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Factors that contribute to the success of regularly occurring open-air music festivals from an organizational perspective
diplom.de, 4 may. 2000 - 129 páginas
Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Music, celebrations, social gatherings and festivals have always been part of the lives of human beings, which is why the historical beginning of music festivals cannot be exactly stated. The lack of historical accuracy is proof that a need for music and social happenings has always existed among people. Moreover, music s influence on peoples cultures and governments has shown to be of great importance regarding the development of our international society. By looking at the last century alone, one can find many examples supporting this statement. For example, Rock & Roll in the 50-s demonstrated how a whole generation could be inspired by music, which resulted in cultural revolution and social change. Open-air music festivals are great promoters of new music genres and especially of the genres performers. Festivals have the potential to make young people aware of current issues that affect the future of our society. This potential has been recognised by the most successful festival in Europethe Glastonbury Festivalthat is known world wide. Some of the aspects that made this festival so successful are examined in this paper. From the author s point of view, factors contributing to the success of music festivals from an organisational perspective are a variety of interacting complex variables and conditions coming either from the various environments surrounding a festival, supporting or limiting it, or from the festival driving components and the festival itself. This paper will look at the operational side of the festival s driving components that are derived from the festival organiser s skills and actions taking into consideration the process-oriented nature of special events. "Success" and "regularly occurring open-air music festivals" are defined in the next chapter. All following chapters will describe key aspects, methods and tools that need to be considered when organising an open-air music festival with a successful outcome from the viewpoints of both festival organisers and event management researchers. The event intensity and impact on the local community can be very high from an economical, social, and environmental perspective, but unfortunately those aspects cannot be included in this paper because of limited space and time even though they are of great importance. There are many factors coming in turn from the culture, economy and environment of the festival s surrounding community, all of [...]
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1997 Glastonbury Performing AAAnnnddd accommodation activities advertising Angie Watts aspects author's point authority Bedey budget Cambridge Folk Festival catering chapter communication companies contingency plans contribute costs crowd effective emergency services environment evaluation event management event marketing event organiser event staff facilities factors festival experience festival goers festival organisers festival visitors festival workers festival's Freyer Glastonbury Festival Resources Glastonbury Performing Arts Greenpeace guests Health and Safety hospitality identified impact important Internet interview via e-mail involved large numbers logistics major incident marketing mix Michael Eavis Munro-Faure needs O'Tool objectives OOOFFF open-air music festivals outcome Oxfam Performing Arts Festival promotion quality control quality improvement Quality Management Systems quality philosophy requirements responsible Risk Management Safety Commission 1993 Safety Executive 1999 special events sponsors sponsorship stage stewards strategy structure suppliers SWOT analysis target groups tickets Total Quality Management tourism venue WaterAid Watt


Data analysis
Data analysis searches for trends, patterns, and relationships among collected data. It is a way to summarize the data to answer questions. The statistical tool or method used to perform the analysis depends on the questions being asked. For example, certain statistical tools can be used to describe the frequency and patterns of certain symptoms in a patient population, whereas a different statistical tool might evalutate the association between a treatment and changes in symptom severity or progression.
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Analysis, Interpretation, and Reporting of Registry Data To Evaluate Outcomes from "Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide" [4th Edition, 2020]
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Rare Diseases Registry Program (RaDaR): Analyze Data Collected
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8 Reply to " Completeness "
 1. completeness The number three has a sense of completeness that is powerful and easy for your audience to remember.
 2. All depends on the completeness and constancy with which the make-believe is supported. The intensity of his emotions arose only from the completeness with which he believed it. There can be no truth or completeness in any study of the mind which is confined to the individual.
 3. Synonyms for completeness include absoluteness, entireness, entirety, fullness, perfectness, wholeness, broadness, completion, comprehensiveness and extensiveness.
 4. Completeness is beyond awareness. It is just Being itself. You're complete without having to know that you're complete. From that Being comes awareness; it is the light of Being.
 5. the fact of including all the parts, etc. that are necessary; the fact of being whole the accuracy and completeness of the information For the sake of completeness, all names are given in full.
 6. Completedness definition, having all parts or elements; lacking nothing; whole; entire; full: a complete set of Mark Twain's writings. See more.
 7. completeness - traduction anglais-français. Forums pour discuter de completeness, voir ses formes composées, des exemples et poser vos questions. Gratuit.
 8. The completeness of this threat might have intimidated the drabble, but he was on the safe side of the wall, and only laughed. The colonel had paused, as he perceived the completeness of the lawyer's entrapping. The completeness and rapidity of the breaking down depends on.
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[en] This paper presents research and education activities of the power systems group of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Liège. These activities cover power systems stability, security, reliability, and markets, within the contexts of expansion planning, operation planning and real-time operation and automatic control. The paper also reviews the international collaborations of the team.
Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (Communauté française de Belgique) - F.R.S.-FNRS
Researchers ; Professionals ; Students ; General public

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


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The one sentence summary
Many organisations are caught up in a stupidity paradox: they employ smart people who end up doing stupid things.
- Why do smart people do stupid things at work? Welcome to the idea of functional stupidity. It can be catastrophic for companies, or just manifest itself in absurd everyday examples of idiotic, unsustainable management fads and daft working practices.
- And yet a dose of stupidity can be useful and produce good, short-term results, nurturing harmony, and encouraging people to get on with things without questioning everything.
- Functional stupidity has three main facets:
- Not thinking about your assumptions (absence of reflexivity)
- Not asking why you are doing something (justification)
- Not considering the consequences or wider meaning of your actions (substantive reasoning)
- There are five main types: Leadership-induced, Structure-induced, Imitation-induced, Branding-induced, and Culture-induced.
- Managers encourage it by using authority, seduction, naturalisation and opportunism. It helps to stamp out negative capability – the ability to tolerate ambiguity and work out how to resolve problems effectively.
- It can be solved by observing, interpreting, questioning. Try introducing reflective routines, devil's advocates, post-mortems, pre-mortems, the views of newcomers, outsiders and critics, and an anti-stupidity task force.
WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT IT
- Many people actually don't want to use their brains. One study showed that over 50% of people would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit and just think for 6 to 11 minutes.
- It's not imbeciles or bigots who do the most stupid things – you need to be relatively intelligent to be functionally stupid. Knowing too much can be frustrating and stressful – wilful ignorance is easier.
- The K word is the knowledge economy. Companies describe themselves as knowledge intensive to disguise the fact that the jobs are actually dull – it's just a confidence trick.
- Most jobs require less skill than the people doing them – automation has created a new generation of bullshit jobs, part of a new age of stupidity. This often involves skilled incompetence, in which supposed experts fall back into defensive routines to justify doing what they have always done.
- Meanwhile there has been a massive McDonaldisation of jobs – a huge increase in mindless, low paid work.
- When ex-Amazon employees move to other companies, they often take with them grindingly critical work practices, earning themselves the nickname 'Amholes'.
WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
- Not much – it's well argued and suitably provocative.


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What is the Big Idea?
Eating meat or fish can make a crab out of you, according to a study published by Nutrition Journal.
Omnivorous diets are high in arachidonic acid (AA) which changes the brain in a way that affects mood. Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), fats prevalent in fish, are suppose to combat the negative effects of AA. However, the study reported significantly worse moods in fish eaters than vegetarians despite higher intakes of EPA and DHA. This is the first study to examine the impact of a meat and fish diet on an omnivore's mood.
Thirty nine meat-eating participants were assigned to one of three diets. A control group ate meat, fish or poultry daily. A second group ate fish 3-4 times weekly but no meat. A third group ate strictly vegetarian. After two weeks, participants completed a questionnaire to assess their moods. The vegetarian group reduced their EPA, DHA and AA intake and the fish eaters increased their EPA and DHA intakes. The mood were unchanged for the omnivores and fish eaters but the vegetarians showed higher mood scores after two weeks.
What is the Significance?
"Reducing meat, fish, and poultry may improve some domains of short-term mood state in modern omnivores," the report concludes. "Exploring this phenomenon further is warranted, as reductions in dietary meat, fish, and poultry would not only reduce health risks but could benefit the environment as well."
Marion Nestle, nutritionist and NYU professor, argues that a vegetarian diet is indeed healthier. But small amounts of meat doesn't hurt. And in developing countries, "where kids don't have enough food, a little meat thrown in makes a big nutritional difference."
Watch this video to hear Marion Nestle weigh in on the pros and cons of vegetarianism:


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*Use fresh fruits in a variety of shapes and colors that are in season, such as watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, strawberries, kiwi fruit, etc.
Pumpkin-carving tools work really well for carving watermelon. If you don't have any, use a small sharp paring knife.
Carving a melon bowl is similar to carving a pumpkin. It takes a bit of time to carve it, but the bowl can be carved before the party, wrapped in plastic and refrigerated. The melon pulp you remove from the shell can be cut up and served with the other fruits in this festive bowl.
Step 1 Select a uniformly-shaped melon and wash it. Cut off the top 1/4 of the melon. Cut a thin slice from the bottom so the melon will sit flat, being careful not to cut into the red pulp. Scoop out the melon, leaving a 1/2 to 1-inch shell. Next, determine a design to carve. For a graduation, you might carve the year (as shown) or carve the graduate's name. Use stencils for the numbers or letters and trace them onto adhesive-backed vinyl-coated paper.
Step 2 Attach the adhesive pattern to the watermelon. With a small sharp, pointed knife or pumpkin carving tool, cut 3/4 of the way around each number or letter.

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


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BIO Web Conf.
Volume 42, 2022International Scientific and Practical Conference "Sustainable Development of Traditional and Organic Agriculture in the Concept of Green Economy" (SDGE 2021)
|Number of page(s)||7|
|Section||Trends in Agricultural Technologies|
|Published online||13 January 2022|
Interactive methods of teaching mathematics, contributing to the formation of competencies in students of the field of training Agronomy format
Omsk SAU, 1 Institutskaya Square, 1, 644008 Omsk, Russia
* Corresponding author: _EMAIL_
The article outlines aspects of the formation of general professional competencies (GPC-1) through the study of mathematical disciplines; reveals the features of the methodology for the application of tasks (tasks of profile content, task case, task-situation), which are the main means of assessing the formation of the corresponding indicators of achievement of competence: ID-1, ID-2, ID-3, etc. The work analyzed educational publications in mathematical disciplines for the presence of tasks for an objective assessment of the level of formation of general professional competence (GPC-1), the problem of developing the content of criteria and assessment tools for formation of general professional competencies. The authors provide examples of tasks in the disciplines of Higher Mathematics and Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, designed to form skills in identifying and defining a problem, choosing research methods, analyzing, interpreting the result and transferring fundamental knowledge into the language of professional activity.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2022
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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3 thoughts on "Words, Words, Words: Dicta Catonis 10
 1. And the less said about them, the happier you'd be. Don't waste words, to them or about them…
 1. Sorry for my comment without explanation. I thought it might be fun to look at the solution for the above from another cultural perspective (Japanese).
 【黙殺】silence + kill
 ignore; take no notice of
 There is another word with a similar meaning
 【無視】no + see
 ignore; disregard; pay no attention
 The common element for both words is to treat something as if it does not exist.
 The difference between them are these.
 1. The top one is used only for fellow human beings, while the bottom one could be used for others, such as inanimate objects, ideas, rules, etc.
 2. The top one is often more severe in sentiment than the bottom one.
 This post may be inappropriate. If so, Please delete it. Thank you.
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Loudoun County Public Schools
Each student at Steuart Weller Elementary will take part in the school guidance and counseling program. The school counselor is responsible for the organization and management of the program. The ASCA National Model provides the mechanisms with which the school counselor will design, coordinate, implement, manage, and evaluate the program for student success.
School counselors work with students, parents, teachers, and administrators to help students succeed in school and prepare for meaningful, productive living. The program is child-centered, developmental and preventative. It encourages students' academics, social/emotional, and career awareness at the stage of their development. Counseling services are inclusive and respectful of differences in gender, religion, ethnicity, race, ability, socioeconomic status, disability, and age.
What do School Counselors Do?
· Individual counseling
· Group counseling
· Classroom lessons for all students
· Respond to student needs in crisis situations
· Orients students to new school settings
· Participates actively in the referral process of students to special programs and/or services
· Conducts conferences with parents
· Facilitates parent, teacher workshops/discussion groups
· Adheres to ethical and legal standards
How is a Student Referred to the School Counselor?
For More Information About School Counselors
Visit the Following Website… _URL_


The origins of Covent Garden
Photo:Salisbury and Worcester houses in 1630 from Haunted London
Salisbury and Worcester houses in 1630 from Haunted London
Covent Garden Community Assocation
Photo:Saxon brooch from credit Museum of London
Saxon brooch from credit Museum of London
Covent Garden Community Assocation
Covent Garden is an ancient part of England's capital outside the original walled City of London, Roman 'Londinium'. From Saxon times people lived and traded here, between the river and what is now Seven Dials. This settlement of 'Lundenwic' thrived from the 6th century, until Londinium was revived in the late 9th century. It then reverted mainly to pasture.
The area's name comes from the 'convent garden' cultivated here in the Middle Ages by the monks of the Abbey of Westminster, who sold their surplus crops on the site. By the 14th Century the capital was expanding, with more demand for food. People began to bring their own produce to sell, creating the first idea of a market here.
Great houses were built along the river and the Strand, their supplies coming up the Thames. More modest dwellings began to appear across the meadows to the north, including those of people servicing the bishops and aristocracy.
The Abbey's property was surrendered to Henry VIII upon its dissolution in 1539. By 1552 the former convent garden and its surrounding land had come into the hands of John Russell, later first Earl of Bedford, via the Crown. These 47 acres comprise the southern part of modern Covent Garden, being most of the land from the Strand northwards to Long Acre. The Bedfords built a grand home, Bedford House, but allowed a small market to grow outside its walls on the south side of what is now the Piazza.
The 3rd Earl of Bedford built along Long Acre around 1615. But the 4th Earl was more ambitious, and conceived really the first exercise in large-scale urban planning in Britain since the Romans. In 1630 he commissioned Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the King's Works under Charles I, to enhance his estate. A central Piazza was built with colonnades and stately town houses, and, across 20 acres, new streets were added in a complementary style. Inspired by his travels in Italy, Jones introduced the idea of a uniform, elegant square which would set a pattern for much of the West End of London.
Courtiers, the gentry and successful men moved into the fashionable residences with their 10 foot ceilings. The parish of St. Paul's was created for them in 1646, with its new church positioned like a temple in a Roman forum. Cottages standing in the way were demolished and the poorer classes moved on.
And so began what are now almost four centuries of competing property development interests, over these 100 or so acres of prime land that are home to the Covent Garden community.


of flywheel momentum or other piston pairs on the same shaft, the hot cylinder begins an upstroke reducing the volume of the system.
3. Almost all the gas is now in the cold cylinder and cooling continues. This continues to reduce the pressure of the gas and cause contraction. Because the hot cylinder is at minimum volume and the cold cylinder is at its maximum volume, the volume of the system is further reduced by compression of the cold cylinder inwards.
4. The system is at its minimum volume and the gas has greater contact with the hot cylinder. The volume of the system increases by expansion of the hot cylinder.
Beta configuration operation
A beta Stirling has a single power piston arranged within the same cylinder on the same shaft as a displacer piston. The displacer piston is a loose fit and does not extract any power from the expanding gas but only serves to shuttle the working gas between the hot and cold heat exchangers. When the working gas is pushed to the hot end of the cylinder it expands and pushes the power piston. When it is pushed to the cold end of the cylinder it contracts and the momentum of the machine, usually enhanced by a flywheel, pushes the power piston the other way to compress the gas. Unlike the alpha type, the beta type avoids the technical problems of hot moving seals, as the power piston is not in contact with the hot gas.[42]
The complete beta type Stirling cycle
Gamma configuration operation
Other types
Other Stirling configurations continue to interest engineers and inventors.
A hybrid between piston and rotary configuration is a double acting engine. This design rotates the displacers on either side of the power piston. In addition to giving great design variability in the heat transfer area, this layout eliminates all but one external seal on the output shaft and one internal seal on the piston. Also, both sides can be highly pressurized as they balance against each other.
The two-cylinder Stirling with Ross yoke is a two-cylinder stirling engine (positioned at 0°, not 90°) connected using a special yoke. The engine configuration/yoke setup was invented by Andy Ross.[46]
The Franchot engine is a double acting engine invented by Charles-Louis-Félix Franchot (de) in the nineteenth century. A double acting engine is one in which both sides of the piston are acted upon by the pressure of the working fluid. One of the simplest forms of a double acting machine, the Franchot engine consists of two pistons and two cylinders and acts like two separate alpha machines. In the Franchot engine, each piston acts in two gas phases, which makes more efficient use of the mechanical components than a single acting alpha machine. However, a disadvantage of this machine is that one connecting rod must have a sliding seal at the hot side of the engine, which is difficult when dealing with high pressures and temperatures[citation needed].
Free-piston Stirling engines
Free-piston Stirling engines include those with liquid pistons and those with diaphragms as pistons. In a free-piston device, energy may be added or removed by an electrical linear alternator, pump or other coaxial device. This avoids the need for a linkage, and reduces the number of moving parts. In some designs, friction and wear are nearly eliminated by the use of non-contact gas bearings or very precise suspension through planar springs.
Four basic steps in the cycle of a free-piston Stirling engine are:
 2. The gas volume in the engine increases and therefore the pressure reduces, which causes a pressure difference across the displacer rod to force the displacer towards the hot end. When the displacer moves, the piston is almost stationary and therefore the gas volume is almost constant. This step results in the constant volume cooling process, which reduces the pressure of the gas.
In the early 1960s, W.T. Beale invented a free piston version of the Stirling engine to overcome the difficulty of lubricating the crank mechanism.[47] While the invention of the basic free piston Stirling engine is generally attributed to Beale, independent inventions of similar types of engines were made by E.H. Cooke-Yarborough and C. West at the Harwell Laboratories of the UKAERE.[48] G.M. Benson also made important early contributions and patented many novel free-piston configurations.[49]
The first known mention of a Stirling cycle machine using freely moving components is a British patent disclosure in 1876.[50] This machine was envisaged as a refrigerator (i.e., the reversed Stirling cycle). The first consumer product to utilize a free piston Stirling device was a portable refrigerator manufactured by Twinbird Corporation of Japan and offered in the US by Coleman in 2004.
Flat Stirling engine
Thermoacoustic cycle
Other developments
Starting in 1986, Infinia Corporation began developing both highly reliable pulsed free-piston Stirling engines, and thermoacoustic coolers using related technology. The published design uses flexural bearings and hermetically sealed Helium gas cycles, to achieve tested reliabilities exceeding 20 years. As of 2010, the corporation had amassed more than 30 patents, and developed a number of commercial products for both combined heat and power, and solar power.[52] More recently, NASA has considered nuclear-decay heated Stirling Engines for extended missions to the outer solar system.[53] At the 2012 Cable-Tec Expo put on by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, Dean Kamen took the stage with Time Warner Cable Chief Technology Officer Mike LaJoie to announce a new initiative between his company Deka Research and the SCTE. Kamen refers to it as a Stirling engine.[54][55]
 4. Constant-volume (known as isovolumetric or isochoric) heat-addition. The gas passes back through the regenerator where it recovers much of the heat transferred in process 2, heating up on its way to the expansion space.
Theoretical thermal efficiency equals that of the hypothetical Carnot cycle – i.e. the highest efficiency attainable by any heat engine. However, though it is useful for illustrating general principles, the ideal cycle deviates substantially from practical Stirling engines.[56] It has been argued that its indiscriminate use in many standard books on engineering thermodynamics has done a disservice to the study of Stirling engines in general.[57][58]
Since the Stirling engine is a closed cycle, it contains a fixed mass of gas called the "working fluid", most commonly air, hydrogen or helium. In normal operation the engine is sealed and no gas enters or leaves the engine. No valves are required, unlike other types of piston engines. The Stirling engine, like most heat engines, cycles through four main processes: cooling, compression, heating and expansion. This is accomplished by moving the gas back and forth between hot and cold heat exchangers, often with a regenerator between the heater and cooler. The hot heat exchanger is in thermal contact with an external heat source, such as a fuel burner, and the cold heat exchanger is in thermal contact with an external heat sink, such as air fins. A change in gas temperature causes a corresponding change in gas pressure, while the motion of the piston causes the gas to be alternately expanded and compressed.
The gas follows the behaviour described by the gas laws, which describe how a gas's pressure, temperature and volume are related. When the gas is heated the pressure rises (because it is in a sealed chamber) and this pressure then acts on the power piston to produce a power stroke. When the gas is cooled the pressure drops and this drop means that less work needs to be done by the piston to compress the gas on the return stroke; the difference in work between the strokes yields a net positive power output.
The ideal Stirling cycle is unattainable in the real world (as with any heat engine); efficiencies of 50% have been reached,[4] similar to the maximum figure for Diesel cycle engines.[61] The efficiency of Stirling machines is also linked to the environmental temperature; higher efficiency is obtained when the weather is cooler, thus making this type of engine less interesting in places with warmer climates. As with other external combustion engines, Stirling engines can use heat sources other than from combustion of fuels.
To summarize, the Stirling engine uses the temperature difference between its hot end and cold end to establish a cycle of a fixed mass of gas, heated and expanded, and cooled and compressed, thus converting thermal energy into mechanical energy. The greater the temperature difference between the hot and cold sources, the greater the thermal efficiency. The maximum theoretical efficiency is equivalent to that of the Carnot cycle, but the efficiency of real engines is less than this value because of friction and other losses.
Very low-power engines have been built that run on a temperature difference of as little as 0.5 K.[62] A displacer type stirling engine has one piston and one displacer. A temperature difference is required between the top and bottom of the large cylinder to run the engine. In the case of the low-temperature difference (LTD) stirling engine, the temperature difference between one's hand and the surrounding air can be enough to run the engine. The power piston in the displacer type stirling engine is tightly sealed and is controlled to move up and down as the gas inside expands. The displacer, on the other hand, is very loosely fitted so that air can move freely between the hot and cold sections of the engine as the piston moves up and down. The displacer moves up and down to control the heating and cooling of the gas in the engine.
There are two positions:
Lubricants and friction
Comparison with internal combustion engines
Compared


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By Kelly Waldron, Ph.D., ValSource, LLC
This is the fifth article in a series of six intended to provide a holistic primer on the field of quality risk management (QRM). The first article, Quality Risk Management 101: Risks Associated With Medicinal Products, discussed the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic risks and clarified the scope of QRM efforts. It was followed by Quality Risk Management 101: A Brief History of Risk Management in the Regulation of Medicinal Products. Quality Risk Management 101: ICH Q9 In Context offered a critical discussion of the QRM process proposed by ICH Q9, while Quality Risk Management 101: QRM And The Product Life Cycle discussed the relationship between QRM and quality by design, the pharmaceutical quality system, and post-approval change management. The final article in the series will explore common challenges associated with QRM implementation.
Following the publication of ICH Q9, industry eagerly embraced the opportunity to share ideas and best practices related to QRM. The cadence of publication steadily increased as ICH Q8, ICH Q10, and ICH Q11 emerged, as thought leaders sought to provide practical guidance to industry on the application of QRM. This article will focus on selected publications addressing general, rather than specific, applications of QRM.
The first book published on the topic of QRM was one by renowned quality expert James Vesper in June 2006, one year following the publication of ICH Q9. Titled Risk Assessment and Risk Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Clear and Simple, the book posits risk management is nothing new; people (and industry) are exposed to and must manage risk every day, whether they are exposed to hazards during a daily commute to work or through the manufacture of sterile, life-saving medicines.1 Through this simple comparison, Vesper dispels any anxiety-provoking stigma that might accompany the introduction of a new quality management tool and made the concepts of QRM more accessible to and achievable by the reader. This pragmatic tone quickly became the modus operandi within industry literature, as many subsequent publications adopted a case study approach in lieu of rigorous philosophical discussion on the principles and application of QRM.
Vesper's book describes the objectives of and process for quality risk management, but devotes much of the text to a discussion of risk tools and assessment methods. While this was certainly appropriate given the low level of QRM knowledge within industry at the time, combined with general (albeit misguided) perceptions that risk assessment was synonymous with risk management, the emphasis on risk tools is now viewed as a very narrow scope indeed. Nevertheless, Vesper's practical language and clarity of insight make his book required reading for the QRM practitioner.
In 2012, the Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) published the first (and only) industry white paper on the general principles and best practices associated with a QRM program, Technical Report No. 54, Implementation of Quality Risk Management for Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Manufacturing Operations.2 In addition to expanding upon ICH Q9 to offer additional guidance on QRM implementation, this technical report expands the body of knowledge by introducing industry to three key concepts to be applied in QRM: risk maturity, the formality spectrum, and human heuristics.
PDA chose to begin the technical report with an introduction of risk maturity, which serves as the foundation of this research effort and is discussed in detail throughout this thesis. A brief review of where QRM should be applied throughout the product life cycle, as described in ICH Q8(R2), Q9, and Q10, is offered, followed by a discussion of the different types of risk management: proactive and reactive. This distinction is particularly important but had not been given much attention in the ICH guidelines; the inclusion of this concept in the PDA technical report sets the tone for future discussions within industry. In addition, PDA proceeds to examine the role of governance in a QRM program, including organizational and managerial aspects that are pivotal to the success of QRM, one of these being transparency in communication throughout all levels of a company.2
The PDA technical report also explores the concept of proportionality of risk management, explaining the intent behind the clause in ICH Q9 that efforts in QRM should be commensurate with the level of risk.2 PDA relates proportionality to various risk tools and the rigor with which they should be applied. For example, PDA suggests that more formal tools, such as FMEA (failure modes and effects analysis) or HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control point), should be applied to more critical and complex systems and leverage expert knowledge from a risk facilitator and curated QRM team to execute the assessment, while less formal tools such as risk ranking need not employ the services of QRM experts in all cases. PDA points out that formality should not be considered a dichotomy (i.e., either formal or informal), but rather is a spectrum that allows for various combinations of rigorous methods, techniques, documentation options, and expertise to be employed as appropriate for the risk question.2
The concept of human heuristics, as applicable to QRM exercises, is likewise reviewed in PDA's Technical Report No. 54. The influence of human heuristics on decision-making processes was first identified by decision science gurus Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work earned a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002. PDA borrowed from both Kahneman/Tversky and Dr. Kevin O'Donnell, who made the critical linkage between Kahneman's work and QRM in 2010 through the publication of a two-part article addressing subjectivity and uncertainty in QRM exercises.3,4 Human heuristics are cognitive "shortcuts" that are used when judgments are made in the presence of uncertainty; colloquially, these are referred to as "rules of thumb." Heuristics have the potential to adversely affect the validity of risk analyses and risk acceptance decisions, as the estimation of risks and their acceptability to the patient can be greatly influenced by cognitive shortcuts at the expense of scientific knowledge. PDA called attention to this phenomenon where other sources had neglected it; the importance of human heuristics in QRM marks this as a breakthrough.
PDA Technical Report No. 54 was one of the earliest documents of its kind, focused on the establishment of a QRM program to be integrated and applied within the product life cycle. Because of this strategic perspective and the best practices offered within the text, this technical report has become one of the most widely referenced treatises on the enabling function QRM plays in an effective quality system.
Risk Management Applications in Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing, edited by Mollah et al and published in 2013, offers a modern and much more sophisticated treatise on QRM, including chapters on philosophical, academic, and statistical topics that enabled a more comprehensive understanding of the benefits and concepts underpinning QRM.5 The book includes chapters on various QRM topics, compiled from myriad QRM experts; this book therefore represented the perspectives of thought leaders on QRM at the time.
Mollah et al provide a succinct business case for the application of risk management for quality improvement before delving into how various risk management tools can support the overarching QRM life cycle. Acknowledging the difficulty of providing discrete "rules" around the use of particular methodologies at the expense of others, Walker and Busmann compare the advantages and limitations of the basic QRM toolkit (e.g., those summarized in Annex I of ICH Q9).6 While the book does not discuss how to select the best fit risk tool for a particular circumstance and risk question, a pivotal article published by Murray and Reich in 2011 offers guidance on navigating the expansive toolkit based on the objective at hand. 7
Long offers his expertise on regulatory expectations of QRM, including common misunderstandings and pitfalls associated with risk implementation, in his chapter, "Risk Management: Regulatory Expectation, Risk Perception, and Organizational Integration."8 Some instances of QRM misuse as described by Long include:
Perhaps the greatest contribution of Mollah et al's book is Long's chapter on probability estimates and statistical techniques as they relate to QRM exercises.9 Despite the fact that probability is a full 50 percent of the risk calculus (likelihood x severity = risk), there are very few sources available to industry QRM practitioners that explore this topic in a suitable depth. Long addresses this topic head on, explaining general principles of probability, the roles of uncertainty and heuristics in estimating probability, and the benefits of moving toward more quantitative, data-driven assertions to support the validity of QRM outcomes.9 Indeed, industry commonly confuses risk management tool categories (qualitative vs. quantitative) with the application of quantitative risk analysis efforts, using actual probability estimates grounded in scientific data.10 Long's direct inquiry into the relationship between statistics and QRM makes a critical connection that is often overlooked by industry practitioners.
Based on its depth of discussion on all manner of QRM topics, Risk Management Applications in Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing serves as a rich source of knowledge that can enhance the level of expertise of its readership, contributing to general increases of QRM maturity within industry.
While a great many articles, white papers, and other documents on the topic of quality risk management are available in the public sphere, it is the author's opinion that those discussed in this article should comprise required reading for any QRM practitioner. These documents offer unique insight into the field that can help make QRM efforts both efficient and effective, ensuring QRM continues to add value to the patient.
About The Author:
Kelly Waldron is currently a senior consultant with ValSource and a member of the Pharmaceutical Regulatory Science Team (PRST) at the Dublin


text:
Yalwal is the site of a former gold mining town of the same name situated 29 km (18 mi) west of Nowra at the confluence of the Dangera and Yarramunmun Creeks which then forms Yalwal Creek which flows into the Shoalhaven River. It is now the site of a City of Shoalhaven managed picnic area and Dangera Dam.
Gold was first discovered in the area by Rev W.B. Clarke in 1852. Successful sluicing operations began in 1870 by J. Sivewright and party but were disrupted by the great flood of 1871. In 1872 open cut mining operations were begun at the Pinnacle when the main reef was discovered. The first shafts were sunk in the Homeward Bound mine in 1872 with payable gold found in 1874. In 1875 the first stamp battery (5 head) was erected. In 1880 a mail receiving station was opened and in 1884 a public school opened, it closed in 1918, reopened in 1924 and finally closed in 1928.


Page 39 - Jackson Journal
P. 39
 be an indicator of a healthy command climate. When Soldiers within a unit understand the mission and commander's intent, they ultimately possess a mental blueprint of "why" the unit executes a particular operation. People are simply more satisfied at work when they understand the purpose of the mission or the unit. When Soldiers are given the "why" of a particular operation, this information engenders a sense of belonging – creating a sense of pride in the unit, motivating mission accomplishment. Leaders who take the time to explain the purpose of the operation can commit to the task and empower subordinates
to contribute to the solution. A simple way to gauge subordinate understanding is through routine back-briefs or merely asking if the Soldier understands the importance of the specific task or mission. If Soldiers understand the mission and purpose; it indicates that leaders are taking the time to communicate effectively to the lowest levels. When Soldiers are well-informed, they feel as though the unit's leadership cares about them, promoting a strong command climate.
plan. Counseling takes time and deliberate effort. Soldiers understand and appreciate their leaders' investment in their professional development, recognizing that leaders have insightful knowledge and valuable experience to share. Leaders who
take the time to counsel subordinates will develop
a healthy command climate. A way for leaders to assess the level of professional growth counseling within their organizations is to inspect counseling packets simply. One inspection method is to review a subordinate leader's counseling packets while
that leader reports for counseling. For example, a company commander's quarterly counseling with his/her platoon leaders can begin with the company commander reviewing the platoon leader's subordinate's counseling packets. This method assesses both the frequency and the quality of the counseling while also stressing its importance.
Causes of a Negative Command Climate
After understanding the positive and negative indicators mentioned above, what are some
of the causes of an adverse command climate? Commanders are ultimately responsible for an organization's climate, but subordinate leaders may contribute to a negative command climate. Indecisive leadership and constant changes
in expectations within a unit can frustrate subordinates. Soldiers want to do right by their leadership, but leaders in an organization are duty-bound to provide the purpose, direction, and motivation required to accomplish the mission. Soldiers expect leaders to both plan and prepare before execution, not during. Soldiers do not fear hard work, but they dread having to do the same work multiple times because expectations were not clearly defined. Indecisiveness among a unit's leadership can foster a negative command climate.
While indecision by leadership can cripple
a unit's command climate, clearly defined –
but unachievable – expectations set by a unit's leadership can have the same effect. In 1964, Yale School of Management Professor Victor Vroom developed "Expectancy Theory," or the expectancy theory of motivation. This theory presumes that an individual will execute a task as long as three key variables are met; expectancy, performance, and outcome. The theory (often referred to as EPO) denotes an equation that links all three variables to determine if an individual will have the motivation
Jackson Journal 39
Signs and Indicators
 Soldiers come to work to perform well; the Soldier's leadership's feedback is necessary for the Soldier to understand that they are executing their duties to standard. Organizations that provide regular developmental counseling to their Soldiers can indicate a healthy command climate. Routine counseling is an opportunity for leaders and subordinates to assess individual and unit strengths and weaknesses, subsequently developing a personal and organizational growth
 37 38 39 40 41


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text:
Smarter Energy: Getting To Grips With In-Home Display
There are five buttons: Menu (also Left), Down, Up, Enter (also Right), and an envelope button which lets you access the last received message.
As mentioned earlier the four main buttons on the display are Select, Readings/Costs, Usage and Emissions:
Select: Select switches between Gas and Electricity modes indicated by a light bulb icon and a flame icon. Be default gas mode shows the cost today based on kilowatt hours (kWh) whilst the electricity mode displays the kilowatt usage (kW) and pence per hour.
Readings/Costs: switches the primary display for each mode to include Cost Yesterday (costs for yesterday, last 7 days, and last 28 days – "For Illustration Only"), Rate Now (in pence per kWh) which also displays the current meter reading, and Cost now (the default display).
Usage: switches between Now (default display), Usage Today (in kWh with a bar graph for usage), Usage over 7 days (in kWh with a 7 day bar graph), Usage over 28 days (in kWh with a matching bar graph), and Usage over 12 months.
Emissions: shows CO2 emissions and can show gas, electricity separately or combined. The Each button press cycles between displays of Greenhouse gas in kg and kg/h, and emissions over the last 7 days, 28 days, and 12 months (in kg).
The menu system, activated by the buttons at the bottom of the display, don't really need access as they will likely be pre-configured by the engineer but essentially they consist of three options: 1. Set-Up, 2. System Info, and 3. Usage Alarm. When navigating the menu use the arrow indicators – left arrow (also Menu) steps back through the options.
Option 1 "Set-Up" allows the setting of "Buzzer Options" which is really the beep of the keypad, "Light Options" toggles the traffic light display and sets the brightness of the traffic lights, and "Enter bind PIN" which the engineer said shouldn't be touched.
Option 2 "System Info" shows the serial numbers for the electricity and gas meters that are attached to the particular in-home display unit.
Option 3 "Usage Alarm" allows a cost per hour value to be set for the electricity. When the usage exceeds this limit an alarm will sound. This option can be disabled by setting the value to zero.
The In-Home Display provides a lot of information but is largely concerned with kWh, kW, and kg/h so we will talk about what these values mean in a future article together with how we obtain this information online.


text:
by Staff Writers
Ann Arbor MI (SPX) Mar 14, 2013
In evolutionary biology, there is a deeply rooted supposition that you can't go home again: Once an organism has evolved specialized traits, it can't return to the lifestyle of its ancestors.
There's even a name for this pervasive idea. Dollo's law states that evolution is unidirectional and irreversible. But this "law" is not universally accepted and is the topic of heated debate among biologists.
Now a research team led by two University of Michigan biologists has used a large-scale genetic study of the lowly house dust mite to uncover an example of reversible evolution that appears to violate Dollo's law.
The study shows that tiny free-living house dust mites, which thrive in the mattresses, sofas and carpets of even the cleanest homes, evolved from parasites, which in turn evolved from free-living organisms millions of years ago.
"All our analyses conclusively demonstrated that house dust mites have abandoned a parasitic lifestyle, secondarily becoming free-living, and then speciated in several habitats, including human habitations," according to Pavel Klimov and Barry OConnor of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Their paper, "Is permanent parasitism reversible?-Critical evidence from early evolution of house dust mites," is scheduled to be published online March 8 in the journal Systematic Biology.
Mites are arachnids related to spiders (both have eight legs) and are among the most diverse animals on Earth. House dust mites, members of the family Pyroglyphidae, are the most common cause of allergic symptoms in humans, affecting up to 1.2 billion people worldwide.
Despite their huge impact on human health, the evolutionary relationships between these speck-sized creatures are poorly understood. According to Klimov and OConnor, there are 62 different published hypotheses arguing about whether today's free-living dust mites originated from a free-living ancestor or from a parasite-an organism that lives on or in a host species and damages its host.
In their study, Klimov and OConnor evaluated all 62 hypotheses. Their project used large-scale DNA sequencing, the construction of detailed evolutionary trees called phylogenies, and sophisticated statistical analyses to test the hypotheses about the ancestral ecology of house dust mites.
On the phylogenetic tree they produced, house dust mites appear within a large lineage of parasitic mites, the Psoroptidia. These mites are full-time parasites of birds and mammals that never leave the bodies of their hosts. The U-M analysis shows that the immediate parasitic ancestors of house dust mites include skin mites, such as the psoroptic mange mites of livestock and the dog and cat ear mite.
"This result was so surprising that we decided to contact our colleagues to obtain their feedback prior to sending these data for publication," said Klimov, the first author of the paper and an assistant research scientist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
The result was so surprising largely because it runs counter to the entrenched idea that highly specialized parasites cannot return to the free-living lifestyle of their ancestors.
"Parasites can quickly evolve highly sophisticated mechanisms for host exploitation and can lose their ability to function away from the host body," Klimov said.
"They often experience degradation or loss of many genes because their functions are no longer required in a rich environment where hosts provide both living space and nutrients. Many researchers in the field perceive such specialization as evolutionarily irreversible."
The U-M findings also have human-health implications, said OConnor, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator of insects and arachnids at the U-M Museum of Zoology.
"Our study is an example of how asking a purely academic question may result in broad practical applications," he said. "Knowing phylogenetic relationships of house dust mites may provide insights into allergenic properties of their immune-response-triggering proteins and the evolution of genes encoding allergens."
The project started in 2006 with a grant from the National Science Foundation. The first step was to obtain specimens of many free-living and parasitic mites-no simple task given that some mite species are associated with rare mammal or bird species around the world.
The research team relied on a network of 64 biologists in 19 countries to obtain specimens. In addition, Klimov and OConnor conducted field trips to North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. On one occasion, it took two years to obtain samples of an important species parasitizing African birds.
A total of around 700 mite species were collected for the study. For the genetic analysis, the same five nuclear genes were sequenced in each species.
How might the ecological shift from parasite to free-living state have occurred?
There is little doubt that early free-living dust mites were nest inhabitants-the nests of birds and mammals are the principal habitat of all modern free-living species in the family Pyroglyphidae.
Klimov and OConnor propose that a combination of several characteristics of their parasitic ancestors played an important role in allowing them to abandon permanent parasitism: tolerance of low humidity, development of powerful digestive enzymes that allowed them to feed on skin and keratinous (containing the protein keratin, which is found in human hair and fingernails) materials, and low host specificity with frequent shifts to unrelated hosts.
These features, which occur in almost all parasitic mites, were likely important precursors that enabled mite populations to thrive in host nests despite low humidity and scarce, low-quality food resources, according to Klimov and OConnor. For example, powerful enzymes allowed these mites to consume hard-to-digest feather and skin flakes composed of keratin.
With the advent of human civilization, nest-inhabiting pyroglyphids could have shifted to human dwellings from the nests of birds and rodents living in or around human homes. Once the mites moved indoors, the potent digestive enzymes and other immune-response-triggering molecules they carry made them a major source of human allergies.
University of Michigan
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text:
SimMan -- A simulation model for workforce capacity planning Motivated by the difficulty in predicting the actual performance of workforce capacity planning solutions obtained from mathematical models, we develop a simulator, SimMan, to serve as a test bed for evaluating the effectiveness and robustness of different planning options and assignment rules. To facilitate the ease of use, the simulator is developed in C++ language with a modular structure so that different users or planners can customize the modules according to their specifications. We further develop a mathematical model for the workforce capacity planning problem, where the uncertainty of the demand is handled by the safety stock concepts. We also suggest a number of practical planning alternatives and assignment rules based on information from IBM. These rules are implemented as modules in SimMan and tested numerically to provide managerial insights
References in zbMATH (referenced in 1 article )
Showing result 1 of 1.
- Huang, Huei-Chuen; Lee, Loo-Hay; Song, Haiqing; Eck, Brian Thomas: SimMan -- A simulation model for workforce capacity planning (2009)


text:
People stop feeling young at 40 years, 8 months and 2 weeks
It's been said that life begins at 40, but it might be more accurate to say that mid-life begins at 40.
A British Government poll has revealed that the age at which we should stop calling ourselves young is 40 years, eight months and two weeks.
More surprisingly, the Britons surveyed believe that old age begins at 59 years, two months and two weeks, the Daily Mail reported.
The poll, for the Department for Work and Pensions, spoke to 2,171 people aged 16 or over and uncovered stark variations in the views of men and women and different age groups.
Men say being young stops at 38 and a half. For women the cut-off is delayed until 42 years, nine months and three months.
Old age, according to women, begins at 60 years, four months and two weeks. But for men, it is much earlier - at 58.
The gap may be down to men placing more emphasis on diminishing strength as a mark of ageing, or because women tend to live longer.
As many might expect, the definition of old age goes back in later life. Under-50s said it begins at 46 years and nine months. For those age 50-plus, old age starts at 62 years, seven months and two weeks.
While 16- to 24-year-olds said being young ends at 32, for those aged 80-plus the answer was 52.
This is not far short of when the youngest group said old age begins - 54.
The Department for Work and Pensions said 'the disparity in perceptions' showed 'the potential for age stereotypes to be applied in very inconsistent ways'.
Class and income may also be factors, as unemployed said being young ends nine years earlier than those with full time jobs.
People who lived in council houses tended to believe old age started five years earlier than those who owned their home outright.


Kay F. Jahnke _kfj@yahoo....
Wed Nov 9 03:16:12 CST 2011
Hi group!
in brief: I'm looking for an efficient way to evaluate B-splines generated by
scipy.signal.cspline2d() at arbitrary float coordinates to interpolate image
I am doing image processing and need a method to interpolate an image at
arbitrary float coordinates. Scipy.signal kindly provides a fast and efficient
routine to calculate spline coefficients, but the module seems not to adress
using this spline for interpolation.
I have written some code to calculate the interpolated value at arbitrary
positions, but this code is cumbersome and slow - I have to calculate the
value of the basis function 8 times (I suspect that takes a good while using
signal.bspline(), haven't done any measurements), plus a fair bit of matrix
manipulation to pick the relevant window of spline coefficients to multiply
with the basis function values - my code (without any frills or checks,
just to convey the basic idea) looks like this:
# assume the spline coefficients are in a 2D array 'cf'
# and (x,y) is the position to interpolate at
def cf_matrix ( cf, x, y ) :
 return cf [ x - 1 : x + 3, y - 1 : y + 3 ]
def base_matrix ( x, y ) :
 x0 = x - floor ( x )
 y0 = y - floor ( y )
 rng = arange ( 1, -3, -1 )
 xv = rng + x0
 yv = rng + y0
 xb = signal.bspline ( xv, 3 )
 yb = signal.bspline ( yv, 3 )
 xx, yy = meshgrid ( xb, yb )
 return xx * yy
def interpolate ( cf, x, y ) :
 m = cf_matrix ( cf, x, y )
 b = base_matrix ( x, y )
 return sum ( m * b )
obviously this is fine to use for a few hundred points or so, but for real
images it's not practical.
In Scipy.interpolate, there is scipy.interpolate.bisplev() to evaluate the
splines generated by scipy.interpolate.bisplrep(), but these splines are of
the more general form with arbitraryly spaced knot points, therefore the
relevant data structures contain the knot vectors, and I assume that all sorts
of performance gains that could be derived from the fact that the splines from
the signal package are using equally-spaced samples are inapplicable in the
general case.
I'd appreciate suggestions on how to proceed or hints at what I'm missing.
More information about the SciPy-User mailing list


Why the'self' argument?
Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Sat Sep 6 22:30:49 CEST 2003
"Harri Pesonen" wrote in message
news:Ucp6b.3992$ZB4.3874 at reader1.news.jippii.net...
> I agree, it's not logical.
Do my previous two responses today make the logic any clearer?
> I'm learning Python at the moment, and like it very much.
Try learning this. Class K method attribute f with params (s, *rest)
can be called as K.f(Kinst, *rest), consistent with all other function
Abbreviation Kinst.f(*rest) makes the call look inconsistent by making
K inplicit (and moving Kinst), but the same inplicitness enables
runtime method lookup and superclass inheritance. I think the
benefits that following are worth the minor bump in one's learning
Terry J. Reedy
More information about the Python-list mailing list


text:
Welcome to our Materials category, dedicated to exploring the fundamental components that shape the built environment within the UK construction industry. Here, we delve into a wide range of construction materials, their properties, applications, and the innovative trends driving material selection.
From discussions on sustainable building materials and advancements in construction technology to insights on material durability and aesthetics, our Materials category provides valuable knowledge for professionals and enthusiasts alike. Whether you're a builder, architect, or simply intrigued by the science behind construction, our articles offer a comprehensive understanding of the pivotal role that materials play. Join us as we navigate the world of construction materials, uncovering innovations that influence the resilience, efficiency, and design of structures across the UK.


Employer Assistance to Employees During the COVID-19 Crisis
March 27, 2020
By Peter Alwardt
With many of our clients contemplating or already implementing employee furloughs, questions have been posed regarding what assistance employers can provide to employees during the current crisis.
In addition to the extensions of family leave, additional paid sick leave, free virus testing, and other provisions in recent federal and state legislation, IRC Sec. 139 provides employers that wish to provide additional assistance to employees a mechanism to make payments that are tax-free to employees and deductible to the employer.
IRC Sec. 139 may be used in instances where the president declares a national disaster under the Stafford Act. Once the declaration is made, employers may use IRC Sec. 139 to provide a variety of assistance to employees.
On March 13 President Trump declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency. Based on this declaration and other guidance, it appears that IRC Sec. 139 has been triggered.
Types of Assistance to Employees
In a national disaster, IRC Sec. 139 specifically provides that employers may pay or reimburse reasonable expenses the employee incurs for personal, family, living, and funeral expenses not otherwise reimbursed through insurance. Under the current circumstances, expenses such as child care or tutoring due to school closings; work-from-home expenses including the cost of establishing a home office with related increased utility costs, higher costs for internet, printers, cell phone, and similar items; increased costs for unreimbursed health-related expenses; and increased transportation costs due to work relocation such as driving to work rather than using public mass transit may be considered as reasonable to reimburse or pay to employees.
IRC Sec. 139 does not require the employer to have a formal written program. However, best practice would dictate that some guidelines are formally adopted and communicated to employees by the employer. Additionally, there is no requirement that the payments be subject to an accountable arrangement in which employees are required to submit evidence of the expense. Employers, however, will want to consider either confirming expenses or deciding on a flat amount to be paid for each type of expense or for a group of expenses (e.g., home office expenses).
Tax Reporting
For employees, payments made under IRC Sec. 139 are not subject to any federal withholding tax obligations and do not need to be reported on a Form W-2. State tax reporting should, generally, follow the federal reporting; however, this should be confirmed for each state.
For the employer, IRC Sec. 139 provides that the payments are deductible for federal tax purposes. State tax treatment should be confirmed on a state-by-state basis.
Employers that would like to utilize IRC Sec. 139 should consider doing so in conjunction with other employee programs they are implementing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and consult labor counsel to assist with the terms of payment and expenses to be reimbursed/paid. Further, they should consult with their tax advisor to confirm the tax treatment for their particular situation.
About Peter Alwardt


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Definition of Radiopaque
Reviewed on 3/29/2021
Radiopaque: Opaque to one or another form of radiation, such as X-rays. Radiopaque objects block radiation rather than allow it to pass through. Metal, for instance, is radiopaque, so metal objects that a patient may have swallowed are visible on X-rays. Radiopaque dyes are used in radiology to enhance X-ray pictures of internal anatomic structures. The opposite of radiopaque is radiolucent.
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text:
La0.8Sr0.2MnO$_3$−$\delta$ (LSM)/8 mol% yttria-stabilized ZrO$_2$ (YSZ) (LSM/YSZ) composite cathodes with varying composition are studied for both polarization and ohmic resistance by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. It was found that total resistance and polarization resistance are lowest for the composite with 60 wt% of LSM (LSM60/YSZ40). However, the ohmic resistance was highest for the same composition and amounted to 60% of the total resistance value. Compositional dependence of resistances has been explained based on the variations of the triple phase boundaries and width of the O$_2$−ion migration path with the composition of the electrode. Based on the observed area specific ohmic resistance values for the composite cathodes, it is proposed to verify the advantages of LSM/YSZ over LSM cathode in anode-supported solidoxide fuel cell with thin electrolyte.
Volume 43, 2020
Continuous Article Publishing mode
Click here for Editorial Note on CAP Mode


text:
Hammond High Magnet School Senior Project
The mission of the Hammond High Magnet School Senior Project is to challenge and engage all seniors in a rigorous inquiry-based process, which provides students the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities and expertise as creative problem solvers, effective communicators, responsible citizens, and lifelong learners. The Hammond High Magnet School Senior Project aims to allow students to take control of, and have a voice in, their own education and development as individuals and learners.
Senior Project Goals
Major Components of HHMS Senior Project
- Seniors will complete a project that demonstrates integrated skills and independent learning.
- The senior project will provide depth and rigor to the senior level english curriculum.
- Provide students with the opportunity to showcase their knowledge and talents to the community through interaction with a mentor.
- Research-based paper
The Senior Project Handbook is in the process of being modified at the moment. As soon as the modifications are complete, the handbook will be able to be accessed here. If you have any questions regarding the senior project, please feel free to email _EMAIL_.


text:
LD Learning and Research
Since 1976, Shelton School has been serving intelligent students with learning differences (LD). The school serves the educational needs of children with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or speech and language disorders. Each year Shelton opens its doors to more than 800 students, grades preschool through twelve. For over 35 years Shelton has been committed to providing the best education to its student community, gathering data and analysis in effective practices in the use of curriculum for those with LD, partnering with other recognized leaders in LD education, and sharing its findings, methods, successes and failures with the greater educational community.
The Shelton School is multidisciplinary in that it addresses several aspects about learning differences:
- Ongoing work in regards to the definitions of what constitutes a learning disability (LD) and appropriate measurement and tracking within current testing standards.
- Ongoing investigation of the successes and failures of newly created preventative and remedial interventions for students with reading difficulties using a multi disciplinary LD curriculum so that we can be sure we are using the best methods for our students.
- The neurobiological correlates of Learning Differences.
- Providing findings and materials to the greater Education Community.
- Collaborating with leading educational institutions for the development of successful strategies and practices that help people with Learning Differences succeed.
Shelton participates and supports research that leads to a more comprehensive classification of Learning Differences. Shelton continually strives to gather and provide data that will lead to a greater understanding of the educational demands that are required to support children with reading and learning challenges.
Currently, the Shelton Training Center is working with a public school system in Alabama. A project like this has not been done in any other state or by any other training course. Read about the successes of this program in the article, Shelton Outreach Provides Groundbreaking Statewide Training.


text:
The occurence of hail and hail damage in South Africa
The occurrence of hail is very much sporadic. For this reason, it is quite difficult in the longer term to predict the possibility of hail at a specific point in time or for a specific area. In the short term, radar and satellite technology can determine the development and movement of hail storms reasonably well, but the predictability is limited to very short periods like minutes up to perhaps an hour or two if it is a very strong developing storm. These short-term predictions may be of value to move, store or safeguard vehicles, animals and other assets, but it is of little value for planting.
The question is, however what can a grain, fruit or vegetable farmer do to limit hail damage or to better manage the effect of hail damage. One of the most important aspects to consider is to determine to risk of hail damage. In other words, how often they occur, the time of the year they happen, as well as the average but specifically maximum intensity of hail and hail damage. It is therefore also very crop specific and the effect of hail on various growth stages of different crops often differs significantly.
How is hail formed? Hail occurs when air rises fast and moisture occurs in the atmosphere beyond freezing levels. This process takes place during strong thunder storm activities or if wind and moisture move up against mountains or mountain ranges. During this process water drops freeze to form hail stones. The hail stones may become bigger when more water drops accumulate around the stone. At some point in time the hail stone becomes too heavy and falls to the earth.
Hail risk areas
The first aspect to consider is to determine where the high-risk hail areas are located in South Africa. Given the discussion around the formation of hail the high-lying areas of the summer rainfall region have the highest occurence of hail as there are many thunder storms due to high energy summer rainfall, which is strengthened by the height above sea level and the mountain ranges. It includes areas that are adjacent to the Drakensberg mountains and other smaller mountain ranges. The eastern Free State, central and western parts of KwaZulu-Natal, the northern parts of the Eastern Cape, as well as parts of Mpumalanga therefore have the highest occurence of hail. Statistics show that there are on average six to eight hail days a year in parts of Lesotho, the eastern Free State, surrounding parts of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as parts of Mpumalanga. The occurence decreases closer to the coastal regions, as well as to the west. Hail storms as a result of the strong upwards movement of air can also occur on relatively flat areas depending on the strength of systems.
The mountain ranges in the southern parts of the country do not cause the same frequency of hail as these ranges are more subject to frontal rainfall and the rising is not as strong. However, there is a misconception that hail does not occur in these regions. Although the frequency of hail is much less some summer rainfall systems move very far south and cause intense hail storms and damage. For example, heavy hail storms with hail stones the size of golf balls in places in Ceres (22 October 1958), Robertson (6 December 1964), in the Swartland and on the West Coast on 3 April 1968 are noted in the archives. In the Southern and Eastern Cape mention is made of large hail storms in the Langkloof and surrounding areas (14 January 1949; 7 December 1964; 14 October 1985 and 12 November 1987). Even though the occurence of hail in the Western Cape is less than one day a year, the intensity of hail storms are still high when they do occur.
From a decision-making point of view a grain, vegetable or fruit producer can therefore do very little to limit hail damage as the growth season determines when crops are exposed to the elements and risks like hail. However, it is important to be aware of the risk and to plan and make decisions accordingly. The question is whether the producer can carry the frequency of hail damage as well as the intensity of damages on his own or whether risk transfer should take place, as in the case of crop insurance. Can the producer recover and continue his operations if damages occur?
This decision is dependent on the exposure to risk and financial position of the producer. For example, the risk of a producer who produces mainly one type of crop is concentrated and he would probably take out insurance whilst another producer who produces more crops that are in the fields at different times of the year would decide not to take out insurance because his risk is spread throughout the year. If a producer can subsidise a large loss from other sources he would probably decide not to take out insurance.
The most important decision a producer must take is to determine the risk (it can be any risk) and whether they can carry and manage the risk themselves.
Santam offers insurance right and proper, and peace of mind to the farmer when it comes to insuring their assets.
Make use of Santam's expertise today and contact your broker or visit Santam's website at _URL_ to find out more about the available cover and options for the unique insurance requirements of agriculture partners.


ila as well. Various other homologs for cell death genes, including three additional caspase-like sequences and a second Bcl-2 family member have been identified in the Drosophila genome sequence [7] and will undoubtedly be published in the near future. And analysis of the human genomic sequence is sure to lead to a better understanding of the number of mammalian homologs for the various components of the cell death pathway.
While it is clear that the search for homologs of known cell death genes has been greatly facilitated by the availability of the entire genome sequence for C. elegans, Drosophila, and humans, there are limitations to this strategy. For instance, the small size of the Reaper protein - only of 65 amino acids - makes it extremely difficult to identify homologs on the basis of genomic sequence information in other species: current gene-finding programs typically require an open reading frame of at least 70 amino acids. Furthermore, there is considerable divergence even among cell death proteins with clearly homologous functions, such as CED-4/Apaf-1 and even CED-9/Bcl-2, and sequence homology between these genes was recognized only after the genes and their products had been functionally characterized. Nevertheless, in combination with traditional approaches including genetics and biochemistry, knowledge of the genome sequence for model organisms will undoubtedly continue to drive our rapidly increasing insights into the molecular basis of programmed cell death.
Table 1. Conservation of key regulators of programmed cell death between species
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 10. Song Z, Guan B, Bergmann A, Nicholson DW, Thornberry NA, Peterson EP, Steller H: Biochemical and genetic interactions between Drosophila caspases and the proapoptotic genes rpr, hid, and grim.
 Mol Cell Biol 2000, 20:2907-2914. PubMed Abstract | Publisher Full Text | PubMed Central Full Text OpenURL
 11. Hawkins CJ, Yoo SJ, Peterson EP, Wang SL, Vernooy SY, Hay BA: The Drosophila caspase DRONC is a glutamate/aspartate protease whose activity is regulated by DIAP1, HID, and GRIM.
 J Biol Chem 2000, 275:27084-27093. PubMed Abstract | Publisher Full Text OpenURL
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Visual Evoked Potentials (VEPs) are electrical signals created by the brain in reaction to visual jolts, and they can be utilized to survey visual work.
Visual Evoked Potentials (VEPs) are electrical signals created by the brain in reaction to visual jolts, and they can be utilized to survey visual work. Whereas VEPs have a few focal points, such as their non-invasive nature and the capacity to distinguish early changes in visual work, there are too a few impediments that got to be considered:
VEPs can be influenced by different components such as consideration, weakness, and personal differences in neural preparation, which can lead to changeability within the recorded flag.
VEPs are not continuously delicate enough to identify unpretentious changes in visual work, particularly within the early stages of visual brokenness.
The translation of VEP can be complex and requires ability. Changes in Visual Evoked Potentials VEPs can be due to an assortment of components, counting changes within the optic nerve, retina, and visual cortex.
Cost and equipment
VEP testing requires specialized gear and prepared staff, which can make it costly and time-consuming.
Constrained demonstrative esteem
VEPs are basically utilized to evaluate visual work, but they have restricted symptomatic esteem in terms of distinguishing the basic cause of visual brokenness. Assisted symptomatic tests may be required to decide the cause of visual anomalies identified by VEPs.
VEPs require the patient's participation to preserve obsession and consideration amid testing, which can be challenging in certain quiet populaces, such as youthful children or people with cognitive disabilities.
Whereas VEPs test have a few preferences within the evaluation of visual function, they also have a few confinements that ought to be considered when deciphering comes about and deciding on their clinical utility.


Memorax: Fence Inference under the TSO Memory Model
Parosh Aziz Abdulla, Mohamed Faouzi Atig, Yu-Fang Chen, Carl Leonardsson and Ahmed Rezine
We introduce MEMORAX, a tool for the verification of control state reachability (i.e., safety properties) of concurrent programs manipulating finite range and integer variables and running on top of weak memory models. The verification task is non-trivial as it involves exploring state spaces of arbitrary or even infinite sizes. Even for programs that only manipulate finite range variables, the sizes of the store buffers could grow unboundedly, and hence the state spaces that need to be explored could be of infinite size. In addition, MEMORAX incorporates an interpolation based CEGAR loop to make possible the verification of control state reachability for concurrent programs involving integer variables. The reachability procedure is used to automatically compute possible memory fence placements that guarantee the unreachability of bad control states under TSO. In fact, for programs only involving finite range variables and running on TSO, the fence insertion functionality is complete, i.e., it will find all minimal sets of memory fence placements (minimal in the sense that removing any fence would result in the reachability of the bad control states). This makes MEMORAX the first freely available, open source, push-button verification and fence insertion tool for programs running under TSO with integer variables.
In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2013)


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[back to project home page]
Here are some screenshots from the example refactoring we used for the demo in Uppsala (using GVim):
The original program and the refactoring menu (detached)
First, let's generalise over the 0 in the nil-case.
Highlight the 0, select generaliseDef, and
enter n as the name of the new parameter:
That done, we do the same for the (+) in the cons-case:
Now, we better rename our function to reflect its more general
definition. Position the cursor on the start of sum, select
rename, and enter fold as the new name:
The partial application fold (+) 0 is our old sum function,
and we can introduce a definition for that expression.
Highlight the expression, select introNewDef, and enter
sum as the name for the new definition:
And since that definition might be reusable, we better move it to
the top level. Position the cursor on the start of sum, then


Science Friday
Today I did 3 experiments. #1 was making 'Surprise Soaps'. Here's how to make it:
1. Grate 1 cup of Ivory® soap into a bowl.
2. Add 1/4 cup of warm water and food coloring (if you want).
3. Knead it until it's like dough.
4. Mold it into any shape you like.
5. Stuff a water-proof small (not small enough to fit down the drain) surprise inside and close the hole.
6. Let it dry overnight and then you are ready to wash!
#2 was 'BIG Soap'. Here's how to make it:
1. microwave 1 chunk


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By BILL GRAY, Supervising Wildlife Biologist, Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries
All too often, deer hunters/managers and landowners plant their annual food plots for deer in the fall and then give them no more attention until next planting season. Additionally, food plots are often over-hunted or improperly utilized to the point that by season's end, their usefulness in attracting deer for harvest or observation is limited at best. With proper management, cool season food plots planted for deer can be as productive at season's end as they are at season's beginning.
Managing Food Plots Effectively
Once planted and growing, there is little opportunity to correct any soil deficiencies that may pose problems. Liming and fertilization should have been done according to a soil test prior to planting. If this hasn't been done, next season's planting activities should include this very important step. Assuming that soil pH has been addressed and fertilizer has been applied at the recommended rates, additional fertilizer is nearly always required to ensure productive food plots. Nitrogen is used up very quickly by growing plants and some is even lost atmospherically. A plot planted in mid October will have expended most of its nitrogen by mid December. Signs of nitrogen loss include plants that begin to look pale and reduced deer use of these plants. Small grains such as wheat, oats, and rye as well as many species of the brassica family (turnips, rape, kale) are most sensitive to nitrogen depletion.
Good plot management will include a follow-up application of nitrogen around 60 days after planting. Applying nitrogen in the form of ammonium nitrate (34-0-0) at 100 pounds per acre will restore depleted nitrogen and produce rapid, noticeable improvement to many common cool season forage plants. Other macro-nutrients such as phosphorous and potassium may also need to be replenished.
A brownish or purplish color in forage plants often indicates a phosphorous deficiency. Potassium is often quickly leached from the soil and must be replenished annually if not more frequently. Again, soil testing is critical because in many cases, an improper (too low) soil pH prevents plants from being able to use essential elements.
Continuing to add fertilizer to a food plot with a poor pH is a waste of time and money. In most cases, the plants simply can't use elements supplied in the fertilizer because they are unavailable under low pH conditions.
When clovers and other legumes comprise a significant portion of the crop, potassium in the form of muriate of potash (0-0-60) should be applied according to soil test recommendations. In the absence of a soil test, apply potash at a rate of 100 pounds per acre during March. Potassium is important for proper plant metabolism and overall production. Longer-lived species such as arrowleaf clover, red clover and white clover will benefit from the addition of potassium.
With proper management, which includes soil testing, addressing pH, and application of additional fertilizer at appropriate intervals, food plots will continue to produce quality forage through the hunting season and beyond. This management strategy will ensure improved attraction for deer and improved opportunities to observe and harvest deer in and around these plots.
Using Food Plots Effectively
The same planning and thought directed toward establishing and managing food plots should be directed toward best utilizing food plots as a hunting/harvest aid. Food plots can provide an excellent place for hunters to observe or harvest deer. However, all too often, hunters make the mistake of over-hunting food plots in their attempts to harvest deer.
Deer quickly respond to hunting pressure and human activity. Hunting the same plot several days per week is a sure way to discourage daylight use of these plots. Ideally, food plots should be hunted sparingly with travel to and from these plots kept as inconspicuous as possible. While food plots do make good areas to harvest deer, especially does, hunters must learn to adapt their hunting methods to enhance success. Hunting a food plot day after day when a bumper acorn crop is hitting the ground is an exercise in futility.
Ironically, for all the benefits they can provide, food plots have contributed to a lack of hunting savvy among many of today's deer hunters. Hunters must learn to hunt where the deer are rather than where they want the deer to be.
Setting up on a food plot can be as simple as constructing a small ground blind from pine limbs or as involved as erecting a large, weatherproof shooting house. In either case, it is important to consider wind direction when hunting a food plot. Smaller blinds can be moved to adjust to wind conditions but larger hunting platforms such as tripods or shooting houses are more or less permanent.
As a rule of thumb, ideal hunting conditions occur on a prevailing wind from the northwest. In fact, in the absence of approaching warm fronts, a northwest wind is generally the prevailing wind during much of hunting season in Alabama. Permanent hunting platforms should be placed with this in mind. If wind conditions are not suited for hunting a plot on a particular day, hunt somewhere else! A deer's sense of smell is phenomenal – in most cases, hunting a plot with the wrong wind usually results in not seeing a deer at all.
Hunting near food plots can be as productive as hunting directly on them. This is especially true when it comes to harvesting bucks during the rut. Often, mature bucks will approach a food plot but not actually come out onto it. Their strategy is to circle the food plot and attempt to wind a receptive doe before actually proceeding onto the plot. Hunters that set up in these staging areas adjacent to food plots are often rewarded with the opportunity to harvest a nice buck. Does also may be harvested along travel routes to plots – this allows harvest opportunity without providing excessive disturbance and human activity directly on a food plot. Again, repeatedly focusing hunting activity directly on food plots can often deprive hunters of better harvest opportunities just a short distance away.
First and foremost, food plots are a crop that must be managed for best results. Second, they are a tool designed for a specific purpose. To get the most benefit from food plots, deer hunters must practice good management and learn to effectively use them for their intended purpose.


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J. Torrent, A. Wagner, S. Grisanti, S. Vogt, R. Read, C. Curcio, M. Rudolf; Morphometry of Cell Phenomena in Histological Sections of Geographic Atrophy Due to Age-Related Macular Degeneration. Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 2010;51(13):4943.
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© ARVO (_PHONE_); The Authors (2016-present)
Background: New clinical high resolution imaging technologies like spectral domain OCT are useful tools in the evaluation of GA due to ARMD. The GA junctional zone includes changes in RPE-Bruch's membrane (BrM) complex that are difficult to interpret. We measured and evaluated characteristic RPE cell changes in histological sections of GA eyes to provide a better basis for interpreting clinical GA imaging data.
Ten µm macular sections of 7 GA donor eyes fixed with 4% paraformaldehyde were evaluated by light microscopy with differential interference contrast. In 3 sections/eye, zones of RPE alterations were graded (0 = normal; 1 = irregular cells, but intact layer; 2 = rounded, enlarged, and/or heaping cells; 3 = migrating cells in retina; 4 = RPE absent). Per graded zone, we measured and statistically evaluated A) the total height of RPE cell layer, B) the height of individual RPE cells, and C) the height of basal laminar deposits (BlamD).
We defined zones from the outer macula towards the central RPE atrophic area in which the RPE passed almost steadily upward through the grades of increased pathology. A) Zone 2 exhibited variable total RPE height (16.9 µm ± 5.6) with hypertrophic and heaping cells next to atrophic ones. In comparison, Zone 0 (10.9 µm ± 2.6) and Zone 1 (11.8 µm ± 2.8) showed significantly less variability and total RPE height (p<0.001). If present, Zone 3 was found close to the atrophy margin, and migrating cells/cell debris were seen across all retinal layers. B) Individual cell height of Zone 0 and 1 equals total RPE height, but in Zone 2, the size of altered RPE cells varied widely (12.4 µm ± 5.2, minimum 5.1, maximum 27.5). C) In Zone 0, sporadic BlamD was thin (3.5 µm ± 1.1) with progressing cell alteration becoming progressively continuous and thicker from Zone 1 (5.0 µm ± 2.3) to Zone 4 (9.5 µm ± 4.3).
Our histological measurements provide information about GA typical alterations of the RPE-Bruch's membrane complex and are useful for interpreting clinical imaging data. BlamD thickness is related to the degree of RPE alteration, with areas of advanced RPE alterations are most likely to exhibit recognizable thickening of the RPE-Bruch's membrane complex in OCT images. Individual large or heaping cells are large enough to be detected by clinical imaging.
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NAVER LABS Europe seminars are open to the public. This seminar is virtual and requires registration
Date: 16th September 2021, 10:00am CEST (GMT +02.00)
Leveraging transformers for effective and efficient retrieval
Abstract: While relatively recent, transformer architectures like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) have already demonstrated their ability to substantially improve effectiveness across a wide range of text ranking tasks. The increased effectiveness of these approaches is not without drawbacks, however, and the architecture of these models both comes with significant efficiency costs and creates challenges for applying them to text ranking. In this talk I will describe where and how transformers can be leveraged for text ranking, discuss some of my work tackling the challenges of applying transformers to this task, and describe some of the remaining challenges and what they mean for applying transformers to text ranking today.
About the Speaker: Andrew Yates is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he focuses on developing content-based neural ranking methods and leveraging them to improve search and downstream tasks. He has co-authored a variety of papers on pre-BERT and BERT-based neural ranking methods as well as an upcoming book on transformer-based ranking methods. In 2016 Yates received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgetown University, where he worked on information retrieval and information extraction in the medical domain.