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Seed Treatment Options For Onion Products
»Seed treatments and enhancements can improve stand establishment, survival, and quality and appearance of onions.
»Seed enhancements include seed priming and seed coating procedures.
»Seed treatment insecticides and fungicides can protect yield potential from losses to onion pests and diseases.
Onion seed can be treated in several ways prior to planting to improve the quality and yield potential of the resulting crop. The term "seed treatment" typically refers to the application of insecticides and/or fungicides to the seed to help protect the seeds and young seedlings from insect pests and fungal pathogens. On the other hand, the term "seed enhancement" usually refers to other processes, such as seed coatings or pelleting, seed priming, or post-priming procedures that are intended to improve the handling and planting of seed, reduce the time to termination, or increase uniformity of seedling emergence. Seminis sells onion seeds for different markets and growers can purchase seed with seed enhancements or seed treatments or both. Non-treated onion seed is also available.
The first step in germination is the imbibition of water by the seed. This imbibition of water starts the physiological processes that allow the seed to break dormancy and germinate. One way to speed the process of germination after planting is by priming the seed before planting. Seed priming is defined as "pretreatment of seeds by various methods in order to improve seed germination rate, percentage germination, and improve uniformity of seedling emergence by controlling the water available in the seed."1
Typically seeds are soaked in a water solution to start the germination process, but then they are dried before they actually sprout. Once planted, primed seed emerge more quickly and more uniformly than non-primed seed. However, priming usually shortens the shelf-life of the seed, so seed should be planted within six to twelve months of priming.
During the priming process, proteins and sugars that protect seed from damage during dormancy are broken down, as they would no longer be needed if the seed were to continue to germinate. When seed are dried before sprouting, they no longer contain most of these protective proteins and sugars. Post-priming enhancement is a process initiated after priming but before re-drying. It is intended to promote the reforming of these proteins and sugars to help protect the seed after priming. Because onion seed are fairly small and irregularly shaped, they can be difficult to plant mechanically. The application of seed coatings can improve handling and planting by making the seed more uniform and spherical. Coatings can also help applied seed treatment products remain on the seed.
There are three basic types of seed coatings (Figure 1). Film-coats are very thin and do not change the shape, size, or weight of the seed, and they can help reduce water loss.2 Encrustments are somewhat thicker, making the seed more uniform in shape, more spherical, and slightly heavier.
Encrusted seed are easier to plant than non-coated seed when using a vacuum seeder. Pelleted seed have the thickest coatings, are more uniform in size and shape, and are heavier. Pelleted seed are easier to handle and plant in operations using beltor vacuum-seeders. Growers can choose to have a seed treatment applied, and Seminis offers a three coating types for onion with and without seed treatment.
Encrustments and pellets have the added advantage of being able to physically separate seed treatment products from the seed. It has been shown that some insecticides can be phytotoxic, and may result in lower viability and germination if applied directly to the seed. The added layer of material between the seed and product can reduce this problem.
Seed treatment products are applied to the seed to protect seeds and seedlings from insect pests and seed/soilborne pathogens. Seed treatment products are usually applied at very low rates directly to the seed, and they are very cost effective with minimal environmental impact.
Onions planted in the muck soils of the eastern United States and Canada tend to have more problems with soilborne diseases and insects than do onions planted in the more mineral soils of the western states because the conditions for survival and infection are more favorable in these eastern locations. As a result, different seed treatment products are typically used in different planting areas.
The cool wet conditions in the eastern U.S. and Canada promote the development of damping-off diseases caused by pathogens such as species of Pythium, Fusarium, and Rhizoctonia. These pathogens reside in the soil and attack seeds and seedlings, both before and after emergence. Seed rots can also result from fungi, such as Aspergillus, Botrytis, and Penicillium species, which are on or in the seed prior to planting, and these fungi colonize and rot the seed when moisture becomes available. Both seed rots and damping-off result in poor stand establishment and reductions in yield.
In the drier growing regions of the western U.S., damping-off and seedling blight caused by the fungus Rhizoctonia solani tend to be the biggest problems, although, the seed rot and other damping-off pathogens can cause disease under certain circumstances in these areas as well.3
Onion maggot and seedcorn maggot are both insects that feed on and damage onion plants. The insects overwinter as pupae in the soil. Adults emerge in the spring and lay eggs in the soil near onion plants. Larvae burrow into the basal plate of the plant and begin to feed on bulb tissue. Damaged seedlings wilt and can eventually die. Two more generations of the onion maggot insect develop during the season. Seed treatments can protect seedlings from feeding by the first generation larvae, and this can reduce the number of subsequent generations that develop in the field.5
In eastern areas of the U.S., where disease and insect pressures are high, treatment with FarMore® FI500 can be useful. FarMore® FI500 contains the same mix of fungicides found in FarMore® 300 plus the insecticides Regard® and Cruiser®. These insecticides are especially helpful in areas where the insects have developed resistance to previously used insecticides. Cruiser®, in particular, is useful because it can systemically control additional pests, such as aphids, onion thrips, and wireworms. Please note that this seed treatment combination is currently only available in the U.S. and cannot be sold to growers and customers in Canada.
1 National Agricultural Thesaurus and Glossary. _URL_
2 Taylor, A. G., Hoepting, C. A., Nault, B. A., Lorbeer, J. W., and. McDonald, M. R. 2008. Onion seed treatment and coating technologies. Acta Hortic. 782, 129-134.
3 du Toit. L., Holms, B., Twomey, M., Gatch E. 2008. Evaluation of seed treatments for soilborne damping-off pathogens and seedborne fungi of onion. PDMR 3:ST021.
4 Delahaut, K. and Stenenson, W. 2004. Onion disorder: Smut. A3796. University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension.
5 Smith, E. and Nault, B. 2014.Onion maggot Delia antique. Cornell University, NYS IPM Fact sheets for vegetables.
For additional agronomic information, please contact your local seed representative. Developed in partnership with Technology, Development & Agronomy by Monsanto.
Individual results may vary, and performance may vary from location to location and from year to year. The information provided in this communication may not be an indicator of results you may obtain as local growing, soil and weather conditions may vary. Growers should evaluate data from multiple locations and years whenever possible. ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW PESTICIDE LABEL DIRECTIONS. The recommendations in this article are based upon information obtained from the cited sources and should be used as a quick reference for information about growing onions. The content of this article should not be substituted for the professional opinion of a producer, grower, agronomist, pathologist and similar professional dealing with this specific crop.
SEMINIS DOES NOT WARRANT THE ACCURACY OF ANY INFORMATION OR TECHNICAL ADVICE PROVIDED HEREIN AND DISCLAIMS ALL LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM INVOLVING SUCH INFORMATION OR ADVICE. 160329062906 042116DME


Municipal Waste Diversion in Ontario Composting
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 Recycling Technology Newsletter at CANMET-MMSL
From the July 1996 issue
Municipal Waste Diversion in Ontario
By Linda Varangu
Over the past years we have seen a public awakening to the concerns of managing solid waste. With total waste
quantities generated across the province of Ontario at around 10 000 000 tonnes per year, the diversion of some of
this waste would be welcome. The public has been well served by local municipal waste diversion programs such
as recycling programs, household hazardous waste programs, backyard composting programs, reuse centres, and
education on less wasteful and toxic alternatives. Through these various programs, Ontario residents were able to
divert an estimated 900 000 tonnes from landfills in 1994, with approximately 500 000 tonnes coming from the blue
box program.
The blue box program has become an institution in households across Ontario. Many blue box programs now
include materials such as textiles, different types of plastics, and household fine paper in addition to metal cans,
glass bottles, newspaper, and plastic bottles. 3.2 million households in Ontario (or 85%), now have access to
recycling programs. In various municipalities, pilot programs have demonstrated that householders can achieve
solid waste diversion of over 75% using a combination of reduction, reuse, composting, and recycling. Considering
that only a few years ago, even 50% diversion was considered unattainable, these diversion rates are remarkable.
Several years ago, federal and provincial governments set diversion goals of 50% by the year 2000. How likely is it
that Ontario municipalities will achieve this? Not very. Lately, the diversion rate for municipalities has reached a
plateau at 25-35%. Significant changes in waste diversion programs must be offered that include attention to the
organic stream if we are to go beyond this plateau. Instead of expanding waste diversion programs, however,
funding cuts may see the erosion of support for some programs currently offered by municipalities.
Many municipalities are now concentrating on activities that will enable them to run their programs as efficiently and
cost effectively as possible. One of the key objectives is to keep recycling operations costs as low or lower than
garbage collection costs. The strategy includes reducing operational costs and services, and increasing revenues
from materials sold through recycling programs.
By Pierrette King
COMPOSTING is an effective recycling strategy for turning otherwise unrecyclable organic wastes into a valuable
resource. It is estimated that approximately 40 to 70 percent of the total municipal solid waste stream could be
composted. Some examples of organic material that can be composted include fruit and vegetable scraps, tea bags
and coffee grounds, leaves and yard wastes, agricultural crop residues, paper products, sewage sludge, and wood.
Composting is a natural biological decomposition process by which microorganisms (primarily bacteria) break down
organic material. There are two types of composting processes (performed by different types of bacteria): aerobic
and anaerobic. Aerobic composting requires oxygen, while anaerobic composting takes place in an oxygendepleted environment. The by-products of anaerobic composting include volatile amines (which smell like rotten
fish), hydrogen sulphide (which smells like rotten eggs), and methane. The anaerobic process is not recommended
for backyard composting.
In addition to oxygen, aerobic microbial activity requires food (carbon for energy and nitrogen for protein building),
and adequate moisture and temperature. During the aerobic composting process, bacteria break down the organic
waste, and the pile gives off heat. The compost temperature should not be allowed to exceed 70°C, because most
microorganisms involved in composting die or become inactive above this temperature. When the compost no
longer generates heat, it is generally ready to be used.
Composting is, of course, not a new idea, but centralized composting facilities have only recently appeared in
government, institutions, and various rural settings. There are presently 162 composting facilities in Canada, of
which 112 are municipal and 50 are private. These facilities processed almost 700 000 tonnes of organic waste in
1994. There are three basic types of centralized aerobic composting methods:
 - the windrow method consisting of long triangular rows known as windrows, which are turned mechanically;
 - the aerated static pile method, which involves forming windrows over perforated pipes, and supplying air to
 the micro-organisms through the pipes rather than turning the compost; and
 - the in-vessel method, where the organic material is composted inside a drum, silo, agitated bed, covered or
 open channels, batch container, or other structure. The process conditions are closely monitored and
 controlled. The material is aerated and mechanically turned or agitated.
Standardized testing methods are needed that would certify the maturity and stability of different compost batches.
The quality of compost is largely defined by its intended use. High quality compost is used in agriculture,
horticulture, landscaping, and home gardening. Medium and low quality compost is used in erosion control,
roadside landscaping, as a landfill cover, and in land reclamation projects.


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Getting the Right Data
The final report states, "When conducting an economic impact or contribution analysis in IMPLAN, it is important to consider when the existing industry parameters that represent its spending activities are sufficient for analysis and when those parameters should be updated through supplemental data collection." The spending patterns present were based on national fruit farming averages. Researchers were aware that there are significant differences in general spending patterns between large fruit farming operations in Washington state (for example) and small apple farms in New York state.
In order to account for this issue, the team sought primary data to ensure the most accurate, representative spending patterns. Surveys were identified as an efficient method of data collection. The survey was developed to match business categories with the IMPLAN sectors and distributed both online (via Qualtrics) and in written formats. NYAA assisted in administering the survey by contacting members via electronic channels and in-person requests. Despite reminders and a significant push by NYAA, survey response rates were incredibly low. Only 25 of 600 commercial apple growers responded at all, and of the 25, only 4 responses were sufficient for analysis. Low response rate was attributed to insignificant participation incentive and poorly-timed distribution (early fall, "Harvest Time").
With the survey producing insufficient results and several months lost, the research team was faced with the difficulty of finding a new primary data source. This search led to the Lake Ontario Fruit Team (LOFT). LOFT, a partnership between Cornell University and the CCE Associations in five NY counties (Wayne, Orleans, Niagara, Monroe, and Oswego counties), strives to maintain profitability and facilitate improvement of fruit farming in their area through applied research. The Cornell researchers used the data collected by LOFT for their own Fruit Farm Business Summary and IMPLAN's local purchase percentages (LPP) to create a representative apple farming spending portrait.

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


rustup provides a number of wrappers for common Rust tools. These are called proxies and represent commands which are provided by the various components.
The list of proxies is currently static in rustup and is as follows:
 - rustc is the compiler for the Rust programming language, provided by the project itself and comes from the rustc component.
 - rustdoc is a tool distributed in the rustc component which helps you to generate documentation for Rust projects.
 - cargo is the Rust package manager which downloads your Rust package's dependencies, compiles your packages, makes distributable packages, and uploads them to (the Rust community's package registry). It comes from the cargo component.
 - rust-lldb and rust-gdb are simple wrappers around the lldb and gdb debuggers respectively. The wrappers enable some pretty-printing of Rust values and add some convenience features to the debuggers by means of their scripting interfaces.
 - rls is part of the Rust IDE integration tooling. It implements the language-server protocol to permit IDEs and editors such as Visual Studio Code, ViM, or Emacs, access to the semantics of the Rust code you are editing. It comes from the rls component.
 - cargo-clippy and clippy-driver are related to the clippy linting tool which provides extra checks for common mistakes and stylistic choices and it comes from the clippy component.
 - cargo-miri is an experimental interpreter for Rust's mid-level intermediate representation (MIR) and it comes from the miri component.


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BUILDING 2G SPORT SURFACE – FROM START TO FINISH
Project Name: Ruthin Leisure Centre
Project Address: Denbighshire, North Wales
Size of Project: 6300 m² sand filled all weather pitch
Works Carried Out: Replacement of the existing poor quality field into a brand new and improved all-weather hockey pitch. The current ground suffered heavily with standing water issues. The construction of this new sports pitch included groundworks, soil stabilisation, sports pitch drainage, engineered macadam subbase, sports rebound fencing, 300 lux sports floodlighting and sand filled multi-use carpet.
"We are very pleased with the outcome. Our surface was awful and unusable before these works and now it has been transformed and the students are making the most of this new facility."
The pitch was very muddy and uneven which made the playing and performance characteristics poor, as well as potentially unsafe for players. Therefore, they decided to construct a new all-weather sports pitch facility for use all year round.
EXCAVATION FOR NEW ARTIFICIAL PITCH:
The excavation process involved removing the existing layer of topsoil in preparation for the new surfacing and pitches to be constructed. The pictures below show the initial ground works for the new multi-use sports court after the original topsoil was removed.
SOIL STABILISATION GROUNDWORKS:
The process of soil stabilisation was carried out to ensure that the pitch had a good quality subbase to install our surfacing on, as the initial ground conditions didn't meet the CBR levels we required to build our synthetic turf pitch onto.
SPORTS PITCH DRAINAGE INSTALLATION:
A sports pitch drainage system was installed to prevent the build-up of water on the surface of the pitch, this could have had a negative effect on the playing characteristics, or have led to the pitch being unusable. This ensures that the surface is an all-weather pitch which is suitable for a variety of conditions.
POROUS STONE SUB BASE SPECIFICATION:
The installation of porous stone works as part of the sports pitch drainage system as it contains lots of air pockets to allow water to pass through it quickly and prevent flooding on the surface of the 2G pitch. This allows the drainage system to combat all weather pitch flooding by disposing of the excess water.
SPORTS FLOODLIGHT COLUMNS:
The installation of sports floodlighting around the pitch allows continued use in low light conditions. This means that the leisure centre can increase its revenue as a result of extending the opening hours.
REBOUND TWIN BAR FENCING:
Sports pitch rebound fencing was put up around the 2G surface to prevent the risk of balls getting lost or causing an inconvenience for other people outside of the playing area. This also reduces maintenance costs by stopping sports surface contamination from external factors.
MACADAM SPORTS SURFACES:
The construction of the Macadam subbase surfacing over the groundworks of the pitch ensures an even playing field and gives a bound subbase specification to work from as a firm platform whenever you might need to have the pitch resurfaced in future.
QUALITY CONTROL TOLERANCE TESTS:
Surfacing tests were carried out to assess the quality and performance characteristics of the pitch, this was to ensure that the safety of the players was not compromised at any time. This surface testing also checks to make sure that the pitch meets all the relevant accreditations of the sport's governing bodies.
INSITU RUBBER SHOCK PAD:
The installation of shock pads between the subbase and the playing surface, which act as an underlay for the artificial grass, ensures that the surface meets the recommended safety requirements and provides a comfortable playing experience for the users.
COMPLETED SYNTHETIC SURFACING:
The final result is a 2G all-weather artificial grass sports pitch which meets all the required performance and safety criteria and provides a much better playing experience for the users when it comes to playing both hockey and other sports like football. With the added floodlighting the Leisure Centre can now increase usage hours.


Al Campbell, Field Editor
June 16th, 2003
The Grand Illusion
By Al Campbell
What is that magic ingredient that makes a fish want to eat an artificial fly? Is it size or color? Does the way a fly floats or the shape of the wings have anything to do with it? Is motion or lack of motion a selling point to the fish? What magical ingredient creates the proper illusion that makes a fish want to munch on your particular offering at that particular time?
Sometimes motion is the key. Motion means life, and fish often drop their defenses when a fly is presented with the proper motion. It might be the erratic motion of a crayfish or the pulse-pause-pulse motion of a dragonfly nymph that sets their hearts to thoughts of feeding. Maybe it's the flash of a fleeing minnow that your fly presents which keys a response, or the illusion of something edible. Could it be the skittering motion of a caddis imitation the fish are waiting for?
I'm a firm believer in the idea of triggers in a fly. By that, I mean the features of a fly or group of flies that trigger a feeding response in the fish we are trying to fool. Those triggers could be size, shape, color or a certain flash that convinces our quarry that the imitation is the real thing. It might be a combination of those things or just one or two key items that sets our imitation apart from the rest. If we want to be more successful, we must discover those triggers and concentrate on those features in our flies.
Several of the flies I have designed that are very successful were designed with those triggers in mind. One example would be my Shrimpf pattern that fools bonefish very well. When I designed it, I didn't have any real bonefish experience, but I did have a lot of successful bonefish flies to examine. I looked for common features in those bonefish flies and extracted what I believed to be the triggers that made them successful. Then I put them in a fly that is easy to tie and easy to fish. It worked.
Elk hair caddis and stimulator flies have a lot of hackle on them. That hackle allows the fly to be skittered across the surface of the water. The insects those flies imitate lay their eggs by flying low above the water and laying their eggs on the fly, or by doing stop and go egg laying. The flight is usually in an upstream direction. While fish will take one of those flies as it drifts downstream in the classic drift, they usually grab it much faster if it is skittered across the surface the way real insects move. In this case, motion is a trigger to success.
How does that apply to hackle? Why do some types of hackle seem to be more productive than others? For instance, why does grizzly hackle seem to be more productive in flies than plain old brown hackle? What is that secret ingredient in grizzly hackle that triggers a feeding response in fish? Could it be the illusion of motion? Does the hackle look like the beating wings of an insect?
When you look at a classic dry fly, something about the hackle seems to create the feeling of motion. This is especially true if the feathers used to hackle the fly have a dark band in their center of if the feather has broken bands of color in its length. Take a good look at a fly that was created with badger hackle or cree hackle and it will look more alive than a fly that has a single colored hackle wrapped around it.
The mix of colors in an Adams dry fly hackle looks more "alive" than it would if the hackle were only brown. A golden badger hackle on an elk hair caddis looks more like it is moving than a ginger or brown hackle would. Why do you suppose we cherish cree hackle with its multi-colored appearance so much? I think it is the illusion of motion that sets our hearts on fire, and I also think the fish sense the same motion we see.
I'm not advocating anything radical here. I just want you to think outside the box for a minute. Is it possible that your dry flies might be more productive if the hackle you use on them looked more like the motion of beating insect wings? Could you maybe add a hackle or change a hackle to create a better illusion of motion in your fly? Am I totally off my rocker?
For a moment, just one tiny moment, consider the idea that your hackle could provide the extra illusion of moving wings. Now consider that a slight change in materials might increase that illusion. It might make all the difference in your catch rate on those tough days when fish are feeding on everything but your offerings. Would a furnace hackle be more productive on your Royal Wulff fly? How about changing the hackle on your Light Cahill to a badger instead of a cream. Would that increase the illusion of motion?
Like I said before, I'm a firm believer in the idea that every successful fly has something in it that riggers a feeding response in the fish. That trigger is a feature that creates the illusion of life to the fish. If you can concentrate on the trigger mechanism in your artificial flies, I'm convinced you'll catch more fish.
Next time you look at a fly you just finished tying, look at the possibility of improving the illusion of motion in the next fly you tie. If you do that, you'll eventually know if I'm nuts or if there is a better way to fool a fish. ~ AC
Previous Al Campell Columns
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This study is the first to provide a systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of unobserved (unofficial) compensation (i.e., bribes) of public sector employees. In the case of Ukraine, we find that public sector employees receive 24-32% less wages than their private sector counterparts. The gap is particularly large at the top of the wage distribution. At the same time, workers in both sectors have essentially identical level of consumer expenditures and asset holdings that unambiguously indicate the presence of non-reported compensation in the public sector. Using the conditions of labor market equilibrium, we develop an aggregate measure of bribery and find that the lower bound estimate of the extent of bribery in Ukraine is between 460 mln and 580 mln U.S. dollars (0.9-1.2% of Ukraine's GDP in 2003).
wage wage differentials public sector corruption bribery Ukraine


Offsite Detection
When measuring the power usage of laptops we need to consider the question of where the laptop is located at any point in time and hence who's power is being used to power the device. The offsite detection feature allows you to configure the eiPower agent to determine when a laptop is On-site (that is, operating within your organisation's buildings) or Off-site (such as when someone takes their computer home to do some work)
When the Off-site detection feature is enabled and configured the eiPower agent includes an On/Off site status on each power event sent to the server. Each of the eiPower saver reports contain a parameter that allows you to specify whether you want the report to include or exclude Off-site power events.
Offsite detection is configured by specifying one or more IP address ranges that contain all the IP addresses used in your organisation. For example, if your organisation uses the following subnets :
Then you would specify the following address ranges as your On-site address ranges: – –
Whenever a computer's IP address lies within one of these ranges then the computer is considered On-site, otherwise it is Off-site.
Notice that it is not necessary to specify an IP address range for each subnet in your organisation, it is only necessary to specify ranges that cover all the IP addresses. Additionally it does not matter if you specify IP ranges that cover a few IP addresses not used by your organisation – these will have no affect on the Offsite detection.
The eiPower agent only checks the IP address of the computer's ethernet and wireless network adaptors – all virtual adaptors are ignored. This ensures that a laptop that is connected via VPN to an organisation's network is not considered On-site.
The use of IP Address ranges to determine On/Off site status is a simple and effective mechanism for performing Offsite detection that does not introduce any addition network traffic.
Issue with use of Private IP Ranges
An issue can arise when an organisation uses the same IP address ranges that are typically used by home networks. In these situations, care must be taken when configuring Offsite detection to ensure that the eiPower agent does not incorrectly report devices as being On-Site when they are being used from someone's home or a public internet location.
The default configuration for your typical home modem/wireless device issues IP Addresses starting from either or Hence when a user is using their laptop at home they will generally have an IP address in the following ranges : -> ->
When the eiPower Offsite detection is configured is it important not to specify an IP Address range that includes the above IP address as doing so will cause the eiPower agent to report a computer as being On-site when it is actually being used from a user's home. Although there may be a few On-site computers that have an address in the above ranges which will get incorrectly reported as Offsite, these will be very small in number and will have a minimal affect on the report results.
Offsite Detection Changes in Adelaide Update 2
One of the major features in the Adelaide Update 2 release is an extension to the Offsite detection feature so that the eiPower agent is able to use the computer's DNS server as well as its IP address when determining if a computer is On/Off site.
The Offsite Detection Policy page has been updated to allow you to specify a list of DNS server addresses as well as the list of IP address ranges.
The agent have been updated to use the follow algorithm to determine if a computer is On/Offsite :
If the computer has no active ethernet or wireless adaptors then the computer is ON-SITE
Otherwise if one or more DNS addresses have been specified and the DNS address of the computer's ethernet or wireless adaptors is NOT in the list of DNS addresses then the computer is OFF-SITE
Otherwise if one or more IP address ranges have been specified and the IP address of the computer's ethernet or wireless adaptors is NOT within one of the IP address ranges then the computer is OFF-SITE.
Otherwise the computer is ON-SITE


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How Variable Naming Can Significantly Impact Your Teams Productivity
How Variable Naming Can Significantly Impact Your Teams Productivity
What does kunnr mean? Anybody? If you've worked with SAP than you might know but to everyone else good luck. What about rqnb? Does it mean anything to you? Isn't it obvious to you that rqnb represents a request number? Seriously though, why do people name their variables so cryptically?
Think about it a little, how much easier would the code be if the variable was named requestNumber instead of rqnb? And for those of you who think it will save a few keystrokes, hence make your typing faster, remember that each time you use the variable you have to remember how to abbreviate it. With one variable it's not so bad, but when you have dozens, you're always looking up the different variable names.
Still don't believe me that it makes a large difference, tell me what the code example below does (ignoring all exception handling):
public static void chPd(uId, oP, nP)
 Usr u = UsrDB.getPrf(uId);
 u.chPd(oP, nP));
You might have a chance with that one because it's similar to the Unix/Linux command line tools. But what about the following more complex case:
function clcMtPy($mtAmt, $ct, $intRt, $nPt)
 $mInt = clcMtInt($ct, $intRt);
 $mPym = $mtAmt * $mInt;
 if($mPym > 0)
 $mPym = $mPym / (1 - pow((1 + $mInt), - ($nPt)));
 return $mPym;
How easy was that to read? You probably didn't get the meaning of what's happening in the first pass, or even the nth pass. And nor should you. But that's how a lot of code is written. What if instead it was written as:
function calculateMonthlyPayment($mortgageAmount, $country, $interestRate, $numberOfPayments)
 $monthlyInterest = monthlyInterest($country, $interestRate);
 $monthlyPayment = $mortgageAmount * $monthlyInterest;
 if($monthlyPayment > 0)
 $monthlyPayment = $monthlyPayment / (1 - pow((1 + $monthlyInterest), - ($numberOfPayments)));
 return $monthlyPayment;
How much easier is that to understand? Sure in the cryptic example, once you get a good handle on what's going on it makes sense, but how long did it take compared to the last example. And How many times did you have to re-remember which variable represented what?
Isn't the last example much much friendlier? Couldn't almost anyone jump in and understand right away. How much time is spent in the first two examples just understanding what's what? And that's with abbreviated names, what if I had just used one letter variables? Don't get me started on that. Ever try to search for instances of a variable that's one letter? Try searching for the variable "u" (used in the first example) on this webpage. How many hits did you get before you found it? Good luck with that!
By the way, this code is actually a real life snippet of code from our free real estate analyzer. Although our main LandlordMax application is written in Java (Swing), the free real estate property analyzer is written in PHP. Not that it really matters, this code isn't really language dependent. (And please note that I've removed all code dealing with currency and doubles for clarity).
In any case, all this to say be careful when you name your variables. Don't think in the now, think beyond. Think about tomorow and the next person. Make everyone's lives easier. Yes it might make your code more verbose, but it also makes it readable! It's well worth the cost.
Like this article?
 - Barend
 · August 14th, 2008 · 8:00 am · Permalink
 I have to agree. For the guys that are worried about the longer time taken in coding, why not just do a Ctrl-H on each of the shortened variable names after you're happy the code works, just replace the short ones with names that makes sense, and the next person that has to work on the code will be so much more productive.
 - Ben
 · August 15th, 2008 · 10:16 am · Permalink
 Completely agree. Standards are important, especially when working with a team. I like our team to code in very similar ways so that when we open another's code it's like looking at something we ourselves would write. This includes: var naming, denoting scope (_privateVar), organization of variables and methods, commenting properly, # of tabs, and so on.
 I'm working on living documents at work right now that define our standards for our development as a whole. Agreed upon folder naming structures for deploying websites, file-naming, deploying via subversion and what-not. What you name things is important and often required (in the case of say working with a framework).
 - Owen
 · August 15th, 2008 · 11:26 am · Permalink
 I agree, its not just the case with PHP but most languages. Its so much easier to read words rather than try to decrypt some one else's acronyms. I try to not use abbreviations but, some times find myself using shortcuts like Dir instead of Directory. 🙁
 - Scott Kane
 · August 15th, 2008 · 12:35 pm · Permalink
 Nice article, Steph. I've been arguing this for years. Glad to hear there are others who can see it too. It gets even more complex with function calls etc as well when they are cryptic. One should be able to intuit a call for crying out loud, but so often I've seen them structured along the same lines as variables – cryptic as all get out.
 - Izkata
 · August 17th, 2008 · 12:47 pm · Permalink
 Even a simple "ReqNum" is far more obvious for one of your first examples, and still retains a lot of space.
 - Steph
 · August 17th, 2008 · 12:58 pm · Permalink
 Hi Izkata,
 Yes, ReqNum is much more obvious, but I'm going to say it's still not enough. And here's why:
 1. What if you have 10 other variables, all abbr. Are you going to remember what they all mean? You'll still have to keep looking them up. If you don't believe me, as someone to pick for you a random chunk of open source code and do a string find/replace on all the variables within a decent method (it has to be code you've never seen). Easier, but it still requires more effort than it should.
 2. Again, do the same, ask someone to set up some sample code for you. Now try to add some code. When you type in the variables, are you able to remember the exact characters in each or do you have to look up what the abbreviations are each time? Could it be ReqNum, ReqNb, RqNum, RequestNum, ReqNo, etc. There's just so many rules to abbr. that you need to look it up. With fully qualified names, it's always the full spelling 😉
 - Steph
 · August 17th, 2008 · 1:00 pm · Permalink
 And thanks everyone for the great comments!
 Fully qualified names are slowly starting to become more and more the "way" to code. I can't wait until it's the standard!
 - ben
 · August 17th, 2008 · 2:15 pm · Permalink
 > Fully qualified names
 You know what would be great is to see some benchmarks on using longer fully qualified var-names versus short guys. I for one love fully qualified names, and IDEs with auto-complete and snippet/macros like Textmate, Zend, et al make it easy to type and re-type variables and function names so "type to write" should be less of a factor.
 - ben
 · August 17th, 2008 · 2:18 pm · Permalink
 * speed benchmarks
 * time to write
 - Steph
 · August 17th, 2008 · 3:00 pm · Permalink
 Hi Ben,
 The book Code Complete 2, chapter 11 specifically (The Power of Variable Names). In it the author has some hard data (research study results) that he shares that supports the same advice as this article 😉
 - vbcpp
 · July 4th, 2013 · 5:28 am · Permalink
 Completely agree! Not sure when I was told to always abbreviate my variables, but since reading


text:
Distance from Pueblo to Mississauga
Driving route: -- ( - )
Driving route: -- ( - )
Extended route information
The flight distance between the nearest airports Pueblo (PUB) and Mississauga (YYZ) is 1,344.04 mi (2,163.02 km). This corresponds to an approximate flight time of 3h 2min. Similar flight routes: PUB → YYZ, PUB → YZD, PUB → YYZ, PUB → YYZ, PUB → YZDBearing: 66.20° (ENE)
The initial bearing on the course from Pueblo to Mississauga is 66.20° and the compass direction is ENE.Midpoint: 41.59979,-92.63763
The geographic midpoint between Pueblo and Mississauga is in 674.61 mi (1,085.68 km) distance between both points in a bearing of 66.20°. It is located in United States of America, Iowa, Poweshiek County.Distance: 1,349.23 mi (2,171.37 km)
The shortest distance (air line) between Pueblo and Mississauga is 1,349.23 mi (2,171.37 km).Driving route: -- ( - )
The shortest route between Pueblo and Mississauga is according to the route planner. The driving time is approx.. Half of the trip is reached in.Time difference: 2h
The time difference between Pueblo (America/Denver) and Mississauga (America/Toronto) is 2 hours. This means that it is now 00:12 (24.01.2021) in Pueblo and 02:12 (24.01.2021) in Mississauga.
How is the distance calculated?
To calculate the distance between Pueblo and Mississauga, the place names are converted into coordinates (latitude and longitude). The respective geographic centre is used for cities, regions and countries. To calculate the distance the Haversine formula is applied.
Similar distance (± 0.5%)
Mississauga is just as far away from Pueblo as Pueblo from Mexico City (2,160 km), Toronto (2,191 km), Iztapalapa (2,169 km), Ecatepec de Morelos (2,142 km), Puebla City (2,225 km), Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (2,166 km), Gustavo Adolfo Madero (2,153 km), Jacksonville (2,278 km), Naucalpan (2,152 km), Charlotte (2,139 km).
Pueblo to New York, Pueblo to Los Angeles, Pueblo to Chicago, Pueblo to Houston, Pueblo to Philadelphia, Pueblo to Phoenix, Pueblo to San Antonio, Pueblo to San Diego, Pueblo to Dallas, Pueblo to San Jose, Pueblo to Austin, Pueblo to Jacksonville, Pueblo to Indianapolis, Mississauga to New York, Mississauga to Los Angeles, Mississauga to Chicago, Mississauga to Houston, Mississauga to Philadelphia, Mississauga to Phoenix, Mississauga to San Antonio, Mississauga to San Diego, Mississauga to Dallas, Mississauga to San Jose, Mississauga to Austin, Mississauga to Jacksonville, Mississauga to Indianapolis,
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text:
Why Is Cheese So Expensive in Canada?
It's a struggle most Canadian dairy lovers are familiar with: Cheese up there is so expensive that a pound of cheddar can end up costing more than a pound of steak. Our neighbors to the north aren't exaggerating when they complain about steep cheese prices—costs are sometimes three times higher than comparable products sold in the States, and it's not because the Canadian air makes cows pump out liquid gold. It's all thanks to a little something called supply management.
Supply management is a blanket term used to describe the policies regulating Canada's dairy (and egg and poultry) markets. The dairy industry works differently in Canada than it does in other cheese-loving parts of the world. Both the European Union and the United States subsidize their dairy farmers—the Canadian government does not. Instead, they use other ways to get farmers the financial support they need.
Minimum price-setting for domestic dairy products keeps cheese prices above a certain mark, while strict quotas and high taxes on imports keep foreign competition under control. International cheeses account for a tiny fraction of the market, so cheese made in France, Italy, and other places abroad is difficult to find outside specialty shops. The result is more profits for Canadian producers taken straight from the consumers' pockets come check-out time.
When supply management was introduced to Canada in the 1960s and '70s, it served a clear purpose. The policies were put in place to protect farmers from unpredictable market fluctuations and keep their livelihoods secure. Since then many of the small family farms that were originally protected under the laws have been replaced with factory farms, and the relevance of supply management is now a topic of hot debate.
The laws aren't terribly popular among citizens (even police officers have been known to help smuggle cheese across the border), and it's not just because of the high grocery bills. Opponents argue that the regulations are bad for innovation, free trade negotiations, and restaurateurs. Canadian farmers still insist the benefits outweigh the costs. On the Dairy Farmers of Canada's web page, they write:
"While farmers around the world face unexpected and inexplicable wild market fluctuations, Canadian farmers sell their milk at constant and stable prices. As a result, Canadian dairy farming is one of the few agricultural sectors that are self-sufficient – providing income security for farmers and requiring no government subsidy. This means Canadian farmers can invest in their farms, communities and Canada."
Because farmers hold significant power in Canadian politics, supply management boasts supporters from every major party. But not all hope is lost for Canadian connoisseurs of affordable cheese. Progress on their front was made last year when a trade deal was signed slightly increasing the quota on foreign dairy imports. Consumers may benefit from the resulting price cuts, while Canadian farmers and processors will receive $4.3 billion from the government over 15 years to make up for the revenue loss. So next time you enjoy a plate of poutine, feel free to be a little less conservative with the cheese curds.


Not sure what kind of sign to recommend to your clients? Here's an overview of the benefits of front and halo lit channel letter signs, otherwise known as dual lit signs.
Signage is an important aspect of branding for your clients. You want a sign for their brick and mortar location to appeal to their customers, and thereby drive increased awareness, and ultimately sales.
Channel letter signs are an excellent option for companies that want to stand out from the competition. There are two basic types of channel letters available on the market today: front lit channel letters, and halo lit channel letters. However, in some cases a combination of these two techniques will optimize the appearance of a sign.
This article will discuss the differences between front lit and halo lit channel letter signs, and how to use a combined approach to achieve maximum impact.
What are Front Lit Channel Letters?
Front lit channel letters are signs in which each letter's interior contains a light source that is visible from the front side of the display. Front lit channel letters are made up of durable aluminum composite panel (ACP) backing and sides. Their front surface is comprised of a translucent, acrylic material that allows the light source inside to transmit outwards. (Sometimes a lexan face can be used.)
Colour selection is vitally important for front lit channel letters, because many vinyl overlays only allow for less than 1% of light transmission from the letter's interior light source. Customized overlays are often available to achieve specific colours/hues. Another popular option among many businesses is the use of dual film. This material allows a company sign to transmit a specific color during daytime, and then white illumination at night (which results in highest visibility).
What are Halo Lit Channel Letters?
Halo lit channel letters (also known as halo lit or reverse channel letters) are the converse of their front lit counterparts. Instead of a translucent front side, these letters are open on the back, and positioned a little bit away from the wall. When the light source begins its transmission, the light reflects off of the wall and gives a silhouetted appearance to the solid outline of the letter; in effect, each letter is surrounded by a "halo" of light.
Halo lit channel letters can provide depth of appearance and a more architectural look to signage. Of course, it is important that the right kind of backing material is utilized for best results. For instance, brick may not distribute the light as well as other surfaces, whereas an extremely slick or shiny background may cause your LEDs to be visibly reflected upon the wall.
Using Front and Halo Lit Illumination
While both front lit and halo lit signs have their own unique advantages, a combined approach also offers significant aesthetic benefits. For instance:
 - Front and halo lit channel letters can use two different colorus to achieve a more rounded effect. All that is needed is a partition panel in the middle of the letter to divide the front side colour from the back.
 - Front and Halo lit illumination allows your clients to leverage a 3D effect for their sign, without sacrificing desired colour at the front.
 - This technique offers maximum visibility, especially at night. Front and halo lit signs are often positioned on high buildings for maximum exposure.
 - Front and halo lit channel letters are usually very attractive elements for advertising storefronts that are closed at night.
Ultimately, the success of a sign as a marketing tool depends on your client's specific business objectives, and which design would best fit into their advertising strategy. Many companies have found that dual lit illumination makes for dynamic, attractive signage that appeals to a wide range of customers. If you'd like to learn more about dual lit channel letter signs, and the many options available, reach out to us at the Channel Letter Depot today.


Introduction to Ibis
Ibis is a Python framework to access data and perform analytical computations from different sources, in a standard way.
In a way, you can think of Ibis as writing SQL in Python, with a focus on analytics, more than simply accessing data. And aside from SQL databases, you can use it with other backends, including big data systems.
Why not simply use SQL instead? SQL is great and widely used. However, SQL has different flavors for different database engines, and SQL is very difficult to maintain when your queries are very complex. Ibis solves both problems by standardizing your code across backends and making it maintainable. Since Ibis is Python, you can structure your code in different files, functions, name variables, write tests, etc.
This tutorial will guide you through Ibis features and provide practical examples. Some knowledge of Python is assumed and knowledge of SQL will be helpful but not required.
Ibis is open source - if anything can be improved in this tutorial, or in Ibis itself, please open an issue in the Ibis GitHub repository or open a pull request with the fix.
Getting started
To start using Ibis, you need a Python environment with Ibis installed. If you don't know how to create an environment, we recommend following the setup instructions in the Ibis website.
Once you have your environment ready, to start using Ibis simply import the ibis module:
import ibis
To make it things easier in this tutorial, we will be using Ibis interactive mode. For production code, that will rarely be the case. More details on Ibis non-interactive (aka lazy) mode are covered in the third tutorial, Expressions, lazy mode and logging queries.
To set the interactive mode, use:
ibis.options.interactive = True
Next thing we need is to create a connection object. The connection defines where the data is stored and where the computations will be performed.
For a comparison to pandas, this is not the same as where the data is imported from (e.g. pandas.read_sql). pandas loads data into memory and performs the computations itself. Ibis won't load the data and perform any computation, but instead will leave the data in the backend defined in the connection, and will ask the backend to perform the computations.
In this tutorial we will be using a SQLite connection for its simplicity (no installation is needed). But Ibis can work with many different backends, including big data systems, or GPU-accelerated analytical databases. As well as most common relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL,…).
To create a SQL connection to our example SQLite database data/geography.db, use:
import os
database_file_path = os.path.join('data', 'geography.db')
connection = ibis.sqlite.connect(database_file_path)
Note that if you installed Ibis with pip instead of conda, you may need to install the SQLite backend separately with pip install ibis-framework[sqlite].
Exploring the data
To list the tables in the connection object, we can use the.list_tables() method. If you are using Jupyter, you can see all the methods and attributes of the connection object by writing connection. and pressing the key.
['countries', 'gdp']
These two tables include data about countries, and about GDP by country and year.
The data from countries has been obtained from GeoNames. The GDP table will be used in the next tutorial, and the data has been obtained from the World Bank website.
Next, we want to access a specific table in the database. We can create a handler to the countries table with:
countries = connection.table('countries')
To list the columns of the countries table, we can use the columns attribute.
Again, Jupyter users can see all the methods and attributes of the countries object by typing countries. and pressing .
We can now access a sample of the data. Let's focus on the name, continent and population columns to start with. We can visualize the values of the columns with:
countries['name', 'continent', 'population']
 name continent population
0 Andorra EU 84000
1 United Arab Emirates AS _PHONE_
2 Afghanistan AS 29121286
3 Antigua and Barbuda NA 86754
4 Anguilla NA 13254
.. ... ... ...
247 Yemen AS 23495361
248 Mayotte AF 159042
249 South Africa AF 49000000
250 Zambia AF _PHONE_
251 Zimbabwe AF _PHONE_
[252 rows x 3 columns]
The table is too big for all the results to be displayed, and we probably don't want to see all of them at once anyway. For this reason, just the beginning and the end of the results is displayed. Often, the number of rows will be so large that this operation could take a long time.
To check how many rows a table has, we can use the.count() method:
To fetch just a subset of the rows, we can use the.limit(n) method, where n is the number of samples we want. In this case we will fetch the first 3 countries from the table:
countries['name', 'continent', 'population'].limit(3)
 name continent population
0 Andorra EU 84000
1 United Arab Emirates AS _PHONE_
2 Afghanistan AS 29121286
Filters and order
Now that we've got an intuition of the data available in the table countries, we will extract some information from it by applying filters and sorting the data.
Let's focus on a single continent. We can see a list of unique continents in the table using the.distinct() method:
0 EU
1 AS
2 NA
3 AF
4 AN
5 SA
6 OC
Name: continent, dtype: object
We will focus on Asia (AS in the table). We can identify which rows belong to Asian countries using the standard Python == operator:
countries['continent'] == 'AS'
0 False
1 True
2 True
3 False
4 False
247 True
248 False
249 False
250 False
251 False
Name: tmp, Length: 252, dtype: bool
The result has a value True for rows where the condition is true, and the value False when it's not.
We can provide this expression to the method.filter(), and save the result in the variable asian_countries for future use.
asian_countries = countries['name', 'continent', 'population'].filter(countries['continent'] == 'AS')
 name continent population
0 United Arab Emirates AS _PHONE_
1 Afghanistan AS 29121286
2 Armenia AS _PHONE_
3 Azerbaijan AS _PHONE_
4 Bangladesh AS 156118464
5 Bahrain AS 738004
6 Brunei AS 395027
7 Bhutan AS 699847
8 Cocos [Keeling] Islands AS 628
9 China AS _PHONE_
10 Georgia AS _PHONE_
11 Hong Kong AS _PHONE_
12 Indonesia AS 242968342
13 Israel AS _PHONE_
14 India AS _PHONE_
15 British Indian Ocean Territory AS 4000
16 Iraq AS 29671605
17 Iran AS 76923300
18 Jordan AS _PHONE_
19 Japan AS 127288000
20 Kyrgyzstan AS _PHONE_
21 Cambodia AS _PHONE_
22 North Korea AS 22912177
23 South Korea AS 48422644
24 Kuwait AS _PHONE_
25 Kazakhstan AS _PHONE_
26 Laos AS _PHONE_
27 Lebanon AS _PHONE_
28 Sri Lanka AS 21513990
29 Myanmar AS 53414374
30 Mongolia AS _PHONE_
31 Macao AS 449198
32 Maldives AS 395650
33 Malaysia AS 28274729
34 Nepal AS 28951852
35 Oman AS _PHONE_
36 Philippines AS 99900177
37 Pakistan AS 184404791
38 Palestine AS _PHONE_
39 Qatar AS 840926
40 Saudi Arabia AS 25731776
41 Singapore AS _PHONE_
42 Syria AS 22198110
43 Thailand AS 67089500
44 Tajikistan AS _PHONE_
45 Turkmenistan AS _PHONE_
46 Turkey AS 77804122
47 Taiwan AS 22894384
48 Uzbekistan AS 27865738
49 Vietnam AS 89571130
50 Yemen AS 23495361
We can check how many


Changes: Arcturis
Back to page
m (adding ID to infobox, replaced: {{Stub/Mob}} {{npcbox |image =Arcturis.jpg | name = Arcturis | gender = Male | race = Spirit beast | creature = Beast | level = 74 | type = Rare Elite | health = 15423 | aggro = {{aggro|0|0}} | repfaction = | facti...)
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|image =Arcturis.jpg
|image =Arcturis.jpg
| name = Arcturis
| name = Arcturis|id=38453
| gender = Male
| gender = Male
| race = Spirit beast
| race = Spirit beast
Latest revision as of 19:34, August 13, 2012
CombatMobEliteRare 32Arcturis
Gender Male
Race Spirit beast (Beast)
Level 74 Rare Elite
Health 15423
Reaction Alliance Horde
Location Grizzly Hills
See Icon-3D-48x48
Pet information
Family Spirit beast
Arcturis is a level 74 spirit beast found in Grizzly Hills. He's one of the four Spirit Beasts known, and is the first Spirit Beast to have the look of a bear.
Trivia Edit
 - The name Arcturis is likely inspired by the name Arcturus, the name of the brightest star in the constellation Boötes, which in turn is derived from the Greek word άρκτος, meaning "bear".
 - Arcturus is also the name of a villain from Starcraft, Arcturus Mengsk
Notes Edit
 - Despite being a rare creature, Arcturis is not on the list of creatures needed for the Achievement zone stormpeaks 03 [Northern Exposure] or the Achievement zone dragonblight 09 [Frostbitten] achievements. He was solely added as a hunter pet.
 - Arcturis is rumored to be on a 21 hour spawn timer that begins from time of kill/tame. This timer DOES reset with server downs and maintenance days.
 - Although, spawn times have been reported from as short of a time as 6 hours, to longer times, upwards of 72 hours.
External links Edit
Around Wikia's network
Random Wiki


text:
Challenges of Personal Health Data Protection in the Era of Cloud Computing: A Comparative Legal Analysis
Author：Chih-hsing Ho Assistant Research Fellow
Origin of Topic
The Taiwanese government has recently promoted the adoption of cloud services in its government agencies since the Executive Yuan approved its "Cloud Computing Industrial Development Plan" in 2010. Among the twelve government's proposed cloud service schemes, the "Health Cloud Project", which has been initiated and funded by the Ministry of Health and Welfare since 2015, aims at applying cloud computing techniques to the National Health Insurance Database to help improve health care delivery. By analyzing the Taipei High Administrative Court's judgments, this paper argues that whether the National Health Insurance Bureau is entitled to release its national health insurance data to third parties for the purpose of secondary use is not without controversy. It further pinpoints that in addition to recognizing information autonomy, which has been proposed by the Grand Justices' constitutional interpretation, as well as considering the legislative purpose of the revision of the Personal Data Protection Act in Taiwan, there is a need to re-evaluate the challenges that cloud computing techniques could have brought to the implementation of the Personal Data Protection Act. This paper adopts a comparative legal perspective to analyze different rules and governance frameworks implemented by the EU, the UK, and the US in their various definitions of personal data and the regulation of risks associated with applying cloud computing techniques to personal data. It plans to reflect an adequate way to address the balance of individual privacy and public interest, especially the protection of personal and information autonomy that the government in Taiwan shall take into consideration for its cloud computing application.


Vibrating glove device could help people with nerve damage
A new glove device that delivers vibration feedback to the fingertips upon contact with surfaces has been designed to improve wearers' tactile sensitivity.
It could be used to assist individuals whose jobs require high-precision manual dexterity, or those with medical conditions that reduce their sense of touch, according to the engineers behind the prototype at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The fingertips of the glove contain a layer of piezoelectric material that generates an electrical charge when a mechanical force is applied to it. This powers an actuator made of a stack of lead zirconate titanate layers to generate high-frequency vibrations. The actuator is attached to the side of the fingertip, so that the palm-side of the finger remains free and the individual wearing the glove can continue to manipulate objects.
Research has shown that applying a small vibration to the side of the fingertip improves tactile sensitivity and motor performance.
In the latest set of experiments, the researchers attached the device to 10 healthy adult volunteers who then performed common sensory and motor-skill tasks, including texture discrimination, two-point discrimination, single-point touch and grasp tests. The experimental results showed that the volunteers performed statistically better on all of the tasks when mechanical vibration was applied.
For example, in the two-point discrimination test, two sharp points were pressed against the fingertip and volunteers reported whether they could reliably distinguish two points touching their finger versus just one. The results showed that when individuals were subjected to vibrations equal to 75 and 100 per cent of their thresholds, they could sense two points that were closer together.
'The future of this research may lead to the development of a novel orthopaedic device that could help people with peripheral nerve damage resume their daily activities, or improve the abilities of individuals with jobs that require skills in manipulation or texture discrimination,' said Prof Jun Ueda of Georgia Tech.


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As far as I can tell within an Fourier Transform Spectrometer the spectral information is gained from changing the path length along one arm, this sounds very similar to a michelson interferometer but using two apertures instead of one.
So are there any underlying differences between the two?
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You are right, fourier transform spectrometer is just a scanning Michelson interferometer. In spectroscopic applications these are just synonims. Spectral information is a fourier transform of intensity dependence on path length, thus the name. Usually a term wavemeter is used, meaning some interferometric device to measure wavelength, including FTS as well as Fabry–Pérot interferometers.
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text:
Sharing Books and Learning Language: What do Latina Mothers and Their Young Children Do?
Early Education and Development
Taylor and Francis
This study examined low-income, Spanish-speaking, immigrant Latina mothers' book sharing behaviors in relation to their children's vocabulary. Participants were 47 3-year-old children and their mothers. We addressed two research questions: (a) What interactive behaviors are evident when low-income immigrant Latina mothers and their 3-year-old children look at books together? (b) For these children and their mothers, which book-sharing behaviors are related to children's expressive language? Overall, our results indicated that mothers were involved in several kinds of interactions with the books. They enhanced their children's attention to the printed text, promoted interaction or conversation with their children about what was in the books, and somewhat less often, used more complex literacy strategies. Mothers who did these things most had children with the largest vocabularies even when mothers' vocabulary was taken into account. Implications for designing interventions for similar families are discussed.
Boyce, L. K., Cook, G. A., Roggman, L. A., Innocenti, M. S., Jump, V. K., & Akers, J. F. (2004). Looking at books and learning language: What do Hispanic mothers and children do? Early Education and Development, 15, 371-385.

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


for threads belonging to the same process; maybe we just need to generalize this "enhanced" highlighting behavior to user-defined groups.
 [Khouzam] Yes, this is probably an obvious thing for groups, now that we have it for the current Multicore Visualizer.
 7. The Multicore Visualizer should have the ability to zoom, and based on the zoom level, the view could automatically add more information because there is more space available. So the level of detail will increase with the zoom level
 [WRS] True -- the Multicore Visualizer already handles being made too small by omitting text labels and other detail. We can also go in the other direction and add more detail if we are given more real-estate. I wouldn't go too far in this direction, though, because then you'll wind up with people complaining about having to keep zooming in and out to see more and less detail. We might want to consider instead putting some information on separate, selectable "overlays" or "layers", so that one can select what's needed without having to make the visualizer bigger to accommodate it.
 [Khouzam] Valid point. I thought automatically adding more information as the user zoomed-in could be user-friendly. The "layer" concept should come first. Automatically turning on layers is something we could then discuss.
 - A concept of grid-in-grid would allow separating each Multicore Visualizer element into sub-elements like a box for each register, or variable. As an example, this could be applied to the zoom level, where we could zoom out of the Multicore Visualizer of a single chip and then show a Visualization of many chips, each one showing a grid of cores as a sub-element.
 [WRS] We might also allow multiple Visualizer views, as someone suggested at the EclipseCon talk, and then have a "Processor Visualizer" view, so that one can click around in the Multicore Visualizer, and see more detail about the currently selected cpu/core in the processor visualizer -- again, as a way to avoid the user having to constantly zoom in and out to see the necessary detail.
 [Khouzam] That sounds good. I'm a little worried that people wouldn't realize they could do this by using multiple views though. But I like that one view could show a higher level, and then using the synchronization with the debug view, a second view could be 'zoomed' on the currently selected core. Then, with Pin&Clone, you could even have multiple views, zoomed on different cores at the same time.
 8. Synchronized resume and step must be supported in the Visualizer view. A synchronized resume or step is performed on multiple cores/processes/threads while keeping the progression in lock-step where each entity progresses at the exact same ratio.
 [WRS] If it's like synchronized resume of multiple threads, that might be a back-end/debugger feature, and below the visualizer's radar.
 [Khouzam] You are right that the actual implementation of the synchronized resume/step must be performed by the back-end. But CDT will need to provide UI to support this operation.
 - The concept of a leader for a synchronized operation is necessary. The leader is the entity part of the synchronized operation that will indicate when the operation has completed. For example, if two threads are stepped in a synchronized manner, the selected leader thread is the one for which the step must finish to indicate the operation is done.
 - The Visualizer view should support soft-groups. A soft-group is a group that is defined for a single operation; for example, a drag-selection or a multi-selection define a soft-group. Soft-groups needs a way to select a leader for synchronized operations. For multi-select, the last selection could be the leader. For drag-selection, the user could specify the leader by un-selecting an entity and then re-selecting it, making it the last one part of the selection.
 9. Building blocks of the view should not be limited to cores, but should be a generic building block that the user can name, set the size, specify the content. The content needs to be based on what the backend knows: "fundamental building blocks", i.e., threads, cores, chips, etc.
 - The Visualizer view could have a concept of widgets which already exists or can be created.
 - Configuration may need to be done at different levels. This means that some configuration would be done by the chip provider, e.g., the number of cores to show, other hardware entries to show; while other configuration could be done by the installer, e.g., which subset of cores to actually show the team of developers; and even more configuration at the user-level, e.g., which register to show
 [WRS] Again, is this extending the Multicore Visualizer, or providing "building block" support for custom views in the framework? We'd need some examples of what people would like to achieve to know where this building block / configuration support should properly live.
 [Khouzam] This is an ambitions and vague requirement. I suggest we revisit it once we have better support for customizations and layers.
 10. When doing drag-selection, it would be convenient to also drag-deselect (DONE)
Comments above from:
 - [WRS] Bill Swanson, Tilera Corporation
 - [Khouzam] Marc Khouzam, Ericsson
Multi-chip debugging
The CDT community is mostly focused in enabling multi-core debugging to the CDT. However, support for multi-chip debugging would also be interesting where you have chips->cores->processes->threads. Current solution will be to use multiple debug sessions (multiple GDBs). We will need GDB support to have a better integrated solution using a single GDB; using a single GDB would allow, for example, to support synchronous control of different chips.
Watch view
A new 'Watch' view would be a good addition to the CDT. This view (see 'watch' command in unix) would provide a way for the user to request that a console command or set of commands be executed at specific times such as:
 - after every state-changing operation
 - at a periodic interval
 - on particular events (suspend, running)
 - based on filters (when thread1 stops)
 - watchpoints
 - catchpoints
 - breakpoints
 - etc
It may be good to look at what is provide by the IAR Debugger where it is apparently possible to have a watch window which can be used to watch expressions which are updated in a specifiable interval.
 1. This concept could be extended to eclipse operations, like refreshing a view automatically on those triggers
 2. We could mimic a breakpoint condition/commands to allow the user to 'run a script' whenever one of the above triggers occurs. This script could be a gdb python script
 3. The view should always refresh if the context changes, unless it is pinned
 4. This watch view would handle its output in the following way:
 1. There should be a standard scrolling mode
 2. There should also be a fixed size output that only shows the last output.We could then "page up" to jump to the previous output repeatedly.
 3. We should have a toggle to choose between the two modes
 5. Another enhancement would be to highlight the changes from the new output compared to the previous output. This would allow the user to quickly see what changes. A nice way of showing change dynamically is firefox' javascript debugger who shows the new html code written in red to indicate what the single step actually created in html. This could be disabled by the user if the data is too different.
Enhancements to the Modules view
The modules view is used to show the list of currently used dynamically linked libraries. The view is updated whenever a new library is loaded or an existing one is unloaded (although there is currently a bug that makes the update not happen). The view also shows information about the libraries such as file location, base address and size. Below are some requirements for the Modules view.
Note that the Watch view described above may be more valuable than the below enhancements
 1. The view should be context-aware and show what is currently loaded based on the current context (process/core)
 2. Although modules can change when a process/core is running, it only needs to be refreshed once the process/core stops, just like for variables and such.
 3. Refresh of the view should be based on GDB's new MI events: =lib-loaded and =lib-unloaded
 4. Since the modules view is so simple for GDB, as to repeatedly issue the 'info sharedlib' command, the current behavior of the view could be replaced by the
new proposed Watch view which would send the 'info sharedlib' command upon the proper triggers.
Enhancements to Disassembly view
The Disassemby view shows the running code as disassembled by GDB. The view allows navigating through that disassembled code, to set breakpoints/tracepoints, and to show the disassembled code interleaved with source code. Below are some requirements relevant to the Disassembly view.
 1. Should support different memory spaces and allow the user to choose which memory space to show the disassembly for.
 2. Instructions that correspond to the same source code line should be identified. An example is shading them to the same color, and/or a vertical bar in the margin (see ARM product http://inf


algorithmic modeling for Rhino
I want to use kangaroo to achieve a minimal surface ( close to the one in the attached picture) where the open edges are made from 2 catenary Curves. How can I keep the two catenary curves in their place ( perpendicular to the XY plane)...
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Here is one way to set this up.
Turning the surface into a mesh, fixing the corners and letting the boundary vertices slide along the outer edge.
Note that this is a tensile surface, but not actually a true minimal one - that is a bit more work to set up using the soap film element.
Thank you a lot for your explanation, I will work on the adding soap film element..
I am not that expert in this topic but what I know is that you can achieve a minimal surface as a version of an existing one you already created, even if the surface is not flat the mean curvature can still be zero, here is an explanation:
"Minimal surface curvature planes. On a minimal surface the curvature along the principal curvature planes are equal and opposite at every point. This makes the mean curvature zero"
Thank you so much I will try them
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text:
Sometimes, there is a kind of error or ambiguity in our documents that causes so many problems for other people. When this happens, they want to know that why it happened. In that situation, you must write an explanation letter telling the recipient about the situation.
What is a letter of explanation for address variation?
This letter is a brief explanation letter that is written when someone needs to explain anything pertaining to the error or variation in the financial or any kind of document. When a problem is found in a document, it often causes a pause in an underwriting. Due to this, a person is expected to explain the situation by writing a brief letter.
When to write this explanation letter?
There is no hard and fast rule as to when you should write this explanation letter. Whenever you find out that you have left a discrepancy in the financial document you submitted to the bank, you can write an explanation letter explaining the whole thing.
In general, institutes that find the error often contact the customer and asks him to write a letter of explanation. In this situation, this becomes a kind of compulsion for the customer to write the explanation letter.
Sometimes, what we call a discrepancy or error is not an error or problem but an intentional variation. This happens when a person has two addresses, and he is not sure as to which address, he should specify in the document. Even if the address variation is intentional, it is important to communicate it so that the reader can get rid of the confusion.
How to write the explanation letter to address the issue of address variation?
If you are in the need to write this letter and you don't know how to write it, you can follow the tips given below:
- Provide your basic details to make it easy for the recipient to identify you.
- This is formal that does not need you to give any irrelevant information. You can directly state the letter from the main thing you wanted to communicate.
- Mention the reason for having the variation in the address. Make sure that you write the reason in such a way that it makes sense and the recipient understands the whole problem.
- Even if the variation was intentional and not a mistake, you should apologize for not having it communicated earlier.
- At the end of the letter, you can ask the recipient to change the address at a certain place if the variation was not intentional.
- Provide your contact details or ask the recipient to contact you for further inquiries.
Name of the sender
Address of the sender
Subject: Letter of explanation for address variation
Dear Mr. XYZ,
I am an account holder in ABC bank with the account number (mention the account number with branch code). I have received a letter from the bank yesterday asking me to explain the address variation that has been pointed out in my statement. Therefore, I am writing the explanation letter in response to that letter.
This letter will explain the address variation that you have seen in my credit report:
- I have mentioned two different addresses on the document I submitted to the bank by mistake. Since I have moved to a new city, there are lots of documents where the change of address was required.
- I was intended to change the address at all the places wherever my old address was mentioned. However, there were some places where there was still a need to change it.
- I could not change the address at all the places and therefore, caused my details to look ambiguous.
I am really sorry to cause you this kind of inconvenience. I am hereby clearly mentioning here that my address in Boston was a real address that I want the bank to consider for any kind of correspondence in the future. I hope that you have understood the entire situation and find no problem in bringing modifications to the letter. In case you have anything to ask, you can contact me.
File: Word (.docx) 2007+ and iPad
Size 21 Kb


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The Sporting Edge UK Altitude Training equipment, ranges from the Cloud 9 personal mask based kit, to Altitude Rooms and 'fully climatic' Environmental Chambers.
- This is the personal/home use equipment of our range which is suitable to be used with a mask (exercise) or an Altitude Tent (sleeping or exercise). The air from the Cloud 9 is ideal for breathing direct once connected to the reservoir/silencer bag, it produces 'altitude' air ideal for altitude training regimes.
- The LT is powered from a standard power socket and is controlled by the same touch screen application which is used in our larger systems. It includes sensors to monitor Oxygen, Temperature, Humidity and Carbon Dioxide. These are ideal for the altitude bedroom, house or a small commercial gym set up. This form of altitude training elicits a greater 'buy in' from the participant due to the removal of the mask element.
Standard Altitude Room
- Our Altitude Rooms can be created from a room using near standard building techniques and comprise an air compressor, an air separation unit and a touch screen controller. As with the LT system all Oxygen, Temperature, Humidity and Carbon Dioxide readings are monitored and displayed. These systems can range up to 1650m.cu size rooms.
Environmental Rooms & Chambers
- The Environmental range of rooms and chambers are fully integrated into a touch screen application, offering one touch 'pre-set' destinations. The pre-sets will comprise of a combination of temperature, humidity and altitude. Depending on the extremes of the conditions required, determines the construction of the room from one comprising near standard building techniques to a fully insulated cold room incorporating a lobby and service hatch.


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|Region||Tororo District, Uganda|
|Native speakers||360,000 (2002 census)|
Adhola, also known as Jopadhola and Ludama, is a dialect of Southern Luo spoken by the Adhola people (AKA Jopadhola or Badama) of Uganda. Dhopadhola is generally mutually intelligible with Acholi, Lango, Kumam, and Alur of Uganda and Dholuo of Kenya.
The prefix dho means "language of". It can be attached to a nationality or speech community to imply the language of such a people. jo means "people of". The infix pa means possessive 'of'.
Dhopadhola thus means the language spoken in Padhola.
Padhola is the area or region where Dhopadhola is spoken.
Jopadhola is the plural of Japadhola; a person who speaks Dhopadhola. Hence, Jopadhola are speakers of Dhopadhola.
Ja is a prefix meaning the 'doer' or a person belonging to a particular place or position. The plural is Jo. That is, people who do something or belong to a particular place or organisation.
Jafwonji means a teacher.
Jofwonji means teachers.
Jawer means a singer.
Jower means singers.
Janywol means a parent.
Jonywol means parents.
Japach means a carpenter.
Jopach means carpenters.
|Adhola dialect test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator|
|This Nilo-Saharan languages-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.|


text: This study highlights the corporate governance potential of debt maturity structure for Turkish firms through investigating its association with ownership and control structure. We model leverage and debt maturity as jointly endogenous under simultaneous equations framework. Firstly, we find that both concentrated ownership structure and presence of a large shareholder is directly but moderately related to corporate debt maturity. We also document that it is important for Turkish firms to match maturity of their assets with maturity of their liabilities. Our findings lend considerable support to the prediction that as firms get financially strong or have more growth opportunities they shorten their corporate debt maturity structure. Moreover, despite having a controlling large shareholder or a concentrated ownership structure, firms with growth opportunities still prefer shorter maturities in order to solve the underinvestment problems. Finally, firm size is positively associated with long-term debt and our empirical analysis provides no evidence that taxes affect debt maturity structure.


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Patrick and the Serpent
(St.). According to tradition, St. Patrick cleared Ireland of its vermin; one old serpent resisted him; but St. Patrick overcame it by cunning. He made a box, and invited the serpent to enter it. The serpent objected, saying it was too small; but St. Patrick insisted it was quite large enough to be comfortable. After a long contention, the serpent got in to prove it was too small, when St. Patrick slammed down the lid, and threw the box into the sea. To complete this wonderful tale, the legend says the waves of the sea are made by the writhings of this serpent, and the noise of the sea is that of the serpent imploring the saint to release it.
Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
More on Patrick and the Serpent from Infoplease:


Polarity Reference Channels: PostgreSQL Error Codes
Polarity User Tips - Jun 26, 2020
Polarity Reference Channels: PostgreSQL Error Codes cover image
Today's post continues an ongoing series on Polarity User Tips. Data tells a story, Polarity helps you see it with Augmented Reality overlaying contextual information as you work, giving you the right data at the right time to make informed decisions and take action with speed (no glasses or goggles required). This guide explains how you can see the story in your data with Polarity using the PostgreSQL Error Codes Reference Channel.
Intro to Polarity Reference Channels
Polarity Channels are a way to organize Entities and Annotations into logical groups, such as all of your assets or your LinkedIn contacts.
Reference channels are a Polarity Channel that is based on another source of information that is used just for reference purposes by Polarity Users. Reference channels can be anything from a list of internal or external threats to a list of assets to the PostgreSQL Error Codes list.
Where to find Reference Channels
On the Polarity Github page, download the PostgreSQL Error Codes reference channel or browse our library of reference channels for better data awareness and recall.
What are PostgreSQL Error Codes?
The PostgreSQL Error Codes is a list of codes that help database users troubleshoot what is happening within the database. The codes range from things that help with queries that are causing issues to errors that have occurred when the database crashes.
PostgreSQL Error Codes Reference Channels in Polarity
Based on the list that Postgres publishes, we have put together a CSV that you can easily upload into Polarity as a reference channel. The reference channel will instantly map the error codes that Postgres provides to what the error code is allowing you to easily correct what is happening.
For example, when you are troubleshooting inside a virtual machine and see something on your screen like "42601" in the image below, you immediately have awareness of what the errors mean, allowing you to course-correct what you are working on without ever having to leave the terminal.
In this image, notice the highlighted error codes 42P01, 42703, or 42601 on the left. You can see that Polarity's computer vision recognized the text on screen, and in real-time while the analyst is working, it has provided contextual information from the PostgreSQL Error Code Reference Channel in the overlay window on the right.
What Next?
Tune into our next Community Tech Tuesday to learn more. Not a Polarity user? See for yourself with a Polarity demo or trial, or take the Tour.


SSH local port forwarding doesn't work, opens a TTY connection instead
Posted September 9, 2019 716 views
Linux CommandsUbuntu 16.04
I'm trying to forward a remote port to a local port on my machine. This is the command I'm using
ssh -R 9000:localhost:3000 root@
But instead this opens a terminal connection. Is my SSH misconfigured? What might be the issue?
1 answer
Local port forwarding lets you connect from your local computer to another server. To use local port forwarding, you need to know your destination server, and two port numbers.
You can try to achieve this using the following command:
ssh -L 9000:localhost:3000 host/serverIPaddress
Basically you need to slightly modified your command not to use root@IP in the end.
Let me know how it goes.
Submit an Answer


text:
Leaning Within a Flexible Inflation-Targeting Framework: Review of Costs and Benefits
This note examines the merits of monetary policy adjustments in response to financial stability concerns, taking into account changes in the state of knowledge since the renewal of the inflation-targeting agreement in 2011. A key financial system vulnerability in Canada is elevated household indebtedness: as more and more households are nearing their debt-capacity limits, the likelihood and severity of a large negative correction in housing markets are also increasing. Adjusting the path of policy rates can be effective in reducing the buildup of household debt and the likelihood of a house price correction over the medium term. Such adjustments can also generate a fall in inflation and in output over the short term compared with the case without a policy-rate adjustment. Overall, the estimated benefits of a leaning adjustment tend to be smaller than its social losses, since its impact on the buildup of vulnerabilities is modest and the reduction in the incidence of house price corrections or financial crises is limited.


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First-principles calculation and valence electron structure analysis of diamond crystal growth from Fe-Ni-C system at high temperature and high pressure
Xiaohong Fan, Bin Xu, Jing Li and Xiaofei Guo
First principle was used to investigate the lattice constants of graphite at high temperature and high pressure (HTHP) firstly. The results computed by density-functional theory with the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) and the local density approximation (LDA) respectively, were agreed well with the experimental ones. After comparing the accuracy of the calculation results, the GGA method were used to compute the lattice constants of diamond and Fe3C at HTHP, while LDA method was used to compute those of graphite. Based on the empirical electron theory of solid and molecules (EET), the valence electron structures (VESs) of diamond, graphite and Fe3C under the condition of diamond synthesis temperature and pressure (5.3GPa, 1623 K) were then constructed. The relative electron density differences (REDDs) of the diamond/graphite and diamond/Fe3C interfaces were also calculated. It was found that the graphite/diamond interfaces were not continuous under 5.3GPa, 1623 K, while the Fe3C/diamond interfaces were continuous at the first order of approximation, indicating that the carbon atoms, required for diamond growth, could possibly come from the decomposition of Fe3C, but not directly from the graphite.
Keywords: Ab initio calculations, interfaces, carbides, electronic structure.


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When fitting an econometric model, it is well known that we pick up part of the idiosyncratic characteristics of the data along with the systematic relationship between dependent and explanatory variables. This phenomenon is known as overfitting and generally occurs when a model is excessively complex relative to the amount of data available. Overfitting is a major threat to regression analysis in terms of both inference and prediction.
We start by showing that the Copas measure becomes confounded by shrinkage or expansion arising from in-sample bias when applied to the untransformed scale of nonlinear models, which is typically the scale of interest when assessing behaviors or analyzing policies. We then propose a new measure of overfitting that is both expressed on the scale of interest and immune to this problem. We also show how to measure the respective contributions of in-sample bias and overfitting to the overall predictive bias when applying an estimated model to new data.
We finally illustrate the properties of our new measure through both a simulation study and a real-data illustration based on inpatient healthcare expenditure data, which shows that the distinctions can be important. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.