William Caxton was an English merchant and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England, in 1476, as a printer was the first English retailer of printed books. Neither his parentage nor date of birth is known for certain, but he may have been born between 1415 and 1424 in the Weald or wood land of Kent in Hadlow or Tenterden. In 1438 he was apprenticed to a wealthy London silk mercer. Shortly after Large's death, Caxton moved to Bruges, Belgium, a wealthy cultured city, where he was settled by 1450. Successful in business, he became governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London; when Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV, married the Duke of Burgundy, they moved to Bruges and befriended Caxton. It was the Duchess who encouraged Caxton to complete his translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a collection of stories associated with Homer's Iliad, which he did in 1471. On his return to England, heavy demand for his translation prompted Caxton to set up a press at Westminster in 1476, although the first book he is known to have produced was an edition of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

He was the first to translate Aesop's Fables in 1484. Caxton was not an adequate translator, under pressure to publish as much as possible as as possible, he sometimes transferred French words into English. In 2002, Caxton was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll. Caxton's family "fairly certainly" consisted of his parents and Dionisia, a brother, Philip. However, the charters used. Caxton's date of birth is unknown. Records place it in the region of 1415–1424, based on the fact that his apprenticeship fees were paid in 1438. Caxton would have been 14 at the date of apprenticeship, but masters paid the fees late. In the preface to his first printed work The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, he claims to have been born and educated in the Weald of Kent. Oral tradition in Tonbridge claims. One of the manors of Hadlow was Caustons, owned by the Caxton family. A house in Hadlow reputed to be the birthplace of William Caxton was dismantled in 1936 and incorporated into a larger house rebuilt in Forest Row, East Sussex.

Further evidence for Hadlow is that various place names nearby are mentioned by Caxton. Caxton was in London by 1438, when the registers of the Mercers' Company record his apprenticeship to Robert Large, a wealthy London mercer or dealer in luxury goods, who served as Master of the Mercer's Company, Lord Mayor of London in 1439. After Large died in 1441, Caxton was left a small sum of money; as other apprentices were left larger sums, it would seem that he was not a senior apprentice at this time. Caxton was making trips to Bruges by 1450 at the latest and had settled there by 1453, when he may have taken his Liberty of the Mercers' Company. There he was successful in business and became governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, his trade brought him into contact with Burgundy and it was thus that he became a member of the household of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the third wife of Charles the Bold and sister of two Kings of England: Edward IV and Richard III. This led to more continental travel, including travel to Cologne, in the course of which he observed the new printing industry and was influenced by German printing.

He wasted no time in setting up a printing press in Bruges, in collaboration with a Fleming named Colard Mansion, the first book to be printed in English was produced in 1473: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a translation by Caxton himself. In the epilogue of the book, Caxton tells how his "pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed" with copying the book by hand, so he "practiced and learnt" how to print it, his translation had become popular in the Burgundian court, requests for copies of it were the stimulus for him to set up a press. Bringing the knowledge back to England, he set up the country's first press in the almonry of the Westminster Abbey Church in 1476; the first book known to have been produced there was an edition of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Another early title was Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, first printed on 18 November 1477, translated by Earl Rivers, the king's brother-in-law. Caxton's translations of the Golden Legend and The Book of the Knight in the Tower contain the earliest verses of the Bible to be printed in English.

He produced the first translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in English. Caxton produced chivalric romances, the most important of, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur; these books appealed to the English upper classes in the late fifteenth century. Caxton was supported by members of the gentry. Caxton's precise date of death is uncertain, but estimates from the records of his burial in St. Margaret's, suggest that he died near March 1492. However, George D. Painter makes numerous references to the year 1491 in h

Aricia nicias, the silvery argus, is a butterfly of the family Lycaenidae. It is found in the Alps and from Scandinavia ranging to Siberia and the north of Mongolia; the wingspan is 25–28 mm. The butterfly flies from May to August depending on the location; the larvae feed on Geranium species. L. donzelii Bdv.. Scarcely so large as the smallest eumedon. Above black-brown with dark discocellular spot and grey-brown fringes. Underside grey, the ocelli being but little prominent, on the hindwing obsolescent. In the high Alps and in the north of Europe, as well as in some of the Asiatic mountain-ranges. — Specimens from East Russia are smaller, with narrower border, above more greenish and beneath with a feebly developed reddish yellow band. — Egg flattened, pure white, deposited on Geranium in July. The larva feeds in the stalks and buds. Pupa pale olive-green with dark dorsal stripe, the wing-cases transparent, bearing a minute reddish network and small thin white hairs; the butterflies are on the wing in July and August, closely resemble L. eumedon in their habits of flight, etc. but are far less plentiful.

They occur only singly resting on a high- grown flower of Geranium. This species is met with only in single specimens among the crowds of Alpine Blues drinking at puddles, only at a considerable altitude Butterflies of Europe Archived version

Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate is elected; the other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked. The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings. A ranked voting system collects more information from voters compared to the single-mark ballots used in most governmental elections, many of which use First-Past-The-Post and Mixed-Member Proportional voting systems.

There are many types of ranked voting, with several used in governmental elections. Instant-runoff voting is used in Australian state and federal elections, in Ireland for its presidential elections, by some jurisdictions in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand. A type and classification of ranked voting is called the single transferable vote, used for national elections in Ireland and Malta, the Australian Senate, for regional and local elections in Northern Ireland, for all local elections in Scotland, for some local elections in New Zealand and the United States. Borda count is used in Nauru. Contingent vote and Supplementary vote are used in a few locations. Condorcet methods are used by private organizations and minor parties, but are not used in governmental elections. Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard's theorem prove that all voting systems must make trade-offs between desirable properties, such as the preference between two candidates being unaffected by the popularity of a third candidate.

Accordingly there is no consensus among academics or public servants as to the "best" electoral system. An increasing number of authors, including David Farrell, Ian McAllister and Jurij Toplak, see preferentiality as one of the characteristics by which electoral systems can be evaluated. According to this view, all electoral methods are preferential, but to different degrees and may be classified according to their preferentiality. By this logic, cardinal voting methods such as Score voting or STAR voting are "preferential". There are different preferential voting systems, so it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. Selection of the Condorcet winner is considered by psephologists as the ideal election outcome for a ranked system, so "Condorcet efficiency" is important when evaluating different methods of preferential voting; the Condorcet winner is the one that would win every two-way contest against every other alternative. Another criterion used to gauge the effectiveness of a preferential voting system is its ability to withstand manipulative voting strategies, when voters cast ballots that do not reflect their preferences in the hope of electing their first choice.

This can be rated on at least two dimensions—the number of voters needed to game the system, the sophistication of the strategy necessary. Used in national elections in Australia, this system is said to simulate a series of runoff elections. If no candidate is the first choice of more than half of the voters all votes cast for the candidate with the lowest number of first choices are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on, ranked next on each ballot. If this does not result in any candidate receiving a majority, further rounds of redistribution occur; this method is thought to be resistant to manipulative voting as the only strategies that work against it require voters to rank choices they want to see lose. At the same time, this system fails Condorcet criterion, meaning a candidate can win if the voters preferred a different candidate, fails the monotonicity criterion, where ranking a candidate higher can lessen the chances he or she will be elected and vice versa. Additionally, instant-runoff voting has a lower Condorcet efficiency than similar systems when there are more than four choices.

This is one of the preferential voting systems most used by states. It is used for electing multi-member constituencies. Any candidates that achieve the number of votes required for election are elected and their surplus votes are redistributed to the voter's next choice candidate. Once this is done, if not all places have been filled the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, their votes are redistributed to the voter's next choice; this whole process is repeated. This method is called the Hare-Clark system; when STV is used for single-winner elections, it becomes equivalent to IRV. Positional voting is a ranked voting electoral system in which the options receive points based on their rank position on each ballot and the option with the most points overall wins. Borda is a positional system in which ballots are counted by assigning a point value to each place in each voter's ranking of the candidates, the choice with the largest number of points overall is elected; this method is named after French mathematician Jean-Charles de Borda.

Instead of selecting a Condorcet winner, this system may select a choice that reflects an average of the preferences of the c