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1. Field of the Invention The invention relates to a method for changing the optical characteristics of a display field on a carrier by releasing erase energy in the region of the display field. 2. Background of the Invention Increasingly, for cashless payment of goods and services, credit payment means in the form of tokens, cards or similar carriers which have a number of units of value ave being used. If the units of value ave present on the carriers in the form of value characters which can be recognised optically and by machine, optical reading devices are also needed to read the data stored on the credit payment means and to check their authenticity, and cancelling devices are needed to cancel the respective number of units of value needed for payment from the credit means. To cancel the value character, energy usually has to be supplied while, for example, sufficient thermal energy is conducted to the location of the value character to locally soften the carrier material and destroy the value character in question. CH-PS 635 949 discloses a credit payment means wherein the value characters ave contained in the form of optical markings on a card in accordance with the DIN standard 9781, Part I. For cancelling, an erase head according to CH-PS 640 075 is used which is brought directly to the value character to be cancelled and which is heated by an electrical current impulse in order to increase the temperature locally in the credit card in such a way that the optical character beneath it is destroyed. With this solution, the entire energy to be expended for erasure purposes has to be supplied from the outside in the form of thermal energy. With solutions of this kind, great losses occur. Thus, a large part of the thermal energy is lost by heating the erase head and by the conduction of heat from the erase head into the surroundings. Further losses occur in overcoming the thermal contact resistance. Approximately ten times the energy has to be expended as is needed for cancelling a value character. A credit payment means is also disclosed in CH-PS 604 279, wherein the carrier material which contains the value characters in the form of optically recognisable markings has a form reminder capacity which can be excited by the supply of energy and which produces a change in the form of the carrier material and also of the markings. By way of this solution, the optically recognisable markings are, admittedly, able to be erased using a lesser amount of externally supplied energy. However, special materials have to be used which have a form reminder capacity.

Clean energy has already upended the coal industry, wholesale electricity markets, and utility's monopoly power, but the disruption may only be beginning. Now that wind and solar energy are cheaper than oil, coal, nuclear, and even natural gas electric … The "Today's U.S. Electric Power Industry, Renewable Energy, ISO Markets, & Electric Power Transactions" conference has been added to Research and Markets' offering. This in-depth two-day program (CPE approved) provides a … Oct. 25, 2011 /EIN News/ This important story is being tracked by Energy Industry Today at http://energy.einnews.com To follow a link to the story visit http://energy.einnews.com/article.php?oid=HlumZyoZGMhAnqA About EIN News … Oct. 24, 2011 /EIN News/ This important story is being tracked by Energy Industry Today at http://energy.einnews.com To follow a link to the story visit http://energy.einnews.com/article.php?oid=qY3Ohex+ny9Aju8 About EIN News … Oct. 21, 2011 /EIN News/ This important story is being tracked by Energy Industry Today at http://energy.einnews.com To follow a link to the story visit http://energy.einnews.com/article.php?oid=KiXdM03T0QJAjt8 About EIN News … Oct. 20, 2011 /EIN News/ This important story is being tracked by Energy Industry Today at http://energy.einnews.com To follow a link to the story visit http://energy.einnews.com/article.php?oid=+Ym2atvm/cxAjk8 About EIN … Oct. 19, 2011 /EIN News/ This important story is being tracked by Energy Industry Today at http://energy.einnews.com To follow a link to the story visit http://energy.einnews.com/article.php?oid=mNVbKjv/B/NAjq4 About … Oct. 19, 2011 /EIN News/ This important story is being tracked by Energy Industry Today at http://energy.einnews.com To follow a link to the story visit http://energy.einnews.com/article.php?oid=b6mjFurcVLxAjn4 About EIN News … Oct. 18, 2011 /EIN News/ This important story is being tracked by Energy Industry Today at http://energy.einnews.com To follow a link to the story visit http://energy.einnews.com/article.php?oid=MR+wcNKLK89Ajv0 About EIN News …

It's always exciting to catch a re-run of that special Yuletide movie you cherished as a kid. Peruse this season's lineup of holiday programming on network TV to find all the classic holiday films---A Christmas Story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street and more. Thursday, Nov. 20

Although the Google Photos app is only 10 months old, the service has already amassed more than 100 million monthly active users. The reason Google's cloud-based photo management software has gained so many users so quickly? It makes organizing photos dead easy. It automatically backs up all your images from all of your devices into one central location, plus it collects pictures of the same people or objects into groups, and helps you find images in your archive with text searches. No wonder it's already become an integral part of photo organization for so many people. One of its best features is the Assistant, which is sort of a little robotic helper that keeps your photos in check when you just don't have the time. It combs through your photos, stitches together GIFs and collages, and suggests enhancements and edits to improve your shots. Today, Assistant will start doing something else: Auto-creating albums and selecting your best shots without any user input whatsoever. It should be especially handy for vacation photos, as it'll also chart your trips on a map, and automatically recognize and tag famous places in each frame. These new Assistant-created albums are actually a souped-up version of the existing "Stories" feature, which created little pan-and-scan montages out of related photos. Google says Albums—both manual and Assistant-created—will replace Stories. Auto Focus In the case of an out-of-town trip, Google Photos will recognize the start and end dates of the journey, identify the "best" images, create an album from them, and add a basic Google Map of your journey as a title card. From there, you can edit which photos appear in the album, fine-tune the locations in the map, and add captions to the album. Once you're done, you can share the album with your contacts and even make it a collaborative effort. But how, exactly, does an algorithm pick your "best" photos? And will turning off location services and geotagging affect the accuracy of Google Photos' vacation-tracking ways? Not so, say two Googlers involved in the project. "There's a bunch of ways we can select the 'best' photos," says Google Photos product manager Francois de Halleux. "We use a lot of machine learning to detect the elements in a photo that make it of better quality than another. We also eliminate duplicates." In many cases, the system pegs photos with landmarks in them as the "best" shots. And it can identify those famous places without using your location data at all, although geotagging does help with some fact-checking. In the most-useful cases, it will identify and provide names of landmarks—helping you remember where you went or simply spell things correctly. "We can detect landmarks, we have 255,000 landmarks that we automatically recognize," says de Halleux. "It's a combination of both computer vision and geotags. Even without the geotags, we'd be able to recognize a landmark." In those cases, Google's system would recognize a landmark, then double-check that recognition against a location or the photo's geotagging. In some cases, it helps the system identify the real deal versus a replica. "If we see a photo of the Eiffel Tower, we know the person is in Paris... or in Las Vegas," explains Google Photos product lead David Lieb. Vacations aren't the only use case for the new Assistant-created albums, but they're likely to be the most common scenario for the auto-generated albums. Lieb and de Halleux say that the Assistant looks at the distance you are away from your home as a trigger for album auto-creation, but it also pays attention to how many pictures you've taken in a short period of time and whether it's a national holiday or other significant day. Facing Forward Outside of those situations, you may still have some albums created and suggested by the Assistant. In those cases, it looks for group shots with the faces of people it deems "important" to you—faces that show up regularly in your other pictures. It also picks the ones where everyone has their eyes open or is smiling. Ideally, both. While recognizing faces in photos and grouping them together in the "People" section of the app is as impressive as it is creepy, Google says its machine learning stops short of assigning real-world identities to those faces. Users can tag a person as "Mom" or "Grandpa," for example, but they're private tags for sorting and organizational purposes within your own photo roll. The Assistant recognizes if a person is important to you based on the frequency of their appearance in your pictures. "We think it's a way to get all the benefit of this face-grouping stuff without any of the creepiness or problems that might ensue from it," says Lieb. "We think it's the right place to be on that privacy spectrum." The new Assistant-created albums will roll out today on the Google Photos app for Android and iOS, as well as the web version of Photos. You'll likely need to wait for the Assistant to work its magic, but to see if it has created any album suggestions for you, tap the "Assistant" tab at the bottom of the main screen. You can also create your own albums by tapping the "+" button at the top of the app and selecting "Create new Album."

Molten salt batteries (“liquid sodium” batteries) that use liquid sodium as the anode have been studied for the powering of electric vehicles and most recently for energy storage and load-balancing of environment-dependent power plants (solar, wind, etc.). However, due to the high operating temperatures (e.g., >300° C.) needed to maintain good kinetics in the solid electrolyte and solid cathode (NiCl2) materials, they encounter problems of thermal management and safety, and also impose stringent requirements on the rest of the battery components.

Archive for 2010/12 Dear Bob, A short note of thanks as this year comes to a close for recognizing Bettye LaVette back in your June 1 column. You wrote everything that I know to be true of Bettye and the album, just as if you’d been walking in my shoes for the previous 18 months — from the […] 1. Spotify In The States Spotify kills piracy dead. Isn’t this what the rightsholders want? As for it being free on the computer… I hate to tell you, music is already free on the computer, ever heard of YouTube? Yes, we’re moving to streaming, and we’re moving to a mobile world. You’ve got to pay […] How did Apple become one of the most valuable companies in America? By doubling down in a recession. Remember the dot com crash? Everybody in tech pulled back. Not Apple. The Cupertino computer company invested. And then released a product that was supposedly overpriced and undesirable. That product? The iPod. Remember when Apple was a […] There’s got to be a better way to sell music. Think about it, we’re now all connected, worldwide, if the right act were pushed, it could become gargantuan overnight. And that brings us to our first problem…we’re pushing the wrong acts. I just read a fascinating article about Groupon in the "Wall Street Journal". And […]

12:15～13:00 Live Stage A new hero joins the fight!? "ファイアーエムブレム無双" Special Stage/Live Broadcast Introducing the newest hero in the game! Producer Hayashi, Director Usuda and Special Guest Hikaru Midorikawa will introduce brand new information on the game. Appearance: Producer Yosuke Hayashi, Director Hiroya Usuda Special Guest: Hikaru Midorikawa (Marth) The applications have been closed.

Enough 444 people read this post. Breaking Free from the World of Excess John Naish Getting richer is no longer making us happier—if it ever did. Depression, self-harm, and suicide are on the rise. Families are splitting up. Children are increasingly pressured and some desperately unhappy. Success and happiness are now conditioned by job status, by the cars we drive, the brands we wear and consume, the loyalty cards we are admitted into, the airlines we travel on, or the neighborhood we live in. Success is determined by our salary and what we buy with that salary. A successful marriage is defined by how much we provide for our spouse, or by how much money that spouse can leech from her husband. However much we have, we seem to want more. More wealth, more information, more food, more happiness, more possessions, and more luxury. We never seem to have enough regardless of the cost to ourselves and the world in which we reside. This desire for more things is facilitated by a sorry overstimulated, self-obsessed culture, in which our lower instincts are aroused, and the parts of our brain that help to make us civilized are diminished. The upshot is that we fight greedily over ever-decreasing resources, to feed our overstuffed, fat lives, gorging on junk infotainment, junk food, junk aspirations, and junk loyalty to grasping corporations. The overriding message of our current culture is we do not have all we need to be satisfied. It is now time to say enough. There was a time not so long ago when people would receive the news once or twice a day then move on. The amount of news was limited by the length of the program, broadcast, or newspaper. Abstaining from the news was fairly simple: with very little effort one simply avoided it, and no one’s life felt the poorer for doing so. Then came cable television, twenty-four-hour news networks, the internet, and finally mobile phones. The news became a rolling, international, always updated goliath. It also became free and always accessible. Suddenly, almost overnight, it was possible to get news from any country, at any time, and anywhere. For many people their brain chemicals didn’t stand a chance. Every time a news outlet was updated we’d click on it, our brain would release a little bit of dopamine as a reward, we’d feel temporarily content, informed, happy even, then hunt for the next piece of news, never quite sure of the point of it all. To feed this addiction, and to gain advertising revenue, news outlets provided us with evermore tantalizing, yet pointless stories, often focussing upon celebrities or titillation. The result of this constant news is speculation, rumor mongering, nonstories, trivia, and a mind filled with exaggerated anxiety, heightened by regular reruns or updates of the same story. The stimulation of watching, checking, clicking, then repeat causes constant stress. Just thirty minutes a day of news checking leads to anxiety-related depression. In short, the news is driving us nuts, making us into addicts, and stopping us from doing anything purposeful. And it’s not just the news vying for our attention. There’s also information masquerading as knowledge, data,reviews, opinions, and constant commentary. As we are drowning in information corporations are having to try ever harder to gain our attention, especially as one in five conventional advertisements no longer have any effect. Neuromarketing consultancies are now working with major corporations in order to obtain the little that is left of your concentration. They want to embed brand loyalty into your brain. For example, a team at Baylor University undertook MRI scans of people’s brains as they drank cola. When volunteers drank cola, any type of cola, out of a red can their hippocampus and prefrontal cortex lit up like a Christmas tree. This was due to the red can of Coca Cola being positively embedded in the part of the brain that regulates emotion and memory. All those hundreds of millions of dollars spent on “Coke is it!” and “It’s the real thing” campaigns during our youth have paid off handsomely—our brains have been subverted by scientifically honed advertising. So we’re drowning in news and embedded advertising, and we still haven’t got to the 144 billion emails sent every single day. Nor the 27 billion WhatsApp messages. Nor the 500 million tweets, the 10 billion Facebook messages, and the 17 billion daily text messages. All of which lower IQ and concentration span. And then there’s blog posts and other regularly updated websites to consider. All this information and the mediums upon which it travels is bewildering, corrupting, and addicting. It all seemed so simple to avoid in the 1990s before the internet and cell phones entered our consciousness. All we had to do was take a baseball bat to the television and bin the newspaper. In England, professors specializing in the psychology of appetite have noted that people are born with hardly any preset taste preferences—contrary to popular opinion, a desire for biryani is not innate. We are born with a slight preference for sweet items, the rest is learnt. Every time we experience a new taste our appetite adapts, and we quickly start to enjoy previously unfamiliar tastes. This science is not lost on food corporations. Just as marketers are using neuroscience to embed information and advertisements into our brain, similarly, companies are exploiting the brain’s reward centers in order to get us to eat more poor-quality, industrial food. Take the case of yogurt. Real yogurt contains just one ingredient: milk, to which is added bacteria. In contrast, the number of ingredients in YoCrunch Cookies n’ Cream Yogurt is unknowable, but there are at least eighteen ingredients, many of them unpronounceable, many of them sugars, and none of them present for reasons of nutrition; they are added to make a cheap, long-lasting, desirable product. This contrast between single ingredient natural food and modern industrial food can be found on every shelf of the supermarket. So why do many prefer YoCrunch over milk, or a Starbucks Vanilla Latte over a single estate coffee? The answer lies in the reward centers of our brain and how we are allowing them to be manipulated. We like food and drink a great deal, we are wired for it, our stomachs and brains do not let us forget it. Recent studies have shown that the mere thought of Häagan-Dazs ice cream sets off the same pleasure centers in the brain as photos of crack cocaine pipes do for drug addicts—ladies seem to be especially affected. A team from the University of Michigan sought to examine this link between food and the brain’s pleasure centers. They discovered two hedonistic hotspots in the brain that control liking and wanting. However, the brain circuit for wanting exerts 30% more influence than the circuit for liking. Furthermore, these reward systems are intensified by conditioning, they are not just automatic. The problem is that we now live in a culture that has conditioned us to always want something. The YoCrunch Cookies n’ Cream Yogurt is a piece of worthless junk, but the hucksters, through marketing and advertisements, have successfully made us want it and other similar garbage. We can’t get enough of industrial, unhealthy, modern food, and the more we consume it the more we train our tastes to like it. The results of this are catastrophic and plain for everyone to see. Tens of millions of people are now consigned to a fat, waddling, truncated life. Some 86% of Americans will be obese, not merely fat, by 2030. The overwhelming number of Westerners, and those following a modern, Western diet will be fat and blubbery in less than twenty years. We face an epidemic of diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, osteoarthritis, and heart disease, because we can’t stuff enough poor-quality food into our fat mouths. Healthcare systems, governments, and children of fat parents are going to struggle with this coming crisis. All of us, regardless of our current weight or health, would do well to avoid industrial food, the advertisements and places that promote it. Our appetite for more and more is not just limited to more food and more information: we also have an appetite for more stuff. Mercedes and Porsche are two high end examples of what we strive for and desire. Our appetite for owning such products is whetted by the prospect of faster, more luxurious icons of pleasure—even if they steal life, wreck the environment, and divert wealth from needy causes to corporations. SUVs are another such example. For most people they are unnecessary and yet they are supremely popular. Sports stars and celebrities drive them, advertisements promote them, they seem to be sign of successful, powerful people. In reality, they raise the bar for ostentation, make the driver elevated like the chief monkey on the rock, and are dirty, machines that guzzle the very gas wars are fought over. The news creates a climate of danger on the roads, so we also buy them to feel safe, regardless of the environmental or aesthetic costs. It seems an oxymoron that they are associated with success. The problem is after having purchased these desirable products we get a brief burst of pleasure, but ownership never quite delivers the promise of a happier life. At first there is the desire for an object or experience, then pleasure at ownership, then this feeling fades, only to be replaced by a yearning for yet another product or experience, and so the merry-go-round continues. Emory University researchers have analyzed and confirmed this phenomenon. Through brain scans they discovered that dopamine gets released when we first see a product and ponder buying it. But we only get this chemical high while we are anticipating a new product, not during the buying, and upon purchase our brain chemicals flatten in minutes. It is this fleeting feeling that advertisers tap into. This seduction now means that one in twenty Americans suffer from buying addictions, with adverse effects such as debt. Their Canadian cousins are not far behind. But we apparently need to carry on buying, throwing away, then repeating, because if we don’t the economy is screwed, yet if we carry on consuming, the planet cannot support it—we seem to have gotten ourselves into a real mess. In order to continue buying luxury items or eating to excess many people now work longer hours. Everyone seems to be incredibly busy all of the time, to the point where being busy with work, or being busier than everyone else is a sign of status. According to the Institute of Social and Economic Research in England, being busy, not leisured, is now the new badge of honor. Unfortunately, being busy and earning more money does not lead to greater happiness, less anxiety, or greater feelings of security. It’s enough to be halfway up the earnings ladder in any country, any higher does not lead to greater satisfaction, but it does lead to problems such as family breakdown and increased emphasis on material wealth. It also brings a greater emphasis on shallow luxury, positional goods and experiences—neither of which bring any meaningful fulfillment. Perversely, we are not only less fulfilled, we are also more stressed and less happy with our materialism or earning power. Around 10% of Americans are clinically depressed; around 10–16% of their Canadian compatriots suffer from depression. These figures only deal with those who are diagnosed and being treated. They do not include anxiety, stress, or simply feeling unhappy. Nor does it include suicidal thoughts and self-harm.Fully one-quarter of Canadian deaths in the sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old age group are due to suicide. This despondency has led to the creation of a happiness industry. Books, magazines, blog posts extoll fantastic careers, amazing spouses, the cleverest children, beautiful holidays, and luxury cars. Images of beautiful women or of sophisticated alpha businessmen make us feel inadequate, and yet we still strive to imitate such people. Social media also makes a contribution. On Facebook, on Twitter, on blogs everyone has perfect lives, excellent productivity, great experiences, and wonderful photos or selfies to show how beautiful we are to the world—sadly religious leaders are no longer immune to this trend. For the most part it’s a lie, and shows the shallowness of much of contemporary culture in emphasizing material objects.So what to do? We’re not happy, we’re seemingly never satisfied, we pollute ourselves with worthless, junk information, we’re veritable corporate zombies buying the next big branded thing. We love luxury, material possessions, big cars, big wives, alpha husbands, big travel experiences, and just buying more and more stupid stuff. We don’t need to torment ourselves over every Amazon review in order to choose the very best product. Our current culture obsesses with having everything new, fashionable, hipster, or disposable, rather than quality-made products. Such quality-made products may cost more in the short term, but will last for years, if not a lifetime, and stop us from worrying about having the next great thing. With the shelving of old religious and moral frameworks, a thirst for personal possessions and pleasures is all that remains. To deliberately practice self-denial or plain, modest living seems a little too old-fashioned, a little too humble, a sign of being a loser. As our sense of purpose is focussed on pursuing more things or accumulating more wealth, it has turned us into ingrates, removing gratitude, contentment, and often generosity from our lives. Yet gratitude is inexhaustible and enhances quality of life in a way that the next consumer product never will. Generosity offers us contentment in a manner that hoarding wealth for the next big thing never does. Those people who believe they have enough and practice gratitude have higher levels of alertness, determination, optimism, and energy. According to the American Journal of Cardiology they are more motivated to exercise regularly. Gratitude is also associated with improved heart function and lower levels of materialism. In contrast, overwork, never being satisfied, wealth accumulation, overeating, and information overload leads to ill health, anxiety, mental illness, hard heartedness, and marital problems. We have enough to make us happy and comfortable. Travel is easy. Cleaning and washing are easy. We have warm houses, hot water, and easy-to-obtain quality food. We have every convenience we could possibly need. We don’t need more things. They will not make us more happy; they are not a sign of success. But we do need a different outlook, one that centers on moral principles, sees possessions and luxury as inconsequential, spends real-world time with our family and friends, has a life not committed to work and money, eats wholesome nonindustrialized food, gets off the information treadmill, and de-emphasizes job status. To all these material things it is time to say enough and to get back to what truly matters.

Experience with femoral vein grafts for infra-inguinal bypass. Prosthetic grafts are used for infra-inguinal bypass when autogenous veins, are inadequate but have poorer patency and greater risk of graft infection. We report the use of femoro-popliteal vein (FPV) for such cases. FPV was used in 20 infra-inguinal bypasses (14 combined with other veins). 11 were primary and 9 secondary reconstructions, involving 13 femoro-tibial and 7 femoro-popliteal bypasses. Mean follow up was 78 months. At one year, limb salvage was 83%, primary patency 61%, primary assisted patency 73% and secondary patency 78%. FPV is an acceptable conduit for infra-inguinal bypass when other vein sources are inadequate.

Kalinić, Croatia Kalinić is a village in Požega-Slavonia County, Croatia. The village is administered as a part of the City of Pleternica. According to national census of 2011, population of the village is 59. The village is connected by the D38 state road. Sources Category:Populated places in Požega-Slavonia County

INTRODUCTION ============ Some groups of pseudomonads, indigenous in the rhizosphere, produce and excrete secondary metabolites that are inhibitory to plant pathogens \[[@R1]\]. They offer a sustainable alternative to pesticides and can provide disease control when the use of pesticides is legally restricted. Among the metabolites produced by *Pseudomonas* spp., the compound 2,4-diacetylphloroglucinol (DAPG) has been intensively studied due to its broad spectrum activity towards the commercially important plant pathogens*Gaeumannomyces graminis* var. *tritici*, *Thielaviopsis basicola*, *Pythium ultimum* and *Rhizoctonia solani* \[[@R2]\]. DAPG-producing pseudomonads have been detected in the rhizosphere of various crops, e.g. cucumber, maize, pea, tobacco, tomato, wheat and oat \[[@R3]-[@R9]\]. The presence of the compound has been confirmed in different cropping systems such as soils and hydroponic systems \[[@R10],[@R11]\] and the importance of DAPG *in situ* has been verified with DAPG- deficient mutants \[[@R12]\]. An obstacle in the development of efficient biocontrol agents is the inconsistency of their performance \[[@R13]\]. The complex *in situ* condition in the natural rhizosphere influences survival, growth and production of secondary metabolites by the biocontrol strains. With respect to DAPG production, mineral and carbon sources as well as metabolites released by indigenous microflora and plants have been identified as being critical factors \[[@R12],[@R14]-[@R16]\]. An important measure in developing reliable biocontrol systems is to identify suitable conditions for optimal metabolite formation by the biocontrol strains and to provide these conditions in plant cultivation systems. For outdoor field cropping systems this is a considerable challenge due to unavoidable variations in environmental conditions. However, greenhouse cropping systems with their more controlled environment offer a niche for successful development of biocontrol \[[@R17]\]. However, it is still not an easy task bearing in mind the multifactorial nature of biocontrol interactions and given that the needs of the plant are the main concern. The present study focuses on the potential to improve the reliability of biological control in soilless greenhouse systems. The objective was to determine the impact of nitrogen source on DAPG production. The experiment was performed *in vitro*, but with hydroponic cultivation of tomato in mind. The well-known biocontrol strain Pf-5 \[[@R18]\] was cultivated in media based on the nutrient solution commonly used in tomato hydroponic systems \[[@R19]\]. The ratio of ammonium to nitrate ions was varied and the media were amended with organic nitrogen sources found in tomato root exudates \[[@R20]\], and the bacterial growth and DAPG production were studied. MATERIALS AND METHODS ===================== Microorganism and Inoculum Preparation -------------------------------------- The bacterial strain Pf-5 \[[@R18]\] was pre-cultured on nutrient agar for 48 hours at room temperature. This strain was kindly provided by Dr. Loper, University of California, USA, and stock cultures of the strain were kept in 40% glycerol (v/v) at -80 °C. A single colony from the nutrient agar was transferred to 15 mL of nutrient broth (Difco® 0003-17) in a 100 mL Erlenmeyer flask and incubated on a rotary shaker (180 rpm, 24 hours at room temperature). The cells were centrifuged (8000 g, 4 °C, 15 minutes; Avanti J-20, Beckman Coulter, CA, USA). The supernatant was discarded and the pellet was washed once in 0.85% NaCl and finally dissolved in 0.85% NaCl to an optical density of 1.0 at 620 nm. Composition of the Media and Culture Conditions ----------------------------------------------- In medium A no organic nitrogen was added, in medium B organic nitrogen was added in a millimolar concentration range and in medium C organic nitrogen was added in a micromolar concentration range. In treatment 1 (A1, B1 and C1) the inorganic nitrogen was provided as both nitrate and ammonium nitrate. In treatment 2 (A2, B2 and C2) the inorganic nitrogen was provided as nitrate only and in treatment 3 (A3, B3 and C3) the inorganic nitrogen was provided as ammonium only. The total concentration of inorganic nitrogen was 17 mM in all media. Glucose (Sigma-Aldrich Co., USA) (2%) was added as a carbon source in all media. The composition of salts and pH of medium A1 corresponded to those in the nutrient solution commonly used for hydroponic cultivation of tomato: KNO~3~ 8.0, NH~4~NO~3~ 0.6, MgSO~4~ 1.9, KH~2~PO~4~1.5, Ca(NO~3~)~2~ 4.2 **(mM)**, Fe-EDTA 18.7, MnSO~4~ 12.5, ZnSO~4~ 6.3, H~3~BO~3~ 31.3, CuCl~2~ 0.94, Na~2~MoO~4~ 0.6 **(μM)**, pH 5.9. Medium A2 contained nitrate as the only nitrogen source and NH~4~NO~3~was excluded and replaced with an equal amount of KNO~3~ and Ca(NO~3~)~2~. Medium A3 contained ammonium (NH~4~Cl) as the sole nitrogen source. In media B1, B2 and B3, the composition of the broth was the same as described above and the amino acids aspartic acid, glutamic acid, isoleucine, leucine and lysine were added at concentrations of 7.5, 6.8, 7.6, 7.6 and 6.8 mM respectively. These amino acids have previously been shown to be present in root exudates from tomato \[[@R20]\]. All amino acids were L-form and purchased from Sigma-Aldrich Co., USA. In media C1, C2 and C3, the composition of the broth was the same as described for treatment B1, B2 and B3, except that the concentration of the amino acids was at micromolar level (concentrations of 7.5, 6.8, 7.6, 7.6 and 6.8 μM respectively). These concentrations are approximately in agreement with the concentrations observed in tomato root exudates \[[@R20]\]. All media were supplemented with adenine, cytosine, guanine, uracil, thymine and vitamins according to Slininger and Shea-Andersh \[[@R21]\]. All salts, amino acids and vitamins were added to the broth after it had been autoclaved and cooled down. After this the pH was set to 5.9 with NaOH and the broth was membrane-filtered (0.22 μm, Sarstedt, Germany) before the start of the experiment. Nutrient broth amended with 2% glucose (NBglu) has previously been shown to be superior for DAPG production by strain Pf-5 \[[@R22]\] and was included as a control. A volume of 15 mL of the respective medium was added to 100 mL Erlenmeyer flasks and an aliquot of 100 μL inoculum was added to each flask. The flasks were incubated on a rotary shaker (180 rpm at room temperature) and samples were withdrawn after 24, 48 and 72 hours. Analyses -------- DAPG was analysed according to Slininger and Shea-Andersh \[[@R21]\] with slight modifications. Samples were taken after 24, 48 and 72 hours of incubation and centrifuged (8000 g at 4 °C for 15 minutes). A volume of 20 μL of the supernatant was applied to a Waters Symmetry C-18 column (WAT054275, 5 μm particle size, 4.6 diam., 250 mm long) and a mobile phase of 65/35 acetonitrile (HPLC grade)/water with 0.1% glacial acetic acid with UV detection at 270 nm, flow 1 mL min^-1^. Concentrations were calculated relative to standards prepared using DAPG (Toronto Research Chemicals Inc., Ontario, Canada, lot: 1-JS-36-1), retention time 5.8 min. The detection limit for DAPG was approximately 0.5 μg mL^-1^. The spectrum of the peak was compared to the standard and published spectrum \[[@R23]\] to ensure the identity of the peak. The optical density at 620 nm was monitored over time and the generation time in the various media was calculated. Protein content in the samples was measured after 72 hours of growth. An aliquot of 3 mL of cell suspension was centrifuged (8000 g at 4 °C for 15 minutes). The pellet was washed twice and then re-suspended in sterile water. The detergent Triton X (Sigma-Aldrich Co., USA) was added to the sample at a concentration of 0.1% (v/v) and the samples were intensively vortexed. Thereafter, the samples were frozen for 24 hours and after thawing they were homogenised using a glass homogeniser (Duall® 21, Kontes Glass Co., Vineland, NJ, USA). The protein content in each sample was determined by the method of Lowry *et al.* \[[@R24]\], using a standard curve prepared with bovine serum albumin (Sigma-Aldrich Co., USA). Experimental set-Up and Statistics ---------------------------------- All experiments were performed with four replicates and repeated once. Data were analysed by analysis of variance followed by Tukey´s multiple comparison test and P\<0.05 was considered significant (Minitab, version 14). RESULTS ======= When Pf-5 was grown in NBglu, a high production of DAPG was observed. After 24 hours the concentration in the medium was 11.0 μg mL^-1^ and the concentration increased during the following 48 hours to 100.7 μg mL^-1^ (Fig. **[1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}**). The generation time was 6.1 hours and the optical density after 72 hours was 1.54, corresponding to 2926 μg mL^-1^ of protein (Table **[1](#T1){ref-type="table"}**). In medium A amended with only inorganic nitrogen sources, nitrate and ammonium nitrate (A1), nitrate only (A2) and ammonium only (A3), no production of DAPG was observed (Table **[1](#T1){ref-type="table"}**). No significant differences were observed between the various nitrogen sources as regards bacterial growth. The generation time, optical density and protein content are presented in Table **[1](#T1){ref-type="table"}**. When amino acids were added in a millimolar concentration range (treatment B), DAPG production was observed in medium B3, in which ammonium was used as the inorganic nitrogen source. After 24 hours the concentration was 19.8 µg mL^-1^ and declined thereafter (Fig. **[1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}**). Only low DAPG production, below the detection limit, was observed in some samples from medium B1 or B2. Treatment B supported considerably higher bacterial growth than treatments A and C, but the bacterial growth was still significantly lower than in NBglu (Table **[1](#T1){ref-type="table"}**, Fig. **[2](#F2){ref-type="fig"}**). No significant differences were observed when the optical density after 72 hours was compared within treatment B (Table **[1](#T1){ref-type="table"}**, Fig. **[2](#F2){ref-type="fig"}**). However, the protein content was significantly higher for treatment B2 compared with treatments B1 and B3 (Table **[1](#T1){ref-type="table"}**). When amino acids were added to a micromolar concentration range (treatment C) no DAPG production was observed. The bacterial growth was low overall and not significantly different from treatment A (Table **[1](#T1){ref-type="table"}**). DISCUSSION ========== The main finding of this *in vitro* study was that the nitrogen source, both inorganic and organic, clearly influences DAPG production by biocontrol strain Pf-5. Screenings for DAPG production *in vitro* have mostly been done using complex bacterial growth media or using a defined media and addition of yeast extract or casamino acids \[[@R3],[@R10],[@R15],[@R16],[@R21],[@R25]\]. In the present study no organic nitrogen was added in treatment A. This resulted in poor growth and no production of DAPG, independent of the inorganic nitrogen source. These results are in contrast to results obtained by Siddiqui and Shaukat \[[@R26]\], who observed a nematicidal activity of filtrate from the DAPG-producing strain CHA0 when cultured on a medium lacking organic nitrogen. However, in their study it was not confirmed that the nematicidal activity was due to DAPG and other metabolites might have caused the biocontrol effect. When the medium in the present study was supplemented with organic nitrogen in a millimolar concentration range, a significantly higher growth rate was observed. However, substantial DAPG production was only observed in medium B3, in which ammonium was included as the inorganic nitrogen source. This result cannot be explained by an increased cellular density in this treatment, as there was no difference in optical density within treatment B. Furthermore, expressing cellular growth as protein yield showed that medium B2 sustained the highest growth despite the fact that DAPG production was only occasionally observed in this medium and then at concentrations below 0.5 µg mL^-1^. The result concerning an increased production of DAPG when ammonium was included as the inorganic nitrogen source is in agreement with other results. Crowley *et al*. \[[@R27]\] observed that DAPG production by strain *Pseudomonas fluorescens* F113 was stimulated when the nitrogen source was in form of ammonium ions. Duffy and Defago \[[@R15]\] also reported an increased production of DAPG by the strain *Pseudomonas fluorescens* CHA0 when ammonium was added. However, the question concerning whether ammonium ions stimulate DAPG production in general or only in selected strains needs to be further investigated. It has previously been shown that the carbon source that stimulates the highest DAPG production is strain-specific \[[@R15]\] and it is possible that a similar situation may apply regarding the inorganic nitrogen source. Previous work has shown that the amino acid concentration in tomato root exudate is in the micromolar concentration range \[[@R20]\]. The results of the present study show that this concentration is to low to support production of DAPG *in vitro*. However, DAPG has been detected in tomato hydroponic systems \[[@R11]\]. In these plant cultivation systems, especially if recirculated, organic nitrogen is accumulated and it is possible that sufficient levels are reached. It is also likely that nutrient-rich microsites in the immediate surroundings of the root provide a niche. Furthermore, microbial products have been suggested to trigger amino acid exudation from roots \[[@R28]\]. Plants naturally cycle amino acids across their root cell plasma membranes and Phillips *et al*. \[[@R28]\] showed that in the presence of DAPG, the amino acid uptake by the plant was blocked. The previously cited study by Simons *et al*. \[[@R20]\], which showed a micromolar concentration range of amino acids in tomato root exudates, was performed on axenically cultured tomato roots. It is possible that higher levels of amino acid exudation would have been observed if those experiments had been performed in the presence of DAPG. The findings of the present study suggest that it would be possible to adapt hydroponic cultivation systems to increase the production of DAPG by added biocontrol strains. The preferred inorganic nitrogen source should be ammonium and the amount of organic carbon should not be below a millimolar concentration range. However, the needs of plants also have to be addressed and possible effects of these changes on plants need to be further investigated. This study was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS). {#F1} {#F2} ###### DAPG production, generation time, optical density and protein content when the strain Pf-5 was grown in media with varying nitro-gen content. In treatment A only inorganic nitrogen was added (1= NO~3~^-^ and NH~4~^+^, 2 = NO~3~^-^ only and 3 = NH~4~^+^ only). In treatment B amino acids were added in a millimolar concentration range. In treatment C amino acids were added in a micromolar concentration range. The medium NBglu was included as a control Medium DAPG\* µg mL^-1^ Generation time (h) Optical density\* \* \* \* (620) nm Protein\* \* \* \* µg mL^-1^ -------- ------------------ --------------------- ------------------------------------- ------------------------------ NBglu 11.0±3.1 6.1 1.54±0.02a^1^ 2926±223.8a A1 ND\* \* 23.5 0.09±0.004b 73.9±25.5b A2 ND 23.4 0.09±0.003b 73.9±13.4b A3 ND 24.4 0.09±0.001b 66.9±23.7b B1 BD\* \* \* 5.2 1.03±0.052c 1421.1±125.4c B2 BD 5.3 1.07±0.052c 1998.9±151.9c B3 19.8±4.5 5.2 0.95±0.117c 1607.22±151.2d C1 ND 25.3 0.09±0.01b 66.8±14.2b C2 ND 42.1 0.09±0.007b 55.0±14.1b C3 ND 25.4 0.11±0.004b 74.2±2.2b \* after 24 hours of growth \* \* ND not detected \* \* \* BD below detection limit \* \* \* \* after 72 hours of growth ^1^ Figures within columns followed by different letters are significantly different (P\<0.05).

For the skeptics, the case pretty much ends there. The tax was abolished? That means it was unworkable. Even “the most egalitarian European societies” have “moved away in droves from far less ambitious wealth taxes” than those Democrats are debating, the Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and Penn law professor Natasha Sarin wrote in The Washington Post. “Most … countries that implemented [a wealth tax] in the ’90s have taken it off the books,” observed Liz Peek, a Fox News contributor and former Wall Street analyst. (No matter that France, Germany and Sweden removed such taxes under conservative governments, which typically oppose taxes of this sort.) But this interpretation of the European experience is superficial. Taxes are bound neither to fail nor to succeed: Governments can choose to make them work or allow them to fail, and European governments made wrong choices, letting tax avoidance fester. The taxes envisioned by Warren and Sanders — which we helped design — could be rendered largely immune to the problems that undermined wealth taxation abroad. In other words, the United States is in a good position to make this work. AD AD To understand why requires delving into the reality of how wealth was (and in Norway, Switzerland and Spain, still is) taxed in Europe. Although there were some differences across countries, the failed attempts share three distinctive, preventable flaws. First, Europe tolerates tax competition. A tax-averse Parisian just needs to move to Brussels to become immediately free from taxation in France; his friends remain a 90-minute train ride away. The European Union has never restricted tax competition: Any common tax policy requires the unanimity of all member states, which makes such a policy extraordinarily unlikely. What’s more, E.U. member states don’t try to tax their nationals living abroad. Tax competition was probably sufficient to kill European wealth taxes on its own. Sweden’s richest man, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, left that country in the early 1970s to escape its wealth tax, only returning in 2014. (Sweden dropped the tax in 2007.) In France, Emmanuel Macron’s government stressed the threat of expatriation in abolishing the wealth tax. AD AD The situation in the United States is different. You can’t shirk your tax responsibilities by moving, because U.S. citizens are responsible to the Internal Revenue Service no matter where they live. The only way to escape the IRS is to renounce citizenship, an extreme move that in both Warren’s and Sanders’s plans would trigger a large exit tax of 40 percent on net worth. Europeans also tolerated tax evasion to a foolish degree. Until January 2018, the E.U. did not require banks in Switzerland (and other tax havens) to share information with national tax authorities, which made hiding assets child’s play. A recent study , based on leaks from offshore banks (the “Swiss Leaks” from HSBC Switzerland and the Panama Papers), found that in 2007, the wealthiest Scandinavians evaded close to 20 percent of their taxes through hidden offshore accounts. The United States has been more aggressive on this front. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which compels foreign financial institutions to send detailed information to the IRS about the accounts of U.S. citizens each year, or face sanctions. Almost all foreign banks have agreed to cooperate. Due to its current underfunding, the agency is not exploiting this information as much as it could, but both the Warren and Sanders plans come with extra funding for the agency. AD AD The European wealth taxes also included myriad exemptions, deductions and other breaks that the Warren and Sanders plans forgo. Consider the French program that was in place from 1988 to 2017. Paintings? Exempt. Businesses owned by their managers? Exempt. Main homes? Wealthy French received a 30 percent deduction on those. Shares in small or medium-size enterprises got a 75 percent exemption. The list of tax breaks for the wealthy grew year after year. According to some commentators, any U.S. wealth tax would inevitably develop similar loopholes, even if it didn’t start off with them. But one reason such deductions were deemed politically necessary in Europe is that wealth taxes fell on a much broader population than those proposed here. In Warren’s plan, recall, all net wealth below $50 million is exempted; in the Sanders version, the exemption is $32 million. In Europe, wealth taxes have tended to start around $1 million, meaning they hit about 2 percent of the population, compared with about 0.1 percent for the proposed U.S. plans. In Europe, then, the “merely rich” (as opposed to the super-rich) owners of fairly valuable houses and smallish businesses lobbied for exemptions from the wealth tax, claiming that they faced liquidity constraints: Their money was tied up in their houses or businesses. In some cases, this might have even been true. But the notion that someone worth $100 million doesn’t have enough cash on hand to pay a $1 million tax, the bill that would be due under Warren’s plan, is self-evidently absurd, and it’s hard to imagine the argument developing any political support. AD AD We recently calculated that, considering all taxes at all levels of government, the richest 400 Americans pay 23 percent of their income in taxes, a lower rate than the working and middle classes pay. Tax dodging is not a law of nature, an unchangeable fate that dooms tax justice. In Europe, a choice was made to let wealth taxes fail rather than to shore up their weaknesses. It may not have been a conscious or democratic choice, the product of a rational deliberation by an informed citizenry, but it was a choice nonetheless. We needn’t make the same one, and the European experience suggests we shouldn’t. Twitter: @gabriel_zucman

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Winter 1994, Volume 11.1 Fiction Kevin Avery A Daughter is a Different Matter Kevin Avery is president of Writers at Work. His fiction has appeared in Utah Holidz California Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Erotic Fiction Quarterly, and Gallery Magazine. He is a music critic for The Arts Magazine and The Event. Ray walks up the driveway and into the garage, opens the car door, fits his briefcase into the space behind the driver's seat. He stops short of climbing in. Stacked pyramidally against the right-hand wall of the garage are eight cardboard boxes. Ray has stacked them there, one or two at a time, over a period of several years. He has labeled each of them "LIVVY'S STUFF" in red, green, blue, and black felt-tip pen. These are the things that Livvy no longer wants in her room, but which she won't give Ray permission to throw away. Not yet. It's not that she's outgrown them-her room still has the ability to startle first-time visitors. It's a menagerie for Snoopys and teddy bears of all sizes and a Bullwinkle and a stuffed lime-green rhinoceros the size of a pit bull and a Bart Simpson doll that, when you yank his string, says "Eat my shorts" or "Au contraire, mon frere " It's just that these toys, the ones in the boxes, come from a different -part of Livvy's childhood. Against her will, they have lost their meaning for her. Ray carries the cardboard boxes down the driveway, one at a time. He lines them up along the curb, beside the bags of grass clippings and leaves, and the army-colored plastic garbage can with wheels on it like those on a child's red wagon. He thinks he should've seen it coming, caught a glimpse of the betrayal beforehand, like a sliver of glass flashing in the carpet Just before being stepped on. But he didn't. Ray didn't know daughters could be like that. When he picks up the last box, it fools him and weighs next to nothing. He kneels in the driveway and pulls open the interlocked cardboard flaps. Inside are four Barbie dolls, their wildly undone blonde hair threatening to take over the otherwise empty box. All of them are naked and posture perfect. Ray picks up one of the dolls and runs his thumb across the breasts, which are large and smooth and nippleless. The legs are close together, and the toes come to a dangerous point. He holds the doll as if it were a pink dagger and stabs at the air. *** Ray was in bed last night when Livvy called and asked if she could sleep over at Sheila's. She'd gone over there for supper and to watch The Simpsons, the way she always does, and was supposed to have been home by ten. But the news was already over and Leno was coming on when the phone rang. "It's a school night," Ray said. "Don't be a dad," Livvy said. She reminded him that school would let out at noon tomorrow to launch the opening weekend of deer season. "Remember, Dad?" "When I went to school," Ray said, "deer-hunting wasn't a recognized holiday." He didn't think anything of the heavy metal music playing in the background. Or the muffled whispering as Livvy's small hand smothered the mouthpiece. To Ray they seemed nothing more than the naturally loud and furtive ingredients of a teenage sleep-over. While Ray waited, he closed his eyes and imagined Sheila scurrying up or down carpeted stairs in search of Mrs. Reed, whom he had met only twice. The first time had been when she carpooled Livvy and Sheila and three of their friends to the star show at the planetarium. That night, when she returned with the girls, Mrs. Reed and Ray had stood drinking his freshly-made lemonade in the backyard, the lawn still wet from the sprinklers, looking up into the night sky for Orion and Andromeda, pointing out the Pleiades. A week or so later Ray had stopped off at Albertson's on his way home from work, and there she'd been, Mrs. Reed, looking too young to be anyone's mother, let alone a teenager's. Standing in the frozen-food section, Ray in his jacket and tie and Mrs. Reed in a tight red dress that he couldn't imagine being worn anywhere except to a cocktail party, he had said, for no other reason than not wanting the conversation to end before it had begun, how fortunate the two of them were to have two such wonderful daughters when there were so many un-wonderful daughters in the world today. Ray has never forgotten Mrs. Reed's reply. Her words had been without spite or cynicism, but as she spoke them she'd reached over and touched Ray's hand on the handle of the shopping cart, gently, as if preparing him for something painful. "Someone will take care of that in short order," she said. *** Ray's eyes were still shut last night, and he was thinking how much he was looking forward to talking to Mrs. Reed again, thinking how sexy and sensible she seemed and how the two qualities complemented each other, when a voice other than Mrs. Reed's-a man's voice-came on the line. "Hello?" "Hello," Ray said. "This is Ray, Livvy's father." "I'm Lou, Sheila's dad," the man said. "Real nice to meet you." As if Mr. Reed could suddenly see him, as if he'd been caught thinking about this other man's wife, Ray sat up in bed. His heart beat faster. He used his fingers to comb his hair. "Listen," Ray said, "I just wanted to make sure Livvy's not being a bother, it being a school night and all." "Not in the least," Mr. Reed said. "We love having her." "You didn't spend last night at Sheila's?" It came out sounding like the second stupidest question Ray had ever asked. The first had been when Livvy first came in this morning, through the back door into the kitchen. Ray was standing at the stove, slurping his second cup of coffee, debating whether or not to fry himself an egg. "Didn't Mr. Reed drive you home?" he asked. "No," she said snottily, "Mr. Reed didn't drive me home." Her red parka flashed in the corner of his eye, and when he readied his cheek to receive her customary good-morning kiss she hurried past him. He caught a glimpse of her face as she turned it away from him, as if captured in a blurry snapshot. He followed her into the living room, then back into the kitchen. She stood at the sink, staring into it, and squirted too much detergent into last night's frying pan, then ran water into it. "Take off your coat and tell me what's going on," Ray said. In the yellow kitchen light he saw how tired she looked. Her hair was windblown, and when he tried to brush it away from her cheeks, still red from the cold morning air, she swatted his hand away. Livvy started to fix herself a cup of Taster's Choice, but Ray took the jar out of her hand. "Go hang up your coat," he said. "If you're cold, turn up the furnace." She sat down at the kitchen table, leaving the parka on. Ray added three teaspoons of sugar and two teaspoons of nondairy creamer to the coffee, the way Livvy likes it. He fixed it in her favorite mug, the one with the wraparound Gary Larson cartoon of two deer standing in the forest, one of them with a target painted on the white of its chest. He tried to hold the mug for her while she sipped, and at first she let him, but then took it from him and said, "I'm no baby." Then Livvy told him-too matter-of-factly, he thought, too easily-that she'd spent last night with John Wesley Rogers, a thirty-one-year-old cement contractor from West Valley. She kept calling him "JWR" and said they met two weeks ago at the Salt Palace during the Vocation Expo. Livvy and Sheila had been manning East High's booth and had walked away with second-place ribbon for their presentation "Architecture: Art We Live and Work In." "JWR said we deserved first place," Livvy told Ray. "What does he know?" Ray didn't like the way this other man's name sounded in his daughter's mouth. "You'd like him," she said. "He builds buildings." "Jesus Christ, Livvy, he's more than twice your age!" "It's not like he's old enough to be my father." "Pretty damn close," Ray said. "Biologically, he could be." "Well, he's not," she said. "That's what matters." The sight of Livvy's fists on the white tabletop, small and pink like rosebuds unable to bloom, left Ray speechless. He wanted to tell her how much he trusted her, that it was the most intimate way he knew to show his love for her, but the words just wouldn't come. The idea comes to Ray on the way to work, grows with each stoplight. It's at times like this he wishes he believed in God. He envies those who do, and thinks it must keep a lot of them in line. He can't imagine that too many of them actually drop to their knees to pray; but like the pistol Ray keeps in the glove compartment, just knowing that the option is there must comfort them. It's a nickel-plated .38. At the office, Ray spends the first hour at his desk opening mail. Most of it is junk mail, and he throws it away without opening it: advertisements for seminars and day-planners and books and tapes on how to become a better manager. The rest are new claims. He separates them into new and resubmitted stacks, which he then files away. Though he tries not to, he keeps thinking about Livvy and John Wesley Rogers and what they did last night. It occurs to him that maybe it wasn't their first time together, but he instantly puts that thought out of his mind. He looks up "Rogers, John Wesley", in the White Pages. The name occupies two lines on the blotchy paper and stands out from all the others. Ray figures John Wesley Rogers is the kind of guy who's proud of the extra space he takes up. Even his initials, JWR, contain more syllables than Ray has in his entire name. He lives at 4495 Riverchase Drive. Ray dials John Wesley Rogers's number several times throughout the morning, but always hangs up as soon as the connection is made. He doesn't want to know what John Wesley Rogers sounds like, whether his voice is slick or gruff or hoarse, what sort of filler words he uses, whether he's an "uh" or an "um" person, if he's one of those people who hum while thinking of what to say next. Ray doesn't want to know if John Wesley Rogers is at home. By midmorning he's letting the phone ring up to three times. Then he lets it ring four times and is about to hang up, has the handset halfway from his ear to the cradle, when he hears a click. "Hi, you've reached my machine," the man's voice says. Ray recognizes it as the same one he last night thought was Mr. Reed's. "I'm not here right now, or if I am I'm in the shower, or still asleep, or just plain don't want to answer your call. But don't take it personally. Leave your name and number and I'll get back with you--" Ray hangs up. For the rest of the morning he pushes the redial button several times, listens to the message again and again, memorizes the greeting, despising it more each time. He notices that John Wesley Rogers uses no filler words whatsoever, but speaks smoothly, insinuatingly, like a late-night FM disc jockey. Finally, after the beep, Ray says, "I hope you have a daughter someday," and hangs up. Ray wants, to talk to Livvy, wants a reason beyond hormones and carelessness for what she did. But he can't find it in himself to call her, and wouldn't know how to talk to her about it if he did. He opens the White Pages again, this time turning to the R's. Running his finger up and down the columns, trying to remember Mrs. Reed's first name, which he either never knew or doesn't remember, he finds only one Reed listed on Ramona Avenue, where Sheila lives. There's an uncomfortable pause as Ray thinks what to say next, how to begin. He wishes he had a window in his office so he could look outside and make small talk about the weather. But the only light in his office is fluorescent and strung with cobwebs, the only plants are plastic and in need of dusting. "Would you like to go to lunch today?" he says abruptly. He looks at his watch and sees that it's almost straight-up noon. "It took you long enough," she says. "I've been waiting for your call ever since that day at the supermarket." "So is that a yes?" "Yes, Mr. Harris," she says, "that's a yes." Just before hanging up, after they make plans to meet in a half-hour at the nearby Sizzler, it occurs to Ray to ask, "Are you still married, or should I ask?" "It probably did." Mrs. Reed reaches over and forks a cantaloupe wedge off the fruit plate that Ray built at the salad bar. He expects her to say more, to fill this gap in his education, but all she does is reach over and steal a couple of white grapes. She pops both of them into her mouth and raises her eyebrows, as if to say, "Well, what do you think?" "Things like this don't just happen," Ray says a little too loudly. "Black eyes just happen. Unwanted children just happen. Falling rocks and car crashes just happen." Mrs. Reed reaches over, and at first Ray thinks it's to swipe more of his lunch, but instead she places two fingers on Ray's hand, the same as she did that day at the supermarket, then touches them to her lips. He looks around and sees that lunch-goers at the adjoining tables are watching them. Leaning closer to Mrs. Reed, across the fruit plate, he whispers, "But betrayal is different. It has to be thought out, plotted, planned. It doesn't just happen." "Oh," she says and pops another grape into her mouth. "It's like that, is it?" Her hair is shorter and, Ray thinks, redder than last time he saw her. He notices what he's noticed before: that Sheila has inherited her mother's grand cheekbones. "You know what Chekhov said," Mrs. Reed says. Ray says, "Refresh my memory." As if the words are printed on the inside of her eyelids, she closes her eyes and recites them: ... "A man can deceive his fiancée or his mistress as much as he likes, and in the eyes of a woman he loves an ass may pass for a philosopher; but a daughter is a different matter." Seemingly proud of her recitation, she steals another grape off of Ray's plate, but he takes it away from her. "What's that supposed to mean?" he says. "Whatever you want it to mean." She shrugs. "You're saying this is all about me. Aren't you? I should've had lunch with John Bradshaw." Mrs. Reed shrugs again. "But you invited me," she says. Ray moves the remaining pieces of fruit around on his plate with his fork. "Anyway," he says, "I think she wanted it to happen." "You're afraid she did." "Livvy isn't that way." "Ray, have you looked at you daughter lately? At my Sheila? At the way they dress, the makeup they wear? Do you think it's just to look like Madonna?" "Wrong guess, I guess?" "Guess again," Mrs. Reed says. "Think about it, Ray: in a free country, why would anybody want to dress in black bustiers and cheap rayon blouses and Lycra pants? What they want is what Madonna gets for looking like that: the money, the fame, and, hold onto your hat, Ray, the men." Ray doesn't admit to Mrs. Reed that he has indeed noticed how Livvy's friends dress, nor does he tell her how uncomfortable he sometimes feels when they come over to the house. Sheila, in particular, Mrs. Reed's daughter, a pretty blonde who's too tall for her age and wears too much eye shadow. She sports jeans that are too tight and chronically forgets to button the top two buttons of her blouse. It's not just the way she dresses, but the way she looks at Ray, unflinchingly, as if daring him to think the things about her that he tries so hard not to. Whenever she comes into the backyard with Livvy, Ray excuses himself to make a phone call or wash his hands. Once inside the house, he watches Sheila's young body in slices through the slats of the Levolors. "Why did it take you so long to call me?" Mrs. Reed folds her arms and rests them on the table. Smiling, she relishes the time it takes him to come up with an answer. "Like I said," he says, "I thought you were still married." He balls up his napkin and tosses it onto the empty plate. "I can't believe Livvy didn't say something. I can't count how many times I told her to invite you over for one of our Thursday night get-togethers. That's no excuse, I know, I should've called and invited you myself, but I wish you'd have come." Ray smiles helplessly. He doesn't tell her that this is the first he's heard of any dinner invitations. He wonders why Livvy didn't say anything. "I'm afraid to answer," Ray says. "Sooner or later," she says, "whatever's supposed to happen, happens. You calling me, for instance. I don't know why it took you so long, but I'm glad you finally did. And I have faith in the cosmic calendar that there must've been some raison d'etre for it happening the way it did." She reaches across the tabletop and squeezes his hand. His first instinct is to pull it away, but he likes the way it feels and squeezes back. "As far as Livvy goes, Ray, so she jumped the gun a bit." Mrs. Reed shrugs. "What are you going to do? Hey, what can you do? Look at me: I only remained immaculate till I was fourteen, and I turned out okay." Her eyebrows rise and fall. "Didn't IT' After lunch Ray doesn't return to work. He thinks about calling in a made-up excuse, but even that seems like too much effort. He goes through the motions of heading for home, but only makes it three blocks before changing direction and getting on the freeway. Leaning across the front seat, he opens the glove compartment to make sure the pistol is still there. He checks to see if it's loaded, then places it on the seat beside him. Only twice has Ray pulled a trigger. The first time was when he was sixteen and went deer-hunting with his father. He's never gone since. It was the year after Ray's older brother Alan had died in a motel room in Bremerton. Alan had hunted and fished big-time, just as his father had raised him to. Raymond and his father came across an out-of-season moose grazing on some joint grass, and his father urged him to shoot it. "Nobody'll ever know," he whispered in Ray's ear. Ray can still recall the huge slow-motion sound of the dumb, beautiful animal's fall to the ground, the scrape of its antlers in the hard dirt. The musky smell of the carcass as they wrapped it in a plastic tarpaulin and covered it with branches and leaves and marked the spot with a small pyramid of rocks. It was too enormous for them to pack out of the canyon by themselves, and Ray's father promised him that they'd get help and come back for it that afternoon. But they never did. Then, one evening the following year, Ray's dog, a two-year-old springer spaniel bitch that had never so much as raised her whiskers in a snarl, snapped onto Ray's father's hand. No matter what he did, the dog refused to let go. Blood sprayed across the kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator door as he lifted the dog off the linoleum and spun her around. When Ray's father finally got free, the dog fled to the back porch and cowered in a corner there. Ray's father wrapped his hand in paper towel and took a pistol from atop the refrigerator. "No dog of mine does this to me," he said as he handed the gun to Ray. Ray took it -the same .38 now on the seat beside him- and coaxed the dog into the backyard. He felt the stickiness of his father's blood on the grip. The dog's fur was matted and thick with the same blood. When Ray came back into the house, he set the pistol in the middle of a half-empty dinner plate on the kitchen table, and told his father, "She wasn't yours, she was mine." *** He wonders if what happened to Livvy will change her life in any significant way; if women who lose their virginity young turn out different from those who keep it until adulthood. Do they spend their lives unhappily searching for that stolen first time? Do they hate all men for something they had nothing to do with? Mrs. Reed said she turned out okay, but Ray guesses that that remains to be seen. He spots the street sign and turns onto Riverchase Drive. He looks over and is surprised to find 4495 right in front of him, the corner house, a duplex sitting upon a hill of coal-black dirt hungry for sod. A white-doored double garage separates the left side of the house from the right, an here's there's a small off-center window in each door that, combined, render the duplex cross-eyed. A red Blazer with an NRA bumper sticker is parked in the right-hand side of the driveway. Ray drives by slowly. Five more times he continues down the street and circles the block. If there were some sign of life, be it Livvy or other young girls leaving the duplex, or just a glimpse of JWR, Ray feels certain that at that moment he'd know exactly what to do. He imagines what it would be like, walking up John Wesley Rogers's driveway, past the Blazer, using the barrel of the.38 to nonchalantly scratch the paint job as he passes by. What it would be like to knock on the front door, wait, and finally see John Wesley Rogers himself: shorter than Ray, runtier, with smooth features but kind of greasy, just what a man who sleeps with teenage girls would look like. To hear him start to say, in his well rehearsed, answering-machine voice, "Hi, can l help you?" as Ray brings the pistol up and points it at him. To feel pleasure at the look on John Wesley Rogers's face as he shrinks, gets smaller, tries to run. Ray rounds the corner onto Riverchase one last time. He takes note of how empty the street is except for the clutter of parked cars. There are no children playing on the lawns. He stops in front of the duplex, looks around, thinks how much he'd like to hurt John Wesley Rogers, how easy it would be. He leans over and rolls down the window on the passenger's side and fires three shots through the Blazer's rear window. Ray drives too fast for someone who has just broken the law. He spends the rest of the day mostly in the mountains, driving with the windows rolled down, the inside of the car swirling with cold air. Winter is getting close. It's after nine o'clock when he returns home. He steps out of the garage cautiously and looks down the driveway. He watches for any activity on the dark street. If the police are waiting for him, he thinks, they'll nab him before he has a chance to get the key into the backdoor. The house is dark. He turns on the fluorescent light above the stove and notices that Livvy has washed and put away last night's dishes as well as the coffee mugs from this morning. He goes through the living room turning on all the lamps to demonstrate that he has nothing to hide, so that his home looks nothing like a harbor for criminals, then turns on the hallway light on his way upstairs to Livvy's room. The door is slightly open. "Love Me Two Times" by the Doors blares from Livvy's stereo. Ray stops short of entering and listens to the words, the music, while watching the light from Livvy's television playing across a triangular section of the hallway carpet. He stands over Livvy's bed. She's asleep, her head turned sideways on the pillow, her long hair caressing her cheek as she breathes. Her covers are all mussed and halfway on the floor. Ray allows this untroubled view of Livvy to erase the image of her from this morning that has haunted him all day. She's wearing her oversized Yale sweatshirt and bulky white sweat socks that make her feet look too large for her legs, which have always been thin and birdlike. But now Ray notices the slope of her ankle to her foot, the swell of her calf, the smoothness of her thigh. He looks away. Gathering up the twisted sheet and bedspread while taking care not to waken her, he tucks Livvy back in. Gently he sits beside her on the bed. MTV is on with the sound off. Ray watches a ZZ Top video while listening to the Doors, watches the three men in long beards move to music that isn't their own. He finds the remote control and turns off the TV. He sits motionless in the near dark for a long time, not touching Livvy. He watches the outline of her breathing, the rise and fall of the covers. He tries but cannot think of her as being any more of a woman, or any less of a young girl, than she was yesterday. He wonders what was lost, if anything was gained. He listens to the Doors, who he liked as much when he was Livvy's age as she does now, for undoubtedly the same reasons. Though he'd never tell her so, to him their songs now sound childish. When the CD ends, the sudden silence wakes up Livvy. She opens her eyes and places her hand on top of Ray's. He smiles at her, and though she can't see his face in the darkness, he'd like to think she can and that she's smiling back at him. Her hand on top of his feels strange. It makes him uncomfortable sitting on her bed, being in her room. He wonders if this is how it will be from now on, never again being able to sit close to her, touching her and having it not mean the same thing as before. Livvy reaches up and wraps her arms around Ray. He pulls her closer and feels her face pressing into his shoulder. He thinks she might be crying, though he can't be sure. He holds her tighter than ever before, but feels her slipping away fast, almost already gone.

Doxycycline determination in human serum and urine by high-performance liquid chromatography. A reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatographic method for quantitative doxycycline determination in human serum and urine is described. The drug was extracted from buffered (pH 6.1) serum or urine into ethyl acetate. A structural analog, demeclocycline, was added as the internal standard. A 10-cm X 2-mm i.d., 5-micrometers Lichrosorb RP8 column with acetonitrile-0.1 M citric acid as the eluent was used. The effluent was monitored at 350 nm. The extraction recovery from spiked serum was 87-8 +/- 4.3% (mean +/- SD, n = 11); for urine, a value of 92.2 +/-2.0% (mean +/- SD, n = 10) was found. Within-run and within-day relative standard deviations averaged (x = 2.5 micrograms/ml, n = 10) and 4.75% (x = 2.6 micrograms/ml, n = 9), respectively. The detection limit was estimated at 50 ng/ml of serum. No significant extra peaks were observed in chromatograms obtained on serum or urine extracts, suggesting the probable absence of metabolic processes in vivo.

Histological alterations in the hepatic tissues of Al2O3 nanoparticles exposed freshwater fish Oreochromis mossambicus. Adverse effects of nanoparticles on aquatic environment and organisms have drawn much special attention to many researches. Aluminium oxide nanoparticles (Al2O3-NPs) have potential uses in varied fields and are seen entering into the ecosystem. Their potential toxicity to the freshwater fish is not much studied. Hence this study was framed to investigate the effect Al2O3 NPs on freshwater fish Oreochromis mossambicus in terms of sub lethal toxicity, histological changes and hepato somatic index (HSI) under laboratory conditions. Fishes were exposed to varying concentrations of Al2O3 NPs for 96hr. LC50 value was found to be in between 235 and 245ppm. The findings of the present work showed that the NPs were accumulated in the fish liver and caused major histological anomalies such as structural alterations in the portal vein, necrotic hepatocytes, vacuolation, aggregation of blood cells and melanomacrophages. Significant histological alterations were observed in the highest concentration. Our results evidenced that the Al2O3 NPs in the aquatic environment affects the health condition of the fishes.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging Microsoft Corporation to fix the problems it will cause when it shuts down the MSN Music validation servers, making it impossible for customers to transfer their music files to new computers or even upgrade their operating system. In an open letter sent to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer today, EFF outlines five steps Microsoft must take to make things right for MSN Music customers -- including a issuing a public apology, providing refunds or replacement music files, and launching a substantial publicity campaign to make sure all customers know their options. "MSN Music customers trusted Microsoft when it said that this was a safe way to buy music, and that trust has been betrayed," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "If Microsoft is prepared to treat MSN Music customers like this, is there any reason to suppose that future customers won't get the same treatment?" MSN Music sold song downloads encumbered with digital rights management (DRM), allowing the music to be played only on approved devices. If you upgraded your computer or operating system, you needed to "reauthorize" your music files with MSN Music's DRM server. But last week, Microsoft announced that it would deactivate those servers because of the complexity of maintaining the technology -- meaning that customers face losing the ability to play their purchased music if they get a new computer or if the hard drive crashes on the old one. Microsoft's only suggestion for customers so far is to export all purchases onto a CD and then recopy it back onto new computers. "Microsoft is asking its customers to spend more time, labor, and money to make degraded copies of music that was purchased in good faith," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "This outcome was easily foreseeable from the moment Microsoft chose to wrap MSN Music files in DRM. Microsoft customers should not have to pay for Microsoft's bad business decisions." EFF's letter also calls on Microsoft to eliminate DRM from its Zune music service now -- or at least to publicly commit to compensating future customers for the inevitable future DRM debacles. "With MSN Music, Microsoft has admitted just how expensive, clumsy, and unfair DRM is. It's time for Microsoft to reject this sloppy technology, and for customers to demand something better," McSherry said. For the full open letter: http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/04/28/microsoft-open-letter Contact: Corynne McSherry Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation corynne@eff.org

As a result of Phase I researches, a perfected design of a simple, reliable and economical phase modulation system has been achieved. Desig parameter perturbation and component selection has lead to this simplified and reliable design of a dual wavelength time sharing phase modulation spectrometer (dual wavelength PMS). The frequency has been optimized at 200 MHz; time-sharing of the oscillator frequency between two diode lasers at different wavelengths, laser diode driver circuits, fiber optic coupling, standardized detector heterodyne njection, amplitude and sensitive phase detection circuit, together with time sharing demodulation are engineered. This instrument had undergone rigorous electromechanical tests and has a remarkable stability corresponding to a draft of less than 0.04degree/hr of phase drift and a noise level of 0.9 mm or approximately 0.2degree of phase. Tissue signals are of the order of 4 cm in amplitude and thus signal to noise ratios of 5:1 with a 5 sec time constant at 3 cm input/output distance are feasible. The remarkable features of time and frequency domain spectroscopy in providing the optical path length for photon migration in tissues is well recognized. Phase I set forth to exploit design parameters of a simplified system suitable for biomedical research and for clinical studies. Phase II will focus on construction of dual wavelength phase modulation systems that will bring to the clinic the advantages of TRs in an economical and feasible device. We propose to pursue product development and testing under Phase II support leading to commercial exploitation under Phase III; that is, production prototype, FDA approval, marketing and sales.

Harrison, Jeff, McCutcheon saying goodbye to HCC The soothing sounds of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” blared from the speakers Friday evening, always the case after a McCutcheon home baseball victory. In 36 years as the Mavericks’ coach, Jake Burton has won nearly 800 games. He made sure to enjoy this 5-1 victory over Hamilton Southeastern, though. It marked the end of the Hoosier Crossroads Conference’s ties to Tippecanoe County. From 2002 to 2004, Burton’s Mavericks won three straight Hoosier Crossroads Conference titles. McCutcheon exits the league with its third straight runner-up finish. McCutcheon, Harrison and Lafayette Jeff were ushered out of the conference and will become members of the North Central Conference next school year. “This has been the most fun in my career playing in this conference, because you’ve got to come ready to play every day, and it can be against ninth place, eighth place, it doesn’t matter,” Burton said. “We’re not going to face any better competition than we see here in this conference with the one and two pitchers.” In 14 years competing as a member of the Hoosier Crossroads Conference, McCutcheon baseball has finished in the lower half of the league just once and posted an average finish of third, the best success story among the three Tippecanoe County schools. “If you’re going to win a state tournament, you’re going to have to beat these guys,” said Burton, who has won two state championships. “(Former LaPorte coach) Ken Schreiber, when I first started coaching, he told me that if you want to be the best you can be, then you have to play the best teams.” Burton has never been one to mince words. But he’s not the first person to advocate being a member of the league because of the postseason preparation the schedule provides. McCutcheon and Harrison were original members of the HCC, which began competition in 2000. Lafayette Jeff joined in 2004 after an ugly exit from the NCC that involved that conference terminating relationships with the Bronchos. Jeff was supposed to enter the Hoosier Crossroads Conference in the 2005-06 school year, but a premature entrance resulted in the Bronchos winning their first sectional baseball title in 16 years in 2004. “Nothing against the (North Central Conference), they were great competition, but the HCC got us ready for this moment," Jeff first baseman Paul Jordan said after the title win. On the unfortunate other end was a plethora of embarrassing defeats, a struggle to be competitive in some sports and the unceremonious removal from what will now be a seven-team league with the suburban Indianapolis schools that remain. Was the move right when each made the move to the HCC? It’s hard to say, and it depends on who you ask. “A lot of times we get killed in soccer, so it would kind of put you in your place when you come back and go against teams that aren’t as good, but it gave us something to shoot for,” said Harrison junior Georgia Lawlor, who competes in girls soccer, gymnastics and track and field. “Getting to play teams ranked in the state is always a great thing. Going into a new conference, we’re probably going to do a lot better, but it’s bittersweet.” The beginning Long trips to Jay County and Connersville were not ideal for Harrison and McCutcheon as members of the Olympic Conference. When Westfield began initial plans in the fall of 1998 to create a new conference, Brownsburg was the initial invitee. According to Harrison athletic director Jerry Galema, who has served in that capacity since 1994, Brownsburg agreed to attend a meeting only if Harrison and McCutcheon were invited. “At the time, it was very enticing,” Galema said. “We picked up the Indianapolis media. Our distances were reduced. When we first started looking at this, we didn’t know the level of competition that was going to be there.” Those early years in the league, which included Avon, Zionsville, Noblesville and Hamilton Southeastern in addition to McCutcheon, Harrison, Westfield and Brownsburg, were strong for the two Tippecanoe County schools. McCutcheon won the inaugural titles in volleyball and boys and girls basketball. Harrison was the first HCC softball champion, then backed it up with a repeat title in 2002. In all, Harrison won six titles between 2001 and 2004. McCutcheon won nine titles in the same span, excluding gymnastics, which never had more than four teams competing in the league. “A thing to think about, too, is the size of the schools were different,” McCutcheon athletic director Ryan Walden said. “We were probably third or fourth or fifth biggest back then. That plays a big difference.” Welcoming Jeff In January 2003, the HCC extended an invitation to Lafayette Jeff, which had over 70 years of history as an NCC member. A month later, Jeff accepted the invitation, effective for the 2005-06 school year. Fishers High School, which was nonexistent at the time, was set to join in 2006-07. “I really don’t want to do it, but it’s the right thing to do,” former athletic director Maurie Denney, a Jeff graduate, told the J&C at the time. A Dec. 12, 2002 column by Jeff Washburn in the J&C assisted in speeding up Jeff’s exit from the NCC and ultimate arrival in the HCC. Washburn wrote: “Some NCC schools are dangerously close to inner-city environments, where safety is an issue.” When Jeff made its official announcement as a future HCC member, the North Central Conference officials sent a faxed letter to former principal Vince Bertram explaining the Bronchos were no longer considered members of the NCC and were ineligible to compete for conference championships. The softball program still owns a 53-game winning streak in NCC play. Jeff still owns six NCC track records. The Bronchos won 164 North Central Conference team titles in 72 years. Like their Tippecanoe County counterparts, the Bronchos had success early in the HCC, winning boys tennis titles in 2004 and ’05, a gymnastics title in 2004 and shared a baseball title in 2006 with Brownsburg. Jeff went undefeated in volleyball in its first season in the league, winning a five-set thriller 15-11 over McCutcheon to claim the title and then defeating Hamilton Southeastern to conclude a perfect run. Jeff’s only other team championships have come in boys basketball (2007-08) and girls basketball (2009-10). “It was a good thing at the time, and I think there were some sports being looked at that they were trying to make the move a good thing for,” former Lafayette Jeff volleyball coach Gail Gripe said. “We always feel like we can compete with some of the best schools. But over time, what happens when we weren’t successful and then we weren’t successful in a lot of sports, it really kind of works on the spirit of the kids and the coaches. “You can say we’re competing, but when you don’t get over that hump, it’s tough.” The struggle While there is proof the three Tippecanoe County schools could win in the Hoosier Crossroads Conference, there’s the notion that certain sports will never be able to compete. For others like Lafayette Jeff baseball a year ago, facing HCC competition strengthened its lineup and pitching staff for the postseason. “You never get a day off,” Jeff baseball coach Scott McTagertt said in early April. “It’s just like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Week after week after week, you are going to face incredible competition.” McTagertt spoke specifically about baseball, but his statement applies across the board. Burton recently compiled a spreadsheet of each sport at McCutcheon’s individual success in the HCC. Boys soccer has finished last in all but two seasons, when the Mavs were ninth out of 10 in 2011 and 2013. True to Burton’s words, though, that program also produced three sectional titles since 2008, the same number as the girls soccer program that finished a program-best sixth in the HCC in the fall. The HCC is considered the state’s elite soccer conference, often filling at least half of the top 10 coaches’ poll. In the fall, Avon and Fishers played each other in the girls state championship and Avon was the boys state runner-up. Like soccer, football programs suffered while preparing for top 10 opponents sprinkled throughout the schedule. The high points were fabulous. Rare football victories in recent years against anyone not from Tippecanoe County became reason to celebrate, such as when Lafayette Jeff students stormed the field following a 30-27 victory over Avon on Sept. 28, 2012. It is Jeff’s only regular-season victory over a non-county rival since 2008. Harrison has lost 36 consecutive football games. Since winning the HCC title in 2002, when Mr. Football Clayton Richard was the quarterback, McCutcheon has not finished above .500. “Football is a little bit different. I think I can support that statement by the IHSAA going to six classes in football,” Walden said. “So what it is indeed saying is that it makes a bigger difference in football with the number of athletes that you have.” Galema concurred. While there’s belief that some of Harrison’s top football players may match up with the top players at other HCC schools, the depth becomes an issue. An injury may be able to be sustained because schools with larger enrollment could have a suitable backup. As the HCC’s smallest school, Harrison hasn’t always enjoyed the same luxury. Several factors can be pinpointed, from school size, depth, talent and even socioeconomic status, depending on the sport. The bottom line is that other than rare programs such as McCutcheon baseball, most of the athletic teams have struggled to do well in conference play on a regular basis in recent years. The future Harrison softball will go down as the last HCC champion from Tippecanoe County. The second-ranked Raiders recently finished the league schedule unbeaten. As the postseasons approach for softball, baseball and boys golf and continue for track and girls tennis, the reality is Harrison, McCutcheon and Lafayette Jeff have a new slate of NCC foes to prove themselves to, some of which appear on schedules already and others that are unfamiliar to the Raiders, Mavericks and Bronchos. It surely was disheartening to be removed from the HCC, at least for some. Lafayette Jeff athletic director Peyton Stovall, a former Broncho athlete who graduated before Jeff moved to the HCC and is in his first year as Broncho AD, calls himself “an NCC guy” — but Galema was Harrison’s AD and had a big part in developing the skeleton of the conference. No one likes to feel like they’re not wanted. It was a harsh reality that perhaps will work out in the form of more wins, more excitement and hopefully more athletes wanting to compete because of newfound success. With the NCC littered with institutions more closely resembling the makeup of Tippecanoe County’s three largest schools, programs may start to see a new level of success — and travel becomes less of an issue in some instances. Given the circumstances, the NCC could be an ideal fit for two new members and a returning one that burned bridges with administrators in the conference just over a decade ago. “For us, moving forward, we’re in this situation of getting into the NCC, and we are excited about it,” Stovall said. “Our coaches are excited about it. Our students, they don’t know much about the NCC. Now it’s coming to, educate about the tradition and how great this conference actually is, and let’s move forward and be excited about it. “There’s a lot of pluses. Down the road, I think they will look back and say this was a good decision.” HCC CHAMPIONS A look at the Hoosier Crossroads Conference championships won by the three Tippecanoe County schools:

Q: Simple example of how to use ast.NodeVisitor? Does anyone have a simple example using ast.NodeVisitor to walk the abstract syntax tree in Python 2.6? The difference between visit and generic_visit is unclear to me, and I cannot find any example using google codesearch or plain google. A: ast.visit -- unless you override it in a subclass, of course -- when called to visit an ast.Node of class foo, calls self.visit_foo if that method exists, otherwise self.generic_visit. The latter, again in its implementation in class ast itself, just calls self.visit on every child node (and performs no other action). So, consider, for example: >>> class v(ast.NodeVisitor): ... def generic_visit(self, node): ... print type(node).__name__ ... ast.NodeVisitor.generic_visit(self, node) ... Here, we're overriding generic_visit to print the class name, but also calling up to the base class (so that all children will also be visited). So for example...: >>> x = v() >>> t = ast.parse('d[x] += v[y, x]') >>> x.visit(t) emits: Module AugAssign Subscript Name Load Index Name Load Store Add Subscript Name Load Index Tuple Name Load Name Load Load Load But suppose we didn't care for Load nodes (and children thereof -- if they had any;-). Then a simple way to deal with that might be, e.g.: >>> class w(v): ... def visit_Load(self, node): pass ... Now when we're visiting a Load node, visit dispatches, NOT to generic_visit any more, but to our new visit_Load... which doesn't do anything at all. So: >>> y = w() >>> y.visit(t) Module AugAssign Subscript Name Index Name Store Add Subscript Name Index Tuple Name Name or, suppose we also wanted to see the actual names for Name nodes; then...: >>> class z(v): ... def visit_Name(self, node): print 'Name:', node.id ... >>> z().visit(t) Module AugAssign Subscript Name: d Index Name: x Store Add Subscript Name: v Index Tuple Name: y Name: x Load Load But, NodeVisitor is a class because this lets it store information during a visit. Suppose all we want is the set of names in a "module". Then we don't need to override generic_visit any more, but rather...: >>> class allnames(ast.NodeVisitor): ... def visit_Module(self, node): ... self.names = set() ... self.generic_visit(node) ... print sorted(self.names) ... def visit_Name(self, node): ... self.names.add(node.id) ... >>> allnames().visit(t) ['d', 'v', 'x', 'y'] This kind of thing is a more typical use case than ones requiring overrides of generic_visit -- normally, you're only interested in a few kinds of nodes, like we are here in Module and Name, so we can just override visit_Module and visit_Name and let ast's visit do the dispatching on our behalf. A: Looking at the code in ast.py it's not that hard to copy paste and roll your own walker. E.g. import ast def str_node(node): if isinstance(node, ast.AST): fields = [(name, str_node(val)) for name, val in ast.iter_fields(node) if name not in ('left', 'right')] rv = '%s(%s' % (node.__class__.__name__, ', '.join('%s=%s' % field for field in fields)) return rv + ')' else: return repr(node) def ast_visit(node, level=0): print(' ' * level + str_node(node)) for field, value in ast.iter_fields(node): if isinstance(value, list): for item in value: if isinstance(item, ast.AST): ast_visit(item, level=level+1) elif isinstance(value, ast.AST): ast_visit(value, level=level+1) ast_visit(ast.parse('a + b')) Prints out Module(body=[<_ast.Expr object at 0x02808510>]) Expr(value=BinOp(op=Add())) BinOp(op=Add()) Name(id='a', ctx=Load()) Load() Add() Name(id='b', ctx=Load()) Load() A: generic_visit is called when a custom visitor (ie visit_Name) can't be found. Here's a piece of code I wrote recently with ast.NodeVisitor: https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/pypy/-/blob/80ead76ab428100ffeb01109c7fc0d94f1048af2/py/_code/_assertionnew.py It interprets the AST nodes to gain debugging information about some of them and falls back in with generic_visit when a special implementation isn't provided.

--- abstract: 'We construct a variational wave function to study whether a fully polarized Fermi sea of ultracold atoms is energetically stable against a single spin flip. Our variational wavefunction contains short-range correlations at least to the same level as Gutzwiller’s projected wavefunction. For the Hubbard lattice model and the continuum model with pure repulsive interaction, we show a fully polarized Fermi sea is generally unstable even for infinite repulsive strength. By contrast for a resonance model, the ferromagnetic state is possible if the $s$-wave scattering length is positive and sufficiently large and the system is prepared to be orthogonal to molecular bound state. However, we can not rule out the possibility that more exotic correlation can destabilize the ferromagnetic state.' author: - 'Xiaoling Cui$^{1}$ and Hui Zhai$^{2}$' title: Stability of a Fully Magnetized Ferromagnetic state in Repulsively Interacting Ultracold Fermi Gases --- Whether a fermion system with repulsive interaction will become ferromagnetic is a long-standing problem in condensed matter physics. Early in 1930s’, Stoner used a simple mean-field theory to predict that ferromagnetism will always take place with sufficient large repulsive interaction [@Stoner]. However, this conclusion is later challenged by Gutzwiller who took the short-range correlation into account [@Gutzwiller]. So far, except a few specific cases [@Nagaoka; @specific], there is no conclusive result on itinerant ferromagnetism. Recently, MIT group reports an experiment on itinerant fermions in an ultracold Fermi gas with large positive scattering length close to a Feshbach resonance [@Ketterle], and they attribute their observations to Stoner ferromagnetism by comparing to theories [@theory; @MacDonald]. However, these theories are basically mean-field theory or a second-order perturbation, which neither include the Gutzwiller type short-range correlation nor consider the unitary limited interaction nearby Feshbach resonance. Moreover many of the experimental signatures can be reproduced qualitatively by a non-magnetic correlated state [@Zhai]. Thus, it calls for a serious study including the effects of both correlation and unitarity in this problem. In this Rapid Communication we address the question whether a fully magnetized state is stable against a single spin flip. We compare the energy of $N+1$ spin-up particles with that of one spin-down particle and $N$ spin-up particles. A fully magnetized ferromagnetic state is definitely unstable if we can find a variational state of the latter whose energy is lower. Similar idea has been used previously in studying the stability of Nagaoka ferromagnetism in the Hubbard model [@Anderson; @Basile; @Roth; @Nagaoka], and attractively interacting Fermi gases with large population imbalance [@Chevy; @imbalance]. In this work, we will explore different realizations of “repulsive interactions" in ultracold Fermi gases: ([**I**]{}) Single-band Hubbard model in a two-dimensional (2D) square or three-dimensional (3D) cubic lattice. The Hamiltonian $\hat{H}=\hat{H}_{\text{t}}+\hat{H}_{\text{int}}$, $\hat{H}_{\text{t}}=-t\sum_{\langle ij\rangle,\sigma}c^\dag_{i\sigma} c_{j\sigma}+\text{h.c}.$, where $\langle ij\rangle$ are nearest-neighbor sites, and $H_{\text{int}}=U\sum_{i}n_{i\uparrow}n_{i\downarrow}$ ($U>0$). ([**II**]{}) Continuum model with finite-range interaction potential in three dimension. $\hat{H}=\sum_{{\bf k}\sigma}\epsilon_{{\bf k}}c^\dag_{{\bf k}\sigma}c_{{\bf k}\sigma}+(1/\Omega)\sum_{{\bf q,k,k^\prime}}V({\bf k-k^\prime})c^\dag_{{\bf q+k}\uparrow}c^\dag_{{\bf q-k}\downarrow}c_{{\bf q-k^\prime}\downarrow}c_{{\bf q+k^\prime}\uparrow}$. Here $\epsilon_{{\bf k}}= {\bf k}^2/(2m)$, $\Omega$ is system volume, and $V({\bf k})$ is the Fourier transformation of real space interaction potential $V({\bf r})$. Let $r_0$ be the interaction range, and thus $V({\bf k})\rightarrow 0$ for $|{\bf k}|\gg k_0=1/r_0$. For the convenience of later calculations, we adopt $s$-wave separable potential $V({\bf k-k^\prime})=Uw({\bf k})w({\bf k^\prime})$, and approximate $w({\bf k})=1/\sqrt{1+e^{\alpha(|{\bf k}|-k_0)/k_0}}$ with $\alpha\gg 1$. The $s$-wave scattering length $a_{\text{s}}$ is related to $U$ as $m/(4\pi a_{\text{s}})=1/U+(1/\Omega)\sum_{|{\bf k}|=0}^{k_c}1/(2\epsilon_{{\bf k}})$, where $k_c=k_0 \ln (1+e^\alpha)/\alpha$. For a repulsive interaction $U>0$, $a_s$ is positive but upper bounded by $\pi/(2k_c)$ at $U\rightarrow +\infty$, and no bound state exists; for an attractive $U<0$, $a_{\text{s}}$ diverges at $U_c=-2\pi^2/(mk_c)$, and only a sufficient attraction $U<U_c$ with $a_{\text{s}}>0$ can support a two-body bound state. ([**III**]{}) Continuum model with zero-range interaction potential in three dimension. $\hat{H}=\sum_{{\bf k}}\epsilon_{{\bf k}}c^\dag_{{\bf k}\sigma}c_{{\bf k}\sigma}+g\sum_{{\bf q,k,k^\prime}}c^\dag_{{\bf q+k}\uparrow}c^\dag_{{\bf q-k}\downarrow}c_{{\bf q-k^\prime}\downarrow}c_{{\bf q+k^\prime}\uparrow}$, and $g$ is related to $a_{\text{s}}$ by $m/(4\pi a_{\text{s}})=1/g+(1/\Omega)\sum_{|{\bf k}|=0}^{\infty}1/(2\epsilon_{{\bf k}})$. There is always a two-body bound state when $a_{\text{s}}>0$. The single-band Hubbard model, as a simplified model for cold atoms in optical lattices (valid when interaction smaller than band gap) and many correlated materials, has been extensively studied before[@Anderson; @Basile; @Roth; @Nagaoka]. The comparison to previous known results justifies the validity of our approach and calibrates the correlation incorporated in our variational wavefunction (w.f.). Then we apply our method to continuum models which are commonly-used for quantum gases and are of our primary interests. The variational w.f. we used for one down-spin system is similar to that used in the discussion of imbalanced Fermi gases [@Chevy], which is $$|\Psi\rangle=\left(\phi_0 c^\dag_{{\bf q_0}\downarrow}+\sum\limits_{{\bf k>k_{\text{F}}},{\bf q<k_{\text{F}}}}\phi_{{\bf k}{\bf q}}c^\dag_{{\bf q_0+ q-k}\uparrow}c^\dag_{{\bf k}\uparrow}c_{{\bf q}\uparrow}+\dots\right)|N\rangle\label{wf}$$ where $|N\rangle$ represents a Fermi sea of $N$-spin up particles with Fermi momentum $k_{\text{F}}$. “$\dots$" in (\[wf\]) represents terms contains more than one particle-hole pairs of spin-up particles. We compute the energy $\mathcal{E}$ (measured from energy of $|N\rangle$) of $|\Psi\rangle$, and compare it with $E_{\text{F}}$ ($=E_{|N+1\rangle}-E_{|N\rangle}$). Our main results are summarized as follows. First, for the single-band Hubbard model, we show that under certain conditions, $H_{\text{int}}|\Psi\rangle=0$ and $\mathcal{E}=\langle \Psi|H_{\text{t}}|\Psi\rangle<E_{\text{F}}$ for most range of particle filling, except for nearby half-filling where the ground state is rigorously proved to be ferromagnetic by Nakaoka [@Nagaoka]. (See Fig. 1). This result agrees with previous studies by various other methods [@Anderson; @Basile; @Roth]; We show that the real space representation of $|\Psi\rangle$ corresponds to Gutzwiller’s w.f. with optimized “backflow" type corrections, which implies $|\Psi\rangle$ includes short-range correlations at least as the Gutzwiller projection. Similarly for the finite-range continuum model, we find $\mathcal{E}<E_{\text{F}}$ for all range of $U>0$. (See Fig. 2). This shows that generally in a purely repulsive interaction model, a fully magnetized ferromagnetic state can not be ground state even for infinite $U$, which is in sharp contrast to Stoner’s mean-field conclusion. Second, for the zero-range continuum model, apart from the polaron state with negative energy discussed before in Ref. [@Chevy; @imbalance; @MC; @polaron], we find the w.f. orthogonal to the polaron state has a positive $\mathcal{E}$ for $a_{\text{s}}>0$. At small $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}$, $\mathcal{E}$ as a function of $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}$ follows the prediction of perturbation expansion very well. At large $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}$, $\mathcal{E}$ saturates (due to unitarity) to $1.82E_{\text{F}}$. Below $k_{\text{F}}a^{\text{c}}_{\text{s}}=2.35$, we can find variational state with which $\mathcal{E}<E_{\text{F}}$, but fail to find such cases otherwise. (See Fig. 3). This result contradicts to the previous prediction $k_{\text{F}}a^{\text{c}}_{\text{s}}=1.40$ based on perturbation theory [@MacDonald; @notation]. Thus the necessary condition for ferromagnetism is a large enough $a_{\text{s}}\gtrsim 2.35/k_{\text{F}}$, which requires a sufficiently attractive interaction potential to support a bound state and cause resonant scattering, and more importantly the system has to be prepared in the metastable scattering state that is orthogonal to molecule state. Nevertheless, our method can not prove this is a sufficient condition. Similar result is found for the finite-range model with $U<0$ and nearby scattering resonance. The details of our calculation are explained below. [*Single-band Hubbard model:*]{} Here we can first prove Theorem 1: Under two conditions that (i) $\phi_{{\bf k q}}\equiv\phi_{\bf k}$ independent of ${\bf q}$, and (ii) $\phi_0=-\sum_{{\bf k}>{\bf k_F}} \phi_{\bf k}$, the w.f. $$|\psi\rangle_{1}=\left(\phi_0 c^\dag_{{\bf q_0}\downarrow}+\sum_{{\bf k}>{\bf k_F}, {\bf q}<{\bf k_F}}\phi_{{\bf k q}}c^\dag_{{\bf q_0}+{\bf q}-{\bf k}\downarrow}c^\dag_{{\bf k}\uparrow}u_{{\bf q}\uparrow} \right) |N\rangle,\label{general_psi}$$ is an exact eigenstate of $\hat{H}_{\text{int}}$, and $\hat{H}_{\text{int}}|\psi\rangle_{1}=0$. This theorem can be verified straightforwardly. The subscript $_1$ of $|\psi\rangle$ means it contains one particle-hole pairs of up-spins, and the best variational energy for this state is denoted by $\mathcal{E}^{(1)}$. Condition (i) ensures that $\hat{H}_{\text{int}}$ acting onto $|\psi\rangle_{1}$ will not generate two particle-hole term, and condition (ii) ensures zero interaction energy. For an intuitive understanding of this zero interaction energy, we can Fourier transfer it to real space. Using condition (ii), one can show the w.f. (\[general\_psi\]) is equivalent to $$\begin{aligned} \left(\frac{\phi_0}{\sqrt{N_s}}\sum\limits_{{\bf m}}c^\dag_{{\bf m}\downarrow}\mathcal{P}_{{\bf m}} +\sum\limits_{{\bf n}\neq {\bf m}}\phi_{{\bf mn}}c^\dag_{{\bf m}\downarrow}c^\dag_{{\bf n}\uparrow} c_{{\bf m}\uparrow}\right)e^{i{\bf q_0}{\bf m}}|N\rangle\nonumber.\end{aligned}$$ Here $\mathcal{P}_{{\bf m}}=1-c^\dag_{{\bf m}\uparrow}c_{{\bf m}\uparrow}$ presents standard Gutzwiller projection operator. $N_{\text{s}}$ is the number of lattice sites. $\phi_{{\bf mn}}=\sum_{{\bf k}>{\bf k_F}}\phi_{{\bf k}}e^{i{\bf k}{\bf (m-n)}}$, and the second term presents “backflow" type corrections. It becomes obvious that there will be no double occupancy and no interaction energy. Hence, we have established a momentum space w.f. representation of short-range correlation, which can be generalized to free space straightforwardly. ![$\delta E=\mathcal{E}^{(1)}-E_{\text{F}}$(in units of $t$) as a function of particle density $\rho=N/N_{\text{s}}$ in a 3D cubic (solid) and a 2D square (dashed line) lattice. \[Hubbard\]](Hubbard.eps){height="3.5cm" width="5.5cm"} Next we try to find the minimum total(=kinetic) energy by introducing a Lagrange multiplier that can be proved as just the energy $\mathcal{E}^{(1)}$ (counted from the band bottom), $\mathcal{F}=\langle\psi|\hat{H}_t|\psi\rangle-\mathcal{E}^{(1)} \langle\psi|\psi\rangle$. Minimization of $\mathcal{F}$ gives ${\bf q_0}=0$ and the self-consistent equation $$\sum\limits_{{\bf k>k_{\text{F}}}}\frac{\mathcal{E}^{(1)}}{\sum_{{\bf q<k_{\text{F}}}} (\epsilon_{{\bf k q}}-\mathcal{E}^{(1)})}=1,$$ in which $\epsilon_{{\bf k q}}=\epsilon_{{\bf q-k}}+\epsilon_{{\bf k}}-\epsilon_{{\bf q}}$. Its solution gives $\mathcal{E}^{(1)}$. $\delta E=\mathcal{E}^{(1)}-E_{\text{F}}$ as a function of particle density $\rho$ in a cubic and a square lattice is plotted in Fig. \[Hubbard\]. We find for $\rho<\rho_c$, $\delta E<0$ means the ferromagnetic state is always unstable even for infinite $U$. In fact, for a cubic lattice, when $\rho\rightarrow 0$, $\mathcal{E}^{(1)}$ goes like $\rho$ while $E_{\text{F}}$ goes like $\rho^{2/3}$, hence $\delta E$ is negative and shows a much rapid decrease compared with the square lattice. While for $\rho>\rho_c$, $\delta E>0$, this is consistent with Nagaoka theorem, which forces $\delta E$ to be positive when $\rho\rightarrow 1$. $\rho_c$ obtained as $0.59\ (0.76)$ for the square (cubic) lattice agree with previous studies by a finite-size real space evaluation[@Basile] or by using Green functions[@Roth]. By contrast, our variational w.f. (Eq. \[general\_psi\]) greatly simplifies the calculation, and also enable calculations in the thermodynamic limit simply by employing density of state in a one-dimensional integral equation. Moreover, this w.f. can be systematically improved by including multiple particle-hole contributions. Theorem 2: Consider the wave function $|\psi\rangle_{n}$ that contains up to $n$ particle-hole pairs $$\begin{aligned} \sum\limits_{m=0}^{n}\frac{1}{(m!)^2}\sum_{\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m}; \{ {\bf q_j}\}_{1}^{m}}\phi^{(m)}_{\{ {\bf k_i}\}_{1}^{m};\{ {\bf q_j}\}_{1}^{m}}c^\dag_{{\bf p_m}\downarrow}\prod_{i=1}^{m}c^\dag_{{\bf k_i}\uparrow}\prod\limits_{j=1}^{m}c_{{\bf q_j}\uparrow} |N\rangle\nonumber\end{aligned}$$ with ${\bf p_m}={\bf q_0}+\sum_{i=1}^m({\bf q_i}-{\bf k_i})$, where $\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m}$ denotes a set $\{ {\bf k_1},\dots,{\bf k_m}\}$ and $\{ {\bf q_j} \}_{1}^{m}$ denotes $\{ {\bf q_1},\dots,{\bf q_m}\}$. It satisfies $H_{\text{int}}|\psi\rangle_{n}=0$ under the condition (i) $\phi^{(m)}_{\{ {\bf k_i}\}_{1}^{m};\{ {\bf q_j} \}_{1}^{m}}$ can be expressed as $B^{(m)}_{\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m};{\bf q_{m-1}},\dots,{\bf q_1}}-B^{(m)}_{\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m};{\bf q_{m}},{\bf q_{m-2}},\dots,{\bf q_1}}+\dots+(-1)^{m-1}B^{(m)}_{\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m};{\bf q_{m}},{\bf q_{m-1}},\dots,{\bf q_2}} +C^{(m)}_{\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m};\{ {\bf q_j}\}_{1}^{m}}, $ with $B^{(0)}=0$, $C^{(0)}=\phi^{(0)}$; $C^{(n)}_{\{ {\bf k_i}\}_{1}^{m};\{ {\bf q_j}\}_{1}^{m}}=0$; and (ii) $C^{(m-1)}_{\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m-1};\{ {\bf q_j} \}_1^{m-1}}+\sum_{{\bf k_{m}}}B^{(m)}_{\{{\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m-1},{\bf k_m}; \{ {\bf q_j}\}_{1}^{m-1}}=0$ for any $\{ {\bf k_i} \}_{1}^{m-1}$ and $\{ {\bf q_j}\}_{1}^{m-1}$. Similar to Theorem 1, this theorem can be verified straightforwardly, and condition (i) ensures $H_{\text{int}}$ acting on $|\psi\rangle_n$ will not generate $n+1$ particle-hole terms, and condition (ii) ensures zero-energy. Obviously, $|\psi\rangle_{n-1}$ is a special case of $|\psi\rangle_n$, and hence $\mathcal{E}^{(n)}\leq \mathcal{E}^{(n-1)}$, where $\mathcal{E}^{(n)}$ is the best variational energy for $|\psi\rangle_n$. By including more particle-hole terms, one can always further lower $\mathcal{E}$, and make $\rho_c$ more close to unity. On the other hand, one can also prove $\lim_{\rho\rightarrow 0}(\mathcal{E}^{(n)}-\mathcal{E}^{(n-1)})/\mathcal{E}^{(1)} \rightarrow 0$, namely, the multiple particle-hole contribution vanishes and $\mathcal{E}^{(1)}$ becomes exact at low density limit. [*Finite-range continuum model:*]{} We consider the same variational w.f. as Eq. \[general\_psi\] with $\phi_{{\bf k}{\bf q}}\equiv\phi_{\bf k}$. The saddle point equation from energy minimization is $$\begin{aligned} \frac{U}{\Omega}\sum_{\bf q}\left( \phi_0 +\sum_{{\bf k}}w_{\bf k}\phi_{{\bf k}}\right)&=&\mathcal{E}\phi_0,\nonumber\\ \frac{U}{\Omega}w_{{\bf k}}\sum_{{\bf q}}\left(\phi_0+\sum\limits_{{\bf k^\prime}}w_{{\bf k^\prime}}\phi_{{\bf k^\prime}}\right)&=&\sum_{{\bf q}}(\mathcal{E}-\epsilon_{{\bf k q}}) \phi_{{\bf k}},\label{sadd}\end{aligned}$$ where we have adopted the approximation $w_{{\bf q}}\approx 1$ for $|{\bf q}|<|{\bf k_{\text{F}}}|<k_0$. From Eqs. \[sadd\] one can obtain a self-consistent equation $$\frac{2E_{\text{F}}}{3\mathcal{E}}-\frac{1}{U_0}= \int_{1}^{+\infty}\frac{\tilde{k}^2 w^2(\tilde{k}) d\tilde{k}}{\tilde{k}^2-\mathcal{E}/(2E_{\text{F}})},\label{finite}$$ where $\tilde{k}=k/k_{\text{F}}$ and $U_0=U mk_{\text{F}}/(2\pi^2)$ are dimensionless. The solution to Eq. \[finite\] is plotted in Fig. \[finiterange\](a). Fig. \[finiterange\](b) shows the results are insensitive to the choice of the free parameter $\alpha$ in the separable potential. As one can see, for $U_0\rightarrow +\infty$, $\mathcal{E}$ saturates to a finite value, which is smaller than $E_{\text{F}}$. This saturation precisely reflects the physics that the repulsive interaction can be strongly renormalized by short-range correlations, whose upper bound is the kinetic energy cost for the screening, and is always finite even when the bare interaction diverges. In fact, for $k_0\gg k_{\text{F}}$, the integral at r.h.s. of Eq. \[finite\] is approximately $k_0/k_{\text{F}}$, hence at $U\rightarrow +\infty$, $\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}= 2k_{\text{F}}/(3k_0)<1$. For a general case, we show in Fig. \[finiterange\](c) $\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}$ at $U_0=+\infty$ as a function of $k_0/k_{\text{F}}$ at different $\alpha$, and this ratio is always below unity. ![(color online). $\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}$ for the continuum model with finite-range interactions. (a) $\mathcal{E}$ as a function of $U_0$ for $k_{\text{0}}/k_{\text{F}}=2$ or $5$, $\alpha=10$. Arrows denote the corresponding critical $U_c$ that can afford a two-body bound state. (b) the same plot as (a) for $k_{\text{0}}/k_{\text{F}}=5$ and $\alpha=2$ or $10$. (c) $\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}$ at $U_0\rightarrow +\infty$ as a functions $k_0$ for $\alpha=2,3,10$. \[finiterange\]](finiterange.eps){height="4.5cm" width="8.2cm"} [*Zero-range continuum model:*]{} This model is in fact the $k_0\rightarrow +\infty$ limit of the finite-range model with $U<0$. For the w.f. of Eq. \[general\_psi\], $H|\psi\rangle=\mathcal{E}|\psi\rangle$ gives the same self-consistent equation as in Ref. [@Chevy], $$\frac{\mathcal{E}}{E_{\text{F}}}=2\int_0^1d\tilde{q}\tilde{q}^2\left[\frac{\pi}{2}\frac{1}{k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}}-1+g\left(\frac{\mathcal{E}}{E_{\text{F}}},\tilde{q}\right)\right]^{-1}$$ where $g(\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}},\tilde{q})$ is given by the integral $$\begin{aligned} \int_1^{+\infty}d\tilde{k}\left(\int_0^{\pi}d\theta\frac{\tilde{k}^2 \sin\theta}{2\tilde{k}^2-2\tilde{q}\tilde{k}\cos\theta-\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}}-1\right)\nonumber\end{aligned}$$ where $\tilde{q}=q/k_{\text{F}}$ and $\tilde{k}=k/k_{\text{F}}$. For this model there is always a bound state in a two-body problem for $a_{\text{s}}>0$, and correspondingly, there is always a polaron solution with negative $\mathcal{E}$ when $a_{\text{s}}>0$, which has been extensively discussed in Ref. [@Chevy; @imbalance; @MC; @polaron]. In addition, there is always a positive energy solution orthogonal to the polaron solution. For small $k_Fa_s$ applying the second-order perturbation theory[@LHY] to this case, one will obtain $\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}=4k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}/(3\pi)+2(k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}})^2/\pi^2$. It is found our variational results fit quite well to this expansion in the regime $|k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}|\lesssim 0.6$ (see inset of Fig. \[zero-range\]), and start to deviate substantially when $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}\gtrsim0.6$. At $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}\rightarrow+\infty$, we find the energy under this trial w.f. saturates at $1.82E_{\text{F}}$ instead of diverging as perturbation theory predicts. This saturation is due to unitary limit of resonance interaction. We find $\mathcal{E}<E_{\text{F}}$ for $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}<2.35$, which means a fully polarized ferromagnetism is definitely unstable below a critical $k_{\text{F}}a^{\text{c}}_{\text{s}}=2.35$. It contradicts to previous results based on a second-order perturbation [@MacDonald] which predicts the system becomes fully magnetized at $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}=1.40$ [@notation]. The reason for this discrepancy is because the second order perturbation overestimates the interaction effects in the regime $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}\gtrsim 1$. Similar behavior is found for a resonance scattering with finite interaction range, as shown in the $U_0<0$ part of Fig. \[finiterange\](a). We would like to point out several intrinsic relations between (a) single-band Hubbard model at $U\gg t$, (b) finite-range continuum model at $U_0=+\infty$ and (c) zero-range continuum model at $a_{\text{s}}=+\infty$. First is the relation between the coefficient of different terms in the w. f. (Eq. [\[general\_psi\]]{}): for (b) we have $\phi_0+\sum_{{\bf k>k_{\text{F}}}}w_{{\bf k}}\phi_{{\bf k}}=0$; this is equivalent to (a) with all $w_{{\bf k}}=1$ and a momentum cut-off imposed by $\pi/a_{\text{L}}$ instead of $k_0$ ($a_{\text{L}}$ is the lattice constant); for (c) we can define $\chi_{{\bf q}}=\phi_0+\sum_{{\bf k>k_{\text{F}}}}\phi_{{\bf k}{\bf q}}$ then we have $\phi_{{\bf k}{\bf q}}=\chi^0_{{\bf q}}/(\mathcal{E}-\epsilon_{{\bf k}{\bf q}})$ with $\chi^0_{{\bf q}}=g\chi_{{\bf q}}/\Omega$[@tan], so at unitary limit one can get similar relation as $\phi_0+\sum_{{\bf k>k_{\text{F}}}}(\phi_{{\bf k}{\bf q}}+\chi^0_{{\bf q}}/(2\epsilon_{{\bf k}}))+\sum_{{\bf q<k_{\text{F}}}}1/(2\epsilon_{{\bf q}})=0$. Second, for (a) at low density limit and (b) with $k_F\ll k_0$ we can show $\mathcal{E}/E_F\sim k_Fr_{\text{eff}}$, here the effective range $r_{\text{eff}}=a_{\text{L}}$ for (a), and $1/k_0$ for (b), which directly leads to the instability of ferromagnetism in these limits; while (c) does not fall into the class of pure repulsive interactions. ![$\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}$ as a function of $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}$ for the continuum model with zero range interactions. Dashed horizontal lines denote saturated values of $\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}$ at unitarity. Inset is fit to the perturbation results (see text) for small $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}$. \[zero-range\]](zerorange.eps){height="4.2cm" width="6.3cm"} The calculation above uses the w.f. that contains only one particle-hole pairs of up-spins. Including multiple particle-hole pairs can systematically improve the results, lead to further lower $\mathcal{E}$ and increased $k_{\text{F}}a^{\text{c}}_{\text{s}}$. However, from the experience in studies of polaron branch, it is found the single particle-hole w.f. can already produce a result very close to Monte Carlo simulation [@MC] and later experiments [@polaron], and the reason for this perfect agreement is understood as a nearly perfect destructive interference of higher-order particle-hole contributions [@imbalance]. Hence it is unlikely $\mathcal{E}/E_{\text{F}}$ at resonance can be reduced from $1.82$ to below unity. Even though, we only prove ferromagnetic is stable against single spin flip above a critical $k_{\text{F}}a^{\text{c}}_{\text{s}}$, and we can not rule out the possibility that a state with more down-spin can be energetically more favorable due to more exotic correlations. Our results bring forward two intriguing issues. (i) for $0.6\lesssim k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}<2.35$, the system can neither be fully ferromagnetic nor be well described by perturbation theory. It is in a very interesting strongly interacting quantum phase with large ferromagnetic and/or short-range fluctuations; (ii) for $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}>2.35$, our approach predicts the system will become ferromagnetic. If it is true, what is the smoking gun experimental evidence? If future experiments find it is not true, then it means the system contains much stronger correlations than discussed here. [*Acknowledgment*]{}: We thank Z. Y. Weng, Y. P. Wang, S. Chen, J. L. Song for valuable discussions. H.Z. is supported by the Basic Research Young Scholars Program of Tsinghua University, NSFC Grant No. 10944002 and 10847002. X.L.C. is supported by NSFC, CAS and 973-project of MOST. [99]{} E. Stoner, Philos. Mag. [**15**]{}, 1018 (1933). M. C. Gutzwiller, Phys. Rev. Lett. [**10**]{}, 159 (1963); Phys. Rev. [**137**]{}, A1726 (1965). Y. Nagaoka, Phys. Rev. [**147**]{}, 392 (1966). A. Mielke, J. Phys. 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Hence the prediction for fully polarized state $k_{\text{F}}a_{\text{s}}=1.112$[@MacDonald] is translated to $1.40$ to compare with our result (2.35). Our result should be translated to 1.87 to compare with MIT experiment [@Ketterle]. It is related to contact density introduced by S. Tan, Ann. Phys. (N. Y.), [**323**]{}, 2952 (2008).

Vehicle headlamp systems employing a plurality of beam patterns offer a unique and attractive viewing experience and to address multiple lighting and visibility functions. It is therefore desired to implement a plurality of dynamic beam patterns in automotive vehicles for various lighting application and vehicle functions.

In the related art, a configuration is known in which an ISOFIX anchor as an attachment tool for fixing a child seat is provided in a rear seat surface of a vehicle seat (JP-A-2015-085730). The ISOFIX anchor is provided in the state of being embedded in a hole which is formed though a portion formed in a rear end portion of a seat cushion and bulging in a bank shape. The embedded hole of the ISOFIX anchor is normally configured such that a front-side opening is covered with a cover member which is openable and closable. When the child seat is mounted, the cover member is opened so that the ISOFIX anchor therein is exposed to a front side. In the above-described related art, the child seat is slid to be pushed in the hole in a state where the cover member is opened, thereby maintaining a position of the cover member in a state where the hole is opened. However, with such a configuration, a space for accepting the cover member in the hole, and a mechanism which maintains the cover member in the hole in an opened posture are provided necessarily, and the hole is increased in size and is complicated.

Q: How to open files with an incremental numbers? Right now I'm doing this: filenames = ['ch01.md', 'ch02.md', 'ch03.md', 'ch04.md', 'ch05.md', 'ch06.md'] with open('chall.txt', 'w') as outfile: for fname in filenames: But I have many files written as chxx.md (until ch24.md). Is there any what to modify the script using ranges? So I don't have to type in all the files names? A: You can probably use glob. It's an easy way to collect files with the use of wildcard characters. import glob filenames = glob.glob('/yourDirectory/ch*.md') # Will give you a list of all the file names with open('chall.txt', 'w') as outfile: for fname in filenames:

Q: Does the blending matrix change between calculating various curve segments in a uniform cubic B-splines approximation? I would like to ask about uniform (periodic) cubic B-splines (approximation, no interpolation). $$B=1/6\begin{bmatrix}-1&3&-3&1\\3&-6&3&0\\-3&0&3&0\\1&4&1&0\end{bmatrix}$$ $B$ is the matrix of coefficients that allows calculating a single curve segment with the formula: $$ Q_i(u)=[u^3 u^2 u^1 1]B \begin{bmatrix}P_{i-3}\\P_{i-2}\\P_{i-1}\\P_{i}\end{bmatrix} $$ When $i=3$ I calculate the first segment of the curve. My question is when $i=4$ and I want to calculate the second segment of the curve I must change the $4$ control points but does $B$ change or not? A: No, the $B$ matrix (basis coefficient matrix) does not change from one segment to the next. It is a property of the type of spline you're using, in this case cubic B-splines. If you used Bézier splines or Hermite splines instead, you'd have a different $B$ matrix.

One of the many petitions circulating on the Internet in the wake of leaks about the US government's massive surveillance programs is aimed at major Internet and technology companies. It calls on them to push Congress to investigate and stop the abuses. This is, of course, a good idea. It may even help, now that some members of Congress are having misgivings about the programs they've worked so hard not to understand. Had companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Yahoo done this in the first place – and had they been as ardent to protect privacy as they are to collect data on their users – the spying programs might not have metastasized to such a degree. This could be a turning point for the tech industry. The biggest companies providing cloud-based Internet services, and some smaller ones as well, are under pressure amid increasing public unease about the government's insistence that privacy is all but a dead letter against the threat of terrorism. They have a chance to regain trust. To do so they will need to rethink a lot of their methods – not least their adoption of systems, based in large part on monetizing their own data-mining, that are inherently insecure in the face of orders from people who command armies, and may be insecure in more general ways. Let's be clear on one thing: the industry has, at the very least, been forced to cooperate with secret disclosure requests that include orders not to speak publicly about what's going on. It remains possible, their wholesale denials aside, that some or all of these companies have been not just cooperating but actively collaborating with the surveillance state. We can't know for sure. By design, the system is opaque. This helps explain why several of these companies have implored the government to make the National Security Agency letter data orders more transparent. They realize that their credibility has taken a serious jolt, and that they are in the position of trying to prove a negative, something that is more difficult when they're told, under threat of prosecution, that they can't talk about it beyond the most vague and meaningless statements. The tech companies would be more convincing if their industry hadn't been so complicit in the development of the surveillance state in the first place. Silicon Valley and its global analogs made it possible, and have made vast amounts of money in the process as government suppliers. They've been arms dealers not just to American spies but to the world's most repressive governments as well. Moreover, even the Internet-related tech companies that haven't actively helped the dictators and spies have been creating large businesses based on collecting, massaging and making money off of the data their users and customers provide in their day-to-day use of the services. And even if the companies themselves haven't been abusing their ownership of these giant data collections, they have by definition left themselves and their customers vulnerable to government overreach. I do not put all of the companies mentioned above in exactly the same category, by the way. While I don't trust Google absolutely, I trust it more than, say, Facebook when it comes to these issues, based on long observation of both. (What should worry you, no matter who you trust today, is the possibility that the next generation of corporate leaders will have different policies.) It is difficult, moreover, to take their denials of complicity fully to heart. Consider the Yahoo statement about the Prism program. Nothing is going on that should worry us, the company insists. Then look at a line-by-line analysis of the statement by the American Civil Liberties Union's Christopher Soghoian, who makes clear on his personal blog that "Yahoo has not in fact denied receiving court orders … for massive amounts of communications data." Statements and letters to Congress won't solve their problem, even if Congress by some miracle changed the law to restrict the overweening data gathering and by a greater miracle President Obama – an ardent surveillance-statist leader, contrary to his campaign promises – were to sign it. (The biggest miracle of all would be compliance with such a law by the government.) The tech companies need to rethink the way they do business entirely. They need to stop collecting so much data in the first place. Then they need to create systems that protect users' data even from people inside the companies, and be absolutely clear about the situations when they can't promise this. For the rest of us, it's time to look for services and products that provide us with more security. The trajectory of surveillance, government and corporate, suggests we should assume we are being recorded at all times on unencrypted networks, for example. We need to adopt encryption and other countermeasures much more widely. I'll discuss there in upcoming columns. Meanwhile, I'm hoping the tech companies will grab this opportunity. They can't prove a negative, but they can take positive actions to regain – or gain for the first time – our trust. Will they?

Kazuo Kasahara was a Japanese screenwriter particularly known for his work in the yakuza film genre. He was born in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo and dropped out of Nippon University. Works Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima (1973) Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Proxy War (1974) Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Police Tactics (1974) Cops vs. Thugs (1975) Yakuza Graveyard (1976) The Battle of Port Arthur (1980) Final Yamato (1983) Odin: Photon Sailer Starlight (1985) See also Kinji Fukasaku Haruhiko Arai - a screenwriter and a movie critic who wrote 'Dramas of Showa' (published from Ohta Publishing) about Kasahara with Kasahara. References External links Category:1927 births Category:2002 deaths Category:Japanese screenwriters

Plasmablastic lymphoma of the stomach: an unusual presentation. Plasmablastic lymphoma (PBL) is listed in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification as a subtype of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Some morphologic features of PBL are similar to DLBCL; however, PBL has minimal or no expression of CD20 and leukocyte common antigen. Instead, PBL has been characterized by the plasmablastic morphology of the cancer cells, with high mitotic figures. It is believed to be an aggressive lymphoma. We describe a case of a patient who seemed to pose a diagnostic dilemma, and who was later found to have PBL.

Genetic predisposition to higher blood pressure increases risk of incident hypertension and cardiovascular diseases in Chinese. Although multiple genetic markers associated with blood pressure have been identified by genome-wide association studies, their aggregate effect on risk of incident hypertension and cardiovascular disease is uncertain, particularly among East Asian who may have different genetic and environmental exposures from Europeans. We aimed to examine the association between genetic predisposition to higher blood pressure and risk of incident hypertension and cardiovascular disease in 26 262 individuals in 2 Chinese population-based prospective cohorts. A genetic risk score was calculated based on 22 established variants for blood pressure in East Asian. We found the genetic risk score was significantly and independently associated with linear increases in blood pressure and risk of incident hypertension and cardiovascular disease (P range from 4.57×10(-3) to 3.10×10(-6)). In analyses adjusted for traditional risk factors including blood pressure, individuals carrying most blood pressure-related risk alleles (top quintile of genetic score distribution) had 40% (95% confidence interval, 18-66) and 26% (6-45) increased risk for incident hypertension and cardiovascular disease, respectively, when compared with individuals in the bottom quintile. The genetic risk score also significantly improved discrimination for incident hypertension and cardiovascular disease and led to modest improvements in risk reclassification for cardiovascular disease (all the P<0.05). Our data indicate that genetic predisposition to higher blood pressure is an independent risk factor for blood pressure increase and incident hypertension and cardiovascular disease and provides modest incremental information to cardiovascular disease risk prediction. The potential clinical use of this panel of blood pressure-associated polymorphisms remains to be determined.

/* sptcon.f -- translated by f2c (version 20061008). You must link the resulting object file with libf2c: on Microsoft Windows system, link with libf2c.lib; on Linux or Unix systems, link with .../path/to/libf2c.a -lm or, if you install libf2c.a in a standard place, with -lf2c -lm -- in that order, at the end of the command line, as in cc *.o -lf2c -lm Source for libf2c is in /netlib/f2c/libf2c.zip, e.g., http://www.netlib.org/f2c/libf2c.zip */ #include "f2c.h" #include "blaswrap.h" /* Table of constant values */ static integer c__1 = 1; /* Subroutine */ int sptcon_(integer *n, real *d__, real *e, real *anorm, real *rcond, real *work, integer *info) { /* System generated locals */ integer i__1; real r__1; /* Local variables */ integer i__, ix; extern /* Subroutine */ int xerbla_(char *, integer *); extern integer isamax_(integer *, real *, integer *); real ainvnm; /* -- LAPACK routine (version 3.2) -- */ /* Univ. of Tennessee, Univ. of California Berkeley and NAG Ltd.. */ /* November 2006 */ /* .. Scalar Arguments .. */ /* .. */ /* .. Array Arguments .. */ /* .. */ /* Purpose */ /* ======= */ /* SPTCON computes the reciprocal of the condition number (in the */ /* 1-norm) of a real symmetric positive definite tridiagonal matrix */ /* using the factorization A = L*D*L**T or A = U**T*D*U computed by */ /* SPTTRF. */ /* Norm(inv(A)) is computed by a direct method, and the reciprocal of */ /* the condition number is computed as */ /* RCOND = 1 / (ANORM * norm(inv(A))). */ /* Arguments */ /* ========= */ /* N (input) INTEGER */ /* The order of the matrix A. N >= 0. */ /* D (input) REAL array, dimension (N) */ /* The n diagonal elements of the diagonal matrix D from the */ /* factorization of A, as computed by SPTTRF. */ /* E (input) REAL array, dimension (N-1) */ /* The (n-1) off-diagonal elements of the unit bidiagonal factor */ /* U or L from the factorization of A, as computed by SPTTRF. */ /* ANORM (input) REAL */ /* The 1-norm of the original matrix A. */ /* RCOND (output) REAL */ /* The reciprocal of the condition number of the matrix A, */ /* computed as RCOND = 1/(ANORM * AINVNM), where AINVNM is the */ /* 1-norm of inv(A) computed in this routine. */ /* WORK (workspace) REAL array, dimension (N) */ /* INFO (output) INTEGER */ /* = 0: successful exit */ /* < 0: if INFO = -i, the i-th argument had an illegal value */ /* Further Details */ /* =============== */ /* The method used is described in Nicholas J. Higham, "Efficient */ /* Algorithms for Computing the Condition Number of a Tridiagonal */ /* Matrix", SIAM J. Sci. Stat. Comput., Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1986. */ /* ===================================================================== */ /* .. Parameters .. */ /* .. */ /* .. Local Scalars .. */ /* .. */ /* .. External Functions .. */ /* .. */ /* .. External Subroutines .. */ /* .. */ /* .. Intrinsic Functions .. */ /* .. */ /* .. Executable Statements .. */ /* Test the input arguments. */ /* Parameter adjustments */ --work; --e; --d__; /* Function Body */ *info = 0; if (*n < 0) { *info = -1; } else if (*anorm < 0.f) { *info = -4; } if (*info != 0) { i__1 = -(*info); xerbla_("SPTCON", &i__1); return 0; } /* Quick return if possible */ *rcond = 0.f; if (*n == 0) { *rcond = 1.f; return 0; } else if (*anorm == 0.f) { return 0; } /* Check that D(1:N) is positive. */ i__1 = *n; for (i__ = 1; i__ <= i__1; ++i__) { if (d__[i__] <= 0.f) { return 0; } /* L10: */ } /* Solve M(A) * x = e, where M(A) = (m(i,j)) is given by */ /* m(i,j) = abs(A(i,j)), i = j, */ /* m(i,j) = -abs(A(i,j)), i .ne. j, */ /* and e = [ 1, 1, ..., 1 ]'. Note M(A) = M(L)*D*M(L)'. */ /* Solve M(L) * x = e. */ work[1] = 1.f; i__1 = *n; for (i__ = 2; i__ <= i__1; ++i__) { work[i__] = work[i__ - 1] * (r__1 = e[i__ - 1], dabs(r__1)) + 1.f; /* L20: */ } /* Solve D * M(L)' * x = b. */ work[*n] /= d__[*n]; for (i__ = *n - 1; i__ >= 1; --i__) { work[i__] = work[i__] / d__[i__] + work[i__ + 1] * (r__1 = e[i__], dabs(r__1)); /* L30: */ } /* Compute AINVNM = max(x(i)), 1<=i<=n. */ ix = isamax_(n, &work[1], &c__1); ainvnm = (r__1 = work[ix], dabs(r__1)); /* Compute the reciprocal condition number. */ if (ainvnm != 0.f) { *rcond = 1.f / ainvnm / *anorm; } return 0; /* End of SPTCON */ } /* sptcon_ */

This lesson gives a quick overview of how multiplying a monomial by a polynomial works. If multiplying is where polynomials trip you up, check out this video first to get a firm foundation in multiplying monomials. A good homework assignment is included as well.

Isoflurane induces expression of vascular endothelial growth factor through activating protein kinase C in myocardial cells. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) plays important roles in establishing collateral circulation of ischemic myocardium. This study aimed to investigate the effect of isoflurane on VEGF expression and the potential intracellular signal transduction pathway in cultured rat myocardial cells in order to further reveal the molecular mechanism of myocardial preservation of isoflurane. Primary myocardial cells of Sprague-Dawley rats were isolated and cultured. They were divided randomly into control group, isoflurane group, protein kinase C (PKC) inhibitor group and PKC inhibitor+isoflurane group where cells were respectively incubated without any treatment, treated by 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of isoflurane for 6 hours, by PKC inhibitor calphostin C at a final concentration of 50 nmol/L and by 50 nmol/L calphostin C+1.0 MAC isoflurane for 6 hours. VEGF expression was detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and the expression levels of PKC isoforms were determined by Western immunoblotting method. Isoflurane increased the VEGF expression in myocardial cells in a dose-dependent way. VEGF levels were significantly higher in 1.0 and 1.5 MAC isoflurane groups than in the control group (both P < 0.01). The effect of isoflurane on upregulating VEGF expression was blocked by PKC inhibitor calphostin C (P < 0.01), but calphostin C did not alter VEGF expression (P > 0.05). Isoflurane induced the activation and translocation of PKCε. Immunoblotting analysis revealed that the immunoreactivity of PKC ε increased significantly in the membrane fractions and deceased significantly in the kytoplasm fractions for cells treated with 1.0 MAC isoflurane as compared with the untreated cells, but not of PKC-α, PKC-δ and PKC-ζ (P less than 0.01). Isoflurane induces myocardial cells to release VEGF through activating PKC-epsilon from the endochylema to the cytomembrane, suggesting a possible novel mechanism of isoflurane protecting myocardial cells.

Definitely captured the character very well, fearless (or apathetic) to anything thrown at her, she wears a glare that rivals even Batman. Footsnakes beware, she'll give you a swift uppercut to the face.

/* * Copyright 2018 The authors * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. * You may obtain a copy of the License at * * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 * * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and * limitations under the License. */ // Generated from ognl.bnf, do not modify package com.intellij.lang.ognl.psi; import java.util.List; import org.jetbrains.annotations.*; import com.intellij.psi.PsiElement; public interface OgnlSequenceExpression extends OgnlExpression { @NotNull List<OgnlExpression> getElementsList(); }

Simple table for estimating confidence interval of discrepancy frequencies in microbiological safety evaluation. We provide a simple tool to determine discrepancies confidence interval (CI) in microbiology validation studies such as technical accuracy of a qualitative test result. This tool enables to determine exact confidence interval (binomial CI) from an observed frequency when normal approximation is inadequate, that is, in case of rare events. This tool has daily applications in microbiology and we are presenting an example of its application to antimicrobial susceptibility systems evaluation.

Q: GAEUnit doesn't automatically refresh code I'm using GAEUnit for unit testing my GAE app. However, anytime I make a change to my code (not the test case code, but actual app code) and rerun the tests, it doesn't use my newly updated code, but the previous version. I have to stop the app completely from the terminal by hitting control+c, then start it up again for the tests to take in my new code. Any ideas why that is? A: The latest SDK has an issue with not reloading changed code, not specific to GAEUnit: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8383

B51 B51 or B-51 may be: HLA-B51, an HLA-B serotype Bundesstraße 51, a road in western Germany Martin XB-51, an American airplane Sicilian Defence in the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings B51 (New York City bus)

Aunt Audrey's Favourites Aunt Audrey's Favourites offers an unlimited selection of cakes & desserts designed for all celebrations plus all your party supply needs. Whether you are having a special occasion or just looking for tonight's dessert. Aunt Audrey's has a mouth watering treat for you. We can also make Gluten Free, Diabetic, Vegan or Milk and Dairy Free products to meet your dietary needs. Products are baked on premises in the homemade style. Comments Share a comment with your facebook friends Feature this listing Increase your priority. Increase your exposure. Featured listings rank higher in search results than basic listings. When you increase your listing's priority it will be featured in BOTH the search results and in competitors* basic listing detailed pages. Stay on top of the pack. Feature this listing!.*based on variables such as location and category

Mitotic bypass via an occult cell cycle phase following DNA topoisomerase II inhibition in p53 functional human tumor cells. Cells cycle checkpoints guard against the inapproriate commitment to critical cell events such as mitosis. The bisdioxxopiperazzine ICRF-193, a catalytic inhibitor of DNA topoisomerase II causes a reversible stalling of the exit of cells from G(2) at the decatenation checkpoint (DC) and can generate tetraploidy via the compromising of chromosome segregation and mitotic failure. We have addressed an alternative origin-endocycle entry-for the tetraploidisation step in ICRF-193 exposed cells. Here we show that DC-proficient p53-functional tumor cells can undergo a transition to tetraploidy and subbsequent aneuploidy via an initial bypass of mitosis and the mitotic spindle checkpoint. DC-deficient SV4-tranformed cells move exclusively through mitosis to tetraploidy. In p53-functional tumor cells, escape through mitosis is enhanced by dominant negative p53 co-expression. The mitotic bypass transition phase (termed G(2)(endo)) disconnects cyclin B1 degradation from nuclear envelope breakdown and allows cells to evade the action of Taxol. G(2)(endo) constitutes a novel and alternative cell cycle phase-lasting some 8 h-with distinct molecular motifs at its boundaries for G(2) exit and subsequent entry into a delayed G(1) tetraploid state. The result challenge the paradigm that checkpoint breaching leads directly to abnormal ploidy states via mitosis alone. We further propose that the induction of bypass could: facilitate the covert development of tetraploidy in p53 functional cancers, lead to a misinterpretation of phase allocation during cell cycle arrest and contribbute to tumor cell drug resistance.

This tutorial will run you through how to build a crazy scalable streaming platform for your radio station, using HLS. This is a long one, so grab a cup of coffee or a Coke. First, you’ll need to sign up to Google’s Project Shield. This is totally free for independent (e.g. community) radio stations. You can do that here. If you want to use another provider, that’s fine also. You also require a Linux (or other UNIX-y) server. Although nginx builds fine on Windows, we haven’t tested it. Although this works on most platforms, there are some exceptions. Notably, in Internet Explorer on Windows 7 and below. For that, you can probably use Flash as a polyfill. We’re not using HE-AAC here, as it’s not supported in all major browsers. If you want to (you’ll break support for Flash/IE, Firefox, and probably Opera – far too many users) add “-profile aac_he_v2”. Now, we can start nginx with service nginx start and chkconfig nginx on. Our HLS stream becomes available at http://host-name/hls/stream/index.m3u8, and DASH at http://host-name/dash/stream/index.mpd. Adding the Plumbing We have our origin server configured now. Next, we need to pipe some audio into it. First, install ffmpeg. We need it with “libfdk-aac” so we can get a good quality stream. This will use the most modern HE-AACv2 codec, as it ensures the highest quality at the lowest bitrates. You can follow a guide here for CentOS on how to do so. For Ubuntu/Debian, make sure you have installed autoconf, automake, cmake, and pgkconfig (we did this above). You can then follow the CentOS guide, which should be mostly the same. In /usr/local/run.sh, add the following (replacing the stream.cor bit with your regular stream URL): These commands tell ffmpeg to grab a copy of your Icecast stream, encode it with High Efficiency AAC, and send it to the server so that it can repackage it for browsers. If it crashes, it will automatically restart after 1/10th of a second (this is intentional, as if the system is ill-configured, the batch job would choke available system resources). If you want to get even better quality, you can use an RTP stream or something else in the ffmpeg command. The reason I’m not using this in the example above is that, to achieve that, it requires an overhaul of your streaming architecture to use PCM on ingest. If you have a Barix based STL, you can configure it to RTP send to your streaming server, thus saving the need for an extra audio interface. Append to /etc/rc.local the following line to instruct the system to automatically restart our script on boot: /usr/local/run.sh& (You could do this using systemd or initv for production, but this works well enough) Excellent. When you run /usr/local/run.sh& or reboot, you should be able to access your streams. Setting up the CDN CDNs are designed to copy your content so that it can scale. For instance, instead of having one server (our origin) serving 100,000 clients, we can send this to lots of “edge” servers. Providers make this easy and are more cost efficient. We’re using Project Shield, because it’s totally free for indie media, and harnesses the same power of Google. Other freebies exist like CloudFlare, but CloudFlare’s terms of service don’t let you use it for multimedia. The nginx config we used above should allow your CDN to work properly from the onset. It will cache the manifest/index files (that instruct the client which audio segments to get) for 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, the files will have changed so we want the edges to update. The media files will be cached for a day so once the CDN grabs it once, it will never need to again. Usage & Testing I’ll post some sample player code on GitHub, but you probably want to use the HLS stream with hls.js. You can test it on this page. Why not DASH? nginx-ts-module, at the time of writing, has tiny gaps between audio segments. These are pretty audible to an average listeners, so until that is fixed we might as well continue using HLS. Once again, the streaming URLs will be http://yourcdnhost.com/hls/stream/index.m3u8 (HLS), and http://yourcdnhost.com/dash/stream/index.mpd (DASH). Do consider setting up SSL. It requires a couple of tweaks in your nginx configuration, and LetsEncrypt makes it much easier. Google are working on support for LetsEncrypt in Shield – hopefully when you read this it will be much easier to use, instead of having to manually replace SSL/TLS certificates every 60 days. Going Further The nginx-rtmp-module, similar to install, provides adaptive bitrate HLS (but not DASH). However, there is a bug in Mobile Safari that adds silent gaps between the segments. The TS module will soon support now supports adaptive HLS, this guide will be updated when that happens. You can also hack it yourself.

Let's talk about health: shoppers' discourse regarding health while food shopping. The present study aimed to examine the role of health in consumers' food purchasing decisions through investigating the nature of people's discourse regarding health while conducting their food shopping. The study employed the think-aloud technique as part of an accompanied shop. All mentions of health and terms relating to health were identified from the data set. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted to examine how health was talked about in relation to people's food choice decisions. Supermarkets in Dublin, Republic of Ireland and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Participants (n 50) were aged over 18 years and represented the main household shopper. Responsibility for others and the perceived need to illicit strict control to avoid 'unhealthy' food selections played a dominant role in how health was talked about during the accompanied shop. Consequently healthy shopping was viewed as difficult and effort was required to make the healthy choice, with shoppers relating to product-based inferences to support their decisions. This qualitative exploration has provided evidence of a number of factors influencing the consideration of health during consumers' food shopping. These results highlight opportunities for stakeholders such as public health bodies and the food industry to explore further ways to help enable consumers make healthy food choices.

Gossip and reputation management are essential features of our world. Their investigation is part of the frontiers of research in at least three scientific domains: the social, the natural and the computational sciences. Understanding the dynamics, evolution and change of social information transmission requires a truly inter-disciplinary scientific effort. The industrialised countries are living in an crucial phase for theireconomies and social systems. Computers and digital technologies havetraditionally played a central role for the development of the socio-economicsystems, and of enterprises in particular. But if the socio-economic scenarioundergoes profound changes, also the enterprises need to change and,consequently, enterprise computing. Researchers at ISTC-CNR are deeply involved in hosting ICAPS (the 23rd Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling) in Rome, June 10-14, 2013. ICAPS is one of the more selective conferences in the area of theoretical and experimental AI reasoning.

Teaching and assessment of professional attitudes in UK dental schools - commentary. The General Dental Council expects professionalism to be embedded and assessed through-out the undergraduate dental programme. Curricula need therefore to accommodate these recommendations. A stroll poll of UK dental schools provided a basis for understanding the current methods of teaching and assessing professionalism. All respondent schools recognised the importance of professionalism and reported that this was taught and assessed within their curriculum. For most the methods involved were largely traditional, relying on lectures and seminars taught throughout the course. The most common form of assessment was by grading and providing formative feedback after a clinical encounter. Whilst clinical skills and knowledge can perhaps be readily taught and assessed using traditional methods, those involved in education are challenged to identify and implement effective methods of not only teaching, but also assessing professionalism. A variety of standalone methods need to be developed that assess professionalism and this will, in turn, allow the effectiveness of teaching methods to be assessed.

Mosaic: Chandra Spacecraft Made from Chandra Images Here’s a nifty mosaic from the folks at Chandra: a representation of the Chandra spacecraft made from images taken by the spacecraft itself. It was put together by Chandra illustrator Melissa Weiss. You can download larger and really huge versions of this image at the Chandra website.

Q: How to change progressbar background color using javascript I was looking for how to change the ext.net progressbar background color using JavaScript. possibly adding a CSS class to the progressbar from JavaScript. I have tried adding a css class but failed. Actually I cant find the function which will facilitate me to add the CSS class to it. any help will be appreciated. EDIT: javascript: function ShowProgressBar(progressBar, progressValue, message) { progressBar.show(); progressBar.updateProgress(progressValue, message); //need to add the css class here something like progressBar.addClass('green-bar') } CSS: .green-bar{ background:#008000; } A: Guys i have solved the issue. just need to change the CSS class name. CSS: .green-bar .x-progress-bar{ background:#008000; } JavaScript: progressBar.addClass('green-bar'); //obviously i have removed the added css class after use.

Ask HN Mac users: Do you use an antivirus ? - ssn If yes, which?<p>Please see instead: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933172 ====== jacquesm try <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll> ------ charlesmarshall No, but more techy people will tend not to download / install / give passwords to "dodgy" applications ------ maudineormsby No, and I don't use AV on my Windows machine either. Never had a problem with either. ------ st3fan No, of course not. What would be the point? ------ ssn Yes [which?] ------ ssn No

"I love the shoe! Very comfortable. However, after wearing the shoes a handful of times, my pinky toe poked a hole through the laser cut material. I looked at the other shoe and it started to do it there too. These are too expensive to have them fall apart that easy. Very disappointing."

Inhibition of tumor promotion by a lecanoric acid analogue. 3',5'-Dichloro-2,4'-dihydroxybenzanilide, an inhibitor of histidine decarboxylase, inhibited skin tumor promotion induced by 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate in mice.

1. Field of the Invention This invention relates to a steam flooding process for the recovery of hydrocarbons from a subterranean formation. More particularly, this invention relates to a recovery process in which hydrocarbons driven toward a production well by means of a fluid, such as steam or a mixture of steam and carbon dioxide, which is injected into the formation via an injection well are coproduced from a lower horizon of the formation via the production well along with water introduced into the upper horizon of the formation. 2. Prior Art and Background The production of hydrocarbon products is usually achieved by drilling into a hydrocarbon-bearing formation and employing one of the art-recognized recovery methods for the recovery of hydrocarbons therein. Present recovery techniques, however, usually result in the recovery of only a minor portion of the petroleum materials present in the formation and this is particularly true with reservoirs of viscous crudes. Even when employing improved secondary recovery practices as much as 50-75 percent of the original hydrocarbon may be left in place and even more in the case of viscous hydrocarbon reservoirs. A variety of processes well known in the art, such as water flooding, steam flooding, miscible flooding, etc. have been employed after natural drive of the reservoir has been depleted in order to recover additional oil from the formation. The application of these techniques which are sometimes referred to as secondary recovery methods permits additional hydrocarbons to be removed from the partially depleted formations. One of the more widely practiced secondary recovery methods is that of the so-called steam flooding process. Steam flooding is notably well-suited for secondary recovery operations since the energy contained in the fluid effectively reduces the viscosity of the hydrocarbons and permits production thereof. In order to realize the maximum viscosity reduction of the hydrocarbons, the injected steam should impart the maximum heat to the formation, as is consistent with economical steam generator design, and provide a uniform penetration of the formation. Despite the advantages of steam flooding operations, under certain circumstances present-day steam flooding techniques fail in many instances to permit recovery of large quantities of hydrocarbons contained in the formation. As a result, a number of modified steam injection processes have been proposed including a "push-pull" technique and throughput methods which have resulted in some instances in additional significant recoveries of crude oil from the reservoirs. One of the main problems faced in the recovery of hydrocarbons by steam flooding is early breakthrough of steam into the production well since at that time no more oil is produced. Breakthrough generally is caused by the tendency of the steam to move updip and to flow only through the upper part of the formation. There is a definite need in the art, therefore, for a steam flooding process in which steam breakthrough into the production well is prevented thus greatly increasing the amount of oil recovered. Another disadvantage of steam flooding is that some distillation in the formation takes place with the result that lighter, more volatile solutions of the in-place hydrocarbons are recovered leaving behind the more viscous oil with an increased asphaltene and aromatic content. Thus, the nature of the residual oil left behind after an initial period of steam flooding of a formation is probably different from that of the original oil composition in place because of distillation effects, etc. and the efficiency of the removal process gradually declines. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to overcome the disadvantages of the prior art steam flooding process by providing an efficient, improved steam flooding method for hydrocarbon recovery.

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The company offers public access to traffic and demographic data for millions of Web sites and detailed user insights to digital publishers enrolled in its Quantified Publisher Program. Their data centers process more than 800,000 transactions per second and the company states that it produces accurate audience measurement to over 100 million web destinations. As of 2013, it was said to be one of the world's top five big data processing organisations. Its headquarters is in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Chicago, London and Dublin.

Ger O'Driscoll (Gaelic footballer) Ger O'Driscoll was a Gaelic footballer from Valentia Island, County Kerry. He played with the Kerry inter-county team from 1975 to 1980. He also played with his local Young Islanders club. References Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people Category:Kerry inter-county Gaelic footballers Category:Valentia Young Islanders Gaelic footballers Category:Winners of two All-Ireland medals (Gaelic football)

A teenage boy had just passed his driving test and inquired of his father as to when they could discuss his use of the car. His father said he’d make a deal with his son: ‘You bring your grades up from a C to a B average, study your Bible, and get your hair cut. Then we’ll talk about the car.’ The boy thought about that for a moment, decided he’d settle for the offer, and they agreed on it. After about six weeks his father said, ‘Son, you’ve brought your grades up and I’ve observed that you have been studying your Bible, but I’m disappointed you haven’t had your hair cut. The boy said, ‘You know, Dad, I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve noticed in my studies of the Bible that Samson had long hair, John the Baptist had long hair, Moses had long hair ~ ~ ~ and there’s even strong evidence that Jesus had long hair.’ You’re going to love the Dad’s reply: ‘Did you also notice that they all walked everywhere they went?’ A blog dedicated to the thoughts, opinions, ideas and random madness of Edward W. Raby, Sr. - Pastor, Theologian, Philosopher, Writer, Bodybuilder and Football Fan. "Yes, the dog is foaming at the mouth. Don't worry, He just had pint of beer and is trying to scare you." This is a Theology Pub so drink your theology responsibly or have a designated driver to get you home as theology can be as intoxicating as alcohol.

Race and related grounds Under the Code, every person has the right to be free from racial discrimination and harassment in the social areas of employment, services, goods, facilities, housing accommodation, contracts and membership in trade and vocational associations. You should not be treated differently because of your race or other related grounds, such as your ancestry, ethnicity, religion or place of origin. Canada, its provinces and territories have strong human rights laws and systems in place to address discrimination. At the same time, we also have a legacy of racism – particularly towards Indigenous persons, but to other groups as well including African, Chinese, Japanese, South Asian, Jewish and Muslim Canadians – a legacy that profoundly permeates our systems and structures to this day, affecting the lives of not only racialized persons, but also all people in Canada. December 2003 - The Commission’s racial profiling inquiry initiative was undertaken in response to community concerns about the impact of profiling on members of their respective communities. The inquiry’s main objectives were to give individuals who had been subjected to profiling an opportunity to share those experiences and to show its effects on their families and communities. In doing so, the Commission hoped to raise public awareness of the harmful effects and the social costs of racial profiling. 2005 - All Ontarians have the right to be free from harassment in the workplace or in housing accommodation because of, among other things, race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, ethnic origin, citizenship and creed. While the Ontario Human Rights Code (the “Code”) doesn’t explicitly prohibit harassment in the areas of services, goods and facilities, contracts or membership in trade and vocational associations, the Commission will treat racial harassment in such situations as a form of discrimination and therefore a breach of the Code. 2003 - For the purposes of its inquiry, the Commission’s definition for "racial profiling" is any action undertaken for reasons of safety, security or public protection, that relies on stereotypes about race, colour, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, or place of origin, or a combination of these, rather than on a reasonable suspicion, to single out an individual for greater scrutiny or different treatment. Racial profiling is an insidious and particularly damaging type of racial discrimination that relates to notions of safety and security. Racial profiling violates people’s rights under the Ontario Human Rights Code (Code). People from many different communities experience racial profiling. However, it is often directed at First Nations, Métis, Inuit and other Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Arabs, West Asians and Black people, and is often influenced by the negative stereotypes that people in these communities face. Racial profiling is an insidious and particularly damaging type of racial discrimination that relates to notions of safety and security. Racial profiling violates peoples’ rights under the Ontario Human Rights Code (Code). People from many different communities experience racial profiling. However, it is often directed at First Nations, Métis, Inuit and other Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Arabs, West Asians and Black people, and is often influenced by the negative stereotypes that people in these communities face. Racial profiling is an insidious and particularly damaging type of racial discrimination that relates to notions of safety and security. Racial profiling violates peoples’ rights under the Ontario Human Rights Code (Code). People from many different communities experience racial profiling. However, it is often directed at First Nations, Métis, Inuit and other Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Arabs, West Asians and Black people, and is often influenced by the negative stereotypes that people in these communities face.

By the time BMW is ready to field a Level 5 fully autonomous vehicle, some older BMW enthusiasts might be very ready for a self-driving car, since they may be too old to pass the eye test—or, for a few very senior BMW fans, the "still breathing" test. That's because a fully autonomous BMW—Level 5, in the self-driving hierarchy—is at least ten years away, according to Dirk Wisselmann, a senior engineer for automated driving at BMW. In an interview with Drive Mag, Wisselmann pointed out that there is a difference between safety systems and cars that can take over all driver functions completely. “Safety systems will help, but not take over 100%. We've got at least ten years ahead of us of assisted driving in such situations, not autonomous driving,” explained Wisselmann. Controlling the car is not the issue. The challenge lies in the vehicle's self-driving systems being able to make all the right decisions in all possible situations. To understand what the developers of self-driving cars are up against, it might be helpful to review the six levels of driver intervention and attentiveness required to classify vehicles as autonomous. These classifications were published by SAE International in 2014. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) adopted these classes in September 2016: Level 0: Automated system has no vehicle control, but may issue warnings. Level 1: Driver must be ready to take control at any time. Automated system may include features such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Parking Assistance with automated steering, and Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA) Type II in any combination. Level 2: The driver is obliged to detect objects and events and respond if the automated system fails to respond properly. The automated system executes accelerating, braking, and steering. The automated system can deactivate immediately upon takeover by the driver. Level 3: Within known, limited environments (such as freeways), the driver can safely turn their attention away from driving tasks, but must still be prepared to take control when needed. Level 4: The automated system can control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe weather. The driver must enable the automated system only when it is safe to do so. When enabled, driver attention is not required. Level 5: Other than setting the destination and starting the system, no human intervention is required. The automatic system can drive to any location where it is legal to drive and make its own decisions. As you can see, there is a big difference between Levels 4 and 5. Other car companies, such as Ford, are projecting a market-ready Level 4 vehicle by 2021. Last year during its centenary, BMW said it would have a self-driving car by 2021. In looking at the standards and after reading Herr Wisselmann's remarks, we can only conclude that a 2021 BMW autonomous vehicle would be Level 4 at the most as well. Many of us have said that BMW has another consideration when it comes to self-driving vehicles: they must have a switch to turn self-driving off. We still consider the operative word in BMW's "Ultimate Driving Machine" slogan to be "driving." According to Wisselmann, BMW is thinking of that, too, and that the self-driving technology of the future will work seamlessly with the human-driving technology. “You can switch it on when you need it, and off when you don’t need it. Autonomous driving just takes care of the most boring parts of driving and lets the driver enjoy his BMW when he wants. There's no fun to commute on a very busy highway. But in the countryside, or on winding roads, you'll still be able—and encouraged—to take matters into your own hands,” said Wisselmann. Who knows what effect the combination of technology, consumer preference, government regulation, and economics will have on the cars of tomorrow? It's nice to know that with BMW, we probably have at least ten years before we're faced with a fully self-driving choice and even then, BMW will still give us the option of being drivers.—Scott Blazey [Photos courtesy of BMW AG.]

Pigmentary hypertrichosis and non-autoimmune insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (PHID) syndrome is associated with severe chronic inflammation and cardiomyopathy, and represents a new monogenic autoinflammatory syndrome. Mutations in SLC29A3 lead to pigmentary hypertrichosis and non-autoimmune insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (PHID) and H syndromes, familial Rosai-Dorfman disease, and histiocytosis-lymphadenopathy plus syndrome. We report a new association of PHID syndrome with severe systemic inflammation, scleroderma-like changes, and cardiomyopathy. A 12-year-old girl with PHID syndrome presented with shortness of breath, hepatosplenomegaly, and raised erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C-reactive protein. An echocardiogram showed biventricular myocardial hypertrophy, and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging showed circumferential late gadolinium enhancement of the myocardium. No systemic amyloid deposits were observed on a whole-body serum amyloid P scintigraphy scan. Abdominal ultrasound revealed intra-abdominal fat surrounding the solid organs, suggesting a possibility of evolving lipodystrophy with visceral adiposity. PHID syndrome is a novel monogenic autoinflammatory syndrome (AIS) associated with severe elevation of serum amyloid. Lipodystrophy, cutaneous sclerodermatous changes, and cardiomyopathy were also present in this case. In contrast to other AIS, blockade of interleukin-1 and tumor necrosis-α was ineffective.

If you’re a T-Mobile customer in the USA and still waiting for news on when your device might receive the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) update then we have some interesting news for you today. A leaked T-Mobile roadmap has come to light with various dates for the update for smartphones such as the Galaxy S2 and more. We must stress that these are leaked details so as always we caution readers that this is not set in stone. However, the leaked roadmap is enlightening and also gives away some info on other devices. First off those ICS updates and owners of the Galaxy S2 (S II) will be pleased to learn that the upgraded OS should be headed your way on May 14, so not too much longer to wait. Two more devices are also scheduled for the ICS update on the roadmap and they are the HTC Sensation 4G and the Amaze 4G. The release date of ICS for both of those phones is June 16. The rest of the roadmap concerns new devices to be released and those include the Huawei Astor (low-end phone) on May 9, the Huawei Buddy (myTouch QWERTY) and Phoenix (myTouch) and Samsung Gravity TXT (new color) all on July 11, the Samsung T159 Cacao (low-end phone) on August 1 and the Samsung Apex Q (unknown device) on August 15. News of the roadmap came to us from Tmo News. Equally as intriguing are the devices NOT shown on the leaked roadmap. If you were hoping for the Galaxy Note variant, Galaxy S3 or HTC One X then they are all noticeably absent which will be very disappointing for some of you. T-Mobile carried the Galaxy S2 but it looks as though the Galaxy S3 might be missed. Of course don’t take this as read just yet. As we said, this is a leaked roadmap so we cannot confirm this but if may give you some food for thought. Are you waiting for any of the ICS updates detailed above? Maybe you’re more concerned that the Galaxy S3 doesn’t appear on the leaked T-Mobile roadmap? We’re always interested to hear from our readers so send your comments to let us know your thoughts.

Breaking Sticks and Ambiguities with Adaptive Skip-gram Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 51:130-138, 2016. Abstract The recently proposed Skip-gram model is a powerful method for learning high-dimensional word representations that capture rich semantic relationships between words. However, Skip-gram as well as most prior work on learning word representations does not take into account word ambiguity and maintain only single representation per word. Although a number of Skip-gram modifications were proposed to overcome this limitation and learn multi-prototype word representations, they either require a known number of word meanings or learn them using greedy heuristic approaches. In this paper we propose the Adaptive Skip-gram model which is a nonparametric Bayesian extension of Skip-gram capable to automatically learn the required number of representations for all words at desired semantic resolution. We derive efficient online variational learning algorithm for the model and empirically demonstrate its efficiency on word-sense induction task. Related Material @InProceedings{pmlr-v51-bartunov16, title = {Breaking Sticks and Ambiguities with Adaptive Skip-gram}, author = {Sergey Bartunov and Dmitry Kondrashkin and Anton Osokin and Dmitry Vetrov}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics}, pages = {130--138}, year = {2016}, editor = {Arthur Gretton and Christian C. Robert}, volume = {51}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, address = {Cadiz, Spain}, month = {09--11 May}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v51/bartunov16.pdf}, url = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v51/bartunov16.html}, abstract = {The recently proposed Skip-gram model is a powerful method for learning high-dimensional word representations that capture rich semantic relationships between words. However, Skip-gram as well as most prior work on learning word representations does not take into account word ambiguity and maintain only single representation per word. Although a number of Skip-gram modifications were proposed to overcome this limitation and learn multi-prototype word representations, they either require a known number of word meanings or learn them using greedy heuristic approaches. In this paper we propose the Adaptive Skip-gram model which is a nonparametric Bayesian extension of Skip-gram capable to automatically learn the required number of representations for all words at desired semantic resolution. We derive efficient online variational learning algorithm for the model and empirically demonstrate its efficiency on word-sense induction task.} } %0 Conference Paper %T Breaking Sticks and Ambiguities with Adaptive Skip-gram %A Sergey Bartunov %A Dmitry Kondrashkin %A Anton Osokin %A Dmitry Vetrov %B Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2016 %E Arthur Gretton %E Christian C. Robert %F pmlr-v51-bartunov16 %I PMLR %J Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %P 130--138 %U http://proceedings.mlr.press %V 51 %W PMLR %X The recently proposed Skip-gram model is a powerful method for learning high-dimensional word representations that capture rich semantic relationships between words. However, Skip-gram as well as most prior work on learning word representations does not take into account word ambiguity and maintain only single representation per word. Although a number of Skip-gram modifications were proposed to overcome this limitation and learn multi-prototype word representations, they either require a known number of word meanings or learn them using greedy heuristic approaches. In this paper we propose the Adaptive Skip-gram model which is a nonparametric Bayesian extension of Skip-gram capable to automatically learn the required number of representations for all words at desired semantic resolution. We derive efficient online variational learning algorithm for the model and empirically demonstrate its efficiency on word-sense induction task. TY - CPAPER TI - Breaking Sticks and Ambiguities with Adaptive Skip-gram AU - Sergey Bartunov AU - Dmitry Kondrashkin AU - Anton Osokin AU - Dmitry Vetrov BT - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics PY - 2016/05/02 DA - 2016/05/02 ED - Arthur Gretton ED - Christian C. Robert ID - pmlr-v51-bartunov16 PB - PMLR SP - 130 DP - PMLR EP - 138 L1 - http://proceedings.mlr.press/v51/bartunov16.pdf UR - http://proceedings.mlr.press/v51/bartunov16.html AB - The recently proposed Skip-gram model is a powerful method for learning high-dimensional word representations that capture rich semantic relationships between words. However, Skip-gram as well as most prior work on learning word representations does not take into account word ambiguity and maintain only single representation per word. Although a number of Skip-gram modifications were proposed to overcome this limitation and learn multi-prototype word representations, they either require a known number of word meanings or learn them using greedy heuristic approaches. In this paper we propose the Adaptive Skip-gram model which is a nonparametric Bayesian extension of Skip-gram capable to automatically learn the required number of representations for all words at desired semantic resolution. We derive efficient online variational learning algorithm for the model and empirically demonstrate its efficiency on word-sense induction task. ER -

1978 Campeonato Argentino de Rugby The Campeonato Argentino de Rugby 1978 was won by the selection of Buenos Aires that beat in the final the selection of Unión de Rugby de Rosario Rugby Union in Argentina in 1978 National The selection of Buenos Aires won also the "Campeonato Juvenil" (under-19) The Buenos Aires Champsionship was won by San Isidro Club The Cordoba Province Championship was won by La Tablada The North-East Championship was won by Tucumán RC International 1978 is an important year for Argentine rugby : the "Pumas" made a tour in Europe. They obtain an historical draw with England, beat Wales "B" and Leinster. But in the end they lost surprising with Italy Results Zone 1 Zone 2 Zone 3 Zone 4 Interzone Semifinals Final <small> Score system: Try= 4 points, Conversion=2 points .Penalty and kick from mark= 3 points. Drop= 3 points. </small> Rosario: 15.D. Baetti (M. Dip), 14.A. Nogués, 13.R. Rodríguez, 12.G. Torno, 11.C. Bisio, 10.J. Escalante, 9.R. Castagna, 8.D. Poet, 7.R. Seaton , 6. Risler (cap.), 5. C. Svetaz, 4.G. Sinópoli, 3. F. Semino (F. Rodríguez), 2. V. Macat, 1. R. Imhoff, Buenos Aires:' 15.M. Sanzot, 14.M. Campo, 13.R. Madero, 12.J. Trueco, 11.A. Puccio, 10.H. Porta (cap.), 9. R. Landajo, 8.T. Petersen, 7.C. Serrano, 6.H. Silva, 5.S. Iachetti, 4.G. Travaglini, 3.H. Nicola, 2.A. Cubelli, 1.A. Cerioni. External links Memorias de la UAR 1978 Francesco Volpe, Paolo Pacitti (Author), Rugby 2000'', GTE Gruppo Editorale (1999) Category:Campeonato Argentino de Rugby Argentina Rugby

Q: Play Framework 1: tag to include javascript file only once In Play Framework 1, is there a tag which includes javascript file only once in the generated page? Example: I want following code: #{press.script 'my.script.js'} #{press.script 'my.script.js'} to inject my.script.js declaration into resulting page only once, so that Play generates the following: <script src="/path/to/my.script.js"></script> Please note that press module should be of version >= 1.0.22. So far, anything but not what's needed was found: #{press.script 'my.script.js'} simply throws exception when specified twice with same js file version 1.0.11 of press module added ignoreDuplicates tag property which, as per documentation, should do what's needed, but in next version it was mysteriously removed ... version 1.0.12 of press module added possibility to add press.allowDuplicates to configuration, but in next version it was again mysteriously removed ... #{press.single-script 'my.script.js'} simply compresses js file and adds <script> twice to generated file Please advise A: I don't think there is. I have solved a similar problem like this. Let's say I have one template, main.html. All other templates extend this one. Main.html includes scripts.html. Based on the current URL, the Controller renders form.html which extends main.html. In form.html I have a widget which needs my.script.js. To make sure it's only included on this page (which needs the script) I've set the following variable: #{set useMyScript: true /} In scripts.html, I will check this variable and render this script only if needed: #{if useMyScript} #{press.script 'my.script.js'} #{/if} So, this is not exactly your case, but I am pretty sure you can set useMyScript to true multiple times with this solution and include the Javascript only once. I hope this helps!

bitcoin: maar wat is het? Inhoudsopgave Staatsloterij wintips: www.slimwinnen.nl Bitcoins - maar wat zijn het? Bitcoin is een munteenheid. Net zoals euro en dollar. Verschil is, is dat het volledig digitaal is en gebruik maakt van peer-to-peer technologie (en blockchain). Bitcoins worden afkort naar 'BTC' (zoals dollars 'USD' zijn en Euro 'EUR'). Je kunt er op sommige plekken mee betalen. Die plekken zijn dan in 99 van de 100 gevallen wel op het internet want winkels gewoon in de stad accepteren meestal geen bitcoins. Hoewel, wel steeds vaker. Met name in Arnhem. Een korte uitleg kun je vinden op de Nederlandse Wikipedia en een uitgebreide op de engelse. bitcoin.org is de officiele website en www.bitcointalk.org het officiele forum. Als jij euro's bij de rabobank (of ing etc) hebt, dan ligt er niet ergens een stapel biljetten of muntjes in een kluis. Het enige wat je dan hebt is een bestandje op de computers van rabobank waarin staat "jan pietersen heeft 10 euro". Bij bitcoins is dit vrijwel hetzelfde met 't verschil dat het bestandje niet bij een bank staat maar op jouw eigen computer. Overigens betekent dat niet dat je het eenvoudig kunt aanpassen en dat je daarna meer bitcoins hebt want daar zijn beveiligingen tegen. Bitcoins zijn eigenlijk niet meer dan een bestandje op je pc ("wallet.dat" - backup die file! want die file kwijt of stuk: geld kwijt!). Als je nu iemand iets wil laten betalen aan jou, dan laat je je bitcoin programma een adres genereren. Dat adres geef je dan aan die ander, en die ander kan daar dan bitcoins naar laten sturen. Het duurt dan nog even voordat je er wat mee kunt: een betaling vereist een aantal "confirmations" (bevestigingen): anderen in het bitcoin-network moeten bevestigen dat die betaling heeft plaatsgevonden (dat is om te voorkomen dat geld dubbel uitgegeven wordt). Alle bitcoin-transacties die plaatsvinden worden verspreid over het hele bitcoin-netwerk. Iedereen kan zien dat er vanaf adres x een bedrag naar adres y gegaan is. Doordat iedereen dat weet, is het onmogelijk geld 2x uit te geven. Zo'n bitcoin adres ziet er bijvoorbeeld zo uit: 1LVyTtygdCnESJcQWE136nxKjNr6s4qB5f (dit is een echt bitcoin "adres" waar je ook echt bitcoins naar kunt sturen - ik dank je alvast hartelijk). De lol van bitcoins is o.a. dat het niet onder bestuur valt van 1 organisatie of land. Het bestaat doordat over de hele wereld heel veel mensen een bepaald programma (de bitcoin client) op hun computer(s) draaien. Voor het verrichten van een betaling is er niet 1 specifieke tussenpersoon nodig: het hele Bitcoin netwerk is als het ware de tussenpersoon (zie "confirmations"). Ook is het open source maar dat is voor het concept niet relevant. Bitcoin is bedacht ergens in 2009 door Craig Wright. Hij publiceerde eea onder de pseudoniem "Satoshi Nakamoto". - klopt niet, zie deze pagina Wat is toch die blockchain? Eigenlijk de belangrijkste peiler waarop bitcoin steunt is de "blockchain" (keten van blokken). In de blockchain wordt iedere bitcoin transactie opgeslagen die wordt uitgevoerd. Betalingen, nieuwe bitcoins, alles. Die blockchain staat bij iedere bitcoingebruiker op z'n computer. Daardoor kan iedereen nagaan of als iemand een transactie inschiet dat die wel geldig is. Of iemand niet bijvoorbeeld probeert twee keer geld uit te geven of probeert te betalen met geld dat hij of zij helemaal niet heeft. Op blockchain.info kun je rondneuzen in die blockchain zonder 'm te downloaden. Technische details: de blockchain bestaat uit blokken. Die blokken hangen cryptografisch aan elkaar (dmv hashing") in een lange keten. Op zich kun je die blockchain die op je lokale pc staat wel aanpassen. Je kunt die wijzingen alleen niet in het bitcoin netwerk "uploaden" omdat de wijzingen zouden worden afgekeurd. Pas als je meer dan de helft van alle gebruikers van bitcoin kunt overtuigen dat jouw aangepaste blockchain de juiste is, zullen deze wijzigingen worden toegepast (zie consensus). "Blockchain" is overigens niet specifiek voor bitcoin. "Altcoins" als ethereum en coinmagi zijn anders dan bitcoin maar gebruiken ook weer een eigen blockchain. Maar ook om te kunnen bewijzen dat een document er was op een bepaald moment wordt blockchain gebruikt. De Nederlandse overheid is aan het kijken of ze wat met deze technologie kunnen en ook banken kijken er naar. Naast blockchains waarbij het echt een chain is, een keten, heb je ook bijvoorbeeld Iota waarbij het een "tangle" is; een soort van web van blokken. Bitcoins kopen Dit kan op verschillende manieren. Als je bekend bent met IRC, ga dan naar bitcoin-otc.com. Wil je gewoon vanaf je bankrekening geld overmaken e.d., ga dan naar bitonic.nl of naar bitstamp.net. Bitstamp is de grootste bitcoin exchange, bitoinic.nl een Nederlandse. Lang geleden was Mt.Gox.d de grootste, die zijn echter door fraude failliet gegaan. Dat gebeurd wel vaker trouwens. Als je wat googlet, dan zul je ook allerlei websites vinden die de weg van PayPal bewandelen. Let daar echter wel bij op: PayPal staat de handel in Bitcoins via hen niet toe (voor een plausibele reden die ik vrijwel vergeten ben maar het had er mee te maken dacht ik dat je een bitcoin transactie niet kunt terugdraaien). Sinds een tijdje is er ook een Nederlandse website waar je tamelijk anoniem BTC kunt kopen: www.btc4euro.nl. Om daar iets te kopen voer je in hoeveel BTC je wilt, je BTC adres en daarna krijg je een code. Vervolgens doe je het bedrag in euro's in een envelop met daarbij een briefje met de code en stuur je het naar het post-adres van btc4euro.nl Een paar dagen later heb je dan je geld. Ik heb 't niet zelf getest overigens. December 2017: lijkt er op dat deze website 't niet meer doet. Naast de gereguleerde(!) exchanges zoals bitstamp (en die bank in Frankrijk (via bitcoin-central.net)) is er ook een "grijs circuit" (al is "grijs circuit" wat gek omdat je zou kunnen zeggen dat het hele bitcoin verhaal een groot grijs circuit is) in chat-kanalen (op bijv. IRC) waar je kunt handelen. Betalingen gaan dan vaak via bijv. paypal en mensen kennen elkaar punten toe om zo een betrouwbaarheidsgetal te verkrijgen zodat anderen weten of het vertrouwd is om met jou te handelen. Een andere aanbieder is BitRush. Het voordeel van Bitrush zijn de scherpe prijzen (zie deze pagina voor een overzicht van de prijzen van een aantal Nederlandse bitcoin aanbieders). Bitcoins verkopen Misschien wil je ooit van je bitcoins af, of je krijgt je salaris in bitcoins maar de albert heijn accepteert nog geen bitcoins. Op je rekening storten Als je dollars op je rekening bij de bank wil laten storten dan deed je dat bijv. via GWK (grens wisselkantoor). Banken hebben die dienst ook maar het is iets speciaals; want ze kopen die dollars van je en storten dat als euro op je rekening. Je kunt dus niet beiden euros en dollars op je rekening hebben staan (ja bij sommige banken kun je dan een extra rekening aanvragen voor een andere munteenheid maar dat even terzijde). Dus wil jij bitcoins op je rekening storten, dan moet dat via een tussenpersoon die bitcoins accepteert en daar euro's voor in ruil geeft. Misschien dat er banken zijn maar dan alleen buitenlandse banken want van Nederlandse banken die dat doen heb ik nog niet gehoord. Je zult het dus via een ander kanaal moeten doen. Daar zijn heel wat bedrijven voor. De ene wat betrouwbaarder dan de ander. Waar ikzelf mee samenwerk (ik plaats reclame voor hen op mijn site en krijg daar geld voor terug) is BTCdirect. Hoeveel zijn ze waard? Een ogenblik, ophalen gegevens... (het resultaat komt hier te staan). Illegaal? V.z.v. ik weet zijn bitcoins (en het gebruik daarvan) niet illegaal (zondag 17 december 2017). Mogelijk dat dat anders wordt omdat het bij Bitcoins lastig is om te traceren hoe geldstromen lopen (maar niet onmogelijk! verhalen dat het absoluut anoniem zou zijn kloppen niet (helemaal)!). Er wordt op allerlei manieren gewerkt aan methoden om het echt helemaal anoniem en ontraceerbaar te maken (via cryptografische truuks en door e.e.a. over FreeNet te versturen), mogelijk dat dat een trigger gaat zijn om bepaalde processen te versnellen qua illegaliseren. Denk nu niet dat je gewoon het via Tor kunt versturen om te anonimiseren omdat dat alleen de route van verzenden verbergt, bijv. niet parameters als tijden waarop, welke bedragen en naar wie (met wat dataminen is uit o.a. die gegevens heel wat af te leiden). Daarnaast kun je een bedrag laten overmaken via sites als bitcoinfog.com (de methode van die site werkt niet als maar weinig mensen er bitcoins via overmaken). Hier en daar zijn er op het internet plaatsen waar in drugs (voorheen "Silk Road"), wapens en what not gehandeld wordt waarbij bitcoins worden gebruikt voor de betalingen. Helaas komt het Bitcoin principe vaak alleen vanwege dat in het nieuws. Jammer want is ook bruikbaar voor het doen van betalingen naar mensen in onderdrukkende regimes. Naast handel in illegale zaken is ransomware die 't losgeld in bitcoin willen ontvangen nogal in opkomst (2017). Een ander ding waar je op moet letten: door hoe het bitcoin-mechanisme werkt zal te achterhalen zijn dat een bitcoin-bedag dat bij een criminele actie is gebruikt, dat dat van jou vandaan komt. Ik heb hierover gesproken met Arnoud Engelfriet (een bekende Nederlandse internet jurist) en ondanks dat het in theorie mogelijk is dat recherche jou een bezoekje brengt (omdat je in de historie van een misbruikte bitcoin zit) acht Arnoud het niet waarschijlijk. Mocht je "niet waarschijnlijk" niet veilig genoeg vinden, dan zijn er mogelijkheden je geld los te koppelen van z'n historie. Zie het tabelletje hieronder voor websites die daarmee kunnen helpen. Arnoud verwacht overigens niet dat bitcoins illegaal worden gemaakt in Nederland, hooguit regulering van handel in/uitgifte van - het is immers een financiele dienst. In oktober 2012 heeft de Europese Centrale Bank een rapport laten verschijnen waar men virtuele currencies bekijkt. Zie hier voor dat rapport. Dit is interessant omdat ze, naast Linden dollars (Second Life - een spel dat ooit eens enorm populair was bij zowel de spelers als allerlei bedrijven) ook BTC de revu laten passeren. Sites waar je BTC's kunt ontkoppelen van hun historie Minen Net zoals het betaalmiddel goud moeten bitcoins eerst "gevonden" worden. Het idee achter een bitcoin is namelijk dat het een bepaald getal is wat aan bepaalde cryptografische regels voldoet. Het uitrekenen van zo'n getal is niet triviaal. Hoe snel een computer zoiets uitrekent wordt uitgedrukt in "gigahashes per seconde". Als je er een gevonden hebt, dan zit er een constructie in het bitcoin netwerk dat er voor zorgt dat je 25 bitcoins (april 2013) krijgt. Dat waren er eerst meer maar er is wat ingebakken in bitcoin dat er voor zorgt dat naarmate er meer bitcoins zijn, die "vergoeding" steeds minder wordt tot je uiteindelijk bij 21 miljoen bitcoins geen vergoeding meer krijgt. Dat is zo gemaakt om er voor te zorgen dat er niet eindeloos veel bitcoins bijgemaakt kunnen worden tbv inflatie. Ja het kan wel, maar het levert je niets op. Een pc (met bijv. een AMD Phenom processor) doet ongeveer 12 megahashes per seconde. Een videokaart (een ATI 7970) doet er 440-500 per seconde. Ga je met je pc minen, dan moet je energieverbruik afzetten tegen wat het oplevert. Zo'n ATI7970 videokaart gebruikt zo'n 250Watt aan energie. Als je die getallen invult op https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator dan zie je dat zo'n videokaart practisch niets meer oplevert (0,01 dollar per maand! (22/6/2017)). Je kunt ook minen mbv ASICs. Dat zijn chips die gemaakt worden om speciaal 1 doel te kunnen doen, niet alles wat je maar kunt bedenken zoals de processor in je laptop. Doordat ze zo specifiek opgebouwd zijn, kunnen ze veel sneller een taak verrichten. Die videokaart waar ik het net over had doet maximaal 500 megahashes, een asic minstens 60000 megahashes per seconde bij een fractie van het energieverbruik. Bijvoorbeeld AntMiner produceert en verkoopt dergelijke apparaten (zie ook deze site voor een overzicht). Kijk op deze website om aanwijzingen te vinden hoe zelf met het minen te beginnen. In het kort: vroeger installeerde je een paar snelle videokaarten en wat software en dat was 't. Die tijd is al lang voorbij. Nu koop je een dedicated miner (ik noem er geen want over een paar dagen is die informatie al weer verouderd). Je kunt ook mining-capaciteit huren. Een ander draait dan de apparatuur en jij hebt de winst. Ja of het verlies. Je spreekt namelijk vooraf af wat je betaalt per eenheid. Als dan de koers daalt of stijgt heeft dat invloed op je winst. Daarom is het interessant voor mensen om capaciteit te verhuren: je weet zeker dat je een bepaald bedrag gaat krijgen, los van de koers. Er komt overigens een moment dat alle 21 miljoen (zoveel zijn het er maximaal) bitcoins gevonden zijn, minen heeft dan geen zin meer. Denk nu niet dat dat betekent dat maximaal 21 miljoen mensen 1 bitcoin kunnen hebben en het dus niet schaalt: bitcoins gaan in een aantal cijfers achter de komma (ik dacht 8) dus er is "wat ruimte". Waarom minen? Het "minen" is een belangrijk onderdeel van bitcoin: iedere keer dat er een nieuw blok gemined wordt kunnen er een aantal transacties gebundeld worden en in de blockchain worden opgenomen (en de miner krijgt dan ook een aantal bitcoin "gratis" toegewezen en krijgt alle transactiekosten van de transacties die gebundeld worden). Zelf een exchange (wisselkantoor) beginnen Dit is niet eenvoudig. Zowiezo zul je toch echt even met de belastingdienst moeten gaan praten hoe je dit moet aangeven. Verder heb je mogelijk (zie hieronder) een bankvergunning nodig. Dat is niet een kwestie van een pdfje uitprinten en opsturen. Ook zul je met de belastingdienst in conclaaf moeten, de beveiliging op orde hebben (physiek, digitaal), een onderneming als dit gaat criminaliteit aantrekken. Je zult niet de 1e exchange zijn die gehacked wordt en al z'n bitcoins kwijtraakt, of dat je server crashed en dat je backups niet goed blijken te zijn. Zoals al aangegeven staat PayPal het niet toe via hun dienst betalingen te laten doen voor geldwisseltransacties (mogelijk dat daar verandering in komt (24 april 2013) maar iDEAL heeft aangegeven (22/8/2012) dat die het wel toestaan ("DEALbetalingen zijn mogelijk voor alle diensten en producten die volgens de Nederlands wet zijn toegestaan"). 29 april 2013 gaf een woordvoorder van De Nederlandsche Bank het volgende aan: "...dat vooralsnog het oordeel van de Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) is dat Bitcoins als zodanig buiten de reikwijdte vallen van zowel de elektronisch geld richtlijn als de betaaldienstenrichtlijn. Dit is in lijn met de visie van de ECB zoals die blijkt uit het recent verschenen rapport over 'virtual currency schemes'. Let wel: het is niet uitgesloten dat dienstverlening met betrekking tot Bitcoins, bijvoorbeeld met betrekking tot de uitvoering van betalingstransacties daarmee, onder omstandigheden als betaaldienstverlening in de zin van de Wet op het financieel toezicht kan worden aangemerkt (bijvoorbeeld dienst 3) en daarmee vergunningplichting zou zijn. Zie voor verdere informatie de volgende link: http://www.toezicht.dnb.nl/2/50-226036.jsp." Er iets mee doen Mocht je bitcoins hebben, dan wil je er ook wat mee doen uiteraard. Er zijn al opvallend veel winkels, bedrijven, hobbyisten die met bitcoins betaald kunnen worden. Op de officiele bitcoin-wiki wordt een lijst bijgehouden. Begin je zelf iets, zelf dat dan vooral jezelf ook op die wiki. Dit is ook wel een leuke: forbitcoin.com: een soort van "heitje voor een karweitje" waar je dan betaald met bitcoins. Uiteraard veel mensen die bloot voor de webcam gaan zitten, maar ook lui die je tuin omspitten of je website hosten of je facebookvriend worden, etc. etc. En natuurlijk gokken. Op Bitcoins Poker vind je een overzicht van alle sites die BTC accepteren. Op bijvoorbeeld deze site kun je pokeren met als inzet BTC. Ook op bitcoinpokersites.net vindt je uitgebreide uitleg en relevante links. Handelen Kado? Sites voor handelen met bitcoins 'come and go'. Eentje met een forum-achtige structuur is bitcointrading.com Global Standard Bank verkoopt kaarten die je vervolgens kunt inwisselen voor BTC, lovebitcoins.org ook en bitcoinsforchristmas.com en coinapult.com doen het via e-mail. Ook in Nederland zijn er vvv-bon achtige kado-kaarten te koop: www.bitcoincadeau.nl - jammer, al die doe-bitcoin-kado-sites zijn verdwenen! forex-, aandelen- & future trading Geautomatiseerde forex-trading kan op bitstamp.net en campbx.com. "binary options" kan via bijv. www.binaryuno.com. Bitcoins accepteren in je (web-)winkel Voorheen duurde het te lang om een bitcoin transactie in een "physieke winkel" plaats te laten vinden. Omdat er echter toch wel de behoefte is bij veel winkeliers zijn een aantal bedrijven in dat probleem gedoken. Zo is er bijvoorbeeld BitKassa wat het heel makkelijk maakt. Met een eenvoudige tablet van een paar tientjes ben je dan al klaar (verder geen andere startup kosten). Een voordeel van BTC kan zijn dat de klant niet het bedrag kan teruboeken. Is de betaling gedaan, dan zal het geld aankomen in je wallet, hoe dan ook. Andere voordelen zijn dat je geen transactie kosten hebt (mits het bedrag boven een bepaald minimum is) en dat je ook betalingen uit het buitenland kunt accepteren. Voor een webwinkel zijn er een aantal opties. Zo kun je zelf wat software gaan schrijven tegen de bitcoin-applicatie aan en dat verbinden met je webwinkel software. Ook kun je de betalingen uitbesteden aan bijvoorbeeld het Nederlandse Mollie. Ik heb er zelf niet zoveel ervaring mee (anders dan een "quick hack" die ik zelf geprogrammeerd heb) maar op deze link staat een minstens complete lijst van "bitcoin winkelkarretjes". Over die veel te ingewikkelde adressen Om een betaling te doen heb je een adres nodig. Die adressen zijn een (te) lange combinatie van letters en cijfers. En dan ook nog eens hoofd- en kleine letters door elkaar. Mocht je een algemeen BTC adres willen opnemen in bijv. drukwerk (brieven, posters, etc.), dan gaat dat niet werken want geen klant zal de moeite nemen om zo'n adres over te tiepen. En het is ook risicovol: 1 tiepfout en het geld verdwijnt voor altijd in het niets (!). Nuja, ik moet dit wel enigzins nuanceren: het bitcoin adres bevat een controle getal. Klopt dit getal niet, dan weigert de bitcoin applicatie je transactie. Dit staat beschreven in de bitcoin wiki. Zie dit controle getal maar als de 11 proef die banken gebruik(t)en bij bankrekeningnummers. Dit probleem met die lange adressen geldt ook voor web-adressen dus daar is wat op gevonden: QR-codes. QR-codes zijn een vierkant met daarin ook weer vierkantjes die een patroon vormen. Dat patroon kan herkend worden door bijv. je telefoon of door software op je pc. Die software kan dan uit die QR-code een web-adres of in dit geval een BTC adres halen. Hoe zo'n QR-code te maken? Daar zijn allerlei software oplossingen voor. Wat je doet is: je pakt het adres dat je wil publiceren, zet er "bitcoin:" (zonder quotes) voor en laat dat omzetten naar een QR-code. Er is nog niet echt een algemene standaard voor en sommigen laten dat "bitcoin:" weg. Op www.wolframalpha.com kun je je adres laten omzetten. Voer daarvoor in: "qr code ..." (en vervang ... door het BTC adres, eventueel voorafgegaan door "bitcoin:"). Dit geeft dan iets als: Die btc.to heeft ook nog een andere leuke feature: het kan een adres als 1LVyTtygdCnESJcQWE136nxKjNr6s4qB5f omzetten in een web-adres als http://btc.to/70p: wanneer iemand naar dat web-adres surft, dan wordt het volledige BTC adres getoond. Belastingen Stel je begint een winkel of je verleent diensten waarbij je je laat uitbetalen in bitcoins, hoe gaat het in z'n werk met de belastingdienst? Begin september 2012 heb ik dit gevraagd en dit is het antwoord: "In artikel 8, zesde lid van de Wet op de omzetbelasting 1968 is bepaald dat indien de vergoeding in een andere munteenheid dan de euro is uitgedrukt, de wisselkoers vastgesteld dient te worden overeenkomst de laatst genoteerde verkoopkoers op het tijdsstip waarop de belasting verschuldigd wordt." "In dit geval betekent dit dat als u wegens een levering of een dienst een factuur moet uitreiken, de wisselkoers moet worden genomen die geldt op de dag waarop de factuur is uitgereikt of uiterlijk uitgereikt had moeten worden. Als er gen verplichting tot het uitreiken van een factuur is, dan wordt de omzetbelasting verschuldigd op het tijdstip waarop de ondernemer de vergoeding ontvangt." Op deze site kun je lezen wat de belastingdienst zegt over je vermogen in BTC: "Omdat u deze bitcoins kunt inwisselen tegen geld en de bitcoins daarom een bepaalde waarde vertegenwoordigen vormen deze bitcoins een onderdeel van uw vermogensbestanddelen. De waarde dient dan ook aangegeven te worden in box 3." Ageras.com geeft een rekenvoorbeeld hoe je je bitcoins moet aangeven bij de belastingen en wat het dan gaat kosten. Op deze website staat het volgende statement van de belasting dienst over loon in BTC: "Bitcoins zijn een niet in geld genoten inkomst op het moment dat iemand de beschikkingsmacht over die Bitcoins heeft verkregen. Als je als werknemer je salaris in Bitcoin ontvangt, zal de Belastingdienst dit dus waarschijnlijk aanmerken als loon in natura." Volgens nu.nl heeft het europesche hof van justitie (oktober 2015) nog eens benadrukt dat voor het handelen in bitcoin (de munt zelf, niet de goederen die je ermee koopt) er geen btw afgedragen hoeft te worden. Is bitcoin te stoppen/verbieden? Of bitcoin te stoppen is is een moeilijke vraag: niemand kan de toekomst voorspellen immers. Alleen hebben al heel veel mensen aanzienlijke bedragen geinvesteerd in bitcoin. Bijvoorbeeld bitcoins gekocht maar ook dingen als mining-hardware gekocht, websites begonnen, business modellen aangepast. Ja het kan dat opeens iedereen het vertrouwen verliest, dan daalt te koers snel. Het gaat hier wel om 10 miljard dollar aan bitcoin inmiddels. Dan het verbieden: dat is lastig. Ja alle "zichtbare" websites (bijv. www.thuisbezorgd.nl) kunnen gedwongen worden te stoppen met accepteren van bitcoin als betaalmiddel, en alle exchanges zoals BitStamp kunnen gedwongen worden te stoppen, maar daarmee is bitcoin nog niet uit de lucht. Mogelijk dat het bitcoin netwerk gewoon blijft bestaan. Want ook als het gefilterd zou gaan worden zijn er weer talloze manieren om dat de omzeilen (die echt niet zo ingewikkeld zijn). Geen conclusie. Links bitcoinsvergelijken.nl is een site die websites vergelijkt waar je bitcoins kunt kopen bitcoinspot.nl is een leuke Nederlandse site met bitcoin-nieuwtjes Op deze pagina vindt je een lange lijst van wisselkantoren en websites. stackechange: een community site waar mensen vragen stellen over bitcoin gerelateerde zaken. Niet alleen hoe je met de software omgaat, maar ook over hoe de BTC economie werkt, filosofische zaken, etc. http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584: "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph" complementaire-economie.startpagina.nl startpagina site over alternatieve economiën De schrijver dezes werd in 2013 geinterviewed in spits!nieuws. Nog vragen? Heb je nog een vraag? Stuur een mail naar: mail@vanheusden.com. Adverteren op deze pagina? Achtergrondfoto van Deze site maakt zelf geen cookies aan. De advertenties wel.Achtergrondfoto van www.schweizfotos.com Stuur me even een mailtje. Geen banner of logo's etc., alleen een tekstueel linkje.