The eight-eyed Repnids seem to be watching as you settle the flyer down on the red soil, but they make no move towards you, in fact they are motionless as you climb out of the flyer and walk slowly towards them. The ground beneath your feet begins to tremble and then shake, as if in an earthquake and you lose your footing, though the Repnids seem unaffected. The rock beneath you gives way suddenly. Repnids have tunnelled below the surface and you fall into a boiling mass of hundreds of Repnid bodies in a cavern below. The end is swift, as several pairs of fangs inject their deadly venom and the air of Dyskra contaminates your lungs. Nobody will ever know that you were the first human future traveller.


You land the flyer nose upward on the side of the slag heap and climb out. The eight-eyed Repnids seem to be watching, but they make no move towards you, in fact they are motionless as you walk slowly towards them. You halt while still on the mound of crumbled rock and soil and speak to them, saying, 'I come in peace, as a friend.' It appears that they cannot hear you, let alone understand, as your Universal Translator picks up no answer. You decide to use your Psychic Awareness to contact them mentally. It is difficult to make sense of their thoughts; they are terrifyingly alien and your mind recoils from the contact. You decide that establishing contact again would be dangerous and return to your flyer, but the experience has cleared your mind which had been befuddled ever since you jumped into the future. Once back in Falcon's Wing you find it quite easy to plot a course for Earth in 3034 AD. Note that you have used up another polybdenum rod as you jump.


#today I have coffee, sunshine and quiet time! I started a new shawl. I am unsure of it at this time. I found a unevenly spun silver gray yarn that is mostly finely spun with lumps. I plan on mixing it with a fine purple/lilac variegated cotton. But am not sure I have enough of the purple. I am using a H hook with a similar double crochet pattern as I have done before. I made the first join last night so we shall see. Wishing everyone a happy Thursday!


However, I hate classes on fine arts and literature, and my school history bears it out.


I have literally tried and dropped EVERY SINGLE ONE. And up until like two years ago, I had no idea until I checked my transcripts.


The literature class hatred is even worse: I love to read. I hit most of the classics before eighteen--though that's more a reflection of living in bumfuck nowhere, I also read the 1979 Encyclopedia Brittanica in desperation.


My home is comfortable and wonderful and I am happy there, but I have to be somewhere else in order to chill enough to read fiction during the day without feeling guilty. It's like I'm on holidays and therefore am doing what one does on holidays.


And that's also even though I haven't slept as well here for the last two nights as I do at home, and get a little #MECFS ed out from simply being in a strange environment where I'm less able to pace myself and have to remember where things are.


And that's also even though I do still have my to-do list and am organising my life as well.


Humanity is out in 5 days. It's exciting, nerve-wracking, stressful, and all the good things that I love about working in games. What will people think of it? I like it but will it be able to attract an audience of the right players? Will a community blossom around the user-generated content piece of the game? (I am really hoping so.) The game's story, ideas and questions it inspires feel timely. Hoping things go well.


It's ThinkPad day!! Came home on my lunch break to see this sitting outside uwu. Wish I could take it back to work with me to setup more. But that will have to wait till tonight.


Was it overly cute to the point of being twee? Most definitely


Do any of these characters talk human beings? Not even remotely


what was Olivia Coleman doing here? Did she owe someone money?


Had a recent graduate artist take some critique badly tonight. In part, because they'd be taught badly. But it's important to not make excuses for issues and just fix them, especially in production when your lead needs changes. Especially with the competition.


Every artist has been there, made the same mistakes. Good critique is there to correct the problem quickly, and isn't directed at your ability. It's assuming you have the ability to fix the problem, or find a solution.


So while composting and bloom scrolling are a wonderful reminder to look up, and be aware of life beyond the screen. It is as important to explore servers and IP addresses. Watch seeds being sown & cultivated (and not randomly scattered) by good peeps. These roots are hidden. Work is not visible. But for strong and firm future growth.


Jami slipped the note to him when they passed each other on the path, just before the dog watch. She was on her way to the wall, he was coming off duty. He glanced behind him to watch her go, and to make sure they hadn't been seen. She did not look back. He waited until he was in the darkness of the bunk room before he pulled the note out and read it in a beam of light coming through the blackout curtains. One block-printed word. He spent a long time staring at it, trying to stay calm:


I've met some marvelous new #Mastodon mates lately and want to maintain the trend. Calling into the #Fediverse makes me feel like a whale singing through the vast ocean! Want to join my "pod"? I'd particularly like to connect with more.


Everyone with their hair on fire about CNN can thank Stephen Colbert for the hard right turn. He helped make Chris Licht a national problem.


Much as we might like some folks, if they are just providing a minor league career to fascists, they probably should wear it.


This was the first time (but won't be the last) that Kaveesha Dilhari has both scored 20+ runs & taken 2+ wickets in the same T20I. She joins a select group of Sri Lankan women to have achieved the all-round feat in the format.


(PERSON11) But for some folders, for some reason, the audio format is wrong, so, something is wrongly – Basically, the big trade, or something is wrong. So, some files are still – still have weird output. But – but for most folders, it should be already fine.


(PERSON6) Yeah, that's great. I support this, it's great that, [PERSON7], you have thought of [PERSON11]. And [PERSON11] now has the time. There are other things where I was thinking of [PERSON11] and that would be training of, empty systems, so that they do the shortening. So, if you, [PERSON11], had the time. Obviously, there is no way we could do it for next week. But we should really have the system – ready for – I looked at the tutorial from the NLP – was it?


(PERSON6) For the upcoming sessions and I've asked about demand because I've seen the (meme) project demo. They do offline subtitling. So, that's slightly easier than what we do. They still have the same segmentation issues and so on. But their mission in translation is shortening simply because the data is shortening. And that's because their target size is the subtitles, which are created for the hearing-impaired. So, there is like a natural shortening in the data. It'd be great if we could also locate such a type of data where there is some natural shortening happening. We would put it in the architecture.


(PERSON8) That takes a bit of time, because I need to figure out which one is the one which is getting passes. So, once I know that, I can keep a track of it, so, for the future – Or actually, for future I would not need it, because once I have the web file, I probably won't need to do a convert.


(PERSON6) Well, this, this should actually be – Can you still hear me? The sound quality is a little worse. So, this should really be done, all the time. So, every time we run this evaluation, it should be run from scratch. So, every time, there should be a fresh download of a fresh conversion and a fresh evaluation.


(PERSON8) But still, if I am keeping track of the files that need to be manually converted, so that I can write a script, and it could take care of the known ones at least, and of course, if we add some new files, I can see for that later.


(PERSON6) So this is an important thing that we should have come across months ago. Remember, it is since August that I've been telling you that we want to evaluate on a later test set. And every time, you all... It is not just you personally, [PERSON8]. There were other things, obviously. But every time you thought about that, you thought "this will be easy, we will just run it". And only when you actually do it, do you see all the problems. So, this is known, common. It is always like that. So that's a message for everybody. Before you try, you never know what the problem will be. So, for example, the call that I had, in which someone was interviewing me, so they wanted to record the video. Zoom never worked as badly for me as it did today for the recording. So, before you do it, you cannot say whether it will work or not. And here we are running into the problems of conversion of the file formats. So, hopefully, we will be able to quickly get the numbers. So, do you have any word error rates so far?


(PERSON8) No, I have not processed it. So [PERSON1] said that, once, they get the transcript, we will do it together.


And then, I agree that there is a lot of noise in this dictionary. So, I asked that you would have various versions of this dictionary by taking only the words that were observed, five times. And only the pronunciations that were observed three times or more, or something like that. So, that way, these random errors, such as the example with this four IBM instead of IBM. This will not be so frequent. But still, you will have the variants in pronunciation, because if the person, says this "alzo", if you remember, if he says this "alzo" with a "Z" 20 times in the in the talk, then you will see that in the data with the "Z". And if he sometimes manages to say also correctly, then yeah, again, you will see that in the data. So, I would like, [PERSON4] to be in touch with [PERSON2]. Maybe you continue on the call, right? I will have to leave now, because I need to give the kids lunch and so on. But please stay on this call and figure out jointly how to use that dictionary. So [PERSON4], please show [PERSON2] what the dictionary is that the system is accepting. Share your screen and show it. And [PERSON2], please, have a look at that and help with converting the dictionary that you emitted to that file. One thing that will still be needed is the language model substitute. But all these words should be known words. So [PERSON4], you need to figure out what words are in the language model. And the words which are in the language model should be simply copied. So, the dictionary will have three col ns. The grapheme, as it is output. One recognized. The phonemes, as [PERSON2] proposed. And there will be multiple lines with different phoneme variations. And the third col n will be also the same again for all of those, and again there will be the same grapheme form. So that is when the language model sees. And I think that this way, these systems should be able to load it. And you will also possibly run into one more problem: that it is not ready for two big custom dictionaries. So, this is also something that has to be tested, but please test it, the two of you together. So [PERSON2] knows what he created in the dictionary. And you know what the dictionary looks like when you are creating it manually, and you need to put these two pieces of knowledge together. Ah, so that it works with the, with the generated dictionary.


(PERSON6) So [PERSON2], does this make sense?


(PERSON6) Yeah, so is there anything else, [PERSON2], that you have?


(PERSON2) Well, maybe interesting information for Dominik. I'm finishing training of a German ASR that may be used for time stamping. I'm not sure how good it will be because I'm trying to do it on (Libry) Speech. And, though, when I was downloading it, they claimed it had more than 600 hours. But then the training said that the actual training set contained only around 300 hours. And I'm still not sure whether these 300 hours do not contain similar sentences. Or actually the same sentences but spoken by different speakers. For example, in English or Czech I used to observe steeper conversions. And now it won't convert so fast. So, if we take some samples during the training. Then there are still some serious errors in the ASR output. So, I'm hopeful that for the time stamping, it is good enough. Or at least we might try it.


(PERSON17) Okay, that's good, yeah. So, I started, but I think I never finished an email to you, because you reminded me, [PERSON8], that your profanity filtering is not yet integrated. And I think this is also an important message for [PERSON5], who has disappeared again from the call. So, the important message is that yes, it's very good that you are actively pushing so that your results are integrated, and everybody should do so. And at the same time, we need to have the setup, so that you can actually integrate and test it yourself. So, I call it "do-it-yourself integration". So, [PERSON8], when working with [PERSON5] and when documenting what the setups are, make sure it is tested well enough by colleagues, such as [PERSON4] or even [PERSON9] for the language model checks and everybody else. So, whenever someone develops a new useful component, the full pipeline should be accessible to him reasonably easily, so he can test it himself. So, this do-it-yourself integration is important, because otherwise it will all remain on you, [PERSON8], and you don't want to be overloaded. So, you want to provide these people with inputs and outputs as the first testing approach, which has already been done. [PERSON4], right? The profanity filtering, has it been tested on logs? I think it was.


(PERSON8) Yeah, it was tested on logs, I think. So, now it's time to test it on the live pipelines. And again, I think it's better if [PERSON8] explains to [PERSON4] how to do it, so that [PERSON4] runs it for himself some of the workers and live playing some of the problematic file like using [PROJECT8] or whatever. Simply play them. Follow the sound output on your machine and see how that works. Because only when doing the real setup will the true errors appear. It is important to first debug it, using the log files, and then it's important to debug it in the pipeline. And if this debugging can be done by the author of that component, here, in this case [PERSON4], it would be most efficient for all of us. So, [PERSON8], please confirm that you agree with this idea of like do-it-yourself integration.


(PERSON17) Yeah, so for the multi-accent English. So, we are now [PERSON14] putting that together to just one technical solution. The current idea that [PERSON14] is working on is that he will create new sentences with words that were spoken in other sentences, and he will do this across different speakers. So, it will be really multi-speaker sentences, and therefore the robustness to the different accents of these speakers could be also improved. Ah, so that's one particle experiment. And later on, we may do something more about the multi-accent thing. So, these new sentences will actually try to solve two problems with one experiment. One problem is the implicit language model. So, the ASR system has to see the largest possible set of sentences. And we are going to create new sentences from the text-only language model by adding the sound part to that, so that the language model will be better for the ASR, and the robustness to different speakers would be also better. And in a talk yesterday, I heard another idea. It was during the training. They were dropping out time bands and frequency bands from the sound. So, they were training on disrupted inputs, and that also greatly improved the robustness of the system.


(PERSON17) Anyone else can work on the non-native accent thing. Ok, then another thing that I spotted is - this is in the Monday test document. It is highlighted four times. So, when some session is happening, we need the names and terminology for that session. And we need to collect it, prepare it manually, create it somewhat. And this manual creation should be supported with automatic tools as much as possible. So, there is a certain skill b in that, which needs to be practiced. So, I'm quite skilled at shuffling text files. And whenever I see any of any of you doing that, then I like always have tips in my head of what could be done faster. Maybe it is not faster for your end, but at least you should consider it. So there this skill is something that that we need people to have. And we need someone to be responsible for that. And I'm afraid that the only person for this could be [PERSON8]. If you find anyone else who would be ready to help with the immediate domain adaptation, the data crunching, please say so. And then we need - So, once we have secured the dictionary of terms and whatever the word pronunciations, we need techniques to put these dictionaries to use in the systems. So, my impression from the domain adaptation that [PERSON9] has been carefully doing for all the sessions was that it was not really visible in the hybrid ASR. So, one such session is again going to happen this Monday. [PERSON9] is already starting the data collection, but I would like to see the benefit of that domain adaptation in in in the [PROJECT5] set up. So, maybe [PERSON9] and [PERSON8], because he's learning how to do domain adaptation and [PERSON14], because he is doing how to work with [PROJECT5]. If you three could meet and double check what is [PROJECT5] doing with the - It's not [PROJECT5], actually, the domain adaptation is for the [PERSON18] toolkit, right.


So, this is kind of backward-looking, making sure that the old approach works. At the moment it is absolutely impossible to do any domain adaptation for the fully neural ASR. So, what I'm considering is to have an independent keyword spotting from sound and some merging procedure. So, we could have two ASRs running at the same time. End-to-end ASR, which is better in general. And then domain-adapted [PROJECT5] setup, which is used only to spot the keywords. And when we see a keyword in the domain-adapted version then we would then we would use that sentence from [PROJECT5], which is in general worse, but contains the right terms. So that's my suggestion of what we could do. And another suggestion is that we really should have our own fully neural ASR and do various experiments on finetuning and all that. So, we have discussed this with [PERSON14]. And, [PERSON14], is there any update from the potential colleague or friend of yours?


(PERSON17) Yeah, so if there is anyone else who'd be curious about this please let me know or get in touch. So, it's this is something which is which would really be accepted well in generally as a as a paper, because people don't do that yet. And that's the most urgent problem these days. So, we really could make an impact there.


(PERSON6) Yeah, I was maybe just thinking about like what kinds of data we currently use for this, because, for example, like if you check like [ORGANIZATION4]'s models on [ORGANIZATION5] that they are like already pretty good at these things -


(PERSON6) And I think that if we just like - We could probably just get the data from them, because you have like a such a large set of videos basically with different domains and different speaker native languages on [ORGANIZATION5]. And I had this idea that we could just like use some tool to download basically some kinds of filtered videos from [ORGANIZATION5] and make training tests a training set out of them.


So, I plan to do it myself. I plan to go there, but we need a backup person. And also, for the [PROJEC210] event we need someone to take care of the recording, So, the archiver person, so that we don't lose that session again. And the more important and still persisting topic to work on is ladder climbing. And I've suggested here in the paragraph for [PERSON2] that we could use simple html tables that would be autogenerated and that that would grow. I think that that would be probably the easiest to just put up the tables as html, but it could get difficult when we want to see the differences, as new systems will be evaluated after every new evaluation campaign. It may be difficult to prepare these tables. So, I asked [PERSON7] and [PERSON7] unfortunately won't be available during this call. To tell us whether [ORGANISATION242], which is a web-based solution. Some start-up company which offers accounts for academic purposes for free. If that would help us or not. Okay, so [ORGANISATION242] is not recommended by [PERSON7]. So, simple html is probably the way to go. So, as soon as [PERSON2] has these evaluations m cleaned up. So, that means moving the few scripts to where they belong from [PROJECT3] test set and some automatic runner. Then also please create a conversion from the tables into html similar to the tech conversion and then put these results regularly to your webpage. Or what you could even do is to have a full git check out directly located in this public html or singling from that public html. So that it would be immediately accessible through the web, and anybody could have a look at the current scorings and explore that. So, this would be useful, especially for m people outside of [ORGANISATION2] such as, [ORGANISATION15]. We know they have like - The performance was bad for some of the files, and they could directly m browse it on the web m. They could also browse it actually in on [ORGANISATION101]. This is up to you to set it up so that it's user-friendly and easy to follow.


(PERSON11) Yeah, thanks. I'm now working on, or getting to update, the demo paper submission, which is due next Friday, if I'm not mistaken. And then I have some project reports to do and I'm starting to gather documents - like, or links to the documents, not the documents themselves yet, for the two sessions.


(PERSON11) <parallel_talk> For ASR as well we should add a complimentary metric - Actually more, we should add complementary met- these complementary metrics. </parallel_talk> So, you mentioned one and that is profanity filtering m evaluation. So <parallel_talk> have an explicit list of things which must not appear in the output </parallel_talk>, right? <parallel_talk> And then rare words evaluation. And here have an explicit list of names and terms that we do want to appear in the output, scored not simply by (order) rate </parallel_talk> but scored by something which directly accounts these things, right? Yes, so I totally agree. This involves also manual preparation of the reference. So, <parallel_talk> both need manually created references. </parallel_talk> I have one remark from [PERSON1]. So <parallel_talk> [PERSON1] has compiled some translation dictionary. And she should share it soon. </parallel_talk> So, this could become an empty part of the second thing of the rare word - So <parallel_talk> this would be the rare word evaluation for MT and then from [PROJEC210] we are also likely to get some dictionary. </parallel_talk> So that would be the [PROJEC210] domain obviously. And [PERSON2], could I ask you to revise the <unintelligible/> domain and create such a dictionary by looking at the outputs and what is missing in the outputs. So, like shortlisting - listing the words that we do like, and we do not like in the <unintelligible/> domain. Could you do that?


(PERSON11) It should be doable, so let's give it a try. It would be like - it would be great if you managed to do that. So, I'll write it down. So, <parallel_talk> aiming towards [ORGANISATION62] deadline with subtitler study paper. </parallel_talk> Yes <parallel_talk> and then then a multi-source with [PERSON7] or based upon [PERSON7] or - </parallel_talk> And for the language ID, I'm curious how do you want to integrate it exactly because it already involves considering multiple ASR sources, multiple channels, so what would be the use case for the for the language ID? How do we plug that in?


(PERSON13) It will be audio to text worker, and it will emit time stamps like for four or two second window and the class. <unintelligible/> silence, Czech, German, English, and then I will let on the others how they want to use it in the pipeline.


(PERSON11) That is important. Please write this down here into the documenter this <unintelligible/> summary, because that is for [PERSON2]. And also [PERSON2], when you talk to [PERSON10], well and also possibly [PERSON5]. If we have this tool, we need to (ship) the audio to multiple ASR or multiple workers <unintelligible/> We will separately need to (ship) the audio to the English ASR, separately to the German ASR and the Czech ASR, for example depending on the <other_noise/> And also, to this language ID worker and then we need to merge these outputs, and this is tool which we do not have yet. That's the multi-source tool, which will be observing the text outputs and also following the time stamps and it would emit the - it would probably like produce the output into three separate language channels for using either silence or the correct ASR. So, we need a filter for the ASRs, so that the ASR is silent if it's the wrong language and it is the recognized text if it's the correct language. I just made it up this type of setup. Another of setup would be that same sound is shipped to ASR and this language checker. This language checker is essentially a part of the ASR, silencing the ASR if it's the wrong language. That's also an option. So, we need to figure out which way of integrating the language ID is the best for our purposes. So, please keep thinking about this like what are our pipelines. Ideally, I think that the least like management confusion and so on would arise if our MT models were multilingual. If they supported different source languages and they were translating from any of these languages into English. Possibly doing just a copy, if the English was given as the input, so we would have multi-lingual multiple ASRs at the beginning. All going into English, and then from the English will go into all of the languages. And later when [PERSON12] would have multi-lingual model of ASR, that language ID would not even be needed.


(PERSON3) The thing is, as long as we do the analysis more properly, one thing is the possible adversarial evaluation, just to indicate that that the constraints are actually having an impact on the actual output. That that would be nice and yeah possibly the attention analysis. But I'm not sure it might give us the same answers, basically, if the if the model attends or does not attend to the constraint.


(PERSON4) I had to look just at a few examples of attention, I did not do any statistics or anything, and it looks at the constraints, and when it translates the constraints, it looks like the constraints given, and I think it would be useful if the system made any errors, but it in fact does not do any in that sense. It makes some general translation errors but not the (phenomena) we are trying to solve. Well, going back to the automatic evaluation, the problem with mismatch is that the output is correctly inflected, but the context is different. Therefore, it is not the same word form as in reference, right?


(PERSON4) Yeah, but I have also checked if the contexts are valid translations and in most cases they are. Like in the first 100 examples that were marked as error by automatic evaluation 91 of them were correctly inflected in correct contexts.


(PERSON4) And I think only two or three sentences were correctly inflected in the incorrect context, like the translation was wrong. And then there are some cases where the translation was totally wrong, because the sentence was really wrong, and the part must be <unintelligible/>, but that was just like one or two cases.


(PERSON3) But you are trying to match the divert forms when you are evaluating it, right? You do not do any-


(PERSON3) -lemmatization of the reference and the-


(PERSON4) Both, both, both, I'm matching both the surface forms and lemma.


(PERSON3) Oh I see, oh yeah, those are the two scores, right?


(PERSON4) It is just the dilemma score for the (European?) is not in the table because of the table like won't fit into the paper so <unintelligible/> Coverage is always like 97 percent. It just generates the correct lemmas, just-


(PERSON3) Oh yeah, okay, I get it, I get it. So basically, the lemma coverage says whether the constraint is there, and the surface coverage difference suggests that it might be incorrectly inflected, but that is not the case.


(PERSON3) Oh yeah, just I do not know if you if you, if you catch <unintelligible/> when we were talking about [PERSON1], but one thing, is, that, that the (blow) is better but the other thing is that the lemmas are actually properly inflected manually, but that is that is another, no, no problem, it is actually good that is <unintelligible/> right, yeah. So, I was thinking there might be. But I'm not sure whether we have some test data for that, but we might try to play around with the models with some sort of style transfer? As you know, we can use a constraint and try to use a synonymous constraint instead and see or compare how, how, what is the difference between the outputs. But this is, like I'm just describing it vaguely because I myself do not have an exact idea how to do it, but it might have been an interesting, distinct scenario. I do not know, [PERSON1], do you know about any style transfer data for English Czech? Do we have something?


(PERSON1) By style transfer, Dusan, you mean that there would be something which is in the written language, and you would be the target side, would be in the spoken language or something like that?


(PERSON3) Well, that is the thing like, I have only a limited knowledge about the task. But I can imagine that you want to rewrite a sentence that it is not written by male, but it is written by a female instead or, I do not know, like you can have a scientific and unscientific explanation of certain phenomena. I'm not really that familiar with the exact data sets and what they cover. And the idea is that the style of the sentences gets quite vaguely defined. So again, not so sure.


(PERSON1) We have this corpus of sentence transformations. And one thing that is there and could be labelled as style transfer is for example, making the sentences more general. So, details are omitted, the sentence is simplified, and then making the sentence sound colloquial. Well, just a paraphrase. And I'm not sure if we have anything like shortening of the sentence. For shortening, Matous is doing some experiment with English–Czech, but we do not have any reference data there. So, we do not have any sentence compression dataset. So maybe the generalization could be of interest but I'm afraid that there are too many different good generalizations, so the single reference one would be too limited to tell you anything about the quality of your generalization. And I'm not aware of any like gender transformations, for example, this could be done <unintelligible/> for Czech, so maybe the right person would be Rudolf Rosa to ask him if he has ever generated any such dataset. So, there will be a root-based generation of some sentence counterpart.


(PERSON3) I guess that is actually like an interesting question whether we can use the constraints to enforce this kind of the like gender of the speaker in the in the translation.


(PERSON1) That is actually a very good idea. So, we could focus on that and create a particular sub-part of [PROJECT1] test set that would cover that. Ah so that we sometimes we know the gender of the speaker so if you are... maybe I'll share the screen and browse that.


(PERSON8) Or I tried it with Marian just attending it and it's... I don't know how many BLEU points lower.


(PERSON2) Because like the way I believe Martin does his <unintelligible/> little translation, so he translates more sentences at once and then picks only the centre one and goes like this for the whole document. So, the context is like in one <unintelligible/> together with sentence we actually want to translate.


(PERSON10) Yeah, I think - wasn't it Dominik doing some experiments with Ivana? I think the last year or two years ago for double empty where they were attending the context or concatenating the context with input sentence and doing some sort of document level translation. But the thing is with this with the concatenation is not completely sure whether it has the same effect as we do multi encoder setting-


(PERSON1) Like everybody is different, it's definitely a different calculation, different leader, but it's I'm surprised that [PERSON8] says that it doesn't work full stop.


(PERSON8) Yeah, okay, so sorry, maybe I should be more correct that it didn't work like in the way I did it <laugh/>


(PERSON1) Yeah, because I think it's a method which is very easy to test, and it always should be tested in contrast with the two encoders, and I would expect sometimes to be better and sometimes to be worse than the two encoders set up, depending on the exact task like what exactly is the second thing that you are encoding. So, maybe if you have two copies two paraphrases of the same sentence, maybe it is somehow confusing for the attention so whatever, I don't know. Behaviour also could be different for the old sequence-to-sequence methods, compared to transformer, so for RNN then it behaved differently maybe with transformer it's yeah, it's harder to train so maybe you need to whatever increase warm-ups number, warm-up sets.


(PERSON8) I don't remember, so I don't remember exactly but this is like what- when I started in summer with those multi-source experiments. The first thing I started with was concatenating the paraphrase and source and maybe I, I don't remember now, I can check it till the next meeting whether I tried also, I definitely tried when the sources are on the first position then some delimiter and the paraphrase on the second position. I might have also tried that I shuffled the two things randomly, yeah, and I just remember that it did abundantly this compenetration stuff and tried multi-encoders.


(PERSON8) And it was probably due to low scores.


(PERSON2) <unintelligible/> that you like can improve your amenity score by just appending phrase-based output and the attention is like double diagonal, so the attention is not an issue, so like I believe you but it's surprising that it didn't work.


(PERSON10) So, if you if you input the phrase-based output that's basically post editing, right? You can think about it as a postediting like you are postediting phrase-based output, right? Or like depends on the point of view, right?


(PERSON1) <unintelligible/> that you like fully to rewrite it but technically it fits exactly the postediting task, you can plug this as a solution to the postediting task.


(PERSON10) Okay, so one question just for me just to make sure in the concatenation settings you insert the sentence separator token, right? You have a special token to distinguish like which is the source and which is the context or the other sentence or do you just concatenate them without anything? And hope that the system learns it?


(PERSON8) I tried to, I guess two tokens and yeah like because in the first version, we had a suspicion that the token could be also tokenized itself, so then I replayed it with another token which is not only for this purpose because we used some pretrained dictionary, and this dictionary didn't contain separator tokens. So, I used some token that I assumed that it wouldn't be like tokenized into several pieces and so it will appear once. I had no guarantee that this token couldn't appear in other places in the sentence and that is the only place it could appear. So, it could be done more properly, yeah, I agree.


(PERSON2) But the Flask part or the communication part with the client is something that I cannot do. Because I have no experience and no time to get it running.


(PERSON1) I thought it meant something using I don't know mediator.


(PERSON2) No, make a HTTP client which can fill the queue and read from another queue. And send the text back in a HTTP request. Because my idea is that the user clicks be used in the Ukrainian project too.


(PERSON2) And my idea is that a client clicks this microphone button and starts to speak, and when the user is speaking, you send the audio in small chunks at the same time. Let's say 200 or even 100 milliseconds. And to the HTTP server put it to a queue which I will handle the queue later with (ASR). And the model will do some logic, some inference with that. And whenever it has a new piece of transcript, it will send it back, and the user should get the partial transcript back. And it should be immediately displayed in the text field.


(PERSON1) I could think about that. Just I don't really know Flask either, but yeah, I can think about that.


(PERSON2) Oh maybe a different HTTP server. I don't know, maybe we don't even need a fancy HTTP server for that.


(PERSON1) I mean for text flow, we use something like Hypercore, but I'm not sure if that would work for this.


(PERSON2) Yeah, the only requirement is that it should handle more connection at a time.


(PERSON1) Well I think online text flow is something around 2 000 at least.


(PERSON1) I mean the script that I have in two different folders, and then will run it with the little different inside workers, so that I mean, yeah, so that I have <unintelligible/> let's say ten, well instead of an output, a file by a <unintelligible/> side worker, so <unintelligible/> that we have, so I'll just make sure that these things for a single file are getting generated parallelly from all the available workers.


(PERSON7) Yeah, yeah, this is very important to parallelize everything actually, parallelize both the processing of the systems as well as the evaluation of the cell DF, because he would need to run this many times, there will be errors, you need to re-run this quickly.


(PERSON7) Okay, so thanks. So, you are very busy with this, I don't want to put any other things on you, so let me start with the reminders. We need to finish the description of [PROJECT1] desk set, Who do we have here? Oh well, not really, yeah, (it's done) and it's not here unfortunately. So, this would be for [PERSON2], Then the evaluation, this is for [PERSON1], but we have discussed this. Listen, give me the table in DSD let's put the fine line here and push the template of the table, like the plan structure into the delebl now, so that the numbers will come later, but I want to see some numbers and the full structure of the table very soon.


(PERSON7) Okay, thank you. We have [PERSON5], that's good. So, for [PERSON5], I would like to check what is the progress in the evaluation of the systems, and whether you are in touch with [PERSON1] also for the evolution, which is more important. Can you hear us, [PERSON5]?


(PERSON1) and then, we'll figure out which packages to install in the Petri environment.


(PERSON7) Yeah, so there's another thing, Maybe it's not a good idea to combine these two runs into one setup. I think it is actually better if you run it separately and save the outputs. So, you first use the environment for cruise control and the processing,


(PERSON7) and you collect all the output files, and then you run the evaluation. And the reason for this split is that you can paralyze more. So, there will be problems on various fronts, I'm sure, and we will need the numbers very soon. So, if for example, some of the test files will fail for some reason, Then you can still keep the translation running for the remaining ones, and re-evaluate, with a sel T F, the missing ones, and, and so on. So, it's, the point is not to create a serial, sequential processing that includes both, but the point is to get the results, and it's actually better to do it in slices. First get all outputs, then we get all evaluations.


(PERSON1) Yeah, so, I mean, right now, I was doing the same.


(PERSON2) Yes, that's the only stuff I did for positive constraints. With the negative constraints I did something a little bit more complicated in the decoding. Like filtering out the beams and replacing the beams with different beams. And for like multi-token constraints and this kind of stuff. But for the positive constraints, I only compared the training approach with yeah just this very simple stuff. Just modifying the scores in each step in the same way.


(PERSON7) Okay, so back to the positive constraints. Were you already focusing on the analysis of the system?


(PERSON2) Yeah, right now, I'm kind of waiting for the dataset reprocessing from ([PERSON9]). Also [PERSON9] I had a look at the (code), and I think I know why it's so slow. Because for each entry in the terminology in the (Europar) reprocessing, you open the dataset, tokenize it, read it line by line, tokenize it line by line and then close it. But you only you do that -


(PERSON4) So, I remember that for [PROJECT1] I was doing this from last year from some cottage in the mountains. And I just realized, shortly before New Year’s Eve that I need to submit it. And <laugh/> so this is also something that will happen to [PERSON8] I'm afraid that he could be...well, no party, but maybe at the remote party. And then suddenly he would realize that he has to submit it. So, there will be no review of like at that point. <laugh/> He would simply take the PDF and upload it so. <laugh/>


(PERSON7) Well, okay. So, Yeah, I will check on 21st, and otherwise I will send them an e-mail.


(PERSON4) Please, I think better send them an e-mail right now and just ask for that link in advance.


(PERSON7) Do we have other issues to discuss today, or is that is that everything until the New Year?


(PERSON6) I hope there wasn’t anything for me?


(PERSON3) Several years ago. MT marathons used to have this system or tool papers that were published as a special issue of PBML. That was in the first year when that happened. And then, in the subsequent years, it was integrated with normal like there were also PBML issues which mixed empty margin papers and separate papers because of the number of those papers. And we even had a thing like if the paper was not good enough for the PBML, but if the tool was presented at the MT marathon. The authors were invited to submit for another review for one for the next PBML issue. So, we have, even as I said, your system, your tool is interesting. Please publish it at the MT marathon among the people. But your paper is too bad. You need to improve it, and you will get only to the next PBML.


(PERSON4) Yes, but another possibility for SIGDial. Isn't it possible that trying SIGDial we attract kind of better participants.


(PERSON3) That's yes, that is... like I thought that I also had, but I don't know either of the venues. They have final paper registration in July. So, the conference was in September, and the paper submission was in May.


Because for Interspeech, we could also like split it paper by paper. So that some papers would go to the Interspeech proceedings. And some of our submission papers would come later for the PBML proceedings. And the authors would be free to choose. So that we have to negotiate this with either SIGDial or Interspeech. If it is okay for them to have some of our papers, given that these papers are submitted by the March deadline. So, there is an absolute strict requirement. And I think it's they cannot have anything against it. Because if the paper is worth publishing. Like, it's only a bonus that the paper has some shared task result appearing in the satellite event. So yeah, I think it's okay. So, we do not need to ask for a special session. In Interspeech it is called special session, we don't want that. In Interspeech we want the satellite event. But we will tell our people. If you manage to have your paper ready by the Interspeech deadline, send it as an Interspeech paper and you will have it within Interspeech. Ah, if you do not, ah, do it for the Interspeech deadline, here is our deadline. And that is for PBML.


(PERSON7) Ah, okay. But the thing is like for Interspeech satellite event. Erm, Interspeech like won't get into any proceedings.


(PERSON2) You can I think you can just you can just reserve the whole semester just for [PERSON9]'s courses and you will have a lot of work and no free time, even though you have just one subject. But I think it's a different thing, because I think it's not really a thing to fail his courses. Like to fail because you are unable to finish it. Of course, like people are just giving up, but I mean it's maybe for different reason that just it's impossible to pass. I think that it's definitely possible, but it's a lot of work.


(PERSON1) Yeah, I think that he told us in the beginning of the semester that well if we want a one (??) you'll get a one. Just within the second deadline, you should submit it. That's pretty much the only thing he asked. But he also told us that judging by previous years' trends, a lot of people don't do that. They find it easier to read for the exam. No, sorry, study for the exam-


(PERSON2) Yeah because well in general, his exams are rather easy.


(PERSON2) So I wouldn't say it's super easy, because there are some courses where the exam is like fun.


(PERSON1) Oh well, one of them was yesterday for me.


(PERSON2) Yeah, when it has short context and because I make decisions based on very short context for this very low latency, then it really commits to something that in, for example, a second or two, it figures out oh, well, actually this was bad translation. So, it tries to use a different wording. To, for example, specify the thing. So actually, I really liked it. I like some of the translations. I was really amazed, even though you could see that the model made mistakes on its first try, it really wanted to make some kind of correction. And it definitely sounded really fluent, which I think is also important. If you really demand low latency, then then I think that even a slightly lower quality is fine, if the fluency is good. Because if you have bad translation quality and bad fluency, then I think that the translation is just pointless. But if the lower quality is because the translation, if you read everything that you will get the same information, but the wording is just poor, because it used, for example, more words and it used some corrections and stuff. So, I think that this is completely fine for simultaneous, as long as you don't lose any information. And for which language pairs do you have these results, like some examples? Because I would like to look at it, just out of curiosity.


(PERSON2) Oh definitely, I can dump you my logs.


(PERSON7) But in which languages? Because you know I don't speak German.


(PERSON7) Yeah, but I don't necessarily speak German <laugh/>.


(PERSON2) Then I can provide English–Chinese and English–Japanese if it helps <laugh/>.


(PERSON2) So again, I mean to make it humanly readable. Because this flickering is really annoying and then you lose focus on what was actually said, because maybe this is also a question of someone who knows more about the human brain and how we work with information. Sorry, I never thought about it in depth. But I think that whenever I see a word, I put it into my memory and my memory is not a linear thing, but it's more like a bag. So, I put a word into a bag. And I like to connect the things in the bag to get the overall image of the word. And I think that that's the problem with the flicker. If you translate something and then you change it, then actually I read it already, it's in my brain. And then I lose focus and control of what was actually then translated as correct and was not what was not. So that's why I think that the whole flicker thing is bad and stupid by definition. Like I see the motivation, like you want to display everything you have. Even though you cannot promise it's good. But I think that we cannot work with this extra information. And I think that maybe the problem is that the systems are created by people working with it. If I'm a developing a system, then I'm really crazy happy if I see that even if I don't promise the translation is correct, I still show it and it's somehow good, but I think that the developer is not really focusing on the content itself. And how you perceive the content, but rather that, oh yeah, my system can output it really quickly. And even though it just guesses the quality is okay-ish, I think maybe that's why the retranslation was created. Just the developers of the systems are eager to display information, and I think that because we are limited in in like the vol e of information we can perceive some time, we like see the extra information is just an extra burden for us. So, I think that it's not good to show extra. Like if you want to decrease latency, then instead of flicker, just lower the quality. I think that's still better than showing the flicker. Because what would be the real use case? Why would you need to see the unstable hypothesis, really? Like from a user perspective?


(PERSON1) Like technically, when human translators start translating, I mean the goal even there is for annotators, they would try to follow the speech string of the original speaker. So, there are times when they would say something, and that would be wrong, so they would just correct themselves.


(PERSON2) Well but yeah this means with my solution, like you would not do flicker, but you committed, like there is no way to change, but you correct yourself. And that's actually what the translators are doing.


(PERSON3) I'm strongly feeling that our work is not exactly in the domain of speech, it is unhealthy. Because there is no concept of speech here. We are directly working on text. But the thing is that the proposal for a statistical workshop this year is over, which was in September, which was too early for us. And the next proposal would come for 2022, which would be too late for us. It is better that if we get either of the two sectile or interspeech, because both of them are well recognized in the community. We can motivate participants to submit. Ah, the only the only caveat that I'm finding now is going with interspeech is like they won't allow us a space in the proceedings, which may deter some of the participants, I am not sure how much they will be excited to publish a paper in archive. So, in archives, people can publish any time, right? So that is not a benefit to their profiles. So how to motivate participants to join our shared task. So, this was the reason that I especially vouched for the special session. But this time, the problem is, what I can understand is the last time, the time periods between proposals, submission and final paper submission was five months, so it would have been enough time for our schedule, but this time. It is only three months.


So, I see this fair as an important possible source of non-native English speech that we can use to extend the test set. So, I think we really should focus on the Clearest voice competition, and we can do the booth if we have to. But I would like to limit that, because the dissemination into high school students is less of an impact for us. It is more important to use it as a test session. So, we should focus, [PERSON1], on the [PROJECT2] Clearest voice, and keeping the organizers happy so that we can do the data gathering there. And do whatever they want us to do in exchange for that, and we need to check their plenary program, and what type of subtitling would be useful for that plenary program. so that would make it a test session for us, and as for our own presence at this fair, I don't think it's too important. So, if we are asked, if we are really expected to be there and present, then okay, but if not, then I think it's definitely good for us just to be behind the curtain and behind the scenes and do our job there.


(PERSON1) Yeah, I haven't tried to do the registration yet for that, but I think that last time, it was compulsory to have the booth.


(PERSON2) Yes. So, discuss with them what is needed so that they are happy, and they allow us to do the Clearest voice, which is the most important thing. The test session is less of an urge. And the booth is just something that we really could avoid, if possible.


I would have preferred them to join the sessions earlier than doing things like that. So, we really need to practice these preparations. With the online world, it seems that you simply j p into the session, and the work is done. But that is not the case. It always takes 30 minutes to get it running and properly connected. So, we need to be there earlier. And if some session that we are doing starts at nine, but the organizers meet at a quarter to nine. Then we have to come at a quarter past eight already, so that we have the 30 minutes extra to make sure that everything is running and chase people. So, this is a remark for everybody that for the management to work, please also anticipate what management might suddenly ask you to do, and that would help a little. Another message that is very important is the recording of these important sessions. I don't know if you have responded, I had not seen anyone providing any- any updates to the document. Maybe I forgot to tell all of you. I had a document about the experience from [PROJECT4]and [PROJECT5] 2020. And the first point in this experience is that we were very bad at recording these sessions. So, it's important for the purposes of further evaluation or analysis of what went wrong to have good recordings of these sessions. And one aspect is to get the consents, to actually be allowed to do the recording. And even if we try to get the consents in retrospect or whatever. Then there is the technical aspect of the- of the recording. And we have seen that this is so diverse and complex. Yeah, [PERSON5] is sending that link. I have sent it by email, I remember.


2 bad lemons in a row :( I ordered from this company because I've bought it previous seasons and it worked great for us. This season I bought the next size I needed. One of the pajamas I received had a hole on the foot of the pajama. I returned it and the company sent me a new one. The replacement pajama my son wore one time, I put it in my washing machine just like always and the zipper broke off! I'm so disappointed because I don't have time to be dealing with returns every few days and yet that is what is happening right now.


This is a basic puffer coat. If you are seeking a basic coat, then this coat will meet expectations. The coat arrived in a vacuum sealed bag so it needs to be hung up for a few days to let wrinkles come out and to "puff up" a bit. I am 5 ft 6 inches and the coat is knee length on me. I ordered 2+ sizes up due to other comments and past experience, and the coat is probably a bit larger than needed. However, with heavier sweater or sweatshirt, it should be fine. There are no cuffs on the sleeves so I will likely add those later. The hood functions, but no ties on it. The front zipper works. There are no vents in the side or back for added movement, but with the larger size, I should have plenty of room. There are two pockets at my waist (may be higher or lower on you). There are no trims or styling details-- it is a BASIC COAT. For the price, I think it is fine. I did wear it on a windy day, but not cold. I could not feel the wind, so I feel that is a good sign. However, I am curious how it will perform in the colder temps and in the rain/snow (supposed to be resistent). Overall, I am pleased. The vacuum seal bag can be re-used and the seller included a really cute thank you note which was a great touch.


This is a very nice skirt. The lacy pattern is classy and soft


This is a very nice skirt. The lacy pattern is classy and soft. It doesn't wrinkle, even after being crammed into plastic and a box it was very smooth, so that's really cool. This can easily be dressed down or dressed up, and has a kind of vintage feel due to the length and cut, which I'm really into. I think this could be flattering on anyone. I'm 5'5" and 130 pounds and I ordered the small, so I would say if you feel like you're stuck between a small and medium, definitely size down.


Item arrived quickly and looked to be in good condition, even included battery pre-installed. However, even though it should have been compatible with my 1999 Buick LeSabre, the remote failed to program or synchronize with the car. The instructions are easy enough and I know that I was following them correctly because I was able to successfully re-program my old remote fob. This new one, however, would not work and so I will be returning it. There was no problem with the seller or service, it just seemed that this particular item was defective or incompatible with my vehicle.


The grill of my car was ripped off by a large something flying down the interstate so I needed a replacement. I was afraid after reading some reviews that this wouldn't fit, but it was perfect! I own a 2013 Corolla LE. I didn't put it on myself--I had a guy at a body shop do it for me--but it looked really easy. It just snapped right on in less than 5 minutes. I gave it a 4 star for the sturdiness because it does seem pretty flimsy (time and flying debris will tell), but over all I'm very satisfied that my car no longer has a gaping maw on the front now and that the price was reasonable.


Super awesome light My 5 year old absolutely loved this light It didn’t last long he got it for his birthday in January it’s February already has trouble with the buttons and doesn’t run bright with plug in eats up batteries even tried recharging batteries Super cool but needs improvement


The piano is great starters! It finds your child’s inner artistic ability and musical talent. It develops a good hand-eye coordination. The piano isn’t only a play toy, but it actually works and allows your child to play music at an early age. If you want your child to be a future pianist, you should try this product out! Very worth the money!


I put this on my nose as directed twice a day rubbing it in for 2 minutes. The skin on my nose reddened and went completely raw. I was pretty taken aback. I had a well healed scar from falling into barb wire from years ago. Not only did this product not work but I almost ended up at the dermatologist's office, however, putting aqua-for and a bandaid over the area finally calmed it down after about a week. My nose is still reddened however but hoping this goes away soon.


Someone screwed up the formula?? This is so weird. In normal light it looks like I have a pink and an orange but under UV light they are the same! I drew a pink line using a paint stick from another brand so you can see what pink should look like and know it's not just my camera. Pink is my most used color so I'm a bit upset about this. Red, orange, and pink are basically all orange. No point in calling them red or pink. The white isn't as bright as I would have hoped. The rest of the colors are all great and I like how easily these paints wash off. I just wits there were a pink. I guess the purple will suffice.


I had bleached my whole head and then dyed over it with a black box dye a few months ago. I then went and had highlights put in all over my head. A few weeks later I put blue/green Arctic Fox hair dye on my hair and it would not fade out. I used this stuff with Olaplex No. 3 and it lightened TREMENDOUSLY all over, removing the green and blue parts as well as lifting the dark box dye. However, after a day I noticed a green tint to my hair. Every day it gets worse and I have used the color extractor twice now, with the same results. My hair is also getting darker where the box dye was. This is a great product it just doesn't seem to last.


Too many five-star reviews on this novel need to be tempered by some more realistic assessments. I tried reading it but I just found the language flat. the "freshwater" metaphor and the many descriptions of the womb like a river and the baby like a fish seemed forced, hackneyed, and contrived. I skipped ahead and it looked like all I was going to find was a campus drama.


I give this book 10 stars! Excellent read!! I absolutely loved the book!! I’ve adopted 4 Siamese cats from Siri over the years and everyone of them were absolute loves. Once you start to read this book, it’s hard to put down. Funny, witty and very entertaining!! Siri has gone above and beyond in her efforts to rescue cats (mainly Siamese)!!


I really Like this ring light! It is wonderful for the price and it gets the job done! The only issue is the light bulb heats up too fast and the light goes out, so I have to turn it off wait for a while then turn it back on. I don't think that is supposed to happen...I don't know if I have a defective light or what, but it is a very nice ring light besides the overheating.


The book was hard to keep up with as it jumped around a lot. Also the title doesn’t fit the story. The author indicated several people were infected by this alien, however left out may details on when or how it happened. I was confused at times and had to go back and re read a lot to make sure I didn’t miss anything.


Loved Collins... It took a while to warm up to Grady


3 1/2 Stars Remedy is a brothers best friend romance as well as a second chance romance mixed into one. It's a unique story, and the hero (Grady) has to do everything to get Collins back and prove he's the guy for her. Three years ago, Grady and Collins had an amazing night together. Collins thought she was finally getting everything she dreamed of, her brothers best friend... but when she woke up alone the next morning, and never heard from her, things definitely changed. Now Grady is back, and he's not leaving, and he's doing everything in his power to prove to her why he left, and that he's not giving her up this time around. While I loved the premise of this story, and at times Grady, he really got on my nerves. I totally understand his reasoning for leaving that night, but to not even send a letter to Collins explaining himself? To leave her wondering and hurt for all those years, and then expect her to welcome him back with open arms? Was he delusional?! Collins was right to be upset, angry, hurt, etc. She was right to put up a fight with him when he wanted her back and to move forward. I admire her will power, because Grady was persistent. I loved Collins in this book, she was strong, and she guarded her heart, and I admired her for that. Sure she loved Grady, but she was scared, and hesitant to let him back in her life, who wouldn't be after what he did to her? Her character was definitely my favorite out of the two. She definitely let things go at the pace she wanted, and when she was ready to listen, she listened. There is a lot of angst in this book, and I did enjoy watching these two reconnect when Collins started to forgive Grady, I just wish Grady would have not come off as so whiney and would have been a little more understanding. He kept saying he understood, but at times he was a little too pushy to me, and then he was sweet towards the end. I ended up loving him just as much as Collins, but in the beginning of the book, I had a hard time reading his points of view because I couldn't connect with his character. The first part of this book, was not my favorite, but he second part? I adored, hence my rating. If you like second chance, and brothers best friend romances, you may really enjoy this book, I just had a hard time with Grady at first and how he handled some of the things he did.


He and Johnny Depp are amazing actors. Regarding his portrayal of Churchill


Mr. Oldman has played and created many, different characters. It is very difficult to tell it is him. He and Johnny Depp are amazing actors. Regarding his portrayal of Churchill, was very well done. The compressed time frame from May 10 to the 26th was well presented with the clock 7 turning pages... The scenery and costumes were excellent. Is poignant with today's pair of demi-gods holding world political position. Worth a look several times...worth thoughtful rumination... many more times


Avoid Wifi connection- go Bluetooth! I purchased this for my wife in October, 2017. At the time, we were in the middle of relocating and living in a hotel. I couldn't get this scale to connect to the Wifi in the hotel. I decided to wait until we moved into our home and I could set up my own Wifi system. March 2018- I have set up my Wifi system and this scale still won't connect. Every time I try, I get the error message. Even when I am 10' away from the Wifi unit. I followed the YouTube setup video with no success. When I purchased the unit, I thought it would connect directly to my wife's phone (like Bluetooth). Instead, this scale uses the Wifi router to communicate to the phone. This system is limited to the router connection...which is usually not close to the bedroom unlike a cell phone! I wouldn't recommend this scale to anyone because of the Wifi connection. Instead, please look at systems that use Bluetooth for communication. I am replacing this with a Bluetooth connection scale.


Good, but would like to find something better


After a lot of research, I started using this product many years ago. It had the least amount of harmful ingredients, and still worked okay. However, it dries up so quickly that you end up using so much lube, which ends up costing a lot of money, as well as being too disruptive during sex. I've just been too lazy to look for a new product, but will start looking for one that is both harmless, works well, and not too costly.


The battery life is terrible on the one I bought on Amazon. Still can’t believe Logitech discontinued this remote, nothing else comes close in comparison. I absolutely LOVE this Harmony remote, this is my 4th one. Dog chewed up the first one, husband kneeled on the screen of the second one, and the third ones still working but there’s an elbow mark in the middle of the touch screen also courtesy of the hubby...bought this one as a back up and the screens great but the battery it came with holds a charge maybe for a couple days. My original (3rd one) keeps a charge for weeks at a time and I use my remote for everything.


I like the product it’s a nice size and color! Unfortunately only had it a week and opened the one door and it cracked the top of the wood piece! I’m really disappointed! It’s all assembled and I don’t have the box anymore so how could I even think about sending it back?! My husband did try and fix it with wood glue but sadly that didn’t work either! The door popped right out again!!


Not too easy to assemble plus.... It’s a nice looking piece of furniture when assembled, but assembly was difficult. Some of the letter markings were incorrectly marked so I had to try and figure out on my own The screws they supplied to attach the floor and side panels all cracked. I had to go out and purchase corner brackets to make sure they stayed together. Also the glass panel doors are out of line and don’t match evenly. This alignment prevents one of the doors from staying closed as the magnet to keep the door closed is out of line. Still haven’t figured out to align them.


I purchased these in February. Recently I tried to use them and unfortunately each time I try one my Keurig machine gives me an error message that the pod is not compatible with my machine. I have been using Donut Shop pods in my machine since I first purchased it and have never had a problem. Upon closer examination of the coffee pod, I noticed that the code printed on the top of the pod isn't very legible so I can only assume that I have a bad box. I purchased a box of 72 which is 6 boxes of 12 each. I have even tried one from each of the 6 boxes and keep getting the same error message. I know it's not my machine because other pods I try work just fine. It's only out of this shipment that I am having this issue. Very disappointing since my return window has expired. UPDATE: I talked to a customer representative who refunded by money. Thank you AMAZON for your wonderful customer support!


Sweetener on the go. Such a convenience! It is really nice to have my favorite sugar alternative packaged in little take along packets! I LOVE swerve, and it is so convenient to have these to throw in my purse for dining out, or to use at a friend’s house. While they are a bit pricey, I cannot stand Equal or the pink stuff in my iced tea. Swerve or nothing, so i am thrilled to have my sweetener on the go!


Doesn't actually do any air "cleaning" Bought this as a humidifier, the "air cleaning" part is actually false advertising; depending on how hard your water is, sediment does accumulate in the bottom, but none of that is any dust in your home unless you live in a coal mine or something. As a humidifier, I would rate it as slightly less effective than a wick type humidifier with the same fan size. The advantage is that it doesn't consume wicks. Given the additional cost of the unit, you probably have to run it for about 5 years to make the difference up. It does have a fairly large water capacity for its size, since the 'tank' is integral to the unit, and it's low power (although no better than a wick type). It is also fairly easy to clean, although the plastic disks can't really be serviced since the disk unit can't be disassembled. However, for German engineering, the build quality isn't great. I've had mine for a year now, which would be about six months of cold weather run time, and the unit has developed a very annoying rattling noise from the fan assembly. My guess would be the fan bearings, so I'm just waiting for complete failure to happen here. As noted by someone else, any repairs are almost equivalent to just buying a new wick humidifier. tl; dr - not worth the extra cost, you are better off with a wick humidifier.


I guess it was easier to break than they thought. I am giving this product a 3 star do to the fact when I got it in it was broken already inside. Once I examined it I realized whoever put it in the box put it in there broken, This could have either been the manufacturers packers or for the manufacturers sake the problem could possibly be that a buyer returned the item and claimed they just didn't want it or didn't need it and Amazon possibly did not do a good enough quality check when it came back. In all fairness the buyer couldn't have said it was broken because then Amazon wouldn't have taken it back which is good especially with this kind of product either way though I am the one who got stuck with someones negligence. I did however get my money back so after thinking about it and discussing it with my spouse I have decided to give this buyer another chance. With that said I will only update my rating to a higher star depending on how customer service handles this post (by at least addressing it) and if the item comes in great shape, actually has the opportunity to do what it does, and works well doing what it is supposed to do.


Easy to install????? Overall I am quite satisfied with this purchase but it was not that easy for me to install. I tried installing both "bells" into the plugged in transmitter several times without any luck. I was about ready to return it as not working but I thought I would give it one more try and check the batteries in the bells. Voila...there were little plastic tabs sticking out from the battery covers which I pulled on and out came the plastic piece which was covering the battery and stopping it from working. After I removed these pieces of plastic the bells worked just fine and I was completely happy with this purchase. The odd thing is that in the users instruction booklet there is no mention of the plastic over the battery which must be removed for the bell to work. It would have been allot less frustrating if they mentioned this and I didn't think the problem was that I wasn't completing the installation correctly. It's a good product with a wide variety of rings, chimes and tunes you can choose and it's easy to change whenever you want. One thing they ask in rating this bell is how "weatherproof" it is. I can't comment on this because it was installed July 5th 2019 and we probably won't be able to comment on how weatherproof it is until next rainy season...probably in November.


Grew up with these and was psyched to purchase them for my son, but they lost the package of live caterpillars. They told me they'd replace it and charge half the shipping this time. After significant phone time they ended up re-charging me for a new order with like a 3$ discount. I thought it was pretty unprofessional because not only did they lose it, but they led me to believe they'd rectify it only to charge me almost full price at the end of a 30 minute phone call with some spiel about a voucher. I spent 30 minutes on the phone so I caved and just bought another set of caterpillars. Whatever.


Works well after some headaches. Had some problems getting it to work. The supplied cable was no good - would not charge the battery. When I replaced cable with my own was able to charge and then connect the device via bluetooth to a PC. Had trouble finding the PC software but when I emailed their support they responded within a day with the correct download info. PC program works well for testing the unit after you figure out which port to use (port 4 in my case). The accuracy and stability of the unit look very good for my application, however I was not able to connect to either an iPhone or iPad (tried several of each) via bluetooth. Will have to hard-wire if I decide to use this device in my product.


... was too yellow before buying and was told it's like antique gold


I asked the seller if the color was too yellow before buying and was told it's like antique gold, darker. Nothing close! The set looks VERY cheap. It's super shiny yellow with lots of CZs, even shinier. Looks great on the photo, but in real life I wouldn't even give it to a teenager to wear.


Loved the ring - but couldn't wear it all the time! :( This ring was beautiful. I loved the design and the chunky feel of it; it looked expensive and it was very comfortable! The only reason why I gave only 3 stars and ultimately returned the product is because I realized I wouldn't be able to wear it all the time. I like to wear my rings all the time, which is why I always make sure to get sterling silver, and I know some people said that their rings tarnished after a while, but I had worn mine for about a week straight - even while washing my hands - and noticed no tarnishing. Interestingly enough, the issue I had was that the inner band of the ring was actually turning my finger white and moist - kind of like the way a bandaid does after you leave it on for a long time. This happened even when I made sure the ring and my finger was completely dry. I don't know why this happened and have never had it happen with any other ring, but it became uncomfortable so I decided it wasn't the ring for me. :( Too bad because I really did love it! So if you are purchasing this ring with the intent to wear it only occasionally, I say go for it!! You won't be disappointed!


buy the Pampered Chef... I own a Pampered Chef small scoop, but am in between residences so most of my 'stuff' is in storage. I love using these scoops while baking for perfectly portioned cookies. I looked at the OXO scoop and the Pampered Chef scoop and decided to save some money and get the OXO one - I usually have good luck with their products. Not this one. At about peanut butter cookie #30 the lever inside the scoop stopped working. I had to pry the handles apart and re-position the lever in order to do a few more, and then repeat. So... save your sanity and buy the Pampered Chef scoop. It's totally worth it!


It was a fine coffee maker for a while, but there were always issues with it. If you got water between the black plastic and metal on the carafe, it would leak and drain the water for days. Then our plastic lever broke which allows the coffee to flow through the filter and into the carafe. I contacted customer support to inquire about a new piece, but they would only refer me to a service center which is over 90 minutes from my house. It's great at making coffee and keeping it hot, but there are too many other issues with it to invest in it at the current price.


Must buy!! I loved this rose gold color and everything about it was great! The only thing I had an issue with, was it was really plain. I like having a little more detail in the handles and I did notice that before I purchased it which is why I still give this 5 stars! It was easy to clean and all came in wrapped individually which I found to be really organised and it calmed my soul lol love, love, LOVE the color and I would definitely buy this again for myself or for a loved one!


Might be good on a pole, but NOT as a hanging baffle or weather shield. Shame on Audubon. The instructions tell you to push the plug up through the hole in the baffle and "Make sure it is securely in place." HOW??? It is designed so that the baffle simply sits loosely on the plug, so that it can be pushed up by any critter or the slightest wind. You can turn the plug upside down so that the thumb screws are on the underside of the baffle, but it will take you hours to turn those screws; no tool will do it, and only the tiniest fingers would have an easy time of it. It took me over an hour to do a half-baked job of getting them screwed in so as to secure the baffle to the plug. It is a complete PITA. I ordered four of these; the three that I didn't open are going straight back and I'm in the market for better weather guards. (Let's face it; there's nothing like this which will actually "baffle" squirrels!)


I love many of the features of these lights


I purchased this lamp to supplement the light my new vegetable seedlings were getting from the window. I love many of the features of these lights. Pros: First, they clamp easily onto my shelf, and bend to many positions allowing me to make changes as my plants grow. The lights are cool to the touch, and haven't cause harm even when touching the plants. I believe my veggies have benefited from the lights. The lights are dimmable, but I use the strongest setting only. I have not made use of the timer, preferring to turn them on and off myself. I can see this feature as useful in an office setting with houseplants or if on vacation Cons: I do not believe these lights are strong enough to be the primary light source for nursery plants. The lights are small! When the lights burn out, I will have to buy a whole new unit.


BEWARE...SMELL IS VERY BAD...CARD SLOTS TOO BIG! When I first saw this I thought it was beautiful, BUT it smelled SO BAD. At first I thought it was the smell of leather, but many pointed out that is was a MOLD smell. It never went away, so I had to return it. PLUS, the pockets for the credit cards are too big. The credit cards slide all the way down, the tips don't show so you have no idea what card is where and very difficult to get out. THE PHOTO THEY SHOW WHERE THE CARDS ARE STICKING OUT IS INACCURATE.


It’s very small.. Received the travel money belt and it a lot smaller than the pictures shows. I wished I did not buy it and will still have to look for something larger.


Good umbrella, would buy it again if I had to


First off, I have to say the color is loveeeee. A lot of things I order in purple always come too light, too kiddish, too weird, too neon-ish, what have you. But this purple was deep and lush and I love it, the umbrella is sturdy and really good quality. Probably best umbrella I’ve had. Comes with a cover and while it may not have much functional use, it really keeps it looking sharp.


Packaging is terrible - received 3 damaged guitars


Very nice looking guitar. Too bad the company does not know how to protect their product. Don’t bother trying to receive one that is not damaged. We returned 2 because of damages in shipping and the the 3rd one was damaged also. Gave up. They ship it in the soft thin case with one sheet of brown paper in a cardboard box. No padding at all.


Cool concept! Just needs some more improvements to make it a really awesome product


Really cool concept when it comes to karaoke-ing. I love karaoke so this mic immediately piqued my interests. I think the overall design is good - the rose gold is a nice touch. It's also a standard design that I've been seeing on all other options related to this kind of microphone. For the uninitiated, the way this works is it simultaneously acts as 1) a personal microphone 2) a music streamer / speaker and 3) a voice recorder. Altogether, you have a 3-in-1 device that amplifies your voices and music and records everything that comes out. There's no music in the mic itself though. It has a bluetooth connector so you sync it to your phone and download a karaoke app that can send the karaoke songs to the mic. Or you can even sync your Spotify app. Note that the mic doesn't work with every app unfortunately. The mic comes with different options to adjust the volume level of the music and your voice (separately too!) and even has an option to adjust the level of echo so you actually sound like you're in a karaoke room. Some things I would like to see future improvements on are: 1) there's some annoying feedback that doesn't seem to go away regardless of how far I distance my phone from the mic. If you've figured this out, I'd love to know! 2) the option switches at the middle of the mic is clunky. I'm a sucker for minimalism so it be great if future products can make the design sleeker. 3) support for more karaoke apps Finally, because the sound comes out of this mic directly, and not through a flatscreen or central living room speaker system, it's not as fun in a party setting. If the manufacturer can somehow integrate this into a larger party karaoke ecosystem, that would make this infinity more enjoyable.


October 2017 purchased four (4) cartridges from Vision Supplies - Amazon Marketplace, so I would have when needed and to save shipping cost. Used two over the last couple of years, about one a year, and they worked okay. Tried to use one last week, almost empty after printing 20 labels, but in last one ran out after 40 pages. The plastic a missing on both. Told warranty expired!!!! Who would check every single cartridge when received???? BUYER BE AWARE!!!!!!!!!!!


I'm sorry, what? My friend recommended the mask of this line so I bought that, this conditioner, and the all in one milk. I cannot speak for the effectiveness of the product because the smell was just not tolerable. You know that musty smell old buildings use in female restrooms to try to mask the smell of *ladies* but it just turns out as this sour, chemical, kind of musty grandma smell? Ya that's all I can think of when I smell this. You know different strokes different folks so maybe you'll like the smell. My friend said it can help even the most damaged hair, so if you don't care about scent then no worries. I know natural products aren't going to smell as pretty as some synthetic ones but I feel like more and more natural lines just care less since it will sell anyway and so now everything just smells like playdough. I've lost a few favorite lines to them changing the formula to cheaper ingredients. I don't know if that's the case here or if this is a fake (which I called Davines and they said it isn't) but this smells like Y U C K and I had to return it.


I bought this modem/router about two years ago. At the start it seemed to be ok but for the last year plus I’ve had problems with it dropping the internet. This happens on all my devices both Wi-Fi and wired. The only way to restore service was to do a AC power reset. This was happening once or twice a day. Comcast came out, ran a new coax line from the pedestal to the house and boosted the signal level. Same problem. The Arris Tech guys were great but could not solve the problem. Additionally, I lost the 5G service on three occasions. I had to do a factory reset to restore this. I cannot recommend this modem/router based upon my experiences. I purchased a Netgear AC1900 modem/router. It’s fantastic. I’v Had it for over a week with no problems. It’s faster and the range is greater than the Arris. I read online that other people have had problems with the Arris modem/router connected to Comcast. If you have Comcast internet I do not recommend this Arris modem/router. Get the Netgear, its much more reliable.


but it happens enough to be annoying. On a positive note


1 of the fans sounded out of balance out of the box. The speed controls are really wonky -- If you dial them to 100% the fans will shut off, so you need to turn it to 100% then dial it back slowly until the come back on. Build quality is mediocre, but this seems to be par for most of these types of product at this price point. The feet for holding the laptop up when it's inclined have snapped off a few times... They go back in, but it happens enough to be annoying. On a positive note, this has ideal fan placement for laptops that intake air from vents located near the top of the laptop. Many other coolers have fans toward the middle and provide very little additional airflow to a laptop with such a cooling configuration.


This case is ok, but not exceptional - a 3.5 or 4 max. The issue is there are fewer cases available for the Tab A 10.1 w S pen. Of those the Gumdrop is about the best, but it has some serious issues. The case rubber (silicone, whatever) is very smooth and slick, and doesn't give you a lot of confidence when hold the Tab with one hand. The Tab A is heavy so if your laying down watching a video the case slips in your hand so you have to make frequent adjustments. I had to remove the clear plastic shield that covers the screen because it impaired the touch screen operation. This affected the strength of the 1-piece plastic frame the surrounds the Tab A, so now the rubber outer cover feels really flexible and flimsy. Lastly, they made it difficult to get to the S pen. The S pen is in the back bottom right hand corner of the Tab A, and they made the little rubber flap that protects corner swing backwards for access to the S pen. This means in order to get the S pen out, the flap has to swing out 180 degrees. This is really awkward and hard to do with one hand. This case does a good job protecting my Tab A, but with these serious design flaws I can't recommend it unless you have an S pen, then you don't have much choice.


This product is really slick - one stop shopping for all my connectivity needs. I love just throwing this and my laptops tiny power adapter in my go bag and being prepared to work on a big 4k display or grab photos from my camera. The only odd thing I experienced (and I’ve experienced this on all 4 usb-c hubs I’ve tried from different brands) is that mac’s apparently can’t tell the difference between multiples of the same monitor (so my mac outputs the same video to all identical monitors connected to the hub whether by HDMI and/or VGA). But if I use 2 separate hubs/adapters or 2 different models of monitor then the mac properly outputs to the displays individually.


Ok, needs some improvement. A decent training tool but it really needs to have some sort of Safety Lock over the shock button( been pressed more on accident when it's in my pocket then I've actually intended to use it) my dogs even accidentally zapped herself after stepping on the remote. Also if your dog likes to roll around in raccoon poop like mine does it is such a pain in the butt to clean. As the fecal matter gets in between the cracks of the device requiring you to disassemble the entire thing to clean it properly and get the smell out. Also the range is a bit inconsistent. I've noticed you almost need line of sight for it to work. And there have been times where it has not functioned at all even though I'm only 30 feet away from my dog. Being rechargeable is certainly a nice feature and the charge does last for a good while. I only need to charge mine about once every two weeks.


You get what you pay for. Horrible product, misrepresented


I bought this as a tracker to use while I swim, and I didn't even get a proper chance to try it. First off, it's not water resistant and it is not recommended to use while swimming per the instruction manual. Second, it doesn't come with a charger. Instead, it suggests to use a USB plug or computer. Fine, we have lots of those around. When I try to get it into the port to charge it, however, it launches right back out. I'm not sure if there's something not compatible or if this is just poorly made, but I'm not going to sit and hold my device in while it charges. Lastly, the app keeps popping up ads, even when it's closed. Ads popped up while I was sending a text, which is very concerning. I then closed down all active apps on my phone, and saw yet another ad when I went to check the time 20 minutes later. Horrible product, I guess I get what I paid for...


Great backpack but overkill on the straps


This backpack looks good and performs well. It’s a great deal especially when you compare it to what backpacks cost now a days. The reason I knocked off a star is because there are just too many straps. There’s more straps on this bag than I can count. I’ll end up cutting and burning these extra straps off because most of them aren’t really necessary and just get in the way of opening and closing the bag. Other than that I’ve made this my new school bag for college. There’s a compartment right in the back of the backpack for my MacBook Pro and all my books fit wel in the pockets provided. The flag also is a great finish to it


Have had probs with Hockey Balls. My dog loves them - her favorite fetch and chew toy - and they float. That is until she chews them to bits. Tried several, even the "hot weather" versions - and they lasted a few minutes longer than the others. Until these showed up. These have stood the test. My dog is not big but she is stubborn about what she chews. Like they say, its not how big the dog in the fight but how big the fight in the dog. Thumbs up from Daisy and I.


This product is hazardous to children. This is a huge health hazard to your baby. We checked the battery after a couple weeks of use and saw that water went into the compartment where the batteries go. The batteries themselves had rotted and a black liquid was coming out of them. Looking at the design, it appears that theres no way the battery enclosure could be waterproof meaning not only did water go into the compartment during bathtime, some of that toxic material came out as well. Please do not buy this product. I’m shocked that it was allowed to go to market despite such an obvious flaw.


overheating issues and hard time connecting controller


Im giving it 3 stars for now, i don't want leave a bad review for the seller unless he deserves it but this drone overheats a lot. Im not sure if i should contact the seller or dji tello themselves but ill probably try both just to see what they say. I like the drone is a cool little toy that fly's better than some bigger older drones and some of my bigger drones feel more like a toy than this one. However its the only drone i have ever had overheating issues with and it actually takes the fun out of flying im going to assume for now that its a manufacturing issue which they need to address asap if they want there product to be successful. I really hope the seller did not send me a use drone as i paid for a new one. I will give the sellers props for delivery as it arrive 1 day after purchase. I will update date my review after contacting seller and dji tello.


I only have good things to say about this gift bag set


I only have good things to say about this gift bag set. I was able to wrap all of my Christmas gifts with the bags, gift wrap and tissue paper. The product is great quality and the different size options make it easier to choose the perfect one for every gift! I highly recommend it. The seller is absolutely sweet and attentive. He reached out to me after my purchase to make sure I was happy with my product. 5 stars all the way around!


The physics are terrible and the people that created the game won't do anything about it


Don't buy this game the physics are terrible and I am so mad at this game because probably there are about 40 hackers on every single game and the game. Don't doesn't even do anything about it you know they just let the hackers do whatever they want and then they do know that the game is terrible but they're doing absolutely nothing about it and the game keeps on doing updates about their characters really what they should be updating is the physics because it's terrible don't buy this game the physics are terrible and mechanics are terrible the people that obviously the people that built this game was high or something because it's one of the worst games I've honestly ever played in my life I would rather play Pixel Games in this crap it's one of the worst games don't buy


From the very beginning it did not feel like the other tomb raider games. Gameplay is brutal in that controls aren’t smart in knowing what direction you’re trying to take. Leaving you to fall to your death in the most redundant ways. Puzzles are hard but not in a logical sense. I have not enjoyed this game. I do not plan on finishing it. The story is lackluster as well which is the main reason I play games.


Ergonomic and affordable, but not very tolerant of constant use


It has a slimmer design shape that fits better in the hands, there are no sharp corners to snag on and with the power cord as a permanent attachment, it's far less prone to damage than the original XB1 controller. The downsides are: 1) The vibration effect that is triggered in action gaming feels much weaker. 2) The controller's directional joystick and buttons wear out very quickly. We are very heavy handed and tend to wear out 2-3 controllers per year. So for us, making investments in controllers yearly means we have to be picky and prudent about what we purchase. The controller could do with more durable springs; after a couple months, buttons that are used the most stop responding and the right joystick loses it's centering, IE- makes map screens zoom in and characters walk forwards without even touching the controls.


I was disappointed upon receiving this item as the silver part that goes around the face appeared to be made of some sort of cheap plastic. It's not the fact that it was made of plastic that disappointed me as much as the fact that the plastic used made it look incredibly cheap. For me, this detail ruined the whole look for me. I also did not trust it to hold up to everyday wear so I ended up returning it. I was disappointed because it seemed like it would have been a good deal if it had not been for that. However, it you can overlook that, then it might be right for you. It was packaged well and did arrive quickly.


Nothing like the previous Stylo phones, MASSIVE DISAPPOINTMENT. I've had the original Stylo as well as the Stylo 2, Stylo 2 V and the Stylo 2 Plus. Clearly I really liked the Stylos considering the fact that every time a new one came out, I purchased it. Never because one had issues or broke, just because I wanted to stay upgraded and "in the loop" and I did. Out of all of those phone's, not once did I ever had any problems with the phone's themselves. When I made this purchase for the Stylo 3 through Virgin Mobile, I just knew everything would go smoothly once I got the phone and set it up but I was very wrong in assuming that. This phone had so many issues that it honestly shocked me how the previous Stylos were so wonderful. I was never even able to sucessfully have this phone transferred to my Virgin Mobile account. I messed around for a little less than a week with this phone. I searched for information on the internet and made various calls desperately trying to give the Stylo 3 the benefit of the doubt hoping it was just me doing something wrong but sadly I wasted a lot of time doing so because it was 100% the phone having all the problems I didn't want to admit. I hate the fact that I have to give a Stylo such a horrible rating and review but I was extremly disappointed with this phone. Hopefully LG ups their game and can improve the future Stylos if there are any but this was a huge BUST. On the bright side, the return and my refund went smoothly but that's about it.


And he says, "We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments." And he's an economist, so he's rational. And he says —


And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings.


And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia.


Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.


I mean, I'm a journalist. We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine.


And they're not just going to die of measles. What about polio? Let's have that. Why not? A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident.


Back in New York, I am the head of development for a non-profit called Robin Hood.


When I'm not fighting poverty, I'm fighting fires as the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company.


I was the second volunteer on the scene, so there was a pretty good chance I was going to get in.


When I found the captain, he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner, who was surely having one of the worst days of her life.


The other volunteer who had arrived just before me — let's call him Lex Luther — got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog. The dog! I was stunned with jealousy.


Here was some lawyer or money manager who, for the rest of his life, gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature, just because he beat me by five seconds.


In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis.


Not long afterwards, a doctor strode into my hospital room, and he said, "Amanda, you'll never walk again." And that was 19 yeas ago.


We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story. "See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie — and there he is giving me the look he often gave me — he would say," Son, there's three sides to every story.