text:
JAMES, D. M., CARRE, M. J. and HAAKE, S. J. (2005). Predicting the playing character of cricket pitches. Sports engineering, 8 (4), 193-207.Full text not available from this repository.
A cricket pitch is a prepared strip of compacted soil and closely mown turf onto which the bowler projects the ball. The surface is of fundamental importance to the game and groundstaff seek to ensure that the ball rebound is of sufficient pace, bounce and consistency to promote skill in both the batsman and bowler. The scientific understanding of the factors that influence the playing quality of a pitch is incomplete and groundstaff often rely on experience and 'rules of thumb'. A major programme of research was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of a range of pitch measurement apparatus that are perceived to provide indications of playing character. Over three seasons, 18 fieldwork visits were completed at 11 different first-class county grounds. Pitches were tested at the end of each match and direct assessments of pace, bounce and consistency were achieved by employing an artificial bowler and high speed video arrangement. Measurements of surface friction, hardness and restitution were also recorded. It was found that no single pitch measurement was able to provide a reliable indication of pace or bounce, but, when the measurements were combined in a simple Newtonian model, good predictions of pace were achieved. The study revealed a simple method by which groundstaff can predict pace during crucial stages in pitch preparation. However, the study also showed that bounce is affected by levels of pitch deformation and that development of impact models and bespoke measurement tools is needed to reliably predict variation in bounce.
|Uncontrolled Keywords:||dynamics, friction, impact, pitch, restitution|
|Research Institute, Centre or Group:||Centre for Sports Engineering Research|
|Depositing User:||Ann Betterton|
|Date Deposited:||05 Dec 2008|
|Last Modified:||30 Jul 2010 16:13|
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Blending Facial Expressions with the Face Puppet Panel
By layering unique facial expressions to an auto motion project, the Face Puppet tool gives you the freedom to add any specific facial feature animations including blinking of the eyes, a slight smile, or creating a full-face expression for your actor.
Blending Facial Expressions from the Library
 1. Make sure the actor has been applied with a voice with either idle or auto motion.
 2. Go to the time frame where you want to blend custom facial expressions to the existing motion.
 3. Click the Face Puppet button on the tool bar.
 4. Make sure that the Blend data on next recording checkbox is activated.
 5. Use the Full Face Control Puppeteering method; or alternatively, use the Solo Feature Selection Puppeteering methods to record and blend a new facial expression.
 6. Repeat the steps to do the multi-layer recording.
 7. After the recording, the entire motion clip replaces the auto motion in a duration. The result in the motion clip takes effect even if you apply any other auto motion to the actor.
 Please also refer to the following sections for more information:


text:
What it is:
A(or ZBA) is a business-oriented bank account that usually has a balance of $0.
How it works (Example):
For example, let's say that restaurant company XYZ keeps its accounting department writes checks on Account B, a checking account that Company XYZ has set up as its ZBA, to pay the bills due that week. This week, the amount of those checks is $40,150.in Account A, an interest-bearing account. Every Tuesday, its
Company XYZ wants to keep its cash centralized in one account that pays interest. To keep as much money in the interest-bearing account as possible, Company XYZ moves only $40,150 out of Account A into Account B on Tuesday so the checks clear.
Why it Matters:
ZBAs help companies avoid havingspread out over several different bank accounts, which costs the company interest and creates more bookkeeping work.

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


text:
The Goodwin-Niering Center actively strives to increase the availability of research opportunities for students. Since the Center's establishment, over 250 student research projects on environmental topics have been completed, including both undergraduate and graduate, individual, summer and honor studies.
The Center particularly emphasizes the importance of long-term ecological research, such as the projects conducted in Arboretum natural areas involving students in forest vegetation and animal inventory and analysis. At least 25 courses regularly use the Arboretum. Students doing individual studies or honors and masters theses commonly use the Arboretum as a field site for research.


text:
Elijah J. McCoyBorn May 2, 1843? at Colchester, Ontario; died October 10, 1929
Elijah McCoy was born to George McCoy and Mildred Goins, both runaway slaves from Kentucky who came via the underground railway to Colchester, Ontario.
The McCoy family returned to the United States while Elijah was very young and settled in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
At age 15 years, Elijah was sent to Edinburgh, Scotland to study mechanical engineering.
He returned to the United States after his studies. The only job he could get was as a fire man or coal man on a Michigan train line, despite his educational qualifications.
During this job, McCoy invented and patented his Improvements on Lubricators for Steam Engines in 1872 in the United States.
In 1874 Improvements on Lubricators for Steam Engines was patented in Canada.
The expression "the real McCoy," which refers to an original or real item versus an inferior imitation, supposedly originated with Elijah McCoy.
Ties to Canada: Elijah's father, George McCoy, reputedly returned to Canada and enlisted in the militia to put down the Red River Rebellion of 1870. It is also suggested that George received land in Canada for serving in the militia.
Sample of inventions patented in Canada by McCoy
|Patent Number||Filing Date||Title|
|3499||1874||Improvements on Lubricators for Steam Engines|
|14270||1882||Improvements on Lubricators|

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


Curation for Engagement
[fa icon="calendar"] Aug 16, 2019 1:26:04 PM / by Elizabeth Chaney
Elizabeth Chaney
Driving engagement is all about enabling the user to easily get to what they need when they need it to accomplish what they are trying to do. Webinfinity data has confirmed that curation is key.
There are multiple ways to curate assets within the Webinfinity system - interests, tag-driven widgets, collections and information pages.
Webinfinity - Many curation options
The Webinfinity solution is designed with many different curation options to drive engagement. "Interests" are driven by tags in the system. They can be configured for specific user engagement scenarios such as a library of specific resources, resources for a specific task, promotions for a specific product or solution, and many more only limited by the curator's imagination and target user needs. An Interest automatically curates specific types of resources, for specific types of job functions and tasks, and for specific geographic locations and languages, according to the configured rules. Interests become extremely useful when the curator wishes to auto-curate a specific group of defined assets.
To create an interest, the content must all have at least one factor in common. For example, an interest can be all battle cards loaded into the system or it can be all battle cards for a specific geography, target audience or selling situation. Interests become fragmented and potentially less useful, when the topic broadens to more types of assets, user roles, geographies or tasks. They are most valuable when the defining point of curation can be pinpointed.
Dynamic tag-driven widgets in the Webinfinity solution work in much the same way as interests. These widgets are useful to present information to the user with specific tags typically on an information page or as assets related to a specific item. "Explore Count" widgets present the user with a count so they can easily see how many assets are available - key uses being for suggested content in a guided selling scenario, the number of approved incentives, and many more. "Tag Explore" widgets are useful when the curator wants to automatically create a list of assets on a page, using the tag categories contained in an entire tag list. This is a quick way to auto-build an explore page for users to quickly see what's available for a specific product or solution area.
"Collections" and "Information Pages" are designed to easily and manually curate an experience, configuring content, applications and tools together to produce quality outcomes for specific job functions and tasks, and for specific geographic locations and languages. Collections are ordered by the curator to potentially guide the users through the assets on a specific topic. Search and filtering work inside the collection to enable the user to easily pinpoint what they need. Information Pages are designed to provide an even more structured approach to the presentation of the assets. They are an aggregation point for a curated experience, combining interests, collections and potentially the dynamic widgets described above.
Manual vs. dynamic curation - which is best?
Manual curation is better suited for specific product launches and announcements, specific time-stamped incentives and promotions, or specific guided experiences needing a manually configured structure. Manual curation would apply if the content does not have one specific tag common denominator. A product launch may include price lists, battle cards, guides, product specifications and more.
Dynamic curation is particularly powerful when the curator wishes the system to auto-track and add assets as they are posted - e.g. news, technical reports, promotions, deals, price lists, etc. Dynamic curation is used for grouping items to produce a pinpointed experience such as is the case with specific asset libraries, and possibly specific tasks depending on the breadth and variability of the assets. Dynamic curation could also be ideal for regional curators looking to group specific announcements or promotions for a specific country or region. This task can be onerous if done manually.
The final decision regarding dynamic vs. manual curation of content has to do with placement. A dynamic "interest" will list items chronologically with the newest item on top. A manual "collection" or "information page" allows the curator to order the content items based on what makes sense for the topic at hand. The key here is to understand what the target users need to find what they need to accomplish their task.
Topics: Enterprise, Personalized Experience, Content, Engagement
Elizabeth Chaney
Written by Elizabeth Chaney


Creating Bootstrapper Packages
Creating Bootstrapper Packages
Updated: August 2011
The Setup program is a generic installer that can be configured to detect and install redistributable components such as Windows Installer (.msi) files and executable programs. The installer is also known as a bootstrapper. It is programmed through a set of XML manifests that specify the metadata to manage the installation of the component.
You can use the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator to create the manifests that describe the bootstrapper package. Alternatively, you can generate the manifests by using the XML Editor in Visual Studio. For more information, see How to: Create a Package Manifest and How to: Create a Product Manifest. To see an example of creating a bootstrapper package, see Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Bootstrapper to Show a Privacy Prompt.
To create a bootstrapper package, you have to supply the redistributable in the form of an EXE or MSI the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator. Then, the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator creates the following files:
 - The product manifest, product.xml, which contains any language-neutral metadata for the package. This contains metadata common to all the localized versions of the redistributable component.
 - The package manifest, package.xml, which contains language-specific metadata; it typically contains localized error messages. A component must have at least one package manifest for each localized version of that component.
After these files are created, put the product manifest file into a folder named for the custom bootstrapper. The package manifest file goes into a folder named for the locale. For example, if the package manifest file is for English redistribution, put the file into a folder called en. Repeat this process for each locale, such as ja for Japanese and de for German. The final custom bootstrapper package could have the following folder structure.
Finally, copy the redistributable files into the bootstrapper folder location. For more information, see How to: Create a Localized Bootstrapper Package.
On 64 bit systems, use the following registry key:
Each redistributable component appears in its own subfolder under the packages directory. The product manifest and redistributable files are put into this subfolder. Localized versions of the component and package manifests are put in subfolders named according to Culture Name. For more information about culture names, see the table in Localization Property.
After these files are copied into the bootstrapper folder, the bootstrapper package automatically appears in the Visual Studio prerequisites dialog box. If your custom bootstrapper package does not appear, close and then reopen the Prerequisites Dialog Box. For more information, see Prerequisites Dialog Box.
The following table shows the properties that are automatically populated by the bootstrapper.
The name of the application.
The processor and bits-per-word of the platform targeted by an executable. Values include the following:
 - Intel
 - IA64
 - AMD64
The version number for Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows ME operating systems. The syntax of the version is Major.Minor.ServicePack.
The version number for the Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or Windows 7 operating systems. The syntax of the version is Major.Minor.ServicePack.
The version of the Windows Installer assembly (msi.dll) run during the installation.
This property is set if the user has administrator privileges. Values are true or false.
The installation mode indicates where the component needs to be installed from. Values include the following:
 - HomeSite - prerequisites are installed from the vendor's Web site.
 - SpecificSite - prerequisites are installed from the location that you select.
 - SameSite - prerequisites are installed from the same location as the application.
You can prevent your redistributable files from being deployed in Setup projects. To do this, create a redistributable list in the RedistList folder in your.NET Framework directory:
The redistributable list is an XML file that you should name using the following format: Company Name.Component Name.RedistList.xml. So, for example, if the component is called Datawidgets made by Acme, use Acme.DataWidgets.RedistList.xml. An example of the redistributable list's contents might resemble this:
August 2011
Added 64 bit registry key.
Content bug fix.
Community Additions
© 2015 Microsoft


Monday, November 15, 2010
Marble and Terrazzo Floors
Marble floors exude richness, quality and sophistication. There is an ancient history of marble flooring, and much of this architectural work still exists today from antiquity. Some of it is still in excellent condition after thousands of years. Marble floors are found in historic structures from the ancient Greek Parthenon to Grand Central Station in New York City (below).
Patterns can be created by using different colored stone, and inlaying them for contrast and juxtaposition. The surface of the marble floor is then polished smooth, for an even flooring surface.
Because marble flooring is so sleek, shiny and reflective, it can often be difficult to keep spotless. Streaks, smudges, scuffs and dust will show up clearly and immediately. Regular cleaning is a must. A soft dust mop works well for daily maintenance, with at least a weekly sweeping and a damp mop. Marble floors need to be professionally cleaned and polished at least once a year to repair any cracks or dried-out areas and help it keep its sheen.
Since marble is so durable, heavy, dramatic and used in places like palaces, folks should get the hint that it's also pretty expensive. Installation of the floor will also be costly, and should not be undertaken by anyone who does not know what he's doing. The maintenance alone takes its toll, with constant cleaning and regular resealing which should also be done by professionals. In addition to the high cost, marble floors are very cold on bare feet. Slippers or throw rugs are highly recommended during winter months
Below are the marble floors of the Mamluk 14th century madrasa and mausoleum of Sultan Hasan in Cairo, Egypt.
Here is a panel from the Duomo's marble floor in Siena, Italy.
Around 1920, Italian masons realized a less expensive method for producing marble floor, in a technique now known as "Terrazzo." First, a concrete substrate is built from a slab at least 3 inches thick. Then a wet mixture of sand-based mortar is applied to the substrate. While this mortar is still wet, marble chips and pigment are placed on top of the wet mortar. This mixture is then tamped or consolidated in place, and subsequently polished. The beauty of terrazzo is that different colored patterns can readily be incorporated, with high precision and accuracy. Terrazzo does not have the same high sheen as marble slabs, so usually a filler or additive is applied to the terrazzo to give it a more lustrous finish.
Here is a Terrazo floor from the Texas State Capitol building:
In American architecture today, a marble floor sometimes seems pretentious, in the same vein as a "McMansion" of the nouveau riche. However, judicious use of marble tastefully applied, properly installed and adequately cared for can add real beauty to any building.
 1. Hey Pete, Perhaps this would interest you, I have a concave hexagonal column which appears could lock very well with other columns like. Than I have that same column with convex ends cube ends also locking, rotations produces angles.
 Perhaps I could make a youtube for you to see if you interested.


How to accept payments using Stripe?
By Snigdha | Last Updated on May 14th, 2020 7:12 am | 5-min read
How to accept payments using Stripe
Supported by widespread access to high speed internet and the insatiable hunger of customers for convenience, online commerce is progressing rapidly all around the world. However, when it comes to payments online, businesses are expanding internationally and taking advantage of the increased reach that online commerce provides with widely varying customer preferences. Not only can delivery terms be quite different, but the payment methods used for online transactions themselves vary too.
Stripe supports a wider range of payment methods to help you accept payments from around the world. Each payment method varies in authentication process. Businesses after reading this blog will be able to discover, understand, and select the right payment methods for them to reach a broader audience. With Stripe, clients have the ability to pay their Invoices with a credit card and can sit back and watch their money get added to their bank account automatically.
How to accept payments using Stripe?
This blog underlines the characteristics of payment methods that determine their relevance to a particular business model and also provides an overview of Stripe payments. The points to be taken into consideration by businesses on how to accept payment using Stripe:
1. Deciding on the right payment methods
Businesses will have to consider their business model and operational constraints to evaluate the value, to them, of additional payment methods.
 1. Identify your customer
 Identifying target audience is an important first step for businesses to decide which payment options to focus on. The distribution of payment methods used online varies by region, but also within specific regions. Some credit cards brands are internationally available, others confined to a single country.
 2. Checkout support
 Certain payment methods only support payments in a limited number of currencies however other payment involve redirecting customers to another app or site to complete their payment. Also, some payment methods may limit the possibility to complete payments without a customer's explicit confirmation. Given the specific payment methods, businesses will have to adapt their checkout to support them.
 3. Risk and frauds
 Businesses can anticipate and manage the risks associated with accepting online payments by choosing payment methods that match their risk preferences. Businesses will have to take into consideration, which payment options may increase the likelihood of fraudulent transactions, and where liability rests in the event of disputed payments.
 4. Analyze the cost to support payment methods
 Businesses will have to take into consideration the costs and benefits of adding payment methods to their checkout. They will need to anticipate the cost of the technical integration of an additional payment method. They will also need to take into account, the internal costs borne to support multiple payment methods.
Deciding on the right payment methods
2. Payment method
Businesses will have to understand the checkout experience their customers will have using it, as well as the implications of accepting it.
 1. Payment completion
 A challenge for businesses accepting payments online is to ensure that they provide a pleasant and genuine payment experience for their customers. The three types of payments are
 - Business-initiated
 - Customer-initiated
 - Customer-authenticated
 2. Confirmation on receiving funds
 Once the business receives a confirmation that the payment has been completed by the customer, it gives them the confidence to fulfill the order. Two cases which fall under this pointer are
 - Immediate Confirmation
 - Delayed Confirmation
 3. Can the payment credentials be stored?
 Businesses offering subscription services and looking to optimize the checkout experience for future transactions will consider whether or not payment details can be stored on file and reused.
 - Payment details are reusable
 - Payment details are single-use
3. Industry considerations
Customers always expect greater speed and convenience when interacting with businesses online. Below mentioned are a few guidelines that businesses can take into consideration.
 1. Mobile commerce
 2. Mobile commerce, also known as m-commerce, comprises of any monetary transaction completed using a mobile device. It is actually an advancement of ecommerce, enabling people to buy and sell goods or services from almost anywhere, by simply using a mobile phone. Payment methods for customers using mobile app installed can offer an extremely simple purchase experience.
 3. On-demand economy
 The on-demand economy is defined as an economic activity created by digital marketplaces and technology organizations to fulfill consumer demand by an immediate access to goods and services. Payment methods offering immediate confirmation that the transaction was successful are a priority for the on-demand economy.
 4. Software-as-a-service
 Software-as-a-service businesses and nonprofits focus on subscriptions as well as larger payments that are settled by bank transfers.
Why should a business opt for Stripe?
Businesses should carefully weigh the following considerations as they evaluate integration solutions to support additional payment method.
Why should a business opt for Stripe?
 1. Simple onboarding
 Adding any payment methods is a very complex process and it requires businesses to establish both a contractual and operational relationship with payment scheme and that might take weeks. Stripe makes this process a lot simpler so businesses can quickly add and scale payment method support.
 2. Easy way to integrate a new payment method
 Businesses can develop against a unified framework that allows them to scale support for all payment methods easily. To reduce the risks of technical integration, Stripe's Sources API (Application Programming Interface) supports accepting any payment method—both cards and non-cards—via single API. Businesses now using stripe have a simple and elegant integration that involve minimal development time and easy to maintain, regardless of which payment methods they choose to implement.
 3. Unified monitoring, reporting, payouts for all payment methods
 Payments made with any payment method using the Sources API, including cards, will appear consistently in Stripe Dashboard, reducing operational complexity and allowing for lightweight financial reconciliation. This process allows businesses to develop standardized processes for typical operations such as customer support, and refunds. Thus stripe payment methods are secure.
 PayPal and Stripe charge exactly the same amount. However, Stripe also accepts ACH (Automated Clearing House) transactions, which PayPal doesn't, and offers them for just 0.8 per cent per transfer. Stripe currently supports popular payment methods around the world. The Stripe Payment Gateway extension allows store owners to accept credit card payments on their sites. Stripe payments are best as they simple and very popular.
 Each payment method supported by Sources API is defined by four characteristics. The combination of these characteristics determines how a source is made chargeable, and how it is used in a charge request to complete a payment.
 - Pull or push
 - Flow
 - Usage
 - Synchronous or asynchronous
Stripe payments are very simple to accept online. Stripe has no setup fees, no monthly or annual fees, or any hidden costs. Stripe checkout is completely satisfactory. Thousands of businesses rely on Stripe's software tools to securely accept payments and expand globally. Stripe will continue to evaluate locally relevant payment methods and support to meaningfully increase conversion rates for its users over time.
Did you know that you can have your very own monetized apps? Try Appy Pie today!
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text:
When a cockroach scuttles into a dark corner as we flip on the kitchen light, we feel revulsion, not kinship. But a new study reveals that most humans
share a basic trait with Kafka's creepy creatures: right-handedness. Researchers released roaches into a Y-shaped tube, where scents of
vanilla or ethanol enticed the insects to venture past the tube's splitting point. The researchers then recorded which direction the bugs turned.
Cockroaches with intact antennae preferred the tube's right fork 57% of the time. This right-side bias persisted even after the scientists chopped off
one of the bugs' sensitive antennae, used to sense touch and smells. The finding, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Insect Behavior, adds to a
growing body of evidence that even the tiniest brains show side-preference. The insight could aid bioengineers who hope to control cockroaches for
search and rescue missions or pest control.
See more ScienceShots.


Rising food prices and household welfare
Working Paper 2011-200
Food price inflation in Brazil in the twelve months to June 2008 was 18 percent, while overall inflation was 5.3 percent. This paper uses spatially disaggregated monthly data on consumer prices and two different household surveys to estimate the welfare consequences of these food price increases, and their distribution across households. Because Brazil is a large food producer, with a predominantly wage-earning agricultural labor force, our estimates include general equilibrium effects on market and transfer incomes, as well as the standard estimates of changes in consumer surplus. While the expenditure (or consumer surplus) effects were large, negative and markedly regressive everywhere, the market income effect was positive and progressive, particularly in rural areas. Because of this effect on the rural poor, and of the partial protection afforded by increases in two large social assistance benefits, the overall impact of higher food prices in Brazil was U-shaped, with the middle-income groups suffering larger proportional losses than the very poor. Nevertheless, since Brazil is 80 percent urban, higher food prices still led to a greater incidence and depth of poverty at the national level.
Authors: Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Anna Fruttero, Phillippe Leite, Leonardo Lucchetti.
Keywords: Food prices, welfare, poverty, inequality, price change incidence curve, Brazil.
JEL: D31, I38, O15.


text:
Influence of Macronutrients and Polyethylene Glycol on Intake of a Quebracho Tannin Diet by Sheep and Goats
Journal of Animal Science
American Society of Animal Science
Villalba, J. J., Provenza, F. D., & Banner, R. E. (2002). Influence of macronutrients and polyethylene glycol on intake of a quebracho tannin diet by sheep and goats. Journal of Animal Science, 80(12), 3154-3164.
We determined if supplemental macronutrients or polyethylene glycol (PEG) influenced intake of a tannin diet. Sheep (lambs 5 mo age, 36 kg) and goats (kids 7 mo age, 32 kg) were fed supplements high in either energy or protein or offered a choice between the two supplements before and after receiving a meal containing 15% quebracho tannin. The effect of PEG, a compound that attenuates the negative effects of tannins, was assessed by offering PEG while animals consumed the tannin diet for 4 h/d. Intake of the tannin diet was influenced by both macronutrients and PEG. Animals that chose their own supplements or that received the high-protein supplement, consumed more of the tannin diet than animals fed the high-energy supplement: 34 and 36 vs 31 g/kg0.75 (lambs) and 41 and 39 vs 34 g/kg0.75 (kids), respectively (P < 0.05). Animals supplemented with PEG ate much more of the tannin diet than unsupplemented animals: 70 vs 39 g/kg0.75 (lambs) and 63 vs 34 g/kg0.75 (kids), respectively (P < 0.001). Sheep and goats consumed more tannin food when given PEG than when supplemented with macronutrients (51 and 38 g/kg0.75, P < 0.001). Sheep and goats offered a choice between supplements consumed more CP than animals fed the high-energy supplement and more ME than animals fed the high-protein supplement (P < 0.05). In so doing, they selected a combination of foods that yielded a more balanced intake of macronutrients, while achieving high levels of intake of the tannin food. Sheep and goats can be used as an environmentally safe and economically sound means to reduce the abundance of tannin-rich vegetation. Macronutrients and PEG enhance use of tannin-containing plants, which may increase production of alternate forages and create a more diverse mix of species in a plant community.


text:
which is an analytic version of the fact that every integer is uniquely a sum of distinct powers of 2. What I didn't realize at the time, but learned from George Andrews article Euler's "De Partitio Numerorum", in the current issue (Vol. 44, No. 4) of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, is that this is due to Euler. This is hardly surprising, though, as Euler was as far as I know the first person to apply generating functions to partitions. (The result was known before that; it's the generating-function statement that's due to Euler.)
But here's one I didn't know:
This is an analytic version of the fact that every integer is uniquely a sum of distinct powers of 3 and their negatives, and is Theorem 4 of the Andrews paper. For example, 1 = 1, 2 = 3-1, 3 = 3, 4 = 3+1, 5 = 9-3+1, 6 = 9-3, 7 = 9-3+1, and so on.
To see this fact combinatorially, note that we can make 3k sums out of the numbers 30, 31,..., 3k-1; for each of these we include the number, its negative, or neither. If we can show that these are the distinct integers from -l to l, where l = (3k-1)/2, then that's enough. (For example, when k = 2, we have l = 4, and the nine possible sums of 1, 3, and their negatives are
-3-1, -3, -3+1, -1, 0, 1, 3-1, 3, 3+1
where "0" denotes the empty sum. These are just the integers from -4 to 4.)
But this can be shown by induction on k. Clearly it's true for k = 0. Then, for the induction, consider the 3k sums of the powers of three up to 3k-1 and their negatives; by the inductive hypothesis these are just the integers in the interval. Now consider the 3k+1 sums of the powers of three up to 3k and their negatives. There are 3k of these which are just the ones which don't include 3k. Those that include +3k add up to, and those which include -3k add up to. These three intervals put together are, as desired. (For example, when k=2, these three intervals are [-4, 4], [5, 13], and [-13, -5], which together make up [-13, 13].) By induction, we can make each integer in uniquely as a sum of distinct powers of 3 which are less than 3k and their negatives, which is essentially the desired result.
The last section of the article talks about partitions with some negative parts, or "signed partitions". For example, 9+8-6-5 is a signed partition of 6. These are a bit more awkward to work with in terms of generating functions -- the generating function above about the powers of 3 doesn't converge, ever! So it's basically a curiosity, but one can actually prove things about these signed partitions using generating functions; see the article for examples.


text:
If the average American eats 10 to 12 pounds of chocolate a year, then I'm already falling behind for 2011. That's okay; eating more chocolate is not one of my New Year's resolutions!
I do love chocolate, though! I even enjoy reading about it. While researching the chocolate crisis for an earlier post, I learned that it can take four days to make chocolate "from bean to bar." ("Bean to bar" means from the time the cacao beans reach the manufacturer to the time the finished chocolate bars are ready to be shipped out.)
The manufacturing process of chocolate is not only interesting, but it gives us a great opportunity to practice using passive voice in English!
The passive voice is formed by combining any form of to be with the past participle of a verb. The past participle is the "ed" form in regular verbs. Only verbs that take an object (transitive verbs) can be used in passive voice.
The passive voice is useful when you want to focus on an action and not on the person who performed the action. When talking about making chocolate, it is the process that is important, not the person who does it. Did you notice that the title of today's post is in passive voice: "How Chocolate is Made"? The word "is" is a form of to be and the word "made" is the past participle of the verb to make.
Below is a description of the chocolate-making process. To make the passive voice, fill in each blank with the past participle of the verb in parentheses.
- The beans are _____ to the chocolate factory. (ship)
- At the chocolate factory, the beans are _____ and _____. (inspect, clean)
- After the beans have been _____, they are _____. ( sort, roast)
- Next, the outer shells of the beans will be _____. The inner parts are called nibs. (crack)
- The nibs are _____ into a thick paste. (grind)
- Sugar and milk are _____ to the chocolate paste. (add)
- All the ingredients will be _____ together well. (blend)
- The chocolate is _____ and _____ several times. (heat, cool)
- This process is _____ tempering; it makes the chocolate smooth and shiny. (call)
- The chocolate is _____ into bars. (shape)
This video from Olive and Sinclair Southern Artisan Chocolate shows how they make their chocolate bars "from bean to bar." The video has no words, so you can be the narrator, using passive voice!
Here are the past participles: 1. shipped 2. inspected, cleaned 3. sorted, roasted 4. cracked 5. ground 6. added 7. blended 8. heated, cooled 9. called 10. shaped
How much chocolate has been eaten at your house this year?


Suppose we have $K$ subjects and a treatment with two levels, "Before" and "After". A paired t-test is equivalent to fitting a fixed effects ANOVA:
$Y = Subject + Treatment +\epsilon$
It is also equivalent Repeated Measures ANOVA or Mixed ANOVA, where Treatment is fixed and Subject is random. It tried all four methods for this simple dataset and the Treatment p-value is exactly the same. For the sake of this question, let us consider the fixed effects version only.
The total number of observations is $2K$, while the number of parameters is:
$ p = intercept + (K-1)$ subject effects + (2 - 1) treatment effects = $K + 1$
That is, there are about 2 observations per parameter for any $K$. To me it suggests that the model is likely to be very overfitted, unless there is a very substantial subject effect.
In practice, how often have you seen the subject effect so large that it justifies pairing the observations by subject?
 - $\begingroup$ Note that treatment & subject are orthogonal so it's simply a matter of whether the error variance within subjects is lower enough than that between subjects to offset its fewer degrees of freedom - rules of thumb for a minimum no. observations per regression degree of freedom to avoid over-fitting are made up for observational data where predictors are often correlated. $\endgroup$ – Scortchi - Reinstate Monica Aug 21 '14 at 15:01
 - $\begingroup$ I don't understand why orthogonality should change how the bias-variance tradeoff principle is applied. You seem to suggest that for an orthogonal design, it's ok to add more factors as long as MSE goes down. But (assuming that MSE is the criterion of choice) the same thing can be said about a non-orthogonal design as well. $\endgroup$ – James Aug 21 '14 at 15:27
 - 1
 $\begingroup$ Sorry, I didn't mean to seem to suggest that. There are two considerations: (1) Orthogonality ensures the estimate of the treatment effect is independent of the subject effects - it's the same whether you include subjects or not, & the only issue's getting a better estimate of its standard error; & (2) including subjects in the model may increase prediction error (though orthogonal designs can typically get away with fewer observations per regression degree of freedom than rules of thumb for observational studies suggest is necessary). The first consideration is the relevant one for people... $\endgroup$ – Scortchi - Reinstate Monica Aug 22 '14 at 8:47
 - $\begingroup$... interested only in effect estimation & who carry out the t-test or its equivalent ANOVAR to this end. $\endgroup$ – Scortchi - Reinstate Monica Aug 22 '14 at 8:47
 - $\begingroup$ orthogonal designs can typically get away with fewer observations per regression degree of freedom than rules of thumb for observational studies suggest is necessary - I.e., all other things being equal, a if there are p parameters in a model with an orthogonal design, it will deliver a better fit (explain the outcome better) than a model with p parameters and a non-orthogonal design. Did I get your right? $\endgroup$ – James Aug 22 '14 at 14:17
It's a question of how the data were collected. In a paired design, you do a separate randomization on each subject, so you need to account for that by including the subject effect in the model. You do that because it's mandatory -- nothing to do with overfitting.
Pairing is a special case of blocking. Blocking is considered to be about the most effective thing you can do to control for nuisance variations -- such as variations among subjects. To quote from the flyleaf of Box, Hunter, and Hunter's Statistics For Experimenters (2nd ed.),
"Block what you can and randomize what you can't" can approximately justify an analysis "as if" standard assumptions were true.
Section 4.2 of that book (if not the whole book) is a good reference on this topic. And almost any example in that section is one where it is worth accounting for blocks in the analysis.
 - $\begingroup$ What exactly do you mean by randomization? Each subject get both treatments in the same order, so what is randomized? $\endgroup$ – James Sep 4 '14 at 19:21
 - $\begingroup$ OK, well then it is a repeated-measures design. All the more reason to include subjects as a factor. In particular, you still have dependence due to subjects, so it is the wrong model if you leave them out. And there really isn't a choice about whether or not to pair -- impossible to do an independent samples design. Note that one common way to analyze repeated measures is to use the paired responses as a multivariate response. You would then not have Subject in the model but you would have no more degrees of freedom. $\endgroup$ – Russ Lenth Sep 4 '14 at 20:58
 - 1
 $\begingroup$ PS -- it seems to me that if you're really concerned about bias, the bigger issue is the fact that the order of the treatments isn't randomized - making it impossible to distinguish between treatment effects and order effects. $\endgroup$ – Russ Lenth Sep 4 '14 at 21:11
 - 1
 $\begingroup$ James -- if everyone gets the treatments in the same order, how do you separate any potential order effects from treatment effects? $\endgroup$ – Glen_b Sep 6 '14 at 2:46
 - $\begingroup$ That's a question for someone else. In the paired t-test they probably assume that there is no carryover effect. $\endgroup$ – James Sep 8 '14 at 15:02
Your Answer


text:
From a Japan Times Editorial:
That Japanese public libraries are thriving may come as no surprise to anyone, but an education ministry report found that the number of books checked out by elementary school children from the 3,274 public libraries nationwide reached an average of 26 per child in fiscal 2010. That is up from 18.8 in 2007, a significant and commendable upswing to the highest level ever. The total number of books checked out by all people was also at a peak of 663.6 million books nationwide.
After the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, libraries in many areas were decimated. Librarians, volunteers and readers of all kinds worked hard to ensure that children and adults had access to books so their reading life could continue even during the middle of the tragedy.
…libraries deserve even more support and use. Their importance will continue as libraries learn to adapt to new forms of reading, such as e-books, while still providing many other functions. Most importantly, books must be presented to young people in fun and meaningful ways until their natural curiosity and reading habits take over to keep them reading on their own. Libraries help do just that.
Read the Complete Editorial


Summer reading program wraps up with a wild time
Youngsters, moms, dads and grandparents turned packed the Willits library for the final Summer Library Reading program event.
Gabe Kerschner of Wild Things Inc. definitely knew how to engage the youngsters with his assortment of wild animals. Between exhorting the group to say goodbye to Izod the alligator, "See you later alligator" to Precious the rattler which couldn't strike straight. Flower, the orphaned skunk, was straight out of Bambi. Archimedes a great horned owl, came to Wild Things because it had a broken wing.
Kerschner brings an assortment of animals to visit classrooms, assemblies and events all around the state. Each of the animals was rescued and the Wild Things Inc. is a recognized rescue center located in Weimer.
Izod, our alligator, was rescued by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department during a drug raid. Izod was living in the bath tub, in filth.
Precious, the rattler, suffered a broken back from a weedeater.
Each of the animals had a story and Kerschner helped educate and entertain his young audience, and a few of the adults, too.
To wrap up the outing, Friends of the Willits Library served up ice cream and a book for each youngster to take home.


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TESL Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of the program, graduates will be able to:
1. Demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of language as a system.
2. Use theories in second language acquisition to differentiate between learning disabilities and language differences.
3. Assess and interpret formal and informal testing results through conducted research.
4. Analyze instructional methods in ESL and Sheltered English Immersion and describe best practices.
5. Interpret the State and Federal laws that govern the education of English language learners and share information with the local community.
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"Bank Gaze/The Implacable order of things" spirits the reader off to a strange, surreal world where the real and the fantastic intermingle. Elements of magic realism help to create an unfamiliar, fairy-tale, poetic universe reminiscent in many ways of the stories in the Bible. The protagonists live under the blazing sun of the Alentejo at a time that is difficult to determine. They include the sheperd Jose, the siamese twins Moises and Elias, attached by their little finger, the cook with her highly artistic dishes, master Rafael who has only one arm and one leg, who is blind from one eye and def from one ear, the more than one hundred and fifty years old Gabriel and the devil who foments the intrigue.
The "montes" (farmsteads) on which these figures go about their archaich activities seem like islands in the expansive plane of the barren and meagre Alentejo. The landscape is seething with symbolism - a real and purely poetic space.
"Bank Gaze/The Implacable order of things" is in two parts and revolves around the idea of deception. There are three central figures: a woman, a man who deceives and a deceived man. The action in the second part takes palce in the following generation thirty years later and is a variation on part one. Deception and guilt are like some inevitable fate that afflicts the main protagonist Jose in the form of a mighty giant.
With a suggestive force that is both compelling and poetic, Peixoto's novel adresses the question of human existence. Much remains unsolved, mysterious, demanding an interpretation. The language is simple, unpretentious, but highly graphic. The frequent repetition of central phrases lends the novel a particular intensity and captivating rhythm.
Manuel Vazquez Montalban on Jose Luis Peixoto: "He is an enormous boon form Portuguese literature and has an acute awareness of the poetry of language".
Nenhum Olhar won the prestigious Jose Saramago literary award in 2001. This award is given every two years for the best novel written in portuguese by a writer under the age of 35 years old. Portuguese is nowadays spoken for over 200 million people all over the world.
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Arquivo de recortes sobre José Luís Peixoto e a sua obra.
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Perfil SAPO
foto do autor


text:
Have your say on bylaw changes
Auckland Council wants to make sure that Aucklanders can enjoy our region's public places, while keeping safe.
The council is proposing changes to the Public Safety and Nuisance Bylaw to minimise nuisance and safety risks to people when using public places.
The bylaw includes a wide range of issues that Aucklanders encounter daily: from using a drone, activities on a park or a beach, set netting, graffiti and car window washing.
The proposed changes won't alter the council's levels of service to safety and nuisance complaints, but will ensure that the most appropriate legislation is used, and that the bylaw is easier to understand.
"Many Aucklanders may not be aware of this bylaw, but it is wide-ranging and covers many activities that people interact with every day," says Councillor Linda Cooper, Chair of the Regulatory Committee.
"We have recently checked how well the rules in the bylaw are working and identified some improvements."
"The proposed changes aim to remove any unnecessary aspects of the bylaw and streamline regulation, so we don't have multiple rules for one issue. They also help to make the bylaw easier to use and understand."
"We encourage people to have their say, so that we can put in place these changes to make sure the bylaw stays fit for purpose in future," she says.
Some parts of the bylaw are proposed to be revoked or removed (as they are dealt with better by other legislation or Auckland Council bylaws), and other parts are proposed to be amended to improve their effectiveness.
The main proposed changes include:
- clarifying expected behavior and restrictions on people using public places
- prohibiting people from leaving or storing construction materials, shipping containers, consumer goods, and boats in public places
- clarifying how the council sets controls and gives approval for activities on public places
- clarifying which public places the bylaw applies to and enabling organisations in control of those places to approve bylaw exceptions.
Regulation would be streamlined by:
- using national legislation rather than bylaws for car window washing, mind-altering substances, graffiti, noise, fish offal, and street naming and numbering
- moving issues about animals, signage, stormwater and vehicles to existing council bylaws.
Request to government to ban the public sale of fireworks
The council intends to ask the government to ban the sale of fireworks to the general public and wants Aucklanders' views on whether or not they support a ban. Public firework displays would still be allowed. Aucklanders are also able to provide their views on this as part of the bylaw consultation process.
Have your say now
You now have an opportunity to tell us your views. This consultation is seeking public feedback from now until 5 December.
Have your say events are also being held across the region over the next month.
Make a submission and find out more at the Auckland Council website.
What are bylaws and why do we review them?
- Bylaws are rules made by local councils that affect the way we live, work and play.
- As a statutory requirement, bylaws are reviewed every five to 10 years. This process involves public consultations to make sure our bylaws are useful and reflect what Aucklanders need.
- Some of these bylaws are no longer needed as other legislation has become operative.


Help IFES promote disability rights!
What's Going on at IFES?
The pervasive culture of political violence in Bangladesh has unique impacts on women, where intimidation, harassment, and sometimes physical violence can inhibit women's electoral and political participation. To address this issue, women themselves have a critical role to play in promoting peaceful and gender-inclusive elections.
On November 29, citizens of Burkina Faso will head to the polls to elect their next President and Deputies who will represent them in the National Assembly. These elections were originally scheduled for October 11, 2015, but were postponed until November 29 due to a coup d'état on September 17.
Electoral violence can emerge out of post-conflict scenarios, simmering socio-economic, ethnic or religious differences, long-standing rivalries of elaborate patronage networks, or in otherwise stable political situations given the wrong mix of circumstances and opportunity. That is, it is a global problem, and communities from Newark, New Jersey in the U.S. to Kabul in Afghanistan have experienced electoral violence.
IFES Making an Impact
years building sustainable democracy
countries in which IFES has worked
voters reached through civic education campaigns


Residential Project
Initial exploration on Phyton coding and pen plotter production, as the result of change between x and y, visually articulated a seam, where the intersection of variables occur. The seam in this residential project becomes a programmatic and structural stitch as it expands and contracts according to uses such as circulation, utility, and storage. Drawings explore the notion of the seam through the cutline, as it defined the essential threshold that holds the parts together.
Pen Plotter Drawings Unable to perfectly click at the spinal spot, yet inescapably being 'one' these drawings explored notions on figure and field tension where the seam becomes visible as the field is formed.
In between particle and object explores the seam through 3 atmospheric volumes folding into each other, the formation of dense encapsulation on the left, a sequential breathe of upsurge in the middle volume and a compact moil of filling in on the very right.
The Seam
In between surface and solid explores the seam through the giving away of space to the surface, a breathing volume constituted of seams that reveal the pursuit of 'volumizing'.
Long Section
Short Section
Interior Space


text:
Have you ever noticed how manufacturers and our dealers continue to do this again and again without getting sued?
They are not marketing it falsely, but smartly!
While manufacturing a pendrive/harddrive they consider:
1 MB = 1000 KB
1 GB = 1000 MB
1 TB = 1000 GB and so on.
However, our computers work on base 2 and for them:
1 MB = 1024 KB
1GB = 1024 MB
1 TB = 1024 GB
This difference in the method of computation is responsible for this "missing space."
I'll take an example of my 16GB Sandisk pendrive.
From Sandisk manufacturer's point of view, the 16GB will have 16*1000*1000*1000 = 16,000,000,000 bytes.
From a computer's point of view, 16GB is actually
16*1024*1024*1024 = 17,179,869,184 bytes.
So, my Sandisk pendrive that promises to have 16 GB storage space will actually displays 14.9GB.
17,179,869,184 – 16,000,000,000 = 1,179,869,184 bytes (1.1 GB) less storage space when connected to a computer.
Things doesn't go so bad when you purchase small storage devices like pendrives,memory cards but with external harddisks….
Just look at the table below:
Take a close look at the box of your harddrive and you'll see a disclaimer like this:


text:
What you will learn
In this collection of lessons we will focus on restoring old photographs in Photoshop. We'll get started by learning some basic best practice information relating to scanning and saving our photos for restoration. Next we'll begin looking at a couple of non-destructive workflows for repairing our image. First we'll learn about some ways that we can heal an image. Next we'll learn about some ways that we can clone parts of an image to another area. After learning how to use these basic tools and techniques, we'll get started repairing some more difficult damage to our photographs. Along the way, we'll learn how to use both layer masks and adjustment layers to our advantage. We'll wrap things up by learning some methods of both increasing the contrast in our image and sharpening up some of it's missing details. After completing this course, you will be well equipped to begin scanning in and restoring those photos that you may have thought were damaged beyond repair.


text:
Are conception rates on your farm where you would like them to be or is there room for improvement?
There are a number of factors that can affect conception rate in dairy cattle. Each can have a considerable impact on conception rate, and all of them can be prevented and/or controlled, says Cynthia Martel with Virginia Cooperative Extension.
In the September 2012 issue of the Virginia Tech Dairy Pipeline, Martel examines the role that hygiene can play in reducing conception rates.
"It's tempting to think reduced conception would only be a result of calving conditions, post-calving health, reproductive disorders, milk production, nutrition, estrous detection errors, and timing of service," she says. "However semen quality and handling, insemination technique, and the environment in which you work can also play a role in reduced pregnancy rate."
Martel has put together a breeding hygiene assessment for you and your employees to examine breeding techniques and hygiene before, during, and after performing artificial insemination.
Source: September 2012 Virginia Tech Dairy Pipeline


text:
From: United Kingdom
Fields: Archaeology Key Words/Phrases: excavated in Egypt and in Zimbabwe
Gertrude Caton-Thompson, a British archeologist, was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. During World War I she worked for the British Ministry of Shipping and she also attended the Paris Peace Conference. Afterwards, she completed her training at the British School of Archeology in Egypt. Occasionally collaborating with another British woman archeologist, E. W. Gardner, she inaugurated the First Archeological and Geological Survey of the Northern Fayum between 1924 and 1926 when she was still a student. She continued the project in _PHONE_ when she was a field director for the Royal Anthropological Institution. Her work pushed the origins of Egyptian culture back to 5000 B.C. Afterwards, she collaborated with Guy Brunton on a project at Hemamiah near Badar in Egypt and together they established that the Badarian period occurred just before the Predynastic period.
From _PHONE_, Caton-Thompson excavated the famed ruins at Zimbabwe in Rhodesia. Her discoveries about the nation's past contributed to new national pride and, later, a new name for this country. From _PHONE_, she again worked in Egypt excavating the early site of Kharga Oasis. In _PHONE_, she investigated the tombs and temples of Hureidha in the Hadramaut in southern Arabia.
Caton-Thompson took time to describe and publish each of her discoveries and her contributions were extensive. She served as president of the British Prehistoric Society and a vice-president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She was governor of the Bedford College (University of London) and the School of Oriental Studies. From 1934 until her retirement in 1957, she was a Fellow of Newnham College (Cambridge). She received many prestigious awards in her lifetime and an honorary LL.D. degree from Cambridge.


Greasewood ecosystem in Pine Valley, Nevada with the Roberts Mountains in the background.
Greasewood Greasewood ecosystem near Pine Valley, Nevada © Louis Provencher/TNC
New Paper Defends Greasewood and Other Undervalued Ecosystems
Scientists from The Nature Conservancy in Nevada introduce the concept of biodiversity potential to assess the value of these ecosystems
Who cares about greasewood? We should, as it's an undervalued and extreme ecosystem that has economic value and policy implications, scientists from The Nature Conservancy in Nevada argue in a new paper published this month.
In "All Systems Are Equal: In Defense of Undervalued Ecosystems," author Louis Provencher and co-authors Laurel Saito, Kevin Badik, and Sarah Byer write that it's time to recognize the biodiversity potential of greasewood and other misunderstood ecosystems that are not considered biodiversity hotspots. Biodiversity potential questions whether the degradation of ecosystems like greasewood with seemingly low number of species compared to more species-rich or socially valued ecosystems is acceptable. According to the authors, it's important to recognize the biodiversity potential of these undervalued systems, as their soils, hydrology, and climates create unique assortments of adapted species that cannot be replaced by other or more species from other ecosystems. In other words, undervalued systems are more significant than they appear.
The Nature Conservancy in Nevada mapped Nevada's indicators of groundwater-dependent ecosystems (iGDEs) last year, which cover at least one-tenth of the state, and found that greasewood was the largest iGDE type and makes up almost a third of iGDEs in Nevada. It is also found in California, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and other western states. Phreatophytic (plants with roots that can tap into groundwater) systems like greasewood are often indicator species for groundwater located near the ground surface. But if groundwater is pumped to the point where the water table drops and taproots cannot reach it, the plants will become stressed, wilt and eventually might disappear. GDEs like greasewood may be disregarded in favor of economic uses for water, but this has policy implications: they could be subject to groundwater withdrawals that could be litigated, subject to NEPA decision-making or other regulatory mechanisms, or reviewed by a state engineer for approval or denial of water right applications.
"As surface water supplies become scarce, pressures to develop and use groundwater can lead to water table declines that can affect greasewood ecosystems," Provencher said. "Understanding the groundwater needs to sustain greasewood ecosystems and being able to model ecosystem transitions of these systems will help us to consider how to maintain groundwater sustainability that supports social, economic and environmental needs for water."
Greasewood ecosystems may also be disregarded in favor of a transition to another ecosystem with more biodiversity, but they aren't easily replaced. Few species other than those present in greasewood ecosystems can survive the saline to sodic (salty or containing sodium chloride) soils they grow in. Instead, the loss of greasewood ecosystems, which are a naturally effective fuel break, could encourage the spread of invasive non-native plants like cheatgrass, which creates a wildfire risk.
Greasewood covers 2.2. million acres of Nevada and is typically found in elevations of 3,800-5,800 feet in valley bottoms where summer temperatures reach into the hundreds. Pronghorn, mule deer, black-tailed jackrabbits, golden eagles and more than 100 invertebrate, reptile, and small mammal species depend on these ecosystems. The loss of these ecosystems not only increases fire risk, but also drops the biodiversity potential, as species such as golden eagle would lose habitat and have to travel further for their preferred prey, jackrabbit.
"Greasewood ecosystems in Nevada have historically been deemed 'less valuable' than other ecosystems based on species richness and past cultural values," the authors write. "However, some greasewood ecosystems may be near or at their biodiversity potential (that cannot be replaced by another ecosystem) and therefore worth conservation protection."
Director of Conservation Ecology, The Nature Conservancy in Nevada


text:
Date of Award
Doctor of Philosophy
School of Education
Associate Professor Lorraine Hammond
Professor Mark Hackling
Field of Research Code
Whether or not teachers use the research-based practices of Explicit Instruction (EI) in lessons matters, since the salient features of EI design and delivery, backed by empirical research (Hattie, 2009), enable the transfer of new and difficult information from shortto long-term memory (Kirschner et al., 2006). How teachers interpret EI is important, because effective early instruction in "systematic, direct and explicit" phonics and phonological awareness (PA) can reduce the incidence of reading difficulties (Moats, 2010).
The aim of this thesis was to investigate, describe and analyse teachers' enacted understanding of Explicit Instruction in phonics and phonological awareness, and identify the factors that enhanced or inhibited faithful implementation of EI practices in pre-primary classrooms.
Case studies were conducted with three pre-primary teachers in Perth, Western Australia. Five explicit phonics and PA lessons, delivered by each teacher, were observed and video recorded over a data collection period of 14 weeks, spanning three school terms in 2014. The teachers were interviewed after the five observations; more extensively at the beginning and end of the datacollection phase. The school principals and, where available, the teacher mentors or EI coaches were also interviewed, with further information gathered from school documents and email contact. The case studies were examined individually and across cases to provide insights into the complexities of teachers' enacted interpretations of EI.
One of the schools had adopted EI as a whole-school approach to literacy in conjunction with fully scripted Direct Instruction Programs (Carnine et al., 2010). In this school, the pre-primary teacher received extensive professional development and delivered EI with fidelity in a school environment highly aligned with teacher-directed approaches. The other two pre-primary teachers taught E I in more eclectic environments, where essential components of EI were not a sufficiently clarified, supported or embedded approach by instructional leaders.
Amongst others, O'Donnell (2019) concluded that teachers' beliefs are an important factor in the success or failure of new teaching approaches. It is therefore likely that the teachers in this study believed phonics should be taught using play-based, meaningful experiences (Campbell, 2015) because the dominant philosophy in early childhood education is play based (Ebbeck & Waniganayake, 2016). This could have contributed to their inability to adhere to critical aspects EI as recommended in the research.
I used Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory to explain how teaching practices were subjected to multiple and complex environmental influences and pedagogical content knowledge, in addition to what teachers deemed important to their students' learning needs. Teachers' practices and understandings were found to be influenced by confusing national and state policies, a predominantly play-based learning philosophy, vagueness of school policy in relation to literacy and EI, teachers' personal beliefs, the school's professional learning framework and the commitment of leadership to embedding teacher-led learning. This study addressed a gap in the literature on teachers' practice of EI in phonics and phonological awareness, and showed that some teachers could articulate the principles but not put them into practice. The findings have implications for further research, policy and teachers' professional learning.
Jensen, H. F. (2019). Pre-primary teachers' enacted understandings of explicit instruction of phonics and phonological awareness as evidenced in practice. Retrieved from _URL_


text:
BECOMING A SOLDIER
a process that changes you - for the better
Becoming a Soldier can be challenging, but it's also a rewarding life. The process can be summed up in three steps. The first is to work with a Recruiter. Once you sign up and are sworn in, you attend Basic Combat Training (BCT). Then you learn valuable job skills at Advanced Individual Training (AIT). Each of these steps is explained in more detail below.


text:
Purpose: Chiral separation is important but also challenging in bioanalytical matrix analysis. The investigation of antifungal drug luliconazole efficacy requires the measurement of its two geometric isomers (E/Z or trans/cis forms), as well as their chiral (R and S) forms. Typical reverse phase chromatographic conditions on non-chiral columns (like BDS Hypersil), baseline separation was only achieved between E and Z forms. With chiral columns under typical reverse phase conditions, RE, SE, RZ and SZ still cannot be baseline separated and achieve the required sensitivity in pg/mL.
Since typical reverse phase chromatography conditions used in electrospray or APCIMS/MS could not achieve the required separation of the 4 enantiomers, we employed APPI (Atmospheric Pressure Photo Ionization) conditions instead.
Methods: In this work, APPI (Atmospheric Pressure Photo Ionization) ion source was used to replace the more common ion sources like ESI (Electrospray Ionization) or APCI (Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Ionization). APPI is well suited to the organic solvents (e.g., hexane), which eliminates the requirement of post column aqueous addition for ESI or APCI. In practice, it was very difficult to make the aqueous addition homogenous therefore, cause signal fluctuation and seriously deteriorated the quantitative measurement.
The organic mobile phase solvents are good dopants for APPI and lead to significantly enhanced sensitivity of LC-APPI-MS/MS.
Results: Under the optimized conditions, 4 chiral compounds were baseline separated and eluted at 5.4, 7.5, 8.3 and 11.4 min, respectively. The internal standard was also separated as two chiral forms, with RT at 9.0 and 11.1 min. It was demonstrated that better accuracy was obtained by applying a second IS for correcting the latest eluting chiral compound, while using the IS at 8.9 min for SZ, RZ, RE and 11.1 min for SE. LLOQ was 50 pg/mL for all four chiral compounds.
Conclusion: LC-APPI-MS/MS is a viable alternative to typical electrospray or chemical ionization techniques for bioanalysis of chiral analytes. The APPI source allowed for use of mobile phase which provided both the needed chromatographic separation, as well as enhanced sensitivity needed, in order to quantitate all 4 chiral analytes with a 15 minute run time.
Yafei Xu– Frontage Laboratories, Inc.
Harry Zhao– Frontage Laboratories, Inc.
Zhongping(John) Lin– Frontage Laboratories, Inc
Wei Zhang– Bioanalytical Scientist, Frontage Laboratories, Inc.


Take the 2-minute tour ×
I have a set of data on which I need to perform a topological sort, with a few assumptions and constraints, and I was wondering if anyone knew an existing, efficient algorithm that would be appropriate for this.
 - The data relationships are known to form a DAG (so no cycles to worry about).
 - An edge from A to B indicates that A depends on B, so B must appear before A in the topological ordering.
 - The graph is not necessarily connected; that is, for any two nodes N and M there may be no way to get from N to M by following edges (even if you ignore edge direction).
 - The data relationships are singly linked. This means that when there is an edge directed from A to B, only the A node contains information about the existence of the edge.
The problem can be formulated as follows:
Given a set of nodes S in graph G which may or may not have incoming edges, find a topological ordering of the subgraph G' consisting of all of the nodes in G that are reachable from any node in set S (obeying edge direction).
This confounds the usual approaches to topological sorting because they require that the nodes in set S do not have any incoming edges, which is something that is not true in my case. The pathological case is:
A --> B --> D
| ^ ^
| | |
\---> C ----/
Where S = {B, C}. An appropriate ordering would be D, B, C, but if a normal topological sort algorithm happened to consider B before C, it would end up with C, D, B, which is completely wrong. (Note that A does not appear in the resulting ordering since it is not reachable from S; it's there to give an example where all of the nodes in S might have incoming edges)
Now, I have to imagine that this is a long-solved problem, since this is essentially what programs like apt and yum have to do when you specify multiple packages in one install command. However, when I search for keyphrases like "dependency resolution algorithm", I get results describing normal topological sorting, which does not handle this particular case.
I can think of a couple of ways to do this, but none of them seem particularly elegant. I was wondering if anyone had some pointers to an appropriate algorithm, preferably one that can operate in a single pass over the data.
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I don't think you'll find an algorithm that can do this with a single pass over the data. I would perform a breadth-first search, starting with the nodes in S, and then do a topological sort on the resulting subgraph.
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Eventually went with this, though I'd still be interested to know if there's anything better and less brute-force out there. – Tyler McHenry Jul 24 '10 at 4:14
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I think you can do a topological sorting of the entire graph and then select only the nodes which are reachable from the set of nodes (you can do some depth first searches from the nodes in the set, in the order resulted after the sorting, and you'll get in the subtree of a node if it wasn't visited before).
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It's not really practical for me to sort the entire graph, since the graph is very large, the portion I want to sort is going to be quite small, and the node information comes out of a database, which would make sorting the whole graph very, very slow. – Tyler McHenry Jul 22 '10 at 13:31
Ok, so you can make the depth first searches entering in a node if the node wasn't visited before, so you'll get the subgraph and then sort the subgraph. The time complexity is o(k + m), where k is the size of the subgraph and m is the number of links in that subgraph. – Teodor Pripoae Jul 22 '10 at 13:48
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text:
Standard C++ programming containers classes such as vector and list are homogeneous, meaning they can store only one type of objects at a time. However, in some cases it's more convenient to use a container of heterogeneous objects, which is where std::tuple comes in handy. std::tuple can store up to 10 objects of different types.
Suppose you need to design a function that retrieves three values from a database: an index number representing the month of the year, and two floating point numbers that represent the consumer's price index (CPI) of the relevant month, and the CPI of the previous month. Although you can split this function into two, it's more efficient and convenient to have one function that retrieves these values in one shot. Your first step consists of defining a tuple type i.e, a specialization of the class template std::tuple. Here's an example:
_TAG_ using namespace std; typedef tuple CPIs;
Here's the function declaration:
CPIs get_cpis(const Date& d);
In the absence of explicit initializers for the tuple's elements, the elements will be default-initialized:
tuple t2(3.55, 'a');// explicit tuple t3; // <0.0,0,string()>
The Standard Library defines meta-functions and helper functions for handling tuples conveniently. Meta-functions use template meta-programming to compute their results at compile time. Helper functions are free-standing functions with short and intuitive names. Let's look at some of these.
To get the number of elements that a tuple type has, use the
_TAG_ using namespace std; int elements=tuple_size::value;//3
To automate the creation of a tuple object, use the
make_tuple() helper function.
make_tuple() deduces the types of its arguments to create a tuple type. It returns a tuple object initialized with those arguments:
CPIs mycpi=make_tuple(2, 0.1, 0.3);
To get the type of a tuple element, use the
tuple_element() meta-function. This function is useful for traversing a tuple or when you want to create copies of a tuple's elements without knowing the elements' types in advance.
tuple_element() takes an index and the tuple type (remember that tuples use zero-based indexing). In the following example,
tuple_element() retrieves the type of the first tuple element. The result is used for declaring val, an object whose type is the same as that of the tuple's first element:
tuple_element <0, tuple >::type val;//int
What if you need to access the actual value of a tuple element rather than its type? Use the get function template. Get
tuple_element() to declare objects of the types of a tuple object's elements and then calls get to copy their corresponding values:
CPIs cpi=make_tuple(4, 0.1, -0.2); tuple_element <0,CPIs>::type val1;//int tuple_element <1,CPIs>::type val2;//double tuple_element <2,CPIs>::type val3;//double val1=get<0> (mycpi);//4 val2=get<1> (mycpi);//0.1 val3=get<2> (mycpi);//-0.2
Putting it all Together
Suppose you're designing a stock quote search engine that accepts a free text query. The engine retrieves the current stock price along with the stock's symbol. To represent the stock prices, you use a pair of integral values for the dollars and cents (a pair of integers rather than double guarantees accurate comparisons among other things), and a string for the stock symbol. You can represent the stock price like this:
typedef tuple StockPrice1;
This design is simple but not descriptive enough -- the reader has to guess that the first two integers are construed as a pair. An alternative design would use a layered structure:
typedef tuple Currency; typedef tuple StockPrice2;
Regardless of your favorite representation, both designs exhibit the beauty of tuples. For example, to compare two
StockPrice records you don't need to overload any operators. std::tuple already includes the relevant overloaded operators for you:
StockPrice1 get_quote(const string& query); StockPrice1 a(620,24,"GOOG"); StockPrice1 b=get_quote("Google Inc."); if (a!=b) //is it the same quote?...
As an aside, you're probably wondering why I didn't use std::pair to represent Currency. The truth is that a pair is nothing but a tuple containing two members. Historically, std::pair inspired the authors of std::tuple to design a more generalized notion of a fixed-size heterogeneous container. Of course, it doesn't mean that you're advised to avoid std::pair;
Tuples were added to C++ programming as part of the Standard Library Technical Report One (TR1 for short) which is a fancy name for what would otherwise be dubbed a service pack for the C++98 Standard Library. Virtually, every standard-compliant C++ compiler supports std::tuple today. Additionally, tuples (as all other TR1 features) are highly portable, so you can use them without hesitation in cross-platform code.
The main advantage of std::tuple is automation. Instead of inventing a heterogeneous container on your own, std::tuple will be convenient so long as you don't need more than 10 elements and don't expect to insert or remove elements dynamically.


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Development of personality is the number one point to work on and with.
In my opinion, development of personality is the number one point to work on and
with. The effect is that students are more engaged, more productive and their results
are better. They discover who they are and what their abilities are. It is a wonderful
experience to see them developing themselves!
Encourage personal development with education
When students own their own learning process, they become intrinsically motivated,
they experience more fun learning and personal growth, says Willy Wijnands,
founder of eduScrum. „Students get the best together and themselves up."
How can students become owners of their own learning process?
„By working in small teams in small teams, they discover in their own way what they
are good at and what they can learn. When a project is completed, students will not
only receive a grade, but will also reflect on their qualities and on what they have
learned from themselves, from others and what others have learned from them. In
addition, they describe what they can do better next time. By becoming aware of their
own ability and learning, appoint what they want and do not want, they become the
boss of themselves and their learning process. „
What role does co-operation play with this?
„Collaboration leads to personal development, based on four building blocks: trust,
communication, involvement and responsibility. Cooperation requires mutual trust
between students. In addition, communication is very important so that they learn to
be themselves and dare to say what they find. These two building blocks provide
engagement within the team, which in turn leads to responsibility. The four building
blocks refer not only to the team as a whole, but also to individual students. „
How do you contribute to this?
„We have developed eduScrum to stimulate the personal development of students.
This is an active collaborative form in which students in teams make assignments
according to a fixed rhythm. They themselves determine their activities and keep
their own progress. The teacher determines the assignments and provides support to
a class, team or individual student, where necessary. Through this method, students
themselves think about how they want to learn. I even take students to training,
teaching teachers how to handle the method. It is important to emphasize that
eduScrum is only a means. It is just right if other methods are used to apply variety to
Founder of eduScrum
More info: _URL_


Posted on
Art Journaling Prompt: How Do You Approach Something Difficult?
It's time for another art journaling prompt: Describe how you approach a difficult task.
This one is deceptively simple and there are several ways to start. You can lead with a straightforward list of steps. If you choose that way, I'd encourage you to elaborate on those steps with how you feel or why you choose them. The expressive part of this prompt is in learning more about yourself when dealing with difficulties.
Another way to start is to take an intuitive direction and explore why something might be hard for you and how you feel about doing hard things in your life. Choosing this way to start is more open to visual imagery and a free-form style.
Or, choose the combo platter! Start with the concrete steps and let that flow into an intuitive exploration. The important thing is that you feel like the page has expressed what you're thinking and feeling.
Head over to the group to see what's up.


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Calculate your age with minute precision
El área de la sombra se refiere a la de un objeto cuadrado o rectangular.
Calculation of azimuth and solar elevation angle by given the coordinates and time of observation. It's possible to input coordinates manually or by selecting from the directory of cities.
Adds and subtracts a specified time interval to the specified date
Calculator calculates the date of the initial date and the number of working days. Taking into account weekends, holidays and weekend shifts at work days, according to the published decrees of the government of the Russian Federation. Created by user's request.
This online calculator computes the result of addition/subtraction of the given number of days to the given date.
This online calculator outputs day of week for given date
This online calculator can be used to find out required amount of dry glue and water to get the needed solution strength
This calculator determines number of days between two given dates
Ideal weight calculator using Paul Broca formula
This online calculator recalculates quantities of ingredients for given proportions if quantity of one ingredient has changed
Julian and Gregorian calendars date conversion
Calculation of Julian day for given date plus some information about it
About 2012, the end of the world and Maya
Moon's age and phase calculation
Calculator calculates the number of days between the two entered dates. Taking into account weekends, holidays and weekend shifts to work days, according to the published decrees of the government of the Russian Federation.
Old Russian calendar - years since world creation


text:
What are graded elements and how do they work? Does L&L use them?
- Graded elements are one way kiln manufacturers adjust for the natural top-to-bottom temperature variations in a kiln.
- Graded elements are great when a kiln is brand new. However, elements age, and with different elements in the same kiln they will age at different rates. If you have to change one element (ruined by glaze, for instance) and not the whole set of elements, your kiln may not be so even. This process is also accelerated by higher temperatures.
- Zone control dynamically deals with any such changes and maintains its evenness over time and under different loading conditions.
- L&L uses graded elements on its new School-Master kilns because the temperatures are not so extreme and it allows us to use the less expensive single zone controllers.


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A team of researchers led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.
The artifact consists of two parts -- a rectangular bar, connected to an apparently broken circular ring, said CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker, who is leading the excavation project. The object, about 2 inches by 1 inch and less than 1 inch thick, was found in August by a team excavating a roughly 1,000-year-old house that had been dug into the side of a beach ridge by early Inupiat Eskimos at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula, which lies within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.
Both sections of the artifact are beveled on one side and concave on the other side, indicating it was manufactured in a mold, said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. A small piece of leather found wrapped around the rectangular bar by the research team yielded a radiocarbon date of roughly A.D. 600, which does not necessarily indicate the age of the object, he said.
"I was totally astonished," said Hoffecker. "The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years."
Hoffecker and his CU-Boulder colleague Owen Mason said the bronze object resembles a belt buckle and may have been used as part of a harness or horse ornament prior to its arrival in Alaska. While they speculated the Inupiat Eskimos could have used the artifact as a clasp for human clothing or perhaps as part of a shaman's regalia, its function on both continents still remains a puzzle, they said.
Since bronze metallurgy from Alaska is unknown, the artifact likely was produced in East Asia and reflects long-distance trade from production centers in either Korea, China, Manchuria or southern Siberia, according to Mason. It conceivably could have been traded from the steppe region of southern Siberia, said Hoffecker, where people began casting bronze several thousand years ago.
Alternatively, some of the earliest Inupiat Eskimos in northwest Alaska -- the direct ancestors of modern Eskimos thought to have migrated into Alaska from adjacent Siberia some 1,500 years ago -- might have brought the object with them from the other side of the Bering Strait. "It was possibly valuable enough so that people hung onto it for generations, passing it down through families," said Mason, an INSTAAR affiliate and co-investigator on the Cape Espenberg excavations.
The Seward Peninsula is a prominent, arrowhead-shaped land mass that abuts the Bering Strait separating Alaska from Siberia. The peninsula was part of the Bering Land Bridge linking Asia and North America during the last ice age when sea level had dropped dramatically, and may have been used by early peoples as a corridor to migrate from Asia into the New World some 14,000 years ago.
The artifact was discovered in August by University of California, Davis, doctoral student Jeremy Foin under 3 feet of sediment near an entryway to a house at Cape Espenberg. Other project members included Chris Darwent of UC Davis, Claire Alix of the University of Paris, Nancy Bigelow of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Max Friesen of the University of Toronto and Gina Hernandez of the National Park Service.
"The shape of the object immediately caught my eye," said Foin, who spotted the soil-covered artifact in an archaeological sifting screen. "After I saw that it clearly had been cast in a mold, my first thought was disbelief, quickly followed by the realization that I had found something of potentially great significance."
The CU-led excavations are part of a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to study human response to climate change at Cape Espenberg from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1400, a critical period of cultural change in the western Arctic, said Mason. Of particular interest are temperature and environmental changes that may be related to Earth's Medieval Warm Period that lasted from about A.D. 950 to 1250.
"That particular time period is thought by some to be an analog of what is happening to our environment now as Earth's temperatures are rising," said Mason. "One of our goals is to find out how these people adapted to a changing climate through their subsistence activities."
The Cape Espenberg beach ridges, wave-swept deposits made of sand and sediment running parallel to the shoreline that were deposited over centuries, often are capped by blowing sand to form high dunes. The Cape Espenberg dwellings were dug into the dunes and shored up with driftwood and occasional whale bones.
The team is examining the timing and formation of the beach ridges as well as the contents of peat and pond sediment cores to help them reconstruct the sea-level history and the changing environment faced by Cape Espenberg's settlers. Information on past climates also is contained in driftwood tree rings, and the team is working with INSTAAR affiliate Scott Elias, a University of London professor and expert on beetle fossils, who is helping the team reconstruct past temperatures at Cape Espenberg.
While the hunting of bowhead whales was a way of life for Inupiat Eskimos at Barrow and Point Hope in northwestern Alaska 1,000 years ago, it is still not clear if the Cape Espenberg people were whaling, said Mason. While whale baleen -- a strong, flexible material found in the mouths of whales that acts as a food filter -- and a variety of whale bones have been found during excavations there, the sea offshore is extremely shallow and some distance from modern whale migration routes. However, there is evidence of fishing and seal and caribou hunting by the group, he said.
The Inupiat Eskimos are believed to have occupied Cape Espenberg from about A.D. 1000 until the mid-1800s, said Hoffecker. They are part of the indigenous Eskimo culture that lives in Earth's circumpolar regions like Alaska, Siberia and Canada.
The Cape Espenberg site has yielded a treasure trove of several thousand artifacts, including sealing harpoons, fishing spears and lures, a copper needle, slate knives, antler arrow points, a shovel made from a walrus scapula, a beaver incisor pendant, ceramics, and even toy bows and toy harpoons. The bronze artifact unearthed in August is currently under study by prehistoric metallurgical expert and Purdue University Assistant Professor H. Kory Cooper.
Explore further: Fossil brain teaser: New study reveals patterns of dinosaur brain development


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Women's Introduction to Firearms
Basic - An introduction to those new to firearms and those needing a refresher class.
Duration: Total of 4 hours: 2.5 hours classroom and 1.5 hours range time.
There are no upcoming classes scheduled for this course.
This is a basic handgun class designed for women and taught by women. This class is not designed to turn you into a master shooter or a gun smith overnight … it will give you a very basic introduction and overview of the fundamentals on how to shoot, as well as a basic understanding on how a semi-auto handgun operates, how to do it safely, and more. Safety is number one and will be continually enforced throughout the class. Approximately 25 rounds of ammunition will be needed.
- 4 universal safety rules
- parts of a semi auto pistol and how it functions
- parts of a cartridge (ammunition)
- types of ammunition
- various firearms/ammunition nomenclature
- the legal system and use of lethal force
- alternative use of non-lethal defense
- brief discussion on holsters
- pistol storage
- how to shoot; eye dominance, stance, grip, sights, breathing, etc
- dry fire shooting
- live fire shooting
Expectations and Outcomes
- Student will receive a certificate
- The student will have the basic understanding of how to handle a semi auto pistol as safely as possible
- The student will have the basic fundementals of how to shoot a semi auto pistol
Basic, USCCA Courses, Women's Only Courses
The instructor requires a copy of your Government Issued ID once you register.
- Eye protection
- Ear protection
- Firearm; if you need to barrow, we can provide
- Bag or case for firearm and gear; if borrowing a firearm, we will provide the ammo.
- One box of ammo; if not borrowing a firearm.
- Ball cap/hat with brim to keep hot brass off of you.
- High neckline shirt.
- Long pants.
- Closed toe comfortable shoes (we will be outside standing in gravel for the shooting portion).
- Notebook and pen.
- Water bottle, snacks (whatever comfort needs).
- Clothes appropriate for outside weather.
- Teachable attitude!