text:
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News
The Ariane 5-ECA got away from Kourou at the second attempt
The British military's Skynet 5A satellite has been launched into space from Kourou in French Guiana.
The spacecraft is part of a £3.6bn system that will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and allied forces.
Sunday's lift-off came 24 hours after a first attempt was thwarted by a technical glitch in ground equipment.
Skynet rode atop an Ariane 5-ECA rocket, which left the ground at 1903 local time (2203 GMT).
"It was an incredibly nerve-racking but also an amazing experience to participate in the countdown and launch of an Ariane 5," said Patrick Wood, who has led the development of the Skynet spacecraft for manufacturer EADS Astrium.
"We've already received telemetry from it. In fact, we had a ground station see it just 10 minutes after separation. We've even sent commands to Skynet. It's behaving itself perfectly," he told BBC News shortly after the launch.
The British spacecraft is the first in what will eventually be a three-satellite constellation designed to allow the Army, Royal Navy and RAF to pass much more data, faster between command centres.
"Skynet's going to provide two-and-a-half times the capacity that the previous system provided, and allow the military to do things they just haven't been able to do in the past," Mr Wood explained.
Skynet 5A matches the capability of the best modern satellite platforms - on which the world depends for much of its telephone, TV, and internet traffic - but has been specially prepared for military use.
Four steerable antennas give it the ability to focus bandwidth on to particular locations where it is most needed - where British forces are engaged in operations.
Its technologies have also been designed to resist any interference - attempts to disable or take control of the spacecraft - and any efforts to eavesdrop on sensitive communications.
An advanced receive antenna allows the spacecraft to selectively listen to signals and filter out attempts to "jam" it.
"As far as we know, this is the most sophisticated technology of its type - certainly in Europe," said Mr Wood. "It allows you to produce peaks of reception across the surface of the Earth, and to change that antenna pattern in extremely rapid time."
Skynet 5 replaces Skynet 4. The new spacecraft system is bigger and much more powerful. The high traffic rates are in both directions.
Analysts talk increasingly of the military's "network enabled capability" - the idea that information and fast access to it are paramount.
Naval vessels have been re-equipped to use Skynet 5
"Modern warfare is all about information," said Bill Sweetman, the technology and aerospace editor for Jane's Information Group. "Every piece of satellite bandwidth is valuable and the military is always hungry for more.
"The practice is to offload mundane traffic on to commercial satellites and then to use a complementary, secure proprietary system for the traffic that has to be protected.
"Take for example the capability of unmanned air vehicles. These generate a lot of imagery and that has to be passed over a secure communications link. Modern warfare involves passing around a lot of data, and that puts a premium on satellite capacity."
The whole Skynet 5 constellation has been funded through the largest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) signed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The MoD does not own the hardware; it merely buys the services run over it.
Initially agreed in 2003, the PFI saw Paradigm Secure Communications, which is a subsidiary of EADS Astrium, take over and operate the UK's military satellite coms network.
As part of this £2.6bn deal, Paradigm agreed to loft new and more advanced spacecraft, and overhaul the ground systems needed to support them. This has included replacing and updating control centres, and major antennas and terminals on military ships, land vehicles and planes.
UK forces have seen a steady upgrade in all their coms systems
Paradigm gets an annual fee for providing this service. It can also earn money by selling excess bandwidth - expected to be about 50% on each spacecraft - to Nato and other friendly countries.
The cost to the British taxpayer of the PFI jumped by several hundred million pounds in 2005, principally because of a decision to go for the "physical assurance" of building a spare spacecraft rather than a straightforward insurance policy that would pay out in the event of a launch failure or breakdown in orbit.
Even so, the MoD says, the Paradigm contract should save many millions of pounds over the 18 years of the deal, compared with a more conventional procurement arrangement.
Skynet 5A was released from the Ariane 5 rocket some 30 minutes into Sunday's flight. It will take about a week for the satellite to achieve its final geostationary orbit.
The 5B platform will be launched towards the end of this year, with 5C due in orbit in 2008.
Skynet 5A's co-passenger on the rocket - the Indian TV satellite Insat 4B - also made it into orbit successfully.
THE SKYNET 5 MILITARY SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM
The satellites are 'hardened' against interference. A special receive antenna (1) can resist attempts at jamming
Each spacecraft has four steerable antennas (2) that can concentrate bandwidth on to particular regions
The system gives global coverage (3), providing 2.5 times the capacity afforded by the previous system
Each spacecraft (4) is a 3x4x4.5m box and weighs just under 5 tonnes; the solar wings once unfurled measure 34m tip to tip
Improved technologies, including a solar'sail' (5), lengthen the platforms' operational lives to at least 15 years


objects (regardless of which program they use).
The p_unlit shader is never actually used in the scene graph; we just use the scene graph as a convenient way to load the shader. Similarly, the m_sphere mesh is not used in a scene graph node. We pull references to both of these out of the graph and use them ourselves where needed. We extract some uniform locations from the unlit shader, so that we can draw unlit objects with colors.
The code as written here is designed to be exception safe. Most of the functions that find nodes by name will throw if the name is not found. What this exception safety means is that it is easy to make the scene reloadable. It only replaces the old values in the global variables after executing all of the code that could throw an exception. This way, the entire scene, along with all meshes, textures, and shaders, can be reloaded by pressing Enter. If something goes wrong, the new scene will not be loaded and an error message is displayed.
Two of the objects in the scene rotate. This is easily handled using our list of objects. In the display method, we access certain nodes and change their transforms them:
 360.0f * g_timer.GetAlpha(), glm::vec3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f)));
g_nodes[3].NodeSetOrient(g_spinBarOrient * glm::rotate(glm::fquat(),
 360.0f * g_timer.GetAlpha(), glm::vec3(0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f)));
We simply set the orientation based on a timer. For the second one, we previously stored the object's orientation after loading it, and use that as the reference. This allows us to rotate about its local Z axis.
Multiple Scenes
The split-screen trick used here is actually quite simple to pull off. It's also one of the advantages of the scene graph: the ability to easily re-render the same scene multiple times.
The first thing that must change is that the projection matrix cannot be set in the old reshape function. That function now only sets the new width and height of the screen into global variables. This is important because we will be using two projection matrices.
The projection matrix used for the left scene is set up like this:
Example 17.4. Left Projection Matrix
glm::ivec2 displaySize(g_displayWidth / 2, g_displayHeight);
 glutil::MatrixStack persMatrix;
 persMatrix.Perspective(60.0f, (displaySize.x / (float)displaySize.y), g_fzNear, g_fzFar);
 ProjectionBlock projData;
 projData.cameraToClipMatrix = persMatrix.Top();
 glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, g_projectionUniformBuffer);
 glBufferData(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, sizeof(ProjectionBlock), &projData, GL_STREAM_DRAW);
 glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, 0);
glViewport(0, 0, (GLsizei)displaySize.x, (GLsizei)displaySize.y);
Notice that displaySize uses only half of the width. And this half width is passed into the glViewport call. It is also used to generate the aspect ratio for the perspective projection matrix. It is the glViewport function that causes our window to be split into two halves.
What is more interesting is the right projection matrix computation:
Example 17.5. Right Projection Matrix
 glutil::MatrixStack persMatrix;
 ProjectionBlock projData;
 projData.cameraToClipMatrix = persMatrix.Top();
 glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, g_projectionUniformBuffer);
 glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, 0);
glViewport(displaySize.x + (g_displayWidth % 2), 0,
 (GLsizei)displaySize.x, (GLsizei)displaySize.y);
Notice that we first take the camera matrix from the perspective view and apply it to the matrix stack before the perspective projection itself. Remember that transforms applied to the stack happen in reverse order. This means that vertices are projected into 4D homogeneous clip-space coordinates, then are transformed by a matrix. Only the rotation portion of the right camera matrix is used. The translation is removed by the conversion to a mat3 (which takes only the top-left 3x3 part of the matrix, which if you recall contains the rotation), then turns it back into a mat4.
Notice also that the viewport's X location is biased based on whether the display's width is odd or not (g_displayWidth % 2 is 0 if it is even, 1 if it is odd). This means that if the width is stretched to an odd number, there will be a one pixel gap between the two views of the scene.
Intermediate Projection
One question may occur to you: how is it possible for our right camera to provide a rotation in NDC space, if it is being applied to the end of the projection matrix? After all, the projection matrix goes from camera space to clip-space. The clip-space to NDC space transform is done by OpenGL after our vertex shader has done this matrix multiply. Do we not need the shader to divide the clip-space values by W, then do the rotation?
Obviously not, since this code works. But just because code happens to work doesn't mean that it should. So let's see if we can prove that it does. To do this, we must prove this:
This might look like a simple proof by inspection due to the associative nature of these, but it is not. The reason is quite simple: w and w' may not be the same. The value of w is the fourth component of v; w' is the fourth component of what results from T*v. If T changes w, then the equation is not true. But at the same time, if T doesn't change w, if w == w', then the equation is true.
Well, that makes things quite simple. We simply need to ensure that our T does not alter w. Matrix multiplication tells us that w' is the dot product of V and the bottom row of T.
Therefore, if the bottom row of T is (0, 0, 0, 1), then w == w'. And therefore, we can use T before the division. Fortunately, the only matrix we have that has a different bottom row is the projection matrix, and T is the rotation matrix we apply after projection.
So this works, as long as we use the right matrices. We can rotate, translate, and scale post-projective clip-space exactly as we would post-projective NDC space. Which is good, because we get to preserve the w component for perspective-correct interpolation.
The take-home lesson here is very simple: projections are not that special as far as transforms are concerned. Post-projective space is mostly just another space. It may be a 4-dimensional homogeneous coordinate system, and that may be an odd thing to fully understand. But that does not mean that you can't apply a regular matrix to objects in this space.


text:
Log In to Anagrammer
Scrabble word: JOINTING
In which Scrabble dictionary does JOINTING exist?
Definitions of JOINTING in dictionaries:
- verb - fit as if by joints
- verb - provide with a joint
- verb - fasten with a joint
- verb - separate (meat) at the joint
- v - to fit together by means of a junction
There are 8 letters in JOINTING: G I I J N N O T
All anagrams that could be made from letters of word JOINTING plus a wildcard: JOINTING?
Scrabble words that can be created with letters from word JOINTING
8 letter words
7 letter words
6 letter words
5 letter words
4 letter words
3 letter words
2 letter words
Images for JOINTING
- Study how to plane edges that meet and make a strong edge joint
- That filling is also used to connect hard floor from living room to my...
- jointing tray
- The world lies east how ample the marsh and the sea and the sky
-... jointing Kits - Products - Low Voltage - Resin Filled Cable jointing
-... jointing asbestos gasket Compolite
- Columnar jointing Volcano World
- Nonequilibrium scale selection mechanism for columnar jointing
- The tooling and profile of a mortar joint has significant effect on...
- Cooper Power Systems dtjointingsolutions.com.au

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


London roundtable on energy & office standards
pre CHIn January 2016 after interviews with 49 expert informants, some from the speculative office development world and others linked directly to 10 'case study' building projects in London, an event was held in London's Building Centre. On January 28th, 22 people gathered to hear a presentation which ran through a summary of the project and its initial findings and discuss the challenges which we had identified for the development of offices with lower 'designed-in' energy demand. The discussions took place under the Chatham House rule of non-attribution and reflected on the findings of DEMAND's research, and the implications for future approaches to office design and specification. The main themes of the discussion were:
Challenge 1: How to avoid over provisioning: making 'more realistic' standards and specifications acceptable?
How can lower levels of provision become normal and 'BCO plus' be avoided?
What role might 'regulation' play in normalising lower levels of provision?
Challenge 2: Occupant/tenant 'needs': how to close the feedback gap?
How can standards better promote design responding to diversity in office work and occupant 'needs'?
Is there scope for differentiation in standards by sector, location or other factors?
Challenge 3: Standards blocking innovation – is there a new 'Grade A' model?
How can standards redefine low energy design as optimum quality?
Can flexibility be redefined through standards that set a lower baseline that can be upgraded?
James CH


);
That's really shorthand for
 if ($age == 28) {
 print "You're 28!\n";
which means, "if $age equals 28, then do everything inside the curly brackets." The if/then control structure can be extended with elsif and else:
 if ($age == 28) {
 print "You're 28!\n";
 } elsif ($sex eq "f") {
 print "You're a female!\n";
 } elsif ($sex eq "m") {
 print "You're a male!\n";
 } else {
 print "You're a mystery to me...";
Only the first true statement will match. So if ($age == 28) and ($sex eq "f"), you'll get the output
 You're 28!
else is the default; its commands will be executed only if none of the preceding statements in the control structure were true
The while/until Structures
The while structure is equivalent to the while structures in Java, C, or C++. The code executes while the expression remains true.
use strict;
while (expression) {
The until (expression) structure is functionally equivalent while (! expression).
The do while/until Structures
The do/while structure works similar to the while structure, except that the code is executed at least once before the condition is checked.
use strict;
do {
} while (expression);
Again, using until (expression) is the same as using while (! expression).
The for Structure
The for structure works similarly to the for structure found in C, C++ or Java. It is really syntactic sugar for the while statement.
use strict;
for(Initial_Statement; expression; Increment_Statement) {
is equivalent to:
use strict;
while (expression) {
The foreach Structure
The foreach control structure is the most interesting in this chapter. It is specifically designed for processing of Perl's native data types.
The foreach structure takes a scalar, a list and a block, and executes the block of code, setting the scalar to each value in the list, one at a time. Consider an example:
use strict;
my _USER_ = qw/hat shoes shirts shorts/;
foreach my $item (_USER_) {
 print "$item\n";
This will print out each item in collection on a line by itself. Note that you are permitted to declare the scalar variable right with the foreach. When you do this, the variable lives only as long as the foreach does.
You will find foreach to be one of the most useful looping structures in Perl. Any time you need to do something to each element in the list, chances are, using a foreach is the best choice.
File Manipulation
You can write to a file as easily as you can write to the terminal. The first step (almost the only step) is to open the file with the open command. Here's an example:
DOG is the "filehandle"--the name by which you'll refer to the open file from now on. It's customary to use all caps for filehandles. The other thing inside the parens is the full pathname of the file; it's prefixed with a > so you can write to it. (Without the > you could only read from it--we'll talk about that in a second.)
Now to write a line of text to the file, just do it like this:
print DOG "This line goes into the
 file and not to the screen.\n";
Pretty easy, huh? I love Perl.
Since failure to successfully open a file can cause your program to go batty, it's a good idea to have the program exit gracefully if it fails to open the file. To do that, use this syntax for the open command:
 || die "Couldn't open DOG.\n";
Now it will either open the file, or quit the program with an explanation why.
To read from a file, open it without the >:
 || die "Couldn't open DOG.\n";
(If the file doesn't exist, the program will quit.) Once the file is open, there are two common ways to get the information out. You can do it one line at a time, with lines like this:
 $x = ;
That copies the first line from DOG (or the next line, if you've already taken some lines out) and assigns it to $x. The syntax is just like the <> we used earlier to get input from the keyboard; sticking DOG in there just tells Perl to get the input from the open file instead.
You can also do it in a loop. This program prints out all the contents of DOG:
 open(DOG,"/home/scotty/data/dogs") ||
 die "Couldn't open DOG.\n";
 while() {
Notice how we didn't specify a variable to store each line from DOG in, and we didn't specify anything for the print command to print? This is a really important concept I should have introduced earlier: Perl features a default variable called $_. Basically, if you don't specify which variable you want to use, or if you use a command like print by itself, Perl assumes you want to use $_.
Some other common commands that can assume you're talking about $_:
That's a valid line all by itself; it means "substitute all occurences of 'dog' in the variable $_ with 'cat'." Another popular type of construction is
 print if (/dog/);
That means "print $_ if $_ has 'dog' in it."
$_ shows up everywhere in Perl, just to make your life easier. For instance, foreach will store its elements in $_ if you're too lazy to name a variable yourself:
 foreach (_USER_) {
 print if (/Tonight/);
You can assign from $_ or manipulate it just like any other variable, with commands like
 $x = $_;
You just have to do it before the next time you overwrite $_ with a command like
--it's a very temporary storage space.
When you're done with a file, don't forget to close it with the close command:
Filename Globbing
Perl can read all the filenames in a directory (/home/scotty/bin in the following example) with this syntax:
 while($x = ) {
One obvious and powerful use of this "filename globbing" is a loop like this:
 open(FILE,"$x") ||
 die "Couldn't open $x for reading.\n";
Thus, the following simple program will print all lines containing the word "dog" (along with the names of the files they came from) in the /home/scotty/bin directory:
 open(FILE,"$x") || die "Couldn't open $x for reading.\n";
 if(/dog/) {
 print "$x: $_";
Here's a key point of Perl philosophy: Perl tries to never limit you. Arrays can be as big as you want, strings as long as you want, and strings can contain anything. If you try to open a file, and the file doesn't open, the program hums right along; if a line is expecting three variables back from a subroutine, as in
 ($one, $two, $three) = & some_routine;
and it only gets back one, well, it won't care. It'll just pad the other variables and move along.
Anyways, Perl doesn't have limits, but Unix sometimes does. A key example is the difference between filename globbing, which relies on the Unix shell's built-in functions, and Perl's own opendir function.
Try to open a directory with 3000 files using filename globbing, and your program will probably crash. But you can open a directory of 100,000 files with opendir (as long as your machine can handle it...)
Anyways, here it is:
 while($file = readdir(DIR)){
Note that opendir will try to open every file, including the enigmatic. and.. files. (I can't imagine why, but I'm sure there's a reason.) So here's a variation that will only attempt to open files whose names don't begin with dots:
 while($file = readdir(DIR)){
Using Unix from Within Perl
Writing to a Process
Watch this: this is so cool:
 print MAIL "Subject: This is a subject line\n\n";
 print MAIL "This is an empty body.\n";
What did that do? It wrote to a process rather than a file. That little pipe (|) on the first line tells any output to the filehandle MAIL to go to a sendmail process; when you close up the process, with the close statement--presto, you've sent yourself a mail message.
This is easily one of Perl's most powerful features. For instance, if you have a Perl script that generates a list of old files (at work, say) and the Internet addresses of the co-workers who own the files, you can send a message to every single one of them:
 open(MAIL,"|/usr/lib/sendmail $owner");
 print MAIL "Subject: Notification of Ancient Fileness\n\n";
 print MAIL "You own an ancient file named $ancientfile.\n";
 print MAIL "Would you like me to do anything about it?\n";
Yup: variables.
System Calls
A lot of the time, Unix can do something faster or easier than your Perl scripts can. Or maybe you just don't want to rewrite an entire program that Unix already provides... Perl enables you to execute a shell command from within a Perl program via the system() function: for instance, to allow a user to edit a file directly:
 system


text:
Maya fluids gives you the tools to simulate any kind of smoke, fire, water, explosions, wind effects etc. and is a very powerful tool for every FX artist. The fluid simulations and shading can be as different as night and day, but they rely on the same attributes which you'll better understand after completing this tutorial.
You'll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.
To begin choose Dynamics as a menu set for this project, since almost all of the things we are using are related to Maya Fluid FX.
Because we are going to use Mental ray nodes, make sure Mental ray is loaded in Maya by going to Window>Settings/Preferences>Plug-in manager and checking both the Loaded and Auto load check boxes for Mayatomr.mll.
Choose Window>Settings/Preferences>Preferences and in the Time Slider tab, change the Playback speed to Play every frame and the Max Playback Speed to Real-time. This ensures that you will see every frame of your animation and if the animation is computing very fast, you'll still be able to watch it in real time and not exceed the 24fps limit (so it wont look like fast forwarded.)
Now create the 3D container that will contain the fluid for the explosion animation. Choose Fluid Effects>Create 3D Container with Emitter.
Now you have a box with a little sphere inside of it. The box is the actual container where you can make your animation and the little sphere is the emitter that emits the fluids (in this particular case the smoke animation).
Since the explosion will spread mostly on the Y axis (because the smoke will rise up quickly.) You need to make the container bigger, especially in the Y axis. Choose the container and in the Attribute Editor, in the fluidShape tab. Set the Size to 45.0 for the X and Z axis and 60.0 for Y.
Choose the Emitter and move it to the bottom of the Container, but beware not to go below it. Next in the Attribute Editor under the fluidEmitter tab, change the Emitter Type to Volume, and the Volume Shape to Sphere.
Now it's time for the first animation test. Give your animation an interval of about five or six seconds. I choose to go with a 140 frame animation, which is almost six seconds. Type 140 in the box below the right part of the Timeline. This will set your Timeline to 140 frames long. Hit the play button at the right side of the timeline. You can see almost nothing is happening, so let's start shaping the explosion animation.
There is almost nothing happening, because there is a very little amount of fluid emitting, and the grid (at the bottom of the container) is not detailed enough to catch the small amounts of fluid.
Select the container and check Keep Voxels Square and set the Base Resolution to 30. Increasing the Resolution improves the depth of the details, much like in image resolution.
Choose -Y Side for Boundary Y, so the container does not let the fluid escape from the bottom of the container, acting as a ground for the explosion.
Set the all Contents Methods option to Dynamic Grid, this makes your simulation relevant to all factors such as Temperature, Fuel etc. and calculates them based on the Dynamic Grid, whose resolution you set above.
Choose the fluidEmitter tab in the Attribute editor and set the Fluid Attributes as follows: Density/Voxel/Sec to 80, Heat/Voxel/Sec to 60, Fuel/Voxel/Sec to 90. This is the amount of emitted voxels per one second for the Density, Heat and Fuel. For Fluid Dropoff, set it to 0.
Now test the simulation again by rewinding and pressing Play. Now you can see that there is much more fluid emitted in the container.
Now all of the Fluid Attributes are continuously emitted at the Rate specified in Step 10.
That's not what you want since the Fuel and Heat, in an explosion are taking place only at the beginning. And the Density of the fluid emitted, is decreasing with the passing time.
To make the emitted amounts decrease in time, you must first Set Key for the first frame.
Hit the Rewind button, and make sure you are at frame 1. Choose the Emitter and in the Fluid Attributes, right click on Density/Voxel/Sec and choose Set Key. Repeat for Heat/Voxel/Sec and Fuel/Voxel/Sec. The values will turn Pink which means that they are animated.
Now move to frame 3 and set Density/Voxel/Sec to 50, and right click and choose Set Key. Then change Fuel/Voxel/Sec to 0, right click and choose Set Key. This way you decrease the amount of emitted density voxels and make sure that there is no Fuel emitting after frame 3.
Move to frame 6 and change the Heat/Voxel/Sec to 5 and right click and choose Set Key.
Next move to frame 15 and change Density/Voxel/Sec to 0 and again right click and choose Set Key.
To check if you have entered the exact values at the exact frame, you can open the Graph Editor by choosing Window>Animation Editors>Graph Editor. Select your Fluid Emitter, and check if your animation Graphs are the same as the ones shown in the picture.
Now if you test your simulation (as in Step 11), you can see that there is a very big difference, there isn't a constant emission of all the attributes. Most of the emission is taking part in the beginning of the simulation, which is closer to the explosion look. There is another problem that you can clearly see now. The simulation is too slow for an explosion.
To make the simulation faster, select the Container and in the Attribute Editor under the fluidShape tab, scroll down to Dynamic Simulation and set the Simulation Rate Scale to 3.5.
Test the simulation again. You can see now it's much faster, but the smoke is still moving a little bit slow, and it looks too heavy. To make it lighter (in order for it to move faster through the air), scroll down to Contents Details and for Density, set the Buoyancy to 3.
Now your simulation is getting closer and closer, but it's still just moving upwards after the emission due to the buoyancy of the fluid. To make it more interesting and believable you need to add some turbulence and swirl.
Change the Swirl to 18 under the Velocity tab. Later you'll add more turbulence with a turbulence field, as it gives a better result than the built in turbulence for the fluid container.
Now rewind and play the animation again to see the difference. You can see now your smoke isn't just going directly upwards, and the result is much more pleasing.
Now it's time to set the values for the Temperature and Fuel.
Set these values in the Temperature and Fuel sections (as shown below). Simply make the temperature more turbulent and more buoyant, because the hot air is raising quicker. Then set the Fuel attributes in order to get a nice reaction (as shown below.)
In order to get a better look at the reaction occurring via the ignition of the fuel, you must make some adjustments in the Shading section.
Scroll down to the Shading section and in the Color section, choose Density for the Color Input. And the color of the fluid will be controlled by the density The more dense the fluid is, the more color is used from the left side of the gradient and the opposite for the right side (the less dense it is).
Now click and drag to the right on the gradient above, so that the second color you add is at the furthermost right position. Click on Selected Color for the right color and set the Value to 0.450.
Now choose the left color and set its Value to 0.140. Check again to make sure that your gradient is darker at the left side (where the fluid is more dense) and lighter at the right.
Below the Color Input there's a Input Bias field, change its value to 0.2, to make it a little bit more lighter (you can later adjust this setting to get the fluid as you like it).
If you rewind and play the animation, you can clearly see that the heat is igniting the fuel, thus making the fluid brighter.
The problem is that the fluid is too transparent, and is gradually mixing with the air around it, there is no distinct border between the air and the smoke generated from the explosion.
To fix this, access the Opacity section (again in the Shading section) and by clicking and dragging, add more control points and move them until you get a similar curve. Change the Input Bias to 0.6 to increase the emitted fluid's opacity.
Make sure that the last control point on the left side is at the bottom (Selected Value = 0.00), otherwise the whole container will be full of smoke.
To make the explosion brighter, there is a section above the Opacity section, called Incandescence. Where you can set the values for the explosion incandescence via a gradient.
First make sure that Incandescence Input is set to Temperature, so your fluid is getting self illuminated in areas where the temperature is very high.
Choose the yellow swatch on the right side of the gradient and click at the Selected Color, change the Value (V) to 3.
Add another swatch just next to the one that you just edited (Selected Position = 0.960) and change it's Value to 2.5.
Move the red swatch in the middle of the gradient to Selected Position 0.900, and then add another swatch between the red

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


Page 41 - LCW LIFE | TEMMUZ 2020
P. 41
 Established in a natural valley, the city expanded over time into and out of the valley. Luxembourg is one of the most beautiful and well-maintained cities in the world. The city is divided into two parts, high and low. The section called Ville Haute covers the old city and Ville Bass covers the river bank. There are stairs and elevators that provide transportation between the two cities. The city is also the first city to be named European Capital of Culture twice between 1995 and 2007. There are three official languages in Luxembourg: Luxembourgish, French and German. Although Luxembourgish is a
language used in daily life, it is not used much in written language.
In the city, which has an oceanic climate, it is rainy every season.
The humidity is high and the annual temperature difference is low. You can visit Luxembourg in the summer when rain is less common, but the trees of Luxembourg, which are beautiful in every season, are worth seeing in the autumn. The city has a national motto. "We wish to remain what we are." When I first heard it, I thought it is something political. Now I find this motto very meaningful. Staying as beautiful as you are or looking like you are.
 39 40 41 42 43


Follow OneKind
Emotions in sheep
Sheep love company. Researchers have found that sheep can remember the faces of 50 other sheep for at least two years.
Like humans, sheep also seem to find familiar faces comforting. Researchers found that when sheep were socially isolated the sight of familiar sheep face pictures compared with those of goats or inverted triangles significantly reduced behavioural and physiological measures of stress.
Researchers have also found that sheep can recognise emotions in facial expression, not only in their species but also in humans.
Dr Keith Kendrick at Cambridge University and colleagues have discovered that sheep prefer smiling or relaxed human faces, over angry or stressed ones.
"Sheep are able to recognise faces that differ by less than 5% so we thought perhaps they could recognise emotions which are much more subtle," Dr Kendrick said. "It turns out they can, both human, smiling versus angry; and sheep, stressed versus calm."
Scientists presented the sheep with two doors they could push open to gain food. On one would be a picture of a smiling human or a happy sheep, on the other an angry human or a stressed out sheep. "They vastly preferred to press the smiling human or the animal that has just had a meal and is feeling all right with life," said Dr Kendrick.
The research has wide reaching implications for animal welfare. Dr Kendrick said: "This does open up the possibility that they have much richer emotional lives than we would give them credit for. If sheep, which in terms of domestic animals tend to be right down the bottom of the league table for intelligence, can do this then the likelihood is that other species can too."
When there is no common verbal language between people we can look at a person's facial expressions and use these to assess how he or she is feeling. Expression of emotions in humans has been extensively studied through changes in facial features. Of course the more different an animal and its' face is to a human the more difficult this method becomes.
It has been shown that individual recognition in farmed animals such as sheep and cattle is partly based on facial features. Researchers have now borrowed techniques used in human psychology to study sheep's facial features and postures and attempted to find convenient physical indicators to reliably infer their emotions.
Compared to other mammals sheep have more simple facial muscles and thus don't appear to have a wide array of facial expressions. However, they do have several muscles for rotating their ears. The researchers investigated whether measuring ear postures in sheep could be used to accurately infer their emotions.
Previous studies have shown that sheep appear to have the potential to feel a wide range of emotions, including fear, anger, rage and despair. The researchers now found that they could link specific ear postures with specific emotional experiences.
For example, the backward ear posture which is associated with unfamiliar and uncontrollable unpleasant situations could express fear, the raised ear posture displayed in response to an unfamiliar but controllable unpleasant situation could characterise anger and the asymmetric ear posture that is mainly displayed in response to sudden situations could express surprise. These findings support the intuitive knowledge of people such as farmers who work closely with sheep and have learnt to understand their expressions.
The researchers believe it's safe to assume that sheep do not only show emotions but also 'feel' them too.
The researchers noted that interpretation of ear postures could be used to assess and improve farming practices from the viewpoint of sheep by helping us to understand what a given animal is feeling at a certain time. Also, findings from assessment of emotional states in sheep may be readily transferable to other closely related prey species.
Other scientists take a more holistic approach to assessing how animals are feeling by looking at their whole bodies and behaviour rather than focussing on certain features.
This experiment, and other like it, show that by adapting and applying models developed for humans in a manner appropriate for each different species, we can increase our knowledge about the emotions other animals can feel.
 - Kendrick K. M, da Costa A. P, Leigh A. E, Hinton M. R and Peirce J. W 2001 Sheep don't forget a face. Nature 414, 165-166
 - Kendrick K. M, Man M, Leigh A. E and da Costa A. P 2004 Face pictures reduce behavioural, autonomic, endocrine and neural indices of stress and fear in sheep. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 271 no. 1552, 2077-2084
 - Boissy A, Aubert A, Désiré L, Greiveldinger L, Delval E and Veissier I 2011 Cognitive sciences to relate ear postures to emotions in sheep. Animal Welfare Volume 20, Number 1: 47-56(10)
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text: We study the long-time behavior of solutions to the nonlinear Schrödinger / Gross-Pitaevskii equation (NLS/GP) with a symmetric double-well potential. NLS/GP governs nearly-monochromatic guided optical beams in weakly coupled waveguides with both linear and nonlinear (Kerr) refractive indices and zero absorption, as well as the behavior of Bose-Einstein condensates. For small L2 norm (low power), the solution executes beating oscillations between the two wells. There is a power threshold at which a symmetry breaking bifurcation occurs. The set of guided mode solutions splits into two families of solutions. One type of solution is concentrated in either well of the potential, but not both. Solutions in the second family undergo tunneling oscillations between the two wells. A finite dimensional reduction (system of ODEs) derived in Marzuola and Weinstein 2010 and is expected to well-approximate the PDE dynamics on long time scales. In particular, we revisit this reduction, find a class of exact solutions and shadow them in the (NLS/GP) system by applying the above approach.


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I would like to ask if anybody knows any result on the least number of edges the maximum simple cycle of connected cubic bridgeless graphs, must have. Thanks
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1 Answer 1
up vote 5 down vote accepted
So you are looking for the circumference of a connected cubic bridgeless graph $G$. Since a bridgeless cubic graph is immediately 2-connected, Bondy and Entringer showed in the paper
Longest cycles in 2-connected graphs with prescribed maximum degree, Canadian Journal of Mathematics, 1980,
that $G$ contains a cycle of length at least $4 (\log_2 n - \log_2\log_2 n - 5)$. And a graph which meets the bound is provided in the result Über längste Kreise in regulären Graphen by Lang and Walther, so this is the best possible.
For the reference, see Longest cycles in 3-connected cubic graphs by Bill Jackson. If the graph is 3-connected, then the bound can be improved to $\Omega(n^c)$ with $c\approx 0.69$, and there are efficient algorithm approximately finding a long cycle in $G$.
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Hsien-Chih the bound you provide is negative for n<256, so for most practical graphs – N27 Jan 10 '11 at 3:12
_USER_: Oops so you need a bound for small size graphs. Maybe you can put the requirement in your question, and there may be someone who knows the answer. (I have no idea what the bound is when the graph is small, it seems like the result above is for sufficiently large n.) – Hsien-Chih Chang 張顯之 Jan 10 '11 at 3:29
_USER_-Chih There is something wrong with this bound obviously, since for 100,000 vertices it gives a cycle of length 30. Maybe they refer to something else in their publication. However, this problem doesn't seem trivial. – N27 Jan 10 '11 at 3:33
_USER_: I'm not sure if the bound is wrong. There are cubic bridgeless graphs with a large number of nodes with small maximum cycle. Take this graph for example. (This graph may not meet our bound, but it gives intuition.) – Hsien-Chih Chang 張顯之 Jan 10 '11 at 3:50
@ Hsien-Chih Chang, actually I learned what I wanted from the example of Dr. Eppstein, since what I needed was a counterexample of a cubic bridgeless graph with a max simple cycle of less than n/2 vertices. – N27 Jan 12 '11 at 5:31
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Late, late, for a very important pill?
Forgot to take your pill on time? Stay calm and read on...
by Andrea Jackson, MD
First, the short answer: If you miss a pill, you should take the pill you missed as soon as you can. If you take the pill less than 24 hours after you were supposed to and it's not the first week of a new pack, you don't need a back-up method—just take the pill you missed and relax. If it's the first week of a new pack of pills, you'll want to use a back-up method like condoms if you have sex in the 7 days after missing your pill.
Now, some more detail.
The pill works best if you take it every single day. You may have seen information about "perfect use" stating that the pill is 99.7% effective, but the reality is that with typical use it's 91% effective. (That means that of 11 women taking the pill for a year, one will become pregnant.)
In the real world, it's a challenge for anyone with a daily medication to take it perfectly. Even people with serious medical conditions like high blood pressure have a hard time taking medicine every day. The World Health Organization estimates that about half of people with chronic medical conditions take their medication late or skip it completely on some days. In a study of young women using the pill, the majority (80%) missed one or more pills within the first few months.
If you take the pill, your health care provider probably recommended that you take it at the same time every day. Making it part of a daily routine can help you remember. Some women keep the pill packet next to their toothbrush, or use a fun reminder app every day.
What should I do about a late pill?
When your routine is a little off, you can still protect yourself from an accidental pregnancy. Exactly what to do depends on three things:
1) What type of pill you use. If you're on the mini-pill, a.k.a. the progestin-only pill, ignore the chart and see the section on mini-pills below.
2) If you're a combination pill user, as most pill users are, it depends on whether it's the first week of a new pill pack, and
3) how long it's been since you took the last pill.
I'm using the mini-pill—is that different?
About 1% of women taking the pill in the U.S. are using the mini-pill, or progestin-only pill. The active ingredient in mini-pills doesn't stay in your body as long as combined pills, and there are no placebo pills. If you are late or skip a mini-pill at any time, follow the instructions above and use a back-up method like a condom (or EC if you miss the condom) if you have sex in the next two days. Yup, with mini-pills you have to use back-up even if you're only a few hours late.
Um, you didn't answer my question
If it's not urgent, ask below and I'll get back to you! If it is urgent, call your health care provider or a local clinic for help. If you can't get through on the phone and you need help right away, you can also ask a pharmacist at a drug store.
Andrea Jackson, MD, is an Obstetrician/Gynecologist and a clinical fellow in Family Planning at the University of California, San Francisco. She's passionate about educating young girls, teens, and women about their bodies, and empowering them to make smart choices in their lives. She loves running, her hyperactive dog Coco, and her nephews Aaron, Solomon, and Alexander.
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This is the mail archive of the mailing list for the libstdc++ project.
Other format: [Raw text]
sso tradeoffs
I am for the first time today poking around the extension short string implementation. I wanted to explore some of the design tradeoffs that we currently have.
The class layout currently looks like:
Allocator - space optimized
union {
CharT buf[16],
This gives a 6 word size for string (CharT is char).
This is a respectable design, and according to Effective STL, very similar, if not a little better (imho) than implementation "D" from ESTL.
The short/long flag is a check to see if the CharT* references the internal buffer or not.
1. Very fast iterator creation (simply return the CharT*).
2. Very fast indexing (index off of the CharT*).
3. Decent internal buffer size before switching to long strings.
Disadvantages (compared to what I'll show below):
1. Significantly more complicated/slower swap (and thus move assign).
2. Slower move construction.
3. Slightly slower default ctor.
Ok, enough blowing smoke. Here's an alternative to consider:
union {
Allocator - space optimized
raw_memory is simply an array of size_type[n_words] where n_words is the number of words in the greater of long_rep or short_rep. Having this raw_memory view of the string can be handy when you know you just need to blow bytes from one location to another.
long_rep is a struct that looks like:
size_type short/long flag : 1
size_type capacity : number of bits in size_type - 1
size_type size
CharT* data
sizeof(long_rep) is 3 words. Except for the leading short/long flag, this is a pretty standard looking string. capacity is cut by half due to stealing a bit for the short/long flag.
short_rep is a struct that looks like:
union {
struct {
unsigned char short/long flag : 1
unsigned char size : number of bits in unsigned char - 1
CharT padding // unused
CharT buf[min_cap]
Ok, the short_rep is a little complex looking. In a nutshell its high order bit is the long/short flag (in the same spot as in the long_rep). Next comes 7 bits of size. In the short form, size is going to be small, and 7 bits is plenty (can represent size up to 127). The padding member only comes into play when sizeof(CharT) > 1. When CharT is a char, padding is the same size as (and shares storage with) the flag/size field. Finally there is the internal buffer.
And the big question is: how big should min_cap be?
The very minimum that min_cap can be is 1. Rationale: The default ctor must not allocate memory. And the default ctor must store the trailing '\0'.
Consider the effects of a very large min_cap, say 128. This is obviously too big. Why? It would take way too much time to pass this thing around by value. sizeof(string) is a very important number, and even more so with move semantics looming on the horizon.
An ideal move constructor will just blow bytes from source to target, and then zero out the source (set the source to a default ctor'd string). The cost of this operation will be proportional to sizeof (string).
An ideal move assignment will just swap bytes between source and target - same operation as swapping strings. Again the cost of this operation will be proportional to sizeof(string).
I anticipate that move construct, move assign, and swap will be performance critical operations for string in C++0X. Therefore one possible rationale for the ideal min_cap is one which makes sizeof (short_rep) == sizeof(long_rep). I.e. min_cap is set to maximize the internal buffer subject to the constraint that you only have sizeof (long_rep) bytes to work with.
On a 32 bit word / 8 bit char machine this gives the capacity of a short string 10 chars (min_cap is 11).
On a 64 bit word / 8 bit char machine the short string capacity jumps to 22 (min_cap is 23).
The capacity for the short string shrinks as sizeof(CharT) grows (from this rationale). Here is a summary, sizeof is in bytes:
32 bit machine:
sizeof(CharT) sizeof(basic_string) short_capacity min_cap
1 12 10 11
2 12 4 5
4 12 1 2
64 bit machine:
1 24 22 23
2 24 10 11
4 24 4 5
A first reaction is that these internal capacities are awfully small (I had the same reaction). But...
Moving is going to be at least twice as fast as a string with twice the sizeof. And moving is how future strings will get around as they are shuffled within vector, or within a std::algorithm, or returned by value from a function (if rvo is otherwise disabled).
Further benefits:
If the short/long flag is chosen to be 0 means short, then the string can be default constructed by just shoving zeroes into it. This is 4 non-branching inlined assembly statements (at most): load an immediate 0 into a register, then store that register to 3 memory locations (ok, so you might have to specialize on std::char_traits for that one - but it is worth it). This is a wicked small and fast default ctor:
li r0,0
stw r0,56(SP)
stw r0,60(SP)
stw r0,64(SP)
I'm not implying that it needs to be coded in assembly, it doesn't. This is what gets generated by using the "raw memory" interface.
1. Ok, the internal buffer is small. Long strings are obviously going to occur with greater frequency.
2. Indexing is slow. The index operator must check the short/long flag to find the data buffer.
3. Iterator creation is slow for the same reason that indexing is slow. However note that iterator creation is rare compared to iterator use. Once iterators are formed, and passed to an algorithm, there is no slow down (the iterator can be a simple pointer). So if clients are encouraged to iterate instead of index when possible, disadvantages 2 & 3 tend not to be significant.
One of the big differences between the two designs is the selfreferential nature of the CharT* pointer: pointing into itself in one design, and being a completely different pointer in the other. Each favors different things: one favors indexing and iterator creation, the other favors swap/move, and to a lesser extent default ctor.
 These are just my musings. I know a lot of good and hard work has been put into the current sso_string.h. And I'm confident that it will blow away the ref-counted design. But here are some further considerations...


How to actually write a program?
Phil Frost indigo at
Fri Sep 3 23:52:54 CEST 2004
How does a composer write a song? He might know the overall sound of the
song, so he might start by playing it on a piano. Then he might work on
the strings part, and a general chord progression. Then add some
woodwinds, building the song piece by piece until all the small parts
are assembled to a greater whole.
Writing a program is no different. You must first break your song in to
parts. It's a highly creative process, and it's not something that can
be taught. Find yourself a nice, quiet room, and a time when you arn't
distracted by anything. Think of the greater problem and try to divide
it into smaller pieces. This division is the hardest part of
programming; expressing the ideas in code becomes as natural as speech
with practice. After some reflection your path should become clear.
On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 09:29:36PM +0000, Nick Evans wrote:
> Hello there,
> I have been on and off learning to code (with python being the second
> language I have worked on after a bit of BASIC). What I really want to know
> is, if you are going to actually write a program or a project of some sort,
> how do you actually start.
> Picture this, you know what you want the program to do (its features), you
> have a possably rough idea of how the program will work. You have opened an
> empty text file and saved it as '' and now your sitting in
> front of an empty text file... Now then.... where do I start.
> Any ideas about this problem :-)
> Ta
> Nick
More information about the Python-list mailing list


Is There a Difference Between Bar Soap and Liquid Hand Wash?
By Claire CameronFeb 19, 2016 6:00 PM
Handwashing Bar Soap - Shutterstock
(Credit: Alliance/Shutterstock)
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Q: Is there any difference between washing our hands with bar soap or liquid hand wash? Would it be better if we wash with both soap and hand wash at the same time? — Rowena Kong, Vancouver, Canada
A: The debate over whether bar or liquid is best has been ongoing for decades, but a 2006 study nearly put an end to bar soap's clean credentials. It found that the more consistently wet the bar soaps were and the more they were used, the more potentially harmful microbes they hosted.
Counterintuitively, this is because of how soap works: When it mixes with water, the soap's fats break down and lather, increasing the solubility of what's on your skin, including bacteria. But water alone can't remove all bacteria, and since some water remains on the soap's surface after you've finished washing, some bacteria lingers in that water.
Luckily, soap is water soluble, so just rinsing the bar reduces bacteria on it. And there's nothing wrong with using it at home, where presumably fewer people (and their germs) will touch it. Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people use liquid hand wash to minimize the risk of spreading harmful bacteria. Even though refilling liquid hand wash dispensers can turn them into potential havens for microbes, liquid still trumps bar in the CDC's eyes. That's because people can either dispose of the dispensers or thoroughly clean them before refilling, decreasing the chance they'll harbor bacteria.
As for mixing the two, CDC spokeswoman Brittany Behm says, "We don't think there is any reason to use both bar and liquid soap simultaneously." So stick to the soap you like best.
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text:
In this tutorial we will see how to change the MAC (Media Access Control) address of a network device under Ubuntu 12.04/11.10 or older. Let's suppose your internet provider is allowing only internet connections with pre-configured MAC addresses. You will be unable to connect to the Internet if you buy a new wireless/wired network device because it uses a different MAC address. So, this tutorial will be very helpful for this situation.
To check your current MAC address (es) for connected wired/wireless network devices under Ubuntu, run this command:
sudo ifconfig -a
A MAC address is a combination of 12 hexadecimal digits and letters. You can generate a random MAC address with this command from the terminal:
openssl rand -hex 6 | sed's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'
Let's now start our tutorial. You need first to stop your network manager (wired or wireless connection) with this command:
sudo service network-manager stop
To change the current MAC address, run this command:
sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
Replace xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx with your own MAC address. Here is an example:
sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 32:43:21:ea:bd:40
"eth0" (eth1, eth2, etc.) is the network interface for a wired connection. If you are connecting to the internet over a wireless connection, then replace it with "wlan0" (wlan1, wlan2, etc.). Your command will be as follows:
sudo ifconfig wlan0 hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
Next, restart your network manager with this command:
sudo service network-manager restart
Now check again your network interfaces to see if the new MAC address (es) is well enabled:
sudo ifconfig -a
Note: This tip is also workable on Ubuntu 11.04/10.10 or older.


raster image of text-ws-02-t
Test for viewer correct handling of whitespace and the 'xml:space' attribute. There are two sub-tests, for value "preserve". In each test, the content of the 'text' element is written on multiple lines. The first test of each pair has indented text with leading space characters, tabs, etc. The second has no indentation, but a line break before the content and after it. There are no space (or other whitespace) characters at the ends of the lines.
The two test cases are self-descriptive. From the top; first, "preserve" applied to essentially the same content as first; second, "preserve" applied to essentially the same content as second.
In each test, the test string is in blue and the reference image is in black. The rendered picture should approximately match the reference image, however there is some question in the reference image concerning the exact amount of space in the long-space areas. The third test uses the nbsp unicode character to force the reference white spaces display, which provides an accurate match if the font in use has the same metrics for that character and the default white space. Also, variations are possible in the text fonts and layout (per CSS2 rules).
The test also uses the'rect' element, as well as basic fill (solid primary colors), stroke (black 1-pixel lines), font-family (Arial) and font-size properties.


text:
Subscribe to news email updates.
Tragic News Reports Weigh More Heavily on Women: Study
Physiological response was evident in reaction to later events.
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Bad news in the media increases women's sensitivity to stressful situations but does not affect men, a new study finds.
University of Montreal researchers asked 60 people to read actual news stories. The articles were either neutral stories about events such as the opening of a new park or the premiere of a film, or negative stories about events such as accidents and murders.
Before and after the participants read the news stories, the researchers collected saliva samples in order to measure levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Higher levels of the hormone indicate higher levels of stress.
After reading the news stories, the participants were given memory and intellect tasks designed to evaluate how they react to stressful situations. Saliva samples were collected again after this part of the study.
"Although the news stories alone did not increase stress levels, they did make the women more reactive, affecting their physiological responses to later stressful situations," study lead author Marie-France Marin said in a university news release.
She and her colleagues found that women who read negative news stories had higher cortisol levels after doing the stressful tasks than women who read neutral news stories. This difference was not seen in men.
The study was published Oct. 10 in the journal PLoS One.
"It's difficult to avoid the news, considering the multitude of news sources out there," Marin said. "And what if all that news was bad for us? It certainly looks like that could be the case."
Additional studies are needed to learn more about how negative news affects different people, she added. Although the study found an association between reading negative news stories and increased stress, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has more about stress.
(SOURCE: University of Montreal, news release, Oct. 10, 2012)
Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
HealthDay news articles are derived from various sources and do not reflect federal policy. Womenshealth.gov does not endorse opinions, products, or services that may appear in news stories.
A federal government website managed by the Office on Women's Health in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
200 Independence Avenue, S.W. • Washington, DC 20201


text:
ChristianAnswers.Net WebBible Encyclopedia
The sickle of the Egyptians resembled that in modern use. The ears of corn were cut with it near the top of the straw. There was also a sickle used for warlike purposes, more correctly, however, called a pruning-hook (Deut. 16:9; Jer. 50:16, marginal note, "scythe;" Joel 3:13; Mark 4:29).


text:
high friction surface.
Lifting from underneath works because all the weight of the object sits on top. So long as the object doesn't topple to either side it will lift up just fine.
THE PROJECT – Explore different material properties using the jaws and a jar of jam
Now, experiment with different materials from around the house and attach hem onto the jaws and test them using something relatively heavy and shiny. I would suggest a jar of jam or something similar BUT make sure you put a towel down in case you drop the jam – you don't want to be responsible for cleaning that up!!
How would you modify the design to make it more like a fork lift truck that that it could reach under objects to lift them up?
- What material was the best and why?
- Were these materials difficult to attach to the jaws? if so why?
- Can you sort materials into two piles, high friction and low friction.? What do you notice about each of them?
Project 8 – Why Cardboard?
Literally my favourite material. Don't get me wrong, I've worked with titanium, die cast aluminium, stainless steel and a multitude of different types of plastics BUT the very best way to get kids interested in engineering is cardboard.
Why? The obvious question, and yet there are so many obvious answers. It's almost free! Every box and parcel delivered to your door, the cereal packets in your cupboards, the inside of your toilet rolls – they are literally giving you FREE materials to work with.
Not just that it's cheap, it's so incredibly versatile. I've created everything from gear systems, to full working cars, to masks, to ping pong ball launchers and visual models. Bend it one way it's super curvy, bend it the other way it becomes very strong. Together with 6 eight year olds, we've made a bridge that all their parents were able to walk over!
The tools required to work with cardboard are cheap, highly accessible and easy to use and with those tools you can create almost anything.
Here's a video I made a while ago showing the basics of cardboard…
Project 9 – The Tower of Hanoi
There's loads of parts to this challenge. The first thing to do is to build yourself some boxes. Below you'll find a link to a document to download and print. The document has plans to cut out and use to build the boxes AND it has the game sheet needed for the Tower of Hanoi Challenge. If you don't have a printer, you can draw the template from scratch like I did and you can draw out the game sheet too.
Once you've got your boxes made, it's time to play the game!
The challenge is to move the boxes from the pad at one end to the pad at the other end – sounds simple right? Well you need to do it in as few moves as possible AND you can only place a lower value box on top of a higher value box, oh and you can only move one box at a time. How many moves did you do it in?
Project 10- Digger Attachment
I've spent the last 8 years working in R&D. You have to work fast, efficient and economically to get answers as soon as possible. It's better to know that an idea won't work sooner rather than wasting weeks, months or years in development. The single best way I've seen over the years is to make our design modular. How can you get 10 answers out of one test rig? How can you design something that is adaptable where neither concept is compromised?
This project is learning to work with someone else's plans (Mine!). The design is already done BUT parts need to be made. It's about learning to make decent quality parts, the right way out of card then assemble them correctly so that the device works.
If it doesn't work the first time, that's ok. Have another go! I've given the kids a starting point by supplying the linkages laser cut in the main kit. these are the hardest parts to make. I've also added an extra dowel in the kit to use for the pivot points.
Watch the video then download the plans.


text:
playwright Dawn Powell, the gift of Elizabeth T. Page and
the ongoing gift of Tim Page. Among the papers are drafts and working notes for
her novel The Golden Spur. These include this chart that she began in
March, 1958, showing how she kept track of characters, places, spots and
episodes for the work, such as: "Cassie Bender, gallery. Would have had a
tea-room in another age," and under "Spots:" "Hotel Le Grand. Golden Spur Cafe.
Supermarket. Wash. Sq. Park."
Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio in 1896, Dawn Powell ran away from an abusive
stepmother when she was thirteen and settled with her unconventional aunt in
nearby Shelby, Ohio. "Auntie May," a divorcée, owned a home near the railroad
depot, made lively by Powell's cousins, Auntie's lover, and passing strangers
who stopped for meals. Encouraged by her aunt to further her education, Powell
begged a scholarship to Lake Erie College for Women. There she wrote and
performed in plays and edited the Lake Erie Record, a campus quarterly,
which often contained her playful yet pessimistic stories. In 1918, Powell moved
to New York City. She married Joseph Gousha, Jr., a Pennsylvania-born poet
turned ad man, and the couple had a son, Jojo. They settled in Greenwich
Village. Powell loved her bohemian neighborhood and the Manhattan nightlife that
she spent alongside friends John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and
others from the literary scene.
Powell set her fiction in the small Ohio towns of her youth and later, most
successfully, in familiar New York neighborhoods and cafés. Though dogged by
Gousha's drinking, Jojo's probable autism, financial strain, and her own
struggles with alcohol, illness, and depression, Dawn Powell managed to write
sixteen novels, nine plays, and numerous short stories and reviews. She died in
1965. Powell's wicked sense of humor, keen ear for dialogue and human sense of
pathos pervade her barbed, shrewd fiction about mid-century Americans in
Manhattan and Ohio. Her remarkable diaries, published in 1995, were hailed by
the New York Times as "one of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter
century." Columbia University's holdings include her personal and professional
correspondence, drafts of her plays and novels and her diaries.
Gift of Tim Page, 2002


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They are both nest-building social insects, but paper wasps and honey bees organize their colonies in very different ways. In a new study, researchers report that despite their differences, these insects rely on the same network of genes to guide their social behavior.
The study appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Honey bees and paper wasps are separated by more than 100 million years of evolution, and there are striking differences in how they divvy up the work of maintaining a colony, said University of Illinois entomology professor Gene Robinson, who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Amy Toth.
"Honey bees have a sharp division of labor between queens, which reproduce, and workers, which care for the brood and forage for food, while among paper wasps social roles are much more fluid," he said. "And yet the same genes can be used by these different organisms to do similar kinds of things. This is the genetic toolkit idea: The same genetic elements are used for different types of division of labor."
A genetic toolkit already has been found for physical traits, such as the development of eyes, said Robinson, who is also a professor in the Institute for Genomic Biology. For example, the same gene, called PAX-6, is involved in eye development in mammals and insects, even though it is virtually certain that these structures did not evolve from a similar structure in a common ancestor.
For the new study, the researchers compared the activation of genes in the brains of four groups of female paper wasps (Polistes metricus) that have different roles in the nest, with some more active in reproduction and others more active in provisioning the brood.
The purpose of the study was to determine if differences in brain gene activity between the wasps rely on the same networks of genes that in the honey bee (Apis mellifera) drive their division of labor.
A previous study of paper wasps by Robinson, Toth and their colleagues obtained a partial sequence of the wasp genome and looked at the expression of 32 genes. That analysis, published in Science in 2007, showed that – as in honey bees – most of the targeted genes are activated differently in different groups of paper wasps. But those genes were hand-picked because they were important to honey bees, Robinson said. For this reason, the team wanted to take a second look at the broad array of genes in the wasp – to be sure that the pattern they had identified was indeed special to wasps as well as bees.
Crop sciences professor Matt Hudson, the team's bioinformatics expert, used a computer algorithm to mine the sequencing data from the previous study to design a microarray. The microarray allowed the researchers to simultaneously measure those genes that were most active in the paper wasp brain.
"We expect that Polistes has got somewhere in the range of 10,000 genes, and we expect that at least half of them, but not all of them, would be expressed in the brain," said Hudson, who also is a professor in the Institute for Genomic Biology. The effort identified more than 4,900 genes that were active in the wasp brain.
The new analysis confirmed that the same genes and gene regulators that are important to the division of labor within a honey bee hive also are used by the wasps as they take on different roles in the nest.


Animal Control Bill
S, 2192, An Act Further Regulating Municipal Animal Control
Signed by the Governor on August 2, 2012. The law took effect 90 days after it was signed, Oct. 31, 2012.
Summary of the new law:
 - Reduces the number of homeless animals in the Commonwealth through a statewide spay/neuter program and will, in turn, also reduce the cost to cities and towns for housing and sheltering these animals. This is funded by a voluntary tax check off.
 - Requires Animal Control Officers to receive training. People are often surprised to learn that their local animal control officer is not required to receive training for the complicated work they do to keep the people and animals in their community safe. This is funded by the tax check off.
 - Prohibits carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide gas as a means to "euthanize" dogs and cats.
The law creates some statewide oversight for animal control, which previously did not exist in Massachusetts; create categories for kennel licensing; create consistency in the holding time for stray dogs and provide other meaningful updates to the state's antiquated animal control laws. A House amendment added some restrictions on the tethering of dogs (Ch 140 sec. 174E).
Why were these changes needed?
Many of the laws that govern animal control date back to the 1800s. Quite simply, the laws did not address the current state of animal control in our municipalities, which are no longer based on the county system. The fines are outdated, as is the term "dog officer"; "animal control officer" more accurately describes the role fulfilled. These proposed changes were made to Chapter 140, sections 136A through 174D to update and make the animal control laws more efficient, current and effective. They will also save cities and towns money. At the beginning of every legislative session, many bills are filed to address a section or issue relating to animal control. For years, organizations, individuals, and legislators have been seeking a more comprehensive revision; this law is the result of stakeholder meetings since 2005 to rework the sections in Chapter 140 relating to animals.
The Animal Control Officers of Massachusetts (ACOAM), the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA), the Animal Rescue League of Boston the state's Bureau of Animal Health within the Department of Agricultural Resources and the Massachusetts Veterinary Medical Association (MVMA) worked together to draft these changes.
Rep. Coakley-Rivera
Rep. Benson
Rep. Atkins
Sen. Brownsberger
Rep. Andrews
Rep. Ashe
Rep. Ayers
Rep. Balser
Rep. Brady
Rep. Toomey
Rep. Hecht
Rep. Cabral
Rep. Canavan
Sen. DiDomenico
Rep. Dwyer
Sen. Eldridge
Rep. Fresolo
Rep. Garballey
Rep. Gobi
Rep. Harrington
Rep. Sullivan
Sen. Hedlund
Rep. Lewis
Rep. Linsky
Sen. Montingy
Rep. Peisch
Sen. Rush
Rep. Sciortino
Rep. Speranzo
Sen. Spilka
Rep. Story
Sponsor: Senator Jehlen


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Protests and Demonstrations
Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary supports the right of persons to lawfully assemble and conduct peaceful protests. We ask members of the Seminary community to follow these guidelines whenever such a gathering becomes disruptive or has the potential to become violent:
- Avoid the area of disturbance and observe the situation from a safe distance to determine if the gathering is currently or potentially violent.
- Do not engage the demonstrators or protesters either verbally or by actions.
- Notify the Safety & Security Department _PHONE_) and await instructions.
- If inside, secure your area (lock doors, files, vital records and expensive equipment).
- Continue with normal routines as much as possible.
- Keep away from doors and windows and Stay Inside!
- Prepare for evacuation or relocation.


When you're using any USB connection option other than Charge Only, you must properly disconnect the phone from the computer. Never just yank out the USB cable. Doing so can damage the phone's storage, which is a Bad Thing. Instead, follow these steps to do things properly:
 1. Close whichever programs or windows are accessing the Droid Bionic from the computer.
 2. Properly unmount the phone from the computer's storage system.
 On a PC, locate the phone's icon in the Computer or My Computer window. Right-click the icon and choose either the Eject or Safely Remove command.
 On a Macintosh, drag the phone's storage icon to the Trash.
 3. On the Droid Bionic, pull down the notifications.
 4. Choose USB Connection.
 5. Choose Charge Only.
 6. Touch the OK button to confirm.
 The phone's storage is unmounted and can no longer be accessed from your computer.
 7. If you like, unplug the USB cable.
When you choose to keep the phone connected to the computer, the phone continues to charge. (Only when the computer is off does the phone not charge.) Otherwise, the computer and phone have ended their little tête-à-tête and you and the phone are free again to wander the earth.


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2004 in scienceThe year 2004 CE in science and technology included many events, some of which are listed below.
See also: 2003 in science, other events of 2004, 2005 in science, and the list of years in science.
- January 3 - NASA's Spirit, the first of two Mars Exploration Rovers, lands successfully on Mars.
- March 2 - NASA report that the area where their Mars probe Opportunity touched down shows unmistakeable signs of contact with water in the geological past.
- March 2 - ESA's Rosetta mission launches, aiming to land on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.
- March 4- NASA's Spirit finds evidence of past contact with water in volcanic rocks on Mars.
- April 1 - The Genesis probe closes and seals its particle collection instrument, and begins to return to Earth.
- June 11 - Cassini-Huygens, the NASA/ESA mission to Saturn, makes a flyby of one of Saturn's small outer moons, Phoebe.
- June 21 - SpaceShipOne, the first civilian space ship is launched in California, reaching an altitude of 100 km (62.5 miles), just passing the edge of space.
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Gordon Research Conferences
To promote discussions and the exchange of ideas of studies in the biological, chemical and physical sciences.
Listing of science of philosophy conferences, workshops, and other meetings. Emphasis on European meetings.
European Research Conferences (EURESCO)
A programme of the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg. Conducts conference series in all scientific areas: discussion meetings exploring research frontiers.
Wonderfest Festival of Science
Biannual event in which pairs of researchers discuss and debate current scientific questions. Much of the event is available for review over the internet in audio and video formats.
All Conferences Directory
Searchable database of science and technology conferences. Organized by category. Also offers information regarding paper submission deadlines.
Database of academic meeting announcements, with abstracts, browsable by subject, by date or by country.
International event for those interested in the explosion of activities at the intersection of art, science, and technology. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) November 3-4, 2001.
Information about conference that addresses interdisciplinary issues in scientific and technical data management and dissemination.
Mathematics and Engineering Techniques in Medicine and Biology
Next meeting will be held 21--24 June 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
Contains meetings, symposia, conferences, courses, seminars, workshops, awards and programs. From the Nature journal.
Allows for the organization of virtual meetings, especially with topics combining science and humanities. Includes list of conferences and bibliography from these meetings.
International Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services
Covers topics ranging from networking and operating system support to teleservices and distributed multimedia applications. Include summaries of speeches. Meeting was held in Enschede, The Netherlands, October, 2000.
WIPCE 2005 - Indigenous Peoples of All Nations
Dedicated to promoting inspirational ideas and practices from indigenous communities that can be applied on an international scale. Invited are educators, researchers and students. From Friday November 25 to Thursday December 1, 2005.
Euroresidue Conference on Residues of Veterinary Drugs in Food
Conference on residues of veterinary drugs in food. Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, 12-14 May 2004.
Wessex Institute of Technology
A postgraduate research engineering centre offering a series of conferences in science and technology. Site includes schedule of events.
EuroScience Open Forum 2004
The first pan-European scientific meeting to provide an interdisciplinary forum for open dialogue, debate and discussion on science and technology in society. Stockholm City Conference Center, Sweden; 25--28 August 2004.
NATO ASI and ARW calendar
Information about Advanced Study Institutes (ASIs) and Advanced Research Workshops (ARWs), which are scientific meetings supported by NATO.
A New Kind of Science 2004
Held in Boston Massachusetts from April 22 though April 25, 2004.
Promotes the development of new mathematical methods and computational techniques as well as their applications in science and engineering.
International Odour Conferences
Directory of International odor related conferences for water and waste management.
IPSI Belgrade Conferences and Workshops
Scientific conferences emphasising synergy and interaction. By invititation with a special emphasis on young researchers.


Literature: The Bone Season
The Bone Season is the 2013 debut novel of author Samantha Shannon. Set in a Dystopian, Alternate History England, the story follows a magic-user (called "voyants", short for clairvoyant, in the book) named Paige Mahoney. Since 1859, when the voyant phenomenon first became public knowledge, England has operated under an oppressive and strongly anti-voyant government known as Scion. Paige belongs to a class of criminal voyants who use their contact with spirits and the spirit world (known as the aether) to commit crime while avoiding the government forces charged with rounding up any voyants. Paige herself is a special kind of voyant known as a "dreamwalker", capable of separating her spirit from her physical body and entering others' bodies through their "dreamscapes."
Paige is captured by the government after using her powers to kill several government agents. She is then transported to the city of Oxford, now a penal colony known as Sheol I. The penal colony is run by a magical race known as the Rephaim. In 1859 the Rephaim arrived on Earth through a rift in the aether, along with a man-eating race known as the Emim. In exchange for the Rephaim protecting Earth from the Emim, the Rephaim have required a tribute of young voyants each decade known as a "Bone Season." The voyants are held in the penal colony and are used a beacon to attract the Emim, as well as a makeshift army to fight the Emim incursions. Voyants are assigned to a Rephaite "keeper" and are kept essentially in slavery. Those who display cowardice or refuse to fight the Emim are forced to perform for the Rephaim as poor and mistreated "harlies."
Paige is chosen by the Rephaite Arcturus Mesarthim, known as the Warden, who has never previously chosen a human. She must learn from the Warden the basics of how to survive in her new environment, all while trying to escape back to her home in London.
The book has met with considerable success. Many media sources have compared the book to the Harry Potter series, due to the similarity of Shannon to J.K. Rowling, including sharing the same publisher. The book has also drawn comparisons with The Hunger Games series, due to its shared nature as a dystopian novel with a female protagonist. The film rights to the book have already been picked up by Andy Serkis' Imaginarium Studios. A sequel is also currently in the works.
This novel provides examples of:
 - Aura Vision: "Sighted" voyants can see the aura given off by other voyants.
 - Alternate History: Splits off with the main timeline around the Victorian Era. In 1859, the rift opens in the aether due to a build-up of dead spirits, allowing the Rephaim and Emim to enter Earth. Edward VII is blamed for the Jack the Ripper murders and accused of being a voyant. He is deposed as King and the government of Scion is established.
 - Big Bad: Nashira.
 - Color-Coded Wizardry: Each voyant gives off an aura, which has a different color depending on the voyant's gift.
 - Eldritch Abomination: The Emim seem to be an example of this.
 - Fate Worse Than Death: Nashira's victims are forced to become "fallen angels," spirits which protect her and which grant her their former powers.
 - Future Slang: Played with, in that the book is set 50 years in the future but much of the slang comes from Victorian English.
 - Incompatible Orientation: Nick and Paige.
 - Mayfly-December Romance: the Warden and Paige.
 - Our Vampires Are Different: While the Warden explicitly states in-book that the Rephaim aren't vampires, there are still a number of similarities. They're nearly immortal, feed on human auras, and drinking human blood can heal them.
 - Oxbridge: Sheol I is what remains of Oxford.
 - Psychic Link: the Warden and Paige inadvertently form one because of their bad habit of saving each other's lives. Oops.
 - Psychic Nosebleed: Paige caused these in people she was angry at before she fully understood her gift.
 - The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The Seven Seals are set up as a badass criminal gang, but they don't seem to do any actual crime aside from selling sketchy paintings.
 - United Europe: SCION controls nine European nations, not all of them named (Britain, Ireland, France, Greece, Serbia and Sweden are). How much autonomy the various countries governments have isn't really gotten into although Britain and Ireland are completely under its control.


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Australians are passionate about their roasts. Even a date with Tom Cruise gets canned if it means missing out on the aromatic Aussie feast.
It takes a lot of time and energy to cook a roast. Literally. The energy used for cooking in an average Australian home is responsible for the release of about half a tonne of greenhouse gas each year.
In Australia, electric ovens dominate the market but would a gas oven be a better choice when it comes to looking after our environment?
The differences in the manufacture of gas and electric ovens are negligible.
Indeed, some manufacturers produce both types, sharing many components between the two production lines. The main component of both types is metal, which makes up 84 per cent of their mass.
An oven survives for about 15 to 20 years and the energy used for cooking during this time overshadows energy spent during manufacture.
Energy use from cooking
The energy use of ovens in Europe is tested by cooking cold, wet bricks, which may explain the quality of British pies.
Researchers measure how much energy each oven uses to heat the brick from 5 to 60°C. The average gas oven uses 1.5 kWh whereas an electric oven uses 1.2 kWh.
This difference is not surprising considering more ventilation is required in gas ovens for safety reasons, which causes more heat loss.
Before singing the praises of electric ovens, we have to consider that to supply 1.2kWh of energy to an electric oven we've wasted an awful lot along the way.
About 78 per cent of electricity consumed in Australia is generated by burning coal.
This supply process requires several energy conversions and transport of the energy from its source. At each stage energy is wasted. The result is that about 20 per cent only of the energy produced by burning coal actually reaches the oven compared to 100 per cent of gas combustion energy.
The inefficiency of converting coal to electricity means that overall, gas is a much more energy-efficient way of powering ovens.


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An NAACP report, "Coal Blooded, Putting Profits Over People," released Friday, lists an Indiana coal-fired power plant as a top-five "environmental justice" offender. The State Line Energy electric generating plant in Hammond, above, was rated as the fifth-worst in the nation. That plant is nearly 150 miles from Fort Wayne, but state and local NAACP officials say its effect reaches beyond northwest Indiana and should concern all Hoosiers, regardless of race. The NAACP report said the power plants are inadequately regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and that their harmful effects are borne disproportionately by people of color and lower incomes. Two of the top three worst offending plants are in Chicago.
The NAACP report, analyzed emissions and demographic factors such as race, income and population density. Those calculations became "environmental justice scores" for America's 431 coal-fired power plants. In Indiana, in addition to the Hammond plant's top-five ranking, Duke Energy's R. Gallagher Generating Station in New Albany ranked seventh and a plant in Michigan City also received a failing grade, according to the report.
The company in May told the Chicago Tribune it plans to close the aging State Line as early as next year and no later than 2014, rather than spend millions to bring it in line with more stringent pollution limits.
Analyzing plants' emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides and demographic factors of where the plants are located, the NAACP said "environmental justice scores" were given for each of the nation's 431 coal-fired power plants. The State Line electric generating plant was rated as the fifth-worst in the nation and the Michigan City Generating Station also received a failing grade.
The 'Top Twelve EJ Offenders' Nationwide
Out of the 431 coal-fired power plants that the report examined in this study, the following twelve had the worst environmental justice scores:
1. Crawford Gen. Station, Chicago, IL (Edison International)
2. Hudson Gen. Station, Jersey City, NJ (PSEG)
3. Fisk Gen. Station, Chicago, IL (Edison International)
4. Valley Power Plant, Milwaukee, WI (Wisconsin Energy)
5. State Line Plant, Hammond, IN (Dominion)
6. Lake Shore Plant, Cleveland, OH (FirstEnergy)
7. R. Gallagher Gen. Station, New Albany, IN (Duke Energy)
8. Bridgeport Station, Bridgeport, CT (PSEG)
9. River Rouge Plant, River Rouge, MI (DTE Energy)
10. Cherokee Station, Commerce City, CO (Xcel Energy)
11. Four Corners Plant, Niinahnízaad, NM (Arizona Public Service Co.)
12. Waukegan Gen. Station, Waukegan, IL (Edison International)
Jacqui Patterson, who coodinated the publication of the report, is director of the NAACP's Environmental and Climate Justice Department. (NWI Times, 7/14/2011, Journal Gazette, 7/16/2011, photo courtesy NWI Times)


Grayscale or colored images for computer vision?
Kiskris report abuse
Hi everybody. I'm a software engineer but I recently become interested in computer vision. By learning different tutorials I have noticed that some of them conduct grayscaling of images as a step in preprocessing before training. But other tutorials don't include grayscaling in the image preprocessing. My question is about what is better: leave the image as it is, or transform it to grayscale?
Lu-at-Imaginghub report abuse
Hello _USER_
It depends on the type of objects you want to classify. There is a general question which could help you: "Is the color important for me to classify these objects?"
For example: if you want to distinguish between different type of insects, the color may be important, because the form of bugs can be the same but red bugs belong to one species and yellow bugs belong to another. On the other side, if you want to distinguish between cars body type the color is probably not important.
Best regards, Lu
Kiskris report abuse
But there can be the following situation. I think that the color is not important, but maybe the machine learning model would be able to derive some useful patterns from color. And then by performing grayscaling I will throw away some useful information from my data?
oksifoxy report abuse
When the color is not important it is better to convert images to grayscale because it is easier to work with (both for you and for the model). Accordingly, this can affect the quality of the final results. In any way, you can try both pre-processing with and without converting to grayscale and decide what is better in your case.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is TENS?
TENS is short for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation. A TENS unit generates electrical impulses that are sent through electrodes placed on the skin over nerve centers. The various pulses employed by TENS can block pain signals normally sent to the brain through nerve fibers, thereby interrupting the brain's awareness of pain. A TENS unit may activate the release of endorphins. These are chemicals in the control system used by the body to suppress pain naturally. The use of TENS usually improves pain management significantly. TENS units are safe, non-invasive, drug free, non-addictive and have no side effects. TENS can reduce the need for pain narcotics and drugs. Federal law restricts these devices to sale by or on the order of a physician. TENS is a FDA regulated non-narcotic pain relief device.
How does TENS work?
TENS works by two different methods. High frequency TENS, is based on the theory that continuous mild electrical activity blocks the pain signal traveling to the brain. If the pain signal does not get through to the brain, the pain is not "felt". The second way TENS works is by stimulating the body's own natural pain-control mechanism. Low frequency or short bursts of electrical activity causes the body to release its own pain relieving substances, called endorphins.
How does Interferential therapy differ from TENS?
Interferential differs from conventional Neuromuscular stimulation and TENS in that it delivers concentrated stimulation deep into the affected tissue. Interferential exploits the interference of two separately generated sinusoidal currents applied to the body simultaneously. It is a low frequency current treatment that uses two medium frequency currents which "interfere" with each other to produce a beat frequency that the body recognizes as a low frequency energy source. The range of this frequency is usually 1-250 Hz. The body itself produces low frequency currents between 1 and 256 Hz. These currents are produced across the cell membranes by ionic exchange, and they will vary depending upon the tissue involved. By using frequencies in this range, different systems within the body can be stimulated.
How does a TENS differ from a Muscle Stimulator?
TENS is designed to help relieve certain types of chronic and acute pain. A Muscle Stimulator is used for muscle re-education and rehabilitation, increasing motion restricted from disuse or atrophy, and for increasing local blood circulation.
What are the recommended placements for electrodes?
While your doctor or healthcare professional can best advise you of placement for your individual treatment, below is an electrode placement chart that can be used as a good place to start. Remember: Never place electrodes on the front of the throat as spasm of the laryngeal and pharyngeal muscle may occur. Never place electrodes on your head or at any sites that may cause the electrical current to flow transcerebrally (through the head).
Electrode Placement Chart


Welcome To Cowgate Under 5's Centre
Cowgate under 5's Centre is an environment where children unfold happily and busily in a carefully arranged environment, surrounded by peace and love.
We appreciate that selecting an early years environment can be a difficult task and are delighted that you are exploring the possibility of sending your child to Cowgate.
Our primary concern is always the wellbeing, happiness and holistic development of each individual child in the Centre, providing the support necessary to lead them to care for themselves and each other and to adopt a caring attitude towards the environment that surrounds us.
Through our shared responsibility with you we can make decisions together that ensure your child is given the best possible start in life.


Chapter 12: The Principle of Computational Equivalence
Section 9: Implications for Mathematics and Its Foundations
Multivalued logic
As noted by Jan Łukasiewicz and Emil Post in the early 1920s, it is possible to generalize ordinary logic to allow k values Range[0, 1, 1/(k - 1)], say with 0 being False, and 1 being True. Standard operations in logic can be generalized as Not[a_] = 1 - a, And[a_, b_] = Min[a, b], Or[a_, b_] = Max[a, b], Xor[a_, b_] = Abs[a - b], Equal[a_, b_] = 1 - Abs[a - b], Implies[a_, b_] = 1 - UnitStep[a - b](a - b). An alternative generalization for Not is Not[a_] := Mod[(k - 1) a + 1, k]/(k - 1). The function Nand[a_, b_] := Not[And[a, b]] used in the main text turns out to be universal for any k. Axiom systems can be set up for multivalued logic, but they are presumably more complicated than for ordinary k = 2 logic. (Compare page 1171.)
The idea of intermediate truth values has been discussed intermittently ever since antiquity. Often—as in the work of George Boole in 1847—a continuum of values between 0 and 1 are taken to represent probabilities of events, and this is the basis for the field of fuzzy logic popular since the 1980s.
Image Source Notebooks:
From Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science [citation]


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"In prehistoric Britain, fifty-six stone pillars stood in the outer circle of Stonehenge. In more recent times, the National War Memorial in Washington, erected after World War II, commemorates the dead with fifty-six pillars (also the number of signatures on the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the thirteen states). And in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the People's Republic, fifty-six towering red columns were erected to represent the 'equal, united and harmonious' ethnic groups of China."
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson's Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.


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Holi is a festival which is celebrated on the full moon day of March, marking the arrival of spring. Mythologically there are different stories to the origin of the festival.
The colors that spread on that day not only makes the cloths and walls dirty but also affect the skin and even the scalp, believes the experts. Most of thecolors available in the markets have harsh chemicals and contains chemicals like mica and even lead.
The Synthetic colours often include lead oxide, engine oil, diesel, chromium iodine and copper sulphate which can cause skin irritation and even blindness if the exposure is very high.
Most people prefer the use of herbal colors but are not available everywhere. Experts also say that the people should use natural colours and herbal dyes.
Experts have said that one should wear a cap and well covered clothing to protect as much body as can be protected. It is usually the opposite as people look to wear lesser cloths for Holi, experts say that the people should cover themselves properly.
Famous beauty expert Shahnaz Hussain said that Holi is mostly played outside and hence people should sun creams. She said, "Sun exposure can also have a detrimental effect on the skin. Apart from harmful ultraviolet radiation, sun exposure makes the skin dry by causing depletion of moisture and also tans the skin."
The use of castor or olive oil can help remove the colors easily and one should not rub the skin for removing the chemicals, she added.
The experts also suggest against using hot water as it leaves color lines. People with a history of eczema or Atopic Dermatitis are at a high risk of developing allergic contact dermatitis to Holi colours and dyes.
In other suggestions she said that the people can use lemon juice with water to condition hair and two tablespoons of honey with half a cup of yogurt and a pinch of turmeric to remove the tan.
The use of soyabean flour or besan with milk is also advised to remove colour and replenish and rejuvenate the skin.