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The Ohio State Senate is the upper house of the Ohio General Assembly. There are 33 State Senators. The state legislature meets in the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. The President of the Senate presides over the body when in session. He is currently Matt Huffman. The Senate is currently controlled by the Republican Party.
Senators serve four year terms. The terms of the Senators are staggered so that about half the membership is elected every two years. The Senators representing the even-numbered districts are elected in years evenly divisible by four. The Senators from the odd-numbered districts are elected in even-numbered years not divisible by four. Senators are limited to two terms.
Each Senator represents approximately 330,000 Ohioans. Each Senate District covers three Ohio House districts.
Composition
134th General Assembly (2021-2022)
Leadership
Other Officers
Clerk: According to the Rules of the Senate, the Clerk is elected by the members of the Senate and is tasked with maintaining records of all Senate bills and resolutions. The Clerk is also responsible for handling all documents received from other government departments.
Members of the 133rd Senate |
module Intrigue
module Core
module Model
class Issue < Sequel::Model
plugin :validation_helpers
plugin :timestamps
many_to_one :project
many_to_one :task_result
many_to_one :entity
self.raise_on_save_failure = false
def self.scope_by_project(project_name)
where(:project => Intrigue::Core::Model::Project.first(:name => project_name))
end
def validate
super
validates_unique([:entity_id, :name, :project_id, :source], allow_nil: true)
end
def uuid
project_name = self.project.name if self.project
project_name = "missing_project" unless project_name
source = source if source
source = 'intrigue' unless source
out = "#{project_name}##{self.name}#{source}##{entity.uuid}"
Digest::SHA2.hexdigest(out)
end
def to_s
"#{name} on #{entity.type} #{entity.name}"
end
def to_v1_api_hash(full=false)
if full
export_hash
else
{
:type => name,
:name => name,
:category => category,
:severity => severity,
:status => status,
:scoped => scoped,
:source => source || "intrigue",
:pretty_name => details["pretty_name"],
:entity_type => entity.type,
:entity_name => entity.name
}
end
end
###
### Export!
###
def export_hash
{
:type => name,
:name => name,
:category => category,
:severity => severity,
:status => status,
:scoped => scoped,
:source => source || "intrigue",
:description => description,
:pretty_name => details["pretty_name"],
:identifiers => details["identifiers"],
:remediation => details["remediation"],
:references => details["references"],
:entity_type => entity.type,
:entity_name => entity.name,
:entity_aliases => entity.aliases.map{|a| {"type" => a.type, "name" => a.name} },
:entity_alias_group_id => entity.alias_group_id,
:details => details,
:task_result => "#{task_result.name if task_result}",
:task_result_entity_name => "#{task_result.base_entity.name if task_result}",
:task_result_entity_type => "#{task_result.base_entity.type if task_result}"
}
end
def export_csv
"#{type}, #{name}, #{severity}, #{status}, #{description.gsub(",",";")}, #{entity.type}, #{entity.name}, #{entity.alias_group_id}"
end
def export_json
export_hash.merge("generated_at" => "#{Time.now.utc}").to_json
end
end
end
end
end |
Nekhbet was a goddess in Egyptian mythology, who was depicted as a vulture. She was the protector of a city but grew into the protector of upper Egypt, protector of child birth and the protector of the pharaohs.
Egyptian gods and goddesses |
He’s only been on Twitter for under an hour and already he has 126,000 followers — and quickly counting.
Can you hear me now? — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 29, 2015
He’s even had time to make a passport joke about Mars:
.@neiltyson Thanks for the welcome. And now we've got water on Mars! Do you think they check passports at the border? Asking for a friend. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 29, 2015
With the simple Twitter bio “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public. Director at ,” he’s introducing us to his work at Freedom of the Press, where he joined the board in 2014.
Welcome to Twitter, Snowden. Will you blow away Caitlyn Jenner’s record? She amassed more than 1 million followers in over four hours, beating President Barack Obama’s record of a million followers in 4 hours and 52 minutes. |
Niederviehbach is a municipality in the district of Dingolfing-Landau in Bavaria in Germany. It is on the Isar River. |
Triangle Shaped Dining Tables
For a true non-conformist triangle shaped dining tables may hold a special appeal. In this case, “four is a crowd” as opposed to the old axiom “three is a crowd”. It definitely makes a different statement in a dining room as opposed to more traditional shapes of rectangular, round or square. This product is called Globe and comes from Domitalia Design. From the second picture it does look like you can squeeze in a fourth chair if needed. |
Richard Norman Hastings (born February 7, 1941) is an American Republican politician. He was the U.S. representative for from 1995 until his retirement in 2015.
In February 2014, Hastings announced that he would not run for re-election in 2014. |
1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method, for use with the satellite-based communications network, for improving the reliability and speed at which communication between a user terminal and the network is established. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for arranging data of a channel request message transmitted from a user terminal to a gateway station via a satellite in the satellite-based network to insure that critical data for establishing communication between the user terminal and the satellite-based network is received at the satellite during the appropriate receiving time frame window.
2. Description of the Related Art:
A satellite communications network, such as a geosynchronous earth orbit mobile communications network, comprises at least one geosynchronous earth orbit satellite, a ground-based advanced operations center (AOC) and spacecraft operations center (SOC) associated with the satellite, at least one ground-based gateway station (GS), and at least one user terminal (UT), which is typically a hand-held or vehicle mounted mobile telephone. The satellite enables the user terminal to communicate with other user terminals, or with other telephones in the terrestrial public switched telephone network (PSIN), via the gateway stations under the control of the gateway stations. The AOC provides system-wide resource management and control functions for its respective satellite, and the SOC controls on-orbit satellite operations for its respective satellite.
When a user terminal is operated to establish a radio resource connection, it generates and transmits a channel request message to the network on a random access channel (RACH) at a frequency assigned by the gateway station to a spot beam covering an area in which the user terminal is located. Typically, a channel request message includes data used to represent the mobile user terminal, as well as contention resolution and timing synchronization information.
To increase the likelihood that the channel request message is received at the satellite during a receiving time frame, the transmitter of the user terminal takes into account an estimated time which will elapse between the point in time when the channel request message is transmitted and the point in time when the channel request message is received at the satellite, which is known as the propagation delay. Typically, a user terminal will calculate, based on information broadcast by the network, the propagation delay for a distance measured from a location on the earth'ss surface at the center of the spot beam in which the user terminal is located to the satellite, which is orbiting at about 22,000 miles above the earth's surface. Because the distance from the surface of the earth at the equator to the satellite is less than the distance from the surface of the earth in the extreme northern and southern hemispheres to the satellite, the propagation delay for a message sent from a user terminal close to the equator is less than that for a message sent from a user terminal in, for example, northern Europe.
Also, if the user terminal is at a distance from the center of the spot beam, the propagation delay is different than at the center of the spot beam, because the distance from the user terminal to the satellite is different. However, some user terminals are equipped with global positioning system (GPS) equipment and could thus better estimate their location with respect to the center of their respective spot beam. Also, some user terminals can estimate their location with respect to the center of their respective spot beam based on the power level at which the user terminal receives the spot beam. In either instance, these type of user terminals can better estimate the propagation delay for the channel request message, and therefore increase the likelihood that the channel request message will be received at the satellite during a receiving time frame. Moreover, because the duration of a conventional channel request message is a fraction of the duration of a receiving time frame at the satellite, the entire channel request message can generally be received within the desired time frame.
To decrease call set up time, it is desirable to include in the channel request message information pertaining to the position of the user terminal making the call, the called party number, the cause for establishing the call, the service provider identification, and so on, in addition to the contention resolution and synchronization information. However, this additional information increases the overall length of the channel request message, and thus increases the likelihood that a complete channel request message will not be received by the satellite during a receiving time frame window. That is, if the instant at which the channel request message is transmitted is not accurately synchronized with the receiving time frame window, some of the information in the channel request message will not reach the satellite during the receiving time frame window, and will thus be lost. Consequently, if information necessary for call set up, such as contention resolution and timing synchronization information, is not received by the satellite, the call cannot be set up. Furthermore, even if the user terminal resends the channel request message, unless the timing difference between transmission of the channel request message and the appearance of the receiving time frames at the satellite is resolved, the network still cannot set up a call.
Accordingly, a need exists for an apparatus and method which enables a user terminal to transmit additional call set-up information in a channel request message to accelerate call set-up time between the user terminal and satellite-based communications network, while also assuring that the information necessary for call set-up is received intact by the satellite in the network. |
In Greek mythology, Talos was a giant bronze man. He guarded the island of Crete by throwing stones at the ships of unwanted visitors. He was given life by the Greek god Hephaestus. He was given to either Minos or Europa as a gift.
Greek legendary creatures
People in Greek mythology
Monsters |
Degranulation status of airway tissue eosinophils in mouse models of allergic airway inflammation.
Eosinophil degranulation is a characteristic feature of asthma and allergic rhinitis. However, degranulated eosinophils have not been convincingly demonstrated in the common mouse models of these airway diseases. This study uses eosinophil peroxidase (EPO) histochemistry and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis to assess eosinophil degranulation in the airways of ovalbumin (OVA)-sensitized and challenged BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice. Using TEM we also examined mouse and human blood eosinophils after in vitro incubation with formyl-Met-Leu-Phe (fMLP) or phorbol myristate acetate (PMA). Although OVA exposure induced significant nasal and lung eosinophilia, we did not observe any of the known cellular processes by which eosinophils release their granule products, i.e., eosinophil cytolysis, piecemeal degranulation, and exocytosis. The occurrence of other allergen-induced degranulation events was ruled out because no difference in granule morphology was observed between lung-tissue eosinophils and blood or bone-marrow eosinophils from control animals. Accordingly, there was no detectable extracellular EPO in lung tissues of allergic mice. Similarly, mouse blood eosinophils remained nondegranulated in vitro in the presence of fMLP and PMA, whereas the same treatment of human eosinophils resulted in extensive degranulation. This investigation indicates that OVA-induced airway inflammation in the present mouse strains does not involve significant eosinophil degranulation. It is speculated that this dissimilarity from the human disease may be due to a fundamental difference in the regulation of mouse and human eosinophils. |
James "Jimmy" Cotton (July 1, 1935 - March 16, 2017), was an American blues harmonica player, singer, and songwriter. He was an orphan.
Career
Cotton first became interested in playing music when he heard Sonny Boy Williamson on the radio. He left his home to find Sonny Boy Williamson, and when he found him (in West Helena, Arkansas), Williamson took him in and raised him. Blues singer Bobby Bland was his half-brother.
First band
Cotton first began playing the blues harp in Williamson's band, called Howlin Wolf's. After one gig, Sonny Boy quit the band to live with his wife in Milwaukee. He left the band in Cotton's hands. Cotton said, "He just gave it to me. But I couldn't hold it together 'cause I was too young and crazy in those days an' everybody in the band was grown men, so much older than me."
Later career
Cotton started working with the Muddy Waters Band in 1955. He performed songs like "I Got My Mojo Working" and "She's Nineteen Years Old". After leaving Muddy's band in 1966, Cotton toured with Janis Joplin. Alone, Cotton wrote classic songs like "Cotton Crop Blues", "Rocket 88" and "Hold Me In Your Arms". He formed the James Cotton Blues Band in 1967. They performed all of Cotton's classics and more.
Death
Cotton died at a medical center in Austin, Texas from pneumonia on March 16, 2017 at the age of 81.
Awards
Cotton played harmonica on Muddy Water's Grammy Award winning 1977 album Hard Again. James Cotton's band would also get nominated for two Grammy Awards. The first one was for his 1984 release, Live From Chicago: Mr. Superharp Himself!. His second for Take Me Back.
Performances
Cotton played with the following people:
Big Mama Thornton
Janis Joplin
Sonny Boy Williamson
Howlin' Wolf
Muddy Waters
Led Zeppelin
Freddie King
Steve Miller
Santana
B.B. King
The Grateful Dead
Willie "Big Eyes" Smith
Johnny Winter
Jimmie Vaughan
Todd Rundgren
Albums
Chicago/The Blues/Today! vol. 2
Take Me Back
3 Harp Boogie
Live from Chicago Mr. Superharp Himself High Compression 100% Cotton
Live & On the Move
Cut You Loose!
Mighty Long Time
Fire Down Under the Hill
Baby, Don't You Tear My Cloths
Deep in the Blues
Living the Blues
''35th Anniversary Jam |
The male Guianan Cock-of-the-rock. This video shows the great views we had of this bird. PhoneSkope video by guide Marcelo Barreiros.
Having just said our good-byes to the first “Rio Negro Paradise: Manaus” tour group, Marcelo and I had a day to rest up before receiving our second group, ready for another exciting and educational journey, perhaps better-said, “voyage”, through this beautiful, central sector of the Amazon basin. Our opening stroll around the grounds of the stately Tropical Hotel served to introduce numerous common, widespread species that would be familiar companions on many days of the tour, and also produced great views of Variable Chachalaca and Golden-spangled Piculet, both of which are much less frequently sighted. We usually encounter a sloth or two around the forest patch behind the hotel, but we dipped on them this time. After an early but well-appointed breakfast next morning, we were off to the famous Adolfo Ducke Reserve, on the northeast corner of Manaus. We started there with a fine pair of Point-tailed Palm-creepers, certainly one of the most distinctive members of the huge Ovenbird (Furnariidae) family. Soon, Red-bellied Macaws began to pass in small groups, and yelping (White-throated) and croaking (Channel-billed) toucans started sounding off from the forest canopy while both Green and Black-necked aracaris posed for scope views. Just a short distance into the reserve we were treated to a really superb view of a pair of Red-billed Woodcreepers, followed by a pair of Black-spotted Barbets, some perched Red-fan Parrots, Fasciated Antshrike, and an Amazonian Pygmy-Owl being mobbed by a Black-eared Fairy and a White-chinned Sapphire, a Tiny Tyrant-Manakin, and a female White-fronted Manakin. Further down the track, we hit a nice mixed-species canopy flock with a very cooperative Guianan Woodcreeper, Spot-backed Antwren, Mouse-colored Antshrike, Slaty-capped Shrike-Vireo, and a pair of Pink-throated Becards. But tops that morning was a prolonged scope study of a young male Harpy Eagle, the same bird we had seen on the first tour.
Our next major venue was the famous INPA research tower, about two hours north of Manaus. We transferred to fairly comfy 4-WD vehicles to make the trip into the tower on a bumpy dirt road, thankful that it was dry and actually in pretty good shape, relative to how it’s been on many previous tours. We had a picnic breakfast at the parking area and scurried down the path and up the (how may is it… 142?) steps to greet the dawning of the day 47 meters (about 150 feet) above the forest floor. It was a gorgeous, birdy morning indeed, highlighted by a fruiting tree that attracted a non-stop parade of birds. We kept an eye on that tree all morning, getting great scope views of Guianan Toucanet and several toucans, Pompadour and Spangled cotingas, and Dusky Parrot, especially. Flock action was good as well, and we eventually tallied Waved and Golden-collared woodpeckers, Curve-billed Scythebill, Ash-winged Antwren, Olive-green Tyrannulet, Guianan Tyrannulet, Short-tailed Pygmy-Tyrant, Yellow-throated Flycatcher, and a male Glossy-backed Becard, along with Red-billed Pied-Tanager and numerous other tanagers, dacnis, and honeycreepers. Guianan and Pied puffbirds, and several Paradise Jacamars also showed beautifully.
After demolishing a fabulous lunch spread in the little town of Presidente Figueiredo, we moved into our home for the next four nights, at Mari Mari. Marcelo and I quickly checked the fruiting acai palms around the lodge dining area, to see if they were still attracting lots of birds, as they had been a couple of weeks earlier, on our first tour. Great news – there was still a lot of fruit and a fine variety of birds! After a little rest, we gathered the group there and the fun started all over again, with four species of toucans, Guianan Cocks-of the Rock of all ages and both sexes, multiple Purple-breasted and Spangled cotingas, Sulphury Flycatchers, saltators and other birds zipping in and out of those trees. Even an immature male Guianan Red-Cotinga showed up for a few minutes. A bit later, we entered the forest proper, where there is an impressive lek of Guianan Cocks-of-the-Rock. The afternoon show was spectacular, as usual, with several males sitting around and doing a little displaying and posturing as we watched, only a few yards away. Also there was a Rufous Nightjar with a recently hatched chick. It must have been sitting on the nest nearby, motionless, incubating its eggs, when we were there on the first tour.
Over the course of the next three days, we birded several forest trails around Presidente Figueiredo, including tall, undisturbed rainforest, lower stature “campinarana” forest, and also the “campina” scrub that the campinarana surrounds. The area is famous for its remarkably pure, blackwater streams and sandstone grottos, and we enjoyed seeing lots of birds and mammals there. There was no sign of the Black-faced Hawk that had graced our bin’s on the first tour, nor the handsome Chestnut-belted Gnateater we had seen, but we were compensated by good views of Guianan Red-Cotinga and Capuchinbird, both of which had been heard only before. Musician Wren performed famously (such a great bird!), as did Rufous-tailed Xenops and Ferruginous-backed Antbird. Spotted Puffbird came quite easily (and close!), but Pelzeln’s Tody-Tyrant and Saffron-crested Tyrant-Manakin took some special effort before they provided good views. It also took a while to get a scope on a male Crimson Topaz at our traditional patch of Isertia trees, but we finally did see a male well. Or, we thought it had been a good view until early the next morning, when we found two males feeding on flying gnats over a stream as the sun was rising, perfectly lighting them up as they chased each other around – that was a real WOW! A Green-tailed Goldenthroat paused for nice views, and Blue-and-yellow Macaws winged by in perfect light. Then, as we prepared to enter a campinarana forest trail, we heard a very distant song we had prayed might fall on our ears: a White-naped Seedeater! This rare finch-like tanager (as it is currently classified) has been very spotty in recent years, with most tours failing to see it. This particular morning, the bird was singing up a storm, and we even watched him chase a female out of sight (at least 2 km straight-line, and rising high above the trees) only to come roaring back to his same patch, right in front of us. We enjoyed superb studies of Bronzy Jacamars and had pretty nice looks at Black Manakin and Rufous-crowned Elaenia. We managed to coax a shy Campinarana Flycatcher into view (Cnemotriccus fuscatus duidae, sure to be officially split from the Fuscous Flycatcher complex), but had no luck with Pale-bellied Mourner. One of the more spectacular mammal encounters we have had on recent tours involved about seven Monk Sakis which, at first, seemed to be performing their usual disappearing act, but which then settled down to begin a prolonged allopreening session (check out the video, below!), some of which Marcelo broadcast live via his Instagram account!
One afternoon, we took the group to a side-road where we had found a male Crimson Fruitcrow on the first tour. Our plan was to stay late and do some owling. Well, we ended up staying late, alright, just not for owling! After we had gone in a few kilometers, a thunderstorm with high, gusty winds came roaring through the forest and toppled a large tree across the road, completely blocking our exit to the highway. We discovered this on our way out, as rain was thundering down, and had to shift quickly to (non-existent) “Plan B” – which evolved into turning back around to continue down that treacherously slippery mud road where we could hope to find a house where someone might be home, and might have a chainsaw because trees must fall across the road now and then, and then might have gas for the chainsaw… in sum, it was not looking good for us making it out of there that night. Quite honestly, I’m amazed that we did – but, sure enough, the rain let up, we were able to drive in (and back out!) on that messy road, far enough to reach a house, and, after talking with some people there, we found a guy with a chainsaw and plenty of gas for it. He soon arrived on the scene via motorcycle, with his young daughter who had insisted on accompanying him for this adventure with a bunch of gringos. It took over an hour to clear the road of that big tree, which was nearly two feet in diameter. We were greatly relieved, of course, and we compensated the fellow well for his tremendous job, but we asked that he follow along toward the highway, just in case we might need his help again… and, yikes!, we soon came to another tree across the road! Fortunately, this one was smaller, only about 8” in diameter, but it was tangled with branches and vines, and it took another hour to get it out of the way enough to squeeze our van through. We finally made it back to the paved highway about 8:00 p.m., very thankful for the helpful hand we had received from our new friend. Check out the video clips at the end of the list ;-). We did manage to get back there to try some owling on our last evening before getting on the boat, and scored a nice Black-banded Owl.
Our four days at Presidente Figueiredo had been great, but now it was time for the boat! Back in Manaus, we found the beautiful Dorinha waiting for us at the Tropical Hotel dock and eagerly descended the steps to go aboard and settle into our rooms. We met our guide for this exciting week on the rivers, Rafael, who later gave us an orientation session covering amenities of the Dorinha and safety procedures. We also had a meet-and-greet with the seven-person crew, which was fun, and very soon we had the bow pointed upriver, toward Anavilhanas National Park. After a jovial checklist/happy hour session and a wonderful dinner that evening, we made a night-lighting excursion a short distance up a small tributary of the Negro in the two long, wooden “canoes” we would use for all of our landings at birding sites. You never know what you might find along these little waterways, but it’s invariably interesting to snoop around at night out there. The water was a good four feet lower than it had been a couple of weeks earlier, on the first Manaus tour. It was a lovely, calm evening as we glided along, spotting a Gladiator Treefrog and a couple of Marine Toads, but not much else. Then, we heard a Crested Owl on a side-branch of the stream, and managed to get the canoes far enough into the area to call it into view – yaHOO! It was getting late and we’d had a big day already, so we called it good and headed back to the Dorinha, spotting a couple of roosting Band-tailed Nighthawks along the way.
Deep in the Anavilhanas Archipelago, the pre-dawn darkness of 23 September found us piling into the canoes for another spot-lighting adventure, the targets this time being Spectacled Owl and both of the species of Band-tailed Nighthawks (which, at present, are considered subspecies of a single species). It looked grim for actually seeing the Spec, which was calling persistently from trees not far back from the river edge, but we eventually maneuvered the canoes sufficiently to get the light on one of the pair, which was great. And sure enough, both of the band-tails were present, responding vigorously each to his own vocalization, cutting circles around the canoes as I gave them appropriate, species-specific playbacks. As I explained to everyone later, the taxonomic/nomenclatural issue attending this case is complex, and is going to require just a little more judicious field work to nail down definitively. We gathered on the top deck for breakfast as the sun was rising through the trees. There were pairs and trios of Festive Parrots on all sides, Crestless Curassows boomed in the still-dark forest (we were not fortunate enough to get to see one), and woodcreepers and antbirds of several species contributed to the dawn chorus. Soon we were back in the canoes and headed off to a trailhead where the crew had just made us a set of mud steps up to the flat terrace where we would walk into the forest. “As advertised”, the Wire-tailed Manakins were there and showing their stuff – what a fabulous bird it is! It was a great start to that morning, which, over the next 2-3 hours, produced a fine assemblage of river-island specialties, such as Blackish-gray Antshrike, Black-crested Antshrike, Ash-breasted Antbird, Black-chinned Antbird, Klages’s Antwren, Leaden Antwren, Streak-throated Hermit and Blue-chinned Sapphire, Snethlage’s Tody-Tyrant, and Long-billed, Straight-billed, Zimmer’s and Striped woodcreepers! Scale-breasted and Crimson-crested woodpeckers also showed nicely.
That afternoon we stopped at the ship-building town of Novo Airão, where there is a floating dock which serves as a feeding station for Amazon River Dolphins (Pink River Dolphin, Inia geoffrensis). The locals started feeding some of the “botos” there nearly 20 years ago, and now there are about 15 individuals which have become accustomed to these feedings at certain hours on 3-4 days a week. We were fortunate to get to participate in that afternoon’s feeding session, and even to get to touch the “beaks” of some of the animals. This initiative has become an important factor in the conservation of the dolphins, as it has certainly helped raise public awareness of the dolphins’ plight. We also got to see Spix’s Night Monkeys at their tradition day-roost nearby, which was greatly enjoyed by all. We then booted it upriver, traveling through the night to guarantee a pre-dawn arrival at the mouth of the Rio Jau.
Sure enough, first light found us anchored at the confluence of the Jau with the Rio Negro. Here, the rivers had not dropped so much, and levels were only 2-3 feet lower than we had experienced a couple of weeks earlier. There were still no sandbars exposed, however, so there were good numbers of Large-billed and Yellow-billed terns around, waiting for them to become exposed so they could commence nesting activities in earnest. Both species of river dolphins were also present, the pink Amazon River Dolphins and also the smaller, gray Tucuxis. As the day dawned behind us, we drifted over to register our entrance into the national park at the floating dock headquarters. Waiting there, we were fortunate to pick up a singing Plumbeous Euphonia and a number of other, more common species. We then motored smoothly up the calm river, spotting a Sungrebe and seeing herons and cormorants and Green Ibis and kingfishers before making our first stop in “chavascal” woodland. This is a strange habitat in which a low diversity of tree species has evolved to survive the severe flooding cycle of these acidic, blackwater river systems, wherein the roots are well underwater for many months in succession. The few species that have evolved to make it here are present in high numbers, such that the density of trees is quite high, and the canopy height relatively uniform, and only about 15 meters tall. We racked up most of the species we were hoping for fairly efficiently, including Lafresnaye’s Piculet, Amazonian Antshrike, Cherrie’s Antwren, Yellow-crowned Manakin, Brown-headed Greenlet, and the still-undescribed, sister-species of Pelzeln’s Tody-Tyrant inhabiting chavascal and campina habitats west of the Rio Negro. Moving up the Jau that afternoon, we spotted a distant Orange-breasted Falcon, which we managed to see pretty well with the scopes. Our traditional owling excursion for that evening started muggily “slow” but kicked into gear bigtime as we threw the lights on both Rufous and White-winged potoos inside of half an hour, the latter cooperating nicely by coming in to the hoped-for snag we had picked out for it, then sitting for leisurely scope study. Back at the river, we pressed our luck with a swing around the margins of the Jau with spotlights, and, just as we were heading back to the Dorinha, we picked up the eyeshine of a Great Potoo high on a dead snag, with, amazingly, a Common Potoo on a snag just below it – thus, we scored a four-potoo evening!!
The next couple of afternoons were unseasonally rainy, which caused us to change our planned stop for an initial night near the first big rapids on the Jau. We would take advantage of the unusually high river level to advance father upriver than we had ever ventured, to reach a stream called “Miratucu”, where we expected to find a mix of chavascal and terra firme forest. We went spotlighting that evening, picking up another Common Potoo that stayed put on a stub just above eye-level as we drifted by in the canoes, but a thick fog and drizzle soon set in, and we had to call it quits. However, early morning on the Miratucu was beautiful. We tied up the canoes at a well-lit bend in the stream and, over the next hour or so, spotted a fine assortment of species along a chavascal/terra firme boundary, and also four Giant Otters. Back down to the rapids that evening, we planned to hit the trail at night, in hopes of finding a Nocturnal Curassow. We did hear one, far off, but it sang only sporadically and we weren’t able to get much closer to it.
It remained for us to transit out of the Jau and all the way down the Negro, to be in position for an important day of birding on the “whitewater” Rio Solimoes, which is the Brazilian name for the Amazon River before its confluence with the Negro. As expected the “furo”, or cut, through the narrow neck of land separating the Negro and the Solimoes, had plenty of water for us to make the passage easily, and we reached our hoped-for position near the upstream end of huge Marchantaria Island by dawn. Somewhat strangely, the landing areas we planned to bird were all complicated by the combination of the dropping river exposing steep banks and then recently exposed mud as well. Still, we managed to get around most obstacles well enough, and improvised a couple of stops to get some of the young-island specialties. Castelnau’s Antshrikes came in very close, providing superb views, and a nesting pair of Red-and-white Spinetails was also really neat. We had lunch over the “Meeting of the Waters”, where the Negro hits the Solimoes, the two forming the great Rio Amazonas. The scene was properly impressive. Rafael explained the dynamics of the meeting of these two massive, but very different rivers, which don’t mix thoroughly for some 400 kilometers downstream. The Amazon is extremely silty, allowing little sunlight penetration, so relatively cold, while the clear, “black” waters of the Rio Negro absorb lots of solar energy, and are thus warmer and less dense – not to mention much more acidic, due to the high concentration of tannins leached out of leaf litter and drained through sand. The “Encontro das Aguas” is indeed an amazing spot on our great planet Earth!
We anchored that evening off the main ferry dock at Manaus, where vehicles cross the Amazon to reach the Transamazon Highway and, eventually, all of southern Brazil. Rising early, we made our way across Manaus to the Ducke Reserve and the fairly new MUSA (Museum of the Amazon) tower. We enjoyed a productive final morning of birding up there, highlighted by a steady stream of parrots and toucans, and woodcreepers and tanagers. Views of the unbroken forest were gorgeous, but we were conscious of the near proximity of the largest city in the Amazon, only a few hundred yards away. That afternoon we made a swing through the public market near the main port of Manaus and then visited the beautiful Manaus Opera House downtown. Back on the Dorinha, we had a couple of hours to rest, clean up, and repack before our final dinner and leisurely transfer to the airport for the American Airlines flight to Miami, and points home.
Marcelo and I thank all of you very much for coming with Field Guides and us for two great weeks of birding in the central Amazon basin, mostly on the beautiful Rio Negro. Please come back for more birding in Brazil, you know where to find us! Marcelo will put together our bird and mammal list and get it out to you with some great imagery very shortly.
Com grandes abraços -- Bret and Marcelo
KEYS FOR THIS LISTOne of the following keys may be shown in brackets for individual species as appropriate: * = heard only, I = introduced, E = endemic, N = nesting, a = austral migrant, b = boreal migrant
BIRDS
Tinamidae (Tinamous)
UNDULATED TINAMOU(Crypturellus undulatus)[*]
VARIEGATED TINAMOU(Crypturellus variegatus)[*]
Anatidae (Ducks, Geese, and Waterfowl)
BLACK-BELLIED WHISTLING-DUCK(Dendrocygna autumnalis)– Many of these birds were seen during our morning at Marchantaria island.
MUSCOVY DUCK(Cairina moschata)
BRAZILIAN TEAL(Amazonetta brasiliensis)– Four birds seen flying over the Marchantaria island.
Cracidae (Guans, Chachalacas, and Curassows)
VARIABLE CHACHALACA(Ortalis motmot)
MARAIL GUAN(Penelope marail)
NOCTURNAL CURASSOW(Nothocrax urumutum)– We heard a single bird calling during the night but unfortunately it was too far away and we could not get closer to it.
CRESTLESS CURASSOW(Mitu tomentosum)[*]
Phalacrocoracidae (Cormorants and Shags)
NEOTROPIC CORMORANT(Phalacrocorax brasilianus)
Some of the nice moments we had during the first half of the tour. Video by guide Bret Whitney.
Anhingidae (Anhingas)
ANHINGA(Anhinga anhinga)
Ardeidae (Herons, Egrets, and Bitterns)
RUFESCENT TIGER-HERON(Tigrisoma lineatum)
COCOI HERON(Ardea cocoi)
GREAT EGRET(Ardea alba)
SNOWY EGRET(Egretta thula)
CATTLE EGRET(Bubulcus ibis)
STRIATED HERON(Butorides striata)
CAPPED HERON(Pilherodius pileatus)– This nice looking Heron was seen once during a canoe trip on the Jaú river.
Threskiornithidae (Ibises and Spoonbills)
GREEN IBIS(Mesembrinibis cayennensis)
BUFF-NECKED IBIS(Theristicus caudatus)– A single bird flying over the Marchantaria island.
Cathartidae (New World Vultures)
BLACK VULTURE(Coragyps atratus)
TURKEY VULTURE(Cathartes aura)
LESSER YELLOW-HEADED VULTURE(Cathartes burrovianus)
GREATER YELLOW-HEADED VULTURE(Cathartes melambrotus)
KING VULTURE(Sarcoramphus papa)– Two adults seen on the way up to Jaú National Park.
HARPY EAGLE(Harpia harpyja)– We had great looks at the juvenile Harpy Eagle at Ducke Reserve. The bird was seen in the scope, sitting near to its nest.
BLACK-AND-WHITE HAWK-EAGLE(Spizaetus melanoleucus)– Another nice raptor seen at Ducke Reserve, on the first morning of the tour.
BLACK-COLLARED HAWK(Busarellus nigricollis)
PLUMBEOUS KITE(Ictinia plumbea)
CRANE HAWK(Geranospiza caerulescens)
SAVANNA HAWK(Buteogallus meridionalis)
GREAT BLACK HAWK(Buteogallus urubitinga)
ROADSIDE HAWK(Rupornis magnirostris)
WHITE HAWK(Pseudastur albicollis)– Great looks at Tucumanduba road on our last morning at Pres. Figueiredo.
BLACK-FACED HAWK(Leucopternis melanops)[*]
GRAY-LINED HAWK(Buteo nitidus)
Harpy Eagle is the largest raptor of the New World. This juvenile was seen near its nest. PhoneSkope video by guide Marcelo Barreiros.
SHORT-TAILED HAWK(Buteo brachyurus)
Rallidae (Rails, Gallinules, and Coots)
GRAY-BREASTED CRAKE(Laterallus exilis)[*]
GRAY-COWLED WOOD-RAIL(Aramides cajaneus)
RUSSET-CROWNED CRAKE(Anurolimnas viridis)[*]
Heliornithidae (Finfoots)
SUNGREBE(Heliornis fulica)– Seen a few times in Jaú National Park.
Charadriidae (Plovers and Lapwings)
PIED LAPWING(Vanellus cayanus)
SOUTHERN LAPWING(Vanellus chilensis)
Jacanidae (Jacanas)
WATTLED JACANA(Jacana jacana)
Scolopacidae (Sandpipers and Allies)
HUDSONIAN GODWIT(Limosa haemastica)
WHITE-RUMPED SANDPIPER(Calidris fuscicollis)
SOUTH AMERICAN SNIPE(Gallinago paraguaiae)
SPOTTED SANDPIPER(Actitis macularius)
SOLITARY SANDPIPER(Tringa solitaria)
Laridae (Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers)
YELLOW-BILLED TERN(Sternula superciliaris)
LARGE-BILLED TERN(Phaetusa simplex)– Common along the rivers.
The Chavascal is the very singular, seasonally flooded habitat, where birds such as the Brown-headed Greenlet live. Photo by participant Rick "The Walrus" Woodruff.
BLACK SKIMMER(Rynchops niger)
Columbidae (Pigeons and Doves)
ROCK PIGEON(Columba livia)
PALE-VENTED PIGEON(Patagioenas cayennensis)
SCALED PIGEON(Patagioenas speciosa)– Beautiful pigeon seen a few times during the tour.
PLUMBEOUS PIGEON(Patagioenas plumbea)
RUDDY PIGEON(Patagioenas subvinacea)
COMMON GROUND-DOVE(Columbina passerina)
RUDDY GROUND-DOVE(Columbina talpacoti)
WHITE-TIPPED DOVE(Leptotila verreauxi)
GRAY-FRONTED DOVE(Leptotila rufaxilla)
Opisthocomidae (Hoatzin)
HOATZIN(Opisthocomus hoazin)– This is one of the most peculiar bird families in the world. These are leaf-eating birds that have a nice looking crest, and live near to the water. We saw a big flock on Marchantaria island.
TAWNY-BELLIED SCREECH-OWL(Megascops watsonii)– On this tour, we had the great luck to see this little owl in a hole during the day.
CRESTED OWL(Lophostrix cristata)– What a bird! Seen really well on our first evening on the boat.
SPECTACLED OWL(Pulsatrix perspicillata)– Another great look at Anavilhanas National Park. The same pair of birds were seen two weeks before, and we also heard a young bird calling.
AMAZONIAN PYGMY-OWL(Glaucidium hardyi)
BLACK-BANDED OWL(Ciccaba huhula)– YES! This big owl is always tough to get! We had great looks at Presidente Figueiredo.
Caprimulgidae (Nightjars and Allies)
SHORT-TAILED NIGHTHAWK(Lurocalis semitorquatus)
BAND-TAILED NIGHTHAWK(Nyctiprogne leucopyga)
BLACKISH NIGHTJAR(Nyctipolus nigrescens)
COMMON PAURAQUE(Nyctidromus albicollis)
LADDER-TAILED NIGHTJAR(Hydropsalis climacocerca)– We saw a female incubating her egg at Marchantaria island.
This Rufous Nightjar was a great surprise on the tour! This is one of the adults that were sitting near to the chick at Mari-Mari Lodge. Photo by tour participant Roger Holmberg.
RUFOUS NIGHTJAR(Antrostomus rufus)– WOW! This is not a common bird around Manaus. Our friend Betão showed us an adult and its chick near the Guianan Cock-of-the-rock arena.
Nyctibiidae (Potoos)
GREAT POTOO(Nyctibius grandis)– Every evening out for night birds is unpredictable and sometimes amazing things happen! One night we were fortunate and saw four (!!!) Potoo species in the same night! Even better, we had the Great and the Common Potoo perched in the same tree!
COMMON POTOO(Nyctibius griseus)– Seen a few times during the tour.
WHITE-WINGED POTOO(Nyctibius leucopterus)– A little Potoo that lives high in the canopy! We had great look at Jaú National Park.
RUFOUS POTOO(Nyctibius bracteatus)– Ten minutes before the White-winged Potoo showed up, we had an adult Rufous Potoo on the same perch as the first tour, 15 days earlier.
Apodidae (Swifts)
CHAPMAN'S SWIFT(Chaetura chapmani)
SHORT-TAILED SWIFT(Chaetura brachyura)
BAND-RUMPED SWIFT(Chaetura spinicaudus)
GRAY-RUMPED SWIFT(Chaetura cinereiventris)
LESSER SWALLOW-TAILED SWIFT(Panyptila cayennensis)
FORK-TAILED PALM-SWIFT(Tachornis squamata)
Trochilidae (Hummingbirds)
CRIMSON TOPAZ(Topaza pella)– One of the highlights of the tour! We saw two males hawking some bugs early in the morning in Pres. Figueiredo, for several minutes.
WHITE-NECKED JACOBIN(Florisuga mellivora)
STRAIGHT-BILLED HERMIT(Phaethornis bourcieri)
LONG-TAILED HERMIT(Phaethornis superciliosus)
STREAK-THROATED HERMIT(Phaethornis rupurumii)– Great looks on our first morning at Anavilhanas National Park.
REDDISH HERMIT(Phaethornis ruber)[*]
BLACK-EARED FAIRY(Heliothryx auritus)
GREEN-TAILED GOLDENTHROAT(Polytmus theresiae)
GREEN-THROATED MANGO(Anthracothorax viridigula)– This bird is only found on the white water islands.
BLUE-TAILED EMERALD(Chlorostilbon mellisugus)
BLUE-CHINNED SAPPHIRE(Chlorestes notata)
GRAY-BREASTED SABREWING(Campylopterus largipennis)
FORK-TAILED WOODNYMPH(Thalurania furcata)
VERSICOLORED EMERALD(Amazilia versicolor)
GLITTERING-THROATED EMERALD(Amazilia fimbriata)
RUFOUS-THROATED SAPPHIRE(Hylocharis sapphirina)
WHITE-CHINNED SAPPHIRE(Hylocharis cyanus)
Trogonidae (Trogons)
BLACK-TAILED TROGON(Trogon melanurus)– Seen nicely from the towers.
GREEN-BACKED TROGON(Trogon viridis)
GUIANAN TROGON(Trogon violaceus)– A male seen very well from the ZF-2 INPA tower.
BLUE-CROWNED TROGON(Trogon curucui)
Two majestic male Crimson Topaz were seen hawking insects early in the morning at Cachoeira das Lajes private reserve. Photo by participant Roger Holmberg.
BLACK-THROATED TROGON(Trogon rufus)
Momotidae (Motmots)
AMAZONIAN MOTMOT(Momotus momota)[*]
Alcedinidae (Kingfishers)
RINGED KINGFISHER(Megaceryle torquata)
AMAZON KINGFISHER(Chloroceryle amazona)
GREEN KINGFISHER(Chloroceryle americana)
GREEN-AND-RUFOUS KINGFISHER(Chloroceryle inda)
AMERICAN PYGMY KINGFISHER(Chloroceryle aenea)
Bucconidae (Puffbirds)
WHITE-NECKED PUFFBIRD(Notharchus hyperrhynchus)– Replaces Guianan Puffbird on the west of the Negro river.
GUIANAN PUFFBIRD(Notharchus macrorhynchos)– A Guianan shield endemic seen well from the ZF-2 INPA tower.
SHORT-TAILED PARROT(Graydidascalus brachyurus)– Hundreds of these loud birds were seen at Marchantaria island.
FESTIVE PARROT(Amazona festiva)
MEALY PARROT(Amazona farinosa)
ORANGE-WINGED PARROT(Amazona amazonica)
BLUE-WINGED PARROTLET(Forpus xanthopterygius)
RED-FAN PARROT(Deroptyus accipitrinus)– Stunning Parrot! Maybe be most beautiful one in the Neotropics! We had a few nice looks during the tour, especially from the towers.
PAINTED PARAKEET(Pyrrhura picta)
BROWN-THROATED PARAKEET(Eupsittula pertinax)
RED-BELLIED MACAW(Orthopsittaca manilatus)
BLUE-AND-YELLOW MACAW(Ara ararauna)
SCARLET MACAW(Ara macao)– A very large Parrot flying against the Amazonian canopy is a fantastic view! This is a kind of memory we have from the towers near to Manaus.
RED-AND-GREEN MACAW(Ara chloropterus)
CHESTNUT-FRONTED MACAW(Ara severus)
WHITE-EYED PARAKEET(Psittacara leucophthalmus)
Thamnophilidae (Typical Antbirds)
ASH-WINGED ANTWREN(Euchrepomis spodioptila)– During our last morning in Pres. Figueiredo, we had a nice flock moving on the forest edge, much lower than usual, for several minutes. Outstanding views of many good species, including this tiny Antwren. Impossible to be better!
Green Aracari is a Guianan Shield endemic that we saw visiting the açaí palm trees on the Mari-Mari Lodge grounds. Photo by participant Roger Holmberg.
FASCIATED ANTSHRIKE(Cymbilaimus lineatus)
BLACK-CRESTED ANTSHRIKE(Sakesphorus canadensis)
MOUSE-COLORED ANTSHRIKE(Thamnophilus murinus)
CASTELNAU'S ANTSHRIKE(Thamnophilus cryptoleucus)– This is another island specialist only found in white water islands.
AMAZONIAN ANTSHRIKE(Thamnophilus amazonicus cinereiceps)– The subspecies "cinereiceps", only found on the north of the Amazon river, doesn't have a black cap as the others do.
PEARLY ANTSHRIKE(Megastictus margaritatus)
DUSKY-THROATED ANTSHRIKE(Thamnomanes ardesiacus)
CINEREOUS ANTSHRIKE(Thamnomanes caesius)– Widespread over the Amazon, this bird is a nuclear species in the understory mixed species flocks.
RUFOUS-BELLIED ANTWREN(Isleria guttata)– Another Guianan Shield endemic well seen during the tour.
SPOT-WINGED ANTSHRIKE(Pygiptila stellaris)– Usually found with the flocks, an easily distinguished bird by its long bill and very short tail.
FULVOUS-THROATED ANTWREN(Epinecrophylla pyrrhonota)
PYGMY ANTWREN(Myrmotherula brachyura)
CHERRIE'S ANTWREN(Myrmotherula cherriei)
KLAGES'S ANTWREN(Myrmotherula klagesi)– Another great bird seen in the islands of the Anavilhanas NP.
WHITE-FLANKED ANTWREN(Myrmotherula axillaris)
LONG-WINGED ANTWREN(Myrmotherula longipennis)
GRAY ANTWREN(Myrmotherula menetriesii)
LEADEN ANTWREN(Myrmotherula assimilis)– Tiny little bird found only in flooded forest, we saw these a few times, mainly following the understory mixed flocks.
SPOT-BACKED ANTWREN(Herpsilochmus dorsimaculatus)
WHITE-FRINGED ANTWREN(Formicivora grisea)– Widespread in the country, this bird is only found in dry forest over the Amazon. We saw it in a Campina forest, near Pres Figueiredo.
GUIANAN WARBLING-ANTBIRD(Hypocnemis cantator)
YELLOW-BROWED ANTBIRD(Hypocnemis hypoxantha)– Fancy little bird seen a couple of times at Jaú National Park.
DUSKY ANTBIRD(Cercomacroides tyrannina)
GRAY ANTBIRD(Cercomacra cinerascens)
ASH-BREASTED ANTBIRD(Myrmoborus lugubris)
BLACK-FACED ANTBIRD(Myrmoborus myotherinus ardesiacus)
BLACK-CHINNED ANTBIRD(Hypocnemoides melanopogon)
BLACK-HEADED ANTBIRD (HELLMAYR'S)(Percnostola rufifrons subcristata)
FERRUGINOUS-BACKED ANTBIRD(Myrmoderus ferrugineus)– One of the greatest birds of the tour, this antbird was seen very well at Cachoeira da Onça private reserve.
BLACK-THROATED ANTBIRD(Myrmophylax atrothorax)
WHITE-PLUMED ANTBIRD(Pithys albifrons)[*]
WHITE-CHEEKED ANTBIRD(Gymnopithys leucaspis)[*]
RUFOUS-THROATED ANTBIRD(Gymnopithys rufigula)[*]
CHESTNUT-CRESTED ANTBIRD(Rhegmatorhina cristata)– We found an army-ant swarm on the Jaú National Park trails and two of these birds were around but unfortunately, they did not respond very well to the tape and only participant Whitney was able to see the birds.
SPOT-BACKED ANTBIRD(Hylophylax naevius)[*]
COMMON SCALE-BACKED ANTBIRD(Willisornis poecilinotus)
REDDISH-WINGED BARE-EYE(Phlegopsis erythroptera)[*]
A gorgeous full moon at Jaú National Park. Photo by participant Rick "The Walrus" Woodruff.
Grallariidae (Antpittas)
VARIEGATED ANTPITTA(Grallaria varia)[*]
Formicariidae (Antthrushes)
RUFOUS-CAPPED ANTTHRUSH(Formicarius colma)
Furnariidae (Ovenbirds and Woodcreepers)
SPOT-THROATED WOODCREEPER(Certhiasomus stictolaemus)– A really hard bird to get. We had nice looks on a Terra-Firme trail at Jaú NP.
OLIVACEOUS WOODCREEPER(Sittasomus griseicapillus)
LONG-TAILED WOODCREEPER(Deconychura longicauda)
WHITE-CHINNED WOODCREEPER(Dendrocincla merula)
PLAIN-BROWN WOODCREEPER(Dendrocincla fuliginosa)
WEDGE-BILLED WOODCREEPER(Glyphorynchus spirurus)
LONG-BILLED WOODCREEPER(Nasica longirostris)– This elegant bird may reach into some deep holes to catch insects using that long bill.
AMAZONIAN BARRED-WOODCREEPER(Dendrocolaptes certhia)
BLACK-BANDED WOODCREEPER(Dendrocolaptes picumnus)– A large woodcreeper seen very well on our last morning, from the Musa Tower.
RED-BILLED WOODCREEPER(Hylexetastes perrotii)– A huge woodcreeper, endemic of the Guianan Shield. We had amazing views at Ducke Reserve, on our very first morning of the tour.
STRONG-BILLED WOODCREEPER(Xiphocolaptes promeropirhynchus)[*]
STRIPED WOODCREEPER(Xiphorhynchus obsoletus)
CHESTNUT-RUMPED WOODCREEPER(Xiphorhynchus pardalotus)
OCELLATED WOODCREEPER(Xiphorhynchus ocellatus)– Common in the understory mixed species flocks at Jaú National Park.
BUFF-THROATED WOODCREEPER(Xiphorhynchus guttatus)
STRAIGHT-BILLED WOODCREEPER(Dendroplex picus)
ZIMMER'S WOODCREEPER(Dendroplex kienerii)– This bird, only found in the Amazonian flooded forest, was considered a subspecies of Straight-billed Woodcreeper for many years, distinguished mainly by the color of its feet and voice, that was recorded for the first time only in 1993.
CURVE-BILLED SCYTHEBILL(Campylorhamphus procurvoides)– On the way back from the INPA ZF-2 tower, we had a huge flock, including birds in the understory and canopy together. This beautiful woodcreeper was seen a few times foraging with that flock for several minutes.
RED-AND-WHITE SPINETAIL(Certhiaxis mustelinus)– Great looks at a pair of birds near to their nest at Marchantaria.
WHITE-BELLIED SPINETAIL(Mazaria propinqua)
DARK-BREASTED SPINETAIL(Synallaxis albigularis)
PALE-BREASTED SPINETAIL(Synallaxis albescens)[*]
This year the açaí palm trees were completely full of berries and many birds came in to enjoy it, including this Purple-breasted Cotinga. This gorgeous male was seen around there many times. PhoneSkope video by guide Marcelo Barreiros.
OLIVE-GREEN TYRANNULET(Phylloscartes virescens)– It usually takes longer to get, even from the towers and maybe this was the best look we've had in many years! Two birds foraging with a flock 15 feet higher.
SLENDER-FOOTED TYRANNULET(Zimmerius gracilipes)– That bird replaces Guianan Tyrannulet on the west of Negro river.
GUIANAN TYRANNULET(Zimmerius acer)
AMAZONIAN TYRANNULET(Inezia subflava)
SHORT-TAILED PYGMY-TYRANT(Myiornis ecaudatus)
DOUBLE-BANDED PYGMY-TYRANT(Lophotriccus vitiosus)
SNETHLAGE'S TODY-TYRANT(Hemitriccus minor pallens)
TODY-TYRANT SP. (Hemitriccus sp. nov.?)– A sister species of Pelzeln's, this bird doesn't have a name yet!
WHITE-EYED TODY-TYRANT(Hemitriccus zosterops zosterops)[*]
WHITE-EYED TODY-TYRANT(Hemitriccus zosterops rothschildi)[*]
PELZELN'S TODY-TYRANT(Hemitriccus inornatus)– It's always a challenge to see this little guy in the canopy, but on this tour we probably had the best looks in many years. A very cooperative individual remained foraging for several minutes near to the group on a Campina trail at Mari-Mari Lodge.
RUSTY-FRONTED TODY-FLYCATCHER(Poecilotriccus latirostris)
SPOTTED TODY-FLYCATCHER(Todirostrum maculatum)
This beautiful little Yellow-billed Jacamar was foraging near to the ground at Cachoeira da Onça private reserve. Photo by participant Roger Holmberg.
PAINTED TODY-FLYCATCHER(Todirostrum pictum)
YELLOW-BROWED TODY-FLYCATCHER(Todirostrum chrysocrotaphum)[*]
BROWNISH TWISTWING(Cnipodectes subbrunneus)[*]
YELLOW-OLIVE FLYCATCHER (RIVERINE)(Tolmomyias sulphurescens insignis)
YELLOW-MARGINED FLYCATCHER(Tolmomyias assimilis)[*]
GRAY-CROWNED FLYCATCHER(Tolmomyias poliocephalus)
CINNAMON MANAKIN-TYRANT(Neopipo cinnamomea)[*]
WHITE-CRESTED SPADEBILL(Platyrinchus platyrhynchos)– Great looks at Jaú National Park.
RUDDY-TAILED FLYCATCHER(Terenotriccus erythrurus)[*]
WHISKERED FLYCATCHER(Myiobius barbatus)
EULER'S FLYCATCHER(Lathrotriccus euleri)
FUSCOUS FLYCATCHER (CAMPINA)(Cnemotriccus fuscatus duidae)– A special bird, only found in the Campina habitats over the Amazon forest.
FUSCOUS FLYCATCHER (FUSCOUS)(Cnemotriccus fuscatus fuscatior)
RIVERSIDE TYRANT(Knipolegus orenocensis)
AMAZONIAN BLACK-TYRANT(Knipolegus poecilocercus)– A pair of birds were seen foraging during our morning at Igarapé Miratucu.
RUFOUS-TAILED FLATBILL(Ramphotrigon ruficauda)
BRIGHT-RUMPED ATTILA(Attila spadiceus)[*]
SIBILANT SIRYSTES(Sirystes sibilator)[*]
GRAYISH MOURNER(Rhytipterna simplex)
PALE-BELLIED MOURNER(Rhytipterna immunda)
DUSKY-CAPPED FLYCATCHER(Myiarchus tuberculifer)
SWAINSON'S FLYCATCHER(Myiarchus swainsoni phaeonotus)
SHORT-CRESTED FLYCATCHER(Myiarchus ferox)
BROWN-CRESTED FLYCATCHER(Myiarchus tyrannulus)
LESSER KISKADEE(Pitangus lictor)
GREAT KISKADEE(Pitangus sulphuratus)
BOAT-BILLED FLYCATCHER(Megarynchus pitangua)
RUSTY-MARGINED FLYCATCHER(Myiozetetes cayanensis)
SOCIAL FLYCATCHER(Myiozetetes similis)
YELLOW-THROATED FLYCATCHER(Conopias parvus)
THREE-STRIPED FLYCATCHER(Conopias trivirgatus)
ISLAND STREAKED FLYCATCHER(Myiodynastes [maculatus] sp. nov.)– Usually seen on the white water island near to Manaus, we saw a single bird singing at theTropical Hotel grounds.
PIRATIC FLYCATCHER(Legatus leucophaius)
VARIEGATED FLYCATCHER(Empidonomus varius)
SULPHURY FLYCATCHER(Tyrannopsis sulphurea)– One of the four species closely related to the Moriche palm trees.
WHITE-THROATED KINGBIRD(Tyrannus albogularis)
TROPICAL KINGBIRD(Tyrannus melancholicus)
The group enjoying the birding at Ducke Reserve, north of Manaus. Photo by participant Gerard Tasset.
FORK-TAILED FLYCATCHER(Tyrannus savana)
Cotingidae (Cotingas)
GUIANAN RED-COTINGA(Phoenicircus carnifex)– This beautiful bird doesn't lek in the same spot, like the Capuchinbird, for example, so it's not easy to find the adult males very often. We had great looks at Cachoeira da Onça private reserve.
BLACK-NECKED RED-COTINGA(Phoenicircus nigricollis)[*]
GUIANAN COCK-OF-THE-ROCK(Rupicola rupicola)– Even if you visit their arena every year, it is impossible not to feel privileged to be there. Those beautiful orange birds look like flaming torches hanging on the vines.
CAPUCHINBIRD(Perissocephalus tricolor)– I do not know if it's better to hear or see this bird! The males do that weird sound all close each other for several minutes. Besides that, it's a big rufous bird with a bald blue head! Oh my god!
PURPLE-BREASTED COTINGA(Cotinga cotinga)– At least two adult males and some females were seen feeding on açaí palm trees at Mari-Mari lodge many times.
SPANGLED COTINGA(Cotinga cayana)
SCREAMING PIHA(Lipaugus vociferans)– The voice of the Amazon!
POMPADOUR COTINGA(Xipholena punicea)– It's wonderful to see the males flying over the canopy and even better when we have a fruiting tree near to the tower. Fantastic!
Pipridae (Manakins)
DWARF TYRANT-MANAKIN(Tyranneutes stolzmanni)[*]
TINY TYRANT-MANAKIN(Tyranneutes virescens)– Replaces Dwarf Tyrant-Manakin on the east of Negro river.
SAFFRON-CRESTED TYRANT-MANAKIN(Neopelma chrysocephalum)
BLACK MANAKIN(Xenopipo atronitens)
BLUE-CROWNED MANAKIN(Lepidothrix coronata)
WHITE-FRONTED MANAKIN(Lepidothrix serena)
YELLOW-CROWNED MANAKIN(Heterocercus flavivertex)
WIRE-TAILED MANAKIN(Pipra filicauda)– There's not enough words to describe how cool this bird is. We were very lucky to watch those males displaying!
WHITE-CROWNED MANAKIN(Dixiphia pipra)
GOLDEN-HEADED MANAKIN(Ceratopipra erythrocephala)
WING-BARRED PIPRITES(Piprites chloris)
Tityridae (Tityras and Allies)
BLACK-TAILED TITYRA(Tityra cayana)
VARZEA SCHIFFORNIS(Schiffornis major)[*]
BROWN-WINGED SCHIFFORNIS(Schiffornis turdina)[*]
DUSKY PURPLETUFT(Iodopleura fusca)– A very rare bird to see near Manaus because the edge of its range is just to the south. We got real nice looks in the Pres Figueiredo area.
CINEREOUS BECARD(Pachyramphus rufus)
CHESTNUT-CROWNED BECARD(Pachyramphus castaneus)
GLOSSY-BACKED BECARD(Pachyramphus surinamus)
PINK-THROATED BECARD(Pachyramphus minor)– One of the first birds we saw at Ducke Reserve; a pair of birds foraging with a mixed species flock.
Some nice images from the second half of the tour. Photos and videos by guide Bret Whitney.
Vireonidae (Vireos, Shrike-Babblers, and Erpornis)
RUFOUS-BROWED PEPPERSHRIKE(Cyclarhis gujanensis)
ASHY-HEADED GREENLET(Hylophilus pectoralis)
GRAY-CHESTED GREENLET(Hylophilus semicinereus)
BROWN-HEADED GREENLET(Hylophilus brunneiceps)
LEMON-CHESTED GREENLET(Hylophilus thoracicus)
SLATY-CAPPED SHRIKE-VIREO(Vireolanius leucotis)
DUSKY-CAPPED GREENLET(Pachysylvia hypoxantha)[*]
BUFF-CHEEKED GREENLET(Pachysylvia muscicapina)– Replacing Dusky-capped Greenlet on the east bank of the Negro river, this bird is usually found with the canopy flocks and the best way to get it is from the tower, as we did at the ZF-2 INPA tower.
RED-EYED VIREO (RESIDENT CHIVI)(Vireo olivaceus solimoensis)
Hirundinidae (Swallows)
BLACK-COLLARED SWALLOW(Pygochelidon melanoleuca)
WHITE-THIGHED SWALLOW(Atticora tibialis)
SOUTHERN ROUGH-WINGED SWALLOW(Stelgidopteryx ruficollis)
PURPLE MARTIN(Progne subis)
GRAY-BREASTED MARTIN(Progne chalybea)
SOUTHERN MARTIN(Progne elegans)
BROWN-CHESTED MARTIN(Progne tapera)
WHITE-WINGED SWALLOW(Tachycineta albiventer)
BANK SWALLOW(Riparia riparia)
BARN SWALLOW(Hirundo rustica)
Troglodytidae (Wrens)
WING-BANDED WREN(Microcerculus bambla)
HOUSE WREN(Troglodytes aedon)
CORAYA WREN(Pheugopedius coraya)
BUFF-BREASTED WREN(Cantorchilus leucotis)[*]
Few things are as good as being in the Amazon and having the chance to see and hear the Musician Wren. It's magical. Video by guide Bret Whitney.
MUSICIAN WREN(Cyphorhinus arada)– Our "friend" was there and did not disappoint us. It is a pleasure to see and hear such a cooperative individual for a few minutes on the same branch.
Polioptilidae (Gnatcatchers)
COLLARED GNATWREN(Microbates collaris)[*]
LONG-BILLED GNATWREN(Ramphocaenus melanurus)
TROPICAL GNATCATCHER(Polioptila plumbea)
GUIANAN GNATCATCHER (RIO NEGRO)(Polioptila guianensis facilis)
Donacobiidae (Donacobius)
BLACK-CAPPED DONACOBIUS(Donacobius atricapilla)
Turdidae (Thrushes and Allies)
PALE-BREASTED THRUSH(Turdus leucomelas)
COCOA THRUSH(Turdus fumigatus)
HAUXWELL'S THRUSH(Turdus hauxwelli)
BLACK-BILLED THRUSH(Turdus ignobilis)
WHITE-NECKED THRUSH(Turdus albicollis)
Parulidae (New World Warblers)
MASKED YELLOWTHROAT(Geothlypis aequinoctialis)
Thraupidae (Tanagers and Allies)
RED-CAPPED CARDINAL(Paroaria gularis)
RED-BILLED PIED TANAGER(Lamprospiza melanoleuca)[*]
HOODED TANAGER(Nemosia pileata)
ORANGE-HEADED TANAGER(Thlypopsis sordida)– A pair of birds seen at Marchantaria island.
FLAME-CRESTED TANAGER(Tachyphonus cristatus)
FULVOUS-CRESTED TANAGER(Tachyphonus surinamus)
WHITE-LINED TANAGER(Tachyphonus rufus)
RED-SHOULDERED TANAGER(Tachyphonus phoenicius)
SILVER-BEAKED TANAGER(Ramphocelus carbo)
BLUE-GRAY TANAGER(Thraupis episcopus)
PALM TANAGER(Thraupis palmarum)
DOTTED TANAGER(Ixothraupis varia)[*]
SPOTTED TANAGER(Ixothraupis punctata)
TURQUOISE TANAGER(Tangara mexicana)
PARADISE TANAGER(Tangara chilensis)
OPAL-RUMPED TANAGER(Tangara velia)
BLACK-FACED DACNIS(Dacnis lineata)
YELLOW-BELLIED DACNIS(Dacnis flaviventer)
BLUE DACNIS(Dacnis cayana)
PURPLE HONEYCREEPER(Cyanerpes caeruleus)
RED-LEGGED HONEYCREEPER(Cyanerpes cyaneus)– Seen well from the ZF-2 INPA tower.
GREEN HONEYCREEPER(Chlorophanes spiza)
GUIRA TANAGER(Hemithraupis guira)
YELLOW-BACKED TANAGER(Hemithraupis flavicollis)
BICOLORED CONEBILL(Conirostrum bicolor)
PEARLY-BREASTED CONEBILL(Conirostrum margaritae)– Another white water island specialist, this bird is only found in the Cecropia sp. forest.
CHESTNUT-VENTED CONEBILL(Conirostrum speciosum)
ORANGE-FRONTED YELLOW-FINCH(Sicalis columbiana)
BLUE-BLACK GRASSQUIT(Volatinia jacarina)
LINED SEEDEATER(Sporophila lineola)
CHESTNUT-BELLIED SEEDEATER(Sporophila castaneiventris)
White-naped Seedeater was a highlight of the tour! A beautiful male entertained us by singing for several minutes. Photo by tour participant Roger Holmberg.
WHITE-NAPED SEEDEATER(Sporophila fringilloides)– We haven't seen this bird during the tour in many years. This year we got lucky and a male was singing spontaneous for us! We also saw a female in the same area. That was FANTASTIC!
BANANAQUIT(Coereba flaveola)
BUFF-THROATED SALTATOR(Saltator maximus)
GRAYISH SALTATOR(Saltator coerulescens)
SLATE-COLORED GROSBEAK(Saltator grossus)[*]
Passerellidae (New World Buntings and Sparrows)
YELLOW-BROWED SPARROW(Ammodramus aurifrons)
PECTORAL SPARROW(Arremon taciturnus)
Cardinalidae (Cardinals and Allies)
YELLOW-GREEN GROSBEAK(Caryothraustes canadensis)
BLUE-BLACK GROSBEAK(Cyanoloxia cyanoides)[*]
Icteridae (Troupials and Allies)
RED-BREASTED MEADOWLARK(Sturnella militaris)
GREEN OROPENDOLA(Psarocolius viridis)
CRESTED OROPENDOLA(Psarocolius decumanus)
SOLITARY BLACK CACIQUE(Cacicus solitarius)
YELLOW-RUMPED CACIQUE(Cacicus cela)
RED-RUMPED CACIQUE(Cacicus haemorrhous)
EPAULET ORIOLE (MORICHE)(Icterus cayanensis chrysocephalus)– Our friend Sibah showed us a pair of birds building a nest near to his house. Thanks a lot, Sibah!
SHINY COWBIRD(Molothrus bonariensis)
GIANT COWBIRD(Molothrus oryzivorus)
ORIOLE BLACKBIRD(Gymnomystax mexicanus)
Fringillidae (Finches, Euphonias, and Allies)
PLUMBEOUS EUPHONIA(Euphonia plumbea)
GOLDEN-BELLIED EUPHONIA(Euphonia chrysopasta)
GOLDEN-SIDED EUPHONIA(Euphonia cayennensis)– A male seen from the ZF-2 INPA tower.
Here are some extras and outtakes captured by Bret Whitney during this very enjoyable tour.
GIANT OTTER(Pteronura brasiliensis)– A group of these majestic creatures seen at Jaú National Park.
JAGUARUNDI(Puma yagouaroundi)
JAGUAR(Panthera onca)– Lois saw it crossing the trail to access the tower at ZF-2 reserve.
Herps
SOUTH AMERICAN LANCEHEAD(Bothrops atrox)
BLACK CAIMAN(Melanosuchus niger)
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
Other nice animals seen during the tour were: Gladiator Tree-frog, Smoky Jungle Frog (Leptodactylus pentadactylus), Red-eyed Treehopper, a Coral Snake, Green Iguana, Cane Toad, a big bat using a termite mount to roosting during the day at Presidente Figueiredo. |
Threlkeld is a village and civil parish in Eden, Cumbria, England. In 2001 there were 454 people living in Threlkeld. It has a church called St Mary's Church. |
/**
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
* or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
* distributed with this work for additional information
* regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
* to you 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.
*/
package org.apache.apex.malhar.lib.testbench;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import com.datatorrent.api.Sink;
/**
* Functional test for {@link org.apache.apex.malhar.lib.testbench.FilteredEventClassifier} for three configuration><p>
* <br>
* Configuration 1: Provide values and weights<br>
* Configuration 2: Provide values but no weights (even weights)<br>
* Configuration 3: Provide no values or weights<br>
* <br>
* Benchmarks: Currently handle about 20 Million tuples/sec incoming tuples in debugging environment. Need to test on larger nodes<br>
* <br>
* Validates all DRC checks of the node<br>
*/
public class FilteredEventClassifierTest
{
private static Logger LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(FilteredEventClassifier.class);
@SuppressWarnings("rawtypes")
class TestSink implements Sink
{
HashMap<String, Integer> collectedTuples = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
HashMap<String, Double> collectedTupleValues = new HashMap<String, Double>();
/**
*
* @param payload
*/
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
@Override
public void put(Object payload)
{
HashMap<String, Double> tuple = (HashMap<String, Double>)payload;
for (Map.Entry<String, Double> e : tuple.entrySet()) {
Integer ival = collectedTuples.get(e.getKey());
if (ival == null) {
ival = 1;
} else {
ival = ival + 1;
}
collectedTuples.put(e.getKey(), ival);
collectedTupleValues.put(e.getKey(), e.getValue());
}
}
/**
*
*/
public void clear()
{
collectedTuples.clear();
collectedTupleValues.clear();
}
@Override
public int getCount(boolean reset)
{
throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Not supported yet.");
}
}
/**
* Test node logic emits correct results
*/
@SuppressWarnings({ "rawtypes", "unchecked" })
@Test
public void testNodeProcessing() throws Exception
{
FilteredEventClassifier<Double> node = new FilteredEventClassifier<Double>();
TestSink classifySink = new TestSink();
node.filter.setSink(classifySink);
HashMap<String, Double> kmap = new HashMap<String, Double>(3);
kmap.put("a", 1.0);
kmap.put("b", 4.0);
kmap.put("c", 5.0);
ArrayList<Integer> list = new ArrayList<Integer>(3);
HashMap<String, ArrayList<Integer>> wmap = new HashMap<String, ArrayList<Integer>>(4);
list.add(60);
list.add(10);
list.add(35);
wmap.put("ia", list);
list = new ArrayList<Integer>(3);
list.add(10);
list.add(75);
list.add(15);
wmap.put("ib", list);
list = new ArrayList<Integer>(3);
list.add(20);
list.add(10);
list.add(70);
wmap.put("ic", list);
list = new ArrayList<Integer>(3);
list.add(50);
list.add(15);
list.add(35);
wmap.put("id", list);
node.setKeyMap(kmap);
node.setKeyWeights(wmap);
node.setPassFilter(10);
node.setTotalFilter(100);
node.setup(null);
int numTuples = 10000;
HashMap<String, Double> input = new HashMap<String, Double>();
int sentval = 0;
node.beginWindow(0);
for (int i = 0; i < numTuples; i++) {
input.clear();
input.put("a,ia", 2.0);
input.put("a,ib", 2.0);
input.put("a,ic", 2.0);
input.put("a,id", 2.0);
input.put("b,ia", 2.0);
input.put("b,ib", 2.0);
input.put("b,ic", 2.0);
input.put("b,id", 2.0);
input.put("c,ia", 2.0);
input.put("c,ib", 2.0);
input.put("c,ic", 2.0);
input.put("c,id", 2.0);
sentval += 12;
node.data.process(input);
}
node.endWindow();
int ival = 0;
for (Map.Entry<String, Integer> e: classifySink.collectedTuples.entrySet()) {
ival += e.getValue().intValue();
}
LOG.info(String.format(
"\n*******************************************************\nFiltered %d out of %d intuples with %d and %d " + "unique keys",
ival,
sentval,
classifySink.collectedTuples.size(),
classifySink.collectedTupleValues.size()));
for (Map.Entry<String, Double> ve : classifySink.collectedTupleValues.entrySet()) {
Integer ieval = classifySink.collectedTuples.get(ve.getKey()); // ieval should not be null?
LOG.info(String.format("%d tuples of key \"%s\" has value %f", ieval, ve.getKey(), ve.getValue()));
}
// Now test a node with no weights
FilteredEventClassifier nwnode = new FilteredEventClassifier();
classifySink.clear();
nwnode.filter.setSink(classifySink);
nwnode.setKeyMap(kmap);
nwnode.setPassFilter(10);
nwnode.setTotalFilter(100);
nwnode.setup(null);
sentval = 0;
node.beginWindow(0);
for (int i = 0; i < numTuples; i++) {
input.clear();
input.put("a,ia", 2.0);
input.put("a,ib", 2.0);
input.put("a,ic", 2.0);
input.put("a,id", 2.0);
input.put("b,ia", 2.0);
input.put("b,ib", 2.0);
input.put("b,ic", 2.0);
input.put("b,id", 2.0);
input.put("c,ia", 2.0);
input.put("c,ib", 2.0);
input.put("c,ic", 2.0);
input.put("c,id", 2.0);
sentval += 12;
nwnode.data.process(input);
}
nwnode.endWindow();
ival = 0;
for (Map.Entry<String, Integer> e: classifySink.collectedTuples.entrySet()) {
ival += e.getValue().intValue();
}
LOG.info(String.format(
"\n*******************************************************\nFiltered %d out of %d intuples with %d and %d " + "unique keys",
ival,
sentval,
classifySink.collectedTuples.size(),
classifySink.collectedTupleValues.size()));
for (Map.Entry<String, Double> ve : classifySink.collectedTupleValues.entrySet()) {
Integer ieval = classifySink.collectedTuples.get(ve.getKey()); // ieval should not be null?
LOG.info(String.format("%d tuples of key \"%s\" has value %f", ieval.intValue(), ve.getKey(), ve.getValue()));
}
// Now test a node with no weights and no values
FilteredEventClassifier nvnode = new FilteredEventClassifier();
classifySink.clear();
kmap.put("a", 0.0);
kmap.put("b", 0.0);
kmap.put("c", 0.0);
nvnode.filter.setSink(classifySink);
nvnode.setKeyMap(kmap);
nvnode.setPassFilter(10);
nvnode.setTotalFilter(100);
nvnode.setup(null);
sentval = 0;
node.beginWindow(0);
for (int i = 0; i < numTuples; i++) {
input.clear();
input.put("a,ia", 2.0);
input.put("a,ib", 2.0);
input.put("a,ic", 2.0);
input.put("a,id", 2.0);
input.put("b,ia", 2.0);
input.put("b,ib", 2.0);
input.put("b,ic", 2.0);
input.put("b,id", 2.0);
input.put("c,ia", 2.0);
input.put("c,ib", 2.0);
input.put("c,ic", 2.0);
input.put("c,id", 2.0);
sentval += 12;
nvnode.data.process(input);
}
nvnode.endWindow();
ival = 0;
for (Map.Entry<String, Integer> e : classifySink.collectedTuples.entrySet()) {
ival += e.getValue();
}
LOG.info(String.format(
"\n*******************************************************\nFiltered %d out of %d intuples with %d and %d " + "unique keys",
ival,
sentval,
classifySink.collectedTuples.size(),
classifySink.collectedTupleValues.size()));
for (Map.Entry<String, Double> ve : classifySink.collectedTupleValues.entrySet()) {
Integer ieval = classifySink.collectedTuples.get(ve.getKey()); // ieval should not be null?
LOG.info(String.format("%d tuples of key \"%s\" has value %f",
ieval,
ve.getKey(),
ve.getValue()));
}
}
}
|
Ann Wedgeworth (January 21, 1934 - November 16, 2017) was an American actress. She was best known for her roles as Lana Shields on Three's Company and Merleen Elridge on Evening Shade.
On Three's Company, Wedgeworth's character pursued the younger Jack Tripper. Wedgeworth was written out of Three's Company due to producers thinking that was too much for the show. However, Wedgeworth said that she asked to be released from her contract when she noticed her role became smaller.
Wedgeworth died on November 16, 2017, aged 83. |
In the first letter Brigadier General J. C. Persons of the Alabama National Guard sends Governor Benjamin Miller an account of recent events in Birmingham, which was submitted by another officer. The second letter contains the report of Second...
Professor S. Ralph Harlow of Smith College writes that he had hoped Chief Justice Anderson's report on the Scottsboro case might have changed the course of things, but is disappointed that their trial will still take place in Decatur, instead of...
In the first letter Wright discusses integration efforts at Auburn University, pointing to liberal faculty members as culprits: "You are aware of the fact Southern institutions such as Auburn, in their frantic desire to have all employees with...
In the first letter Edwards protests the recent appearance of Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, on an Auburn television station. On the program McGill criticized Alabama, "the people and their customs." Edwards also encloses a copy...
2010-11-08
QuickView
Display a larger image and more item information when the pointer pauses over a thumbnail |
"God save the Tsar!" was a national anthem of Russian Empire, used from 1833 to 1917. The melody of the anthem was composed by Alexei Lvov, and lirycs was written by Vasily Zhukovsky.
History
In 1833 the emperor Nicholas I was visiting Austria and Prussia with Alexei Lvov. The Nicholas was greeted by english marches which he didn't liked. When he came back to Russia he had Alexei compose song that would became a national anthem. The composer: Alexei Lvov and the lirycist Vasily Zhukovsky created anthem that was first played in december 1833. After that, song became a national anthem of Russian Empire, with a name of God save the Tsar! Anthem was used untill revolution in 1917. The song were succeeded by the "Worker's Marseillaise" and later by the "Internationale".
Lirycs
During Imperial Russia mostly were played only first stanza, easy to remeber, usually repeated three times. |
Q:
actionPerformed method call Java
I built an interface and when I call the actionPerformed method it gives me errors.
My method:
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evento){
Button active;
active = (Button) evento.getSource(); //line 144
if(active==botonSalir)
mainF.dispose();
...
}
The main method:
public static void main(String [] args){
InterfaceE objetoM = new InterfaceE();
objetoM.actionPerformed(); //line 195
}
The errors I get are:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at InterfaceE.actionPerformed(InterfazceE.java:144)
at InterfaceE.main(InterfaceE.java:195)
What should be the parameters in InterfaceE()?
A:
you must be invoking method of Interfaz when Interfaz object is not assigned or it must be null inside actionPerformed() method. objectM is not null which is sure as I can see the code. But you have not pasted code for actionPerformed() method. Let's see the code in actionPerformed() method so that we can give you exact answer.
Update after your edit in question.
aren't you getting compile time error as you have called no argument acionPerformed method ? actionPerformed must be taking anonymous object of ActionEvent class with getSource() method implemented. You are not sending ActionEvent anonymous object in actionPerformed method as a argument.
Is your code at line no. 195 looking like,
objetoM.actionPerformed(new ActionEvent(){ //this is your line 195 for anonymous object.
public ReturnType getSource(){
// some code
}
}
);
|
Barrow-upon-Soar, also known as Barrow-on-Soar or simply Barrow, is a large village in the north of Leicestershire in England. It is in the Borough of Charnwood. It is between Loughborough and the city of Leicester. In 2011, the village had a population of 5,856 people.
History
It is famous for a plesiosaur that was dug out in the village in 1851. It was given the nickname "The Barrow Kipper". The skeleton was taken out from it is now being displayed at the New Walk Museum in Leicester.
There is also a full-size replica at the Charnwood Museum in Loughborough. The village's football club, Barrow Town FC, has the skeleton on its logo. Barrow is also famous for its limestone working. There are streets in the village with names in reference to this.
Location
The River Soar runs through the village. The village is near the A6 road from Quorn.
Transport
The village has a small railway station located on the Ivanhoe Line from Burton upon Trent to Loughborough. Trains run from Monday-Saturday between Leicester and Lincoln, however some carry on to Sleaford.
Twin cities
Barrow-upon-Soar is twinned with:
Marans, Charente-Maritime, France
Gallery
Villages in Leicestershire |
Q:
Awk, If test to replace 1 column with 2 columns
Good day
I have the following data matrix
1 1 0 0 1
2 0 0 1 1
1 1 0 0 1
2 1 2 2 0
I would like to double the columns according to the following conditions
Condition 1 if $i == 0, replace with 1 1 (i.e. in 2 columns)
Condition 2 if $i == 1, replace with 1 2
Condition 3 if $i == 2, replace with 2 2
So the expected output for the example, would be
1 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2
2 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2
1 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2
2 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 1 1
I usually use R and Octave matrices but the current matrix in quiet large after a while R get out of memory and it takes long.
A:
awk 'BEGIN {
map[0] = "1 1"; map[1] = "1 2"; map[2] = "2 2"
}
{
for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++)
printf "%s", (map[$i] (i < NF ? FS : RS))
}' infile
|
Merchtem is a municipality in the Belgian province of Flemish Brabant.
In 2007, 15053 people lived there.
It is at 50deg 57 North, 04deg 14 East. |
Strengthening public awareness
On Wednesday November 11 the European Union approved a measure labeling Jewish-made goods from Judea and Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Golan in a clear anti-Semitic move.
Prior to the guidelines being approved, official representatives of the State of Israel as well as initiatives from the U.S Congress and Senate
Green Now, the Legal Forum’s environmental sub-organization marked a significant success in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, May 14, following a petition filed in 2012. Green Now petitioned against the dumping of hazardous waste near Bet El.
This area,in the Binyamin region,is home to a number of army bases that,since
In the last two years, following requests from Holocaust survivors and their families, attorneys from the Legal Forum have been acting within the Knesset and the government to correct injustices in the treatment of Holocaust survivors.
After much effort by the Forum and other sources, this week the government approved |
Bradley James Allan (14 February 1973 - 7 August 2021) was an Australian martial artist, action choreographer, actor, and stunt performer. He was born in Melbourne, Australia. He was known for his stunt works in Rush Hour 2, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Allan died on 7 August 2021 in Melbourne of a heart attack, aged 48. |
describe('nodezip', function() {
beforeEach(function() {
this.nodezip = require('..')();
});
describe('when initialized', function() {
it('should load JSZip in this.nodezip', function() {
expect(this.nodezip.options).not.toBeNull();
});
it('should declare JSZip', function() {
expect(JSZip).not.toBeNull();
});
});
describe('when archiving a dummy file', function() {
beforeEach(function() {
this.fs = require("fs");
this.dummyFile = this.nodezip.file('test.file', 'hello there');
this.dummyFileData = this.dummyFile.generate({base64:false,compression:'DEFLATE'});
});
it('should contain valid data', function() {
expect(this.dummyFileData).not.toBeNull();
expect(this.dummyFileData).toMatch(/^PK/);
expect(this.dummyFileData).toMatch(/test.file/);
});
it('should be able to write file', function() {
this.fs.writeFileSync('test.zip', this.dummyFileData, 'binary');
expect(this.fs.lstatSync('test.zip')).not.toBeNull()
});
it('should be able to deflate file', function() {
this.dummyFileData = this.fs.readFileSync('test.zip', 'binary');
this.dummyFile = new JSZip(this.dummyFileData, {base64: false, checkCRC32: true});
expect(this.dummyFile.files['test.file'].asText()).toEqual("hello there");
this.fs.unlink('test.zip');
});
});
}); |
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites are places of importance to cultural or natural heritage. Below is the list of sites in Chile.
History
UNESCO was created for the "conservation and protection of the world's inheritance of books, works of art and monuments of history and science". The constitution of UNESCO was ratified in 1946 by 26 countries.
Chile agreed to take part in the World Heritage Convention in 1980.
List
The World Heritage Site (WHS) list has developed over time. It is part of a process; and the list continues to grow.
As of 2014, there are 17 places in Chile which are on the World Heritage List.
15 cultural sites
2 natural sites
There are 17 sites which are on a tentative list.
Table
Tentative List
The Tentative List consists of sites which have been nominated. The evaluation process is not yet completed. Here is the list.
Related pages
World Heritage Committee
UNESCO World Heritage Site
Table of World Heritage Sites by country
List of World Heritage Sites in South America |
Actually, that's not surprising. They have CDNs (data servers) all over the world which keep local copies of video/music/apps so that they don't need to continuously clog up the pipes in the middle pushing the same data over and over again. The upshot is that if a major line goes down you can still access your content.
I'm just going to get all of the irrational comments out of the way before anybody else does:
Steve Jobs is rolling in his urn!
This never would have happened if Steve Jobs were alive!
Really, Apple? Really?! Wow, just... Wow.
Further proof Apple has gone downhill.
Figures, more articles on iOS and nothing about any new Macs coming out.
(Something about how awesome Android is.)
Did I miss anything?
- I don't believe Tim Cook's new products anymore
- 1GB of RAM ain't enough
- This is what you get for having assembly lines in China
- Final proof that the iWatch is going to be released. Today.
- and the most important of all : "Analists predict that service will be restored in the near or far future." |
Tom Hammond (born May 10, 1944 in Lexington, Kentucky) is a sportscaster who works for NBC Sports along with Dan Hicks and Bob Costas.
Biography
Hammond is the co-host of Thoroughbred Racing on NBC.
He also currently calls Notre Dame football games on NBC and Olympic games for NBC as well.
He is a track-and-field announcer during the Olympics.
Before NBC
Before his time at NBC, he was the radio voice of the Syracuse Orangemen football and basketball team and called college basketball games for ESPN and Lincoln Financial Sports.
Past and current jobs at NBC
He was the lead play-by-play announcer for the WNBA on NBC and the AFL on NBC with Pat Haden. Hammond and Haden also teamed up for Notre Dame Football on NBC. Hammond has called NBA games for NBC as well as NFL games for NBC. He also called NFL Wild Card Saturday playoffs for NBC from 2007 through 2012. He is the main play-by-play announcer for NBC's coverage of figure skating. He has called the Orange Bowl and gymnastics for NBC and filled in for Bryant Gumbel on the Thursday Night Football matchup between the Denver Broncos-Houston Texans game pairing with Cris Collinsworth.
Personal
Hammond was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky and continues to live there.
Hammond has criticized SportsCenter by calling it a "comedy show".
He suffered a heart attack in 2002 and missed the Breeders' Cup. NBC colleague Bob Costas took his role as the host.
1944 births
Living people
Olympic Games broadcasters
Arena Football League broadcasters
College basketball broadcasters
College football broadcasters
National Basketball Association broadcasters
National Football League broadcasters
American sports commentators
People from Lexington, Kentucky |
Table of Contents
=================
* [Articles](#articles)
* [2018\-01](#2018-01)
* [Unsupervised Low\-Dimensional Vector Representations for Words, Phrases and Text that are Transparent, Scalable, and produce Similarity Metrics that are Complementary to Neural Embeddings](#unsupervised-low-dimensional-vector-representations-for-words-phrases--and-text-that-are-transparent-scalable-and-produce-similarity-metrics-that--are-complementary-to-neural-embeddings)
* [Knowledge\-based Word Sense Disambiguation using Topic Models](#knowledge-based-word-sense-disambiguation-using-topic-models)
* [Unsupervised Part\-of\-Speech Induction](#unsupervised-part-of-speech-induction)
* [MaskGAN: Better Text Generation via Filling in the \_\_\_\_\_\_](#maskgan-better-text-generation-via-filling-in-the-______)
* [2018\-02](#2018-02)
* [Improving Variational Encoder\-Decoders in Dialogue Generation](#improving-variational-encoder-decoders-in-dialogue-generation)
* [TextZoo, a New Benchmark for Reconsidering Text Classification](#textzoo-a-new-benchmark-for-reconsidering-text-classification)
* [Tensor Comprehensions: Framework\-Agnostic High\-Performance Machine Learning Abstractions](#tensor-comprehensions-framework-agnostic-high-performance-machine--learning-abstractions)
* [Ranking Sentences for Extractive Summarization with Reinforcement Learning](#ranking-sentences-for-extractive-summarization-with-reinforcement--learning)
* [Deep contextualized word representations](#deep-contextualized-word-representations)
* [Latent Topic Conversational Models](#latent-topic-conversational-models)
* [Disentangling Aspect and Opinion Words in Target\-based Sentiment Analysis using Lifelong Learning](#disentangling-aspect-and-opinion-words-in-target-based-sentiment--analysis-using-lifelong-learning)
* [2018\-03](#2018-03)
* [Simple random search provides a competitive approach to reinforcement learning](#simple-random-search-provides-a-competitive-approach-to-reinforcement--learning)
* [Achieving Human Parity on AutomaticChinese to English News Translation](#achieving-human-parity-on-automaticchinese-to-english-news-translation)
* [Fast Decoding in Sequence Models using Discrete Latent Variables](#fast-decoding-in-sequence-models-using-discrete-latent-variables)
* [An Analysis of Neural Language Modeling at Multiple Scales](#an-analysis-of-neural-language-modeling-at-multiple-scales)
* [2018\-04](#2018-04)
* [Large scale distributed neural network training through online distillation](#large-scale-distributed-neural-network-training-through-online--distillation)
* [Frustratingly Easy Meta\-Embedding \-\- Computing Meta\-Embeddings by Averaging Source Word Embeddings](#frustratingly-easy-meta-embedding----computing-meta-embeddings-by--averaging-source-word-embeddings)
* [The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation](#the-best-of-both-worlds-combining-recent-advances-in-neural-machine--translation)
* [2018\-05](#2018-05)
* [Paper Abstract Writing through Editing Mechanism](#paper-abstract-writing-through-editing-mechanism)
* [Zero\-Shot Dual Machine Translation](#zero-shot-dual-machine-translation)
* [2018\-06](#2018-06)
* [TextWorld: A Learning Environment for Text\-based Games](#textworld-a-learning-environment-for-text-based-games)
* [2018\-07](#2018-07)
* [Talk the Walk: Navigating New York City through Grounded Dialogue](#talk-the-walk-navigating-new-york-city-through-grounded-dialogue)
* [2018\-08](#2018-08)
* [Fake Sentence Detection as a Training Task for Sentence Encoding](#fake-sentence-detection-as-a-training-task-for-sentence-encoding)
* [Dynamic Self\-Attention : Computing Attention over Words Dynamically for Sentence Embedding](#dynamic-self-attention--computing-attention-over-words-dynamically-for--sentence-embedding)
* [TaxoGen: Unsupervised Topic Taxonomy Construction by Adaptive Term Embedding and Clustering](#taxogen-unsupervised-topic-taxonomy-construction-by-adaptive-term-embedding-and-clustering)
* [Summarizing Opinions: Aspect Extraction Meets Sentiment Prediction and They Are Both Weakly Supervised](#summarizing-opinions-aspect-extraction-meets-sentiment-prediction-and-they-are-both-weakly-supervised)
* [2018\-09](#2018-09)
* [Adaptive Input Representations for Neural Language Modeling](#adaptive-input-representations-for-neural-language-modeling)
* [Weakly\-Supervised Neural Text Classification](#weakly-supervised-neural-text-classification)
* [Accelerated Reinforcement Learning for Sentence Generation by Vocabulary Prediction](#accelerated-reinforcement-learning-for-sentence-generation-by-vocabulary-prediction)
* [2018\-10](#2018-10)
* [Phrase\-Based Attentions](#phrase-based-attentions)
* [BERT: Pre\-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](#bert-pre-training-of-deep-bidirectional-transformers-for-language--understanding)
* [2018\-11](#2018-11)
* [CALCS: Continuously Approximating Longest Common Subsequence for Sequence Level Optimization](#calcs-continuously-approximating-longest-common-subsequence-for-sequence-level-optimization)
* [2018\-12](#2018-12)
* [Von Mises\-Fisher Loss for Training Sequence to Sequence Models with Continuous Outputs](#von-mises-fisher-loss-for-training-sequence-to-sequence-models-with-continuous-outputs)
Articles
========
## 2018-01
### Unsupervised Low-Dimensional Vector Representations for Words, Phrases and Text that are Transparent, Scalable, and produce Similarity Metrics that are Complementary to Neural Embeddings
**Authors:** Neil R. Smalheiser, Gary Bonifield
**Abstract:** Neural embeddings are a popular set of methods for representing words, phrases or text as a low dimensional vector (typically 50-500 dimensions). However, it is difficult to interpret these dimensions in a meaningful manner, and creating neural embeddings requires extensive training and tuning of multiple parameters and hyperparameters. We present here a simple unsupervised method for representing words, phrases or text as a low dimensional vector, in which the meaning and relative importance of dimensions is transparent to inspection. We have created a near-comprehensive vector representation of words, and selected bigrams, trigrams and abbreviations, using the set of titles and abstracts in PubMed as a corpus. This vector is used to create several novel implicit word-word and text-text similarity metrics. The implicit word-word similarity metrics correlate well with human judgement of word pair similarity and relatedness, and outperform or equal all other reported methods on a variety of biomedical benchmarks, including several implementations of neural embeddings trained on PubMed corpora. Our implicit word-word metrics capture different aspects of word-word relatedness than word2vec-based metrics and are only partially correlated (rho = ~0.5-0.8 depending on task and corpus). The vector representations of words, bigrams, trigrams, abbreviations, and PubMed title+abstracts are all publicly available from [URL](http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu) for release under CC-BY-NC license. Several public web query interfaces are also available at the same site, including one which allows the user to specify a given word and view its most closely related terms according to direct co-occurrence as well as different implicit similarity metrics.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01884
**Notes:** medical-related paper on word embeddings; guys used few tricks over word2vec, like weighted score for 1- & 2-grams or list of important terms; results show their embedding actually improve relatedness of terms for humans; with code!
### Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation using Topic Models
**Authors:** Devendra Singh Chaplot, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
**Abstract:** Word Sense Disambiguation is an open problem in Natural Language Processing which is particularly challenging and useful in the unsupervised setting where all the words in any given text need to be disambiguated without using any labeled data. Typically WSD systems use the sentence or a small window of words around the target word as the context for disambiguation because their computational complexity scales exponentially with the size of the context. In this paper, we leverage the formalism of topic model to design a WSD system that scales linearly with the number of words in the context. As a result, our system is able to utilize the whole document as the context for a word to be disambiguated. The proposed method is a variant of Latent Dirichlet Allocation in which the topic proportions for a document are replaced by synset proportions. We further utilize the information in the WordNet by assigning a non-uniform prior to synset distribution over words and a logistic-normal prior for document distribution over synsets. We evaluate the proposed method on Senseval-2, Senseval-3, SemEval-2007, SemEval-2013 and SemEval-2015 English All-Word WSD datasets and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised knowledge-based WSD system by a significant margin.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01900
**Notes:** word sense disambiguation with wordnet, assigning prior as normal distribution; the parameters of normal distribution are determined from corpus at hand; the topics are being modelled by synset disrtibution instead of word themselves
### Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Induction
**Authors:** Omid Kashefi
**Abstract:** Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is an old and fundamental task in natural language processing. While supervised POS taggers have shown promising accuracy, it is not always feasible to use supervised methods due to lack of labeled data. In this project, we attempt to unsurprisingly induce POS tags by iteratively looking for a recurring pattern of words through a hierarchical agglomerative clustering process. Our approach shows promising results when compared to the tagging results of the state-of-the-art unsupervised POS taggers.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03564
**Notes:** unsupervised PoS-tagging; the author use classic backward-forward algorithm to cluster tags produced by HMM; it shows promicing results - only 10% worse that SotA
### MaskGAN: Better Text Generation via Filling in the ______
**Authors:** William Fedus, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew M. Dai
**Abstract:** Neural text generation models are often autoregressive language models or seq2seq models. These models generate text by sampling words sequentially, with each word conditioned on the previous word, and are state-of-the-art for several machine translation and summarization benchmarks. These benchmarks are often defined by validation perplexity even though this is not a direct measure of the quality of the generated text. Additionally, these models are typically trained via maxi- mum likelihood and teacher forcing. These methods are well-suited to optimizing perplexity but can result in poor sample quality since generating text requires conditioning on sequences of words that may have never been observed at training time. We propose to improve sample quality using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which explicitly train the generator to produce high quality samples and have shown a lot of success in image generation. GANs were originally designed to output differentiable values, so discrete language generation is challenging for them. We claim that validation perplexity alone is not indicative of the quality of text generated by a model. We introduce an actor-critic conditional GAN that fills in missing text conditioned on the surrounding context. We show qualitatively and quantitatively, evidence that this produces more realistic conditional and unconditional text samples compared to a maximum likelihood trained model.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.07736
**Notes:** GAN on texts which actually makes sense; gererator is standard seq2seq; discriminator has the same architecture as generator, but it has two outputs: probability for a word to be real and value function, which is used as baseline in REINFORCE for generator
## 2018-02
### Improving Variational Encoder-Decoders in Dialogue Generation
**Authors:** Xiaoyu Shen, Hui Su, Shuzi Niu, Vera Demberg
**Abstract:** Variational encoder-decoders (VEDs) have shown promising results in dialogue generation. However, the latent variable distributions are usually approximated by a much simpler model than the powerful RNN structure used for encoding and decoding, yielding the KL-vanishing problem and inconsistent training objective. In this paper, we separate the training step into two phases: The first phase learns to autoencode discrete texts into continuous embeddings, from which the second phase learns to generalize latent representations by reconstructing the encoded embedding. In this case, latent variables are sampled by transforming Gaussian noise through multi-layer perceptrons and are trained with a separate VED model, which has the potential of realizing a much more flexible distribution. We compare our model with current popular models and the experiment demonstrates substantial improvement in both metric-based and human evaluations.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02032
**Notes:** combined arch for better dialog gen: auto-encoder entangled with conditional VAE; variational HRED for CVAE; CVAE is trained with scheduled sampling; training of the whole model is resembling of GANs: AE or CVAE is freezed while the other has being trained
### TextZoo, a New Benchmark for Reconsidering Text Classification
**Authors:** Benyou Wang, Li Wang, Qikang Wei
**Abstract:** Text representation is a fundamental concern in Natural Language Processing, especially in text classification. Recently, many neural network approaches with delicate representation model (e.g. FASTTEXT, CNN, RNN and many hybrid models with attention mechanisms) claimed that they achieved state-of-art in specific text classification datasets. However, it lacks an unified benchmark to compare these models and reveals the advantage of each sub-components for various settings. We re-implement more than 20 popular text representation models for classification in more than 10 datasets. In this paper, we reconsider the text classification task in the perspective of neural network and get serval effects with analysis of the above results.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03656
**Notes:** conceptually simple paper, but the code for it is really useful: guys reimplemented SotA text classification architectures in one manner
### Tensor Comprehensions: Framework-Agnostic High-Performance Machine Learning Abstractions
**Authors:** Nicolas Vasilache, Oleksandr Zinenko, Theodoros Theodoridis, Priya Goyal, Zachary DeVito, William S. Moses, Sven Verdoolaege, Andrew Adams, Albert Cohen
**Abstract:** Deep learning models with convolutional and recurrent networks are now ubiquitous and analyze massive amounts of audio, image, video, text and graph data, with applications in automatic translation, speech-to-text, scene understanding, ranking user preferences, ad placement, etc. Competing frameworks for building these networks such as TensorFlow, Chainer, CNTK, Torch/PyTorch, Caffe1/2, MXNet and Theano, explore different tradeoffs between usability and expressiveness, research or production orientation and supported hardware. They operate on a DAG of computational operators, wrapping high-performance libraries such as CUDNN (for NVIDIA GPUs) or NNPACK (for various CPUs), and automate memory allocation, synchronization, distribution. Custom operators are needed where the computation does not fit existing high-performance library calls, usually at a high engineering cost. This is frequently required when new operators are invented by researchers: such operators suffer a severe performance penalty, which limits the pace of innovation. Furthermore, even if there is an existing runtime call these frameworks can use, it often doesn't offer optimal performance for a user's particular network architecture and dataset, missing optimizations between operators as well as optimizations that can be done knowing the size and shape of data. Our contributions include (1) a language close to the mathematics of deep learning called Tensor Comprehensions offering both imperative and declarative styles, (2) a polyhedral Just-In-Time compiler to convert a mathematical description of a deep learning DAG into a CUDA kernel with delegated memory management and synchronization, also providing optimizations such as operator fusion and specialization for specific sizes, (3) a compilation cache populated by an autotuner. [Abstract cutoff]
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04730
**Notes:** really hot engineering work from Facebook: DSL which is really close to mathematic notation, so a researcher could write in it directly, from this DSL an algorithm generates code in CUDA a few times, the best generated code is used for production
### Ranking Sentences for Extractive Summarization with Reinforcement Learning
**Authors:** Shashi Narayan, Shay B. Cohen, Mirella Lapata
**Abstract:** Single document summarization is the task of producing a shorter version of a document while preserving its principal information content. In this paper we conceptualize extractive summarization as a sentence ranking task and propose a novel training algorithm which globally optimizes the ROUGE evaluation metric through a reinforcement learning objective. We use our algorithm to train a neural summarization model on the CNN and DailyMail datasets and demonstrate experimentally that it outperforms state-of-the-art extractive and abstractive systems when evaluated automatically and by humans.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08636
**Notes:** new SotA in summarization; CNN for feature extraction from sentences; LSTM for document embedding; embedding based ranking of sentences which are used for summarization; ranking trained by REINFORCE; beam search analog for RL training
### Deep contextualized word representations
**Authors:** Matthew E. Peters, Mark Neumann, Mohit Iyyer, Matt Gardner, Christopher Clark, Kenton Lee, Luke Zettlemoyer
**Abstract:** We introduce a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). Our word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. We show that these representations can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems, including question answering, textual entailment and sentiment analysis. We also present an analysis showing that exposing the deep internals of the pre-trained network is crucial, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05365
**Notes:** new SotA in NER & other tasks for embeddings; ELMo - n layers of bidirectional language model (4096 LSTM units each direction) and attn over layers, i.e embedding from each layer for each token is taken with softmax weight and summarized
### Latent Topic Conversational Models
**Authors:** Tsung-Hsien Wen, Minh-Thang Luong
**Abstract:** Despite much success in many large-scale language tasks, sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models have not been an ideal choice for conversational modeling as they tend to generate generic and repetitive responses. In this paper, we propose a Latent Topic Conversational Model (LTCM) that augments the seq2seq model with a neural topic component to better model human-human conversations. The neural topic component encodes information from the source sentence to build a global “topic” distribution over words, which is then consulted by the seq2seq model to improve generation at each time step. The experimental results show that the proposed LTCM can generate more diverse and interesting responses by sampling from its learnt latent representations. In a subjective human evaluation, the judges also confirm that LTCM is the preferred option comparing to competitive baseline models.
**URL:** https://openreview.net/forum?id=S1GUgxgCW
**Notes:** generating utterances in dialogues with VAE and topic modelling: before generating a sentense we draw a topic proportion and generate phrase according to it
### Disentangling Aspect and Opinion Words in Target-based Sentiment Analysis using Lifelong Learning
**Authors:** Shuai Wang, Mianwei Zhou, Sahisnu Mazumder, Bing Liu, Yi Chang
**Abstract:** Given a target name, which can be a product aspect or entity, identifying its aspect words and opinion words in a given corpus is a fine-grained task in target-based sentiment analysis (TSA). This task is challenging, especially when we have no labeled data and we want to perform it for any given domain. To address it, we propose a general two-stage approach. Stage one extracts/groups the target-related words (call t-words) for a given target. This is relatively easy as we can apply an existing semantics-based learning technique. Stage two separates the aspect and opinion words from the grouped t-words, which is challenging because we often do not have enough word-level aspect and opinion labels. In this work, we formulate this problem in a PU learning setting and incorporate the idea of lifelong learning to solve it. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05818
**Notes:** Authors are proposing nouvelle technique to extract opinion words from general vocabulary words. They use Amazon review dataset. The key idea here is to found opinion words as being close in multiple domains to base lexicon.
## 2018-03
### Simple random search provides a competitive approach to reinforcement learning
**Authors:** Horia Mania, Aurelia Guy, Benjamin Recht
**Abstract:** A common belief in model-free reinforcement learning is that methods based on random search in the parameter space of policies exhibit significantly worse sample complexity than those that explore the space of actions. We dispel such beliefs by introducing a random search method for training static, linear policies for continuous control problems, matching state-of-the-art sample efficiency on the benchmark MuJoCo locomotion tasks. Our method also finds a nearly optimal controller for a challenging instance of the Linear Quadratic Regulator, a classical problem in control theory, when the dynamics are not known. Computationally, our random search algorithm is at least 15 times more efficient than the fastest competing model-free methods on these benchmarks. We take advantage of this computational efficiency to evaluate the performance of our method over hundreds of random seeds and many different hyperparameter configurations for each benchmark task. Our simulations highlight a high variability in performance in these benchmark tasks, suggesting that commonly used estimations of sample efficiency do not adequately evaluate the performance of RL algorithms.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07055
**Notes:** random search with a few optimizations achieve SotA on continous control tasks! essentially is is random search with scaling of update by reward std. deviation; much more sample efficient then Evolution Strategy; with code!
### Achieving Human Parity on AutomaticChinese to English News Translation
**Authors:** Hany Hassan, Anthony Aue, Chang Chen, Vishal Chowdhary, Jonathan Clark, Christian Federmann, Xuedong Huang, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, William Lewis, Mu Li, Shujie Liu, Tie-Yan Liu, Renqian Luo, Arul Menezes, Tao Qin, Frank Seide, Xu Tan, Fei Tian, Lijun Wu, Shuangzhi Wu, Yingce Xia, Dongdong Zhang, Zhirui Zhang, and Ming Zhou
**Abstract:** Machine translation has made rapid advances in recent years. Millions of people are using it today in online translation systems and mobile applications in order to communicate across language barriers. The question naturally arises whether such systems can approach or achieve parity with human translations. In this paper, we first address the problem of how to define and accurately measure human parity in translation. We then describe Microsoft’s machine translation system and measure the quality of its translations on the widely used WMT 2017 news translation task from Chinese to English. We find that our latest neural machine translation system has reached a new state-of-the-art, and that the translation quality is at human parity when compared to professional human translations. We also find that it significantly exceeds the quality of crowd-sourced non-professional translations.
**URL:** https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/03/final-achieving-human.pdf
**Notes:** human level performance in MT from MSFT! really strong claim proved in reliefingly narrow domain of English/Chinese news; not sure if the reference-matching measures are good for MT; arch is Transformer with joint unservised training on monolingual corpora
### Fast Decoding in Sequence Models using Discrete Latent Variables
**Authors:** Łukasz Kaiser, Aurko Roy, Ashish Vaswani, Niki Parmar, Samy Bengio, Jakob Uszkoreit, Noam Shazeer
**Abstract:** Autoregressive sequence models based on deep neural networks, such as RNNs, Wavenet and the Transformer attain state-of-the-art results on many tasks. However, they are difficult to parallelize and are thus slow at processing long sequences. RNNs lack parallelism both during training and decoding, while architectures like WaveNet and Transformer are much more parallelizable during training, yet still operate sequentially during decoding. Inspired by [arxiv:[URL](/abs/1711.00937)], we present a method to extend sequence models using discrete latent variables that makes decoding much more parallelizable. We first auto-encode the target sequence into a shorter sequence of discrete latent variables, which at inference time is generated autoregressively, and finally decode the output sequence from this shorter latent sequence in parallel. To this end, we introduce a novel method for constructing a sequence of discrete latent variables and compare it with previously introduced methods. Finally, we evaluate our model end-to-end on the task of neural machine translation, where it is an order of magnitude faster at decoding than comparable autoregressive models. While lower in BLEU than purely autoregressive models, our model achieves higher scores than previously proposed non-autogregressive translation models.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03382
**Notes:** great work from Google; like Non-Autoregressive Trasformer; vector quantization as projection on subspaces; the reconstruction loss for latent space and input with AE; convolutions instead of fully-connecteds; latent variables instead of fertility rate in NAT
### An Analysis of Neural Language Modeling at Multiple Scales
**Authors:** Stephen Merity, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Richard Socher
**Abstract:** Many of the leading approaches in language modeling introduce novel, complex and specialized architectures. We take existing state-of-the-art word level language models based on LSTMs and QRNNs and extend them to both larger vocabularies as well as character-level granularity. When properly tuned, LSTMs and QRNNs achieve state-of-the-art results on character-level (Penn Treebank, enwik8) and word-level (WikiText-103) datasets, respectively. Results are obtained in only 12 hours (WikiText-103) to 2 days (enwik8) using a single modern GPU.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08240
**Notes:** new paper from Salesforce: larger well-tuned LSTM (and QRNN) are giving SotA results in language modelling; in addition they use longer BPTT (150) and tied adaptive softmax; interestingly they found that QRNN need to be deeper than LSTM for these tasks
## 2018-04
### Large scale distributed neural network training through online distillation
**Authors:** Rohan Anil, Gabriel Pereyra, Alexandre Passos, Robert Ormandi, George E. Dahl, Geoffrey E. Hinton
**Abstract:** Techniques such as ensembling and distillation promise model quality improvements when paired with almost any base model. However, due to increased test-time cost (for ensembles) and increased complexity of the training pipeline (for distillation), these techniques are challenging to use in industrial settings. In this paper we explore a variant of distillation which is relatively straightforward to use as it does not require a complicated multi-stage setup or many new hyperparameters. Our first claim is that online distillation enables us to use extra parallelism to fit very large datasets about twice as fast. Crucially, we can still speed up training even after we have already reached the point at which additional parallelism provides no benefit for synchronous or asynchronous stochastic gradient descent. Two neural networks trained on disjoint subsets of the data can share knowledge by encouraging each model to agree with the predictions the other model would have made. These predictions can come from a stale version of the other model so they can be safely computed using weights that only rarely get transmitted. Our second claim is that online distillation is a cost-effective way to make the exact predictions of a model dramatically more reproducible. We support our claims using experiments on the Criteo Display Ad Challenge dataset, ImageNet, and the largest to-date dataset used for neural language modeling, containing $6\times 10^{11}$ tokens and based on the Common Crawl repository of web data.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03235
**Notes:** Google large scale language modelling. It is 20 _Terabytes_ of texts with 673 billion tokens. The algorithm they propose called codistillation: distributed learning of similar models with additional loss for each model to predist close to others results.
### Frustratingly Easy Meta-Embedding -- Computing Meta-Embeddings by Averaging Source Word Embeddings
**Authors:** Joshua Coates, Danushka Bollegala
**Abstract:** Creating accurate meta-embeddings from pre-trained source embeddings has received attention lately. Methods based on global and locally-linear transformation and concatenation have shown to produce accurate meta-embeddings. In this paper, we show that the arithmetic mean of two distinct word embedding sets yields a performant meta-embedding that is comparable or better than more complex meta-embedding learning methods. The result seems counter-intuitive given that vector spaces in different source embeddings are not comparable and cannot be simply averaged. We give insight into why averaging can still produce accurate meta-embedding despite the incomparability of the source vector spaces.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05262
**Notes:** really simple claim - averaging of different embedding makes them better; it is proved on datasets for semantic properties of words; interestingly averaging is slighly worse then concatenation but don't requires extra storage space
### The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation
**Authors:** Mia Xu Chen, Orhan Firat, Ankur Bapna, Melvin Johnson, Wolfgang Macherey, George Foster, Llion Jones, Niki Parmar, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Yonghui Wu, Macduff Hughes
**Abstract:** The past year has witnessed rapid advances in sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) modeling for Machine Translation (MT). The classic RNN-based approaches to MT were first out-performed by the convolutional seq2seq model, which was then out-performed by the more recent Transformer model. Each of these new approaches consists of a fundamental architecture accompanied by a set of modeling and training techniques that are in principle applicable to other seq2seq architectures. In this paper, we tease apart the new architectures and their accompanying techniques in two ways. First, we identify several key modeling and training techniques, and apply them to the RNN architecture, yielding a new RNMT+ model that outperforms all of the three fundamental architectures on the benchmark WMT'14 English to French and English to German tasks. Second, we analyze the properties of each fundamental seq2seq architecture and devise new hybrid architectures intended to combine their strengths. Our hybrid models obtain further improvements, outperforming the RNMT+ model on both benchmark datasets.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.09849
**Notes:** Google's paper on combination of multi-head and ol' good RNNs; it's somewhat surprisingly better in NMT task; as reguralizers authors use Label Smoothing, Dropout and Weight Decay; an ablation study shows that LS is even more important for NMT than MH attn
## 2018-05
### Paper Abstract Writing through Editing Mechanism
**Authors:** Qingyun Wang, Zhihao Zhou, Lifu Huang, Spencer Whitehead, Boliang Zhang, Heng Ji, Kevin Knight
**Abstract:** We present a paper abstract writing system based on an attentive neural sequence-to-sequence model that can take a title as input and automatically generate an abstract. We design a novel Writing-editing Network that can attend to both the title and the previously generated abstract drafts and then iteratively revise and polish the abstract. With two series of Turing tests, where the human judges are asked to distinguish the system-generated abstracts from human-written ones, our system passes Turing tests by junior domain experts at a rate up to 30% and by non-expert at a rate up to 80%.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06064
**Notes:** generate abstract from title; dataset id published; two networks: writing and editing ones, which relates to back-translation; Attentinve Revision Gate; ROUGE, METEOR and Turing tests (METEOR correlates with the latter, surprisingly)
### Zero-Shot Dual Machine Translation
**Authors:** Lierni Sestorain, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Christian Buck, Thomas Hofmann
**Abstract:** Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems rely on large amounts of parallel data. This is a major challenge for low-resource languages. Building on recent work on unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, we present an approach that combines zero-shot and dual learning. The latter relies on reinforcement learning, to exploit the duality of the machine translation task, and requires only monolingual data for the target language pair. Experiments show that a zero-shot dual system, trained on English-French and English-Spanish, outperforms by large margins a standard NMT system in zero-shot translation performance on Spanish-French (both directions). The zero-shot dual method approaches the performance, within 2.2 BLEU points, of a comparable supervised setting. Our method can obtain improvements also on the setting where a small amount of parallel data for the zero-shot language pair is available. Adding Russian, to extend our experiments to jointly modeling 6 zero-shot translation directions, all directions improve between 4 and 15 BLEU points, again, reaching performance near that of the supervised setting.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10338
**Notes:** Google's fresh paper on semi-supervised NMT; zero-shot & back-translation inside; it is still pretty far from supervised models, but that approach adds 2-5 point to every language they tried (UN offial languages); and they opensourcing the model!
## 2018-06
### TextWorld: A Learning Environment for Text-based Games
**Authors:** Marc-Alexandre Côté, Ákos Kádár, Xingdi Yuan, Ben Kybartas, Tavian Barnes, Emery Fine, James Moore, Matthew Hausknecht, Layla El Asri, Mahmoud Adada, Wendy Tay, Adam Trischler
**Abstract:** We introduce TextWorld, a sandbox learning environment for the training and evaluation of RL agents on text-based games. TextWorld is a Python library that handles interactive play-through of text games, as well as backend functions like state tracking and reward assignment. It comes with a curated list of games whose features and challenges we have analyzed. More significantly, it enables users to handcraft or automatically generate new games. Its generative mechanisms give precise control over the difficulty, scope, and language of constructed games, and can be used to relax challenges inherent to commercial text games like partial observability and sparse rewards. By generating sets of varied but similar games, TextWorld can also be used to study generalization and transfer learning. We cast text-based games in the Reinforcement Learning formalism, use our framework to develop a set of benchmark games, and evaluate several baseline agents on this set and the curated list.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.11532
**Notes:** oh, yes! I've been waiting for that: text quests environment for RL agents! Thanks to MSR and colleagues from McGill! They use classic text adventures from the 80s as a Pierian spring, they introduce fwd and bkwd generation using generative grammars
## 2018-07
### Talk the Walk: Navigating New York City through Grounded Dialogue
**Authors:** Harm de Vries, Kurt Shuster, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, Jason Weston, Douwe Kiela
**Abstract:** We introduce "Talk The Walk", the first large-scale dialogue dataset grounded in action and perception. The task involves two agents (a "guide" and a "tourist") that communicate via natural language in order to achieve a common goal: having the tourist navigate to a given target location. The task and dataset, which are described in detail, are challenging and their full solution is an open problem that we pose to the community. We (i) focus on the task of tourist localization and develop the novel Masked Attention for Spatial Convolutions (MASC) mechanism that allows for grounding tourist utterances into the guide's map, (ii) show it yields significant improvements for both emergent and natural language communication, and (iii) using this method, we establish non-trivial baselines on the full task.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03367
**Notes:** the next step in grounding natural language: now it's dialog-based orientation in virtual environment (Google StreetView); NLP, CV and RL mix; innovative MASC - transformation of landmark embeddings to directions for a "tourist"-agent
## 2018-08
### Fake Sentence Detection as a Training Task for Sentence Encoding
**Authors:** Viresh Ranjan, Heeyoung Kwon, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Minh Hoai
**Abstract:** Sentence encoders are typically trained on language modeling tasks which enable them to use large unlabeled datasets. While these models achieve state-of-the-art results on many sentence-level tasks, they are difficult to train with long training cycles. We introduce fake sentence detection as a new training task for learning sentence encodings. We automatically generate fake sentences by corrupting some original sentence and train the encoders to produce representations that are effective at detecting fake sentences. This binary classification task allows for efficient training and forces the encoder to learn the distinctions introduced by a small edit to sentences. We train a basic BiLSTM encoder to produce sentence representations and find that it outperforms a strong sentence encoding model trained on language modeling tasks, while also training much faster on smaller amount of data (20 hours instead of weeks). Further analysis shows the learned representations capture many syntactic and semantic properties expected from good sentence representations.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.03840
**Notes:** really nice work on transfer learning in NLP; authors improve SotA results on 5 classification and 1 retrieve tasks with usage of additional goal for a learning - the detection of fake sentences produced by word drop and word shuffle
### Dynamic Self-Attention : Computing Attention over Words Dynamically for Sentence Embedding
**Authors:** Deunsol Yoon, Dongbok Lee, SangKeun Lee
**Abstract:** In this paper, we propose Dynamic Self-Attention (DSA), a new self-attention mechanism for sentence embedding. We design DSA by modifying dynamic routing in capsule network (Sabouretal.,2017) for natural language processing. DSA attends to informative words with a dynamic weight vector. We achieve new state-of-the-art results among sentence encoding methods in Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset with the least number of parameters, while showing comparative results in Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) dataset.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07383
**Notes:** dynamic sentence embeddings with usage of dense CNN and (interesting!) simplified capsules; dynamic attention is an algorithm of iterative recomputation of simple attention with addition nonlinearity applied; new SotA on SNLI
### TaxoGen: Unsupervised Topic Taxonomy Construction by Adaptive Term Embedding and Clustering
**Authors:** Chao Zhang, Fangbo Tao, Xiusi Chen, Jiaming Shen, Meng Jiang, Brian Sadler, Michelle Vanni, and Jiawei Han
**Abstract:** Taxonomy construction is not only a fundamental task for semantic analysis of text corpora, but also an important step for applications such as information filtering, recommendation, and Web search. Existing pattern-based methods extract hypernym-hyponym term pairs and then organize these pairs into a taxonomy. However, by considering each term as an independent concept node, they overlook the topical proximity and the semantic correlations among terms. In this paper, we propose a method for constructing topic taxonomies, wherein every node represents a conceptual topic and is defined as a cluster of semantically coherent concept terms. Our method, TaxoGen, uses term embeddings and hierarchical clustering to construct a topic taxonomy in a recursive fashion. To ensure the quality of the recursive process, it consists of: (1) an adaptive spherical clustering module for allocating terms to proper levels when splitting a coarse topic into fine-grained ones; (2) a local embedding module for learning term embeddings that maintain strong discriminative power at different levels of the taxonomy. Our experiments on two real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TaxoGen compared with baseline methods.
**URL:** https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/TaxoGen-Unsupervised-Topic-Taxonomy-Construction-by-Adaptive-Term-Embedding-and-Clustering.pdf
**Notes:** taxonomy generation w/o supervision; authors use spherical K-means, a relevance and the local embeddings for sub-topic construction; the relevance is more sophisticated TF-IDF; the local embs are constructed from subcorpora from (again) clustering
### Summarizing Opinions: Aspect Extraction Meets Sentiment Prediction and They Are Both Weakly Supervised
**Authors:** Stefanos Angelidis, Mirella Lapata
**Abstract:** We present a neural framework for opinion summarization from online product reviews which is knowledge-lean and only requires light supervision (e.g., in the form of product domain labels and user-provided ratings). Our method combines two weakly supervised components to identify salient opinions and form extractive summaries from multiple reviews: an aspect extractor trained under a multi-task objective, and a sentiment predictor based on multiple instance learning. We introduce an opinion summarization dataset that includes a training set of product reviews from six diverse domains and human-annotated development and test sets with gold standard aspect annotations, salience labels, and opinion summaries. Automatic evaluation shows significant improvements over baselines, and a large-scale study indicates that our opinion summaries are preferred by human judges according to multiple criteria.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.08858
**Notes:** interesting approach to summarization of user reviews: authors use aspect extraction, sentiment analysis and semantic duplication removal to produce a summary of user opinions on one item; with code & data!
## 2018-09
### Adaptive Input Representations for Neural Language Modeling
**Authors:** Alexei Baevski, Michael Auli
**Abstract:** We introduce adaptive input representations for neural language modeling which extend the adaptive softmax of Grave et al. (2017) to input representations of variable capacity. There are several choices on how to factorize the input and output layers, and whether to model words, characters or sub-word units. We perform a systematic comparison of popular choices for a self-attentional architecture. Our experiments show that models equipped with adaptive embeddings are more than twice as fast to train than the popular character input CNN while having a lower number of parameters. On the WikiText-103 benchmark we achieve 18.7 perplexity, an improvement of 10.5 perplexity compared to the previously best published result and on the Billion Word benchmark, we achieve 23.02 perplexity.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10853
**Notes:** Transformer is definitely ground breaking, next step in word embeddings - different number of dimensions for different frequency bins; a Transformer decoder with a few tweaks projects its hidden state to different capacity embeddings
### Weakly-Supervised Neural Text Classification
**Authors:** Yu Meng, Jiaming Shen, Chao Zhang, Jiawei Han
**Abstract:** Deep neural networks are gaining increasing popularity for the classic text classification task, due to their strong expressive power and less requirement for feature engineering. Despite such attractiveness, neural text classification models suffer from the lack of training data in many real-world applications. Although many semi-supervised and weakly-supervised text classification models exist, they cannot be easily applied to deep neural models and meanwhile support limited supervision types. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised method that addresses the lack of training data in neural text classification. Our method consists of two modules: (1) a pseudo-document generator that leverages seed information to generate pseudo-labeled documents for model pre-training, and (2) a self-training module that bootstraps on real unlabeled data for model refinement. Our method has the flexibility to handle different types of weak supervision and can be easily integrated into existing deep neural models for text classification. We have performed extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different domains. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves inspiring performance without requiring excessive training data and outperforms baseline methods significantly.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.01478
**Notes:** authors construct vMF distribution to sample word vectors for keywords and generate pseudo-docs using these keywords for clf; the procedure itself is closely related to LDA motivation but its samples whole embeddings instead; with code!
### Accelerated Reinforcement Learning for Sentence Generation by Vocabulary Prediction
**Authors:** Kazuma Hashimoto, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
**Abstract:** A major obstacle in reinforcement learning-based sentence generation is the large action space whose size is equal to the vocabulary size of the target-side language. To improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning, we present a novel approach for reducing the action space based on dynamic vocabulary prediction. Our method first predicts a fixed-size small vocabulary for each input to generate its target sentence. The input-specific vocabularies are then used at supervised and reinforcement learning steps, and also at test time. In our experiments on six machine translation and two image captioning datasets, our method achieves faster reinforcement learning ($\sim$2.7x faster) with less GPU memory ($\sim$2.3x less) than the full-vocabulary counterpart. The reinforcement learning with our method consistently leads to significant improvement of BLEU scores, and the scores are equal to or better than those of baselines using the full vocabularies, with faster decoding time ($\sim$3x faster) on CPUs.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.01694
**Notes:** a technique to select important words from a dictionary for sentence generation task; authors use this cherry-picked dictionary to form an action space for reinforcement algorithms and get faster training, inference and less memory consumption; with code!
## 2018-10
### Phrase-Based Attentions
**Authors:** Phi Xuan Nguyen, Shafiq Joty
**Abstract:** Most state-of-the-art neural machine translation systems, despite being different in architectural skeletons (e.g. recurrence, convolutional), share an indispensable feature: the Attention. However, most existing attention methods are token-based and ignore the importance of phrasal alignments, the key ingredient for the success of phrase-based statistical machine translation. In this paper, we propose novel phrase-based attention methods to model n-grams of tokens as attention entities. We incorporate our phrase-based attentions into the recently proposed Transformer network, and demonstrate that our approach yields improvements of 1.3 BLEU for English-to-German and 0.5 BLEU for German-to-English translation tasks on WMT newstest2014 using WMT'16 training data.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03444
**Notes:** convolutional attention prings back multi-word expressions to machine translation; the core idea is to produce one vector from each n-gram and combine it with traditional [multi-head] attention; new SotA on En-De & De-En
### BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
**Authors:** Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova
**Abstract:** We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT representations can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
**Notes:** new SotA on many tasks from Google; bidirectional transformer language model, which is trained for 1M steps with 128k words/batch; for downstream tasks they train additional output layer with small lr; closely resembles OpenAI GPT, but bigger & better
## 2018-11
### CALCS: Continuously Approximating Longest Common Subsequence for Sequence Level Optimization
**Authors:** Semih Yavuz, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Patrick Nguyen, Yonghui Wu
**Abstract:** Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is one of the most widely used approaches for training structured prediction models for textgeneration based natural language processing applications. However, besides exposure bias, models trained with MLE suffer from wrong objective problem where they are trained to maximize the word-level correct next step prediction, but are evaluated with respect to sequence-level discrete metrics such as ROUGE and BLEU. Several variants of policy-gradient methods address some of these problems by optimizing for final discrete evaluation metrics and showing improvements over MLE training for downstream tasks like text summarization and machine translation. However, policy-gradient methods suffers from high sample variance, making the training process very difficult and unstable. In this paper, we present an alternative direction towards mitigating this problem by introducing a new objective (CALCS) based on a differentiable surrogate of longest common subsequence (LCS) measure that captures sequence-level structure similarity. Experimental results on abstractive summarization and machine translation validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
**URL:** http://aclweb.org/anthology/D18-1406
**Notes:** continuous approximation of longest common subsequence (LCS) from Google; nice math proof as for me; shows improvement in machine translation and abstractive summarization on transformer and pointer-nets
## 2018-12
### Von Mises-Fisher Loss for Training Sequence to Sequence Models with Continuous Outputs
**Authors:** Sachin Kumar, Yulia Tsvetkov
**Abstract:** The Softmax function is used in the final layer of nearly all existing sequence-to-sequence models for language generation. However, it is usually the slowest layer to compute which limits the vocabulary size to a subset of most frequent types; and it has a large memory footprint. We propose a general technique for replacing the softmax layer with a continuous embedding layer. Our primary innovations are a novel probabilistic loss, and a training and inference procedure in which we generate a probability distribution over pre-trained word embeddings, instead of a multinomial distribution over the vocabulary obtained via softmax. We evaluate this new class of sequence-to-sequence models with continuous outputs on the task of neural machine translation. We show that our models obtain upto 2.5x speed-up in training time while performing on par with the state-of-the-art models in terms of translation quality. These models are capable of handling very large vocabularies without compromising on translation quality. They also produce more meaningful errors than in the softmax-based models, as these errors typically lie in a subspace of the vector space of the reference translations.
**URL:** https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04616
**Notes:** long awaited SoftMax replacement: predicting a word emb instead of a vocab index; computation of NLLvMF loss is 2x faster than SM; interestingly, this loss became possible only two years back when the tight lower bound for Bessel's functions was proven
|
An allusion is a figure of speech. It refers to a well-known story, event, person, or object in order to make a comparison in a person's mind.
Figures of speech
English language |
Monday, March 20, 2017
HOLY SEE : Papal agency marks 90 years of quietly serving poor from Ukraine to India
A Catholic organisation has celebrated 90 years of quiet service to
the poor in the Middle East, northeast Africa, India and eastern Europe.
Mgr John Kozar, secretary of the Catholic Near East Welfare
Association, said the agency maintains a low profile because it works
through and with the local Church.
“They know best how to represent the face of Christ. We trust their
experience, holiness and knowledge about how to govern and care for
their people,” he said in an interview with Catholic News Service (CNS).
The mission of the organisation is to serve and accompany Eastern
Catholic churches in pastoral and humanitarian activities, generally at
the level of the diocese or eparchy, Mgr Kozar said.
A secondary mission
is to share the needs of the Eastern churches with people in North
America who may be confused about where Eastern churches fit in the
larger Catholic picture.
Eastern Catholic churches have their origins in the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, India or northeast Africa, have distinctive liturgical
and legal systems, and are often identified by the national or ethnic
character of their region of origin. Members of the 22 Eastern Catholic
churches enjoy the same dignity, rights and obligations as members of
the Latin Church.
Msgr Kozar said people in North America have little exposure to
Eastern churches and he takes it in stride when asked if Eastern
Catholics are “really Catholic” and if they are under the authority of
Pope Francis. “I say, ‘Yes! We are one church with two very enriching
traditions, Latin and Eastern.'”
He said Eastern Catholic churches are typically smaller than Latin
churches. Many have deep historic roots and are in areas of suffering
and religious persecution.
Catholic Near East Welfare Association was founded in 1926 in
response to a request by Pope Pius XI to unite all American Catholic
organisations providing aid to Russia and the Near East. Near East is an
imprecise geographic term that encompasses southwest Asia and the
Arabian Peninsula.
As a papal organisation, it has a mandate from the Vatican to support
the Eastern Catholic Church. Another mandate of the agency is to work
for union among Catholic and non-Catholic Eastern churches, including
the Orthodox churches.
In recent years, the association spent approximately $22 million annually on assistance in 14 countries.
The abiding challenge is with refugees and displaced persons in the
Middle East, especially Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, Mgr Kozar said.
Access in Syria has been sharply limited because of the ongoing
conflict, but the organisation is still helping the local churches
provide milk, bedding, diapers and antibiotics to their people.
“There are heroic priests, Sisters and bishops who never left. Some
Catholics and other Christians have been hunkered down for more than
five years,” he said.
Catholic Near East Welfare Association also is active in areas where
the Church has experienced persecution, such as Egypt. In one town, the
agency funded the repair of a section of a burned-out orphanage so the
Sisters living there could continue to care for 15 children.
The
orphanage was one of 55 church properties damaged in anti-Christian
violence during 2013.
The agency also supports school feeding programmes for children in
drought-affected parts of the horn of Africa. It serves some of the
million families displaced in Ukraine as a result of fighting along the
border with Russia.
In India, the agency supports evangelisation in the remote tribal
areas in the northern part of the country. “It’s very uplifting how
people have a yearning to have a different experience of God or to
experience him for the first time,” said Mgr Kozar, who has visited the
area several times.
“It’s the most basic form of evangelisation,” he said. “Priests and
sisters live in villages with indigenous peoples and share their prayer
life in a very basic way.”
The two Eastern Catholic churches in India are the Syro-Malabar and
Syro-Malankara, which trace their origins to St Thomas the Apostle.
Pope Francis is expected to travel to India this year, possibly in
November. Mgr Kozar said the visit will give hope to the people and
encourage them to continue their many good works of charity and service.
He said Catholics comprise only 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent of the
population. “The Catholic Church contributes tremendously to the
education environment, medical care and social services,
disproportionate to our numbers,” he said.
Catholic Near East Welfare Association works to empower Eastern
Catholic churches through education and formation of religious, clergy
and communities, according to Michael La Civita, the agency’s
communications director.
“We’re not teaching them how to be a church. We’re providing
resources and sometimes know-how to build more responsive and holy
churches,” he told CNS. “They start with a foundation and it has to be
sustainable, so we have to be invisible.”
“These are churches rooted in the time of Jesus and the apostles, and
filled with men and women doing great things,” he said. Instead of
falling into despair because of extraordinary challenges in the current
day, “they are motivated by the Gospel to do something to change the
situation,” he said.
Although the organisation’s efforts are “for, through and with” the
Eastern Catholic churches, La Civita said humanitarian aid is provided
to all as a witness to the Gospel. “This requires us to be in dialogue
of other communities of faith,” he said.
La Civita said the agency’s accompaniment extends to Orthodox and
other Christian and non-Christian traditions. It also participates in
national and local Catholic dialogues with Muslims, Jews and Orthodox.
As Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan serves as the agency’s chairman.“In this role I have visited a number of Eastern churches in some
very challenging areas of the world,” he said in response to a question
from CNS.
“This papal agency is focused on, as Pope Francis would say,
accompaniment – reaching out in a pastoral way to demonstrate solidarity
of the Holy Father and the Church universal with these local churches
that suffer greatly, and are even persecuted,” the cardinal said. “Our
message is clear and simple: You are not alone. We are here, and we love
you.” |
Wolf's Lair (German: Wolfsschanze; Polish: Wilczy Szaniec) was Adolf Hitler's first Eastern Front military headquarters in World War II. The complex became one of several Fuhrer Headquarters in parts of Eastern Europe. Organisation Todt built it for the start of Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of the Soviet Union - in 1941. It is also the site of the 20 July Plot in 1944.
Military of Germany
World War II |
The allegations that Sen. Al Franken forcibly kissed and groped radio host Leeann Tweeden in 2006 and groped another woman in 2010 came at an unfortunate time for Democrats. Instead of addressing the numerous (and more severe) allegations against Alabama Senate candidate and accused pedophile Roy Moore, the right could simply ask why Franken, who until the allegations were revealed was a much-loved and respected congressman, wasn’t also disqualified from serving in Congress. Trump himself used this defense on Twitter, tweeting “The Al Frankenstien [sic] picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?” Fortunately, the vast majority of liberals did condemn Franken’s behavior. Within a few hours of the Tweeden allegations, The New York Times, Slate and Vice all published op-eds demanding that Franken resign. Actress Alyssa Milano, who started the #MeToo hashtag in response to the Weinstein revelations, tweeted that Franken “should not be in a position to represent the female constituents in [his] state.” Even CNN’s Chris Cillizza, the most milquetoast man alive, went in on Franken that day. It was a heartening display of ideological consistency and, naturally, it was shortlived. Democrats, perhaps unable to cope with the thought of the downfall of one of their strongest members, began backtracking almost immediately, creating yet another example of hypocrisy over sexual misconduct within their own ranks.
My twitter feed is nothing but liberals telling Al Franken to resign and conservatives asking why liberals aren’t telling Al Franken to resign. — Daniel Kibblesmith 🧠⚔️🦖 (@kibblesmith) November 17, 2017
Congressional Democrats — including Franken himself — responded to the allegations only by calling for an ethics investigation into the senator’s behavior. This made for a good sound bite for Sen. Chuck Schumer and company, but it doesn’t necessarily mean Franken will suffer any consequences. Franken already admitted to the offenses, making an investigation somewhat pointless, and the events in question took place three years before he was admitted to the Senate. And, as Nate Silver pointed out, the last time an ethics investigation actually resulted in an expulsion from Congress was in 1862, when ten Southern senators essentially ghosted their jobs. Franken has no intention of vacating his seat voluntarily, and it seems unlikely that he will be removed.
Russian Bots all over Al Franken story. pic.twitter.com/vvZuCuaZVf — Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) November 17, 2017
Some liberals were not satisfied with the slap on the wrist Franken received for his behavior. Did they want him to be punished more severely? No, Franken had to become the victim. Because Tweeden, a radio host, is a Republican, some prominent liberals took a page from the other side of the aisle and immediately assumed she lied about their encounter and was engaging in a conspiracy against Democrats. Forget that she had photographic proof, or that Franken admitted that he behaved inappropriately toward Tweeden. Forget that the first woman to accuse Roy Moore of sexual misconduct was also a Republican, or that a genuine ratfucking scheme would have aimed higher than “forced kissing 11 years ago.” In this mindset — the same one that prevents Trump or Moore supporters from confronting reality — a middling center-left senator from Minnesota becomes an unassailable hero. Franken is a Democrat, and, like Bill Clinton before him, he can do no wrong.
oh the terror in her eyes https://t.co/T538RjfKCG — ROSIE (@Rosie) November 20, 2017
This argument proved popular among centrist Democrats, who really ran wild with it. Numerous bloggers at Daily Kos thought it wise to question Tweeden’s story and suggested that she actually enjoyed having Franken’s tongue thrust down her throat. In a post titled “More Photos Emerging From Franken & Tweeden's USO Tour. They speak for themselves,” a Kos blogger dug up a 2006 picture of Franken and Tweeden smiling next to each other and captioned it “Tweeden looking miserable sitting next to her assailant.” The argument here, which rules out that anyone might maintain a professional demeanor around a lecherous colleague out of necessity, could just as easily be used to defend Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby. As of this writing, that post has 301 “recommends.” Others on Daily Kos and Twitter decided that the picture was edited and began analyzing it pixel by pixel for misplaced shadows and JPEG artifacts.
Twitter’s most irritating conspiracy theorists and ultrapartisan Democrats were enamored with the idea that there might be something to analyze in the Franken story. Seth Abramson, a journalist infamous for weaving amateur Trump-Russia theories in essay-length tweetstorms, did what he always does. “I just went down the rabbit hole of computer experts analyzing the Franken-Tweeden pic,” he tweeted, referring to random #Resistance accounts drawing circles on the Franken picture in MS Paint. He continued with a classic “just asking questions” routine: “I'm trying to back away slowly, because a) I don't understand any of it and b) that something isn't right feels like it's clear pretty quickly—but I need to wait until smarter people weigh in.” Sally Albright, a former Newt Gingrich staffer who ingratiated herself to the upper echelon of establishment liberals with frequent denunciations of Bernie Sanders, observed that “Berners are piling on, calling for Franken to drop out so he can't run against Bernie in 2020. Sad.”
Sorry but if what @alfranken is doing in that photo is sexual harassment we're going to need a bigger boat. Come on, people. Snap out of it. — Sasha Stone (@AwardsDaily) November 16, 2017
Keith Olbermann, who should really know better, became the first prominent figure to buy into this Pizzagate-level nonsense when he quoted a video of “Al Franken/Leeann Tweeden” performing onstage in 2003 and captioned it “So, this “forced kiss” sketch was performed in the 2003 tour but per @LeeannTweeden, Franken didn’t write it until the 2006 tour? The photo is what it is. Her backstory seems to conflict with her...video.” The video, originally posted by a user selling a self-published book called “The Trump Tweet Scrapbook,” shows them performing the comedy routine Tweeden described. She reads off some moderately risqué lines, asks a volunteer from the audience to come onstage, and then performs the now-infamous kiss with him. The audience member grins and pumps his fist. Where is the “conflict”?
So, this “forced kiss” sketch was performed in the 2003 tour but per @LeeannTweeden, Franken didn’t write it until the 2006 tour?
The photo is what it is. Her backstory seems to conflict with her...video. https://t.co/1yVasxAT7I — Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) November 19, 2017
Not only does the video in question not prove anything about what Franken did in the rehearsal room, it isn’t even of LeeAnn Tweeden. The woman, it turns out, is Karri Turner, who played Harriet Sims in JAG. She even references JAG several times during the routine. Olbermann confidently described this as “her video,” meaning Tweeden’s, but he didn’t bother to check whether Tweeden was actually in it. It has nothing to do with her. This is, in the most literal sense, fake news, and for the sole purpose of smearing a victim of sexual assault. This would be unconscionable coming from Fox News, and it is unconscionable coming from whatever website Keith Olbermann pretends to still have a TV show for.
Trump’s anti-intellectualism and contempt for the media has created an opening for liberals to position themselves as the sole arbiters of truth, honesty, and decency. They seized that opportunity with aplomb, adopting pompous slogans like “Facts first” (CNN) and “Democracy dies in darkness.” (The Washington Post). It might be a tad embarrassing, but this is all for the best, because Trump’s signature arguing tactic, “whataboutism,” relies on a plentiful supply of hypocrisy. The most daring (and disgusting) use of this strategy was Trump’s decision to invite the victims of Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct to the second presidential debate. The point Trump he was attempting to make wasn’t wrong — Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party spent decades covering for Bill’s Trump-like treatment of women, and that fact undermined their platform. More than two decades later, Democrats are beginning to reckon with their rank hypocrisy over Bill Clinton’s crimes; unfortunately, this newfound self-awareness has not yet extended to the newly revealed sexual improprieties committed by other members of their party.
The best possible thing Democrats can do in this situation is set a good example. Stooping to Trump’s level doesn’t work. In this case, it accomplishes nothing and gives Republicans a new, legitimate target for whataboutism. By borrowing Sean Hannity’s tactic of smearing victims of sexual assault in order to protect politicians, Keith Olbermann has created a new way of dodging questions about Sean Hannity: What about Keith Olbermann? By allowing Franken to remain in office, Democrats have created a similar question: What about Al Franken? If the party had taken a firmer stand on sexual assault, it might have given itself a satisfying answer. |
Arizona Donnie Barker (also Kate Barker or Ma Barker; October 8, 1873 - January 16, 1935) was an American gangster. She was born in Ash Grove, Missouri. She ran the Barker gang.
On January 16, 1935, Barker and her son, Fred, were killed by federal agents in Ocklawaha, Florida.
The song "Ma Baker" refers to the life and crime of Ma Barker. |
s the remainder when 322703817 is divided by 774?
771
Calculate the remainder when 573246 is divided by 114583.
331
What is the remainder when 14310997 is divided by 12?
1
What is the remainder when 503371 is divided by 160?
11
What is the remainder when 12994693 is divided by 63?
61
What is the remainder when 5266271 is divided by 585137?
38
What is the remainder when 3106222 is divided by 477?
475
What is the remainder when 1138817 is divided by 38?
33
What is the remainder when 277763 is divided by 33905?
6523
What is the remainder when 4898950 is divided by 835?
5
What is the remainder when 21384975 is divided by 66828?
15
What is the remainder when 6262942 is divided by 1004?
994
Calculate the remainder when 628847 is divided by 62883.
17
Calculate the remainder when 449740 is divided by 27979.
2076
Calculate the remainder when 532463 is divided by 88740.
23
What is the remainder when 16975 is divided by 8441?
93
Calculate the remainder when 13830 is divided by 13605.
225
What is the remainder when 7083807 is divided by 300?
207
Calculate the remainder when 64004064 is divided by 302.
298
Calculate the remainder when 209391039 is divided by 1631.
1628
Calculate the remainder when 184658936 is divided by 186.
182
Calculate the remainder when 727680 is divided by 530.
520
Calculate the remainder when 645964 is divided by 34.
32
Calculate the remainder when 54403704 is divided by 88.
80
What is the remainder when 838414411 is divided by 67?
62
What is the remainder when 498723176 is divided by 6?
2
Calculate the remainder when 3678859 is divided by 4570.
9
What is the remainder when 1884477 is divided by 534?
525
What is the remainder when 133971396 is divided by 11164283?
0
Calculate the remainder when 1121808 is divided by 4527.
3639
Calculate the remainder when 5458436 is divided by 606492.
8
What is the remainder when 678609 is divided by 4088?
1
What is the remainder when 354644 is divided by 35456?
84
Calculate the remainder when 12040268 is divided by 325.
318
What is the remainder when 1568300 is divided by 133?
97
Calculate the remainder when 15708 is divided by 5217.
57
Calculate the remainder when 61193 is divided by 566.
65
What is the remainder when 69019932 is divided by 39?
33
Calculate the remainder when 7034136 is divided by 36.
24
Calculate the remainder when 60305148 is divided by 20101710.
18
What is the remainder when 114224 is divided by 428?
376
What is the remainder when 985474 is divided by 2079?
28
Calculate the remainder when 101468 is divided by 1080.
1028
What is the remainder when 3210501 is divided by 211?
136
What is the remainder when 23854 is divided by 7944?
22
What is the remainder when 2807085 is divided by 1720?
45
What is the remainder when 1529115 is divided by 36390?
735
What is the remainder when 3294673 is divided by 35?
18
What is the remainder when 22108838 is divided by 4283?
4275
Calculate the remainder when 47963 is divided by 15022.
2897
Calculate the remainder when 113448 is divided by 28298.
256
What is the remainder when 232029410 is divided by 6203?
6195
Calculate the remainder when 60994334 is divided by 1208.
1206
What is the remainder when 13045551 is divided by 484?
299
What is the remainder when 14933434 is divided by 194?
90
Calculate the remainder when 1032670 is divided by 36.
10
What is the remainder when 27207192 is divided by 6801795?
12
What is the remainder when 11469866 is divided by 3095?
2891
What is the remainder when 3366903 is divided by 841653?
291
Calculate the remainder when 147205709 is divided by 90.
89
Calculate the remainder when 534259913 is divided by 35.
33
What is the remainder when 4744352 is divided by 4158?
74
Calculate the remainder when 331965 is divided by 165878.
209
Calculate the remainder when 69955036 is divided by 1180.
1096
Calculate the remainder when 4312121 is divided by 287474.
11
What is the remainder when 481533 is divided by 3708?
3201
Calculate the remainder when 295531 is divided by 575.
556
What is the remainder when 23991 is divided by 146?
47
Calculate the remainder when 2536053 is divided by 1805.
28
What is the remainder when 140693485 is divided by 45?
40
What is the remainder when 876703728 is divided by 5?
3
What is the remainder when 26217115 is divided by 515?
10
What is the remainder when 2377617 is divided by 13?
8
What is the remainder when 2456599 is divided by 62983?
262
Calculate the remainder when 62161427 is divided by 1202.
1199
Calculate the remainder when 47575434 is divided by 10629.
30
What is the remainder when 136007689 is divided by 13971?
4
What is the remainder when 992602 is divided by 690?
382
Calculate the remainder when 299255 is divided by 4275.
5
What is the remainder when 1156667 is divided by 3386?
2041
Calculate the remainder when 550831 is divided by 98.
71
Calculate the remainder when 2214380 is divided by 3753.
110
Calculate the remainder when 9462161 is divided by 1892427.
26
What is the remainder when 3431565 is divided by 28360?
5
Calculate the remainder when 471277 is divided by 152.
77
Calculate the remainder when 412703 is divided by 206275.
153
Calculate the remainder when 1639605 is divided by 409897.
17
Calculate the remainder when 37548 is divided by 604.
100
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8
What is the remainder when 860689 is divided by 418?
27
What is the remainder when 27468135 is divided by 2278?
11
What is the remainder when 273598 is divided by 1847?
242
What is the remainder when 81164684 is divided by 18?
2
What is the remainder when 3191518 is divided by 28?
22
What is the remainder when 561176 is divided by 754?
200
Calculate the remainder when 6510560 is divided by 36.
32
What is the remainder when 43878493 is divided by 705?
703
Calculate the remainder when 6294583 is divided by 82.
17
What is the remainder when 15528 is divided by 4013?
3489
Calculate the remainder when 252044 is divided by 251989.
55
What is the remainder when 15884891 is divided by 95692?
19
Calculate the remainder when 16500125 is divided by 153.
146
What is the remainder when 34196 is divided by 31661?
2535
Calculate the remainder when 232937 is divided by 472.
241
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10
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497
Calculate the remainder when 1274134922 is divided by 111.
110
Calculate the remainder when 31790 is divided by 465.
170
Calculate the remainder when 75022 is divided by 1766.
850
What is the remainder when 6391323 is divided by 159?
0
What is the remainder when 21762 is divided by 126?
90
What is the remainder when 7798727 is divided by 2562?
2561
Calculate the remainder when 1481581 is divided by 412.
29
What is the remainder when 66053870 is divided by 62551?
14
Calculate the remainder when 35339438 is divided by 29697.
8
Calculate the remainder when 312732207 is divided by 2793.
2790
What is the remainder when 379580 is divided by 37032?
9260
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315
What is the remainder when 209057 is divided by 1760?
1377
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7
Calculate the remainder when 118467103 is divided by 787.
780
Calculate the remainder when 169875 is divided by 55.
35
What is the remainder when 309106 is divided by 309023?
83
What is the remainder when 7308478 is divided by 4965?
4963
Calculate the remainder when 393099 is divided by 95.
84
What is the remainder when 21036 is divided by 4799?
1840
What is the remainder when 424124092 is divided by 138?
136
What is the remainder when 58988179 is divided by 91?
68
What is the remainder when 43080120 is divided by 839?
826
What is the remainder when 71449 is divided by 22707?
3328
What is the remainder when 25826643 is divided by 1614164?
19
Calculate the remainder when 3559046 is divided by 47453.
71
What is the remainder when 248428 is divided by 81653?
3469
Calculate the remainder when 298351 is divided by 4812.
7
What is the remainder when 5892765 is divided by 1964244?
33
Calculate the remainder when 13510667 is divided by 180142.
17
What is the remainder when 11036796 is divided by 274?
76
Calculate the remainder when 13964699 is divided by 592.
11
Calculate the remainder whe |
Georgi Gervanov Ananiev (; 12 April 1950 - 26 January 2021) was a Bulgarian politician. He was Minister of Defence between 1997 and 1999. Ananiev was born in Pernik Province, Bulgaria.
Ananiev died on 26 January 2021 of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bulgaria, aged 70. |
Q:
ASP.NET - ConstraintException was unhandled by user code
Been dabbling with a bit of ASP.NET. I current have the following error:
Failed to enable constraints. One or more rows contain values violating non-null, unique, or foreign-key constraints
It breaks on the following line:
DataTable propertyTable = pta.searchByType(sType);
Code:
String sType = Request.QueryString["type"];
DataSetTableAdapters.propertiesTableAdapter pta = new DataSetTableAdapters.propertiesTableAdapter();
DataTable propertyTable = pta.searchByType(sType);
if (propertyTable.Rows.Count > 0)
{
lblStatus.Text = "Your Results";
gvProperty.DataSource = propertyTable;
gvProperty.DataBind();
}
The query that pta.searchByType(sType); is calling is:
SELECT property_id, name, description, price, image, town
FROM properties
WHERE (date_approved IS NOT NULL) AND (property_type = @property_type)
The primary key for the properties table is property_id, the table has one FK that links to a users table but that's it.
Any help pointing me in the right direction is great. If you need any more details just drop them in the comments below.
Thanks :)
A:
Are you selecting ALL the columns?
See:
http://forums.asp.net/t/1400495.aspx/1
You can always cheat and set enable constraints to false on the table adapter, too.
|
Marktschorgast is a municipality in Kulmbach in Bavaria in Germany.
City arrangement
Marktschorgast is arranged in the following boroughs: |
Q:
Native Javascript doesn't append element on the DOM
I have a website built in Expression Engine. In the back-end there is a code snippet that takes care of a JavaScript request and build a page based on the request.
I have a HTML Page without head tag.
This page is without styling
Sample:
<div class="top-arrow"><p><!--- Rest of code --></p>
</div>
<!-- Html page continues-->
I have added the following code in my attempt and it doesnt seem to work.
var span = document.createElement("span"); //Test element
span.textContent = "A <span> element.";
var node = document.getElementsByClassName("top-arrow");
node.insertBefore(span);
Below is what I get:
TypeError: node.insertBefore is not a function
node.insertBefore(span);
How best can I append text before the div with plain JavaScript.
A:
getElementsByClassName will return array-like node-list which does not have method insertBefore
The Node.insertBefore(newNode, referenceNode) method inserts the specified node before the reference node as a child of the current node(If referenceNode is null, the newNode is inserted at the end of the list of child nodes)
Note: referenceNode is not an optional argument, if there is no ant ref node, pass null
Try this:
var span = document.createElement("span");
span.textContent = "A <span> element.";
var node = document.getElementsByClassName("top-arrow")[0];
//_____________________________________________________^^(Get the first element from collection)
node.insertBefore(span, null);
<div class="top-arrow">
<p>
</p>
</div>
|
The Daughters of Bilitis , also called the DOB or the Daughters, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States.
The organization, formed in San Francisco in 1955 by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, was created to be another hangout area for lesbians other than lesbian bars. This was to avoid raids and police harassment. It later gave support to women who were afraid to come out.
The DOB educated them about their rights, and about gay history.
The Daughters of Bilitis lasted for 14 years, becoming an educational resource for lesbians, gay men, researchers and mental health professionals. |
I agree with Winston. Although I am a history buff and I read a lot of books about wars, seen hundreds of war movies and played dozens of war games, I don't see the point of becoming a puppet for the government.
I don't see the point in spending billions of dollars in the war machine instead of medical technology or education. War has always served the elites not the people.
Wars are much less deadly today than they typically were further back in history, at least for high tech "kill them from a distance" fighting forces. So very few soldiers in the U.S. die from warfare.
People join as an out or because they are patriotic. I don't doubt most of their intentions, but being in the armed forces is delusional if one is doing it to "fight for freedom." Delusional or ignorant. Anyone with half a brain nowadays sees that wars are just a corporate profit-making endeavor.
People in the ZOG military have agreed to travel to places they had previously never even heard of to murder, main, rape and torture complete strangers who have done nothing to them at the whim of the worst people on Earth. They do this in exchange for a planned lifetime of welfare scrounging. The ZOG military are scum, pure and simple. The only difference between them and, say, mafia hit-men (other than the much greater enormity and much more cowardly nature of their crimes) is that a mafia hit-man might be doing the right thing on a given job, whereas if the orders come from the Jews & large corporations, as the US military's orders do, you can bet the effect will be pure evil. The ZOG's goons will likely be among those brought to justice come the revolution.
Last edited by Cornfed on February 5th, 2013, 2:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
ladislav wrote:The US military protects American interests, that is why it is seen as serving one's country.
Given that they are taking orders from an occupational regime that is intent on the actual genocide of mainstream American culture and the physical extinction of the populations who founded it, how can they possibly be construed as serving American interests?
My answer: It just proves how stupid so many people are. People are SO f***ing STUPID that they STILL BELIEVE that they are "fighting for freedom" and all that bullshit.
It is also noteworthy that a majority of the military joins from rural areas, in other words, idiotic uneducated redneck types. No intelligent man joins the military.
If they are stupid enough to join the military, I hope they get killed. The world would be a better place without such stupid f***s in it.
Yes this is why the Founding Fathers and other intellectuals knew that a democracy could not work. Most people are not wise or rational, but are foolish and easily misled. Thus, a mob rule system is ultimately doomed to fail and would be unstable. That's why they established a Republic, not a Democracy. The myth of a Democracy came about when the elites decided to give people an "illusion of control" to appease them.
But it doesn't matter who you vote for. It doesn't change policy or agenda, because the secret cabal that run things will buy them off or coerce them through threats and blackmail, to get them to comply with their agenda.
Cornfed wrote:
ladislav wrote:The US military protects American interests, that is why it is seen as serving one's country.
Given that they are taking orders from an occupational regime that is intent on the actual genocide of mainstream American culture and the physical extinction of the populations who founded it, how can they possibly be construed as serving American interests?
You are talking to someone who doesn't believe that conspiracies exist. For some reason, some people have a mental block against them and believe that the official version of things are the only truth.
"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World
6. In the military, you lose every freedom you have ever known. This starts right from boot camp, where you are treated like property, not like a human being, while you are turned into a killing machine. It's very degrading. (see the boot camp section at the beginning of the movie "Full Metal Jacket")
Winston, this is an easy one to start with. In boot camp or Officer Candidate School you are harassed and run through rigorous physical training. So what? Most young Americans would benefit from gaining mental and physical toughness. It is tough but it is not degrading.
Then after boot camp (enlisted) or OCS (Officer) you are trained in your specialty. An officer, even in the Marine Corps leads a comfortable and rather normal life, except during deployments. I lived off base, married, had kids, bought houses, typical life.
When I was an officer in the US Marine Corps I flew helicopters and led men. After 6 years of active duty I resigned my commission. It was a great experience but I did not care to spend another 14 to 24 years doing it. The self-discipline, leadership experience, knowledge, and confidence from those years is still with me today. Everything which I gained in the military has been useful in my entrepreneurial life and my personal life. It takes much of the fear and worry away from everyday life. Overcoming some hardship gives most people an "I can handle it" attitude.
I find it laughable that people with no military experience whatsoever are offering opinions based upon experience with movies and games.
My answer: It just proves how stupid so many people are. People are SO f***ing STUPID that they STILL BELIEVE that they are "fighting for freedom" and all that bullshit.
It is also noteworthy that a majority of the military joins from rural areas, in other words, idiotic uneducated redneck types. No intelligent man joins the military.
If they are stupid enough to join the military, I hope they get killed. The world would be a better place without such stupid f***s in it.
Yes this is why the Founding Fathers and other intellectuals knew that a democracy could not work. Most people are not wise or rational, but are foolish and easily misled. Thus, a mob rule system is ultimately doomed to fail and would be unstable. That's why they established a Republic, not a Democracy. The myth of a Democracy came about when the elites decided to give people an "illusion of control" to appease them.
But it doesn't matter who you vote for. It doesn't change policy or agenda, because the secret cabal that run things will buy them off or coerce them through threats and blackmail, to get them to comply with their agenda.
Cornfed wrote:
ladislav wrote:The US military protects American interests, that is why it is seen as serving one's country.
Given that they are taking orders from an occupational regime that is intent on the actual genocide of mainstream American culture and the physical extinction of the populations who founded it, how can they possibly be construed as serving American interests?
You are talking to someone who doesn't believe that conspiracies exist. For some reason, some people have a mental block against them and believe that the official version of things are the only truth.
Good post Winston. It is true that the Illuminati controls the govt, the corporations, the military, etc. Anyone who still believes in this two party sytem bullshit is hopeless. Republican or Democrat, it's all the exact same thing and both parties are bought off and owned by the same corporations. I remember that in 2008, Monsanto was one of the biggest campaign donators to BOTH candidates.
It's mostly the older generation that still believes in all this patriotic American bullshit, the "American dream". A lot of younger people never had any "American dream" to begin with, so they are not blinded by such false dreams and hopes. That's one good thing about growing up in the nihilist generation- we never had any hope to begin with, so it's not like we have anything to lose either.
"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose" was spoken by some 60s hippie rock star, I think.
6. In the military, you lose every freedom you have ever known. This starts right from boot camp, where you are treated like property, not like a human being, while you are turned into a killing machine. It's very degrading. (see the boot camp section at the beginning of the movie "Full Metal Jacket")
Winston, this is an easy one to start with. In boot camp or Officer Candidate School you are harassed and run through rigorous physical training. So what? Most young Americans would benefit from gaining mental and physical toughness. It is tough but it is not degrading.
Then after boot camp (enlisted) or OCS (Officer) you are trained in your specialty. An officer, even in the Marine Corps leads a comfortable and rather normal life, except during deployments. I lived off base, married, had kids, bought houses, typical life.
When I was an officer in the US Marine Corps I flew helicopters and led men. After 6 years of active duty I resigned my commission. It was a great experience but I did not care to spend another 14 to 24 years doing it. The self-discipline, leadership experience, knowledge, and confidence from those years is still with me today. Everything which I gained in the military has been useful in my entrepreneurial life and my personal life. It takes much of the fear and worry away from everyday life. Overcoming some hardship gives most people an "I can handle it" attitude.
I find it laughable that people with no military experience whatsoever are offering opinions based upon experience with movies and games.
Yea and how many f***ing women and children did you murder on your deployments, you f***ing baby killer?
Some of us have DIGNITY, honor, and integrity. That is, we'd rather be UNEMPLOYED AND EVEN HOMELESS than have a job (the military) that forces us to kill innocent people.
Soldiers are the scum of the earth. Even worse than feminists. At least feminists don't go around murdering people in mass numbers.
6. In the military, you lose every freedom you have ever known. This starts right from boot camp, where you are treated like property, not like a human being, while you are turned into a killing machine. It's very degrading. (see the boot camp section at the beginning of the movie "Full Metal Jacket")
Winston, this is an easy one to start with. In boot camp or Officer Candidate School you are harassed and run through rigorous physical training. So what? Most young Americans would benefit from gaining mental and physical toughness. It is tough but it is not degrading.
Then after boot camp (enlisted) or OCS (Officer) you are trained in your specialty. An officer, even in the Marine Corps leads a comfortable and rather normal life, except during deployments. I lived off base, married, had kids, bought houses, typical life.
When I was an officer in the US Marine Corps I flew helicopters and led men. After 6 years of active duty I resigned my commission. It was a great experience but I did not care to spend another 14 to 24 years doing it. The self-discipline, leadership experience, knowledge, and confidence from those years is still with me today. Everything which I gained in the military has been useful in my entrepreneurial life and my personal life. It takes much of the fear and worry away from everyday life. Overcoming some hardship gives most people an "I can handle it" attitude.
I find it laughable that people with no military experience whatsoever are offering opinions based upon experience with movies and games.
Yea and how many f***ing women and children did you murder on your deployments, you f***ing baby killer?
Some of us have DIGNITY, honor, and integrity. That is, we'd rather be UNEMPLOYED AND EVEN HOMELESS than have a job (the military) that forces us to kill innocent people.
Soldiers are the scum of the earth. Even worse than feminists. At least feminists don't go around murdering people in mass numbers.
lol. Are you off your medication? I have experience in the military. You don't.
You probably have a great deal of experience in unemployment and homelessness. You don't see me trying to tell you what that is like.
6. In the military, you lose every freedom you have ever known. This starts right from boot camp, where you are treated like property, not like a human being, while you are turned into a killing machine. It's very degrading. (see the boot camp section at the beginning of the movie "Full Metal Jacket")
Winston, this is an easy one to start with. In boot camp or Officer Candidate School you are harassed and run through rigorous physical training. So what? Most young Americans would benefit from gaining mental and physical toughness. It is tough but it is not degrading.
Then after boot camp (enlisted) or OCS (Officer) you are trained in your specialty. An officer, even in the Marine Corps leads a comfortable and rather normal life, except during deployments. I lived off base, married, had kids, bought houses, typical life.
When I was an officer in the US Marine Corps I flew helicopters and led men. After 6 years of active duty I resigned my commission. It was a great experience but I did not care to spend another 14 to 24 years doing it. The self-discipline, leadership experience, knowledge, and confidence from those years is still with me today. Everything which I gained in the military has been useful in my entrepreneurial life and my personal life. It takes much of the fear and worry away from everyday life. Overcoming some hardship gives most people an "I can handle it" attitude.
I find it laughable that people with no military experience whatsoever are offering opinions based upon experience with movies and games.
Yea and how many f***ing women and children did you murder on your deployments, you f***ing baby killer?
Some of us have DIGNITY, honor, and integrity. That is, we'd rather be UNEMPLOYED AND EVEN HOMELESS than have a job (the military) that forces us to kill innocent people.
Soldiers are the scum of the earth. Even worse than feminists. At least feminists don't go around murdering people in mass numbers.
lol. Are you off your medication? I have experience in the military. You don't.
You probably have a great deal of experience in unemployment and homelessness. You don't see me trying to tell you what that is like.
Yeah, a lot of guys posting on here don't have any military experience, so they base they're opinions on personal opinions rather than fact; however, they're right in saying they oppose U.S. foreign policy and the involvement of the military-industrial complex in buying and corrupting our politicians. Other than that, the military wasn't really that bad for me--and I'm Asian American. I did despise some of my NCOs and some of the officers I dealt with were complete d**ks, but for the most part, I met some pretty good people in the military.
Andrewww wrote:I agree with Winston. Although I am a history buff and I read a lot of books about wars, seen hundreds of war movies and played dozens of war games, I don't see the point of becoming a puppet for the government.
I don't see the point in spending billions of dollars in the war machine instead of medical technology or education. War has always served the elites not the people.
I agree. Wars have never solved anything. All through the middle ages, wars were staged to kill off young men so they wouldn't overthrow the Kings. Smedley-Butler said war is a "scam" to enrich the bankers, etc. so I'd listen to this soldier before Obammmmaaa
winston, i used to think the same way until i found out how many real benefits the military provides. When i was younger it was a lot of young guys who didn't know what to do i life that joined, but:
1. The biggest benefit: They get have pay after 20 years of service and i think like 66% or something after 30 years of service. In other words they can join at 18 and retire at 38. Imagine getting 50K a year for doing nothing.
2. Free health and get everything for a discount at the PX.
3. Free travel. Get to go around the world while working.
4. Money for college for the people who can't afford it.
5. Preference in hiring for government jobs.
6. With the Iraq/Afghan boom, lots of defense types made 200K plus. That's good money by any standard.
7. There are people who are more skilled in the military, like engineers, air force etc. Also lots of technologies that come from the defense industry.
In other words, a lot more benefits than you would think. The U.S. government makes it that way. It's really red America's big welfare program. |
Paolo Borsellino (19 January 1940 - 19 July 1992) was an Italian judge from Sicily, who became known as a Mafia hunter. Together wirth Emanuele Basile, he was able to get convictions for Mafiosi, starting about 1980. Basile was assassinated in 1980, because of his work. On 19 July 1992, a car bomb killed Borsellino, and 5 other people. Palermo airport was renamed to carry his name, in his honor.
Borsellino's life parallels that of his close friend Giovanni Falcone. They both spent their early years in the same neighbourhood in Palermo. Though many of their childhood friends grew up in the Mafia background, both men fought on the other side of the war against crime in Sicily as prosecuting magistrates. They were both killed in 1992, a few months apart. In recognition of their tireless effort and sacrifice during the anti-mafia trials, they were both awarded the Italian "Medaglia d'oro al valore civile" (Gold medal for civil valour). They were also named as heroes of the last 60 years in the 13 November 2006 issue of Time Magazine. |
The natural beauty of the forest and the wetlands is enhanced by two creeks that wander throughout, as well as numerous ponds and Ohio Valley sand-filled bunkers that await any errant strokes.
Four sets of tee blocks on every hole allow the novice golfer to appreciate the generous landing areas, while challenging the more accomplished player to execute a variety of shots using every club in the bag. |
A camera lens is the part of a camera that directs light to the film or, in a digital camera, to a computer chip that can sense the light. Many cheap lenses are plastic but better ones are made from glass. The lens makes an image by focusing the light.
The majority of cameras only have one lens that users cannot change or take out. This is called a fixed lens design. More expensive cameras usually have lenses that come off, so anyone can take out one lens and put in another. A lens may be simple, or may actually be made of several lenses.
Photographers can use different lenses (objectives) to make different kinds of pictures. For example, a telephoto lens can take a picture of something far away. A wide-angle lens is the opposite. A zoom lens is more versatile; it can do both. There are many kinds of lenses.
The study of lenses and how they work is called optics.
Lenses for large sheet film cameras are especially difficult to design. Cameras and their lenses have been made since the 19th century. Some from before World War II, are still usable today. Computers now let engineers make better lenses, though, because they can calculate the way that light goes through the lens and find the best design for each task. Together with lenses, filters, macro lenses, teleconverters, wide-angle and tele attachments are used.
Camera lenses |
Congratulations! Here are the search results for all local florists near me. Scroll to find a florist or easily refine your search results of local florists by category, geography or florist ratings. Click the "Map View" tab so display the results on a map to find the closest florist to me. Enhance your floral experience and look for the “Verified” florist banner on your local flower shop listing.
Ari Garden Flower is a local florist offering same day flower delivery in Bronx, NY. Order flowers online or call to send flowers to Bronx. Leave a rating or review and remember to mention floristopia!
She Loves Me Not Flower Btq is a local florist offering same day flower delivery in Bronx, NY. Order flowers online or call to send flowers to Bronx. Leave a rating or review and remember to mention floristopia!
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Rosa's Florist Shop is a local florist offering same day flower delivery in Bronx, NY. Order flowers online or call to send flowers to Bronx. Leave a rating or review and remember to mention floristopia! |
In the 2015 Formula One season, Lewis Hamilton won the championship with Mercedes.
Formula One seasons
2015 in sports |
New to ROMs
New to ROMs
What's up everyone I'm ready to root my VZW GNex...but I want a Tom that's pretty stable and one thing I was really looking for was one where it has all the software buttons at the bottom. Home back menu search and multitask..I'm less worried about the multitask... is this a feature that can be edited in CM10.1? Because that's one I was looking into. Aside from that any recommendations for a newbie? I'm tired of waiting for VZW for my updates |
The Northern line is a deep-level tube line on the London Underground, coloured black on the Tube map. It carries more passengers than any other Underground line; 206,734,000 a year.
For most of its length it is a deep-level tube line. The portion between and opened in 1890 and is the oldest section of deep-level tube line on the Underground network. There were about 252 million passenger journeys recorded in 2011/12 on the Northern line, making it the second-busiest on the Underground. (It was the busiest from 2003 to 2010.) It is unique in having two different routes through central London. Despite its name, it does not serve the northern-most stations on the network, though it does serve the southern-most station, Morden, as well as 16 of the system's 29 stations south of the River Thames. There are 50 stations in total on the line, of which 36 have platforms below ground.
The line has a complicated history, and the current complex arrangement of two main northern branches, two central branches and the southern route reflects its genesis as three separate railways, combined in the 1920s and 1930s. An extension in the 1920s used a route originally planned by a fourth company. Abandoned plans from the 1920s to extend the line further southwards, and then northwards in the 1930s, would have incorporated parts of the routes of two further companies. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the tracks of a seventh company were also managed as a branch of the Northern line. An extension from Kennington to Battersea is currently under construction, which may either give the Northern line a second southern branch or may see it split into separate distinct lines with their own identities. It is coloured black on the current Tube map.
History
Early History
The City and South London Railway (C&SLR) was the first deep-level underground "tube" railway in the world, and the first major railway to use electric traction. The railway was originally intended for cable-hauled trains, but owing to the bankruptcy of the cable contractor during construction, a system of electric traction using electric locomotives--an experimental technology at the time--was chosen instead. Given the small dimension of the tunnels as well as the difficulty of providing sufficient ventilation, steam power, as used on London's other underground railways, was not feasible for a deep tube railway. Like Greathead's earlier Tower Subway, the CL&SS was intended to be operated by cable haulage with a static engine pulling the cable through the tunnels at a steady speed. Section 5 of the 1884 Act specified that:
The Patent Cable Tramway Corporation owned the rights to the Hallidie cable-car system first invented and used in San Francisco in 1873; trains were attached to the cable with clamps, which would be opened and closed at stations, allowing the carriages to disconnect and reconnect without needing to stop the cable or to interfere with other trains sharing the cable. There were to be two independent endless cables, one between City station and Elephant and Castle moving at 10 mph, and the other between Elephant and Castle and Stockwell, where the gradient was less, at 12 mph. However, the additional length of tunnel permitted by the supplementary acts challenged the practicality of the cable system.
It is reported that this problem with the CL&SS contributed to the bankruptcy of the cable company in 1888. However, electric motor traction had been considered all along, and much engineering progress had been made since the tunnel's construction had begun in 1886. So, CL&SS chairman Charles Grey Mott decided to switch to electric traction. Other cable-operated systems using the Hallidie patents continued to be designed, such as the Glasgow Subway which opened in 1896.
The solution adopted was electrical power, provided via a third rail beneath the train, but offset to the west of centre for clearance reasons. Although the use of electricity to power trains had been experimented with during the previous decade, and small-scale operations had been implemented, the C&SLR was the first major railway in the world to adopt it as a means of motive power. The system operated using electric locomotives built by Mather & Platt collecting a voltage of 500 volts (actually +500 volts in the northbound tunnel and -500 volts in the southbound) from the third rail and pulling several carriages. A depot and generating station were constructed at Stockwell. Owing to the limited capacity of the generators, the stations were originally illuminated by gas. The depot was on the surface, and trains requiring maintenance were initially hauled up via a ramp although, following a runaway accident, a lift was soon installed. In practice, most rolling stock and locomotives went to the surface only for major maintenance.
To avoid the need to purchase agreements for running under surface buildings, the tunnels were bored below roadways, where construction could be carried out without charge. At the northern end of the railway, the need to pass deep beneath the bed of the River Thames and the medieval street pattern of the City of London constrained the arrangement of the tunnels on the approach to King William Street station. Because of the proximity of the station to the river, steeply inclined tunnels were required to the west of the station. Because of the narrow street under which they ran, they were bored one above the other rather than side by side as elsewhere. The outbound tunnel was the lower and steeper of the two. The tunnels converged immediately before the station, which was in one large tunnel and comprised a single track with a platform on each side. The other terminus at Stockwell was also constructed in a single tunnel but with tracks on each side of a central platform.
When opened in 1890, the line had six stations and ran for in a pair of tunnels between the City of London and Stockwell, passing under the River Thames:
Stockwell
The Oval (now Oval)
Kennington
Elephant & Castle
Borough
King William Street
The original service was operated by trains composed of an engine and three carriages. Thirty-two passengers could be accommodated in each carriage, which had longitudinal bench seating and sliding doors at the ends, leading onto a platform for boarding and alighting. It was reasoned that there was nothing to look at in the tunnels, so the only windows were in a narrow band high up in the carriage sides. Gate-men rode on the carriage platforms to operate the lattice gates and announce the station names to the passengers. Because of their claustrophobic interiors, the carriages soon became known as padded cells. These trains were however, preserved in London Transport Museum as the first static exhibit to the metro train.
The diameter of the tunnels restricted the size of the trains, and the small carriages with their high-backed seating were nicknamed padded cells. The railway was extended several times north and south, eventually serving 22 stations over a distance of from Camden Town in north London to Morden in Surrey.
Although the C&SLR was well used, low ticket prices and the construction cost of the extensions placed a strain on the company's finances. In 1913, the C&SLR became part of the Underground Group of railways and, in the 1920s, it underwent major reconstruction works before its merger with another of the Group's railways, the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway, forming a single London Underground line called the Morden-Edgware line. In 1933, the C&SLR and the rest of the Underground Group was taken into public ownership. Today, its tunnels and stations form the Bank Branch of the Northern line from Camden Town to Kennington and the southern leg of the line from Kennington to Morden.
The CCE&HR (commonly known as the "Hampstead Tube") was opened in 1907 and ran from Charing Cross (known for many years as Strand) via Euston and Camden Town (where there was a junction) to Golders Green and Highgate (now known as Archway). It was extended south by one stop to Embankment in 1914 to form an interchange with the Bakerloo and District lines. In 1913 the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL), owner of the CCE&HR, took over the C&SLR, although they remained separate companies.
During the early 1920s, a series of works was carried out to connect the C&SLR and CCE&HR tunnels to enable an integrated service to be operated. The first of these new tunnels, between the C&SLR's Euston station and the CCE&HR's station at Camden Town, had originally been planned in 1912 but had been delayed by World War I. The second connection linked the CCE&HR's Embankment and C&SLR's Kennington stations and provided a new intermediate station at Waterloo to connect to the main line station there and the Bakerloo line. The smaller-diameter tunnels of the C&SLR were expanded to match the standard diameter of the CCE&HR and the other deep tube lines.
Extensions
In conjunction with the works to integrate the two lines, two major extensions were undertaken: northwards to Edgware in Middlesex (now in the London Borough of Barnet) and southwards to Morden in Surrey (then in the Merton and Morden Urban District, but now in the London Borough of Merton).
The Edgware extension used plans dating back to 1901 for the Edgware and Hampstead Railway (E&HR) which the UERL had taken over in 1912. It extended the CCE&HR line from its terminus at Golders Green to Edgware in two stages: to Hendon Central in 1923 and to Edgware in 1924. The line crossed open countryside and ran on the surface, apart from a short tunnel north of Hendon Central. Five new stations were built to pavilion-style designs by Stanley Heaps, head of the Underground's Architects Office, stimulating the rapid northward expansion of suburban developments in the following years.
The engineering of the Morden extension of the C&SLR from Clapham Common to Morden was more demanding, running in tunnels to a point just north of Morden station, which was constructed in a cutting. The line then runs under the wide station forecourt and public road outside the station, to the depot. The extension was initially planned to continue to Sutton over part of the route for the unbuilt Wimbledon and Sutton Railway, in which the UERL held a stake, but agreements were made with the Southern Railway to end the extension at Morden. The Southern Railway later built the surface line from Wimbledon to Sutton, via South Merton and St. Helier. The tube extension opened in 1926, with seven new stations, all designed by Charles Holden in a modern style. Originally, Stanley Heaps was to design the stations, but after seeing these designs Frank Pick, Assistant Joint Manager of the UERL, decided Holden should take over the project. With the exception of Morden and Clapham South, where more land was available, the new stations were built on confined corner sites at main road junctions in areas that had been already developed. Holden made good use of this limited space and designed impressive buildings. The street-level structures are of white Portland stone with tall double-height ticket halls, with the famous London Underground roundel made up in coloured glass panels in large glazed screens. The stone columns framing the glass screens are surmounted by a capital formed as a three-dimensional version of the roundel. The large expanses of glass above the entrances ensure that the ticket halls are bright and, lit from within at night, welcoming. The first and last new stations on the extension, Clapham South and Morden, include a parade of shops and were designed with structures capable of being built above (like many of the earlier central London stations). Clapham South was extended upwards soon after its construction with a block of apartments; Morden was extended upwards in the 1960s with a block of offices. All the stations on the extension, except Morden itself, are Grade II listed buildings.
The resulting line became known as the Morden-Edgware line, although a number of alternative names were also mooted in the fashion of the contraction of Baker Street & Waterloo Railway to "Bakerloo", such as "Edgmor", "Mordenware", "Medgway" and "Edgmorden". With Egyptology very much in fashion after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, there was also a proposal to call the line the Tootancamden Line as it passed through both Tooting and Camden. It was eventually named the Northern line from 28 August 1937, reflecting the planned addition of the Northern Heights lines.
After the UERL and the Metropolitan Railway (MR) were brought under public control in the form of the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) in 1933, the MR's subsidiary, the Great Northern & City Railway, which ran from Moorgate to Finsbury Park, became part of the Underground as the Northern City Line. In preparation for the Northern Heights Plan, it was operated as part of the Northern line, although it was never connected to it.
The Northern Heights
In June 1935, the LPTB announced the New Works Programme, an ambitious plan to expand the Underground network which included the integration of a complex of existing London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) lines north of Highgate through the Northern Heights. These lines, built in the 1860s and 1870s by the Edgware, Highgate and London Railway (EH&LR) and its successors, ran from Finsbury Park to Edgware via Highgate, with branches to Alexandra Palace and High Barnet. The line taken over would be extended beyond Edgware to Brockley Hill, Elstree South and Bushey Heath with a new depot at Aldenham. The extension's route was that planned for the unbuilt Watford and Edgware Railway (W&ER), using rights obtained from the earlier purchase of the W&ER (which had long intended an extension of the EH&LR Edgware route towards Watford). This also provided the potential for further extension in the future; Bushey's town planners reserved space in Bushey village for a future station and Bushey Heath station's design was revised several times to ensure this option would remain available in the future.
The project involved electrification of the surface lines (operated by steam trains at the time), the doubling of the original single-line section between Finchley Central and the proposed junction with the Edgware branch of the Northern line, and the construction of three new linking sections of track: a connection between Northern City Line and Finsbury Park station on the surface; an extension from Archway to the LNER line near East Finchley via new deep-level platforms below Highgate station; and a short diversion from just before the LNER's Edgware station to the Underground's station of the same name.
The peak-hour service pattern was to be 21 trains an hour each way on the High Barnet branch north of Camden Town, 14 of them via the Charing Cross branch and seven via the Bank branch. 14 would have continued on beyond Finchley Central, seven each on the High Barnet and Edgware branches. An additional seven trains an hour would have served the High Barnet branch, but continued via Highgate High-Level and Finsbury Park to Moorgate, a slightly shorter route to the City. It does not seem to have been intended to run through trains to the ex-Northern City branch from Edgware via Finchley Central. Seven trains an hour would have served the Alexandra Palace branch, to/from Moorgate via Highgate High-Level. In addition to the 14 through trains described, the ex-Northern City branch would have had 14 four-car shuttle trains an hour.
Work began in the late 1930s, and was in progress on all fronts by the outbreak of World War II. The tunnelling northwards from the original Highgate station (now Archway) had been completed, and the service to the rebuilt surface station at East Finchley started on 3 July 1939, but without the opening of the intermediate (new) Highgate Station, at the site of the LNER's station of the same name. Further progress was disrupted by the start of the war, though enough had been made to complete the electrification of the High Barnet branch onwards from East Finchley over which tube services started on 14 April 1940; the new (deep-level) Highgate station opened on 19 January 1941. The single track LNER line to Edgware was electrified as far as Mill Hill East, including the Dollis Brook Viaduct, opening as a tube service on 18 May 1941 to serve the barracks there, thus forming the Northern line as it is today. The new depot at Aldenham had already been built and was used to build Halifax bombers. Work on the other elements of the plan was suspended late in 1939.
Preparatory work including viaducts and a tunnel had been started but not completed on the Bushey extension pre-war. After the war, the area beyond Edgware was made part of the Metropolitan Green Belt, largely preventing the anticipated residential development in the area, and the potential demand for services from Bushey Heath thus vanished. Available funds were directed towards completing the eastern extension of the Central line instead, and the Northern Heights plan was dropped on 9 February 1954. Aldenham depot was converted into an overhaul facility for buses.
The implemented service from High Barnet branch gave good access both to the West End and the City. This appears to have undermined traffic on the Alexandra Palace branch, still run with steam haulage to Kings Cross via Finsbury Park, as Highgate (low-level) was but a short bus ride away and car traffic was much lighter than it would become later. Consequently, the line from Finsbury Park to Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace via the surface platforms at Highgate was closed altogether to passenger traffic in 1954. This contrasts with the decision to electrify the Epping-Ongar branch of the Central line, another remnant of the New Works programme, run as a tube-train shuttle from 1957. A local pressure group, the Muswell Hill Metro Group, campaigns to reopen this route as a light-rail service. So far there is no sign of movement on this issue: the route, now the Parkland Walk, is highly valued by walkers and cyclists, and suggestions in the 1990s that it could, in part, become a road were met with fierce opposition. Another pressure group has proposed using the track bed further north, as part of the North and West London Light Railway. The connection between Drayton Park and the surface platforms at Finsbury Park was opened in 1976, when the Northern City Line became part of British Rail.
Recent developments
In 1975, the Northern City Line, known by that time as the Highbury branch, was transferred from London Underground to British Rail; it is now served by Great Northern. In the past, before the introduction of the 1995 stock, the Northern line was sometimes nicknamed the "Misery Line" in the press because of its perceived unreliability.
In 2003, a train derailed at Camden Town. Although no one was hurt, points, signals and carriages were damaged, and the junctions there were not used while repairs were under way: trains coming from Edgware worked the Bank branch only, and trains from High Barnet and Mill Hill East worked the Charing Cross branch only. This situation was resolved when the junctions reopened, after much repair work and safety analysis and testing by contractor, on 7 March 2004.
On 7 July 2005 a defective train on the Northern line (causing its subsequent suspension) saved a Northern line train from being blown up as part of a terrorist attack on the London Underground and bus systems. Three trains on the Circle and Piccadilly lines were blown up. The Northern line bomber-to-be instead boarded a bus, which he later blew up.
On 13 October 2005 the Northern line service was suspended due to maintenance problems with the emergency braking system on the entire train fleet. A series of rail replacement buses was used to connect outlying stations with other Underground lines. Full service was restored on 18 October.
From June 2006, the service between East Finchley and Camden Town was suspended for two non-consecutive weekends every month, with service on the Edgware branch suspended for the other two weeks. This was part of Tube Lines's redevelopment of some Edgware and High Barnet Branch stations, including replacement of track, signals, as well as station maintenance. This included refurbishment of all High Barnet branch stations from West Finchley to Camden Town. In October 2006, off-peak service between Mill Hill East and Finchley Central was cut back to a shuttle, except for a few weekend through trains.
On 13 August 2010, a defective rail maintenance train caused disruption on the Charing Cross branch, after it travelled four miles in 13 minutes without a driver. The train was being towed to the depot after becoming faulty. At Archway station, the defective train became detached and ran driverless until coming to a stop at an incline near Warren Street station. This caused morning rush-hour services to be suspended on this branch. All passenger trains were diverted via the Bank branch, with several not stopping at stations until they were safely on the Bank branch.
The Northern line was originally scheduled to switch to automatic train operation in 2012, using the same SelTrac S40 system as used since 2009 on the Jubilee line and for a number of years on the Docklands Light Railway. Originally the work was to follow on from the Jubilee line so as to benefit from the experience of installing it there, but that project was not completed until spring 2011. Work on the Northern line was contracted to be completed before the 2012 Olympics. It is now being undertaken in-house, and TfL predicted the upgrade would be complete by the end of 2014. The first section of the line (West Finchley to High Barnet) was transferred to the new signalling system on 26 February 2013 and the line became fully automated on 1 June 2014 with the Chalk Farm to Edgware via Golders Green section being the last part of the line to switch to ATO. |
Baldeep Singh
Baldeep Singh (born 17 August 1982) is an Indian footballer who plays for Air India as a Defender in I-League. He is often referred to as "Baldeep Singh Senior" to avoid confusion with another former JCT player Baldeep Singh "Junior".
Career
Air India
Singh made his debut for Air India F.C. on 20 September 2012 during a Federation Cup match against Mohammedan at the Kanchenjunga Stadium in Siliguri, West Bengal in which he started the match; Air India lost the match 0–1.
Career statistics
Club
Statistics accurate as of 12 May 2013
References
Category:Indian footballers
Category:1987 births
Category:Living people
Category:Salgaocar F.C. players
Category:United Sikkim F.C. players
Category:Air India F.C. players
Category:Footballers from Punjab, India
Category:Association football defenders |
The Northeast Region of Brazil () is one of the five geographical regions of Brazil defined by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 1969. It is the third largest region, corresponding to 18% of the national territory, and the second in population.
Geography
The Northeast Region has an area of . It is the region of the country with the longest coastline.
The climate in the region is very hot all the year long; tropical near the coast and semi-arid in the interior; semi-equatorial in the far west of the region. The vegetation mainly desert-like, with tropical forests along the coast and in the west and savanna-like vegetation, known as the Cerrado. in the southwest.
The Northeast Region is between 01deg 02' 30" of latitude north and 18deg 20' 07" of latitude south and between 34deg 47' 30" and 48deg 45' 24" of longitude west. It borders to the north and east with the Atlantic Ocean; to the south with the Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo states; and to west with the Para, Tocantins and Goias states.
The main rivers in the region are the Sao Francisco and the Parnaiba rivers; they have many tributaries.
Mountains
The highest point in the Northeast Region is Pico do Barbado () at . Pico do Barbado is the highest summit of the larger Serra do Barbado, in the Chapada Diamantina, in Bahia.
The highest point of the different states of the North Region are:
States
This region is formed of nine states: Alagoas, Bahia, Ceara, Maranhao, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Piaui, Rio Grande do Norte and Sergipe.
Population
, the Northeast region had a population of 56,915,936, for a population density of inhabitants/km2.
The most important municipalities of the North Region are: |
How about this for getting a jump on scouting for next year's MLS draft: Colorado Rapids top assistant coach Wilmer Cabrera will be attending three college matches this weekend during the Rapids bye week.
Head coach Oscar Pareja told ColoradoRapids.com on Thursday that Cabrera will attend Friday's match between the #8 ranked University of Maryland and the University of Pittsburgh at Ludwig Field in College Park, Md (PREVIEW / VIDEO). |
Margaret O'Brien (born January 15, 1937) is an American movie, stage and television actress who began acting as a child. She became famous through the movie Journey for Margaret (1942). She also played a French girl in the movie version of Jane Eyre in 1944. O'Brien was born in San Diego, California. |
Q:
SSH Keychain for Xfce
I have recently switched from Gnome to Xfce on Ubuntu 9.04.
In Gnome, the first time I entered the passphrase, it prompted me to save the passphrase.
In Xfce however, I am prompted for the passphrase every time I connect.
Is there a simple way to save the passphrase in Xfce?
A:
If you've installed Seahorse (sudo apt-get install seahorse), add export $(gnome-keyring-daemon --daemonize --start) to your .bashrc and you'll get the same SSH key behaviour as in vanilla Ubuntu.
A:
I think this is what you're looking for:
Setup of SSH agent in Xubuntu 11.10 to get password-less authentication with use of public key | Hnygard.no
If you have not already done so, set up your private and public key (See Githubs description about SSH key half way through Set Up Git). It is important that you add a passphrase to your private key.
Install the package ssh-askpass:
sudo apt-get install ssh-askpass
Add «/usr/bin/ssh-add» to your start up. Go to Settings – Settings manager – Session and startup. Go to Application Autostart and add an item that runs the command «/usr/bin/ssh-add«:
On next login you’ll get the following dialog asking for your passphrase. After entering it, you can open a terminal or use sftp in the file manager without typing a password.
A:
Use ssh-agent and ssh-add?
|
Double factorial is a method of calculating how many times a number is repeated in a geometric equation. This way, we can calculate the number of times a product is used in its life-time.
The double factorial of n is written as . When n is a positive odd integer, is defined as . When n is an positive even integer, is defined as . By definition, .
Related pages
Factorial
Permutation |
Inversion Table Review – All You Want to Know
It is always better to try certain products and tell our audience about the kind of experience we had with them, always make it a point that you read best inversion table reviews. This has many benefits. For one, we get to know the best products in the market and the way the market is changing. We get to know how companies are adapting to user demands. Then, our audience gets to know what they can expect out of each and every table that they buy. This helps them in making dramatically better decisions.
In this article, we would like to review the Teeter EP-960. And a word about it before we go into the details: we were really impressed with the table.
What is good about the table?
There are certain aspects to the table which are great and worth discussing. Then we will head on to the cons and let you know our compete verdict.
Control over the machine: Firstly, you have the EZ Angle Tether which helps you set the precise angle you would like to for the inversion table. Then, you can rest easy as the machine will do its job well. Also, the table has a precision rotation mechanism. In simple words, you can move your arms and the table will rotate accordingly and you become aware of the product by reading best inversion table reviews.
Flex technology for the seat: Teeter has a flex technology for its seat. It has been their trademark feature and you need to experience it to really know about it. However, it is very comfortable and moves along with your body to give you a perfect rest posture.
Functionality: Teeter machines are known for their accessibility and functionality. The ankle reach system has a triple lock technology which keeps you sturdy. Moreover, the handles for adjusting the ankles are long. Hence, you won’t have to bend to adjust them.
Durability: Lastly, Teeter is one of the best-known brands in this field. The company has been doing this for the last 35 years and has a reputation for durability. Plus, it uses high-grade materials and has a five-year warranty to go along with the product. Hence, if anything ever goes wrong, you really will not have anything to worry about.
Let us look at brand like Teeter EP-960 LTD Inversion Table is an FDA Registered medical device that is designed to provide spinal traction while stretching the spinal muscles and this is a good one. This table features a Comfortrak bed with in-built hand holds to optimize your stretching contour, shape, and position. It has an easy-to-reach ankle lock handle and also has patented ankle cups for comfort and support. The table boasts of Acupressure nodes and lumbar bridge for delivering trigger-point release for deeper compression and this is a feature not there are other options. It has an EZ-Angle Tether that has preset markings at 20 degrees, 40 degrees, and 60 degrees so that you can control the rotation more easily. Most inversion therapists suggest that even 60 degrees is a huge benefit to the body and also warn us that we should not stretch beyond the body limits. It can also be folded to take up minimal space while in storage with no need for disassembling the table and this always helps.
Another one is Health Gear ITM5500 Advanced Technology Inversion Table boasts of a vibrating massage pad that helps you by soothing aching muscles and removing knots in muscles during the inversion therapy itself, acting like a double treatment at the same time. The ITM5500 has a heat therapy pad along with the vibrating massage pad as well, which improves blood circulation and oxygen circulation in the body, greatly helping in relieving strain and stress. This one is good quality and gives you value for money. You should make it a point that you try this one before buying, as this one will surely get your mind changed. There is an extra-long locking arm which makes it easy to lock and unlock your ankles without having to bend over on the table to do so. It also has an easy 4 pin system for 20, 40, 60 and 90 degrees positions in inversion. The 4 adjustable leg rollers made of high-density foam ensure that there is no calf pinching during the inversion therapy session.
With a sturdy and strong frame, the Health Gear ITM5500 Advanced Technology Inversion Table supports people up to 300 lbs. in weight and up to 6’5” height. It also comes with a smart foldable technology that allows you to store it in minimal space without needing any disassembling of the table. The ITM5500 is very easy to assemble and put together and is available on Amazon and other such sites for purchase. With its price range, it is definitely one of the best picks in the market and is the closest that you can get to having a profession inversion table therapy session at home. You can buy it from the comfort of your home and also get a good discount, so you can save some money, and why not?.
Make it a point that when you buy these always read some best inversion table reviews as they will give you lots of important information about the product and make your choice much easier.
Conclusion
When it comes to the cons, we found one or two small issues but we would not want to spoil such a great product by playing spoilsport. At the end of the day, it is one of the best machines out there and deserves every bit of respect for that.
In case you are looking for an inversion table for yourself and this comes under your price range, you search would probably end here itself. Otherwise, you must seriously consider buying this Teeter table because, as reviewers, we can say that it really packs a great punch. |
An Israeli Jew is a Jew who lives in the state of Israel. Jews have been living in Israel ever since Moses led them to there. But over time they had been kicked out then let back. The modern term mostly refers to the Jews who moved to the Jewish holy land after the forming of the state in 1948.
Israeli Jews live there because of Zionism in the 20th century. |
Augmentation of intestinal and peripheral natural killer cell activity during the graft-versus-host reaction in mice.
We have investigated the possibility that nonspecific cytotoxicity may be involved in the pathogenesis of the intestinal phase of the graft-versus-host reaction (GVHR) in mice. A GVHR was induced in unirradiated (CBA X BALB/c)F1 mice and natural killer (NK) cell activity against YAC-1 followed in the spleen, mesenteric lymph node (MLN), and isolated intraepithelial lymphocytes (IEL). Augmented NK activity developed simultaneously in all tissues in parallel with the progress of the GVHR. The NK activity of IEL also showed a close association with the increased numbers of IEL found on sections of small intestine. Mature T lymphocytes and macrophages did not contribute to the nonspecific cytotoxicity, and antihost cytotoxic T cells were not detected in any tissue. The results indicate that generalized recruitment of NK cells occurs during the GVHR both in peripheral and intestinal lymphoid tissues, and we propose that lymphokines are responsible for this phenomenon. NK cells recruited by a delayed-type hypersensitivity reaction may contribute to the pathogenesis of the GVHR, but an alternative explanation is that NK cells may inhibit the progression of the GVHR. |
The Bad Girls Club (season 6) is the sixth season of The Bad Girls Club. It aired on Oxygen on January 10, 2011.
About this season
The season had beat ratings from the previous season. Season six also had a lot of conflicts. Some people in the area, complained to local police that the girls were screaming all night club. They also stated that their children heard curse words coming from them. Season 6 was filmed in Hollywood, California. Perez Hilton hosted the reunion specials. Guinness Book of World Records named their creed as "the tallest creed in history". In this season, there were a high number of "replacements". The season was nominated for "Favorite Reality-Show Guilty Pleasure" at the iVillage Entertainment Awards.
Cast members
Replacements |
Public sees plans for possible I-35 toll road
1of 4Buck Benson looks at plans during a public meeting held by the Texas Department of Transportation about the I-35 Northeast San Antonio Expansion Project on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at Morgan's Wonderland in San Antonio, TX. "I am a lawyer representing developers, so this is a big deal to me," he said.Photo: San Antonio Express-News
2of 4Sal Hernandez, a consultant, right, talks about the I-35 Expansion Project plans during a public meeting held by the Texas Department of Transportation about the I-35 Northeast San Antonio Expansion Project on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at Morgan's Wonderland in San Antonio, TX.Photo: San Antonio Express-News
3of 4Sal Hernandez, a consultant, right, talks about the I-35 Expansion Project plans during a public meeting held by the Texas Department of Transportation about the I-35 Northeast San Antonio Expansion Project on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at Morgan's Wonderland in San Antonio, TX.Photo: San Antonio Express-News
4of 4Mike Wikman speaks during a public meeting held by the Texas Department of Transportation about the I-35 Northeast San Antonio Expansion Project on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at Morgan's Wonderland in San Antonio, TX.Photo: San Antonio Express-News
A presentation Thursday about possible new managed lanes on Interstate 35 was met by the larger debate over toll lanes, with the project’s supporters saying tolls were needed to pay for vital new road capacity and critics calling them double taxation.
The $1.3-billion proposal would add four managed lanes — two in each direction — along I-35 from the Loop 410 South interchange near San Antonio Military Medical Center to FM 1103 in Schertz, according to Texas Department of Transportation plans.
The proposal would expand an already crowded section of Interstate 35 where traffic is only expected to worsen in the coming years, said Jonathan Bean, TxDOT San Antonio’s director of transportation, planning and development. From 1995 to 2012, Bean said, traffic along the corridor increased by 60 percent, and is forecasted to increase by an additional 47 percent by 2035.
“I hope that you’ll support this needed route for our community,” said Rob Killen, the chairman of the board of the North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.
Killen, who said expanding I-35 was essential for the local economy, was one of about 20 people who spoke at the hearing. More than 200 people attended.
The new lanes would be elevated and situated between the main lanes and access road in each direction for most of the 15-mile stretch, and the existing highway and access lanes would remain free. New connecting ramps would be built to link the managed lanes with 410 South, 410 West and Loop 1604.
On the managed lanes, the cost of the toll would vary depending on the time of day or level of congestion. Some vehicles, like public transit or registered carpoolers, could generally use the lanes for free.
Bean said TxDOT did not have the money to build new lanes on I-35 without tolls. The toll would range from 17 cents per mile to 50 cents per mile, he said.
But Paul Henson, who lives off of O’Connor Road near I-35, said that everyone was already paying taxes for road construction and maintenance, and the toll amounted to a second tax.
Other critics of the proposal argued the toll road would only benefit people who could afford the extra money needed to access the lanes.
“That’s $7.50 one way, or 15 bucks a day in new toll costs,” toll-road opponent Terri Hall said about someone who would drive the entire stretch at peak pricing.
Hall, founder of Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, said Gov. Greg Abbott has promised new funding for roads, but others said the region could not wait to see if the state took action.
“We’ve got to move forward and solve this problem,” said Don Durden, chair of the San Antonio Mobility Coalition and president of the firm Civil Engineering Consultants.
While many of the proposal’s supporters said it was needed from an economic standpoint, Michael Garza noted that decreased congestion could make the stretch safer. Garza said his wife drives the section every day with their young son, and he gets worried about all the traffic.
The managed lanes, Garza said, would provide a choice.
“We have the opportunity now to have an alternate route,” he said.
Before anything can be built, the I-35 project still needs final environmental approval, which TxDOT officials say is expected to come this summer. At this point, there is no anticipated groundbreaking date, TxDOT said.
People can make additional comments about the proposal until March 9 at TxDOT’s website.
Drew Joseph joined the Express-News in 2013 . Before coming to San Antonio, he covered health for the San Franciso Chronicle, lobbying and campaign finance for National Journal and breaking news for the Oregonian. He is a San Francisco Bay Area native and went to Dartmouth College. |
Hazrat Sheikh Ahmed Ar-Rifai (1118-1182) was a Sufi master and saint. He founded the Rifai Sufi order.
He was born in the Hasen region of Iraq. He died and was buried in Northern Iraq near Tal Afar. His shrine is respected by most Muslims, Shia or Sunni. However, in 2014, this shrine was destroyed by the ISIS terrorists. |
1. Introduction {#sec1-nutrients-10-01955}
===============
Zinc, an essential trace element, has been reported to play various pivotal roles in the human body. Notably, in the liver, zinc is needed for the activation of many enzymes, such as ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) and glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH), which are utilized in the urea cycle and the glutamine synthetase cycle respectively. Superoxide dismutase (SOD), which requires zinc for its activation, has strong antioxidant activity. Zinc deficiency may cause SOD inactivity, followed by increased reactive oxygen species (ROS). Takeda et al. recently reported that zinc deficiency delays both extracellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP) clearance and adenosine generation, followed by enhanced inflammation \[[@B1-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Many roles of zinc, especially in chronic liver diseases (CLDs), were explained by Himoto in a review article \[[@B2-nutrients-10-01955]\].
Vallee et al. first reported on the occurrence of marked hypozincemia in patients with severe cirrhosis in 1956 \[[@B3-nutrients-10-01955]\]. This finding has been confirmed by many investigators \[[@B4-nutrients-10-01955],[@B5-nutrients-10-01955]\]. The mechanisms underlying zinc deficiency in patients with CLDs appear to be multifactorial. First, patients with CLDs have inadequate dietary intake of zinc \[[@B6-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Second, the absorption of zinc is also impaired in these patients because of portal hypertension \[[@B7-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Third, urinary excretion of zinc is increased, and greater excretion has been observed in patients taking diuretics \[[@B4-nutrients-10-01955],[@B5-nutrients-10-01955],[@B8-nutrients-10-01955],[@B9-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Based on these results, the serum zinc concentration decreases with the progression of CLDs.
Limited clinical trials have evaluated the effects of zinc supplementation on clinical outcomes in patients with CLDs. As zinc helps activate some enzymes in the urea cycle, many investigators have focused on improving hepatic encephalopathy by administering a zinc supplement. Reding et al. first reported that oral zinc supplementation improved hepatic encephalopathy in 22 patients with cirrhosis in a double-blind randomized trial. The effect of taking zinc acetate, 600 mg a day for 7 days, was evaluated in that study \[[@B10-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Katayama et al. also presented the importance of zinc supplementation in a trial showing that treatment with zinc acetate for 3 months was an effective and safe treatment for hyperammonemia in patients with liver cirrhosis \[[@B11-nutrients-10-01955]\]. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the use of zinc in patients with hepatic encephalopathy revealed a significant improvement in psychological tests after zinc therapy \[[@B12-nutrients-10-01955]\]. However, many of these studies have focused on the short-term administration of zinc. The period of zinc administration was only 7 days in the study by Reding and colleagues, and 3 months in the study by Katayama and coworkers. Few papers have explored the long-term effects of zinc on patients with CLDs. Therefore, the first issue is whether long-term zinc administration improves the long-term prognosis of these patients. The second issue is determining the zinc concentration necessary to improve the prognosis of patients with CLDs \[[@B10-nutrients-10-01955],[@B11-nutrients-10-01955],[@B12-nutrients-10-01955]\]. While all of these reports supported the efficacy of zinc supplementation in patients with CLDs, almost all studies explored the efficacy of zinc by comparing the placebo group with the zinc group; thus, the appropriate plasma zinc concentration after zinc administration to achieve these effects remains unknown.
In the present study, we investigated liver function and the risk of events---death, liver failure and the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)---after the administration of zinc for more than 3 years, to clarify the long-term effects of zinc. In addition, the incidence rates of events were evaluated among the groups stratified according to their zinc concentrations measured after 6 months of zinc administration. Zinc preparations were approved in 13 February 2018, and they may become valuable drugs for the prevention of cancer.
2. Patients and Methods {#sec2-nutrients-10-01955}
=======================
267 patients with CLDs, who had received a zinc preparation (ZnSO4, Zn 60--120 mg/day; Zn-group; 196 patients) for at least 6 months or who had never received zinc (no Zn-treatment group; 71 patients), were retrospectively analyzed in this study. These patients were initially diagnosed with CLDs at Osaka Rosai Hospital between 1 January 2007 and 31 December 2017. A total of 267 consecutive patients who provided informed consent were recruited in this study. Each doctor decided whether to administer zinc supplements, but some physicians tended to administer them to patients with severe fibrosis. The dose of zinc was determined according to the decision of the primary physician, and did not depend on the clinical situation or disease severity. Patients in the Zn-group were divided into 4 groups according to their Zn concentration at 6 months after the start of Zn treatment---less than 50 µg/dL (G1), 50--69 µg/dL (G2), 70--89 µg/dL (G3), and not less than 90 µg/dL (G4). Liver function and the number of events (death, development of liver cancer, and appearance of liver failure) were evaluated at least every 6 months. The severity of liver disease was assessed based on the Child-Pugh score, and patients were grouped into Class A, B and C according to a total score of 5--6, 7--9 or 10--15. The total bilirubin (T-Bil), albumin (Alb), and prothrombin (PT) values, and the presence/absence of ascites and hepatic encephalopathy, were scored as 1, 2, or 3. A fasting blood sample (3--4 mL) was drawn from each subject in plain, EDTA, and PT vials to perform the following investigations: Aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), T-Bil, Alb, and branched amino acids/tyrosine ratio (BTR), which were performed on a fully automated analyzer (Olympus AU 400, Olympus Corporation, Tokyo, Japan). The plasma concentration of zinc was assessed on an atomic absorption spectrophotometer (Shino-test Company, Tokyo, Japan). This study was approved by the Ethics and Committee of Osaka-Rosai Hospital (approval code 29--47). All participants provided written informed consent.
The data are presented as the means ± standard error (SE). Data from two groups were compared using unpaired *t*-tests. Multiple comparisons were performed by ANOVAs with the Scheffe post hoc test. A value of *p* \< 0.05 was considered statistically significant. The log-rank test was used to assess the cumulative incidence rates of events and HCC development.
3. Results {#sec3-nutrients-10-01955}
==========
3.1. Zinc Administration Improved Liver Function {#sec3dot1-nutrients-10-01955}
------------------------------------------------
The characteristics of the 267 patients with CLDs are shown in [Table 1](#nutrients-10-01955-t001){ref-type="table"}. The patients in the Zn-group were older and had more advanced liver diseases than patients in the no Zn-treatment group; the proportion of patients with cirrhosis and the proportion of patients with Child-Pugh scores of B and C was higher in the Zn-group than in the no Zn-treatment group: cirrhosis: 52.6% vs. 21.1% (*p* \< 0.001), Child-Pugh-B and C: 50.0% vs. 5.6% (*p* \< 0.001). Other characteristics of the two groups are shown in [Supplementary Table S1](#app1-nutrients-10-01955){ref-type="app"}. The number of patients taking diuretics was greater in the Zn-group than in the no Zn-treatment group, but this did not seem to influence the outcomes. The mean follow-up period was 40.0 ± 31.5 months, and patients took zinc for the entire follow-up period. Regarding the relationship between the dose of zinc administered and the increase in zinc concentration, the zinc concentration increased to a greater extent when higher doses of zinc were administered ([Figure 1](#nutrients-10-01955-f001){ref-type="fig"}). The zinc concentration increased to greater than 90 µg/dL in the Zn-group and was maintained at that level for 4 years, while it did not increase and remained low in the no Zn-treatment group ([Figure 2](#nutrients-10-01955-f002){ref-type="fig"}). The Zn concentration remained in the plateau phase after 6 months of Zn treatment; thus, the Zn concentration at 6 months after the start of Zn therapy was used to investigate the relationship between the Zn concentration and prognosis. The biochemical changes in T-Bil levels, Alb levels, PT activity, and BTR are shown in [Figure 3](#nutrients-10-01955-f003){ref-type="fig"}. Before treatment, the T-Bil level was high, and the Alb and PT activity levels were low in the Zn-group. The T-Bil level in the no Zn-treatment group significantly increased after 3 years (*p* \< 0.01), while in the Zn-group, it remained at approximately the same level ([Figure 3](#nutrients-10-01955-f003){ref-type="fig"}a). In the no Zn-treatment group, the levels of Alb and PT activity were significantly decreased after 3 years (*p* \< 0.01), while in the Zn-group, they remained at approximately the same levels ([Figure 3](#nutrients-10-01955-f003){ref-type="fig"}b,c). Taken together, liver function significantly deteriorated in the no Zn-treatment group, while no notable change was observed in the Zn-group. This suggests that zinc administration can prevent the worsening of liver function in patients with CLDs. AST and ALT levels gradually decreased after treatment with zinc preparations ([Supplementary Figure S1](#app1-nutrients-10-01955){ref-type="app"}).
3.2. Zinc Administration May Suppress the Incidence of HCC {#sec3dot2-nutrients-10-01955}
----------------------------------------------------------
As shown in [Figure 4](#nutrients-10-01955-f004){ref-type="fig"}a, the cumulative incidence rate of events (death, the development of liver cancer, and appearance of liver failure) at 3 years was 9.5% in the Zn-group, which was significantly less than that in the no Zn-treatment group (24.9%, *p* = 0.0049). In particular, the incidence rate of HCC (3 years) was significantly lower in the Zn-group (7.6%) than in the no Zn-treatment group (19.2%, *p* = 0.0002; [Figure 4](#nutrients-10-01955-f004){ref-type="fig"}b).
3.3. Patients with High Zinc Concentrations after Zn Therapy Had Lower Cumulative Event and HCC Incidence Rates {#sec3dot3-nutrients-10-01955}
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oral zinc supplementation was shown to be quite effective for patients with CLDs. The Zn-group was divided into 4 groups according to their Zn concentration at 6 months after the start of Zn treatment---less than 50 µg/dL (G1), 50--69 µg/dL (G2), 70--89 µg/dL (G3), and not less than 90µg/dL (G4)---to clarify the serum zinc concentration needed to achieve a positive effect. The characteristics of these 4 groups are shown in [Table 2](#nutrients-10-01955-t002){ref-type="table"}. The G1 group tended to be older and had lower platelet counts than the other three groups, but no significant differences were observed in the 4 groups with regard to age, gender, Zn concentration, or the levels of T-Bil, Alb, and PT activity before Zn administration. The cumulative incidence rates of events recorded at 3 years were 34.5%, 21.7%, 8.6%, and 0.0% in the G1, G2, G3, and G4 groups, respectively ([Figure 5](#nutrients-10-01955-f005){ref-type="fig"}a), and they were significantly lower (*p* \< 0.0001, [Figure 5](#nutrients-10-01955-f005){ref-type="fig"}b) in the G3 and G4 groups (not less than 70 µg/dL) than in the G1 and G2 groups (less than 70 µg/dL). Regarding the relationship between the serum zinc concentration and the incidence rate of HCC, the HCC incidence rates recorded at 3 years were 33.3%, 16.7%, 3.8%, and 0.0% in the G1, G2, G3, and G4 groups, respectively ([Figure 5](#nutrients-10-01955-f005){ref-type="fig"}c), and the HCC incidence rate was significantly lower in the G3 and G4 groups than in the G1 and G2 groups (*p* \< 0.001, [Figure 5](#nutrients-10-01955-f005){ref-type="fig"}d). The progression of fibrosis has been reported to cause HCC, and the Zn-group was divided into 2 groups according to their platelet counts before treatment (borderline: 12 × 10^4^ platelets/µL). As shown in [Figure 6](#nutrients-10-01955-f006){ref-type="fig"}a,b, regardless of whether the original platelet counts were high or low, significantly lower cumulative incidence rates (*p* \< 0.0001) of events were observed in the groups with higher serum zinc concentrations (G3 and G4 groups) than in the groups with lower serum zinc concentrations (G1 and G2 groups). No events were observed during the three-year observation period in patients with higher platelet counts and higher serum zinc concentrations. The same trend was observed in the HCC incidence rate ([Figure 6](#nutrients-10-01955-f006){ref-type="fig"}c,d). In summary, lower cumulative incidence rates of events and incidence rates of HCC were observed in the Zn-group than in the no Zn-treatment group, and this effect was much more clearly observed in patients with serum zinc concentrations exceeding 70 µg/dL after Zn supplementation.
4. Discussion {#sec4-nutrients-10-01955}
=============
Serum zinc concentration gradually decreases as liver fibrosis progresses, and zinc supplementation suppressed the exacerbation of the disease in patients with CLDs. According to these results, a reduction in zinc levels partially causes the worsening of liver function. In other words, many liver enzymes do not work well because of a zinc deficiency. The importance of zinc in the urea cycle has been elucidated; many investigators have shown that zinc supplementation improves hepatic encephalopathy after short-term treatment (7 days--3 months). Zinc is needed for the activation of not only OTC in the urea cycle, but also many other enzymes, such as DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase, alkaline phosphatase and SOD; thus, researchers have speculated that the administration of zinc may exert a positive effect on liver function and inhibit cancer development. It is difficult to evaluate the influence of zinc supplementation on liver function and the incidence rate of HCC in the short term; therefore, the period of zinc administration and the follow-up period were longer than 3 years in this study, enabling us to address this issue. In the present study, we revealed that supplementation with zinc was effective at maintaining liver function and suppressing HCC. These results are quite interesting. The mechanism by which zinc suppresses the deterioration of liver function and the development of HCC is currently unknown, but three possibilities exist. First, improvement of liver injury is caused by normalization of both extracellular ATP clearance and adenosine generation \[[@B1-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Second, SOD activity is restored to the basal level, enabling reductions in the levels of ROS, which can induce epigenetic modulations that lead to carcinogenesis. In support of this hypothesis, we examined the value of dROM, which is a possible marker of ROS \[[@B13-nutrients-10-01955],[@B14-nutrients-10-01955]\]. In almost all the zinc-treated patients, the value of dROM was significantly decreased after the administration of zinc (unpublished data). Third, the severity of fibrosis is related to the risk of HCC development, and Takahashi reported that the serum levels of type IV collagen and the activity of tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinase-1 (TIMP-1) were significantly reduced by oral zinc supplement therapy \[[@B15-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Zinc therapy can suppress the progression of fibrosis, which reduces the risk of HCC development.
It is necessary to determine the serum zinc concentration that is needed after zinc administration to obtain a better prognosis. In this study, we revealed that a serum zinc concentration of 70 µg/dL after zinc supplementation was needed to exert this inhibitory effect on HCC development. Few papers have explored the appropriate serum zinc concentration. Takamatsu reported that serum zinc concentrations greater than 72 µg/dL are needed to suppress fibrosis, based on a study with 57 patients with CLDs \[[@B16-nutrients-10-01955]\]. Our results are consistent with this report, and both studies showed that it is important to increase and maintain a certain serum zinc concentration to obtain a better prognosis.
This is the first report to clarify that zinc administration improves liver function and decreases the cumulative incidence of events and the incidence of HCC in patients with CLDs, over the course of long-term follow-up. We also confirmed that a serum zinc concentration greater than 70 µg/dL must be maintained to obtain good clinical outcomes, and patients should take more than 90 mg/day of zinc to achieve the aforementioned serum zinc concentration. The effectiveness does not depend on the etiology of the CLD; thus, zinc administration is equally useful for patients with an HCV infection, HBV infection, NASH, or alcohol-related liver diseases. It is necessary to highlight the importance of zinc and to start administering zinc preparations in the clinical setting.
We are grateful to Shokura H and Izutani Y (our medical assistants) for collecting the large amounts of data analyzed in this study. We also thank Katayama K for providing expertise with regard to zinc. This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Research on Hepatitis from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare of Japan and the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (17fk0210106h0901).
The following are available online at <http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/12/1955/s1>, Figure S1: Serial changes of AST and ALT values in the Zn- and no Zn-treatment groups; Table S1: Clinical backgrounds in the Zn- and no Zn-treatment groups.
######
Click here for additional data file.
A.H., study concept and design and data acquisition; E.K., S.A., T.T., K.O., Y.K., Y.S., K.M., M.H. and T.Y., data acquisition; N.H., data analysis and interpretation, and funding acquisition.
This research received no external funding
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
CLDs, chronic liver diseases; HCC, hepatocellular carcinoma; OTC, ornithine transcarbamylase; GDH, glutamate dehydrogenase; SOD, superoxide dismutase; T-Bil, total bilirubin; Alb, albumin; PT, prothrombin activity; BTR, branched chain amino acids/tyrosine ratio; TIMP-1, tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinase-1.
{#nutrients-10-01955-f001}
{#nutrients-10-01955-f002}
{#nutrients-10-01955-f003}
{#nutrients-10-01955-f004}
{#nutrients-10-01955-f005}
######
The cumulative incidence rates of events (**a**) and the incidence rates of HCC (**c**) (left panel) in the low-platelet count group and (right panel) the high-platelet count group ((**a**) in both panels, G1/G2 groups vs. G3/G4 groups, *p* \< 0.0001, (**c**) left panel, G1/G2/G3 groups vs. G4 group, *p* = 0.0172, and right panel, G1/G2 groups vs. G3/G4 groups, *p* = 0.0098). (**b**,**d**) The cumulative incidence rates of events (**b**) and HCC (**d**) (left panel) in the low-platelet count group and (right panel) the high-platelet count group, (low serum zinc concentration group and high serum zinc concentration group) (all panels, *p* \< 0.0001).
nutrients-10-01955-t001_Table 1
######
Clinical profiles of 267 patients with chronic liver diseases enrolled in this study. F/M: Female/Male; ns: not significant; HCV/HBV/alcohol/NASH/AIH+PBC: hepatitis C virus/hepatitis B virus/alcohol/nonalcoholic steatohepatitis/autoimmune hepatitis + primary biliary cholangitis.
Zn Group No Treatment Group *p*-Value
----------------------------------------- ----------------- -------------------- ---------------
number of patients 196 71
mean age (years) 73.2 ± 9.5 66.4 ± 12.6 *p* \< 0.0001
gender (F/M) 97/99 36/35 ns
chronic hepatitis/liver cirrhosis 93/103 56/15 *p* \< 0.0001
Child-Pugh (A/B/C) 98/89/9 67/4/0 *p* \< 0.0001
Zn (μg/dL) 51.0 ± 16.8 61.7 ± 9.1 *p* \< 0.0001
T-Bil (mg/dL) 1.2 ± 1.8 0.8 ± 0.4 *p* \< 0.0001
albumin (g/dL) 3.5 ± 0.6 4.0 ± 0.3 *p* \< 0.0001
PT activity (%) 77.8 ± 17.6 89.1 ± 11.7 *p* \< 0.0001
platlet count (10^4^/L) 12.9 ± 14.2 15.8 ± 7.1 *p* = 0.035
observation period (Months) 40.0 ± 31.5 39.6 ± 22.8 ns
Etiology (HCV/HBV/alcohol/NASH/AIH+PBC) 121/10/23/19/23 35/13/7/7/8 ns
nutrients-10-01955-t002_Table 2
######
Clinical characteristics of the 4 groups stratified by their serum zinc concentrations at 6 months after the start of the zinc treatment.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G1 Group\ G2 Group\ G3 Group\ G4 Group\ *p*-Value
\<50 μg/dL ≥50 and \<69 μg/dL ≥70 and \<89 μg/dL ≥90 μg/dL
----------------------------------- ------------- -------------------- -------------------- ------------- -----------
number of patients 23 42 38 93 ns
mean age (years) 75.0 ± 7.3 72.6 ± 8.9 74.1 ± 10.2 72.6 ± 10.0 ns
gender (F/M) 14/9 21/21 21/17 43/50 ns
chronic hepatitis/liver cirrhosis 6/17 20/22 18/20 47/46 ns
Child-Pugh (A/B/C) 8/14/1 21/20/1 17/20/1 52/35/6 ns
Zn (μg/dL) (before treatment) 49.8 ± 18.0 51.3 ± 11.5 49.4 ± 13.3 52.0 ± 20.1 ns
T-Bil (mg/dL) 2.2 ± 2.8 1.5 ± 0.9 1.5 ± 0.9 1.5 ± 2.2 ns
albumin (g/dL) 3.1 ± 0.4 3.3 ± 0.5 3.1 ± 0.6 3.3 ± 0.6 ns
PT activity (%) 66.2 ± 16.2 68.2 ± 19.9 69.0 ± 15.0 72.0 ± 17.7 ns
platelet count (10^4^/L) 10.4 ± 11.7 11.5 ± 6.9 13.3 ± 14.6 14.2 ± 16.9 ns
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
Joseph Horovitz (26 May 1926 - 9 February 2022) was an Austrian-born British composer and conductor. He was born in Vienna, Austria and moved to the United Kingdom in 1938. His works include 16 ballets. The children's "pop cantata" Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo (1970) was his best known work. He was also a professor at the Royal College of Music in London.
Horovitz died on 9 February 2022, at the age of 95. |
#!/bin/bash
set -e
# Usage
usage() {
echo "Usage:"
echo " ${0} -c <host> -p <port>"
exit 1
}
# Constants
SLEEP_TIME=5
MAX_RETRY=10
BASE_JENKINS_KEY="adop/core/jenkins"
BASE_JENKINS_SSH_KEY="${BASE_JENKINS_KEY}/ssh"
BASE_JENKINS_SSH_PUBLIC_KEY_KEY="${BASE_JENKINS_SSH_KEY}/public_key"
JENKINS_HOME="/var/jenkins_home"
JENKINS_SSH_DIR="${JENKINS_HOME}/.ssh"
JENKINS_USER_CONTENT_DIR="${JENKINS_HOME}/userContent/"
while getopts "c:p:u:w:" opt; do
case $opt in
c)
host=${OPTARG}
;;
p)
port=${OPTARG}
;;
*)
echo "Invalid parameter(s) or option(s)."
usage
;;
esac
done
if [ -z "${host}" ] || [ -z "${port}" ] ; then
echo "Parameters missing"
usage
fi
echo "Generating Jenkins Key Pair"
if [ ! -d "${JENKINS_SSH_DIR}" ]; then mkdir -p "${JENKINS_SSH_DIR}"; fi
cd "${JENKINS_SSH_DIR}"
if [[ ! $(ls -A "${JENKINS_SSH_DIR}") ]]; then
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f 'id_rsa' -b 4096 -C "jenkins@adop-core" -N '';
echo "Copy key to userContent folder"
mkdir -p ${JENKINS_USER_CONTENT_DIR}
rm -f ${JENKINS_USER_CONTENT_DIR}/id_rsa.pub
cp ${JENKINS_SSH_DIR}/id_rsa.pub ${JENKINS_USER_CONTENT_DIR}/id_rsa.pub
# Set correct permissions for Content Directory
chown 1000:1000 "${JENKINS_USER_CONTENT_DIR}"
fi
# public_key_val=$(cat ${JENKINS_SSH_DIR}/id_rsa.pub)
# Set correct permissions on SSH Key
chown -R 1000:1000 "${JENKINS_SSH_DIR}" |
A credit card is a card which allows people to buy items without cash. Each card has a unique number. Using this number, plus other details on the card (such as the validity date, or a code), the client can buy goods or services. The issuer of the card automatically transfers the money to the seller. The person using the card gets a credit. The customer has a certain amount of time to pay the credit card bill. If the bill is left unpaid for some time, the customer will have to pay interest for the amount that is left unpaid. Payment using a credit card is one of the most common methods of electronic payment. A debit card similarly allows paying without cash, but it pays with money in the user's bank account.
Credit cards are usually small plastic cards with a unique number attached to an account. Most are magnetic stripe cards and many have an EMV chip for use by card readers.
Paying with a credit card means you borrow the money and must pay it back in a specified time. Users who fail to pay in time may have to pay much more.
Money |
52 Faces: Healthy families are a life's work
WEST BURLINGTON - Sally O'Riley knows the struggles families can face. She grew up the ninth of 13 children born to a mother who didn't stay in school past fifth-grade, and a father who left school two years short of a diploma.
Theirs was a low-income family.
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Rachel Jessen/The Hawk Eye
Early Childhood Iowa area director Sally O'Riley sits Thursday in the dining room of her rural West Burlington home. O'Riley, who worked 42 years for the Iowa Department of Human Services, starting as a clerk and retiring as an area director, has served as the ECI director for Des Moines and Louisa counties for the past seven years.
Facebook Commenting Guidelines on The Hawk Eye:
1. Comments from users that have private profiles are blocked by Facebook.
2. Comments containing words in Facebook's blacklist will be held for moderation.
3. Threaded comments on a comment held for moderation will not appear online. |
The Pearl Fishers is an opera by Georges Bizet. The libretto was written by Eugene Cormon and Michel Carre. It was first performed in Paris on 30 September 1863. The opera is set in ancient Ceylon, which is now called Sri Lanka. It tells the story of two men who are best friends, but love the same woman, who is a priestess. It was generally disliked at the time, especially by the newspapers. After his death, it has been more popular and is now regularly played across the world.
Compositions by Georges Bizet
1860s operas |
---
layout: api
title: "v3.1.1 JavaScript Library: L.mapbox.styleLayer(url, options)"
categories: api
version: v3.1.1
permalink: /api/v3.1.1/l-mapbox-stylelayer/
---
<h2 id="section-l-mapbox-stylelayer">L.mapbox.styleLayer(url, options)</h2>
<p><span class='leaflet icon'><em>Extends</em>: <code><a href="/mapbox.js/api/v3.1.1/l-tilelayer">L.tileLayer</a></code></span></p>
<p><code><a href="/mapbox.js/api/v3.1.1/l-mapbox-stylelayer">L.mapbox.styleLayer</a></code> provides a way to integrate <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/help/define-style/">styles</a> created with Mapbox Studio into your map.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Options</th>
<th>Value</th>
<th>Description</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>url</td>
<td>string</td>
<td>Must be a string like <code>mapbox://styles/mapbox/cin286r4x006safncofpcb71v</code></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>options</td>
<td>object</td>
<td>If provided, it is the same options as provided to <code><a href="/mapbox.js/api/v3.1.1/l-tilelayer">L.tileLayer</a></code>, as well as: <ul><li><code>sanitizer</code>: A function that accepts a string containing tooltip data, and returns a sanitized result for HTML display. The default will remove dangerous script content, and is recommended.</li></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><em>Example</em>:</p>
<pre><code>var styleLayer = L.mapbox.styleLayer(url)
.addTo(map);
</code></pre><p><em>Returns</em> a <code><a href="/mapbox.js/api/v3.1.1/l-mapbox-stylelayer">L.mapbox.styleLayer</a></code> object.</p>
|
Luigi Illica (9 May 1857 - 16 December 1919) was an Italian writer. He wrote the librettos (stories and words) for many operas. He teamed with Giuseppe Giacosa for Puccini's operas La boheme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. He also wrote the libretto for Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chenier.
1857 births
1919 deaths
Italian writers
Librettists |
Predictors of long-term visual outcome after chemoreduction for management of intraocular retinoblastoma.
To determine the predictors of long-term visual outcome after chemoreduction for management of intraocular retinoblastoma. Retrospective case series. One hundred and forty eyes of 96 new retinoblastoma patients. The clinical records were reviewed for demographical profile, tumour characteristics, treatment methods, treatment side effects and final visual outcome. Multivariate analysis was used to evaluate factors predictive of final visual acuity. The clinical data were analysed for main outcome measures of good vision (visual acuity ≥6/12) or ambulatory vision (visual acuity ≥6/60). The correlation among predictor variables was determined using Pearson's product moment correlation for continuous variables, and t-test and analysis of variance test for categorical baseline variables. Follow-up ranged from 2 years to 14 years (median 75 months). The final mean logarithm of minimum angle of resolution visual acuity was 0.79. Ambulatory vision (≥6/60) was achieved in 100 of 140 (71%) eyes, and vision of ≥6/12 was seen in 52 eyes (37%). Extrafoveolar tumour and greater number of tumours in the eye were the only predictors of visual acuity ≥20/40. Greater number of tumours correlated with smaller mean basal tumour diameter. The mean basal tumour diameter was 9.8 mm in eyes with multiple tumours and 12.2 mm in eyes with single tumours (P = 0.03). Long-term ambulatory vision (≥6/60) was achieved in the majority (71%) of retinoblastoma containing eyes not requiring enucleation after treatment with chemoreduction and adjunctive therapy. Absence of foveolar involvement and greater number of tumours were the predictor of long- term visual outcome of 6/12 or better. |
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre (in French) or Sint-Pieters-Woluwe (in Dutch) is a municipality in the Belgian Brussels-Capital Region.
In 2007, 38554 people lived there.
It is at 50deg 49 North, 04deg 27 East. |
Q:
Transforming the circle function to round mitered line segments
I am trying to achive fast, smooth, variable width lines in a graphics application. The goal is to draw a 2 segment line with a rounded corner in the middle.
Ultimately the goal would be to minimize the following:
The amount of quadrilaterals (or triangles if you find it easier to
think in terms of that.
Minimize the computation to find the points of the geometry
I will define the problem with points p0, p1, and p2. w1 would be the width of the rectangle through p0 and p1, and w2 would be the width of the rectangle between p1 and p2. the final goal would be to get a drawing such as this:
One of the first problems I have is calculating the position of the mitter in a situation where w1≠w2. I have seen the formula when both of the widths are equal but have never seen it extended for different widths.
The problem with the mitter based approach is when ∠p0p1p2 is very small the mitter gets extremely large.
After calculating the two quads formed by the tree points the geometry is passed to a pixel shader and the goal would be to mathematically determine which pixels need to be shaved off to round the outer corner formed by the three points.
Here is the tricky part. In the pixel shader there is no conception of space. I can pass in things like angles or ratios etc but those must be used to interpret an interpolated xy value from 0 to one.
The above diagram shows my understanding of how the value is interpolated but the key take away is that it has no idea of what kind of shape it is forming just its distance from each of the vertices.
So the problem I have essentially is:
Given the 2 dimensional value representing a pixel's interpolated position figure out whether the pixel should be shaded or not.
You are welcome to use any specific values to help interpret and transform the interpolated value given in.
A:
Here is a suggestion of how one might decide whether or not to shade a pixel on the inside or outside of the bend.
I'm thinking that the idea is to have a smooth curve from $A$ to $B$ which is tangent to the outer sides of the rectangles at the points $A$ and $B$.
This can be done in a smooth way by looking at the ratios of angles and moving smoothly between a distance of $W_1$ from $C$ to a distance $W_2$ from $C$.
For a given pixel at $X$ lying between the rays $AC$ and $AB$, define the ratio $r_X=\dfrac{\angle ACX}{\angle ACB}$.
Then $0\le r_X\le 1$.
Then for each such pixel $X$ define a width
$$ W_X=(1-r_X)\cdot W_1+r_X\cdot W_2 $$
Note that when $r_X=0$ then $W_X=W_1$ and when $r_X=1$ then $W_X=W_2$.
The idea is to shade pixel $X$ unless it is further from $C$ than $W_X$.
For the inside of the bend, label a point on $EC$ a distance $W_1$ from $C$ and a point on $CF$ a distance $W_2$ from $C$ (Sorry, I forgot to put those two points on the diagram).
Then one can do something similar for pixels inside the bend.
Define $s_Y=\dfrac{\angle ECY}{\angle ECF}$. (Note that $\angle ECF=\angle $ACB.)
Then define
$$ W_Y=(1-s_Y)\cdot W_1+s_Y\cdot W_2 $$
Then shade pixel $Y$ unless it is further from $C$ than $W_Y$.
|
Harz is a rural district in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany named after the highland area also called harz. It is home to the highest point in the region: the Brocken.
History
The district was made by joining the old districts of Halberstadt, Wernigerode and Quedlinburg as well as the city of Falkenstein (from the district of Aschersleben-Stassfurt). This was part of the reform of all districts in 2007.
Towns and municipalities |
Q:
How do I process multiple variables in the same way?
It's highly probable this question has been asked, but I can't find the answer.
I have four variables:
a,b,c,d = [a,b,c,d].map{|myvar| myvar+1 }
How can I make this line more DRY (keeping it compact), i.e., achieve the same changes without repeating variable names?
A:
i have a growing suspicion that short answer (for this specific example with integers) is "no way"
due to the same reason as described in the answer in my previous question:
replacing referenced Integer value in Ruby like String#replace does
update:
if variables we operate on are an Array, Hash or String, and they keep the same datatype after the performed operation, it's drier, more compact and saving memory to use replace
[a,b,c,d].each{|v| v.replace(v + [1])} #example for an array
|
Coral Gables is a city of Florida in the United States.
Cities in Florida |
President Xi Jinping called for an “all-out rescue effort,” according to CCTV, the state broadcaster, and the authorities said that hundreds of rescuers had been sent to Yancheng to sort through the wreckage. Nearly half of the injured were in serious condition, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs said late Thursday.
The tornado, which began around 2:30 p.m. and was accompanied by hailstorms, destroyed thousands of homes and stores, as well as several manufacturing plants and rice mills, according to news reports. Yancheng is known as a center of textile production and farming in Jiangsu Province.
A man who gave his last name as Zhang told China News Service that he had been driving along a street when he noticed that trees were falling in a “strange way.” He pulled over, and soon the winds lifted his car and threw it into a river.
Tornadoes are relatively common in Jiangsu Province, in China’s southeast, with more than 1,000 recorded over the past six decades, according to Chinese news reports. Southern China has faced several bouts of extreme weather recently, with floods killing more than 20 people this week. |
Lonnie Alexander "Lon" Simmons (July 19, 1923 - April 5, 2015) was an American baseball and football broadcaster. He worked for the San Francisco Giants baseball team and the San Francisco 49ers football team. He also played for three minor league baseball teams after World War II.
Simmons was born in Vancouver, Washington and grew up in Burbank, California. At the time of his death, he was living in San Francisco. He had four daughters.
Simmons died on April 5, 2015 in Daly City, California, aged 91. |
[Construction of wild-type and mutant SPAST vectors for the study of molecular mechanism of hereditary spastic paraplegia].
To construct wild-type and mutant pEGFP SPAST vectors and to explore the molecular mechanism of hereditary spastic paraplegia. Mutant SPAST vector was constructed using overlap PCR method following construction of wild-type SPAST vector. Wild-type and mutant constructs were transfected to COS7 cells and subcellular localization of spastin was observed. Co-localizations of spastin and microtubule, spastin and mitochondria were viewed by immunofluorescence staining. Wild-type spastin is localized in plasma, and mutant spastin did not change its cellular localization. Wild-type and mutant spastins did not co-localize with microtubules and mitochondria by immunofluorescence analysis. Wild-type and mutant SPAST constructs were successfully generated. Mutant spastin did not change its localization in cells. Spastin does not co-localize with microtubules and mitochondria. This study may facilitate further studies on molecular mechanism of hereditary spastic paraplegia. |
Bota is a 2014 Albanian Italian Kosovan drama movie directed by Iris Elezi and Thomas Logoreci. It stars Flonja Kodheli, Artur Gorishti, Fioralba Kryemadhi, Tinka Kurti, Luca Lionello and won the Fedeora Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2014. |
List of streets in Baltimore
This is a list of notable streets in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
Heath St. Route 64. (MTA Maryland)
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
Ramsay st
S
U
W
Y
Numbered streets
In Baltimore, numbered streets are found in the north-central part of the city, mostly in the communities of Charles Village, Hampden, and Waverly. The numbered streets, which run west-east, start with 20th Street (excluding 19½ Street, a short alley crossing Howard Street), which runs parallel to and one block north of North Avenue. The highest numbered street in Baltimore is 43rd Street, which runs from York Road several block east to Marble Hall Road near Cold Spring Lane. The numbered streets correspond with the first two digits in address numbers on north-south streets in this part of the city.
See also
List of roads in Baltimore County, Maryland
References
Baltimore
Streets
Baltimore |
Mutual intelligibility is where the speakers of one language can understand another language because they are alike. This is sometimes (but not always) used to decide whether they are different languages or different dialects.
There are noticeable differences in accent, vocabulary, and spelling between British and General American English, but speakers can largely understand each other without serious problems. These dialects are therefore mutually intelligible.
Sometimes, even different languages can be mutually intelligible.Hindi and Urdu are called different languages, but speakers of both languages can largely understand each other if they are using everyday language. This is because the two languages used to be dialects of Hindustani, the official language of British India until India became independent. Since the two languages are so alike, they are sometimes called together as Hindi-Urdu.
Also, dialects of a certain language can sometimes be mutually unintelligible. Chinese, for example, has hundreds of different dialects, and many native speakers of those dialects cannot understand each other without knowing the other's dialect. For example, the local dialects of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong are Mandarin, Shanghainese/Wu Chinese, and Cantonese/Yue in that same order. If natives from each of these cities were to talk to each other in their native dialects, they would not understand each other. This is because they are too different from each other. This is why the governments of China and Taiwan want their citizens to speak Standard Mandarin in public so that there can be a spoken dialect of Chinese everyone can understand. While the spoken dialects are mutually unintelligible, they all use the same written code, Chinese characters, so they can understand each other if they write to each other.
These examples above show that the difference between language and dialect is often hard to define, even for linguists, or people who study languages as their job.
When a speaker of one language can understand what a speaker of another language is saying but not the other way around, it is called asymmetric intelligibility. An example of of this is Portuguese and Spanish. While Portuguese speakers say they can understand Spanish without major problems, Spanish speakers, on the other hand, have a very difficult time understanding Portuguese speakers. This situation is actually quite common across languages.
Language |
---
title: "基于Java、jQuery开发的账务管理系统(个人版)即将开源"
wordpress_id: 89
wordpress_url: http://www.wsria.com/?p=89
date: 2009-02-13 15:15:01 +08:00
tags:
- jquery
---
最近公司的事情太多没有时间整理源代码，公司总是把员工当做年轻的黄牛使用，什么事情都交给你做……
情人节别人双双亲亲热热的咱着个宅男还是在家里codeing，正好趁这个时间把代码整理发布给大家，帮助那些想在java环境中使用jQuery的同学快速入门并应用的实际项目中去
前段时间在<a title="googlecode" href="http://www.googlecode.com" target="_blank">googlecode</a>上申请了一个空间专门存放系统版本库，地址暂时先不公布，下周发布时发布消息。
需要此系统的同学可以先留下<a href="http://www.gmail.com" target="_blank">gmail</a>账号
<a title="预览系统截图" href="http://www.wsria.com/archives/73" target="_blank">系统预览</a>
谢谢关注，敬请期待……
|
Theo-Ben Gurirab (23 January 1938 - 14 July 2018) was a Namibian politician. He was the second Prime Minister of Namibia between 28 August 2002 to 20 March 2005. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1990 to 2002.
Gurirab was President of the United Nations General Assembly from 1999 to 2000. He was Speaker of the National Assembly from 2005 to 2015. Gurirab retired from active politics in 2015.
Gurirab died at a Windhoek hospital on 14 July 2018., aged 80 |
Induction of apoptosis by ribosome-inactivating proteins and related immunotoxins.
Immunotoxins have been prepared with 3 ribosome-inactivating proteins (RIPs), namely, momordin, pokeweed anti-viral protein from seeds (PAP-S) and saporin, linked to the Ber-H2 monoclonal antibody directed against the CD30 antigen of human lymphocytes. Either the RIPs or the immunotoxins induced apoptosis in the CD30+ L540 cell line, as shown by the morphological aspects of the cells, by the DNA fragmentation visible at the electrophoresis, and by the formation of DNA breaks evidenced by 2 cytofluorometric techniques (propidium-iodide staining and fluoresceine-isothiocyanate conjugate dUTP incorporation). The AC50 (concentration causing apoptosis in 50% of the cells) is in the range 10(-8) to 10(-7) M in the case of RIPs, and 10(-11) to 10(-10) M in the case of the immunotoxins. |
Toivakka is a municipality in Central Finland. It had almost 2,050 people living there in January 2014. The municipalities next to it are Hankasalmi, Joutsa, Jyvaskyla, Kangasniemi, Laukaa and Muurame.
Some villages
Haukanmaa, Huikko, Humalamaki, Kankainen, Nisula, Paloskyla, Ruuhimaki, Taka-Toivakka, Vihijarvi and Viisarimaki. |
A tripolar current-steering stimulator ASIC for field shaping in deep brain stimulation.
A significant problem with clinical deep brain stimulation (DBS) is the high variability of its efficacy and the frequency of side effects, related to the spreading of current beyond the anatomical target area. This is the result of the lack of control that current DBS systems offer on the shaping of the electric potential distribution around the electrode. This paper presents a stimulator ASIC with a tripolar current-steering output stage, aiming at achieving more selectivity and field shaping than current DBS systems. The ASIC was fabricated in a 0.35-μ m CMOS technology occupying a core area of 0.71 mm(2). It consists of three current sourcing/sinking channels. It is capable of generating square and exponential-decay biphasic current pulses with five different time constants up to 28 ms and delivering up to 1.85 mA of cathodic current, in steps of 4 μA, from a 12 V power supply. Field shaping was validated by mapping the potential distribution when injecting current pulses through a multicontact DBS electrode in saline. |
Paul Larose (born November 1, 1950) is a Canadian retired ice hockey forward who played 33 games in the World Hockey Association for the Quebec Nordiques and Michigan Stags/Baltimore Blades.
Career statistics |
Analysis: how the dramatic shift in British politics is clear in this election
The Guardian’s editor-in-chief takes a look at what the candidate lists can tell us about this election and the way Britain’s political dynamics have changed.
This election is set to be fought between the centre and the right, according to Guardian analysis of the candidate lists.
The August 2019 general election got underway today and promises to be closely fought. And, like any election, it comes with many of the traditions of British democracy: manifestoes being harshly scrutinised; leaders trotting up and down the country to spread their message, and talk down the messages of other parties; and the relatively new tradition of the electoral commission publishing the list of every candidate running this election. The Guardian is aiming to produce a comprehensive profile of every candidate seeking a vote in this election, but, even without that, the candidate list illustrated a dramatic dynamic shift that has been tangible at Westminster since the Greens withdrew from the Traffic Light Coalition (Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, and, in the most recent case, Plaid Cymru) earlier this term.
First, a bit of history. The rise of the Radical Socialist redefined the underlying currents of British politics, taking the far-left mainstream and conquering the left in the process. When the RSP dramatically collapsed – taking the left in general with it and opening the way to Conservative dominance – this created a new power dynamic in British politics. Britain’s elections began to become fought between two clearly-defined ideological electoral blocs: the left and the right who largely endorsed each other in elections and worked together in opposition. This dynamic was repeatedly threatened, first by Green withdrawal from a TLC opposition in the winter of 2017, and then the formation of a grand coalition government of the Conservatives and Labour, which damaged alliances and led to the creation of the Liberal Alliance opposition coalition.
Even then, the dynamic withheld. Labour’s withdrawal from that government prior to the next election allowed them to heal relations with the Green party who they formed an official opposition with. Relations with the Liberal Democrats also healed, and there were endorsement deals in that election. But this reflected one of the central features of this dynamic: that more centre parties (the Liberal Democrats on the left and the Classical Liberals on the right) never felt particularly comfortable part of their ideological bloc.
They were stationed much closer to the centre of British politics, but you would be hard pressed to argue that there was a clearly defined centre bloc. The Liberal Democrats and Classical Liberals cooperated closely with one another, yes, but the Liberal Democrats also worked closely with the left, and the same for the Classical Liberals on the right. The proof that a centre bloc never really existed was in the way that, following the demise of the Liberal Alliance, the Liberal Democrats went back to the left, leading a TLC opposition, and the Classical Liberals who joined a right wing Brexit Coalition. The temporary formation of a makeshift centre was facilitated by a Liberal Democrat leader and prime minister (TheNoHeart) from his party’s right, and a Classical Liberal leader and deputy prime minister (CDocwra) from his party’s left.
But, my contention is that, that changed this term for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Green party eventually left the Traffic Light Coalition amid a great deal of acrimony following the formation of splinter far-left grouping the People’s Movement, led by former Prime Minister ContrabannedtheMC, to whom the Greens promised his Oxfordshire and Berkshire seat in a by-election – a promise that went down exceptionally badly with the Liberal Democrats. They threatened to withdraw from the coalition, but it was finally the Greens who pulled the plug, leaving the coalition with bitter recriminations against Labour on Twitter. This all but shattered relations on the left in a way that even the Grand Coalition did not.
Secondly, the party was already in the midst of a polling decline before its exodus from the opposition, and was now losing some of its biggest names and most moderate members. In an attempt to resurrect their fortunes, they conducted a merger with the People’s Movement with a new internal faction structure, rebranding to Green-Left. This did not last long. Soon the People’s Movement splintered off once again, but what that whole episode showed was that the Greens had turned away from traditional centre-left allies to find its salvation in the far-left – as demonstrated by its manifesto.
Thirdly, the Social Democratic party formed. First they were the Independent Social Democrats, and most doubted that they would last as a significant national force. And then they won more votes than the Liberal Democrats in the Holyrood elections and rebranded as the SDP. Seeing Labour as having moved too far left, the SDP set itself up as a progressive alternative for centre-left voters bored of a political dichotomy.
Fourthly, Labour rocketed in the polls to top 20% of the vote for the first time since before their departure from the Grand Coalition in 2018. At the same time, the SDP and Classical Liberals rose, while the Greens and the Liberal Democrats fell. For the first time in a long time it is actually starting to look feasible that there could be a Labour prime minister in Downing Street in the form of Secretary_Salami. But, in modern Britain’s electoral system you must be able to form a coalition in order to secure a majority in the House of Commons. The dynamics were clear for Labour: if they want the keys to No 10 they cannot rely on the traditional left alone – neither the Green party, with whom relations had soured and who had secluded themselves on the far-left nor the declining and crisis-stricken Liberal Democrats. Ideologically, Labour had more of an affinity with them, but strategically it made no sense.
And that brings us up to now and the candidate list for this election which confirms what that trend means in electoral term. There is no longer simply a left and right bloc. The centre bloc – termed because it is now a cohesive group that sits in the centre between the left bloc, which is now the far-left, and the right bloc, rather than describing Labour as a centrist party – is now a fully fledged alliance of its own, consisting of Labour, the SDP, the Liberal Democrats and the Classical Liberals. Where’s the proof? Notice Labour’s endorsements. Not a single endorsement of, or from, the Greens or any of the other new far-left parties. The same is true of the SDP while the Liberal Democrats have a couple of endorsement deals with the People’s Movement. It’s less true of the Classical Liberals on the right, but, whereas in previous elections they have heavily endorsed the Conservatives and LPUK, this time there are far more centre-left endorsements.
Yet, Labour’s very left wing manifesto and the reaction of their fellow centre parties to what has been regarded as a strategic misstep – by producing policies far from what their new, closer-to-the-centre allies could accepted – shows that while it was previously the centre parties who felt uncomfortable in the bloc that the voters forced them to work with, now it is Labour. The party wants to be more left wing, but is forced by circumstance to work with the middle and they have had a very hard time squaring that with where the party currently is ideologically. And although it has moved a little bit to the right compared to February, the manifesto remains very left wing in some places, and occasionally more left wing, and has become more centrist in others. Thus, their manifesto reads as an incoherent, uneven vision with no clear, consistent narrative or sense of identity. The party wants to be back on the left, but, unlike the Greens, they want to form a government and cannot retreat to their ideological comfort zone. Previous Labour manifestos could be left wing because the party didn’t need to worry about forming a majority coalition, but doing the same this time was an error and shows us that even those at the heart of the formation of this new political dynamic have not fully comprehended what this means.
Yet, despite that, the centre retains some of the ad-hoc, ramshackled nature that it has always contained. Right wing endorsements are crisp, clean and near universal, with the Tories and LPUK endorsing each other strongly, with occasional endorsements of the Classical Liberals, and one of the Liberal Democrats. The centre meanwhile is a bit of a mess. Besides the Classical Liberals returning the favour with Conservative and LPUK endorsements, while the right has a clean set of endorsements, with just two parties trading endorsements and back and forth across most seats, this is far from true of the centre.
Centre endorsements are a complete smorgasboard. In some seats, two have endorsed each other, while the other have their own endorsement deal. In others, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and SDP have endorsed each other while the Classical Liberals have endorsed the LPUK. And in many seats, the Liberal Democrats haven’t endorsed anyone, nor are the running a candidate. As mentioned, they’ve also endorsed The People’s Movement in a small number of seats – a very minor bridge between the left and centre which are, on the whole, divorced from each other. What this says, like Labour’s manifesto, is that these centre parties have not yet realised that they are now one of the main blocs of British politics. They are no longer divided between left and right. It’s a bit of a strategic coup for the right, and demonstrates how rapidly, and stealthily, this dynamic shift has come about.
This, I would wager, will be the central story of this election campaign, and will be vital in forming a government in the new Parliament. Relationships, dramatic polling changes, and big developments have given the centre more power than ever before. Parties like the People’s Movement, the Democratic Reformists, and the Phoenix Committee are desperately looking to re-energise the left after the near total collapse of the Greens, and many have endorsed each other, and the Greens, forming the new left bloc – what is essentially now the far-left, since the centre-left is now allied with the centre. Ultimately, though, they have no hope of government and are likely too far leftwards for many Labour voters who may be uncomfortable with who their party is now working with. Despite their best efforts, this election is not left v right – as much as Labour might prefer it – but it is instead now centre v right and it makes it one of the most interesting elections in a long time.
The Guardian will continue to cover this story and other stories of the election as they unfold. The Guardian will continue it’s manifesto summaries and analysis soon, with many currently being written. The Guardian is your best source for keeping up with the nuances, twists, turns, and features of this election campaign and what it will mean for the country, with our analysis pieces, op-eds, coverage of the big events, our Agenda Summer 2019 series looking at the big issues of the election, and exclusive interviews. Stick with the Guardian for the next week, and beyond, for your front row seat to history! |
Cynthia Coffman is an American serial killer. In 1986, she killed two women in California. She was convicted along with her boyfriend, James Marlow. Coffman says she was present when the women were killed. She also says that she suffered from battered woman syndrome. She was sentenced to death and is sitting on death row in a prison in California.
Life
She was bourn in St .Louis, Missouri. She had a difficult childhood. Her father soon left the family, and her mother raised her alone. At one point, her mother tried to give her and her brother away. When she was 18 years old, she was married. She became a mother. The marriage did not last long, however. She moved to Arizona with a friend. She met Marlow shortly after he was released from jail. They started to take methamphetamine together, got married, and began to commit violent crimes.
Crimes and trial
Both Coffman and Marlow were accused of killing four women, in October and November 1986. Coffman confessed to the murders, Her attorneys said that she loved Marlow, bur that he brainwashed and abused her.
They were put on trial in July 1989 and 1990 and sentenced to death. Coffman was the first woman to receive a death sentence in California since the death penalty was reintroducerd in 1977. A trial in 1992 convicted her of another murder, for which she received a sentence of life imprisonment. After this, Coffman confessed to the murders. |
Immunodiffusion test for ovine progressive pneumonia.
An agar gel immunodiffusion test was developed to detect precipitating antibody against ovine progressive pneumonia (OPP) virus. The test was conducted in plastic petri dishes containing 6 ml of 1% purified agar in tris buffer and 8% sodium chloride. Wells for serum and antigen were 8 mm in diameter and were cut in a hexagonal pattern 3 cm from a central well. Tests were read at 24 and 48 hours. Soluble antigen for the test consisted of concentrated nutrient medium removed every 2 weeks from a cell culture persistently infected with isolate WLC 1 of OPP virus. Specificity of results was verified by testing serums from experimentally exposed sheep and appropriate controls. Two lines of precipitate formed with some serums from experimentally inoculated sheep. Serums taken soon after exposure of sheep to the virus and those taken 3 to 4 years after exposure frequently formed only 1 line of precipitate. Of 37 lambs inoculated with OPP virus, 25% of those tested were positive by postinoculation (PI) month 1, 79% of those tested were positive by PI month 3, and all of those tested were positive by PI month 6. The test appears adequate to detect exposure of sheep to OPP virus. |
Live a Paris (English: Live in Paris) is a live album by Canadian singer Celine Dion.
Track listing
"J'attendais" (Jean-Jacques Goldman) - 4:58
"Destin" (Goldman) - 4:11
"The Power of Love" (Candy DeRouge, Gunther Mende, Mary Susan Applegate, Jennifer Rush) - 4:45
"Regarde-moi" (Goldman) - 3:49
"River Deep, Mountain High" (Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich) - 3:29
"Un garcon pas comme les autres (Ziggy)" (Luc Plamondon, Michel Berger) - 5:03
"Les derniers seront les premiers" (with Jean-Jacques Goldman) (Goldman) - 3:52
"J'irai ou tu iras" (with Jean-Jacques Goldman) (Goldman) - 3:46
"Je sais pas" (Goldman, J. Kapler) - 4:25
"Le ballet" (Goldman) - 10:33
"Priere paienne" (Goldman) - 4:55
"Pour que tu m'aimes encore" (Goldman) - 5:10
"Quand on n'a que l'amour" (Jacques Brel) - 4:41
"Vole" (Goldman) - 4:03
"To Love You More" (studio recording) (David Foster, Junior Miles) - 5:28
Charts and certifications
Charts
Awards
Release history |
I’m not exactly sure who introduced me to blood oranges, not clear on where I was, or when it even happened. But I’d like to take a minute and say whoever you are, where ever you are, thank you. I owe ya one (a blood orange, that is).
I love bulking up on citrus this time of year. In the winter months, citrus is at its peak season and is so fresh, juicy, and delicious. It’s probably no coincidence either that these vitamin C-packed, immune-boosting fruits are abundant in the winter when cold and flu season is in full-force.
The moro (blood) orange is one variety not to miss because of its uniqueness in appearance and flavor. Its flesh is deep red, a far cry from its orange friends and family. And that deep red color means it contains a powerful antioxidant – anthocyanin, which protects the body from oxidative damage. It’s also less acidic than navel oranges and sweet enough that you can almost taste a hint of raspberry or strawberry.
I’ve been into roasting fruits lately (ever since my epic roasted balsamic strawberry shortcake last year) and wanted to try roasting blood oranges to see this awesome fruit taken to another level. Roasting caramelized the sugars so it definitely bumped the sweetness up a notch, which made them a perfect addition to morning oatmeal.
I feel like oatmeal gets a bad rep and I’m not sure why exactly. People think it’s boring, bland, the list goes on. But everyone knows that an outfit is only as good as its accessories, right? Jeans and a tee shirt can only go so far unless you pair them with a cute pair of flats and a statement necklace. Same thing with oatmeal. You’ve got to accessorize it to make it beautiful (and delicious).
I also think this could be a perfectly pretty breakfast-in-bed for you and your sweetheart for Valentine’s Day next weekend.
I think I was first introduced to blood oranges when I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, and I’ve loved them ever since! I’ve been really into using them in salads, especially with fennel, this winter! |
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen is a 1981 American mystery comedy movie directed by Clive Donner and is the latest movie in the Charlie Chan series. It stars Peter Ustinov, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lee Grant, Angie Dickinson, Roddy McDowall, Brian Keith, Rachel Roberts, Courteney Cox. |
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Because I had the solia iron and to this day have not found anything better, I had assumed their blow dryer would be just as amazing to me. I watched reviews and read up on it because I work for minimum wage and it's a big purchase for me - and it looked perfect based on what I saw. I love the way it looks. But I really don't see a difference between my hair using the Solia dryer and my old Conair Infiniti. I've never had problems with knots but this dryer blows my hair everywhere and there's no setting low enough to avoid massive tangles. Dry time takes just as long also. On the plus side, it is literally the prettiest hair dryer I've ever seen. I just wish it was as great as it looks.
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Stevie M.
United States
Hair
Oily Hair
Curly Hair
Fine or Thin Hair
Works For Me!
I usually buy blow dryers from the drugstore and they fried my hair. This is my first "high end" blow dryer and I really like it! My hair comes out very shiny and now I rarely use any extra products in my hair. I know there are concerns that this unit doesn't get very hot. I prefer it that way. I find that the hotter the tool, the frizzier my hair gets. Using this dryer cuts down most of that frizz. It also drys my hair faster than the old Conair one I used to use.
I've had this product for about a year. Granted, I only use it every once in a while, but I've had no problems with it thus far. I would recommend it to someone who's hair has been burned by cheap drugstore dryers.
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Marisol P.
New York
Hair
Dry Hair
Curly Hair
Color Treated Hair
Miss It So Much Getting Another One!
I had this hair dryer! It was amazing. After 3 years my daughter dropped it on my tile floor and broke it. I bought a rusk because I thought it would be better. NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is too strong and all it did was burn my hair and kill my curls. Yes it did dry my hair faster as the Rusk claims but at the expense of my hair. I am ordering my Solia again right now!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Mon
United States
Hair
Medium Brown
Normal Hair
Color Treated Hair
Thick or Coarse Hair
So Far, So Great!
I've never owned a nice hair dryer - I always bought the Conair ones from the drug store! I can't believe how well this hair dryer works - Saturday night, my hair was almost completely dry and styled in 8 minutes! I have very thick brown hair that is pretty long. I am so thankful for a good friend who turned me onto this site, and helped me choose an affordable, yet great product. It came with a 2 year warranty - it was in the box, but I am not sure where I put it for "safe keeping" - oops!
Only con so far - it is a bit heavy, so if that's an issue for you this won't be a dryer you'll like. I'm enjoying the extra bicep/tricep workout! :-)
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Lori
Hair
Dark Brown
Normal Hair
Color Treated Hair
Solia - Not Hot
Purchased a Solia after four years of owning the Sedu Revolution. The negative reviews for both products are correct. The Solia does not get hot and just blows a lot ...making a frizzy mess. The negative reviews on the Sedu is that back filter piece easily fall off and or breaks. The Sedu did come with the 2 yr warranty and when it was close to the 2yr mark it was not getting as hot. I sent it back to Folica for warranty repair (very easy process), they fixed it and returned it very quickly. After a couple more years of use my Sedu wasn't as hot so I decided to try a new model hair dryer.. the Solia 1875. It just doesn't have the power - makes your hair frizzy - much shorter cord than Sedu and buttons are not that great. Half the time you spend pressing them to see if you have it on the hottest setting,,, which usually you do. I have returned the Solia to Folica and repurchased a new Sedu. The small negative of the Sedu outweigh all the positive.
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Kjc
Hair
Blonde
Curly Hair
Color Treated Hair
Thick or Coarse Hair
The Reviews Were Right!
After reading the positive reviews I purchased this hair dryer to replace my very old Babyliss. This is an excellent dryer at a great price! No it doesn't get very hot, but that is a good thing for me since I tend to "fry" my hair. There is enough warm air circulating through the shaft to dry my thick and curly hair. Highly recommend!
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Maritza B.
Miami, FL
Hair
Dark Brown
Oily Hair
Thick or Coarse Hair
Worth It
My cousin recommended I step up to a blow dryer that is going to do a good job for a long time - this is it! I am absolutely happy with my purchase. I have thick wavy hair and it used to take me up to two hours to get it straight and just "ok" looking, but now I get to do it under an hour and it looks fabulous!
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Gibson
Not So Great....
Based on reviews I purchased this dryer. After using it for a week I have to say it doesn't live up to my expectations. It's no better than any other dryer I have used and certainly no better than the Chi I sent for recycling, but at least I got $40 off the cost of this one. That helps ease the pain.
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"Fed Up" is the a song by DJ Khaled. It was released on March 2, 2010. It became his first single from his album Victory (2010). The song features Usher, Young Jeezy, Rick Ross and Drake.
Charts
2009 songs
Drake (musician) songs
Lil Wayne songs
Usher songs |
Desensitization of the stimulatory A2 adenosine receptor-adenylate cyclase system in vascular smooth muscle cells from rat aorta.
We have previously shown that adenylate cyclase present in rat aorta vascular smooth muscle cells can be stimulated by adenosine, its analogs and other agonists. In the present studies, we have examined the effect of preexposure of aorta vascular smooth muscle cells to N-ethylcarboxamide adenosine (NECA) on adenylate cyclase activity stimulated by NECA and other agonists. The vascular smooth muscle cells, when exposed to NECA, resulted in a concentration- and time-dependent loss of NECA-stimulated adenylate cyclase activity. NECA stimulated adenylate cyclase activity by about 120% in control cells, which was decreased to 20% in cells pretreated with 50 microM NECA for 30 min at 37 degrees C. However, GTP-, isoproterenol-, and forskolin-sensitive adenylate cyclase activities were not affected by such treatment, suggesting that NECA treatment of the cells resulted in homologous desensitization. Similarly, the exposure of the cells to isoproterenol resulted in the desensitization of isoproterenol-stimulated adenylate cyclase activity without affecting the NECA-stimulated adenylate cyclase activity. Furthermore, when NECA-treated cells were washed free of agonist, the desensitized state was reversed and the cells regained about 75% responsiveness to NECA stimulation of adenylate cyclase. |
National Party of South Africa was an Afrikaner dominated white South African nationalist political party that controlled the South African government from 1948 to 1994. It was founded in 1914 by J.B.M. Hertzog as a result of disagreements between him and the leaders of the South African Party, which he then was a member of. In 1948 its leader Daniel Francois Malan became Prime Minister of South Africa, and the party began instituting apartheid in South Africa. However, apartheid was only one among a variety of issues that helped bring the National Party to power. Most people who voted for the National Party in 1948 were voting more against the previous United Party led by Jan Smuts than for Malan's National Party. This was because of Smuts's support of the United Kingdom in the Second World War, and other issues that irritated Afrikaner voters such as the poverty of Afrikaners, the competition from native Africans for jobs, the urbanization of Afrikaner towns, and the threat of communism, which the Afrikaner voters generally felt Smuts had wrongly handled and felt that the problems were partially his fault. South African President FW de Klerk, the last South African government leader to belong to the party, disbanded apartheid in the 1990s and allowed all adults of all races to vote for the first time in 1994, which resulted in the National Party being voted out of office. |
He Cihong
He Cihong (born 6 June 1975) is a Chinese former swimmer who competed in the 1992 Summer Olympics and in the 1996 Summer Olympics.
At the 1994 FINA World Championships, she won the 100- and 200-meter backstroke events, setting the meet record in the women's 100 back at 1:00.16.
See also
World record progression 100 metres backstroke
World record progression 200 metres backstroke
References
Category:1975 births
Category:Living people
Category:Chinese female swimmers
Category:Female backstroke swimmers
Category:Olympic swimmers of China
Category:Swimmers at the 1992 Summer Olympics
Category:Swimmers at the 1996 Summer Olympics
Category:World record setters in swimming
Category:World Aquatics Championships medalists in swimming
Category:Medalists at the FINA World Swimming Championships (25 m)
Category:Asian Games medalists in swimming
Category:Asian Games gold medalists for China
Category:Swimmers at the 1994 Asian Games
Category:Medalists at the 1994 Asian Games |
Cardinal or The Cardinal may refer to:
Christianity
Cardinal (Catholicism), a senior official of the Catholic Church
Cardinal (Church of England), two members of the College of Minor Canons of St. Paul's Cathedral
Navigation
Cardinal direction, one of the four primary directions: north, south, east, and west
Cardinal mark, a sea mark used in navigation
Mathematics
Cardinal number
Large cardinal
Animals
Cardinal (bird) or Cardinalidae, a family of North and South American birds
Cardinalis, genus of cardinal in the family Cardinalidae
Cardinalis cardinalis, or Northern Cardinal, the common cardinal of eastern North America
Argynnis pandora, a species of butterfly
Cardinal tetra, a freshwater fish
Paroaria, a South American genus of birds
Places
Cardinal, Manitoba, Canada
Cardinal, Ontario, Canada
Cardinal High School (Middlefield, Ohio), a public high school in Middlefield, Ohio, Geauga County, United States
Cardinal Power Plant, a power plant in Jefferson County, Ohio
Cardinal, Virginia, United States
C/2008 T2 (Cardinal), a comet
Arts, entertainment, and media
Movies
Cardinal (movie), a 2001 American movie directed by Michael Harring
Cardinals (movie), a 2017 Canadian movie
The Cardinal (1936 movie), a British historical drama
The Cardinal, a 1963 American movie
Games
Cardinal (chess), a fairy chess piece, also known as the archbishop
Cardinal, a participant in the army drinking game Cardinal Puff
Music
Groups
The Cardinals (rock band), a group formed in 2003
The Cardinals, a 1950s R&B group
Albums
Cardinal (Cardinal album), a 1994 album by indie pop duo Cardinal
Cardinal (Pinegrove album), 2016
Television
Cardinal (TV series), a 2017 Canadian television series
"Cardinal" (The Americans), the second episode of the second season of the television series The Americans
Other arts, entertainment, and media
Cardinal (comics), a supervillain appearing in Marvel Comics
The Cardinal (play), a 1641 Caroline era tragedy by James Shirley
Plants
Cardinal (grape), a table grape first produced in California in 1939
Lobelia cardinalis, also known as "cardinal flower"
Businesses
Cardinal Brewery, a brewery founded in 1788 by Francois Piller, in Fribourg, Switzerland
Cardinal Health, a health care services company
Sports
Arizona Cardinals, an American professional football team
Assindia Cardinals, an American football club from Essen, Germany
Ball State Cardinals, the athletic teams of Ball State University
Cardenales de Lara, a Venezuelan baseball team
Catholic University Cardinals, the athletic teams of the Catholic University of America
Front Royal Cardinals, an American baseball team
Lamar Cardinals, the athletic teams of Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, USA
Louisville Cardinals, the athletic teams of University of Louisville
Mapua Cardinals, the athletic teams of Mapua Institute of Technology
North Central Cardinals, the athletic teams of North Central College
St. John Fisher Cardinals, the athletic teams of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY
St. Louis Cardinals, an American professional baseball team
Stanford Cardinal, the athletic teams of Stanford University
Wesleyan Cardinals, the athletic teams of Wesleyan University
West Perth Football Club, an Australian rules football club in Western Australia
Woking F.C., an English football team
Transport
Aircraft
Cessna 177 Cardinal, a single engine aircraft
St. Louis Cardinal C-2-110, a light aircraft built in 1928
Trains
Cardinal (train)
The Cardinal (railcar)
Linguistics
Cardinal number (linguistics), a part of speech for expressing numbers by name
Cardinal vowel, a concept in phonetics
Other uses
Cardinal (color), a vivid red
Cardinal (name), a surname
Cardinal, a Ruby programming language implementation using for the Parrot virtual machine |
1. Field of the Invention (Technical Field)
The present invention relates to the field of digital signal processing.
Delta Sigma technology has been widely used in converting analog signals to digital signals, it has not been commonly applied in digital signal processing, because of the lack of Delta Sigma based linear processing circuits. Here, this invention is directed to an alternative method using a 1-bit DSP system to process Delta Sigma bit-streams directly.
2. Description of Related Art
In digital signal processing systems, the most important linear circuits are adders, coefficient multipliers, and compressors. To build those circuits with low noise and complexity, pure digital implementations are preferable. However, some previous Delta Sigma processing methods focused on modifying the Delta Sigma modulators, J. Melanson, “Signal processing system using delta-sigma modulation having an internal stabilizer path with direct output-to-integrator connection,” U.S. Pat. No. 7,696,913, 2010; J. Choi, S. Han, J. Jang, and H. Yu, “Structure of delta-sigma fractional divider,” U.S. Patent Publication No. 2003/0108143; M. Cho, Y. Kim, and J. Kwon, “Coefficient multiplier and digital delta sigma modulator using the same,” U.S. Patent Publication No. 2011/0140940, instead of processing the modulated bit-stream. Moreover some solutions are hindered by involving analog operations, A. Niwa and Y. Ueno, “Delta-sigma modulator and signal processing system,” U.S. Pat. No. 8,581,763, 2013; T. Moue, “Delta-sigma modulator and signal processing system,” U.S. Pat. No. 8,581,764, 2013; V. F. Dias, “Signal processing in the sigma-delta domain,” Microelectron. J., vol. 26, pp. 543-562, 1995, or tri-state digital circuits, C.-W. Ng, N. Wong, and T.-S. Ng, “Bit-stream adders and multipliers for tri-level sigma delta modulators,” Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 54, no. 12, pp. 1082-1086, December 2007, which increase the complexity of the circuits. Other designs are impeded by their ability of processing only first-order Delta Sigma bit-streams, N. Kouvaras, “Operations on delta-modulated signals and their application in the realization of digital filters,” Radio and Electronic Engineer, vol. 48, no. 9, pp. 431-438, September 1978; N. Kouvaras, “Some novel elements for delta-modulated signal processing,” Radio and Electronic Engineer, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 241-250, May 1981; N. Kouvaras and J. Karakatsanis, “A technique for a substantial reduction of the quantization noise in the direct processing of delta-modulated signals,” Signal Processing, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 107-119, 1985; N. Kouvaras, “Modular network for direct complete addition of delta modulated signals with minimum quantization error,” International Journal of Electronics, vol. 59, no. 5, pp. 587-595, 1985; H. Fujisaka, R. Kurata, M. Sakamoto, and M. Morisue, “Bit-stream signal processing and its application to communication systems,” Circuits, Devices and Systems, IEE Proceedings, vol. 149, no. 3, pp. 159-166, 2002; K. Matsuyama, H. Fujisaka, and T. Kamino, “Arithmetic and piecewise linear circuits for sigma-delta domain multi-level signal processing,” in 2005 International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications (NOLTA 2005), October 2005, pp. 58-61; Y. Hidaka, H. Fujisaka, M. Sakamoto, and M. Morisue, “Piecewise linear operations on sigma-delta modulated signals,” in Electronics, Circuits and Systems, 2002. 9th International Conference on, vol. 3, 2002, pp. 983-986 vol. 3; D. Zrilic, “Method and apparatus for mixed analog and digital processing of delta modulated pulse streams including digital-to-analog conversion of a digital input signal,” U.S. Pat. No. 5,349,353, 1994; D. Zrilic, “Circuits and methods for functional processing of delta modulated pulse density stream,” U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,306, 2001; S. Horianopoulos, V. Anastassopoulos, and T. Deliyannis, “Design technique for hardware reduction in delta modulation fir filters,” International Journal of Electronics, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 93-106, 1991; A. Pneumatikakis, V. Anastassopoulos, and T. Deliyannis, “Realization of a high-order iir delta sigma filter,” International Journal of Electronics, vol. 78, no. 6, pp. 1071-1089, 1995; P. O'Leary and F. Maloberti, “Bit stream adder for oversampling coded data,” Electronics Letters, vol. 26, no. 20, pp. 1708-1709, September 1990; Y. Liang, Z. Wang, Q. Meng, and X. Guo, “Design of high speed high SNR bit-stream adder based on delta sigma modulation,” Electronics Letters, vol. 46, no. 11, pp. 752-753, May 2010; D. McGrath, “Method and apparatus for processing sigma-delta modulated signals,” U.S. Pat. No. 5,990,818, 1999, which do not fit the widely used higher-order Delta Sigma modulators. Furthermore adders in Kouvaras can only take two inputs. So far the most promising structure of processing higher-order Delta Sigma bit-stream is the digital Delta Sigma modulator proposed by Fujisaka et al. in H. Fujisaka, M. Sakamoto, C.-J. Ahn, T. Kamio, and K. Haeiwa, “Sorter based arithmetic circuits for sigma-delta domain signal processing—part ii: Multiplication and algebraic functions,” Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 59, no. 9, pp. 1966-1979, September 2012. Although that system has achieved higher-order noise shaping with high signal-to-noise-plus-distortion-ratio (SNDR), the complicated sorting network in Fujisaka et al. requires a great amount of circuit resources, which may work better with future quantum device. T. Katao, Y. Suzuki, H. Fujisaka, T. Kamio, C.-J. Ahn, and K. Haeiwa, “Single-electron arithmetic circuits for sigma-delta domain signal processing,” in Nanotechnology, 2008. NANO '08. 8th IEEE Conference on, August 2008, pp. 729-732.
The Delta Sigma average adder proposed by N. Kouvaras [N. Kouvaras, “Operations on delta-modulated signals and their application in the realization of digital filters,” Radio and Electronic Engineer, vol. 48, no. 9, pp. 431-438, September 1978] is shown in FIG. 1. It uses a binary full adder with switched role of sum and carry output. It can take only two inputs. The analog value of the output bit stream is the average value of the two input bit stream, instead of the sum.
The Delta Sigma coefficient multiplier [N. Kouvaras, “Operations on delta-modulated signals and their application in the realization of digital filters,” Radio and Electronic Engineer, vol. 48, no. 9, pp. 431-438, September 1978] based on the average adder is shown in FIG. 2.
The tri-state Delta Sigma adder [IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, vol. 54, no. 12, pp. 1082-1086, December 2007] is shown proposed by Chiu-Wa Ng. et al. is shown in FIG. 3. The circuit uses tri-state digital signals, which is not well compatible with current bi-state digital technology.
The digital Delta Sigma modulator proposed by David A. Johns [David A. Johns and David M. Lewis: Design and Analysis of Delta Sigma Based IIR Filter, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing. Vol. 40, No. 4, April 1993, pp. 233-240] is shown in FIG. 4. The main application is digital filtering. The digital Delta Sigma modulator does not have a toggling multiplexer thus the output noise is high.
The Delta Sigma adder based on sorting network proposed by Fujisaka et. al., [H. Fujisaka, M. Sakamoto, C.-J. Ahn, T. Kamio, and K. Haeiwa, “Sorter based arithmetic circuits for sigma-delta domain signal processing—part ii: Multiplication and algebraic functions,” Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 59, no. 9, pp. 1966-1979, September 2012.] is shown in FIG. 5. The circuit uses complex sorting networks. |
Lynbrook is a village in Nassau County, New York, USA. The population was 19,427 at the 2010 census. The Incorporated Village of Lynbrook is inside the Town of Hempstead. The Village of Lynbrook's current mayor is William Hendrick.
Towns in New York (state) |
Polish-Brazilian pair claim title without dropping a setLukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo dominated the doubles field at the Mutua Madrid Open, clinching their second ATP World Tour Masters 1000 of the year without dropping a set.Kubot and Melo downed Frenchmen Nicolas Mahut and Edouard Roger-Vasselin 7-5, 6-3 in one hour and 20 minutes on Sunday. The Polish-Brazilian pair turned in an impressive serving performance, claiming 88 per cent of first serve points and saving three of four break points faced. Also the champions in Miami and runners-up in Indian Wells, Kubot and Melo are off to a flying start in their first full season together. They improve to 17-7 in 2017 and open a 240-point lead over Henri Kontinen and John Peers atop the Emirates ATP Doubles Race To London, passing the Finnish-Aussie duo for No. 1."We can't feel better," said Melo. "We played another really good tournament. In four Masters 1000 tournaments we won two and reached another final, so these are pretty big results. I am really happy the way we are playing now and looking forward to the next one."Lukasz went to Barcelona alone because my mom had some health problems, but she's perfect now. She is recovering at home and watched our final today. It's Mother's Day in Brazil so this title is for her."
After exchanging breaks midway through the first set, the fourth seeds sealed the opener with another break in the 12th game. They would reel off five straight games, also snatching the early lead in the second set, and did not look back from there. With Melo serving for the match at 5-3, Roger-Vasselin turned aside the first championship point with a rifled return winner, but could not handle Melo's delivery on the second.
Individually, it was Kubot's 16th tour-level doubles crown and fourth with Melo. They had also teamed up to win consecutive titles in Vienna in 2015-16. The Brazilian now owns 24 tour-level titles in total, including seven at the Masters 1000 level. They earn 1,000 Emirates ATP Doubles Rankings points and split €323,200 in prize money."We're learning day-by-day how to improve and we're having great results," said Kubot. "We have to be ready for the tough moments and the next big event in Rome. Let's see what will happen in the future."The French duo of Mahut and Roger-Vasselin, meanwhile, were bidding for their fifth team title and first since 2013, when they won on the grass of Newport. Mahut falls to 17-13 in tour-level doubles finals, while Roger-Vasselin drops to 13-6.
_________________“I doubt about myself, I think the doubts are good in life. The people who don’t have doubts I think only two things: arrogance or not intelligence.”
"When these kind of matches happen you suffer, but I really enjoy these moments. I really enjoy suffering, because what's harder is when I am in Mallorca last year and I had to watch these kind of matches on the TV."
_________________“I doubt about myself, I think the doubts are good in life. The people who don’t have doubts I think only two things: arrogance or not intelligence.”
"When these kind of matches happen you suffer, but I really enjoy these moments. I really enjoy suffering, because what's harder is when I am in Mallorca last year and I had to watch these kind of matches on the TV."
_________________“I doubt about myself, I think the doubts are good in life. The people who don’t have doubts I think only two things: arrogance or not intelligence.”
"When these kind of matches happen you suffer, but I really enjoy these moments. I really enjoy suffering, because what's harder is when I am in Mallorca last year and I had to watch these kind of matches on the TV."
Rafael Nadal was made to work in claiming his fifth Mutua Madrid Open title, edging Dominic Thiem 7-6(8), 6-4 in his home capital on Sunday. Thiem refused to back down in his first ATP World Tour Masters 1000 final and the pair would produce a stunning display of high-octane tennis from first ball to last. Nadal eventually converted his fourth championship point to close out one of the matches of the year on the ATP World Tour.
The five-time champion extended his unbeaten start to the European clay-court season, which stands at 15-0 following the final. He adds to victories at the Monte-Carlo Rolex Masters and Barcelona Open Banc Sabadell, where he also defeated Thiem in the final. The Spaniard lifted a record-tying 30th ATP World Tour Masters 1000 crown, joining Novak Djokovic in the elite club.
Here is how the final unfolded..
FIRST SET - Nadal 7-6(8)Thiem burst out of the gates on a sunny late afternoon at the Caja Magica, exhibiting no signs of rust after a midnight semi-final finish against Pablo Cuevas. Launching his forehand deep to Nadal's backhand, the Austrian claimed first blood in the third game.
Nadal refused to be broken in their Barcelona final just two weeks prior, but he would concede the first break of the match in the Spanish capital as Thiem struck a volley winner. But the home favourite answered in kind in the sixth game, claiming the point of the match with a stunning defensive display from well behind the baseline. He would draw level for 3-all and pushed Thiem to the brink with the 23 year old serving to stay in the set at 5-4.
Thiem escaped from a 0/40 deficit in that game, denying all three set points and punctuating the hold with an ace down the T. Continuing to strike his forehand with conviction, Thiem was not fazed by the moment of his first Masters 1000 final and would force an opening tie-break.
The margins proved to be razor thin as the set neared its conclusion. Thiem clawed back from a mini-break down with a beautiful forehand into the open court and Nadal rifled a sublime backhand winner at 6-all. The hot shots continued as the tie-break wore on, with Thiem digging deep with a clutch stab volley winner at 7-all. But Nadal is the King of Clay for a reason and he would not be denied, taking the opener 10-8 in the tie-break after a gripping one hour and 18 minutes of high-octane tennis.
Eight of the 18 points in the tie-break were won with outright winners.
SECOND SET - Nadal 6-4Nadal fired just 14 winners to Thiem's 16 in the first set, but the Austrian was victimised by 21 unforced errors. It would continue to plague him in the opening game of the second set. Nadal was a defensive demon, tracking down everything Thiem sent his way, and he would capture the initial break for 1-0 as the World No. 9 sent a forehand long.
Thiem would not back down, proving why he is one of the brightest stars on the ATP World Tour. But despite continuing to fight and battle for every point, his energy began to fade after such an emotionally-charged first set.
Nadal held to love in two straight service games and was relentless from the baseline as the match neared the finish line. A brilliant running forehand pass moved him to within two points of the title, with Thiem serving down 5-3.
The Austrian would valiantly save two championship points at 15/40 and remarkably held four break points with Nadal serving for the title in the next game. But the Manacor native fired an ace, a service winner and a powerful forehand winner down the line, and he would eventually lift the trophy after two hours and 18 minutes of stunning, world-class tennis.
We look into storylines that emerged during the season's second clay-court Masters 1000 event. Nadal Is Appearing UntouchableCan anyone stop Rafael Nadal? The Spaniard picked up his fifth Mutua Madrid Open title and moved to 15-0 on the red dirt this year after prevailing in an epic final over Dominic Thiem. The victory also gives Nadal his 30th ATP World Tour Masters 1000 crown, tying Novak Djokovic for the all-time lead.But what stands out most is Nadal’s dominance in recording these wins. The Spaniard has won 30 of 32 sets he’s played on clay this year and recorded straight-sets wins against everyone he’s faced inside the Top 20 of the Emirates ATP Rankings. Major roadblocks including Djokovic, Thiem and David Goffin were swiftly brushed aside.Currently at the top of the Emirates ATP Race to London, which tallies all the race points accumulated beginning Jan. 1 of this year, he is now an overwhelming favourite heading into the Internazionali BNL d’Italia. Although Nadal isn’t unbeatable, it will take a brilliant performance to defeat him if he continues to play at this level.Thiem Making Push For Top 5The 23-year-old Austrian reached his first ATP Masters 1000 final in Madrid and showed it certainly won’t be his last by giving Nadal all he could handle in the final. Thiem has been in outstanding form on clay this year, winning in Rio de Janeiro (d. Carreno Busta) and finishing runner-up in Barcelona (l. Nadal).Thiem’s superior fitness means a heavy match schedule – Madrid is his 12th tournament of 2017 – won’t slow him down heading into Rome and Roland Garros. Currently third in the Emirates ATP Race to London, he looks poised to pick up plenty of points over the next few weeks.Goffin Continues Racking Up Top 10 WinsDavid Goffin has never shown fear when competing against the world’s best, but has been especially impressive in scoring scalps on clay. En route to a quarter-final showing in Madrid, the Belgian defeated Milos Raonic in the third round for his fourth Top 10 win of the season. Three of those have come on the dirt, including over Djokovic and Thiem at the Monte-Carlo Rolex Masters.Goffin is now 8-3 on clay, with two of those losses coming to Nadal. No less of an authority that Nadal praised Goffin as someone who can eventually become World No. 1, and the 26 year old is showing that he will continue to use his arsenal to its fullest potential.The #NextGenATP Players Are Coming#NextGenATP players Alexander Zverev and Borna Coric put together impressive performances in Madrid to reach the quarter-finals. Zverev ousted Marin Cilic and Tomas Berdych en route to the last eight. Coric, a lucky loser who only entered the main draw after Richard Gasquet withdrew, defeated World No. 1 Andy Murray in the third round.Zverev and Coric are the top two players in the Emirates ATP Race to Milan, which will determine who qualifies for the Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan from 7-11 November. Both men hold sizable leads over their peers in the race and will only continue to add to that gap with their current form.Kubot/Melo Are Hottest Team On TourIn their first year competing full-time as a team, Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo picked up their second ATP World Tour Masters 1000 title of the season in Madrid by defeating Nicolas Mahut and Edouard Roger-Vasselin. Kubot/Melo also won in Miami (d. Monroe/Sock) and finished runner-up in Indian Wells (l. Klaasen/Ram).Their win in Madrid also puts them past Henri Kontinen and John Peers for the top spot in the Emirates ATP Doubles Race to London, and makes them prime contenders to prevail next month at Roland Garros. |