text:
Aug. 13, 2018 / 11:11 PM
Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Brewers meet in key two-game series
Jeff Arnold, The Sports Xchange
Chicago Cubs third baseman David Bote doubles against the San Diego Padres in the first inning on August 5 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/UPI | License Photo
CHICAGO -- If the Chicago Cubs needed a shot in the arm heading into what could prove to be a pivotal two-game series against the Milwaukee Brewers starting Tuesday at Wrigley Field, David Bote certainly delivered.
Bote's walk-off grand slam on Sunday delivered a 4-3 victory over the Washington Nationals that not only provided the first-place Cubs a series victory but extended their lead over the Brewers in what remains a tightly contested race in the National League Central.
Now the Cubs will look to create even more breathing room in two games that could really do damage to second-place Milwaukee's division title hopes.
Bote's improbable game-winner came with two outs in the ninth inning after the Cubs had been shut down by Max Scherzer. They faced a three-run deficit after the Nationals used two ninth-inning runs to open the three-run lead.
RELATED Surging St. Louis Cardinals host stunned Washington Nationals
But thanks to Bote, another comeback victory gives the Cubs a three-game lead in the Central heading into Tuesday's showdown. And if Bote's late-game heroics proved anything, it was that the Cubs will win with any means necessary to keep marching toward another postseason appearance.
"Our guys fight to the end," said pitcher Cole Hamels, who allowed just one run and one hit in his third Cubs start.
Jose Quintana (10-8, 4.28 ERA) will try to ride the wave of momentum that came from Sunday's win. Quintana has been vastly improved and had registered four wins in his previous five outings before getting roughed up in his last start against Kansas City. He allowed five runs and six hits in 6 1/3 innings against the Royals on Aug. 8 and will attempt to rediscover the rhythm he had found during the past month.
RELATED Atlanta Braves look to continue success vs. NL East as they host Miami Marlins
Quintana has been dominant against the Brewers in his career with a 4-1 record and 0.92 ERA in seven starts.
While the Cubs hope to keep surging forward, the Brewers could use the two games to remain relevant in the Central. The Brewers have dropped four of their past six and lost two of three over the weekend to the Atlanta Braves.
Milwaukee stranded 13 runners in an 8-7 loss on Sunday, which, combined with Chicago's prime-time thriller, put the Brewers in an even bigger hole as they prepare to face the rival Cubs.
RELATED Chicago White Sox's Adam Engel robs third home run of the week
"I think when you strand 13, you always feel like you left opportunities out there," Brewers manager Craig Counsell said, according to the team's official website.
But the Brewers must find a way to move on as they prepare for the first of eight remaining games against the Cubs. Chicago is 8-3 in the season series against Milwaukee this season, and if the Brewers are to remain in the chase, they understand they have to find a way to start gaining ground.
"Every game from now on is a big game, especially against the Cubs," Brewers pitcher Jhoulys Chacin told the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel. "It's the team we're chasing. It's going to be huge."
Chacin (11-4, 3.91) will start Tuesday's matinee for the Brewers. Chacin, like Quintana, had a very productive July with four victories, but he has surrendered 11 runs in his two starts this month. Chacin is 3-4 with a 3.30 ERA in eight career appearances (seven starts) against the Cubs.
Craig Counsell
MLB // 3 days ago
All-Star 3B Josh Donaldson agrees to 4-year, $92M contract with Twins
Jan. 14 (UPI) -- Former Atlanta Braves third baseman Josh Donaldson and the Minnesota Twins reached an agreement on a four-year deal.
Red Sox, manager Alex Cora part ways amid Astros' sign-stealing scandal
Jan. 14 (UPI) -- Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who has been linked this off-season to two sign-stealing schemes, mutually agreed to part ways with Boston.
Detroit Tigers sign pitcher Ivan Nova
Jan. 14 (UPI) -- The Detroit Tigers have signed right-handed pitcher Ivan Nova to a one-year deal.
Washington Nationals pitching prospect Fausto Segura dies at 23
Jan. 13 (UPI) -- Washington Nationals pitching prospect Fausto Segura, 23, died over the weekend.
Astros fire manager A.J. Hinch, GM Jeff Luhnow after MLB bans in cheating scandal
Jan. 13 (UPI) -- Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch were fired Monday after Major League Baseball issued one-season suspensions for their connection to a sign-stealing scheme.
MLB // 1 week ago
Cleveland Indians, Francisco Lindor reach $17.5M deal to avoid arbitration
Jan. 10 (UPI) -- All-Star shortstop Francisco Lindor avoided salary arbitration after agreeing to a one-year deal with the Cleveland Indians.
Cody Bellinger agrees to record $11.5M deal with Los Angeles Dodgers
Jan. 10 (UPI) -- The Los Angeles Dodgers avoided arbitration with 2019 National League MVP Cody Bellinger.
Kris Bryant, Chicago Cubs reach one-year, $18.6M agreement
Jan. 10 (UPI) -- Third baseman Kris Bryant and the Chicago Cubs avoided arbitration after agreeing on a one-year settlement.
LSU wins College Football Playoff National Championship


Located in a magnificent spot in Tapola Jalsrushti Agro Tourism centre with a newly built lake view building is the best hotel in Tapola offering services that emulates 3 star category hotels..
Be it boating and rafting in Koyna back waters, fishing, visiting strawberry farms or enjoying farm based activities, there is a wide array of activities that awaits you at Tapola Tent Resort.
Koyna Agro Tourism center is a campsite where accommodation is arranged in tents equipped with flush toilets. It also has a huge covered dining hall where home made food is served.
An Agrotourism centre to the very essence of the term Sakha Niwas Agro Tourism Centre - Tapola is an off beat resort offering an alternative holiday experience in Tapola.
Hotel Shivneri located just two minutes walk away from the Shiv Sagar Boat club with 11 spacious rooms of which 5 are air conditioned, Hotel Shivneri is a good stay option in Tapola.
LakeView Sagar is a small hotel with two spacious rooms ideal for couples and families. LakeView Sagar also has a roof top restaurant that serves delicious veg food.
Located at the base of a valley on the banks of the vast expanse of the Koyna backwaters sorrounded by the hills of Sahyadris, Mahabaleshwar Agro Village is a perfect destination.
With arguably the best view of Tapola lake Nisarga Agro or Tapola Lake Resort is the best place to stay if you are especially travelling with your family.


text:
Home » No More Two-Step in Texas (and Beyond): the Fifth Circuit Rejects the Two-Stage Lusardi Approach to Conditional Certification in Favor of Employer-Friendly Standard
By Seyfarth Shaw LLP on January 14, 2021
Posted in Conditional Certification, FLSA
By: Tim Watson, Brian Wadsworth, and John Phillips
Seyfarth Synopsis: In an important decision for employers, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the all-too lenient but commonly accepted Lusardi standard for conditional certification under the FLSA. In its place, the court adopted a more practical, common sense approach in deciding whether trial courts should send notice to past and current employees advising them that a lawsuit against their employer has been filed and that they have the right to join or "opt into" the lawsuit. Instead of Lusardi's modest factual showing that other employees are "similarly situated" to the plaintiff, the court held that before allowing notice to be sent, a trial court should (1) decide what facts and legal questions are material to the "similarly situated" analysis; (2) authorize preliminary discovery on these issues; and (3) analyze all available evidence to determine whether the employees and the plaintiff are similarly situated, including "merits-based" evidence (which under Lusardi courts typically do not consider). This case marks an important win for employers and is a must read for anyone facing an FLSA collective action in the Fifth Circuit (or elsewhere).
On January 12, 2021, the Fifth Circuit issued a significant opinion in Swales v. KLLM Transport Services, L.L.C. that drastically alters the landscape of wage and hour litigation in the Fifth Circuit. The two-step Lusardi approach, which ignores the "merits" of the case at the conditional certification stage, no longer applies. Instead, courts must initially determine the facts and legal questions material to the "similarly situated" analysis early in the case and allow discovery directed towards these issues, including "merits-based" issues. The court may then analyze those "merits-based" issues in reaching a determination as to which potential opt-in plaintiffs are similarly situated to the plaintiff. This is significant because it counters the oft-used mantra from plaintiffs' counsel that the "merits" of the case are irrelevant to conditional certification. In other words, the Swales decision gives employers the ammunition to fight back at the conditional certification stage.
The onslaught of collective actions against employers under the FLSA, which continues to grow, has been fueled in part by the relatively low standard for obtaining conditional certification under Lusardi. Unlike opt-out class actions under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, plaintiffs' counsel often are able to obtain conditional certification before any discovery takes place and without the need for expert witnesses. In fact, in 2020, the plaintiffs' bar won 84% of conditional certification motions (231 out of 274), a higher percentage of successful conditional certification motions than in any of the past 15 years. Thus with the Lusardi standard, Plaintiffs' counsel are able to pursue lucrative cases with little up-front investment.
Moreover, once certification is granted, there are real consequences for employers. Court-sanctioned notice of the case must be sent to past and current employees advising them of their right to join the case, which, given the relative size of the population to be notified, can be very disruptive in addition to creating significant exposure. As a result, employers face enormous pressure early in wage and hour cases to reach a settlement—before a case is conditionally certified and before notice goes out.
But nothing in the FLSA requires that conditional certification be so routine. In fact, nothing in the FLSA mentions conditional certification (or certification for matter) at all; the entire concept is a court-creation. Rather, the FLSA permits employees to sue for unpaid minimum wage and overtime compensation, and it states that the lawsuit may be brought "by any one or more employees for and in behalf of himself or themselves and other employees similarly situated." It also requires that each plaintiff who joins the case file a written consent to join. There is no mention of conditional certification or mailing notice of the case to putative collective members.
The Lusardi Framework
So where did conditional certification come from? It was created by federal courts to manage wage and hour litigation. And because there are few appellate court decisions on the issue—and even fewer Supreme Court decisions—the result is a hodgepodge of district court decisions that rely on shifting standards with predictably diverse (and sometimes contradictory) outcomes.
A little history: in 1989, in the seminal Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc. v. Sperling decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts have discretion (within limits) to send notice of a collective action to potential opt-in plaintiffs. But the Court also cautioned that a district court's "intervention in the notice process" cannot devolve into "the solicitation of claims." And the Court instructed district courts to "avoid even the appearance of judicial endorsement of the merits of the action." Since Hoffmann-La Roche, the Supreme Court has not provided additional guidance on the issue.
Without guidance from the text of the FLSA or higher courts, district courts have searched for the right approach. They have largely settled on two general approaches: the Lusardi ad hoc approach (from the District of New Jersey's 1987 decision in Lusardi v. Xerox Corporation) and the Shushan approach (from the District of Colorado's Shushan v. University of Colorado decision). The overwhelming majority of courts—including most courts in the Fifth Circuit—have used some form of the Lusardi approach.
Under the Lusardi approach, courts apply a two-step "ad hoc" process to determine whether FLSA plaintiffs are "similarly situated" under the FLSA. At stage one, i.e., conditional certification, the court looks at whether the proposed collective members are similarly situated enough to receive notice. This stage is often based solely on the pleadings and some affidavits, and courts typically require nothing more than "substantial allegations that the putative [collective] members were together the victims of a single decision, policy, or plan." Courts also take great pains not to delve into the merits and routinely credit plaintiffs' assertions, even when those assertions are not based in evidence. As a result, conditional certification is often granted.
Stage two of Lusardi approach typically takes place after discovery has been completed. At that point, the defendant may move to "decertify" the collective, and the court applies a stricter test to determine whether the named plaintiff and opt-in plaintiffs are sufficiently similarly situated to proceed together as a collective at trial. If the court decides the plaintiffs are not similarly situated, it dismisses the opt-in plaintiffs leaving only the original named plaintiff's claims.
The second test (the Shushan test) borrows concepts from class actions under Rule 23 and looks at numerosity, commonality, typically, and adequacy of representation when deciding whether to certify the collective. As mentioned above, the majority of district courts across the country have adopted some version of the Lusardi approach (rather than the Shushan test); although the actual application differs from court-to-court and even judge-to-judge.
The Fifth Circuit's Decision
Over the years the Fifth Circuit has taken great pains not to endorse (or reject) the Lusardi framework. This changed with the Fifth Circuit's recent decision in Swales v. KLLM Transport Services, L.L.C. In a lively and engaging opinion, the Court went through the history of conditional certification, examined the text of the FLSA, and analyzed the Supreme Court's Hoffmann-La Roche decision. After doing so, the Court rejected the Lusardi approach (and the Shushan approach) and set out a new test.
First, the Court explained that "Lusardi frustrates, rather than facilitates, the notice process." And the Court pointed out that "[t]he use of 'Lusardi' or even collective-action 'certification' has no universally understood meaning." Accordingly, the approach provides district courts with little guidance.
Second, the Court concluded that Lusardi does not comport with the text of the FLSA. The FLSA says nothing about "conditional certification," and the Fifth Circuit refused to read the Lusardi approach into the FLSA. The Court explained:
Two-stage certification of § 216(b) collective actions may be common practice. But practice is not necessarily precedent. And nothing in the FLSA, nor in Supreme Court precedent interpreting it, requires or recommends (or even authorizes) any "certification" process. The law instead says that the district court's job is ensuring that notice goes out to those who are "similarly situated," in a way that scrupulously avoids endorsing the merits of the case. A district court abuses its discretion, then, when the semantics of "certification" trump the substance of "similarly situated."
The Court explained that the refusal to look at the "merits" under the Lusardi approach ignores the requirement under the FLSA that plaintiffs be similarly situated and leads courts to certify collective actions of putative collective members that are not similarly situated. The Court stated:
Considering, early in the case, whether merits questions can be answered collectively has nothing to do with endorsing the merits. Rather, addressing these issues from the outset aids the district court in deciding whether notice is necessary. And it ensures that any notice sent is proper in scope—that is, sent only to potential plaintiffs. When a district court ignores that it can decide merits issues when considering the scope of a collective, it ignores the "similarly situated" analysis and is likely to send notice to employees who are not potential plaintiffs. In that circumstance, the district court risks crossing the line from using notice as a case-management tool to using notice as a claims-solicitation tool. Hoffmann-La Roche flatly forbids such line crossing.
Accordingly, the Court rejected the Lusardi approach and set out a completely different test for conditional certification:
[A] district court should identify, at the outset of the case, what facts and legal considerations will be material to determining whether a group of "employees" is "similarly situated." And then it should authorize preliminary discovery accordingly. The amount of discovery necessary to make that determination will vary case by case, but the initial determination must be made, and as early as possible.
And the Court made clear that a district court should consider all of the evidence available when deciding whether and to whom notice should be issued. In short, the Fifth Circuit set out the following framework: (1) courts should decide what facts and legal questions will be material to the "similarly situated" analysis early in the case; (2) courts should authorize preliminary discovery directed toward these issues; and (3) the court should then analyze all of the evidence available to determine whether the putative collective is similarly situated. If the proposed group is "too diverse" to be similarly situated, the court may decide the case cannot proceed on a collective basis.
The new test represents a sea change in the conditional certification framework, and the case is a welcome decision for employers. The decision should curtail some of the success the plaintiffs' bar has enjoyed of obtaining conditional certification early in FLSA cases on little more than allegations alone. Although it may result in increased discovery costs early in the case, it promises to provide an avenue for employers to meaningfully oppose conditional certification; especially in misclassification, joint employment, "off-the-clock," and similar-type FLSA cases where plaintiffs have had success in pushing back "merits" arguments at stage one of the Lusardi test. In short, this decision is required reading for all employers facing wage and hour litigation in the Fifth Circuit (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), and even employers outside of those jurisdictions.
Moreover, employers who are currently in pending FLSA litigation may want to ask the court to reconsider a prior ruling on a motion for conditional certification that is inconsistent with Swales. To the extent the case has not reached the conditional certification stage, or if the conditional certification briefing is pending, employers should immediately apprise the court of this significant decision.
New Year's Gift From WHD: Guidance on Continuous Workday Rule in the WFH Era
As COVID-Driven Remote Work Arrangements Continue, Wage and Hour Compliance Challenges Grow
Reasonable, Not Required: DOL Says IRS Mileage Rate Is Not Only Expense Reimbursement Method
Thank You, Next Guidance Please — Everything You Need to Know About the Wage and Hour Division's Latest Guidance on COVID-19 and the FLSA
Retail on Wheels & Selling in Someone Else's Store: DOL Clarifies Application of the Outside Sales Exemption in Unique Settings

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
home / success stories / SIPRAL a.s.
SIPRAL a.s.
FASCINATING FAÇADES
High-quality, custom-made light curtain walling from our customer Sipral gives buildings across
Europe a unique character
"Each project is unique; each project is a challenge." Since 1991 Czech company Sipral has delivered construction and design projects throughout Europe following this motto. Sipral specializes in element façades, fire-protection structures and bespoke glass and aluminium designs. It all gives our machines the opportunity to display their full capabilities in production.
Sipral was founded in 1991.
Image copyright: Sipral
Sipral was founded in Prague in 1991 by Leopold Bareš, and today he remains at the helm as Chairman of the Board of a company which has now become one of the leading Czech providers of glass and aluminium light curtain walling for buildings. Its 300 employees work at the company headquarters in Prague, the Jirny production and storage centre near Prague and also in London. Most of Sipral's projects are situated in the Czech Republic and the UK. The company's
turnover grew from €0.5 million in 1992 to €65 million in 2018, and its key customers are typically general contractors, investors and architects, mostly from the building, construction & real estate sector.
Sipral's machine pool includes the following elumatec machines: the SBZ 131 eluCam, the SBZ 122/75 and the DG 244 and DG 142 double mitre saws.
A reliable performer: the SBZ 131 in the Sipral production facility.
SBZ 122/75 – Providing a competitive advantage and boosting productivity
Sipral staff are delighted with the new SBZ 122/75 profile machining centre, which has been well received on the market as it achieves previously unseen speeds and acceleration values. As Leopold Bareš explains, this is a major benefit for the company: "We are expecting it to boost our productivity by 20 percent and to reduce unexpected machine downtimes."
In fact, Sipral has two SBZ 122/75 machines in use simultaneously in order to machine aluminium profiles as quickly and efficiently as possible. A further key advantage is the DC link coupling in the axis drives, which makes the SBZ 122/75 profile machining centre, the winner of the 2018 German Design Award, particularly energy-efficient.
Sipral is equally impressed with elumatec's service and support, which covers everything from consultation when choosing new machines to training for new staff working with elumatec machines. "We very rarely have problems with the machines, and if something does go wrong, we always get exactly the support we need which takes into account our specific requirements," says Bareš. Sipral's Chairman of the Board also appreciates the long service life of all elumatec products; the machines still work smoothly and reliably, despite some of them being in use for more than ten years.
Custom-made, intelligent – and eye-catching
Sipral has carved out a name for itself in the sector thanks to its creative approach to each individual project. The company aims to design new façade systems which meet its customers' aesthetic and technical requirements, and each system undergoes extensive structural analysis and thermal and acoustic testing in separate test centres. "We try to reflect our customers' values by producing intelligent, visually appealing façades featuring innovative technology, and of course the design must be long-lasting and reliable as well," says Bareš.
The AFI Vokovice complex in Prague
Examples of this successful approach include the AFI Vokovice complex in Prague, "The Diamond" at the University of Sheffield and the Paris La Défense Arena, a multi-purpose 40,000-capacity stadium which is home to rugby club Racing 92 and will be a venue for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Sipral supplied the double-skin stadium envelope, which rises from the first to the fourth floor and partially consists of sheet metal lamellas including thermal insulation.
The striking outer shell of the Paris La Défense Arena is one of many European projects delivered by our customer Sipral.
The external section, in front of the sheet metal cladding, consists of three types of shells: fully glazed panels, composite panels and glass/composite panels. Sipral also installed gutters with a decorative cladding made from further composite panels under the shell section.
"The Diamond" at the University of Sheffield
"Individuality and creativity are at the heart of what we do."
A waste-to-energy plant with unusual extra features
Another of Sipral's flagship projects is a striking addition to the Copenhagen skyline. Opened in 2017, Amager Bakke is one of Denmark's newest and most environmentally friendly waste-to-energy plants, handling 400,000 tonnes of waste a year.
Amager Bakke, Kopenhagen
But that's not all the building does: it was built in the shape of a slope to allow a range of recreational activities on its roof, including skiing. Early on in the Amager Bakke project, Sipral came up with a different technical solution for the façade from the original plan, which reduced the construction weight, simplified transport and production and reduced the overall construction costs. As winner of the public tender, Sipral designed and produced the building's intricate external envelope as well as an internal wall with a special glazing to separate the operational and administrational areas of the plant. Both façades were subjected to rigorous testing for air permeability, waterproofness and resistance to wind loads. The visible layer of the façade was covered by approximately 3250 natural aluminium "bricks" or cassettes, which gives the plant a distinctive, attractive appearance, while the internal wall was designed to provide fire and acoustic protection so
that staff can work safely and without annoying noise even when the plant is in operation.
A unique view of the Thames
The British capital is the location of Sipral's latest project, the Wardian London, which is making a real statement. Scheduled for completion in 2020, the 170 m and 183 m high-rise towers will be two of Britain's tallest buildings, with the interior featuring 792 luxury apartments and a Sky Lounge offering a unique view over London. Sipral is supplying three-metre long aluminium structures for the balconies with fully glazed railings, the supporting steel brackets and other sections of the building shell including balconies, sliding doors and glazed windows and corner panels. The windows stretch from the ceiling to the floor, bathing the inside of the building in natural light, while the glazed railings alone have a total surface area of 14,550 m² and the façade for the two towers comes to 40,000 m² overall. The non-transparent façade sections, such as the hanging balcony ceilings, were clad in aluminium using a construction method that avoids the need for a crane and were installed from the inside of the building.
Wardian London
Sipral has won no fewer than ten major European prizes for its projects, the most recent being the 2017 European Steel Design Award for the Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant. We are proud to play a part in this Czech company's success and delighted that we have now worked together for over 20 years – here's to even more success in future projects
"Collaboration with elumatec
is based on high standards,
and this allows us to produce unique designs
that meet all the requirements
our customers have."
Leopold Bareš, Chairman of the Board, Sipral
For more about Sipral visit:
www.sipral.com
OTHERS SUCCESS STORIES
ST-Vitrinen Trautmann
ST-Vitrinen Trautmann combines the SBZ 628 XXL with eluCad for optimum results
Werner Keller AG
There's no such thing as impossible!
Metallbau Harig - "EFFICIENCY AND TRUST FROM THE VERY FIRST DAY"
Harig Group buys one thousandth elumatec profile machining centre in the 6xx series
KFK - BEHIND THE FAÇADE
elumatec customer KFK has become a leading provider of façade solutions.
LOTTE World Tower in Seoul
SBZ 151 used in the construction of mega skyscraper LOTTE World Tower in Seoul
Jocz invests in the newest elumatec solutions
Innovative elumatec products give Wipro a clear advantage in the European market
The dome of the new Louvre in Abu Dhabi
A profile machining masterpiece by elumatec
AAV contractors SA
Success has many foundations - fast solutions for standard and custom-built designs
Driessens Group B.V.
PVC windows: SBZ 618 as the springboard to the national league
Medicke Metallbau GmbH
"elumatec delivers what others promise"
Marlex d.o.o.
A string of successes reaching all the way to the Antarctic
Tiedt & Iden GmbH & Co. KG
Tiedt & Iden reduces throughput time for a wide range of parts
Wilken GmbH - Elemente & Wintergartenbau
Wilken shows growth with conservatory construction and elumatec
Christian Kotschenreuther GmbH
elumatec customer, Kotschenreuther, automates and increases throughput in PVC window manufacturing and special applications


These light pink glitter dice have tiny little glitter sparkles that reflect in the light and will remind you those classic glitter dice of the 90's. Our glitter dice are some of the most beautiful dice I have seen, they are perfect for any collection. Every Kraken Dice set includes our signature velvet dice bag to hold your precious dice.
The lighter color glitter dice seem nicer to me than their darker counterparts, and this set is no exception. I also own the yellow glitter dice, and both showcase the glitter very well. A simple yet gorgeous set of dice.
4/6 of the dice I was sent are very beautiful and match the pictures perfectly - those 4 are a lovely light pink with a perfect amount of glitter. However, the d8 is a slightly darker pink with less glitter than the rest, which isn't hugely noticeable, and I didn't mind that at first. But. The d6 is incredibly light pink with a very high concentration of glitter. It looks like its from another set, it doesn't match at all with the other 5 dice. The rest are absolutely beautiful, it's just a disappointment this slipped past quality control.
This pastel pink set is so stunning! No imperfections and they roll very balanced like Kraken tends to deliver! Wonderful for people who like anything sparkly - like me - or anything pink/pastel pink - also like me. Arrived super fast and I love them to bits!
They look amazing under the light and I love the colour. A really eye catching, vibrant addition to any collection.
Pink and girly dice for my male swashbuckler rogue!!
These are such a nice soft pink with the perfect amount of glitter! And I cannot wait to put these lovelies to the test!
The set sparkles like pink champagne, theyre absolutely beautiful.
I love the color of these so much!! They have such a soft and pretty look to them. The glitter and slight translucence looks so cool in person, better than the photos. The dice are great quality also, no flaws whatsoever.
They are very pretty but in a soft kind of way. I think the numbers may be a bit harder to read in dim light. It doesn't really affect me but people who regularly play in dim light might want to know.


text:
BMW rolls out new factory and showroom for 30th anniversary
A County Durham-based Halo Approved Fabricator and Installer is marking its 30th year in business with a move to new, larger premises near Chester-le-Street.
BMW Windows was established in 1985, with founders Bent, Murphy and Wilkinson lending their initials to the company name. Its current executive team – John and Debbie Jefferson and their sons, John and Andrew – took over the running of the company in 1997-98, with John Snr. leaving his accountancy job to branch out in business alone.
He commented: "It's not often that you come across a double glazing company celebrating its 30th year in business. We're proud to have reached this milestone – testament to our hard work, determination and commitment to supplying systems of the highest quality.
"Our association with Halo and The VEKA UK Group in general stands us in good stead with customers, who realise that we only work with the best. Now – for the first time – being able to display our products in the comfort of a bespoke showroom, customers have the opportunity to browse our range of products first-hand – invaluable for visualising how they'll look in their own home."
An impressive sun room forms the entranceway to BMW's new base – an 11,000 sq ft unit on the Stella Gill Industrial Estate, Pelton Fell. It makes for a warm welcome to their showroom and a stark contrast to the working factory environment that, formerly, had been the company's only means of showcasing its products.
"We have invested more than £300,000 in the new showroom and factory" John continues. "It's created the capacity we need to sustain our growth, with turnover increasing by 22% over the past three years and no signs of it slowing!"
In the same period, BMW has taken on seven new members of staff, raising their total workforce to 20. Besides its 12 manufacturers and eight sales, installation and admin staff, the company also employs three teams of fitters on contract.
Colin Torley, Sales and Marketing Director for The VEKA UK Group congratulated BMW on the recent expansion: "It's fantastic to see Halo fabricators and installers overcoming and now flourishing in the wake of an economic downturn that held significant repercussions for the home improvement industry.
"The family atmosphere has filtered down from the directors throughout the entire BMW team. There's a real sense of pride in the business and its future, and we're honoured that Halo products continue to play an integral part in its story.
"Great products with great service are always a winning formula. Here's to BMW's next 30 successful years!"
A family fun day on 30th May 2015 saw the launch of BMW's new showroom.
To create the bigger picture, we focus on the little things.
Introducing WinDoPlan: An accelerator of industry progress
Missin' Our Member's Weekend
Farrington Road, Rossendale Road Industrial Estate,
Burnley, Lancashire, BB11 5DA
Group Veka
VEKA PLC Company No.01626563 VAT No.GB497951576
UK Tax Policy
It's your choice regarding cookies on this site. We use cookies to enhance the site functionality and provide you with a better experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Learn more AcceptRejectPrivacy Policy


text:
Seniors Taking Multiple Meds: It's a Complicated Problem
Lying About COVID: Many People Did
3 COVID Scenarios That Could Spell Trouble for the Fall
Colonoscopy Benefits Lower Than Expected (Study)
Microplastics Found in Human Breast Milk
Dr. Whyte's Book: Take Control of Your Diabetes Risk
WebMD Investigates Street Medicine Reaches People Where They Live
What's Really in Your Fast Food?
Medically Reviewed by Christine Mikstas, RD, LD on September 04, 2020
The humble potato, fried in a vat of simmering oil, and finished with a sprinkling of salt. What could be simpler? Apparently, quite a lot. Fast-food fries often have more than 15 ingredients, including sugar and artificial coloring. They also have preservatives like sodium acid pyrophosphate and tert-butylhydroquinone, which in high doses has been linked to vision problems.
Ground beef, right? Sure -- but there also may be growth hormones and antibiotics, which can end up in your system. And in one study, some burgers had over 100 calories more per serving than the fast-food places said they did.
It's the same soda you buy at the grocery store. But when you get it at a fast-food chain, you get more calories because the drink sizes are so large. And we're not talking "supersize." A large soda at a typical fast-food place is about 32 ounces and has about 270 calories. Studies show that if you order it, you'll drink it.
Some of the ingredients listed for what one national outlet calls a "fried egg" include modified corn starch, soybean oil, medium chain triglycerides, propylene glycol, artificial flavor, citric acid, xanthan gum, and -- oh yeah -- egg whites and yolks (listed separately). If you didn't bargain for all of that, ask for the propylene glycol (also used in fog machines and to make polyester) on the side.
What's in them? Let's just say they make full use of the animals that supply the meat. They're also loaded with salt and saturated fat (which most Americans get too much of) and with nitrates, a preservative linked to diabetes and cancer.
A piece of chicken breast battered and fried to golden perfection? Not exactly. There's meat in there, but there are also bones, blood vessels, nerves, connective tissue, and skin. And they have loads of salt and fat, which are linked to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Besides milk and sugar, one leading fast-food outlet also adds high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives like sodium benzoate, and artificial flavors and colors to this drinkable dessert. One thing that appears to be missing: actual strawberries.
The first ingredient listed for almost any sauce served at a fast-food restaurant is sugar. It may be called sucrose, dextrose, maltose, rice syrup, barley malt, high-fructose corn syrup, or any number of other things, but the end result is the same: quick delivery of lots of calories with almost zero nutritional value.
Show Sources
IMAGES PROVIDED BY:
1) archmercigod / Thinkstock
2) studioportosabbia / Thinkstock
3) Stockbyte / Thinkstock
4) Violette Nlandu Ngoy / Thinkstock
5) Monkey Business Images / Thinkstock
6) Dana_Zurki / Thinkstock
7) Brand X Pictures / Thinkstock
8) JoanieSimon / Thinkstock
American Journal of Medicine: "The Autopsy of Chicken Nuggets Reads 'Chicken Little.'"
Consumers Union: "Which fast food chains serve meat on drugs?"
National Institutes of Health: "Toxicology of tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ)," "tert-Butylhydroquinone (tBHQ) protects hepatocytes against lipotoxicity via inducing autophagy independently of Nrf2 activation," "Cytotoxicity and DNA damage properties of tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) food additive," "Risk Assessment of Growth Hormones and Antimicrobial Residues in Meat," "A review of potential metabolic etiologies of the observed association between red meat consumption and development of type 2 diabetes mellitus," "Total N-nitroso compounds and their precursors in hot dogs and in the gastrointestinal tract and feces of rats and mice: possible etiologic agents for colon cancer," "Small, medium, large or supersize? The development and evaluation of interventions targeted at portion size," "What is the role of portion control in weight management?"
Sugar Science: "Hidden in Plain Sight."
© 2020 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved. View privacy policy and trust info
Get The Protein You Need
How to Make a Great Grocery List
Becoming a Vegetarian: Foods to Choose From
Best and Worst Appetizers
Truth About Omega-3s
Video: Powerhouse Fruits and Veggies


text:
Le FK Liepājas Metalurgs est un club letton de football basé à Liepāja fondé en 1909 et disparu en 2013.

Historique

 1909 : fondation du club sous le nom de Olimpija Liepaja
 1962 : le club est renommé Zvejnieks Liepaja
 1991 : le club est renommé Olimpija Liepaja
 1993 : le club est renommé FK Liepaja
 1995 :  à une Coupe d'Europe (C2, saison 1995/96)
 1996 : fusion avec le FK DAG Liepaja en FK Baltika Liepaja
 1997 : le club est renommé Baltika Metalurgs Liepaja
 1997 : le club est renommé FK Liepājas Metalurgs
 2013 : le club disparaît à la suite de la faillite de l'usine métallurgique Liepājas Metalurgs

Bilan sportif

Palmarès
 Ligue balte
 Vainqueur : 2007

 Championnat de Lettonie
 Champion : 1927, 1928, 1929, 1933, 1936, 1938, 1939, 2005, 2009

 Coupe de Lettonie
 Vainqueur : 2006
 Finaliste : 1939, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2011 et 2012

Bilan par saison
Légende

Bilan européen
Légende

Note : dans les résultats ci-dessous, le score du club est toujours donné en premier

Anciens joueurs

Notes et références

Lien externe
    Site officiel du club

Club de football disparu en Lettonie
Club de football fondé en 1909
Metalurgs
Club de football disparu en 2013

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


I am sending you my warmest wishes; as always I am thinking of you at Christmas.
Wishing you and your Family a wonderful festive season blessed with love, joy, peace, and hope.
I know that the package I sent you this year has been received, and by now you must have opened it and see the contents, so I am not spoiling a surprise for you. I hope you will like gifts I chose for you. Have an enjoyable Christmas dear Atria.
This year we started a new tradition, a reverse advent calendar. For the past 24 days we filled a medium box with food and toiletries by adding an item each day. You can see the result in the picture. Well, minus the Rabbit - he is helping us to commemorate your step-brother Leo and inspires us to do more, contribute more, be more helpful and spread love. He is our Rabbit :-) Today we donated the rest of the content of the box to our local food bank in order to help those less fortunate that are struggling at Christmas time.
By sharing our reverse advent calendar here, I am hoping to inspire you to take part and make a small difference to those most vulnerable in your local community.
Have a great Christmas Atria and open your heart to others.
Christmas Party Season Opens Today!
Today I attended my first Christmas party of this festive season. I very much enjoyed time spent with my close friends chatting, eating, playing board games and being silly together. We all wore Christmas jumpers and we felt very festive.
I hope that you are blessed with wonderful friends with whom you can share many beautiful moments and create unforgettable memories during this festive season. Have an amazing time Atria.
Dear Atria, I had a bit of a rough start of the Christmas Day, but finally about 10am, I got out of the bed and opened my Christmas gifts. It's not so much about the presents, but about knowing that people around me care enough to write a card, make an effort and choose something for me and share with me.
Wishing you a very joyful festive season. I will be thinking of you during the Christmas dinner and I hope some day we can sit by the same table and share it together. Merry Christmas Atria!
I am very happy to be given an opportunity to send you a Christmas gift this year. Please thank your mother for providing your new postal address.
I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous New Year 2018!
Dear Atria, the Christmas package I sent you in mid-December came back couple of days ago. To my surprise it apparently hasn't been collected. I thought that maybe you were away for Christmas holidays and therefore was not able to collect it? Anyway, I will keep it for you and I will send it to you again whenever you want. Please contact me via this website, email or phone whenever you want me to post it again.
Dear Atria, I assume you went away for Christmas holidays or were busy with your friends & family and therefore the Christmas gift I sent you this year has not been yet collected. I checked today and it is still waiting for you at the Woking sorting office. You can arrange delivery via website or using the telephone number provided. You can also go and collect it in person from the sorting office. Please see details below.
I hope you will be able to collect it soon and you will enjoy it.
A new year is all about starting afresh and realising your dreams. Have a Happy New Year Atria and happy beginnings to whatever you want to do or change this year.
Every year I and Anna add one new ornament to our Christmas tree. We had a squirrel, fairy and some other fancy decorations, but this year's addition is very special.
This year's addition are two Macmillan Stars in memory of my Mum (MadarJan) and Anna's Dad (Tato), who both lost their battles with cancer.
We made a donation to Macmillan Cancer Support and as a thank you we received these stars.
Macmillan is a charity that supports people with cancer and their families. They aim to reach and improve the lives of everyone with cancer. They provide care, moral support, advice about work, help with money worries or just are there for anyone who wants to talk about cancer.
My Mum and Anna's Dad shall continue to live in our hearts through the memories they left behind. We miss them, especially at times like Christmas when the families gather together to celebrate.
Hopefully soon the scientists will find a cure for cancer and one day it will be treated as simply as a common cold today. Do you think it is far fetched? Maybe... but, well, years ago a very powerful Egyptian queen died from untreated dental abscess. Today abscess treatment is not only very simple but also widely affordable and accessible to everyone, even if they are not a King or a Queen. So let's keep our hopes up.
Your Christmas present this year is a limited edition ice-watch. I got it for you with the hope that every time you look at it, it will remind you to value your time and to cherish your memories.
Time we value at present forms our future happy memories, whilst the time we took for granted and did not value contributes towards our future regrets.
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2016.
This year's Christmas card for you.
Present and card wrapped and ready to placed in an envelope.
Below there are pictures of your Christmas card and present which today at 12.51pm postman attempted to deliver unsuccessfully.
Go to Royal Mail website (Tracking number AF257623564GB) and rearrange a delivery or take the card they left at your address to the local sorting office and collect in person. I hope you get it before Christmas.
Wishing you and your family and friends a wonderful, magical Christmas filled with love, joy and happiness.
I hope you had a nice and enjoyable Christmas, are rested and all ready to start school again.
The little angel I have sent you together with your Christmas card is hand made by Celina Wandas of Pracownia Ceramiczna 'Angel' from Krakow. I got this angel direct from the artist and I myself wrote the message on the little heart.
I asked the artist to write her name on a piece of paper and sign it for you.
There are different legends about Christmas tree and the Christmas angel and no one knows for sure which one is closer to true fact.
One such legend has it that in winter of 1536 one night Martin Luther went for a walk in forest and was inspired by the wondrous sight of thousands of stars shining trough the branches of the fir trees.
Legend continues that he, that year, took a small fir tree to his house and decorated it with candles and shiny objects to recreate that beautiful heavenly view for his children.
A different legend has it that in December of year 1800 Queen Charlotte, the German wife of King George III set up the first known English Christmas tree at Queen"s Lodge in Windsor or Kew Palace.
She decorated her royal tree with shining glass ornaments, glowing wax candles, sweets, fruits, small jewellery, toys, presents and an angel.
Your grandparents sent you a Christmas card and Christmas wishes.
As they can't sent it to you directly, they have posted it to me, I have taken a picture of the card and their wishes and am putting it below for you to see.
Although we are not Christians and we do not celebrate Christmas the same way as they do, we all enjoy the spirit of Christmas. It is a spirit of giving, sharing, forgiveness, family reunion, caring for others, a spirit of being thankful for what we have and above all a spirit of being kind and helping those who are less fortunate than we are.
Christmas, as you no doubt know, is to commemorate the birth of Jesus. Although it is not clear in history or from the bible when Jesus was born, legend has it that Christian church adopted to celebrate Christmas at the end of winter as they wanted it to replace the already popular winter festival which dated back to roman times.
I thought you might enjoy having your very own miniature Christmas in a box. I have chosen the following few items for you to symbolise Christmas, I will pack them and give it to your Mum to bring for you.
Although unclear when it became a tradition to decorate a tree for Christmas, that too dates back to the winter festival. In roman times traditionally an evergreen fir tree was decorated outside the houses and branches of it was used to decorate homes during the winter festival.
Some believe use of evergreen plants or trees was to symbolise the everlasting life with god. History has it that Romans were using branches of Fir Tree to decorate their temples during their Saturnalia festival.
As to taking the tree indoor and decorating it, again it is unclear when exactly it was adopted as a Christmas tradition and why. There are many different legends about when an why a tree was first brought to the house as well as why and how it was decorated.
"The first person to bring a Christmas Tree into a house, in the way we know it today, may have been the 16th century German preacher Martin Luther. A story is told that, one night before Christmas, he was walking through the forest and looked up to see the stars shining through the tree branches. It was so beautiful, that he went home and told his children that it reminded him of Jesus, who left the stars of heaven to come to earth at Christmas".
The first Christmas Trees were decorated with edible things, such as gingerbread, gold covered apples, sweets & wafers. Later glass makers made special small ornaments similar to some of the decorations used today to decorate the trees and children started using colour paper, gold foil, tinsels, candles, etc to decorate their tree. It is believed that originally people used to put a figure of the Baby Jesus on the top of their tree. This in time has changed to an angel, a fairy or a star. Today that simple Christmas decoration has grown to a commercially profitable business that is hard to miss in any town.
Christmas crackers are favourite in the UK. They were first made in about 1850 by a London sweet maker called Tom Smith. He one night, while he was sitting in front of his log fire, became very interested by the sparks and cracks coming from the fire. Suddenly, he thought what a fun idea it would be, if his sweets and toys could be opened with a crack when their fancy wrappers were pulled in half. I hope you will enjoy opening miniature crackers I am sending you.
The use of candle for decoration also dates back to the ancient winter celebrations. No one knows when candles first became connected with Christmas, but let's not forget that candles were the main source of light after dark and their use in any winter festival (short days) was hardly surprising.
Originally candles were used to decorate Christmas Trees but as they were responsible for starting many fires now days they are replaced by the safer electric lights.
It is nice to lit a scented candle in a cold winter evening. It provides a gentle, soft light and gives a feeling of warmth.
I included a small box of sweets in your package as usually during Christmas people treat themselves to some chocolate. Olden days an ordinary familie couldn't afford to have good food, including chocolate, on a daily basis and Christmas was one of the rare and special occasions when parents were treating their children to the chocolate. It was very special and children were looking forward to it the whole year. Nowadays it doesn't have the same meaning as we can afford chocolate during the year, but Christmas is a good excuse to have something sweet.
I hope you like my Christmas card this year. I thought the Fairy is a nice idea as you can use it as a decoration on your tree.
The custom of sending Christmas cards was started in the UK in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole. He was a civil servant (Government worker) who was very interested in the new 'Public Post Office' and wondered how it could be used more by ordinary people.Sir Henry had the idea of Christmas Cards with his friend John Horsley, who was an artist. They designed the first card and sold them for 1 shilling each. (That is only 5p or 8 cents today(!), but in those days it was worth much much more.) The card had three panels. The outer two panels showed people caring for the poor and in the centre panel was a family having a large Christmas dinner! Some people didn't like the card because it showed a child being given a glass of wine!
One of the main reasons we have the custom of giving and receiving presents at Christmas, is to remind us of the presents given to newborn baby Jesus by the Wise Men: Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh.
Frankincense was a perfume used in Jewish worship and, as a gift, it showed that people would worship Jesus.
Gold was associated with Kings and Christians believe that Jesus is the King of Kings.
Myrrh was a perfume that was put on dead bodies to make them smell nice and, as a gift, it showed that Jesus would suffer and die.
Christmas itself is really about a big present that God gave the world about 2000 years ago - Jesus! One of the most famous Bible verses, John 3:16, says: 'God loved the world so much, that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not be lost but have eternal life.'.
But still all over the world, families and friends give presents to each other. It is an occasion to treat your loved ones. I bought you couple of present as well and I hope you will like them.
They say that the picture is worth 1000 words - I bought you this notebook, so you can record your memories by drawing simple pictures.
Dear Atria, We have put up our tree and decoration for 2013 Christmas. Do you remember that I wrote to you, that to make our tree different from previous years we were going to add a new decoration to it tree every year?
Dear Atria, You can pride yourself for being a Zoroastrian and from a cultural background who celebrates their new year on the first day of the spring, yet you should pride yourself even more for understanding, respecting and taking part in celebrating the new year with those who are from a different cultural background and have different beliefs.
After all, enjoying to take part in celebrating the cultural events of other cultures and other societies is only one of the benefits of living in a multicultural society.
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas filled with joy, love and happiness surrounded by family and friends. I am sorry I am not allowed to share this happy season with you, but I hope we will celebrate together many Christmases in future.
I am sure your Mum and the rest of the family made you feel loved and special, as you are and always will be.
We celebrated Christmas this year with our Polish friend Dorotka, and our English friends Tommy & Pam, so we had people from three different cultures and traditions around the same table. I think this is the whole beauty of celebrating Christmas - unity and people being together despite of their differences.
In many cultures Christmas is also seen as a time of forgiveness and giving, being kind to others, helping those who are less fortunate than we are, time of sharing. Anna always sends cheques at Christmas to two charities - one is a charity that helps the homeless people and the other one helps people rebuild their life after conflict. Even if you don't have much there are many who don't have even that little and who also, as every human being want to be happy.
I hope you are happy and you also remember about those who are less fortunate.
Happy Christmas my Little Princess!
I hope this new year will bring you everything you need, what you hope for, what makes you happy and what is the best for you. I always have you in my heart and want the best for you.
I hope this little video brings a smile to your face. The 'actors' are: I - your dad Fash, you my darling Atria, Maman and Baba Jan - your Grandparents who love you and miss you very much and Anna - my wife, who always supports me and would love to see you reunited with me.
They are the most important and dearest people in my life.


text:
Eston girl swaps office work for RAF
A TEESSIDE woman swapped office work for days loading large aircraft on a windswept airfield - and she's loving every minute.
Dave Robson
Zara Durrant, of Eston, is an RAF movements operator with No 1 Air Mobility Wing at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire.
Just six weeks out of her trade training at nearby RAF Brize Norton, Zara, 20, is now gaining the job experience that will allow her to deploy to overseas operations.
Leading Aircraftsman Durrant and her colleagues provide the RAF and their allies with a vital specialist freight service.
The Air Mobility Wing also provides a mobile flight team of six personnel, ready to move at a moment's notice in support of military operations.
Back at Lyneham, they could be dealing with up to 10 freight charters a week, with air cargo ranging from clothing, food and medical supplies to mail for service personnel.
Despite the long hours and physical work, Zara takes the aircraft, cargo and passenger handling in her stride.
She's one of only a few women in what is largely a male dominated trade.
But the former Inland Revenue administrative assistant is enthusiastic about her new role and recommends her trade choice as a great option for women.
Zara said: "Joining the RAF was the best thing I've ever done.
"The opportunities to travel and the social life are great.
"This isn't just a man's job. I've never felt there is anything that I can't do."
She added: "And don't be put off by how it sounds - it's so much more than moving boxes!"
Zara worked for the Inland Revenue for four years before joining the RAF last year.
RAF Lyneham is home to the RAF's 48 Hercules aircraft, and is the second largest Hercules base in the world.


text:
Q: Trouble in getting selected item text in dropdownlist @Html.DropDownList("city",(SelectListItem)ViewBag.city,new { @class = "form-control", @onchange="fun1()"})

 $(document).ready(function fun1() {

        alert("Selected item value is " + $("#city").val() + " and Selected item
          text is " + $("#city option:selected").text());

    });

A: write your function function fun1() outside document.ready. It will work.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


There must be a thousand Kremlin- and Washington-watchers who would have loved to be a fly on the table when Mr. Reagan sat down with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the White House barbecue last weekend.
The sudden revival of talk of an arms parley has caught many by surprise - inside the White House and outside. Conventional wisdom held that the Kremlin would give Reagan the cold shoulder on negotiations until the election. No one can be confident just how the latest proposal by the Soviets, to initiate antisatellite weapons talks in Vienna in September, will fare.
Any prospect of widened talks with the Soviets in September has to help Mr. Reagan politically. That need not be dwelt upon. And it would be fruitless to try to fathom what if any political calculation the Soviets may have made about the United States election; signs point to stresses and strains inside the Kremlin over what to do with the boisterous and assertive Reagan administration, just as the internal White House struggle to direct policy is incessantly waged. Certainly this latest Kremlin offer is not of a piece with the Soviet and East-bloc decision to boycott the Los Angeles Olympics.
For the West, what is most important through this period ahead is what it will reveal of Mr. Reagan's basic commitment to arms talks and getting on with the Soviets. That's the nuance that the fly at the barbecue might even have swapped Redskin Super Bowl tickets to have heard.
Arms control tends to have its own life, through unending private talks among experts, without a direct presidential role. It's been difficult to know, through Mr. Reagan's 31/2-year term, who speaks for the administration. Is it Richard Perle or Fred Ikle at the Department of Defense, George Shultz at State, Robert McFarlane at the National Security Council? The stable of spokesmen has often seemed to exercise a presidential prerogative without direct presidential guidance.
A lot is at stake at this moment on arms. A momentum for policy usually builds before an administration takes office. This was true of momentum for the SALT treaty and detente, which preceded Richard Nixon's coming to office.
Mr. Reagan can start now to set the tone and pace of negotiations for a second Reagan administration, or the domestic and diplomatic conditions for a Democratic successor.
The pragmatists in the White House appear to be on the winning side of late. It was the President himself, at a June press conference, who seemed to open the door for a look at the antisatelite issue. The administration now talks about a wide range of diplomatic exchanges on cultural and other issues. A lot of careers are on the line. How a next administration will be staffed will depend a lot on the public commitment Reagan makes during the campaign ahead.
Sitting down with Dobrynin, the President himself for the first time had the chance to talk directly and quietly with a Soviet listener about where he stands on the arms issue. If he is now viewing the issue as important to his place in history, as current evidence might suggest, the Kremlin would do well to take his interest seriously.


text:
Q: Jquery/Javascript : call a function outside of the file we are calling the function I have a number of javascript plugins which are included in my HTML file, and are included successfully because I have checked.
Heres the problem;
Basically I want to create a function outside the HTML file, and then inside the HTML file load that particular function when the document is ready.
this is the function (outside) of the HTML file. As a stand alone JS file:
function do_anchor_scrolling() {
    $('#back_to_top').anchorScroll();
    $("#landing_link").anchorScroll();
    $("#menu_link").anchorScroll();
    $("#sauces_link").anchorScroll();
    $("#ranches_link").anchorScroll();
    $("#order_link").anchorScroll();
    $("#about_link").anchorScroll();
    $("#franchise_link").anchorScroll();
});

the function is called do_anchor_scrolling
How in JQuery can I say when the document is ready perform the do_anchor_scrolling function.

A: When the document is ready, call the function.
$(document).ready(function(){
    do_anchor_scrolling();
});

A: Pass it as a handler into the ready method:
$(document).ready(do_anchor_scrolling);

Or even shorter:
$(do_anchor_scrolling);

Notice the function is not executed right there (no invoking parenthesis) - the function object itself is passed into the ready function.

A: You can just do:
$.getScript("yourfile.js");//it grabs and executes yourfile.js
                           //so your function is now defined
do_anchor_scrolling();     //and you can call it

You can go without the $_getScript() call by just putting yourfile.js inside a <script> tag in <head>.


text:
Q: capistrano deploy:migration does not exist This is my first rails project and its been a real pleasure working with capistrano.
My current issue is that I need to run cap deploy:migrate and cap:deploy:migration as seperate tasks. I believe there should be a cap deploy:migration which combines these.
Here is my terminal output:
kris$ cap staging deploy:migration
      triggering load callbacks
     * executing `staging'
    the task `deploy:migration' does not exist

My setup is using multi stages and is using the RVM capistrano plugin.
Here is my gem file:
source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.2.1'

group :development do
  gem 'sqlite3'
end

group :production do
  gem 'mysql2'
end

group :test do
  gem 'sqlite3'
  gem 'ZenTest'
end

# Gems used only for assets and not required
# in production environments by default.
group :assets do
  gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.2.3'
  gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.2.1'
  gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
end

#formtastic 2.2 breaks activeadmin
gem "formtastic", "~> 2.1.1"
gem "activeadmin", "~> 0.4.3"

# meta_search required for activeadmin
gem 'meta_search'

gem 'jquery-rails'
gem "paperclip", "~> 3.0"

gem 'acts_as_list'
 gem 'unicorn'

# Deploy with Capistrano
 gem 'capistrano'
 gem 'rvm-capistrano'

gem 'mail'
gem 'friendly_id'

and here is my config/deploy file:
set :rvm_ruby_string, 'ruby-1.9.3-p194@xxx'                     # Or:
#set :rvm_ruby_string, ENV['GEM_HOME'].gsub(/.*\//,"") # Read from local system

require "rvm/capistrano"                               # Load RVM's capistrano plugin.
require "bundler/capistrano"

# set :verbose ,1

require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'
set :stages, %w(staging production)
set :default_stage, "staging"
set :deploy_via, :remote_cache

set :user, "webm"
# set :deploy_via, :remote_cache
set :use_sudo, false

set :scm, "git"
set :repository, "git@xx.beanstalkapp.com:/xx.git"

# :branch is being set in stage files

default_run_options[:pty] = true
# ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true

after "deploy", "deploy:cleanup" # keep only the last 5 releases

namespace :deploy do
    %w[start stop restart].each do |command|
        desc "#{command} unicorn server"
        task command, roles: :app, except: {no_release: true} do
            run "#{sudo} service unicorn_#{server_configuration} #{command}"
        end
    end

    desc "build missing paperclip styles"
    task :build_missing_paperclip_styles, :roles=> :app do
        run "cd #{release_path}; RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake paperclip:refresh:missing_styles"
    end
    after "deploy:update", "deploy:build_missing_paperclip_styles"

    task :setup_config, roles: :app do
        puts "#making symlink to nginx sites-enabled"
        run "#{sudo} ln -fs #{current_path}/config/server/#{server_configuration}/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/#{server_configuration}"
        puts "#making symlink to unicorn service script"
        run "#{sudo} ln -fs #{current_path}/config/server/#{server_configuration}/unicorn_init.sh /etc/init.d/unicorn_#{server_configuration}"
        puts "#making a the new config directory"
        run "mkdir -p #{shared_path}/config"
        run "sunique 1"
        put File.read("config/database.yml"), "#{shared_path}/config/database.yml"
        run "sunique 0"
        puts "Now edit the config files in #{shared_path}."
    end
    after "deploy:setup", "deploy:setup_config"

    task :symlink_config, roles: :app do
        run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/config/database.yml #{release_path}/config/database.yml"

        puts "#for reference:"
        puts "#rvm wrapper 1.9.3@ac_helenefrance_01 ruby-1.9.3-p194@#{server_configuration} unicorn cap"
        puts "#now be sure to run: sudo update-rc.d unicorn_#{server_configuration} defaults"
    end
    after "deploy:finalize_update", "deploy:symlink_config"

    # desc "Make sure local git is in sync with remote."
    # task :check_revision, roles: :web do
        # if :isRemote == false
            # unless `git rev-parse HEAD` == `git rev-parse beanstalk/#{branch}`
                # puts "WARNING: HEAD is not the same as beanstalk/#{branch}"
                # puts "Run `git push` to sync changes."
                # exit
            # end
        # end
    # end
    #before "deploy", "deploy:check_revision"
end

Any help with why deploy:migration is broken would be very helpful.
thank you.

A: You forgot an s, as in cap deploy:migrations


Top dog or under dog?
Back in the days when power tools were beyond humanity's wildest dreams yet trunks and branches still had to be sawn into planks, two men working at either end of a single saw undertook the task.
They soon discovered that the least effortful and therefore the most profitable way to do the job was to dig a deep pit in which one worker could stand and saw upwards whilst the other, standing on the pit's outer rim, sawed downwards.
Both positions were equally back breaking but having to put up with wood chippings, leaves, insects and fine dust raining down onto your head meant that to be in the pit was much the less enviable position.
To utilise this man power to its best advantage, the two would have originally taken turns in each position. Over time, however, the relative comfort of the upper position must have become hard to relinquish, and top dog and under dog - the terms descriptive of the physical position involved in the task - became terms of status and hierarchy.
To be atop all others has denoted high rank throughout recorded history. Head and shoulders above the rest; beyond the reach of ordinary mortals; the upper crust: our language is littered with terms which indicate the higher the position the greater the importance.
Once permanently up there, however, top dogs have permanently to contend with the strain of bending to the pull of those below.
Seeking to remove some of this effort from his own shoulders and place it on those of his knights, Britain's King Arthur utilised a round table: no doubt made from planks sawn by just such an uneasy partnership as that mentioned above.
With his team thus constrained, Arthur sought to corral their ideas, and get them to see eye to eye over how best to manage any given situation. Meanwhile, of course - since no matter how large its circumference each person in a circle can see all the others - Arthur's skills of leadership were laid open for all to see.
In our own time, we had the opportunity to observe leadership skills in the round and in minute detail when the eyes of the world focussed in on Ground zero: that great O gouged out of the heart of Manhattan's vibrant community on 9/11.
1. The vision to see what needs to be done.
2. The ability to keep focused while formulating the relentless planning needed to achieve that goal.
4. The persuasive powers to gain their willingness to operate as a team when necessity dictates.
5. The need to acknowledge and properly reward the effort of those in the 'basement' who struggle to make a difference.
This last would seem to be the condition of leadership beside which all others pale. For until the underdogs buried deep in boiler rooms; pinned down behind sewing machines; entombed by headphones; blinkered by the minutiae of nanotech products; incarcerated in sewers; stashed on off shore oil rigs; holding ladders steady; etc. are properly acknowledged and valued, the top dogs will always be in danger of being caught off balance by the uncertain force of the thrust from below.


text:
Remarks on the 2000 Ghana Population and Housing Census
To put it in a nutshell: The publication of the 2000 Ghana Population Census is the best that has ever appeared. Most significantly, by avoiding the very confusing representation of the data, which made many previous census entries inapplicable, the 2000 census has been improved. In the Gazetteers (alphabetical lists of Ghana's settlements) of former censuses, the Bulsa towns and villages were arranged partly according to their village names and partly to the clan-sections (e.g. Abilyeri, Yisobsa, Chiok etc.) inhabiting these places. It was nearly impossible to determine the total population of, say, Wiaga. In the 2000 Gazetteer, the clan-sections appear as sub-entries under the village names so that the reader must only sum up the population data of these sections to get the total population of the village. Continuing in this method, the total population of the people in the Bulsa District is 63,748. In a table of the population by region and district, the total number in the Builsa District is 75,375, which probably means that some clan-sections of villages were still registered under their clan name.
At this point, please allow me to make some speculation about the total number of Bulsa living on earth. We should add the population of Biuk (2,875), Kunkwa (1,595) and Kategra (520) and, above all, the thousands of Bulsa living outside of the Bulsa District within Ghana or in other parts of the world to the 75,375 inhabitants of the district. My estimation in BULUK 2 (p.30) that there are currently about 100,000 Bulsa on earth does not seem to be quite wrong, for according to the 2000 Population and Housing Census (Summary Report of Final Results, p. 23) 118,709 Bulsa are currently living in Ghana.
For the first time we can cite quite reliable data regarding the population of the 13 Bulsa villages:
Bachonsa: 660
Chuchuliga: 7,752
Doninga: 1,676
Fumbisi: 8,154
Gbedema: 3,709
Gbedembilisi: 285
Kadema: 1,873
Kanjaga: 5,175
Sandema: 14,736
Siniensi: 3,058
Wiaga: 10,858
Wiesi: 1,413
Yiwasi: 2,526
A separate publication of the 2000 Population Census (Special Report on Urban Localities) includes all Ghanaian urban localities... "with a population of 5,000 or more" (p. iv).
It is, however, noteworthy that the Bulsa localities of Chuchuliga (7,752) Fumbisi (8,154), Sandema (14,736) and Wiaga (10,858) do not appear in this list.
According to the Accra Census Office, the results of the Population Census 2010 will appear soon.


Pyeongyang Press Corps/REUTERS South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a luncheon at in Ryanggang province, North Korea, September 2018.
JOSHUA SHIFRINSON is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University and the author of Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts.
Upon returning from the Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June, U.S. President Donald Trump declared the North Korea problem "solved." Many experts did not share his optimism. Pyongyang, they argued, had done nothing to indicate that it was committed to "complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization." And nothing since then—up to and including the recent meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York—has indicated otherwise. Trump, in other words, was fleeced.
With its nuclear arsenal in place, the survival of the North Korean regime is virtually assured. The regime in Pyongyang no longer has to rely on saber-rattling and warmongering to intimidate its neighbors and keep their superior conventional militaries in check. Just as important, Kim's arsenal forces the United States, China, and other regional players to find ways to accommodate North Korea. Washington may continue to call for denuclearization, and Kim may continue to issue vague halfpromises to keep this useful fiction alive. But the real driver of lasting regional stability may turn out to be North Korea's bomb. Trump's failure thus may sow the seeds for a new and better Northeast Asian power equilibrium.


Strong exports and domestic demand pushed Vietnam's gross domestic product (GDP) growth higher in 2018 than in more than a decade, standing at 7.1 percent, but in 2019 and 2020, a weaker external environment will likely moderate growth and narrow the current account surplus, while inflation remains stable this year but will rise somewhat next year, the ADB stated in its report released Wednesday.
Vietnam's inflation is expected to continue to average 3.5 percent in 2019 but accelerate to 3.8 percent in 2020, the ADB said in the report.
Vietnam achieved GDP growth of 6.79 percent in the first quarter of this year, down against the first quarter of last year, but up against the first quarter of 2011-2017, the country's General Statistics Office said last Friday.
Vietnam gained GDP growth of 7.08 percent last year, up from the annualized target of 6.5-6.7 percent, the office said, adding that the country's top legislature has set a target of attaining GDP growth of 6.6-6.8 percent this year.
Standard Chartered Bank has recently forecast Vietnam will see a stable economic growth of 6.9 percent in 2019, buoyed by strong manufacturing sector supported by FDI.


Save money. This item is on sale.
FREE TO MEMBERS The 2014 NAR Commercial Member Profile describes the business characteristics, business activity and demographic characteristics of commercial members, and defines the property information needs of this growing segment of NAR membership.
NOTE: This Report is only available as an eProduct, not available in printed format.
The profile provides the answers to questions about NAR's commercial membership in a user-friendly format, using a mix of text, charts, graphs and tables.
This eProduct will be delivered immediately after order to your My Account section of REALTOR.org. You will not receive anything physically.


text:
\section{Introduction}
Automatic speaker verification (ASV) is the task of determining the ID of a speaker given his/her voice. Lots of works have been focused on this open-set recognition task. In the past several years, the mainstream is to generatively model the speaker information base on manually designed acoustic features such as MFCC\cite{reynolds2000speaker, kenny2008study}. I-vector based system enables us to estimate a low-level utterance level feature given an acoustic feature of a sentence, using factor analysis\cite{dehak2010front}. Probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA)\cite{prince2007probabilistic, garcia2011analysis} models the speakers in the utterance level embedding space, enabling us to scoring the trials with a likelihood ratio.

Recently, the trend in this field is to use deep neural networks as the utterance level embedding extractor, exploiting the non-linearity and powerful representation power of DNN. This trend has lead to a wide range of studies that successfully improve the performance on ASV, such as the well-known x-vector/PLDA system\cite{snyder2017deep, snyder2018x}. Moreover, many studies are now focusing on exploring an end-to-end speaker verification system\cite{jung2019rawnet, jung2018complete, jung2018avoiding, wan2018generalized}, which use a neural network to model all component in a speaker verification system.

Learning a better embedding is important for all recent DNN based ASV systems no matter what front-end or back-end we use. The object of embedding learning is to find a discriminative feature representation at a specific hidden layer of a neuron network. This requires to learn an embedding space that has good intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Softmax cross entropy loss has been widely used in recognition and classification task including ASV\cite{variani2014deep, snyder2017deep, snyder2018x}. Triplet loss is designed to encourage the embeddings in the same class to have smaller Euclidean distance than embeddings from different classes\cite{schroff2015facenet}, which also have successfully implemented in ASV tasks\cite{zhang2017end, li2017deep}. However, there also remains some disadvantages to these methods. For softmax, the learned embeddings may be suitable for closed-set classification problems, but not discriminative enough for open-set verification problems. For triplet loss, triplet sampling method turns out to be tricky for effective model training.

In the face recognition field, the recently proposed large margin angular based embedding learning method is effective\cite{liu2017sphereface,wang2018cosface,deng2019arcface,wang2018additive}. These methods encourage the embeddings to compactly distributed in the unit hypersphere by adding an angular margin between embeddings and their cluster centers. Some of these methods have been exploited for the ASV task\cite{novoselov2018triplet,huang2018angular,liu2019large,li2018angular} and better results have been observed.

In some more recent works, inter-class regularization is found to be effective when we are using angular based loss\cite{zhao2019regularface,liu2018learning,liu2017deep,duan2019uniformface}. These studies show that angular based softmax tend to focus mainly on intra-class compactness but not inter-class separability. This makes the embedding centers from different classes not well distributed in the embedding space when the dimension of embeddings are high.

In this work, we give a more detailed study on the angular based embedding learning methods for text-independent ASV task comparing to existing works. We consider our contribution as follows: 1. Apply several different types of large margin angular based loss for ASV task and make an explicit comparative experiment for their performance. 2. Propose an angular based inter-class regularization which leads to improved results consistently, and verify the effect of such method with qualitative and quantitative experiments. We also share our findings of some effective training methods to give a successful implementation of angular based methods on ASV. These methods together lead to impressive improvements comparing with the baseline system.

\section{Angular Based Embedding Learning}
\subsection{Angular based softmax}
The most widely used classification loss function is known as softmax cross entropy, presented as follows:
\begin{eqnarray}
L_{softmax} = -\frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}^{N}\log{\frac{e^{\mathbf{w}_{y_i}^{T}\mathbf{x}_i+b_{y_i}}}{\sum_{j=1}^{C}e^{\mathbf{w}_{j}^{T}\mathbf{x}_i+b_j}}},
\label{softmax}
\end{eqnarray}
where $ \mathbf{x}_i \in \Re^{d} $ denotes the last hidden layer output for the i-th sample, which is also known as an embedding. $y_i$ is the label of $\mathbf{x}_i$. The embedding feature dimension $d$ is set to 512 in this paper. $\mathbf{w}_j$ denotes the j-th column of the output linear matrix ${\mathbf{W} \in \Re^{d \times C}}$, and ${b_j \in \Re^C}$ is the bias term. $N$ and $C$ are batch size and class number. Following\cite{deng2019arcface,liu2017sphereface} we fix $\mathbf{b}_j = 0$ and transform the logit as $ \mathbf{w}_j^{T}\mathbf{x}_i = \lVert \mathbf{w}_j \rVert \lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert cos (\theta_{j, i}) $. We further normalize $\lVert \mathbf{w}_j \rVert = 1$ to have modified softmax loss:
\begin{eqnarray}
L_{modified} = -\frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}\log\frac{e^{\lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert cos(\theta_{y_i, i})}}{\sum_{j=1}e^{\lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert cos(\theta_{j, i})}},
\label{mod}
\end{eqnarray}
in which $ \theta_{j, i} (0 \leqslant \theta_{j,i} \leqslant \pi)$ is the angle between vector $\mathbf{w}_j$ and $\mathbf{x}_i$. Note $\mathbf{w}_j$ can thus be seen as the \textit{cluster centers}. Modified softmax is able to directly optimize angles by making the decision boundary only depends on the angles. We do not further normalize the length of $\mathbf{x}_i$ and give a fix scale constraint in our study, since that is parameter sensitive, as suggested in \cite{liu2017deep}.

The recent studies show adding an angular margin to softmax is effective to learn more discriminative embeddings, and the connection with hypersphere manifold makes the learned features particularly suitable for open-set verification task. These methods can be concluded in the following equation:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
&L_{a} = \\
&-\frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}\log\frac{e^{\lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert (cos(m_1\theta_{y_i, i} + m_2) - m_3)}}{e^{\lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert (cos(m_1\theta_{y_i, i} + m_2) - m_3)}+\sum_{j \neq y_i}e^{\lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert cos(\theta_{j, i})}},
\label{angular}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
in which $m_1$, $m_2$ and $m_3$ are hyper-parameters to set angular margins. More specifically, setting $m_1$ gives angular softmax (A-softmax or SphereFace)\cite{liu2017sphereface}, $m_2$ gives additive angular margin softmax (AAM-softmax or ArcFace)\cite{deng2019arcface} and $m_3$ gives additive margin softmax (AM-softmax)\cite{wang2018additive}.

\subsection{Annealing}
Different from the implementation of angular based loss in face recognition, we observe some training difficulties when re-implementing these methods to ASV task. We find annealing is important for the convergence of all angular based loss in our study. For A-softmax system we use the following annealing as in \cite{liu2017sphereface}:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
f_{y_i} = \frac{\lambda \lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert cos(\theta_{y_i, i}) + \lVert \mathbf{x}_i \rVert cos(m\theta_{y_i, i})}{1 + \lambda},
\label{a_annealing}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $f_{y_i}$ is the $y_i$-th output logit given embedding $\mathbf{x}_i$, and $\lambda$ need to be gradually reduced during training.

For AM-softmax and AAM-softmax systems, we find annealing is equivalently important to achieve neuron network convergence at the beginning of the training, we use a more straight forward method in these two cases:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
L_{a}^{'} = (1-\lambda^{'})L_{modified}+ \lambda^{'} L_{a},
\label{aam_annealing}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where we gradually increase $\lambda^{'}$ in first several epochs to gradually shift the loss from modified softmax to large margin angular based loss.

\subsection{Inter class regularization}
Inter-class separability and intra-class compactness are two key factors to learn a discriminative embedding space. However, as suggested in \cite{zhao2019regularface, liu2018learning, duan2019uniformface}, current angular based embedding learning methods effectively encourage better intra-class compactness but the inter-class separability can be degraded due to feature redundancy. This may cause the \textit{cluster centers} not so well distributed in the high-dimension embedding space. Following the effectiveness in face recognition, we thus propose an angular regularization that explicitly encourages the \textit{cluster centers} in $\mathbf{W}$ to be uniformly distributed around the hypersphere. We consider the following separability measurement:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
SEP_{\mathbf{W}} = \frac{1}{C}\sum_{j}\sum_{i, i \neq j}max[0, cos(\phi_{i, j})]^{2},
\label{SEP}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $\phi_{i, j}$ is the angle between $\mathbf{w}_i$ and $\mathbf{w}_j$, ideally this scalar should be minimize to zero.
This is equivalent to the following criterion:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
L_{inter} = \frac{1}{C} \lVert [\mathbf{W}_n^T\mathbf{W}_n]_{+} - \mathbf{I} \rVert_{F}^{2},
\label{F}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where l2-normalized columns of $\mathbf{W}$ consist $\mathbf{W}_n$, $[\cdot]_{+}$ denotes clamping the matrix elements below zero, and squared Frobenius norm can be considered as calculating the energy of the matrix. We thus denote this angular regularization as \textit{hyperspherical energy} following\cite{liu2018learning}. We use the following loss function to combine the inter-class regularization:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
L_{a+inter} = (1-\lambda_{inter})L_{a}+ \lambda_{inter} L_{inter},
\label{a+inter}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $\lambda_{inter}$ is the hyper-parameter.

\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Experimental Setup}
Our experiment is based on the Voxceleb I \& II dataset\cite{nagrani2017voxceleb}\cite{chung2018voxceleb2}. To enhance the efficiency of experiments, we randomly sample 100 examples for each of the 5994 speakers in Voxceleb II development set to make a small training set for our experiment. Note we did not use any activity detection and data augmentation techniques to our training set following the baseline implementation\cite{nagrani2017voxceleb}. For testing, we use Voxceleb I verification trial list, consisting of 37720 non-target or target trials from 40 speakers. For each example, we use 512-point STFT as input feature. Mean and variance normalization on each frequency bin is performed.

The backbone deep neural network is similar to the baseline  Resnet structure used in \cite{chung2018voxceleb2}, but we use a more efficient Resnet18 structure to speed up training. Preactivate Resnet blocks\cite{he2016identity} are used in our implementation.

The major testing criterion is to evaluate equal error rate and minimum detection cost function (minDCF) with target prior set to 0.01. Since our focus is on the discriminative power from embedding learning, we use cosine distance scoring as a simple back-end. The length variability is dealt with averaging pooling on the hidden layer.

\subsection{Training Details}
We train our neural network with SGD optimizer, the initial learning rate is set to 0.1 in all of our experiments and step decay to 0.001, annealing techniques are used in all the angular based training. Note besides annealing, we find the choice of the large learning rate and sample balance is also critical to a successful implementation of angular based systems on ASV. We set $\lambda_{inter}$ to 0.01 and our implementation is based on Pytorch.

\begin{table*}[t]
\begin{center}
\begin{threeparttable}
\caption{Results of systems on Voxceleb}
\label{Results}
\begin{tabular}{|p{50mm}|p{20mm}|p{20mm}|p{20mm}|}
\hline
\rule[-5pt]{0pt}{16pt}Systems & Margin & EER & MinDCF(0.01)\\
\hline
Resnet34 Softmax\cite{chung2018voxceleb2} & - & 5.04 & 0.543 \\
\hline
Resnet18 Softmax (Baseline) & - & 5.33 & 0.489 \\
\hline
Resnet18 Modified Softmax & $m_1=1$ & 5.74 & 0.515 \\
\hline
\hline
Resnet18 AM-Softmax & $m_3=0.1$ & 5.17 & 0.485 \\
\hline
Resnet18 AM-Softmax & $m_3=0.2$ & 4.56 & 0.402 \\
\hline
Resnet18 AM-Softmax & $m_3=0.3$ & 4.81 & 0.456 \\
\hline
Resnet18 AM-Softmax + inter & $m_3=0.2$ & \underline{{\bfseries4.45}} & \underline{{\bfseries0.400}} \\
\hline
\hline
Resnet18 AAM-Softmax & $m_2=0.2$ & 4.63 & 0.446 \\
\hline
Resnet18 AAM-Softmax & $m_2=0.3$ & 4.55 & 0.443 \\
\hline
Resnet18 AAM-Softmax & $m_2=0.4$ & 4.99 & 0.485 \\
\hline
Resnet18 AAM-Softmax + inter & $m_2=0.3$ & \underline{4.49} & \underline{0.441} \\
\hline
\hline
Resnet18 A-Softmax & $m_1=2$ & 4.58 & 0.429 \\
\hline
Resnet18 A-Softmax & $m_1=3$ & 4.64 & 0.431 \\
\hline
Resnet18 A-Softmax & $m_1=4$ & 4.75 & 0.468 \\
\hline
Resnet18 A-Softmax + inter & $m_1=2$ & \underline{4.46} & \underline{0.427} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{threeparttable}
\end{center}
\end{table*}

\subsection{Results and Analysis}
In Table~\ref{Results}, the performance of the systems using softmax and different kinds of angular based loss functions are compared. We use the corresponding type-1 results given in\cite{chung2018voxceleb2} as the baseline. From our tested results, the Resnet18 and our small training set are sufficient to achieve reasonable results and conduct the experiments. The modified softmax system perform worse than softmax, due to the pruned bias term. AM-softmax, AAM-softmax and A-softmax systems with different margins are explicitly compared. The angular based systems perform consistently better than softmax, showing the effectiveness of the adding large angular margin. Comparing different angular based systems, we see that their improvements to the baseline are similar. Note that adding relatively small margin is enough to get ideal improvement on our ASV task. We get better performance if all these angular based losses are regularized with inter-class separability. We manage to achieve the best performance with AM-softmax with inter-class regularization at margin 0.2 among all the system we implement.

To further explore the effectiveness of angular based systems, we plot the embeddings of 40 different classes draw from the training set, using t-SNE to reduce dimension Fig.~\ref{emb}. We see that by training the neural network we obtain a linear separable embedding space. Within each class, the samples distribute more compactly when we use AM-softmax (m=0.2) comparing with the softmax, which clearly shows that angular based loss encourage better intra-class compactness.

\begin{figure}[!b] \centering
\includegraphics[height=7cm,width=8cm]{modified_softmax_e10.png}
\includegraphics[height=7cm,width=8.1cm]{resnet_18_am_inter.png}
\caption{Embedding plot of 40 classes from Voxceleb training data. Top: Softmax, Bottom: Angular based softmax. The embeddings are dimension reduced using t-SNE.}
\label{emb}
\end{figure}

\begin{table}[t]
\begin{center}
\begin{threeparttable}
\caption{Comparing on inter-class separability}
\label{sep}
\begin{tabular}{|p{40mm}|p{15mm}|p{15mm}|}
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\rule[-5pt]{0pt}{16pt}System} & $SEP_{\mathbf{W}}$ & $S_b$ \\
\hline
Resnet18 Softmax & 25.8 & 0.910 \\
\hline
Resnet18 A-Softmax & 39.3 & 0.907 \\
\hline
Resnet18 A-Softmax + inter & {\bfseries22.8} & {\bfseries0.942} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{threeparttable}
\end{center}
\end{table}

\begin{figure}[b] \centering
\includegraphics[height=6cm,width=8.5cm]{score_plot.png}
\caption{Score distribution plot of the Voxceleb non-target trials, fit by Student's t-distributions. Inter-class regularization makes the scores compactly distributed near zero.}
\label{score}
\end{figure}

We also explore the effectiveness of adding the inter-class regularization. In Talbe~\ref{sep}, we first compare the \textit{hyperspherical energy} in equation~\ref{SEP}, which reflect the separability between the \textit{cluster centers}. We see that using A-softmax, the \textit{cluster centers} become less separably distributed in the embedding space, even comparing with the softmax system, which is not ideal to fully utilize the embedding space to learn better class separable embeddings. This motivate us to explicitly combining the inter-class regularization as a complement with A-softmax, which lead to reduced \textit{hyperspherical energy}. This shows such regularization encourages inter-class separability. We also evaluate the between-class angular variance $S_b$ like\cite{liu2017sphereface} given by,
 \begin{eqnarray}
S_b = \frac{1}{N}\frac{1}{C-1}\sum_{i}^{C}n_i\sum_{j, j \neq i}^{C}(1-cos \langle m_i, m_j \rangle),
\label{Sb}
\end{eqnarray}
on the testing set. N is the sample number, C is the class number of the testing set, $m_{i}$ is the mean vector from class i. A-softmax with inter-class regularization has larger between-class angular variance comparing to other systems. As shown in Fig.~\ref{score}, we plot the score distribution from the Voxceleb non-target trials, which is a good indicator for the distance between examples from different classes in the testing set. We calculate their cosine distances and use a Student's t-distribution to fit results of each system. The A-softmax system has large score variance and many embeddings from different classes stay too close on the hypersphere. With inter-class regularization, the scores of non-target trails tend to distribute closer to zero with a smaller variance, indicating a large proportion of the angels between embeddings from different classes are 90 degrees. These experiments show that inter-class regularizing not only lead to a better-separated \textit{cluster centers} but also well generalize to the class separability on the testing set.

We finally draw the detection error trade-off (DET) plot of the softmax system and inter-class regularized AM-softmax system in Fig.~\ref{det}. We see that the proposed system outperform the baseline softmax system in almost all operation points. The gap between the two systems is especially large at lower false alarm range, suggesting that the angular based system can have superior performance on open-set speaker verification tasks.

\begin{figure}[t] \centering
\includegraphics[height=7cm,width=8.5cm]{det.png}
\caption{DET plot for softmax system and angular based softmax system.}
\label{det}
\end{figure}

\section{Conclusions \& Future Works}
We have explored a sort of angular based embedding learning methods on ASV task. By adding a large angular margin, we manage to achieve better intra-class compactness. And with inter-class regularization, we effectively learned a more class-separable space. All these methods lead to more discriminative speaker embeddings and better speaker verification performance. The performance of several angular based learning methods has been compared on Voxceleb dataset. Angular based loss with inter-class regularization achieves apparently better results comparing with baseline softmax. The effectiveness of the inter-class regularization has also been studied, which improves the inter-class separability of training cluster centers and generalizes to testing data. In the future, we plan to conduct more detailed experiments on different strategies to add inter-class regularization. We will also conduct experiments on more datasets to see the robustness of these methods.

\clearpage
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Vicki Wright has successfully represented many clients in accident compensation claims. She also specialises in applications to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) representing victims who have suffered injuries as a result of violent crime.
Vicki is an Associate and Solicitor at Swain & Co.
She qualified as a solicitor in 1996 and completed her Masters in Law Degree in 1997. She started with Swain & Co. in 2000 and became an Associate in 2005.
Vicki holds membership to the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) and successfully represents clients that have been injured such as victims of road traffic accident and people injured in accidents at work.
She also advises in connection with Actions Against the Police, including when there are allegations of assault during arrest, or there have been failures to take appropriate steps to care for a suspect in custody.
Similarly, Vicki undertakes work for prisoners who may have been injured as a result of an accident in prison or as a result of an assault by another prisoner or prison officer.
In her spare time, Vicki enjoys gardening, playing tennis, attending circuit training and sings with a large choral society.
Why do you enjoy personal injury work, Vicki?
"I derive immense satisfaction from being able to help those who have suffered an injury and who are in constant pain through no fault of their own. Clients who have been involved in an accident have, by the nature of their personal injury claim, suffered pain and quite often the pain, loss and inconvenience that arise as a consequence of the accident continue.
Money obviously cannot take away the pain but it can help those individuals come to terms with what happened and in effect, move on with their life.