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From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level : Fortification of food
Mains level : Read the attached story
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has approved supply of fortified rice in all States and Union Territories (UTs) by 2024 in a phased manner.
What is the news?
- Fortified Rice will be supplied throughout the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) under the:
- National Food Security Act (NFSA)
- Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS)
- Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman-PM POSHAN [erstwhile Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDM)] and
- Other Welfare Schemes (OWS)
Phases of implementation
The following three phases are envisaged for full implementation of the initiative:
- Phase-I: Covering ICDS and PM POSHAN in India all over by March, 2022 which is under implementation.
- Phase-II: Phase I above plus TPDS and OWS in all Aspirational and High Burden Districts on stunting (total 291 districts) by March 2023.
- Phase-III: Phase II above plus covering the remaining districts of the country by March 2024.
What is Fortification?
- The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has explicitly defined fortification.
- It involves deliberate increasing of the content of essential micronutrients in a food so as to improve the nutritional quality of food and to provide public health benefit with minimal risk to health.
Types of food fortification
Food fortification can also be categorized according to the stage of addition:
- Commercial and industrial fortification (wheat flour, cornmeal, cooking oils)
- Biofortification (breeding crops to increase their nutritional value, which can include both conventional selective breeding, and genetic engineering)
- Home fortification (example: vitamin D drops)
How is fortification done for rice?
- Various technologies are available to add micronutrients to regular rice, such as coating, dusting, and 'extrusion'.
- The last mentioned involves the production of fortified rice kernels (FRKs) from a mixture using an 'extruder' machine.
- It is considered to be the best technology for India.
- The fortified rice kernels are blended with regular rice to produce fortified rice.
How does the extrusion technology to produce FRK work?
- Dry rice flour is mixed with a premix of micronutrients, and water is added to this mixture.
- The mixture is passed through a twin-screw extruder with heating zones, which produces kernels similar in shape and size to rice.
- These kernels are dried, cooled, and packaged for use. FRK has a shelf life of at least 12 months.
- As per guidelines issued by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, the shape and size of the fortified rice kernel should "resemble the normal milled rice as closely as possible".
- According to the guidelines, the length and breadth of the grain should be 5 mm and 2.2 mm respectively.
But why does rice have to be fortified in the first place?
- India has very high levels of malnutrition among women and children.
- According to the Food Ministry, every second woman in the country is anaemic and every third child is stunted.
- Fortification of food is considered to be one of the most suitable methods to combat malnutrition.
- Rice is one of India's staple foods, consumed by about two-thirds of the population. Per capita rice consumption in India is 6.8 kg per month.
- Therefore, fortifying rice with micronutrients is an option to supplement the diet of the poor.
What are the standards for fortification?
- Under the Ministry's guidelines, 10 g of FRK must be blended with 1 kg of regular rice.
- According to FSSAI norms, 1 kg of fortified rice will contain the following: iron (28 mg-42.5 mg), folic acid (75-125 microgram), and vitamin B-12 (0.75-1.25 microgram).
- Rice may also be fortified with zinc (10 mg-15 mg), vitamin A (500-750 microgram RE), vitamin B-1 (1 mg-1.5 mg), vitamin B-2 (1.25 mg-1.75 mg), vitamin B-3 (12.5 mg-20 mg) and vitamin B-6 (1.5 mg-2.5 mg) per kg.
Does fortified rice have to be cooked differently?
- The cooking of fortified rice does not require any special procedure.
- The rice needs to be cleaned and washed in the normal way before cooking.
- After cooking, fortified rice retains the same physical properties and micronutrient levels as it had before cooking.
What is India's capacity for fortification?
- At the time of the PM's announcement last year, nearly 2,700 rice mills had installed blending units for the production of fortified rice.
- India's blending capacity now stands at 13.67 lakh tonnes in 14 key states, according to figures provided by the Ministry.
- FRK production had increased rapidly from 7,250 tonnes to 60,000 tonnes within 2 years.
How can a beneficiary distinguish between fortified rice and regular rice?
- Fortified rice will be packed in jute bags with the logo ('+F') and the line "Fortified with Iron, Folic Acid, and Vitamin B12".
- Health: Fortified staple foods will contain natural or near-natural levels of micro-nutrients, which may not necessarily be the case with supplements.
- Taste: It provides nutrition without any change in the characteristics of food or the course of our meals.
- Nutrition: If consumed on a regular and frequent basis, fortified foods will maintain body stores of nutrients more efficiently and more effectively than will intermittently supplement.
- Economy: The overall costs of fortification are extremely low; the price increase is approximately 1 to 2 percent of the total food value.
- Society: It upholds everyone's right to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger
Issues with fortified food
- Against nature: Fortification and enrichment upset nature's packaging. Our body does not absorb individual nutrients added to processed foods as efficiently compared to nutrients naturally occurring.
- Bioavailability: Supplements added to foods are less bioavailable. Bioavailability refers to the proportion of a nutrient your body is able to absorb and use.
- Immunity issues: They lack immune-boosting substances.
- Over-nutrition: Fortified foods and supplements can pose specific risks for people who are taking prescription medications, including decreased absorption of other micro-nutrients, treatment failure, and increased mortality risk.
Back2Basics: Public Distribution System (PDS)
- The PDS is an Indian food Security System established under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food, and Public Distribution.
- PDS evolved as a system of management of scarcity through the distribution of food grains at affordable prices.
- PDS is operated under the joint responsibility of the Central and State Governments.
- The Central Government, through the Food Corporation of India (FCI), has assumed the responsibility for procurement, storage, transportation, and bulk allocation of food grains to the State Governments.
- The operational responsibilities including allocation within the State, identification of eligible families, issue of Ration Cards and supervision of the functioning of FPSs etc., rest with the State Governments.
- Under the PDS, presently the commodities namely wheat, rice, sugar, and kerosene are being allocated to the States/UTs for distribution.
- Some states/UTs also distribute additional items of mass consumption through PDS outlets such as pulses, edible oils, iodized salt, spices, etc.
Mid-Day Meal Scheme
- The Midday Meal Scheme is a school meal program in India designed to better the nutritional standing of school-age children nationwide.
- It is a wholesome freshly-cooked lunch served to children in government and government-aided schools in India.
- It supplies free lunches on working days for children in primary and upper primary classes in government, government-aided, local body, and alternate innovative education centers, Madarsa and Maqtabs.
- The program has undergone many changes since its launch in 1995.
- The Midday Meal Scheme is covered by the National Food Security Act, 2013.
The scheme aims to:
- avoid classroom hunger
- increase school enrolment
- increase school attendance
- improve socialization among castes
- address malnutrition
- empower women through employment


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Joined: Nov. 2011
Don't know if anyone missed this:
"MicroRNA-mediated gene regulation is important in many physiological processes. Here we explore the roles of a microRNA, miR-941, in human evolution. We find that miR-941 emerged de novo in the human lineage, between six and one million years ago, from an evolutionarily volatile tandem repeat sequence."
"Cows who know a moose when they see one will do infinitely better than a cow that pairs with a moose because they cannot see the difference either." Gary Gaulin

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


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Fifty Dangerous Thing (You Should Let Your Children Do) is the first book from the people who created Tinkering School. With projects, activities, experiences, and skills ranging from "Superglue Your Fingers Together" to "Play with Fire," along with 48 other great ideas, the book is a manifesto for kids and parents alike to reclaim childhood.
Easy to follow instructions, fun facts, and challenging undertakings that will engage and inspire whole households. Why Fifty Dangerous Things? First off, Five Dangerous Things just weren't enough (although the audience at TED thought it was a good starting point). More importantly, there are many "dangerous" things that are interesting, eye-opening, enlightening or just plain fun! And while there are aspects of danger in virtually everything we do, the trick is to learn how mastery actually minimizes danger.
Most of us learn how to walk without toppling over at a very young age, so that walking is no longer dangerous. Next we learn to negotiate stairs. Why stop there? Why not practice and become proficient at walking on the roof or walking on a tightrope? These are just a few of the Fifty Dangerous Things that we invite you to try. Take a peek and step into a world of danger and discovery. 130 pages

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


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Cranbrook House & Gardens (Organization)
Found in 1 Collection or Record:
Abstract Cranbrook history dates back to 1904 when George and Ellen Booth purchased land in Bloomfield Hills, MI for their home. The next five decades saw the majority of this land transformed into an educational, artistic, and scientific community. In the early 1970s, a major reorganzition created the Cranbrook Educational Community. More than a century later, in 2021, this Community comprises five program areas: Cranbrook Schools, Cranbrook Art Academy, Cranbrook Art Museum, Cranbrook Institute of...
Dates: circa 1830-; Majority of material found within 1931 - 1970


The Ultimate Guide to Making Magical Butter
Do you want to make edibles?
If so, welcome to your first step: making Magical Butter.
While you can use other infused oils to make an edible, infused cannabutter is one of the most versatile ingredients. Think about it: with Magical butter, you can make virtually anything an edible. From baked goods to making your morning toast an edible, it's one of the best ways to do so.
In this article, we'll go over how to infuse your butter and some ideas for how to use it. Remember, you don't have to use it just to make canna brownies and cookies, you can use it for a huge variety of recipes, both sweet and savory.
Read on for more information.
Wait, is This Really Difficult?
Let's squash your fears right now.
We'll be honest. When you skim this blog post, some of the processes might seem intimidating. Without studying it, you might read processes like decarboxylation and think, "Whoa, I'm out of here."
But don't let that stop you. If you've ever baked before, making Magical butter isn't as difficult as you might presume.
Sure, it's not as easy as taking pre-mixed brownie powder and adding an egg and water and letting them bake. But it's also not like you're discovering something new in a lab here. So, if you have experience baking items from scratch, or cooking items from scratch, we believe you'll be able to infuse your butter.
And hey, even if you don't have experience with all that stuff, we still believe you'll be able to make it if you put your mind to it.
Without further ado, let's get to it. And we believe in you!
First, Decarboxylation
Don't run away, this process isn't as scientific as it sounds, even though it does involve a bit of science.
Decarboxylation is the process of activating T-C and other molecules and terpenes in your flower. In order to produce the psychoactive effect, or the "high" you feel when consuming, it needs to be heated. This process converts T-CA to plain old TH-. When you smoke or vape herb, the heat from the smoke or vape will do it for you. But here, you need to do it yourself.
Heating Your Herb
There are a few methods for decarboxylation, but the most common is just putting it in the oven. But if you'd rather simplify the process and ensure your herb is at a constant temperature, you can use our DecarBox.
The box goes in the oven as well, but it ensures maximum efficiency as well as reduces the smell while the herb is baking. If you have young children or live with roommates, it's probably best not to shove it in the oven uncovered and allow everyone to smell it.
Method of Activation
Preheat your oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. You can do this while you're breaking up your herb into little florets. This is to ensure that the herb is activated evenly.
Then, place them on an oven safe cookie sheet or put them into your DecarBox, careful to spread them around.
Let your herb cook for about 30 minutes, or literally until it is golden brown. It's now ready to make into butter.
Some people think that you should make your butter immediately, but it is up to what you prefer, and what you have time for.
Making the Butter: The Tools
First, you need a few things on hand before you begin. The first one you need is butter. While we are making butter, we're not making butter fresh from the cow, we're only infusing the butter that already exists.
Your butter must be unsalted. Ideally, you'll want it to be clarified butter or ghee butter because they both have a lack of milk fats and water which makes it easier for the molecules to bind to it. It also results in almost no loss of end product.
You can clarify butter yourself, however, and ensure you can remove all of the milk fats. The fastest way to do this is the separate your butter into quarters. Take each quarter separately, and microwave on high for two minutes. Skim the foamy white parts off and throw away. Make it even clearer by pouring it through a cheesecloth or fine colander.
This can be done a bit more slowly by melting the butter on low heat on the stove. Don't stir. After it has melted completely, take it off of the stove and let sit for 5 minutes. Again, scrape off the foam and pour the contents through cheesecloth or Purify Filter bag.
You'll also need a thermometer and more cheesecloth (if you're working without our Magical Butter machine and Filter Bag). You may wish to have butter molds if you're making an entire stick of butter. Some people prefer to use only what's required for whatever edible they want to make, others want the butter on hand for later use. Neither is wrong, it's up to you completely.
The Process of Making Magical Butter
First, put the canna you've just decarbed (12-28 grams per cup of butter) into our Magical Butter Machine. Then, add 2-5 cups of clarified butter and a tablespoon of lecithin per cup of butter you use. Then press 2 buttons and let it work its magic! The machine will heat, chop, and stir your infusion and maximize it's potential, and 2 hours later you'll have infused butter ready to strain.
If you have a Magical Filter Bag then you'll want to strain your infusion through it and into a measuring cup or large bowl. Lightly squeeze the solid plant matter with a silicone glove as it strains through to get all of your butter out (careful as it will be hot!). As you strain you'll see the plant matter and sediment get trapped in the bag, leaving only your beautiful infusion behind.
Some people think cheesecloths are too fine and block some of the butter from getting into your bowl. But it is totally up to you which you prefer. Then pour the mixture into one of our silicone molds.
Then, put the lid on the butter tray, set in the fridge and let cool until it has hardened.
Using a Butter Mold
If you want to use the butter as an everyday item, a butter mold is the best way to store it in your fridge. Once you've strained your infusion, you can pour it into one of our molds and let it sit in the fridge to harden. Once it has taken the shape of the molds, you can wrap it and let sit in your fridge, or put in a butter dish.
Bake or Cook with Your Infused Butter
Success! You're now ready to use your Magical butter to bake or cook. Just reach into the fridge and collect your ingredients for your edible.
While delectable cakes and chewy cookies are often thought of as the perfect recipes for edibles, you can eat edibles that are sweet or savory. We have a recipe section on our site that will blow your mind when it comes to the types of food you can turn into an edible. If you put butter in it, or oil, you can make an edible out of it. We even have a recipe for some upgraded brownies and jalapeno bacon poppers.
Or, you can simply use the infused butter for butter with your non-edible dishes. For example, put the Magical butter into your mashed potatoes for a trippy savory delight. Or, put it on your toast or with roll, and get ready to rock and roll.
Frequently Asked Questions?
Here are a couple of questions that are frequently asked about making Magical butter.
Do I Need to Add Lecithin?
It's up to you, but many people find they prefer it to make the molecules bind together better with the butter. You should always use sunflower over soy, as this avoids issues for those with soy allergies. It also ensures you're not using anything made from GMOs, as soy often is. Powder is also better than liquid, as it contains far less fat. Buy our powdered sunflower lecithin here.
Can I Make Anything an Edible?
Yes. As long as it is made with butter or oil, you can get your infusion on.
Is It As Easy As You Say?
Yes! It may seem daunting at first, but you'll get the hang of it eventually. It's even easier if you use our Magical Butter machine.
Don't Be Shy with Your Butter
We hope that this article has helped demystify the process of infusing butter a little bit. And we hope that we've taken some processes that sounded scary originally and showed how almost anyone can do them.
Once you break it down, making Magical butter isn't that difficult. It takes a bit of time and dedication. But if you want to make your butter go a long way, you can do that as well.
Check out the rest of our site for some surprising ways to make edibles or other infused goodies.


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Incarnation of the Divine: I forgot, is Christmas a Religious Holiday?
The commercialization of Christmas and the Christian religious focus on Easter can often overshadow the important religious meaning of Christmas. The Easter idea of resurrection is well-known and powerful. Less well known but also powerful is the Christmas idea of the Incarnation, the birth of the divine in human form which can be inspiring as well as problematic. This worship service will explore what the idea of the incarnation of the divine can mean to us today from our Unitarian Universalist perspective.


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towards the second, as shown in Figure 8.
A half-step with the combination of one and two windings energized in full-step mode produces higher resolution, but does not provide constant torque throughout rotation.
Figure 8: Three half steps, 1/8 of a rotation.
Microstepping mode is an extension of the half-step drive mode. Instead of switching the current in a winding from on to off, the current is scaled up and down in smaller steps. When two phases are turned on and the current of each phase is not equal, the rotor position is determined by the current phase ratio. This changing current ratio creates discrete steps in the torque exerted on the rotor and results in smaller fractional steps of rotation between each full-step. Microstep mode reduces torque ripple and low-speed resonance present in the other modes and is required in many situations.
Microstepping creates rotation of the rotor by scaling the contributions of the two additive torque vectors from the two stepper motor windings.
Figure 9: Torque in microstepping control mode.
The total torque exerted on the rotor is the vector addition of the torque from the two rotors. Each of the torques is proportional to the position of the rotor and the sine/cosine of the step angle.
These equations can be combined and solved for the position of the rotor.
Fractional steps are created by scaling torque contributions between windings. Because torque is proportional to magnetic flux that is proportional to the current in the winding, the position of the rotor can be controlled by controlling the current flowing in each winding. To create smooth microsteps between full-steps, the current is varied sinusoidally with a 90 degree phase shift between the two windings as shown in Figure 10.
The current is scaled by controlling the root mean square (RMS) current using a current mode buck converter, commonly called a chopper drive when used with stepper motors. The phase current is converted into a voltage using a sense resistor in each phase ground path. This voltage is routed to a comparator that disables the output whenever the phase current rises above a reference. The comparator reference is provided by a voltage digital-to-analog converter (VDAC). By changing the VDAC supplied current limit for each microstep, the total motor torque remains approximately constant for each step of the sinusoidal current waveform.
Figure 10: VDAC current limit for microstep mode.
Microstepping allows the rotor position to be controlled with more accuracy and also has advantages in the rotation. Advantages of microstepping are:
- Position is controlled with more accuracy.
- Rotation can be stopped at specific fraction of a step.
- Transitions are smoother.
- Damp resonance creates fewer oscillations as motor steps (especially at startup and slowdown).
Figure 11: Smooth transitions between steps and limited oscillations and settling in microstep mode.
PSoC 3 introduction
The CY8C3866AXI device is in the PSoC 3 architecture. A block diagram of the device is shown in Figure 12 with the blocks used in the stepper application highlighted.
Figure 12: PSoC 3 (CY8C3866AXI) block diagram.
The PSoC 3 digital subsystem provides unique configurability of functions and interconnects. The stepper motor control uses these digital resources to implement timers, pulse width modulator (PWM) blocks, control registers, and a hardware lookup table (LUT).
The PSoC 3 analog subsystem provides the device the second half of its unique configurability. The stepper motor uses dedicated comparators, voltage DACs, and programmable gain amplifiers (PGA).
Stepper motor control based on PSoC 3
The block diagram of the stepper motor control based on the CY8C3866AXI is shown in Figure 13. The PSoC Creator™ schematic is shown in Figure 14.
Figure 13: Block diagram of PSoC 3 stepper motor controller.
Input control signals to the PSoC 3 device are:
- Motor Current Sensing: Analog input pins to detect motor phase current on shunt resistor. Used to limit current of the motor phases. See details in the following section.
- User Interface Pins
- User Input: Analog pin to read potentiometer for parameter input. Two digital pins for Menu control buttons.
- Character LCD: Digital output port (seven pins) to drive the character LCD on the DVK for menu options and user feedback.
- PWM signals to the high-side drivers (four digital output pins).
- PWM signals to the low-side drivers (four digital output pins).
Figure 14: PSoC Creator schematic for stepper motor control.
The PWMs are not used to produce the typical pulse width modulation output used with other motors. Instead, the PWMs act more as a timer to ensure a maximum chopping frequency to avoid overheating the drivers. Additionally, the PWM 'kill circuit' natively includes the cycle kill mode that implements the chopper drive method by disabling the drive outputs for the remainder of the current PWM cycle after the comparator trips.
The PWM signals are routed to a look up table (LUT) logic block, along with the current stepping stage index. This logic block implements a LUT using the PLD capabilities of a universal digital block (UDB) and routes the PWM signals to the eight legal output control combinations based on the current polarity of each phase. These control signals are routed through GPIOs to the external power driver circuits that drive the stepper motor. In the demonstrated chopper drive topology, transistors or MOSFETs are typically used to switch the high voltages and currents used to drive the stepper motors. The sequencing of the PWM control signals on the external power drivers produces the step by step rotation of the motor.
A timer generates periodic interrupts that generate each step (or microstep) of the motor. This timer can be used to run the motor at a specific speed, or to a specific position (exact number of steps). To set the speed of the motor, the interrupt period of the timer is updated by firmware.
PSoC 3 also implements current limiting for motor overcurrent protection and microstepping in hardware. This is described in the following section.
Microstepping and current protection implementation
Microstepping limits the current flowing in the motor windings to create smooth and well-controlled transitions between full-steps. This functionality also builds protection in hardware for overcurrent that shields the motor from damage. The block diagram of the system with the current feedback sensing paths is shown in Figure 15.
Figure 15: Overcurrent protection block diagram for microstepping.
Motor current is measured with two shunt resistors in the ground paths of the power driver MOSFETS (R1 and R2 in Figure 15). This voltage is low-pass filtered on the board and connected to two analog pins on PSoC 3 (labeled Curr_A and Curr_B).
The input voltages are fed into programmable gain amplifiers (PGA) implemented with the analog continuous time (CT) blocks. The PGA buffers the input voltage and drives it to a continuous time comparator. This voltage level from the sense resistor is compared to the current limit, set by an 8-bit voltage DAC. For microstepping the DACs' output, sine and cosine waveforms are generated from a software lookup table. This limits the motor current sinusoidally for smooth microstepping.
The output of the comparator is connected to the PWM block and kills the PWM output when the current limit threshold is exceeded. This provides cycle-by-cycle current limiting to the motor and creates smooth microstepping transitions. The implementation of the current limiting protection in PSoC Creator is shown in Figure 16.
Figure 16: PSoC Creator schematic implementation of current limiting block for microstepping.
The PSoC 3 resources used in current limiting are:
- Two continuous time (CT) blocks implement the PGAs.
- Two fixed analog comparators are dedicated analog resources and do not use any SC/CT blocks.
- Two 8-bit PWMs implemented in UDBs (the same PWMs used to control the power device drivers). The output of the comparator triggers the kill input to the PWM when a current limiting condition is detected.
- Two 8-bit VDACs. These built in 8-bit voltage DACs are used to set the threshold for the comparator current limit.
Shown in Figure 17 are the settings for each DAC and rotation index, and the microstep pointer (ramping 1-128).
Figure 17: Current limit versus time step for 128 step microstepping.
The currents flowing in the two windings are measured with small sense resistors between the power devices and ground. The value of the current detection shunt resistor is a trade-off between power efficiency and robustness of the detection blocks. For a given current limit, enough change in voltage must be generated by the motor current to accurately detect the change with the comparator, but increasing the resistor increases heat and reduces efficiency.
The current limiting protection mechanism implemented in PSoC 3 hardware is an on-chip low-cost solution.
The output PWM drivers are controlled by a hardware lookup table. The table takes inputs from the two PWM blocks and a control register that holds the rotation index (as shown in Figure 18).
In Table 4, the PWM control hardware LUT receives the stage index and PWM signals as inputs and outputs the eight PWM driver signals.
Table 4: PWM control hardware LUT.
Figure 18: PSoC Creator schematic LUT implementation of PWM output control.
When operating with microstep drive mode, the PWM outputs for PWM_A and PWM_B cycle through 01, 10, and 11. When the stepper motor operates under full-step mode, both PWMs


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One of the mysteries of the English language finally explained.
A mother (often used as a respectful form of address for a woman).
- 'Mama Mata feared they might not live much longer.'
- 'I prayed to Surya, the Sun God, and to Durga Mata, the Holy Mother.'
- 'The inspiration for it was his mother, who believes all Goddesses are different shapes of the same Mata.'
- 'He introduced the dignitaries to the mammoth crowd one by one, each of them rising from their seats to acknowledge the audience and to bow to the Mata.'
- 'Mama Mata's presents to her cousin and nephew were given to demonstrate her attachment to them and to incur obligation.'
Via Hindi from Sanskrit mātā 'mother'.
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Irish Language in Danger of Digital Extinction
New European research shows that the Irish language is in danger of digital extinction due to the lack of critical mass of digitised Irish language content. A new White Paper, The Irish Language in the Digital Age, published by academics from the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, Centre for Speech and Language Technology for Irish (TCD), NUIG and Saint Louis University, reveals, however, that the application of language technology in Ireland can not only reverse this decline, but has considerable job creation potential in the wider language technology and localisation sector.
Language technology produces software that can process spoken or written human language. Well-known examples of language technology software include spell and grammar checkers, interactive personal assistants on smartphones eg iPhone Siri, web search engines and synthetic speech devices used in car navigations systems. These all rely on statistical methods that require incredibly large amounts of written or spoken data. For languages, such as Irish, with relatively few speakers, it is difficult to acquire the needed mass of data.
There are a number of difficulties encountered in digitising Irish language content:
- No standard spoken form of Irish which makes the development of speech recognition and synthesis more difficult
- A lack of prior linguistic resources - the development of speech and text based technologies rely on the availability of existing resources such as pronunciations dictionaries which are not as readily available in Ireland compared to countries which have benefited from decades of investment in research and resource development.
- Perceived limited economic market for Irish technologies - most research in language technologies tends to have economic gain as a primary object and Irish has difficulty competing with markets for "larger" languages and as such is lagging behind
- A lack of availability of researchers with both the linguistic skills for Irish and the engineering and computational skills which are required to conduct the necessary research.
Despite these challenges, the White Paper finds that language technologies offer significant opportunities for minority languages and can be a major force in addressing and alleviating some of the difficulties they face. Among the opportunities for Irish technology are:
- Community Building: Speech and language technologies are a powerful way to bring together the Irish speaking communities, linking the traditional Gaeltacht areas, the network of Irish speakers across the country and the global community outside of Ireland.
- Education: Technology can have a major impact on language learning support.
- Inclusion: For many with visual and vocal disabilities, language technology may be an absolute prerequisite to their participation in the Irish language communities.
- Maintenance and preservation: Particularly with regard to the status of Irish in the eyes of the younger, digitally-oriented generation.
Furthermore, language technology is generally acknowledged today as one of the key growth areas in information technology. The Horizon 2020 EU Framework for Research and Innovation plans for significant research funding in language technology. This new investment, combined with Science Foundation Ireland's existing investments in this space through CNGL, represents an unprecedented opportunity for language technology research and development in Ireland. The outcomes of such R&D will help to support the country's significant language industry. A rapidly growing sector, there are currently 166 translation and interpreting services companies in Ireland, representing an estimated €686 million to the Irish economy in 2011.
Speaking on European Day of Languages (26th September), a day which recognises the importance of fostering and developing the rich linguistic and cultural heritage of Europe, Dr John Judge of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation based at Dublin City University, a co-author of the White Paper, believes that there must be a co-ordinated approach at European and national level to safeguarding minority languages,
'A wide-ranging, coordinated effort focused on language technologies would help safeguard the future of the Irish language, together with other languages, and establish a genuine multilingual agenda for Europe and the world as a whole. Europe and Ireland must take action to prepare its languages for the digital age. They are a precious component of our cultural heritage and, as such, they deserve future-proofing.'
"The current situation where there is a clear and growing demand for technologies which both support and enable the Irish language and many the vast array of global languages represents a unique opportunity for LT research and development in Ireland."
The White Paper cites examples of software supports that already exist for Irish, including Irish language versions of Google, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Windows. Clare-based company eTeams localised Microsoft Office 2010 and Windows 7 into Irish. eTeams Managing Director Nana Luke believes that translation plays an important part in maintaining Irish as a vibrant language and generating digital content,
"The localisation of Microsoft programs into Irish by eTeams is a positive example of Irish being enabled for the digital age, as well as creating new terminology. The 2003 Official Languages Act and the recognition of Irish as an official EU language have greatly increased the volumes of content for translation. This in turn has led to a high level of professionalism in Irish language translation, with degree courses and good career opportunities available."
Language technology can now simplify and automate the processes of translation and content production, enabling Irish speakers to use more software and systems in their own language.
Language technology also has tremendous potential for reinvigorating the learning of Irish. An example is the new 'Language Trap' computer game developed by CNGL researchers at TCD. This video game is designed to help students in preparing for oral examinations by means of an interactive dialogue system, which automatically adapts to the user's ability level. Neasa Ní Chiarain of TCD's Centre for Language and Communication Studies believes that such high-tech games offer significant advantages for Irish language learners,
"The Language Trap (or 'Digichaint' as Gaeilge) is an interactive game through which students can learn German or Irish by participating in engaging puzzles/detective work in order to get through the game. It is a revolutionary new method of language teaching which offers a real and purposeful context for the use of the target language. It is particularly significant for minority languages such as Irish where students may find it difficult to have a realistic context in which to use the language. It is the first time the interactive potential of computers can be harnessed so that learners can become actively engaged with the target language from an early stage."
Language Trap forms part of the education and outreach activities of the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Next Generation Localisation. CNGL is striving to address the shortage of Irish graduates with the linguistic and computational skills required for the language technology industry. Its programmes include the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad and publication of a localisation careers guide, both of which aim to encourage second level students to pursue careers in this vibrant sector.
The Irish Language in the Digital Age White Paper is part of an international series, Europe's Languages in the Digital Age, which assesses language resources and technologies available for 30 European languages. Produced by the European Commission-funded META-NET European Network of Excellence, it calls for a large-scale effort to be made in Europe to create the key enabling technologies necessary to realise the full potential of language technology in rejuvenating minority languages and enabling communication and trade across borders.
For further information, visit here.


text:
Problem: Determine if a number is prime, with an acceptably small error rate.
Solution: (in Python)
import random def decompose(n): exponentOfTwo = 0 while n % 2 == 0: n = n/2 exponentOfTwo += 1 return exponentOfTwo, n def isWitness(possibleWitness, p, exponent, remainder): possibleWitness = pow(possibleWitness, remainder, p) if possibleWitness == 1 or possibleWitness == p - 1: return False for _ in range(exponent): possibleWitness = pow(possibleWitness, 2, p) if possibleWitness == p - 1: return False return True def probablyPrime(p, accuracy=100): if p == 2 or p == 3: return True if p < 2: return False exponent, remainder = decompose(p - 1) for _ in range(accuracy): possibleWitness = random.randint(2, p - 2) if isWitness(possibleWitness, p, exponent, remainder): return False return True
Discussion: This algorithm is known as the Miller-Rabin primality test, and it was a very important breakthrough in the study of probabilistic algorithms.
Efficiently testing whether a number is prime is a crucial problem in cryptography, because the security of many cryptosystems depends on the use of large randomly chosen primes. Indeed, we've seen one on this blog already which is in widespread use: RSA. Randomized algorithms also have quite useful applications in general, because it's often that a solution which is correct with probability, say, is good enough for practice.
But from a theoretical and historical perspective, primality testing lied at the center of a huge problem in complexity theory. In particular, it is unknown whether algorithms which have access to randomness and can output probably correct answers are more powerful than those that don't. The use of randomness in algorithms comes in a number of formalizations, the most prominent of which is called BPP (Bounded-error Probabilistic Polynomial time). The Miller-Rabin algorithm shows that primality testing is in BPP. On the other hand, algorithms solvable in polynomial time without randomness are in a class called P.
For a long time (from 1975 to 2002), it was unknown whether primality testing was in P or not. There are very few remaining important problems that have BPP algorithms but are not known to be in P. Polynomial identity testing is the main example, and until 2002 primality testing shared its title. Now primality has a known polynomial-time algorithm. One might argue that (in theory) the Miller-Rabin test is now useless, but it's still a nice example of a nontrivial BPP algorithm.
The algorithm relies on the following theorem:
Theorem: if is a prime, let be the maximal power of 2 dividing, so that and is odd. Then for any, one of two things happens:
- for some.
The algorithm then simply operates as follows: pick nonzero at random until both of the above conditions fail. Such an is called a witness for the fact that is a composite. If is not a prime, then there is at least a 3/4 chance that a randomly chosen will be a witness.
We leave the proof of the theorem as an exercise. Start with the fact that (this is Fermat's Little Theorem). Then use induction to take square roots (the result has to be +/-1 mod p), and continue until you get to.
The Python code above uses Python's built in modular exponentiation function pow to do fast modular exponents. The isWitness function first checks and then all powers. The probablyPrime function then simply generates random potential witnesses and checks them via the previous function. The output of the function is True if and only if all of the needed modular equivalences hold for all witnesses inspected. The choice of endpoints being 2 and are because 1 and will always have exponents 1 mod.


where APG is the pressure drop across the packed bed (kPa) and z is the height of the tower. The validity of the correlation was explored by Li [15], and it has excellent agreement with the experimental data. The pumping power required for the diffusion tower liquid is calculated as, E, = "m P = LA gH (4.4) Thus the total pumping power is calculated as, E,,,a1 = E, + EG (4.5) The energy consumption rate per unit of fresh water production is defined as, Ef, =totax (4.6) m,, The fresh water production rate and energy consumption rate are two important parameters that characterize the performance of the DDD process. The fresh water production rate characterizes the quantity of fresh water produced at a given set of operating conditions while the energy consumption rate denotes how much energy is consumed per unit of fresh water produced. The two values are important in finding the optimal operating conditions. An ideal DDD process would have a high fresh water production rate and a low energy consumption rate. Heated Air/Heated Water Results and Discussion Using the analysis described above and the theory discussed in Chapter 3, a parametric analysis is performed to determine the effects of certain operating variables on the performance of the heated air/heated water process. In performing the analysis, the air inlet temperature, water inlet temperature, specific packing area, diameter of the packing material, and inlet humidity ratio were all held constant at 600 C, 600 C, 267


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In the spring of 1998, I joined the National Museum of American History as a curator of Armed Forces History. Shortly after I arrived, my new colleague, Margaret Vining, showed me a collection of uniforms that radically reshaped my ideas about military history in general and World War I in particular. The hundred or so uniforms in the extraordinary and unique Colonial Dames Collection of World War I Women's Uniforms represented the participation of tens of thousands of American women in what was then called the Great War.
The Colonial Dames Collection includes this uniform worn by an army contract surgeon. Women doctors were not allowed to join the Army Medical Corps. Only the Army Nurse Corps accepted women. But the army did issue contracts to a small number of female physicians, who remained civilians even though they worked in uniform.
I was astonished. Although I'd been studying, teaching, and writing about American military history for forty years, and had also taught university courses in women's history, I never realized how many thousands of American women had volunteered in World War I. The real surprise was that most of the uniforms were not military. They belonged to civilian relief and welfare organizations, like the Salvation Army, not to the armed forces.
This 1918 photo from the National Archives shows a cheerful American Salvation Army "lassy" rolling pie crusts for men of the 26th Division in France. The Salvation Army uniform in the Colonial Dames Collection is not complemented by helmet and gas mask canister.
Women had served in earlier wars, of course, but rarely in uniform. Questions tumbled through my mind. What made the war of 1914–1918 different from earlier wars? Why were so many women eager to serve in uniform? How did women's uniformed service in the war relate to their work in other early 20th century movements like Progressivism, Suffrage, Temperance, or the Social Gospel? These questions and others marked the beginning my long-term research project in collaboration with Margaret. But where did this remarkable collection come from?
As I soon learned, Margaret herself had been instrumental in adding the collection to our museum's holdings. But first some background. In 1919 the Colonial Dames, proud of what their members had done in the war and certain that women's wartime contributions were historically significant, began to assemble uniforms worn by its members and others, which they insisted, successfully, belonged in the grand exhibit of First World War artifacts at the United States National Museum. The women's uniforms remained on display until 1929.
This photograph records Case No. 1 of the sixteen cases that displayed uniforms from the Colonial Dames Collection in the Arts and Industries Building of the U.S. National Museum during the early 1920s. This case held four Red Cross uniforms, left to right: Motor Corps driver's skirt and tunic; Motor Corps driver's uniform; Motor Corps driver's overcoat; Foreign Service uniform.
The uniforms stayed with the Smithsonian, "on deposit," which meant that they still belonged to the Colonial Dames but were available for museum use, though with serious restrictions. Eventually the deposited collection moved to the new Museum of History and Technology, which opened in 1964. Three decades later, Margaret persuaded the Society to donate the entire collection to the renamed National Museum of American History, where it now resides in the Division of Armed Forces History. For the whole story, check out the article by Margaret Vining and Barton C. Hacker, "Uniforms Make the Woman," which was published in the 2005 edited volume Materializing the Military.
Bart Hacker is a Senior Curator of Armed Forces History at the National Museum of American History.


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Does Love Survive Loss?
Auden and Larkin each wrote powerful lines about love—and then had grave doubts about them. Why?
Photograph by Tom Oates.
"Amor vincit omnia," Love conquers all. Or so Virgil wrote. But does it? Does love survive dissolution of the lovers? And if so, where exactly would it be, where does all that lost love survive?
I was prompted to revisit these ancient questions anew by a long footnote about a single line in the new Complete Poems edition of Philip Larkin's poetry. The footnote refers to "An Arundel Tomb"—widely regarded as one of Larkin's finest poems—and contains a provocative remark about that the poem's celebrated, controversial, closing line, the one about the true nature of immortality:
"What will survive of us is love."
The line is so uncharacteristic of Larkin, one of the most relentlessly downbeat poets in modern literature, that it's almost shocking in its apparently uncomplicated affirmation. You can barely believe it. In that footnote I mentioned there are quotes from Larkin suggesting he could barely believe it either.
No offense to the Beatles, but on first reading, Larkin's line sounds like "And in the end, the love you take/ Is equal to the love you make," that saccharine reduction of love's transcendence to algebra.
Thinking about the survival of love in the context of Larkin's poem, I suddenly felt the parallel with another controversial line, this one from W.H. Auden. A quarter-century or so before Larkin, Auden originally wrote, in the closing line of the penultimate stanza of perhaps his most celebrated poem, "September 1, 1939":
"We must love one another or die."
These two lines—Larkin's "What will survive of us is love" and Auden's "We must love one another or die"—may be the most well-known lines of poetry about love written in the past century. But what's remarkable about them both is that the poets who wrote them agonized over them, were conflicted and critical of their own lines. Both Larkin and Auden eventually tried to distance themselves from their original unmediated utterances.
Indeed that extended footnote in the new Larkin edition eventually led me to rethink it all—Larkin, Auden, love, love poetry—even footnotes. Footnotes? Sometimes with poetry you can know too much about what the poet thinks. After he publishes a poem, it's not his or hers anymore, you know? Though that doesn't stop some of the poets—or their loving anthologists—from trying to control how you construe the poems (or at least prevent egregious misconstruals) via scholarly footnotes. But do poets always know the truth of what they've wrought?
Auden rethought his line—"We must love one another or die"—almost immediately. Indeed he turned violently against it, tried to ban, or vanish it. Called the poem in which it appeared "trash." Said he "loathed" it. And yet the line still persists in a limbo of literary erasures that don't completely efface the original. And now we learn Larkin had doubts about his love-affirming line.
What is going on here? Where is the love for love, guys?
Larkin and Auden are perhaps the two pre-eminent English-language poets of the past century, successors to Eliot and Yeats. For Americans less familiar with Larkin, I'm not going to get into an argument here over the poets' pre-eminence. Yes, there are American contenders, Lowell, Bishop, Hart Crane. Even Nabokov on the strength of "Pale Fire" alone. But Larkin and Auden are frequently paired as poets without peers. (I know it's unseemly to talk in these horse-racy terms, but have you noticed the way Larkin appears to have overtaken Auden—and virtually all other moderns—in critical estimation of late?)
Here in America Larkin has previously been most well-known for his famous opening line "They fuck you up/ your mum and dad." That line and Larkin's doggerel-like verse about how "Sexual intercourse began in 1963... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP" have given many casual American non-readers of poetry the misleading impression that Larkin was a cheeky writer of light verse. But just one exposure to his "Aubade" or "The Whitsun Weddings," "The High Window" or the poem with the controversial line about love—"An Arundel Tomb"—will knock you flat with the weightiness of the words, their fierce and sorrowful, yet somehow self-effacing intensity. They make you understand why "Larkinesque"—denoting a devastating yet somehow vibrant, self-revelatory, self-effacing melancholy—has become a kind of household word in households where poetry is still read.
Which is why that one line about love from "An Arundel Tomb" has always stood out, provoked questions. It seemed, in isolation, so un-Larkinesque. Was it an anomalous moment of uplifting affirmation, or was the line, taken out of context, being misread?
In a graveyard the speaker stumbles on the 14th-century tomb of the Earl of Arundel and his wife. In the age-blurred, partially eroded tomb carving, the Earl is fully dressed in armor from head to toe. Except for one thing: The speaker notes that in the carving the Earl has removed the armed gauntlet from one hand. (Larkin got the hand wrong—on the real tomb, it was the right-handed gauntlet not the left. Thank you, footnote.)
The point is that the mailed glove is off so he can clasp, skin to skin, the hand of his wife, as if they were joined forever by love in their journey to death. Joined, the poet implies, until the ravages of time blur and erase them from recognition as they have already been erased from life. Joined even though the purported loving jointure may be mere stone-carver's fantasy.
Here is how Larkin puts it in the poem:
"One sees with a sharp tender shock" the handholding gesture. "Sharp tender shock"!—one could write a book about that phrase.
The remaining five verses are devoted to the speaker's vexed examination of the image and his sharp tender shocked reaction to it. The speaker reflects on the fact that the joined hands were probably the sculptor's idea, suggesting a faithful love that may be merely "faithfulness in effigy"—an image rather than the lived reality of fidelity. So that finally "only an attitude remains" and "Time has transfigured them into Untruth...."
And yet in the final lines he says of this attitude:
Their "stone fidelity" has come to prove:
"Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love."
I feel a sharp tender shock every time I read that line. It's one that attained a certain wider degree of attention when Anthony Lane, the witty—and rarely sentimental—New Yorker film critic, cited it in a beautiful essay he wrote in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He related Larkin's line to the image of the two people who jumped to their death from the burning towers, hand in hand, like the figures on Larkin's Arundel tomb.
"What will survive of us is love."
All alone, extracted from the poem, the line has the feel of an unmediated affirmation uncharacteristic of Larkin (or Lane). Let's face it, it sounds more like Oprah (not that there's anything wrong with that). Of course, there's more nuance and depth—and irony—to it when you consider it in context. But before we really dig into Larkin's unexpected Hallmark moment—and the footnote that complicates our view of it— let me first say a little more about the eerily not-quite-parallel case of W.H. Auden's famous line about love, because its tormented fate at the author's own hands may foreshadow—maybe even have caused—what we now know are Larkin's second thoughts about "what will survive of us is love."
Auden's line—and his second thoughts about it—invite questions about what we talk about when we talk about this kind of love. Not just mere perishable personal romantic love, but also the kind of numinous transfigured, impersonal universal love that embraces us all, survives like a holy ghost, survives like smoke from a High-Church censer ascending to heaven from the mortal bodies it inspirited.
Auden's more famous line about love (and death) refers at first glance to the title date of his poem "September 1, 1939," the date, of course, of the Nazi invasion of Poland that began the slaughter of the Second World War. It's the poem that opens:
Later lines from this despairing poem that has given birth to half a dozen book titles such as "The Haunted Wood" and "The Psychopathic God" and several aphorisms that now sound like old saws: "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return." (This last was Auden's explanation for Hitler, the "psychopathic god" himself.)
And yet it is a poem whose original version climaxed with the line, "We must love one another or die."
A line that was also invoked after 9/11, as a consolatory uplift-inspiring sentiment that supposedly turned that tragedy into a "teachable moment." A line that has even more fatally, gratingly become


text:
IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY?
George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature
BY JAMES MILLER
These are trying times for the left in America, which may be one reason why a bitter debate has erupted among avowedly left-wing academics and intellectuals over a venerable topic--"Politics and the English Language," to borrow the title of George Orwell's famous 1946 essay. Must one write clearly, as Orwell argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write radically and subversively--or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly? That is the question.
-- via wood s lot


text:
Been posting this on Google+, putting it all together here for my easy reference : )
Rough plan of the '9box' symbol. It should allow guides if needed, but autodetect your intentions if it can do that correctly. Potentially even autodetect the 9box (or nBox) from a bitmap. A true 3box (where the tl and bl are not symmetrical) would need to be specified in the properties.
It also needs layers for things that cover the whole box, like a shadow or highlight. These things can scale based on their locks and springs – so eg a highlight on the entire box, or textbox with it's top left corner locked to the top left box's center point.
- templates are per device or per screen (template is created for each target screen, all common devices have prebuilt templates).
- some devices (like XBoxes) have an unknown screen, so you can target multiple screen (eg: put unimportant graphics in the 16:9 area).
- guides are attached to the template, not the rulers.
- guides are locked to the template, and move/grow proportionally as the template changes.
- There is a view mode for each targeted template. Automated positions can be overridden in those, but not in the 'master' template (some kind of broken icon for the overridden handle).
- handles are normally box (or rotation) allowing the designer free control of the object.
- anything with box icons (default) will behave as normal, and will be positioned in absolute coordinates on export.
- a lock icon always locks to the template (or guides).
- a pin icon locks to the paper (which grows and shrinks per device template
- an anchor locks to objects
- a spring locks to objects or templates/guides
- if a side is locked (like button 1 top), then not only is its position locked to the template, but the designer can not scale in that direction without removing the lock.
- in the case of button 1, the top corner boxes will only allow horz scaling, thus they are greyed out a bit.
- whenever something is moved to 'snap' to a guide/template, it automatically locks in that direction. If moved or keyboard nudged, it keeps the lock, but it becomes distance bound.
- locks can be cleared with a shortcut (perhaps ctrl/shift/Z, clear all transforms also breaks custom icons?).
- in button two (bottom left image), the item is locked 5 pixels from the bottom left title safe area (this may be better accomplished with guides?). It is also pinned to the paper on the right. Thus it will grow horizontally to the right. It does this when the designer drags it, per template, and when the width is set in code. The top is not set, therefore it will not change per template (constant height), however it could change with code or by designer adjustment.
- the center icon group is pinned to the center (center icons can be set). In the center this has the same effect as being locked to the center, but had it been offset, the offset would be proportional the the template size.
- these icons are separated by springs. This can be set manually, but it is automatically set when something is distributed.
- Spring or anchor joined objects become a 'weak' group. In the center icons case, you could move the third icon independently, but the second would move to keep the distances equal, and pin would change locations. Had the pin been a lock, the first icon would move left to keep distances equal.
Bottom Right Set
- the second icon set (bottom right) has been top aligned. This automatically anchored to tops to each other. moving one icon up or down will move them all, but moving them left or right will be the spring behaviour.
- they are locked to the guide on the right. Moving this guide will move the group (and anything else attached to it). Probably that would move the group 'as is' rather than affecting the springs.
- the guide is locked to the template, so as the template grows, the guide will as well.
Templates in Symbols
- templates can be used internally to define symbols. The allow things like minimum size, flow handling, stretch logic etc. So when scaling a symbol defined with a template, you will not necessarily get the regular stretch – eg a grid defined this way may space the icons differently (or even add icons if it is so defined).
Edit in Place
The green outline is the bounds, but it isn't a template/guide bounds so you can't lock objects to it. It auto grows and shrinks as you transform objects like normal, but distinguishes from Flowable objects (next). When used, this type of symbol scales like normal objects in Flash do, where flowable objects can have specific flows.
Flowable Symbol – Kern
This is editing an Array or Flowable symbol (not sure what to call these yet, they are like primitives that you use for components, with specific flows and can be made of collections).
This shows a grid of objects, but it could also be used to specify a table row of multiple elements, or a whole table where each row is grouped (that may be separate versions of the same type of element).
The elements have been separated by springs (selecting the first two elements and 'distributing' would give this setup for everything). The number of elements can be set with the slider. The designer can drag in different types of symbols and they will be added to the possible symbol types. For auto added types, the user can specify on the property bar whether to add randomly or in order added.
These types can be marked 'Creatable', where it is empty at start up and is dynamically filled at runtime (the object is a collection in code, and syntax is basically xx.Add() or xx.Add(Type) if the developer wishes to add different types of objects). This can be restricted by specifying 'named types' – eg: only allow symbols with at least an element named 'bkg' and a text field named 'label'. This can be set in the ide as well.
When the blue handle at the bottom right is moved in, the objects compess their width based on the regular handle icon rules.
This version flows down, as indicated by the top left icon, and the arrow at the bottom of the first icon. The elements of the first row are therefore indexed 0,2,4,6.
The blue outline box indicates this is a templated component, so it flows when scaled. When finishing editing the component will retain its set bounds, but if it is scaled later on stage it will flow the same way it did when edited.
Floawable Symbol – Wrap
This is similar to the kern object, but it is set to wrap. Kern or wrap will need to be able to be manually specified, probably if the row count or column count is manually set then it must be a kern object, if not it is a 'wrap at bounds' object. That level of specification probably needs to be discovered through use…


Cinema of Mongolia
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Cinema of Mongolia
Number of screens 24 (2011)[1]
Main distributors Tengis cinema
Urguu cinema
Soyombo cinema[2]
Produced feature films (2011)[3]
Fictional 1 (7.7%)
Animated -
Documentary 12 (92.3%)
Number of admissions (2011)[4]
Total 1,916,700
Gross Box Office[4]
Total MNT 5.11 billion
It is assumed that the first cinematographic performances in Mongolia happened between 1903 and 1913, as private events for the prince Tögs-Ochiryn Namnansüren and the Jebtsundamba in the capital Urga.
After the socialist revolution, the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party decided in its fifth congress of 1925 to use movies as an instrument of mass education. From 1926 on, mobile projection facilities would regularly show Soviet films to the Mongolian people. The first permanent cinema "Ard" (ард, people) opened in the capital (now named Ulaanbaatar) in 1934. Eventually, every aimag center would have fixed cinemas, and every sums of Mongolia or negdel would have a mobile cinema. In the 1990s, many cinemas, fixed and mobile alike, closed down or reduced activities.
Mongol Kino[edit]
The national film studios, Mongol Kino, were founded in 1935, with Soviet technical assistance. Their first productions were a documentary on the "47th anniversary of the 1st May" and a fictional story named A Mongol son (Mongol Khüü) directed by the Russian Ilya Trauberg and Mongolian Demberel Baldan. The first Mongolian-directed movie was the black-and-white short feature Norjmaa's Destiny (Norjmaagiin Zam) by Demberel Baldan in 1938.
From then on, the Mongolian movie production focused around heroic revolutionary propaganda and ancient popular legends, still often under Russian direction. This program was very successful with movies like Sükhbaatar (1942) and Tsogt Taij (1945). The studios of Mongol Kino also produced documentaries and current news reports.
1950s and 1960s[edit]
After WWII, the party moved the focus on working class heroes, reflected in movies like New Year (Shine Jil, 1954) by Tseveeny Zandraa. Examples of this genre are Awakening (Serelt, 1957) by S. Genden and The Rejected Girl (Gologdson khüükhen) by Dendevyn Chimid-Osor. In 1955, the first musical comedy appeared, which started a trend that continued into the 1960s. The first colour movie was The Golden Yurt (Altan Örgöö, 1961), based on a folk tale. It was produced in cooperation with the East German DEFA studios. The music of the film, written by L. Mördorj, was played and recorded by the GDR Radio orchestra and became a classic of the Mongolian symphony. As a fairy tale film, it is rich with match moving and other special effects of cinematography.
1970s and 1980s[edit]
While the production of documentaries increased, the fictional stories turned to everyday life in the 1970s. One of the most famous movies of that time, The Clear Tamir (Tungalag Tamir, 1970) by Ravjagiin Dorjpalam, based on the novel by Chadraabalyn Lodoidamba, is however set during Mongolia's 1921 revolution. Other well-known productions were "The Legend of the Mother Oasis" ("Ehe Bürdiin domog"), made in 1976 by Gombojav Jigjidsuren (Гомбожавын Жигжидсүрэн) and Jamyangiin Buntar (Жамъяангийн Бунтар), and The Five Colors of the Rainbow (Solongiin tavan öngö) in 1979. The Leading Wrestler Garuda (Garid Magnai, 1983) by Jamyangiin Buntar marks a turning point, where the authors liberate themselves from the existing power structures.
1990s and 2000s[edit]
After the introduction of market economy, most mobile and permanent cinemas closed down. Mongolian productions had to seek partners outside of the former COMECON. However, some young filmmakers of the transformation period, such as N. Gankhuyag, B. Uranchimeg, J. Binder, made domestic success films.
The movie "Genghis Khan, Under Power of the Eternal Sky", starring Enkhtaivan Agvaantseren was the first Mongolian-Japanese co-production. State of Dogs (Nokhoin Oron, 1998) was written and directed collaboratively by the Belgian Peter Brosens and the Mongolian Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh.
The director Byambasuren Davaa has had international success with the German-Mongolian co-productions The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003, nominated for an Academy Award as foreign documentary in 2005) and The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005).
Elsnii Nuudel (Mongolian: Элсний нүүдэл, movement of sand), was a successful movie produced for the domestic market in 2007. Later known films are Iim negen durlal, Goyoliin Daashinz etc.
The 2008 historical film A Pearl in the Forest (Mongolian: Мойлхон) by director Enkhtaivan Agvaantseren is one of the first films to openly talk about events of the 1930s and the impact of the rise of Soviet communism on Mongolia. It is also one of the first films intended to present the history of the Buryats, one of the ethnic groups present in Mongolia.
See also[edit]
External links[edit]


text:
An analysis of the commuting and housing expenses of the working poor finds that compared with other workers:
- The working poor spend a much higher portion of their income on commuting. The cost burden of commuting for the working poor is 6.1 percent compared with 3.8 percent for other workers. The working poor who drive to work spend the most: 8.4 percent.
- The combined costs of commuting and housing make up a larger portion of the household budgets of the working poor than other households. For working-poor homeowners, nearly 25 percent of their household income is consumed by housing and commuting expenses compared with just 15.3 percent for other households. For those who rent, the disparities between the working poor (32.4 percent) and other households (19.7 percent) are even greater.
- The cost burden of commuting for the working poor is greater than the national median in eight of the 12 largest metropolitan areas. Six of these—Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.—also have a higher cost burden of housing than the national median for the working poor.
Transportation is necessary to nearly every aspect of daily life. It enhances both physical and economic mobility and is a key factor in workers' ability to find and retain employment. This survey offers a better understanding of transportation and its costs by focusing on one of its components, commuting.


text:
(1 syl., g hard). To stand at gaze. To stand in
doubt what to do. A term in forestry. When a stag first hears the
hounds it stands dazed, looking all round, and in doubt what to do.
Heralds call a stag which is represented full-faced, a "stag at
"The American army in the central states remained wholly at gaze." —Lord Mahon: History.
As the poor frighted deer, that stands at gaze,
Wildly determining which way to fly.
Shakespeare: Rape of Lucrece,
Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
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Final Product What You'll Be Creating
Have you seen those animated adverts, where the text seamlessly moves along path? In this tutorial we are going to learn how to create a sequence that involves text animating along a custom path using the first margin text property. A custom path is a vector path that is drawn freehand using the pen tool in After Effects.
Create a new composition
The first thing we are going to do is create a composition; this is the canvas you will create your animation on. To manually create a composition, you need to do the following.
Choose New Composition.
New composition window.
This will open the composition dialog box. The options on the basic tab will allow you to set up the preset,
width, height, aspect ratio, frames per second, start code and duration for your animated sequence.
With the dialog box open apply the following settings:
Preset: PAL D1 / DV
Width and height: 720 X 576
Aspect Ratio: D1/ DV PAL 1.09
Start Timecode: 0.00.00.00
Depending on your output, you may want to set up the first 4 settings at other standard settings, for example for Northern American broadcast media or for the Web.
So now our sequence will run for 30 seconds.
Changing background color of the composition.
To change the background color you need to do the following:
Choose Background color.
This will open the color picker dialog box.
The color picker dialog box.
Click OK to choose a color for your background. With your cursor move around within the color space to pick a color, when you have chosen your color click ok to accept this.
Creating text for the animation.
Using the text tool type out a word on the stage.
Choose the font and size using the character palette.
The character palette.
Creating the path for the animation
With the text layer selected, select the pen tool draw a path for the text to follow.
Make sure that
Rotobezier check box in the tool palette, is selected, this allows you to draw a smooth path.
Twirl down the text option to reveal the path options.
Select Mask 1 for the path, this is the path you have just created. Now the text is automatically
linked to that path.
Animating text the path
With the play back at the start of the time line, create a keyframe for the first margin property.
For this property set the stopwatch and drag the word to the beginning of the path by dragging the slider value for the first margin property.
Drag the play back head further down the timeline set a keyframe for the last margin property, drag the slider value for the for the first margin property so that the so the text moves to the end
of the path.
Move the play back head to the start of the animation and scrub through the timeline. You should now
see your animated text animating along a path.
I've added some extra graphics and text in addition to the animated text.
Hope you have found this tutorial useful.


How to build a tailored user onboarding experience
This is the second half of our two-part series: How to Take Lead Enrichment Beyond the Funnel. Read the first part here.
Onboarding is usually one-size-fits-all. There's a video or tutorial that greets every new user with the same templated experience that walks them through the product's core functionality. But if your leads don't fall into one bucket, your onboarding process shouldn't either.
Ghosting is all too common: people sign up for your product and too many of them leave. Without a strong onboarding process, you run the risk of investing time and energy into getting leads, only to lose them after conversion.
The case for tailored onboarding experiences is particularly strong for SaaS companies, which may serve multiple audiences, industries, or pricing tiers — or have multiple product offerings. An onboarding experience that accounts for such segmentation can build the foundation for a stronger customer relationship.
Let's go through how to use enriched lead data to segment leads automatically and build customized onboarding sequences.
Use lead data to personalize user onboarding
Leads can come in different shapes and sizes. The key activation event for one group of leads may not be the same for another. Things may start to diverge based on job role, seniority, stage of company. So how do you deal with diverging goals and expectations?
For example:
 - Your leads split into two groups because you have a freemium product: self-serve and larger deals where you want to offer a more hands-on experience.
 - Your product offers features and functionalities that appeal to several types of job roles or multiple industries.
 - Leads generated from a paid ad placement have a different product awareness level from those that came in from a search result.
Leverage insights about your leads, such as differences in attributes, key activation, and product usage contexts to create an onboarding experience that addresses those specific needs.
1. Segment leads to discover their aha moment
Start by analyzing whether you're dealing with different types of leads. The closer in persona, behavior, and goals each member of a cohort is, the more likely they are to share the same aha moment. (Maybe your leads look different but their actions, needs, and paths to success converge. Then the one-size-fits-all approach works!)
For example, let's say our product is a sales and marketing automation platform. By analyzing past sales and roles from enriched data, we know to break out our single bucket of "New Leads" into one of three job categories: marketers, sales, developers.
three segments of leads
Each lead type gets value from our product in a different way:
 - Marketers value performance-reporting and email-marketing functionality.
 - Salespeople get more value from our CRM and outreach tools.
 - Developers prioritize ease of integration with other sales and marketing products.
2. Automatically process leads into segments
In order to send people on different onboarding paths, you'll have to know what lead bucket they fall into. While you can have users self-select, the most efficient method is to automate it and lower the risk of drop-off.
Use APIs to enrich new signups with more data to help qualify and categorize them. That way, once you get an email address on signup, you can unlock useful insights such as:
 - Company
 - Industry
 - Role
 - Seniority
 - Technology used
... and use those data points along the customer journey — in product onboarding, interaction with sales and support, emails and in-app messaging, and more.
Once you've got automatic enrichment set up, you can send leads right to the onboarding path most appropriate for their segment.
API-enriched signup for onboarding
3. Diagnose existing drop-off points
If you've set up event tracking internally or with a tool like Amplitude, you can review steps in an existing onboarding process and plot the drop-offs from action to action. By doing this for each segment, you develop a clearer picture of which parts of the experience is serving which leads well.
Let's look at the onboarding process for our marketing cohort for our example product. Here, the drop-off from action to action is close to 10%, and 70% of leads successfully launch their first campaign.
Marketing onboarding dropoffs
Contrast that with the same onboarding process, but experienced by the leads with sales roles. In this case, there's a 20% drop-off after viewing the welcome message, and a huge 40% drop-off when it comes to installing the tracking code.
Sales onboarding dropoffs
Almost everyone who successfully configures the tracking code goes on to launch their first campaign, which is great. But we've identified a clear sticking point in our onboarding process for our salespeople segment. Only 30% of them are making it to the activation point.
It might be that our current welcome message focuses too much on the marketing functionality of our product and leaves salespeople cold — or configuring the tracking code is just too technical for this crowd.
Given this knowledge, we can turn to onboarding tools like Appcues to quickly customize the messaging and design of an onboarding flow according to the segment. Here we could try revamping our welcome message to appeal more broadly and add a call to action for sales leads. They could see a quick link to send instructions on configuring the tracking code to a developer, similar to this example from LiveChat.
4. Build tailored onboarding sequences
Once you've segmented your leads and reviewed your current onboarding, map out each group's aha moment by calculating their key activation event as well as the steps required to reach it. The more lead insight you uncover, the easier it is to find each user's "minimum path to awesome": the shortest possible route from first app interaction to successful activation.
Here's what that looks like for our example's three lead cohorts:
 - Marketers need to install a tracking code before running their first analytics report.
 - Salespeople need to integrate their current CRM to enable them to send their first outreach email.
 - Developers need to view the API documentation to set up their first custom integration.
tailoring onboarding by designing segmented minimum paths to awesome segmented
These minimum paths to awesome for our three segments of new users create the blueprint for personalized onboarding sequences, a clear path from first interaction to each lead's desired outcome.
Using that information, we can build out onboarding paths, tailoring elements such as a welcome screen, app walk-through, first user experience.
Post sign-up welcome screen
The welcome screen is the first thing a new user sees upon signup. The more relevant we can make it for each lead, the more likely they are to continue engaging with the app and reach activation.
A few years ago, the blogging platform Ghost had two distinct lead types: nontechnical users looking for a plug-and-play blogging platform and people with more technical expertise looking for a powerful, open-source, easy-to-customize solution.
Ghost old onboarding
The page offered two distinct pitches and two distinct calls to action: Test It Out vs. Get the Code. This fork in the road was a choice that set a new user up for success better than a blanket "Get started" approach. Each user would fall into either the technical or the nontechnical camp and get a more relevant path towards activation.
Onboarding walk-through
Customizing even a few small details in a walk-through, such as an in-app tutorial, can make a big difference in how new users connect with your product. Here are two quick examples from Twilio and Asana.
Though targeted primarily at savvy developers, API communications platform Twilio recognizes that new users have varying degrees of technical expertise. Instead of forcing leads to engage with a walk-through that might be too complex or just plain irrelevant, they've segmented it according to three common situations.
Developers get a link straight to the console. New users who came in for an integration head straight to adding Twilio as a plugin. Non-technical users are gently directly toward finding Twilio partners to help them get use out of the product.
The project management tool, Asana has new users self-select what type of team they work on:
Asana onboarding self-select
Then they use the selection to seed their onboarding walkthrough with relevant project templates:
First User Experience
As part of your product walk-through or in a first user experience, guide people to value and find their aha moment by highlighting their next best step.
For example:
 - If your lead completed a marketing-focused walk-through, direct them to your reporting dashboard.
 - If they came from a sales flow, open up an email outreach template.
After their walk-through, Dropbox shows a clear next step: dragging your first file into the Dropbox folder.
Dropbox onboarding 1st task
Instead of leaving it to chance, use lead insight to trigger the right action.
From Lead Insight to Long-Term Customer
When there's an overbalance of focus on customer acquisition, the harder it is to build systems and design your product experience to help new users actually benefit.
Instead of funneling leads into a one-size-fits-all onboarding process, tools like Clearbit and Appcues make it easier than ever to create personalized, purposeful onboarding.
The more you learn about new users, the quicker that aha moment comes — and the easier it becomes to retain a happy, long-term customer.
Did you miss part 1 about how to find your key activation event? Read it here.


How to Sell a Property Held in a Revocable Trust
by Fraser Sherman, Demand Media Google
 If you follow state law, selling property in a trust should be simple.
 Selling a house in a revocable trust isn't complicated. If you've set up a trust and appointed yourself as trustee, you can manage the real estate just as if the title were still in your name. If you're incapacitated and your successor trustee steps in to manage your assets, she can do the same. Most elements of the sale -- negotiating a price, getting a home inspection, attending the closing -- are no different from when you sell property as yourself, rather than as a trustee.
 Step 1
 Research deed law in your state. Every state requires a "grantor" or seller -- you, in your job as trustee -- to sign a deed conveying property to the "grantee" or buyer. Some states also require the grantee to sign the deed, and some want one or possibly two witnesses to sign the deed as well.
 Step 2
 Show a copy of the trust documents to the title company. The company's job is to research your property's ownership history and confirm nobody else has a claim on it. Reviewing the trust documents helps the title company establish that the trust has a clear title and the right to sell it.
 Step 3
 Sign the deed transferring ownership to the grantee. You do this at the closing, where you sign as, for example, Jane Smith, trustee of the Jane Smith Trust. If you and your spouse have a joint revocable trust, the bank will want both of you to sign. Even if you have the authority to sell the house, the bank will want the security of two signatures.
 Step 4
 Complete any other requirements state law requires, such as having the deed notarized or having someone witness your signature. File the deed with the appropriate county office, which if often called the "registry of deeds."
 - If you transfer your personal home to your revocable trust's control, the IRS still regards you as the owner for tax purposes. If you live in the house for two of the five years before you sell it, you can exempt some of the sale proceeds from capital gains tax, even though the trust technically holds title to the house.
 About the Author
 Photo Credits
 - Jupiterimages/ Images


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A transonic collisionless model of the solar wind
MetadataShow full item record
Because of the seraicollisional nature of the solar wind, the collisionless or exospheric approach and the hydrodynamic one are both inaccurate. However, the advantage of simplicity makes them useful for enlightening us on some basic mechanisms of solar wind acceleration. Previous exospheric models have been able to reproduce winds that were already nearly supersonic at the exobase, the altitude above which there are no collisions. In order to allow transonic solutions, a lower exobase has to be considered, in which case the protons are experiencing a nonmonotonic potential energy profile. This is done in the present work. In this model, the electron velocity distribution in the corona is assumed to be nonthermal. Parametric results are presented and show that the high acceleration obtained does not depend on the details of the nonthermal distributions. This acceleration seems, therefore, to be a robust result produced by the presence of a sufficient number of suprathermal electrons. A method for improving the exospheric description is also given, which consists of mapping particle orbits in terms of their invariants of motion.
CitationZouganelis, I.; Maksimovic, M.; Meyer-Vernet, N.; Lamy, H.; Issautier, K. (2004). A transonic collisionless model of the solar wind., Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 606, Issue 1, 542-554, DOI: 10.1086/382866.


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Artist Charles Sowers specializes in public art works and display of physical phenomena. In Windswept, Sowers displays wind patterns in the actual space.
Windswept is a wind-driven kinetic façade consisting of 612 freely-rotating directional arrows creating a large-scale observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between the wind and the building. The wind arrows serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon.
Compare this to Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg's Wind Map or Nicolas Garcia Belmonte's map of wind motion patterns. We're essentially seeing the same data in action, but they're on completely different scales.
[via Visualising Data]


Hard Magic – by Larry Correia – A Fantasy Book Review
Larry Correia is the author of the Monster Hunter urban fantasy book series. I've enjoyed these books for years and also enjoy his comical Tom Stranger audiobook series. So recently I looked around and decided I should check out some of his other writing.
Back in 2011 Correia wrote an urban fantasy, alternate history book called Hard Magic – Book I of the Grimnoir Chronicles. In this alternate reality magic starts appearing on Earth in the 19th century and by the time of the story, the 1930s, there are various magical powers that have become part of everyday life and corporate policy. For instance, dirigibles and blimps do not disappear from the airs because magical practitioners called "Torches" have the ability to prevent fires from destroying the explosive hydrogen filled balloons with their powers.
There are humans called "Healers" with the power to heal disease and injury by a laying on of hands. And alternatively, there can be an individual called a "Pale Horse" who has the power to cause disease and even horribly painful death with just a touch of his hand. And there are dozens of other powers out there. "Brutes" are able to increase their strength tremendously and toughen themselves to withstand enormous punishment. Some can walk through walls, some teleport from place to place and some can control gravity and density and even the weather.
The outlines of history are similar to the actual history. World War One occurred and the rise of the Japanese Empire is happening but each of these things included large-scale use of magical power. Historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Black Jack Pershing exist but they are involved in the magical events. Nikola Tesla is a "Cog" which is an individual whose intellect has a magical quality to it and in this world, he invents magical doomsday devices such as the Geo-Tel which can destroy everything within a thousand-mile radius at the push of a button.
The book has a couple of main characters. Faye Vierra is a teenager living on her adoptive grandfather's dairy ranch. She is a "Traveller." Grandpa was able to teach her how to safely use her power because he also is a "Traveller." What she doesn't know is that he is a retired member of the Grimnoir Society, an order of magically gifted individuals who pledge to use their power to protect society from the misuse of magic. When evil men show up Grandpa sends Faye off with a dangerous device that he tells her to give to Black Jack Pershing.
The other main character is Jake Sullivan. Jake is a Gravity Spiker. He can change the force of gravity. He can make it stronger of weaker and even change its direction. Jake is getting out of prison for a justifiable homicide that was declared murder. Jake has agreed to a parole condition under which he will assist the FBI and local law enforcement with super strong magical individuals like brutes in exchange for a shortened sentence. But during one of these operations he finds out that there are magical agents working outside the law but not against it. And it leads back to Pershing.
The story knits together a cast of characters inside the Grimnoir Society that are working to prevent the capture by the Japanese Imperium of a Geo-Tel device. A shadowy leader, the Chairman, is a powerful, almost godlike leader whose forces are bent on world domination and the destruction of the United States.
Correia crafts an enjoyable narrative with a full range of engaging characters moving across the country and the world pursuing their varying interests and racing against time to retrieve the pieces of the Geo-Tel before the Imperium can unleash Armageddon. I highly recommend the book and am looking forward to the arrival of the sequel Spellbound.


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Using dedicated vacuum hoses like TruBlu from Accutools will help consistently achieve deep vacuum quickly. Vacuum hoses are designed specifically to hold under deep vacuum and to keep moisture and contaminants from bonding to the inside.
A typical refrigerant hose used for recovery and charging has been exposed to refrigerant, oil, moisture, and other contaminants.
The micron gauge should be located as close to the system as possible for an accurate reading. When you place a micron gauge at the pump, it is measuring the pressure of the pump, which can be drastically different than the vacuum level at the system itself — especially at the furthest point in the system from where the pump is connected.
We find that the best place to locate the vacuum (micron) gauge is either on the side port of the suction CRT when vacuum hoses are connected to both service ports, or directly on the liquid line port when using a single hose on the suction port.
After degassing and dehydrating the system as deeply and as quickly as possible, isolate the system and micron gauge from the pump and hoses and confirm that it will hold the vacuum.
This is easily done with CRTs by closing the valves after achieving the target vacuum level. Sometimes, air can get trapped in the ball valves of the CRTs and cause a significant rise when closing them. Slowly close and open the CRTs a couple of times before starting the decay test.
In general, on a newly installed residential split system, you should be able to pull to a target vacuum of 300 microns or less. Then, close the CRT valves. The pressure in the system will rise slowly; this is called "vacuum decay." After at least 10 minutes of isolation, the system pressure should remain under 500 microns. When servicing an existing system, especially when the entire system, including the compressor, is being evacuated, a target vacuum level of 500 microns and decay to under 1000 microns after a minimum of 10 minutes of isolation is more realistic.
If there are any leaks, trapped refrigerant, or moisture, then these targets will be impossible to achieve with typical residential or light commercial equipment up to 5 tons in capacity.
Some manufacturers advise pulling down to certain levels, then breaking the vacuum with nitrogen to bring the system up to atmospheric pressure (0 psig/14.7 psia,) then repeating the process. This certainly isn't a bad practice, especially when contamination from moisture or interference from refrigerant is suspected.
If moisture or other vapor contaminants are suspected, a "nitrogen sweep" can be performed between evacuations. This consists of bringing the system pressure up slowly from a vacuum to 0 psig/14.7 psia by injecting nitrogen into one port until the system is at or slightly above atmospheric pressure, then venting the other port to the atmosphere while continuing the nitrogen flow. This allows nitrogen to carry unwanted vapors out of the system by displacement.
Some techs think that nitrogen "absorbs" moisture, but it does not. Nitrogen flowing through the system can carry moisture out or help to release refrigerant from the oil through entrainment, but it doesn't absorb anything. It does help to displace the air and the moisture in the air, which is worthwhile in some instances.
You may hear that pulling a vacuum too quickly results in water freezing in the system. While it is true that water can freeze under vacuum, this only happens in real life when significant liquid water is in the system and when ambient temperatures are already near or below freezing. In low ambient conditions, it is advised to use a heat gun to warm the accumulator and evaporator and turn on the crankcase heater to help drive out the moisture. Pulling a deep and fast vacuum is always a good idea, and in a very wet system, using a heat gun and periodically sweeping with nitrogen will also help.
Some techs say that pulling a vacuum below 250 microns can damage the compressor oil. I've done extensive research and spoken to many experts and have seen no evidence that evacuation below 250 microns causes any issues with POE or mineral oil.
One excuse I often hear is that the ports on the system are ¼ inch, so larger hoses don't matter. This simply isn't true; larger, shorter hoses with no manifold can easily reduce vacuum time by 10 times or more, and this has been demonstrated time and time again. Even with a ¼-inch "choke point" in a few spots, the size of the hoses still matters significantly.
 - Use proper assembly practices to keep everything clean, dry, and tight.
 - Remove or fully depress cores.
 - Use dedicated large-diameter vacuum hoses and keep them as short as possible.
 - Keep clean oil in your pump and test the pump regularly.
 - Nix the manifold when evacuating and connect straight from the pump to CRTs.
 - Isolate and test after the desired vacuum level has been achieved to ensure there is no moisture or leaks.
Using this method, you will find that newly installed residential equipment can be pulled down to under 500 microns in under five minutes with another 10 minutes for the decay test. This is a combination of time savings and best practices for a win-win result for you and the customer.
Publication date: 2/25/2019