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Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Otto Lagerfeld (10 September 1933 – 19 February 2019) was a German fashion designer.

Lagerfeld began his career in fashion in the 1950s, working for several top fashion houses including Balmain, Patou, and Chloé before joining Chanel in 1983. As the creative director of Chanel from 1983 until his death, he oversaw every aspect of the fashion house's creative output, from designing collections to overseeing advertising campaigns and in store displays. He was instrumental in revitalizing the Chanel brand, helping it regain its position as one of the top fashion houses in the world. He was also creative director of the Italian fur and leather goods fashion house Fendi, as well as his own eponymous fashion label. Throughout his career, he collaborated on a variety of fashion and art-related projects.

Lagerfeld was recognized for his signature white hair, black sunglasses, fingerless gloves, and high-starched detachable collars.

Early life
Karl Otto Lagerfeldt was born in Hamburg on 10 September 1933 to Elisabeth (née Bahlmann) and Otto Lagerfeldt. His father, coming from a family of wealthy wine-merchants, was a prosperous businessman and polyglot, speaking nine languages; his father owned an import company (Lagerfeldt & Co.) specialising in evaporated milk, leading him to work with the American dairy company Carnation. During his travels, his father was present during the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, escaping unharmed. A fluent speaker of Russian, his father had even attempted to gain citizenship into the country at the start of World War I, leading to an accusation of espionage and a three-year prison term in Vladivostok, eventually returning to Germany after the Russian Revolution in 1917. His maternal grandfather, Karl Bahlmann, was a local politician for the Catholic Centre Party. His family belonged to the Old Catholic Church. When Lagerfeld's mother met his father, she was a lingerie saleswoman from Berlin. His parents married in 1930.

Lagerfeld was known to misrepresent his birth year, claiming to be younger than his actual age and misrepresenting his parents' background. For example, he claimed that he was born in 1938 to "Elisabeth of Germany" and Otto Ludwig Lagerfeldt from Sweden. These claims have been conclusively proven to be false, as his father was from Hamburg and spent his entire life in Germany, with no Swedish connection. There is also no evidence his mother, Elisabeth Bahlmann, the daughter of a middle-class local politician, called herself "Elisabeth of Germany". He was known to insist that no one knew his real birthdate. In an interview on French television in February 2009, Lagerfeld said he was "born neither in 1933 nor 1938".

In April 2013, he finally declared he was born in 1935. A birth announcement was, however, published by his parents in 1933, and the baptismal register in Hamburg also lists him as born in that year, showing he was born on 10 September 1933. Bild am Sonntag published his baptismal records in 2008 and interviewed his teacher and a classmate, who both confirmed he actually was born in 1933. Later, his death record confirmed the same. Despite that, Karl Lagerfeld announced publicly he was celebrating his "70th birthday" on 10 September 2008, despite actually turning 75.

His older sister, Martha Christiane "Christel", was born in 1931. Lagerfeld had an older half-sister, Theodora Dorothea "Thea", from his father's first marriage. His family name has been spelled both Lagerfeldt (with a "t") and Lagerfeld. Like his father, he used the spelling Lagerfeld, considering it to "sound more commercial".

His family was mainly shielded from the deprivations of World War II due to his father being a member of the Nazi party and his business interests in Germany through the firm Glücksklee-Milch GmbH.

As a child, he showed great interest in the visual arts, and former schoolmates recalled he was always making sketches "no matter what we were doing in class". Lagerfeld told interviewers he learned much more by constantly visiting the Kunsthalle Hamburg museum than he ever did in school.

Early career, Chloé, and Fendi (1954–1982)
In 1954, Lagerfeld submitted a dress design to the International Wool Secretariat's design competition. His submitted entry presaged the chemise dresses which would be introduced by Givenchy and Balenciaga three years later. In 1955, Lagerfeld entered another IWS competition and won in the coat category. He also befriended another winner, Yves Saint Laurent, and was soon after hired by Pierre Balmain who was a judge for the competition. He worked as Balmain's assistant, and later apprentice, for three years.

In 1957, Lagerfeld became the artistic director for Jean Patou. He left Jean Patou in 1962, to become a freelance designer, one of the first designers to do so. In the 1960s, he freelanced for brands including Charles Jourdan, Chloé, Krizia, Valentino, and for the Rome-based fashion house Tiziani. In 1965, he was hired by Fendi to modernize their fur line. The fashion editor of The Independent, Alexander Fury, wrote in 2015 that Lagerfeld's designs for Fendi were innovative and proved groundbreaking within the industry. These included the introduction of less expensive furs such as rabbit and squirrel pelts into high fashion, and launching a ready-to-wear line. He also designed the brand's double F logo. Lagerfeld remained with Fendi Rome until his death.

In 1966, Lagerfeld became a designer for Chloé working alongside Gaby Aghion, and in 1974 he became the sole designer for the brand. In the 1970s, Lagerfeld's work for Chloé made him one of the most prominent designers in the world, often vying with Yves Saint Laurent for most influential. After a period in the early seventies when he toyed with styles from the 1930s and 1950s,  in 1974 he contributed to the burgeoning Big Look or Soft Look by eliminating linings, padding, and even hemming from voluminous, thin-fabric garments, even from fur in his work for Fendi at the time, to enable an unencumbered, comfortable, layered style which would dominate the high fashion of the middle of the decade.

After refining this style and saying that to go back to linings and stiff structure would be regressive, he did a complete about-face in 1978  and joined other designers in showing the heavily constructed, huge-shouldered, more restrictive looks that would dominate the 1980s. He presented such an exaggerated retro 1940s-50s silhouette – immense shoulder pads; severe, stiffly constructed suits with padded lampshade peplums; padded busts and hips; impractically tight skirts; awkwardly high spike heels; hats;  gloves; even boned corsets  – that his work did not look out of place alongside similar retro fare from Thierry Mugler of the period.

During both these phases, his mid-seventies Soft Look phase and his late seventies-eighties big-shoulders phase, his love of the eighteenth century was frequently on display. For instance, his Fall 1977 collection, one of the most celebrated of the seventies Soft Look era, included lace trim, headwear, and thigh-high boots in styles from the 1700s,  while his Fall 1979 collection, one of the most influential of the early years of the big-shoulder era, contained millinery that recalled Napoleonic bicornes, along with button-sided spats/leggings that looked somewhat like military accoutrements from the same period.

Lagerfeld continued producing outfits in the shoulder pads-tight skirts-stiletto heels direction into the eighties, joining other similar designers in shortening the skirts of the look even as high as mini length, though his hemlines could also range as low as the ankle. Alongside these styles, he also showed softer, more comfortable clothing, particularly in 1981-'82, when a brief revival of somewhat mid-seventies-looking long dirndl skirts and shawls appeared on runways and Lagerfeld touted the gossamer weightlessness he had perfected in the seventies, although he did like to place corsets and girdles over it by that time. The variety of lengths and trouser shapes he presented during this period kept him in line with modern women's needs.

International fame with Chanel (1982–2000)
In the 1980s, Lagerfeld was hired by Chanel, which was considered a "near-dead brand" at the time since the death of designer Coco Chanel a decade prior. Taking over the couture there in 1983, Lagerfeld brought life back into the company, making it a huge success by revamping its ready-to-wear fashion line. Lagerfeld integrated the interlocked CC monogram of Coco Chanel into a style pattern for the House of Chanel.

Lagerfeld also changed the Chanel silhouette that had prevailed since the early 1960s, making it more eighties by padding the shoulder, shortening and tightening the skirt,   raising the heel,   and enlarging or miniaturizing the jewelry and purses,    all controversial moves,   especially the short skirts, as Mlle. Chanel had always disapproved of above-the-knee skirts. This new direction was actually initiated the year before Lagerfeld took the helm, 1982, when a design team led by Hervé Léger, a Lagerfeld protegé, operated at the house. Lagerfeld is suspected of having influenced Léger's changes.

In 1984, a year after his start at Chanel, Lagerfeld began his own eponymous "Karl Lagerfeld" brand with a focus on ready-to-wear clothing. The brand was established to channel "intellectual sexiness". Lagerfeld had signed an agreement with Bidermann Industries USA, giving them ownership and licensing rights to fashion labels he produced. Lagerfeld ended the agreement with Bidermann in 1989. That same year, Lagerfeld launched two Karl Lagerfeld brand menswear lines. The Lagerfeld label was then purchased by the Cora Revillon Group, which had previously reached an agreement to manufacture and market Karl Lagerfeld-branded products.

In 1992, Dunhill Holdings—part of the Vendôme Luxury Group—acquired the Karl Lagerfeld brand from Cora-Revillon for an estimated $30 million. The acquisition was part of the agreement the company made with Lagerfeld for him to return to designing for the fashion house Chloé. Vendôme retained ownership of the brand for five years, until 1997, when it sold the brand back to Lagerfeld for a "symbolic one franc", following the end of his contract with Chloé. Lagerfeld stated that Vendôme “had not hired the right people to manage it."

Lagerfeld flourished in the plethora of historical revivals of the eighties, from the shoulder-padded 1940s-50s revivals beginning in 1978 and continuing through the eighties, to the 1950s pouf skirts, 1860s crinolines, and hoops of the mid-eighties, now often showgirl-short. Lagerfeld participated in it all, for both his namesake line and Chanel. In 1986, he marked the move away from broad shoulders by removing pads from the shoulders and placing them visibly on the outside of the hips.

Fashion
In 2002, Lagerfeld asked Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel, to collaborate with him on a special denim collection for the Lagerfeld Gallery. The collection, Lagerfeld Gallery by Diesel, was co-designed by Lagerfeld and then developed by Diesel's creative team, under the supervision of Rosso. It consisted of five pieces that were presented during the designer's catwalk shows during Paris Fashion Week and then sold in highly limited editions at the Lagerfeld Galleries in Paris and Monaco and at the Diesel Denim Galleries in New York and Tokyo. During the first week of sales in New York, more than 90% of the trousers were sold out, even though prices ranged from $240 to $1,840. In a statement after the show in Paris, Rosso said: "I am honored to have met this fashion icon of our time. Karl represents creativity, tradition and challenge, and the fact that he thought of Diesel for this collaboration is a great gift and acknowledgement of our reputation as the prêt-à-porter of casual wear".

In December 2006, Lagerfeld announced the launch of a new collection for men and women dubbed K Karl Lagerfeld, which included fitted T-shirts and a wide range of jeans. In September 2010, the Couture Council of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology presented Lagerfeld with an award created for him, The Couture Council Fashion Visionary Award, at a benefit luncheon at Avery Fisher Hall, in New York City. In November 2010, Lagerfeld and Swedish crystal manufacturer Orrefors announced a collaboration to design a crystal art collection. The first collection was launched in spring 2011, called Orrefors by Karl Lagerfeld.

In 2012 Lagerfeld released his photo-book The Little Black Jacket which featured entertainers, models, and friends of his. In 2014, Palm Beach Modern Auctions announced that many of Lagerfeld's early sketches for the House of Tiziani in Rome would be sold.

Because his designs changed depending on which fashion house he was working for, designers such as Anna Sui and Clare Waight Keller praised his "chameleon-like versatility". In November 2015, Karl Lagerfeld was presented with the Outstanding Achievement Award at the British Fashion Awards. Anna Wintour, Editor in Chief of American Vogue, presented the award.

Final collection
The final Chanel collection completed before his death had an Alpine theme of après-ski clothing. As Lagerfeld requested not to have any type of funeral, the show only included a moment of silence in his honor and chairs emblazoned with his image next to Coco Chanel with the saying "the beat goes on". Although Lagerfeld shunned any emotional reactions around the idea of his death, some models could be seen crying on the runway, as well as audience members.

Other media
Lagerfeld and investments enterprise Dubai Infinity Holdings (DIH) signed a deal to design limited edition homes on the island of Isla Moda. A feature-length documentary film on the designer, Lagerfeld Confidential, was made by Rodolphe Marconi in 2007. Later that year, Lagerfeld assumed the role of the host of the fictional radio station K109 in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV and its DLCs The Lost & Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony.

In 2008, he created a teddy bear in his likeness that was produced by Steiff in an edition of 2,500 that sold for $1,500. and has been immortalized in many forms, which include pins, shirts, dolls, and more. In 2009, Tra Tutti began selling Karl Lagermouse and Karl Lagerfelt, which are mini-Lagerfelds in the forms of mice and finger puppets, respectively. That same year, he had a guest voice role in the French animated film Totally Spies! The Movie.

Later in life, Lagerfeld realized one of his boyhood ambitions by becoming a professional caricaturist; from 2013, his political cartoons were regularly published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2013, he directed Once Upon a Time..., a short film starring Keira Knightley as Coco Chanel and Clotilde Hesme as her aunt, Adrienne. In June 2016, it was announced that Lagerfeld would design the two residential lobbies of the Estates at Acqualina, a residential development in Miami's Sunny Isles Beach.

In October 2018, Lagerfeld in collaboration with Carpenters Workshop Gallery launched an art collection of functional sculptures titled Architectures. Sculptures were made of Arabescato Fantastico, a rare vibrant white marble with dark gray veins and black Nero Marquina marble with milky veins. Inspired by antiquity and referred to as modern mythology the ensemble consists of gueridons, tables, lamps, consoles, fountains and mirrors.

Personal life
Lagerfeld was recognized for his signature white hair, black sunglasses, fingerless gloves, and high, starched detachable collars.

He had an 18-year relationship with French aristocrat and socialite Jacques de Bascher (1951–1989), though Lagerfeld said that the relationship never was sexual. "I infinitely loved that boy", Lagerfeld reportedly said of de Bascher, "but I had no physical contact with him. Of course, I was seduced by his physical charm". De Bascher had an affair with the couturier Yves Saint Laurent; subsequently, Saint Laurent's business partner and former lover Pierre Bergé accused Lagerfeld of being behind a gambit to destabilize the rival fashion house. De Bascher died of AIDS in 1989 while Lagerfeld stayed on a cot at his bedside in his hospital room during the final stages of his illness. After Lagerfeld's death, tabloids reported that he was to be cremated and his ashes mixed with those of de Bascher, which Lagerfeld kept in an urn, or with those of his mother.

Lagerfeld lived in numerous homes over the years: an apartment in the Rue de l'Université in Paris, decorated in the Art Deco style (1970s); the 18th-century Chateau de Penhoët in Brittany, decorated in the Rococo style (1970s to 2000); an apartment in Monte Carlo decorated until 2000 in 1980s Memphis style (from the early 1980s); the Villa Jako in Blankenese in Hamburg, decorated in the Art Deco style (mid-1990s to 2000); the Villa La Vigie in France (the 1990s to 2000), a 17th-century mansion (hôtel particulier) in the Rue de l'Université in Paris, decorated in the Rococo and other styles (1980s to the 2000s); an apartment in Manhattan, although he never moved into or decorated it (2006 to 2012); the summer villa El Horria in Biarritz, decorated in the modern style (1990s–2006); and a house dating from the 1840s in Vermont (from the 2000s). From 2007, Lagerfeld owned an 1820s house in Paris in Quai Voltaire decorated in modern and Art Deco style.

A spread with pictures inside Lagerfeld's apartments in Paris and Monaco was published in Vogue. He also revealed his vast collection of Suzanne Belperron's pins and brooches and used the color of one of her blue chalcedony rings as the starting point for the Chanel spring/summer 2012 collection.

Lagerfeld owned a red point Birman cat named Choupette, which, in June 2013, he indicated he would marry, if it were legal. According to reports, the designer included the feline in his will from 2015, and designated 1.5 million dollars for its care and maintenance.

Weight loss
Lagerfeld lost 42 kg in 2001. He explained: "I suddenly wanted to dress differently, to wear clothes designed by Hedi Slimane... But these fashions, modeled by very, very slim boys—and not men my age—required me to lose at least 40 kg. It took me exactly 13 months". The diet was created specially for him by Dr. Jean-Claude Houdret, which led to a book called The Karl Lagerfeld Diet. He promoted it on Larry King Live and other television shows.

Book collecting
Lagerfeld was a passionate book collector and amassed one of the largest personal libraries in the world. According to the Rare Book Hub, he was quoted as saying: "Today, I only collect books; there is no room left for something else. If you go to my house, I'll have you walk around the books. I ended up with a library of 300,000. It's a lot for an individual".

Photography
Lagerfeld took up photography in 1987 after being frustrated with images done for Chanel press kits. Chanel's then-image director, Éric Pfrunder, encouraged Lagerfeld to redo them himself, and photography became one of the passions of Lagerfeld's life outside of design. He went on to shoot commercial fashion campaigns, editorial shots for magazines like Harper's Bazaar, as well as architectural and landscape work. "I’m an illustrator with a camera", Lagerfeld told Women's Wear Daily at a 2010 exhibition of his work at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

Death, tributes, and retrospectives
After health complications in January 2019, Lagerfeld was admitted to the American Hospital of Paris in Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine on 18 February. He died there the following morning from complications of prostate cancer. He requested no formal funeral with plans for cremation and ashes spread at secret locations alongside his mother as well as his late partner, Jacques de Bascher.

Lagerfeld was memorialized on 20 June 2019 at the Grand Palais with "Karl For Ever", a celebration of the designer's life, which featured a career retrospective highlighting his tenures at Chloé, Fendi, and Chanel. The 90-minute tribute was attended by 2,500 guests. Nearly 60 gigantic portraits were on view within the pavilion, which has hosted many Chanel runway collections. The ceremony also included readings and musical performances by Tilda Swinton, Cara Delevingne, Helen Mirren, Pharrell Williams, and Lang Lang. The production was staged by theater and opera director Robert Carsen.

After the memorial, the house of Karl Lagerfeld announced in July 2019 the development of the "White Shirt Project". In homage to its eponymous founder, the collaboration celebrated the late designer's legacy with a collection of reimagined, iconic white shirts.

Lagerfeld once said: "If you ask me what I'd most like to have invented in fashion, I'd say the white shirt. For me, the white shirt is the basis of everything. Everything else comes after".

The global project, which was curated by style adviser Carine Roitfeld, features designs from Cara Delevingne, Kate Moss, Tommy Hilfiger, Diane Kruger, Takashi Murakami, Amber Valletta, and British street artist, Endless, amongst others.

Seven was Lagerfeld's favorite number; as such, seven of the final designs were replicated 77 times and sold for €777 each beginning on 26 September 2019. All proceeds benefitted the French charity Sauver La Vie, which funds medical research at the Paris Descartes University.

In February 2020, Eden Gallery honored Lagerfeld with an exhibition that featured sculptures and paintings inspired by his work.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art honored the designer with a retrospective of his work with Balmain, Patou, Chloe, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous line. The posthumous exhibition, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, which was held from 5 May through 13 July, spanned Lagerfeld's six-decade career and included more than 150 objects.

Chanel provided support for the exhibition and the accompanying 2023 Met Gala. The 2023 fête was co-chaired by Michaela Coel, Penélope Cruz, Roger Federer, Dua Lipa, and Condé Nast Global Chief Content Officer, Anna Wintour. Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando designed the exhibit. Curator Andrew Bolton expounded on the exhibition's inspiration in the April 2023 issue of Architectural Digest. He noted that the tribute would focus largely on Lagerfeld's design process, specifically his sketches. Named for English painter William Hogarth's concept of the line of beauty, the retrospective showcased both the literal lines of Lagerfeld's drawings as well as the sartorial lines or silhouettes of his works.

Controversies
There was much controversy from Lagerfeld's use of a verse from the Quran in his spring 1994 couture collection for Chanel, despite apologies from the designer and the fashion house. The controversy erupted after the 1994 couture show in Paris when the Indonesian Muslim Scholars Council in Jakarta called for a boycott of Chanel and threatened to file formal protests with the government of Lagerfeld's homeland, Germany. The designer apologized, explaining that he had taken the design from a book about the Taj Mahal, thinking the words came from a love poem.

Lagerfeld was a supporter of the use of fur in fashion, although he himself did not wear fur and hardly ate meat. In a BBC interview in 2009, he claimed that hunters "make a living having learnt nothing else than hunting, killing those beasts who would kill us if they could" and said: "In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish". Spokespersons for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) called Lagerfeld "a fashion dinosaur who is as out of step as his furs are out of style", and "particularly delusional with his kill-or-be-killed mentality. When was the last time a person's life was threatened by a mink or rabbit?" In 2001, he was the target of a pieing at a fashion premiere at Lincoln Center in New York City. However, the tofu pies hurled by animal rights activists in protest against his use of fur within his collections went astray, instead hitting Calvin Klein. A PETA spokesperson described the hit on Klein as "friendly fire", calling Klein, who does not use fur, "a great friend to the animals" and Lagerfeld a "designer dinosaur", who continues to use fur in his collections. In 2010, after Lagerfeld used fake fur in his 2010 Chanel collection, PETA's website claimed: "It's the triumph of fake fur ... because fake fur changed so much and became so great now that you can hardly see a difference".

Lagerfeld in 2009 joined critics of supermodel Heidi Klum, following German designer Wolfgang Joop's remarks about Klum, who had posed naked on the cover of the German edition of GQ magazine. Joop described Klum as being "no runway model. She is simply too heavy and has too big a bust". Lagerfeld commented that neither he nor Claudia Schiffer knew Klum, as she had never worked in Paris, and that she was insignificant in the world of high fashion, being "more bling bling and glamorous than current fashion". He created an international furore on 9 February 2012, when he called the singer Adele "a little too fat". Adele responded that she is like the majority of women, and she is very proud of that fact. Lagerfeld later caused another controversy, on 31 July 2012, when he criticised Pippa Middleton, the sister of Catherine, Princess of Wales, for her looks.

His caricature drawing Harvey Schweinstein, that shows film producer Harvey Weinstein as a pig, was criticised as antisemitic and dehumanizing. He sparked controversy by criticizing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's immigration policy during the European migrant crisis by saying, "You cannot kill millions of Jews and then take in millions of their worst enemies afterwards, even if there are decades [between the events]", and by accusing her to have thereby caused the rise of the party Alternative for Germany (AfD). In May 2018, during an interview with French newspaper Le Point, Lagerfeld mentioned that he was contemplating giving up his German citizenship due to the one million Muslim immigrants that had been accepted into Germany by Merkel, a decision to which he attributed the increase in neo-Nazism in the country.

In a 2019 interview with French magazine Numéro, Lagerfeld dismissed the #MeToo movement and stated, "If you don't want your pants pulled about, don't become a model. Join a nunnery, there'll always be a place for you in the convent". He also criticized newly instated regulations in photo studios and modeling agencies enacted to protect young models, stating that they were "too much" and as a designer, "you can't do anything". Lagerfeld also defended stylist Karl Templer, who was accused of sexual misconduct and stated that although he could not stand Harvey Weinstein, his distaste for him was of a professional nature.

Lagerfeld said in 2007 that his controversial persona was an act.

title: Karl Lagerfeld


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Talk:Peter Wessel Zapffe

Zapffe
Great author. If you're norwegian, read Måke-egg By the way, there's alot more coming on this one, as I'm presently writing a major task on P.W Zapffe and his life as an author and philosopher. I have a question, though, can we go public with bibliographies written by other people?
 * Added an extended introduction to Zapffes philosophy. Alot more coming..Sigg3.net

 * A question to all Norwegian users: kan 'Om det tragiske' med rette oversettes til 'About the Tragedy' eller er 'About the tragical' o.l en bedre oversettelse? Jeg skal se om jeg kan finne noe i Zapffes egen "oversettelse" av innholdet i verket. Tips mottas med takk! -- Sigg3.net

 * I would follow literary tradition and translate it to "On Tragedy" or perhaps more precisely "On the tragical". Actually, perhaps "On what is tragic" would be more in keeping with the content  Espen

 * No, no and yes. "On what is tragic" is probably the best translation, yet this is really beating about the bush. What we need here is a greater general outline of what the treatise advocates, more on Zapffes environmentalism (which I've seen someone added, to which I don't fully agree, but well,) and maybe some more biographic stuff. Added a couple of external links. - Sigg3.net 15:51, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

 * This page by Gisle Tangenes uses On the Tragic. Don't know what's up with that capital T, though. - Sigg3.net 15:55, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

 * In English you use capital letters in the beginning of important words when in the title of a work. Short prepositions (such as 'to', 'for' 'by' but not 'between', 'towards', 'during') and articles are not capitalized in the title. So "On the Tragic" is suppose to have a capital T as Tragic is deemed an important word. --User:Sentius

 * In addition NORLA's webpage on selected titles in Norwegian Non-fiction (Philosophy, religion, ethics): ON THE TRAGIC from 1941 is Zapffe's PhD dissertation in philosophy. It is among the very rare masterpieces that possess both philosophical and literary qualities beyond what is considered the standard academic norm. In ON THE TRAGIC Zapffe elucidates the foundation for his particular philosophy which is..
 * Read the whole thing here. I think we should stay with On the tragic. - Sigg3.net 11:40, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

How about changing 'the fixing mechanism' to 'Anchoring' as I have seen it referred to elsewhere? Zukix
 * It's done. - Sigg3.net 10:40, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

I've got the English summary of On the Tragic on my homepage, but I don't know about copyrights and stuff, so I'm a bit uncertain as to add it to the links on this page. Anyone? - Sigg3.net 10:15, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Are there any of his works available in English translation? --JBellis 21:59, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Not except from the Summary noted above, as far as I know. You could find essays, if you search hard and ask people. Translating Zapffe is very difficult, as he writes in Norwegian anno 1907, and writes very lyrically too. I've tried. But look out for a translation of The Last Messiah, which can be considered a compact version of the key to Zapffe's philosophy. - Sigg3.net 11:32, 16 February 2006

Some Quotes
This is Mr.P. I've added a couple of quotes from the documentary that was made about Zapffe in 1990. I hope no one minds.

It's Mr.P again. I've put up the English translations for the titles of Zapffe's major works that previously had no translation. I don't speak Norwegain, but these are the translations that I found in a few Arne Naess works.

Mr.P again. I separated the list of Zapffe's works into 'greater works' and 'collections of shorter writings' to make things clearer. Having them all together makes him seem more prolific than he actually was. Mr.P (the Zapffe enthusiast) 06:35, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Some more changes
Mr.P again. Apart from a couple of translation 'attempts' that I have put up over the last few months, I have also changed 'Wits and witless' to Wit and whimsy.

The word, 'wits', is almost always understood as someone's senses or alertness (to have your wits about you, as they say). 'Vett' probably means wit, as in clever humour.

Also, the word, 'witless', has a connotation of someone or something being stupid or dumb, rather than unwitty or silly. There probably isn't a correspinding word in English for 'uvett', which literally translates to 'un-wit' or 'non-wit' (but you couldn't use either of these as a translation). I have used the word 'whimsy' (meaning odd or silly humour) instead. Apart from it probably being closer to the meaning of 'uvett', it also has an antiquated feel to it, which fits the style of writing that Zapffe reputedly wrote in. What do you think? Mr.P (the Zapffe enthusiast) 00:55, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

 * I would translate 'vett' to 'sense', because someone who doesn't have 'vett' is senseless, in terms of common sense v. sense of perceiving. Common sense can also be translated to 'folkevett' or 'sense of the people'. The term 'vett' has a prominent place in North-Norwegian sayings and obscenities. But I think it's more important to make the title sound as sharp and witty as possible, which was arguably Zappfe's intention. - Sigg3.net (talk) 11:47, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

I have changed 'Vett og Uvett' translation too 'Sense and Silly', using your suggested translation of 'vett', Sigg3. Mr.P (the Zapffe enthusiast) (talk) 08:22, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

More changes
I have put up two more quotes from the Zapffe documentary made in 1990. Also, I have re-translated a word of two in the quotes (from the English subtitles in the documentary), which seemed confusing or out of place. Mr.P (the Zapffe enthusiast) 03:57, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciation
The lead needs to indicate how to pronounce his name. ~ Alcmaeonid (talk) 14:58, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

There you go Alcaeonid. I've put up the correct pronunciation, which I got from the documentary made about Zapffe that I have on DVD (cited in the article). His full name, by the way, is literally pronounced PET-er Vessel ZAP-fe. Yep, that's how Norwegians say Peter, no joke... --Mr.P (the Zapffe enthusiast) (talk) 00:17, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Zapffe is derived from the Dutch weinzappfer (not sure about spelling) meaning wine bottler, tapster. I wrote a school paper on Zapffe and r$ead his philosophy when I was a teenager. I have a telephone interview that I conducted with his second wife, and friend & philosopher Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng, for exactly this purpose. Maybe I could put it on my homepage and we could reference to it as a primary source? I also have his collected works if needed. - Sigg3.net (talk) 11:52, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Zapffe comes from the German word Zapf, meaning a faucet on a keg. It is similar to the English "tap."Lestrade (talk) 15:41, 30 March 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

An 'On the Tragic' section...
I found a great summary of 'On the Tragic' from a book, and have added it to the page as an excerpt. Mr.P (the Zapffe enthusiast) (talk) 21:45, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

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John Edward

John Edward McGee Jr. (born October 19, 1969) is an American television personality, writer and self-proclaimed psychic medium.

After writing his first book on the subject in 1998, Edward became a well-known (and controversial) figure in the United States with his shows broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel premiering in July 2000 along with broadcasting on We TV since May 2006.

Biography
Edward (born in Glen Cove, New York) is the only son of an Irish-American police officer and an Italian-American working mother. He was raised Roman Catholic and although he later stopped practicing, he's stated he's never stopped feeling connected to God and his Catholic roots. Edward was quoted saying, "This is something that is driven by a belief in God. It's the energy from that force that I think allows us to create this energy."

According to Edward, when he was 15 and "a huge doubter" (in psychic abilities), he was read by a New Jersey woman who convinced him that he could become a medium. "She told me things that there is no way she could have known. And the first part of the reading was that this was the path that I was supposed to be on and that I was supposed to be a teacher and help people and – I thought she was nuts."

Later, Edward worked as a phlebotomist while pursuing a degree in health care administration at Long Island University. He met his wife, Sandra McGee, when he was a student in a dance studio, and he became a ballroom dancing instructor. He and his wife have a son and a daughter; their second child, Olivia, is an actress.

Television shows
Edward published his first book, One Last Time, in 1998. His related appearance on Larry King Live later in the year prompted enough phone calls to overload the show's switchboard. The next year, Edward had a show of his own.

Crossing Over with John Edward
From 2001 to 2004, Edward was the producer and host of the show Crossing Over with John Edward, which has been syndicated and was broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel in the United States and on Living TV in the UK. In Crossing Over, Edward gave psychic readings to audience members.

Show format
Readings in Crossing Over involve Edward questioning audience members with what is presented as information being supposedly "communicated" by deceased friends and relatives. Edward says he receives images and clues from "the other side" which the audience must try to interpret. The audience is not supposed to supply Edward with any prior information about themselves, their family or whom they are trying to connect with "on the other side", aside from questionnaires filled out prior to taping. Audience members respond to Edward's statements and questions, adding any details they feel are appropriate. The show often employs a split screen, the view of a reading without sound on one half of the screen while on the other half the subjects of the reading are shown in a later interview as they discuss their experiences. A voiceover by Edward is also implemented at times, sharing further insights.

In other instances, Edward conducted private sessions away from the studio audience. The subjects of these segments later spoke in greater detail about the situation that led to their reading with Edward and the effect the reading had on their lives. Periodically, segments revisit people who have previously appeared on the show.

9/11 special
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Edward began filming at least one special in which he met with some relatives of the victims, with the intention of communicating with those who were killed. According to Edward's autobiography, he did not know that the producers had chosen the victims' families to appear on the show. The trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable sent a story, "'Psychic' Plans WTC Victims Show", on the daily subscription-fax sent to news media and TV station executives on October 25, 2001.

Steve Rosenberg, president of domestic television at Studios USA, the company that distributes Edward's program, had tentatively scheduled the program(s) to be broadcast during the November sweeps period, but news of the taping sparked a national outcry. Both the Sci Fi Channel and the Crossing Over with John Edward production office were flooded with phone calls and e-mails, some expressing outrage at the exploitation of the national tragedy, others at what they perceived as extreme tastelessness in search of ratings. Rosenberg initially ignored the criticism, insisting the programming would go on as scheduled, but within hours he terminated his plans.

John Edward Cross Country
Edward's next show, John Edward Cross Country, was broadcast on We TV from March 2006 to late 2008. In each episode, after a reading, Edward is filmed visiting the person or people whose reading was televised, along with their families, to see how the experience had changed their lives.

During the first season of Cross Country, Edward traveled across the US, giving readings to large audiences in public venues. In subsequent seasons, the show has been broadcast from a set similar to that used for Crossing Over.

International appearances
Edward's tours outside the USA have included performances in Canada, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. In response to the announcement of his 2019 Australian tour, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article by Peter FitzSimons which called Edward a fraud.

Veracity of abilities
Critics of Edward assert that he performs the mentalist techniques of hot reading and cold reading, in which one respectively uses prior knowledge or a wide array of quick and sometimes general guesses to create the impression of psychic ability. Choosing the first reading from a two-hour tape of edited shows as a sample, illusionist and skeptic James Randi found that just 3 of 23 statements made by Edward were confirmed as correct by the audience member being read, and the three statements that were correct were also trivial and nondescript.

In October 2007, Edward appeared on Headline Prime, hosted by Glenn Beck. When asked if he would take "the Amazing Randi's" challenge, Edward responded, "It's funny. I was on Larry King Live once, and they asked me the same question. And I made a joke [then], and I'll say the same thing here: why would I allow myself to be tested by somebody who's got an adjective as a first name?" Beck simply allowed Edward to continue, ignoring the challenge.

In another incident, Edward was said to have used foreknowledge to hot read in an interview on the television show Dateline. James Underdown of the Independent Investigative Group (IIG) attended a Crossing Over show in November 2002 and said "there were no indications of anyone I saw collecting information... none of his readings contained the kind of specific information that would raise an eyebrow of suspicion. ... John Edward was a bad cold reader. He, too, struggled to get hits, and in one attempt shot off nearly 40 guesses before finding any significant targets."

Underdown also claimed that Edward's apparent accuracy on television may be inflated by the editing process. After watching the broadcast version of the show he had attended and recorded, Underdown attributed a great deal of Edward's accuracy on television to editing and wrote, "Edward's editor fine-tuned many of the dead-ends out of a reading riddled with misses." In 2002, Edward said, "People are in the studio for eight hours, and we have to edit the show for time, not content. We don't try to hide the 'misses'." Edward has denied ever using hot or cold reading techniques.

In a 2019 segment of Last Week Tonight, Edward and other prominent TV psychics were featured. Several clips of Edward attempting cold reading and failing to get "hits" were included, as well as a clip of Edward telling an audience member, "I can only tell you what they're showing me, and if he's calling your mother a bitch, I'm gonna pass that on." John Oliver criticized the predatory nature of the psychic industry, as well as the media for promoting psychics, because this convinces viewers that psychic powers are real, and so enables neighborhood psychics to prey on grieving families. Oliver said "...when psychic abilities are presented as authentic, it emboldens a vast underworld of unscrupulous vultures, more than happy to make money by offering an open line to the afterlife, as well as many other bullshit services."

Appearances in the media
Edward has appeared or been mentioned in many television shows, including ABC's 20/20, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, The Crier Report, Dateline, The Early Show, Entertainment Tonight, Family Guy, Fox and Friends, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Larry King Live, HBO's America Undercover, Live with Regis & Kelly, Maury, Oprah, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, The 7pm Project, The Tony Danza Show, The View, Smallville, The Wayne Brady Show, Will & Grace, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Kourtney and Kim Take New York and Dr. Phil. as well as in the Law and Order season 14 episode "Compassion".

The adult animated TV series South Park featured Edward in the episode "The Biggest Douche in the Universe". The series' co-creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, credit James Randi for Stan's explanation of cold reading.

title: John Edward


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Plasma display

A plasma display panel (PDP) is a type of flat-panel display that uses small cells containing plasma: ionized gas that responds to electric fields. Plasma televisions were the first large (over 32 inches diagonal) flat-panel displays to be released to the public.

Until about 2007, plasma displays were commonly used in large televisions. By 2013, they had lost nearly all market share due to competition from low-cost LCDs. Manufacturing of plasma displays for the United States retail market ended in 2014, and manufacturing for the Chinese market ended in 2016. Plasma displays are obsolete, having been superseded in most if not all aspects by OLED displays.

General characteristics
Plasma displays are bright (1,000 lux or higher for the display module), have a wide color gamut, and can be produced in fairly large sizes—up to 3.8 m diagonally. They had a very low luminance "dark-room" black level compared with the lighter grey of the unilluminated parts of an LCD screen. (As plasma panels are locally lit and do not require a back light, blacks are blacker on plasma and grayer on LCDs.) LED-backlit LCD televisions have been developed to reduce this distinction. The display panel itself is about 6 cm thick, generally allowing the device's total thickness (including electronics) to be less than 10 cm. Power consumption varies greatly with picture content, with bright scenes drawing significantly more power than darker ones – this is also true for CRTs as well as modern LCDs where LED backlight brightness is adjusted dynamically. The plasma that illuminates the screen can reach a temperature of at least 1200 °C. Typical power consumption is 400 watts for a 127 cm screen. Most screens are set to "vivid" mode by default in the factory (which maximizes the brightness and raises the contrast so the image on the screen looks good under the extremely bright lights that are common in big box stores), which draws at least twice the power (around 500–700 watts) of a "home" setting of less extreme brightness. The lifetime of the latest generation of plasma displays is estimated at 100,000 hours (11 years) of actual display time, or 27 years at 10 hours per day. This is the estimated time over which maximum picture brightness degrades to half the original value.

Plasma screens are made out of glass, which may result in glare on the screen from nearby light sources. Plasma display panels cannot be economically manufactured in screen sizes smaller than 82 cm. Although a few companies have been able to make plasma enhanced-definition televisions (EDTV) this small, even fewer have made 32 inch plasma HDTVs. With the trend toward large-screen television technology, the 32 inch screen size was rapidly disappearing by mid-2009. Though considered bulky and thick compared with their LCD counterparts, some sets such as Panasonic's Z1 and Samsung's B860 series are as slim as 2.5 cm thick making them comparable to LCDs in this respect.

Competing display technologies include cathode-ray tube (CRT), organic light-emitting diode (OLED), CRT projectors, AMLCD, Digital Light Processing DLP, SED-tv, LED display, field emission display (FED), and quantum dot display (QLED).

Advantages

 * Capable of producing deeper blacks than LCD allowing for a superior contrast ratio.
 * As they use the same or similar phosphors as are used in CRT displays, plasma's color reproduction is very similar to that of CRTs.
 * Wider viewing angles than those of LCD; images do not suffer from degradation at less than straight ahead angles like LCDs. LCDs using IPS technology have the widest angles, but they do not equal the range of plasma primarily due to "IPS glow", a generally whitish haze that appears due to the nature of the IPS pixel design.
 * Less visible motion blur, thanks in large part to very high refresh rates and a faster response time, contributing to superior performance when displaying content with significant amounts of rapid motion such as auto racing, hockey, baseball, etc.
 * Superior uniformity. LCD panel backlights nearly always produce uneven brightness levels, although this is not always noticeable. High-end computer monitors have technologies to try to compensate for the uniformity problem.
 * In their heyday, they were less expensive for the buyer per square inch than LCD, particularly when considering equivalent performance.

Disadvantages

 * Earlier generation displays were more susceptible to screen burn-in and image retention. Recent models have a pixel orbiter that moves the entire picture slower than is noticeable to the human eye, which reduces the effect of burn-in but does not prevent it.
 * Due to the bistable nature of the color and intensity generating method, some people will notice that plasma displays have a shimmering or flickering effect with a number of hues, intensities and dither patterns.
 * Earlier generation displays (circa 2006 and prior) had phosphors that lost luminosity over time, resulting in gradual decline of absolute image brightness. Newer models have advertised lifespans exceeding 100,000 hours (11 years), far longer than older CRTs.
 * Uses more electrical power, on average, than an LCD TV using a LED backlight. Older CCFL backlights for LCD panels used quite a bit more power, and older plasma TVs used quite a bit more power than recent models.
 * Does not work as well at high altitudes above 6,500 ft due to pressure differential between the gases inside the screen and the air pressure at altitude. It may cause a buzzing noise. Manufacturers rate their screens to indicate the altitude parameters.
 * For those who wish to listen to AM radio, or are amateur radio operators (hams) or shortwave listeners (SWL), the radio frequency interference (RFI) from these devices can be irritating or disabling.
 * Plasma displays are generally heavier than LCD and may require more careful handling, such as being kept upright.
 * More susceptible to glare.

Native plasma television resolutions
Fixed-pixel displays such as plasma TVs scale the video image of each incoming signal to the native resolution of the display panel. The most common native resolutions for plasma display panels are 852×480 (EDTV), 1,366×768 and 1920×1080 (HDTV). As a result, picture quality varies depending on the performance of the video scaling processor and the upscaling and downscaling algorithms used by each display manufacturer.

Enhanced-definition plasma television
Early plasma televisions were enhanced-definition (ED) with a native resolution of 840×480 (discontinued) or 852×480 and down-scaled their incoming high-definition video signals to match their native display resolutions.

ED resolutions
The following ED resolutions were common prior to the introduction of HD displays, but have long been phased out in favor of HD displays, as well as because the overall pixel count in ED displays is lower than the pixel count on SD PAL displays (852×480 vs 720×576, respectively).
 * 840×480p
 * 852×480p

High-definition plasma television
Early high-definition (HD) plasma displays had a resolution of 1024x1024 and were alternate lighting of surfaces (ALiS) panels made by Fujitsu and Hitachi. These were interlaced displays, with non-square pixels.

Later HDTV plasma televisions usually have a resolution of 1,024×768 found on many 42 inch plasma screens, 1280×768 and 1,366×768 found on 50 in, 60 in, and 65 in plasma screens, or 1920×1080 found on plasma screen sizes from 42 inch to 103 inch. These displays are usually progressive displays, with non-square pixels, and will up-scale and de-interlace their incoming standard-definition signals to match their native display resolutions. 1024×768 resolution requires that 720p content be downscaled in one direction and upscaled in the other.

Design
A panel of a plasma display typically comprises millions of tiny compartments in between two panels of glass. These compartments, or "bulbs" or "cells", hold a mixture of noble gases and a minuscule amount of another gas (e.g., mercury vapor). Just as in the fluorescent lamps over an office desk, when a high voltage is applied across the cell, the gas in the cells forms a plasma. With flow of electricity (electrons), some of the electrons strike mercury particles as the electrons move through the plasma, momentarily increasing the energy level of the atom until the excess energy is shed. Mercury sheds the energy as ultraviolet (UV) photons. The UV photons then strike phosphor that is painted on the inside of the cell. When the UV photon strikes a phosphor molecule, it momentarily raises the energy level of an outer orbit electron in the phosphor molecule, moving the electron from a stable to an unstable state; the electron then sheds the excess energy as a photon at a lower energy level than UV light; the lower energy photons are mostly in the infrared range but about 40% are in the visible light range. Thus the input energy is converted to mostly infrared but also as visible light. The screen heats up to between 30 and 41 C during operation. Depending on the phosphors used, different colors of visible light can be achieved. Each pixel in a plasma display is made up of three cells comprising the primary colors of visible light. Varying the voltage of the signals to the cells thus allows different perceived colors.

The long electrodes are stripes of electrically conducting material that also lies between the glass plates in front of and behind the cells. The "address electrodes" sit behind the cells, along the rear glass plate, and can be opaque. The transparent display electrodes are mounted in front of the cell, along the front glass plate. As can be seen in the illustration, the electrodes are covered by an insulating protective layer. A magnesium oxide layer may be present to protect the dielectric layer and to emit secondary electrons.

Control circuitry charges the electrodes that cross paths at a cell, creating a voltage difference between front and back. Some of the atoms in the gas of a cell then lose electrons and become ionized, which creates an electrically conducting plasma of atoms, free electrons, and ions. The collisions of the flowing electrons in the plasma with the inert gas atoms leads to light emission; such light-emitting plasmas are known as glow discharges.

In a monochrome plasma panel, the gas is mostly neon, and the color is the characteristic orange of a neon-filled lamp (or sign). Once a glow discharge has been initiated in a cell, it can be maintained by applying a low-level voltage between all the horizontal and vertical electrodes–even after the ionizing voltage is removed. To erase a cell all voltage is removed from a pair of electrodes. This type of panel has inherent memory. A small amount of nitrogen is added to the neon to increase hysteresis. In color panels, the back of each cell is coated with a phosphor. The ultraviolet photons emitted by the plasma excite these phosphors, which give off visible light with colors determined by the phosphor materials. This aspect is comparable to fluorescent lamps and to the neon signs that use colored phosphors.

Every pixel is made up of three separate subpixel cells, each with different colored phosphors. One subpixel has a red light phosphor, one subpixel has a green light phosphor and one subpixel has a blue light phosphor. These colors blend together to create the overall color of the pixel, the same as a triad of a shadow mask CRT or color LCD. Plasma panels use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to control brightness: by varying the pulses of current flowing through the different cells thousands of times per second, the control system can increase or decrease the intensity of each subpixel color to create billions of different combinations of red, green and blue. In this way, the control system can produce most of the visible colors. Plasma displays use the same phosphors as CRTs, which accounts for the extremely accurate color reproduction when viewing television or computer video images (which use an RGB color system designed for CRT displays).

Plasma displays are different from liquid crystal displays (LCDs), another lightweight flat-screen display using very different technology. LCDs may use one or two large fluorescent lamps as a backlight source, but the different colors are controlled by LCD units, which in effect behave as gates that allow or block light through red, green, or blue filters on the front of the LCD panel.

To produce light, the cells need to be driven at a relatively high voltage (~300 volts) and the pressure of the gases inside the cell needs to be low (~500 torr).

Contrast ratio
Contrast ratio is the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of an image, measured in discrete steps, at any given moment. Generally, the higher the contrast ratio, the more realistic the image is (though the "realism" of an image depends on many factors including color accuracy, luminance linearity, and spatial linearity). Contrast ratios for plasma displays are often advertised as high as 5,000,000:1. On the surface, this is a significant advantage of plasma over most other current display technologies, a notable exception being organic light-emitting diode. Although there are no industry-wide guidelines for reporting contrast ratio, most manufacturers follow either the ANSI standard or perform a full-on-full-off test. The ANSI standard uses a checkered test pattern whereby the darkest blacks and the lightest whites are simultaneously measured, yielding the most accurate "real-world" ratings. In contrast, a full-on-full-off test measures the ratio using a pure black screen and a pure white screen, which gives higher values but does not represent a typical viewing scenario. Some displays, using many different technologies, have some "leakage" of light, through either optical or electronic means, from lit pixels to adjacent pixels so that dark pixels that are near bright ones appear less dark than they do during a full-off display. Manufacturers can further artificially improve the reported contrast ratio by increasing the contrast and brightness settings to achieve the highest test values. However, a contrast ratio generated by this method is misleading, as content would be essentially unwatchable at such settings.

Each cell on a plasma display must be precharged before it is lit, otherwise the cell would not respond quickly enough. Precharging normally increases power consumption, so energy recovery mechanisms may be in place to avoid an increase in power consumption. This precharging means the cells cannot achieve a true black, whereas an LED backlit LCD panel can actually turn off parts of the backlight, in "spots" or "patches" (this technique, however, does not prevent the large accumulated passive light of adjacent lamps, and the reflection media, from returning values from within the panel). Some manufacturers have reduced the precharge and the associated background glow, to the point where black levels on modern plasmas are starting to become close to some high-end CRTs Sony and Mitsubishi produced ten years before the comparable plasma displays. With an LCD, black pixels are generated by a light polarization method; many panels are unable to completely block the underlying backlight. More recent LCD panels using LED illumination can automatically reduce the backlighting on darker scenes, though this method cannot be used in high-contrast scenes, leaving some light showing from black parts of an image with bright parts, such as (at the extreme) a solid black screen with one fine intense bright line. This is called a "halo" effect which has been minimized on newer LED-backlit LCDs with local dimming. Edgelit models cannot compete with this as the light is reflected via a light guide to distribute the light behind the panel.

Screen burn-in

Image burn-in occurs on CRTs and plasma panels when the same picture is displayed for long periods. This causes the phosphors to overheat, losing some of their luminosity and producing a "shadow" image that is visible with the power off. Burn-in is especially a problem on plasma panels because they run hotter than CRTs. Early plasma televisions were plagued by burn-in, making it impossible to use video games or anything else that displayed static images.

Plasma displays also exhibit another image retention issue which is sometimes confused with screen burn-in damage. In this mode, when a group of pixels are run at high brightness (when displaying white, for example) for an extended period, a charge build-up in the pixel structure occurs and a ghost image can be seen. However, unlike burn-in, this charge build-up is transient and self-corrects after the image condition that caused the effect has been removed and a long enough period has passed (with the display either off or on).

Plasma manufacturers have tried various ways of reducing burn-in such as using gray pillarboxes, pixel orbiters and image washing routines, but none to date have eliminated the problem and all plasma manufacturers continue to exclude burn-in from their warranties.

Environmental impact
Plasma screens use significantly more energy than CRT and LCD screens.

Early development

Kálmán Tihanyi, a Hungarian engineer, described a proposed flat-panel plasma display system in a 1936 paper.

The first practical plasma video display was co-invented in 1964 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and graduate student Robert Willson for the PLATO computer system. The original neon orange monochrome Digivue display panels built by glass producer Owens-Illinois were very popular in the early 1970s because they were rugged and needed neither memory nor circuitry to refresh the images. A long period of sales decline occurred in the late 1970s because semiconductor memory made CRT displays cheaper than the $2500 USD 512 × 512 PLATO plasma displays. Nevertheless, the plasma displays' relatively large screen size and 1 inch thickness made them suitable for high-profile placement in lobbies and stock exchanges.

Burroughs Corporation, a maker of adding machines and computers, developed the Panaplex display in the early 1970s. The Panaplex display, generically referred to as a gas-discharge or gas-plasma display, uses the same technology as later plasma video displays, but began life as a seven-segment display for use in adding machines. They became popular for their bright orange luminous look and found nearly ubiquitous use throughout the late 1970s and into the 1990s in cash registers, calculators, pinball machines, aircraft avionics such as radios, navigational instruments, and stormscopes; test equipment such as frequency counters and multimeters; and generally anything that previously used nixie tube or numitron displays with a high digit-count. These displays were eventually replaced by LEDs because of their low current-draw and module-flexibility, but are still found in some applications where their high brightness is desired, such as pinball machines and avionics.

1980s
In 1983, IBM introduced a 19 in orange-on-black monochrome display (Model 3290 Information Panel) which was able to show up to four simultaneous IBM 3270 terminal sessions. By the end of the decade, orange monochrome plasma displays were used in a number of high-end AC-powered portable computers, such as the Ericsson Portable PC (the first use of such a display in 1985), the Compaq Portable 386 (1987) and the IBM P75 (1990). Plasma displays had a better contrast ratio, viewability angle, and less motion blur than the LCDs that were available at the time, and were used until the introduction of active-matrix color LCD displays in 1992.

Due to heavy competition from monochrome LCDs used in laptops and the high costs of plasma display technology, in 1987 IBM planned to shut down its factory in Kingston, New York, the largest plasma plant in the world, in favor of manufacturing mainframe computers, which would have left development to Japanese companies. Dr. Larry F. Weber, a University of Illinois ECE PhD (in plasma display research) and staff scientist working at CERL (home of the PLATO System), co-founded Plasmaco with Stephen Globus and IBM plant manager James Kehoe, and bought the plant from IBM for US$50,000. Weber stayed in Urbana as CTO until 1990, then moved to upstate New York to work at Plasmaco.

1990s
In 1992, Fujitsu introduced the world's first 21 in full-color display. It was based on technology created at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories.

In 1994, Weber demonstrated a color plasma display at an industry convention in San Jose. Panasonic Corporation began a joint development project with Plasmaco, which led in 1996 to the purchase of Plasmaco, its color AC technology, and its American factory for US$26 million.

In 1995, Fujitsu introduced the first 42 in plasma display panel; it had 852×480 resolution and was progressively scanned. Two years later, Philips introduced at CES and CeBIT the first large commercially available flat-panel TV, using the Fujitsu panels. Philips had plans to sell it for 70,000 french francs. It was released as the Philips 42PW9962. It was available at four Sears locations in the US for $14,999, including in-home installation. Pioneer and Fujitsu also began selling plasma televisions that year, and other manufacturers followed. By the year 2000 prices had dropped to $10,000.

2000s
In the year 2000, the first 60-inch plasma display was developed by Plasmaco. Panasonic was also reported to have developed a process to make plasma displays using ordinary window glass instead of the much more expensive "high strain point" glass. High strain point glass is made similarly to conventional float glass, but it is more heat resistant, deforming at higher temperatures. High strain point glass is normally necessary because plasma displays have to be baked during manufacture to dry the rare-earth phosphors after they are applied to the display. However, high strain point glass may be less scratch resistant.

In 2006, LCD prices started to fall rapidly and their screen sizes increased, although plasma televisions maintained a slight edge in picture quality and a price advantage for sets at the critical 42" size and larger. By late 2006, several vendors were offering 42" LCDs, albeit at a premium price, encroaching upon plasma's only stronghold. More decisively, LCDs offered higher resolutions and true 1080p support, while plasmas were stuck at 720p, which made up for the price difference.

In late 2006, analysts noted that LCDs had overtaken plasmas, particularly in the 40 in and above segment where plasma had previously gained market share. Another industry trend was the consolidation of plasma display manufacturers, with around 50 brands available but only five manufacturers. In the first quarter of 2008, a comparison of worldwide TV sales broke down to 22.1 million for direct-view CRT, 21.1 million for LCD, 2.8 million for plasma, and 0.1 million for rear projection.

Until the early 2000s, plasma displays were the most popular choice for HDTV flat-panel display as they had many benefits over LCDs. Beyond plasma's deeper blacks, increased contrast, faster response time, greater color spectrum, and wider viewing angle; they were also much bigger than LCDs, and it was believed that LCDs were suited only to smaller sized televisions. However, improvements in LCD fabrication narrowed the technological gap. The increased size, lower weight, falling prices, and often lower electrical power consumption of LCDs made them competitive with plasma television sets.

When the sales figures for the 2007 Christmas season were finally tallied, analysts were surprised to find that not only had LCD outsold plasma, but CRTs as well, during the same period. This development drove competing large-screen systems from the market almost overnight. Plasma had overtaken rear-projection systems in 2005. The February 2009 announcement that Pioneer Electronics was ending production of plasma screens was widely considered the tipping point in the technology's history as well.

Screen sizes have increased since the introduction of plasma displays. The largest plasma video display in the world at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, was a 150 in unit manufactured by Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) standing 6 ft tall by 11 ft wide.

2010s
At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Panasonic introduced their 152" 2160p 3D plasma. In 2010, Panasonic shipped 19.1 million plasma TV panels.

In 2010, the shipments of plasma TVs reached 18.2 million units globally. Since that time, shipments of plasma TVs have declined substantially. This decline has been attributed to the competition from liquid crystal (LCD) televisions, whose prices have fallen more rapidly than those of the plasma TVs. In late 2013, Panasonic announced that they would stop producing plasma TVs from March 2014 onwards. In 2014, LG and Samsung discontinued plasma TV production as well, effectively killing the technology, probably because of lowering demand.

Notable display manufacturers
Most have discontinued doing so, but at one time or another all of these companies have produced products containing plasma displays:

 * Beko (known sometimes as Grundig)
 * Fujitsu (only produced panels )
 * Funai
 * Gradiente
 * Chunghwa Picture Tubes (only produced panels )
 * Formosa plastics (only produced panels )
 * Hitachi (produced panels )
 * JVC
 * Lanix
 * LG (produced panels )
 * Magnavox
 * Marantz
 * NEC (only produced panels )
 * Orion
 * Panasonic Viera (produced panels  )
 * Philips
 * Pioneer (produced panels )
 * ProScan
 * Protron
 * Samsung (produced panels )
 * Sanyo
 * Sony BRAVIA (produced panels )
 * Toshiba (produced panels )
 * Vestel (both under Vestel name but also under various brands)

Panasonic was the biggest plasma display manufacturer until 2013, when it decided to discontinue plasma production. In the following months, Samsung and LG also ceased production of plasma sets. Panasonic, Samsung and LG were the last plasma manufacturers for the U.S. retail market.

title: Plasma display


text:
László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy (born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl called him "relentlessly experimental" because of his pioneering work in painting, drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film, theater, and writing.

He also worked collaboratively with other artists, including his first wife Lucia Moholy, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Herbert Bayer. His largest accomplishment may be the School of Design in Chicago, which survives today as part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, which art historian Elizabeth Siegel called "his overarching work of art". He also wrote books and articles advocating a utopian type of high modernism.

Early life and education (1895–1922)
Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz in Bácsborsód (Hungary) to a Jewish family. His mother's second cousin was the conductor Sir Georg Solti. László was the middle child of three surviving sons, but the family was soon abandoned by the father, Lipót Weisz.

The remainder of the family took protection and support from the maternal uncle, Gusztáv Nagy. The uncle was a lawyer, and sponsored the education of László and his younger brother, Ákos. In turn, László took the Magyar surname of his mentor. Later, he added "Moholy" to his surname, after the name of the town of Mohol (now part of Serbia) where he spent part of his boyhood in the family home nearby.

László attended a gymnasium school in the city of Szeged, which was the second-largest city in the country. Initially he wanted to become a writer or poet, and in 1911 some of his poems were published in local daily newspapers. Starting in 1913, he studied law at the University of Budapest.

In 1915 during World War I, he enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army as an artillery officer. In service, he also made crayon sketches, watercolors, and writings to document his wartime experiences. He was injured on the Russian Front during the Kerensky offensive of July 1917, and convalesced in Budapest. While on leave and during convalescence, Moholy-Nagy became involved first with the journal Jelenkor ("The Present Age"), edited by Hevesy, and then with the "Activist" circle around Lajos Kassák’s journal Ma ("Today").

After his discharge from the military in October 1918, he abandoned his law studies and attended the private art school of the Hungarian Fauve artist Róbert Berény. In 1918, he formally converted to the Hungarian Reformed Church; his godfather was his Roman Catholic university friend, the art critic Iván Hevesy. He was a supporter of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, declared early in 1919, though he assumed no official role in it.

After the defeat of the Communist regime in August, he withdrew to Szeged. An exhibition of his work was held there, before he left for Vienna around November 1919.

Moholy-Nagy moved to Berlin early in 1920, where he met photographer and writer Lucia Schulz; they married the next year.

In 1922, at a joint exhibition with fellow Hungarian Peter Laszlo Peri at Der Sturm, he met Walter Gropius. That summer, he vacationed on the Rhone with Lucia, who introduced him to making photograms on light-sensitized paper. He also began sketching ideas for what would become his most well-known sculpture, the Light-Space Modulator.

Bauhaus years (1923–1928)
In 1923, Moholy-Nagy was invited by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. He took over Johannes Itten's role co-teaching the Bauhaus foundation course with Josef Albers, and also replaced Paul Klee as Head of the Metal Workshop. This effectively marked the end of the school's expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a school of design and industrial integration. The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artists, and Moholy-Nagy was no exception. Throughout his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, film-making, and industrial design.

One of his main focuses was photography; starting in 1922, he had been initially guided by the technical expertise of his first wife and collaborator Lucia Moholy. In his books Malerei, Photographie, Film (1925) and The New Vision, from Material to Architecture (1932), he coined the term Neues Sehen (New Vision) for his belief that the camera could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. This theory encapsulated his approach to his art and teaching.

Moholy-Nagy was the first interwar artist to suggest the use of scientific equipment such as the telescope, microscope, and radiography in the making of art. With Lucia, he experimented with the photogram; the process of exposing light-sensitive paper with objects laid upon it. His teaching practice covered a diverse range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, photomontage, and metalworking.

Depression era (1929–1937)
Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus in 1928 and established his own design studio in Berlin. Marianne Brandt took over his role as Head of the Metal Workshop. He separated from his first wife Lucia in 1929.

An iconic achievement was Moholy-Nagy's construction of the Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne (Light Prop for an Electric Stage) (1928–1930), a device with moving parts designed to have light projected through it to create shifting light reflections and shadows on nearby surfaces. It was made with the help of the Hungarian architect Istvan Seboek for the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition held in Paris during the summer of 1930; it was later dubbed the Light-Space Modulator and was seen as a pioneer achievement of kinetic sculpture using industrial materials like reflective metals and Plexiglas. Given his interest in the light patterns it produced more than its appearance when viewed directly, it might more accurately be seen as one of the earliest examples of Light art. This was a form that he continued to develop in the 1940s in the United States, in Space Modulator (1939–1945), Papmac (1943), and B-10 Space Modulator (1942).

Moholy-Nagy was photography editor of the Dutch avant-garde magazine International Revue i 10 from 1927 to 1929. He designed stage sets for successful and controversial operatic and theatrical productions, designed exhibitions and books, created ad campaigns, wrote articles, and made films. His studio employed artists and designers such as Istvan Seboek, György Kepes, and Andor Weininger.

In 1931, he met actress and scriptwriter Sibylle Pietzsch. They married in 1932 and had two daughters, Hattula (born 1933), and Claudia (1936–1971). Sibyl collaborated with her husband to make Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau ("A Lightplay: Black White Gray"), a now-classic film based on the Light-Space Modulator. She would also work with him on the films Gypsies and Berlin Still Life, and would remain with him for the rest of his life, later becoming an art and architectural historian.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, as a foreign citizen, he was no longer allowed to work there. He worked in 1934 in the Netherlands (doing mostly commercial work) before moving with his family to London in 1935.

In England, Moholy-Nagy formed part of the circle of émigré artists and intellectuals who based themselves in Hampstead. Moholy-Nagy lived in the Isokon building with Walter Gropius for eight months and then settled in Golders Green. Gropius and Moholy-Nagy planned to establish an English version of the Bauhaus but could not secure backing, and then Moholy-Nagy was turned down for a teaching job at the Royal College of Art.

Moholy-Nagy earned a living in London by taking on various commercial design jobs, including work for Imperial Airways and a shop display for men's underwear. György Kepes worked with him on various commercial assignments.

He photographed contemporary architecture for the Architectural Review where the assistant editor was John Betjeman who commissioned Moholy-Nagy to make documentary photographs to illustrate his book An Oxford University Chest. He was commissioned to make the films Lobsters (1935) and New Architecture and the London Zoo (1936). He began to experiment with painting on transparent plastics, such as Perspex.

In 1936, he was commissioned by fellow Hungarian film producer Alexander Korda to design special effects for the now-classic film Things to Come, based on the novel by H. G. Wells. Working at Denham Studios, Moholy-Nagy created kinetic sculptures and abstract light effects, but they were mostly unused by the film's director. At the invitation of Leslie Martin, he gave a lecture to the architecture school of Hull School of Art.

In 1937 his artworks were included in the infamous "Degenerate art" exhibition held by Nazi Germany in Munich.

Chicago years (1937–1946)
In 1937, on the recommendation of Walter Gropius, and at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, the Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus. The philosophy of the school was basically unchanged from that of the original, and its headquarters was the Prairie Avenue mansion that architect Richard Morris Hunt had designed for department store magnate Marshall Field.

However, the school lost the financial backing of its supporters after only a single academic year, and it closed in 1938. Moholy-Nagy resumed doing commercial design work, which he continued to do for the rest of his life. Moholy-Nagy was also the Art Advisor for the mail-order house of Spiegel in Chicago.

Paepcke continued to support the artist, and in 1939 Moholy-Nagy opened the School of Design in Chicago. He also started making static and mobile sculptures in transparent plastic, often accented with chromed metal.

In 1940, the summer session of the School of Design was held at Mills College in Oakland, California. In 1942, he taught a summer course at the Women's Teachers College in Denton, Texas.

In 1943, Moholy-Nagy began work on an account of his efforts to develop the curriculum of the School of Design. It would be posthumously published in his 1947 book Vision in Motion, in collaboration with his art historian wife Sibyl.

In 1944, the School of Design in Chicago became the Institute of Design, and in 1949 it would become a part of Illinois Institute of Technology, the first institution in the United States to offer a PhD in design.

Moholy-Nagy was diagnosed with leukemia in 1945. He became a naturalized American citizen in April 1946. He continued to produce artworks in multiple media, to teach, and to attend conferences until he died of the disease in Chicago on November 24, 1946. He was buried at Graceland Cemetery.

Legacy
The software company Laszlo Systems (developers of the open source programming language OpenLaszlo) was named in part to honor Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest is named in his honor. In 1998 a Tribute Marker from the City of Chicago was installed. In the autumn of 2003, the Moholy-Nagy Foundation, Inc. was established as a source of information about Moholy-Nagy's life and works. In 2016, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York exhibited a retrospective of Moholy-Nagy's work that included painting, film, photography, and sculpture. In 2019, a documentary film The New Bauhaus directed by Alysa Nahmias was released. The film centers on Moholy-Nagy's life and legacy in Chicago, featuring his daughter Hattula Moholy-Nagy, grandsons Andreas Hug and Daniel Hug, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and artists Jan Tichy, Barbara Kasten, Barbara Crane, Kenneth Josephson, Debbie Millman, and Olafur Eliasson.

title: László Moholy-Nagy


text:
Vernon L. Smith

Vernon Lomax Smith (born January 1, 1927) is an American economist who is currently a professor of economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly the McLellan/Regent’s Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics, which helped establish “laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms”.

Smith is the founder and president of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREEE), a member of the Independent Institute’s board of advisors, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Hee was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1987, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995. In 2004, Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidad Francisco Marroquín, where the Vernon Smith Center for Experimental Economics Research is named for him. He was also a founding board member of the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. As of 2023, Smith also sits on the Advisory Board of the Madden Center for Value Creation at Florida Atlantic University.

Early life and education
Smith was born in Wichita, Kansas, where he attended Wichita North High School and Friends University. Grover Bougher, Vernon's mother's first husband, who worked as a fireman on the Santa Fe railroad, died in an accident. The life insurance money provided by the Santa Fe railroad was invested in a farm which became the sole means of survival for Vernon's family during the tough years of the Great Depression. His future interests were influenced by his childhood at the farm.

Smith received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1949, an M.A. in economics from the University of Kansas in 1952, and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1955. His Ph.D. thesis title was A theoretical and empirical inquiry into the economic replacement of capital equipment.

Academic career
Smith's first teaching post was at the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, which he held from 1955 until 1967, attaining the rank of full professor.

Smith also taught as a visiting associate professor at Stanford University (1961–1962) and there made contact with Sidney Siegel, who was also doing work in experimental economics. Smith moved with his family to Massachusetts and got a position first at Brown University (1967–1968) and then at the University of Massachusetts (1968–1972). Smith also received appointments at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1972–1973) and Caltech (1973–1975).

Much of the research that earned Smith the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was conducted at the University of Arizona between 1976 and 2001. In 2001, Smith left Arizona for George Mason University. From 2003 to 2006, he held the Rasmuson Chair of Economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage. In 2008, Smith founded the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University in Orange, California.

Smith has served on the board of editors of the American Economic Review, the Cato Journal, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Science, Economic Theory, Economic Design, and the Journal of Economic Methodology. He also served as an expert for the Copenhagen Consensus.

Academic work
Smith began his work in experimental economics at Purdue University. As Smith describes it:

"In the Autumn semester, 1955, I taught Principles of Economics, and found it a challenge to convey basic microeconomic theory to students. Why/how could any market approximate a competitive equilibrium? I resolved that on the first day of class the following semester, I would try running a market experiment that would give the students an opportunity to experience an actual market, and me the opportunity to observe one in which I knew, but they did not know what were the alleged driving conditions of supply and demand in that market."

In framing the experiment, Smith varied certain institutional parameters seen in the first classroom economics experiments as conducted by Edward Chamberlin: in particular, he ran the experiments for several trading periods, to give the student subjects time to train.

At Caltech, Charles Plott encouraged Smith to formalize the methodology of experimental economics, which he did in two articles. In 1976, "Experimental Economics: Induced Value Theory" was published in the American Economic Review (AER). It was the first articulation of the principle behind economic experiments. Six years later, these principles were expanded in "Microeconomic Systems as an Experimental Science," also in the AER. This paper adapts the principles of mechanism design, a microeconomic system developed by Leonid Hurwicz, to the development of economic experiments. In Hurwicz's formulation, a microeconomic system consists of an economic environment, an economic institution (or economic mechanism), and an economic outcome. The economic environment is simply the preferences of the people in the economy and the production capabilities of the firms in the economy. The key insight in this formulation is that the economic outcome can be affected by the economic institution. The mechanism design provides a formal means for tests of the performance of an economic institution, and experimental economics, as developed by Smith, provided a means for formal empirical assessment of the performance of economic institutions. The second main contribution of the paper is to the technique of induced values, the method used in controlled laboratory experiments in economics, political science, and psychology, which allows experimental economists to create a replica of a market in a laboratory. Subjects in an experiment are told that they can produce a "commodity" at a cost and then sell it to buyers. The seller earns the difference between the price received and its cost. Buyers are told that the commodity has a value to them when they consume it, and they earn the difference between the value of the commodity to them and its price. Using the technique, Smith and his coauthors have examined the performance of alternative trading mechanisms in resource allocation.

In February 2011, Smith participated in the "Visiting Scholars Series" at the Nicholas Academic Centers in Santa Ana, California, conducted in collaboration with Chapman University. Smith and his colleague Bart Wilson conducted experiments designed to expose high school students from underserved neighborhoods to market dynamics and how concepts such as altruism influence economic behavior.

Smith has authored or coauthored articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics and experimental economics. He was also one of the first to propose the combinatorial auction design, with Stephen J. Rassenti and Robert L. Bulfin in 1982.

In January 2009, Smith signed a public petition opposing the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In a 2010 Econ Journal Watch study, Smith was found to be one of the most active petition-signers among US economists.

The Vernon Smith Prize for the Advancement of Austrian Economics is named after him and is sponsored by the European Center of Austrian Economics.

Vernon Smith is renowned for his seminal contributions to the elucidation of spontaneous order within the field of economics. He posits spontaneous order as the organic emergence of structure and coherence from apparent disorder, a phenomenon ubiquitously observed in both social and economic contexts. Smith has expounded upon the notion of spontaneous order in the context of his pedagogical endeavors as well. In his instructive course titled "Spontaneous Order and the Law" at the Fowler School of Law, Chapman University, he illuminates how social norms and legal frameworks emerge organically through human interaction, gradually coalescing from apparent chaos into structured societal systems.

In recent years, Vernon L. Smith’s research has expanded to include the study of Neuroeconomics as seen in Law & Neuroeconomics Smith (2000), where he integrates economic theory with neuroscience to understand decision-making processes. Vernon Smith’s work in this area has led to new insights into how brain activity influences economic decisions. Additionally, he has been instrumental in promoting the use of experimental methods in economics education, advocating for a hands-on approach to learning economic concepts. Some of these contributions were used in Neuroeconomics Lab books published by Academic Press (2014).

Personal life
In February 2005, Smith publicly attributed features of his personality to Asperger syndrome after a process of self-diagnosis.

Works

 * Plott, Charles R., and Vernon L. Smith, ed. (2008). Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, v. 1, Elsevier. Description and preview.
 * _____ (1976).
 * _____ (1982).
 * _____ (1991). Papers in Experimental Economics [1962–88], Cambridge. Description and chapter-preview links.
 * _____ (2000). Bargaining and Market Behavior: Essays in Experimental Economics [1990–98], Cambridge. Description and chapter-preview links.
 * _____ (2003).
 * _____ ([1987] 2008a). "experimental methods in economics." The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, Abstract.
 * _____ (2008b). "experimental economics," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, Abstract.
 * Reprinted in Timothy N. Cason and Charles Noussair, ed. (2001), Advances in Experimental Markets, pp. 15– 32.
 * Chorvat, T., McCabe, K., & Smith, V. (2005). Law and Neuroeconomics. Supreme Court Economic Review
 * _____ (2000). Bargaining and Market Behavior: Essays in Experimental Economics [1990–98], Cambridge. Description and chapter-preview links.
 * _____ (2003).
 * _____ ([1987] 2008a). "experimental methods in economics." The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, Abstract.
 * _____ (2008b). "experimental economics," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, Abstract.
 * Reprinted in Timothy N. Cason and Charles Noussair, ed. (2001), Advances in Experimental Markets, pp. 15– 32.
 * Chorvat, T., McCabe, K., & Smith, V. (2005). Law and Neuroeconomics. Supreme Court Economic Review

Articles

 * "Default is not the end of the world" Interview with Vernon Smith by Luis Martin (Winter 2011)
 * Reflections On Human Action After 50 Years by Vernon L. Smith, Cato Journal, Fall 1999
 * "Using Experiments to Inform the Privatization/Deregulation Movement in Electricity," by Stephen J.Rassenti, Vernon L. Smith, and Bart J.Wilson, Cato Journal, Winter 2002
 * The Clinton Housing Bubble, Vernon L. Smith, The Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2007
 * From Bubble to Depression?, Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, The Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2009

title: Vernon L. Smith


text:
Active-matrix liquid-crystal display

An active-matrix liquid-crystal display (AMLCD) is a type of flat-panel display used in high-resolution TVs, computer monitors, notebook computers, tablet computers and smartphones with an LCD screen, due to low weight, very good image quality, wide color gamut and fast response time.

The concept of active-matrix LCDs was proposed by Bernard J. Lechner at the RCA Laboratories in 1968. The first functional AMLCD with thin-film transistors was made by T. Peter Brody, Fang-Chen Luo and their team at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1972. However, it took years of additional research and development by others to launch successful products.

Etymology
The term "active matrix" was coined by T. Peter Brody in 1975.

Introduction
The most common type of AMLCD contains, besides the polarizing sheets and cells of liquid crystal, a matrix of thin-film transistors to make a thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display. These devices store the electrical state of each pixel on the display while all the other pixels are being updated. This method provides a much brighter, sharper display than a passive matrix of the same size. An important specification for these displays is their viewing-angle.

Thin-film transistors are usually used for constructing an active matrix so that the two terms are often interchanged, even though a thin-film transistor is just one component in an active matrix and some active-matrix designs have used other components such as diodes. Whereas a passive matrix display uses a simple conductive grid to apply a voltage to the liquid crystals in the target area, an active-matrix display uses a grid of transistors and capacitors with the ability to hold a charge for a limited period of time. Because of the switching action of transistors, only the desired pixel receives a charge, and the pixel acts as a capacitor to hold the charge until the next refresh cycle, improving image quality over a passive matrix. This is a special version of a sample-and-hold circuit.

title: Active-matrix liquid-crystal display