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EDtv

EDtv is a 1999 American satirical comedy film directed by Ron Howard. An adaptation of the Quebecois film Louis 19, King of the Airwaves (Louis 19, le roi des ondes) (1994), it stars Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres, Martin Landau, Rob Reiner, Sally Kirkland, Elizabeth Hurley, Clint Howard, and Dennis Hopper.

The movie received mixed-to-positive reviews, with some criticizing its similarity to The Truman Show (1998), and was a box office flop, grossing only $35.2 million compared to its $80 million production budget.

Plot
Television network True TV is commencing interviews for a planned reality show that shows a normal person's life 24/7, created by TV producer Cynthia. They interview Ed Pekurny and his brother, Ray. When the producers see the interview, Cynthia chooses Ed. The show hits the airwaves under the title "Ed TV." It is a total failure at first, as only boring things happen. The producers want to pull the plug, but Cynthia remains determined that the show will succeed.

Ed TV gets interesting when Ed visits Ray. Ed (along with the cameramen) discovers that Ray is cheating on his girlfriend Shari. Ed visits Shari to apologize to her for Ray's actions, but a drunk Shari starts insulting Ray, calling him "a bad lay", to the audience's amusement. Ed tries to comfort Shari, revealing he has feelings for her; she reveals she has feelings for him too, and they kiss, making Ed TV extremely popular. At Cynthia's insistence, Ed starts a relationship with Shari, but their relationship is short-lived, as Ed grows more interested in staying on TV and Shari is abused by viewers who find her unappealing.

Ed goes on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and meets beautiful model and actress Jill who takes a liking to Ed. Ed visits Shari, who tells him she does not want to be with him until Ed TV stops airing. She then leaves town. Ed goes to a park to play football with Ray when Jill arrives to invite Ed over for dinner at her house, as Cynthia brought her in to earn more ratings. When Ed arrives at Jill's house, there is a massive crowd. The two have a small talk, and kiss on top of a table. They are about to have sex, but Ed falls off the table and lands on her cat, which results in a sore back for the former and a broken leg for the latter. Ed never sees Jill again, and he also finds out his brother wrote a book (called My Brother Pissed on Me).

Ed's father Hank, who abandoned his family when Ed was thirteen, unexpectedly visits Ed and informs him that he left because Ed's mother was having an affair with Ed's current stepfather, Al. Ed is furious with his mother Jeanette, who had previously claimed that she'd only met Al after Hank left, and argues with her. Ed then gets a phone call telling him to come to the hospital, where he is told his father died making love to his wife. Ed assumes the father in question is Al, but it is actually Hank, who was having an affair with Jeanette.

After Hank's funeral, Ed becomes disheartened by how the producers want him to stay on longer and that he cannot do anything to change their minds or he would be in breach of his contract. Ed is depressed until he notices a disguised Shari. He chases her to a women's bathroom in a movie theater, where she explains that she is staying with her brother for his birthday and that she just wanted to see Ed. Ed vows to find a way to end the show to be with Shari. When Ed exits, one cameraman stays with Shari, explaining that it is the producers' new idea: Ed's entire family is being filmed, but they will focus on the most interesting person, eliminating his family's right to privacy for as long as the show will air.

Ed gets an idea on how to stop the main producer from airing the show: he will give $10,000 to the person who can give him the best amount of "dirt" on the producers and that he will announce it live, with the desired result being that they stop airing the show before he can make the announcement. As Cynthia feels sorry for Ed, she tells him a secret of the main producer. Ed announces the secret (that the man has to pump a liquid into his penis to get an erection), but before he can announce who it is, the show is taken off the air.

After the camera crew finally leaves Ed's apartment, he and Shari renew their relationship and celebrate as TV news panelists predict Ed will be forgotten in a short period of time.

Release
The film was screened out of competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Box office
EDtv opened in third place behind Forces of Nature and Analyze This, making $8.3 million during its opening weekend. The film was a box office bomb, grossing only $35.2 million against a production budget of $80 million.

Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 64%, based on 47 reviews, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The site's consensus states: "If it's not as ambitious as The Truman Show in satirizing the voyeuristic nature of television, EdTV is an amiable, witty comedy with fine performances from Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson." On Metacritic the film has a rating of 48 out of 100, based on reviews from 26 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Ross Anthony of Hollywood Report Card questioned the plausibility of parts of the script but wrote: "Though the thunder of its big idea may have been lost to The Truman Show [...], this screenplay still has real and punchy dialogue. Despite its faults EDtv will engage from beginning till end."

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film 2 and a 1/2 out of 4 stars. Ebert says that although they share the same idea, The Truman Show is a parable, and EDtv is an ambitious sitcom. Ebert wonders what type of person would sign up for a show like this, and doesn't believe Ed is that kind of person, so "the film never quite feels convincing."

title: EDtv


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Cumrun Vafa

Cumrun Vafa (, ; born 1 August 1960) is an Iranian-American theoretical physicist and the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University.

Early life and education
Cumrun Vafa was born in Tehran, Iran on 1 August 1960. He became interested in physics as a young child, specifically how the moon was not falling from the sky, and he later grew his interests in math by high school and was fascinated by how mathematics could predict the movement of objects.

He graduated from Alborz High School in Tehran and moved to the United States in 1977 to study at university. He received a B.S. in mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1985 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Symmetries, inequalities and index theorems", under the supervision of Edward Witten.

Academia
After his PhD degree, Vafa became a junior fellow via the Harvard Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he later got a junior faculty position. In 1989 he was offered a senior faculty position, and he has been there ever since.

Vafa worked at Princeton University within the Institute for Advanced Study, within the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Mathematics in 1994.

Research
Vafa's research is primarily in string theory, and is focused on the nature of quantum gravity and the relation between geometry and quantum field theories. He is known in the string theory community for his co-discovery with Strominger that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole can be accounted for by solitonic states of superstring theory, and for expounding the relation between geometry and field theories that arise through string dualities (culminating in the Gopakumar–Vafa conjecture). This topic has been known as "geometric engineering of quantum field theories".

In 1997, he developed F-theory, a 12-dimensional theory that compactifies to 10-D Type IIB superstring theory.

He is also interested in understanding the underlying meaning of string dualities, as well as trying to apply superstring theory to some unsolved questions of elementary particle physics such as the hierarchy problem and the cosmological constant problem.

He has made contributions to topological string theories and to the understanding of mirror symmetry.

He is a trustee of Network of Iranians for Knowledge and Innovation (NIKI).

Awards and honors
In 2017, Vafa, alongside Andrew Strominger and Joseph Polchinski, jointly won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their advancement of string theory and jointly won the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Physics Frontiers Prize.

He is the recipient of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)'s, 2008 Dirac Medal, which was won alongside Juan Maldacena, and Joseph Polchinski for their advancement of string theory.

In 1998 he was a Plenary Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

In 2016, Vafa was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.

Vafa was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

In 2021, Vafa was awarded the Mustafa Prize.

Research articles
Vafa has co-authored and published more than 300 research articles in the fields of string theory, mathematics, and physics, with many other researchers including: Robbert Dijkgraaf, Hirosi Ooguri, Mina Aganagic, Sergei Gukov, Rajesh Gopakumar, Lotte Hollands, and many others. This is a select list of these works:

 * Dixon, L; Harvey, JA; Vafa, C; Witten, E. "Strings on orbifolds" . Nuclear Physics.
 * Dixon, L; Harvey, JA; Vafa, C; Witten, E. "Strings on orbifolds" . Nuclear Physics.
 * Dixon, L; Harvey, JA; Vafa, C; Witten, E. "Strings on orbifolds" . Nuclear Physics.
 * Dixon, L; Harvey, JA; Vafa, C; Witten, E. "Strings on orbifolds" . Nuclear Physics.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Cumrun Vafa


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title: Template:Game theory


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List of video game developers

This is a list of notable video game companies that have made games for either computers (like PC or Mac), video game consoles, handheld or mobile devices, and includes companies that currently exist as well as now-defunct companies.

See the list of video games for other lists relating to video games, and defunct video game companies for a more specific list of companies that no longer exist. Many of the developers publish their own games.

title: List of video game developers