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Voucherology
I've continued to defend my position that the best argument against vouchers is private schools are intentionally off the hook from really going deeply into civics out of loyalty to Uncle Sam, grooming students to be president someday.
For example, you might be doing this "grin and bear it" stint in Oregon, a Japanese national, staring down the barrel of some ETS equivalent, have no time to waste on what passes for "curriculum" at Joe Sixpack public high school.
So you attend a private school, funded by Japanese companies, and no, you can't take public tax funded vouchers to fund your attendance here, nor did you ask to do that, ever.
The USA is very accepting of the many cultures and isn't hell bent on stifling freedoms, so we have lots of Yeshivas, Ashrams, Gulags, Gazeebos you name it.
Many kids go through life mostly oblivious to the USA's inner workings and dynamics, don't need to know, don't care to know, read the voters' pamphlets, take cues from community leaders.
However, those public systems which work openly in service of the public trust in having a USA sustained charter, need to focus on training and recruiting future elected officials and their support staffs, providing them with the skills necessary to work in a rough and tumble democracy with many diverse ethnicities endeavoring to self-govern as USA citizens.
Filling openings in local, state and federal government from the ranks of public schools is not a conflict of interest, it's what these schools are especially good at, by design.
Now one could imagine an "eager beaver" private school turning itself into a 100% flag waving pro USA elite academy, taking that tack, and then lining up to take vouchers, could happen.
But that's a kind of back handed loophole approach, versus simply forming a new charter and accepting public monies openly and directly, i.e. if you want to quack like a public school, why not just be one?
There's a wrinkle here, in that some private academies might actually have a more effective way of promoting its grads into government positions i.e. it is indeed possible for privately run schools to outshine public ones, even where training "virtual presidents" is concerned. Something in the meatloaf? Some secret sauce?
However this is not inherently a contradiction, nor need these schools take a position any different from mine on the voucher issue, i.e. they're proud of not taking government handouts, even as they help staff the ranks of government. Takes all kinds.
Back at Cubespace
I'm geeking out around town again, hoping to snarf five PHP books before sundown, praise Allah for O'Reilly's Safari.
These have been heady days. I phoned the office of a heart surgeon, talked with the secretary, hoping for permission to use his name as a reference, having collaborated on that application for the operating room years ago.
Too boring for ER or Gray's Anatomy: Kirby in scrubs, 2 AM, plugging away in Microsoft FoxPro at the observation station, all darkness and empty theaters, nothing going, reams of xBase reflecting in my glasses, pre-iPod (CD players in the theaters though).
By day, I'd be out of their way, except those few times when perfusionists called me in for a font change or something, a way of keeping alert during a sometimes long procedure, for which they are highly trained.
Open heart surgery is a little like open source programming: many eyeballs praying for easy fixes for complications (aka "shallow bugs"). Surgeons have a cool bag of tricks, more every day, plus sometimes an angioplasty is sufficient (like with a stent or balloon).
I'm still debating about OSCON, whether I should give a talk this year in San Jose (Silicon Valley). Would anyone be interested? Do I have a budget?
Attracting Grunchies to cosponsor my Oregon Curriculum Network has been like pulling teeth (mine). No one thinks there's any commercial potential in tetrahedra I guess, aside from Lipton, or at least not 4D ones -- 3D is OK, as long as squares get to go first and qyoobs get all the respect they deserve.
Hooray for qyoobs, I love Big Brother, V-sign etc. (flag waving -- not white though).
I accepted an invite to join another book review team, another "animal book" maybe, University of Michigan connection.
More School Business
Anna continues chopping wood for her Thunderbird Early College Charter. Her meetings with LEP High, which I arranged, had to do with governance structures, model UN, and relationships with local institutions of higher learning.
The K-16 pipeline isn't about regimenting by age too strictly, especially in terms of technical content -- orthogonal to "lore" I would argue, e.g. there's nothing to stop Big Bird from teaching about complex numbers, other than reputation (character) -- no small asset in his case, ditto Barney.
So, if Jill shoots ahead up the fish ladder, wants to geek out, the well-designed charter obliges by providing early access to college materials, presuming that's what she craves. This presumes good town-gown relations, between administrators and faculties.
Closer to home, I've continued lallygagging with OS Bridge organizers Audrey and Selena, Igal and Ed. I referred them to my letter of introduction to the new PPS superintendent, about promotiong Portland schools at Pycon 2009, a possible source of marketing ideas?
How to interest teachers, executives, activists of all stripes, in the prospects of free and open source software (FOSS) and hardware? What good is "open source" if you can't read it or change it?
Not just the Gutenberg Press sparked a renaissance; also critical was learning how to teach reading effectively.
Private sky namespace: I'm liking CHR for "chief of human resources", rhymes with CTO, CSO etc., plus HR also stands for human rights.
Quiet First Day
re "evil Russians"
This is post number 501 to Control Room, sounds like a blue jeans commercial.
Alexia is over for a family breakfast. They're heading to Multnomah Friends, where Tara has committee responsibilities. Then we get to meet up with our friends from Stillaguamish Country (north of Seattle).
Speaking of Quakers, Quaker-P is abuzz with policy discussions this morning, John Wilmerding, fellow faculty at John Woolman College, having just archived something to the new USA president, others (e.g. me) kibitzing.
I'm currently in the process of getting my Python for Teachers peer reviewed, just sent out some more links, to like New Mexico Tech and places. Loyal readers of my blog will have seen a lot of this material already.
Salons Dot Net
Some holdouts still think the printed page is the best investment, and I do enjoy my glossy magazines, bought the new Vanity Fair at Powell's yesterday, Tara getting something in metaphysics.
However the scribes were doing illuminated manuscripts while dreaming of Prospero's Books, much as Leibniz was dreaming of machine executable languages. They were enjoying a thriving economy while prefiguring a future one, ours, based more around LCDs, with more economies to come.
In the lore we study as geekoid Americanos, Romany Marie figures in as one of our early CSN queens. She helped Bucky and Isamu find one another, making history. Philosophy and coffee shops have an old relationship anyway, some saying those were the beans Pythagoras raved about, in terms of boosting his IQ. I don't believe it.
The printed page stays important of course, nor is there a line between those, and the illuminated screen versions. We're talking a kind of isomorphism here, with digital storage actually more secure, assuming a high tech civilization able to perpetuate itself (a lot to assume, but it's what the book people were aiming for, so it's not like we're abandoning their dream of literate descendants).
I'm awake early again, chipping away on my slides for Chicago, fixing those typos. We're gonna slog through a pre-college "curriculum of tomorrow" (or visit an "other tomorrow" as Esozone put it) but not by treating ourselves as if we're on some remedial track. No, we're busy professionials, here to have fun. Experience counts for something. We'll share lotsa lore.
Twas my privilege to meet with the CSN CTO at Laughing Planet today, to go over my Pycon 2009 Chicago slides. I'm now one of the lucky few with this Save the Polar Bears T-shirt, a fine work of art.
We also chatted about the CFO some, another jet setter, if I may use an archaic term.
Prior to jets, Hollywood movie stars would head for Avalon, Catalina, a romantic overnight trip. The small airfield wasn't really about handling large scale commercial traffic, so when jet travel came into vogue, Catalina sort of went off the radar, in favor of Paris, Hawaii...
The Chicago talk looks at the importance of mnemonics, the Art of Memory, as a complement of skills building. We master new skills with a purpose, because we're expecting to accomplish some real world task. A seminar or workshop will have that purpose as a focus, and gear its stories accordingly.
The same skills-building exercises will come wrapped in different stories, depending on which subculture is making use of the tools (in this case, computer languages).
My choice of predominantly Akbar font was pretty interesting. We talked about Oregon's history as a source of cartooning, including of political cartooning. My particular brand of positive futurism builds on that past.
Inaugural Day Ball
Confetti by D. Koski using vZome
David Koski has been working hard on his analysis of the 62-faced great rhombicosidodecahedron in terms of component hexahedra, in turn comprised of edges from the golden cuboid.
These studies relate to Steve Baer's vis-a-vis the 90-faced enneacontahedron, the hexahedral Baer cells likewise expressible in terms of phi-scaled tetrahedral components.
This newest dissection features 455 hexahedra with some of these (70) flattened into tiles, yielding one hexagon and two compositions of three Penrose tiles (two thin and a fat, two fat and a thin), the latter suitable for tiling the 12 decagons.
Additional patterns pertain, relating the axial count to surface:total facet ratios. These patterns served Koski as a guide, when developing this 15 axis shape from a 14 axis precursor, adding 91 hexahedra in the process.
Five of the component hexahedra are simple cubes and in Confetti (above), their locations are depicted. Note that one of these cubes is on the surface. David comments: "The name? First thing to pop in my head. I do like the Obama inaugural celebratory tie in."
Omnitriangulating
I drove to the place on NE 33rd where the Google Streets car turned by the Oregon Food Bank, a former client.
Google Maps helpfully demarcates Streets View coverage, when you drag the little person icon onto the map, so finding this turn was no problem.
Dignity Village, not currently included in the dodeca-cam archive, is experimentally prototypical of the small, remote (sometimes extremely) campus of tomorrow, featuring local self government, some permaculture, plenty of bandwidth (potentially), and easy enough access to transportation (PDX is adjacent, while the #10 stops right outside the main gate).
Today was bright and cold, with a strong east wind from up the Columbia Gorge.
The weather wasn't severe enough to keep us off the water however. Brenda of Washington DC, and Leslie of Multnomah's Friendly Care Committee joined us in this Wanderers head office for a pow wow. I dug out the Bucky play brochure and talked about Doug Tompos, the actor, coming on the boat last year.
Given Leslie is highly trained as a teacher, I was happy to get some pointers on my technique after explaining the gist of public key cryptography to her, a topic she thought might be of interest to Montessori students.
Welcome back Alexia, after a long drive from Tennessee, looking forward to seeing you once you get settled.
OOP in an Hour
Alex knows his stuff
Learn OOP the Python way, from a master. Sure, it's a home movie in some ways, but that's part of its charm.
This takes us back a ways, to the dawn of Python 2.3 when the property descriptor was introduced. What's a descriptor again? If you've heisted the __set__, __get__ and __delete__ rib cage, that makes you one.
Note: every Python class comes with a "rib cage" of special names or __ribs__, for which you're free to define special behaviors. Snakes have lots of ribs so this all makes some sense, no?
OS Bridge
:: pythonic math in the silicon forest ::
:: birds of a feather ::
:: open source science ::
Mathematical Toyz
Projectile Motion in VPython
by Erik Thompson at Cal State
Calling it "progamming for everyone" ala CP4E and/or P4E may give the wrong picture, given cultural stereotypes.
TV people program, sequence our shows (lotsa loops on HBO). Go to the theater, many churches, and they hand you a program don't they. The calendar is a program, a web framework, serving events (meetings, holidays) -- ready or not a lot of the time (those wheels keep on turning).
You'll interact with our snake (Python), play with a deque, a chat bot, reach into the guts of our objects for methods (dot notation), but did you write any programs? Maybe, maybe not (sure, sometimes). We don't care that much, what you call something everybody does (dinks around? solves stuff?).
We're too busy learning about vectors and polyhedra in Vpython to care strongly if this is "computer programming" or not (what's that again?). We've got this philosophical model, a logic, of objects with attributes, and yes, it happens to be machine executable (a feature, not a bug).
We're playing with "toyz" (edgier than "toys" -- closer to real tools of the trade).
Or do we deny junior much access to toyz? Too dangerous to empower her or him with executive level skills. She might become a hacker, move to Portland, feed that open source revolution or whatever they call it. Can't have that. Must oppress, must deaden.
No Zome, no vZome, no magnetic MITEs, no StrangeAttractors, nothing much hands-on (certainly no GPS, no classes in how to use those school-issued PDAs), no YouTube... a conspiracy of idiocrats or simply obsolete programming?
Does it matter whom we blame? Only to the extent that this helps us solve the problem. Allow for upgrades (have faith), do the work, be attentive, experiment. These are some Quaker teachings as well.
:: stairway 2 by David Koski in vZome ::
:: cube view ::
I'm a cube farmer today, in familiar digs, having checked in at the front desk. My job: curriculum writing around Unicode, bridging that to our gnu numeracy sequence, which takes you to public key cryptography, embedded in every web browser, by senior year (the better to run your Visa card my dear -- you've seen that little key when in SSL mode right?).
My solution: do the early group theory stuff using non-Latin-1 characters, or maybe with Latin-1 if working with those unfamiliar with it. The point is to focus on the patterns without getting sucked in by any meaning, let the characters stay alien and interesting; more cardination than ordination.
You'll see another approach in my Vegetable Group Soup, done in Flash. Turn down your sound if you're in a cube not using headphones, might be annoying.
On my lunch break, I'm doing something perverse: buying the same pair of shoes I just bought from Payless, because I somehow managed to misplace some size 13Ws. My understanding of P.D. Ouspensky is he'd've had himself taken back side of the barn and shot for such spaciness (something about an umbrella -- kinda scary those Russians), but then fortunately "man cannot do" (joke).
That'll give me a chance to move the car (in a 30 minute slot) and pick a different cube (lots of empties, not tethered by an Ethernet cord). I've got the Men's Warehouse shoes now, doing "the professor". Cell phone: Mary just called, setting up lunch for Thursday, cool. The CFO, met via Western Equities, is flitting about, doing the "hotlanta circuit" via Texas.
US Bank did come through with that SBA thing, but it's not really a capital equipment challenge (KTU3's giant Sony Trinitron monitor may be going soon, I'll grant you that). It's more a matter of HR, of too many lawyers not knowing enough SQL, if I might be blunt about something. People sit around in meetings deciding what they're entitled to, but nobody has the skills. I understand Patrick's disillusionment and the millions Portland may have already lost to some other city with more savvy about buzz bots (very SQL intensive). Reminds me of the old bedside story where the patient goes "whassa matter doc, ain't my millions good enough for ya?" Too much stairway to heaven talk in some circles, no one enrolling in medical school, actually doing the hard jobs.
Of course I exaggerate the direness of the situation. Given the global Internet, we're not dependent on any one local economy for smarts. Plus Portland is on a steep learning curve, thanks to the Bucky play, thanks to Powell's, thanks to ISEPP, thanks to a lot of reasons. We're a very literate culture, plus have that pioneer spirit to boot.
Nick was through yesterday, coming from Bellingham, looks like Chehalis has opened again. Fernwood was like under water I think he said. We yakked about the student loan problem, Princeton having an enlightened policy on that score (ahead of its time). I'm more in the mood to talk "refund" than "forgiveness" but that's just my usual blarney (goes hand in hand with that elvynchyk "not ready to make nice" talk). OK, gotta go. My XO fits in the Ubuntu bag no problem. I have two XOs, thanks to "get one, keep one" (joke).
Cockfight!
:: looking at Spore ::
OK, it's somewhat demented, but consistent with my view that shadow boxing with puppets is a way to sublimate violence, more than encourage it. Channel aggression into these games, play chess (cold), not war (hot). Even make the games remunerative in some way, educational.
From the Wanderers list:
Here's an invention, based on Spore and like those: kids breed their own chickens, based on various comical algorithms, on the computer (cartoon chickens), ready for combat in a game called 'Cockfight!'. At first parents object but then we show how it comes with a syllabus, like Clifford Geertz doing deep description, lots of National Geographic video about cock fighting cultures, and suddenly it's OK, and not only that, junior gets academic credit in the anthro department, plus you can play for real money, so some of the parents get involved, muscle junior aside, get involved in obsessive cockfighting for money -- all thanks to me.
As I mentioned later on edu-sig:
My own DWA / 4D has: Satellite Toshiba x1 (x2 counting mom's when she's around, plus she has a Sony Vaio which I'm not counting); OLPC XO x2; Ubuntu Dell laptops x2; various PC desktops x4 (3 in office, one for Spores etc., working on Spores-based Cockfight! concept, an alternative to violence against chickens (roosters), with real money bets possible, more on Wanderers Yahoo! list (have to knock to get in)).
Note I say "concept" i.e. I am not equipped to write this computer game all by my lonesome (nobody is -- takes a team). Most projects that interest me aren't one person jobs (e.g. the edu-sig link above talks more about my "bizmo" fleets).
In the context of Wanderers, I went on to compare having the Bucky & Ed stuff in philosophy to having a "combat chicken" on steroids giving philosophers fun ways to engage other departments on their own turf, more like in the old days, very Quadrivial.
Of course that's a trivializing metaphor, but hey, as a Quaker who plays Quake, I have my own karma to work out. My World Game Museum is another one of my outlets, helps me get through the day.
1-2-3 Testing...
I use Skype with my CTO sometimes (even to send money). Here I'm testing Google Video Chat with Friend Fabik. Works great. Dave's on an Eee PC by Asus (costs more than an XO).
Weird Technoinvective
From the Wanderers list (adding hyperlinks here); me swatting at something. FAQ: "what's technoinvective Dr. Urner?"
Yeah STEM is a big buzz word, see that on Math Forum, also in Anna's writings (she's the charter school founding home schooling Sarah Palin type in Wasilla, doing Thunderbird Charter based on STEM).
What I heckled IEEE about at Portland Center Stage is how it's all so much lip service, as here I am, giving the basic STEM class, focusing on late 20th century sphere packing etc., which you'd think we'd be up to by now, yet I have approximately zero competition. They cart kids back to their public school prisons in tears after my class, as that's probably the last light of intelligence they're ever gonna see. Then it's back to dark ages Oliver Twist and anglophile curricula (count me an anglophile, but these curricula are from the time of Malthus-Darwin and we've come a long way since then).
So I do tend to snicker and sneer when I hear people tout their "reforms". As a back stage kinda guy, I know they're just bluffing, have no intention of saying "buckminsterfullerene" in the context of teaching about hexapents (e.g. nanotubes) which, if they have any clue about, they're not sharing (Alaska, on the other hand, does seem sincere, even wants to teach Python). It's the lower 48 (48L) that serves as a base for a cesspool of scam artists, a lot of them big name foundations, very into strut-and-puffery (reminds me of pre-WWII in some ways).
Anyway, not to sound too pessimistic, I don't think it's all up to the lower-48 where we go with STEM. Japan has a lot of strong leadings, and South Africa has already been a key player, will continue to be so. Alaska ain't so stupid either. Even Guam is ahead of West Virginia I'd hazard (but then who isn't?).
I'm just not looking to WDC for any leadership on this (Obama an exception -- he's from Hawaii, not L48), as legislator-lawyers don't have much math-science under their belts, can't think their way out of a paper bag, just take direction from Obnoxico (cite my rants on Exxon Math recently -- hollow self-promotion in the wake of wanton eco-slaughter).
Doug Strain was pretty funny on this, when talking about the transition to "cesium time" -- lots of pretty boys in the Navy, acting all miffed, just because they couldn't wrap their heads around metrology (Doug's forte). So they go down in history looking stupid, so what else is new?
When taxes go towards streamlining medical record keeping, the solutions obviously belong in the commons somehow. Copyleft doesn't mean "commie" it means "you paid for it already". The engineers didn't see how they could ethically sell you the same pile of bits over and over, whereas marketing had no problem with that (they live on commissions). So GNU banded with Linus and others to make the critical tool set free of charge. Only problem: it still takes a lot of skill to use them, especially well.
So when the government moves in on some disaster zone, working on collecting census information (demographics), that's not about throwing money at the private sector and saying "hey, we're too dumb to do this ourselves" (it's not about outsourcing). The government has engineers and scientists just like everyone else and contributes. Not only that, but it contributes in a generous open way that lets more private operations benefit. We call this a BSD or MIT license -- many names for it.
Other times, we're more restrictive, because we don't trust the private sector to not pirate (copyright) what wasn't theirs to begin with -- the historical pattern. Some memes are just too valuable, make too much sense, to let the moneymakers hog 'em exclusively for selfish gain, in their trademarked "legally piggily" fashion (Bucky's word for it, cite Critical Path). Governments aren't behaving mindlessly when they protect their assets from being dumbed down by scam artists, other brands of counterfeiter, snake oil salesmen or whatever.
People worried about all this wealth flowing into cyberspace, economists mostly, think it's probably misbegotten altruism, not long for this world. But the more intelligent picture is we have a layered stack with open and closed in a sandwich (like a Dagwood). The benefit of free tools is it levels the playing field, opens the game to many more talented players.
The reason economists needn't worry is there's still good old fashioned competition and the ability to keep trade secrets (secret sauces). A typical business will carve out a niche in some coral reef, e.g. Python + SQL + Django (a turf I'm familiar with), then value-add in some proprietary direction, or maybe it's just the data that's private (medical records, bank accounts, whatever transactions). The government, like IBM, like MIT, pumps new wealth into the commons, plus has its own way of keeping secrets.
The idea of governments contributing to open source projects, especially those aimed at internationalization, i.e. opening up the interfaces to local languages, keeping a distro nurturing to a nation's children, is not all that new. This ability to build some core icons into the GUI is what will help young citizens begin to learn their way about vis-a-vis their government sponsors and services.
Faculties will be assisted in forging those voluntarily alliances with agencies reaching out to assist, not just with dollars, but with state of the art teaching materials. Recruiting begins early, a high level of civic-mindedness becomes taken for granted.
Physics Update
The physics community has long dreamed of games atop physics engines, with a lot of those coming true, as in Spore and Uru. The importance of storytelling, not just particles dashing about, was singled out by Thomas Malone, a cognitive psychologist writing in BYTE magazine back in 1981 (see endnote). His theories of intrinsic motivation aimed to explain why computer games are fun, if they're fun. One of the guidelines: include lots of hidden info, make it a treasure hunt of some kind.
Our marketing is moving towards an "adds spice" message, in relation to a boringly bland diet of all XYZ all the time. It's not "teach the controversy" as the "intelligent design" people counseled, but "share the stage" i.e. we get equal time for our puppets, or at least a bigger slice of the programming pie than today, wherein few have ever heard of the great rhombicosidodecahedron (too big for Big Bird's little brain, let alone Bert's), and wherein our "arrowhead geometry" is considered strictly out of bounds, too NC-17 for any high school geometry classes (so call it geography then?).
My sense is the physics community isn't as stuck in the mud as the mathematicians and will have no problems with our slight variants on the Newtonian themes. Saying all linear momentum is angular momentum really makes no difference if your orbits are long enough, and all that matters since Einstein is "geodesic" in any case, the shape of space being described by accelerations (world lines), not any "instant, simultaneously everywhere, XYZ grid" (relative to which observer again?). These subtleties aren't enough to matter, 99% of the time. Mostly we all just want to teach the same old same old as best as we're able: how to live long and prosper while remaining worthy of such a fine planet.
Endnote: Malone, T.W., What makes computer games fun? Byte, 1981, 6, 258-277 (Reprinted in Computers in Education (U.K.), 1982, 4, 14-21; and in D. Peterson (Ed.), Intelligent Schoolhouse. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co. (Prentice-Hall), 1984. Abbreviated version reprinted as: Guidelines for designing educational computer programs, Childhood Education, 1983, 59, 241-247.)
Philanthropic Arcade Games
Excerpt from a recent post to Quaker-P (Jan 3, 2009):
Buy stuff from the LCD menu, get tokens per vendor-sponsored games, and commit to various charities (could be competitive i.e. you keep some of the money yourself if you're a strong player, but if you lose you know it's to a good cause of your choosing e.g. Friends Peace Teams (depends on the shop, its selection of vendors, what your choices might be)).
Of course the cynics are saying we're just doing this to take the edge off casino gambling, removing the stigma. A percentage of winnings funneled through a "public switchboard" seems like even more direct control than we get over our taxes (like sales taxes), how they're spent by non-transparent legislatures (where are their billboard-sized displays?).
Here you get to commit some casino profits yourself through another colorful game i.e. here's one more reason to stick around and play the slots, feeling good about yourself and your legacy (more salmon!). But that's just one application. No one says your CP [Cafe Philanthropique] has to be anywhere near such a place, might be in Cape Town.
from Coyote Warrior
Quoting Publisher's Weekly:
Raymond Cross is a Yale-educated attorney and the youngest son of Martin Cross, an American Indian tribal chairman who spent the bulk of his life fighting a losing battle against the construction of a post–WWII dam near the upper Missouri River that would forcibly remove hundreds of families from their ancestral lands. VanDevelder's exhaustively researched book uses the Cross family story — and Raymond Cross's eventual transformation into Coyote Warrior, the term given to a growing group of Ivy League–trained lawyers working on American Indian rights issues — to help trace the century-long struggle of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes to protect their North Dakota homelands.


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text:
Ethiopia Information - Page 1
The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia is a landlocked country in Eastern Africa. It is bordered by Kenya, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia.
Addis Ababa is the capital. Other cities include Dire Dawa, Nazret, Gondar and Dessie.
The terrain consists of high plateau, mountains and dry lowland plains. The principal river is the Blue Nile.
The climate of Ethiopia is varied: temperate in the highlands and hot in the lowlands.
Protected areas in Ethiopia include Abiyata-Shalla National Park, Awash National Park, Bale Mountains National Park, Gambella National Park, Mago National Park, Nechi Sar National Park, Omo National Park, Simien National Park and Yangudi Rassa National Park.
The Lower Valley of the Awash, the Lower Valley of the Omo and Simien National Park are World Heritage sites.
Simien National Park is home to rare animals such as the Gelada Baboon, the Simien Fox and the Walia Ibex. The Ethiopian Wolf Programme, associated with Dr. Claudio Sillero-Zubiri, has its headquarters in the Bale Mountain National Park. Other animals found in Ethiopia are crocodiles, gazelles, giraffes, hippopotamuses, hyenas, leopards, lions and monkeys and zebras. Over four hundred species of birds have been recorded in the country.
World Heritage sites in Ethiopia include the ruins of the city of Aksum, the Rock Hewn Churches of Lalibela, the fortified historic town of Harar Jugol and Fasil Ghebbi in the Gondar Region.
The ancient city of Aksum dates from between the first and the thirteenth centuries. Obelisks, royal tombs and the remains of ancient castles can be seen at the ruins.
Lalibela is the site of eleven monolithic cave churches dating from the thirteenth century. The most famous is carved in the shape of a cross.
The fortified historic town of Harar Jugol is a Muslim city built between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. There are over eighty mosques; three date from the tenth century.
The fortress-city of Fasil Ghebbi in the Gondar Region, founded by the Emperor Fasilides, was the country's capital in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Architecture in the city displays examples of Hindu, Arab and Baroque influences.
The population of Ethiopia was estimated at 102.5 million in 2018.
Amharic is the official language. Other languages include Tigrinya, Oromigna, Guaragigna, Somali, Arabic and English - the major foreign language taught in schools.
The majority of Christians in Ethiopia are Orthodox. Islam and traditional beliefs are also followed.
The national dish of Ethiopia is a stew called wot. Wot is prepared using meat, fish or vegetables. The sauce contains coriander, garlic, ginger, onions, red peppers, cardamom, cloves, fennel seeds and nutmeg.
Meals are served with an unleavened bread (injera) made from teff grain.
Vegetables available are beetroot, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, leeks, lentil beans, potatoes, spinach, and tomatoes.
Fruits include bananas, citrus fruits, mangoes, melons, papayas, pineapples, plums and strawberries.
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text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}
\input{sections/intro.tex}

\section{Preliminaries}
\label{sec:preliminaries}
\input{sections/preliminaries.tex}

\section{Stochastic activation pruning}
\label{sec:sap}
\input{sections/SAP.tex}

\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:experiments}
\input{sections/experiments.tex}

\section{Related work}
\label{sec:related}
\input{sections/related.tex}

\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:discussion}
\input{sections/discussion.tex}

\subsection{Advantage against adversarial attack}

We attempt to explain
the advantages of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace
under the assumption
that we are applying it to a pre-trained model that achieves high generalization accuracy.
For instance $p$ under policy $\pi$,
if the number of samples drawn for each layer $i$, $r^{i}_{p}$, is large,
then fewer parameters of the neural network are pruned,
and the scaling factor gets closer to $1$.
Under this scenario, the stochastically pruned model
performs almost identically to the original model.
The stochasticity is not advantageous in this case,
but there is no loss in accuracy in the pruned model
as compared to the original model.

On the other hand, with fewer samples in each layer, $r^{i}_{p}$,
a large number of parameters of the neural network are pruned.
Under this scenario,
the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace model's accuracy will drop
compared to the original model's accuracy.
But this model is stochastic and has more freedom to deceive the adversary.
So the advantage of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace comes if we can balance the number of samples drawn in a way that negligibly impacts accuracy
but still confers robustness against adversarial attacks.

\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace is similar to the \emph{dropout} technique due to \citet{srivastava2014dropout}.
However, there is a crucial difference:
\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace is more likely to sample activations
that are high in absolute value,
whereas dropout samples each activation with the same probability.
Because of this difference, \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace, unlike dropout,
can be applied post-hoc
\emph{to pretrained models}
without significantly decreasing
the accuracy of the model.
Experiments comparing \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace and dropout are included in section \ref{sec:experiments}.
Interestingly, dropout confers little advantage over the baseline.
We suspect that the reason for this is
that the dropout training procedure
encourages all possible dropout masks
to result in similar mappings.

\subsection{Adversarial attack on \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace}
\label{stochasticAttack}
If the adversary knows that our defense policy
is to apply \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace,
it might try to calculate
the best strategy against the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace model.
Given the neural network $h$, input data $x$,
corresponding true output $y$,
a policy $\rho$ over the allowed perturbations,
and a policy $\pi$ over the model parameters
that come from \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace
(this result holds true for any stochastic policy chosen over the model parameters),
the adversary determines the optimal policy $\rho^*$
\begin{align*}
\rho^*=\arg\max_{\rho}\mathbb{E}_{p\sim\pi,r\sim\rho}[J(M_{p}(\theta),x+r,y)].
\end{align*}
Therefore, using the result from section \ref{sec:preliminaries}, the adversary determines the perturbation
$\Delta x$ as follows;
\begin{align*}
\Delta x=\arg\max_{r}r^{\top}\mathbb{E}_{p\sim\pi}[\mathcal{J}(M_{p}(\theta),x,y)].
\end{align*}
To maximize the term, the adversary will set $r$ to be in the direction of sign of $\mathbb{E}_{p\sim\pi}[\mathcal{J}(M_{p}(\theta),x,y)]$.
Analytically computing $\mathbb{E}_{p\sim\pi}[\mathcal{J}(M_{p}(\theta),x,y)]$ is not feasible.
However, the adversary can use Monte Carlo (MC) sampling
to estimate the expectation
as $\widetilde{\mathcal{J}}(M_{p}(\theta),x,y)$.
Then, using FGSM,
$\Delta x=\lambda\cdot\text{sign}(\widetilde{\mathcal{J}}(M_{p}(\theta),x,y))$.

\section{Reinforcement learning model architecture}
\label{app:rl}

For the experiments in section \ref{exp:rl}, we trained the network with RMSProp, minibatches of size $32$, a learning rate of $0.00025$, and a momentum of $0.95$ and as in \citep{mnih2015human} where the discount factor is $\gamma = 0.99$, the number of steps between target updates to $10000$ steps. We updated the network every $4$ steps by randomly sampling a minibatch of size $32$ samples from the replay buffer and trained the agents for a total of $100M$ steps per game. The experience replay contains the $1M$ most recent transitions. For training we used an $\varepsilon$-greedy policy with $\varepsilon$ annealed linearly from $1$ to $0.1$ over the first $1M$ time steps and fixed at $0.1$ thereafter.

The input to the network is $4\times 84\times 84$ tensor with a rescaled, gray-scale version of the last four observations. The first convolution layer has 32 filters of size $8$ with a stride of $4$. The second convolution layer has $64$ filters of size $4$ with stride $2$. The last convolution layer has $64$ filters of size $3$ followed by two fully connected layers with size $512$ and the final fully connected layer Q-value of each action where \textit{ReLU} rectifier is deployed for the nonlinearity at each layer.

\section{Other methods}
\label{app:moreMethods}

We tried a variety of different methods that could be added to pretrained models and tested their performance against adversarial examples.
The following is a continuation of section \ref{exp:cifar10}, where we use the dense model again on the CIFAR-$10$ dataset.

\subsection{Random noisy weights (RNW)}

One simple way of introducing stochasticity to the activations is by adding random Gaussian noise to each weight, with mean $0$ and constant standard deviation, $s$. So each weight tensor $W^{i}$ now changes to $M(W^{i})$, where the $j$'th entry is given by
\begin{align*}
M(W^{i})_{j}=(W^{i})_{j}+\eta,&&\eta\sim \mathcal{N}(0, s^{2}).
\end{align*}

These models behave very similar to the dense model (Fig. \ref{fig:rnw}, the legend indicates the value of $s$).
While we test several different values of $s$, we do not observe any significant improvements regarding robustness against adversarial examples.
As $s$ increased, the accuracy for non-zero $\lambda$ decreased.

\subsection{Randomly scaled weights (RSW)}

Instead of using additive noise, we also try multiplicative noise. The scale factor can be picked from a Gaussian distribution, with mean $1$ and constant standard deviation $s$. So each weight tensor $W^{i}$ now changes to $M(W^{i})$, where the $j$'th entry is given by
\begin{align*}
M(W^{i})_{j}=\eta\cdot(W^{i})_{j},&&\eta\sim \mathcal{N}(1, s^{2}).
\end{align*}

These models perform similar to the dense model, but again, no robustness is offered against adversarial examples.
They follow a similar trend as the RNW models (Figure \ref{fig:rsw}, the legend indicates the value of $s$).

\subsection{Deterministic weight pruning (DWP)}

Following from the motivation of preventing perturbations to propagate forward in the network, we tested deterministic weight pruning, where the top $k\%$ entries of a weight matrix were kept, while the rest were pruned to $0$, according to their absolute values. This method was prompted by the success achieved by this pruning method, introduced by \cite{han2015deep}, where they also fine-tuned the model.

For low levels of pruning, these models do very similar to the dense model, even against adversarial examples (Fig. \ref{fig:dwp}, the legend indicates the value of $k$). The adversary can compute the gradient of the sparse model, and the perturbations propagate forward through the surviving weights. For higher levels of sparsity, the accuracy in the no-perturbation case drops down quickly.

\subsection{Stochastic weight pruning (SWP)}

Observing the failure of deterministic weight pruning, we tested a mix of stochasticity and pruning, the stochastic weight pruning method. Very similar to the idea of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace, we consider all the entries of a weight tensor to be a multinomial distribution, and we sample from it with replacement. For a weight tensor $W^{i}\in\mathbb{R}^{a^{i}}$, we sample from it $r^{i}$ times with replacement. The probability of sampling $(W^{i})_{j}$ is given by
\begin{align*}
p^{i}_{j}=\frac{|(W^{i})_{j}|}{\sum_{k=1}^{a^{i}}|(W^{i}))_{k}|}.
\end{align*}
The new weight entry, $M(W^{i})_{j}$, is given by
\begin{align*}
M(W^{i})_{j}=W^{i}_{j}\cdot\frac{\mathbb{I}(W^{i}_{j})}{1-(1-p_{i})^{r^{i}}},
\end{align*}
where $\mathbb{I}(W^{i}_{j})$ is the indicator function that returns $1$ if $W^{i}_{j}$ was sampled at least once, and $0$ otherwise.

For these experiments, for each weight matrix $W^{i}\in\mathbb{R}^{m^{i}}$, the number of samples picked were $k\%$ of $m^{i}$. Since samples were picked with replacement, $k$ could be more than $100$. We will refer to $k$ as the percentage of samples drawn.

These models behave very similar to the dense model.
We tried drawing range of percentages of samples, but no evident robustness could be seen against adversarial examples (Figure \ref{fig:swp}, the legend indicates the value of $k$).
For a small $s$, it is very similar to the dense model. As $s$ increases, the these models do marginally better for low non-zero $\lambda$ values, and then drops again (similar to the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace case).

\subsection{Random noisy activations (RNA)}

Next we change our attention to the activation maps in the dense model. One simple way of introducing stochasticity to the activations is by adding random Gaussian noise to each activation entry, with mean $0$ and constant standard deviation, $s$. So each activation map $h^{i}$ now changes to $M(h^{i})$, where the $j$'th entry is given by
\begin{align*}
M(h^{i})_{j}=(h^{i})_{j}+\eta,&&\eta\sim \mathcal{N}(0, s^{2}).
\end{align*}

These models too do not offer any robustness against adversarial examples. Their accuracy drops quickly with $\lambda$ and $s$ (Fig. \ref{fig:rna}, the legend indicates the value of $s$).

\subsection{Randomly scaled activations (RSA)}

Instead of having additive noise, we can also make the model stochastic by scaling the activations. The scale factor can be picked from a Gaussian distribution, with mean $1$ and constant standard deviation $s$. So each activation map $h^{i}$ now changes to $M(h^{i})$, where the $j$'th entry is given by
\begin{align*}
M(h^{i})_{j}=\eta(h^{i})_{j},&&\eta\sim \mathcal{N}(1, s^{2}).
\end{align*}

These models perform similar to the dense model, exhibiting no additional robustness against adversarial examples (Figure \ref{fig:rsa}, the legend indicates the value of $s$).

\subsection{Adversarial attacks in image classification}
\label{exp:cifar10}

The CIFAR-$10$ dataset \citep{krizhevsky2009learning} was used for the image classification domain.
We trained a ResNet-$20$ model \citep{he2016deep} using SGD,
with minibatches of size $512$,
momentum of $0.9$,
weight decay of $0.0001$,
and a learning rate of $0.5$
for the first $100$ epochs,
then $0.05$ for the next $30$ epochs,
and then $0.005$ for the next $20$ epochs.
This achieved an accuracy of $89.8\%$ with cross-entropy loss and \textit{ReLU} non-linearity.
For all the figures in this section,
we refer to this model as the \emph{dense} model.
\begin{figure*}[t]
    \centering

    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{SAP_Random.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{}
        \label{fig:sap_random}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{SAP.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{}
        \label{fig:sap_sap}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Iterative.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{}
        \label{fig:iterative}
    \end{subfigure}

    \caption{Accuracy plots of a variety of attacks against dense model and \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace models with different perturbation strengths, $\lambda$. For the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace $\tau\%$ models, $\tau$ denotes the percentages of samples drawn from the multinomial distribution, at each layer. $(a)$ \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace models tested against random perturbation. $(b)$ \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace models tested against the FGSM attack, using MC sampling. $(c)$ \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ tested against an iterative adversarial attack, using MC sampling (legend shows defender vs. adversary). It is worth restating that obtaining the iterative attack of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace models is much more expensive and noisier than the iterative attack of dense models.}
\end{figure*}
The accuracy of the dense model degrades quickly with $\lambda$.
For $\lambda=1$, the accuracy drops down to $66.3\%$,
and for $\lambda=2$ it is $56.4\%$.
These are small (hardly perceptible) perturbations in the input images,
but the dense model's accuracy decreases
significantly.

\subsubsection{Stochastic activation pruning (\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace)}

We apply \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace to the dense model.
For each activation map $h^{i}\in\mathbb{R}^{a^{i}}$,
we pick $k\%$ of $a^{i}$ activations to keep. Since activations are sampled with replacement, $k$ can be more than $100$.
We will refer to $k$ as the percentage of samples drawn.
Fig. \ref{fig:sap_random} plots performance of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace models against examples perturbed with random noise.
Perturbations of size $\lambda=64$ are readily perceptible and push all models under consideration
to near-random outputs,
so we focus our attention on smaller values of $\lambda$.
Fig. \ref{fig:sap_sap} plots performance of these models against adversarial examples.
With many samples drawn, \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace converges to the dense model.
With few samples drawn, accuracy diminishes
for $\lambda=0$, but is higher for $\lambda\neq 0$.
The plot explains this balance well.
We achieve the best performance with $\sim100\%$ samples picked.
We will now only look at \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace $100\%$ (\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$). Against adversarial examples, with $\lambda=1$, $2$ and $4$, we observe a $12.2\%$, $16.3\%$ and $12.8\%$ absolute increase in accuracy respectively. However, for $\lambda=0$, we observe a $6.5\%$ absolute decrease in accuracy. For $\lambda=16$ again, there is a $5.2\%$ absolute decrease in accuracy.

\subsubsection{Dropout (DRO)}

\begin{figure*}[t]
    \centering
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{DRO.png}
        \vspace*{-0.7cm}
        \caption{}
    	\label{fig:DRO}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{DRO_TRAIN_STO.png}
        \vspace*{-0.7cm}
        \caption{}
    	\label{fig:DRO_STO}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{DRO_TRAIN_NONSTO.png}
        \vspace*{-0.7cm}
        \caption{}
    	\label{fig:DRO_NONSTO}
    \end{subfigure}
    \caption{Robustness of dropout models, with different rates of dropout (denoted in the legends), against adversarial attacks, using MC sampling, with a variety of perturbation strengths, $\lambda$: $(a)$ dropout is applied on the pre-trained models during the validations; $(b)$ the models are trained using dropout, and dropout is applied during the validations; $(c)$ the models are trained using dropout, but dropout is not applied during the validations.}
\end{figure*}

\emph{Dropout}, a technique due to \citet{srivastava2014dropout}, was also tested to compare with \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace.
Similar to the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace setting, this method was added to the \textit{ReLU} activation maps of the dense model. We see that low dropout rate perform similar to the dense model for small $\lambda$ values, but its accuracy starts decreasing very quickly for higher $\lambda$ values (Fig. \ref{fig:DRO}).
We also trained ResNet-$20$ models, similar to the dense model, but with different dropout rates. This time, the models were trained for $250$ epochs, with an initial learning rate of $0.5$, reduced by a factor of $0.1$ after $100$, $150$, $190$ and $220$ epochs. These models were tested against adversarial examples with and without dropout during validation (Figs. \ref{fig:DRO_STO} and \ref{fig:DRO_NONSTO} respectively). The models do similar to the dense model, but do not provide additional robustness.

\subsubsection{Adversarial training (ADV)}

\emph{Adversarial training} \citep{goodfellow2014explaining} has emerged a standard method for defending against adversarial examples. It has been adopted by \citet{madry2017towards,tramer2017ensemble} to maintain high accuracy levels even for large $\lambda$ values.
We trained a ResNet-$20$ model, similar to the dense model, with an initial learning rate of $0.5$, which was halved every $10$ epochs, for a total of $100$ epochs.
It was trained on a dataset consisting of $80\%$ un-perturbed data and $20\%$ adversarially perturbed data, generated on the model from the previous epoch, with $\lambda=2$.
This achieved an accuracy of $75.0\%$ on the un-perturbed validation set.
Note that the model capacity was not changed. When tested against adversarial examples, the accuracy dropped to $72.9\%, 70.9\%$ and $67.5\%$ for $\lambda=1,2$ and $4$ respectively. We ran \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ on the ADV model (referred to as ADV$+$\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$).
The accuracy in the no perturbation case was $74.1\%$.
For adversarial examples, both models act similar to each other for small values of $\lambda$. But for $\lambda=16$ and $32$, ADV$+$\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ gets a higher accuracy than ADV by an absolute increase of $7.8\%$ and $7.9\%$ respectively.

We compare the accuracy-$\lambda$ plot for dense, \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$, ADV and ADV$+$\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ models. This is illustrated in Fig. \ref{fig:accuracies} For smaller values of $\lambda$, \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ achieves high accuracy. As $\lambda$ gets larger, ADV$+$\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ performs better than all the other models. We also compare the calibration plots for these models, in Fig. \ref{fig:calibration}. The dense model is not linear for any $\lambda\neq 0$.
The other models are well calibrated (close to linear), and behave similar to each other for $\lambda\leq 4$. For higher values of $\lambda$, we see that ADV$+$\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ is the closest to a linearly calibrated model.

\begin{figure}[t]
   \centering
   \includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{Accuracies.png}
   \caption{Accuracy plots of the dense, \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$, ADV and ADV$+$\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ models, against adversarial attacks, using MC sampling, with a variety of perturbation strengths, $\lambda$.}
   \label{fig:accuracies}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure*}[t]
    \centering
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Calibration_0.png}
        \vspace*{-0.9cm}
        \caption{$\lambda=0$.}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Calibration_1.png}
        \vspace*{-0.9cm}
        \caption{$\lambda=1$.}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Calibration_2.png}
        \vspace*{-0.9cm}
        \caption{$\lambda=2$.}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Calibration_4.png}
        \vspace*{-0.9cm}
        \caption{$\lambda=4$.}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Calibration_8.png}
        \vspace*{-0.9cm}
        \caption{$\lambda=8$.}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Calibration_16.png}
        \vspace*{-0.9cm}
        \caption{$\lambda=16$.}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{Calibration_32.png}
        \vspace*{-0.9cm}
        \caption{$\lambda=32$.}
    \end{subfigure}
    \caption{Calibration plots of the dense, \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$, ADV and ADV$+$\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ models, against adversarial attacks, using MC sampling, with a variety of different perturbation strengths, $\lambda$. These plots show the relation between the confidence level of the model's output and its accuracy.}
    \label{fig:calibration}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{Adversarial attacks in deep reinforcement learning (RL)}
\label{exp:rl}

Previously, \citep{behzadan2017vulnerability,huang2017adversarial,kos2017delving}
have shown that the reinforcement learning agents
can also be easily manipulated by adversarial examples.
The RL agent learns the long term value $Q(a,s)$
of each state-action pair $(s,a)$
through interaction with an environment,
where given a state $s$,
the optimal action is $\arg\max_a Q(a,s)$.
A regression based algorithm,
Deep Q-Network (DQN)\citep{mnih2015human}
and an improved variant,
Double DQN (DDQN) have been proposed
for the popular Atari games \citep{bellemare2013arcade} as benchmarks.
We deploy DDQN algorithm and train an RL agent in variety of different Atari game settings.

Similar to the image classification experiments, we tested \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace on a pretrained model (the model is described in the Appendix section \ref{app:rl}), by applying the method on the \textit{ReLU} activation maps. \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ was used for these experiments.
Table \ref{table:rl} specifies the relative percentage increase in rewards of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ as compared to the original model.
For all the games, we observe a drop in performance for the no perturbation case. But for $\lambda\neq 0$, the relative increase in rewards is positive (except for $\lambda=1$ in the BattleZone game), and is very high in some cases ($3425.9\%$ for $\lambda=1$ for the Bowling game).

\begin{table}[t]
\caption {Relative percentage increase in rewards gained for \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ compared to original model while playing different Atari games.}\label{table:rl}
\begin{center}
\scalebox{0.7}{
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c}
    \toprule
    $\mathbf{\lambda}$ & \textbf{Assault} & \textbf{Asterix} & \textbf{BankHeist} & \textbf{BattleZone} & \textbf{BeamRider} & \textbf{Bowling} \\
    \midrule
    0 & -12.2\% & -33.4\% & -59.2\% & -65.8\% & -15.8\% & -4.5\% \\
    1 & 10.4\% & 13.3\% & 131.7\% & -22.0\% & 164.5\% & 3425.9\% \\
    2 & 9.8\% & 20.8\% & 204.8\% & 110.1\% & 92.3\% & \\
    4 & 12.4\% & 14.0\% & 1760.0\% & 202.6\% & & \\
    8 & 16.6\% & 7.4\% & 60.9\% & 134.8\% & & \\
    \bottomrule
\end{tabular}}
\end{center}
\end{table}

\subsection{Additional baselines}

In addition to experimenting with \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace, dropout,
and adversarial training,
we conducted extensive experiments with other methods
for introducing stochasticity into a neural network.
These techniques included $0$-mean Gaussian noise
added to weights (RNW), $1$-mean multiplicative Gaussian noise for the weights (RSW),
and corresponding additive (RNA) and multiplicative (RSA) noise added to the activations.
We describe each method in detail in
Appendix \ref{app:moreMethods}.
Each of these models
performs worse than the dense baseline
at most levels of perturbation
and none matches the performance of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace.
Precisely why SAP works while other methods
introducing stochasticity do not,
remains an open question that we continue to explore in future work.

\begin{figure*}[t]
    \centering
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{RNW.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{Random noisy weights.}
        \label{fig:rnw}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{RSW.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{Randomly scaled weights.}
        \label{fig:rsw}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{DWP.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{Deterministic weight pruning.}
        \label{fig:dwp}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{SWP.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{Stochastic weight pruning.}
        \label{fig:swp}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{RNA.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{Random noisy activations.}
        \label{fig:rna}
    \end{subfigure}
    \hfill
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.32\textwidth}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{RSA.png}
        \vspace*{-0.5cm}
        \caption{Randomly scaled activations.}
        \label{fig:rsa}
    \end{subfigure}
    \caption{Robustness of
different pruning and noisifying strategies against their respective adversarial attacks (MC sampling used to estimate gradients of stochastic models).}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{\textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace attacks with varying numbers of MC samples}

In the previous experiments the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace adversary used $100$ MC samples
to estimate the gradient.
Additionally, we compared the performance of \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ against various attacks, these include the standard attack calculated based on the  dense model and those generated on \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ by estimating the gradient with various numbers of MC samples.
We see that if the adversary uses the dense model to generate adversarial examples, \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ model's accuracy decreases.
Additionally, if the adversary uses the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ model to generate adversarial examples, greater numbers of MC samples lower the accuracy more.
Still, even with $1000$ MC samples, for low amounts of perturbation ($\lambda=1$ and $2$), \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ retains higher accuracy than the dense model.

Computing a single backward pass of the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ model for $512$ examples takes $\sim 20$ seconds on $8$ GPUs.
Using $100$ and $1000$ MC samples
would take $\sim 0.6$ and $\sim 6$ hours respectively.

\subsection{Iterative adversarial attack}

A more sophisticated technique for producing adversarial  perturbations (than FGSM) is to apply multiple and smaller updates to the input in the direction of the local sign-gradients.
This can be done by taking small steps of size $k\leq \lambda$ in the direction of the sign-gradient
at the updated point and repeating the procedure
$\lceil\frac{\lambda}{k}\rceil$ times \citep{kurakin2016adversarial} as follows
\begin{align*}
x^{0}=x~~,\quad\quad
x^{t}=\textit{clip}_{x,\lambda}\left(x^{t-1}+k~\text{sign}(\mathcal{J}(\theta,x^{t-1},y))\right),\\
\end{align*}
where function $\textit{clip}_{x,\lambda}$ is a projection into a $L_{\infty}$-ball of radius $\lambda$ centered at $x$, and also into the hyper-cube of image space (each pixel is clipped to the range of $\left[0,255\right]$).
The dense and \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ models are tested against this adversarial attack, with $k=1.0$ (Fig. \ref{fig:iterative}).
The accuracies of the dense model at $\lambda=0$, $1$, $2$ and $4$ are $89.8\%$, $66.3\%$, $50.1\%$ and $31.0\%$ respectively.
The accuracies of the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ model against attacks
computed on the same model (with $10$ MC samples taken at each step to estimate the gradient)
are $83.3\%$, $82.0\%$, $80.2\%$ and $76.7\%$,
for $\lambda=0, 1, 2,4$ respectively.
The \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ model provides accuracies of $83.3\%$, $75.2\%$, $67.0\%$ and $50.8\%$,
against attacks computed on the dense model, with the  perturbations $\lambda=0, 1, 2,4$ respectively.
Iterative attacks on the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace models
are much more expensive to compute and noisier
than iterative attacks on dense models.
This is why the adversarial attack computed on the dense model results in lower accuracies on the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ model than the adversarial attack computed on the \textsc{\small{SAP}}\xspace-$100$ model itself.

\begin{figure}[t]
   \centering
   \includegraphics[width=0.32\linewidth]{MC_Samples.png}
   \caption{Accuracy plots of adversarial attacks, with different perturbation strengths, $\lambda$. The legend shows defender vs. adversary models (used for gradient computation), and the number of MC samples used to estimate the gradient.}
   \label{fig:mc_samples}
\end{figure}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


The Brand new mattress consists of four different layers of polyurethane, including around 10 inches of relaxation. The most recent iteration has a Zoned Support, that is good to note, as it includes two different kinds of foam: One is thicker beneath the shoulder area and the other firm to the hip area. It is intended to provide the ideal relaxation.
Cover – Its cover is made with a exceptional polyester that is thick and usually snaps back into its original place immediately, this means that it will not bunch if you make moves at night. Be aware it is removable so that you can clean it along with the bedding.
Comfort Layer – The layer is created from a latex-like foam that supplies the mattress some fantastic immediate bounce. Whilst this area quickly in responding to pressure it gives room for the consumer to sink with ease. Like every latex, this foam also has good cooling , making certain the bed won't sleep too hot at night.
Contour Twist – Under its relaxation layers, one will find the section of the memory foam. This layer gives the body a contouring feel while also relieving pressure to its upper layers.
Support Twist – The next layer is where you receive the zoned support that's made with two types of a long-lasting polyfoam, with its milder variation put on the edges of the mattress while the firmer one is put in the middle. The positioning is supposed to help with pressure relief and support.
1) Firmness – If you apply some form of stress to it one thing you get is a good bounce. Implementing pressure farther, one receives a contouring from its memory foam layer. It will not feel like you are getting stuck at the mattress. Though you might get decent sinkage out of its contour layers, its zoned support and polyester foam layers will lift you off the mattress. This indicates you will feel like you are sleeping on top rather than on it and won't ever feel trapped. It is fantastic for those who sleep in several positions and the bed's is easy for rolling over once you need to.
Laying In your back — While lying on the back, one gets a good pressure relief from the Casper mattress. The zone support gives space at your lower back as well as the hip area.
Laying On the stomach — Rolling onto the stomach, the mattress does well to keep the spine in a fantastic alignment. Be aware it is easy to switch between all these different sleeping positions.
3) Motion Transport – If a person plans on sharing her or his bed with anyone, you need to understand what it feels like when another person moves from bed or tosses around in the night. The mattress is fairly typical when it comes to containing any motion. So you will probably feel it as your partner tosses and turns through the evening but it won't be anything too disturbing.
It Shows less sinkage in comparison to most other foam mattresses. Additionally, it proves that the upper layer along with the polyester foam foundation gives the mattress a buoyant lift, encouraging the consumer. It's particularly beneficial for on-the-stomach and back sleepers.
5) Edge Support – When you share your bed with a person and want to use the entire subject of the mattress, it's a fantastic idea to consider the level of advantage support the mattress will give. As you put in your back, you will feel well supported on its edges. Zoned Support does well in ensuring you're protected at the edges and helps to ensure that you will not fall out of the bed. Tossing on your side, you will continue to feel secure on the advantages. Most foam mattresses undergo more compression when people sit on them but Casper mattresses do hold up nicely.
• Zoned support – If one experiences discomfort at the shoulders or hips, an individual will surely get a great deal of assistance from the mattress's Zoned Support layer. This section can help to cushion the discomfort arising in various ways, providing a pain-free break.
• Balanced foam feel — Someone seeking to locate a fantastic equilibrium foam texture, should contemplate the Casper mattress. Its memory foam, latex as well as the heavy-duty polyester foam operate together perfectly on the bed to give you a very nice rest encounter.
The Casper mattress encompasses great technologies to offer a Fantastic sleeping Experience, using a key being its exceptional Zoned Support layers offering a good Pressure assistance and relief system. After conducting a general review of Casper Mattresses, it is relatively well-constructed and will provide a great return on Your money considering its retail price on the market. So, if you are Experiencing distress at your hip or shoulder area, consider purchasing the Casper mattress.


text:
Home Business Startups
IBM invests in blockchain startup Digital Asset
IBM has joined the list of finance-based companies that have contributed to the $60 million raised so far this year by blockchain startup Digital Asset.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor on Feb. 2, 2016
Computer giant IBM and investment bankers Goldman Sachs Group are amongst the latest companies to get behind Digital Asset, contributing to the $60 million the fintech startup has already raised this year.
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According to IBM fellow and blockchain vice president Jerry Cuomo, blockchain technology, the underlying system that facilitates bitcoin trading, holds real potential to transform a wide range of industries.
"We are excited to jointly develop distributed ledger technologies that will allow our clients to transform their business, and further strengthen our partnership with Digital Asset," he said. "IBM is committed to making it ready for business."
Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset and former executive with JPMorgan Chase, said the addition of Goldman Sachs and IBM as investors will help drive the global adoption of what she called a transformative technology.
So far this year the New York-based startup has secured investment from the likes of Accenture, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Citi, CME Ventures, Deutsche Börse Group, ICAP, JP Morgan, Santander InnoVentures, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.
The ASX injected AU$14.9 million into Digital Asset, giving them a 5 percent equity interest in the startup, as well as the right to purchase further equity and appoint a director to the board.
"ASX believes that Australia can be a world leader in the development of innovative post-trade solutions," Elmer Funke Kupper, ASX managing director and CEO, said.
"Our investment in Digital Asset represents a commitment to sizing the potential of Distributed Ledger Technology to reduce cost, risk, and complexity for ASX's broad stakeholder base, including issuers, investors, intermediaries, and regulators."
In December, Digital Asset along with the likes of ANZ Bank, IBM, Cisco, Intel, and VMware partnered with the Linux Foundation in a bid to advance blockchain technology.
According to The Linux Foundation, the open ledger partnership is expected to help identify and address important features and requirements that are missing when it comes to having a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers. The foundation believes such a standard can transform the way business transactions are conducted around the world.
"Distributed ledgers are poised to transform a wide range of industries from banking and shipping to the Internet of Things, among others," executive director at The Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin said at the time.
"As with any early-stage, highly-complex technology that demonstrates the ability to change the way we live our lives and conduct business, blockchain demands a cross-industry, open source collaboration to advance the technology for all."
Adam Ryan, CEO of Australian e-procurement service provider Think, said earlier this year that blockchain is one of the most sound and secure transaction avenues, and is more than just a payment method for buying illicit goods via online marketplaces.
"What you're really doing with blockchain technology is enabling two parties to complete a transaction almost as efficiently as you possibly can because it's automated, processed by someone who doesn't really factor in overheads at the transaction cost, and it's almost infinitely scaled," he said.
"The transaction is like a lolly wrapper, it's used once then you throw it away."
Similarly, David Whiteing, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's CIO, said that blockchain could change the way we view not just payments, but business processes.
"We also believe it will help and develop innovations we can't yet even think of," he said.
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Former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Peter McPherson has been named financial coordinator for Iraqi reconstruction, Treasury Secretary John Snow has announced.
In an April 25 news release, Snow said that McPherson will serve as the principal financial and economic policy advisor to Jay Garner, chief of the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) in Iraq.
McPherson's background includes service as administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 1981 to 1987. He is currently president of Michigan State University.
In a separate announcement, Snow said that Treasury Deputy General Counsel George Wolfe will serve as the deputy financial coordinator of the Iraq reconstruction office.
The two officials and will work closely with Iraqis to assist in rebuilding the finance ministry, the central bank and the banking system in Iraq, Treasury said.
WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow today announced that Peter McPherson will serve as Financial Coordinator for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) in Iraq. In this role, McPherson will serve as the principal financial and economic policy advisor to Director of ORHA, Jay Garner.
"Peter McPherson brings a wealth of experience in the public and private sector, including the presidency of a major university, to this new position," stated Treasury Secretary John Snow.
In his capacity as Financial Coordinator, McPherson will work closely with Iraqis to assist in rebuilding the finance ministry, the central bank and the banking system. McPherson will be working for the Director of ORHA and will receive support from the Department of the Treasury.
McPherson has served as the President of Michigan State University since 1993. Prior to accepting the post at Michigan State, he held a variety of senior positions at Bank of America, beginning in 1989, as Group Executive Vice President working in international banking, global debt restructuring, and investment management.
McPherson's service in the U.S. Federal Government includes Deputy Secretary of the Treasury (August 1987 - March 1989); Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development (February 1981 - August 1987); Chairman of the Board, Overseas Private Investment Corporation (February 1981 - August 1987); and Special Assistant to President Ford (March 1975 - January 1977).
He has also served as managing partner in the Washington office of the law firm of Vorys, Seymour and Pease (January 1977 - November 1980); has served on the boards of several corporations and educational organizations; and has worked in Peru as a Peace Corps volunteer (1964 - 1965).
McPherson received a B.A. in Political Science from Michigan State University (1963), an M.B.A. from Western Michigan University (1967), and a J.D. from American University Law School (1969). McPherson is married to Joanne McPherson. They have four grown children.


text:
Music for the MMA Soul
By On Aug 15, 2013
Metal band DeathThrob spreads MMA awareness one note and lyric at a time.
DeathThrob isn't a group of individuals moonlighting as professional mixed martial artists, but the four musicians do practice in various fighting disciplines and have decided to dedicate their band's livelihood to the advancement of the sport. The New Jersey metal quartet is so consumed with their mission that they test out their new records by bringing the music to lead singer Ryan Healy's garage and sparring to it with the sound system cranked to the max.
"We all belong to different fight clubs in the area—professional gyms to learn jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, and other martial arts," Healy says. "But then we all get together and train, blasting our jams and making sure the songs feel good to train to. We don't release anything until we spar to it and make sure it will get you psyched up."
Something finally passed their ultimate test—their self-titled debut album. The 12-track collection, which was independently released in July and self-produced at guitarist Mike Morello's Daywrecker Studios, features motivational lyricism pertaining to the societal acceptance of mixed martial arts over a pulsating array of adrenaline-induced metal melodicism.
"There are a lot of metal bands that talk about negative stuff—we're all about inspiring. We're yelling and we're screaming, but it's all to inspire," Healy says. "We're not trying to talk about anything negative, we're trying to get average people to want to train and to support mixed martial arts. That's the whole idea, so when it comes to songwriting, we're trying to keep it upbeat and write lyrics that are gonna make you wanna participate."
That is echoed on highlights like "Believe," "One Swing," and the uplifting banger "Smashed Up," the latter of which resonates the idea that gender doesn't matter and everyone has the right to fight.
Although the group members previously played in different bands, DeathThrob (also comprised of bassist Matthew Menafro and drummer Brendan Healy) formed in August 2012 after UFC 150. The Healy boys, both longtime fans of the sport, were with some of their music buddies watching the fights when they heard something that sparked their creative juices.
"Frankie Edgar was fighting, and he is a big draw because he is from Jersey," Healy says. "But some of our friends didn't even know who he was. So we were like, 'You know what? We're gonna do this MMA vibe. We're gonna write all these songs about training.' It became an outlet for us to watch it more and try to be a part of it."
Not only did they continue to watch the events and pen songs about the sport, but they also sought out gyms to train at so they could better understand what the athletes go through. Ryan Healy initially worked with Andy Main from TUF 12, and later practiced at Alex Wilkie's Martial Arts Academy in Bridgewater, New Jersey.
"It just came to the point where we were so obsessed with watching it—that's all we were doing," Healy says. "When we weren't playing, we were following MMA. When it comes to heavy metal music, no one is gonna be able to put songs together like we do because we're that into it."
So far, it's catching on. The Garden State troupe has had their music featured in interviews and video blogs with UFC stars Jeremy Stephens and Mike Pyle. The group also sponsors up-and-coming pro and amateur fighters, many of whom use their songs as walkout themes.
"When you start to see and hear heavy metal in MMA, I want people to connect that to DeathThrob," Healy says. "I want the songs to create a vibe so that when you think of metal MMA, you think of DeathThrob."
In addition to their song placements in the fight world, DeathThrob has taken massive leaps forward in the music industry and rocked stages that most one-year metal bands could only dream about. The quartet performed on The All Stars Tour 2013 alongside Every Time I Die, Iwrestledabearonce, and Veil of Maya. They also played at The Summer Slaughter Tour 2013 with Dillinger Escape Plan, Norma Jean, and Animals as Leaders.
DeathThrob plans to build off that momentum by touring in support of their self-titled release, while spreading the word about MMA. "In the next couple of months, we're gonna try to play at these MMA events because we think we bring a good live show," Healy says. "The main thing is making sure we bring some entertainment, and the thing about metal is the energy. We want to write music that pushes people to new levels."
DeathThrob's self titled debut album is available for download on amazon.com
Online: facebook.com/DeathThrob
youtube.com/DeathThrob
Kris Letang – NHL Fit
Return to Fat City


PAF have developed a great modular workshop product it's called System7 it combines superb quality with honest value and is available in 120 colours!
In a few short years it's become the industry standard for workshop fit outs with hundreds in operation in repair facilities, colleges, technical centres and race teams.
PAF System7 is a highly versatile modular workshop system that features a wide range of accessories to allow easy customisation.
Each 1 metre wide module is fully assembled by PAF with your own selection of accessories in your own choice of colours. The completed modules are delivered direct to you, ready for action!
PAF System7 is built tough to withstand the rigours of serious commercial use in the automotive, educational, and industrial sectors, our technical furniture is manufactured in the UK largely from 1.5mm cold rolled steel with typical bench ratings of 200kgs.


The walking stick for the blind has been around since the beginning of blindness. Okay, that was a bad intro, but you see my point: the walking stick hasn't needed much improvement.
Of course, it is modern human nature to take something that needs to be crude and simple and add technology to it. For example, the Tactile Wand is a walking stick device that uses a distance sensor to detect objects in front of the user. Apparently, the closer you come to an object, the greater the vibration.
Many gadget blogs have been calling this device a "Wiimote for the blind". I have to admit that there is an uncanny resemblance, and the fact that it has a "shaker" inside won't remove this particular moniker anytime soon.
However, one shouldn't discount the device's ability to genuinely help people. I imagine that a blind person could easily adapt to this device, and increase their mobility without having to use the traditional stick. I am wondering if there is a way to make the Tactile Wand detect potentially harmful things that aren't solid, such as an open elevator shaft.
The Tactile Wand has a recharging cradle, which addresses another obvious problem: the need for power. You would definitely not want to be a blind person dependent on a Tactile Wand, only to have it fail you at a critical moment.
Right now, the Tactile Wand exists in concept only, but it certainly has great potential.
This is not the first product of it's kind. There is actually one on the Maxiaid site called a laser cane that is in production and offered, at a very unaffordable price. The laser cane does do dropoff detection, which I noticed you were wondering about. It also uses regular AA batteries, which one can hold in their pocket to avoid the "Great timing to die" type of thing. It would be really nice if these type of products were a bit more affordable, or partially covered to raise our standard of life.


text:
Oil Spills Increased by 17% in 2013
May 22, 2014 3:40AM EDT Home
The rate of oil drilling in the U.S. leveled off in 2013, but the same can't be said for the amount of spills that took place.
According to a report from E&E Publishing, there were at least 7,662 spills, blowouts, leaks and similar incidents last year in 15 of the top states for onshore oil and gas activity. In states where the publication could compare results for both years, the publication determined there were about 20 more spills per day than in 2012.
While most of the spills were small, they amounted to more than 26 million gallons of oil, fracking wastewater and more. That's equivalent to the amount of oil BP gushed into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Graphic credit: E&E Publishing
No all-encompassing list of U.S. oil spills exist, so E&E had to analyze results from different states. The trouble there is that not all states keep track and some simply didn't make good on the publication's request for data. For instance, Mike Soraghan writes that Louisiana referred E&E to the U.S. Coast Guard's National Response Center, but the database is shut down. The group also did not respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from March.
North Dakota, Montana Pennsylvania and Texas were among the states with the largest increases. Production-related spills more than doubled to 103 in Ohio, but that figure is tiny compared to other states.
"We still have this mentality that we have to go faster and faster," said Don Morrison of the Dakota Resource Council, an environmental group that monitors activity in the Bakken formation. "When you're rushing, things go wrong."
In some states, the spill increases have led to more enforcement, while that's not the case in others. Notices of alleged violations increased by 50 percent in Colorado. Since 2010, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources tripled the number of workers who deal with oil and gas to more than 100. That includes 50 inspectors.
In Texas, officials issued one-third more noncompliance shutdown threats than in 2012. However, an agency spokeswoman told E&E that most of that bump arose from delinquent reports. The actual number of enforcement penalties that were assessed dropped by 40 percent.
In addition to the analysis, Soraghan got a commitment from Continental Resources Inc., the largest operator in the Bakken formation, to reduce spills, maintain spill prevention teams and take "appropriate action" against contractors who don't make an improvement. Examples include steel-lined containment systems and emergency shutdown systems at well sites.
"All these enhancements are part of our drive to continuously improve," said Tom Oddie, vice president of health, safety, security and environment for Continental.
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text:
Watch Now: Fox 8 News at 6 Fox 8 TV Schedule Autos
Rocky River student beats all odds to graduate
Posted 6:53 pm, May 18, 2015, by Jennifer Jordan
ROCKY RIVER, Ohio - Mysha DeJong of Rocky River beat the odds.
In a little more than two weeks, the 18-year-old honor student will accomplish something many thought would never happen: she is graduating on-time, with her class, after undergoing major surgery to have the left side of her brain removed.
DeJong says, "It was really difficult because I had puberty changes like that going on and you deal with that and school work and brain surgery and that's never easy. "
Mysha was born with a brain malformation - a rare condition that caused her to have frequent, debilitating seizures.
"She was taking about 27 pills a day. Her brain was in a constant state of seizure, not always physically, but the brain itself seized and it made her unable to learn, unable to function," says Mysha's mother Melissa Holman.
After years of seeing various doctors across the country, Mysha ended up at the Cleveland Clinic. And just four years ago, at the beginning of her freshman year, Mysha went under the knife with doctors removing a part of the brain that controls speech and vision. The life-saving surgery was a success and Mysha was determined to get better quickly.
Holman says, "She started physical therapy the day after surgery and less than 24-hours later she sat up for the first time.,
Mysha also started hitting the books, doing classwork from home and keeping up with her peers, while dealing with the loss of 50-percent of her vision and with her right arm paralyzed.
DeJong attended prom just a few days ago, and is now looking forward to donning that cap and gown.
Holman says "Right now we're still in disbelief that we're gonna see her walk across that stage."
"I'm not always the strongest person, but I've made it through a lot and I'm really grateful that I am where I am at this point in my life," says DeJong.
Mysha will be receiving her diploma with the rest of her Rocky River class at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium on June 5th. She hopes to attend community college after graduating and eventually attend a four-year college.
Topics: rocky river student graduates after brain surgery
Implantable brain device; New technology in treating epileptic seizures
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Two Rocky River burglaries hours apart
Middle school student, crossing guard nearly run over by woman driving recklessly through Rocky River school zone
String of distraction burglaries reported on west side, residents urged to be careful
Colorado teen in coma-like condition after breast surgery goes wrong
4-year-old fighting for life, suffered brain damage after getting the flu
8-year-old Wisconsin girl who went viral as a dog lover has died after battle with brain tumor
Family continues push to keep killer behind bars 33 years after teen's murder
Former President Jimmy Carter out of surgery, no complications
Caught on camera: Rocky River officers rescue student who fell off break wall and into Lake Erie
Flu leaves 4-year-old girl blind


Home Motivation & Gyan Why?
Hello! It feels good to write for CLAT Gyan! The reason why I haven't for so long (Mind you, it was a tough task; I belong to the class of people that generally likes blabbering.) is that I really haven't any Gyan to give when it comes to CLAT. My CLAT preparation was, as per all that you're being asked to do, grossly inadequate.
Well, because with high tension preparation for one test that does, to some degree, mould the path that one's life takes comes an inevitable questioning of oneself and one's abilities. I distinctly remember feeling like an absolute git when I just didn't arrive at the same answers as were held to be correct, be it in logical reasoning or legal reasoning.
So, this little post; just to tell you that everyone ends up with some skewed logic for something at some point in time. It's alright. If you think off track more often than not, it's still alright! If you find that an explanation to a question doesn't conform to what's going on in your head, ASK. I know that sounds obvious on first reading, but often one finds that you read an explanation knowing that it's probably right so you try to conform to that explanation. Unless you get what you're thinking cleared (and you never know, sometimes you may be right and the explanation wrong) you're not going to remember what the logical approach to some sort of problem is. Question the given answer, even if they say that it's the right answer.
The same goes with English. A comprehension passage is necessarily subjective. If everyone understood the same thing from a sentence, literature would be so darned boring. So if you understand something from a passage while the 'right' answer is 'different': question!
It works with GK too… Don't learn up facts, learn stories. It's easier that way. When you come across some fact that you think is important, look it up. Then look up things that have a direct correlation to it. Then things that have a direct correlation to the new facts that you come across. Do it until you're convinced that even if you forget the fact itself, various different connections will cause you to be able to pick out right answers during that crucial test. For example: The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is Baroness Catherine Ashton. This was a question in CLAT 2010. Some might have known in because they'd read this fact. I could answer it because, while reading about the European Union, I stumbled upon the Lisbon Treaty which linked me to the newly established post of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy which further told me that the post was occupied by Baroness Ashton. Did I remember all of this during the exam? No. All I did remember was that the person occupying the post had short hair. Would that matter in case of a man where it's all too normal? No. So it must be a woman occupied position. There was only one option that named a woman. Tadaa! So, you see, random things count!
Please don't be disheartened if you're not arriving at the right answers! Question the answer, and stop only when you're convinced. This might sound horribly didactic, but please don't even dream of mugging up for CLAT. If you painstakingly understand everything that you're doing, and it may seem like a horrible idea because it takes a lot of time, it IS going to help you. Especially, if you do Torts well for legal reasoning, you'll notice that one subject in your first semester becomes that much easier! Look! Post CLAT perks, already!
With that heartening bit of news, I shall bid you adieu.
1. Make weird/funny/relevant connections. I'll give you one example. Do you know what the Malimath Committee was set up to do? I tried learning it up: "Malimath Committee: Reforms of Criminal Justice System"… It really didn't work.
Now I'll remember the Malimath committee forever. The connection being: Reforms in the Indian Criminal justice system are as likely as a 'mali' (gardener) doing math. It's a stupid connection (and a cynical one) but it helps me remember. Try things like this.
Hehe, it's one of those silly idosyncrasies.
I like pigs, and I like the idea of them flying (making the impossible possible…yah di dah).
And it's actually full of real Gyan.
For GK "…don't learn up facts, learn stories." – This method, in truth, is easier!
really, last year it seemed horrendous to me but now when I am learning it as stories I love to say "I feel good".
GIRL…..THE TRICKS AS SUCH WORK WITH CLAT ONLY….
I am new to this site, I was waiting to catch a new fresh article and yours, was just what I needed.!
Also, i totally agree with your opinions on it.
Gk can't be mugged up, you know half of the things which I am able to answer are just because I ended up reading them in some or the other magazine.
The other half, well end up digging deep into the story and come out with more facts then what I was asked.
It is time consuming but it feels so good that you know so much about things and well a lawyer needs to know more then he /she is asked of.


text:
At rally, labor backs Coakley, condemns Globe poll
By Lauren Dezenski
Lauren Dezenski
Mayor Martin Walsh speaks to the crowd of over 200 union members at a Martha Coakley rally at IBEW Local 103 on Saturday morning. Photo by Lauren Dezenski
If Saturday morning's rally with union leaders and Mayor Marty Walsh is any indication, the Martha Coakley campaign is using recent poll numbers to seize the opportunity to whip supporters into action.
Labor was out in force at the IBEW Local 103 hall on Freeport Street as speaker after speaker condemned the recent Boston Globe poll putting Republican Charlie Baker nine points ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley in the gubernatorial race.
"The Globe hasn't been right in a long, long time," said Ed Kelly, president of the Professional Firefighters of Massachusetts, to the crowd of more than 200. "As organized labor, we're going to prove we're still as strong as we ever were."
The Globe endorsed Coakley in her failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 2010 against Scott Brown.
"I know what kind of record The Boston Globe has," Coakley told the crowd. "They always get it wrong, believe me."
Coakley defended her harsh words to the Reporter: "We just believe that poll is incorrect. It's been a neck-and-neck race, we know that. We're focused on making sure we get our vote out because that's the only poll that matters."
The rally kicked off a day of door knocking in and around Dorchester and had many, including Walsh himself, drawing parallels between his mayoral race and Coakley's, when before election day in 2013, polls had the former state representative down against rival John Connolly.
"A year ago in this room, it was just like this," Walsh told the crowd. "Every newspaper was against us. Every headline was against us. But the way we won that race was about knocking doors."
Steven Tolman, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, touched on the Democrats' strength in numbers in his remarks to the crowd. "We have history," he said. "Charlie Baker doesn't have what we have around Boston."
State Rep. Dan Cullinane, the labor chair for the Coakley campaign, agreed. "The polling numbers have motivated more people to get out and knock doors," he told the Reporter. "People are willing to roll up their sleeves to elect Martha."
martha coakley
Mayor Marty Walsh
Gubernatorial Race