fiddle at dances. This experience inspired one of Monroe's most famous compositions, "Uncle Pen", recorded in 1950, and the 1972 album "Bill Monroe's Uncle Pen." On that album, Monroe recorded a number of traditional fiddle tunes he had often heard performed by Vandiver. Vandiver has been credited with giving Monroe "a repertoire of tunes that sank into Bill's aurally trained memory and a sense of rhythm that seeped into his bones."


title: Bill Monroe

text: Also significant in Monroe's musical life was Arnold Shultz, an influential fiddler and guitarist who introduced Monroe to the blues.


title: Bill Monroe

text: In 1929, Monroe moved to Indiana to work at an oil refinery with his brothers Birch and Charlie, and childhood friend and guitarist William "Old Hickory" Hardin. Together with a friend, Larry Moore, they formed the "Monroe Brothers", to play at local dances and house parties.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Birch and Moore soon left the group, and Bill and Charlie carried on as a duo, eventually winning spots performing live on radio stations, first in Indiana and then, sponsored by Texas Crystals, on several radio broadcasts in Shenandoah, Iowa, Nebraska, South Carolina and North Carolina from 1934 to 1936. RCA Victor signed the Monroe Brothers to a recording contract in 1936. They scored an immediate hit single with the gospel song "What Would You Give in Exchange For Your Soul?" and ultimately recorded 60 tracks for Victor's Bluebird label between 1936 and 1938.


title: Bill Monroe

text: After the Monroe Brothers disbanded in 1938, Bill Monroe formed The Kentuckians in Little Rock, Arkansas, but the group only lasted for three months. Monroe then left Little Rock for Atlanta, Georgia, to form the first edition of the Blue Grass Boys, with singer/guitarist Cleo Davis, fiddler Art Wooten, and bassist Amos Garren. Bill had wanted William Hardin to become one of the original members of his Blue Grass Boys; however, he had to decline.


title: Bill Monroe

text: In October 1939, Monroe successfully auditioned for a regular spot on the Grand Ole Opry, impressing Opry founder George D. Hay with his energetic performance of Jimmie Rodgers's "Mule Skinner Blues". Monroe recorded that song, along with seven others, at his first solo recording session for RCA Victor in 1940; by this time, the Blue Grass Boys consisted of singer/guitarist Clyde Moody, fiddler Tommy Magness, and bassist Bill Wesbrooks.


title: Bill Monroe

text: While the fast tempos and instrumental virtuosity characteristic of bluegrass music are apparent even on these early tracks, Monroe was still experimenting with the sound of his group. He seldom sang lead vocals on his Victor recordings, often preferring to contribute high tenor harmonies as he had in the Monroe Brothers. A 1945 session for Columbia Records featured an accordion, soon dropped from the band. Most importantly, Monroe added banjo player David "Stringbean" Akeman to the Blue Grass Boys in 1942. Akeman played the instrument in a relatively primitive style and was rarely featured in instrumental solos. Monroe's pre-1946 recordings represent a transitional style between the string-band tradition from which he came and the musical innovation to follow.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Key developments occurred in Monroe's music with the addition of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs to the Blue Grass Boys in December 1945. Flatt played a solid rhythm guitar style that would help to set the course for bluegrass timing. Scruggs played the banjo with a distinctive three-finger picking style that immediately caused a sensation among Opry audiences. Flatt and Scruggs joined a highly accomplished group that included fiddler Howdy Forrester and bassist Joe Forrester and would soon include fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Howard Watts, who often performed under the name "Cedric Rainwater".


title: Bill Monroe

text: In retrospect, this line-up of the Blue Grass Boys has been dubbed the "Original Bluegrass Band", as the music finally included all the elements that characterize bluegrass music, including breakneck tempos, sophisticated vocal harmony arrangements, and impressive instrumental proficiency demonstrated in solos or "breaks" on the mandolin, banjo, and fiddle. By this time, Monroe had acquired the 1923 Gibson F5 model "Lloyd Loar" mandolin, which became his trademark instrument for the remainder of his career.


title: Bill Monroe

text: The 28 songs recorded by this version of the Blue Grass Boys for Columbia Records in 1946 and 1947 soon became classics of the genre, including "Toy Heart", "Blue Grass Breakdown", "Molly and Tenbrooks", "Wicked Path of Sin", "My Rose of Old Kentucky", "Little Cabin Home on the Hill", and Monroe's most famous song "Blue Moon of Kentucky", which was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1954, appearing as the B-side of his first single for Sun Records. Monroe gave his blessing to Presley's rock and roll cover of the song, originally a slow ballad in waltz time, and re-recorded it himself with a faster arrangement after Presley's version became a hit. Several gospel-themed numbers are credited to the "Blue Grass Quartet", which featured four-part vocal arrangements accompanied solely by mandolin and guitar – Monroe's usual practice when performing "sacred" songs.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Both Flatt and Scruggs left Monroe's band in early 1948, soon forming their own group, the Foggy Mountain Boys. In 1949, after signing with Decca Records, Monroe entered what has been called the "golden age" of his career with what many consider the classic "high lonesome" version of the Blue Grass Boys, featuring the lead vocals and rhythm guitar of Jimmy Martin, the banjo of Rudy Lyle (replacing Don Reno), and fiddlers such as Merle "Red" Taylor, Charlie Cline, Bobby Hicks, and Vassar Clements.


title: Bill Monroe

text: This band recorded a number of bluegrass classics, including "My Little Georgia Rose", "On and On", "Memories of Mother and Dad", and "Uncle Pen", as well as instrumentals such as "Roanoke", "Big Mon", "Stoney Lonesome", "Get Up John", and the mandolin feature "Raw Hide". Carter Stanley joined the Blue Grass Boys as guitarist for a short time in 1951 during a period when The Stanley Brothers had temporarily disbanded.


title: Bill Monroe

text: On January 16, 1953, Monroe was critically injured in a two-car wreck. He and "Bluegrass Boys" bass player, Bessie Lee Mauldin, were returning home from a fox hunt north of Nashville. On highway 31-W, near White House, their car was struck by a drunken driver. Monroe, who had suffered injuries to his back, left arm and nose, was rushed to General Hospital in Nashville. It took him almost four months to recover and resume touring. In the meantime Charlie Cline and Jimmy Martin kept the band together.


title: Bill Monroe

text: By the late 1950s, however, Monroe's commercial fortunes had begun to slip. The rise of rock-and-roll and the development of the "Nashville sound" in mainstream country music both represented threats to the viability of bluegrass. While still a mainstay on the Grand Ole Opry, Monroe found diminishing success on the singles charts, and struggled to keep his band together in the face of declining demand for live performances.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Monroe's fortunes began to improve during the American folk music revival of the early 1960s. Many college students and other young people were beginning to discover Monroe, associating his style more with traditional folk music than with the country-and-western genre with which it had previously been identified.


title: Bill Monroe

text: The word "bluegrass" first appeared around this time to describe the sound of Monroe and similar artists such as Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Reno and Smiley, Jim and Jesse, and the Osborne Brothers. While Flatt and Scruggs immediately recognized the potential for a lucrative new audience in cities and on college campuses in the North, Monroe was slower to respond. Under the influence of Ralph Rinzler, a young musician and folklorist from New Jersey who briefly became Monroe's manager in 1963, Monroe gradually expanded his geographic reach beyond the traditional southern country music circuit. Rinzler was also responsible for a lengthy profile and interview in the influential folk music magazine "Sing Out!" that first publicly referred to Monroe as the "father" of bluegrass. Accordingly, at the first bluegrass festival organized by Carlton Haney at Roanoke, Virginia in 1965, Bill Monroe was the central figure.


title: Bill Monroe

text: In 1964, before the Grateful Dead got together, Jerry Garcia caravanned across the country from California to tag along with Monroe.


title: Bill Monroe

text: The growing national popularity of Monroe's music during the 1960s was also apparent in the increasingly diverse background of musicians recruited into his band. Non-southerners who served as Blue Grass Boys during this period included banjo player Bill Keith and singer/guitarist Peter Rowan from Massachusetts, fiddler Gene Lowinger from New Jersey, banjo player Lamar Grier from Maryland, banjo player Steve Arkin from New York, and singer/guitarist Roland White and fiddler Richard Greene from California.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Even after the folk revival faded in the mid-1960s, it left a loyal audience for bluegrass music. Bluegrass festivals became common, with fans often traveling long distances to see a number of different acts over several days of performances.


title: Bill Monroe

text: In 1967, Monroe himself founded an annual bluegrass festival at Bean Blossom in southern Indiana, a park he had purchased in 1951, which routinely attracted a crowd of thousands; a double LP from the festival featuring Monroe, Jimmy Martin, Lester Flatt, and Jim and Jesse was released in 1973. The annual "Bill Monroe Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival" is now the world's oldest continuously running annual bluegrass festival.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Monroe's compositions during his later period were largely instrumentals, including "Jerusalem Ridge", "Old Dangerfield" (originally spelled Daingerfield after the town in East Texas), and "My Last Days on Earth"; he settled into a new role as a musical patriarch who continued to influence younger generations of musicians. Monroe recorded two albums of duets in the 1980s; the first featured collaborations with country stars such as Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, and The Oak Ridge Boys, while the second paired him with other prominent bluegrass musicians. A 1989 live album celebrated his 50th year on the Grand Ole Opry. Monroe also kept a hectic touring schedule. On April 7, 1990, Monroe performed for Farm Aid IV in Indianapolis, Indiana along with Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and with many other artists.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Monroe's last performance occurred on March 15, 1996. He ended his touring and playing career in April, following a stroke. Monroe died on September 9, 1996, in Springfield, Tennessee, four days before his 85th birthday.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Bill Monroe was made an honorary Kentucky Colonel in 1966. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as an "early influence") in 1997. Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Hank Williams Sr., and Johnny Cash are the only other performers honored in all three. As the "father of bluegrass", he was also an inaugural inductee into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 1991. Monroe was a recipient of a 1982 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. That year's fellowships were the first bestowed by the NEA. In 1993, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1995. His well-known song "Blue Moon of Kentucky" has been covered not only by bluegrass but also rock and country artists, most notably Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, and Patsy Cline. In 2003, CMT had Bill Monroe ranked No. 16 on "CMT 40 Greatest Men of Country Music".


title: Bill Monroe

text: Artists that claimed to be influenced by or to be playing the bluegrass genre were often bullied by Bill Monroe. He always considered himself the father and caretaker of bluegrass. He would often say of new bands that did not perform to his standards, "That ain't no part of nothin'." Even those who question the scope of bluegrass refer to Monroe as a "musical giant" and recognize that "there would be no bluegrass without Bill Monroe."


title: Bill Monroe

text: More than 150 musicians played in the Blue Grass Boys over the nearly 60 years of Monroe's performing career. Monroe tended to recruit promising young musicians who served an apprenticeship with him before becoming accomplished artists in their own right. Some of Monroe's band members who went on to greater prominence include singer/guitarists Clyde Moody, Lester Flatt, Jack Cook, Mac Wiseman, Jimmy Martin, Carter Stanley, Del McCoury, Peter Rowan, Roland White, Roland Dunn and Doug Green; banjo players Earl Scruggs, Buck Trent, Don Reno, Stringbean, Sonny Osborne, and Bill Keith; and fiddlers Tommy Magness, Chubby Wise, Vassar Clements, Byron Berline, Kenny Baker, Bobby Hicks, Gordon Terry, Randall Franks and Glen Duncan. Monroe also regularly performed with flat-picking guitar virtuoso Doc Watson.


title: Bill Monroe

text: Modern bluegrass singer and mandolin player Ricky Skaggs was influenced by Monroe. Skaggs was only six years old, in 1960, when he first got to perform on stage with Monroe and his band at the high school in Martha, Kentucky. He stated, "I think Bill Monroe's importance to American music is as important as someone like Robert Johnson was to blues, or Louis Armstrong. He was so influential: I think he's probably the only musician that had a whole style of music named after his band."


title: Bill Monroe

text: In 1999, the portion of Indiana State Road 135 running from Morgantown through to Nashville, Indiana was dedicated to Bill Monroe and is known as the Bill Monroe Memorial Highway.


title: 15.ai

text: 15.ai is a non-commercial freeware artificial intelligence web application that generates natural emotive high-fidelity text-to-speech voices from an assortment of fictional characters from a variety of media sources. Developed by an anonymous MIT researcher under the eponymous pseudonym 15, the project uses a combination of audio synthesis algorithms, speech synthesis deep neural networks, and sentiment analysis models to generate and serve emotive character voices faster than real-time, even those with a very small amount of data.


title: 15.ai

text: Launched in early 2020, 15.ai began as a proof of concept of the democratization of voice acting and dubbing using technology. Its gratis and non-commercial nature (with the only stipulation being that the project be properly credited when used), ease of use, and substantial improvements to current text-to-speech implementations have been lauded by users; however, some critics and voice actors have questioned the legality and ethicality of leaving such technology publicly available and readily accessible.


title: 15.ai

text: Credited as the impetus behind the popularization of AI vocal reconstruction technology in content creation, 15.ai has had a significant impact on multiple Internet fandoms, most notably the , "Team Fortress 2", and "SpongeBob SquarePants" fandoms. Several commercial alternatives have spawned with the rising popularity of 15.ai, leading to cases of misattribution and theft. In January 2022, it was discovered that Voiceverse NFT, a company that voice actor Troy Baker announced his partnership with, had plagiarized 15.ai's work as part of their platform.


title: 15.ai

text: Available characters include GLaDOS and Wheatley from "Portal", characters from "Team Fortress 2", Twilight Sparkle and a number of from "", SpongeBob from "SpongeBob SquarePants", Daria Morgendorffer and Jane Lane from "Daria", the Tenth Doctor from "Doctor Who", HAL 9000 from "", the Narrator from "The Stanley Parable", the Wii U/3DS/Switch Super Smash Bros. Announcer (formerly), Carl Brutananadilewski from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", Steven Universe from "Steven Universe", Dan from "Dan Vs.", and Sans from "Undertale".


title: 15.ai

text: The deep learning model used by the application is nondeterministic: each time that speech is generated from the same string of text, the intonation of the speech will be slightly different. The application also supports manually altering the emotion of a generated line using "emotional contextualizers" (a term coined by this project), a sentence or phrase that conveys the emotion of the take that serves as a guide for the model during inference.


title: 15.ai

text: Emotional contextualizers are representations of the emotional content of a sentence deduced via transfer learned emoji embeddings using DeepMoji, a deep neural network sentiment analysis algorithm developed by the MIT Media Lab in 2017. DeepMoji was trained on 1.2 billion emoji occurrences in Twitter data from 2013 to 2017, and has been found to outperform human subjects in correctly identifying sarcasm in Tweets and other online modes of communication.


title: 15.ai

text: 15.ai uses a "multi-speaker model"—hundreds of voices are trained concurrently rather than sequentially, decreasing the required training time and enabling the model to learn and generalize shared emotional context, even for voices with no exposure to such emotional context. Consequently, the entire lineup of characters in the application is powered by a single trained model, as opposed to multiple single-speaker models trained on different datasets. The lexicon used by 15.ai has been scraped from a variety of Internet sources, including Oxford Dictionaries, Wiktionary, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter. Pronunciations of unfamiliar words are automatically deduced using phonological rules learned by the deep learning model.


title: 15.ai

text: The application supports a simplified version of a set of English phonetic transcriptions known as ARPABET to correct mispronunciations or to account for heteronyms—words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently (such as the word "read", which can be pronounced as either or depending on its tense). While the original ARPABET codes developed in the 1970s by the Advanced Research Projects Agency supports 50 unique symbols to designate and differentiate between English phonemes, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary's ARPABET convention (the set of transcription codes followed by 15.ai) reduces the symbol set to 39 phonemes by combining allophonic phonetic realizations into a single standard (e.g. codice_1; codice_2) and using multiple common symbols together to replace syllabic consonants (e.g. codice_3). ARPABET strings can be invoked in the application by wrapping the string of phonemes in curly braces within the input box (e.g. codice_4 to denote , the pronunciation of the word "ARPABET").


title: 15.ai

text: In 2016, with the proposal of DeepMind's WaveNet, deep-learning-based models for speech synthesis began to gain popularity as a method of modeling waveforms and generating human-like speech. Tacotron2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis developed by Google AI, was published in 2018 and required tens of hours of audio data to produce intelligible speech; when trained on 2 hours of speech, the model was able to produce intelligible speech with mediocre quality, and when trained on 36 minutes of speech, the model was unable to produce intelligible speech.


title: 15.ai

text: For years, reducing the amount of data required to train a realistic high-quality text-to-speech model has been a primary goal of scientific researchers in the field of deep learning speech synthesis. The developer of 15.ai claims that as little as 15 seconds of data is sufficient to clone a voice up to human standards, a significant reduction in the amount of data required.


title: 15.ai

text: A landmark case between Google and the Authors Guild in 2013 ruled that Google Books—a service that searches the full text of printed copyrighted books—was transformative, thus meeting all requirements for fair use. This case set an important legal precedent for the field of deep learning and artificial intelligence: using copyrighted material to train a discriminative model or a "non-commercial" generative model was deemed legal. The legality of "commercial" generative models trained using copyrighted material is still under debate; due to the black-box nature of machine learning models, any allegations of copyright infringement via direct competition would be difficult to prove.


title: 15.ai

text: 15.ai was designed and created by an anonymous research scientist affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology known by the alias "15". The project began development while the developer was an undergraduate. The developer has stated that they are capable of paying the high cost of running the site out of pocket.


title: 15.ai

text: According to posts made by its developer on Hacker News, 15.ai costs several thousands of dollars per month to operate; they are able to support the project due to a successful startup exit. The developer has stated that during their undergraduate years at MIT, they were paid the minimum hourly rate to work on a related project (approximately $14 an hour in Massachusetts) that eventually evolved into 15.ai. They also stated that the democratization of voice cloning technology is not the only function of the website; in response to a user asking whether the research could be conducted without a public website, the developer wrote:


title: 15.ai

text: The algorithm used by the project to facilitate the cloning of voices with minimal viable data has been dubbed DeepThroat (a double entendre in reference to speech synthesis using deep neural networks and the sexual act of deep-throating). The project and algorithm—initially conceived as part of MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program—had been in development for years before the first release of the application.


title: 15.ai

text: The developer has also worked closely with the Pony Preservation Project from /mlp/, the "" board of 4chan. The Pony Preservation Project, which began in 2019, is a "collaborative effort by /mlp/ to build and curate pony datasets" with the aim of creating applications in artificial intelligence. The "Friendship Is Magic" voices on 15.ai were trained on a large dataset crowdsourced by the Pony Preservation Project: audio and dialogue from the show and related media—including , , spinoffs, leaks, and various other content voiced by the same voice actors—were parsed, hand-transcribed, and processed to remove background noise. According to the developer, the collective efforts and constructive criticism from the Pony Preservation Project have been integral to the development of 15.ai.


title: 15.ai

text: In addition, the developer has stated that the logo of 15.ai, which features a robotic Twilight Sparkle, is an homage to the fact that her voice (as originally portrayed by Tara Strong) was indispensable to the implementation of emotional contextualizers.


title: 15.ai

text: 15.ai has been met with largely positive reviews. Liana Ruppert of "Game Informer" described 15.ai as "simplistically brilliant." Lauren Morton of "Rock, Paper, Shotgun" and Natalia Clayton of "PCGamer" called it "fascinating," and José Villalobos of "" wrote that it "works as easy as it looks." Users praised the ability to easily create audio of popular characters that sound believable to those unaware that the voices had been synthesized by artificial intelligence: Zack Zwiezen of "Kotaku" reported that "[his] girlfriend was convinced it was a new voice line from GLaDOS' voice actor, Ellen McLain," while Rionaldi Chandraseta of "Towards Data Science" wrote that, upon watching a YouTube video featuring popular character voices generated by 15.ai, "[his] first thought was the video creator used cameo.com to pay for new dialogues from the original voice actors" and stated that "the quality of voices done by 15.ai is miles ahead of [its competitors]."


title: 15.ai

text: Computer scientist and technology entrepreneur Andrew Ng commented in his newsletter "The Batch" that the technology behind 15.ai could be "enormously productive" and could "revolutionize the use of virtual actors"; however, he also noted that "synthesizing a human actor's voice without consent is arguably unethical and possibly illegal" and could potentially open up to cases of impersonation and fraud. In his blog "Marginal Revolution", economist Tyler Cowen deemed 15 one of the "most underrated talents in AI and machine learning."


title: 15.ai

text: 15.ai has been frequently used for content creation in various fandoms, including the , the "Team Fortress 2" fandom, the "Portal" fandom, and the "SpongeBob SquarePants" fandom. Numerous videos and projects containing speech from 15.ai have gone viral. However, some videos and projects that contain non-15.ai-generated speech have also gone viral, many of which do not properly credit the source(s) of the synthetic speech featured in them. As a consequence, many videos and projects that have been made with other speech synthesis software have been mistaken as being made with 15.ai, and vice versa. Due to this misattribution and absence of proper credit, 15.ai's terms of service has a rule that forbids having 15.ai-and-non-15.ai-generated speech in the same videos and projects.


title: 15.ai

text: The "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" fandom has seen a resurgence in video and musical content creation as a direct result, inspiring a new genre of fan-created content assisted by artificial intelligence. Some fanfiction have been adapted into fully voiced "episodes": "The Tax Breaks" is a 17-minute long animated video rendition of a fan-written story published in 2014 that uses voices generated from 15.ai with sound effects and audio editing, emulating the episodic style of the early seasons of "Friendship Is Magic".


title: 15.ai

text: Viral videos from the "Team Fortress 2" fandom that feature voices from 15.ai include "Spy is a Furry" (which has gained over 3 million views on YouTube total across multiple videos) and "The RED Bread Bank", both of which have inspired Source Filmmaker animated video renditions. Other fandoms have used voices from 15.ai to produce viral videos. , the viral video "Among Us Struggles" (which uses voices from "Friendship Is Magic") has over 5.5 million views on YouTube; YouTubers, TikTokers, and Twitch streamers have also used 15.ai for their videos, such as FitMC's video on the history of 2b2t—one of the oldest running "Minecraft" servers—and datpon3's TikTok video featuring the main characters of "Friendship Is Magic", which have 1.4 million and 510 thousand views, respectively.


title: 15.ai

text: Some users have created AI virtual assistants using 15.ai and external voice control software. One user on Twitter created their own personal GLaDOS desktop assistant using the voice control system VoiceAttack that is able to boot up applications, utter corresponding random dialogues, and thank the user in response to actions.


title: 15.ai

text: In December 2021, the developer of 15.ai posted on Twitter that they had no interest in incorporating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into their work.


title: 15.ai

text: On January 14, 2022, it was discovered that Voiceverse NFT, a company that video game and anime dub voice actor Troy Baker announced his partnership with, had plagiarized voice lines generated from 15.ai as part of their marketing campaign. Log files showed that Voiceverse had generated audio of Twilight Sparkle and from the show "" using 15.ai, pitched them up to make them sound unrecognizable from the original voices, and appropriated them without proper credit to falsely market their own platform—a violation of 15.ai's terms of service.


title: 15.ai

text: A week prior to the announcement of the partnership with Baker, Voiceverse made a (now-deleted) Twitter post directly responding to a (now-deleted) video posted by Chubbiverse—an NFT platform with which Voiceverse had partnered—showcasing an AI-generated voice and claimed that it was generated using Voiceverse's platform, remarking ""I wonder who created the voice for this? ;)"" A few hours after news of the partnership broke, the developer of 15.ai—having been alerted by another Twitter user asking for his opinion on the partnership, to which he speculated that it "sounds like a scam"—posted screenshots of log files that proved that a user of the website (with their IP address redacted) had submitted inputs of the exact words spoken by the AI voice in the video posted by Chubbiverse, and subsequently responded to Voiceverse's claim directly, tweeting "Certainly not you :)".


title: 15.ai

text: Following the tweet, Voiceverse admitted to plagiarizing voices from 15.ai as their own platform, claiming that their marketing team had used the project without giving proper credit and that the "Chubbiverse team [had] no knowledge of this." In response to the admission, 15 tweeted "Go fuck yourself." The final tweet went viral, accruing over 75,000 total likes and 13,000 total retweets across multiple reposts.


title: 15.ai

text: The initial partnership between Baker and Voiceverse was met with severe backlash and universally negative reception. Critics highlighted the environmental impact of and potential for exit scams associated with NFT sales. Commentators also pointed out the irony in Baker's initial Tweet announcing the partnership, which ended with "You can hate. Or you can create. What'll it be?", hours before the public revelation that the company in question had resorted to theft instead of creating their own product. Baker responded that he appreciated people sharing their thoughts and their responses were "giving [him] a lot to think about." He also acknowledged that the "hate/create" part in his initial Tweet might have been "a bit antagonistic," and asked fans on social media to forgive him. Two weeks later, on January 31, Baker announced that he would discontinue his partnership with Voiceverse.


title: 15.ai

text: Some voice actors have publicly decried the use of voice cloning technology. Cited reasons include concerns about impersonation and fraud, unauthorized use of an actor's voice in pornography, and the potential of AI being used to make voice actors obsolete.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: An electroshock weapon is a less-lethal weapon that utilizes an electric shock to incapacitate a target by either temporarily disrupting voluntary muscle control and/or through pain compliance. There are several different types of electroshock weapons.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: An electroshock is not a taser, though the two terms are often used interchangeably, stun guns and Tasers refer to two different devices. Stun guns administer an electric shock through direct contact, whereas a taser device administers the shock through thin flexible wires connected to two probes that are fired into the target.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In 1935 Ciril Diaz of Cuba designed an electroshock glove for use by the police. The glove delivered 1,500 volts of electricity (only 0.03% of the modern tasers voltage)


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Jack Cover, a NASA researcher, began developing the Taser in 1969. By 1974, he had completed the device, which he named after his childhood hero Tom Swift ("Thomas A. Swift's electric rifle"). The Taser Public Defender product used gunpowder as its propellant, which led the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to classify it as a firearm in 1976.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Cover's patent was adapted by Nova Technologies in 1983 for the Nova XR-5000, their first non-projectile hand-held style stun gun. The XR-5000 design was widely copied as the source for the compact handheld stun gun used today.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Electroshock weapon technology uses a temporary high-voltage, low-current electrical discharge to override the body's muscle-triggering mechanisms. Commonly referred to as a stun gun, electroshock weapons are a relative of cattle prods, which have been around for over 100 years and are the precursor of stun guns. The recipient is immobilized via two metal probes connected via wires to the electroshock device. The recipient feels pain, and can be momentarily paralyzed while an electric current is being applied. Essential to the operation of electroshock, stun guns and cattle prods is sufficient current to allow the weapon to stun. Without current these weapons cannot stun and the degree to which the weapon is capable of stunning depends on its proper use of current. It is reported that applying electroshock devices to more sensitive parts of the body is even more painful. The maximum effective areas for stun gun usage are upper shoulder, below the rib cage, and the upper hip. High voltages are used, but because most devices use a less-lethal current, death does not usually occur from a single shock. The resulting "shock" is caused by muscles twitching uncontrollably, appearing as muscle spasms.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The internal circuits of most electroshock weapons are fairly simple, based on either an oscillator, resonant circuit (a power inverter), and step-up transformer or a diode-capacitor voltage multiplier to achieve an alternating high-voltage discharge or a continuous direct-current discharge. It may be powered by one or more batteries depending on manufacturer and model. The amount of current generated depends on what stunning capabilities are desired, but without proper current calculations, the cause and effect of high voltage is muted. Output voltage is claimed to be in the range of 100 V up to 6 kV; current intensity output is claimed to be in the range of 100 to 500 mA; individual impulse duration is claimed to be in the range of 10 to 100 μs (microseconds); frequency of impulse is claimed to be in the range of 2 to 40 Hz; electrical charge delivered is claimed to be in the range of 15 to 500 μC (microcoulombs); energy delivered is claimed to be in the range of 0.9 to 10 J.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Manufacturers' instructions and manuals shipped with the products state that a half-second shock duration will cause intense pain and muscle contractions, startling most people greatly. Two to three seconds will often cause the recipient to become dazed and drop to the ground, and over three seconds will usually completely disorient and drop the recipient for at least several seconds. Taser International warns law enforcement agencies that "prolonged or continuous exposure(s) to the TASER device's electrical charge" may lead to medical risks such as cumulative exhaustion and breathing impairment.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Because there was no automatic stop on older model Taser devices, many officers have used it repeatedly or for a prolonged period of time, thus potentially contributing to suspects' injuries or death. The current X26 model automatically stops five seconds after the trigger is depressed and then the trigger must be depressed again to send another shock. The trigger can be held down continuously for a longer shock or the device can be switched off before the full five seconds have elapsed. The devices have no protections against multiple police officers giving multiple shocks, cumulatively exceeding the recommended maximum levels.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: There is a fabric that purports to protect the wearer from Taser devices or other electroshock weapons.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The compact handheld stun guns are about the size of a TV remote or calculator, and they must touch the subject when used. The original XR-5000 design in 1983 had the electrodes spread farther apart to make the noisy electric arc between the electrodes as a more visible warning. Some such devices are available disguised as other objects, such as umbrellas, mobile phones or pens.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The larger baton-style prods are similar in basic design to an electric cattle prod. It has a metal end split into two parts electrically insulated from each other, or two thin projecting metal electrodes about apart, at an end of a shaft containing the batteries and mechanism. At the other end of the shaft are a handle and a switch. Both electrodes must touch the subject. In some types the sides of the baton can be electrified to stop the subject from grasping the baton above the electrodes.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Some models are built into long flashlights also designed to administer an electric shock with its lit end's metal surround (which is split into halves insulated from each other).


title: Electroshock weapon

text: A stun belt is a belt that is fastened around the subject's waist, leg, or arm that carries a battery and control pack, and contains features to stop the subject from unfastening or removing it. A remote-control signal is sent to tell the control pack to give the subject an electric shock. Some models are activated by the subject's movement.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The United States uses these devices to control prisoners. One type is the REACT belt. Some stun belts can restrain the subject's hands and have a strap going under his groin to stop him from rotating the belt around his waist to reach its battery and control pack and trying to deactivate it. Stun belts are not generally available to the public.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Stun shields are shields with electrodes embedded into the face, originally marketed for animal control, that have been adopted for riot control.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: A taser conducted energy weapon (CEW) is a handheld weapon that fires two small dart-like electrodes which remain connected to the main unit by conductors. It delivers electric current to disrupt voluntary control of muscles resulting in pain and broad "neuromuscular incapacitation".


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Taser International has developed a long-range wireless electro-shock projectile called XREP(eXtended Range Electro-Muscular Projectile), which can be fired from any 12-gauge shotgun. It contains a small high-voltage battery. Its range is currently , but the U.S. Department of Defense, which funded development for the technology, expected delivery of a range projectile of this type from the company in 2007.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: An XREP projectile was controversially used by British police during the 2010 Northumbria Police manhunt. It subsequently transpired that the XREP has never been officially approved for use in the United Kingdom and the weapon system was provided unrequested to the police at the scene directly by the civilian company which distributes Taser International's products in the UK. The company's license to provide Taser systems was afterwards revoked by the Home Secretary Theresa May.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Due to increased interest in developing less-lethal weapons, mainly from the U.S. Military, a number of new types of electroshock weapon are being researched. They are designed to provide a "ranged" less-lethal weapon.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The electrolaser is a prototype weapon that uses a laser to create a conducting ionized channel through the air.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Prototype electroshock guns exist that replace the solid wire with a stream of conductive liquid (e.g., metallic solution, salt water), which offers an increase in the range of a Taser CEW (or better) and the possibility of multiple shots. According to the proponents of this technology, difficulties associated with this experimental design include:


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Another design, announced by Rheinmetall W&M as a prototype in 2003, uses an aerosol as the conductive medium. The manufacturers called it a "Plasma Taser"; however, this is only a marketing name, and the weapon does not use plasma. According to the proponents of this technology, problems associated with this design include:


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Since 2001, Russian developer Oleg Nemtyshkin has sought to create a repeating stun pistol, after the Axon Taser CEW. This weapon, the first of its kind, uses tensioned, uninsulated wire and is capable of cycling multiple shots with the pull of a trigger. A video of the S5 pistol firing at targets was uploaded on YouTube.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Because of the use of electricity and the claim of the weapon being non-lethal, controversy has sprouted over particular incidents involving the weapon and the use of the weapon in general. In essence, controversy has been centered on the justification of the use of the weapon in certain instances, and, in some cases, health issues that are claimed to be due to the use of the weapon.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Tests conducted by the Cleveland Clinic found that Taser CEWs did not interfere with pacemakers and implantable defibrillators. A study conducted by emergency medicine physicians at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Medical Center showed no lasting effects of the Taser device on healthy test subjects. However, Taser International no longer claims the devices are "non-lethal", instead saying they "are more effective and safer than other use-of-force options".


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Currently, Taser devices are programmed to be activated in automatic five second bursts, and the officer can stop the energy charge by engaging the safety switch. The charge can also be prolonged beyond five seconds if the trigger is held down continuously. The operator can also inflict repeated shock cycles with each pull of the trigger as long as both barbs remain attached to the subject. The only technical limit to the number or length of the electrical cycles is the life of the battery, which can be ten minutes or more.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Concerns about the use of conducted electrical weapons have arisen from cases that include the death of the Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski in the Vancouver, BC airport where he died after the RCMP officer, in spite of his training, repeatedly stunned him with a TASER CEW. The report by forensic pathologist Charles Lee, of Vancouver General Hospital, listed the principal cause of death as "sudden death during restraint", with a contributory factor of "chronic alcoholism".


title: Electroshock weapon

text: A similar incident occurred in Sydney, Australia, to Roberto Laudisio Curti, a 21-year-old tourist from Brazil. He died after repeated exposure to a Taser device even after being physically apprehended (by the weight of several police officers lying on top of him compressing his chest and making it hard to breathe. He was pepper sprayed at the same time). The Coroner was scathing of the "thuggish" behavior of the police. The repeated use of several Taser devices was considered excessive and unnecessary.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The study done by Pierre Savard, Ing., PhD., Ecole Polythechnique de Montréal, et al., for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), indicated that the threshold of energy needed to induce deadly ventricular fibrillation decreased dramatically with each successive burst of pulses; however, one pulse may provide enough energy to induce deadly ventricular fibrillation in some cases. The threshold for women may be less.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Although the Taser CEW is a programmable device, the controlling software does not limit the number of the bursts of pulses and the time between bursts while the trigger is held down continuously, or the number of times the shock cycles can be repeated.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Electroshock weapons have been made illegal in Germany by supplement 2 WaffG if they do not carry an official seal of approval demonstrating they do not constitute a health risk. As of July, 2011, no such seal has been issued to any device on the market. According to § 40 Abs. 4 WaffG, the German federal police may approve of exceptions. Such a special approval for purchase, ownership and carrying was in effect until 31 December 2010. As of 1 January 2011, only devices carrying the PTB's seal of approval are legal. Previous owners may keep their devices, but cannot carry or sell them. Electroshock weapons effective over a distance, like Taser CEWs, have been completely outlawed in Germany since 1 April 2008.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In the United Kingdom the possession and purchase of any weapon of whatever description designed or adapted for the discharge of any noxious liquid, gas or other thing is prohibited. This includes electroshock weapons.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The United Nations Committee against Torture reports that the use of Taser devices can be a form of torture, due to the acute pain they cause, and warns against the possibility of death in some cases.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Taser CEWs may also not leave the telltale markings that a conventional beating might. The American Civil Liberties Union has also raised concerns about their use, as has the British human rights organization Resist Cardiac Arrest.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In 2010, one court ruled against the use of five imported Taser devices by the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police, to comply with a claim from the Human Rights Observatorium, that states that Taser CEWs are considered an instrument of torture by NGOs and the Committee against Torture of the UN.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Possession, ownership and use of a stun gun (including Taser CEWs) by civilians is considerably restricted, if not illegal in all States and Territories. The importation into Australia is restricted with permits being required.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Austria allows police to use stun guns, including Taser CEWs. After using a Tasert CEW, police must immediately call for an ambulance. The victim must be medically checked directly at the place of the shooting, and only a medically trained person may remove the darts. From 2006 to 2012, Austrian police used Taser CEWs 133 times—127 against humans and six against dogs. About 1,000 police officers were permitted in 2012 to carry and use a Taser CEW.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Use of the Taser device is legal for the police in Brazil. Its use is widespread mainly in the Guardas Municipais (Municipal Guards), who receive professional training in the use of electro-conductive pistols. Taser devices are also used by military police and specialized forces. There are laws allowing their use by private security companies, but such use is unusual because of the expense of maintaining a Taser CEW compared with a gun.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: According to previous interpretation of the "Firearms Act, 1995", Taser CEWs were considered "prohibited weapons" and could be used only by members of law-enforcement agencies after they were imported into the country under a special permit. The possession of restricted weapons must be licensed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Canadian Firearms Program unless exempted by law. A 2008 review of the "Firearms Act, 1995" found that the act classifies "the TASER Public Defender and any variant or modified version of it" as "prohibited firearms". However, Canadian police forces typically treat TASER devices as "prohibited weapons", inconsistent with the restrictions on firearms.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The direct source for this information comes from an independent report produced by Compliance Strategy Group for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The report is called An Independent Review of the Adoption and Use of Conducted Energy Weapons by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In the report that is available through access to information, the authors argued that the CEW was, for several years after its adoption by the RCMP, erroneously characterized as a prohibited "weapon" under the Criminal Code, as opposed to a prohibited "firearm". This misunderstanding was subsequently incorporated into the RCMP's operational policies and procedures as well as those of other police services in Canada.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: While the most recent RCMP operational manual, completed in 2007, correctly refers to the CEW as a prohibited firearm, a number of consequences of this error in classification remain to be dealt with, by both the RCMP and other Canadian police services. Consequently, it could be argued the police in Canada may not have had the proper authority under their provincial policing Acts and Regulation to use the CEW in the first place. The point of unauthorized use by the police was also raised by Dirk Ryneveld, British Columbia's Police Complaint Commissioner at the Braidwood inquiry on June 25, 2008. Taser device safety and issues have been extensively rehearsed and investigated after the Robert Dziekański Taser CEW incident at Vancouver International Airport.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Electroshock weapons that require direct contact are not regulated by Czech law. They may be purchased, owned and carried for personal protection without any limitations and are a popular choice for self-defense alongside pepper sprays by people who don't have a license to carry a concealed firearm.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Taser CEWs are considered class C-I firearms under Czech law, i.e. freely available over the counter, however the owner must be older than 18, have full legal capacity, place of residence in the Czech Republic, clean criminal record, full mental capacity and must register the taser with police.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In Finland possession of a Taser CEW is legal only for police officers. Police have been using Taser CEWs since 2005. Nowadays there is one in almost every patrol car.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Taser devices are used by the French National Police and Gendarmerie. In September 2008, they were made available to local police by a government decree, but in September 2009, the Council of State reversed the decision judging that the specificities of the weapon required a stricter regulation and control.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: However, since the murder of a policewoman on duty, the Taser CEW has been in use again by local police forces since 2010.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The purchase, possession, and carrying of Taser devices in Germany has been prohibited since April 1, 2008 (gun control law: "Anlage 2, Abschnitt 1, Nr. 1.3.6. WaffG"). However Taser devices are in use by police SWAT teams, "Spezialeinsatzkommando" (SEK) and others, in 13 out of 16 German states.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The Greek police uses Taser CEWs. Greek Police special forces used a Taser CEW to end the hijacking of a Turkish Airlines A310 by a Turkish citizen at Athens International Airport in March 2003.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Under Hong Kong laws, Chapter 238 "Firearms and Ammunition Ordinance", "Any portable device which is designed or adapted to stun or disable a person by means of an electric shock applied either with or without direct contact with that person" is considered an "arm" and therefore, the importation, possession and exportation of Taser devices requires a license from the Hong Kong Police Force. They are otherwise illegal, and violation carries penalties up to a $100,000 fine and 14 years in jail.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Specialist units of Ireland's national police force (Garda Síochána) use the X26 model; Special Detective Unit, Emergency Response Unit and Armed Support Units. Issuing Taser CEWs to all members of the force (who are generally unarmed) was under consideration as of 2013. Use of Taser CEWs in Ireland by private individuals is prohibited.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: The Israeli police have approved using Taser devices. As of 16 February 2009, the first Taser CEWs became available to police units.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Taser devices were first used by the Israeli Defense Force by the former special counter-terror unit Force 100 in 2004. The unit was disbanded in 2006. Taser CEWs are expected to re-enter operational use by the Israeli Defense Forces in the near future.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: As of August 18, 2013, the use of Taser devices by Israeli police was temporarily suspended by Police Chief Yohanan Danino; after such instruments were used repeatedly and excessively by police against a person who allegedly was unarmed and who was not resisting a warranted arrest. But two weeks later the Taser CEW was unsuspended.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Under Kenya's Firearms Act, a Taser device is considered a firearm, as per section 2 (a) (ii) of the Act. The section offers one of the descriptions for a firearm as "a lethal barrelled weapon of any description from which any shot, bullet or other missile can be discharged or which can be adapted for the discharge of any shot, bullet or other missile and includes ... an electrical charge which when it strikes any person or animal is of sufficient strength to stun and temporarily disable the person or animal struck (such weapon being commonly known as a 'stun gun' or 'electronic paralyser' ".


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Royal Malaysia Police are set to become the second in Southeast Asia police force after Singapore Police Force to use the less-lethal Taser X26 CEW. The Taser X26 CEW that Malaysian police bought comes with a holster and uses a non-rechargeable lithium battery able to deliver 195 cartridge shots. Policemen on rounds are issued four cartridges. The Taser devices were issued to policemen in Petaling Jaya, Dang Wangi in Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: A large-scale and generally well received trial by the New Zealand Police saw Taser devices presented almost 800 times and fired over 100 times, but firing was "ineffective" about a third of the time. The Taser device had been "unintentionally discharged" more often than they had been used properly in the line of duty.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In October 2012, police said the TASER device had been "very successful in de-escalating dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations". Since their introduction, TASER CEWs had been presented 1320 times but only fired 212 times, resulting in 13 injuries. In July 2015, the Police Commissioner announced that TASER CEWs would be routinely carried by all police officers.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Requires a permit to manufacture, distribute, purchase or carry an electroshock weapon. Any electroshock devices with a projectile (TASER devices) are completely banned for civilian use.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: TASER devices and other electronic control devices are considered firearms in Sweden and are banned for civilian use. The Swedish police had purchased a limited quantity of TASER CEWs, and was about to initiate field trials when these were cancelled in 2005 after an ethics commission found that the need for (and risks of) such devices was not firmly established. The purchased TASER CEWs were then donated to Finland, where field trials were initiated. Since January 1, 2018, the Swedish police have been conducting tests with electroshock weapons for a two-year period and during the trial period approximately 700 police officers are trained. The move has been welcomed by the country's union for law enforcement.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: TASER CEWs are considered "prohibited weapons" under the Firearms Act 1968 and possession is an offence. The maximum sentence for possession is ten years in prison and an unlimited fine. There is a minimum sentence of 5 years imprisonment if the TASER device is disguised as another object such as a torch or a mobile phone.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: TASER CEWs are now used by some British police as a "less lethal" weapon. It was also announced in July 2007, that the deployment of TASER devices by specially trained police units who are not firearms officers, but who are facing similar threats of violence, would be trialled in ten police forces. The 12-month trial commenced on 1 September 2007, and took place in the following forces: Avon & Somerset, Devon & Cornwall, Gwent, Lincolnshire, Merseyside, Metropolitan Police, Northamptonshire, Northumbria, North Wales and West Yorkshire.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Following the completion of the trial, the Home Secretary agreed on 24 November 2008 to allow chief police officers of all forces in England and Wales, from 1 December 2008, to extend TASER CEW use to specially trained units in accordance with current Association of Chief Police Officers policy and guidance, which states that TASER CEWs can be used only where officers would be facing violence or threats of violence of such severity that they would need to use force to protect the public, themselves, and/or the subject(s).


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Also, in Scotland Strathclyde Police agreed in February 2010 to arm 30 specially trained police officers using the TASER X26 CEW. The pilot would last three months and would be deployed in Glasgow City Centre and Rutherglen.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: A fund for up to 10,000 additional TASER devices is being made available for individual chief police officers to bid for TASER devices based on their own operational requirements.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Court cases in recent years have addressed the legality of TASER CEW use by police officers. In "Bryan v. MacPherson", the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a TASER CEW had been used in a way that constituted excessive force and hence a violation of the Fourth Amendment. In the latter case "Mattos v. Agarano", the same Court of Appeals found that in two situations involving TASER CEW use, one in drive-stun and one in dart mode, officers had used excessive force. According to an article in "Police Chief" magazine, this decision implies guidelines for the use of TASER CEWs and other Electronic Control Devices in gaining compliance (in a setting where safety is not an issue), including that the officer must give warning before each application, and that the suspect must be capable of compliance, with enough time to consider a warning, and to recover from the extreme pain of any prior application of the TASER device; and that TASER devices must not be used on children, the elderly, and women who are visibly pregnant or inform the officer of their pregnancy.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In 1991, an electroshock device supplied by Tasertron to the Los Angeles Police Department failed to subdue Rodney King—even after he was shocked twice with the device—causing officers to believe he was on PCP. Its lack of effectiveness was blamed on a possible battery problem.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: TASER devices are considered the same as firearms by the United States government for the purposes of the Second Amendment protection, the right to keep and bear arms. They can be legally carried (concealed or openly) without a permit in almost every state. Their use in Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin is legal with restrictions.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In March 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in "Caetano v. Massachusetts" that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court erred in its rationale in upholding a law that prohibited the possession of stun guns. Though the decision didn't explicitly rule that stun gun bans are unconstitutional, it created doubt in laws forbidding their possession which led to many legal challenges and subsequent legalization of stun gun possession in previously prohibitive jurisdictions.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Hawaii's 1976 ban on stun guns was challenged in at least two lawsuits. As a result, the legislature passed HB891, legalizing stun guns in Hawaii as of January 1, 2022. A permit is not required but sellers must perform background checks and provide safety training.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Previously, the U.S. Supreme Court had overruled the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in the "Caetano" case. However, when the case was remanded, the state dismissed the charges, thus allowing it to retain its ban on stun guns at the time. The law remained in force but was challenged in a separate lawsuit. On April 17, 2018, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in "Ramirez v. Commonwealth", ruled that the state's 2004 ban on stun guns is unconstitutional.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: On November 15, 2016, it was reported that New Jersey's Attorney General Christopher Porrino had conceded that the state's 1985 ban on stun guns is unconstitutional. On April 26, 2017, the lawsuit was settled by agreeing that the ban was unconstitutional and to promulgate regulations to allow for the possession of stun guns. The regulations allow for people over 18 to purchase stun guns, effective October 20, 2017.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: New York's ban on stun guns is being challenged by Matthew Avitabile. On March 22, 2019, the ban was ruled unconstitutional by the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York. But it was ruled constitutional by a state court on October 15, 2019.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: On September 29, 2016, Washington D.C. announced that it intends on repealing its ban on stun guns in response to a lawsuit. The new law regulating stun guns for persons 18 years or older took effect on May 19, 2017. Metropolitan Police Department issued a statement about the legality of stun guns.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: In legalizing concealed carry of firearms in 2011, Wisconsin also legalized stun gun possession for people with a license.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Chicago bans the sale of stun guns within its limits and imposes an application requirement followed by a 120-day waiting period for attempting to purchase a stun gun from outside the city. Illinois law requires licensure prior to possessing a stun gun in addition to several other restrictions. On March 21, 2019, the Supreme Court of Illinois ruled unanimously that the ban on possession or carriage of stun guns in public is facially unconstitutional. It ruled that a section of law which prohibits the carrying or transportation of stun guns is unconstitutional because an exception against the prohibition (possessing a concealed carry permit) only covers handguns, thus there is no exception for stun guns, and therefore the ban is unconstitutional. This leaves stun gun carriage legal without a permit.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Newark's 2012 ban on stun guns was repealed on February 24, 2020. New Castle County and Wilmington retain their bans.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Anne Arundel County lifted its ban on stun guns in 2013 and Harford County did so in 2014. Howard County, facing a lawsuit over its ban on stun guns, repealed its law on February 21, 2017; Annapolis voted to repeal its ban on February 27, 2017; Baltimore County repealed its local ordinance in April 2017; Baltimore city's ban, in response to a lawsuit, was repealed on May 15, 2017 but retains bans on possession in public schools and state or city public buildings; Ocean City retains its ban but exempts from the ban homeowners in their home or persons with a concealed weapons permit.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: New Orleans' ban on stun guns was challenged in November 2016 and was eventually repealed on April 3, 2017.


title: Electroshock weapon

text: Bellingham repealed its ban on stun guns in 2016. Tacoma's ban was repealed on June 27, 2017. Ruston retains its ban.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Suffragette is a 2015 British historical drama film about women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Abi Morgan. The film stars Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Anne-Marie Duff, Ben Whishaw, and Meryl Streep.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Filming began on 24 February 2014. It is the first feature film to be shot in the Houses of Parliament. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 12 October 2015 by the French film company Pathé through its British distributor 20th Century Fox. Originally scheduled to be released by Relativity Media, the film was ultimately released in a limited release in North America on 23 October 2015 by Focus Features.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: In 1912, Maud Watts is a 24-year-old laundry worker. While delivering a package, she is caught up in a suffragette protest which includes her workmate, Violet Miller.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Alice Haughton, the wife of an MP, encourages women from the laundry to testify to a Parliamentary committee. Violet offers but is beaten by her abusive husband and Maud testifies. The women later learn, at a public announcement, that the vote is not to be extended. Maud is caught up in the protest, arrested, and jailed for a week. While in jail, she meets Emily Davison, a confidante of Emmeline Pankhurst.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Maud faces stigma from neighbours and workmates. She tells her husband Sonny that she will stay away from the suffragettes but attends a secret rally to hear Pankhurst speak. She has a brief exchange with Pankhurst. Again detained, she is taken home by police. This time, her husband throws her out. Maud struggles to see her son, continuing to work until her picture is published as a known suffragette. Maud is then sacked and, past breaking point, she burns the hand of her male supervisor, who has been sexually abusing girls in the laundry for years, including Maud when she was younger, and Maggie, Violet's daughter. The police are called, and Inspector Steed allows Maud to leave, offering her an opportunity to act as an informer. Maud refuses.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Sonny continues to prevent Maud from seeing their son, George. This prompts Maud into more radicalism in favour of women's rights. She learns that Sonny has offered George for adoption. Maud becomes more radical and is involved in bombing pillar boxes and cutting telegraph wires. She and her comrades are imprisoned after they blow up an empty Parliamentary residence. In prison, Maud goes on hunger strike and is subjected to brutal force-feeding.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: The suffragettes feel that they must do still more to gain attention. They decide to attend the Derby when King George V will be in attendance, planning to step in front of the cameras and unfurl their banners. Before they go, Emily Davison hands Maud a copy of "Dreams" (1890), a book by Olive Schreiner that has been passed from one suffragette to another. On the day of the Derby, only Maud and Emily attend. They are barred from the area near the King, but Emily decides that they must carry on anyway. While the race is underway, Emily runs onto the track, stepping in front of Anmer, the King's horse, and Maud witnesses her being trampled to death. After returning to London, Maud retrieves Violet's daughter, Maggie, from the laundry, and takes her to the home of Alice Haughton, who agrees that Maggie can work there instead. Maud later joins in Emily's funeral procession. The film ends by stating that Emily's funeral was reported around the world; and that certain women over 30 in the UK were given the right to vote in 1918, rights over their own children in 1925, and the same voting rights as men in 1928. Scrolling text lists countries that preceded Britain in giving women the vote and others that did so later.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: In April 2011, it was announced that Film4 Productions, Focus Features and Ruby Films were developing a history drama film about the British women's suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Abi Morgan was set to write the script while Sarah Gavron was attached to direct the film. On 24 October 2013, it was revealed that Pathé had replaced Focus, while the BFI Film Fund was to fund the film and that Ryan Kavanaugh was attached to produce it.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: In October 2014, Relativity Media acquired only the North American rights and Pathé acquired the international rights to distribute "Suffragette". However, on 17 March 2015, Focus Features took over the North American distribution rights, after the success of "The Theory of Everything". The main reason was that Relativity had filed for bankruptcy at the time, so Focus took over the distribution rights in the United States and Ryan dropped out of producing the film due to the bankruptcy of Relativity.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Carey Mulligan was cast to play the lead role on 24 February 2013; Helena Bonham Carter joined on 20 December 2013; Meryl Streep was cast as British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst on 19 February 2014; Ben Whishaw and Brendan Gleeson joined the cast on 20 February 2014.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Principal photography began on 24 February 2014 in London. The production also visited The Historic Dockyard Chatham where they filmed the factory and prison scenes.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: The film was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 12 October 2015 by Pathé, distributed by 20th Century Fox.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: Originally, Relativity Media acquired United States distribution rights in October 2014; but eventually left the project following its financial struggles and bankruptcy at the time. In the aftermath of the success of "The Theory of Everything", Focus Features later acquired distribution rights to the film in North America instead as well as several other territories, following which Ryan Kavanaugh dropped out of producing the film. Focus Features then set the film for a limited release in the United States on 23 October 2015.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: In June 2015, it was announced that "Suffragette" would receive its European premiere on 7 October 2015 as the opening film of the BFI London Film Festival. The LFF director, Clare Stewart, said Gavron's feature was an "urgent and compelling film, made by British women, about British women who changed the course of history". The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on 4 September 2015.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: To promote the film before its October 2015 release, "Suffragette" teamed with the magazine "Time Out London" to develop a marketing campaign featuring the film's stars. After its publication in September 2015, the resulting material generated controversy among media outlets. Mulligan, Streep, Garai and Duff appeared in a promotional photograph wearing T-shirts emblazoned with a Pankhurst quotation used in the film: "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave". This quickly led to a media furore, with critics describing the magazine's choice of slogan "unfortunate", "tone-deaf", and "racist". Scholar Ana Stevenson noted that while from a historical perspective the usage of the Pankhurst quotation in the film was accurate, "Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan, Romola Garai and Anne-Marie Duff are rich, privileged, white women who are celebrity movie stars – certainly not slaves"; Stevenson further argued that there is "a perversity in claiming otherwise when racial discrimination and domestic violence remain very present concerns".


title: Suffragette (film)

text: The feminist group Sisters Uncut demonstrated at the London premiere against government cuts to domestic violence services. Bonham Carter described the protest as "perfect. If you feel strongly enough about something and there's an injustice there you can speak out and try to get something changed". Carey Mulligan said that the protest was "awesome" and that she was sad she had missed it.


title: Suffragette (film)

text: "Suffragette" has received positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 72%, based on 217 reviews, with an average rating of 6.70/10. The website's critical consensus reads, ""Suffragette" dramatizes an important – and still painfully relevant – fact-based story with more than enough craft and sincerity to overcome its flaws." On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 66 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".


title: Total Request Live

text: Total Request Live (known commonly as TRL) was an American television program broadcast on MTV that premiered on September 14, 1998. TRL featured popular music videos played during its countdown, and was also used as a promotion tool by musicians, actors, and other celebrities to promote their newest works to the show's target teen demographic.


title: Total Request Live

text: During the original run of the program, "TRL" played the ten most requested music videos of the day, as voted by viewers via phone or online. The show generally aired Monday through Thursday for one hour, though the scheduling and length of the show fluctuated over the years. Although "TRL" was billed as a live show, many episodes were actually pre-recorded. Due to declining ratings, and the larger secular decline of music-based television in favor of online services, MTV would announce the cancellation of "TRL" on September 15, 2008. The special three-hour finale episode, "Total Finale Live", aired on November 16, 2008.


title: Total Request Live

text: Less than a decade later, "TRL" would be revived on October 2, 2017. In 2019, the show aired Saturday mornings at 10:00 a.m. ET as "TRL Top 10". The show was then rebranded to "Fresh Out Live".


title: Total Request Live

text: "Total Request Live" originated from several pre-existing programs on MTV. "Dial MTV", the first video request show on the network, had aired from 1986 to 1996. In 1997, MTV launched two new shows that became the predecessors of "TRL": "Total Request", a revival of the "Dial MTV" concept hosted by Carson Daly, and "MTV Live", which was hosted by Toby Amies, Daly, and Ananda Lewis and featured live performances and interviews from musical artists.


title: Total Request Live

text: "Total Request" was more subdued than "MTV Live", as Daly introduced music videos from an empty, dimly lit set. As the show progressed and gained more momentum with viewers tuning in, it was soon added to the list of daytime programming during MTV's "Summer Share" in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. The countdown would prove to be one of the most watched and most interactive shows in recent MTV history, demonstrating that it had potential to become an even larger success by combining with the element of live television.


title: Total Request Live

text: In Fall 1998, MTV producers merged the real-time aspect of "MTV Live" with the fan-controlled countdown power of "Total Request" into "Total Request Live". The program made its debut from MTV Studios on September 14, 1998. The show then grew to become MTV's unofficial flagship program.


title: Total Request Live

text: The original host of "TRL", Carson Daly, brought popularity to the show. The widely known abbreviation of "TRL" was adopted as the official title of the show in February 1999, after Daly and Dave Holmes began using the abbreviation on air regularly. In the years following, the program was rarely referred to by its complete title. The show's countdown started off successfully while receiving hundreds of votes for favorite artists such as Hanson, Aaliyah, Blaque, TLC, Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, Janet Jackson, *NSYNC, and Backstreet Boys.


title: Total Request Live

text: "TRL" spent its first year developing a cult-type following. In Fall 1999, a live studio audience was added to the show. By Spring 2000, the countdown reached its peak, becoming a very recognizable pop culture icon in its first two years of existence. A weekend edition of the show known as "TRL Weekend", with a countdown consisting an average of the week's Top 10, aired for a short time in 2000.


title: Total Request Live

text: In 2001, the popularity of "TRL" was at such a level that it spawned a country music spin-off, "CMT Most Wanted Live", on sister network CMT, until 2004. In July 2001, MTV sponsored the Total Request Live Tour, which played over 30 dates in North America and featured acts like Destiny's Child, Jessica Simpson, Eve, and Nelly.


title: Total Request Live

text: Some evolutionary changes were made to "TRL" throughout the next few years. The show received a new set and on-screen graphics for the debut of the Fall 2001 season. A year later, on October 23, 2002, "TRL" celebrated its 1,000th episode. The number-one video on that day was "Dirrty" by Christina Aguilera. Also throughout the year of 2002, original host Carson Daly would be seen gradually less and less as he had branched out with his own late-night talk show "Last Call with Carson Daly" on NBC. The show had near-daily segments from MTV News correspondents reporting on the latest in national or entertainment and music news from inside the studio.


title: Total Request Live

text: In 2003, the next generation of "TRL" was ushered in as Carson Daly officially stepped down as host. Daly left the show to focus on his own talk show which premiered a year earlier on NBC. Following Daly stepping down, a revolving door of VJs hosted "TRL", including Damien Fahey, Hilarie Burton, Vanessa Minnillo, Quddus, La La Vasquez, and Susie Castillo. Some of these VJs made their debut on the show in earlier years, so they recently had the opportunity to host the show on days in which Daly was absent.


title: Total Request Live

text: Some changes were made to "TRL"'s voting process in 2005. The show previously allowed anyone to vote online several times, but as part of these changes, only registered members on MTV.com could vote online. Additionally, a limit of one vote per day was added. Then, on July 10, 2006, MTV announced that votes would not be taken by phone, ending the legacy of the "DIAL MTV" phone number, which had been in use for voting on MTV since the premiere of the countdown show "Dial MTV" in the mid-1980s.


title: Total Request Live

text: In September 2006, "TRL" reached its eighth anniversary and, at that point, it was the longest-running live program that MTV had ever produced. It is also the third-longest-running program of all time in the network's history, following behind "The Real World", which has aired for the past 21 years, and "120 Minutes", which aired for 17 years. Around this time, "TRL" began airing officially on just four days a week (Monday through Thursday), as opposed to all five weekdays.


title: Total Request Live

text: On November 2, 2006, "TRL" introduced what was billed as the first-ever hip hop public service announcement on global warming. The three-minute piece, titled "Trees", warned about deforestation and the dangers of global warming. The video corresponded with MTV's social campaign, "Break the Addiction", as part of "think MTV".


title: Total Request Live

text: The hosts of "TRL" in 2008 were Damien Fahey and Lyndsey Rodrigues. Additionally, Stephen Colletti, former cast member on "", has appeared on "TRL" as host numerous times. The rest of the VJs are or have been working on separate projects. Hilarie Burton left "TRL" in 2004, after joining the cast of The WB/CW's "One Tree Hill", playing Peyton Sawyer. Quddus hosted from 2001 to 2006. He left to move to California to be a host of "TV One Access".


title: Total Request Live

text: On May 22, 2007, "TRL" celebrated its 2000th episode, showing highlights from the past 2000 episodes, and a special countdown of ten of the most successful videos to ever appear on the show. Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River" topped the special countdown.


title: Total Request Live

text: In 2007, rumors began circulating stating that the ratings-challenged music video countdown show was to be canceled. In early 2007, an average of 373,000 viewers regularly watched the program. "New York Daily News" were one of the first to publish this rumor. In February 2007, MTV said the rumor was unfounded and claimed "TRL" would continue to air for the foreseeable future.


title: Total Request Live

text: The producers of "TRL" experimented with web-based viewer interaction throughout the 2006–2007 season, showing viral videos, allowing viewers to send feedback on a video via internet forums and webcams, along with a heavy emphasis on MTV's since discontinued Overdrive video portal. However, MTV still secretly planned to cancel the show and replace one with even more emphasis on viewer interaction, named "YouRL" (a homophone of URL.)


title: Total Request Live

text: Consequently, in July 2007, it was reported that "YouRL" was not received well by test audiences and the concept was abandoned. "Total Request Live" proceeded with a new season as usual on September 4, marking the tenth season of the show.


title: Total Request Live

text: On September 15, 2008, it was announced that "TRL" would be shut down. The final regular weekday episode aired on November 13, 2008, with guest Seth Green and The All-American Rejects. The Rejects spent the entire episode assisting in the tear down of the set which was a theme for the episode. At the end of the episode, Lindsey and Damien cooperatively added the last step in the demolition process by shutting down all the lights. Preceding was a montage of cast and crew members saying their goodbyes by waving to the camera.


title: Total Request Live

text: A three-hour special marking the end of the show aired on November 16, 2008. Several artists made appearances, including Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, Nelly, Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Fall Out Boy, Backstreet Boys, Justin Timberlake, Kid Rock, JC Chasez, Christina Aguilera, Travis Barker, Taylor Swift, Hilary Duff, Eminem, and Korn's Jonathan Davis. Former host Carson Daly described the media atmosphere after his departure from "TRL", in an interview with "TV Guide": "MySpace was sold. Social networking took off. Technology went crazy. The whole tectonic shift of mass media. There were a lot of reasons why "TRL" became kind of a different show after I left. I don't necessarily think it had anything to with me leaving as much as it had to do with the changing landscape."


title: Total Request Live

text: The last music video to be played on "TRL" (during the final episode) was "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears, being the video that made number one on the countdown of the most iconic videos of all time. As the show did its final countdown of all-time videos, her now-iconic first hit, "... Baby One More Time", emerged as the top video, and played as the credits of the show ran for the last time.


title: Total Request Live

text: On June 25, 2014, MTV announced that they would bring back "Total Request Live" for a one-off special edition on July 2, presented by MTV personality Sway with recording artist Ariana Grande, who performed her single "Problem" and premiered her song "Break Free", as well as having her hip hop knowledge tested in a "Hip Hop Mix Up" game. The special was titled "Total Ariana Live" and was broadcast from MTV's Times Square studio in front of a live audience. Grande called it "a huge honor" to bring back "TRL". The episode drew an average of 456,000 viewers.


title: Total Request Live

text: On September 27, 2016, as part of MTV's Elect This campaign, the network revived the program for a one-hour live special called "Total Registration Live". It was simulcast on MTV's website, app, Facebook and YouTube pages, and ElectThis.com. It was hosted by Nessa and featured performances by Ty Dolla $ign from his politically motivated mixtape "Campaign". Kendall Jenner appeared in Times Square on behalf of Rock the Vote, and Ana Marie Cox and Jamil Smith from MTV News appeared on-air for segments. There were other appearances by Joss Whedon, Camila Cabello, Vic Mensa, Natalia Dyer, and Mack Wilds. Stories of millennials who have been activists were spotlighted.


title: Total Request Live

text: Following the launch of MTV Classic on August 1, 2016, music video blocks have consistently aired on the network under the name "Total Request Playlist". When broadcast, however, this is merely an automated playlist of pop, rap/hip-hop, R&B, and rock videos from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.


title: Total Request Live

text: On July 30, 2017, MTV announced that the network would revive "TRL". In addition to the hosts, Liza Koshy, The Dolan Twins, Eva Gutowski, Gabbie Hanna and Gigi Gorgeous and Jaymes Skendarian were correspondents.


title: Total Request Live

text: Since January 22, 2018, "TRL" was halved from a full hour to only a half-hour per day. The program then went on a hiatus until April 23, 2018. Jackson left the show in 2018.


title: Total Request Live

text: In February 2018, a half-hour late-night edition of TRL, "Total Request LateNight" was launched. The show aired Monday and Tuesday at 11 PM and was often an after-show for a preceding program. MTV announced plans to expand the show to three nights in the summer and four nights by the end of the year, but this never materialized.


title: Total Request Live

text: On April 23, 2018, MTV launched a pre-recorded, hour-long daily morning edition of "TRL" titled "Total Request AM". The show aired at 8am and was hosted by Sway. Vinny from "Jersey Shore" was brought on as host for the week and the first guests were boy band PrettyMuch. The program featured the return of a top ten countdown focusing on a specific playlist (Monday Motivation being the first countdown).


title: Total Request Live

text: In 2019, saw another retooling and name change as "TRL Top 10", which featured hosts Sway, Kevan Kenney and Jamila Mustafa. An off-shoot of the program, "Fresh Out Live", airs every Friday on MTV.


title: Total Request Live

text: "TRL" became "appointment after-school TV, its studio at 1515 Broadway a pop-culture fishbowl where rabid teens could catch a glimpse of their favorite stars." Debuting before social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, the show is considered one "of the first truly interactive television shows, utilizing the synergy of the internet and television to countdown the top music videos of the day." Among the interactive features of "TRL" was the video shoutout, a 15-second video clip where fans could "appear, screen-within-screen, during the airing of a music video" screaming about their love for an artist or band. Because "TRL" was initially filmed in an age before social media, the show was seen as "the last pure view of...big celebrities. You were getting unadulterated ego." The show had a number of notably unscripted moments happen in studio, such as band members streaking or celebrities showing up unannounced. Hanson, a frequent guest on "TRL", said "Before you could see what an artist had for breakfast from Twitter, "TRL" was the place you were going to hear about it."


title: Total Request Live

text: "TRL" not only became "destination TV" for young people to get news on their favorite stars and on pop culture, but also became a place for viewers to stay updated with major world events as "MTV News" reporters would make regular appearances announcing news headlines. As "MTV News" correspondent SuChin Pak said, "For young people, "TRL" was not only where you got to see your rock idols and pop stars, but where you connected with the major events happening around the world, outside the small town you were living in."


title: Total Request Live

text: The show was likened to the millennial generation's version of "American Bandstand" or "Soul Train," averaging 853,000 viewers in 1999 according to Nielsen. "TRL" is widely viewed as the show that launched the careers of many artists from the late 1990s and early 2000s. "MTV News" correspondent John Norris said, "It's an interesting debate whether NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Britney, Christina [Aguilera], Jessica [Simpson] and Good Charlotte would have had the careers they had without "TRL"." Writing for "Spin", Peter Gaston opined that "TRL" "helped keep the major labels afloat by boosting pop artists sales numbers on the "Billboard" charts." "TRL" became a "must-stop on every celebrity's promotional itinerary." Musicians themselves including Eminem and Britney Spears would sometimes fill in for the hosts. The show was also the site of in-studio performances by big artists promoting album releases.


title: Total Request Live

text: Even though late ‘90s boy bands like Backstreet Boys and NSYNC released albums before "TRL" began in the fall of 1998, both groups only reached their commercial peaks after their videos were seen on "TRL". In 1999, the Backstreet Boys' second LP, "Millennium", achieved the highest first week sales ever from an LP at the time.


title: Total Request Live

text: In 2000, when NSYNC released their second LP "No Strings Attached", they topped the Backstreet Boys' first week sales and set a record for first-week album sales that would last for 15 years until Adele’s 25 surpassed the record in 2015. Fans numbering in the thousands stood outside "TRL"'s studio to see NSYNC or Backstreet Boys appear as guests, resulting in the closure of Times Square. Throughout most of 1998, 1999, and 2000, videos by the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC would claim the top position on the countdown. Other boy bands of the era who achieved number one videos or received heavy rotation on the show included 98 Degrees, O-Town, B2K, soulDecision, and LFO.


title: Total Request Live

text: Pop singers like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore and Jessica Simpson all made their music debuts on "TRL" as well. Spears, Aguilera, and Simpson would often appear as guests and their music videos would receive regular airplay. Simpson’s video "Irresistible" reached number two on the countdown in 2001. Shakira made her English-language pop debut with "Whenever, Wherever", and saw regular number one spot status with the songs "Objection (Tango)", "La Tortura" (the first only Spanish-speaking song to reach number one on the countdown), and "Hips Don't Lie". Mandy Moore saw success on the show with her debut single's "Candy" in 1999 and "I Wanna Be with You", but did not score her first number-one video until her 2002 single "Crush".


title: Total Request Live

text: Jessica Simpson's younger sister Ashlee Simpson is another pop singer that has had success on "TRL." Ashlee would go on to score two videos in the number one spot with "Boyfriend" and "Invisible." The artist with the most retired videos is Britney Spears with 13 videos retired, an honorary retired video ("I'm a Slave 4 U"), and three videos retired number one. A "pop princess" streak occurred in March 2007, where the number one and number two spots were women for every show. There was no other month in the history of "TRL" where every show had a woman at the top spot.


title: Total Request Live

text: Although best known for featuring pop acts, "TRL" regularly featured videos and performances from rock bands in genres such as nu metal, pop punk and emo pop. The nu metal/rap metal bands Korn and Limp Bizkit were particularly popular on the program in the late 1990s, and often shared airtime with Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. In later years, Green Day, Blink-182, My Chemical Romance, Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy and Sum 41 also were successful on the TRL chart.


title: Total Request Live

text: Vanessa Hudgens premiered "Come Back to Me", which peaked at number three, and "Say OK", which only went to number ten. The Jonas Brothers premiered their songs "Hold On" and "SOS" on the show; "SOS" made it on the countdown peaking at number six. "When You Look Me in the Eyes" was on the charts for several weeks before peaking at number one, after fans crushed and flooded the "TRL" site by requesting the video hundreds of times on March 19, 2008. "Burnin' Up" has also made it to the number-one spot on "TRL". Ashley Tisdale premiered "He Said She Said" on "TRL" and it reached the number-one spot for 16 days and was retired at 40 days in the countdown, becoming the most successful song for a Disney recording artist in the show. Aly & AJ's videos for "Rush", "Chemicals React" and "Potential Breakup Song" have all been on the countdown with "Rush" peaking at number two and "Chemicals React" peaking at number four, and "Potential Breakup Song" peaking at number five. Miley Cyrus's "7 Things" premiered on "TRL" and reached number four on the show.


title: Total Request Live

text: A PC video game called MTV Total Request Live Trivia was developed by Hypnotix and published by Take-Two Interactive, with a release on August 14, 2001. GameRankings rates it at 53.89% acclaim, with a 48/100 grade from Metacritic.


title: Patricia Quinn (Northern Irish actress)

text: Patricia Quinn, Lady Stephens (born 28 May 1944) is an actress and singer from Northern Ireland. She is best known for her role as Magenta in the 1975 film "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," and the original stage play from which it was adapted. She appeared as Dr. Nation McKinley in the 1981 film "Shock Treatment". In 2012, Quinn played the role of Megan in "The Lords of Salem".


title: Patricia Quinn (Northern Irish actress)

text: Quinn was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to James Connolly Quinn, a bookmaker, and his wife Rebecca. She attended the Princess Gardens Grammar School, where she developed an early talent for acting. Following stints at Belfast's Arts Theatre and British Drama League, she left for London aged 17. In 1969, she trained at the Drama Centre London while simultaneously working as a blackjack-dealing Bunny at the Playboy Club in Mayfair. In 1971, she was in repertory for six months with the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.


title: Patricia Quinn (Northern Irish actress)

text: Quinn is known primarily for her role as Magenta in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975). In the film's opening title sequence, the movements of her disembodied lips are synchronised with the lyrics of the title song, "Science Fiction/Double Feature" (the singing voice is that of scriptwriter and actor Richard O'Brien).