title: Still Open All Hours

text: Forty-one episodes of "Still Open All Hours", all written by Roy Clarke, have been produced for the BBC. The show began airing on 26 December 2013 with an anniversary special of original series, "Open All Hours" All episodes had a running time of 30 minutes. Between "Open All Hours" and "Still Open All Hours", there have been a total of 67 episodes and ten series broadcast between 1973 and 2019.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: "Still Open All Hours" was first broadcast on 26 December 2013, with Jason reprising his role of Granville from "Open All Hours". The new one-off episode written by Clarke showed Granville now running the shop with his son Leroy (played by James Baxter), after inheriting it from Arkwright. Clarke wrote the script in two weeks, and production began in October 2013. The exterior scenes were filmed at the original location at Lister Avenue in Doncaster from 18 to 20 November 2013. The interior scenes were recorded on 3 December 2013 at dock10 studios in Salford in front of a studio audience. A 30-minute documentary accompanying the show's return, entitled "Open All Hours: A Celebration", aired on 27 December 2013, the day after the new episode was broadcast, on BBC One.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: On 30 January 2014, the BBC commissioned "Still Open All Hours" for six new episodes beginning on 26 December 2014. The controller of BBC comedy commissioning, Shane Allen, said: "The resounding success of the Christmas revival showed the huge and enduring audience affection for this much-loved classic. Roy has done a terrific job of updating the characters whilst keeping what was warm-hearted and enjoyable about the world of the original series."


title: Still Open All Hours

text: Production for series one began in August 2014, exterior filming started on 15 September and location work was completed on 26 September 2014. Interior scenes were recorded in front of a studio audience from 10 October until 21 November 2014 at Teddington Studios.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: The show later returned for a second series, beginning on 26 December 2015. with production starting in September 2015. Exterior scenes were shot on location from 14–24 September 2015. Interior scenes were recorded before a studio audience at Pinewood Studios from 9 October until 20 November 2015.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: In January 2016, David Jason said a third series would be produced during the year. The series began airing on 26 December 2016. Production started in September 2016 with on location for exterior scenes being shot in Balby Doncaster from 12 September 2016. Lynda Baron could not reprise her role as Nurse Gladys Emmanuel as the scheduled production dates clashed with Baron's "EastEnders" contract.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: David Jason announced that a fourth series would be produced in 2017. Recording began in September 2017 with David Jason seen on location in Doncaster with co-star Tim Healy. The series began airing on 28 December 2017. Interior scenes were recorded at Pinewood Studios in front of a live studio-audience on 7, 14, and 21 October and on the 4, 11, 18, and 24 November 2016.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: In early 2017 a fourth series was commissioned with production beginning in August 2017. On location exterior scenes for the fourth series commenced on 11 September 2017 in Doncaster. For the original special and the first three series, all episodes were filmed in front of a studio audience. Series 4 was, by contrast, filmed on a closed set and screened to an audience for recording of a laughter track, due to cast availability problems.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: In January 2018, it was announced the show will return for a fifth series late 2018. The fifth series was officially confirmed on 2 May 2018, with filming due to commence in the summer. On 21 December 2018, the BBC confirmed a sixth series that was commissioned for transmission in late in 2019.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: The exterior shots reused the original shop from the series, on Lister Avenue in Balby, a suburb of Doncaster. The shop had to be extensively redressed (for both programmes) to resemble a traditional corner shop, as it has been a hair salon known as Beautique since 1962. This process took two days, before filming on location for three consecutive days. The hair salon "Beautique" is listed on Google Maps as "Arkwright's."


title: Still Open All Hours

text: The studio recordings for the 2013 special were recorded at Dock10 at MediaCityUK. For the first series, Teddington Studios were used and the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth series were all recorded at Pinewood Studios.


title: Still Open All Hours

text: The special was broadcast on BBC One on 26 December 2013 and received 9.43m (39.9% of the audience) viewers according to overnight figures and was the most watched programme on that day. Final viewing figures showed that it was watched by 13.07m and was the most watched programme for that week. It received generally poor reviews from critics. Will Dean of "The Independent", referencing Arkwright's trademark stutter, called it "a w-w-worthy effort" but criticised the attempt to revive the show without Ronnie Barker, who had died in 2005. Ben Lawrence of "The Telegraph" said it "felt like a relic of another era" criticising the jokes and Jason's performance. Jacob Mason, writing on the "Radio Times" website, described the show as "warmly nostalgic", whilst others noted it as "a fitting tribute to Ronnie Barker".


title: Still Open All Hours

text: Although filmed and broadcast in High-definition, no Blu-ray releases have been announced. Series 1 and the 2013 Christmas Special was released on DVD on 2 February 2015 by 2 entertain. Series 2 was released on 1 February 2016. Series 3 was released on 13 February 2017. Series 4 was released on 19 February 2018. Series 5 was released on 7 January 2019. Series 6 was released on 6 January 2020.


title: Social constructivism

text: Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge according to which human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others.


title: Social constructivism

text: Like social constructionism, social constructivism states that people work together to construct artifacts. While social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created through the social interactions of a group, social constructivism focuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of his or her interactions in a group.


title: Social constructivism

text: A very simple example is an object like a cup. The object can be used for many things, but its shape does suggest some 'knowledge' about carrying liquids (see also Affordance). A more complex example is an online course—not only do the 'shapes' of the software tools indicate certain things about the way online courses should work, but the activities and texts produced within the group as a whole will help shape how each person behaves within that group. A person's cognitive development will also be influenced by the culture that they are involved in, such as the language, history and social context.


title: Social constructivism

text: For a philosophical account of one possible social-constructionist ontology, see the 'Criticism' section of "Representative realism".


title: Social constructivism

text: Strong social constructivism as a philosophical approach tends to suggest that "the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge". According to Maarten Boudry and Filip Buekens, Freudian psychoanalysis is a good example of this approach in action.


title: Social constructivism

text: However, Boudry and Buekens do not claim that 'bona fide' science is completely immune from all socialisation and paradigm shifts, merely that the strong social constructivist claim that "all" scientific knowledge is constructed ignores the reality of scientific success.


title: Social constructivism

text: One characteristic of social constructivism is that it rejects the role of superhuman necessity in either the invention/discovery of knowledge or its justification. In the field of invention it looks to contingency as playing an important part in the origin of knowledge, with historical interests and resourcing swaying the direction of mathematical and scientific knowledge growth. In the area of justification while acknowledging the role of logic and reason in testing, it also accepts that the criteria for acceptance vary and change over time. Thus mathematical proofs follow different standards in the present and throughout different periods in the past, as Paul Ernest argues.


title: Social constructivism

text: Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. Social constructivism extends constructivism by incorporating the role of other actors and culture in development. In this sense it can also be contrasted with social learning theory by stressing interaction over observation. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of A. Sullivan Palincsar. Psychological tools are one of the key concepts in Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective.


title: Social constructivism

text: Studies on increasing the use of student discussion in the classroom both support and are grounded in theories of social constructivism. There is a full range of advantages that results from the implementation of discussion in the classroom. Participating in group discussion allows students to generalize and transfer their knowledge of classroom learning and builds a strong foundation for communicating ideas orally. Many studies argue that discussion plays a vital role in increasing student ability to test their ideas, synthesize the ideas of others, and build deeper understanding of what they are learning. Large and small group discussion also affords students opportunities to exercise self-regulation, self-determination, and a desire to persevere with tasks. Additionally, discussion increases student motivation, collaborative skills, and the ability to problem solve. Increasing students’ opportunity to talk with one another and discuss their ideas increases their ability to support their thinking, develop reasoning skills, and to argue their opinions persuasively and respectfully. Furthermore, the feeling of community and collaboration in classrooms increases through offering more chances for students to talk together.


title: Social constructivism

text: Studies have found that students are not regularly accustomed to participating in academic discourse. Martin Nystrand argues that teachers rarely choose classroom discussion as an instructional format. The results of Nystrand’s (1996) three-year study focusing on 2400 students in 60 different classrooms indicate that the typical classroom teacher spends under three minutes an hour allowing students to talk about ideas with one another and the teacher. Even within those three minutes of discussion, most talk is not true discussion because it depends upon teacher-directed questions with predetermined answers. Multiple observations indicate that students in low socioeconomic schools and lower track classrooms are allowed even fewer opportunities for discussion. Teachers who teach as if they value what their students think create learners. Discussion and interactive discourse promote learning because they afford students the opportunity to use language as a demonstration of their independent thoughts. Discussion elicits sustained responses from students that encourage meaning-making through negotiating with the ideas of others. This type of learning “promotes retention and in-depth processing associated with the cognitive manipulation of information”.


title: Social constructivism

text: One recent branch of work exploring social constructivist perspectives on learning focuses on the role of social technologies and social media in facilitating the generation of socially constructed knowledge and understanding in online environments.


title: Social constructivism

text: In a constructivist approach, the focus is on the sociocultural conventions of academic discourse such as citing evidence, hedging and boosting claims, interpreting the literature to back one's own claims, and addressing counter claims. These conventions are inherent to a constructivist approach as they place value on the communicative, interpersonal nature of academic writing with a strong focus on how the reader receives the message. The act of citing others’ work is more than accurate attribution; it is an important exercise in critical thinking in the construction of an authorial self.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car is a children's novel written by Ian Fleming for his son Caspar, with illustrations by John Burningham. It was initially published in three volumes, the first of which was released on 22 October 1964 by Jonathan Cape in London.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: Fleming, better known as the creator of James Bond, took his inspiration for the subject from a series of aero-engined racing cars called "Chitty Bang Bang", built by Louis Zborowski in the early 1920s at Higham Park. Fleming had known Higham Park as a guest of its later owner, Walter Whigham, chairman of Robert Fleming & Co. It was the last book he wrote and he did not live to see it published.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang" was loosely adapted as a 1968 film of the same name with a screenplay by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes; a subsequent novelisation was also published. The film was produced by Albert R. Broccoli, co-producer of the James Bond film series. The story was also adapted as a stage musical under the same name. In April 2011 a BBC Radio 4 Extra adaptation was broadcast with Imogen Stubbs as the voice of Chitty. Three sequels to Fleming's book have been published, all written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: Commander Caractacus Pott is an inventor who buys and renovates an old car after gaining money from inventing and selling whistle-like sweets to Lord Skrumshus, the wealthy owner of a local confectionery factory. The car, a "Paragon Panther", was the sole production of the Paragon motor-car company before it went bankrupt. It is a four-seat touring car with an enormous bonnet, or hood. After the restoration is complete, the car is named for the noises made by its starter motor and the characteristic two loud backfires it makes when it starts.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: At first Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang is just a big and powerful car, but as the book progresses the car surprises the family by beginning to exhibit independent actions. This first happens while the family is caught in a traffic jam on their way to the beach for a picnic. The car suddenly instructs Commander Pott to pull a switch which causes Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang to sprout wings and take flight over the stopped cars on the road. Commander Pott flies them to Goodwin Sands in the English Channel where the family picnics, swims, and sleeps. While the family naps, the tide comes in threatening to drown them. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang wakes them just in time with a hiss of steam. At the car's direction, Commander Pott pulls another switch which causes it to transform into a hovercraft-like vehicle. They make for the French coast and land on a beach near Calais. They explore along the beach and find a cave boobytrapped with some devices intended to scare off intruders. At the back of the cave is a store of armaments and explosives. The family detonates the cache of explosives and flees the cave.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: The gangsters/gun-runners who own the ammunition dump arrive and block the road in front of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. The gangsters threaten the family, but Commander Pott throws the switch which transforms the car into an aeroplane and they take off, leaving the gangsters in helpless fury. The Potts stay overnight in a hotel in Calais. While the family sleeps, the gangsters break into the children's room and kidnap them and drive off towards Paris. Chitty tracks the gangsters' route, wakes Commander and Mrs. Pott, and they drive off in pursuit.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: The gangsters are planning to rob a famous chocolate shop in Paris using the children as decoys. The Pott children overhear this and manage to warn the shop owner, Monsieur Bon-Bon. Chitty arrives in time to prevent the gangsters from fleeing. The police arrive and the gangsters are taken away. As a reward Madame Bon-Bon shares the secret recipe of her world-famous fudge with the Potts, and the two families become good friends. Chitty flies the family away to parts unknown, and the book implies that the car has yet more secrets.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: By 1961, Fleming had published nine James Bond books. The most recent of these was "Thunderball", a novel Fleming initially published under his own name, but which was the subject of a legal action by its co-authors, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham. In March 1961, McClory read an advance copy of the book and he and Whittingham immediately petitioned the High Court in London for an injunction to stop publication. The case was heard on 24 March 1961 and allowed the book to be published, although the door was left open for McClory to pursue further action at a later date.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: Fleming had also begun to write the children's book "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang". The car itself was based on a composite of two cars: Fleming's own Standard Tourer, which he had driven in Switzerland in the late 1920s, and Chitty Bang Bang, a chain-driven customised Mercedes with a 23-litre 6-cylinder Maybach aero-engine. Fleming had seen the car's owner, Louis Zborowski race at the Brooklands race track. The origin of the name "Chitty Bang Bang" is disputed, but may also have been inspired by early aeronautical engineer Letitia Chitty. Like Zborowski, Fleming names his car because of the noise it made—and the noise a car made was important to Fleming.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: As he wrote the novel, Fleming used aspects of his life to flesh out the details, much as he did with many of his Bond stories. Thus, in the novel, one of the children was called Jemima, after the daughter of his previous employer, Hugo Pitman; the advice Pott gave to his children also echoed that of Fleming: "Never say 'no' to adventures. Always say 'yes', otherwise you'll lead a very dull life."


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: In May 1961, Fleming sent his publisher the manuscripts for the first two volumes of "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang". To illustrate the book, Fleming suggested the "Daily Mail" cartoonist Trog—the pseudonym of Wally Fawkes—as he admired the artist's work. While undertaking the preliminary drawings for the book, Trog tried to make the fudge recipe included in the book and found it was not particularly good: the editors at Jonathan Cape spent a day making up batches from different recipes to find a better one to use. Although Fawkes completed preliminary drawings for the project, the "Daily Mail" refused to allow him to complete the work as many of Fleming's works were serialised in its rival, the "Daily Express". Other early illustrative sketches were produced by artist Haro Hodson and motor engineer Amherst Villiers. After Trog was forced to withdraw from the project, Cape commissioned John Burningham, who had recently won the 1963 Kate Greenaway Medal for his book "".


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: On 19 November 1963, the case of McClory v Fleming, following up the 1961 case, was heard at the Chancery Division of the High Court. The proceedings lasted three weeks, during which time Fleming was unwell, suffering a heart attack as the case progressed. Two weeks after the case, during the weekly Tuesday staff conference at his employers, "The Sunday Times", Fleming suffered a serious, second heart attack that necessitated convalescence, which he undertook at the Dudley Hotel in Hove. While there, one of Fleming's friends, Duff Dunbar, gave him a copy of Beatrix Potter's "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin" to read and suggested that he took the time to write up the bedtime story that Fleming used to tell his son Caspar each evening. Fleming attacked the project with gusto and wrote to his publisher, Michael Howard of Jonathan Cape, joking that "There is not a moment, even on the edge of the tomb, when I am not slaving for you."


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: Fleming did not live to see "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang" published: he suffered a further heart attack on 11 August 1964 and died in the early morning of the following day—his son Caspar's twelfth birthday—in Canterbury, Kent. The book was published two months after his death.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang" was first published in the UK in three hard-backed volumes by Jonathan Cape, each costing 10s. 6d. The first volume was launched on Thursday, 22 October 1964, the second on 26 November 1964 and the third on 14 January 1965. In July 1968, the three volumes were released in one single volume by Pan Books.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: Alexander Muir, in the "Daily Mirror", considered that the first two volumes of "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang", "would make wonderful Christmas presents for everybody's young ones", declaring that they were "thrilling cliff-hanger adventures". Writing in "The Guardian", John Rowe Townsend was damning of the book, saying of the car "I don't care for her much, or the values she stands for" and, of the writing, that "we have the adult writer at play rather than the children's writer at work. The style is avuncular, the writing down too evident."


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: The reviewer for "The Times" noted that "junior Bonds-men ... can cut their teeth on" the novel. Concerning volume one of the book, "The Sunday Times" reviewer Oscar Turnill wrote that "Fleming was right in judging the children's market ripe for the ... cliff hanger" and praised his "avuncular and knowledgeable storytelling", which was matched by Burningham's illustrations.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang" was serialised in the "Daily Express" newspaper in five episodes over the course of a week, from Monday 19 October 1964, to Friday 23 October 1964.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: A film loosely based on the novel was made in 1968, with a screenplay written by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes, directed by Hughes. It was produced by Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, who had made five James Bond films previously. The film starred Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts and Sally Ann Howes as Truly Scrumptious, an additional character who was not in Fleming's novel. Two actors from the Bond franchise were involved in the film: Desmond Llewelyn and Gert Fröbe, who played the parts of scrap-dealer Coggins and Baron Bomberst, respectively. A novelisation of the film was published by Pan Books in 1968, written by author John Burke.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: On 16 April 2002, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", a stage musical based on the film, opened at the London Palladium theatre. It was directed by Adrian Noble with musical staging and choreography by Gillian Lynne, and starred Michael Ball. This version of the show closed in September 2005. It was the longest-running show ever at the London Palladium, taking over £70 million in its three-and-a-half-year run. The show was nominated for two Laurence Olivier Awards.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: A Broadway version opened on 28 April 2005 at the Lyric Theatre (then the Hilton Theatre) in New York City and closed on 31 December 2005, after 34 previews and 284 regular performances, grossing $27,509,505 during its run. The production was nominated for five 2005 Tony Awards.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: A one-hour adaptation of the novel by Sherry Ashworth was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly BBC Radio 7) on 3 April 2011, starring Imogen Stubbs as the voice of Chitty and Alex Jennings as Caractacus Potts.


title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

text: Three sequels to Fleming's work have been written by Frank Cottrell Boyce. The first—"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again"—was published on 7 October 2011. The second, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time" was released on 27 September 2012. A third sequel, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon" was released on 26 September 2013.


title: Magnises

text: Magnises was a card-based membership club co-founded by convicted fraudster Billy McFarland in August 2013. Similar to another scam by McFarland, Ja Rule was the spokesman. The club card was not itself a real credit card; members could use it to make purchases only by first linking it to one of their pre-existing credit card accounts.


title: Magnises

text: The company's namesake card, which was targeted to millennials, was widely compared to American Express's "Black Card" (officially known as the Centurion Card). Similarities between the two cards include that they were both black, made of metal, and promised exclusive perks to members. Despite appearances, however, Magnises's card was not a real charge card; instead, each card copied the magstripe information from a customer's existing Wells Fargo or Bank of America card, for which it could then be used as a substitute. By December 2013, the company had about 500 members. Benefits offered to members included VIP access to clubs, hotel discounts, and various exclusive events.


title: Magnises

text: The company was initially based out of a rented townhouse in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, New York. The owner of this townhouse filed a lawsuit against McFarland in 2015, alleging that McFarland had "trashed" the building, accusations which he denied. The case was settled in January 2016, and the company subsequently relocated its headquarters to the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. By 2016, it was operating in New York City and Chicago, and, according to McFarland, its membership had grown to the tens of thousands.


title: Magnises

text: After McFarland's Fyre Festival ended in a high-profile disaster in 2017, Magnises reportedly terminated its lease on its Chelsea office, and its website ceased allowing new customers to sign up. The company has retrospectively been described as a scam. In June 2018, after the Fyre Festival, McFarland was arrested again for selling fake tickets to the Coachella Festival and the Met Gala, being accused of acquiring up to $100,000 in this manner. McFarland was subsequently sentenced to six years in federal prison for various frauds in connection with the Fyre Festival.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram Singh (born 21 July 1985), is an Indian wrestler, actor, motivational speaker, philanthropist, health guru and Honorary doctorate.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Ministry of youth affairs and sports of India choose him as a brand ambassador and Fit India Icon of Fit India Campaign, 2021 He is the face of anti-tobacco campaign "Tobacco Free India".


title: Sangram Singh

text: He has also appeared in a number of reality television shows, such as " Survivor India" and was finalist of season seven of "Bigg Boss" in 2013 and many others. In July 2015, he won the Commonwealth Heavyweight Wrestling Championship in the South Africa , and again in 2016 he won Commonwealth Heavyweight Wrestling Championship. He was also World’s best professional wrestler in 2012.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Wrestling federation of India appointed him as their official Brand Ambassador and motivational speaker 2014 - 15.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram is from the village Madina in Rohtak, Haryana. He was born into a humble family. Sangram was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and was confined to a wheelchair for the first eight years of his life.


title: Sangram Singh

text: His father, Umed Singh, is a retired army soldier. His mother Ramodevi is a homemaker. Sangram was an average student in school.


title: Sangram Singh

text: He said that people can contact him if those families need support for education or marriage of their children.


title: Sangram Singh

text: He also pledges all his organs for donation and motivates the same to all youths from which the deaths due to organ failure can be averted.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram Singh Charitable Foundation joins hands with Yuva Unstoppable to transform bathrooms, water facilities, smart classrooms and overall fitness of 1000 government schools across India. It begin with 200 schools in Haryana, Sangram's home town.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Now cancer sufferers from any state of the country will not be financially deprived of treatment. Sangram Singh's foundation will provide free treatment to such patients. Sangram Singh has started a campaign towards defeating cancer and making a healthy India. Cancer sufferers, women and children, contact them through the Internet media, e-mail or directly. Cancer patients will be treated completely free of cost. Its expenses will be borne by Sangram Singh Charitable Foundation.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Wrestler Sangram Singh adopted several children from all over India to educate them and provide them a bright future.


title: Sangram Singh

text: In All India Police Games 2005 he represented Delhi Police at Chawla (New Delhi) and successfully had a bronze medal.


title: Sangram Singh

text: He was also awarded the title World's Best Professional Wrestler by World Wrestling Professionals, after a match in South Africa in 2012 for his style, stamina, and nature of wrestling.


title: Sangram Singh

text: In July 2015, Sangram won the Commonwealth Heavyweight Championship after defeating Joe E. Legend in the Last Man Standing fight in Port Elizabeth.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi called Sangram Singh at the Parliament house to congratulate him for his victory in common wealth heavyweight wrestling championship.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram won the Commonwealth Heavyweight Championship for the second time on 27 March 2016, by defeating South African wrestler Ananzi, keeping the belt in India. The match was played at Port Elizabeth, South Africa.


title: Sangram Singh

text: In 2019 he bought the rights to make a biopic on the life of wrestler K. D. Jadhav, who won the first Olympic title for India in 1952. He is playing the titular role in the movie.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram has been involved in social service and conducts various motivational talks for corporate companies. He motivates youngsters at schools and colleges by sharing his life journey, thus being a real life motivational coach. He was a motivational speaker for Indian wrestlers who were representing India in the Commonwealth Games. Sangram has also been part of promotion to create awareness about voting in Haryana, his hometown. Singh announced the launch of the Champions Pro Khusti league in December 2015 in Mumbai. Sangram played his first international match in India in Chandigarh on 6 February 2016, the proceeds of which were dedicated to the benefit of cancer patients. Recently, Sangram Singh adopted 16 girls and 7 boys from his hometown Haryana and has sponsored their education. This is along with the adoption of a school in Satara, Maharashtra. Sangram Singh Foundation organised the first wrestling awards to felicitate and honour the forgotten heroes from wrestling who had won individual medals for India over the years on 16 September 2017 in New Delhi.


title: Sangram Singh

text: In 2018 Director Mahesh Bhatt presented his first music video with Sangram Singh. Sangram shared his fitness mantra with actress Raveena Tandon on her television chat show "Simply Baatein". Sangram also featured in Hrithik Roshan and Discovery India's television show "HRX Heroes" depicting stories of real-life heroes. Sangram's journey from the wheelchair to being an international professional wrestler was portrayed in this show. DD Sports telecasted a panel discussion series titled "Rio to Tokyo: Vision 2020" to encourage participation of female athletes in various fields of sports. A special show as part of the series was hosted by Sangram Singh at Haryana's MD University Rohtak on 19 December 2016. Sangram has walked the ramp for designers like Sanjana Jon, Nitya Bajaj Birla, Dhruv Vaish in FDCI.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram launched his sportswear range SGXbySangramSingh in Delhi on 17 March 2016 at FDCI. This launch was supported by celebrity designer Rohit Bal, President of FDCI Sunil Sethi and Sangram's fiancée, actress Payal Rohatgi.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram received the Man of Substance award on "India Men Show" which took place on 18 April 2019, at the Metropolitan Hotel, New Delhi. He is also the world peace brand ambassador of Wockhardt Group. He received the title Indian Affairs Indian of the year 2014 in Sports Leadership at the 5th Annual Indian Affairs, founded by Satya Brahma, at India Leadership Conclave & Indian Affairs Business Leadership Awards 2014. He gave a motivational talk to the students of IIT Delhi in February 2016 when he was invited to the institution as a guest of honour. Recently, a chapter on Sangram's life journey has been included in Hindi textbooks for children studying in the 7th standard. A scholarship in a university under Sangram Singh has been offered to students who come from modest families. Sangram was also appointed the brand ambassador for Haryana Kabaddi League, that was organised in Haryana in June 2016. Sangram was invited by the AYUSH ministry and the NDMC to Delhi as guest of honour to motivate youngsters on International Yoga Day 2016, by sharing his life story and talking about the benefits of yoga.


title: Sangram Singh

text: Sangram Singh hails from Rohtak, Haryana. His parents are Umed Singh and Ramodevi. He has a brother and a sister. Born in the village of Madina, Sangram fought rheumatoid arthritis and got up from the wheelchair to become a wrestler representing India. He also had a brief stint in Delhi Police. Sangram and actress Payal Rohatgi got engaged on 27 February 2014 at a ceremony in Payal's hometown Ahmedabad. He is also a registered organ donor.


title: Word embedding

text: In natural language processing (NLP), word embedding is a term used for the representation of words for text analysis, typically in the form of a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word such that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using a set of language modeling and feature learning techniques where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.


title: Word embedding

text: Methods to generate this mapping include neural networks, dimensionality reduction on the word co-occurrence matrix, probabilistic models, explainable knowledge base method, and explicit representation in terms of the context in which words appear.


title: Word embedding

text: Word and phrase embeddings, when used as the underlying input representation, have been shown to boost the performance in NLP tasks such as syntactic parsing and sentiment analysis.


title: Word embedding

text: In Distributional semantics, a quantitative methodological approach to understanding meaning in observed language, word embeddings or semantic vector space models have been used as a knowledge representation for some time. Such models aim to quantify and categorize semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was proposed in a 1957 article by John Rupert Firth, but also has roots in the contemporaneous work on search systems and in cognitive psychology.


title: Word embedding

text: The notion of a semantic space with lexical items (words or multi-word terms) represented as vectors or embeddings is based on the computational challenges of capturing distributional characteristics and using them for practical application to measure similarity between words, phrases, or entire documents. The first generation of semantic space models is the vector space model for information retrieval. Such vector space models for words and their distributional data implemented in their simplest form results in a very sparse vector space of high dimensionality (cf. Curse of dimensionality). Reducing the number of dimensions using linear algebraic methods such as singular value decomposition then led to the introduction of latent semantic analysis in the late 1980s and the Random indexing approach for collecting word cooccurrence contexts. In 2000 Bengio et al. provided in a series of papers the "Neural probabilistic language models" to reduce the high dimensionality of words representations in contexts by "learning a distributed representation for words".


title: Word embedding

text: A study published in NeurIPS (NIPS) 2002 introduced the use of both word and document embeddings applying the method of kernel CCA to bilingual (and multi-lingual) corpora, also providing an early example of self-supervised learning of word embeddings


title: Word embedding

text: Word embeddings come in two different styles, one in which words are expressed as vectors of co-occurring words, and another in which words are expressed as vectors of linguistic contexts in which the words occur; these different styles are studied in (Lavelli et al., 2004). Roweis and Saul published in "Science" how to use "locally linear embedding" (LLE) to discover representations of high dimensional data structures. Most new word embedding techniques after about 2005 rely on a neural network architecture instead of more probabilistic and algebraic models, since some foundational work by Yoshua Bengio and colleagues.


title: Word embedding

text: The approach has been adopted by many research groups after advances around year 2010 had been made on theoretical work on the quality of vectors and the training speed of the model and hardware advances allowed for a broader parameter space to be explored profitably. In 2013, a team at Google led by Tomas Mikolov created word2vec, a word embedding toolkit that can train vector space models faster than the previous approaches. The word2vec approach has been widely used in experimentation and was instrumental in raising interest for word embeddings as a technology, moving the research strand out of specialised research into broader experimentation and eventually paving the way for practical application.


title: Word embedding

text: Historically, one of the main limitations of static word embeddings or word vector space models is that words with multiple meanings are conflated into a single representation (a single vector in the semantic space). In other words, polysemy and homonymy are not handled properly. For example, in the sentence "The club I tried yesterday was great!", it is not clear if the term "club" is related to the word sense of a "club sandwich", "baseball club", "clubhouse", "golf club", or any other sense that "club" might have. The necessity to accommodate multiple meanings per word in different vectors (multi-sense embeddings) is the motivation for several contributions in NLP to split single-sense embeddings into multi-sense ones.


title: Word embedding

text: Most approaches that produce multi-sense embeddings can be divided into two main categories for their word sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Based on word2vec skip-gram, Multi-Sense Skip-Gram (MSSG) performs word-sense discrimination and embedding simultaneously, improving its training time, while assuming a specific number of senses for each word. In the Non-Parametric Multi-Sense Skip-Gram (NP-MSSG) this number can vary depending on each word. Combining the prior knowledge of lexical databases (e.g., WordNet, ConceptNet, BabelNet), word embeddings and word sense disambiguation, Most Suitable Sense Annotation (MSSA) labels word-senses through an unsupervised and knowledge-based approach considering a word's context in a pre-defined sliding window. Once the words are disambiguated, they can be used in a standard word embeddings technique, so multi-sense embeddings are produced. MSSA architecture allows the disambiguation and annotation process to be performed recurrently in a self-improving manner.


title: Word embedding

text: The use of multi-sense embeddings is known to improve performance in several NLP tasks, such as part-of-speech tagging, semantic relation identification, semantic relatedness, named entity recognition and sentiment analysis.


title: Word embedding

text: As of the late 2010s, contextually-meaningful embeddings such as ELMo and BERT have been developed. Unlike static word embeddings, these embeddings are at the token-level, in that each occurrence of a word has its own embedding. These embeddings better reflect the multi-sense nature of words, because occurrences of a word in similar contexts are situated in similar regions of BERT’s embedding space.


title: Word embedding

text: Word embeddings for "n-"grams in biological sequences (e.g. DNA, RNA, and Proteins) for bioinformatics applications have been proposed by Asgari and Mofrad. Named bio-vectors (BioVec) to refer to biological sequences in general with protein-vectors (ProtVec) for proteins (amino-acid sequences) and gene-vectors (GeneVec) for gene sequences, this representation can be widely used in applications of deep learning in proteomics and genomics. The results presented by Asgari and Mofrad suggest that BioVectors can characterize biological sequences in terms of biochemical and biophysical interpretations of the underlying patterns.


title: Word embedding

text: Word embeddings with applications in game design have been proposed by Rabii and Cook as a way to discover emergent gameplay using logs of gameplay data. The process requires to transcribe actions happening during the game within a formal language and then use the resulting text to create word embeddings. The results presented by Rabii and Cook suggest that the resulting vectors can capture expert knowledge about games like chess, that are not explicitly stated in the game's rules.


title: Word embedding

text: The idea has been extended to embeddings of entire sentences or even documents, e.g. in form of the thought vectors concept. In 2015, some researchers suggested "skip-thought vectors" as a means to improve the quality of machine translation. A more recent and popular approach for representing sentences is Sentence-BERT, or SentenceTransformers, which modifies pre-trained BERT with the use of siamese and triplet network structures.


title: Word embedding

text: Software for training and using word embeddings includes Tomas Mikolov's Word2vec, Stanford University's GloVe, GN-GloVe, Flair embeddings, AllenNLP's ELMo, BERT, fastText, Gensim, Indra and Deeplearning4j. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and T-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (t-SNE) are both used to reduce the dimensionality of word vector spaces and visualize word embeddings and clusters.


title: Word embedding

text: For instance, the fastText is also used to calculate word embeddings for text corpora in Sketch Engine that are available online.


title: Paddle steamer

text: A paddle steamer is a steamship or steamboat powered by a steam engine that drives paddle wheels to propel the craft through the water. In antiquity, paddle wheelers followed the development of poles, oars and sails, where the first uses were wheelers driven by animals or humans.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In the early 19th century, paddle wheels were the predominant way of propulsion for steam-powered boats. In the late 19th century, paddle propulsion was largely superseded by the screw propeller and other marine propulsion systems that have a higher efficiency, especially in rough or open water. Paddle wheels continue to be used by small, pedal-powered paddle boats and by some ships that operate tourist voyages. The latter are often powered by diesel engines.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The paddle wheel is a large steel framework wheel. The outer edge of the wheel is fitted with numerous, regularly spaced paddle blades (called floats or buckets). The bottom quarter or so of the wheel travels under water. An engine rotates the paddle wheel in the water to produce thrust, forward or backward as required. More advanced paddle-wheel designs feature "feathering" methods that keep each paddle blade closer to vertical while in the water to increase efficiency. The upper part of a paddle wheel is normally enclosed in a paddlebox to minimise splashing.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The three types of paddle wheel steamer are stern-wheeler, with a single wheel on the rear, a side-wheeler with one on each side, and an inboard with the paddlewheel mounted in a recess amidship. All were used as riverboats in the United States. Some still operate for tourists, for example on the Mississippi River.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Although the first stern-wheelers were invented in Europe, they saw the most service in North America, especially on the Mississippi River. was built at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in 1814 as an improvement over the less efficient side-wheelers. The second stern-wheeler built, "Washington" of 1816, had two decks and served as the prototype for all subsequent steamboats of the Mississippi, including those made famous in Mark Twain's book "Life on the Mississippi".


title: Paddle steamer

text: Side-wheelers are used as riverboats and as coastal craft. Though the side wheels and enclosing sponsons make them wider than stern-wheelers, they may be more maneuverable, since they can sometimes move the paddles at different speeds, and even in opposite directions. This extra maneuverability makes side-wheelers popular on the narrower, winding rivers of the Murray–Darling system in Australia, where a number still operate.


title: Paddle steamer

text: European side-wheelers, such as , connect the wheels with solid drive shafts that limit maneuverability and give the craft a wide turning radius. Some were built with paddle clutches that disengage one or both paddles so they can turn independently. However, wisdom gained from early experience with side-wheelers deemed that they be operated with clutches out, or as solid-shaft vessels. Crews noticed that as ships approached the dock, passengers moved to the side of the ship ready to disembark. The shift in weight, added to independent movements of the paddles, could lead to imbalance and potential capsizing. Paddle tugs were frequently operated with clutches in, as the lack of passengers aboard meant that independent paddle movement could be used safely and the added maneuverability exploited to the full.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Recessed or inboard paddlewheel boats were designed to ply narrow and snag infested backwaters. By recessing the wheel within the hull it was protected somewhat from damage. It was enclosed and could be spun at a high speed to provide acute maneuverability. Most were built with inclined steam cylinders mounted on both sides of the paddleshaft and timed 90Deg apart like a locomotive, making them instantly reversing.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In a simple paddle wheel, where the paddles are fixed around the periphery, power is lost due to churning of the water as the paddles enter and leave the water surface. Ideally, the paddles should remain vertical while under water. This ideal can be approximated by use of levers and linkages connected to a fixed eccentric. The eccentric is fixed slightly forward of the main wheel centre. It is coupled to each paddle by a rod and lever. The geometry is designed such that the paddles are kept almost vertical for the short duration that they are in the water.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The use of a paddle wheel in navigation appears for the first time in the mechanical treatise of the Roman engineer Vitruvius ("De architectura", X 9.5–7), where he describes multigeared paddle wheels working as a ship odometer. The first mention of paddle wheels as a means of propulsion comes from the fourth– or fifth-century military treatise "De Rebus Bellicis" (chapter XVII), where the anonymous Roman author describes an ox-driven paddle-wheel warship:


title: Paddle steamer

text: Italian physician Guido da Vigevano ("circa" 1280–1349), planning for a new crusade, made illustrations for a paddle boat that was propelled by manually turned compound cranks.


title: Paddle steamer

text: One of the drawings of the Anonymous Author of the Hussite Wars shows a boat with a pair of paddlewheels at each end turned by men operating compound cranks. The concept was improved by the Italian Roberto Valturio in 1463, who devised a boat with five sets, where the parallel cranks are all joined to a single power source by one connecting rod, an idea adopted by his compatriot Francesco di Giorgio.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In 1539, Spanish engineer Blasco de Garay received the support of Charles V to build ships equipped with manually-powered side paddle wheels. From 1539 to 1543, Garay built and launched five ships, the most famous being the modified Portuguese carrack "La Trinidad", which surpassed a nearby galley in speed and maneuverability on June 17, 1543 in the harbor of Barcelona. The project, however, was discontinued. 19th century writer Tomás González claimed to have found proof that at least some of these vessels were steam-powered, but this theory was discredited by the Spanish authorities. It has been proposed that González mistook a steam-powered desalinator created by Garay for a steam boiler.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In 1704, French physicist Denis Papin constructed the first ship powered by his steam engine, mechanically linked to paddles. This made him the first to construct a steam-powered boat (or vehicle of any kind). Then, he poured the first steam cylinder of the world in the iron foundry at Veckerhagen.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In 1787, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton invented a double-hulled boat that was propelled on the Firth of Forth by men working a capstan that drove paddles on each side.


title: Paddle steamer

text: One of the first functioning steamships, "Palmipède", which was also the first paddle steamer, was built in France in 1774 by Marquis Claude de Jouffroy and his colleagues. The steamer with rotating paddles sailed on the Doubs River in June and July 1776. In 1783, a new paddle steamer by de Jouffroy, , successfully steamed up the river Saône for 15 minutes before the engine failed. Bureaucracy and the French Revolution thwarted further progress by de Jouffroy.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The next successful attempt at a paddle-driven steam ship was by Scottish engineer William Symington, who suggested steam power to Patrick Miller of Dalswinton. Experimental boats built in 1788 and 1789 worked successfully on Lochmaben Loch. In 1802, Symington built a barge-hauler, , for the Forth and Clyde Canal Company. It successfully hauled two 70-ton barges almost in 6 hours against a strong headwind on test in 1802. Enthusiasm was high, but some directors of the company were concerned about the banks of the canal being damaged by the wash from a powered vessel, and no more were ordered.


title: Paddle steamer

text: While "Charlotte Dundas" was the first commercial paddle steamer and steamboat, the first commercial success was possibly Robert Fulton's "Clermont" in New York, which went into commercial service in 1807 between New York City and Albany. Many other paddle-equipped river boats followed all around the world; the first in Europe being designed by Henry Bell which started a scheduled passenger service on the River Clyde in 1812.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In 1812, the first U.S. Mississippi River paddle steamer began operating out of New Orleans. By 1814, Captain Henry Shreve had developed a "steamboat" suitable for local conditions. Landings in New Orleans went from 21 in 1814 to 191 in 1819, and over 1,200 in 1833.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The first stern-wheeler was designed by Gerhard Moritz Roentgen from Rotterdam, and used between Antwerp and Ghent in 1827.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Team boats, paddle boats driven by horses, were used for ferries the United States from the 1820s–1850s, as they were economical and did not incur licensing costs imposed by the steam navigation monopoly. In the 1850s, they were replaced by steamboats.


title: Paddle steamer

text: After the American Civil War, as the expanding railroads took many passengers, the traffic became primarily bulk cargoes. The largest, and one of the last, paddle steamers on the Mississippi was the sternwheeler "Sprague". Built in 1901, she pushed coal and petroleum until 1948.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In Europe from the 1820s, paddle steamers were used to take tourists from the rapidly expanding industrial cities on river cruises, or to the newly established seaside resorts, where pleasure piers were built to allow passengers to disembark regardless of the state of the tide. Later, these paddle steamers were fitted with luxurious saloons in an effort to compete with the facilities available on the railways. Notable examples are the Thames steamers which took passengers from London to Southend-on-Sea and Margate, Clyde steamers that connected Glasgow with the resort of Rothsay and the Köln-Düsseldorfer cruise steamers on the River Rhine. Paddle steamer services continued into the mid-20th century, when ownership of motor cars finally made them obsolete except for a few heritage examples.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The first mention of a paddle-wheel ship from China is in the "History of the Southern Dynasties", compiled in the 7th century but describing the naval ships of the Liu Song Dynasty (420–479) used by admiral Wang Zhen'e in his campaign against the Qiang in 418 AD. The ancient Chinese mathematician and astronomer Zu Chongzhi (429–500) had a paddle-wheel ship built on the Xinting River (south of Nanjing) known as the "thousand league boat". When campaigning against Hou Jing in 552, the Liang Dynasty (502–557) admiral Xu Shipu employed paddle-wheel boats called "water-wheel boats". At the siege of Liyang in 573, the admiral Huang Faqiu employed foot-treadle powered paddle-wheel boats. A successful paddle-wheel warship design was made in China by Prince Li Gao in 784 AD, during an imperial examination of the provinces by the Tang Dynasty (618–907) emperor. The Chinese Song Dynasty (960–1279) issued the construction of many paddle-wheel ships for its standing navy, and according to the British biochemist, historian, and sinologist Joseph Needham:


title: Paddle steamer

text: "...between 1132 and 1183 (AD) a great number of treadmill-operated paddle-wheel craft, large and small, were built, including sternwheelers and ships with as many as 11 paddle-wheels a side,".


title: Paddle steamer

text: The standard Chinese term "wheel ship" was used by the Song period, whereas a litany of colorful terms were used to describe it beforehand. In the 12th century, the Song government used paddle-wheel ships "en masse" to defeat opposing armies of pirates armed with their own paddle-wheel ships. At the Battle of Caishi in 1161, paddle-wheelers were also used with great success against the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234) navy. The Chinese used the paddle-wheel ship even during the First Opium War (1839–1842) and for transport around the Pearl River during the early 20th century.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The first seagoing trip of a paddle steamer was by the "Albany" in 1808. It steamed from the Hudson River along the coast to the Delaware River. This was purely for the purpose of moving a river-boat to a new market, but paddle-steamers began regular short coastal trips soon after. In 1816 Pierre Andriel, a French businessman, bought in London the paddle steamer "Margery" (later renamed "Elise") and made an eventful London-Le Havre-Paris crossing, encountering heavy weather on the way. He later operated his ship as a river packet on the Seine, between Paris and Le Havre.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The first paddle-steamer to make a long ocean voyage crossing the Atlantic Ocean was , built in 1819 expressly for this service. "Savannah" set out for Liverpool on May 22, 1819, sighting Ireland after 23 days at sea. This was the first powered crossing of the Atlantic, although "Savannah" was built as a sailing ship with a steam auxiliary; she also carried a full rig of sail for when winds were favorable, being unable to complete the voyage under power alone. In 1822, Charles Napier's , the world's first iron ship, made the first direct steam crossing from London to Paris and the first seagoing voyage by an iron ship.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In 1838, , a fairly small steam packet built for the Cork to London route, became the first vessel to cross the Atlantic under sustained steam power, beating Isambard Kingdom Brunel's much larger by a day. "Great Western", however, was actually built for the transatlantic trade, and so had sufficient coal for the passage; "Sirius" had to burn furniture and other items after running out of coal. "Great Western"s more successful crossing began the regular sailing of powered vessels across the Atlantic. was the first coastal steamship to operate in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Paddle steamers helped open Japan to the Western World in the mid-19th century.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The largest paddle-steamer ever built was Brunel's , but it also had screw propulsion and sail rigging. It was long and weighed 32,000 tons, its paddlewheels being in diameter.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In oceangoing service, paddle steamers became much less useful after the invention of the screw propeller, but they remained in use in coastal service and as river tugboats, thanks to their shallow draught and good maneuverability.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The last crossing of the Atlantic by paddle steamer began on September 18, 1969, the first leg of a journey to conclude six months and nine days later. The steam paddle tug was never intended for oceangoing service, but nevertheless was steamed from Newcastle to San Francisco. As the voyage was intended to be completed under power, the tug was rigged as steam propelled with a sail auxiliary. The transatlantic stage of the voyage was completed exactly 150 years after the voyage of "Savannah".


title: Paddle steamer

text: Beginning in the 1820s, the British Royal Navy began building paddle-driven steam frigates and steam sloops. By 1850 these had become obsolete due to the development of the propeller – which was more efficient and less vulnerable to cannon fire. One of the first screw-driven warships, , demonstrated her superiority over paddle steamers during numerous trials, including one in 1845 where she pulled a paddle-driven sister ship backwards in a tug of war. However, paddle warships were used extensively by the Russian Navy during the Crimean War of 1853–1856, and by the United States Navy during the Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the American Civil War of 1861–1865. With the arrival of ironclad battleships from the late 1850s, the last remaining paddle frigates were decommissioned and sold into merchant-navy service by the 1870s. These included , which became one of the first Boston steamers in 1867.


title: Paddle steamer

text: At the start of the First World War, the Royal Navy requisitioned more than fifty pleasure paddle steamers for use as auxiliary minesweepers. The large spaces on their decks intended for promenading passengers proved to be ideal for handling the minesweeping booms and cables, and the paddles allowed them to operate in coastal shallows and estuaries. These were so successful that a new class of paddle ships, the Racecourse-class minesweepers, were ordered and 32 of them were built before the end of the war.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In the Second World War, some thirty pleasure paddle steamers were again requisitioned; an added advantage was that their wooden hulls did not activate the new magnetic mines. The paddle ships formed six minesweeping flotillas, based at ports around the British coast. Other paddle steamers were converted to anti-aircraft ships. More than twenty paddle steamers were used as emergency troop transports during the Dunkirk Evacuation in 1940, where they were able to get close inshore to embark directly from the beach. One example was , which saved an estimated 7,000 men over the nine days of the evacuation, and claimed to have shot down three German aircraft. Another paddle minesweeper, , was deliberately beached twice to allow soldiers to cross to other vessels using her as a jetty. The paddle steamers between them were estimated to have rescued 26,000 Allied troops during the operation, for the loss of six of them.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In order to thank the Qing government for its support of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, Japan specially built a yacht called "Yonghe Steamer" for Cixi, which, from the outside, should be a steam-propelled structure, with waterwheel-like waterwheels on both sides to push the ship forward. It can be viewed in the Summer Palace.


title: Paddle steamer

text: A few paddle steamers serve niche tourism needs as cruise boats on lakes and others, such as , still operate on the Mississippi River. In Oregon, several replica paddle steamers, which are non-steam-powered sternwheelers built in the 1980s and later, are operated for tourism purposes on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers.


title: Paddle steamer

text: , built in 1912 as PS "Seeandbee", was the biggest passenger-carrying paddle steamer ever built, with a capacity for 6,000 passengers; it was converted to a training aircraft carrier during World War II. , also built in 1912 with a capacity for 6,000 passengers, operated on the Hudson River from 1913 until it was sunk in an accident in 1926. One of the last paddle steamers built in the U.S. was the dredge , built in 1934 and now a National Historic Landmark.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The Shelburne Museum of Vermont features the paddle steamer , a preserved Lake Champlain ferry, which was transported overland to the museum after being retired from service in 1969, and is now open for tours.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The ferries system in Toronto, Ontario, Canada operates , a paddle steamer originally built in 1910 and restored for operation since 1976. It is the last sidewheel-propelled vessel on the Great Lakes. Sister ships "Bluebell" and "Mayflower" became garbage scows and the former's hull is now a break wall in Toronto Harbour.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The Elbe river Saxon Paddle Steamer Fleet in Dresden (known as "White Fleet"), Germany, is the oldest and biggest in the world, with around 700,000 passengers per year. The 1913-built "Goethe" was the last paddle steamer on the River Rhine. Previously the world's largest sidewheeler with a two-cylinder steam engine of , a length of and a height above water of , "Goethe" was converted to diesel-hydraulic power during the winter of 2008/09.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Paddle wheelers are still in operation on some lakes in Southern Bavaria, such as "Diessen" () on Ammersee, built in 1908 and converted to a diesel system in 1975. It has been completely rebuilt in 2006. As paddle wheelers have proven to be such a great tourist attraction, a new one was even built in 2002 on Ammersee, "Herrsching", but it has never been powered by steam. On lake Chiemsee, RMS "Ludwig Fessler" () is still in regular service. It was built in 1926, but is now also powered by diesel engines (since 1973). The original diesel engine was the last ship engine being built by Maffei (no. 576). This engine has ended up in Switzerland to drive the newly renovated "Neuchâtel", launched in 2013.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The era of paddle steamers in Bangladesh began in 1929 during the British colonial rule. At that time, there were many paddle steamers built by British Government for travel facilities as Bangladesh (Eastern Bengal at that time) is a riverine country. These paddle steamers are also known as Rocket Steamers because at that time these paddle steamers were the fastest water vessel. Now there are 4 paddle steamers on service. They are "PS Mahsud" (Built: 1929), "PS Ostrich" (Built: 1929), "PS Tern" (Built: 1937) and "PS Lepcha" (Built: 1948–49). "PS Mahsud" and "PS Ostrich" are the biggest paddle steamers. These paddle steamers run in the route of Dhaka-Chandpur-Barisal-Morrelganj. These paddle steamers are controlled & superintend by Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Corporation (BIWTC). These paddle steamers are 100 years of heritage of Bangladesh.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In Austria only a small paddle steamer fleet operates. There is "Gisela" from 1872 in Gmunden at the Traunsee, "Kaiser Franz Josef I." from 1873 in St. Gilgen at the Lake Wolfgang, "Hohentwiel" from 1913 in Hard (near Bregenz) at the Lake Constance and "Schönbrunn" from 1912 in Linz at the Danube.


title: Paddle steamer

text: has been operation with the same company since she was built in 1861. Sailing passengers to and from Silkeborg and Himmelbjerget ever since, using her original steam engine she was built with.


title: Paddle steamer

text: is the oldest steamship in regular operation. Built in 1856, she still operates on lake Mjøsa in Norway.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Switzerland has a large paddle steamer fleet, most of the "Salon Steamer-type" built by Sulzer in Winterthur or Escher-Wyss in Zurich. There are five active and one inactive on Lake Lucerne, two on Lake Zurich, and one each on Lake Brienz, Lake Thun and Lake Constance. Swiss company CGN operates a number of paddle steamers on Lake Geneva. Their fleet includes three converted to diesel electric power in the 1960s and five retaining steam. One, "Montreux", was reconverted in 2000 from diesel to an all-new steam engine. It is the world's first electronically remote-controlled steam engine and has operating costs similar to state-of-the-art diesels, while producing up to 90 percent less air pollution.


title: Paddle steamer

text: No paddle ship is currently in operation in France as of 2015 (though some Paris sightseeing tourist crafts sport a dummy sternwheel powered by a hydraulic motor).


title: Paddle steamer

text: In Lac D'Annecy an almost intact paddle steamer called la France, resting on an even keel, can be visited by advanced divers (resting at deep). She was built, like most of its Swiss counterparts by Escher-Wyss in 1909 (as a CKD dismantled kit to be transported by railway and assembled at the local annecy Puya Shipyard) and ran a regular line around Lac d'Annecy. During World War II the ship was laid up in Annecy and used as a prison by the German occupying forces and the Gestapo. "La France" made her last commercial voyage in 1965 and then fell into neglect and disrepair. Her owner had moored her some distance from the shore to save quay fees and she sprung an ice related leak and sunk in March 1971. It is a popular site among advanced divers (Level 2-assisted or 3-autonomous CMAS is requested to dive the wreck), an almost intact time capsule due to the fresh and low temperature water. Some divers even (mimic to) play underwater French billiard on the intact billiard table in the main lounge. Any hope of raising the ship is vain though: the hull was badly distorted when hitting the rocky lake bottom.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The former British paddle steamer, , a veteran of the Dunkirk Evacuations, is preserved as a restaurant in Dunkirk harbour.


title: Paddle steamer

text: , a Clyde steamer built in 1947, is the last seagoing paddle steamer in the world. This ship sails a full season of cruises from ports around Britain, and sailed across the English Channel to commemorate the sinking of her predecessor of 1899 at the 1940 Battle of Dunkirk.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Based at Wareham, (one of the smallest passenger-carrying vessels of her type, with a passenger capacity of only 12) takes trips on the River Frome. "Monarch" is a side wheeler privately built at Chatham Historic Dockyard.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In the River Dart (Devon) (a coal-fired river paddle steamer) operates short cruises from Dartmouth and trips between Dartmouth and Totnes at high tide.


title: Paddle steamer

text: In the USSR, river paddle steamers of the type "Iosif Stalin" (project 373), later renamed s, were built until 1951. Between 1952 and 1959, ships of this type were built for the Soviet Union by Óbudai Hajógyár Budapest factory in Hungary. In total, 75 type "Iosif Stalin"/"Ryazan" sidewheelers were built. They are long and can carry up to 360 passengers. Few of them still remain in active service.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Australia has a large collection of authentic and replica paddle steamers and paddle boats operating along the Murray and Darling Rivers, and in other areas around the country. Echuca/Moama has the largest fleet of paddle steamers in Australia, with seven operating commercially, and a large number of smaller privately owned vessels.


title: Paddle steamer

text: , built in Moama in 1911 and based in Echuca, is still working as a tourist attraction on the Murray River. "Pevensey" also starred as the fictional paddlesteamer "Philadelphia" in the TV series "All the Rivers Run".


title: Paddle steamer

text: PS "Etona" is now privately owned, but was built as a church mission boat for the SA Murray: sponsored by the Anglican Archbishop of Adelaide, and funded by old boys of Eton (UK). It had a small chapel. Larger gathering were held on riverbanks and in woolsheds. After retirement, it became a fishing boat, then moved to Echuca to be a private houseboat. It also appeared in 'All the rivers' run, reprising its role as a mission boat.


title: Paddle steamer

text: PS "Alexander Arbuthnot", built 1923 at Koondrook, and named after the former owner of the Arbuthnot Sawmills, works today as a tourist boat at the Port of Echuca.


title: Paddle steamer

text: , built 1913 at Goolwa, is currently operating public cruises in Echuca. "Canberra" was built for the Conner family of Boundary Bend, as their flagship fishing vessel, but has been in the tourism industry since 1944.


title: Paddle steamer

text: , a replica steamer, was built in 1982 at Barham, and operates a large range of cruises in Echuca – from one-hour sightseeing trips to three-night and four-day fully accommodated voyages. She is powered by an authentic steam engine, dating back to 1906.


title: Paddle steamer

text: , the largest of the paddle wheelers operating in Australia [diesel, not steam], is a recent build (1987). "Murray Princess" measures in around in length and in width (the maximum which can fit the standard size of locks 1 to 10), and has a remarkably shallow draft of . It has accommodation for 120 passengers and up to 30 crew, and operates three, four and seven-night cruises along the Murray, from Mannum in South Australia. "Murray Princess" was owned and operated for many years by Captain Cook Cruises in Sydney, but was sold to the SeaLink Travel Group, now the Kelsian Group, based in Adelaide.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The replica paddle steamer was constructed in Gippsland, Australia, and launched in November 2008. As at 2020, it was on the hard at Paynesville, with an uncertain future.


title: Paddle steamer

text: PV "Kookaburra Queen" [diesel, not steam] operates on the Brisbane River as a floating restaurant or venue for hire, along with SWPV "Kookaburra Queen II"


title: Paddle steamer

text: , which was built in Echuca in 1876–78, was used on the Murray River, the Darling River and the Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales. She was acquired by the National Museum of Australia in 1984, restored to full working order, and is now berthed as an exhibit outside the Museum at a wharf on the Acton Peninsula, Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra.


title: Paddle steamer

text: PS "Marion" is based at Mannum. It is run by volunteers, and runs short local cruises, and extended overnight ones. PV "Mayflower" is run by the same people.


title: Paddle steamer

text: PS "Cumberoona" was built as a bicentennial project by Albury City Council. It suffered from uncertain water levels, and has been transferred to Lake Mulwala (Yarrawonga Weir, on Murray River).


title: Paddle steamer

text: PV "Thomson Belle" operates cruises on Thomson River (Longreach, Qld). It was originally PS Ginger Belle on Maroochy River, and retains its steam equipment as a display item.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Replica PV "Golden City" is on Lake Wendouree (Ballarat, Vic.). The original was on that lake, then went to Caribbean Gardens (a Melbourne recreational park), then back to Ballarat for restoration. That was nearly complete when the shed and the vessel were destroyed by arson. The group then built a replica.


title: Paddle steamer

text: Replica PS "William IV" on Hunter River (Newcastle, NSW). This was built as a bicentennial project (1988), languished on the hard for many years while fundraising took place, but is active again.


title: Paddle steamer

text: PV "Julie Fay" ran local morning/afternoon-cruises on Murray River for many years, then was sold for private use. It is now a static b&b, moored somewhere near Cobram or Tocumwal.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The restored paddle steamer is based in Wanganui. "Waimarie" was built in kitset form in Poplar, London in 1899, and originally operated on the Whanganui River under the name "Aotea". Later renamed, she remained in service until 1949. She sank at her moorings in 1952, and remained in the mud until raised by volunteers and restored to begin operations again in 2000.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The 1907 "Otunui Paddleboat" operated on the Whanganui River until the 1940s in her original form as a tunnel screw riverboat. Lost from her mooring in a flood she was refloated in the late 1960s and rebuilt as a sternwheeled jetboat. Around 1982 she went overland to Lake Okataina and was converted to the sidepaddle vessel as she is today. Currently operating on the Wairoa River at Tauranga, this , diesel powered vessel with hydraulic drive for the paddlewheels offers scenic cruises and charters.


title: Paddle steamer

text: "Kapitein Kok" is a paddle steamer built in 1911 for ferry service on the river Lek. It was fully restored in 1976 and is still in use today as a party ship. Queen Beatrix chartered the ship in 1998 as part of her 60th birthday celebrations. The paddle steamer "De Majesteit" was built in 1926. In 1958, a part of the movie "G.I. Blues" featuring Elvis Presley was shot on board of this ship.


title: Paddle steamer

text: "Michigan" is a paddle wheeler built in 1982, for cruising on the Lake Biwa at Shiga. The name is from Michigan, a sister region of Shiga.


title: Paddle steamer

text: is a preserved steam-powered sternwheel tug based in Portland, Oregon, that is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.


title: Paddle steamer

text: The British Admiralty's Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service constructed a new "Director" class of diesel-electric paddle tugs as recently as 1957 and 1958. Each paddle wheel was driven by an individual electric motor, giving outstanding maneuverability. Paddle tugs were able to more easily make use of the inherent advantage of side wheel paddle propulsion, having the option to disconnect the clutches that connected the paddle drive shafts as one. This enabled them to turn one paddle ahead and one astern to turn and maneuver quickly.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The Seven Sisters () are a group of seven skyscrapers in Moscow designed in the Stalinist style. They were built from 1947 to 1953 in an elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles.  At the time of construction, they were the tallest buildings in Europe, and the main building of Moscow State University remained the tallest building in Europe until 1997.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The seven are: Hotel Ukraina, Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments, the Kudrinskaya Square Building, the Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya Hotel, the main building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the main building of Moscow State University, and the Red Gates Administrative Building. There were two more skyscrapers in the same style planned that were never built: the Zaryadye Administrative Building and the Palace of the Soviets.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The construction of the first Soviet skyscraper project, Palace of the Soviets, was interrupted by the German invasion of 1941, at which point the steel frame was scrapped in order to fortify the Moscow defense ring, and the site was abandoned. Between 1947 and 1956, Boris Iofan presented six new drafts for this site, and also for Vorobyovy Gory on a smaller scale—they were all rejected. In 1946, Stalin personally switched to another idea—construction of "vysotki", a chain of reasonably-sized skyscrapers not tarnished by the memories of the Comintern. As Nikita Khrushchev recalled Stalin's words, "We won the war ... foreigners will come to Moscow, walk around, and there are "no skyscrapers". If they compare Moscow to capitalist cities, it's a moral blow to us". Sites were selected in between January 1947 (the official decree on "vysotki") and September 12, 1947 (formal opening ceremony).


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Nothing is known about selection of construction sites or design evaluation; this process (1947–1948) was kept secret, a sign of Stalin's personal tight management. Old professionals like Shchusev, Zholtovsky etc., were not involved. Instead, the job was given to the next generation of mature architects. In 1947, the oldest of them, Vladimir Gelfreikh, was 62. The youngest, Mikhail Posokhin, was 37. Individual commissions were ranked according to each architect's status, and clearly segmented into two groups—four "first-class" and four "second-class" towers. Job number one, a Vorobyovy Gory tower that would become Moscow State University, was awarded to Lev Rudnev, a new leader of his profession. Rudnev received his commission only in September 1948, and employed hundreds of professional designers. He released his draft in early 1949. Dmitry Chechulin received two commissions.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: In April 1949, the winner of the Stalin Prize for 1948 was announced. All eight design teams received first and second class awards, according to their project status, regardless of their architectural value. At this stage, these were conceptual drafts; often one would be cancelled and others would be altered.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: All the buildings employed over-engineered steel frames with concrete ceilings and masonry infill, based on concrete slab foundations (in the case of the University building—7 meters thick). Exterior ceramic tiles, panels up to 15 square meters, were secured with stainless steel anchors. The height of these buildings was not limited by political will, but by lack of technology and experience—the structures were far heavier than American skyscrapers.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: In other words, the resources diverted for this project effectively halved housing construction rates. On the other hand, the new construction plants, built for this project (like Kuchino Ceramics), were fundamental to Khrushchev's residential program just a few years later.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Buildings are listed under their current names, in the same order as they appeared in the April 1949 Stalin Prize decree. Note that different sources report different number of levels and height, depending on inclusion of mechanical floors and uninhabited crown levels.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Boris Iofan made a mistake placing his draft skyscraper right on the edge of Sparrow Hills. The site was a potential landslide hazard. He made a worse mistake by insisting on his decision and was promptly replaced by Lev Rudnev, a 53-year-old rising star of Stalin's establishment. Rudnev had already built high-profile edifices like the 1932–1937 M. V. Frunze Military Academy and the 1947 "Marshals' Apartments" (Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya, 28), which earned the highest credits of the Party. He set the building 800 meters away from the cliff.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The building was constructed in part by several thousand Gulag inmates. When the construction was nearing completion, some inmates were housed on the 24th and 25th levels to reduce transportation costs and the number of guards required.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The main tower, which consumed over 40,000 metric tons of steel, was inaugurated on September 1, 1953. At 787.4 feet or 240 meters tall, it was the tallest building in Europe from its completion until 1990. It is still the tallest educational building in the world.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: "Ukraina" by Arkady Mordvinov and Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky (leading Soviet expert on steel-framed highrise construction) is the second tallest of the "sisters" (198 meters, 34 levels). It was the tallest hotel in the world from the time of its construction until the Peachtree Plaza Hotel opened in Atlanta, Georgia in 1975.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Construction on the low river bank meant that the builders had to dig well below the water level. This was solved by an ingenious water retention system, using a perimeter of "needle pumps" driven deep into ground.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The hotel reopened its doors again after a 3-year-renovation on April 28, 2010, now a part of Radisson Collection Hotels Group, Moscow, with 505 bedrooms and 38 apartments. The hotel was acquired by billionaire property investor God Nisanov for £59 million during an auction in 2005. He co-owns it with Zarakh Iliev.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: This 172 meter, 27 story building was built between 1948 and 1953 and overseen by V.G.Gelfreih and A.B.Minkus. Currently, it houses the offices for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Russian Federation. The Ministry is covered by a light external stone wall with projecting pilasters and pylons. Its interior is splendidly decorated with stones and metals. According to the 1982 biography of Minkus, draft plans were first drawn up in 1946 and ranged from 9 to 40 stories. In 1947 two designs were proposed: one used layered setbacks while the other called for a more streamlined construction which culminated into a blunt rectangular top. The second proposal was accepted but as the Ministry's completion neared, a metal spire, dyed to match the building's exterior (and presumably ordered by Joseph Stalin), was hastily added to tower's roof, assimilating its silhouette with those of the other Sisters.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Originally known simply as the Leningradskaya Hotel, this relatively small (136 meters, 26 floors, of which 19 are usable) building by Leonid Polyakov on Komsomolskaya Square is decorated with pseudo-Russian ornaments mimicking Alexey Shchusev's Kazansky Rail Terminal. Inside, it was inefficiently planned. Khrushchev, in his 1955 decree "On liquidation of excesses ..." asserted that at least 1,000 rooms could be built for the cost of Leningradskaya's 354, that only 22% of the total space was rentable, and that the costs per bed were 50% higher than in "Moskva" Hotel. Following this critique, Polyakov was stripped of his 1948 Stalin Prize but retained the other one, for a Moscow Metro station. After a multimillion-dollar renovation ending in 2008, the hotel re-opened as the Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Another of Chechulin's works, 176 meters high, with 22 usable levels, the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building was strategically placed at the confluence of the Moskva River and Yauza River. The building incorporates an earlier 9-story apartment block facing Moskva River, by the same architects (completed in 1940). It was intended as an elite housing building. However, very soon after construction, units were converted to multi-family kommunalka (communal apartments). Built in a neo-gothic design, though also drew inspiration from Hotel Metropol.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Designed by Mikhail Posokhin (Sr.) and Ashot Mndoyants. 160 metres tall, 22 floors (18 usable in the wings and 22 in the central part). The building is located on the end of Krasnaya Presnya street, facing the Sadovoye Koltso and was primary built with high-end apartments for Soviet cultural leaders rather than politicians.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Designed by Alexey Dushkin of the Moscow Metro fame, this mixed-use block of 11-storey buildings is crowned with a slim tower (total height 133 meters, 24 levels).


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: In this case, cryotechnology was indeed used for the escalator tunnels connecting the building with the Krasniye Vorota subway station. The building's frame was erected deliberately tilted to one side; when the frozen soil thawed, it settled down – although not enough for a perfect horizontal level. Then the builders warmed the soil by pumping hot water; this worked too well, the structure slightly overreacted, tilting to the opposite side but well within tolerance.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: In 1934, the Commissariat for Heavy Industries initiated a design contest for its new building on Red Square (on the site of State Universal Store, GUM). A last showcase for constructivists, this contest didn't materialize and GUM still stands.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: In 1947, the nearby medieval Zaryadye district was razed to make way for the new 32-story, 275-meter tower (the numbers are quoted as in the 1951 finalized draft). It is sometimes associated with the Ministry of Heavy Machinery, the same institution that ran a contest in 1934. However, in all public documents of this time its name is simply the "administrative building", without any specific affiliation. Likewise, association with Lavrentiy Beria is mostly anecdotal.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The tower, designed by Chechulin, was supposed to be the second largest after the University. Eventually, the plans were cancelled at the foundation stage; these foundations were used later for the construction of the Rossiya Hotel (also by Chechulin, 1967, demolished 2006–2007).


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: While many cities in the former USSR and former Soviet Bloc countries have Stalinist skyscrapers, few fall in the same league as the Moscow "vysotki". Of these three, "Hotel Ukraina" in Kyiv was completed in stripped-down form, without the tower and steeple originally planned for them.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Plans to build a skyscraper on the site of the destroyed Ginzburg Hotel emerged in 1948, but the design was finalized by Anatoly Dobrovolsky as late as 1954, when Stalinist architecture was already doomed. Building work proceeded slowly, with numerous political orders to make it simpler and cheaper. It was completed in 1961, without a tower, steeple and any original ornaments.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Another Lev Rudnev design, with Polish Renaissance Revival detailing. Built in 1952–1955 (topped out October 1953). Construction plans were agreed upon on April 5, 1952 and sealed during Vyacheslav Molotov's visit on July 3 of the same year (after the opening ceremony on May 1). The Soviets planned it as a university, but the Polish side insisted on its current administrative function. A workforce of around 7,000 was nearly evenly split between Poles and imported Soviet laborers; 16 were presumed killed during the work. The building remained the tallest in Poland until construction of Varso Tower modern glass skyscraper constructed in Warsaw in 2021.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Construction began in 1952 and was completed in 1956. The building was named "Combinatul Poligrafic Casa Scînteii "I.V.Stalin"" and later "Casa Scînteii" ("Scînteia" was the name of the Romanian Communist Party's official newspaper). It was designed by the architect Horia Maicu, and was intended to house all of Bucharest's printing presses, the newsrooms and their staff. Its height is without the television antenna, which measures an additional .


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The largest Stalinist architecture building in Prague, Czech Republic. The building was built between 1952 and 1954 at the order of Defence minister Alexej Čepička. It is 88 m high (the roof is 67 m, plus a 10 m chalice and a 1.5 m red star) and has sixteen floors. Part of the building was a fallout shelter for 600 people, currently used as a staff clothes room.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Initially planned as House of Kolkhoz workers ("Kolhoznieku nams"), construction was started in 1951 and finished in 1958, although the building was officially opened only in 1961. Upon finishing the building was turned over to the Latvian Academy of Sciences. It has 21 floors and a conference hall that seats 1,000 people.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The 108-meter high Academy is not the tallest building in Riga. Unlike other "vysotki", which are based on a steel frame with masonry infill, this is a reinforced concrete structure, the first of its kind in the USSR.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: Many Stalinist buildings have tower crowns, but they do not belong to the "vysotki" project and their style is completely different. This is evident in Chechulin's Peking Hotel building. Seen from a low point of the Garden Ring south, it could be mistaken for a skyscraper, but if viewed from Triumfalnaya Square it is clear that the building is far less imposing. There are also several smaller Stalinesque towers in Barnaul, St. Petersburg and other cities. Design and construction of such towers became widespread in the early 1950s, although many ongoing projects were cancelled in 1955, when regional "skyscrapers" were specifically addressed by Nikita Khrushchev's decree "On liquidation of architectural excesses..." as unacceptable expense.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The high-profile Triumph Palace tower in north-western Moscow (3, Chapayevsky Lane), completed in December, 2003, attempts to imitate the "vysotki", and actually exceeds the University building in structural height. It is criticized for being placed deeply inside a residential mid-rise area, away from major avenues and squares, where it could be an important visual anchor. A close inspection reveals that this white-red tower has little in common with Stalinist style, except for sheer size and layered tower outline. It competes for the 'Eighth Vysotka' title with an earlier Edelweiss Tower in western Moscow. Construction began in 2001. The 57-story building, containing about 1,000 luxury apartments, was topped out on December 20, 2003, and, at the time, was Europe's tallest building at 264.1 metres or 867 feet.


title: Seven Sisters (Moscow)

text: The Triumph Tower of Astana is a , 39-story residential building in the Kazakhstan capital that was completed in 2006. Modeled after 1950s Soviet high-rise buildings, the complex includes home cinema, restaurants, a center of children’s development, and a shopping center.


title: Kitchen knife

text: A kitchen knife is any knife that is intended to be used in food preparation. While much of this work can be accomplished with a few general-purpose knives – notably a large chef's knife, a tough cleaver, a small paring knife and some sort of serrated blade (such as a bread knife or serrated utility knife) – there are also many specialized knives that are designed for specific tasks. Kitchen knives can be made from several different materials.


title: Kitchen knife

text: The edge of the knife can be sharpened to a cutting surface in a number of different ways. There are three main features:


title: Kitchen knife

text: Kitchen knives generally either feature a curve near the tip, as in a chef's knife, or are straight for their entire length. The edge itself may be generally smooth (a "straight" or "clean" edge), or may be serrated or scalloped (have "teeth") in some way. Lastly, the point may differ in shape: most common is a sharp, triangular point (as in photo), as in a chef's knife or paring knife, though the French point (also called "Sheep's foot") is common in , and a round point is sometimes found on long slicing knives.


title: Kitchen knife

text: Some companies have names for their own serration patterns and apply them to an entire line of knives. Examples are Cutco's "Double-D" edge and Henckel's "Eversharp Pro" series.


title: Kitchen knife

text: Away from the edge, a knife most simply has either a rectangular or wedge-shaped cross-section (saber grind vs. flat grind), but may also have indentations, whose purpose is to reduce adhesion of the food to the blade. This is widely found in Japanese knives, and in the West is particularly found in meat carving knives, though also in knives for soft cheese, and some use for vegetables.


title: Kitchen knife

text: The edge of a knife gradually loses its sharpness, which can be restored by sharpening. For many types of knives (e.g., butter knives) this is not relevant. Knives with smooth edges can be sharpened by the user; knives with any form of serrated edge should ideally be sharpened with specialist equipment, although the useful life of a serrated knife can be extended by simple sharpeners, even if they damage the edge.


title: Kitchen knife

text: The handles of kitchen knives can be made from a number of different materials, each of which has advantages and disadvantages.


title: Kitchen knife

text: Also known as a cook's knife or French knife, the chef's knife is an all-purpose knife that is curved to allow the cook to rock the knife on the cutting board for a more precise cut. The broad and heavy blade also serves for chopping bone instead of the cleaver, making this knife the all purpose heavy knife for food preparation. Chef's knives are most commonly available between 15 cm and 30 cm (6 and 12 inches), though 20 cm (8 inches) is the most common size.


title: Kitchen knife

text: A paring knife is a small all-purpose knife with a plain edge that is ideal for peeling (or "paring") fruits and vegetables, and other small or intricate work (such as de-veining a shrimp, removing the seeds from a jalapeño, 'skinning' or cutting small garnishes). Paring knives are usually 6 to 10 cm ( to 4 inches) long. An alternative way to peel vegetables and fruit is to use a peeler.


title: Kitchen knife

text: 16th century French bookbinders used a tool also known as a paring knife (couteau à parer) to thin the edges of the leather binding being prepared to cover a book in order to ensure it was neater and stuck better to the board. The knife was a large piece of steel, very thin at the cutting edge, with a wooden handle.


title: Kitchen knife

text: In kitchen usage, a utility knife falls between a chef's knife and a paring knife in size, some 10 cm to 18 cm (4 to 7 inches) in length.


title: Kitchen knife

text: Outside a kitchen, the term "utility knife" refers to a cutting tool with a short blade which can be replaced, or with a strip of blades which can be snapped off when worn.


title: Kitchen knife

text: Serrated knives are able to cut soft bread without crushing it; one was exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago by the Friedrich Dick company (Esslingen, Germany). One design was patented in the United States by Joseph E. Burns of Syracuse, New York. His knife had sections of grooves or serrations, inclined with respect to the axis of the blade, that form individual small cutting edges which were perpendicular to the blade and thus cut without the excessive normal pressure required of a scalloped blade and without the horizontal force required by positive-raked teeth that would dig into the bread like a wood saw. There were also sections of grooves with the opposite direction of inclination, separated by a section of smooth blade, and the knife thus cut cleanly in both directions in both hard and soft bread.


title: Kitchen knife

text: An "offset" bread knife 'doglegs' the handle above but parallel to the blade (rather than inline with it, although some are angled), providing clearance for the user's knuckles. This design makes it easier for the user to cut fully through the loaf without using an awkward grip, angling and 'see-sawing' the blade, or needing to position the knife handle over the edge of the counter or cutting board. While fairly specialized and unnecessary for most kitchens (and breads), the offset design is well-suited for high-volume/'production' work where much bread - particularly e.g. crusty loaves of baguette-type bread - is cut regularly and/or over long periods, to reduce fatigue. An alternative seen mostly in Europe is a baguette "chopper" or "guillotine" - not properly a knife, and prone to produce more of a "crushing" cut depending on the bread - but serving the same function.


title: Kitchen knife

text: Butter knives have a dull cutting edge and are generally used for spreading. They are typically thought of more as servingware (used more as part of a table setting), to be used by diners to serve and/or spread butter or other soft spreadable foods, i.e. soft cheeses or jams, than as a kitchen or food preparation tool.


title: Kitchen knife

text: A modern variant that "is" intended for food prep is the 'sandwich spreader' - a broad, flexible, almost spatula-like tool, with a rounded end and often with one serrated edge, similar to that used by pastry chefs to ice cakes. This is useful for spreading butter, mayonnaise/mustard, other similar 'spreads' or dressings, sandwich 'salad' toppings like egg salad, chicken salad, ham spread, etc., on bread.


title: Kitchen knife

text: A carving knife is a large knife (between 20 cm and 38 cm (8 and 15 inches)) that is used to slice thin cuts of meat, including poultry, roasts, hams, and other large cooked meats. A carving knife is much thinner than a chef's knife (particularly at the spine), enabling it to carve thinner, more precise slices.