text:
Methanol price rises first and then decreases in 2014
car bearings
Wake up the second spring of methanol futures
ignites
Cobalt-based catalysts promise to enhance heavy oil extraction
Despite the large number of existing reagents, research is ongoing in the world to obtain universal catalysts that are distinguished by their efficiency, low cost and neutral impact on the environment. After conducting laboratory studies, KFU scientists were able to create a new type of reagent based on nickel and cobalt carboxylates, which are highly effective catalysts for the refinement of heavy oil.
The use of catalysts injected into a reservoir intensifies the destruction of asphaltene-resinous compounds, those which most affect the viscosity of oil.
In the paper, chemical changes in the composition of asphaltene subfractions of heavy oil under the influence of oil-soluble Co-based catalyst were investigated. The results of SARA-analysis and MALDI-spectroscopy revealed a decrease in absolute content of asphaltenes and their molecular masses in the presence of catalyst. Moreover, the sulfur content was decreased under the catalyst influence and it was mostly observed in the subfraction with the highest molecular weight (A5). The main catalytic reaction was a destructive hydrogenation, directed to break the -C-S-C- bonds in the asphaltene molecules. The 13C NMR spectra revealed the decrease in average length of chain (MCL) after catalytic treatment by 15 times in A1 subfraction, which was accepted as a solvate layer and almost by 13 times in A2 subfraction. The C-O and C-S bonds break in the side chains of aromatic and alicyclic hydrocarbons. The content of primary (Cp) and the sum of secondary and quaternary (Csq) carbons was increased, while the content of tertiary (Ct) and aromatic carbons (Car) declined. The high-molecular poly-alicyclic and polyaromatic components had lost the straight and branched aliphatic hydrocarbons, and then were transformed into coke like substance - carbene-carboids.
"The aquathermolysis technology is used to work with catalysts. These reagents are our own production. To date, they have found their application in Cuba and on Ashalchi field in Tatarstan," said Salikh Indad Sharif Salikh, Junior Research Associate at the In-Situ Combustion Lab.
The market, according to the researcher, has already appreciated this technology - the catalysts are being introduced into production by the largest Russian companies.
"Representatives from Iran, Iraq, Algeria and other countries work at our laboratory. And it is no coincidence that we have plans to promote our catalysts in other countries of the world. We are convinced that they can perform well on numerous overseas oilfields," said Irek Mukhamatdinov, Senior Research Associate at the same laboratory.
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text:
House bill would boost CISA funding by $335 million
(Scoop News Group photo)
Jun 4, 2019 | CyberScoop
House lawmakers on Tuesday released a draft fiscal 2020 appropriations bill that would increase funding by $335 million for the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to a bill summary.
The House Appropriations Committee bill would allot $2 billion for CISA in fiscal 2020 in recognition of the tall task CISA faces in helping civilian agencies fend off hackers, among other priorities. According to the summary, the legislation would allot $156 million for Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program, which agencies use to monitor their networks for threats.
The bill provides "necessary funding increases…to defend our nation's infrastructure from physical and rising cyberthreats," House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., said in a statement.
The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security will consider the bill on Wednesday. Senate appropriators have yet to release a companion bill.
CISA, which was formally established in November when the agency's name and cybersecurity mission was codified into law, welcomed the funding and support from Congress.
Jeanette Manfra, CISA's assistant director for cybersecurity, said she hopes the funding will "provide a much-needed boost for our cyber threat analysis and response capabilities as well as CISA's supply chain security efforts."
"We are hopeful that the additional funds provided in this mark will allow CISA to expand and mature several of our cybersecurity priorities, including expanding and modernizing our federal network services, accelerating the deployment of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program, and growing our vulnerability management capabilities," Manfra said in a statement.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), funding, House Appropriations Committee, Jeanette Manfra
Accused scammer Burkov to...
by Jeff Stone • 2 mins ago

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
\section{Introduction}
Human-Robot Interaction research often focuses on constructing fully-autonomous systems that work with humans or language-based interfaces that take explicit commands as a form of linguistic teleoperation.  Since both the robot and the human have reasoning abilities and unique capabilities, we propose that language can form the basis of a system with shared autonomy wherein both agents help each other accomplish a task by leveraging their individual strengths.  In this paper, we investigate how constraints from language balance the cognitive loads both the human and robot need to handle to complete the task, and the language's robustness when scaling the problem size.

Our work views incorporating language with robots through the lens of shared autonomy~\cite{javdani2015shared}.
Autonomy falls on a spectrum ranging from fully autonomous systems (e.g., manufacturing robots) that require no input from humans, to simple devices (e.g., telescopic cranes) that rely entirely on the user to specify the next action. All scenarios require both reasoning and action. Often we assume both tasks should fall to the robot, but shared autonomy aims to share the burden across all participants.  This also allows the user to bias actions of their robotic assistant.  This work presents a series of user studies on how humans naturally communicate about a simple table-clearing task to their robot butler, and how knowledge of robotic manipulation capabilities, linguistic comprehension, and task complexity affect a user's language.

\begin{figure}[t!]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.95\linewidth]{fig1.pdf}
    \caption{\sf \footnotesize  Shared autonomy is a spectrum along which efforts of both the human and robot trade off in service of a task. We show that a human's expectations of the robot's agency manifest in their utterances.}
    \label{fig:spectrum}
\end{figure}

Complex environments make planning difficult and automatic plans do not account for user preferences.
For example, when packing a suitcase, one might want their toiletries on top for easy access, and they will need to communicate this constraint.  When asked for input on plan creation, we find that humans are fast and effective planners, but only once they understand the robot's capabilities.  In linguistics, the nature of language a person produces is believed to be guided by Grice's Maxims \cite{frederking1996grice}.  We paraphrase two of them here:

\vspace{5pt}
\begin{itemize}
\item[]\hspace{-25pt} \textbf{Quantity:} A speaker tries to be as informative as possible while giving only as much information as is necessary.
\item[]\hspace{-25pt} \textbf{Manner:} A speaker tries to be brief and to avoid ambiguity.
\end{itemize}
\vspace{5pt}

What is most important to understand about these principles is that they are fundamentally social.  To know what or how much to say requires modeling the listener.  In the case of robotics, most users have either a weak or incorrect model of the robot's abilities and so, without guidance, they make the wrong assumptions about what is necessary and what is useful to communicate.  We explore this later in the paper.

We hypothesize that language varies from natural to programmatic (Fig. \ref{fig:spectrum}) depending on a user's expectations of the robots capabilities.  Our second hypothesis is that if asked to, humans are effective and efficient planners whose insights, preferences and task intuitions can be effectively harnessed to improve task performance.  Our experiments use the task and motion planning library, MAGI~\cite{srinivasa2016system}, to translate the high-level table-clearing task into an ordering of table-top objects and the corresponding motion plans needed to execute moving each object.\footnote{The planner performs a depth-first search over a permutation graph of manipulable objects until it finds a geometrically feasible solution which addresses all objects.} We setup our experiments within this planning framework to allow users to specify high-level goals or orders of objects to manipulate.  We avoid bias that might be introduced by working with members of the university community by running studies on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) with participants who had no previous knowledge of robotics.  We constrain the experiments to a simple table clearing task \cite{srinivasa2016system} but feel these results generalize to other domains and robotic platforms.

We first describe a preliminary study (\S \ref{sec:prelim}) which guides the creation of our AMT study on comparing plan efficiency and user effort (\S \ref{sec:exp1}).  Next, we investigate a new type of language to the literature that occurs in complex domains (\S \ref{sec:exp2}) and analyze the language strategies users produced  (\S \ref{sec:lang_strategy}).

\section{Related Work}
Our work is motivated by the rich breadth of research on using natural language to communicate with robots both within the robotics and natural language communities.
We are interested in how language interaction shifts the cognitive load in shared autonomy.

Previous work has grounded natural language navigational commands to executable representations.
Graphical model-based approaches using syntactic parses have been applied to controlling robotic forklift actions \cite{tellex2011understanding} and mobile navigation in novel environments \cite{hemachandra2015learning,yi2016expressing}.
Others have utilized CCG semantic parsing of robotic commands in synthetic environments \cite{matuszek2013learning}, and with weak supervision \cite{artzi2013weakly}.
Howard (2014) \cite{howard2014natural} parsed natural language to constraints in trajectory space in order to reduce the search space of their graphical model that grounds language to instructions. Park (2017) \cite{park2017generating} used a similar approach, grounding instructional language to a probabilistic graphical model, though they address the manipulation domain and learn soft cost functions to avoid dynamically-specified regions (e.g., ``don't put it there'').

Language interaction provides useful information in solving many of the challenges in shared autonomy, which include how to correctly and accurately identify a human's intent through interaction ~\cite{javdani2015shared} and observation~\cite{dragan2013legibility}.
Low-level control strategies from humans have also been successfully integrated and applied to search terrain~\cite{okada2011shared}. Recent research aggressively incorporates high-level human information in shared autonomy~\cite{ahmed2013bayesian,yi2017incorporating}. Language, which is a direct and natural way for a human to share information in collaboration, has been widely researched within the ``supervisor" paradigm \cite{kollar2013toward,matuszek2012joint,howard2014natural} where only a goal is provided or where the human acts as a ``programmer" \cite{sato1987language,lauria2002mobile,forbes2015robot} that instructs the agent in tedious detail.  Balancing these roles and investigating user preferences is still an open challenge for deploying communication in shared autonomy.

Finally, when referencing ambiguous objects, people use visual attributes and referring expressions to indicate which object should move next.  Like our work, approaches to referring expressions largely focus on the tabletop domain \cite{matuszek2012joint}, and offer systems that are interactive \cite{kollar2013toward}, collaborative \cite{fang2015embodied}, or incorporate manipulation actions \cite{forbes2015robot}.
Referring expressions can also be used as a means of effectively asking for help \cite{tellex2014asking}.
Finally, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has recently also introduced corpora for this task with substantially more complex linguistic constructions \cite{bisk2016natural}.  Given such varied language between papers, our work aims to better understand what leads a user to choose a given communicative strategy.

\section{Preliminary Study}
\label{sec:prelim}
Our preliminary study investigates whether humans are good planners and how their language changes when they are taught about a robot's capabilities and planner.  The training we provide partway through the study is a proxy for the online learning they would receive when interacting with a robot, but allows us to collect multiple data points for an individual user. This provides us a clear before-and-after comparison to investigate the effect of training.

We explained the goal task (table-clearing) to the user and that our robot, HERB, will only be using his right arm to manipulate one object at a time (partially replicated below). We then provided ten object configurations images like those shown in the top box of Figure \ref{fig:configs} (the design rational of which is explained in greater detail in section \ref{sec:studydesign}) to nine participants and requested instructions one-by-one:
\begin{small}
\begin{quote}
    \textit{You are overseeing a robot (HERB)'s role as a butler, ensuring he completes his tasks correctly and efficiently. Occasionally, he needs a little guidance.}\\
    ...\\
    \textit{For each scenario below, write an instruction for HERB to follow.  Remember, all cups must end up in the tray.}
\end{quote}
\end{small}

\begin{figure}[t!]
    \centering
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{training.pdf}
    \caption{\sf \footnotesize  Low-level motion planning might not find a collision-free solution to a multi-step manipulation task if forced to follow a bad action order.}
    \label{fig:training}
    \end{subfigure}
    ~
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{pilot_Planner.pdf}
    \caption{\sf \footnotesize  Planning time increases significantly when the task is complex,
    but incorporating human insight can offer dramatic performance gains.}
    \label{fig:pilot}
    \end{subfigure}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Untrained}  For the initial experiment no additional information was provided.  Unsurprisingly, most participants provided vague goal-oriented language:
\begin{enumerate}
    \item \textit{Place all cups in the tray} \hfill \begin{footnotesize}\texttt{[goals]}\end{footnotesize}
    \item \textit{Pick up the closest cup and move it onto the tray.  Repeat until there are no more cups.} \hfill \begin{footnotesize}\texttt{[algorithmic]}\end{footnotesize}
\end{enumerate}

Even a user who anticipated the fine-grained planning needs of the robot and initially provided verbose step-by-step instructions like: \textit{``Pick up the red cup and put it in the tray, then pick up the blue cup and put it in the tray, then...''} eventually switched to vague phrasings after growing bored with the task.

As it is clear that these ``plans" contain no immediately useful information for the planner, once all scenarios were completed we asked participants to ``translate" their own instructions into an explicit ordering over subtasks corresponding to each object on the table.  Here, they are making concrete their own assumptions about how to complete the task.  We pass these orderings to the planner and compare its planning times to those produced by vanilla planner runs (meaning it has no priors on ordering over subtasks for objects on the table).  Plan performances are shown in Figure \ref{fig:pilot}. The ten instructions cover tables with three through seven uniquely colored cups for both densely and loosely cluttered scenes.  We chose these to compare the breadth of difficulty for the planner as compared to the human participants.

\subsection{Training}
Next, we train users on basic details of planning algorithms in colloquial terms and with a technical definition:
\begin{small}
\begin{quote}
    \textit{HERB must sample and evaluate trajectories to assess if he can reach the cup and manipulate it.  The fewer viable paths, the more samples are rejected and the harder it is to plan successfully.}
\end{quote}
\end{small}

Alongside this explanation we provide the user a basic demonstration of what to avoid when giving an ordering (Figure \ref{fig:training}).
We do not instruct users in how to communicate.
After training, we repeat our data collection with ten new prompts.  This brief training leads participants to converge on the use of long verbose plans with explicit orderings.

\subsection{Preliminary Experimental Results}
This preliminary study shows that a small amount of training dramatically affects robot-oriented language in a way that's easier for the robot but less natural and more cumbersome for the person (quantitative metrics and analysis of our large-scale studies are presented in section \ref{sec:exp1}).  Next we evaluate the plans users produced to see how well human intuitions map to good motion plans.

Figure \ref{fig:pilot} suggests two important findings.  First, humans intuit good orderings well (outperforming our baseline in planning time), and second, even untrained users perform well.  This might indicate that their initial high-level instructions assumed a very capable planner, and when training introduced doubts they made their assumptions explicit.

\section{Study design}
\label{sec:studydesign}

\subsection{Stimulus Design}
We programatically generated stimulus images which consisted of colored cups (and/or) bottles in varying configurations on a table top. Each of the images was rendered from a 45 degree inclination angle and had the robot, HERB, present sitting in a pre-task configuration behind the table from the viewers perspective. Each of the configurations could be varied by the number of objects in the scene, whether the objects were sparsely placed or packed tightly, and by the object attributes available (object type, color, and size). When scaling the number of objects in a configuration, we chose to incrementally add an additional object to an existing set to create the new configuration. Doing this allowed us to be confident that there were no additional factors that could affect the changing complexity between two configurations.
\\

\noindent \textbf{Experiment I Stimuli}
Our first experiment consists of two types of stimuli (Figure \ref{fig:configs}).
The first set of stimulus images was composed of 5 `sparse' configurations and 5 `packed' configurations (each of which contained between 3 and 7 uniquely colored large-sized cups) for a total of 10 images.

\begin{figure}[t!]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{configs.pdf}
    \caption{\sf \footnotesize  Example configurations and language from both experiments. The orange boxes denote the type of language used in the shown example.}
    \label{fig:configs}
\end{figure}

The second set of images was composed of 6 `sparse' configurations and 6 `packed' configurations where the number of objects for all configurations was fixed at 6, colors were restricted to only red and blue (no longer unique), and objects' attributes were systematically varied. We generated a `sparse' and a `packed' configuration for each possible combination of available discriminating object attributes. For example, in the first two configurations, color is the only available attribute while in the last two configurations, color, type, and size are all varied among the objects. Our rational for picking 6 objects and not more was that this resulted in sufficient complexity without creating longer run-times for our planner. In total, the second set contained 12 images.
\\

\noindent \textbf{Experiment II Stimuli}
Our second experiment investigates the effect of scaling and complexity.  Here
the set of stimulus images was composed of 6 configurations with 24 uniquely colored cups and 6 configurations of 24 objects in which they were randomly assigned attributes (a color from ${red,blue}$, a size from ${small,large}$, and a type from ${cup,bottle}$).
In total, the third set contained 12 images (examples in Fig.~\ref{fig:configs}).

\subsection{Subject Allocation}

Both Experiments I and II were deployed via AMT. We recruited a total of n=50 participants for each, ensuring that participants who had seen Experiment I were not eligible to do Experiment II. We required that each participant was a native English speaker and was not color blind. We also surveyed participants on their past experience with robots at the end of each study.

\section{Experiment I}
\label{sec:exp1}

The results of the preliminary study corroborate our intuition that researching human robot collaboration in decision making falls within the framework and goals of shared autonomy. Specifically, we noted that humans are good at high-level reasoning and can specify an efficient ordering over subtasks in a high-level planning task. However, this shifts the cognitive workload to the human which they are reluctant to accommodate.  In contrast, robots are unlikely to have context specific heuristics about the environment and therefore have more difficulty finding a good orderings over subtasks, but they are very good at low-level path-planning for generating motion trajectories for individual subtasks and are highly capable assistants. This asymmetry between humans and robots can be generalized to a wide range of shared autonomy systems. Both agents will always have different capabilities or specialties, and shifting the cognitive load required by the human biases the system in one direction on the spectrum of full-autonomy to full teleoperation.

Understanding the breadth of language people tend to use in these interactions helps to
\begin{enumerate}
    \item design language understanding algorithms and language communication schemes to support human-robot communication;
    \item enable a robot to interpret the current intent of a human in sharing the workload; and
    \item allow a robot to actively generate language in order to shift its contribution on the autonomy spectrum to optimize the team performance.
\end{enumerate}

Our first experiment is designed to test two hypotheses:

\noindent \textbf{H1} \emph{Humans tend to provide ``natural" expressions when they trust in the robot's capabilities (they assume high robot autonomy before any information is given), which requires less work (mental + temporal demands).}

\noindent \textbf{H2} \emph{Humans tend to provide ``programmatic" expressions when they are aware of a robot's limitations, despite it increasing their workload.}

\subsection{Study Design}
\label{sec:exp1_design}
We use the stimuli discussed in \S \ref{sec:studydesign} in our experiment on AMT.  Training is split into two phases: 1. \textbf{R}: Robot capabilities and 2. \textbf{R+C}: Information about language phrasings that the robot can understand (constraints and orderings).  This two phase approach ensures that our ``translation" step from the preliminary study cannot bias participants towards listing objects.

\subsection{Evaluation}
To test our hypotheses we perform three evaluations based on plan efficiency, participant self-assessment, and linguistic analysis.\\
\\
\noindent \textbf{Plan Efficiency}
We annotate all plans provided by users into orderings (or partial-orderings) over the manipulable objects in the scene. With these orderings, we run the motion planner and assess each plan's efficiency by averaging over 10 plan times. When users provide high-level instructions (which contain no ordering information), we use the planner's de facto performance on the task. When users provide instructions which map to partial-orderings, we average the planning time of 3 samples from the set of feasible orderings which satisfy the given partial ordering.  \\
\\
\noindent \textbf{Participant Self-Assessment}
We ask our participants two categories of question: 1. We ask about the effort involved in the task and 2. We ask if they prefer scenes with simple referents or sets of objects.
User effort is collected with questions based on NASA TLX~\cite{hart2006nasa}. For each instruction we ask:
\begin{enumerate}
    \item \textit{How mentally demanding was it to come up with this?}
    \item \textit{How much time did it take you to think of this?}
    \item \textit{How satisfied are you with your performance on this?}\\
\end{enumerate}

\noindent \textbf{Linguistic Analysis}
We introduce two metrics for how the language of our participants vary through several conditions. First, we analyze type-token ratios.  Natural language is highly varied and rarely formulaic.  This manifests in a high type-token ratios (number of unique word types vs number of total words used).   In contrast, when language becomes repetitive and programmatic the ratio will fall.  We therefore present type-token ratios for all conditions as a proxy for how programmatic and ``unnatural" language has become.

Second, we manually annotated all of the responses as falling into one of three categories: \textit{high-level}, \textit{partial ordering}, and \textit{absolute ordering}.  We therefore report the number of instructions in each condition which belong to these classes.

\subsection{Results}
Our primary interest is in understanding the trade-off between the mental energy exerted by the participant versus their informativeness to the planner.

\begin{figure}
    \centering

    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{exp1_LangCoding.pdf}
    \label{fig:exp1_ordering}
    \end{subfigure}
    ~
    \centering
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{exp2_LangCoding.pdf}
    \label{fig:exp2_ordering}
    \end{subfigure}

    \vspace{-.3cm}

    \includegraphics[width=0.7\linewidth]{LangCoding-key.pdf}

    \vspace{.5cm}

    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{exp1_Lexical.pdf}
    \label{fig:exp1_ratio}
    \end{subfigure}
    ~
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{exp2_Lexical.pdf}
    \label{fig:exp2_ratio}
    \end{subfigure}

    \caption{Language analysis. \textbf{Top:} After training users in robot capabilities, we observe an increase in absolute ordering language. In Experiment I, we also observe an increase in grouping language after communication training (\S \ref{sec:exp1_design}). \textbf{Bottom:} Word repetition analysis (1.0 = no repetition, 0.0 = complete repetition). We observe that after robot capability training, repetitiveness increases, though this is then offset in Experiment I with communication training. In Experiment II, users overall relied more heavily on algorithmic language due to the complexity of the task.}
    \label{fig:language}
\end{figure}

\subsubsection{Language Analysis}
H1 and H2 supposed that language would change in potentially drastic ways when users are trained on a robot's capabilities.  The left column of Figure \ref{fig:language} shows precisely this effect.  On top, we show how users were split between different linguistic approaches, but once trained they shift almost exclusively to absolute orderings. It is only after we tell them that constraints and partial orderings are acceptable that they begin to change their approach.

In Figure \ref{fig:language} (below), we see a very similar trend in the type token ratios.  Again, untrained users take a diverse set of strategies but once trained they shift towards very repetitive language (low type/token ratios).
Given these jarring changes to the language, we assess their effects on plan efficiencies and correlation with mental demand.

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.98\linewidth]{exp1_Planner.pdf}
    \includegraphics[width=0.98\linewidth]{exp1_Mental.pdf}
    \caption{\textbf{Top:} High-level language does not assist the planner, but both grouping language and absolute orderings provide considerable gains. \textbf{Bottom:} Grouping language strikes a balance in mental demand. Overall, grouping language limits mental demand while benefiting planner performance.}
    \label{fig:mst_exp1}
\end{figure}

\subsubsection{Plan Efficiency vs Mental Demand}
Every type of language (shown in Fig. \ref{fig:configs}) provides an incrementally larger amount of information to the planner.  For every configuration, we ran our planner 10 times on the most common constraint/ordering provided (error bars shown in figure).  Figure \ref{fig:mst_exp1} shows the result of these instructions in planning time.  For analysis, we aggregate configurations into four categories: Packed vs Sparse, and Small ($\leq 5$) vs Large ($\geq$ 6).  When only a high-level plan is provided, we default to the planner's de facto performance.  We use exact sequences for absolute orderings.  Finally, if only a partial ordering is provided, we average over orderings sampled from the set of orderings that lead to geometrically feasible solutions.  Immediately, we see that human insight dramatically speeds up planning.

Next, we plot the mental demand users indicated was required for each type of language and configuration.  First we note that high-level plans are unaffected by task complexity while providing absolute orderings becomes tiring.  Importantly though, our results for grouping language which only partially constrain the task validate H2, as they balance plan efficiency (providing large gains to the planner) while incurring a lower mental demand than fully explicit orderings.

\begin{figure*}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.48\linewidth]{exp1_MST.pdf}
    \hspace{10pt}
    \includegraphics[width=0.48\linewidth]{exp2_MST.pdf}
    \caption{Mental demand, satisfaction, and time ratings for both experiments. Difficulty increases after robot training and language training, but appears to level off as users acclimate to the task.}
    \label{fig:mst}
\end{figure*}

\subsubsection{Mental Exhaustion}
Finally, we investigate how the phases of our task are wearing on the participants.  The top of Figure \ref{fig:mst_exp1} shows how, regardless of the scenario, users are very satisfied with their performance but the time and mental energy they are spending on the task increases and decreases as they become aware of the robot's limitations and linguistic abilities, respectively.
Their desire to communicate effectively but easily also shows up as a strong preference for scenes in which all cups have a unique color (Figure \ref{fig:exp_preferences}).  This makes sense since naming a color is easier than using spatial language or multiple attributes to disambiguate an object (``red cup'' vs ``red cup on the left'').

\section{Experiment II}
\label{sec:exp2}
Experiment I limited scenarios to at most seven objects to be consistent with most robots+language literature which stay under 15 objects.  In contrast, most natural scenes are more ambiguous with a large number of possible referents.  While complex environments are exponentially more difficult for motion planners, in our simulated environment, we can scale our experiment to see the effects on language.  This leads us to a new hypothesis untested in the literature:\\
\\
\noindent \textbf{H3} \textit{The preference for programmatic language and absolute orderings is an artifact of people's desire to minimize their own cognitive load and therefore an artifact of simple environments.  Specifically, we expect constraint and set based language to be most common in complex environments}.

\subsection{Study Design}
Our design mirrors Experiment I but uses a new set of stimuli which focuses on scaling the number of objects in a scene. These were divided into two scene types with 24 objects in specified locations. In the first, each of the 24 objects was uniquely identifiable by a color with a common name. In the second, each of the 24 objects was randomly assigned a value for each attribute (bottle/cup, blue/red, small/large). Again, we disallow any user overlap from the previous experiment, so all participants are new to the task and untrained.

\subsection{Results}
While the planner will now be too slow to compare as a possible baseline, we still want to investigate how language and mental exhaustion scale to more realistic scenarios.

\subsubsection{Language Analysis}
Where simple environments occasionally elicited explicit ordering language even before training, these are not seen as natural or viable approaches in the richer environment.  Figure \ref{fig:language} (top) shows a dramatic preference for high-level language, and correspondingly, we see very high type/token ratios (bottom).  These are truly natural and diverse instructions.  More importantly, and interestingly, we see a remarkable reluctance to change even after training.  Where knowledge of robot capabilities previously led participants to use the very helpful (though taxing) absolute orderings, now users choose to only provide partial orderings or set-based language. It is only after we explicitly tell them of the types of language we want that absolute orderings become more common. Even then, they are half as common as in the simpler setting.  Again, the lowest type-token ratios in this experiment are higher on average than Experiment I.

\subsubsection{Mental Exhaustion}
Another important differentiation of this result from Experiment I is seen in the changing mental demands.  Figure \ref{fig:mst_exp1} shows how, after training, mental demand increases and never drops.  Where before, we gave participants a ``way out" by suggesting they try and use constraints or orderings to simplify the communication, now they are reluctant to change their language and forcing them to consider plans in detail is highly demanding.  Particularly poignant is that while demand stays constant, satisfaction decreases.  Users are increasingly uneasy about their own instructions and how they will be interpreted.  This leaves open some important questions about how to decide when it is worth pressing the human for their powerful insights if they find the process frustrating.

Correspondingly, now that the scenes are complicated, preferences for easily referenced colors versus sets even out.  Figure \ref{fig:exp_preferences} shows that unique colors are still preferred, but there is little agreement as to which setting is actually easiest.

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{exp1_Preferences.pdf}

    \end{subfigure}
    ~
    \begin{subfigure}[t]{0.48\linewidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{exp2_Preferences.pdf}

    \end{subfigure}
    \caption{Preference ratings across task configurations for Experiments I and II. In Experiment I, users preferred using simple referring expressions to locate unique objects. Users did not demonstrate any preference in Experiment II.}
    \label{fig:exp_preferences}
\end{figure}

\section{Language Strategies}
\label{sec:lang_strategy}
Upon publication we will make available all of our configurations and the corresponding language for the community to scrutinize, but we include a few examples here in Figure \ref{fig:configs}.  We want to draw particular attention to the different types of high-level language.  Recent results in robotics lead us to believe that many labs can handle absolute orderings and recent work on understanding groups/rows/sets should cover partial orderings, but high-level language appears to be much less homogeneous in nature.  Specifically, in Experiment II the majority of users tried to be helpful by providing us with techniques, strategies, and intuition for the problem.

These example differ from goal-language as they are closer to pseudocode for the correct search procedure.  In our experiments, HERB's abilities nicely parallel a human's arm and so the user might be describing how they would reason about the task.   Equally important for future work is to include details subtle ways the robot differs from their expectations (e.g. HERB's long arms might make close grasps difficult), and then compare the algorithms/heuristics generated by the user.  More technically, we are unaware of any literature that works to interpret and convert these types of hints into planner actions or constraints.

Finally, our participants all tried to be helpful to HERB.  When we compared the most common plan (the ones used for computing motion plans in our plots) to all others produced within the pilot, we saw on very small differences in plan time since nobody strategically instructed HERB to perform infeasible actions.  This may not be true in general for deployed robotics, hinting at a new research question:  How do we detect when a user is being malicious?

\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclusion}

This work discusses the interaction between humans and robots from a language communication perspective.
It investigates the importance of language in shifting autonomy between the human and robot, and when or why a human might choose to be helpful or abdicate responsibility.

We only discussed the language from human to robot in this work, which allows the human to decide how much autonomy they want the robot to exhibit.
Understanding the variables we introduced helps us calibrate the shared load a human teammate expects.
Analysis and categorization of language also provides insight into how much of the workload the human teammate is willing to take-on or how hard they are working on a given task.
A natural extension is to inquire how a robot should respond (verbally) if they want to strategically ask for help or increase the user's participation to redistribute or optimize the cognitive load.

Humans work very well with each other in teams by communicating goals, plans, heuristics, and asking for help.
While semantic parsers and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems may not yet be equipped to handle all of the parsing necessary for the language we have presented, if robots are to serve as helpful team members, we will need to bridge this gap between human language preferences and robot understanding ability.

This is still a young area of research, and language communication in shared autonomy provides an exciting and effective interface to enhance existing sliding autonomy systems~\cite{heger2006sliding} into complex task coordination, where-in task-planning libraries can be extended to be interactive task-planning libraries that elicit language interaction.
We believe these research results will help us to better design agents with bidirectional communication between humans and robots, especially in manipulation tasks, where a robot needs to: (1) precisely understand what a human wants, (2) dynamically monitor the workload distribution, and (3) model the human's characteristic behaviors for optimizing reactions.

\addtolength{\textheight}{-12cm}

\input{reference.bbl}
\end{document}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
China's Sweetheart Swimmer Fu Yuanhui Wins Bronze, Doesn't Know It
China Memes & Viral
Swimming athlete Fu Yuanhui, who became an internet sensation overnight after her semi-finals interview has won a bronze medal after the women's 100m backstroke finals. Her reaction again warms the hearts of Chinese netizens.
Swimming athlete Fu Yuanhui, who became an internet sensation overnight after her semi-finals interview, has won a bronze medal after the women's 100m backstroke finals at the Rio Olympics. Her reaction again warms the hearts of Chinese netizens.
Chinese swimmer and new Weibo sensation Fu Yuanhui won bronze in the women's 100-metre backstroke on Monday night at the Olympic Aquatics Centre in Barra.
The backstroke specialist has to share the medal with Canada's Kylie Masse, who also swam an identical "58.76. Katinka Hosszu from Hungary won gold ("58.45) and USA's Kathleen Baker took silver with a time of "58.75.
After setting her new time in the finals, Fu spoke to CCTV reporters. Halfway through the interview, it becomes clear that Fu does not realize she has just won bronze. Fu talks about her Olympic experience and tells the reporter that "even now that I didn't win a medal,..". When the reporter tells her she has in fact won a medal, Fu's reaction, again, is heart-warming. [See video below, turn on subtitles for English]
The post-finals interview is one of many incidents that has got Chinese netizens loving their 'cute' national athlete. Fu has become a Weibo meme, with many netizens copying her expressions or making Fu Yuanhui cartoons.
"Wow, I can swim so fast!"
"I am so pleased today!
Fu has become one of the quickest rising stars on Weibo. Today she posted on her account: "Whahahaha, it seems like I did not break an Asian record after all!", something which she mentioned in her post-finals interview. Fu says she is "embarrassed" for saying so and that she wants to crawl into a "little dark room". This Wikipedia page shows that Fu's "58.76 indeed is not record-breaking within Asia.
"It doesn't matter," one netizen says: "You broke all the records when it comes to public opinion!" Others also support her, saying: "Don't hide away, we still want to see the face of our swimming queen!"
In the meantime, Fu gained a staggering 1.4 million followers on her official Weibo account within 24 hours. Going from 1.8 million followers yesterday to 3.2 million fans today, it seems that the Olympic medalist has broken yet another personal record this week.
-By Manya Koetse
Related Topics:china sportschina womenWeibo trending
China's E-Learning Revolution: The 10 Hottest Chinese Online Education Companies of 2016
"Wow I'm So Fast!" – Olympic Swimmer Fu Yuanhui Becomes Chinese Internet Sensation
It's been a tough year for Chinese celebrity Fan Bingbing.
First published June 27 2019, 21:00 CST
Two years after their engagement, Chinese actress Fan Bingbing and actor Chen Li have announced their breakup.
On the night of June 27 (China Standard Time), news came out that Chinese actress Fan Bing Bing is breaking up with her partner, Chinese actor Chen Li.
It was Fan herself who announced the separation through a post on social media, writing:
"We go through all kinds of farewells during our lifetime. The love and warmth we gain throughout our encounters become everlasting forces. I want to thank you for all the love and support you've given me. Thank you for your care and love in the future. We are no longer 'we', but we are still ourselves."
The post soon received over 180,000 comments and more than 650,000 likes.
Chen Li also posted a message on his Weibo account, saying:
"From friends to lovers, and now back to friends. Emotions can change, but the purest feeling between you and me will not change. The trust and support we have for each other will always be there. We are no longer 'we', but we are still ourselves."
This breakup comes after a difficult year in Fan's career. In summer of 2018, the 37-year-old actress was at the center of a social media storm due to a tax evasion scandal.
She disappeared from the public eye for months, and then returned with an emotional apology on Weibo.
The announcement of the split has triggered thousands of reactions on Weibo, where the hashtag "Fan Bingbing and Li Chen Split Up" (#范冰冰李晨分手#) had received 380 million views by Thursday night.
At time of writing, the breakup is dominating Weibo's top trending topics, with many netizens commenting that Weibo is 'exploding' and that Weibo servers must be overheating due to the celebrity news.
It is often celebrity news that causes Weibo to blow up. A recent incident of Chinese teen idol smoking inside a Beijing restaurant also triggered millions of views and comments.
When Chinese singer and actor Lu Han announced his relationship with actress Guan Xiaotong in 2017, it even led to a rare temporary breakdown of Weibo's servers.


And often, on the eve of the holidays, you are thoughtfully looking through the options for gifts. You can't decide in any way, buy another unnecessary sweet trinket or necessary-useful-practical?
We, for example, have long been determined that the most valuable thing for a person is his HEALTH! After all, when a person is full of health, force, energy, then everything is possible for him.
We suggest that you follow our way.
Yes, you were not mistaken.
We all understand the importance of HEALTH, especially when it go away from us in a very unexpected moment !!! Physical and psychological health can and should be maintained!
It is not necessary to theorize a lot and convince no one that physical exercise is useful! They increase vitality and immunity, the body's resistance to external influences and stress, with it your youthfulness is prolonged. In the end, a person who systematically, physically correctly loads himself, is less prone to negative mood, depression and other psychological "ailments".
We all understand this, but not many can voluntarily abandon the habitually vicious circle. Bad habits like sedentary lifestyle, whether sitting at the TV and computer, or eating fast food, eating at night and so on, quickly take possession of us. We so "let them in", that they sometimes become our second nature, and we don't notice how we destroy ourselves from the inside. Alas.
We can see it from the outside, right? So sometimes you see that someone who is not indifferent to you has to correct something in the way of life.
So let's direct our good intentions, directed to our dear people in a positive direction!
Give them the opportunity to see another way of life, complete victory over oneself (both physically and psychologically), because they deserve it! Worthy to be beautiful, strong, confident in any situation!
Give them health, well-being and faith in themself!
Present as a gift to your DEAR PEOPLE the opportunity to start a NEW PAGE in a book called "LIFE"!
and in English http://systema-rma.com/en/ tests-0.
In Kiev, you can buy a GIFT CERTIFICATE for ONE LESSON, and a MONTHLY LESSONS or more, for attending classes for dear people, whose quality of LIFE and whose HEALTH you care about!
For the purchase of GIFT CERTIFICATES you can contact by e-mail: frbiu2@gmail.com.


text:
Q: How to pass a variable from controller to javascript within a view? I have an array @fields which has text and an id, asset_id.
To pass local variables from controller to view in render we use
render(:template => "assets/invalid", :locals => {:asset_id => params[:id], :fields => @fields})

The view is

This should generate a popup box. However, I want the popup box to redirect to "../assets/asset_id" and also display 'Invalid values for + fields'
The following doesn't work,

A: Could it be as simple as this?

UPDATE And by the way, why do you need to pass fields or params as a local variable, why not to use @fields in your view?

A: An approach I have used in a couple apps where it's necessary for the client code to use server data is to build a hash and render it into a json literal on the page and have all my JS reference that object. It's the same approach as mentioned above but it's a bit cleaner because you don't have to mix a lot of server tags into your JS code. Easier to read and maintain.

A: What wrong with this

Now you can pass data to html for advance thing you can use something like gon check out gon gem it might help

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
"The Boat" as it stood last year. (Alexis de Suremain)
Structural Problems Sink Plans for Arts Boat
by Michelle Vachon
A year ago, a team of leading arts advocates in Phnom Penh unveiled grand plans to turn a multi-story boat into a visual and performing arts center off Sisowath Quay. They invited the public to decide on the name, settling on "The Boat."
However, inspections by various experts have since shown that the structure could not sustain restoration, so those coordinating the project announced on Saturday that they have dropped their plans.
"The boat was an incredible project, which made us dream for a year," Alexis de Suremain, chief executive of the Maads hotel-group, said on Sunday.
"But the more structural assessments specialists did, the more issues came up," he said. "The conclusion was that the cost of fixing all these elements would have reached several thousands of dollars."
The boat stands at five stories high and has a pool on its sixth level. Plans announced in October last year consisted of creating working space as well as exhibition and performing halls for arts organizations, and make room for a few restaurants and design outlets.
For the contemporary dance company Amrita Performing Arts, this meant getting a small performance hall ideal for experimental works, said Kang Rithisal, its executive director. Amrita would have become "a company in residence with a space for rehearsal and also to showcase its works," he said on Sunday.
"We talked both to the municipality and the port authority and they were in support of the project," said Dana Langlois of JavaArts on Sunday.
"We were very fortunate about that. What wouldn't work was the boat itself."
Assessments over the last few months revealed that its structure could barely support its current weight; the hull was made of a single layer, which was insufficient in ensuring safety; and there was no emergency exit or secondary staircase.
Possible solutions included building a permanent structure in the water for the boat, or removing two floors and setting it up onshore, which would have required a fairly large piece of land, Ms. Langlois said.
Mr. de Suremain said those involved would start looking elsewhere in their efforts to create a new art space in the city.
"Personally, as a hotelier, I really believe that our duty is to make this city more attractive with more things to visit and see for people who live in the city, but also to attract visitors from the outside," he said. "So definitely we will continue to search for opportunities."
Police Look to Thwart Festival Thieves Through Facebook
Cambodia Helps Find Gene Marker for Drug-Resistant Malaria
In rural Cambodia, fried tarantulas are a crispy delicacy
Can Cambodia become Southeast Asia's sustainable travel capital?
Independent -
South Asians Admixed With Cambodians About a Millennium Earlier Than Previously Thought: DNA Analysis
The Wire -


Sparsholt emphatically sealed their first Premier League title with a crushing 9 wicket win at struggling Tichborne Park.
On an overcast day and with the wicket looking green Sparsholt were somewhat surprised to find themselves bowling having lost the toss. With Stuart Taylor handed the new ball alongside David Banks the Sparsholt pair set about dismantling a brittle Tichborne batting line up in a clinical fashion. Taylor kicked things off removing the dangerous Tom Allam as the opener drove through extra cover only to pick out debutant Tom Kimber who took a fine tumbling catch at extra cover. Taylor (3 for 24) only had a couple of deliveries to wait before his next wicket as Ryan Brooks edged to Frith at slip. Banks (5 for 26) then got in on the act dismissing Cheyney, Allen and Bristow in quick succession and the procession continued as Tichborne through a combination of ambitious shot making and excellent disciplined bowling slipped to 57 for 8. Tichborne were eventually dismissed for 72 as Liam Doran got in on the act with the final two wickets.
Despite losing Mike Haworth relatively early on in their reply Sparsholt made light work of their total, despite the ball continuing to move in the air and off the pitch. Jeremy Frith (29 not out) and Lewis Mitchard (33 not out) eased Sparsholt to their victory total inside 15 overs. At that point Sparsholt were still not mathematically champions as Rowledge needed to drop at least two points to give Sparsholt the title. However, at 5:30pm the news came through that Rowledge had only made 185 in their match, thus handing Sparsholt their first premier league title with two games remaining.
Sparsholt hosted Sway II at Locks Lane on Saturday. With the hosts needing to win to stay in with a chance of promotion and the visitors needing to win to avoid slipping into a relegation slot it was a key game for both sides. Captain Skeoch won the toss and elected to bat and opened with Mckeever, the northern duet took the score to 24 before Mckeever was bowled for 8. Skeoch followed in the next over for 11 with Sparsholt at 25 for 2 from 9 overs. Mitchell and Foster took their time in rebuilding the innings before Foster was bowled for 15 in the 21 st over. Worth joined Mitchell and quickly went for 1 along with Vaughan for 7 and proctor for 3. At 103 for 5 from 31 overs and some tight bowling from Sway a big push was required to get the score up and obtain some batting points. Mike Doubell joined Mitchell and the pair set about the bowling with Mitchell scoring a classy 93 including 8 fours and 2 sixes. Doubell with a pulled hamstring was unable to run and smashed 53 with 4 fours and 4 sixes to take Sparsholt to 206 for 6.
The Sway innings started steadily with Stevenson and Clark putting on 65 and playing the bowling well. The introduction of McKeever into the attack resulted in wickets falling as he bowled his 9 over spell taking 5 for 30. Steve How remained resolute for Sway and kept the score ticking along and with the score at 159 from 38 overs Sway looked in control needing 47 from 7 overs. Whiting then proceeded to bowl and gentle half tracker which How looked as though he was putting over the hedge the ball travelled towards its destination and just as everyone was expecting a six to be signalled 6ft 5 Tom Proctor leapt defying gravity and the laws of Physics to pluck the ball out of the air within inches of the boundary. This outstanding catch proved to be a game changer as Proctor then chipped in with 3 key wickets to leave Sway needing 17 runs from 3 overs with one wicket remaining. The pressure was visible as a fumble from Vaughan behind the stumps prompted a quick single, Vaughan recovered and through the ball towards the bowlers end where Skeoch with whippet like reactions grabbed it and ran to the stumps giving Sparsholt a valuable 23 points and needing 10 points for guaranteed promotion in their final game next Saturday.
Sparsholt have lined up a potential league and cup double with another solid all-round display against Calmore at Locks Lane on Sunday in the T20 plate. Their reward, a 16th September final date with fellow Premier 2 club Paultons at the Ageas Bowl. Losing the toss on another outstanding Locks Lane wicket; Sparsholt applied pressure from ball one. Calmore were never able to establish any momentum in their innings scoring only 8 boundaries in their 20 overs. Liam Doran took the first wicket as he bowled Darren Vann for 10. Mark Lavelle soon followed, run out at the non-strikers' end by a sharp piece of fielding by Nick Doubell off his own bowling. Doubell bowling his 4 overs for a miserly 13 runs, picking up the wicket of Ben Johns in the process. Frith, Banks, Mitchard and Doran supported Doubell's fine effort with tight bowling that sucked the wind out of Calmore's innings and a steady flow of wickets prevented the Premier Division 1 club from getting a foothold in the game, eventually closing on 101 for 8 from their 20 overs.
The Sparsholt chase took a similar format to the previous day. Haworth struck a couple of boundaries before falling LBW to Lavelle however Lewis Mitchard (51 not out), striking the ball cleanly combined with Jeremy Frith (39 not out) to guide Sparsholt home in 15 overs. Calmore's bowling had begun tightly, however boundaries began to flow as the overs ticked by. Sparsholt eventually romped home with Mitchard bringing up his 50 and finishing the game with a huge six over mid-wicket to complete a second 9 wicket victory inside two days.


The owner of trademark in Myanmar with fully protected rights in relation to the object specified in the contract can be assigned to other organizations or individuals. The trademark assignment in Myanmar must be registered and declare the assignment with the trademark registry office.
Under Myanmar's legislation, the heirs of the trademark owner has the right to own and use the trademark.
Note the item "Signature of the witness": Under current practice, trademark assignment in Myanmar is not expressly required the attendance of a witness and his signature, where it depends on case by case.
The package cost including both official fees and all inclusive attorney's fee and disbursements for the recordal of assignment for the trademark from the time of filing up to the obtaining the recordal of assignment.
The average time from filing up to the recordal of trademark assignment in Myanmar will be about 2 – 3 months.
The assignment shall only valid after the declarations of assignment are certified by Myanmar's trademark registry office.
In case you require more information or require advice on trademark assignment in Myanmar or Intellectual Property right in Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia as well as other IP matters, please do not hesitate to contact us via email: ageless@ageless.vn.


text:
Q: Where do I find a Dwarven Armor Fragment? So I failed the Little Sisters quest in Chapter 2/Roche's Path and looted a diagram for the Mahakaman Sihil steel sword. Amongst others the sword requires a dwarven armor fragment, but I don't have the faintest idea where I could get one. Maybe somebody knows?

A: I found something like that in deeper Google. Source.

You can fight three bullvores in Ch 2, I think. One is summoned, one is in the camp caves, the third is in the dwarven mines. I think you get the fragment from the third.

Somebody can try this?


text:
Black (Black Bear Brand) Manufacturing Company Historical Highlights/Timeline
December 23, 2017 Josh Sirlin
I received a call from a local Seattle gentlemen about 6 months ago (Jack Colins... who's 80 years young). Here's a great example of what curiosity... it's agelessness and it's ability to connect people...
"I just completed the history (below) of what was one of the most significant manufacturing businesses in Seattle history. George Black, the founder of the company should be celebrated, not only for his economic success, but also for his sensitivity to the needs of his employees. He was one of the great contributors to Seattle, as is Josh Sirlin, who is continuing the brand and many of the traditions of the company."
- Jack Collins
This is an historical story of a very successful Seattle company, Black Manufacturing. It is about its people, particularly the founder, George G. Black, and a long-time employee, Catherine Z. Collins. It is also about their employee-friendly manufacturing building and their well-made and popular clothing.
The project was inspired by Josh Sirlin, who currently owns Seattle-based Black Manufacturing and the Black Bear brand and is continuing the tradition of manufacturing and selling high quality clothing.
The story relies heavily on articles, photographs and advertisements in the Seattle Daily Times, a staff report recommending landmark designation of the Black building by the Landmark Preservation Board, and two contemporary volumes of Seattle and King County history by Clarence Bagley.
George G. Black, the founder of the Black Manufacturing Company, was born in May 1867, in Kentucky. His father, F. David Black, was 52, and his mother, Permelia, was 39.
George Black was employed in wholesale and dry goods and in the manufacturing of working clothes in Chicago. Later, in Oklahoma, he learned about the retail clothing business. He arrived in Seattle in 1900 and was associated with McDougall and Southwick, a major retail apparel store.
In 1902, he organized and began operations in Seattle as the George G. Black Overall Manufacturing Company in the Smith Building at the corner of First Avenue and Jackson Street. The first factory operated in a 20' by 30' room on an upper floor. It contained a cutting room, six sewing machines, a shipping department, and the office.
Three months after beginning operations, a fire destroyed the Smith Building. Although there was a total loss of materials and manufactured product, there were no personal losses. Mr. Black estimated the loss at $7,000, and there was insurance in the amount of $2,000.
George G. Black, the founder, president, and general manager, was sole owner of the business until 1907, when his cousin, J. C. Black, who was appointed secretary and treasurer, joined him.
Also in the summer of 1907, the Seattle Daily Times reported that,"Mr. George G. Black entertained a party of his friends on Saturday at his summer home on Alki Point. He was assisted in his duties as host by Mrs. Curtis and Miss Curtis, who are spending the summer at the Baker Hotel. Mrs. Baker chaperoned the party, the additional members of which were Miss Millard, Miss Sengfelder, Miss Georgie Smith, Dr. F.A. Black, Mr. Robert Hill and Mr. Joseph Black, who is home on his vacation from Yale. The afternoon was spent cruising on board the yacht Hydia, followed by dancing at Mr. Black's cottage, 'Lonesomehurst.'"(Seattle Daily Times," August 7, 1907, p. 8.)
Two years after the party mentioned above, chaperoned by Mrs. Curtis, George Black married a woman who would serve in that role for the rest of his life. According to their marriage certificate, he married Sadie Dorsey Brown in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 3, 1909. Mrs. Black's first name on the certificate is "Sadie," but all of the references to her in Seattle refer to her as "Sarah."
On February 7, 1927, George Black was reported in the Seattle Daily Times to be in "grave condition" in Swedish Hospital. Mr. Black had failed to rally after a surgical operation performed three weeks earlier.
The death notice the next day in the Times noted: "George G. Black, aged 59 years, beloved husband of Mrs. Sarah Black, father of Nancy Dorsey Black and uncle of Dr. F.A. Black. Remains at the family residence, 3028 Cascadia Ave. Funeral services at the residence, Wednesday at 1 o'clock. Friends invited. Private internment. Bonney-Watson Co. Funeral directors."
In his History of King County, Volume 1, 1929, Clarence Bagley stated that
"the notable success attained by the corporation has been largely due to the administrative power and high standard of production set by George G. Black, whose useful, upright life was terminated at the age of sixty years."
The Landmark report states,
George G. Black, the founder of Black Manufacturing Company, may be viewed in the same historic context as the Nordoffs, founders of the Bon Marché Department Store, the Schwabaker family, founders of the hardware company, and Joshua Green, banker and financier. These men represent a breed of late nineteenth and early twentieth century entrepreneurs whose small first efforts conceived broadly and with vision generated highly successful local and later regional enterprises that had substantial economic impacts and benefits to the Puget Sound area. For its time, "Black Bear" wearing apparel was a remarkably large and prominent industry.
When George Black died, his cousin Joseph C. Black took over as president. Lyman H. Black and Lyman H. Black, Jr., also cousins of George G. Black, succeeded Joseph C. Black as president until 1981, when the company disbanded. The Black Manufacturing Company was under the same family ownership for nearly 80 years.
George Black and his wife had one child, Nancy Dorsey Black, who died on July 8, 2003, in Seattle, Washington, at the age of 87. The Black immediate family are buried in the Evergreen Washelli Cemetery in Seattle.
After the disastrous fire to their building at First and Jackson in 1902, a new plant was soon in operation at Seventh Avenue and Battery Street. This building was occupied while the old one was being rebuilt. The factory then moved back to the old location, one whole floor being leased for its accommodation.
Before long, one floor was found to be inadequate to the demands of the growing business and another was added, but by 1910 this too was too small, so a move was made to the Security Building on First Avenue South near King Street, where 22,500 square feet was obtained.
Within four years this location, too, had been outgrown, and it was decided to build a thoroughly modern plant. A tract of land was secured on Rainier Boulevard, where the permanent factory was constructed during the year 1914, the equipment was moved in, and on January 1, 1915, the Black Manufacturing Company was established in a home of its own.
When it was built, it was the largest overall factory west of Chicago, and Eastern manufacturers, who visited Seattle for the purpose of inspecting the plant, pronounced it the best garment factory in the world. The building, which is 100' by 240' in size and three stories high, contained more side-and skylight glass than any other building of the same size in the city. The building, which is still standing, is located at 1130 Rainier Avenue South in Seattle, and the legal description is Block 4, Rainier Boulevard Addition, Lots 17 through 28, inclusive.
Architect Andrew Willatsen, who designed the building in 1914, was already established as an exceptionally talented residential architect after a number of years generating outstanding residential projects both in partnership with Barry Byrne and on his own. The Black Manufacturing building marks one of Willatsen's earliest recorded efforts to apply his design and structural knowledge to an industrial building.
Born in 1876, Andrew Willatsen (also spelled Willatzen) came to America with his family in 1902 and settled in Illinois. As an admirer of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, he moved to Chicago that year to work in Wright's Oak Park studio, where he was given increasing responsibility for projects. Between 1902 and 1905, he executed designs for several Prairie-style houses, a fence for the Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York, and designs for the lobby of the Rookery.
In 1907, he migrated west and worked for the prestigious Northwest firm of Cutter and Malgren in Spokane. As draftsman and later supervising architect for the Rainier Club and Seattle Golf and Country Club, Willatsen became acquainted with Seattle and decided to settle there. He formed a partnership with another Frank Lloyd Wright student, Barry Byrne. Their exceptional residential work for A.S. Kerry and C.H. Clark in the Highlands (1909) promoted the distinctive Prairie style in residential architecture, and led to the establishment of the Prairie School in Puget Sound.
In May 1914, Willatsen was commissioned to design a home on West Highland Drive for J.C. Black, a cousin of George G. Black. Not long after, in 1914, he designed the Black Manufacturing Building. It was one of his earliest departures from the residential style into industrial, warehouse, and commercial buildings, which led to many commissions well into the 1960's.
Readers interested in the design details of the 1130 Rainier Avenue building are invited to consult the excellent report by Karen Gordon, the then City of Seattle Historic Preservation Officer, who wrote the Landmark Preservation Board staff report cited above and below.
The building featured more than 15,000 square feet of windows and a shed roof skylight provided healthy daylight for the employees. An overhead fire prevention sprinkler system was a very early use of such a system. The incentives for the sprinkler system were the safety of the workers and the fact that fire had destroyed the business just twelve years earlier. An article in a 1915 "Pacific Builder and Engineer" magazine, cited in the landmark report, notes, "In fact the character of construction and the system of fire prevention adopted removed every reasonable possibility of fire hazard. So safe is the building that it enjoys the lowest rate of any in the state of Washington."
When the building opened on January 2, 1915, the entertainment was described in detail:
More than 3,000 people, mostly young folk, but with a liberal sprinkling of the elders, gladly accepted the invitation extended by the Black Manufacturing Company's employees to formally dedicate the big new manufacturing plant of the company at Rainier Avenue and Norman Street last night, with the result that Pres. George G. Black and Sec. Joseph C. Black were enabled to enjoy the spectacle of 1,500 couples dancing through a program of twenty-two numbers and regale themselves with a bountiful luncheon.
The entertainment began at 3:30 o'clock, with a program of musical numbers, reinforced with a speech by Councilman Robert B. Hesketh, who represented the city government in the unavoidable absence of Mayor H. C. Gill. The program out of the way, the youngsters began the real fun of the evening in terpsichorean pleasures including the one step, the two step, the hesitation and even some old-time figures like the gavotte and minuet, the music being supplied by an orchestra of ten persons. ("Seattle Daily Times," January 3, 1915, p. 19.)
Hundreds of volunteers, mostly women, served on the Cloak Room, Dance, Decoration, and Reception Committees, and were all individually listed in the Times article above.
The company continued its successful operation at 1130 Rainier Avenue South until 1981 when the company was disbanded. The building was vacant from 1981 until 1984, when it was extensively remodeled as corporate headquarters for Darigold LLC , a dairy agricultural marketing cooperative. At the time of this writing, Darigold still owns it.
"The rehabilitation of the building was dedicated to recapturing the original design of the building while adapting it to useful modern office and manufacturing space, according to the building's owners. The architectural firm of Ralph Anderson, Koch, and Duarte guided the rehabilitation in conformance with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation." (Landmark Report).
On September 8, 1987, The Seattle City Council, by a 9-0 vote designated the 1130 building as a Seattle landmark because of its association with the heritage of the community and its distinctive architectural style. Mayor Charles Royer signed the designation legislation ten days later.
At the time of this writing, 1130 Rainier Avenue South is vacant. Its 62,200 square feet are offered for lease at $30.00 per square foot per year ($1,860,000/year.) The building was appraised in 2017 for $9,777,800. With the land, total appraised value for the site was $13,207,800.
The promotional brochure from Colliers International offering the lease states:
What was the most up-to-date factory building in America in the 1900's is today recognized as one of the most up-to-date wired buildings of the 21st Century. The 1130 building was renovated in 1999 and 2000 by CMGI to become one of the West Coast's premier, state of the art high-tech buildings for those demanding the best of today's technology. Tens of millions of dollars were invested by CMGI in infrastructure for Activate's live webcasting/streaming business. (ed. George G. Black would be pleased that his building is still, in 2017, "premier" and "state of the art.")
George Black was quite proud to be able to make the claim that his building was the most up-to-date factory building in America, built entirely of Washington-made materials and by Washington workers.
In December 1915, the company added a line of work shirts to its products, in addition to manufacturing overalls, overcoats, mackinaws, pants, and special garments for loggers, fishermen, and other trades. By 1916 there were 50 men and 265 women employed; 275 machines were in operation, producing 205 dozen garments per day, or a total of 52,000 dozen for that year. The plant was so arranged that a total of 584 machines could be installed without building additional room.
The Black Manufacturing Company was one of Seattle's greatest manufacturing institutions from the beginning to near the end of the Twentieth century, and the Black Bear brand of clothing did much to demonstrate that in Seattle, goods could be produced just as cheaply and of as good quality as anywhere in the United States.
The manufacturing staff, mostly women, worked hard and carefully knowing that they would be paid according to the amount of their production. Their health was safeguarded by supervisors and a small medical staff, with a two-bed health care room, and the building construction itself. Warm meals were served at cost, and lectures and special entertainment were provided each week because the Blacks believed that the health, happiness, and prosperity of their employees was of as great importance as were the machines and cloth used in the manufacture of its garments.
An undated (1910–1914) photo offers the caption, "Union members at the Black Bear factory, now the Seattle Quilt Building on First Avenue South wear Miss Black Bear overalls at work." At a time when women wore only dresses in public, the company promoted its overalls for outdoor recreation.
(ed. Catherine Collins sent me a wide variety of Black Bear clothing for Christmas presents when I was growing up in the 1940's. These knickers, especially the gray ones, were my favorites.)
An article in the Seattle Daily Times on April 24, 1927, noted a significant company anniversary:
The Black Manufacturing Company, manufacturers of men's clothing, is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. The organization has grown from an obscure workshop to an institution with a payroll of more than $1,000,000 annually.
The firm is most widely known from its product, "Black Bear" garment, which were first marketed in Seattle and the Northwest by George G. Black of the organization.
A total of 400 persons are employed and daily produce more than 5,000 garments. This clothing is distributed throughout the West and Alaska.
The factory is at 1130 Rainier Avenue and has been declared to be a model of its kind.
A full-paged, comprehensive story about the company appeared in the Sunday, September 25, 1927, edition of the Seattle Daily Times, page 6. It is the longest and most comprehensive piece written about the company's operations and is attached to this story. Since it is difficult to read a full-paged newspaper story reduced to an 8½" x 11" piece of paper, the story is reproduced here:
Headline: "Stitching Dollars to Seattle's Payroll"
Sub-headline: "Each Garment Made by the Black Manufacturing Company Represents One Dollar in Wages, and Annual Production at Its Busy Factory in This City Is Now at the Million Dollar Mark"
"Stitching Dollars to Seattle's industrial payroll.
Whirling, humming, twirling sewing machines, score on score, manned by women and girls, eating up mile after mile of thread are literally sewing into the industrial life of Seattle millions of dollars annually.
Here it is that a million dollar payroll is created for Seattle by the process of converting 10,000 yards of cloth daily into 3,260 garments—each garment representing one payroll dollar. Just a quarter of a century ago, when Seattle was beginning to march rapidly forward as its destiny as one of the leading seaports of the world and metropolis of the Northwest, a man with a vision of the city's greatness, backed by a desire to strike from this section the shackles of manufacturers in other parts of the country, who considered this a trade territory belonging to them exclusively; a man with little capital but with an overwhelming ambition, strengthened by a willingness to make sacrifices and to work twenty-four hours out of each day if necessary, gave to the city and the Northwest its first exclusively wholesale clothing factory.
The man was George G. Black, the founder of the Black Manufacturing Company. This was in October, 1902, two years after Mr. Black had arrived in Seattle and gained employment at the MacDougall and Southwick Company. It was while employed at this store that Mr. Black overheard a travelling salesman for an overall factory in another state inform the firm that it "would take" a certain number of overalls whether they wanted them or not. Then it was that the newcomer in the city decided that Seattle, with its tremendous demand for clothing of this character, should strike the shackles of the outside-of-the-state factories and supply the thousands of workers in the great Northwest timber camps and mills with their work clothes.
Beginning at First and Jackson Street in a small room, with five sewing machines, a salesman, five machine operators and himself managing the establishment, the Black Manufacturing Company was launched upon an uncertain sea of the commercial world, making blue denim overalls. At that time, the infant company managed to turn out 125 dozen overalls a month and the fight was on. The product was a rather weird one as compared to the products of today, but it was a Seattle product and it won the support of the Northwest because it was a wearing product. During the next six years the plant had increased to fifty-five machines and moved to 531 First Ave. S. There it showed a steady increase in production so that twelve years ago a handsome new modern factory building was constructed on Rainier Ave., the one in which the company is now located.
Today the Black Manufacturing Company has a payroll approximating $1,000,000 a year. It requires 142,000 square feet of floor space, has an average of 142 persons employed, including 325 operators, 25 salesmen, an office force of 35 and 40 workers in the shipping department. The big plant turns out seven garments a minute, 420 an hour, 3,260 a day, 51,500 a month, a grand total of 988,000 a year. (ed. The numbers don't add (multiply) up.)
It manufactures overalls, jumpers, denim combination suits, children's play suits, khaki clothing, cotton trousers, woolen trousers, mackinaws for men and boys, overcoats for men, water repellent suits, flannel shirts, cotton shirts and dress shirts. It has extended its trade territory from Seattle and the immediate vicinity to include the states of Washington, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and British Columbia, the Hawaiian Islands and Alaska, and now has plans underway to reach the Atlantic seaboard and cover the entire nation with its products.
The big, ivy-covered brick factory building at 1130 Rainier Ave. for many years has been a landmark in Rainier Valley and numbered among the hundreds of employees are women who started with the firm more than twenty years ago, who have married, raised families, or are raising families, and have returned to the plant to add to the family income and help defray the costs of home building. During the quarter of the century the factory has been growing to its present size and capacity, it has at the same time built up within its walls a happy family of its own.
Some idea of the tremendous value of the production at the factory may be had from the fact that 175 pounds of thread are used daily, every pound containing 3,400 yards so that in the course of a year 270,000 miles of thread alone are sewed into the garments turned out. The 15,000 yards of cloth cut and stitched daily mean that something like seven and a half miles of cloth is used, enough to provide a canopy over the Pacific Highway between Seattle and Tacoma.
The waste from the cutters amounts to around 250 pounds of cloth a day and this goes to the junk dealer, who in turn sells it to the paper mills, so it is not beyond possibility that a person buying a pair of overalls anywhere in the Northwest will find the package wrapped in paper made from the same bolt of cloth from which the overalls were cut, or at least made from waste from the same factory. This is (ed. These are) modern industrial methods. There is little, if any, actual waste. That from one industry finds use in another.
The cloth, huge bolts of it, is first laid out on tables 218 feet in length. Here the cloth is piled, layer on layer, five dozen deep, making a thick pile. A designer takes his patterns and marks on top of the 218 feet of cloth patterns the cuts to be made, going down the entire length of the table. He first marks the larger cuts and then backtracks and marks the smaller pieces, using every available square inch to avoid waste.Following after the designer comes a battery of electrically driven cutters, machines resembling electric hand drills. These are armed with razor edge knives with a jigsaw up and down motion, going at a terrific speed. A heavy under base acts as the lower guide. The operator simply moves his rapidly reciprocating knife blade along the white lines chalked on the cloth and the goods are cut as desired. In the sewing rooms each machine performs a different operation. These machines are equipped with as many as four needles and sew as many seams in one operation. Operated by electric equipment and controlled by a pressure of the foot, the machines sew and stitch at lightning-like speed.
One girl may be sewing a pants leg, another sewing in or on pockets at a tremendous rate, another stitches the suspenders, another makes the button holes, and so it goes. Each operator does one distinct job and passes it on to the next. The overall factory is one of the most interesting places about the factory, because it is in this field that the Black company established its reputation.It is now engaged in developing and building water repellent out-of-door wearing apparel, which is rapidly winning its way into the markets of the Northwest and the nation. In the early days when the company was first broadening its production, there was a saying that the condition of business in the Northwest could be gauged by observing the overall market. When the camps and mills, which provided the main industrial activity of the state, were going full blast and were prosperous, the demand for overalls was greater. The demand reflected the condition of the lumber market and was a fairly good guide of the condition of the state financially.
The Black Manufacturing Company has its own cafeteria conducted by the employees under a cooperative arrangement. The employees operate this business through their own committee, drawing their help from among their fellow workers, employing only a cook and a dishwasher. It is managed similar to an army mess and the costs are checked up and the employees pay what the meals actually cost. They have no fuel, light, or rent charges to pay.
In addition, there is a branch of the public library in the factory, a recreation room, a two-bed hospital, a place where dances and entertainment can be held, a stage, and a safety committee. Then there are girls in the plant who are trained hair dressers and manicurists and in this day of bobbed hair, these girls can be found almost any noon hour or in the late afternoon aiding their fellow workers, clipping, bobbing and curling.
There are several separate and distinct sewing sections in the factory. On one floor is to be found the shirt makers. Here the lighter sewing machines are to be found, but it is here also that machines with four needles making 12,000 stitches a minute, are in operation. In this section the shirts are made and laundered and packed for the trade.In another section are to be found only machines engaged in working on blue denim overalls, which are sewed and riveted and made as durable as humanly possible. Still another section is that where the heavy mackinaws and water repellent goods are made, while in another the woolen and cotton trousers and men's overcoats are turned out.
An enterprise such as the Black Manufacturing Company provides a ready market for the paper box manufacturer, the label maker and the printer. As this concern has grown and expanded, it has created a new market in the Northwest for the raw materials it needs; woven woolens, cottons, special cloths, denims, thread, buttons, copper rivets, and elastic webbing.Following the death of the founder, George G. Black, last winter, J.C. Black was elected president of the company, and is now devoting to it his time and attention. C.H. Black is vice president and L.H. Black is secretary and treasurer. The three Blacks were cousins of George Black, the founder of the company.
J.C. Black started in with the company while still a boy in his teens, leaving for some time to return after the death of the founder to take up the work the pioneer manufacturer had started.
Frederick and Nelson, a major long-time downtown Seattle department store, honored Black Manufacturing Co. for supplying them for fifty years.
C.J. Byrne, Frederick & Nelson store vice-president and general merchandise manager, presented honor awards and special citations to two principal suppliers, Baxley Dress Manufacturing Co. and Black Manufacturing Co. Baxley has supplied Frederick & Nelson for 35 years, Black for 50. [Seattle Daily Times, August 4, 1954, p. 21]
Lyman H. Black, Jr. was president of the Black Manufacturing Co. until 1958. He then was treasurer and director of the Seattle Hardware Co. until retiring in 1964. He was also a director of the Pacific National Bank and the Smith Canning Machinery Co. He died at age 90 in 2013.
Catherine Collins
My aunt, Catherine Zora Collins, was born on January 6,1894, in Epping Forest, Essex, England. She moved to Seattle sometime between 1910 and 1920, and was naturalized on June 9, 1942.
Catherine began employment at the Black Manufacturing Co. in 1925. She worked as a secretary, personnel manager, and assistant manager.
Catherine Collins retired in 1963 at age 69, after working for thirty-eight years for the Black Manufacturing Company. She died on January 31, 1983, in Carlsbad, California.
Ed. This piece owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the crucial assistance of Ann Ferguson, Curator of the Seattle Public Library Seattle Room, who made copies for me of the Landmark Report and the relevant parts of the Clarence Bagley histories and, most usefully, showed me how to utilize the digitized and searchable Seattle Daily Times from home.
The photograph, which is page 16, is courtesy of the Seattle Museum of History and Industry.
It also benefitted greatly from the efforts of Carole Jordan, who heavily invested her skill and sensitive touch to making suggestions as to structure and content, as well as editing and re-editing the document.
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He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things. Because the things are disappeared, overhead is low.
When orders come he packs up boxes and brings them to the post-office. He sends them certified mail.
At night he buys the postmaster dinner to thank him again for losing them.
You cannot expect to receive disappeared things.
A Selection of Disappeared Things: obsolete words; minuets and quadrilles; dire wolves and pallid grey mice; passenger pigeons and giant Antillean rice rats; insular cave bats, dwarf elephants and Peerages, dormant, extinct, forfeited and abeyant; fossil remains of large, bird-like animals not found elsewhere, such as the Aepyronis, remnants of whose eggs are strewn over the beaches of the extreme south; concaveness, as in fishes and many reptiles; rectangular and anthropoid coffins derived from a cast of his own body and the sort of mummy-coffin that has a face carved on it, extinct languages, such as Zuñi and Spanish and Athapascan; a hortus-siccus of extinct cryptogamic vegetation and giant lemurs.
i am thinking about the catalog, wondering if it'd be interesting to produce one with illustrations.
From the title on, this is great.
How much for a Peerage? Be nice to order something that never comes. I love to wait. Master Card, Visa? Do send that catalog.
This really struck a chord with me. Who among us does not long for recapture of that which is no longer? All things are burnished by extinction. A very provocative premise, very wisely articulated.
I enjoyed this ride. Great think piece. I like it.
Yes, with illustrations! Very good piece!
Thanks very much for the reads and comments. I'm pleased, not least because the list in particular was great fun to make & it's not all the time that something that much fun resonates with other people.
Susan--I went back and forth about the spelling & in the end acquiesced in the face of those annoying squiggely red lines that the Spelling Bureaucrats put into word processing software.
Love the second part. What do you need the first part for?
thanks julie & bill for the reads and lovely comments.
bill--the first part puts the second into motion.
"bill--the first part puts the second into motion."
Don't think you need it.