text:
- endeavor •
Pronunciation: en-de-vêr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, intransitive
Meaning: To try hard, attempt, to take pains, to make an effort.
Notes: Today's Good Word is spelt endeavour in Jolly Old, like labour and colour. This word was immortalized on the ship that carried Captain James Cook on his "voyage of discovery" around the globe in the late 1660s. This trip made such an impression on history that we placed her name on the fifth and final NASA space shuttle to be built. The verb may be used as a noun, as in, "His work was a monumental endeavor." An endeavor is an extraordinary attempt; any lesser attempt is just a try.
In Play: As viewers of the British mystery series Inspector Morse will know, the good inspector preferred to be called just "Morse", without revealing his Christian name. Toward the end of the series we learned why: his father was an admirer of Captain Cook and in his fervor had named his son, Endeavour. Remember that endeavor means "to try hard": "Susan Liddy-Gates endeavored to retrieve the money Hans Opp had taken from his clients in a Ponzi scheme, but failed to do so."
Word History: Today's Good Word comes from the French phrase se mettre en devoir de faire quelque chose "to make it one's duty to do something". Devoir came from Old French dever "duty, obligation", in turn from Latin debere "to owe". The neuter past participle of debere is debitum, which also served as a noun meaning "thing owed". English borrowed its terms debit and debt from this word, even while it was borrowing its French grandchildren. Debere originally meant "to deprive someone of something", because it came from Latin de- "away, un-" + habere "to have". (We shall endeavor now to offer Chris Berry the show of gratitude he so deserves for submitting today's extraordinarily Good Word through the Alpha Agora.)


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Backward-Compatible Thread#onSpinWait with MethodHandles
Thread#onSpinWait is an interesting JDK9 addition to the Thread API, which is used as a hint that we're inside a spin-wait loop.
The method itself is… empty:
public static void onSpinWait() {}
But it can be intrinsified to utilize, for example, x86's PAUSE instruction – it's a small thing but results in reduced power consumption and improved performance of spin-wait loops:
Improves the performance of spin-wait loops. When executing a "spin-wait loop," a Pentium 4 or Intel Xeon processor suffers a severe performance penalty when exiting the loop because it detects a possible memory order violation. The PAUSE instruction provides a hint to the processor that the code sequence is a spin-wait loop. The processor uses this hint to avoid the memory order violation in most situations, which greatly improves processor performance. For this reason, it is recommended that a PAUSE instruction be placed in all spin-wait loops.
Unfortunately, it was introduced only in JDK9, and many libraries need to maintain JDK8(or even JDK6) compatibility.
However, since it's just a void-returning method, what if we prepared a fallback for it when running on an earlier version of Java when it can't really be used?
Thread#onSpinWait JDK8 Fallback
Java is a statically typed language, but if you're missing these dynamic flavours, they are still accessible using, for example, Reflection or MethodHandles API, which allows you to invoke Java methods dynamically.
For example, a handle representing Thread#onSpinWait could be created using:
 Thread.class, "onSpinWait", methodType(void.class))
So, we could do our best to resolve Thread#onSpinWait and when no luck, default to nothing, or some other method:
class OnSpinWaitJDK8Adapter {
 private static final MethodHandle ON_SPIN_WAIT_HANDLE = resolve();
 private OnSpinWaitJDK8Adapter() {
 private static MethodHandle resolve() {
 try {
 return MethodHandles.lookup().findStatic(
 Thread.class, "onSpinWait", methodType(void.class));
 } catch (Exception ignore) {
 return null;
 static boolean onSpinWaitOrNothing() {
 if (ON_SPIN_WAIT_HANDLE!= null) {
 try {
 return true;
 } catch (Throwable ignore) {
 return false;
Now we can spin-wait using our helper method instead which will resolve to NOOP on JDK8 and Thread#onSpinWait on JDK9+:
while (!flag.compareAndSet(false, true)) {
Or you could default to any other method that fits your use case:
while (!flag.compareAndSet(false, true)) {
 if (!OnSpinWaitJDK8Adapter.onSpinWaitOrNothing()) {
 // whatever else suits your needs
And that's all. There's also no need to be worried about performance impact since the MethodHandle is resolved at startup time and invokeExact() of static methods are on-par with plain method calls, and null-checks will most-likely be elided, and methods inlined.
A simple benchmark proves that a resolved MethodHandle on a warmed-up JVM provides similar overhead to a plan static method call, and unresolved MethodHandle performs almost like an empty method:
Benchmark Mode Cnt Score Error Units
Bench.baseline_empty avgt 15 0.388 ± 0.003 ns/op
Bench.baseline_mh_resolved avgt 15 4.755 ± 0.039 ns/op
Bench.baseline_mh_unresolved avgt 15 0.384 ± 0.001 ns/op
Bench.baseline_plain avgt 15 4.739 ± 0.015 ns/op
Just out of pure curiosity, if we enable '-XX:+LogCompilation -XX:+PrintInlining', we can additionally inspect how well the method gets inlined:
However, if extra overhead is still your concern, consider using Multi-Release JARs.
Agrona/Disruptor make use of a similar pattern: link.
The above code snippets can be found on GitHub.
If you enjoyed the content, consider supporting the site:


text:
Introducing a new take on an old classic. The Golden Oakland Holly Tree is a fantastic upright holly from the Southern Living Plant Collection. It is a variegated cousin of the Oakland Holly, giving you the same dense growing habit with the added dimension of variegated green and golden-yellow foliage.
This dense-growing holly maintains a pyramidal habit and is naturally compact, so it needs little maintenance pruning. It's height and density make it a perfect screen plant when planted in rows, and it's color adds more character to your landscape than traditional evergreen screens like arborvitae or cypress.
Once achieving the appropriate height, this plant is ideal as a nearly impenetrable privacy screen. Just try and make it through this heavy-duty beauty!
We love seeing this holly planted on the corner of houses as a foundation plant to bookend your landscape. It provides a large accent that pairs well with medium height green shrubs like Emerald Snow Loropetalum or it can accent bold pops of color from blooming shrubs like Encore Azaleas.
When Golden Oakland is still young, you can plant it in containers for a bright, evergreen accent that holds its shape. You can fill in around it with annuals or perennials to provide a spark of color and truly eye-catching container planting. This holly is also bright enough to stand on its own in a container.
Another added benefit of this dense growing evergreen holly is that it makes a wonderful habit for birds and other wildlife as it gets older. Because you don't need to prune it and its leaves are so dense, it becomes a reliable shelter for the birds you love to see!
Golden Oakland Holly Care
Grows best in Full Sun to Part Shade. Furthermore, provide at least 4-5 hours of sun daily to ensure that its foliage is dense and attractive.
Plant in slightly acidic soil for best results. If your soil is too alkaline, mix in some elemental sulfur to lower its pH.
Water 2-3 times per week during the first growing season. During its second season, water 1-2 times per week depending on the weather. Afterward, it only needs supplementary water during times of extreme heat and drought.
Fertilize your tree with Holly-tone or another acidic plant fertilizer 2-3 times during the growing season, starting in early spring.
How to Plant:
- First, determine your planting location. Somewhere that provides at least 4-5 hours of sun.
- Next, dig a hole that is about three times as wide as the root ball of your plant.
- The hole should be deep enough that the top of your plant's root ball is even with or slightly above the native ground around it.
- Mix the native soil that you removed from the hole with some good quality garden soil or composted manure.
- Fill the hole with the soil mixture.
- Layer 3-4 inches of mulch around the base of your plant to help the soil retain moisture.
- Lastly, water your new planting deeply to hydrate the plant and settle the soil/mulch.
Spacing Your Golden Oakland Holly
For a seamless planting, plant your Golden Oakland Holly 6 feet apart. Space them 9+ feet apart for gaps between the plants.
Suggested Companion Plants
The variegated foliage of the Golden Oakland makes a stunning background for many different plants. They look fantastic with some reblooming roses such as Red Double Knock Out Rose, or reblooming azaleas such as the Autumn Bonfire Encore Azalea. It also pairs well with Boxwoods, Orange Rocket Barberry, and most Gardenias.

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


text:
Died This Day: Edward Drinker Cope
July 28, 1840 – April 12, 1897
"What truly assured Cope's (above right) place in the history of paleontology and even eclipsed his science was his bitter feud with Yale University paleontologist O.C. Marsh (above left). What began as a friendly rivalry in the late 1860s, broke out into all out war in 1872 and then raged on until Cope's death in 1897. Both Cope and Marsh were recipients of family fortunes and they used their wealth to discover new fossils and to reconstruct ancient life. This scramble literally propelled American science into the forefront of paleontology."Read about Cope HERE.

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


Economics and ecology are key, say Christians at WSF
By staff writers
January 23, 2007
At the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, speakers involved in a workshop organized by the World Council of Churches (WCC) said that wealth, poverty and ecology are strongly linked to each other and to society‚Äôs commitment to the common good.
Wealth, poverty and ecology are all closely related to the sustainability of life, said Dr Marcos Arruda, from Brazil. A social researcher and activist, Arruda called the current world economy "one of war and death" which threatens life because of social inequality, global financial crisis and militarization. It needs to be replaced by a "solidarity-based economy" that requires the "socialization and democratization of property".
The need to recover a "sense of common good" was stressed by Rev Phillip Woods, head of the international office of the United Reformed Church, UK. "Today, the interconnectedness with my neighbours has been lost as lifestyles are marketed to us as a matter of choice," he said.
On the subject of lifestyles, Ms Lapapan Supamanta, general secretary of the International Buddhist Association, affirmed the central concept of sharing, which is linked to a certain detachment from wealth. Comparing over-consumption to moderation and wealth to humbleness, Supamanta wondered whether perhaps the issue is "to eradicate wealth instead of poverty".
Mr Xiao Lian, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, proposed the need for a greater distribution of wealth. "A bigger portion of the cake needs to be distributed to the poor," he said, affirming that economic growth - which has amounted to 10% annually during the last decade in China - needs to be of a nature that protects the environment.
"Another property order is possible," said Profesor Ulrich Duchrow, a German theologian, paraphrasing the World Social Forum motto. While acknowledging that human beings "need property for their lives," Duchrow criticized the current model which is based on expropriation, exploitation and exclusion. A new property order needs to be based on "sharing resources and the fruits of humanity's common endeavour".
Mr John Jones, a social activist from Norway, defended a well-known model of wealth redistribution, the welfare state. The welfare state is about "the right of everyone to receive their share," and its goal is "a society for all", he affirmed. But the concentration of wealth in the North is actually opposed to this. "Pollution and even people are cheaper in the South," he said.
Bishop Mvume Dandala, general secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC), also pointed to the painful imbalance between North and South. "Poverty in Africa is the direct causal effect of the wealth of the North," he said, affirming that African governments are "co-responsible".
"We need to work together and we need all the society to look at poverty as the enemy," said Malawi‚Äôs minister of health, Marjorie Ngaunje, who described a number of initiatives of her government to empower small farmers and women.
Amongst concrete ways to improve the life conditions of the poor, Ms Birgit Weinbrenner from Holland stressed the positive impact of micro-credit. "Plenty of stories show that poverty declines and people are able to support their children," said Weinbrenner, who is programme secretary at Oikocredit. Churches - which too often simply seek the highest financial returns for their investments - should invest more in micro-credit, she affirmed.


text:
To skew an object by using the resize handles
Select an object or a group of objects or anchor points. The resize handles appear.
Position your pointer near but outside one of the side handles and use one of the following methods:
To skew horizontally, drag the top or bottom side handle of the object to the left or right.
To skew vertically, drag either the left or right side handle.
To skew the object around its center point, hold down the ALT key.
A shape (in blue) being skewed with the top handle
You can skew and create a duplicate of a selection at the same time by holding down CTRL+ALT when you drag.
To skew an object by using the Action Bar
On the left side of the Action Bar, click the registration point icon to indicate which part of the selected object you want to stay stationary during skewing. For example, if you want the upper-right corner of your object to remain in position when the rest of the object skews, click the upper-right corner of the registration point icon.
Adjust the Skew Angle. Drag the pointer up or to the right to increase the value, or drag it down or to the left to reduce the value. Click the field to type a numeric value.
To skew vertically (shear) instead of horizontally, set the Rotation Angle and Skew Angle fields to the same value.


text:
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE
SELECT Field FROM table t1
INNER JOIN table2 t2 WITH (READUNCOMMITTED) ON t1.ID = t2.ID
This would cause serializable locks on t1 and read uncommitted on t2.
Monday, August 29, 2005
SQL Server 2005 includes patented technology for estimating the selectivity of LIKE conditions. It builds a statistical summary of substring frequency distribution for character columns (a string summary). This includes columns of type text, ntext, char, varchar, and nvarchar. Using the string summary, SQL Server can accurately estimate the selectivity of LIKE conditions where the pattern may have any number of wildcards in any combination. For example, SQL Server can estimate the selectivity of predicates of the following form:
Column LIKE'string%'
Column LIKE '%string'
Column LIKE '%string%'
Column LIKE'string'
Column LIKE'str_ing'
Column LIKE'str[abc]ing'
Column LIKE '%abc%xy'
If there is a user-specified escape character in a LIKE pattern (i.e., the pattern is of the form LIKE pattern ESCAPE escape_character), then SQL Server 2005 guesses selectivity. This is an improvement over SQL Server 2000, which uses a guess for selectivity when any wildcard other than a trailing wildcard % is used in the LIKE pattern, and has limited accuracy in its estimates in that case. The String Index field in the first row set returned by DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS includes the value YES if the statistics object also includes a string summary. The contents of the string summary are not shown. The string summary includes additional information beyond what is shown in the histogram. For strings longer than 80 characters, the first and last 40 characters are extracted from the string and concatenated prior to considering the string in the creation of the string summary. Hence, accurate frequency estimates for substrings that appear only in the ignored portion of a string are not available.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
I honestly love SQL Server even more now :-) I don't want to talk bad about MySQL itself because I don't know enough about the product to do so. But the tools provided are really sad as opposed to the tools that are included with SQL Server. I just wanted to know the queries that were run and their io, cpu, duration etc (<3 Profiler<3) but apparently there is no way with the standard tools to determine this. Graphical Query plans or even plans like the Text Query Plans in SQL Server... couldn't find it :-(


if everything is working properly.
You should now have CJDNS setup and configured to start on boot and peered with both system letting you securely route data between the two systems.
We have not covered restricting communication between the systems to only use this new route, and how to segregate peer connections if you connect to other CJDNS peers.
Event ID 4319 NetBIOS over TCP/IP with Dual Nic's
We have received many alerts on the error Event ID 4319 as seen below.
Event log: System
Event Source: NetBT
Event ID: 4319
Message Contents: A duplicate name has been detected on the TCP network.
The IP address of the computer that sent the message is in the data.
Use nbtstat -n in a command window to see which name is in the Conflict state.
View of the nbtstat -n command result
The cause of this issue has been systems that have more than one network card, this is more common in laptops that will use a hardline in the office. you can see this by using the command 'nbtstat -n' multiple network cards have the same NetBIOS name.
To correct this behavior you could prevent both network cards from connecting at the same time, although that is not a viable tactic to us. What we have decided to do is disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP on the wireless card. If you are doing this remotely you can run the following commands.
First you will need to know what the index number of your network card is, you can retrieve that with the following command.
wmic nicconfig get caption,index,TcpipNetbiosOptions
View of the network cards and the index numbers
You can see the index number listed next to each network card name, in this case we are looking for the wireless card, that would be index number '2'. You can also see the TcpipNetbiosOptions column is showing a '0', that means it is set to DHCP server options or fail over to enabled if DHCP has no options set. we will need the TcpipNetbiosOptions value to be '2' to disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP, and with the index number we can run the following. (Change the index to the nic relevant to your issue.)
wmic nicconfig where index=2 call SetTcpipNetbios 2
Result of setting NetBIOS over TCP/IP off.
The Shape of Tomorrow
One of the ideas that is common to hear is 'tomorrow will be so different' and the recently more common 'this will change everything'. The idea being that the next thing on the horizon will change the world in ways that we could never imagine and that is not going to happen to our civilization without a revolution in technology itself.
Let us consider the example of the horseless carriage, or not since we have beaten that to death. Let us instead look to your home, it is a nice place, it has 4+ walls, a solid flooring, and one would hope a roof over your head. This basic idea has not changed much but our execution of this simple concept can now take us from a dry hole in a hill to any modern dwelling. but we have mastered the building style, tools, and knowledge to make a modern structure. The story of how the food go to your plate is a much better story to show how things change and yet can stay the same, contemplate the supply chain needed to get you that produce on time.
We can see the changes coming that sound big take for example the idea that all stores will have robotic attendants, and all manufacturing is done by machines creating on demand custom handbag to the new kitchen counters. We can imagine this because it is already happening. You only need to look at manufacturing, farming, and distributors to see how they use more advanced tools like robotics to see how this will have a reduction in the need for humans on site.
The shape of the world has is not changed from how it was, we are still going about our daily life handling many small items, doing a task, and interacting with others around us. The idea that things will change beyond our imagining is a farce to help us deal with change in general.
We constantly change but we also adapt and accept the changes. Lets look at something simple like keeping your floor clean, wipe or pickup all the dirt if you do not have a broom or mop the carpet need to be beaten if you do not have a vacuum cleaner. Or jumping forward actually vacyume if you do not have a robotic vacuum. From this simple idea we can see that soon the laundry will be folded for you, the dishes cleaned, and put away.
When you can go down to the local store and pickup a personal attendant for the cost of a small appliance it will be common place. and just like with robotic vacuums nothing will have really changed. We as a species do change more every day and at a faster rate then ever before but your life will not change fundamentally, it will just be improved like it was yesterday.
Job Losses, Basic Income, and EVE.
The modern person works a job to pay the bills and support their way of life and improve it, hopefully by doing something that they enjoy and find rewarding. I would like to ask what happens when you do not have an income and compare this to the MMO Game EVE.
A job is very important to the average person because it pays for the most important things you need like food, and shelter. I do not know anyone that can do without food, and most places are not sunny year round requiring shelter to survive. You might be luck and your parents, partner or to a limited extent governments can provide a limited coverage when you can not support your self. But if government support runs out or parents have issues how do you survive?
If you are luck to find a job you like and you are good at, you should not have many issues providing for yourself. Many people though do not know what they want to do, or have no support to test the waters and get the first job they can. Many articles have been written on the topic of job progression and how once you are in a job that only provides the basics of survival you do not have much ability to progress to better employment, you cannot risk what little you have. To progress you might need to take risks and the risks need to be balanced against what you might gain and what you might loss. If you risk losing your survival you will not take the risk and this would result in becoming trapped and unable to escape.
In most MMO games you do not need to survive in the traditional sense, in EVE you can sit in a space station forever and never pay for rent or food. Now this is not much of an existence but it does something very basic, you can fail at everything in the game and still have a second chance. You can start a company in game, you can explore the universe, you can do literally everything that is offered until you succeed. But the important thing here is that you can and will fail, and that is not a problem in the game world. Because of this safety net you can keep trying and learning from the mistakes and improving until you do something great, and when someone bigger takes it all away you can still try again.
This is where Basic Income would help society grow by giving everyone a guarantee of survival even if they lost everything. We need to provide the basics of food and shelter to all people with no restrictions if we want to encourage people to take the risks to do something great. We normally can not take the same risks we do in games, but if we could build a safety net like Basic Income then we would finally be able take many of the risks in life, imagine what we could accomplish.
If you would like to read more on Basic Income read the Wiki on the topic.
I also recommend keeping up with the reddit community.
Error: The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135)
If you are getting the error "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application." when you are launching an application you do not have the.NET Framework installed.
You can go to to download the.NET Framework from Microsoft.
This can be an issue with XP systems as they do not come with.NET Framework by default, most Vista and newer systems will have.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed by default. Please remember that.NET Framework 4.0 is not backwards compatible with.NET Framework 3.5.
Windows ReportQueue Eating the Drive
Working on a few system I have found that the following folder has filled up at times with error report files eating all available drive space.
C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows\Wer\ReportQueue\*
Now I know that this if you have files collecting here you might have bigger issues with the system and you should check that out in time. The files are safe to delete and will not cause any issues after removed. You can also disable error reporting on the system to stop the generation of the error reports.


text:
Capital Investments – Improving Ontario's Schools
Since 2003, the Ontario government has invested $11.6 billion to make schools better places to learn. When students are in good learning environments, they can focus on learning and personal achievement.
Priority Capital Investments
In January 2013, the Ministry announced over $700 million in Capital Priority and FullDay Kindergarten funding to support school boards' Capital Priority projects needed in the next three years. These include building new schools and additions/retrofits to address enrolment growth, to support full-day kindergarten, to replace schools in poor condition and to support school consolidations.
A complete list of the 39 new schools and 48 additions/retrofits funded by this investment can be found here: New Schools and Additions
This funding is in addition to the more than $1 billion in new capital funding over three years that was announced in 2011-12. This included:
The government has provided just over $1.4 billion in capital funding since 2010 to support the full-day kindergarten (FDK) program. This funding is used by school boards to create the extra classrooms required to accommodate the program and to support the first-time equipping needs of new FDK classrooms. This funding supports the creation of close to 3,400 new kindergarten classrooms, in 3,675 schools, through additions and major retrofits.
FDK is scheduled to be fully implemented by September 2014.
Good Places to Learn
The Ontario government's Good Places to Learn program was launched in 2005 to address the backlog of urgent school renewal needs and the need for new schools around the province. Projects included building new schools and expanding and retrofitting existing school facilities. Highlights of this investment include:
As of fall 2012:
Greening Ontario's Schools
The government has provided $550 million to make schools more energy efficient, while supporting a stronger and greener economy. This Energy Efficient Schools investment included:
The government also invested $50 million for public school boards to reduce energy costs in schools by installing renewable energy technologies for heating or cooling schools or generating electricity. This investment is supporting 135 projects in 126 schools (PDF, 20 KB). The projects cover a range of renewable energy technologies, including:
These projects will help green the energy supply and help school boards save money on energy costs or earn revenue by selling electricity back to the grid. By reinvesting savings and revenue into local schools, boards will have more money to support student success. Solar panels and wind turbines can sell electricity back to the grid through the microFIT Program, an important part of the Green Energy Act.
In addition, the Green Schools Pilot Initiative invested $20 million in a variety of innovative green products and technologies in more than 150 Ontario schools. Learn more about these pilot projects across the province.


text:
The leader in tool presetting
The KENOVA set line h7 stands out due to its long-term stability, excellent repeatability and unrivalled precision. KeNOVA set line h7 is
predominantly used in setting rooms. The measuring and presetting of various tools for turning, drilling and cutting work determine its range of operation. The device completes these tasks with the highest level of precision.
Its stable design makes the KeNOVA set line h7 an ideal device for workshops. It can be used optimally and has low maintenance requirements, so there are almost no follow-up costs.
The guideways are covered with metal plates which prevents soiling from oil, chips and dust while guaranteeing protection for the glass scales and drive shafts. This means the measurement-relevant components are optimally screened and there is virtually no possibility of damage.
Facts at a glance:
-The measuring and presetting device is self-supporting with a high degree of intrinsic rigidity
-Resistance to interference factors such as oscillations and vibrations.
-The large rotary table can be extended by a position monitoring system and guarantees a high level of flexibility with a wide variety of working processes.
-The motor-driven axis control is equipped with three speeds and additional one-hand operation.
-Manual or partially automated working is possible with or without target data.
-CNC drives are available on all levels and ensure ease-of-use.
-A travelling command centre ensures operator comfort and reduces improper operation and saves time.
-Workshop compatible design with integrated measurement control and industry PC.
-Modular precision spindles for the highest degree of reproducibility when changing different insert modules.
- Self-supporting structure with integrated switch cabinet
- Travelling command centre for a high level of operator comfort
- high load-bearing capacity and stability
- 2 axes, CNC
- 3rd axis manual or automatic
Cutting edge scanning:
- CCD camera with telecentric lens and reflected light
- Optional: optical turning centre measuring equipment
Electronic measurement equipment:
- PC electronics with intelligent image processing
- 24" TFT colour monitor
- X = 520 mm (∅); Z = 500 mm
- X = 520 mm (∅); Z = 800 mm
- Turntable 800 mm


Book Reviews
Perl Books
Static Link:
Perl Developer's Dictonary
Title:Perl Developer's Dictonary
Author(s):Clinton Pierce
Reviewer:Brian McCauley
My first impression of this book is that the style is, on the whole, clear and readable, and the examples are also clear and helpful. It basically covers the same material in the same depth as any Perl reference manual. The book is not, and does not claim to be, a tutorial and if you tried to use it as such you'd find that the order in which concepts are introduced surprising - most people wouldn't get around to code references, labels and version strings until after introducing subroutines.
Calling itself a dictionary, the book is not an alphabetical reference, but could be a serviceable reference manual, if it were not let down by a very weak index. The index works if you are looking up a Perl function or a Perl concept by the author's chosen name. But if you want to find out about GLOBs you'll not find them by looking up "glob", but rather you'll have to lookup the pedantically correct but less widely used "typeglob". If you want to find out about an abstract concept such as how to do a set union operation in Perl you are really stuck. The explanation of tainting can only be found by looking up the -T switch and not the word "taint".
Cross linking between sections ("see also") is not as extensive as I would like. For example there is no mention of the qr// construct in the explanation of the /o regex qualifier. Similarly the example of _TAG_, __FILE__ and __LINE__ should mention eval() as this is the main time it's useful. (Most people don't get involved in using preprocessors). These examples are not atypical for the book.
More significantly, in these days when we are used to the instant gratification of the hyperlink, it is outrageously annoying to have to do a double look-up to follow cross-references - they could at least have included page numbers!
Examples often unnecessarily use features that are not related to the current topic and could cause inexperienced programmers to pick up bad habits. For example, in the example for the use of quotemeta() the /o regex qualifier is used with no explanation of what it does. In this particular case it's harmless, but many new Perl programmers become far too keen on using /o on every regex in their code, without realizing that it will cause problems if the program is subsequently changed such that the code in question is called repeatedly with different patterns. Similarly many examples use alternate delimiter characters on the match operator for no good reason.
It would be good if examples used my() more. In a well-written real Perl program very few assignments (except ones to elements of aggregates) would lack a my. It seems odd that programming examples in many books fail to reflect this. Worse still in many examples in this book even variables used within subroutines are not localized in any way - neither lexically nor dynamically. The initial introduction to variables doesn't even mention lexical scope. Late introduction of lexical variables is, IMNSHO, a bad affectation often found in Perl books that have been inappropriately influenced by the fact that my() appeared late on in the history of Perl.
The final nail in the coffin of this book is the poor proof-reading. There are just too many trivial mistakes (see appendix below) for one to have confidence in this as a reference.
So despite my initial positive impressions of this book, I'm afraid I would have grave misgivings about recommending the current edition of this book. Hopefully a second edition will appear soon with corrections.
Appendix - errors
I have not read the whole book. I have read up to page 100 and dipped into the rest at random. I found errors, on average, every few pages. In this I am counting anything that is misleading, factually incorrect or omits important information that could cause the reader to adopt bad practices. The following are the errors I have found.
p12 The URL of perlmongers is wrong.
p19 sperl called on a non-suid script gives an error.
p24 For a Perl scalar, being dual-valued in not the same thing as being magic. $! is both.
p27 The typeface of n used as a metasyntactic variable in $array[n] is not distinguished from the rest of the text.
p31 "Perl assumes that hash keys are simple strings, but will do interpolation within the curly braces". What is this supposed to mean? It appears to be saying that the braces of a hash subscript are double-quotish. They are not.
p32 Explanation of a hash used in a scalar context doesn't explain that an empty hash will return a false value in a Boolean context.
p41 When talking of a constructor called with two arguments, the book says "new() will receive two arguments in _USER_". No it bloody won't - it gets three.
p41 "Anonymous [aggregates] are simply [aggregates] with a reference count of 1". I think this is confusing. They are in effect more like aggregates with a reference count of zero - until you store the reference to them somewhere.
p42 Section on circular references should contain at least a "see also" mentioning weak references. In fact weak references are not even mentioned in the index so probably don't appear in the book.
p51 The example used the /o regex qualifier without explaining it. This is indeed one of the very rare cases where it helps, but the program would run OK without it and this is a big problem with people over-using /o.
p54 "A block is [...] a loop that executes exactly once". No, that's just bare blocks, as correctly explained on p56.
p55 I think "undocumented" is too mild a word for the behavior of the "my if 0;" construct. The behavior is undefined.
p58 The "Usage" of sub implies anonymous subroutines can't have attributes and prototypes. They can even though these aren't much use unless you subsequently put the subroutine into the symbol table.
p62 The magical while(<>) does not create a new dynamic scope for $_.
p62 The for(LIST) loop syntax does not do assignment to $_ (it does aliasing).
p64 Monspaced typeface of the word "lexical" in the section heading implies that it is a reserved word in Perl. It isn't.
p65 Not all pragmas are lexically scoped.
p71 Does not warn of the counterintuitive interaction between the package directive and our() declarations.
p75 The reserve word wantarray is one word.
p75 POSIX:_exit should read POSIX::_exit.
p80 If the loop control variable of for is already lexically scoped, it is implicitly redeclared as a new lexical within the loop scope as if you had specified my in the for statement.
p80 "assignment-and-localization" should read "aliasing-and-localization" and the example of the one-element loop should therefore come after the explanation of the aliasing.
p84 Description of the while statement modifier does not mention the special case for do{}.
p82 Redundant local($_) before a for(LIST) which does an implicit one anyhow.
p99 In the list of zero-but-true constants the widely used '0E0' value is not mentioned.
p261 eval() example to unroll a loop does not warn about the dangers of special characters in data.
p293 The book states that the sequence 2 in a regex will be interpreted as either a back-reference or as ASCII 2 depending upon whether or not there are two or more captures in the regex. It then immediately contradicts this and says it will always be interpreted as a back-reference.
p300 "... with the {min,max} searches, the match will absorb only as many characters as necessary and still have the match succeed." This wrongly implies that the quantifier is non-greedy. The word "necessary" should read "possible".
p304 The regex /(?i:the)/ is equivalent to /[Tt][Hh][Ee]/ not /[Tt]he/.
p312 Description of the $ regex anchor does not explain its behavior with respect to newline characters.
p313 In the description of B it states, "B matches between W and W characters; thus BFOO will find FOO but only if it's preceded by a word character". Whilst it is true that B will match between


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Release of coumarin incorporated into chitosan-gelatin irradiated films
Abstract : Chitosan and fish gelatin were used to formulate active biobased films containing an antioxidant (coumarin). After drying, the films were irradiated at 40 and 60 kGy using an electron beam accelerator. The effect of irradiation on the film properties as well as the coumarin release mechanism were investigated and compared with the control. Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) revealed free radical formation during irradiation in films containing coumarin. Antioxidant addition and/or irradiation treatment at a dose of 60 kGy resulted in a shift of amide A and amide B peaks. Furthermore a shift of amide II band was only observed for the control film at the same dose. Irradiation allowed improving the thermal stability of the control films. Both irradiation process and addition of coumarin increased the surface wettability (increase of the polar component of the surface tension). From the water barrier analysis, neither irradiation nor coumarin addition influenced the permeability at the lower RH gradient used (0-30% RH). Using the higher RH gradient (30-84%) induced a rise of the WVP of all films (containing or not coumarin) after irradiation treatment. At 60 kGy, the tensile strength of only the control films increased significantly. Considering coumarin release from the film in aqueous medium, the apparent diffusion coefficient of coumarin is two times reduced after irradiation. Irradiation also allowed to better protect the incorporated antioxidant. Indeed, the amount of coumarin in the non-irradiated film was significantly lowered compared to the initial quantity, which is probably due to chemical reactivity.
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Contributeur : Pam - Université de Bourgogne <>
Soumis le : mercredi 11 janvier 2017 - 15:21:34
Dernière modification le : samedi 13 février 2021 - 03:31:22
Lien texte intégral
Nasreddine Benbettaïeb, Odile Chambin, Ali Assifaoui, Saphwan Al-Assaf, Thomas Karbowiak, et al.. Release of coumarin incorporated into chitosan-gelatin irradiated films. Food Hydrocolloids, Elsevier, 2016, 56, pp.266 - 276. ⟨10.1016/j.foodhyd.2015.12.026⟩. ⟨hal-01432119⟩
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ASHAs are taught to take blood pressure and test for blood sugar
Smart answer to BP, sugar in rural India
Civil Society News, New Delhi
Published: Jan. 06, 2018
Updated: Mar. 25, 2020
Arising graph of blood pressure and diabetes cases in India has been found to include rural areas as much as cities, the poor as much as the rich. But what can be the strategies for dealing with these diseases when awareness is lacking and medical facilities aren't up to scratch?
The George Institute, which dedicates itself to bridging the gap between theory and practice in matters of public health, has come up with some interesting insights based on an initiative over two years in the West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh.
Working in 54 villages since July 2014, the institute used public health workers to identify individuals at risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) because of blood pressure and diabetes, provided counselling and encouraged them to seek treatment.
The aim of the effort was to see whether the public healthcare system could be sensitised and successfully deployed to address challenges in dealing with non-communicable diseases in a rural population.
Using its SMARThealth platform, the institute screened 53,478 persons above the age of 40 in 54 villages. Of them, 16 percent were found to be at high risk of CVD and were referred to a nearby primary health centre (PHC). Of these high-risk patients, 40 percent consulted a PHC doctor and 38 percent went to a private practitioner. When follow-ups were done with 85 percent of these high-risk patients, it was found that 75 percent of them were taking their medicines.
The success of the effort is not merely in adding up these numbers but in marrying the public healthcare system with technology. A total of 240 ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists were trained to promote awareness and measure diabetes and high blood pressure. They learned how to use the SMARThealth computer application on a hand-held tablet which recorded these readings and showed risk levels. At the same time, 18 PHC doctors were trained to use the data the ASHAs were collecting.
SMARThealth not only takes in data but provides comparative information about the readings to the person being screened. For instance, how does a smoker's longevity improve by becoming a non-smoker? Or, how do exercise and better diet reduce obesity? The tablet also shows educational videos. The data collected on the tablet is shared with the PHC where the doctor can access it. The blood pressure machine and the tablet are linked through Bluetooth so that readings are directly transferred and there is no chance of data entry error.
But at the core of this effort is the ASHA, who is embedded in the community and, therefore, able to win trust and create awareness. It is also she who follows up on patients, encouraging them to go to the physician and take their medicines regularly.
Making the ASHA effective in identifying and dealing with NCDs is one of the achievements of this effort. The other is helping the PHC doctor deal with such cases. The PHC doctors are oriented to deal with only the most basic of health needs. Getting these doctors to identify NCDs like high blood pressure and sugar and prescribe medication for them requires setting the context with prompting and exposure. Often, medications for NCDs are not stocked in PHCs.
The George Institute's goal is to promote preventive healthcare through awareness and early detection. Since the ASHA belongs in the community, she is the perfect sentinel and since she connects easily with local people they find it easier to understand the complexities of diabetes and blood pressure through her. Similarly, the PHC doctor deals with the problem before it gets out of hand.
Both blood pressure and diabetes and, at a later stage, cardiovascular ailments place a huge burden on the public healthcare system. They also dent family incomes when the public system is inadequate and private facilities are used. Studies show rising numbers, which means prevention strategies are needed sooner rather than later. In 2000, 118 million people were diagnosed with hypertension and the number could reach 213 million by 2025. CVD accounts for 52 percent of all mortality in both urban and rural India.
These numbers are probably on the low side because sentinel services and documentation are inadequate. It is also clear that diabetes and blood pressure are not only health issues related to the lifestyle of the urban rich, but also of the poor and people in farming communities who could be eating wrong or not doing enough physical labour.
The George Institute was founded in Australia and additionally has offices in India, the UK and China. It conducts healthcare-related research across Asia and Southeast Asia. This is the institute's 10th year in India.
"We believe in finding solutions which are affordable, scalable and yet high-quality. The objective is to improve access to healthcare and make it affordable for all," says Amit Khanna, director, finance and operations, at the George Institute's office in New Delhi.
"We essentially support the public sector, but quality and outcome measures have to be much more carefully defined," he says.
Often, public-private partnerships work well to achieve these ends as in the example of providing access to dialysis in Andhra Pradesh where a private player, Nephro Plus, has improved services in government hospitals and the George Institute is a knowledge partner in the initiative.
"SMARThealth provides an ecosystem for improving the delivery of quality primary healthcare in communities. It influences three key areas: task shifting, facilitating technology for healthcare providers and use of mobile devices for delivery and quality control," explains Khanna.
"What is the problem in rural areas? The PHC is geared to cater only to basic diseases, and many of them only to maternal and child health," says Kannan Krishnaswamy, communications manager. "But evidence shows that NCDs are increasing in rural areas. So, can we use the same set-up that the government has to provide these services?"
"The doctor-patient ratio in rural areas is 1: 20,000. So how do we create a system whereby NCDs get attention and treatment?"
"Another need the project addresses is to create awareness," adds Krishnaswamy. "People don't know that they have hypertension and blood sugar. How do we create an environment of health-seeking behaviour?"
"Chronic diseases don't just happen like infectious diseases," points out Krishnaswamy. "They build up over a period of time and either they never get treated or it takes years to treat them. We are advocates of preventive care to keep people out of hospital."
"Our survey in Andhra Pradesh showed that more people were dying of cardiovascular disease than of HIV and road accidents put together," he says.
The successful use of SMARThealth based on the experience in West Godavari district remains to be seen. But the possibilities are enormous, particularly its use in relation to other diseases and in the integrated management of multiple ailments.


text:
As a Canadian immigrating to Norway, I have a basic understanding of how other immigrants have to adapt to their new environment. Yet, as an English-speaking North-American I lack insights into many of the problems that people from developing countries, speaking non-European languages, and writing with non-Latin alphabets, have to cope with.
While I can't do much to help local immigrants learn to speak or write Norwegian, despite these being important tools that allow for a better integration into the community, I can encourage immigrants to acquire skills in areas that will enhance their ability to obtain work, or start their own businesses. These are:
- Health, Environment and Safety, with an emphasis on workplace safety, human factors and ergonomics.
- Mechatronics, with an emphasis on basic electronics and programming.
- Entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on disruptive innovation.
YouTube is a great place for learning new skills. Unfortunately, there is no certification available with their videos to state that health, environmental and safety practices conform with best practices. For example, a large number of woodworking videos involve people working with inadequate hearing and eye protection.
So, the first piece of advice is to gain a basic understanding of workplace safety, human factors and ergonomics before one learns about other skill sets. A good place to begin is with Wikipedia: _URL_
The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, also has valuable insights: _URL_
Despite the following video being made in 2015, and despite my mixed feeling about Volkswagen, this short video shows the direction ergonomics is heading: _URL_
The second piece of advice is that mechatronics is an area with considerable growth potential. Because it is so complex, it is difficult to know where to start. Here my advice is to learn elementary electronics and programming with an Arduino. As a teacher, I actively used Jeremy Blum's Arduino videos: _URL_
The third piece of advice requires people to relate to disruptive innovation. This is explained in Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma. It is also explained in numerous YouTube videos, including this one: _URL_


How Congress Became a 'Cathouse' of Prostitutes Paying Off Their Pimps
The Pandemic Disease of the 21st Century Is on the Rise
Reza Aslan: Why Aren't You a Jew?
Why Have Art Historians Been Silent About the Falsification of Biblical History in Artworks?
To View Comments or Join the Conversation:


text:
Keep Perkins Quality. Keep Perkins Strong.
Vote FOR Perkins' Schools on May 2nd!
- Perkins Schools' operating levy on the May ballot is 6.9-mill levy to fund day-to-day operating costs for our schools.
- Perkins Schools has not had a new operating levy in 17 years. Even with passage of this levy, Perkins Schools will continue to look for responsible cost efficiencies to stretch operating dollars as long as possible.
- State funding reductions to Perkins Schools have resulted in the loss of millions of dollars for Perkins Schools. The Governor's recent proposed budget reflects an additional reduction in Perkins' state core funding for next year of more than 4%.
- Perkins teachers and staff have not had a base salary increase since 2008, and in the last few years – the district has eliminated more than forty teaching, administrative, and classified positions to reduce salary and healthcare costs.
- The State of Ohio has placed Perkins Schools under fiscal caution status, and a state audit is underway to make recommendations for additional reductions.
- This levy funding is critically needed to maintain Perkins' quality of education, including:
- Ensuring students have access to up-to-date courses, learning technology, and classroom materials so they
are prepared for college and good jobs.
- Continuing to offer gifted and advanced placement courses to students.
- Paying for fuel and bus services to ensure that reliable and safe transportation is available to students
throughout the community.
- Providing enough counselors, tutors, and nurses to support students' needs.
- Without this levy, our schools will have to cut dozens more teachers and staff, and make drastic cuts to programs, courses, transportation, and other student services.
- The Board of Education has reduced the millage amount in an effort to be responsive to the residents' input.The cost of this levy is less than $5 a week or about $20 a month per $100,000 of property value ($20.13/month or $4.65/week).
Paid for by Citizens for Perkins Schools, c/o Sally Burger, Deputy Treasurer, 4707 Hayes Avenue, Sandusky, OH 44870


text:
The model of competitive markets in the long-run is one of the most important models in the microeconomics curriculum. Although MarketLink doesn't currently include a long-run competitive market model, we do plan to include the long-run competitive market model in the future. The lecture notes give significant coverage to the topic, and there is also discussion of the choice problem that a seller would face in an experimental implementation of the long-run competitive market model.
Lecture note coverage of the topic is fairly extensive. In the long-run
model, firms can expand their capacity in order to reduce their marginal cost. The reduction to the marginal cost curve for a firm as its capacity expands means that the firm - and hence the market - supply expands. These
ideas are described to motivate the model in Sections 5.1 and 5.2. In order to carry out this analysis in a coherent way, the model needs to show how the production function of a firm is used to determine a short-run cost function and a marginal cost function for the firm. The lecture notes develop these ideas in a formal way, but with only moderate mathematical requirements. Development of the model of firm capacity choice, firm supply, and market
supply are carried out in Sections 5.3 through 5.6. Section 5.7 describes the market adjustment problem when new firms can enter a market with economic profits, or when existing firms can exit a market with economic losses. The last part of the notes on long-run competitive market model examines the problem of market adjustment when firms alter their capacity (rather than when the number of firms adjusts, as in the previous subsection).


text:
IST regularly receives questions regarding property changes which occur in spring materials during simple stress relieving treatments. For example, a recent IST training course attendee wanted to know why stainless steel spring wire behaved differently than music wire. He knew that the outside diameter of music wire springs decreased when heat treated, while the outside diameter increased when stainless steel springs are heat treated. He had also been told to use the same value of the torsional modulus (G) for music wire both before and after heat treatment, but to use a different value of G for stainless steel after heat treatment.
To understand the mechanism causing the increase in outside diameter for stainless steel springs on stress relieving, the metallurgy of the wire drawing process needs to be considered. When stainless steel spring wire is drawn, the microstructure of the rod stock material is austenite, but in every die a little of the austenite is mechanically transformed to martensite as a consequence of the cold reduction. After several reductions in area, the wire will acquire the tensile strength required for springs, and the microstructure will be a mixture of austenite and martensite (it is the latter constituent in the microstructure that makes stainless steel spring wire slightly magnetic).
The spring manufacturer then coils the wire into springs, and thereby imparts a residual stress at the inside surface of the coil. When the spring is heat treated, some more of the austenite will transform to martensite, and the transformation will occur most at the position where the residual stress is at a maximum. A volume expansion is associated with this transformation, and the overall outcome is that the spring diameter becomes larger.
It might be expected that thus microstructural change would be visible on optical metallography but that is not IST's experience. Although the percentage of austenite and martensite could be determined by X-ray methods, the percentages of each that would equate to satisfactory/unsatisfactory spring performance is not known, so there is no point in using these expensive test methods.
It is also the change in the percentage of martensite in the microstructure that causes the moduli (E and G) of stainless steel wire to increase after heat treatment, as the stiffness of martensite is greater than that of austenite. This explains why 316 stainless steel spring wire has a lower modulus than 302, which itself is lower than 631 (17/7PH) – the last having the greatest percentage martensite – but all three grades have a microstructure which is referred to as "austenitic." It should also be noted that, if the springmaker makes springs with a small coiling ratio (index), there will be more residual stress and consequently more transformation during heat treatment. The small index spring will have a higher modulus than similar springs, made from the same wire, with larger index.
There is very good guidance about the expected change in the G modulus included in the appendix to the European specification for stainless steel spring wire, EN 10270-3. The values published in this specification are approximate, and depend upon a number of factors. However, IST strongly recommends use of the values in this standard as the best available, and good enough for spring design purposes.
In another training course several delegates were convinced that both their music wire and silicon chromium alloy wire springs would have different microstructures before and after heat treatment, and they wanted to know how this change could be recognized. Their company had the facilities to examine microstructures and one of their automotive customers requested use of the CQI-9 quality procedure. This procedure covers stress relieving of springs, and demands that the metallographic structure produced be examined. However, these delegates were surprised to hear that optical metallography would show the microstructure of music wire, silicon chromium and 302 stainless steel to be exactly the same both before and after heat treatment. For this simple reason, it is IST's opinion that the CQI-9 quality procedure should not be applied to stress relieving. The procedure is appropriate for spring manufacturers who carry out hardening and tempering or austempering heat treatments, where a significant change in microstructure occurs.
Mark Hayes is technical advisor to the Institute of Spring Technology (IST) in Sheffield, England. He is also the principal trainer for the spring training courses that the Institute offers globally. Readers are encouraged to contact IST with comments about this cautionary tale, and with subjects that they would like to be addressed in future tales, by email _EMAIL_.


text:
Sinusoidal oscillators are known to be realized using dynamical systems of second-order or higher. Here we derive the Barhkausen condition for a linear noninteger-order (fractional-order) dynamical system to oscillate. We show that the oscillation condition and oscillation frequency of some famous integer-order sinusoidal oscillators can be obtained as special cases from general equations governing their fractional-order counterparts. Examples including fractional-order Wien oscillators, Colpitts oscillator, phase-shift oscillator and LC tank resonator are given supported by numerical and PSpice simulations. © 2008 IEEE.
Radwan A.G., Elwakil A.S., Soliman A.M.
Fractional-order circuits; Noninteger order systems; Oscillators
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, Vol. 55, PP. 2051 to 2063, Doi: 10.1109/TCSI.2008.918196


3 Steps to Create a Project Contract
By | February 2, 2021
3 Steps to Create a Project Contract
Every application, programming, and even a basic job starts with an idea. However, there are several steps between the inception and starting the development of that idea. Most important among the proceedings to fulfill a project is the project contract establishment. However, a process exists between the first meeting with the client and the signing of the contract. Read on to know more.
The importance of project contract
So, why bother going through the whole nine yards of writing and enforcing a contract for any project? The reason is simple; to keep the client and the company providing the job on the same page. As mentioned earlier, the essential details are mentioned in the project contract, but it may change depending upon the need of the client, company, or the project. Some of the other benefits provided by a project contract can be listed as;
 - Alignment of expectations
It is important to know the expectations and the requirements of the client, along with the provisions and services provided by the company. The project contract ensures the alignment of the requirements and the targets of the project between the company and the client.
 - Specifying the needed details
The project contract specifies the details of the working relationship between the client and the company with all the required details. For example, the contract can stipulate the time limit of delivery of any project or the correct time to pay the money. These specifications help in building the roadmap of the whole project.
 - Protection of the business
A written legal contract provides a sense of security to the clients and the company. In any case, if either of them refrains or become unsuccessful in fulfilling a condition, the other party can take legal action against them. After both parties have understood and signed the document, the contract becomes officially mandatory. With a legally binding document supporting the project contract, each of the parties has a solid reason to fulfill the terms and conditions set for the job and protect their rights in official and legal matters.
Creating a project contract
A project contract is made after the client and the service provider party agrees upon the conditions and other required points. Usually, the legal representative of each of the parties will review the conditions, change some of them if necessary, and then present it to their respective clients for final signature. The intermediate steps occurring between these events can be divided into three distinct periods. The three steps of creating a project contract can be given as;
 1. Establishment of the fundamentals
The first step of creating a project contract is to specify the basics of the job being offered. Let us discuss this taking the development of an app as an example. Usually, the client's concern will provide the content and the concept to the service provider. After that, the question of selecting the platform will come, whether it should be android, iOS, web, or any other. Besides, the management requirements of the contents and the vision and goal for the near future will also have to be discussed.
The features of this app and the technical feasibility and options provided will also be a topic of discussion. Lastly, the timeline of the project will have to be selected, whether it is a stringent one or flexible; so that the steps to be taken in such cases could be decided beforehand.
Just like the example mentioned above, any project contract will have to touch upon the several pointers mentioned above. The factors governing the project contract may change, however, the overall arrangement shall remain the same.
 1. Defining the scope
After hashing out the basics of the contact, comes the establishment of the scope of the project. Let us extend the example of the app development mentioned earlier. After the establishment of a high-level idea together, the client and the provider parties will have to go into the details and make a scope document. What would be the features of this document? It will explain and underline every feature of the app, including any back-end content management system and incorporation job. Essentially, it is an itemized list of the functions the app would include and the labor, both physical and digitalit would need to complete the project.
Again, this principle would be feasible on any service and its related project contract. All the clients and the service provider need to get cleared about should be scoped out properly and the project contract should be designed likewise.
 1. Cost and phase determination
After the establishment of defined project scope, each of the items on the lines of the project contract is a point to reimbursement of the costs. There would be fixed proposals of costs based on an estimation of labor required for the project, along with a consolidated amount for the total project.
In this context, the job would be needed to be broken into different phases, especially logical divisions that direct the commencing of work. However, this may or may not be driven by the budget. The service provider company can design a product with the most basic features before improving, adding, launching, or testing before adding more features. This is called a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which can be used as the template for a functional product. Depending upon the client, the project can be phased or prepared with all the features discussed. Accordingly, the project contract is prepared which outlines all the feasible requirements of the client (agreed upon by the service provider), the time, and the total cost of the project.
Including every detail
More than a document filled with important legal guidelines, a project contract outlines the essential details like the range of the project, deliverables, reimbursement, timeline, and other emergencies. These guidelines and their execution determine the running of the business and the ways to protect it if any problems arise in the course. So, the inclusion of all the required features and their conditions in detail would be helpful in the long run.
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Home >> CBSE XI >> Math >> Probability
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In a non-leap year,the probability of having 53 tuesdays or 53 wednesdays is
$\begin{array}{1 1}(A)\;\large\frac{1}{7}\\(B)\;\large\frac{2}{7}\\(C)\;\large\frac{3}{7}\\(D)\;\text{None of these}\end{array} $
Can you answer this question?
1 Answer
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Step 1:
Given a non-leap year
$\therefore$ A non leap year has 365 days
Which includes 52 whole weeks
$\therefore 52\times 7=364$
Step 2:
$\therefore$ Remaining is 1 day which could be either of the day out of 7 days.
$\therefore$ Probability of having 53 tuesdays or 53 wednesdays =$\large\frac{1}{7}$
Hence (A) is the correct answer.
answered Jul 8, 2014 by sreemathi.v
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Mr Njini lived to 45. He was an old man
Togara Sanyatwe was buried in the sprawling West Park cemetery on the edge of Bulawayo at 83 years of age. The granite headstone reveals nothing more about his life but he would already have been considered an elder of his community at the time those who now lie around him were being born.
They include Zah Zah Ngwenya, who was just 28 at the time of her death on the same day as Mr Sanyatwe. A little further on lies Mabutho Njini, who died a fortnight shy of his 46th birthday, but he still enjoyed more years than Norah Manyati, who barely made it past 30.
Their graves sit at the beginning of a narrow road running through the newest part of the cemetery. Its length is a chronicle of Zimbabwe's surging death rate and plummeting life expectancy as political crisis and economic collapse have fused with rampant Aids to transform the graveyards from resting places for the elderly at the end of a full life to the premature final stop for a generation barely out of youth.
In Bulawayo, the cemeteries are filled to the point that there is now pressure to put two corpses in each grave.
Women in Zimbabwe live an average of 34 years and men manage just three years more, half of the life expectancy of little more than a decade ago. Prince Handina didn't even make that. He died at 20 years old. Plan Ndebele, in the neighbouring grave, made it to 39.
The pair are buried just after the road passes the walled and padlocked Muslim cemetery. Here the graves begin in January 2004. The numbers buried each month are already rising, their ages dropping and the plots squeezed closer together.
A little further down the road, among the graves of 2005 and 2006, granite headstones, decorated with pictures, fond messages or biblical quotations, increasingly give way to black metal plates hand painted with white lettering that tell no more than a name and dates of birth and death. It is one more sign of the growing poverty as Zimbabweans struggle to survive.
One grave stands out because it has been transformed into a carefully nurtured plot of aloes but many others are untended and unmarked, their metal plates stolen and recycled for other uses - sometimes as coffin handles.
Not far away is the children's cemetery, packed with bodies of those who did not live long enough to make it to school.
At the far end of the road, where there is almost no more room to spare, the recent arrivals are easy to spot. Multicoloured plastic flowers adorn the freshly turned earth mounds that are almost on top of each other.
Odian Ncube is digging a new grave in front of the last resting place of Sibonginkosi Dube, who was buried last week at the age of 30.
"We have enough for two more rows of graves before we reach the road," he said. "Maybe they will find room somewhere else. Perhaps this whole city will be a graveyard."
President Robert Mugabe's destruction of his own economy as he fights to hold on to power - with inflation running above 10,000%, power and water cuts a daily reality, shops rapidly emptying of food and the grain harvest expected to fail yet again after the seizure of white-owned farms and drought - has played a large part in the surging number of deaths.
Millions are underfed, weakening immune systems and bringing on Aids. Few can afford the drugs to treat the illnesses that the disease brings on, even if the medicines are available which, increasingly, they are not.
Many of the country's doctors and nurses have left for South Africa or Europe.
The World Health Organisation estimates that that lethal combination is claiming 3,500 lives a week in the former British colony. The World Food Programme says 4 million Zimbabweans, one-third of the population, will need food aid this year.
Mr Ncube's team of diggers is making four to five new graves each day, and that is just in one corner of one cemetery. "We work harder now. There are many many more. Look, you can see it's different. Over there the graves are like they used to be, a certain distance apart. Now we put them almost on top of each other," he said.
Many of the dead are laid to rest in cardboard coffins or cloth bags. Mr Ncube says some people come in and bury their relatives at night in the graves dug during the day because they cannot afford the funerals or the ubiquitous burial societies, a savings club that provides a decent funeral for the dead if nothing for the surviving family.
The number of burials in Bulawayo is rising by about 20% each month. The mayor, Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, says the time has come when people will have to be buried one on top of the other or not at all. He wants the city's residents to accept two bodies in a grave or cremation, a social taboo for many.
"It is very real. In most cases we run away from facing reality," he told a council meeting last week. "It is incumbent upon us to go and spread the message on cremation and the burying in the same grave, and at the same time continue with the fight against Aids."
Another councillor, Amen Mpofu, said the real problem was not how to bury the dead but how to save the living. "I think the most important question we should ask ourselves as we discuss this is why are people dying at this rate? I think this is what we should zero in on," he said.


(853)2878 7375 _EMAIL_
There are many ways that data leaks in an office placing can occur, and frequently the cause is straightforward and apparent. However, the greater serious issues may not be so evident.
A data leak is known as a computer problem that occurs when a part of information that will not have been there was inadvertently left by a program or perhaps software program. This kind of error appears when documents, programs or adjustments are incorrectly saved or accessed. Frequently, the information is definitely accidentally left out or taken off the system after the information was inadvertently deleted.
System files can often become corrupted, making it challenging to locate info. In addition to being difficult to locate, the files themselves may become damaged over time. For example, files can become fragmented after a while, meaning that the entire data file is not readable or even usable. Likewise, files which have been opened by other courses in the computer may keep information which has been inadvertently that is abandoned, as well.
There are many different types of data leakages that can appear at work. Many are easy to stop, while others are harder. The easiest type of trickle to stop is that of the type where a program inadvertently deletes crucial files. Quite often these types of complications can be without difficulty corrected and repaired, whilst they will take time.
For instance, if a course accidentally deletes some simple files, including pictures, it could be easier to simply delete the files completely than to re-create them. However, in the event these same data files are used in an additional program over a network, then re-creating these people may be required. Also, removing a file that is part of a crucial business repository can create a data leak.
Other types of info leaks are a little more complicated. Many times, data that is saved inside the wrong fashion can be dangerous, resulting in erroneous information which is not easily examine. These types of leaks are usually not easy to detect and can take a wide range of time to fix.
Finally, there are data leaks that occur from your human mind. A data flow occurs each time a person does not remember to close a plan that has been start without being closed down before the end of the day. This could occur because of forgetfulness, aggravation, or even lack of business.
Data leaks at your workplace corioilsglobal.com are definitely not nearly since common because the common mistakes that are caused by a data loss. Yet, there are times when your personal computer system problem, a memory error, or even a simple individuals error causes a trickle.
One of a data outflow would be in the event that an employee forgot to turn off of the printer or computer that they were applying. The inkjet printer or computer may be in a drawer in a closet, over a desk, or any other site where it really is out of sight. As soon as the printer is turned on, it is likely that any important docs can be preserved and utilized when the electricity goes out.
Another sort of a data leak would be if a network forvalter forgot to shut down a server that is not normally applied. This may happen when some other person logs on to the hardware without consent, causing a power outage that baby wipes away each and every one files.
Even when info leaks in the office do take place, they may not necessarily trigger severe harm to a company. Most companies only need to bother about a minor annoyance, such as a non permanent data loss. Yet, it is always better to find out at the earliest possible time so that your provider can repair the problem as quickly as possible.
If you need to end data leakages at work, one of the first things that you should do is check to see that your network is not being hacked. The Internet is a major method of obtaining hackers and other hackers could be able to gain access to important paperwork in a short amount of time.
When you have found the origin of the problem, there are a number of computer reliability measures that you can take to try and prevent a heavy problem out of occurring. For instance, you can use firewalls to prevent a hacker coming from accessing sensitive information. You can also work anti-virus programs and anti-spyware programs that could keep hackers at bay.


Fighting Internal Resistance to CRM
A major national financial institution produces and executes a successful credit card direct mail campaign, resulting in numerous applications for new credit cards. The very next week, the company's home equity department sends appeals to the same customers, urging them to cut up their credit cards and consolidate their debt with a home equity loan.
Couldn't happen? Without an integrated customer relationship management focus, it did happen.
Where companies were product-focused with their marketing efforts and sales initiatives, it was far too often the case that customers received mixed marketing messages. Departmental silos, as they are known, were concerned primarily with how a single product's sales contributed to the bottom line and whether the salespeople were meeting the volume goals established, rather than focusing on the long-term, overall customer relationship.
The financial institution saga is common in many businesses, not just the financial industry. Internal cultural barriers are inhibiting communication and coordination among divisions and thereby defeating marketing objectives. Strategic rethinking by management and transforming sales and service behaviors are key to the success of a strategic customer relationship management program.
With the push toward a more customer-centric focus, organizations find they no longer can look at a consumer from a specific product perspective but must encompass the entire customer relationship to fully understand that client's profitability.
The technology component of CRM offers organizations a more comprehensive understanding of its customers through data analysis and predictive modeling, therefore enabling the development of more accurate sales and marketing strategies. However, technology alone cannot ensure a successful CRM initiative. Key organizational changes are critical to facilitate true CRM value.
An overall strategic buy-in from all divisions, changes in management practices and a transformation in sales and service personnel behaviors are crucial to align all departments with corporate CRM objectives.
The strategic buy-in requires a company not only to set a strategic CRM direction but also to communicate thoroughly the value of this customer-centric strategy to all its employees. To help break down departmental silos, executive management needs to hold itself accountable for overall customer profitability. To do this, data and key metrics from different departments need to be made common and integrated.
In another example with a financial institution, the credit card division of a bank decided to charge a user fee to all of its unprofitable customers to increase the profitability of its credit card portfolio. Not surprisingly, the notification of this new fee resulted in many of these unprofitable customers closing their credit cards.
Initially, this sales strategy was deemed a success because the unprofitable customers either left the bank or became profitable for the bank with the payment of the new fee.
However, imagine the bank's distress when it took a comprehensive view of the customer relationships and realized that the unprofitable credit card customers who left the bank were, in fact, the most profitable customers of the bank. These were the customers with large mortgages, savings and stock portfolios who paid off their credit card balances each month.
To break down departmental silos, product managers must, to some extent, be held accountable for overall customer profitability in addition to the profitability of their specific product.
To facilitate organizational changes in management practices, and sales and service behaviors, companies must set goals and implement incentive plans focused on customer value, not just sales volume. This shift also requires a new measurement and inspection system aimed at selling to the complete customer relationship. By focusing activities and systems on relationship building and coaching the primary contact personnel on relationship-selling, organizations begin the process of true CRM.
Exemplifying this concept, a toy company found that it was more successful in sales initiatives by training and coaching its sales employees to interact with customers by asking questions, such as: What age child are you buying for? Is the child a boy or girl? What do they like to do? Armed with this knowledge, the company was better able to recommend appropriate toys for its customers. Therefore, it had reduced returns of merchandise and improved its profitability.
Bottom-line profitability is associated with an integrated, customer-focused total CRM strategy. Using CRM technology combined with the necessary cultural changes leads to better decision support and improved cross-selling ability, which ultimately increases offer acceptance and profitability.
Financial institutions, insurance brokers, e-tailers and telecommunications companies alike are finding that by refocusing internal operations and overcoming inhouse resistance to change, they can effectively execute a strategic CRM plan


text:
a repulsion term must be added to the equation. In addition, a more satisfactory estimate of binding energy is achieved by computing the lipophilic interactions in a pairwise manner rather than using the area based energy term of the above Böhm functions.
Therefore, in a preferred embodiment, the binding energy is estimated using a modified Böhm scoring function. In the modified Böhm scoring function, the binding energy between protein and ligand (ΔGbind) is estimated considering the following parameters: The reduction of binding energy due to the overall loss of translational and rotational entropy of the ligand (ΔG0); contributions from ideal hydrogen bonds (ΔGhb) where at least one partner is neutral; contributions from unperturbed ionic interactions (ΔGionic); lipophilic interactions between lipophilic ligand atoms and lipophilic acceptor atoms (ΔGlipo); the loss of binding energy due to the freezing of internal degrees of freedom in the ligand, i.e., the freedom of rotation about each C—C bond is reduced (ΔGrot); the energy of the interaction between the protein and ligand (EVdW). Consideration of these terms gives equation 1:
Where N is the number of qualifying interactions for a specific term and, in one embodiment, ΔG0, ΔGhb, ΔGionic, ΔGlipo and ΔGrot are constants which are given the values: 5.4, −4.7, −4.7, −0.17, and 1.4, respectively.
The term Nhb is calculated according to equation 2:
f1((R)=1 if (R<=TOL
or =1−((R−TOL)/0.4 if (R<=0.4+TOL
or =0 if (R>0.4+TOL
f2((( )=1 if ((<30°
or =1−(Δα−30)/50 if Δα<=80°
or =0 if Δα>80°
fpcs is a function which allows for the polar contact surface area per hydrogen bond and therefore distinguishes between strong and weak hydrogen bonds and its value is determined according to the following criteria:
For the implementation of the modified Böhm scoring function, the contributions from ionic interactions, ΔGionic, are computed in a similar fashion to those from hydrogen bonds described above since the same geometry dependency is assumed.
The term Nlipo is calculated according to equation 5 below:
f(rlL) is calculated for all lipophilic ligand atoms, l, and all lipophilic protein atoms, L, according to the following criteria:
The term Nrot is the number of rotable bonds of the amino acid side chain and is taken to be the number of acyclic sp3-sp3 and sp3-sp2 bonds. Rotations of terminal —CH3 or —NH3 are not taken into account.
The final term, EVdW, is calculated according to equation 6 below:
With regard to Equation 6, in one embodiment, the constants ε1 and ε2 are given the atom values: C: 0.245, N: 0.283, O: 0.316, S: 0.316, respectively (i.e. for atoms of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Sulphur, respectively). With regards to equations 5 and 6, the Van der Waal's radii are given the atom values C: 1.85, N: 1.75, O: 1.60, S: 2.00 Å.
It should be understood that all predetermined values and constants given in the equations above are determined within the constraints of current understandings of protein ligand interactions with particular regard to the type of computation being undertaken herein. Therefore, it is possible that, as this scoring function is refined further, these values and constants may change hence any suitable numerical value which gives the desired results in terms of estimating the binding energy of a protein to a ligand may be used and hence fall within the scope of the present invention.
As described above, the scoring function is applied to data extracted from the database of side-chain conformations, atom identities, and interatomic distances. For the purposes of the present description, the number of MHC Class II molecules included in this database is 42 models plus four solved structures. It should be apparent from the above descriptions that the modular nature of the construction of the computational method of the present invention means that new models can simply be added and scanned with the peptide backbone library and side-chain conformational search function to create additional data sets which can be processed by the peptide scoring function as described above. This allows for the repertoire of scanned MHC Class II molecules to easily be increased, or structures and associated data to be replaced if data are available to create more accurate models of the existing alleles.
The present prediction method can be calibrated against a data set comprising a large number of peptides whose affinity for various MHC Class II molecules has previously been experimentally determined. By comparison of calculated versus experimental data, a cut of value can be determined above which it is known that all experimentally determined T-cell epitopes are correctly predicted.
It should be understood that, although the above scoring function is relatively simple compared to some sophisticated methodologies that are available, the calculations are performed extremely rapidly. It should also be understood that the objective is not to calculate the true binding energy per se for each peptide docked in the binding groove of a selected MHC Class II protein. The underlying objective is to obtain comparative binding energy data as an aid to predicting the location of T-cell epitopes based on the primary structure (i.e. amino acid sequence) of a selected protein. A relatively high binding energy or a binding energy above a selected threshold value would suggest the presence of a T-cell epitope in the ligand. The ligand may then be subjected to at least one round of amino-acid substitution and the binding energy recalculated. Due to the rapid nature of the calculations, these manipulations of the peptide sequence can be performed interactively within the program's user interface on cost-effectively available computer hardware. Major investment in computer hardware is thus not required.
It would be apparent to one skilled in the art that other available software could be used for the same purposes. In particular, more sophisticated software which is capable of docking ligands into protein binding-sites may be used in conjunction with energy minimization. Examples of docking software are: DOCK (Kuntz et al., J. Mol. Biol., 161:269-288 (1982)), LUDI (Böhm, H. J., J. Comput Aided Mol. Des., 8:623-632 (1994)) and FLEXX (Rarey M., et al., ISMB, 3:300-308 (1995)). Examples of molecular modeling and manipulation software include: AMBER (Tripos) and CHARMm (Molecular Simulations Inc.). The use of these computational methods would severely limit the throughput of the method of this invention due to the lengths of processing time required to make the necessary calculations. However, it is feasible that such methods could be used as a 'secondary screen' to obtain more accurate calculations of binding energy for peptides which are found to be 'positive binders' via the method of the present invention.
The limitation of processing time for sophisticated molecular mechanic or molecular dynamic calculations is one which is defined both by the design of the software which makes these calculations and the current technology limitations of computer hardware. It may be anticipated that, in the future, with the writing of more efficient code and the continuing increases in speed of computer processors, it may become feasible to make such calculations within a more manageable time-frame.
Further information on energy functions applied to macromolecules and consideration of the various interactions that take place within a folded protein structure can be found in: Brooks, B. R., et al., J. Comput. Chem., 4:187-217 (1983) and further information concerning general protein-ligand interactions can be found in: Dauber-Osguthorpe et al., Proteins 4(1):31-47(1988), which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. Useful background information can also be found, for example, in Fasman, G. D., ed., Prediction of Protein Structure and the Principles of Protein Conformation, Plenum Press, New York, ISBN: 0-_PHONE_-9.
The interaction between MHC, peptide and T-cell receptor (TCR) provides the structural basis for the antigen specificity of T-cell recognition. T-cell proliferation assays test the binding of peptides to MHC and the recognition of MHC/peptide complexes by the TCR. In vitro T-cell proliferation assays of the present example, involve the stimulation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), containing antigen presenting cells (APCs) and T-cells. Stimulation is conducted in vitro using synthetic peptide antigens, and in some experiments whole protein antigen. Stimulated T-cell proliferation is measured using 3H-thymidine (3H-Thy) and the presence of incorporated 3H-Thy assessed using scintillation counting of washed fixed cells.
Buffy coats from human blood stored for less than 12 hours were obtained from the National Blood Service (Addenbrooks Hospital, Cambridge, UK). Ficoll-paque was obtained from Amersham Pharmacia Biotech (Amersham, UK). Serum free AIM V media for the culture of primary human lymphocytes and containing L-glutamine, 50 μg/ml streptomycin, 10 μg/ml gentomycin and 0.


text:
The Hayward fault runs through the heart of Montclair, in the Oakland hills behind Piedmont. Montclair Park's duck pond was constructed where the fault left a natural sag in the ground.
Only in seismologists' equations, and perhaps deep down in the crust, are faults smooth, flat planes. In the world, on the surface, faults are as ragged and variable as any other geological feature. The Hayward fault is more of a zone, from a few to a hundred meters in width, with several fractures running through it. Where two strands overlap, a block of ground between them may slump in tension or rise in compression, depending on how the strands are oriented. At Montclair Park, two strands are mapped on either side of the sag basin. Lake Temescal is another example of a sag basin repurposed as a water feature. So, apparently, is Lake Aliso, the pond on the grounds of Mills College.
The first "great San Francisco earthquake" occurred 21 October 1868 on the Hayward fault. The epicenter appears to have been in southern San Leandro, and surface rupture extended from there all the way down to Fremont. In Montclair, the other direction along the fault, there was plenty of shaking of course, but no rupture of the ground from what we can tell. A trenching study, conducted along the third-base line of the little ballfield in Montclair Park, found no sign of recent movement along the fault there. But slow, silent motion does affect the fault in Montclair. The old fire station on Moraga Avenue has been rendered useless by aseismic creep, and some of the houses along the fault appear to show foundation disruption. But generally creep is invisible unless there is some structure that it affects, like the south curb of Medau Place, below. South of here, the fault crosses Route 13, reaching the other side at the head of Dimond Canyon.


text:
Is 100mm of concrete enough in naturally-ventilated buildings?
A question often asked by architects and designers is: "Will 100mm of concrete provide enough thermal mass?" The answer largely depends on the extent to which you want to optimise the building design. It is sometimes thought that a 100mm of concrete is sufficient, but this fails to take account of a range of factors including how buildings actually respond to real weather conditions. For example, a naturally-ventilated office with exposed 100mm concrete composite floors (steel decking/soffit with insitu concrete topping) might have sufficient heat capacity to cope with a simple 24-hour heating and cooling cycle. However, in addition to a building's daily cycle, there are also longer cycles related to a typical hot spell (usually three to five days) and also the five working days per week cycle, from which heat will reach different depths within the available thermal mass. In the case of floors in a non-air conditioned building for example, the greater the slab depth, the longer the time period it responds to; the core of a 300mm thick concrete slab responds to the monthly average condition and draws heat in deeper over an extended period of hot weather.
For longer time periods these factors are important because it is the longer-term average room temperatures that define the thermal storage core temperature and hence the temperature gradient that draws heat in to the concrete. So, whilst a 100mm of concrete offers some useful thermal mass, thicker slabs provide greater temperature stability and increased cooling performance across a range of conditions including hot periods.
To help visualise what this means in practice, the graph below shows how the soffit temperature of exposed 100mm and 300mm floors in a naturally-ventilated office respond to hot weather. This was produced using finite difference modelling to calculate the heat transfer at the soffit and into the floor slab over the course of several days, during which there is a shift to warmer weather.
Figure 3 (from Concrete Floors Solutions for Passive and Active Cooling publication): Change in soffit temperature in response to a period of hot weather


from new contributors. Often they are assisted by other established Bitcoin Core contributors, including sometimes the authors of the PRs being discussed.
Optech recommends attendance to any engineer who wants to get more involved in the Bitcoin Core process. IRC meetings are held at 17:00 UTC on Wednesdays.
Bech32 sending support
Week 12 of 24 in a series about allowing the people you pay to access all of segwit's benefits.
This segment marks half-way through our series about bech32, so we decided to have some fun this week by describing some bech32-related trivia that's interesting but not important enough for its own segment.
 - How is bech32 pronounced? Pieter Wuille, co-author of the proposal, uses a soft "ch" so that the word sounds like "besh thirty two". The name is a portmanteau that mixes the letters of the address's error correction coding (BCH) into the name of its numeric base (base32). Pronouncing it with a soft "ch" allows the first syllable of bech32 to be similar to Bitcoin's legacy address format, base58. We admit this extended explanation ruins the joke, but it's a clever and amusing bit of wordplay.
 - BCH has nothing to do with Bitcoin Cash's ticker code: the name of the BCH codes bech32 is based upon are an abbreviation for Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem, with Hocquenghem inventing this type of cyclic codes in 1959 followed by Bose and Ray-Chaudhuri independently rediscovering them in 1960. Moreover, the bech32 address format was announced in March 2017, three months before the first plans for what would later be labeled Bitcoin Cash (which initially planned to use the ticker code BCC).
 - Over ten CPU years consumed: using existing information about BCH codes, the authors of bech32 were able to find the set of codes that provided the minimum amount of error detection they desired for Bitcoin addresses. However, there were almost 160 thousand eligible codes in this set, and the authors expected some of them to be better than others. To find the best code among them, over 200 CPU cores and "more than 10 years of computation time" was used.
Notable code and documentation changes
 - Bitcoin Core #15741 speeds up importing keys, addresses, and other information into the wallet using the importmulti RPC by batching the database updates rather than making them sequentially. In a test performed by the PR author, this reduced the time to import 10,000 addresses from 465 seconds to 4 seconds.
 - LND #2985 waits to relay gossip announcements until there are there are at least ten of them to send and five seconds have elapsed since the previous batch, reducing bandwidth overhead. This continues the work done by LND and other implementations towards reducing the overhead of the gossip protocol given the significant growth in the size of the LN network over the past year.
 - LND #2761 switches to using a persistent state machine for routed payments and to storing some additional state data for the machine, improving the program's ability to correctly handle HTLCs that were unresolved when the daemon was restarted.


what is a kush
What is a kush
Or perhaps Chepsiro, commander of Hermothybia, who is so boastful of his conquests in the land of Kush?
Dem Yankees tuck eber thing dat dey saw eben to our kush, what we had cooked fer our supper.
Kush was cornbread, cooked in de big griddle on de fireplace, mashed up with raw onions an' ham gravy poured over hit.
Thou knowest well that thy divine father destines thee to wed the Prince of Kush whom but now thou didst smite so fiercely.'
Kush definition, marijuana, formerly specific to a strain of cannabis that originated from the Hindu Kush region. See more.
What is a kush
MaximumYield explains Kush
This definition explains the meaning of Kush and why it matters.