title: Formation (association football)

text: A variation of the 4–3–3 wherein a striker gives way to a central attacking midfielder. The formation focuses on the attacking midfielder moving play through the centre with the strikers on either side. It is a much narrower setup in comparison to the 4–3–3 and is usually dependent on the "1" to create chances. Examples of sides which won trophies using this formation were the 2002–03 UEFA Cup and 2003–04 UEFA Champions League winners Porto under José Mourinho's; and the 2002–03 UEFA Champions League and 2003–04 Serie A-winning Milan team, and 2009–10 Premier League winners Chelsea, both managed by Carlo Ancelotti. This formation was also adopted by Massimiliano Allegri for the 2010–11 Serie A title-winning season for Milan. It was also the favoured formation of Maurizio Sarri during his time at Empoli between 2012 and 2015, during which time they won promotion to Serie A and subsequently avoided relegation, finishing 15th in the 2014–15 Serie A season.


title: Formation (association football)

text: A variation of the 4–3–3 with a defensive midfielder, two central midfielders and a fluid front three.


title: Formation (association football)

text: The , commonly described as the "Christmas tree" formation, has another forward brought on for a midfielder to play "in the hole", so leaving two forwards slightly behind the most forward striker.


title: Formation (association football)

text: Terry Venables and Christian Gross used this formation during their time in charge of Tottenham Hotspur. Since then, the formation has lost its popularity in England. It is, however, most known for being the formation Carlo Ancelotti used on-and-off during his time as a coach with Milan to lead his team to win the 2007 UEFA Champions League title.


title: Formation (association football)

text: In this approach, the middle of the three central midfielders act as a playmaker while one of the attacking midfielders plays in a free role. However, it is also common for the three midfielders to be energetic shuttlers, providing for the individual talent of the two attacking midfielders ahead. The "Christmas tree" formation is considered a relatively narrow formation and depends on full-backs to provide presence in wide areas. The formation is also relatively fluid. During open play, one of the side central midfielders may drift to the flank to add additional presence.


title: Formation (association football)

text: A flexible formation in prospects to defensive or offensive orientation, as both the wide players and the full-backs may join the attack. In defence, this formation is similar to either the 4–5–1 or 4–4–1–1. It is used to maintain possession of the ball and stopping opponent attacks by controlling the midfield area of the field. The lone striker may be very tall and strong to hold the ball up as his midfielders and full-backs join him in attack. The striker could also be very fast. In these cases, the opponent's defence will be forced to fall back early, thereby leaving space for the offensive central midfielder. This formation is used especially when a playmaker is to be highlighted. The variations of personnel used on the flanks in this set-up include using traditional wingers, using inverted wingers or simply using wide midfielders. Different teams and managers have different interpretations of the 4–2–3–1, but one common factor among them all is the presence of the double pivot. The double pivot is the usage of two holding midfielders in front of the defence.


title: Formation (association football)

text: At international level, this formation is used by the Belgian, French, Dutch and German national teams in an asymmetric shape, and often with strikers as wide midfielders or inverted wingers. The formation is also currently used by Brazil as an alternative to the 4–2–4 formation of the late 1950s to 1970. Implemented similarly to how the original 4–2–4 was used back then, use of this formation in this manner is very offensive, creating a six-man attack and a six-man defence tactical layout. The front four attackers are arranged as a pair of wide forwards and a playmaker forward who play in support of a lone striker. Mário Zagallo also considers the Brazil 1970 football team he coached as pioneers of 4–2–3–1.


title: Formation (association football)

text: In recent years, with full-backs having ever more increasing attacking roles, the wide players (be they deep lying forwards, inverted wingers, attacking wide midfielders) have been tasked with the defensive responsibility to track and pin down the opposition full-backs. Manuel Pellegrini is an avid proponent of this formation, and frequently uses it in the football clubs that he manages.


title: Formation (association football)

text: This formation has been very frequently used by managers all over the world in the modern game. One particularly effective use of it was Liverpool under Rafael Benítez, who deployed Javier Mascherano, Xabi Alonso and Steven Gerrard in central midfield, with Gerrard acting in a more advanced role in order to link up with Fernando Torres, who acted as the central striker. Another notable example at club level is Bayern Munich under Jupp Heynckes at his treble-clinching 2012–13 season. Mauricio Pochettino also uses this formation.


title: Formation (association football)

text: Often referred to as the "magic rectangle" or "magic square", this formation was used by France under Michel Hidalgo at the 1982 World Cup and Euro 1984, and later by Henri Michel at the 1986 World Cup and a whole generation, for Brazil with Telê Santana, Carlos Alberto Parreira and Vanderlei Luxemburgo, by Arturo Salah and Francisco Maturana in Colombia. The "Magic Rectangle" is formed by combining two box-to-box midfielders with two deep-lying ("hanging") forwards across the midfield. This provides a balance in the distribution of possible moves and adds a dynamic quality to midfield play.


title: Formation (association football)

text: This formation was used by former Real Madrid manager Manuel Pellegrini and met with considerable praise. Pellegrini also used this formation while with Villarreal and Málaga. The formation is closely related to a 4–2–4 previously used by Fernando Riera, Pellegrini's mentor, and that can be traced back to Chile in 1962 who (may have) adopted it from the Frenchman Albert Batteux at the Stade de Reims of 50s.


title: Formation (association football)

text: This formation had been previously used at Real Madrid by Vanderlei Luxemburgo during his failed stint at the club during the latter part of the 2004–05 season and throughout the 2005–06 season. This formation has been described as being "deeply flawed" and "suicidal". Luxemburgo is not the only one to use this although it had been used earlier by Brazil in the early 1980s. At first, Telê Santana, then Carlos Alberto Parreira and Vanderlei Luxemburgo proposed basing the "magic rectangle" on the work of the wing-backs. The rectangle becomes a 3–4–3 on the attack because one of the wing-backs moves downfield.


title: Formation (association football)

text: In another sense, the Colombian 4–2–2–2 is closely related to the 4–4–2 diamond of Brazil, with a style different from the French-Chilean trend and is based on the complementation of a box-to box with 10 classic. It emphasises the triangulation, but especially in the surprise of attack.


title: Formation (association football)

text: The 4–2–2–2 formation consists of the standard defensive four (right back, two centre backs, and left back), with two centre midfielders, two support strikers, and two out and out strikers. Similar to the 4–6–0, the formation requires a particularly alert and mobile front four to work successfully. The formation has also been used on occasion by the Brazilian national team, notably in the 1998 World Cup final.


title: Formation (association football)

text: The somewhat unconventional 4–2–1–3 formation was developed by José Mourinho during his time at Inter Milan, including in the 2010 UEFA Champions League Final. By using captain Javier Zanetti and Esteban Cambiasso in holding midfield positions, he was able to push more players to attack. Wesley Sneijder filled the attacking midfield role and the front three operated as three strikers, rather than having a striker and one player on each wing. Using this formation, Mourinho won The Treble with Inter in only his second season in charge of the club.


title: Formation (association football)

text: As the system becomes more developed and flexible, small groups can be identified to work together in more efficient ways by giving them more specific and different roles within the same lines, and numbers like 4–2–1–3, 4–1–2–3 and even 4–2–2–2 occur.


title: Formation (association football)

text: Many of the current systems have three different formations in each third, defending, middle, and attacking. The goal is to outnumber the other team in all parts of the field but to not completely wear out all the players on the team using it before the full ninety minutes are up. So the one single number is confusing as it may not actually look like a 4–2–1–3 when a team is defending or trying to gain possession. In a positive attack it may look exactly like a 4–2–1–3.


title: Formation (association football)

text: 4–5–1 is a conservative formation; however, if the two midfield wingers play a more attacking role, it can be likened to 4–3–3. The formation can be used to grind out 0–0 draws or preserve a lead, as the packing of the centre midfield makes it difficult for the opposition to build up play. Because of the "closeness" of the midfield, the opposing team's forwards will often be starved of possession. Due to the lone striker, however, the centre of the midfield does have the responsibility of pushing forward as well. The defensive midfielder will often control the pace of the game.


title: Formation (association football)

text: A highly unconventional formation, the 4–6–0 is an evolution of the 4–2–3–1 or 4–3–3 in which the centre forward is exchanged for a player who normally plays as a "trequartista" (that is, in the "hole"). Suggested as a possible formation for the future of football, the formation sacrifices an out-and-out striker for the tactical advantage of a mobile front four attacking from a position that the opposition defenders cannot mark without being pulled out of position. Because of the intelligence and pace required by the front four attackers to create and attack any space left by the opposition defenders, however, the formation requires a very skilful and well-drilled front four. Due to these demanding requirements from the attackers, and the novelty of playing without a proper goalscorer, the formation has been adopted by very few teams, and rarely consistently. As with the development of many formations, the origins and originators are uncertain, but arguably the first reference to a professional team adopting a similar formation is Anghel Iordănescu's Romania in the 1994 World Cup Round of 16, when Romania won 3–2 against Argentina.


title: Formation (association football)

text: The first team to adopt the formation systematically was Luciano Spalletti's Roma side during the 2005–06 Serie A season, mostly out of necessity as his "strikerless" formation, and then notably by Alex Ferguson's Manchester United side that won the Premier League and Champions League in 2007–08. The formation was unsuccessfully used by Craig Levein's Scotland against Czech Republic to widespread condemnation. At Euro 2012, Spain coach Vicente del Bosque used the 4–6–0 for his side's 1–1 group stage draw against Italy and their 4–0 win versus Italy in the final of the tournament.


title: Formation (association football)

text: Using a 3–4–3, the midfielders are expected to split their time between attacking and defending. Having only three dedicated defenders means that if the opposing team breaks through the midfield, they will have a greater chance to score than with a more conventional defensive configuration, such as 4–5–1 or 4–4–2. However, the three forwards allow for a greater concentration on attack. This formation is used by more offensive-minded teams. The formation was famously used by Liverpool under Rafael Benítez during the second half of the 2005 UEFA Champions League Final to come back from a three-goal deficit. It was also notably used by Chelsea when they won the Premier League under manager Antonio Conte in the 2016–17 season and when they won the 2021 UEFA Champions League Final under Thomas Tuchel.


title: Formation (association football)

text: This formation is similar to 5–3–2, but with some important tweaks: there is usually no sweeper (or "libero") but rather three classic centre-backs, and the two wing-backs are oriented more towards the attack. Because of this, the most central midfielder tends to remain further back in order to help prevent counter-attacks. It also differs from the classical 3–5–2 of the WW by having a non-staggered midfield. There are several coaches claiming to be the inventors of this formation, but the first to successfully employ it at the highest level was Carlos Bilardo, who led Argentina to win the 1986 World Cup using the 3–5–2. The high point of the 3–5–2's influence was the 1990 World Cup, with both finalists, Bilardo's Argentina and Franz Beckenbauer's West Germany employing it.


title: Formation (association football)

text: Italian coach Antonio Conte successfully implemented the 3–5–2 at Juventus, having won three Serie A consecutive titles between 2012 and 2014, the first unbeaten (record in a league championship with 20 contestants) and the last reaching the points record (102). After coaching the Italian national team, Conte used again the 3–5–2 system at Chelsea during the 2016–17 Premier League season, leading the club to the league title and an FA Cup final. In order to properly counteract the additional forward pressure from the wing-backs in the system, other sides, including Ronald Koeman's Everton and Mauricio Pochettino's Tottenham, also used the formation against Chelsea. At international level, Louis van Gaal utilised 3–5–2 with the Netherlands in the 2014 World Cup, in which they finished third. Notably, this formation was specifically employed as a counter to the challenge of possession football used by the Spanish national side. Cesare Prandelli used it for Italy's 1–1 draw with Spain in the group stage of Euro 2012, with some commentators seeing Daniele De Rossi as a sweeper. The Netherlands used it to greater effect against Spain during the group stage of the 2014 World Cup, completing a 5–1 win. This was successful in minimizing the Dutch weaknesses (inexperience in defence) and maximising their strengths (world-class forwards in Robin van Persie and Arjen Robben).


title: Formation (association football)

text: 3–4–1–2 is a variant of 3–5–2 where the wingers are more withdrawn in favour of one of the central midfielders being pushed further upfield into the "number 10" playmaker position. Martin O'Neill successfully used this formation during the early years of his reign as Celtic manager, noticeably taking them to the 2003 UEFA Cup Final.


title: Formation (association football)

text: This uncommon modern formation focuses on ball possession in the midfield. In fact, it is very rare to see it as an initial formation, as it is more useful for maintaining a lead or tie score. Its more common variants are 3–4–2–1 or 3–4–3 diamond, which use two wing-backs. The lone forward must be tactically gifted, not only because he focuses on scoring but also on assisting with back passes to his teammates. Once the team is leading the game, there is an even stronger tactical focus on ball control, short passes and running down the clock. On the other hand, when the team is losing, at least one of the playmakers will more frequently play on the edge of the area to add depth to the attack. Steve Sampson (for the United States at the 1998 World Cup) and Guus Hiddink (for Australia at the 2006 World Cup) are two of the few coaches who have used this formation. Hiddink used the 3–3–3–1 formation for the Socceroos as well.


title: Formation (association football)

text: The 3–3–1–3 was formed of a modification to the Dutch 4–3–3 system Ajax had developed. Coaches like Louis van Gaal and Johan Cruyff brought it to even further attacking extremes and the system eventually found its way to Barcelona, where players such as Andrés Iniesta and Xavi were reared into 3–3–1–3's philosophy. It demands intense pressing high up the pitch especially from the forwards, and also an extremely high defensive line, basically playing the whole game inside the opponent's half. It requires extreme technical precision and rapid ball circulation since one slip or dispossession can result in a vulnerable counter-attack situation. Cruyff's variant relied on a flatter and wider midfield, but Van Gaal used an offensive midfielder and midfield diamond to link up with the front three more effectively. Marcelo Bielsa has used the system with some success with Argentina and Chile's national teams, and is currently one of the few high-profile managers to use the system in competition today. Diego Simeone had also tried it occasionally at River Plate.


title: Formation (association football)

text: The 3–3–3–1 system is a very attacking formation and its compact nature is ideally suited for midfield domination and ball possession. It means a coach can field more attacking players and add extra strength through the spine of the team. The attacking three are usually two wing-backs or wingers with the central player of the three occupying a central attacking midfield or second striker role behind the centre forward. The midfield three consists of two centre midfielders ahead of one central defensive midfielder or alternatively one central midfielder and two defensive midfielders. The defensive three can consist of three centre backs or one centre back with a full back either side.


title: Formation (association football)

text: The 3–3–3–1 formation was used by Marcelo Bielsa's Chile in the 2010 World Cup, with three centre-backs paired with two wing-backs and a holding player, although a variation is the practical hourglass, using three wide players, a narrow three, a wide three and a centre-forward.


title: Formation (association football)

text: This formation has three central defenders, possibly with one acting as a sweeper. This system merges the winger and full-back positions into the wing-back, whose job it is to work their flank along the full length of the pitch, supporting both the defence and the attack. At club level, the 5–3–2 was famously employed by Helenio Herrera in his Inter Milan side, influencing many other Italian teams of the era. The Brazil team which won the 2002 FIFA World Cups also employed this formation with their wing-backs Cafu and Roberto Carlos two of the best known proponents of this position.


title: Formation (association football)

text: A variant of the 5–3–2, this involves a more withdrawn sweeper, who may join the midfield, and more advanced full-backs. The 1990 world champion West German teams was known for employing this tactic under Franz Beckenbauer, with his successor Berti Vogts retaining the scheme with some variations during his tenure.


title: Formation (association football)

text: This is a particularly defensive formation, with an isolated forward and a packed defence. Again, however, a couple of attacking full-backs can make this formation resemble something like a 3–6–1. One of the most famous cases of its use is the Euro 2004-winning Greek national team.


title: Formation (association football)

text: When a player is sent off (i.e. after being shown a red card) or leaves the field due to an injury or other reason with no ability to be replaced with a substitute, teams generally fall back to defensive formations such as 4–4–1 or 5–3–1. Only when facing a negative result will a team with ten players play in a risky attacking formation such as 4–3–2, 3–4–2, or even 4–2–3. If one or more players are also sent off, teams often adopt all-out attacking or all-out defensive formations, depending on the score.


title: Charter school

text: A charter school is a school that receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located. It is independent in the sense that it operates according to the basic principle of autonomy for accountability, that it is freed from the rules but accountable for results.


title: Charter school

text: Charter schools are publicly funded through taxation and operated by privately owned management companies. Charter schools are often established, operated, and maintained by for-profit organizations, and are not necessarily held to the same standards as traditional public schools.


title: Charter school

text: There is debate on whether charter schools should be described as private schools or state schools. Advocates of the charter model state that they are public schools because they are open to all students and do not charge tuition. Critics of charter schools assert that charter schools' private operation with lack of public accountability makes them more like private institutions subsidized by the public.


title: Charter school

text: All Australian private schools have received some federal government funding since the 1970s. Since then they have educated approximately 30% of high school students. None of them are charter schools, as all charge tuition fees.


title: Charter school

text: Since 2009, the Government of Western Australia has been trialling the Independent Public School (IPS) Initiative. These public schools have greater autonomy and could be regarded as akin to 'charter' Schools (but the term is not used in Australia).


title: Charter school

text: The first charter school in Bulgaria, 151 General Education School with Interest-Based Profiles, was established in 1990 in Sofia, Bulgaria.


title: Charter school

text: The Canadian province of Alberta enacted legislation in 1994 enabling charter schools. The first charter schools under the new legislation were established in 1995: New Horizons Charter School, Suzuki Charter School, and the Centre for Academic and Personal Excellence. , Alberta remains the only Canadian province that has enabled charter schools.


title: Charter school

text: There are 23 charter school campuses operated by 13 Alberta charter schools. The number of charter schools was limited to a maximum of 15, but the Provincial government eliminated this cap effective September 2020.


title: Charter school

text: Chile has a very long history of private subsidized schooling, akin to charter schooling in the United States. Before the 1980s, most private subsidized schools were religious and owned by churches or other private parties, but they received support from the central government. In the 1980s, the government of Augusto Pinochet promoted neoliberal reforms in the country. In 1981 a competitive voucher system in education was adopted. These vouchers could be used in public schools or private subsidized schools (which can be run for profit). After this reform, the share of private subsidized schools, many of them secular, grew from 18.5% of schools in 1980 to 32.7% of schools in 2001. As of 2012, nearly 60% of Chilean students study in charter schools.


title: Charter school

text: Free primary schools have long existed in Denmark, often with roots in Grundtvig's folk high school movement. Many other independent schools have a religious focus or cater for the German-speaking minority in Schleswig. Danish private schools have often been set up on the initiative of a group of parents. Around 75% of pupils' costs are covered by the public purse, with the remainder paid by parents. A supervisor, appointed by the parents, checks that teaching of core subjects meets the standards of the elementary school. Some 90 000 pupils (15 % of schoolchildren) attend Danish private schools. Profits in Danish private schools stay in the business.


title: Charter school

text: The United Kingdom established grant-maintained schools in England and Wales in 1988. They allowed individual schools that were independent of the local school authority. When they were abolished in 1998, most turned into foundation schools, which are really under their local district authority but still have a high degree of autonomy.


title: Charter school

text: Prior to the 2010 general election, there were about 200 academies (publicly funded schools with a significant degree of autonomy) in England.


title: Charter school

text: In 2007, there were 75 private general education schools in Finland. Of these, 47 were members of the Association of Private Schools. In addition to special education schools, 13% of the pupils in its member schools were in adult secondary schools, 8% in language schools, 8% in special education schools (Steiner schools and Freinet schools) and 5% in Christian schools. According to the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, twenty of the private schools were Christian in 2011.


title: Charter school

text: Private schools started to be established in Finland in the mid-19th century, reaching a peak of 346 schools between 1965 and 1966, before their number started to decline in the late 1960s and 1970s due to municipalisations, nationalisations and closures. More than 80% of Finnish upper secondary schools were originally founded and run by a private association or limited company. Private primary schools need a licence from the Government and other educational institutions from the Ministry of Education to operate. Most private schools follow the national curriculum. Exceptions to this are international and foreign language schools (such as International Baccalaureate schools). Tuition fees may not be charged in Finnish private schools (with the exception of some foreign language schools), but the schools are financed by per pupil grants from the state and municipalities. The operator of a private school must be a non-profit-making, non-profit-making organisation.


title: Charter school

text: The operation of private preschools, primary and secondary schools is permitted in accordance with Art. 7 of the "Grundgesetz" (German constitution). They are regulated by the applicable laws of the respective federal state they are based in and must not be "inferior to the state schools in terms of their educational aims, their facilities or the professional training of their teaching staff". Furthermore, "segregation of pupils according to the means of their parents" may not be encouraged. In return, all private schools are supported financially by government bodies, comparable to charter schools. The amount of control over school organization, curriculum etc. taken over by the state differs from state to state and from school to school. Average financial support given by government bodies was 85% of total costs in 2009.


title: Charter school

text: Some private schools in Hong Kong receive government subsidy under the Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS). DSS schools are free to design their curriculum, select their own students, and charge for tuition. A number of DSS schools were formerly state schools prior to joining the scheme.


title: Charter school

text: Charter schools in Ireland were set up mostly in the 1700s by the Church of Ireland to educate the poor. They were state or charity sponsored, but run by the church. The model to copy was Kilkenny College, but critics like Bernard Mandeville felt that educating too many poor children would lead them to have unrealistic expectations. Notable examples are the Collegiate School Celbridge, Midleton College, Wilson's Hospital School and The King's Hospital.


title: Charter school

text: Charter schools in New Zealand, labelled as Partnership schools | kura hourua, were allowed for after an agreement between the National Party and the ACT Party following the 2011 general election. The controversial legislation passed with a five-vote majority. A small number of charter schools started in 2013 and 2014. All cater for students who have struggled in the normal state school system. Most of the students have issues with drugs, alcohol, poor attendance and achievement. Most of the students are Maori or Pacific Islander. One of the schools is set up as a military academy. One of the schools ran into major difficulties within weeks of starting. It is now being run by an executive manager from Child, Youth and Family, a government social welfare organization, together with a commissioner appointed by the Ministry of Education. 36 organizations have applied to start charter schools.


title: Charter school

text: As in Sweden, the publicly funded but privately run charter schools in Norway are named "friskoler" and was formally instituted in 2003, but dismissed in 2007. Private schools have since medieval times been a part of the education system, and is today consisting of 63 Montessori and 32 Steiner (Waldorf) charter schools, some religious schools and 11 non-governmental funded schools like the Oslo International School, the German School Max Tau and the French School Lycée Français, a total of 195 schools.


title: Charter school

text: All charter schools can have a list of admission priorities, but only the non-governmental funded schools are allowed to select their students and to make a profit. The charter schools cannot have entrance exams, and supplemental fees are very restricted. In 2013, a total of 19,105 children were enrolled in privately run schools.


title: Charter school

text: The Swedish system of "friskolor" ("free schools") was instituted in 1992. These are publicly funded by school vouchers and can be run by not-for-profits as well as for-profit companies. The schools are restricted: for example, they are prohibited from supplementing the public funds with tuition or other fees; pupils must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis; and entrance exams are not permitted. There are about 900 charter schools throughout the country.


title: Charter school

text: According to the Education Commission of the States, "charter schools are semi-autonomous public schools that receive public funds. They operate under a written contract with a state, district or other entity (referred to as an authorizer or sponsor). This contract – or charter – details how the school will be organized and managed, what students will be expected to achieve, and how success will be measured. Many charters are exempt from a variety of laws and regulations affecting other public schools if they continue to meet the terms of their charters." These schools, however, need to follow state-mandated curricula and are subject to the same rules and regulations that cover them, although there is flexibility in the way this is realized.


title: Charter school

text: Minnesota passed the first charter school law in the United States in 1991. , Minnesota had 165 registered charter schools, with over 41,000 students attending. The first of these to be approved, Bluffview Montessori School in Winona, Minnesota, opened in 1992. The first charter to operate was City Academy in St. Paul. Some specialized Minnesota charter schools include the Metro Deaf School (1993), Community of Peace Academy (1995), and the Mainstreet School of Performing Arts (2004).


title: Charter school

text: The most radical experimentation with charter schools in the United States possibly occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (2005). the New Orleans Public Schools system was engaged in reforms aimed at decentralizing power away from the pre-Katrina public school board to individual charter school principals and boards, monitoring charter school performance by granting renewable, five-year operating contracts permitting the closure of those not succeeding, and parents the choice to enroll their children in almost any school in the district. New Orleans is one of two cities in the United States of America where the majority of school students attend charter schools. 78% of all New Orleans schoolchildren studied in charter schools during the 2011–12 school year. By May 2014 all but five of New Orleans' public schools were charter schools.


title: Charter school

text: Unlike their public counterparts, laws governing charter schools vary greatly. The three states with the highest number of students enrolled in charter schools are California, Arizona, and Michigan. These differences largely relate to what types of public agencies are permitted to authorize the creation of charter schools, whether or not and through what processes private schools can convert to charter schools, and what certification, if any, charter school teachers require.


title: Charter school

text: In California, local school districts are the most frequent granters of school charters. If a local school district denies a charter application, or if the proposed charter school provides services not provided by the local school districts, a county board consisting of superintendents from state schools or the state board of education can grant a charter. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools grants charters in Arizona. Local school districts and the state board of education can also grant charters. In contrast, the creation of charter schools in Michigan can be authorized only by local school boards or by the governing school boards of state colleges and universities.


title: Charter school

text: Different states with charter school legislation have adopted widely different positions in regard to the conversion of private schools to charter schools. California, for example, does not allow the conversion of private schools into charter schools. Both Arizona and Michigan allow such conversions, but with different requirements. A private school wishing to convert to a charter school in Michigan, for example, must show that at least 25% of its student population is made up of new students. Legislation in Arizona stipulates that private schools that wish to become charter schools within that state must have admission policies that are fair and non-discriminatory. Also, while Michigan and California require teachers at charter schools to hold state certification, those in Arizona do not.


title: Charter school

text: Charter schools were targeted as a major component of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Specifically, the act specifies that students attending schools labeled as under-performing by state standards now have the option to transfer to a different school in the district, whether it is a state, private, or charter school. The act also suggested that if a failing school cannot show adequate yearly progress, it will be designated a charter school.


title: Charter school

text: Typically, charter schools claim nonprofit status, but most operate in a for-profit system. Additionally, the buildings in which they operate are generally owned by private landlords. Accordingly, this asset class generates interest from real-estate investors as well as building contractors. Charter schools have grown in number in the US since the 1990s, but have experienced many failures. A recent study found that more than a quarter of new charter schools had closed after 5 years, and after just 15 years of operation, about half had closed. , 6,700 charter schools enroll approximately 2.9 million students in the United States.


title: Charter school

text: Charter cyber schools operate like typical charter schools in that they are independently organized schools, but are conducted partly or entirely over the Internet. Proponents say this allows for much more flexibility compared with traditional schools.


title: Charter school

text: For 2000–2001, studies estimated that there are about 45,000 online K–12 students nationally. Six years later, a study by Picciano and Seamon (2006) found that over 1 million students were involved. These numbers increased to 6.7 million students in 2013. A study by Watson, Murin, Vashaw, Gemin, and Rapp found that cyber charter schools are currently (as of 2014) operating in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.


title: Charter school

text: The increase of these online campuses has aroused controversy. In November, 2015, researchers at the University of Washington, Stanford University, and the Mathematica Policy Research group published the first major study of online charter schools in the United States, the "National Study of Online Charter Schools". It found "significantly weaker academic performance" in mathematics and reading in such schools when compared to conventional ones. The study resulted from research carried out in 17 US states which had online charter schools. It concluded that keeping online pupils focused on their work was the biggest problem faced by online charter schools and that in mathematics the difference in attainment between online pupils and their conventionally-educated peers equated to the cyber pupils missing a whole academic year in school.


title: Charter school

text: Four states have adopted specific legislation tailored to cyber charter schools. One example is Arizona, which has about 3,500 students in cyber schools, about half of them cyber charter schools and the other half governed by traditional, brick-and-mortar public school districts. The cyber schools teach students from kindergarten to 12th grade, and the setting varies from being entirely online in one's home to spending all of the class time in a formal school building while learning over the Internet.


title: Charter school

text: Cyber charter school diplomas have been unevenly valued by post-secondary institutions. Universities sometimes apply additional requirements or have cyber-charter quotas limiting the number of applicants. The US military also classifies non-traditional diplomas at a lower tier, although as of 2012 this could be bypassed by high ASVAB test scores.


title: Charter school

text: In 2014, New Orleans became the first place in the United States to establish an all-charter school district, called the Recovery School District.


title: Charter school

text: A 2017 policy statement from the National Education Association expressed its strong commitment to public schools. Charter schools are funded by taxpayers so there must be the same liability, transparency, safeguards, and impartiality as public schools. Forty-four American states along with the District of Columbia implement legislation on state charter schools. However, many states do not compel charters to abide by open meeting statutes as well as prerequisites on conflict of interest that pertain to school districts, boards, and employees.


title: Charter school

text: The Trump administration's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was a major proponent of school choice and charter schools.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree ) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical or genetic characteristics. All life on Earth is part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: In a "rooted" phylogenetic tree, each node with descendants represents the inferred most recent common ancestor of those descendants, and the edge lengths in some trees may be interpreted as time estimates. Each node is called a taxonomic unit. Internal nodes are generally called hypothetical taxonomic units, as they cannot be directly observed. Trees are useful in fields of biology such as bioinformatics, systematics, and phylogenetics. "Unrooted" trees illustrate only the relatedness of the leaf nodes and do not require the ancestral root to be known or inferred.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: The idea of a "tree of life" arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower into higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being). Early representations of "branching" phylogenetic trees include a "paleontological chart" showing the geological relationships among plants and animals in the book "Elementary Geology", by Edward Hitchcock (first edition: 1840).


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Charles Darwin featured a diagrammatic evolutionary "tree" in his 1859 book "On the Origin of Species". Over a century later, evolutionary biologists still use tree diagrams to depict evolution because such diagrams effectively convey the concept that speciation occurs through the adaptive and semirandom splitting of lineages.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: The term "phylogenetic", or "phylogeny", derives from the two ancient greek words (), meaning "race, lineage", and (), meaning "origin, source".


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: A rooted phylogenetic tree (see two graphics at top) is a directed tree with a unique node — the root — corresponding to the (usually imputed) most recent common ancestor of all the entities at the leaves of the tree. The root node does not have a parent node, but serves as the parent of all other nodes in the tree. The root is therefore a node of degree 2, while other internal nodes have a minimum degree of 3 (where "degree" here refers to the total number of incoming and outgoing edges).


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: The most common method for rooting trees is the use of an uncontroversial outgroup—close enough to allow inference from trait data or molecular sequencing, but far enough to be a clear outgroup. Another method is midpoint rooting, or a tree can also be rooted by using a non-stationary substitution model.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Unrooted trees illustrate the relatedness of the leaf nodes without making assumptions about ancestry. They do not require the ancestral root to be known or inferred. Unrooted trees can always be generated from rooted ones by simply omitting the root. By contrast, inferring the root of an unrooted tree requires some means of identifying ancestry. This is normally done by including an outgroup in the input data so that the root is necessarily between the outgroup and the rest of the taxa in the tree, or by introducing additional assumptions about the relative rates of evolution on each branch, such as an application of the molecular clock hypothesis.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Both rooted and unrooted trees can be either bifurcating or multifurcating. A rooted bifurcating tree has exactly two descendants arising from each interior node (that is, it forms a binary tree), and an unrooted bifurcating tree takes the form of an unrooted binary tree, a free tree with exactly three neighbors at each internal node. In contrast, a rooted multifurcating tree may have more than two children at some nodes and an unrooted multifurcating tree may have more than three neighbors at some nodes.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Both rooted and unrooted trees can be either labeled or unlabeled. A labeled tree has specific values assigned to its leaves, while an unlabeled tree, sometimes called a tree shape, defines a topology only. Some sequence-based trees built from a small genomic locus, such as Phylotree, feature internal nodes labeled with inferred ancestral haplotypes.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: The number of possible trees for a given number of leaf nodes depends on the specific type of tree, but there are always more labeled than unlabeled trees, more multifurcating than bifurcating trees, and more rooted than unrooted trees. The last distinction is the most biologically relevant; it arises because there are many places on an unrooted tree to put the root. For bifurcating labeled trees, the total number of rooted trees is:


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Among labeled bifurcating trees, the number of unrooted trees with formula_3 leaves is equal to the number of rooted trees with formula_7 leaves.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: The number of rooted trees grows quickly as a function of the number of tips. For 10 tips, there are more than formula_8 possible bifurcating trees, and the number of multifurcating trees rises faster, with ca. 7 times as many of the latter as of the former.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text:
! Labeled
leaves !! Binary
unrooted trees !! Binary
rooted trees !! Multifurcating
rooted trees !! All possible
rooted trees


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: A dendrogram is a general name for a tree, whether phylogenetic or not, and hence also for the diagrammatic representation of a phylogenetic tree.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: A cladogram only represents a branching pattern; i.e., its branch lengths do not represent time or relative amount of character change, and its internal nodes do not represent ancestors.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: A phylogram is a phylogenetic tree that has branch lengths proportional to the amount of character change.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: A phylogenetic network is not strictly speaking a tree, but rather a more general graph, or a directed acyclic graph in the case of rooted networks. They are used to overcome some of the limitations inherent to trees.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: A spindle diagram, or bubble diagram, is often called a romerogram, after its popularisation by the American palaeontologist Alfred Romer.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: It represents taxonomic diversity (horizontal width) against geological time (vertical axis) in order to reflect the variation of abundance of various taxa through time.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: However, a spindle diagram is not an evolutionary tree: the taxonomic spindles obscure the actual relationships of the parent taxon to the daughter taxon and have the disadvantage of involving the paraphyly of the parental group.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Darwin also mentioned that the "coral" may be a more suitable metaphor than the "tree". Indeed, phylogenetic corals are useful for portraying past and present life, and they have some advantages over trees (anastomoses allowed, etc.).


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Phylogenetic trees composed with a nontrivial number of input sequences are constructed using computational phylogenetics methods. Distance-matrix methods such as neighbor-joining or UPGMA, which calculate genetic distance from multiple sequence alignments, are simplest to implement, but do not invoke an evolutionary model. Many sequence alignment methods such as ClustalW also create trees by using the simpler algorithms (i.e. those based on distance) of tree construction. Maximum parsimony is another simple method of estimating phylogenetic trees, but implies an implicit model of evolution (i.e. parsimony). More advanced methods use the optimality criterion of maximum likelihood, often within a Bayesian framework, and apply an explicit model of evolution to phylogenetic tree estimation. Identifying the optimal tree using many of these techniques is NP-hard, so heuristic search and optimization methods are used in combination with tree-scoring functions to identify a reasonably good tree that fits the data.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Tree-building techniques have also gained the attention of mathematicians. Trees can also be built using T-theory.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Trees can be encoded in a number of different formats, all of which must represent the nested structure of a tree. They may or may not encode branch lengths and other features. Standardized formats are critical for distributing and sharing trees without relying on graphics output that is hard to import into existing software. Commonly used formats are


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Although phylogenetic trees produced on the basis of sequenced genes or genomic data in different species can provide evolutionary insight, these analyses have important limitations. Most importantly, the trees that they generate are not necessarily correct – they do not necessarily accurately represent the evolutionary history of the included taxa. As with any scientific result, they are subject to falsification by further study (e.g., gathering of additional data, analyzing the existing data with improved methods). The data on which they are based may be noisy; the analysis can be confounded by genetic recombination, horizontal gene transfer, hybridisation between species that were not nearest neighbors on the tree before hybridisation takes place, convergent evolution, and conserved sequences.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Also, there are problems in basing an analysis on a single type of character, such as a single gene or protein or only on morphological analysis, because such trees constructed from another unrelated data source often differ from the first, and therefore great care is needed in inferring phylogenetic relationships among species. This is most true of genetic material that is subject to lateral gene transfer and recombination, where different haplotype blocks can have different histories. In these types of analysis, the output tree of a phylogenetic analysis of a single gene is an estimate of the gene's phylogeny (i.e. a gene tree) and not the phylogeny of the taxa (i.e. species tree) from which these characters were sampled, though ideally, both should be very close. For this reason, serious phylogenetic studies generally use a combination of genes that come from different genomic sources (e.g., from mitochondrial or plastid vs. nuclear genomes), or genes that would be expected to evolve under different selective regimes, so that homoplasy (false homology) would be unlikely to result from natural selection.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: When extinct species are included as terminal nodes in an analysis (rather than, for example, to constrain internal nodes), they are considered not to represent direct ancestors of any extant species. Extinct species do not typically contain high-quality DNA.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: The range of useful DNA materials has expanded with advances in extraction and sequencing technologies. Development of technologies able to infer sequences from smaller fragments, or from spatial patterns of DNA degradation products, would further expand the range of DNA considered useful.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Phylogenetic trees can also be inferred from a range of other data types, including morphology, the presence or absence of particular types of genes, insertion and deletion events – and any other observation thought to contain an evolutionary signal.


title: Phylogenetic tree

text: Phylogenetic networks are used when bifurcating trees are not suitable, due to these complications which suggest a more reticulate evolutionary history of the organisms sampled.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written words on a home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1990s.


title: Speech synthesis

text: A text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called "text normalization", "pre-processing", or "tokenization". The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called "text-to-phoneme" or "grapheme-to-phoneme" conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the "synthesizer"—then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the "target prosody" (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which is then imposed on the output speech.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Long before the invention of electronic signal processing, some people tried to build machines to emulate human speech. Some early legends of the existence of "Brazen Heads" involved Pope Silvester II (d. 1003 AD), Albertus Magnus (1198–1280), and Roger Bacon (1214–1294).


title: Speech synthesis

text: In 1779 the German-Danish scientist Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein won the first prize in a competition announced by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts for models he built of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds (in International Phonetic Alphabet notation: , , , and ). There followed the bellows-operated "acoustic-mechanical speech machine" of Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg, Hungary, described in a 1791 paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in 1846, Joseph Faber exhibited the "Euphonia". In 1923 Paget resurrected Wheatstone's design.


title: Speech synthesis

text: In the 1930s Bell Labs developed the vocoder, which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tones and resonances. From his work on the vocoder, Homer Dudley developed a keyboard-operated voice-synthesizer called The Voder (Voice Demonstrator), which he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories built the Pattern playback in the late 1940s and completed it in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device; only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues discovered acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels).


title: Speech synthesis

text: The first computer-based speech-synthesis systems originated in the late 1950s. Noriko Umeda "et al." developed the first general English text-to-speech system in 1968, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and his colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer (vocoder) recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel "", where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman puts it to sleep. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research into mechanical speech-synthesizers continues.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Linear predictive coding (LPC), a form of speech coding, began development with the work of Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in 1966. Further developments in LPC technology were made by Bishnu S. Atal and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs during the 1970s. LPC was later the basis for early speech synthesizer chips, such as the Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips used in the Speak & Spell toys from 1978.


title: Speech synthesis

text: In 1975, Fumitada Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT. From 1975 to 1981, Itakura studied problems in speech analysis and synthesis based on the LSP method. In 1980, his team developed an LSP-based speech synthesizer chip. LSP is an important technology for speech synthesis and coding, and in the 1990s was adopted by almost all international speech coding standards as an essential component, contributing to the enhancement of digital speech communication over mobile channels and the internet.


title: Speech synthesis

text: In 1975, MUSA was released, and was one of the first Speech Synthesis systems. It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and a specialized software that enabled it to read Italian. A second version, released in 1978, was also able to sing Italian in an "a cappella" style.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Dominant systems in the 1980s and 1990s were the DECtalk system, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, and the Bell Labs system; the latter was one of the first multilingual language-independent systems, making extensive use of natural language processing methods.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Handheld electronics featuring speech synthesis began emerging in the 1970s. One of the first was the Telesensory Systems Inc. (TSI) "Speech+" portable calculator for the blind in 1976. Other devices had primarily educational purposes, such as the Speak & Spell toy produced by Texas Instruments in 1978. Fidelity released a speaking version of its electronic chess computer in 1979. The first video game to feature speech synthesis was the 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game, "Stratovox" (known in Japan as "Speak & Rescue"), from Sun Electronics. The first personal computer game with speech synthesis was "Manbiki Shoujo" ("Shoplifting Girl"), released in 1980 for the PET 2001, for which the game's developer, Hiroshi Suzuki, developed a ""zero cross"" programming technique to produce a synthesized speech waveform. Another early example, the arcade version of "Berzerk", also dates from 1980. The Milton Bradley Company produced the first multi-player electronic game using voice synthesis, "Milton", in the same year.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Early electronic speech-synthesizers sounded robotic and were often barely intelligible. The quality of synthesized speech has steadily improved, but output from contemporary speech synthesis systems remains clearly distinguishable from actual human speech.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Synthesized voices typically sounded male until 1990, when Ann Syrdal, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, created a female voice.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that as the cost-performance ratio caused speech synthesizers to become cheaper and more accessible, more people would benefit from the use of text-to-speech programs.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The most important qualities of a speech synthesis system are "naturalness" and "intelligibility". Naturalness describes how closely the output sounds like human speech, while intelligibility is the ease with which the output is understood. The ideal speech synthesizer is both natural and intelligible. Speech synthesis systems usually try to maximize both characteristics.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The two primary technologies generating synthetic speech waveforms are "concatenative synthesis" and "formant synthesis". Each technology has strengths and weaknesses, and the intended uses of a synthesis system will typically determine which approach is used.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Concatenative synthesis is based on the concatenation (stringing together) of segments of recorded speech. Generally, concatenative synthesis produces the most natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, differences between natural variations in speech and the nature of the automated techniques for segmenting the waveforms sometimes result in audible glitches in the output. There are three main sub-types of concatenative synthesis.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Unit selection synthesis uses large databases of recorded speech. During database creation, each recorded utterance is segmented into some or all of the following: individual phones, diphones, half-phones, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Typically, the division into segments is done using a specially modified speech recognizer set to a "forced alignment" mode with some manual correction afterward, using visual representations such as the waveform and spectrogram. An index of the units in the speech database is then created based on the segmentation and acoustic parameters like the fundamental frequency (pitch), duration, position in the syllable, and neighboring phones. At run time, the desired target utterance is created by determining the best chain of candidate units from the database (unit selection). This process is typically achieved using a specially weighted decision tree.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Unit selection provides the greatest naturalness, because it applies only a small amount of digital signal processing (DSP) to the recorded speech. DSP often makes recorded speech sound less natural, although some systems use a small amount of signal processing at the point of concatenation to smooth the waveform. The output from the best unit-selection systems is often indistinguishable from real human voices, especially in contexts for which the TTS system has been tuned. However, maximum naturalness typically require unit-selection speech databases to be very large, in some systems ranging into the gigabytes of recorded data, representing dozens of hours of speech. Also, unit selection algorithms have been known to select segments from a place that results in less than ideal synthesis (e.g. minor words become unclear) even when a better choice exists in the database. Recently, researchers have proposed various automated methods to detect unnatural segments in unit-selection speech synthesis systems.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Diphone synthesis uses a minimal speech database containing all the diphones (sound-to-sound transitions) occurring in a language. The number of diphones depends on the phonotactics of the language: for example, Spanish has about 800 diphones, and German about 2500. In diphone synthesis, only one example of each diphone is contained in the speech database. At runtime, the target prosody of a sentence is superimposed on these minimal units by means of digital signal processing techniques such as linear predictive coding, PSOLA or MBROLA. or more recent techniques such as pitch modification in the source domain using discrete cosine transform. Diphone synthesis suffers from the sonic glitches of concatenative synthesis and the robotic-sounding nature of formant synthesis, and has few of the advantages of either approach other than small size. As such, its use in commercial applications is declining, although it continues to be used in research because there are a number of freely available software implementations. An early example of Diphone synthesis is a teaching robot, Leachim, that was invented by Michael J. Freeman. Leachim contained information regarding class curricular and certain biographical information about the students whom it was programmed to teach. It was tested in a fourth grade classroom in the Bronx, New York.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Domain-specific synthesis concatenates prerecorded words and phrases to create complete utterances. It is used in applications where the variety of texts the system will output is limited to a particular domain, like transit schedule announcements or weather reports. The technology is very simple to implement, and has been in commercial use for a long time, in devices like talking clocks and calculators. The level of naturalness of these systems can be very high because the variety of sentence types is limited, and they closely match the prosody and intonation of the original recordings.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Because these systems are limited by the words and phrases in their databases, they are not general-purpose and can only synthesize the combinations of words and phrases with which they have been preprogrammed. The blending of words within naturally spoken language however can still cause problems unless the many variations are taken into account. For example, in non-rhotic dialects of English the ""r"" in words like ""clear"" is usually only pronounced when the following word has a vowel as its first letter (e.g. ""clear out"" is realized as ). Likewise in French, many final consonants become no longer silent if followed by a word that begins with a vowel, an effect called liaison. This alternation cannot be reproduced by a simple word-concatenation system, which would require additional complexity to be context-sensitive.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an acoustic model (physical modelling synthesis). Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called "rules-based synthesis"; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Many systems based on formant synthesis technology generate artificial, robotic-sounding speech that would never be mistaken for human speech. However, maximum naturalness is not always the goal of a speech synthesis system, and formant synthesis systems have advantages over concatenative systems. Formant-synthesized speech can be reliably intelligible, even at very high speeds, avoiding the acoustic glitches that commonly plague concatenative systems. High-speed synthesized speech is used by the visually impaired to quickly navigate computers using a screen reader. Formant synthesizers are usually smaller programs than concatenative systems because they do not have a database of speech samples. They can therefore be used in embedded systems, where memory and microprocessor power are especially limited. Because formant-based systems have complete control of all aspects of the output speech, a wide variety of prosodies and intonations can be output, conveying not just questions and statements, but a variety of emotions and tones of voice.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Examples of non-real-time but highly accurate intonation control in formant synthesis include the work done in the late 1970s for the Texas Instruments toy Speak & Spell, and in the early 1980s Sega arcade machines and in many Atari, Inc. arcade games using the TMS5220 LPC Chips. Creating proper intonation for these projects was painstaking, and the results have yet to be matched by real-time text-to-speech interfaces.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The first articulatory synthesizer regularly used for laboratory experiments was developed at Haskins Laboratories in the mid-1970s by Philip Rubin, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, known as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Until recently, articulatory synthesis models have not been incorporated into commercial speech synthesis systems. A notable exception is the NeXT-based system originally developed and marketed by Trillium Sound Research, a spin-off company of the University of Calgary, where much of the original research was conducted. Following the demise of the various incarnations of NeXT (started by Steve Jobs in the late 1980s and merged with Apple Computer in 1997), the Trillium software was published under the GNU General Public License, with work continuing as gnuspeech. The system, first marketed in 1994, provides full articulatory-based text-to-speech conversion using a waveguide or transmission-line analog of the human oral and nasal tracts controlled by Carré's "distinctive region model".


title: Speech synthesis

text: More recent synthesizers, developed by Jorge C. Lucero and colleagues, incorporate models of vocal fold biomechanics, glottal aerodynamics and acoustic wave propagation in the bronchi, trachea, nasal and oral cavities, and thus constitute full systems of physics-based speech simulation.


title: Speech synthesis

text: HMM-based synthesis is a synthesis method based on hidden Markov models, also called Statistical Parametric Synthesis. In this system, the frequency spectrum (vocal tract), fundamental frequency (voice source), and duration (prosody) of speech are modeled simultaneously by HMMs. Speech waveforms are generated from HMMs themselves based on the maximum likelihood criterion.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Sinewave synthesis is a technique for synthesizing speech by replacing the formants (main bands of energy) with pure tone whistles.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Currently, Tacotron2 + Waveglow requires only a few dozen hours of training material on recorded speech to produce a very high quality voice. However, for tonal languages, such as Chinese or Taiwanese language, there are different levels of tone sandhi required and sometimes the output of speech synthesizer may result in the mistakes of tone sandhi.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are full of heteronyms, numbers, and abbreviations that all require expansion into a phonetic representation. There are many spellings in English which are pronounced differently based on context. For example, "My latest project is to learn how to better project my voice" contains two pronunciations of "project".


title: Speech synthesis

text: Most text-to-speech (TTS) systems do not generate semantic representations of their input texts, as processes for doing so are unreliable, poorly understood, and computationally ineffective. As a result, various heuristic techniques are used to guess the proper way to disambiguate homographs, like examining neighboring words and using statistics about frequency of occurrence.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Recently TTS systems have begun to use HMMs (discussed above) to generate "parts of speech" to aid in disambiguating homographs. This technique is quite successful for many cases such as whether "read" should be pronounced as "red" implying past tense, or as "reed" implying present tense. Typical error rates when using HMMs in this fashion are usually below five percent. These techniques also work well for most European languages, although access to required training corpora is frequently difficult in these languages.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Deciding how to convert numbers is another problem that TTS systems have to address. It is a simple programming challenge to convert a number into words (at least in English), like "1325" becoming "one thousand three hundred twenty-five". However, numbers occur in many different contexts; "1325" may also be read as "one three two five", "thirteen twenty-five" or "thirteen hundred and twenty five". A TTS system can often infer how to expand a number based on surrounding words, numbers, and punctuation, and sometimes the system provides a way to specify the context if it is ambiguous. Roman numerals can also be read differently depending on context. For example, "Henry VIII" reads as "Henry the Eighth", while "Chapter VIII" reads as "Chapter Eight".


title: Speech synthesis

text: Similarly, abbreviations can be ambiguous. For example, the abbreviation "in" for "inches" must be differentiated from the word "in", and the address "12 St John St." uses the same abbreviation for both "Saint" and "Street". TTS systems with intelligent front ends can make educated guesses about ambiguous abbreviations, while others provide the same result in all cases, resulting in nonsensical (and sometimes comical) outputs, such as "Ulysses S. Grant" being rendered as "Ulysses South Grant".


title: Speech synthesis

text: Speech synthesis systems use two basic approaches to determine the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling, a process which is often called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (phoneme is the term used by linguists to describe distinctive sounds in a language). The simplest approach to text-to-phoneme conversion is the dictionary-based approach, where a large dictionary containing all the words of a language and their correct pronunciations is stored by the program. Determining the correct pronunciation of each word is a matter of looking up each word in the dictionary and replacing the spelling with the pronunciation specified in the dictionary. The other approach is rule-based, in which pronunciation rules are applied to words to determine their pronunciations based on their spellings. This is similar to the "sounding out", or synthetic phonics, approach to learning reading.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Each approach has advantages and drawbacks. The dictionary-based approach is quick and accurate, but completely fails if it is given a word which is not in its dictionary. As dictionary size grows, so too does the memory space requirements of the synthesis system. On the other hand, the rule-based approach works on any input, but the complexity of the rules grows substantially as the system takes into account irregular spellings or pronunciations. (Consider that the word "of" is very common in English, yet is the only word in which the letter "f" is pronounced .) As a result, nearly all speech synthesis systems use a combination of these approaches.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Languages with a phonemic orthography have a very regular writing system, and the prediction of the pronunciation of words based on their spellings is quite successful. Speech synthesis systems for such languages often use the rule-based method extensively, resorting to dictionaries only for those few words, like foreign names and loanwords, whose pronunciations are not obvious from their spellings. On the other hand, speech synthesis systems for languages like English, which have extremely irregular spelling systems, are more likely to rely on dictionaries, and to use rule-based methods only for unusual words, or words that aren't in their dictionaries.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The consistent evaluation of speech synthesis systems may be difficult because of a lack of universally agreed objective evaluation criteria. Different organizations often use different speech data. The quality of speech synthesis systems also depends on the quality of the production technique (which may involve analogue or digital recording) and on the facilities used to replay the speech. Evaluating speech synthesis systems has therefore often been compromised by differences between production techniques and replay facilities.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Since 2005, however, some researchers have started to evaluate speech synthesis systems using a common speech dataset.


title: Speech synthesis

text: A study in the journal "Speech Communication" by Amy Drahota and colleagues at the University of Portsmouth, UK, reported that listeners to voice recordings could determine, at better than chance levels, whether or not the speaker was smiling. It was suggested that identification of the vocal features that signal emotional content may be used to help make synthesized speech sound more natural. One of the related issues is modification of the pitch contour of the sentence, depending upon whether it is an affirmative, interrogative or exclamatory sentence. One of the techniques for pitch modification uses discrete cosine transform in the source domain (linear prediction residual). Such pitch synchronous pitch modification techniques need a priori pitch marking of the synthesis speech database using techniques such as epoch extraction using dynamic plosion index applied on the integrated linear prediction residual of the voiced regions of speech.


title: Speech synthesis

text: In the early 1980s, TI was known as a pioneer in speech synthesis, and a highly popular plug-in speech synthesizer module was available for the TI-99/4 and 4A. Speech synthesizers were offered free with the purchase of a number of cartridges and were used by many TI-written video games (games offered with speech during this promotion included "Alpiner" and "Parsec"). The synthesizer uses a variant of linear predictive coding and has a small in-built vocabulary. The original intent was to release small cartridges that plugged directly into the synthesizer unit, which would increase the device's built-in vocabulary. However, the success of software text-to-speech in the Terminal Emulator II cartridge canceled that plan.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The Mattel Intellivision game console offered the Intellivoice Voice Synthesis module in 1982. It included the SP0256 Narrator speech synthesizer chip on a removable cartridge. The Narrator had 2kB of Read-Only Memory (ROM), and this was utilized to store a database of generic words that could be combined to make phrases in Intellivision games. Since the Orator chip could also accept speech data from external memory, any additional words or phrases needed could be stored inside the cartridge itself. The data consisted of strings of analog-filter coefficients to modify the behavior of the chip's synthetic vocal-tract model, rather than simple digitized samples.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Also released in 1982, Software Automatic Mouth was the first commercial all-software voice synthesis program. It was later used as the basis for Macintalk. The program was available for non-Macintosh Apple computers (including the Apple II, and the Lisa), various Atari models and the Commodore 64. The Apple version preferred additional hardware that contained DACs, although it could instead use the computer's one-bit audio output (with the addition of much distortion) if the card was not present. The Atari made use of the embedded POKEY audio chip. Speech playback on the Atari normally disabled interrupt requests and shut down the ANTIC chip during vocal output. The audible output is extremely distorted speech when the screen is on. The Commodore 64 made use of the 64's embedded SID audio chip.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Arguably, the first speech system integrated into an operating system was the 1400XL/1450XL personal computers designed by Atari, Inc. using the Votrax SC01 chip in 1983. The 1400XL/1450XL computers used a Finite State Machine to enable World English Spelling text-to-speech synthesis. Unfortunately, the 1400XL/1450XL personal computers never shipped in quantity.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The first speech system integrated into an operating system that shipped in quantity was Apple Computer's MacInTalk. The software was licensed from third-party developers Joseph Katz and Mark Barton (later, SoftVoice, Inc.) and was featured during the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh computer. This January demo required 512 kilobytes of RAM memory. As a result, it could not run in the 128 kilobytes of RAM the first Mac actually shipped with. So, the demo was accomplished with a prototype 512k Mac, although those in attendance were not told of this and the synthesis demo created considerable excitement for the Macintosh. In the early 1990s Apple expanded its capabilities offering system wide text-to-speech support. With the introduction of faster PowerPC-based computers they included higher quality voice sampling. Apple also introduced speech recognition into its systems which provided a fluid command set. More recently, Apple has added sample-based voices. Starting as a curiosity, the speech system of Apple Macintosh has evolved into a fully supported program, PlainTalk, for people with vision problems. VoiceOver was for the first time featured in 2005 in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). During 10.4 (Tiger) and first releases of 10.5 (Leopard) there was only one standard voice shipping with Mac OS X. Starting with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the user can choose out of a wide range list of multiple voices. VoiceOver voices feature the taking of realistic-sounding breaths between sentences, as well as improved clarity at high read rates over PlainTalk. Mac OS X also includes say, a command-line based application that converts text to audible speech. The AppleScript Standard Additions includes a say verb that allows a script to use any of the installed voices and to control the pitch, speaking rate and modulation of the spoken text.


title: Speech synthesis

text: The second operating system to feature advanced speech synthesis capabilities was AmigaOS, introduced in 1985. The voice synthesis was licensed by Commodore International from SoftVoice, Inc., who also developed the original MacinTalk text-to-speech system. It featured a complete system of voice emulation for American English, with both male and female voices and "stress" indicator markers, made possible through the Amiga's audio chipset. The synthesis system was divided into a translator library which converted unrestricted English text into a standard set of phonetic codes and a narrator device which implemented a formant model of speech generation.. AmigaOS also featured a high-level "Speak Handler", which allowed command-line users to redirect text output to speech. Speech synthesis was occasionally used in third-party programs, particularly word processors and educational software. The synthesis software remained largely unchanged from the first AmigaOS release and Commodore eventually removed speech synthesis support from AmigaOS 2.1 onward.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Despite the American English phoneme limitation, an unofficial version with multilingual speech synthesis was developed. This made use of an enhanced version of the translator library which could translate a number of languages, given a set of rules for each language.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Modern Windows desktop systems can use SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 components to support speech synthesis and speech recognition. SAPI 4.0 was available as an optional add-on for Windows 95 and Windows 98. Windows 2000 added Narrator, a text-to-speech utility for people who have visual impairment. Third-party programs such as JAWS for Windows, Window-Eyes, Non-visual Desktop Access, Supernova and System Access can perform various text-to-speech tasks such as reading text aloud from a specified website, email account, text document, the Windows clipboard, the user's keyboard typing, etc. Not all programs can use speech synthesis directly. Some programs can use plug-ins, extensions or add-ons to read text aloud. Third-party programs are available that can read text from the system clipboard.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Microsoft Speech Server is a server-based package for voice synthesis and recognition. It is designed for network use with web applications and call centers.


title: Speech synthesis

text: From 1971 to 1996, Votrax produced a number of commercial speech synthesizer components. A Votrax synthesizer was included in the first generation Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Text-to-speech (TTS) refers to the ability of computers to read text aloud. A TTS engine converts written text to a phonemic representation, then converts the phonemic representation to waveforms that can be output as sound. TTS engines with different languages, dialects and specialized vocabularies are available through third-party publishers.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Currently, there are a number of applications, plugins and gadgets that can read messages directly from an e-mail client and web pages from a web browser or Google Toolbar. Some specialized software can narrate RSS-feeds. On one hand, online RSS-narrators simplify information delivery by allowing users to listen to their favourite news sources and to convert them to podcasts. On the other hand, on-line RSS-readers are available on almost any personal computer connected to the Internet. Users can download generated audio files to portable devices, e.g. with a help of podcast receiver, and listen to them while walking, jogging or commuting to work.


title: Speech synthesis

text: A growing field in Internet based TTS is web-based assistive technology, e.g. 'Browsealoud' from a UK company and Readspeaker. It can deliver TTS functionality to anyone (for reasons of accessibility, convenience, entertainment or information) with access to a web browser. The non-profit project was created in 2006 to provide a similar web-based TTS interface to the Wikipedia.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Other work is being done in the context of the W3C through the W3C Audio Incubator Group with the involvement of The BBC and Google Inc.


title: Speech synthesis

text: At the 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) researchers from Google presented the work 'Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis', which transfers learning from speaker verification to achieve text-to-speech synthesis, that can be made to sound almost like anybody from a speech sample of only 5 seconds.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Also researchers from Baidu Research presented a voice cloning system with similar aims at the 2018 NeurIPS conference, though the result is rather unconvincing.


title: Speech synthesis

text: By 2019 the digital sound-alikes found their way to the hands of criminals as Symantec researchers know of 3 cases where digital sound-alikes technology has been used for crime.


title: Speech synthesis

text: In March 2020, a freeware web application called 15.ai that generates high-quality voices from an assortment of fictional characters from a variety of media sources was released. Initial characters included GLaDOS from "Portal", Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy from the show "", and the Tenth Doctor from "Doctor Who".


title: Speech synthesis

text: A number of markup languages have been established for the rendition of text as speech in an XML-compliant format. The most recent is Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), which became a W3C recommendation in 2004. Older speech synthesis markup languages include Java Speech Markup Language (JSML) and SABLE. Although each of these was proposed as a standard, none of them have been widely adopted.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Speech synthesis markup languages are distinguished from dialogue markup languages. VoiceXML, for example, includes tags related to speech recognition, dialogue management and touchtone dialing, in addition to text-to-speech markup.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Speech synthesis has long been a vital assistive technology tool and its application in this area is significant and widespread. It allows environmental barriers to be removed for people with a wide range of disabilities. The longest application has been in the use of screen readers for people with visual impairment, but text-to-speech systems are now commonly used by people with dyslexia and other reading disabilities as well as by pre-literate children. They are also frequently employed to aid those with severe speech impairment usually through a dedicated voice output communication aid. Work to personalize a synthetic voice to better match a person's personality or historical voice is becoming available. A noted application, of speech synthesis, was the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind which incorporated text-to-phonetics software based on work from Haskins Laboratories and a black-box synthesizer built by Votrax


title: Speech synthesis

text: Speech synthesis techniques are also used in entertainment productions such as games and animations. In 2007, Animo Limited announced the development of a software application package based on its speech synthesis software FineSpeech, explicitly geared towards customers in the entertainment industries, able to generate narration and lines of dialogue according to user specifications. The application reached maturity in 2008, when NEC Biglobe announced a web service that allows users to create phrases from the voices of characters from the Japanese anime series "".


title: Speech synthesis

text: In recent years, text-to-speech for disability and impaired communication aids have become widely available. Text-to-speech is also finding new applications; for example, speech synthesis combined with speech recognition allows for interaction with mobile devices via natural language processing interfaces.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Text-to-speech is also used in second language acquisition. Voki, for instance, is an educational tool created by Oddcast that allows users to create their own talking avatar, using different accents. They can be emailed, embedded on websites or shared on social media.


title: Speech synthesis

text: Another area of application is AI video creation with talking heads. Tools, like Elai.io are allowing users to create video content with AI avatars who speak using text-to-speech technology.


title: Speech synthesis

text: In addition, speech synthesis is a valuable computational aid for the analysis and assessment of speech disorders. A voice quality synthesizer, developed by Jorge C. Lucero et al. at the University of Brasília, simulates the physics of phonation and includes models of vocal frequency jitter and tremor, airflow noise and laryngeal asymmetries. The synthesizer has been used to mimic the timbre of dysphonic speakers with controlled levels of roughness, breathiness and strain.


title: Brian Geraghty

text: Brian Timothy Geraghty (born May 13, 1975) is an American actor, known for his roles in the 2005 film "Jarhead", the 2008 film "The Hurt Locker", and in the 2012 film "Flight", along with his recurring role in the HBO drama series "Boardwalk Empire". He appeared as a regular on NBC's "Chicago P.D." from 2014 to 2016 and played Theodore Roosevelt in the TV series "The Alienist". From 2020 to 2022, he was a main character on the ABC crime drama "Big Sky."


title: Brian Geraghty

text: Geraghty was born in Toms River, New Jersey, and is of Irish descent. He graduated from Toms River High School East in 1993 and then studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre before beginning his professional career in New York City; he later moved to Los Angeles.


title: Brian Geraghty

text: Geraghty was featured in a small role in the crime drama "The Sopranos". Feature roles soon followed, in such pictures as "Jarhead", "Bobby", "The Guardian", "We Are Marshall", and "The Hurt Locker". He also appeared in the January 6, 2010, episode of "", "", as a man intentionally infecting women with HIV. In 2013, he portrayed Agent Knox on the HBO crime drama series "Boardwalk Empire". In August 2014, Geraghty was cast as a series regular on the second season of the NBC procedural "Chicago P.D.", playing Sean Roman. In 2018, Geraghty starred in the TNT drama "The Alienist", as NYPD Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Dressed to Kill is a 1980 American erotic thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. Starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, and Keith Gordon, the film depicts the events leading up to the murder of a New York City housewife (Dickinson) before following a prostitute (Allen) who witnesses the crime. It contains several direct references to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film "Psycho".


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Released in July 1980, "Dressed to Kill" was a box office success in the United States, grossing over $30 million. It received largely favorable reviews, and critic David Denby of "New York" magazine proclaimed it "the first great American movie of the '80s." Dickinson won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for her performance. Allen received both a Golden Globe Award nomination for New Star of the Year, as well as an inaugural first-year Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Sexually frustrated housewife Kate Miller is attending therapy sessions with New York City psychiatrist Dr. Robert Elliott. During an appointment, Kate attempts to seduce him, but Elliott rejects her advances, stating his unwillingness to jeopardize his happy marriage. Kate has planned to spend the day with her teenaged son Peter, an inventor, but he has to cancel as he has reached a critical point in his research, for his entry to the city's science fair. Thus, Kate goes alone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she unexpectedly flirts with a mysterious stranger. Kate and the stranger stalk each other through the museum until they finally wind up outside, where Kate joins him in a taxi. They go to his apartment and have sex.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Hours later, Kate awakens and decides to discreetly leave while the man, Warren Lockman, is asleep. Kate sits at his desk to leave him a note and finds a document indicating that Warren has contracted both syphilis and gonorrhea. Shocked, she leaves the apartment, but having hastily forgotten her wedding ring on the nightstand, she returns to retrieve it. The elevator doors open on the figure of a tall, blonde woman in dark sunglasses wielding a straight razor, who violently slashes Kate to death in the elevator. Upon discovering the body, Liz Blake, a high-priced call girl, notices the killer in the elevator's convex mirror, and subsequently becomes both the prime suspect and the killer's next target.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Dr. Elliott receives a bizarre message on his answering machine from "Bobbi", a transgender patient. Bobbi taunts the psychiatrist for ending their therapy sessions, apparently because Elliott refuses to sign the necessary papers for Bobbi to get sex reassignment surgery. Elliott tries to convince Dr. Levy, the patient's new doctor, that Bobbi is endangering herself and others.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Police Detective Marino doubts Liz's story, partly because of her profession, so Liz partners with a revenge-minded Peter to find the killer, using a series of his homemade listening devices and time-lapse cameras to track patients leaving Elliott's office. They catch Bobbi on camera, and soon a tall blonde in sunglasses starts stalking Liz, subsequently making several attempts on her life. Peter thwarts one of them in the New York City Subway by spraying Bobbi with homemade Mace.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: The pair scheme to learn Bobbi's birth name by infiltrating Dr. Elliott's office. Liz baits the therapist by stripping to lingerie and flirting with him, distracting him long enough to briefly exit and look through his appointment book. Peter is watching through the window when a blonde pulls him away. When Liz returns, a razor-wielding blonde confronts her; the blonde outside shoots and wounds the blonde inside, knocking the wig off and revealing the razor-wielding blonde as Dr. Elliott/Bobbi. The blonde who shot Bobbi is actually a female police officer, revealing herself to be the blonde who has been trailing Liz.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Elliott is arrested and placed in an insane asylum. Dr. Levy explains later to Liz that Elliott wanted to be a woman, but their male side would not allow them to proceed with the operation. Whenever a woman sexually aroused Elliott, Bobbi, representing the unstable, female side of the doctor's personality, became threatened to the point that she finally became murderous. When Dr. Levy realized this through his last conversation with Elliott, he called the police on the spot, who then, with his help, did their duty.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: In a final sequence, Elliott escapes from the asylum after strangling a nurse, and slashes Liz's throat in a bloody act of vengeance. She wakes up screaming, with Peter rushing to her side to help her realize that it was just a nightmare.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: De Palma originally wanted Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann to play Kate Miller, but she declined because of the violence, and the role then went to Angie Dickinson. Sean Connery was offered the role of Robert Elliott and was enthusiastic about it, but declined because of previous commitments. Connery later worked with De Palma on the 1987 Oscar-winning adaptation of "The Untouchables".


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: "Dressed to Kill" was shot primarily in New York City, though the art gallery scene was filmed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: The naked body in the opening scene, taking place in a shower, was not that of Angie Dickinson, but of 1977 "Penthouse" Pet of the Year model Victoria Lynn Johnson. De Palma has referred to the elevator killing as the best murder scene he has ever done.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: Two versions of the film exist in North America, an R-rated version and an unrated version. The unrated version is around 30 seconds longer and shows more pubic hair in the shower scene, more blood in the elevator scene (including a close-up shot of the killer slitting Kate's throat), and more explicit dialogue from Liz during the scene in Elliott's office. These scenes were trimmed when the MPAA originally gave the film an X rating.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: "Dressed to Kill" premiered in Los Angeles and New York City on July 25, 1980. The film grossed $3,416,000 in its opening weekend from 591 theatres and improved its gross the following weekend with $3,640,000 from 596 theatres. It grossed a total of $31.9 million at the U.S. box office, and was the 21st highest-grossing film of the year.


title: Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

text: "Dressed to Kill" holds a 82% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 55 reviews, with an average rating of 6.70/10. The consensus states, "With arresting visuals and an engrossingly lurid mystery, "Dressed to Kill" stylishly encapsulates writer-director Brian De Palma's signature strengths." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 74 out of 100 based on 16 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".