title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Karpman used triangles to map conflicted or drama-intense relationship transactions. The Karpman Drama Triangle models the connection between personal responsibility and power in conflicts, and the destructive and shifting roles people play. He defined three roles in the conflict; Persecutor, Rescuer (the one up positions) and Victim (one down position). Karpman placed these three roles on an inverted triangle and referred to them as being the three aspects, or faces of drama.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Initially, a drama triangle arises when a person takes on the role of a victim or persecutor. This person then feels the need to enlist other players into the conflict. As often happens, a rescuer is encouraged to enter the situation. These enlisted players take on roles of their own that are not static, and therefore various scenarios can occur. The victim might turn on the rescuer, for example, while the rescuer then switches to persecution.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The reason that the situation persists is that each participant has their (frequently unconscious) psychological wishes/needs met without having to acknowledge the broader dysfunction or harm done in the situation as a whole. Each participant is acting upon their own selfish needs, rather than acting in a genuinely responsible or altruistic manner. Any character might "ordinarily come on like a plaintive victim; it is now clear that the one can switch into the role of Persecutor providing it is 'accidental' and the one apologizes for it".


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The motivations of the rescuer are the least obvious. In the terms of the triangle, the rescuer has a mixed or covert motive and benefits egoically in some way from being "the one who rescues". The rescuer has a surface motive of resolving the problem and appears to make great efforts to solve it, but also has a hidden motive to not succeed, or to succeed in a way in which they benefit. They may get a self-esteem boost, for example, or receive respected rescue status, or derive enjoyment by having someone depend on them and trust them and act in a way that ostensibly seems to be trying to help, but at a deeper level plays upon the victim in order to continue getting a payoff..


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The relationship between the victim and the rescuer may be one of codependency. The rescuer keeps the victim dependent by encouraging their victimhood. The victim gets their needs met by having the rescuer take care of them.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Participants generally tend to have a primary or habitual role (victim, rescuer, persecutor) when they enter into drama triangles. Participants first learn their habitual role in their family of origin. Even though participants each have a role with which they most identify, once on the triangle, participants rotate through all the three positions.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Each triangle has a "payoff" for those playing it. The "antithesis" of a drama triangle lies in discovering how to deprive the actors of their payoff.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: After World War II, therapists observed that while many battle-torn veteran patients readjusted well after returning to their families, some patients did not; some even regressed when they returned to their home environment. Researchers felt that they needed an explanation for this and began to explore the dynamics of family life – and thus began the family therapy movement. Prior to this time, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts focused on the patient's already-developed psyche and downplayed outside detractors. Intrinsic factors were addressed and extrinsic reactions were considered as emanating from forces within the person.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: In the 1950s, Eric Berne developed transactional analysis, a method for studying interactions between individuals. This approach was profoundly different than that of Freud. While Freud relied on asking patients about themselves, Berne felt that a therapist could learn by observing what was communicated (words, body language, facial expressions) in a transaction. So instead of directly asking the patient questions, Berne would frequently observe the patient in a group setting, noting all of the transactions that occurred between the patient and other individuals.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The theory of triangulation was originally published in 1966 by Murray Bowen as one of eight parts of Bowen's family systems theory. Murray Bowen, a pioneer in family systems theory, began his early work with schizophrenics at the Menninger Clinic, from 1946 to 1954. Triangulation is the “process whereby a two-party relationship that is experiencing tension will naturally involve third parties to reduce tension”. Simply put, when people find themselves in conflict with another person, they will reach out to a third person. The resulting triangle is more comfortable as it can hold much more tension because the tension is being shifted around three people instead of two.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Bowen studied the dyad of the "mother and her schizophrenic child" while he had them both living in a research unit at the Menninger clinic. Bowen then moved to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he resided from 1954 to 1959. At the NIMH Bowen extended his hypothesis to include the "father-mother-child" triad. Bowen considered "differentiation" and "triangles" the crux of his theory, Bowen Family Systems Theory. Bowen intentionally used the word "triangle" rather than "triad". In Bowen Family Systems Theory, the triangle is an essential part of the relationship.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Couples left to their own resources oscillate between closeness and distance. Two people having this imbalance often have difficulty resolving it by themselves. To stabilize the relationship, the couple often seek the aid of a third party to help re-establish closeness. A triangle is the smallest possible relationship system that can restore balance in a time of stress. The third person assumes an outside position. In periods of stress, the outside position is the most comfortable and desired position. The inside position is plagued by anxiety, along with its emotional closeness. The outsider serves to preserve the inside couple's relationship. Bowen noted that not all triangles are constructive – some are destructive.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: In 1968, Nathan Ackerman conceptualized a destructive triangle. Ackerman stated "“we observe certain constellations of family interactions which we have epitomized as the pattern of family interdependence, roles those of destroyer or persecutor, the victim of the scapegoating attack, and the family healer or the family doctor." Ackerman also recognized the pattern of attack, defense, and counterattack, as shifting roles.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: In 1968, Stephen Karpman, who had an interest in acting and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild, chose "drama triangle" rather than "conflict triangle" as, here, the Victim in his model is not intended to represent an actual victim, but rather someone feeling or acting like one. He first published his theory in an article entitled "Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis". His article, in part, examined the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" to illustrate its points. Karpman was, at the time, a recent graduate of Duke University School of Medicine and was doing post post-graduate studies under Berne. Berne, who founded the field transactional analysis, encouraged Karpman to publish what Berne referred to as "Karpman's triangle". Karpman's article was published in 1968. In 1972, Karpman received the Eric Berne Memorial Scientific Award for the work.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Eric Berne, a Canadian-born psychiatrist, created the theory of transactional analysis, in the middle of the 20th century, as a way of explaining human behavior. Berne's theory of transactional analysis was based on the ideas of Freud but was distinctly different. Freudian psychotherapists focused on talk therapy as a way of gaining insight to their patients' personalities. Berne believed that insight could be better discovered by analyzing patients’ social transactions.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: "Games" in transactional analysis refers to a series of transactions that is complementary (reciprocal), ulterior, and proceeds towards a predictable outcome. In this context, the Karpman Drama Triangle is a "game".


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Games are often characterized by a switch in roles of players towards the end. The number of players may vary. Games in this sense are devices used (often unconsciously) by people to create a circumstance where they can justifiably feel certain resulting feelings (such as anger or superiority) or justifiably take or avoid taking certain actions where their own inner wishes differ from societal expectations. They are always a substitute for a more genuine and full adult emotion and response which would be more appropriate. Three quantitative variables are often useful to consider for games:


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The consequences of games may vary from small paybacks to paybacks built up over a long period to a major level. Based on the degree of acceptability and potential harm, games are classified into three categories, representing first degree games, second degree games, and third degree games:


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The Karpman triangle was an adaptation of a model that was originally conceived to analyze the play-action pass and the draw play in American football and later adapted as a way to analyze movie scripts. Karpman is reported to have doodled thirty or more diagram types before settling on the triangle. Karpman credits the movie "Valley of the Dolls" as being a testbed for refining the model into what Berne coined as the Karpman Drama Triangle.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: Karpman now has many variables of the Karpman triangle in his fully developed theory, besides role switches. These include space switches (private-public, open-closed, near-far) which precede, cause, or follow role switches, and script velocity (number of role switches in a given unit of time). These include the "Question Mark triangle, False Perception triangle, Double Bind triangle, The Indecision triangle, the Vicious Cycle triangle, Trapping triangle, Escape triangle, Triangles of Oppression, and Triangles of Liberation, Switching in the triangle," and "the Alcoholic Family triangle."


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: While transactional analysis is the method for studying interactions between individuals, one researcher postulates that drama-based leaders can instill an organizational culture of drama. "Persecutors" are more likely to be in leadership positions and a "persecutor culture" goes hand in hand with cutthroat competition, fear, blaming, manipulation, high turnover and an increased risk of lawsuits. There are also "victim cultures" which can lead to low morale and low engagement as well as an avoidance of conflict, and "rescuer cultures" which can be characterized as having a high dependence on the leader, low initiative and low innovation.


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The Winner's Triangle was published by Acey Choy in 1990 as a therapeutic model for showing patients how to alter social transactions when entering a triangle at any of the three entry points. Choy recommends that anyone feeling like a victim think more in terms of being "vulnerable and caring", that anyone cast as a persecutor adopt an "assertive" posture, and anyone recruited to be a rescuer should react by being "caring".


title: Karpman drama triangle

text: The Power of TED*, first published in 2009, recommends that the "victim" adopt the alternative role of "creator", view the persecutor as a "challenger", and enlist a "coach" instead of a rescuer.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: Bigg Boss also known as BB is an Indian Tamil-language version of the reality TV program "Bigg Boss". The program follows the "Big Brother" format developed by Endemol in the Netherlands. Over five years, Bigg Boss has rolled out six seasons and Kamal Hassan has continued as a host for six seasons and broadcast by Star Vijay and streamed on Disney+ Hotstar.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: The first season was premiered on 25 June 2017. The 6th Season will featured general public along with celebrities as a housemates and was launched on 9th October 2022.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: "Bigg Boss Tamil" is a reality show based on the original Dutch "Big Brother" format developed by John de Mol Jr. Unlike original Big Brother, Bigg Boss Tamil features celebrity and commoner contestants. The contestants (known as "housemates") live in a house that is isolated from the world. Following anonymous internal voting by the housemates and external voting by television audiences, one housemate is "evicted" (removed) from the house each week. During the final week, the final four or five housemates vote to determine the show's winner. The eponymous "Bigg Boss" character serves as an omnipresent authority figure and represents the show's producers. He often interacts with the housemates to assign challenges and ask questions.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: Housemates are bound by various rules. For example, contestants must speak Tamil, may not tamper with objects in the house, may not leave the premises without permission, may not discuss the nomination process, may not sleep during the day, and may not commit violence against fellow housemates. Do not write in paper or written format. The complete rules are not revealed to the audience.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: Daily episodes present the main events of the previous day while weekend episodes focus on discussion of the main problems of the week and interviews with evicted contestants. On the Sunday episode the host announces the evicted contestant.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: Contestants are nominated for eviction each week by their housemates. Viewers cast their votes in favour of the contestants they would like to save from eviction. Each viewer is entitled to cast ten votes per day. The contestant with the fewest votes is out. Contestants who break the rules or who leave the house for medical reasons are evicted.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: "Bigg Boss Tamil" is aired on Star Vijay and also available on Disney+ Hotstar. Everyday episodes contain the main happenings of the previous day. Every Sunday episode mainly focuses on an interview of an evicted contestant by the host. The unseen episode will be available as "Bigg Boss Unseen" on Vijay Music (sister channel to Star Vijay).


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: Bigg Boss Tamil programme is regarded as the most expensive Tamil television show. The season was a overall success and was stated as the best season so far of the "Bigg Boss Tamil" franchise and received a opening TRP of 15.15 TVR on the grand launch day and a low 14.25 TVR on the grand finale day.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: The launch of season 2 opened with 11.72 TVR which was impressive and welcoming for the franchise. Overall this season was only seen as decent compared to its 1st season in the franchise it did not blow up major and received average reviews from critics. The TRP of 19.25 TVR for the grand finale was recorded as the highest ratings on charts for "Bigg Boss Tamil" till date for a grand finale episode.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: The launch of season 3 opened with 11.9 TVR, which is bigger than the previous seasons. Overall this season emerged as a highly successful season getting positive response from both critics and general audience. Season 3 is still regarded as the most popular & trendsetting season of "Bigg Boss Tamil" among general audience . The Grand Finale episode of season 3 received a TRP of 10.05 TVR .


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: The launch of season 4 opened with 16.61 TVR benefited from the impact of highly successful season 3 and broke records for viewership for "Bigg Boss Tamil" on a grand opening day, the ratings of the launch proved that the audience for Bigg Boss is getting bigger year by year. The season overall was a decent season receiving mixed reviews from critics and audiences. However the grand finale received a TRP of 10.29 TVR which is the lowest TRP rating for a Tamil Biggboss finale


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: The launch of season 5 received TRP rating of 18.60 TVR . This season 5 was considered good but lost its TRP in midway . It received mixed to negative reviews from critics and audience. Season 5 witnessed the highest ever TRP in the history of Bigg "Boss Tamil." The Grand Finale also received one of the lowest TRP of 10.25 TVR.


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: The series is also set to roll out a digital version of the show called "Bigg Boss Ultimate" which is also going to be hosted by Kamal Haasan and broadcast by Disney+ Hotstar for 24×5 coverage. The series was eventually hosted by Silambarasan after Haasan had to opt out due to scheduling conflicts with his latest release, "Vikram".


title: Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series)

text: Bigg Boss Fun Unlimited is an Indian Tamil-Indian language Reality Talk show with former housemates from the previous season of reality television series Bigg Boss Tamil. The show features former housemates talking about the present contestants in the current season, its aired on Disney+ Hotstar. However this show was only for Bigg Boss 2 and later discontinued from Bigg Boss 3.


title: J. D. Chakravarthy

text: Nagulapati Srinivasa Chakravarthy, known professionally as J. D. Chakravarthy, is an Indian actor, screenwriter, director, producer, composer, and singer known for his work primarily with Telugu cinema in addition to Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada films. Chakravarthy made his screen debut with the Telugu film, "Siva", an action blockbuster directed by Ram Gopal Varma, featured at the 12th IFFI. He subsequently made his Bollywood debut with the remake of the same film titled Shiva (1990). He then starred in the blockbuster "Satya", featured in the Indian panorama section at the 29th IFFI, and was listed among CNN-IBN's 100 greatest Indian films of all time. Chakravarthy received the Screen Award Special Jury Award.


title: J. D. Chakravarthy

text: Chakravarthy has starred in more than seventy feature films in a variety of roles predominantly in Telugu, Hindi and a few Tamil, and Malayalam films. He is best known for his performances in box office hits like "Neti Siddhartha" (1990), "Money" (1993), "Money Money" (1995), "One by Two" (1993), "Gulabi" (1996), for which he received the state Nandi Special Jury Award, "Mrugam" (1996), "Bombay Priyudu" (1996), "Anaganaga Oka Roju" (1997), "Egire Paavurama" (1997), "Nenu Premisthunnanu" (1997), "Wife of V. Varaprasad" (1998), "Premaku Velayara (1999)", "Pape Naa Pranam" (2000), "Premaku Swagatam" (2002), "Madhyanam Hathya" (2004), "Dubai Seenu" (2007), "Homam" (2008), "Arima Nambi" (2014), "Bhaskar the Rascal" (2015), "Mikhael" (2019), "Ek Villain Returns" (2022), "Anek" (2022), and "Dahini - The Witch" (2022), "Kaari" (2022).


title: J. D. Chakravarthy

text: Chakravarthy was born into a Telugu speaking family of carnatic singer Prof. Dr. Kovela Shantha, and father Nagulapati Suryanarayana Rao. He is born in Hyderabad, India. His elder sister Vijayanthi is settled in the United States. He did his schooling in St. George's Grammar School (Hyderabad), and completed B. E. from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology.


title: J. D. Chakravarthy

text: His first Hindi film in a lead role, "Satya", was critically acclaimed and became a commercial blockbuster. He also starred in Hindi films like "Vaastu Shastra", and "Aag" alongside Sushmita Sen, and "Bhoot Returns" alongside Manisha Koirala. He made his film directing debut, with "Darwaza Bandh Rakho" and anthology film "Darna Zaroori Hai" got archived at the New York Institute of Technology, New York, America as part of the film course


title: J. D. Chakravarthy

text: He debuted in 1989 through Ram Gopal Verma's debut Telugu film, "Siva" as J.D., as one of the student leaders, and in the same year appeared in a supporting role in the Malayalam film "Ennodishtam Koodamo" before devoting all his time to films under his mentor's Ram Gopal Varma 's production.


title: J. D. Chakravarthy

text: He has worked in many Telugu films directed by ace film makers of the time like Mani Ratnam, Krishna Vamsi, S. V. Krishna Reddy, K. Raghavendra Rao, Kodi Ramakrishna, E. V. V. Satyanarayana, Shiva Nageswara Rao, Gunasekhar, and Vamsy. In 2002, he played a role of Sri Lankan Tamil Eelam fighter Dhileepan, in Mani Ratnam's Tamil film, "Kannathil Muthamittal". He has returned to Telugu film industry with his Hit Film ""Homam" Both as Director And Actor in year 2008."


title: J. D. Chakravarthy

text: He then went on to direct "Homam" and "Sidham". He had a role in director Vishnuvardhan's Tamil film "Sarvam", starring Arya and Trisha. In 2016, he has appeared in the Super Hit Malayalam "Bhaskar The Rascal" pairing with Nayan Tara also starring Mamooty. Then he played a young army officer in another Malayalam film "Shikhamani", and made his Kannada film debut with "Raavani" alongside Pooja Gandhi. He is also directing 3 Kannada films for entertainment factory productions.


title: Mail-order bride

text: A mail-order bride is a woman who lists herself in catalogs and is selected by a man for marriage. In the twentieth century, the trend was primarily towards women living in developing countries seeking men in more developed nations. The majority of the women making use of these services in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century are from East and Southeast Asia, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and to a lesser extent Latin America. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, large numbers of eastern European women have advertised themselves in such a way, primarily from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia and Moldova. Men who list themselves in such publications are referred to as "mail-order husbands", although this is much less common.


title: Mail-order bride

text: The term "mail-order bride" is both criticized by owners (and customers) of international marriage agencies and used by them as an easily recognizable term.


title: Mail-order bride

text: An international marriage agency (also called an international introduction agency or international marriage broker) is a business that endeavors to introduce men and women of different countries for the purpose of marriage, dating, or correspondence. Many of these marriage agencies are based near women in developing countries (such as Ukraine, Russia, Colombia, Brazil, China, Thailand, and the Philippines). International marriage agencies encourage women to register for their services, and facilitate communication and meetings with men from developed regions of North America, Western Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. This network of smaller international marriage agencies is often affiliated with web-based international dating sites that are able to market their services on a larger scale, in compliance with regulations such as the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act. Experian, a market research firm, reports that the top 10 international dating sites attracted 12 million visitors in March 2013, up 29% from March 2012. International dating sites provide a wide variety of online communication, including instant messaging, email letters, webchat, phone translation, virtual gifts, live games, and mobile-based chat. International marriage agencies are frequently referred to as "mail-order bride" agencies. However, many consider the term "mail-order bride" derogatory and feel it demeans foreign women by comparing them to commodities for sale and by falsely implying that (unlike local women), they exercise no judgment over the men they meet and would marry anyone from a relatively wealthy country.


title: Mail-order bride

text: In 1620, the Virginia Company recruited mail-order brides for the Jamestown colony, sponsoring the emigration of 140 women in hopes of reducing desertion by the settlers and to avoid the men marrying women from the local Native American tribes. They were sometimes referred to as "tobacco wives", because each male colonist who married a mail-order bride had to reimburse the company for her passage at a cost of 120 pounds of "good leaf tobacco". The women who were brought over by the company were free to marry whomever they chose, even men who were too poor to pay their passage fee. The average age of these brides was 20.


title: Mail-order bride

text: France took a similar tactic in the mid-1600s, recruiting and sponsoring approximately 800 women to emigrate to New France. These mail-order brides were known as the King's Daughters ( or in the spelling of the era). The New France colony had problems similar to Jamestown's: male settlers returning to France or marrying Native American women and leaving the colony to live with their wives' tribes. For the King's Daughters, the government not only paid to recruit and transport them, it also provided each woman with a dowry of at least 50 livres. As with the "tobacco wives" of Jamestown, the King's Daughters had the right to choose their partners and could refuse any suitor. The success of the program is indicated by genetic studies of modern French Canadians which found that the King's Daughters and their husbands were "responsible for two-thirds of the genetic makeup of over six million people".


title: Mail-order bride

text: When New France began its Louisiana colony in 1699, it requested more mail-order brides. These were known as Pelican girls (for the first ship that brought women to the colony, "Le Pélican"). This program was not successful; the women had been recruited with false descriptions of the struggling colony and had many complaints about their treatment. When women in France heard of the terrible conditions and of how the Pelican girls had been treated, the government was unable to recruit many more mail-order brides. France had to resort to shipping over thieves and prostitutes, known as "correction girls".


title: Mail-order bride

text: The Órfãs do Rei ("orphans of the king") were Portuguese girl orphans who were sent from Portugal to overseas colonies during the Portuguese Empire as part of Portugal's colonization efforts. The orphans were married to native rulers or Portuguese settlers. Their fathers were Portuguese men who died in battle for the king. Both noble and non-noble girls were in the "órfãs do rei". Many were sent to the colony of Brazil, and they ranged from 12 to 30 years of age.


title: Mail-order bride

text: There are at least two historical roots of the mail-order bride industry that emerged in the 1800s in the American frontier: Asian workers in the frontier regions (although Asian workers were scattered throughout the world), and American men who had headed west across the United States to the frontier.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Asian men worked through mail-order agencies to find wives as they worked overseas in the 1800s. Key variables determining the relationship between migration and marriage were demographics, legal policies, cultural perceptions and technology. Imbalances between the number of available women and the number of men desiring partners created a demand for immigrant women. As a result of this imbalance, a new system of "picture brides" developed in predominantly male settlements. In the early 20th century, the institution of "picture brides" developed due to immigration restrictions. The Japanese-American Passport Agreement of 1907 allowed Japan to grant passports to the wives of immigrants to America. As immigration of unmarried Japanese women to America was effectively barred, the use of "picture brides" provided a mechanism for willing women to obtain a passport to America, while Japanese workers in America could gain a female helpmate of their own nationality.


title: Mail-order bride

text: European American men sought financial success in the migration West, but few women lived there at this time, so it was hard for these men to settle down and start a family. During the California gold rush in 1849, there were at least three men for every woman, and by 1852 the ratio had increased to nearly seven men for every woman. They attempted to attract women living back East; the men wrote letters to churches and published personal advertisements in magazines and newspapers. In return, the women would write to the men and send them photographs of themselves. Courtship was conducted by letter, until a woman agreed to marry a man she had never met. Many women wanted to escape their present way of living, gain financial security and see what life on the frontier could offer them. Most of these women were single, but some were widows, divorcées or runaways. Mail-order marriages gave Black women an escape from the crushing racial restrictions in the South. In 1885, a group of married Black women in Arizona Territory formed the Busy Bee Club to advertise for wives for Arizona miners, hoping to reduce violence in the mining camps and encourage Black women to move to the area.


title: Mail-order bride

text: To recruit mail-order brides for Oregon, area bachelors combined funds to send two brothers east. The Benton brothers began their search in Maryland, posting "Brides Wanted" flyers. They held meetings at which they described the territory and promised free passage west. More than 100 women accompanied the Bentons back to Oregon. Asa Mercer performed a similar recruiting role for Seattle. Only 11 women accompanied Mercer back on his first trip, but his second was more successful, with more than 100 women travelling to Seattle, accompanied by a "New York Times" journalist to chronicle the journey. These prospective brides were known as Mercer Girls.


title: Mail-order bride

text: British Columbia welcomed sixty women from Britain, mail-order brides recruited by the Columbia Emigration Society, in 1862. Another twenty women from Australia were bound for Victoria but were convinced to stay in San Francisco when their ship docked there.


title: Mail-order bride

text: In the early 20th century, answering matrimonial ads was a route to entering the United States after immigration limits became more restrictive. It was also a means of escaping war-torn regions. In 1922, two ships docked in New York with 900 mail-order brides from Turkey, Romania, Armenia, and Greece, fleeing the Greco-Turkish War.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Women in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other Eastern European countries are common mail-order bride candidates. Economic and social conditions for women in Russia and other Post-Soviet states are a motivational factor in finding foreign arrangements. Finding a foreign husband gives a woman a chance to leave her country and find better economic opportunities. In testimony before the United States Senate, Professor Donna Hughes said that two thirds of Ukrainian women interviewed wanted to live abroad and this rose to 97% in the resort city of Yalta.


title: Mail-order bride

text: 52 percent of Russia's workforce is made up of women, yet according to some sources they often hold low positions of prominence in their home country and work jobs with less respect and lower wages (such as teaching or physician positions); and women earn 43 percent of what men do. Marriage is a substantial part of Russian culture, with 30 years being the age at which a woman is considered an "old maid". With 4,138,273 more females than males from the ages of 15 to 64, marriage opportunities are slim at home and worsened by the life expectancy difference between men (64.3 years) and women (73.17 years), as well as the fact that a large portion of successful males are emigrating out of Russia.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Many international brides come from developing countries in Asia, particularly East Asia and Southeast Asia, and occasionally South Asia as well. The countries the women come from are faced with unemployment, malnutrition and inflation. However, economic factors are not the only driving factor for women in Asia to enter the mail-order industry. In some cases women were recruited based on their physical appearance, with an emphasis placed on youth and virginity. This is found among boutique agencies, most of which cater to wealthy men from other Asian nations. The majority of Asian mail-order brides come from the developing nations of Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, and China.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Filipino women often entered the mail-order industry in the hope of marrying abroad, and then sponsoring their family for immigration.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Since 2003, the Government of Australia's resolve to decrease what was deemed "inappropriate immigration" by then-Prime Minister John Howard has gained momentum. Initial reactions to the program were mixed. However, during the January 2004 visit to Eastern Europe by the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Philip Ruddock, Australian-Russian relationships were strengthened while both nations committed to a timetable for reductions in Russian human trafficking into Australia. The Australian public further embraced its government's new policies following the media circus of the Jana Klintoukh case. This case first exploded into the public's view when current-events program "Today Tonight" aired footage of a young Russian-born Australian, claiming she was imported via an Internet site and was kept as a sexual slave by her "husband" while being confined to his Sydney home.


title: Mail-order bride

text: In 2005, President Alexander Lukashenko attempted to regulate "marriage agencies" in Belarus and make it difficult for them to operate. He believed that Western men were draining his country of women of child-bearing age. However, as most agencies are being run from outside Belarus (either in Russia, other European countries or the United States), he has been unable to stop (or otherwise regulate) this activity.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Thousands of women from Cambodia were mail-order brides to men in South Korea. Viewing the practice as a form of human trafficking, in the 21st century the Cambodian government passed a number of laws, such as prohibiting marriage between Cambodian women and men over the age of 50, a ban on marriage between Cambodian women and Korean men, and a ban on marriages with foreigners (which was rescinded after six months).


title: Mail-order bride

text: Canadian immigration laws concerning mail-order brides have traditionally been similar to (but slightly less restrictive than) their U.S. counterparts; for instance, previously not requiring the Canadian citizen to prove minimum-income requirements (as has been a long-standing requirement of United States immigration laws). While there is still no formal requirement for a minimum salary, the sponsor must provide evidence of income (such as the T4 income tax slip from an employer) with their IMM 5481 Sponsorship Evaluation. Until 2001 Canada's immigration policy designated mail-order brides under the "family class" to refer to spouses and dependents and "fiancé(e)" class for those intending to marry, with only limited recognition of externally married opposite-sex "common law" relationships; same-sex partners were processed as independent immigrants or under a discretionary provision for "humane and compassionate" considerations. In 2002, the Canadian Immigration Law was completely revised. One of the major changes was conjugal partner sponsorship, available for any two people (including same-sex couples) who have had conjugal relations together for at least one year. Canadian immigration authorities frown upon conjugal-partners sponsorship for heterosexual couples, and now require the couple to marry before a visa is granted (unless serious reason can be demonstrated why the couple is not yet married).


title: Mail-order bride

text: There have been reported instances in which foreign spouses have abandoned their Canadian sponsors upon arrival in Canada or soon thereafter, often collecting welfare, which the sponsor is obligated to repay. In some of the cases, federal immigration authorities have made no attempt to revoke fraudulently-obtained landed immigrant status or deport the claimants, treating cases where one spouse is duped by the other as low-priority and difficult to prove.


title: Mail-order bride

text: A two-year conditional residence requirement (like that in force in Australia and the United States) was proposed in 2011 and is now applied to new arrivals.


title: Mail-order bride

text: China is one of the main source countries of East Asian mail-order brides. Vietnamese women are traveling to China as mail-order brides for rural Han Chinese men to earn money for their families and a rise in the standard of living, matchmaking between Chinese men and Vietnamese women has increased and has not been affected by troubled relations between Vietnam and China. Some Vietnamese women from Lào Cai who married Han Chinese men stated that among their reasons for doing so was that Vietnamese men beat their wives, engaged in affairs with mistresses, and refused to help their wives with chores while Han men actively helped their wives carry out chores and care for them. Cambodian women also travel to China as mail order brides for rural men. In the majority of cases, young women are persuaded by friends and relatives with an offer, and at least 5 percent of Vietnamese women in marriages to Chinese men are victims of human trafficking. There is no established bilateral cooperation between China and Vietnam to deal with the problematic aspects of undocumented, transnational marriages, since the Chinese marriage market crisis has been significantly alleviated by female immigrants. Despite prohibition, illegal border crossing and de facto marriage are common and uncontrollable.


title: Mail-order bride

text: According to immigration statistics from the United States Department of Homeland Security, Colombia has ranked in the top 10 of countries since 1999 from which fiancées have emigrated for the United States. As well, the number of Colombians being admitted to the United States between 1999 and 2008 using fiancé visas (including children) has increased 321 percent.


title: Mail-order bride

text: A dissertation by Jasney E. Cogua-Lopez, "Through the Prisms of Gender and Power: Agency in International Courtship between Colombian Women and American Men", suggests various reasons for this growth, including continuing cultural inequality between the sexes despite equality being codified in the country's laws (honor killings were not made completely illegal until 1980).


title: Mail-order bride

text: Because of the large number of Colombians wishing to leave their country by marrying foreigners, a black market for marriages to foreigners has developed, with some people allegedly paying as much as 20 million pesos ($10,000) to illegal groups.


title: Mail-order bride

text: According to Colombia Decrees No. 2668/88 and 1556/89, passed in 1988, foreigners are allowed to marry nationals in the country provided they supply the proper paperwork, including a birth certificate and proof that both parties are not already married. A notary is required, but because the laws are open to interpretation, the requirements can vary from notary to notary.


title: Mail-order bride

text: During the 1980s and 1990s, local authorities started government-led initiatives encouraging marriage between women from other Asian countries and Japanese farmers due to the lack of Japanese women who wanted to live in the countryside. These Asian brides came from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and South Korea. The phenomenon of marrying women from other Asian countries later spread to urban parts of Japan as well.


title: Mail-order bride

text: The Philippines prohibits the business of organizing or facilitating marriages between Filipinas and foreign men. The Philippine congress enacted the Anti Mail-Order Bride Law on June 13, 1990, as a result of stories in the local media about Filipinas being abused by their foreign husbands. Because of this, Filipinas often used "reverse publications" – publications in which "men" advertise themselves – to contact foreign men for marriage to Filipina women.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Successful prosecution under this statute is rare or non-existent as widespread deployment of the Internet in the mid-1990s brought a proliferation of websites operating outside the Philippines which legally remain beyond the reach of Filipino law. One Montana site profiled in an ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs report entitled "Pinay Brides" circumvented the restrictions by characterising its role as that of a travel agency. Thousands of Filipina women marry Americans each year.


title: Mail-order bride

text: "The New York Times" reports, "Every month, hundreds of South Korean men fly to Vietnam, the Philippines, Nepal and Uzbekistan on special trips. An agent escorts each man to see many women in a single day, sometimes all gathered in the same hall". Although these marriages can be successful, in some cases immigrant wives are mistreated, misunderstood and separated from their Korean husbands. One method men use when choosing young girls as wives is "Like a judge in a beauty pageant, the man interviews the women, many of them 20 years younger than he, and makes a choice". The British newspaper "The Independent" reports, "Last year it was reported that more than 40,000 Vietnamese women have married South Korean men and migrated there." Cambodian women are also popular with Korean men seeking foreign brides, but in March 2010 the Cambodian government banned marriages to South Korean men.


title: Mail-order bride

text: "The Korea Times" reports that every year, thousands of Korean men sign up for matches with Filipina brides through agencies and by mail order. Based on data from the Korean government, there are 6,191 Filipinas in South Korea who are married to Koreans. After contacting a mail-order agency, the majority of Filipina mail-order brides met their husbands by attending "show-ups", a meeting in which a group of Filipina women are brought to meet a Korean man who is looking for a wife. At the show-up the Korean man picks a prospective wife from among the group, and in a matter of days they are married.


title: Mail-order bride

text: An anthropological study on Filipina wives and Korean men by professor Kim Min-jung of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Kangwon National University found that these Korean men find it difficult to marry Korean women, so they look for girls in poorer countries with difficult economic circumstances. The Korean men feel that because of the difficult circumstances from which the Filipina women come, cultural differences and the language barrier, they "will not run away". Further, she said, Korean men characterize Southeast Asian women as friendly, hardworking (due to agrarian backgrounds), "docile and obedient, able to speak English, and are familiar with Korean patriarchal culture".


title: Mail-order bride

text: A recent study by matchmaking firm Bien-Aller polled 274 single South Korean men through its website concerning motivations for marrying non-Korean women and found that men choose foreign brides primarily for one of four reasons. "According to the poll, 32.1 percent of the men said they felt the biggest benefit of marrying foreign women is their lack of interest in their groom's educational background and financial or social status. The next best reason was their belief that foreign brides would be submissive (23 percent), make their lives more comfortable (15.3 percent), and that the men would not have to get stressed about their in-laws (13.8 percent)."


title: Mail-order bride

text: The majority of mail order brides from China to South Korea consist of Chinese citizens of Korean ethnicity.


title: Mail-order bride

text: In June 2013, The Philippine embassy in Seoul reported that it had received many complaints from Filipinas who have married Korean men through mail-order, frequently becoming "victims of grave abuses". The Philippine police rescued 29 mail-order brides on their way to marry South Korea men whom Chief Superintendent Reginald Villasanta, head of an organised crime task force, says were "duped into promises of an instant wealthy life through marriage with Korean gentlemen". The women were advertised in online and offline "catalogs" to South Korean men. In many cases however, victims were fed false information about the background of their future spouse and family, and suffered abuse from the South Korean men, which led to "abandonment of the marital home, separation and divorce", Villasanta said.


title: Mail-order bride

text: There have been several murders of mail-order brides in South Korea. On May 24, 2011, one South Korean man "stabbed his Vietnamese wife to death while the couple’s 19-day-old baby lay next to her. The man, a farmer, had been matched up with his foreign bride through a broker. In 2010, another Vietnamese woman was killed by her husband a week after they were married. In 2008, a Vietnamese woman jumped from an apartment building to her death after being abused by her husband and mother-in-law."


title: Mail-order bride

text: In November 2009, Philippine Ambassador to South Korea Luis T. Cruz warned Filipina women against marrying Korean men. He said in recent months that the Philippine Embassy in Seoul has received complaints from Filipina wives of abuses committed by their Korean husbands that caused separation, divorce and abandonment. As language and cultural differences become an issue, the Filipina women are regarded as commodities bought for a price.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Mail-order brides travelled to Malaysia to marry Malaysian men. Mail-order brides include women from Vietnam, Indonesia, and China.


title: Mail-order bride

text: Vietnamese and Uzbek mail order brides have gone to Taiwan for marriage. Domestic violence and other problems that Vietnamese women faced during the marriages in Taiwan.


title: Mail-order bride

text: On June 4, 2001, Turkmenian President Saparmurat Niyazov (also known as Turkmenbashi) authorized a decree that required foreigners to pay a $50,000 fee to marry a Turkmen citizen (regardless of how they met), and to live in the country and own property for one year. Authorities indicated that the law was designed to protect women from being duped into abusive relationships.


title: Mail-order bride

text: U.S. immigration law provides protection for brides once they arrive. "In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act... Section 652 of this legislation specifically addresses the mail-order bride industry".


title: Mail-order bride

text: On January 6, 2006, President George W. Bush signed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) as part of the Violence Against Women Act. The requirements of the law are controversial, and some commentators have claimed that it presumes that American men are abusers.


title: Mail-order bride

text: In enacting IMBRA, Congress was responding to claims by the Tahirih Justice Center (TJC), a woman's advocacy group, that mail-order brides were susceptible to domestic abuse because they are unfamiliar with the laws, language and customs of their new home. The TJC insisted that special legislation was needed to protect them. The TJC asked Congress to consider several notable cases mentioned in the Congressional Record. Critics of IMBRA claim that the TJC failed to ask Congress to consider the relative amount of abuse between mail-order bride couples and other couples (including the thousands of spousal murders that occurred in the US over the past 15 years).


title: Mail-order bride

text: Two federal lawsuits ("European Connections & Tours v. Gonzales", N.D. Ga. 2006; "AODA v. Gonzales", S.D. Ohio 2006) sought to challenge IMBRA on constitutional grounds. The AODA case was terminated when the plaintiffs withdrew their claim. The European Connections case ended when the judge ruled against the plaintiff, finding the law constitutional regarding a dating company.


title: Mail-order bride

text: On March 26, 2007, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper dismissed with prejudice a suit for injunctive relief filed by European Connections, agreeing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and TJC that IMBRA is a constitutional exercise of Congressional authority to regulate for-profit dating websites and agencies where the primary focus is on introducing Americans to foreigners. Additionally, the federal court specifically found that: "the rates of domestic violence against immigrant women are much higher than those of the U.S. population". According to a compilation of disaggregated samples of Asian ethnicities from local communities, Asian women in the United States reported intimate physical and/or sexual violence of 21 to 55 percent in 2015. The judge also compared background checks on American men to background checks on firearm buyers by stating, "However, just as the requirement to provide background information as a prerequisite to purchasing a firearm has not put gun manufacturers out of business, there is no reason to believe that IMBs will be driven from the marketplace by IMBRA".


title: Mail-order bride

text: Marriage agencies are legal in almost all countries. On January 6, 2006, the United States Congress enacted IMBRA, which requires certain actions of some businesses prior to selling a foreign woman's address to a US citizen or resident or otherwise facilitating contact, including the following:


title: Mail-order bride

text: In order to bring a spouse into the United States, Form I-130 must be filed, which is an immigrant petition on behalf of a relative. After that, a K-3/K-4 & V-1/V-2 Entry Visa for Spouse must be filed. The Immigration and Nationalization Service advises that "in some cases, it may be to a couple's advantage to pursue a K-1 fiancée visa before getting married. In other cases, applicants may find that it is more cost effective to get married abroad and then apply for an immigrant visa overseas. In many cases, the K-1 visa application process takes just as long as the immigrant visa process". The cost of the visa may be around $2000. Couples must remain together at least two years. There were 849,000 female naturalized citizens between the ages of 20 and 29 and 2,084,000 women of the same age living without U.S. citizenship in 2016, accounting for 13.3% of the female population of that age bracket. "Despite well over 2,000 mail-order marriages a year, there is no information on the amount of mail-order brides entering the United States. The purpose of this law is two-fold: to protect the safety of mail-order brides and to prevent fraud".


title: Michael Olise

text: Michael Akpovie Olise (born 12 December 2001) is a professional footballer who plays as a midfielder for Premier League club Crystal Palace. Born in England, he represents France at youth international level.


title: Michael Olise

text: Olise was a youth player at Arsenal, Chelsea (spending seven years with them before leaving aged 14), and Manchester City,


title: Michael Olise

text: In July 2018 Olise was inducted into Reading's Academy scholarship program. He made his debut for Reading on 12 March 2019, in a 3–0 home defeat to Leeds United, and on 15 July signed a three-year professional contract with the club. He scored his first league goal for Reading on 19 September 2020, volleying home in the 76th minute with the second goal in a 2–0 win over Barnsley at the Madejski Stadium. In April 2021 he was nominated for the EFL Young Player of the Season.On 29 April 2021, he was crowned EFL Young Player of the Season.


title: Michael Olise

text: On 8 July 2021, Olise signed a five-year deal with Premier League side Crystal Palace after they had activated his £8.37 million release clause.


title: Michael Olise

text: On 11 September 2021, Olise made his Premier League debut for Crystal Palace in a 3-0 home win against Tottenham after coming on as a substitute in the 86th minute in place of Jordan Ayew. On 23 October 2021, Olise made his full debut for Crystal Palace in a 1-1 home draw against Newcastle United.


title: Michael Olise

text: On 3 October 2021, Olise scored his first Premier League goal for Crystal Palace as a second half substitute in a 2–2 home draw against Leicester City. In doing so he became Palace's youngest Premier League scorer since Clinton Morrison in 1998.


title: Michael Olise

text: Olise was born in England to a Nigerian father and French-Algerian mother, and is eligible to represent France, Algeria, England or Nigeria internationally. On 27 May 2019, he was called up to the France U18 for the 2019 Toulon Tournament. He made his debut on 2 June 2019, against Qatar U23. In March 2021, Olise was named as a standby for the Nigeria squad taking part in their Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers against Benin and Lesotho.


title: Michael Olise

text: In March 2022, Olise was called up to the France under-21 team for the first time and made his debut in the side's 2–0 win over the Faroe Islands under-21 team on 24 March.


title: Michael Olise

text: Olise is a left-footed attacking midfielder who can play as a number 10, or either side of this position as a left or right-sided attacking midfielder. He is noted for his ability to quickly play passes that carve open defences. His first touch is good and has a good awareness of what is happening around him. Olise has a good range of passing which he can use often to play in behind the opposition defence or switch the angle of attack. He likes to operate 50 to 30 yards out from goal in the right half-space, where he can use various options to continue the attack.


title: Michael Olise

text: On the ball, Olise is an agile and mobile player. He is capable of turning quickly with good acceleration and change of pace, even when he is dribbling in very tight spaces or running with the ball.


title: Michael Olise

text: Olise's younger brother Richard is also a footballer and joined Chelsea as an Under-9, representing England at youth level.


title: Chaturanga

text: Chaturanga (; "") is an ancient Indian strategy game. While there is some uncertainty, the prevailing view among chess historians is that it is the common ancestor of the board games chess (European), xiangqi (Chinese), janggi (Korean), shogi (Japanese), sittuyin (Burmese), makruk (Thai), and modern Indian chess.


title: Chaturanga

text: Chaturanga is first known from the Gupta Empire in India around the 6th century CE. In the 7th century, it was adopted as "chatrang" ("shatranj") in Sassanid Persia, which in turn was the form of chess brought to late-medieval Europe. Archeological remains from 2000 to 3000 BC have been found from the city of Lothal (of the Indus Valley civilisation) of pieces on a board that resemble chess. According to Stewart Culin, chaturanga was first described in the Hindu text "Bhavishya Purana". The "Bhavishya Purana" is known to include modern additions and interpolations, however, even mentioning British rule of India.


title: Chaturanga

text: The exact rules of chaturanga are unknown. Chess historians suppose that the game had similar rules to those of its successor, shatranj. In particular, there is uncertainty as to the moves of the Gaja (elephant).


title: Chaturanga

text: The Sanskrit word "chaturanga" means "four-limbed" or "four arms", referring to ancient army divisions of infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry. The origin of chaturanga has been a puzzle for centuries. It has its origins in the Gupta Empire, with the earliest clear reference dating from the sixth century of the common era, and from north India. The first substantial argument that chaturanga is much older than this is the fact that the chariot is the most powerful piece on the board, although chariots appear to have been obsolete in warfare for at least five or six centuries. The counter-argument is that they remained prominent in literature. Several more recent scholars have proposed a gradual evolution in the centuries BC in the northern or northwestern border areas of Indian culture, where it was in contact with Greek culture brought by the Macedonian-Greek army, and where some rulers issued coins with fused Greek-Indian imagery.


title: Chaturanga

text: Sanskrit "" is a bahuvrihi compound word, meaning "having four limbs or parts" and in epic poetry often meaning "army". The name comes from a battle formation mentioned in the Indian epic "Mahabharata". Chaturanga refers to four divisions of an army, namely elephantry, chariotry, cavalry and infantry. An ancient battle formation, "akshauhini", is like the setup of chaturanga.


title: Chaturanga

text: Chaturanga was played on an 8×8 uncheckered board, called "ashtāpada", which is also the name of a game. The board sometimes had special markings, the meaning of which are unknown today. These marks were not related to chaturanga, but were drawn on the board only by tradition. These special markings coincide with squares unreachable by any of the four Gajas that start on the board due to movement rules. Chess historian H. J. R. Murray conjectured that the ashtāpada was also used for some old race-type dice game, perhaps similar to chowka bhara, in which the marks had meaning.


title: Chaturanga

text: An early reference to an ancient Indian board game is sometimes attributed to Subandhu in his "Vasavadatta", dated between the 5th and 7th centuries AD: The time of the rains played its game with frogs for pieces ["nayadyutair"] yellow and green in colour, as if mottled by lac, leapt up on the black field squares.


title: Chaturanga

text: The colours are not those of the two camps, but mean that the frogs have two colours, yellow and green.


title: Chaturanga

text: Banabhatta's "Harsha Charitha" (c. AD 625) contains the earliest reference to the name chaturanga: Under this monarch, only the bees quarrelled to collect the dew; the only feet cut off were those of measurements, and only from Ashtâpada one could learn how to draw up a chaturanga, there was no cutting-off of the four limbs of condemned criminals...


title: Chaturanga

text: While there is little doubt that ashtâpada is the gameboard of 8×8 squares, the double meaning of chaturanga, as the four-folded army, may be controversial. There is a probability that the ancestor of chess was mentioned there.


title: Chaturanga

text: The game was first introduced to the West in Thomas Hyde's "De ludis orientalibus libri duo", published in 1694. Subsequently, translations of Sanskrit accounts of the game were published by Sir William Jones.


title: Chaturanga

text: In Arabic, most of the terminology of chess is derived directly from chaturanga: Modern chess itself is called shatranj in Arabic, and the bishop is called the elephant. The Tamerlane chess was also introduced in Iran later.


title: Chaturanga

text: The initial position is as shown. White moves first. The objective in chaturanga is to checkmate the opponent's Raja (king) or reducing the opposition to just the Raja.


title: Mark Bezos

text: Mark Bezos ( ) (born 1967) is an American space tourist and former advertising executive. He is the half-brother of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, with whom he flew to the edge of space as part of the Blue Origin NS-16 mission on July 20, 2021.


title: Mark Bezos

text: Mark is 6 years younger than his half-brother Jeff. Mark grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Houston, Texas; and Pensacola, Florida. He finished high school in Norway. He graduated from Texas Christian University in 1992.


title: Mark Bezos

text: After graduation, he worked in the advertising industry, including positions at Saatchi & Saatchi and DDB. His own agency Bezos–Nathonson, founded in 1999, was bought by EastWest Creative in 2005. From 2006 to 2016 he was head of communications at the Robin Hood Foundation, earning $140,000 to $240,000 per year as Robin Hood's communications director, which is supported by his brother and other members of his family. He founded a private equity firm in 2019.


title: Mark Bezos

text: , he is a director of the Bezos Family Foundation. He owns an unknown stake in his brother's company Amazon; $10,000 of shares he bought in 1996 were estimated to be worth $640 million in 2018.


title: Mark Bezos

text: He is married with four children and lives in Scarsdale, New York, where he is also a volunteer firefighter.


title: Mark Bezos

text: On July 20, 2021, he flew to the edge of space alongside his brother Jeff, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen, aboard the Blue Origin NS-16 flight. The suborbital flight lasted over 10 minutes, reaching a peak altitude of .


title: Aisling Franciosi

text: Aisling Franciosi ( , ; born 6 June 1993) is an Irish actress. She won an AACTA Award for her leading performance in the film "The Nightingale" (2018). On television, she is known for her roles in the RTÉ-BBC Two crime drama "The Fall" (2013–2016), season 2 of the TNT series "Legends" (2015), and the BBC One miniseries "Black Narcissus" (2020).


title: Aisling Franciosi

text: Franciosi was born and grew up in Dublin, Ireland. Her father is Italian and her mother is Irish and she has two older brothers and a younger sister. She is trilingual, fluent in English, Italian and Irish. She studied French and Spanish at Trinity College Dublin.


title: Aisling Franciosi

text: From 2013 to 2016, Franciosi starred as Katie Benedetto in the RTÉ and BBC Two crime drama series "The Fall". She made her feature film debut in 2014 in "Jimmy's Hall". The following year, she starred in the second season of the TNT series "Legends" as Kate Crawford.


title: Aisling Franciosi

text: In 2016, Franciosi appeared in the HBO series "Game of Thrones" in the sixth season as Lyanna Stark and reprised her role in the seventh season. She landed the lead role of Clare Carroll in "The Nightingale", a 2018 period drama set in Tasmania and directed by Jennifer Kent. For "The Nightingale", Francioisi received critical acclaim and a number of accolades including an AACTA. She also had supporting and recurring roles season 1 of the BBC thriller "Clique" as Georgia Cunningham and the "" installment of the National Geographic television anthology "Genius" as Fernande Olivier.


title: Aisling Franciosi

text: Franciosi played Sister Ruth in the 2020 miniseries "Black Narcissus" opposite Gemma Arterton and appeared in the films "Home", "The Unforgivable", and "God's Creatures". She has upcoming film roles in the biographical-drama film "Rothko", directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, as well as the horror film "The Last Voyage of the Demeter".


title: Léo Major

text: Léo Major (January 23, 1921 – October 12, 2008) was a Canadian soldier who was the only Canadian and one of only three soldiers in the British Commonwealth to receive the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) twice in separate wars.


title: Léo Major

text: Major earned his first DCM in World War II in 1945 after a successful reconnaissance mission in Zwolle. As he was sent to scout the city with one of his best friends, a firefight broke out in which his friend was killed. Major continued on to find that the city was mostly deserted by the German occupational army. Thanks to his efforts, Zwolle was spared from the artillery fire that was planned the next day by the Allies. He received his second DCM during the Korean War for leading the capture of a key hill in 1951. Today, he is sometimes called by the nickname, "the Québécois Rambo".


title: Léo Major

text: Born on January 23, 1921, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents, Major moved with his family to Montreal before his first birthday. Due to a poor relationship with his father, he moved to live with an aunt at age 14. This relationship, combined with a lack of available work, led Major to join the Canadian army in 1940 to prove to his father that he was "somebody to be proud of".


title: Léo Major

text: Major was serving with the , which landed on the beaches in the Invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. During a reconnaissance mission on D-Day, Major captured a German halftrack by himself. The vehicle contained German communication equipment and secret codes. Days later, during his first encounter with an SS patrol, he killed four soldiers. However, one of them managed to ignite a phosphorus grenade; in the resulting explosion, Major lost one eye but continued to fight. He continued his service as a scout and a sniper by insisting he needed only one eye to sight his weapon. According to him, he "looked like a pirate".


title: Léo Major

text: Major allegedly single-handedly captured 93 German soldiers during the Battle of the Scheldt in Zeeland in the southern Netherlands. According to the "Ottawa Citizen", Major and his friend, Corporal Wilfrid Arsenault, were assigned to determine the fates of a company of recruits that had disappeared after being sent to capture a town; however, as Arsenault fell ill, Major went alone. After finding the company's abandoned equipment and determining they had been captured, Major entered a house to find shelter from the rain and the cold, when he spotted two German soldiers walking along a dike. He captured the first German, used him as bait to capture the other, and brought his captives to their commanding officer; the officer and his company, totaling around 100 men, surrendered, though three of the soldiers were killed by Major. In a nearby group of houses, SS troops, witnessing the company surrender, opened fire on them, killing seven and injuring some others. Major disregarded the enemy fire and continued escorting his prisoners to the Canadian front line, ordering a passing Canadian tank to fire on the SS troops. He marched back to camp with the surviving 93 prisoners.


title: Léo Major

text: Allegedly, Major was chosen to receive a Distinguished Conduct Medal. However, he declined the offer as, according to him, General Montgomery (who was to present him with the award) was "incompetent" and in no position to be giving out medals. Whether he actually got this nomination and why he would not have received it is not clear; The National Archives only contains records of his later DCM recommendation from 1945. An article in "Trouw" claims he received seven days off instead, which he spent in Belgium, and that he was not present to receive his DCM because his car would not start. However, Dirk Staat, conservator of the Nationaal Militair Museum, has done research on Major for two years and doubts the usual telling of the events, arguing that there were no reports of a DCM recommendation and that one person escorting 93 prisoners is unfathomably difficult: "Those stories are indeed doing the rounds, that he also received a medallion for the Battle of the Scheldt, the Distinguished Conduct Medal. He would have captured 93 soldiers there. He refused [the medal] because of General Montgomery. But you cannot find anything about all of that. Major fought in Zeeland, and undoubtedly he would have been competent. But about his medal we read nothing. And do not be mistaken; if someone came ten minutes too late to the evening roll call, then that is in the reports. Or that they get new shoes on Tuesday. And then there would be nothing noted down about the medal for Major? Would be really weird, I cannot imagine that. "In February 1945, Major was helping a military chaplain load corpses from a destroyed Tiger II tank into a Universal Carrier in Keppeln, Germany. After they finished, the chaplain and the driver seated themselves in the front while Major jumped in the back of the vehicle. The carrier struck a land mine, the resulting explosion killing the chaplain and the driver and knocking Major unconscious. Major claimed to have remembered a loud blast, followed by his body being thrown into the air and smashing down hard on his back. Upon regaining consciousness, he awoke to find two concerned medical officers trying to assess his condition. He simply asked if the chaplain was okay. They did not answer his question, but transported him on a truck to a field hospital away, stopping every 15 minutes to inject morphine to relieve the pain in his back.


title: Léo Major

text: At the beginning of April 1945, the were approaching the city of Zwolle, which was shown to have strong German resistance. On April 13, the regiment's commanding officer asked for two volunteers for a reconnaissance mission into Zwolle, their tasks being to scout the German force and, if possible, make contact with the Dutch Resistance, before an Allied artillery barrage could commence. Private Major and Corporal Arsenault stepped forward to accept the task. However, Major and Arsenault, wanting to spare the city from destruction, agreed to attempt to liberate the city themselves.


title: Léo Major

text: That night, Major and Arsenault entered the farmhouse of Hendrik van Gerner, who gave them rough positions of German emplacements near the railway tracks. After leaving the farmhouse, Arsenault was killed by German fire after accidentally giving away the pair's position. In a radio interview with , Major told that he became mad after that, but managed to control himself. Major killed two of the Germans, but the rest fled in a vehicle. Deciding to continue his mission alone, Major entered Zwolle near Sassenpoort.


title: Léo Major

text: What happened after that is unclear. Stories about Major's actions in Zwolle have been exaggerated and conflated with his other deeds, and there are several conflicting accounts of what actually happened, including several contradictory accounts from Major himself. However, what is certain is that Major spent several hours in Zwolle, the German military left the city, Major contacted the Dutch resistance, and he returned to camp with Arsenault's body.


title: Léo Major

text: Thanks to Major's efforts, the planned shelling of Zwolle was called off, and the entered the city the next day without firing a single shot. For his actions, Major received the Distinguished Conduct Medal.


title: Léo Major

text: The most popular and oft-cited story claims that Major, armed with several machine guns and a sack of grenades, launched a solo assault on Zwolle, using gunfire and grenade explosions to trick the German elements in the city into believing a large Canadian force was assaulting the city; after killing several German soldiers and making contact with the resistance, the German force fled, and Major returned to camp to report his findings to the commanding officer of the Chaudières. Certain versions of the story add or change details of what Major encountered in the city, such as him taking the driver of a German military vehicle hostage or assaulting the local SS headquarters.


title: Léo Major

text: According to Major's official recommendation for the Distinguished Conduct Medal, written 20 May 1945:To save as many Dutch lives as possible, it was necessary to know exactly the location of the enemy positions, many of which were not known. Private Leo Major and a Corporal [Wilfred Arsenault] from the scout platoon volunteered to enter the town and contact the underground movement to obtain the necessary information. At the entrance of the town, was a roadblock guarded by a small group of enemy. The patrol was discovered and the Corporal killed. Pte. Major killed two Germans and scattered the others. Undaunted by the death of a friend and comrade, he continued to patrol alone for 6 hours, contacting the underground and formed patrols of the local Dutch civilians, with the result that by morning the enemy garrison menaced from inside and from outside, were forced to withdraw as their position became untenable. To urge them on Pte. Major had the Gestapo headquarters set on fire. At 0400 hours 14 April 1945, this gallant soldier waded across a canal, after posting numerous patrols of the Dutch Resistance Movement at strategic points. On his way back, though wet and tired, he picked up the body of his Corporal and brought it in.According to an article written after Major's death from the "Canadian Army Journal Vol. 11.3 Fall 2008":Major [was] carrying two Sten guns and a sack of grenades. He arrived in the centre of Zwolle at about 0100 hours and found the streets silent and deserted. Here, he spotted a German machine-gun nest which, since the crew was sleeping, he promptly attacked and eliminated. He then found a German scout car and forced one of the Germans, who he had captured, to drive through the streets with the lights on, flying a white flag. For several hours, Major moved through the streets in this manner, shooting at any target he could find, making an impression that a large Canadian force had arrived. The citizens were awakened but were afraid to come out of their houses. By a stroke of luck, Private Major came across the head of the local resistance, Frits Kuipers, and three of his men. By now the Germans appeared to have fled the city in panic. The group therefore returned to the town hall and the resistance fighters brought the citizens out into the streets. The local radio station was used to announce that the town had been liberated. Major was exhausted but he had to complete his mission by bringing back the body of his comrade, Wilfrid Arsenault, to his lines. The resistance fighters arranged for a car to transport the body back, but were fired on by outposts of the Chaudières. Major was furious and climbed onto the top of the car so that he could be easily seen from a distance. In this manner, he returned to the Canadian lines to report the result of his mission to his commanding officer.


title: Léo Major

text: A similar version from a 2005 article from the "Ottawa Citizen" claims that Major "worked his way to the city centre", captured the driver of a German staff car outside a tavern, went inside the tavern with this captive, and disarmed the officer who was drinking inside. The two communicated in French, and Major learned the officer was from Alsace-Lorraine, "a region near France that was not terribly committed to Adolf Hitler's rabid designs"; finding the officer did not mean any harm, Major gave the officer his gun back: "I said the war is almost finished and I am a member of the advance party – I didn't say I was alone. I said it's a lovely town and I didn't want nobody to destroy that town." Major then "spent the next few hours engaging patrols whenever he could and setting off grenades where they would make noise, but do little damage", and killed four SS members during an attack on the local SS headquarters. By four in the morning, Major learned the Germans had left the city, and tried to signal the townsfolk to come outside; however, he found that this was difficult, as they were unsure of who he was. Linking up with the resistance, Major returned to camp with Arsenault's body.


title: Léo Major

text: The Dutch newspaper "Trouw" offers a much less fantastical account of Major's actions, presenting the "solo assault" story as a legend that Major entertained and that the actual operation was much more simple, as the Germans had already mostly left:


title: Léo Major

text: He reached the city and walked through deserted streets. He knocked on doors, but nobody dared to open the doors. "After a while I was so tired that I couldn't think straight anymore. But I had enough information, and I encountered enemies nowhere." He walked around in circles, left the town and came to a farmer whom he reassured by pointing at the word CANADA in the inside of his hat. Quickly he came in contact with the underground resistance. He was able to return to his unit with the message that the enemy left Zwolle. ... But in the decades that followed Leo Major became a 'Rambo' who according to many conquered street after street wildly shooting around on 'certainly a thousand' Germans who persistently resisted. It was a story that he – so his friends mildly laugh – in the end started to believe a little bit himself.


title: Léo Major

text: A 2017 article in "Jonge Historici" offers a similar account, stating that Major simply "walked through deserted streets and established contact with the underground resistance. After that he returned to his regiment, where at 9 o'clock he reported that the enemy had left the city."


title: Léo Major

text: Similarly, in an interview with "De Stentor", Nationaal Militair Museum curator Dirk Staat, who had researched Major for two years, argued that much of the popularly-accepted story is a myth with no records or proof of any incident happening that night in Zwolle. Staat also believes the vehicle used by Major was not a hijacked German military vehicle, but rather just the car of the head of the local resistance, Frits Kuiper, which Major also used to ride back in the morning.


title: Léo Major

text: Descriptions of him setting the city on fire like Rambo, while he was shooting around him and threw grenades through the city; I don't think that is the right image. We have read police reports about that night, and within we read nothing about the unrest. ... The Germans [Major] saw, would have been the tail end of the retreating occupation. ... [Setting the building on fire] fits the modus operandi of the retreating Germans. They kill prisoners and destroy dossiers. And what is more effective to destroy dossiers, than to set the building on fire? A radio program about Léo Major by agrees with Staat's argument that the Germans set fire to the house on the Potgietersingel, where the German police held office, to destroy their documents." The program included an interview with Major, who described the events of the night. He stated the first thing he did was go to the railroad station, because he "thought that's were the Germans would come in", and he had "heard from Hendriks van Gerner that some of the bridges were destroyed." He entered the city through the Sassenpoort. All the people he met "were either collaborators or German. And the German I met, most of them were drunk." He made noise using grenades and machine gun fire, and believed the noises he made startled the Germans into fleeing.


title: Léo Major

text: After the conclusion of World War II, Major returned to his former job as a pipe fitter. He also got an operation to fix his back, which had bothered him since the landmine explosion in February 1945.


title: Léo Major

text: When the Korean War broke out, the Canadian government raised a force to join the United Nations Command in repelling the communist invasion. Major was called back and ended up in the Scout and Sniper Platoon of 2nd Battalion Royal 22 Régiment (R22R) of the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade, 1st Commonwealth Division. Major fought in the First Battle of Maryang San, where he received a bar to his Distinguished Conduct Medal for capturing and holding a key hill in November 1951.


title: Léo Major

text: Hill 355, nicknamed Little Gibraltar, was a strategic feature, commanding the terrain for twenty miles around, so the Communists were determined to take it before the truce talks came to an agreement that would lock each side into their present positions. Hill 355 was held by the 3rd U.S. Infantry Division, who linked up with the R22R on the Americans' western flank. On November 22, the 64th Chinese Army (around 40,000 men) began their attack: over the course of two days, the Americans were pushed back from Hill 355 by elements of the Chinese 190th and 191st Divisions. The 3rd U.S. Infantry Division tried to recapture the hill, but without any success, and the Chinese had moved to the nearby Hill 227, practically surrounding the Canadian forces.


title: Léo Major

text: To relieve pressure, an elite scout and sniper team led by Léo Major was brought up. Armed with Sten guns, Major and his 18 men, wearing running shoes to silence their movements, passed through enemy lines and crept up Hill 227 from the Chinese side. At a signal, Major's men opened fire, panicking the Chinese who were trying to understand why the enemy's fire was coming from the centre of their troops instead of from the outside. By 12:45 am, Major's team had retaken the hill. However, an hour later, the 190th and the 191st, totalling around 14,000 men, launched a counter-attack. Major was ordered to retreat, but refused and found scant cover for his men. He held the enemy off throughout the night, though they were so close to him that Major's own mortar bombs were practically falling on him. The commander of the mortar platoon, Captain Charly Forbes, later wrote that Major was "an audacious man ... not satisfied with the proximity of my barrage and asks to bring it closer...In effect, my barrage falls so close that I hear my bombs explode when he speaks to me on the radio." Major and his platoon held Hill 227 for three days until relieved by the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division.


title: Léo Major

text: Major died in Longueuil on October 12, 2008, and was buried at the Last Post Fund National Field of Honour in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. He was survived by Pauline De Croiselle, his wife of 57 years; four children; and five grandchildren. A documentary film about his exploits, , has been produced in Montreal (Qc). To commemorate the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe, Canada Post issued a stamp in honour of Major, "The one-eyed ghost", on April 29, 2020.


title: The Game Awards

text: The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony honoring achievements in the video game industry. Established in 2014, the shows are produced and hosted by game journalist Geoff Keighley, who worked on its predecessor, the Spike Video Game Awards, for over ten years. In addition to the awards, The Game Awards features premieres of upcoming games and new information on previously-announced titles.


title: The Game Awards

text: In 1994, Canadian games journalist Geoff Keighley had been part of the first televised awards show for video games, "Cybermania '94: The Ultimate Gamer Awards". Keighley, as a teenager, had been brought on to help write material for the celebrity hosts such as William Shatner and Leslie Nielsen. The show was not considered successful, aimed more for comedy than celebration, but he had been prompted from it to develop something akin to the Academy Awards for video games later in his career.


title: The Game Awards

text: Keighley had subsequently worked on the Spike Video Game Awards (VGA), which ran from 2003 to 2013. The show was broadcast on Spike TV near the end of each calendar year, and was designed to honor video games released during that year. Keighley served as the producer and often host for these shows. While the network had shown strong support for the award show through 2012, having brought Samuel L. Jackson to host the show, Keighley found Spike less interested in pursuing the 2013 show, partially due to the network seeking less male-oriented programming. Spike opted to rename the awards from VGA to VGX as to reflect that they wanted to focus more on next-generation games that were being ushered in by the onset of the eighth generation of consoles, as well as bringing comedian Joel McHale to co-host alongside Keighley. Additionally, the show was reduced to a one-hour presentation, which was first streamed online before airing on television. The 2013 show was considered to be disappointing and aimed as a more commercial work rather than a celebration of video game achievements. Keighley was disappointed with the change in tone that this show has presented. Spike offered to continue the show in 2014, but would be limited to streaming media rather than broadcast. Keighley opted to drop out from further involvement in the VGX, allowing Spike to retain ownership of the property; in November 2014, Spike TV announced that they had opted to drop the awards show in its entirety.


title: The Game Awards

text: Keighley worked with several entities within the industry, including console hardware manufacturers Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and several large publishers, to financially back and craft a new awards show, the Game Awards, with Spike's permission. He invested around of his own personal funds to support the new show, and was able to secure space at The AXIS theater in Las Vegas for hosting the live event. Without a broadcaster, Keighley and the other producers agreed to live stream the show on the consoles' networks and on Valve's Steam service to be able to reach a much larger audience than Spike TV previously had.


title: The Game Awards

text: Since the 2014 show, Keighley has been able to secure the larger Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles to host the event. He has worked to partner with multiple streaming services around the globe for the show, which has been a move appreciated by several of the Game Awards' partners since the show's inception. Keighley has been approached by broadcast networks offering to air the show, but he had refused these offers, allowing them to keep the freedom of how they present and structure the show. The 2019 show included a simulcast in partnership with Sony Pictures for select Cinemark movie theaters throughout the United States. The Game Awards 2020 was not held in a live theater due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was instead hosted virtually. The 2021 show was held live again at the Microsoft Theater with a reduced audience due to ongoing COVID-19 precautions.


title: The Game Awards

text: Keighley considered it important that the Game Awards are aimed to favorably present the interest of gamers and the industry at large, as well as being welcoming to celebrities and others that have shown interest in video games. While the Game Awards are principally an awards show, Keighley knew the importance of having additional content, having seen other experiments of video game awards shows that were only dedicated to awards fail due to lack of audience. Keighley believed that the Game Awards should fall somewhere between the entertainment venues that are used for the Academy Awards and the standard award presentation used for the Game Developers Choice Awards, and wanted a balance of material. Through the Spike VGX and into the Game Awards, Keighley has engaged with games studios to bring reveals of new games alongside the awards. He considers the crowning moment of this approach was being able to secure the first gameplay reveal of "" at The Game Awards 2014. Keighly encourages game studios to provide any content that might be deemed exciting or that can pique interest, even if these games are at an early stage of development, and then makes the selection of which games and trailers to feature. Keighley subsequently works with those studios about how to best position their trailers to have the most impact; for example, in the 2018 show, he and Nintendo worked on a trailer reveal for the "Persona 5" character Joker in "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" that appeared to start as a teaser for a new game in the series.


title: The Game Awards

text: Since the show's launch, Keighley has solicited input from fans on how to improve the show, typically while at trade shows and conventions in months ahead of the show. For 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic causing cancellations of many of these events, Keighley invited about one hundred fans to private chats with himself and other top organizers of the program to help solicit their input. The Game Awards were still held in 2020 and 2021, though with a limited invited audience for the latter and limited interactions of hosts, presenters and nominees due to restrictions set by California and Los Angeles in regards to large gatherings in indoor spaces. The 2022 show returned to a full live audience as these government restrictions were since lifted.


title: The Game Awards

text: In conjunction with the show, digital storefronts such as Steam, Xbox Games Store, Nintendo eShop, and PlayStation Store offer the nominated games on sale leading up to and a few days after the event. The statuette awarded to the selected games was designed by collaboration between Keighley and Weta Workshop. It is meant to represent "the evolution of the video game medium by way of an angel that ascends through digital building blocks".


title: The Game Awards

text: On June 25, 2023, Keighley will host "The Game Awards 10-Year Celebration", a night of video game music at the Hollywood Bowl backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.


title: The Game Awards

text: The Game Awards has an advisory committee which includes representatives from hardware manufacturers Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and AMD, along with several game publishers. This committee selects around thirty influential video game news organizations that are able to nominate and subsequently vote on the video games in several categories. The advisory committee otherwise does not participate in the nomination or voting process. During the nomination round, each of the news outlets provides a list of games in several categories; games for the esports-related categories are chosen by a specific subset of these outlets. The committee compiles the nominations and selects the most-nominated games for voting by these same outlets. Prior to 2017, there were 28 industry experts and representatives that selected the winners, while the awards from 2017 onwards have used over 50 such experts. In 2019, non-English media publications were added to the jury. Winners are determined by a blended vote between the voting jury (90%) and public fan voting (10%) via social platforms and the show's website.


title: The Game Awards

text: Generally, only games released before a specific date in November are eligible for being nominated in the year's awards. As the jury must make their nominations in the weeks prior to this date, this may leave some anticipated games that are scheduled for release just before that date to be underrepresented in the nominations, since the jury must go by pre-release review copies and not the final version. Any games releasing after the November deadline (which varies every year) are eligible for the next year's ceremony.


title: Ledger

text: A ledger is a book or collection of accounts in which account transactions are recorded. Each account has an opening or carry-forward balance, and would record each transaction as either a debit or credit in separate columns, and the ending or closing balance.


title: Ledger

text: The ledger is a permanent summary of all amounts entered in supporting journals which list individual transactions by date. Every transaction flows from a journal, to one or more ledgers. A company's financial statements are generated from summary totals in the ledgers.


title: Ledger

text: For every debit recorded in a ledger, there must be a corresponding credit, so that the debits equal the credits in the grand totals.


title: Ledger

text: The general ledger accumulates information from journals. Each month all journals are totaled and posted to the General Ledger. The purpose of the General Ledger is therefore to organize and summarize the individual transactions listed in all the journals. The Debtors Ledger accumulates information from the sales journal. The purpose of the Debtors Ledger is to provide knowledge about which customers owe money to the business, and how much. The Creditors Ledger accumulates information from the purchases journal. The purpose of the Creditors Ledger is to provide knowledge about which suppliers the business owes money to, and how much.


title: Ledger

text: The term "ledger" stems from the English dialect forms "liggen" or "leggen", meaning "to lie or lay" (Dutch: "liggen" or "leggen", German: "liegen" or "legen"); in sense it is adapted from the Dutch substantive "legger", properly "a book lying or remaining regularly in one place". Originally, a ledger was a large volume of scripture or service book kept in one place in church and openly accessible. According to Charles Wriothesley's "Chronicle" (1538), "The curates should provide a booke of the bible in Englishe, of the largest volume, to be a ledger in the same church for the parishioners to read on."


title: Ledger

text: In application of this original meaning the commercial usage of the term is for the "principal book of account" in a business house.


title: Geometric progression

text: In mathematics, a geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a sequence of non-zero numbers where each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed, non-zero number called the "common ratio". For example, the sequence 2, 6, 18, 54, ... is a geometric progression with common ratio 3. Similarly 10, 5, 2.5, 1.25, ... is a geometric sequence with common ratio 1/2.


title: Geometric progression

text: Examples of a geometric sequence are powers "r" of a fixed non-zero number "r", such as 2 and 3. The general form of a geometric sequence is


title: Geometric progression

text: where "r" ≠ 0 is the common ratio and "a" ≠ 0 is a scale factor, equal to the sequence's start value.


title: Geometric progression

text: The distinction between a progression and a series is that a progression is a sequence, whereas a series is a sum.


title: Geometric progression

text: The "n"-th term of a geometric sequence with initial value "a" = "a" and common ratio "r" is given by


title: Geometric progression

text: Generally, to check whether a given sequence is geometric, one simply checks whether successive entries in the sequence all have the same ratio.


title: Geometric progression

text: The common ratio of a geometric sequence may be negative, resulting in an alternating sequence, with numbers alternating between positive and negative. For instance


title: Geometric progression

text: Geometric sequences (with common ratio not equal to −1, 1 or 0) show exponential growth or exponential decay, as opposed to the linear growth (or decline) of an arithmetic progression such as 4, 15, 26, 37, 48, … (with common "difference" 11). This result was taken by T.R. Malthus as the mathematical foundation of his "Principle of Population".


title: Geometric progression

text: Note that the two kinds of progression are related: exponentiating each term of an arithmetic progression yields a geometric progression, while taking the logarithm of each term in a geometric progression with a positive common ratio yields an arithmetic progression.


title: Geometric progression

text: An interesting result of the definition of the geometric progression is that any three consecutive terms "a", "b" and "c" will satisfy the following equation:


title: Geometric progression

text: Letting "a" be the first term (here 2), n be the number of terms (here 4), and "r" be the constant that each term is multiplied by to get the next term (here 5), the sum is given by:


title: Geometric progression

text: The formula works for any real numbers "a" and "r" (except "r" = 1, which results in a division by zero). For example:


title: Geometric progression

text: Since the derivation (below) does not depend on "a" and "r" being real, it holds for complex numbers as well.


title: Geometric progression

text: since all the other terms cancel. If "r" ≠ 1, we can rearrange the above to get the convenient formula for a geometric series that computes the sum of n terms:


title: Geometric progression

text: An exact formula for the generalized sum formula_19 when formula_20 is expanded by the Stirling numbers of the second kind as


title: Geometric progression

text: An infinite geometric series is an infinite series whose successive terms have a common ratio. Such a series converges if and only if the absolute value of the common ratio is less than one ( < 1). Its value can then be computed from the finite sum formula


title: Geometric progression

text: The formulae given above are valid only for  < 1. The latter formula is valid in every Banach algebra, as long as the norm of "r" is less than one, and also in the field of "p"-adic numbers if  < 1. As in the case for a finite sum, we can differentiate to calculate formulae for related sums.


title: Geometric progression

text: Also, the infinite series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ⋯ is an elementary example of a series that converges absolutely.


title: Geometric progression

text: The inverse of the above series is 1/2 − 1/4 + 1/8 − 1/16 + ⋯ is a simple example of an alternating series that converges absolutely.


title: Geometric progression

text: The summation formula for geometric series remains valid even when the common ratio is a complex number. In this case the condition that the absolute value of "r" be less than 1 becomes that the modulus of "r" be less than 1. It is possible to calculate the sums of some non-obvious geometric series. For example, consider the proposition


title: Geometric progression

text: This is the difference of two geometric series, and so it is a straightforward application of the formula for infinite geometric series that completes the proof.


title: Geometric progression

text: The product of a geometric progression is the product of all terms. It can be quickly computed by taking the geometric mean of the progression's first and last individual terms, and raising that mean to the power given by the number of terms. (This is very similar to the formula for the sum of terms of an arithmetic sequence: take the arithmetic mean of the first and last individual terms, and multiply by the number of terms.)


title: Geometric progression

text: As the geometric mean of two numbers equals the square root of their product, the product of a geometric progression is:


title: Geometric progression

text: Let represent the product. By definition, one calculates it by explicitly multiplying each individual term together. Written out in full,


title: Geometric progression

text: A clay tablet from the Early Dynastic Period in Mesopotamia, MS 3047, contains a geometric progression with base 3 and multiplier 1/2. It has been suggested to be Sumerian, from the city of Shuruppak. It is the only known record of a geometric progression from before the time of Babylonian mathematics.


title: Geometric progression

text: Books VIII and IX of Euclid's "Elements" analyzes geometric progressions (such as the powers of two, see the article for details) and give several of their properties.