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We've come a long way since the days of women's suffrage, and even since the seventies for that matter! In 1977, only about 5% of private business were owned by women and of those, most were in the fields of fashion, fitness, and beauty. While owning and growing a business in any field is commendable, women have more recently catapulted out of these gender-stereotyped fields to excel in traditionally male-dominated areas. These days, women who own multi-million dollar businesses are more likely to be in wholesale trade (20%), finance and insurance (12%), or transportation and warehousing (11%).
Today, women are increasingly likely to take the plug to becoming entrepreneurs. The Harvard Business Review Blog Network recently reported that 37% of all global businesses are owned by women. The figures aren't yet at the 50/50 ownership point with men, but we have sure made a lot of progress since the days of 5% ownership! This trend towards more women business owners is helping everyone from the women themselves, to their families, to the economy as a whole. The HBR Blog Network reports that women business owners reinvest 90 cents of every dollar earned back into human resources, creating jobs and strengthening local economies.
If all of this isn't convincing enough to show that female entrepreneurship is on the rise, Forbes recently called 2013 the "Year of the Female Founder". Additionally, American Express OPEN's latest Growing Under the Radar report notes that women-led and -owned businesses recently had revenue growth rates of 57%, which is 47% more than their male counterparts. More impressively, these growth rates were during the recession years!
So, if you've ever thought about starting a business, it looks like now is the time for female founders.


text:
Union Ends Strike Against Coke Distributor
Teamsters members are going back to work after a brief walkout against two Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated operations in West Virginia.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- Teamsters members are going back to work after a brief walkout against two Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated operations in West Virginia.
The union says 86 members of Teamsters Local 175 went on strike Thursday morning at the company's facilities in Charleston and Logan. Another 67 union workers honored picket lines at facilities in Bluefield, Clarksburg and Parkersburg.
The union says the workers will report back to their jobs on Friday.
The union says in a news release the company agreed to abide by a decision issued by a third-party grievance panel, which the contract requires. Luke Farley of Teamsters Local 175 says the grievance was over some work requirements.
Charlotte, N.C.-based Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated produces, markets and distributes Coca-Cola and other beverages in 11 states, primarily in the Southeast.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
'999:What's Your Emergency' and how we can tackle Blackpool's social problems
Posted on November 1, 2012 by cllrsimonblackburn
Two events have drawn me to the same conclusion recently.
Firstly, there has been the '999 – What's your emergency' program on Channel 4, and the subsequent heated debate. Secondly, my car broke down. Seemingly unconnected, I know, but bear with me.
I live in Blackpool (just off Preston New Road), two of my three children were born in the Vic, and all three attend Blackpool schools. I work part-time for a small local charity just off Lytham Road.
Now nearly 40, I occasionally make it to the Blue Room (and even more occasionally, The Tache), but for many years, whilst working for the Pleasure Beach, at the De Vere, at the Waxworks etc., I was a fairly frequent visitor to the town centre to sample the pleasures of our night-time economy. I've lived in a variety of bedsits, flats and houses in both North and South Blackpool, and have represented both Bloomfield and Brunswick.
I know my patch – or I thought I did.
I didn't really pay a great deal of attention to the Channel 4 stuff at first (Council Leaders don't have much time for TV) – other than meeting with the Police and expressing the view that they should have consulted with us before embarking on this particular course – a point they accept.
However, as the episodes went by, the debate sharpened, and my friends' accounts of what they had watched grew ever more lurid, I thought I ought to take a look.
Some of you may recall that in 2004 (I think), I was attacked in the street by some local charmers – more bruised pride than anything else. We were burgled in 2000, and again in 2005.
I've had my car stolen (they got it about 300 yards down the road before deciding it was that awful they'd rather walk) – but on all four occasions, I remember feeling that I was a victim of crime, and as my colleague Cllr. Eddie Collett points out, whatever the statistics show, whether there is a 2% decrease in reported crime or not, when you're the victim of a crime, you are 100% a victim of crime.
Now television packs hundreds of hours of filming into bite-sized, dramatic chunks. The accumulated pain and misery of many months has been distilled into a few hours of actual "action". But it's not pretty is it?
Some people wanted me to make grand press announcements about the fact that "Blackpool isn't really like that", but I demurred.
The simple fact of the matter is that in some parts of Blackpool, it is more than a bit like that – in other parts it is very much like that – and that pain and misery can be both terrifying and oppressive at the same time.
Blackpool's population hasn't changed much over the past decade – in terms of headline figures at least – but that doesn't mean it hasn't changed.
There are more people out of work now than 10 years ago, more people of long-term benefits, a worse public health outlook, more poverty and little, if any improvement in alcohol and drug fuelled violence, disorder and anti-social behaviour.
My car having broken down has given me another window on these issues. I now walk, take the bus, take the tram (or if the weather is simply too awful for any of the above, get a taxi).
This means that I stray from my usual routes (we all have them don't we) – so I find myself going through Mereside at 11pm, through Grange Park at 8am, along Central Drive at 2am in a cab.
Not only are you able to watch things more intently as a passenger than you are as a driver, but you also have the company of other pedestrians, bus or tram users, or the views of your taxi driver for company – the sights and sounds I am now liberated to focus on are somewhat different to driving down Whitegate Drive or the Prom, listening to the radio and concentrating on the road ahead.
I am forced to wonder therefore, at what point we accepted that Blackpool was going to become a refuge for the dispossessed and the never-possessed?
When did we simply accept that if people turned up here with both profound and enduring criminal records, major social problems, housing issues or poverty issues, we would scoop them up into our bosom and seek to fix them?
Any society can (and absolutely should) cope with some people who are criminal, some people who are out of work through circumstances, some who are sick, some who are just plain idle, and others who need a wide variety of other help and support.
It becomes an issue though when we are fuelling a culture of dependency on the state (a dependency that we are struggling to afford now, never mind in another 10 years time).
How much longer can we run around after people fixing their problems because we are frightened that nobody else will do it? Do we need a bit more stick and a bit less carrot?
Would that allow us to focus our resources on those people who are vulnerable and poor BUT who want to help themselves to change, and want to be part of mainstream civic society?
Before people start, I am not talking about the deserving versus the undeserving poor. What I am saying however is that there comes a point whereby after a wide variety of interventions and attempts to support people, we cannot usefully continue to seek to spend our way to happiness (even if we could afford it, and we can't).
A colleague spoke to me the other day about the notion of developing a suite of policies to try and manage this situation. Essentially, we'd be saying that Blackpool is full, and that if people are planning on moving here, they need to think long and hard about securing accommodation, a job, and means of entertaining themselves that do no negatively impact on the wider community.
At the same time, we would continue to pursue policies such as selective licensing, to drive out bad landlords and begin to soak up the vast oversupply of naff bedsits and one-bedroomed flats.
We'd seek to restore confidence to would-be owner occupiers that the streets were safe (and worth investing in as a family home), and not just keep providing services to people whose lives didn't change as a consequence, decade in decade out.
There are a great many people in Blackpool who work very hard, take their role in the community seriously, spend their lives unknown to Police and Social Services, are good neighbours, pay their taxes and just get on with life.
I was privileged to address a "Big Thank You" event at the Winter Gardens yesterday – where we recognised the commitment of the 15,000 people who give up their time to work in all manner of volunteer projects, without whom we'd be lost.
Regular readers will know that I talk a lot about fairness. Is it fair that the great many people who work hard are supporting a growing number of people that don't?
Don't get me wrong, as a socialist (and actually, I think this is a belief common to most political parties) I want to support those who are genuinely sick, who have disabilities, and who are jobless and in need of support despite their best efforts.
But I can't stand by and let Blackpool be seen as some sort of hapless victim of society's ills. The recession has been tough (a lot tougher up here in the North than it has been elsewhere) – people are hard up, jobs are scarce.
But we must have HOPE, a vision for a better future, and an unshakeable belief that things can change.
There has been a lot of furore recently about the NHS spending £85,000 on 'No Smoking' signs in parks – but nobody is talking about the fact that the NHS spends £5 million, right here in Blackpool, every year, on services connected to drug use and abuse. £5 million. Is that fair when, daily we read in the national press of people being denied treatment or medication on the grounds of cost?
I believe that if we show enough pride in Blackpool, enough dedication to developing policies, and pursuing them doggedly, we can start to turn around the dependency culture that has been created – allowing us to target tax-payers cash on those who are in genuine need of help, and who take responsibility for their own lives.
But I need your help.
Could we do this? Do people think it is fair? Let me know your views…email me at or comment on the blog.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized by cllrsimonblackburn. Bookmark the permalink.
About cllrsimonblackburn
Leader of Blackpool Council.
View all posts by cllrsimonblackburn →
15 thoughts on "'999:What's Your Emergency' and how we can tackle Blackpool's social problems"
John Rudkin on November 1, 2012 at 5:56 pm said:
Simon, it's the hardest questions that are the easiest to avoid. I was delighted to read your missive – because you face those questions head on – and I respect that. It is the truth, but it poses those real dilemmas in a simple to understand way. A lot of people will see the willingness to open up the discussions, and hopefully they will contribute in a positive way. There will always be those who want to do no more than take advantage of a negative situation, and those who struggle as victims. Many of the Council's own staff do what they do because they believe that the town has the people with the resolve, determination desire and ideas to share in the task – if their voices can make themselves heard over the storm. Sometimes the bystanders will tell you it's impossible…you can't do anything. I've met that before……the thing is, once efforts are focused and the hard work delivers answers, they'll change the tune.
Someone said to me just today – have Ch 4 offered to do a series about the positive changes in Blackpool? We know where those are don't we? So why not? Maybe we make our own? There – another difficult question?
Rudkin John on November 2, 2012 at 11:44 am said:
Just found this –
"The quality of a leader cannot be judged by the answers they give, but by the questions they ask."
haroldernestgokdogan on November 2, 2012 at 7:47 am said:
Its good that you are waking up to the reality of Blackpool, its been a dumping ground for years.Its time to wage an all out war on the capitalist slumlords who make a fortune in taxpayers money through the DELIBERATE importation of social undesireables,even as a socialist you would have to admit the the working poor are bearing the brunt of this sordid trade in human flesh. A line must be drawn, as this is unsustainable;its literally destroying Blackpool.For too long they have held sway in Blackpool,perhaps naming and shaming them is one approach.
s394010 on November 2, 2012 at 9:11 am said:
I think it's very fair and long overdue; I have held a job full or part time since I was 14 years old all through school and college. I have never been in trouble with the police and I have visited the hospital (touch wood) only twice.
I am not surprised by what I have seen on 999 at all as I have worked in a number of positions that have meant I have worked with a lot of the people and their counterparts that have been seen in the documentary.
I had a similar thought to you when I was about 19 years old, I couldn't understand why we constantly as a society threw money at people that just didn't want or wouldn't take the help offered to them or more annoyingly abused the help they were given.
I like you am not saying we don't help those that need it. The way we show we live in a truly great society is through the acts of kindness and generosity shown to those who need our help and I totally believe we have to still be a society that prides itself on helping those that need it. But we cannot afford to become a soft society prayed on by those who take us for all we are worth.
It is about time somebody (you) took a stand against the people who are taking us for mugs and I for one am grateful.
Seasider on November 2, 2012 at 9:58 pm said:
This may or may not be useful since it would need a change at central government to happen but…
Seems to me that Blackpool is a place that inherently attracts these kinds of people because of its night-time and tourism-based economy. People can easily fall from grace when their livelihoods fall apart too – Blackpool not only has high (and growing) unemployment but even before the recession, it had a lot of low-wage seasonal labour – unstable employment. Clearly, as the tourism industry has declined, successive councils (with or without backing from central government at different times) have tried to revive or at least maintain that with differing levels of success. The public sector has to an extent helped Blackpool 'keep going' both in the face of the decline of tourism and by being all-year-round work which is therefore vital for the local economy. Now they are being slashed too. A short-term tourism boost from people choosing to to holiday within the UK is no long-term solution either (even if such events should be exploited by the town.
Truth is – Blackpool needs to find another source of stable employment for more of its population. Until it does, these problems are never going away. I personally think manufacturing is the solution. That would need a government in Westminster with an active industrial policy however, something the current lot are either too incompetent or ideologically opposed to committing to.
Todd on November 3, 2012 at 10:22 am said:
Being born in Blackpool I can say honestly that Blackpool has got worse yr after yr.Many people I know and work with would love to move out of Blackpool but the housing market prevents that. Blackpool is being taken over by low life no hopers.
Your words sound good but as they say actions speak louder.
The time has come to return the place to a family resort not a come and get drunk stag and hen venue.
Annimouse on November 3, 2012 at 5:27 pm said:
I think you have missed the point Simon. The money spent on drug treatment is to protect the good and deserving not to look after addicts who you rightly say are less deserving. Drug addicts who live chaotic lives create havoc and create victims of crime. That might not be right but it is certainly true as the majority of crime is committed by a small handful of criminally active people. The criminality is driven by an addiction that is out of control and makes people commit crime. That is not an excuse for them, it is just a fact. By all means stop spending money on trying to control drug addiction, the addicts will carry on regardless, but hundreds of people who would otherwise have been untouched by crime will soon become burglary victims, robbery victims and car crime victims. The money is spent to protect them not to mollycoddle addicts. If you don't believe me look at the crime figures for the years before the Tower programme (the police and health project that treats active criminals with raging drug habits) You will see a dramatic fall in crime since it started In the years that followed, that drop in the graph line is a running total of real decent people who were not victimised because money was spent trying to manage the behaviour of people who would otherwise have run amok. So when you think it's all about the addicts, consider the possibility that it is actually about the decent people who are being protected by solving the root cause of a problem rather than simply reacting to what it causes. On the subject of 999, its not all about Blackpool Council actually, its about the people in the emergency services and bringing some recognition for the excellent job they do.
EddieUK on November 3, 2012 at 6:45 pm said:
There are out of town landlords who are turning our streets into slums. They buy properties at rock bottom prices, spend nothing on them and sublet to people who know nothing about the holiday business so change the use into HMOs which are eventually closed and lay empty only to rot and bring the area down. Get the slum properties cleaned up or knocked down with the cost to the owners.
Simon Blackburn on November 5, 2012 at 12:59 pm said:
I agree Eddie – and through selective licensing we are starting to make in-roads into this area – but I agree, we need to do more, and faster.
Paul Edwards on November 5, 2012 at 8:01 pm said:
If tenants are causing a nuisance then the authorities should have the powers to call the landlord / responsible person to the property to sort out the problem. That would certainly make them think twice about who they let their properties to.. If the landlords are prepared to take government money in the form of housing benefit then they have to abide by the terms and conditions which goes with accepting the payment ie provide a 24/7 response service.
cllrsimonblackburn on November 6, 2012 at 11:50 am said:
Thanks Paul, through the selective licensing scheme, we are doing just what you suggest – making landlords take responsibility for their tenants. I want to see this rolled out across the Borough because it seems to me to be an issue which touches the lives of many people. Thanks again
haroldernestgokdogan on November 6, 2012 at 11:54 pm said:
Saw you on TV Simon, well done,its important that you bring national media attention to Blackpools problems ,especially with regard to landlords/property speculators who have milked the benefits system to make huge profits out of importing social undesireables.Its a vile practice that has to be stamped out.In addition those who dont comply with new strict rules as suggested, will the council publicly name and shame them as unfit landlords, ie picture and name?They are the scourge of the UK,especially as there is a housing shortage, that the current goverment has done nothing about and aggravated.Thankyou and well done.
Rand Hobart on November 13, 2012 at 1:18 pm said:
The sad reality is, if one has determined to be a burden on the state and spend a lifetime taking and not giving, the seaside is a great place to do it. Seaside towns attract losers, wasters, and wrong'ns. The trick is to deny them their comforts. And this is nothing new, it's been building over the last three decades, or so.
More generally, and specifically to Blackpool's situation, I'm sure Beveridge would be turning in his grave to see his welfare state turned into a cash cow for those who contribute little or nothing to society, rather than the safety net he envisaged for those genuinely caught out by circumstance, a safety net that would provide the bare minimum to stave off the worst of the consequences.
Given a free hand, and right wing sensibilities, I'm sure we all know what we'd like to do, but the question is what *can* we do to redeem our once great town and thriving economy?
Whistleblower on November 20, 2012 at 8:34 pm said:
A very gutsy and bold request for help from everyone and I must congratulate you for having the nerve to do it. Your convictions and hopes for Blackpool are admirable and honest from what I see and witness on a daily basis. With regards to the housing issues and licensing, isn't it time that Blackpool (possibly in conjunction with other Council's in a similar position) grabbed the bull by the horns and approach Government with forward thinking and cutting edge new ideas and tools to help turn around and combat the problems that swamp us.
Housing Benefit is a driving force for those that don't contribute towards anything and conversely it attracts the landlords that don't want to contribute anything towards housing standards. Accept anything and take everything culture from both sides. Lobby Government to change the law on distribution/allocation of housing benefit for example so that it is not automatically paid to tenants or landlords as a right when they turn up with a valid tenancy agreement. Surely, there must be some measures that can be brought into play at a local level with the backing of Government (even as a trial) to stop or suspend any payments before being allowed in full until housing officers have inspected the premises to check on standards and suitability? This way Landlords would at least have to present the property in a decent state at the start of the tenancy.
Lobby Government to bring in full regulation of the private rented sector including compulsory registration and licensing of properties and landlords/agents etc that can be administered on a UK wide database much the same as the review by Dr Julie Rugg (The Rugg review). Many other countries have strict regulation and benefit massively from such schemes such as Germany where over 50% of the market is rented. The UK is heading this way with more and more finding it hard to get a mortgage.
Eire (Republic of Ireland) brought in a swathing system in 2004 which is turning the private rented sector around and ridding it of bad tenants and landlords. A bold move by Eire and something that Blackpool could pilot so that the UK as a whole may benefit in the long run. By controlling the PRS in such ways you could reduce the demand for slums and those people that thrive on them and put the slumlords out of action/business if they don't fall in line.
There is obviously far more to this than I can write here and if you read between the lines you'd be hard pressed not to see the logic behind it. Certainly it is easier said than done but you've already taken the first steps to returning Blackpool to something many of us hope emerges out of the fog of the dependent culture that swallows up so much of everyone's time and tax payers money. Keep up the good work.
Will McGhee on November 24, 2012 at 9:28 am said:
Why is anyone surprised by this tv prog, we all knew about Blackpools problems long before this was aired.
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text:
\section{Introduction}

    In February 2010, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the first mission of NASA's Living with a Star program, which is a long term project dedicated to the study of the Sun and its impacts on human life \cite{withbroe:lws}. The SDO mission is an invaluable instrument for researching solar activity, which can produce damaging space weather. This space weather activity can have drastic impacts on space and air travel, power grids, GPS, and communications satellites \cite{nrc:spaceweather}. For example, in March of 1989, geomagnetically induced currents, produced when charged particles from a coronal mass ejection impacted the earth's atmosphere, caused power blackouts and direct costs of tens of millions of dollars to the electric utility ``Hydro-Qubec'' \cite{boteler:geomagnethazards}.  If a similar event would have happened during the summer months,  it is estimated that it would likely have produced widespread blackouts in the northeastern United States, causing an economic impact in the billions of dollars \cite{boteler:geomagnethazards}.

    A solar flare is an event occurring in the solar corona that is characterized by a sudden orders-of-magnitude brightening in Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) and X-ray, and for large events, gamma-ray emissions, from a small area on the Sun, lasting from minutes to a few hours \cite{Benz2008, martens2017data}. The classification system for solar flares are on a logarithmic scale and uses the letters A, B, C, M or X, according to the peak X-ray flux. In a typical binary classification strategy, M and X classes are identified as the positive class while no flare occurrence and flares of A, B and C classes are identified as the negative class.

    The goal of this project is to generate synthetic data, especially for multivariate time series of magnetic filed parameters leading up to solar flares. As discussed in \cite{max2019understanding,ahmadzdeh2021how}, the extreme class-imbalance between positive and negative classes in the solar flare data, and the improper treatment of said extreme imbalance between classes, can result in unrealistic and unreliable analyses, with little practical value in flare forecasting, flare classification, and flare clustering. Therefore, solving the issue of insufficient positive class of flare data is an important problem for current research in this domain. As such, this project is dedicating to generate realistic flare data based on real data, in order to provide a balanced training dataset for use in such problems.

\section{Related work}

    Although remedies such as oversampling, undersampling, and cost-sensitive learning, have been considered to tackle this problem \cite{ahmadzadeh:challenges,ahmadzadeh:rareevent}, these methods can only provide limited improvements since they do not introduce or utilize any new data. The development of generative modeling provides an attractive alternative and potentially more domain-specific approach for data augmentation. For example, the Generative Adversarial Network can be trained to learn data distributions of the minority classes, thereby generating synthetic data for constructing a balanced and larger dataset to train more unbiased and powerful classifiers.

    \subsection {Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)}\label{sect:related-work:gan}

    First proposed in \cite{goodfellow2014generative}, the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) tries to learn an implicit density of real samples. The GAN trains the two components in an adversarial way. First, the generator is used to sample initial inputs from a latent space, which is used to produce data similar to real data. Next step, both generated samples and real data are used as inputs of a discriminator, and the discriminator assigns the label of samples after processing inputs with a neural network. Eventually, the predicted labels are used to calculate errors with a defined objective function, and the result is used for adjusting the whole model. This mechanism can help a generator gradually generate better realistic samples under the supervision of real samples, and this process keeps running until the discriminator cannot distinguish real data and synthetic samples.

    There have been various types of GANs proposed as an extension of the vanilla GAN to deal with different demands. For instance, in the computer vision domain, the Deep Convolutional GAN \cite{Radford2016UnsupervisedRL} has been applied to learn reusable feature representations and generate synthetic images by utilizing convolutional neural networks as the generator and discriminator. The Wasserstein GAN \cite{arjovsky2017wasserstein} commits to improve the stability of learning and provide a meaningful learning curve. The Info GAN \cite{chen2016infogan} incorporates the representation learning by encoding features into the latent vector. The Conditional GAN (CGAN) \cite{mirza2014conditional} is dedicated to improving the quality of generated samples and controlling the classes of synthetic samples by utilizing conditional information. Finally, the advantage of controlling the mode of generated samples makes CGAN become the most appropriate framework in our study since our goal is to generate synthetic samples of multiple minority classes for tackling the class imbalance issue.

    \subsection{Time series generation}

    There are already several projects in different domains that have worked on generating time series data utilizing the Generative Adversarial Network. In \cite{esteban2017real}, the RGAN was utilized to generate medical time series data implemented with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The motivation of their work was to develop a privacy-preserving method of generating synthetic medical data for machine learning modeling since actual patient data is sensitive to privacy issues. In \cite{mogren2016c}, the use of a C-RNN-GAN was proposed as a method to generate musical data. This method differs from \cite{esteban2017real}, in that it applied a unidirectional LSTM for the generator and a bidirectional LSTM for the discriminator. Then, in \cite{yoon2019time}, the TimeGAN was proposed that combines the versatility of the unsupervised GAN approach with the control over conditional temporal dynamics. This method has two more autoencoding components, including an embedding function and a recovery function trained jointly with generator and discriminator components. This structure enables the model can learn to encode features, generate representations and iterate across time simultaneously.

    \subsection{Multivariate time series dataset}\label{sect:related-work:swan-sf}

    The data primarily used in this project is a benchmark dataset, named as Space Weather ANalytics for Solar Flares (SWAN-SF), recently released by \cite{angryk2020multivariate}. SWAN-SF is a comprehensive, multivariate time series (MVTS) dataset extracted from solar photospheric vector magnetograms in HMI Active Region Patch (HARP) data made available as the Spaceweather HMI Active Region Patch (SHARP) series \cite{hoeksema2014, bobra2014helioseismic}. The SWAN-SF is made up of five temporally non-overlapping partitions covering the period from May 2010 through August 2018. Each partition contains approximately an equal number of X- and M-class flares, and there is a total of 6,234 flare records and 324,952 no-flare records. Comparing the amount of two kinds of data, we can find an extremely imbalanced issue in this dataset. As mentioned previously, \cite{ahmadzdeh2021how} showed that the extreme class imbalance between positive and negative classes in the solar flare data, and the improper treatment of said extreme imbalance can result in unrealistic and unreliable analyses. Furthermore, each flare record is a multivariate time series with 60 time steps, and each time step has 51 magnetic field parameters. This work will focus on four parameters, including TOTUSJH, ABSNJZH, SAVNCPP, and TOTBSQ, as a representative subset of the full 51 field parameters (for the definition of parameters see Table 1 in \cite{angryk2020multivariate}). This is because many of the parameters are highly correlated, leading most studying flare forecasting to utilize some subset of the full set.

\section{Methodology} \label{sect:methodology}

    We decide to use the Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) in this study for several reasons. First, the advantage of controlling the mode of generated samples allows us to generate samples of minority classes to tackle the class imbalance issue. Second, CGAN can provide a stable and faster training compared to the vanilla GAN. Moreover, the SWAN-SF dataset is labelled, therefore it can provide conditional information for us to train CGAN models. LSTM network is utilized as the basic components in both the generator and the discriminator illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:cgan_framework} since we are processing time series data.

    \begin{figure} [t!]
      \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{./fig/CGAN_Framework.pdf}
      \caption{This is the framework of the CGAN model, including components of the generator (\textit{G}) and the discriminator (\textit{D}). Each component is processed by the combination of the LSTM layer and the Dense layer. The inputs of the generator are random input vectors concatenated with conditional vectors. The inputs of the discriminator are either synthetic or real multivariate time series with conditional vectors. The binary cross-entropy is the criterion for optimizing the model.}
      \label{fig:cgan_framework}
    \end{figure}

    The ultimate goal of a generator \textit{G} is to generate an output with similar characteristics as the real data. As seen in Fig.~\ref{fig:cgan_framework}, the model takes in a random input vector $Z_{n}$, which is a tensor with the shape of [${batch\_size}$, ${sequence\_length}$, ${latent\_dim}$]. In this study, the shape is $[32, 60, 3]$ for $32$ multivariate time series in a batch, each of length $60$ and latent dimensions $3$. Moreover, the conditional vector, namely $C_{n}$, has the shape of $[32, 60, 2]$ since it is encoded in one-hot representation with labels of binary classes. Finally, we concatenate $Z_{n}$ and $C_{n}$, obtaining a tensor of shape $[32, 60, 5]$ as the final input of the generator. After going through the calculations of LSTM layer and Dense layer, the outputs, regarded as synthetic samples, have the same shape as the real data, i.e., $[32, 60, 4]$ where $4$ stands for four magnetic field parameters mentioned in \ref{sect:related-work:swan-sf}.

    The task of a discriminator \textit{D} is to classify inputs as either being real or synthetic samples generated by the generator. In Fig.~\ref{fig:cgan_framework}, it can be seen that the discriminator takes two forms of multivariate time series (MVTS) as the input: the real and the generated MVTS samples. To simplify the representation for our discussion about the discriminator, we denote ${X_{n}}$ as a uniform set of inputs. Through feeding $C_{n}$ into \textit{D}, the discriminator not only produces judgments about whether the data is synthetic or real but also evaluates the correspondence of the synthetic sample to its conditional information. Finally, the binary cross-entropy loss calculated between the prediction and the ground truth is used to update the parameters of both the generator and the discriminator with the back-propagation algorithm.

    So far, we have comprehended the structures and functionalities of the generator and discriminator. Next, we will define the objective function used for optimizing the discriminator and the generator. In our framework, the objective function is divided into two parts, including the generator loss and the discriminator loss. First, the discriminator loss which is calculated as the cross-entropy between the ground-truth and outputs of a discriminator, is defined as:

    \begin{equation}
    \begin{footnotesize}
    \label{eq:D_loss}
    Loss_{D}(X_{n}|C_{n}, y_{n}) = -\text{CE}\Big(D(X_{n}|C_{n}), y_{n}\Big)
    \end{footnotesize}
    \end{equation}

    \par
    In this equation, $X_{n}$ is the set of inputs of the discriminator, and $C_{n}$ is the conditional vector. $D(X_{n}|C_{n})$ returns the probability of $X_{n}$ being a real or synthetic sample by taking $X_{n}$ and $C_{n}$ as inputs. Note that ${X_{n}}$ in this equation is composed of two different types of data sources:

    \begin{equation} \label{eq:X_n}
    \begin{footnotesize}
    \begin{aligned}
    \textit{$X_{n}$}\!=\!\!
    \begin{cases}
    \textit{$X_{n}$} & \textbf{if~}inputs\ are\ real\ samples,
    \\
    \mbox{G}(Z_{n}|C_{n}) & \textbf{if~}inputs\ are\ synthetic\ samples.
    \end{cases}
    \end{aligned}
    \end{footnotesize}
    \end{equation}

    \par
    Correspondingly, the $y_{n}$ takes two different values, dependent upon the source of the sample in $X_{n}$,

    \begin{equation} \label{eq:y_n}
    \begin{footnotesize}
    \begin{aligned}
    \textit{$y_{n}$}\!=\!\!
    \begin{cases}
    \textit{\textbf{1}} & \textbf{if~}inputs\ are\ real\ samples,
    \\
    \textit{\textbf{0}} & \textbf{if~}inputs\ are\ synthetic\ samples.
    \end{cases}
    \end{aligned}
    \end{footnotesize}
    \end{equation}

    The generator loss is also formulated with cross entropy as below:

    \begin{equation} \label{eq:G_loss}
    \begin{footnotesize}
    Loss_{G}(Z_{n}|C_{n}) = -\text{CE}\bigg(D\Big(G(Z_{n}|C_{n})|C_{n}\Big), \textbf{1}\bigg)\\
    \end{footnotesize}
    \end{equation}

    \noindent where the input $G(Z_{n}|C_{n})$ is the synthetic samples, and its corresponding predictions are $D\Big(G(Z_{n}|C_{n})|C_{n}\Big)$. In calculating the loss of the generator, the label of a synthetic sample is held constant as $\textbf{1}s$, since the goal of the generator is to generate realistic-enough samples such that the discriminator can no longer distinguish them from the real samples.

\section{Experiments}
    Despite the model that can be optimized according to the objective function defined in Section~\ref{sect:methodology}, the loss cannot objectively reflect the convergence of the training progress or the quality of generated samples \cite{arjovsky2017wasserstein}. To determine when to stop training models is a well-known and up in the air question in the GAN study. Unlike many image-based GAN projects, such as deepfake \cite{chan2019everybody} and GauGAN \cite{park2019gaugan}, the visual verification of synthetic time series as outputs does not give us much evidence as to whether the generated data are realistic or not. In this section, we present three types of evaluation methods, in both qualitative and quantitative metrics, to verify the effectiveness and correctness of the CGAN model.

    \subsection{Experimental settings}\label{sect:experiment:settings}

    We have implemented our model using the TensorFlow 2.0 library \cite{tensorflow2015-whitepaper}, and the code can be found at our repository for the project\footnote{https://bitbucket.org/gsudmlab/mvts-gann}. After we explored various settings based on the defined objective function, we found that using the Adam Optimizer for the generator and the Gradient Descent Optimizer for the discriminator produced our best results. Moreover, we concluded our parameter settings of the learning rate to $0.1$, the LSTM hidden size to $100$, and the batch size to $32$. The model is trained with $300$ epochs, and intermediate models are saved every five epochs. In Sections~\ref{sect:experiment:statistics} and \ref{sect:experiment:aa}, we utilize $1,254$ real flare samples in partition $1$ of SWAN-SF and $1,254$ synthetic samples generated by the CGAN model in our evaluations. In Section~\ref{sect:experiment:svm} though, we utilize the entire partition $1$, including $1,254$ real flares and $72,238$ no-flare samples, and generate $70,984$ synthetic flare samples to balance the training dataset. More details regarding the experimental setup will be presented in that section.

    \subsection{Evaluation using the distributions of statistical features}\label{sect:experiment:statistics}

    To provide a statistical evaluation for our model, we utilize the statistical features extracted from the time series data, including the mean, median, and standard deviation statistics. For visualization, we construct frequency distributions of these values for both the real input data and the synthetic data produced by the trained generator through binning the values into $20$ equal-width bins. It is our assumption that if the distributions of the statistic values for both the real data and generated data are similar, then the generated samples should be similar enough to perform well for our final task of producing minority class samples for model training.

    \begin{figure} [hbt!]
        \centering
        \includegraphics[scale=0.6]{./fig/KL_Evaluation_2.pdf}
        \caption{Columns (A) and (B) show the distributions of three features, including mean, median, and standard deviation, of TOTUSJH at two intermediate epochs with a bin size of $20$. Red bars stand for the real data, and blue bars stand for the synthetic data. Specifically, (A) is the result of the model at the $50$th epoch, and (B) is the result of the model at the $250$th epoch. Column (C) shows the distributions of KL divergence scores calculated by comparing distributions of synthetic samples and real samples across all intermediate models divided into six groups.}
        \label{fig:KL_Evaluation}
    \end{figure}

    We have conducted statistical feature evaluation on all the physical parameters, but for brevity, we present only the results of TOTUSJH. The columns (A) and (B) in Fig.~\ref{fig:KL_Evaluation} show the distributions of three features evaluated based on two intermediate models saved in the training process. (A) is resulted after training 50 epochs, which is the last model of the first group (1-50 epoch), and (B) is resulted after training 250 epochs, which is the last model of the fifth group (201-250 epoch). From (A) to (B), it can be found that the generator can gradually produce time series which have similar statistic attributes to the real data. Additionally, we calculate the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence between distributions of real data and generated samples with all features at different epochs. We observe, as shown in column (C) of Fig.~\ref{fig:KL_Evaluation}, that the KL divergences of all three features are decreasing as training progresses, which means that the two distributions are getting more and more similar as the model evolves. We found that models between the 201-250 epochs achieve the best performance, with lower KL divergence for the mean, median, and standard deviation value distributions. We also see that the variance between the results produced by intermediary models trends downward until we surpass the 250 epoch mark. This is regarded as the first criterion of the model selection in this study.

    \subsection{Evaluation using Adversarial Accuracy}\label{sect:experiment:aa}

    The Adversarial Accuracy, as formulated in Eq.~\ref{eq:Adversarial_Accuracy}, is put forward by Yale \cite{yale2019assessing}, which is used for comparing the similarity of two sets of data samples.

    \begin{equation} \label{eq:Adversarial_Accuracy}
    \begin{footnotesize}
    AA_{TS} = \frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n}\boldsymbol{1}(d_{TS}(i)>d_{TT}(i)) + \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n}\boldsymbol{1}(d_{ST}(i)>d_{SS}(i)))
    \end{footnotesize}
    \end{equation}

    In the definition, the variable $T$ stands for the set of real data, and the variable $S$ stands for the set of synthetic data. For calculating $\textbf{1}(d_{TS}(i) > d_{TT}(i))$, each real sample from $T$ are compared with all synthetic data points in $S$ to calculate the shortest distance $d_{TS}(i)$, and compared with all the other real data points in $T$ to calculate the shortest distance $d_{TT}(i)$. The most straightforward distance metric is the Euclidean distance which is our choice in this study as well. The shortest distance generally means the highest similarity between two data points. If $d_{TS}(i) > d_{TT}(i)$, it means no synthetic data point can be found that is more similar to the current real data point than other real data points. Otherwise, a synthetic data point, which is more similar to the current real data point, can be found. The $d_{TS}(i) < d_{TT}(i)$ indicates a realistic samples is generated. The second part, $\textbf{1}(d_{ST}(i) > d_{SS}(i))$, is implemented in a similar manner, except that here each synthetic sample will be compared with not only all the real samples but also all the other synthetic samples. Overall, the best balance result of Adversarial Accuracy should equal 0.5, which implies the generator can generate realistic samples.

    \begin{figure} [hbt!]
        \centering
        \includegraphics[scale=0.55]{./fig/AA_Evaluation_H_2.pdf}
        \caption{The box plots show the distributions of Adversarial Accuracy of three features, including mean, median, and standard deviation, of TOTUSJH evaluated with all intermediate models by divided into six groups. This metric is regraded as the second criterion for exploring the model selection.}
        \label{fig:AA_Evaluation}
    \end{figure}

    In our experiments, each time series is represented by extracting statistical attributes of the mean, median, and standard deviation. Then, we utilize each attribute to calculate the Adversarial Accuracy among all samples using Eq.~\ref{eq:Adversarial_Accuracy} with all intermediate models. Fig.~\ref{fig:AA_Evaluation} shows the results of the three statistical features of TOTUSJH. Through observing the box plots, we find that the models between 201 to 250 epochs can achieve $0.55$ in mean, $0.60$ in median, and $0.68$ in standard deviation on average, which shows that the CGAN model can generate synthetic samples by maintaining a good balance between underfitting and overfitting with real samples. Moreover, the Adversarial Accuracy results have a consistent conclusion with the KL divergence experiment in Section~\ref{sect:experiment:statistics} regarding the model selection.

    \subsection{Evaluation using SVM classifiers}\label{sect:experiment:svm}

    In this section, we evaluate how well the generated data remedy the class-imbalance issue in classification of flaring and non-flaring instances of SWAN-SF. First, we train the generator on partition $1$ of SWAN-SF, with the four magnetic field parameters mentioned in Section~\ref{sect:related-work:swan-sf}. The outputs of the generator are the synthetic multivariate time series most similar to the actual multivariate time series of flares. Then, we move to train two classifiers: one on the highly imbalanced real data without any change, and the other, on the data that is made balanced by adding synthetic samples. Of course, the synthetic samples are only used for the purpose of training, and the validation and test sets are made entirely of real data. We consider the former as the baseline. The only difference between the two classification strategies is that they are trained with different training datasets.

    Both classifiers are trained on partition 1 and evaluated on partitions 2, 3, and 5. Partition 4 is used for tuning hyperparameters. We choose the SVM as the standard classifier for both classification tasks with the same settings that conclude the hyperparameters C and $\gamma$ to 0.25 and 0.25. For preprocessing of SWAN-SF, we linearly transform all five partitions to the range $[-1, 1]$ for training the CGAN model and SVM classifiers, and impute Missing data with the linear interpolation.

    Considering the flare forecasting problem that we approach is in fact a rare-event classification task, choosing a proper evaluation is important. From years of exploration, domain experts have come to agree on the effectiveness of two metrics, namely the \textit{true skill statistic} ($TSS$) \cite{hanssen1965relationship} and the updated \textit{Heidke skill score} ($HSS2$) \cite{balch2008updated} as shown in Eq.~\ref{eq:tss} and Eq.~\ref{eq:hss2}.

    \begin{equation}\label{eq:tss}
    \begin{footnotesize}
        TSS = \frac{tp}{tp + fn} - \frac{fp}{fp + tn}
    \end{footnotesize}
    \end{equation}

    \begin{equation}\label{eq:hss2}
    \begin{footnotesize}
        HSS2 = \frac{2 \cdot ((tp \cdot tn) - (fn \cdot fp))}{(tp + fn) \cdot (fn + tn) + (fp + tn) \cdot (tp + fp)}
    \end{footnotesize}
    \end{equation}

    \begin{figure} [hbt!]
      \centering
    \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{./fig/SVM_Evaluation.pdf}
      \caption{This is the evaluation of flare forecasting based on SVM classifiers. The Baseline experiment (Left) is trained on partition 1 (imbalanced) of SWAN-SF, and the CGAN experiment (Right) is trained on the balanced partition 1 by adding synthetic samples generated by the CGAN model. Both experiments are evaluated on the same test dataset: partitions 2, 3, and 5 of SWAN-SF. From the results, we find notable improvements in terms of TSS and HSS. This experiment shows the CGAN can be considered as an effective remedy for tackling the class imbalance issue.}
      \label{fig:SVM_Evaluation}
    \end{figure}

    As the forecasting results reported in Fig.~\ref{fig:SVM_Evaluation}, we observe that the performance of the classifier trained on the training dataset which was made balanced using our generated synthetic samples is remarkably higher than that of the baseline classifier, by both metrics , TSS and HSS2. This observation confirms that the model generally performs best when classes in the training dataset are roughly equal in size. Specifically, the CGAN classifier results in an over 20-fold improvement compared to the baseline experiment in terms of TSS (an increase from 0.04 in average to 0.81). Moreover, the HSS2 improves an over 5-fold improvement from 0.08 to 0.45. The CGAN experiment results show that the CGAN model can successfully capture statistical features of real MVTS samples by learning the data distribution and, therefore, generating realistic MVTS samples. Overall, the CGAN model can be regarded as an effective remedy for tackling the class imbalance issue.

\section{Conclusion \& Future Work}

    In this project, we utilized the conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) to overcome the class imbalance issue with a multivariate time series dataset. We generated synthetic samples and evaluated them by conducting two sets of experiments: First, experiments based on the data distributions of statistical features and the Adversarial Accuracy verified that synthetic samples are indeed similar to the real data. Next, our classification experiment showed that generating synthetic samples of the minority class in order to balance the training dataset can remarkably boost the performance of classification models. Therefore, we concluded that the CGAN method can be considered as an effective remedy for tackling the class imbalance issue in flare forecasting.

    Of course, this study is only the first attempt towards generating a reliable synthetic dataset with meaningful physical features. There are still many aspects to be improved upon, such as incorporating an advanced loss function of Wasserstein GAN, introducing the representation learning of Info GAN, or exploring more complex structures of the generator and the discriminator.As our future work, we plan to compare the presented approach with other class-imbalance remedies including simple oversampling and undersampling strategies, in order to provide more insights into the effectiveness of the CGAN approach. Furthermore, exploring and interpreting the meaning of synthetic samples from the astrophysics point of view is also a worthwhile topic that we wish to investigate in the future, by collaborating with domain experts.

\section*{Acknowledgment}

    It will be provided at publication.

\balance
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Use of a smart lip holder for minimally invasive minor salivary gland biopsy
Early-stage innovation report
Alexandre Dumusc1,
Bettina Bannert2,
Florian Kollert3,
Jorge Álvarez-Troncoso4,
Thomas Hügle1
1Rheumatology, Lausanne University Hospital, Lausanne, Switzerland
2Rheumatology, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland
3Rheumatology, Inselspital University Hospital Bern, Bern, Switzerland
4Unidad de Enfermedades Autoinmunes Sistémicas, Hospital Universitario La Paz, Madrid, Spain
Correspondence to Professor Thomas Hügle, Rheumatology, Lausanne University Hospital, Lausanne 1011, Switzerland; thomas.hugle{at}chuv.ch
Summary box
We describe a novel instrument that permits a rapid and safe minor salivary gland biopsy in cases of suspected Sjögren's syndrome or other diseases.
How might it impact on healthcare in the future?
Minor salivary gland biopsy can be performed by a single person
The intervention is less invasive and more rapid
No neurological complications such as numbness were observed
Sjögren's syndrome (SS) is a chronic autoimmune condition with a prevalence of up to 1%.1 Salivary gland biopsy showing focal lymphocytic sialadenitis (focus score of ≥1) is required to fulfil the classification criteria for SS in seronegative patients, which is the case in up to 30%.2 Salivary gland biopsy is also an important tool to diagnose or exclude other systemic diseases causing sicca symptoms, such as sarcoidosis, amyloidosis, Mikulicz's disease or IgG4-related disease. So far, there has been no standard technique for salivary gland biopsy. Minor salivary gland biopsy (MSGB) of the lower lip is widely used due to its low invasiveness, and has a sensitivity ranging from 63% to 93% and a specificity of >90% reported in most studies.3 In contrast to biopsy of the parotid gland, fascial nerve damage does not occur in MSGB. Yet it can lead to transient local paraesthesia of the lower lip in up to 11% of the interventions, at least when including different techniques regarding length and direction of incision or punch biopsy.4 Newer, less invasive techniques applying transcutaneous pressure manually or using devices such as adapted chalazion forceps5 reduce permanent neurological complications to 0.1%.6 7 In a study, using a needle tip for vertical mucosal incision and dissection of the glands along with pressure applied from the sides by the operator showed better results than the more invasive elliptic incision.8
MSGB is commonly performed by two operators, one providing assistance to hold the lip with or without pressure and the main operator performing local anaesthesia, mucosal incision and extraction of the glands. In this retrospective study we characterise the use of a novel disposable device to facilitate MSGB in routine practice.
We retrospectively studied 28 consecutive adult patients with clinically suspected SS who underwent MSGB using Saliclick (Curmed, Switzerland) between August 2018 and March 2020. We also studied 22 patients who underwent MSGB during this period without the device. In this case, transcutaneous pressure was performed by a second person after receiving instructions.
The clamp is a single-use device produced by three-dimensional printing and injection moulding subsequently. The technical use of the device is described in the Results section. We recorded the demographics of the patients, the side of the biopsy, the number of incisions, sample surface and the number of lobuli when possible. We also assessed if the quality of the sample was sufficiently useful for clinical decision making. We noted any use of stitches and any occurrence of complication, notably transient or persistent numbness, bleeding or infection.
Local anaesthesia of the lower lip was performed in all cases before the intervention. Figure 1 shows the device in the form of a disposable two-leg clamp with teeth-row sparing concave distal ends to be placed on the lower lip. A stamp is located on the lower leg with an opposite notch. A locking mechanism is situated in the middle of the device to allow application of constant transcutaneous pressure on the lower lip. In all 28 interventions the clamp was locked in the first grid with acceptable pressure for the patients and with sufficient pressure to provoke protrusion of the salivary glands after incision. The procedure is shown step by step in figure 2. A video of a representative procedure is seen in the following link: https://vimeo.com/chuv/review/436329329/644f692d5e.
Saliclick lip holder.
Step-by-step procedure of minor salivary gland biopsy using the Saliclick lip holder.
MSGB was performed by two operators (AD, TH). The characteristics and procedure outcomes of patients who underwent MSGB using the device are summarised in table 1. All MSGB procedures were performed during a 30 min routine clinic slot in outpatient clinic boxes. All MSGB procedures were performed by the operator alone without assistance. The mean sample surface was 4.4 mm2. For three patients, no glands were obtained on the first incision. The biopsy was repeated on the contralateral side with success in all three cases. In 89% of the cases the biopsy was conclusive and useful in the diagnosis or exclusion of SS. Alternative diagnoses such as amyloidosis or sarcoidosis were not reported. Complications occurred in two patients; one patient fainted, and the procedure had to be suspended for several minutes and resumed afterwards. Local haematoma was observed in the second patient. No neurological complications occurred; notably no hypoesthesia (or numbness) was reported. We found no difference between the intervention group using the clamp and the control group with an assisting person in terms of size. In the control group, one patient fainted and the procedure has been temporarily suspended.
MSGB is a cornerstone in the diagnosis of SS. In this study we showed that a novel, self-locking clamp with a stamp can be used to perform MSGB safely and rapidly by a single person and thus is feasible to be integrated into a normal clinical consultation. Tissue yield and pathological assessment were comparable with results from other studies.6 We experienced mild haematoma in one patient, but notably no transitory or persistent numbness of the lower lip. We postulate that by transcutaneous pressure, incisions are more superficial than in other techniques, particularly as compared with punch biopsy. The duration of the procedure was not longer using the device when compared with the standard procedure including an assisting person, and yielded a similar number of glands. We observed less frequent bleeding during the procedure with the device compared with the standard procedure, even with patients under antiplatelet agents, and we postulate a haemostatic effect of the clamp through the applied pressure. Despite the technical advance in salivary gland biopsy, recent articles indicate that patients with SS may have negative biopsy results.9 Of note, other clinical criteria including ocular symptoms must be present in SS and should be investigated thoroughly. The recommendations for standardisation of labial salivary gland histopathology in clinical trials propose assessment of at least four labial salivary glands, with a surface of at least 8 mm2.10 Given the mean surface of 4.4 mm2 obtained in this study, at least two mucosal incisions are necessary if this device is used for clinical trials. In patients with suspected Mikulicz's disease or lymphoma, submandibular gland biopsy has shown a higher diagnostic utility than MSGB and might be preferable.11
In conclusion we observed that the use of this device allows performance of MSGB without assistance, has good-quality outcomes and is not associated with neurological complication due to low invasiveness.
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Daniels T, et al
. Standardisation of labial salivary gland histopathology in clinical trials in primary Sjögren's syndrome. Ann Rheum Dis 2017;76:1161–8.doi:10.1136/annrheumdis-2016-210448pmid:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27965259
Moriyama M,
Furukawa S,
Kawano S, et al
. The diagnostic utility of biopsies from the submandibular and labial salivary glands in IgG4-related Dacryoadenitis and sialoadenitis, so-called Mikulicz's disease. Int J Oral Maxillofac Surg 2014;43:1276–81.doi:10.1016/j.ijom.2014.06.014pmid:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25062551
Contributors TH: development of the clamp, study design, biopsy and analysis, performance of biopsy, manuscript preparation. AD, BB, FK, JA-T: study design and analysis, performance of biopsy, manuscript preparation.
Competing interests TH developed the instrument and receives royalties.


Woodside School's Multiage program offers a fun learning environment for 3/4 year olds. Our curriculum is based on the knowledge of how children grow and develop socially, emotionally, cognitively and physically. Our teachers respect and value the uniqueness of each child. By individualizing teaching strategies we provide the ideal environment and energy to make learning fun.
The Woodside Multiage schedule is Monday-Friday 7:00-5:30 and offer the choices of M-F, MWF, or T-TH full or half days. Woodside School's half days are 7:30-12:30.


Knit from the top down and in the round, this pullover features a simple lace rib on the front body. Stockinette back and sleeves add a simple contrast to the textural front. Designed with slight negative ease at the bust and positive ease around the waist and hips, this truly is a sweater you'll want to live in.
The A-line body ends with 1x1 ribbing just below the beltline for a comfortable fit and a casual look. The open neckline is finished with a subtle two-stitch applied i-cord. The smooth finish of Tosh DK creates a slightly lighter fabric than worsted weight, making this the perfect all-season garment that can be worn against the skin or over layers.
Palladio is part of SEASONLESS, a Mini Collection from designers Jane Richmond and Shannon Cook.


text:
=begin
def separate_comma(integer)
  convert integer to string using .to_s and store in "string" variable
  if string.length is less than 4 chars
    puts original number
  else if string.length == 4 chars
    puts string[0] + ',' + string[1...3]
  else if string.length == 5 chars
    puts string[0] + string[1] + ',' + string[2...4]
  else if string.length == 6 chars
    puts string[0] + string[1] + string[2] + ',' + string[3...5]
  else if string.length == 7 chars
    puts string[0] + ',' + string[1...3] + ',' string[4...6]
  else if string.length == 8 chars
    puts string[0] + string[1] + ',' + string[2...4] + ',' + string[5...7]
  else
    puts "That string is not the right size"
=end

# 1. Initial Solution
def separate_comma(int)
  str = int.to_s
  if str.length < 4
    return str
  elsif str.length == 4
    return str[0] + ',' + str[1] + str[2] + str[3]
  elsif str.length == 5
    return str[0] + str[1] + ',' + str[2] + str[3] + str[4]
  elsif str.length == 6
    return str[0] + str[1] + str[2] + ',' + str[3] + str[4] + str[5]
  elsif str.length == 7
    return str[0] + ',' + str[1] + str[2] + str[3] + ',' + str[4] + str[5] + str[6]
  elsif str.length == 8
    return str[0] + str[1] + ',' + str[2] + str[3] + str[4] + '.' + str[5] + str[6] + str[7]
  else
    return "no thanks"
  end
end

# 2. Refactored Solution
def separate_comma(int)
  str = int.to_s
  if str.length < 4
    return str
  elsif str.length == 4
    return str[0] + ',' + str[1..3]
  elsif str.length == 5
    return str[0..1] + ',' + str[2..4]
  elsif str.length == 6
    return str[0..2] + ',' + str[3..5]
  elsif str.length == 7
    return str[0] + ',' + str[1..3] + ',' + str[4..6]
  elsif str.length == 8
    return str[0..1] + ',' + str[2..4] + ',' + str[5..7]
  else
    return "no thanks"
  end
end

# 3. Reflection

=begin
Q: What was your process for breaking the problem down? What different approaches did you consider?
A: Originally, I wanted to use an array method, but this seemed like a
difficult and unnecessary option. Instead, I figured that the best way to
solve this would be to convert the integer to a string and use regex
pattern recognition to place commas in the right places. Since we're not
using regex, I figured I could convert the integer to a string and
manually place the commas where they belonged.

Q: Was your pseudocode effective in helping you build a successful initial
solution?
A: The pseudocode was incredibly effective in helping me understand how I
wanted my program to run. The pseudocode was especially useful for when
knew how I wanted a line of code to run, but didn't know the method I was
supposed to use.  This worked as a good placeholder when I went to
research
the proper method.

Q: What new Ruby method(s) did you use when refactoring your solution?
A: It wasn't so much a method, as a type of shortcut.  Instead of being
verbose and manually returning each individual character in the string, I
took groups of three characters and used a string slice operation to group
them together and insert a comma.

Q: How did you initially interate through the data structure?
A: I took the integer as an input, converted it to a string, and inserted
commas where they belonged.

Q: Do you feel your refactored solution is more readable?
A: I didn't drastically change my code when refactoring it since I think
I was hitting the ceiling of what I could do without the use of regex.
However, I did include string slicing in order to better chunk the
characters into groups of three.  This made it easier to see where the
commas should be placed.
=end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Vasyl Stus: Life in Creativity
Dmytro Stus
Paperback €29.90
Click here for details about availability, delivery time, and s&h costs:
eBook €19.99
Available format(s):
Order a review copy OR
How to explain the mystery of fame? Many once well-known people who spent much of their lives at the core of historic events have fallen into oblivion since. The brilliant East Ukrainian poet and Soviet-era dissident Vasyl Stus (1938-85) became renowned only after his reburial in late Soviet Ukraine in 1989. What are the reasons for the widespread admiration for him in post-Soviet Ukrainian society? The exceptional beauty of his poetry? His stunning courage and selflessness as a Soviet dissident? The irreconcilability of his position as a human being? Or/and Vasyl Stus' ability to feel the pain of others as his own? Trying to answer these and other questions, the poet's son and literary scholar Dmytro Stus masterfully combines a cultural and biographical study with private recollections and observations of his father. The book offers a sometimes-paradoxical merger of genres mixing academic analysis with novelistic narration. It shows Vasyl Stus through the eyes of his son and researcher against the background of twentieth-century Ukrainian "belated" emergence as a nation-state. In 2007, the Ukrainian edition of this book won Ukraine's prestigious Shevchenko National Prize.
Dr. Dmytro Stus studied Philology at Kyiv State University. Since 2012, he has been Director of the Taras Shevchenko National Museum in Kyiv. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Dmytro Stus is the chair of the Congress of Litterateurs of Ukraine, a former editor of the journals Kyivs'ka Rus', Suchasnist', and Knyzhnyk-Review, and CEO of the Ukraine Incognita Foundation. He has compiled several collections of works by his father as well as, together with Leonid Finberg and Oleksii Sinchenko, the anthology Ukrainian Dissidents (ibidem-Verlag 2021).
The translator:
Ludmila Bachurina is Senior Lecturer in English at the V.I. Vernadsky Taurida National University at Kyiv.
"This is the first detailed biography of a genial poet whose word expressed the pains, tragedies, and lost hopes of the Soviet Ukrainian so-called 'Sixtiers' in the 20th century. To those who do not know or know only little of Vasyl Stus' oeuvre, the book will reveal a great European poet who, together with Rilke, Whitman, Celan and Pasternak, represents mankind's finest twentieth-century poetry. To those who already know his legacy, the book will reveal the context of Stus' poems and help to better understand his texts."Leonid Finberg, Editor-in-Chief, Dukh i Litera Press, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
2-3 Tage / 2-3 days
Dmytro Stus, Ludmila Bachurina
Andreas Umland
Publisher program
Edition Noëma
Link to Edition Noëma
Frankfurter Buchmesse 2021
Es geht weiter! Lesereise: "Unerhörte Ostfrauen"
Unerhörte Ostfrauen - Problemzone Ostmann?
Ban the Bomb!
Ukraine vs. Darkness
Ukraine: rapid escalation of conflict in 2014 has lessons for today
Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy
Next online seminar of our book series "Ukrainian Voices" on April 21st: "At the Fence of Metternich's Garden"
The Treblinka Death Camp
Festschriften - conference proceedings
Distribution & PR
Heller Weg: Geschichte eines Konzentrationslagers im Donbass 2017-2019
Transdisciplinary Beckett
A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister
The European Handbook of Central Asian Studies
Lehren aus 9/11
A Constitution of the People and How to Achieve It
Health Power: Einfach gesund!
ibidem Press on Facebook
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It's the underground time in the popoooche! Take the lead of your own Crazy Taxi empire.
Prestige Mega Corp., an unscrupulous carpooling company, swindles your drivers to fill the pockets of the rich corporatists.
In Crazy Taxi, SEGA's latest semi+passive clicker, you just have to touch the screen to sow chaos. The more your driver will race, the more money you'll raise! The more your driver will do stunts, the quicker your savings will fall.


In-house designed wedding suite featuring foil and letterpress. The invitation consists of black and gold foil on duplexed Neenah Environment Moonrock/ Classic Crest Epic Black stocks with the remaining pieces being black letterpress on duplexed Neenah Environment Moonrock.
The wedding invitation suite utilized letterpress and foil stamping.
Detail of the invite back with black gloss foil on black paper stock.


Iconic desk or table lamp designed by Louis Christiaan Kalff for Philips and made in Belgium 1955. We have several of these lamps available all in good and clean brass condition. We also have some of the other models available with more edged shades. Ask us for other options.


Download our Skype extras and plugins to get even more from your Skype.
VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype is a Skype Extra that lets you stay informed whenever your Skype contacts change their online status. Using VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype plugin you can enable custom alerts for every Skype status. Anytime your Skype contact switches status you can be notified with a popup window or a sound alert.
Want to chat with your offline Skype contacts and keep checking when they come online? Need to set a quick reminder to confirm meeting time with your Skype buddy? Welcome to VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype! Using this free plugin you can enable individual status notifications, set quick reminders and easily check when your Skype contact was last seen online.
VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype is a freeware Skype Extras plugin which helps you stay in touch with all of your Skype contacts no matter whether they are friends, colleagues, customers or business partners.
VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype lets you select for which of your Skype contacts you would like to receive status notifications when they change their online Skype status. You can even define individual Skype status for which notifications will be presented.
Ever wanted to say something to your friend or colleague, but they are Away, Not Available or in Do Not Disturb mode and you have to run out? Well, now you can. Simply enable a contact alert for your Skype buddy and type in a chat message. Your chat message will be sent to your contact whenever they switch their Skype status to Online.
You can choose between text popup and/or sound alerts for status notifications. You can switch between static and fading popup messages or define your custom sound to be played whenever your contact alert is triggered.
Use VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype to set individual contact reminders. Contact reminders will show up as text popups whenever your contacts change their online status.
Using VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype you can easily view the last time your contact was seen online. This can be especially useful when planning an occasional chat or a follow up call with your business partners or customers, who you don't speak to on a regular basis.
Use VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype installation package (.sparc file) which is available on Skype Extras site.
Use setup.exe file, which can be downloaded by clicking on the banner above.
2. Select "I accept the agreement" and click Next button.
3. Click Next button to continue. If you would like to select custom installation directory, click Browse button.
4. Click Next button to continue. If you would like to select a different Start Menu folder, click Browse button.
5. Select any additional tasks you would like to be automatically performed after installation. Click Next button to continue.
6. Review installation settings and click Install to continue with the installation, or click Back if you want to change any settings.
7. Installation of VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype is complete. Click Finish to exit the setup wizard.
8. If your Skype client is running, you should see a popup window appear from the task bar area. Click on "Click here to accept/deny".
9. If your Skype client is not running, start up and sign into your Skype account. You should see a new Plugin authorization event in the events area. Click on the event.
10. Your Skype client will display a "Manage API Access Control" dialog. Select "Allow this program to use Skype" option and click OK.
11. VoiceGear Contact Alerter for Skype is connected to Skype and should display your list of contacts.
We are always looking for ways to improve our Skype plugin software, your feedback is very important to us.


text:
Northrop Grumman to launch OmegA rocket from ULA's Delta 4 pad at Vandenberg
by Sandra Erwin — October 26, 2019
Northrop Grumman vice president Kent Rominger speaks at the opening of the company's vertical assembly building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Aug. 22, 2019. Credit: Northrop Grumman
Space Launch Complex 6, or SLC-6, is a sprawling facility that the Air Force leases to United Launch Alliance.
WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman intends to conduct West Coast launches of its OmegA rocket from the same Vandenberg Air Force Base launch complex currently leased to United Launch Alliance for Delta 4 Heavy launches, a senior executive said Oct. 23.
"On the West Coast, we will launch from SLC-6," Kent Rominger, Northrop Grumman's vice president and capture lead for the OmegA launch system, said in a presentation at the 2019 International Astronautical Congress.
Space Launch Complex-6, originally built in the 1960s to launch the Air Force's never-flown Manned Orbital Laboratory, was repurposed in the 1980s as a dedicated launch and landing site for military space shuttle missions. After the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Air Force mothballed the California site without ever conducting a West Coast shuttle launch. It reactivated the site in the 1990s for a handful of Lockheed Martin Athena launches and eventually turned it over to the Delta 4 program.
Rominger said it will be possible for Northrop Grumman to start preparing SLC-6 for OmegA launches pad without disrupting ULA's Delta 4 Heavy operations, which are expected to wrap up in 2024 with Delta 4's final flight.
"Our plan is to use it on a non-interference basis as we modify the pad to accommodate OmegA," said Rominger. The rocket's first and second stages use solid fuel "so we don't have nearly the demand for the cryogenics that you would on a liquid system," he said. The upper stage uses a liquid engine but Rominger said that will only require a small amount of cryogenic propellants.
"Modifications at SLC-6 are not as difficult as one might imagine," Rominger said.
OmegA is one of the rockets being offered to the Air Force for the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 Launch Service Procurement. One of the requirements for all bidders is to be able to launch from both East Coast and West Coast ranges.
Northrop Grumman is building its East Coast pad and vertical assembly facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, at the same site where NASA will launch its Space Launch System rocket. Rominger said both vehicles will be able to operate on the same site without causing disruption. "We roll out, launch and come back," he said. "There is no huge conflict to share it with SLS."
As recently as July, Northrop Grumman had not selected one of Vandenberg's space launch complexes for OmegA, but an Air Force official said this summer that both Northrop Grumman and Blue Origin had expressed interest in SLC-6. Of the four launch providers competing for the Air Force procurement contract, only ULA and SpaceX have pads at Vandenberg. Blue Origin has said it is considering options and has not yet announced its plans to launch from the West Coast.
The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center over the past several months allowed both Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman to tour SLC-6. It takes years to secure permits to build new launch pads at Vandenberg so using existing ones might the only option for new entrants. Industry sources told SpaceNews that ULA raised concerns about sharing the site and wanted to make sure that sensitive equipment used to assemble and launch classified satellites was not shown to competitors.
ULA CEO Tory Bruno said any decisions on who uses the pad are made jointly by the company and the Air Force. During a meeting with reporters Oct. 23, Bruno did not mention that Northrop Grumman would be allowed to use SLC-6 but said ULA, at the government's request, has allowed other companies to inspect the facilities. ULA said it will continue to use the pad as long as the Delta 4 Heavy is in operation, which will be at least until 2024.
OmegA to fly in 2021
Rominger said Northrop Grumman believes OmegA has a strong chance to win one of two Phase 2 contracts the Air Force plans to award next year. He said OmegA's strengths are its simple design and reliability.
The rocket's intermediate version is expected to fly in 2021 and the heavy variant in 2024. He said over the past 20 years, solid rocket motors used in space vehicles have been "99 percent reliable," but he acknowledged that no matter how good a rocket might look on paper it has to show it can perform in flight. OmegA's booster and second stage are solid fueled and the third stage uses two RL-10 liquid engines made by Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Rominger said Northrop Grumman already is producing flight hardware and is racing to complete development tests. "Early 2021 is not that far away," he said.
So far Northrop Grumman has only test fired the first stage of OmegA. In a May 30 static fire test in Utah, the booster was fired for 120 seconds and near the end the engine nozzle suffered an anomaly. In a statement in June, the company said it studied the data and concluded the nozzle anomaly did not affect motor performance and the issue appeared to be limited to the rear most section of the nozzle. Northrop Grumman said it would need to analyze the data further to determine whether manufacturing, design or conditions unique to ground tests contributed to the exit cone issue.
The ground test of the second state was expected to happen in August 2019 but Rominger said it has been pushed into early 2020, and did not provide a more specific timeline.
A spokeswoman said a in a statement to SpaceNews that Northrop Grumman "postponed the OmegA second stage static fire test to early next year to provide time to incorporate lessons learned from the first stage test."
Launch Military Northrop GrummanOmegAVandenberg


text:
Q: Changing the starting value in dropdown menu So, I have a drop down menu that starts from 25000 to 3,000,000, increased by 25,000 each time.
<option  <?php selected('3000000', isset($_GET['max']) ? $_GET['max'] : ''); ?> ><?php _e('No Max', 'my_site') ?></option>
  <?php
    for($i=0; $i<=3000000; $i+=25000) {
    echo '<option '. selected($i, isset($_GET['max']) ? $_GET['max'] : '') . ' value='.$i.'>'.number_format($i, 0).'</option>';
    }
  ?>

At this point, however, the "No Max" gives the value of "0" as that is the starting value.
However I need this to be "3,000,000" instead of "0" when no selection is made.
Could someone help me out with it?
Thanks

A: If you add selected="selected" as an attribute inside the <option> tag you want to be the default choice (3,000,000 in this case), it should show that option as the default.
Does this help?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


22 July :Post Offices in the country have opened more than 110 lakh accounts in the names of the beneficiaries of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) for making timely disbursement of wages. Recently, the Department of Posts signed MoUs with the State Governments of Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat for payment of wages to job card holders in these states.
(i) NREGS workers will open their accounts in the nearest Post Office for payments of their wages. In order to ensure that the workers are paid actual amount due to them, the amount of money to be paid to the workers based on the measurement of work done and attendance will be electronically transferred to the Payment System and directly credited into the accounts of the workers without any manual intervention.
(ii) For the purpose of identification of NREGS workers at the time of making payment and providing other savings bank related services to them, Department of Posts will issue smart cards at the time of opening of accounts. These cards will work as their ID cards as well as electronic Passbook. Post Office will not be able to make any transaction on behalf of the workers without using the smart card of the worker concerned. These cards will also have the photograph of the worker printed on it so as to ensure that the card belongs only to the presenting worker.
(iii) One of the key aspects of the software being implemented for the electronic Payment System is to ensure the security of transaction made from the mobile phone being used at the Post Office to the central server.
A pilot implementation of this system is being planned by the Government in selected districts of Orissa which is expected to be operational by December, 2008.


This book provides a theoretical and historical examination of the evolution of money. It is distinct from the majority of 'economic' approaches, for it does not see money as an outgrowth of market exchange via barter. Instead, the social, political, legal and religious origins of money are examined.
The methodological and theoretical underpinning of the work is that the study of money be historically informed, and that there exists a 'state theory of money' that provides an alternative framework to the 'orthodox' view of money's origins.
The contexts for analysing the introduction of money at various historical junctures include ancient Greece, British colonial dependencies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and local communities which introduce 'alternative' currencies. The book argues that, although money is not primarily an 'economic' phenomenon (associated with market exchange), it has profound implications (amongst others, economic implications) for societies and habits of human thought and action.
Mark Peacock is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science, York University, Canada.


text:
'use strict';

import express        from 'express';
import itemTypes      from '../../shared/domain/itemTypes';
import * as MongoUtil from '../util/MongoUtil';

const students = express.Router();

//***************************************************************************************************
//*** retrieve a list of students: /api/students[?query-string ... see below]
//***
//***   - by default, all students will be retrieved, in random order, emitting fields defined in
//***     meta.defaultDisplayFields.
//***
//***   - use optional "selCrit" query-string to fine tune retrieval/sort functionality.
//***
//***     This is a common structure for ALL DB retrievals
//***      ... see: src/client/state/appState.md for details
//***
//***     NOTE: Client's should always protect the data (above) by using the
//***           encodeJsonQueryStr(queryName, jsonObj) utility.
//***           ... src/shared/util/QueryStrUtil.js
//***
//***************************************************************************************************

students.get('/api/students', (req, res, next) => {

  // define our optional top-level selCrit from the request object
  const selCrit = MongoUtil.selCrit(req, itemTypes.meta.student);

  // force studentNum to always be emitted
  if (!selCrit.mongoFields.studentNum) {
    selCrit.mongoFields.studentNum = true;
  }

  // perform retrieval
  const studentsColl = req.geekU.db.collection('Students');
  studentsColl.find(selCrit.mongoFilter, selCrit.mongoFields)
              .sort(selCrit.mongoSort)
              .toArray()
              .then( students => {
                res.geekU.send(students);
              })
              .catch( err => {
                // communicate error ... sendError() will also log as needed
                res.geekU.sendError(err.defineClientMsg("Issue encountered in DB processing of /api/students"),
                                    req);
              });
});

//******************************************************************************
//*** retrieve a student detail (with enrollment): /api/students/:studentNum
//***   - when studentNum is Not Found, a 404 status is returned (Not Found)
//******************************************************************************

students.get('/api/students/:studentNum', (req, res, next) => {

  const studentNum = req.params.studentNum;

  // perform retrieval
  const studentsColl = req.geekU.db.collection('Students');
  studentsColl.aggregate([
    { $match: {_id: studentNum} },
    { $lookup: {
      from:         "Enrollment",
      localField:   "studentNum",
      foreignField: "student.studentNum",
      as:           "enrollment" } },
    { $project: {
      _id: false,
	    "studentNum": true,
	    "gender":     true,
	    "firstName":  true,
	    "lastName":   true,
	    "birthday":   true,
	    "phone":      true,
	    "email":      true,
	    "addr":       true,
	    "gpa":        true,
      'graduation': true,
	    "degree":     true,
      "enrollment.term":   true,
      "enrollment.grade":  true,
      "enrollment.course": true } }
  ])
  .toArray()
  .then( students => {
    if (students.length === 0) {
      res.geekU.sendNotFound();
    }
    else {
      res.geekU.send(students[0]);
    }
  })
  .catch( err => {
    // communicate error ... sendError() will also log as needed
    res.geekU.sendError(err.defineClientMsg("Issue encountered in DB processing of /api/students/:studentNum"),
                        req);
  });

});

export default students;


This travel grant is offered to young scholars from "outside of Europe" to attend the annual ECSS congress. Young researchers (32 years of age or younger at the time of ECSS Dublin 2018; born after 7 July 1985) working in the field of sports nutrition and hydration are encouraged to apply by submitting an online application form (CV, publication list and letter of motivation), two letters of recommendation together with the abstract to the ECSS. ECSS membership is mandatory.
All applications will undergo thorough review. Three candidates shall be receiving a grant of Two Thousand Euro (2.000 €) each, to cover travel expenses to the 23rd annual congress of the European College of Sport Science – ECSS Dublin 2018.


Ventana is the go-to oil and gas company that provides a good, fair deal to mineral and leasehold owners through technical expertise and trustworthy business practices from a team of experienced professionals deeply embedded within the Oklahoma community.
Oklahoma is truly a land of wide-open opportunity, if you have the knowledge, savvy, and expertise to make the right moves. Ventana's expert land and geology teams target acreage positions that are primed for growth, and we strive to identify low-risk investments that will provide reliable returns for our investors.
Our data-driven approach allows us to grow at a steady, smart rate, and we make the right technological investments to meet the evolving demands of the oil & gas industry. At Ventana, the future is wide open.
Ventana is right-sized for the flexibility and nimbleness needed in today's oil & gas marketplace. We rely on in-house technical expertise to quickly evaluate and turn around offers to landowners, often at the highest bonus prices, because of our unique non-op strategy. And we develop strong partnerships with interest sellers, investors and operators to ensure development stays on track.
Ventana is an experienced, accessible team who knows the business, and knows how to get the deal done.
WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR LAND, WE'RE DOWN TO EARTH.
Ventana Exploration & Production was established in Oklahoma by Oklahomans. Our entire team was born, raised and educated here, so we not only know the land, we embody the entrepreneurial spirit of our great state. Hard-working. No nonsense. With honesty and integrity as core values in every deal we make and every relationship we build.
At Ventana, we're true to our word: we are who we say we are, and we do what we say we'll do, in an environment built on respect, trust, and openness.
What Do Landowners Say About Ventana?
My experience leasing my minerals in Canadian County, Oklahoma to Ventana was a great experience and went very smoothly. Everyone I had contact with were very professional and took care of business in a timely manner. I had been contacted by numerous companies wanting to lease but none were as professional as Ventana which is why I chose them.
We have done business with Ventana several times, and the Land Department has exceeded my expectations with each transaction. I would recommend Ventana to any leasehold or mineral owner looking for the best deal, and a quick and thorough due diligence process.
It is such a privilege and blessing to work with you in our industry. Your honest and timely responses make it possible for us to maximize our time. The other aspect of Ventana Exploration that is refreshing is your fairness. While other companies are trying to negotiate every last penny you treat people like you would like to be treated and pay a price that is fair for everyone. Thank you again for contributing to our successes.