text:
Morro Castle, Part 3: Aftermath
In "Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast," author Patrick McGilligan states that one of the director's first projects upon coming to America was "Hell Afloat," a story based on the 1934 Morro Castle fire. It was to have been a typically Langian scenario, full of spies, saboteurs, intrigue, and double-crossing. What the new arrival may not have realized at the time, but would become startlingly apparent over the course of an investigation launched while the linerstill burned on the beach off Asbury Park, is that the story of the S.S. Morro Castle already had intrigue to spare. The people involved could have been made to order by central casting, a motley assortment that included communists, dope smugglers, a haunted and suspicious captain dead under suspicious circumstances, one radio operator suspected of being an agitator and saboteur, and another–the disaster's unlikely hero–a pedophile and psychopath beneath an unassuming exterior.
The investigation would stretch on for weeks, with passengers, crew, and experts being interviewed and cross-examined. Much as the disaster had been the first to be covered on the radio, so too would the investigation be brought into people's living rooms. What unfolded may have struck some like a soap opera; passengers accusing seamen and officers of neglect of duty and gross incompetence, while the ship's crew in turn blamed the passengers for panic and drunkenness and blamed one another for lack of foresight and dereliction of duty, just for good measure. The press, in the meantime, found no rumor or innuendo too small or far-fetched to report. The Morro Castle had run guns to Cuba, and this raised speculation that Communists had set the blaze; the commission also allowed that it might have been spontaneous combustion. Rumors also circulated of looters, stolen jewels, officers shooting sailors, and any number of other things. This is perhaps understandable, in a sense; when the "safest ship afloat" burns in sight of shore with the rapidity of celluloid, anything else must also have seemed possible. In the meantime, the ship's radio operator George Rogers let slip–after a show of hesitation–that he suspected his assistant radio operator, George Alagna.
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Morro Castle, Part 2: Rescue At Sea
A short time after 3 in the morning on September 8, 1934, hysteria seemed to have gripped the Morro Castle as surely as the flames that were consuming the ships's superstructure. Deck B, where the fire had originated in the ship's Writing Room, was all but lost, while on Deck A, the flames were closing in on the lifeboats, radio room, and wheelhouse. Decks C and D fared little better, though at least the aft sections of both decks were–for the time being–clear of fire, if not of the bitter, acrid smoke given off by the ship's wood furnishings and paneling, not to mention layer upon layer of highly inflammable paint, varnish, and polish.
The more passengers awoke, the greater the confusion in the ship's smoke- and fire-choked passageways. Some passengers were roused by the smell of smoke, some when friends and family pounded on stateroom doors; still others woke to the sounds of stewards clattering pots and pans, or one of the ship's musicians blowing reville. Nearly all were astonished to find that the fire had not, in fact, been raging for hours while they slept; it was nearly incomprehensible that so much of the vessel should burn so quickly.
The fire's rapid spread, and accompanying smoke, quickly made the ship's elevator impassible, and the stairways in public spaces fared no better. While the ship's crew were aware of, and made use of, steel-sheathed companionways to move between decks, most passengers (save for a few who had been directed to the companionways by crew members) were unaware of their existance. Some passengers were also reluctant to brave the smoke and flames to reach the boats when the fire was less intense, only to find that the way was impassible when they'd finally mustered the courage to try for the lifeboats.
Consequently, most of the passengers, and many of the crew who had tried to help them, found themselves faced with a grim choice: jump–chancing the dark, churning waters in terrible weather conditions–or burn. Some of the crew had, when the fire first broke out, thrown anything bouyant that they could find overboard, in hopes of giving those who jumped over the rails something to cling to. Before the ship's engines were shut down and the anchor dropped, however, this simply meant that the ship–moving at close to 20 knots into a headwind of about 20-30 miles per hour–left a long wake of flotsam as she moved up the Jersey shore. The fact that the ship was underway also meant certain death for many who jumped overboard and were sucked into her twin screws.
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Morro Castle, Part 1: Fire at Sea
Captain Robert Wilmott could recite her vital statistics from memory, and often did as he gave passengers a tour of the T.E.L. Morro Castle's bridge. 11,520 gross tons. 508 feet from stem to stern. 70 foot beam. Turboelectric motors capable of producing 16,000 horsepower, and driving the ship upwards of 20 knots.
As if this weren't enough, advanced fire detection systems covered the ship's staterooms and cargo holds, complementing an equally advanced set of fire supression measures; naval architecture had, it seemed, come a long way since the General Slocum fire claimed 1,100 lives scarcely thirty years before. And, in addition, enough lifeboats, life jackets, floats, and other paraphernalia were available to save well over three times the ship's passengers and crew when the ship was travelling fully loaded–which, in the depths of the Great Depression, didn't usually happen. Captain Wilmott could often be heard boasting to passengers that the Morro Castle was safer than crossing Times Square; in 1933, after all, she had weathered a hurricane off the Carolinas that had been severe enough to send waves nearly the height of the vessel's bridge and knock out the ship's radio system, suffering no more than a handful of wet blankets. When a passenger asked the captain what he would do if he ever had to give up command of the Morro Castle, he joked, "Well, in that case, I'll take her with me."
For their part, the ship's owners, the Ward Line, boasted that this was the safest ship afloat. But a vessel–even one like the Morro Castle, whose design was the state of the art when it was launched in 1930–is only as good as the officers and seamen that staff it. For all the care put into the ship's design and construction, for all the attention paid to its lavish interiors that called to mind a swanky hotel, not nearly as much effort was put into making sure that the ship's crew were equal to the task of maintaining and sailing a safe ship.
While the ship's officers, from her captain to her fourth officer, were all licensed to operate vessels of any tonnage anywhere in the world (and a number of other staff, like her watchman, held mate's certificates), the Ward Line's hiring practices were notoriously lax. Crew turnover, especially among the seamen who worked in the bowels of the ship and kept things running in good order, was astonishingly high, resulting in a lack of crew cohesion that would have disastrous consequences later.
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Continue reading "Morro Castle, Part 1: Fire at Sea"


This summer, 31 teams will join Russia for the 2018 World Cup. All of those teams will be looking to be crowned world champions. The tournament has been billed as the last time we'll see Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi at a major event together. Others are even saying that this will be the time that Neymar stakes his claim to the throne. Apart from all the individual goals, there are teams as well looking to establish themselves on the international scene.
England has been considered a farce on the global stage for far too long. The 2018 World Cup offers them the chance to rectify that bogus status. If set up in the right way, the Three Lions could go all the way in Russia.
Here are three ways England can set up in the World Cup.
To Gareth Southgate's credit, the 47-year-old has shown much tactical versatility since becoming England manager. He's shown that he's willing to change formations depending on the opposition. In his short reign, he's already played with 3 at the back on multiple occasions, producing quality performances against the best in the world.
Primarily, the 3-5-2 offers defensive solidity and midfield congestion, thus making the team hard to break down. This is a formation that well-drilled teams use to stifle the opposition while conducting finely-tuned counter attacks. In this system, the Three Lions would have no choice but to counter down the flanks, in which they'd have pacey wing-backs like Kyle Walker and Danny Rose. The 3-5-2 is the system England should revert to when playing teams of superior quality.
The 4-4-2 diamond is the epitome of creativity and intricate link-up play. Off the ball, the attacking-minded players revert into a more resolute shape but on the ball, they completely overload opposition defences through the middle.
The LCM and RCM positions are integral to the implementation of this system. These players must have a high work rate and great technical ability to contribute in all phases of play. Jack Wilshere, Adam Lallana & Jordan Henderson are all ideal candidates for the role. Then as a #10, England have Dele Alli or Raheem Sterling to occupy them. In a front two, Harry Kane and Jamie Vardy would be the perfect duo. Why? Harry Kane would drop deep to link up with midfielders, while on the counter-attack, Jamie Vardy could run in behind defences.
Many cite the 4-3-3 as the most balanced formation in football. Having a trio in midfield offers protection across the middle of the park, thus allowing a team to occupy all vertical zones. As well as having a congested midfield, the formation deploys a wide front three that can stretch opposition defences.
To maximise the effectiveness of the 4-3-3, the system requires two energetic box to box midfielders deployed on either side of a reserved holding midfielder. B2Bs like Jack Wilshere and Jordan Henderson both have the sufficient energy to execute the role.
In a 4-3-3, England would be the perfect counter-attacking machine that'd revert to a 4-5-1 off the ball.


text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{intro}

Speech separation refers to the task of extracting all overlapping speech sources in a given mix speech signal \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker}.
With growing speech activated technologies, such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, the cocktail party problem \cite{haykin2005cocktail} has became more of an interest. Generally speaking, speech separation can be considered as a pre-processing step for other speech applications (e.g., speech and speaker recognition) when data has been collected with overlapping speech sources \cite{chen2018multi}.

Source and speech separation has been studied for many years \cite{schmidt2006single, stark2011source, kristjansson2006super, cooke2010monaural, divenyi2004speech, hu2013unsupervised}; however, after introducing deep clustering (DC) \cite{hershey2016deep} approach for speech separation and generally deep learning based methods \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker, wang2018alternative}, automatic speech separation performance is improving faster.

Most of speech separation techniques are studied in frequency-domain \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker, hershey2016deep, xu2018single, wang2018alternative, weng2015deep} for close-talk single-channel recordings; and over the past few years new network structures \cite{wang2018end} or loss functions \cite{xu2018single, wang2018alternative} are introduced to increase the accuracy of these systems.
In addition, authors in \cite{wang2018end} proposed an end-to-end framework with incorporating STFT operation in network layers and introduced unfolded iterative phase reconstruction to further improve the performance (inspired by the effectiveness of phase information in speech separation objective criteria).
Speech separation with effective deep learning approaches are also started to develop for multi-channel data as well \cite{chen2018multi, yoshioka2018multi}.
After all, recently \cite{luo2018tasnet} introduced a new solution, i.e., TasNet, for speech separation but in time-domain, which achieved an interesting performance comparing against the frequency-domain solutions.

In this paper, we investigate two approaches of speech separation; i.e., spectrogram (frequency-domain) and waveform (time-domain) separation in detail. We incorporate effective components of the TasNet into a spectrogram separation framework, such as: CNN-based separation network as well as loss function. We introduce an end-to-end spectrogram separation network with directly optimizing the Si-SNR criterion.
We study both waveform and spectrogram separations for multi-channel data as well, with introducing IPD (inter-microphone phase difference) features \cite{wang2018end}.
We also evaluate the effectiveness of our multi-channel framework with speaker directional features, i.e., angle features, for extracting speech of a specific target speaker from the mix signal.
Eventually, in addition to speech separation objective and subjective criteria, we report WER as well; considering the fact that speech separation is introduced to benefit other speech related applications, including speech recognition.

\vspace{-7pt}
\section{Problem Setup}

In this section, we overview speech separation task in time and frequency-domain, introduce data used here for our experiments and describe our evaluation metrics.

\subsection{Speech Separation: Spectrogram vs Waveform}

In this section, we briefly describe spectrogram and waveform separation methods based on masking approaches.
Our focus in this paper is also on masking based separation.

The methods performing in frequency-domain, first analyze the given mix speech signals into magnitude and phase (with STFT - short-time Fourier transform), then separate the magnitude part into $S$ components (where $S$ is the number of overlapping individual sources in the mix signal) with the separation network. For reconstructing the separated speech signals in time-domain, the input mix signal phase along with the separated magnitudes are fed into ISTFT (inverse STFT).
In detail, for a mix signal $y$, the task is separating overlapping sources $x_s$ such as $y = \sum_{s=1:S}(x_s)$. If we represent $|Y|$ and $\angle Y$ as magnitude and phase of signal $y$, respectively; and $M$ as the mask functions learned with separation network, then for each individual source $x_s$ the estimated magnitude is $|\hat{X}_s| = M_s \odot |Y_s|$ (where $\odot$ is element-wise multiplication). Separated signals are then reconstructed with ISTFT using inputs $|\hat{X}_s|$ and $\angle Y$.
In \cite{wang2018end} authors proposed iterative phase reconstruction algorithm which has shown to perform better than using the $\angle Y$ for reconstruction of the signal.
In this paper, by lower-case letters, e.g., $y$, we mean time-domain samples, upper-letter $Y$ frequency-domain representation and $|Y|$ as the magnitude; $y_0$ also means time-domain samples for channel 0.

On the other hand, the TasNet as a time-domain speech separation replaces the STFT and ISTFT components with trainable encoder and decoder, respectively. Therefore, instead of mapping samples into the frequency-domain, it maps them into a new temporal resolution space. The encoder does not analyze time samples into magnitude and phase components, it operates on a unified representation which makes it different from the spectrogram separators.
In sum, the time-domain signal is mapped to a new domain with encoder and fed into the separation network. The separation network learns $S$ mask functions which are multiplied by the output of the encoder; the $S$ estimated separated sources are then converted back to the time-domain with decoder layer.

Throughout this paper, we use uPIT-BLSTM \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker} as our baseline system for spectrogram separation; and TasNet \cite{luo2018tasnet} for waveform separation.

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{Data}
\label{data}

We simulated a spatialized reverberant dataset derived from Wall Street Journal 0 (WSJ0)-2mix corpus, which is a well-studied dataset in monaural and multi-channel speech separation. There are 20,000, 5,000 and 3,000 multi-channel, reverberant, two speaker mixed speech in training, development and test subsets, respectively.
The performance evaluation is all done on the test set, where all the speakers are unseen during training. We consider a 6-microphone circular array of 7-cm diameter, where speakers and the microphone-array are randomly located in the room. The two speakers and microphone array are on the same plane and all of them are at least 0.3m away from the wall. The image method is employed to simulate RIRs randomly from 3000 different room configurations with the size (length-width-height) ranging from 3m-3m-2.5m to 8m-10m-6m. The reverberation time T60 is sampled in a range of 0.05s to 0.5s. Samples with angle difference of 0-15\degree, 15-45\degree, 45-90\degree and 90-180\degree respectively account for 16\%, 29\%, 26\% and 29\% in the dataset.
From these 6-channels, we always use the first channel as input to the network representing the mix signal.

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{Metric}
Different metrics are introduced for evaluation of speech separation systems \cite{vincent2006performance}. We use Si-SNR and SDR to objectively measure the separation accuracy.
\vspace{-2pt}
\begin{equation}
\label{sdr}
\text{SDR} = 10 \log_{10} \frac{||x_{target}||^2} { ||e_{inter} + e_{noise} + e_{artif} ||^2 },
\end{equation}

\begin{equation}
\label{si-snr}
\text{Si-SNR} = 10 \log_{10} \frac{||x_{target}||^2} { ||e_{noise}||^2 },
\end{equation}
where $x_{target} = \frac{ <\hat{x} , x> x }{ ||x||^2 }$. $\hat{x}$ and $x$ respectively represent estimated and reference signals. For Si-SNR, the scale invariant is guaranteed by mean normalization of estimated and reference signals to zero mean \cite{luo2018tasnet}.

Quality of separated speech sources is also evaluated with PESQ \cite{rix2001perceptual}.
We also report WER (word error rate) to measure how the the alternative separation techniques can be effective in speech recognition tasks.

\vspace{-7pt}
\section{Improved Spectrogram Separation}

Traditional TF-masking (time-frequency masking)/spectrogram separation networks are different than TasNet in three main components:
1) \textit{Encode-decoder}: for spectrogram separation STFT/ISTFT is used to transform/reconstruct data into/from the frequency-domain, but in waveform separation, Conv-1d and ConvTranspose-1d are used respectively to encode and decode the data. Therefore, the latter one does not decompose the signal in magnitude and phase components (part of the gain achieved from waveform separation can be related to this fact).
2) \textit{Separation network}: the separation networks used in \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker} and \cite{luo2018tasnet} are also different. In \cite{luo2018tasnet}, authors mentioned the CNN-based structure outperforms the BLSTM-based network for their task (although, for spectrogram separation, alternative network structures are studied besides the BLSTM layers \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker, wang2018end})
3) \textit{Training loss}: the loss function used for TF spectrogram masking is usually MSE (mean square error) \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker} which directly does not optimize the separation criterion. However, TasNet network is trained with Si-SNR loss function which directly optimizes the separation performance.

In this paper, we incorporate the CNN-based separation structure of TasNet into a spectrogram separation framework to examine the effectiveness of the network structure.
In addition, we formulate the Si-SNR loss function for spectrogram separation as well; by replacing STFT and ISTFT with Conv-1d and ConvTranspose-1d using a specific kernel.
Details of these two modifications are explained in the following two subsections.

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{CNN- and BLSTM-Based Separation Network}

We use the BLSTM structure in \cite{kolbaek2017multitalker} as baseline and evaluate the performance of the system when n$\times$BLSTM layers are replaced with CNN-based separation network introduced in \cite{luo2018tasnet} (please refer to the original paper for details on the structure).

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{Si-SNR Loss Function}

The traditional uPIT (utterance level permutation invariant training) loss function uses MSE to train the model parameters; and in other TF-masking methods as well variations of MSE have been chosen as the training loss. To the best of our knowledge Si-SNR loss was not used with frequency domain frameworks before. \cite{wang2018end} implemented the STFT throughout the network layers but used phase sensitive MSE as their loss function.

At the end, speech separation performance will be reported in terms of Si-SNR and SDR. The TasNet network directly optimizes the Si-SNR value. Here, with some modifications in traditional implementation of STFT and ISTFT, we propose to employ Si-SNR loss while training the spectrogram separation.

Short-time Fourier transform can be formulated simply as a Conv-1d operation with a fixed specific kernel function, and ISTFT as well can be simply implemented with ConvTranspose-1d. We use the fixed kernel function with hamming window (similar to the traditional calculation of STFT). The equation of the STFT kernel function is defined in \cite{lorrymch}.
Therefore, with implementing traditional STFT and ISTFT with Conv-1d and ConvTranspose-1d, uPIT-MSE loss can be replaced easily with uPIT-SiSNR. For computing loss function, first need to call ConvTranspose-1d using mix signal phase, and estimate time-samples and then compute Si-SNR.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{minipage}{.25\textwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=0.85\linewidth]{TMch.pdf}

  \label{fig:test1}
\end{minipage}%
\begin{minipage}{.25\textwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=0.7\linewidth]{FMch.pdf}

  \label{fig:test2}
\end{minipage}
\caption{ Multi-channel speech separation; (left) waveform separation, (right) spectrogram separation.}
\label{fig:cat}
\end{figure}

\vspace{-7pt}
\section{Multi-Channel Speech Separation}
\vspace{-3pt}
As described in subsection \ref{data}, we simulated multi-channel spatialized WSJ0-2mix for our evaluations.
In this section, the integration of multi-channel data into waveform and spectrogram separation networks is described.

In subsection \ref{sec:ipd} we introduce the spatial features, i.e., IPD, used in our multi-channel framework.
IPD (inter-microphone phase difference) features are representing the correlation of multi-channel signals and are useful for spatial locating of overlapping sources \cite{chen2018multi}.
Next, in subsection \ref{sec:angle}, angle features are explained which we used them to locate the speakers and extract the speech of a target speaker \cite{chen2018multi}.

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{Single-Channel vs Multi-Channel Separation}
\label{sec:ipd}

IPD (inter-microphone phase difference) features represent spatial location information \cite{chen2018multi} and are calculated as,
\begin{equation}
\label{ipd}
\text{IPD}_{i,t,f} = \angle (\frac{Y_{i_1, t,f}}{Y_{i_2, t, f}}), i=1:6
\end{equation}
where $i$ represents an entry in a microphone pair list defined for calculating the IPD; and $i_1$ and $i_2$ are the index of microphones in each pair. We calculate IPD features for 6 pairs and then concatenate 6-cos(IPD) and 6-sin(IPD) together.

Figure \ref{fig:cat} shows the integration of IPD features (as well as angle features described in the next subsection) into spectrogram and waveform separation networks.
For spectrogram separation, multi-channel framework is straightforward; the IPD features are appended with $|Y_0|$, i.e., magnitude of channel 0, and then are fed into the network.
For waveform separation, the time-samples at the input are analyzed with Conv-1d implementation of STFT and IPD features are calculated; then they are appended to the encoder output, and followed by the same separation network.
However, concatenation of IPD features in time-domain networks can be applied with various fusion methods, which is explored more in detail in \cite{lorrymch}.

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{Target Speaker Extraction vs uPIT Separation}
\label{sec:angle}
\vspace{-3pt}
Multi-channel separation networks can also use speakers location information to extract the target speaker of interest. Here, we use angle features \cite{chen2018multi} for this purpose.

Speech separation networks need to have a prior knowledge of number of overlapping speakers. Therefore, for different conditions when number of overlapping speakers are changing or is unknown, we need to train different models (as these systems usually estimate one mask function for each speaker simultaneously).
Using directional information or speaker-related knowledge can help to extract a target speaker; and with a single trained model and multiple passes can extract all overlapping sources.
Therefore, we extend our multi-channel framework with angle features (A) \cite{chen2018multi} to locate a target speaker and extract his/her speech; the block-diagram is shown in Figure \ref{fig:cat}. These directional features are formulated as,
\vspace{-2pt}
\begin{equation}
\label{angle}
A_{s,t,f} = \sum_{i=1}^{6} \frac{ e_s^{i,f}  \frac{ Y_{i_1, t,f}}{Y_{i_2, t,f}}  }{ | e_s^{i,f} \frac{ Y_{i_1, t,f}}{Y_{i_2, t,f}} | },
\end{equation}
where $s$ is the speaker index and $e_s^{i,f}$ represents steering vector coefficient of speaker $s$ direction of arrival at microphone $i$ for frequency $f$ \cite{chen2018multi}.
In our experiments, we append both speaker angle features together, and always assume the first one is the target speaker for optimizing the target extraction loss.

For traditional uPIT loss function, where $S$ speakers are separating simultaneously, their reference outputs are required for optimizing the network. However, for TGT (target) loss only the reference speech of the target speaker is required.
Using more informative directional and speaker related features are studied further in \cite{lorrytgt}.

\begin{table*}[!th]
\scriptsize
\caption{{ \it Experimental setup for time/frequency-domain models.}}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{c  c  c  c  c}
\toprule
\textbf{Model} & \textbf{Input} & \textbf{\# of Parameters} &  \textbf{Setting} & \textbf{Normalization}\\ \hline
F-CNN-1 & $|Y_0|$ & 8.78M & N=257 & gLN \\
F-CNN-2 & $|Y_0|$ + cos(IPD) + sin(IPD) & 9.58M & N=257$\times$13 & gLN\\
F-CNN-3 & $|Y_0|$ + cos(IPD) + sin(IPD) + Angle & 9.71M & N=257$\times$15 & gLN \\
F-BLSTM-1 & $|Y_0|$ & 67.05M & 4 $\times$ BLSTM-896 & -\\
F-BLSTM-2 & $|Y_0|$ + cos(IPD) + sin(IPD) & 89.15M & 4 $\times$ BLSTM-896 & - \\
F-BLSTM-3 & $|Y_0|$ + cos(IPD) + sin(IPD) + Angle & 92.84M & 4 $\times$ BLSTM-896 & - \\
T-CNN-1 & $y_0$ & 8.76M & L/N=40/256 & gLN \\
T-CNN-2  & $y_0$ + cos(IPD) + sin(IPD) & 8.83M & L/N=40/256 &  BN \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:setup}
\vspace{-0.25cm}
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}[!th]
\scriptsize
\caption{{ \it Comparing CNN separation network and Si-SNR loss function in spectrogram separation with single-channel input.}}
\centering
\resizebox{14cm}{!}{
\begin{tabular}{|c |c | c c c c | c | c c c c | c |}
\hline
\textbf{Model} & \textbf{Loss} & \multicolumn{5}{c|}{\textbf{Si-SNR}} & \multicolumn{5}{c|}{\textbf{SDR}}\\
&  & 0-15\degree & 15-45\degree & 45-90\degree & 90-180\degree & AVG & 0-15\degree & 15-45\degree & 45-90\degree & 90-180\degree & AVG \\
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{F-BLSTM-1} & uPIT-SiSNR & 7.54 & 7.80 & 7.72 & 7.81 & 7.74 & 8.14 & 8.39 & 8.29 & 8.38 & 8.32 \\
 & uPIT-MSE & 6.50 & 6.79 & 6.67 & 6.78 & 6.71 & 6.98 & 7.24 & 7.11 & 7.22 & 7.16 \\
\multirow{2}{*}{F-CNN-1} & uPIT-SiSNR & 7.08 & 7.48 & 7.45 & 7.48 & 7.42 & 7.70 & 8.06 & 8.02 & 8.06 & 8 \\
 & uPIT-MSE & 6.31 & 6.67 & 6.54 & 6.65 & 6.58 & 6.81 & 7.13 & 7.0 & 7.1 & 7.04 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
}
\label{tab:sisnr}
\vspace{-0.25cm}
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}[!th]
\scriptsize
\caption{{ \it$|Y_0|$+cos(IPD)+sin(IPD)+Angle are input to the network to evaluate the performance of multi-channel framework in extracting the speaker of interest.}}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|c | c | c c c c | c | c c c c | c |}
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{Model}} & \multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{Loss}} & \multicolumn{5}{c|}{\textbf{Si-SNR}} & \multicolumn{5}{c|}{\textbf{SDR}} \\
&  & 0-15\degree & 15-45\degree & 45-90\degree & 90-180\degree & AVG & 0-15\degree & 15-45\degree & 45-90\degree & 90-180\degree & AVG \\
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{F-BLSTM-3} & uPIT-SiSNR & 5.09 & 9.11 & 9.62 & 9.31 & 8.72 & 5.81 & 9.64 & 10.11 & 9.85 & 9.27 \\
 & TGT-SiSNR & 4.59 & 9.07 & 9.59 & 9.13 & 8.58 & 5.31 & 9.60 & 10.08 & 9.64 & 9.12 \\
\multirow{2}{*}{F-CNN-3} & uPIT-SiSNR & 5.59 & 9.38 & 10.29 & 10.79 & 9.49 & 6.92 & 10.36 & 11.2 & 11.75 & 10.50 \\
 & TGT-SiSNR & 4.88 & 9.69 & 10.32 & 9.80 & 9.2 & 5.61 & 10.19 & 10.77 & 10.27 & 9.71 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:tgt}
\vspace{-0.25cm}
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}[!th]
\scriptsize
\caption{{ \it Comparing spectrogram and waveform separation for both separation and ASR tasks.}}
\centering
\resizebox{17cm}{!}{
\begin{tabular}{|c c c | c c c c | c | c c c c | c | c | c |}
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{\# Channels}} & \multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{Domain}} & \multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{Model}} & \multicolumn{5}{c|}{\textbf{Si-SNR}} & \multicolumn{5}{c|}{\textbf{SDR}} & \multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{PESQ}} & \multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{WER Reduc. (\%)}} \\
& & & 0-15\degree & 15-45\degree & 45-90\degree & 90-180\degree & \textbf{AVG} & 0-15\degree & 15-45\degree & 45-90\degree & 90-180\degree & \textbf{AVG} &  &  \\
\hline
\multirow{4}{*}{1-ch} & \multirow{2}{*}{time} & T-BLSTM & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & -  & - \\
&  & T-CNN-1 & 9.02 & 9.33 & 9.59 & 9.71 & \textbf{9.47} & 9.57 & 9.83 & 10.09 & 10.2 & \textbf{9.97} & 1.95 & 45.53\\
& \multirow{2}{*}{freq} & F-BLSTM-1 & 7.54 & 7.80 & 7.72 & 7.81 & \textbf{7.74} & 8.14 & 8.39 & 8.29 & 8.38 & \textbf{8.32} & 1.77 & 32.21\\
& & F-CNN-1 & 7.08 & 7.48 & 7.45 & 7.48 & \textbf{7.42} & 7.70 & 8.06 & 8.02 & 8.06 & \textbf{8} & 1.77 & 35.17 \\
\multirow{4}{*}{m-ch} & \multirow{2}{*}{time} & T-BLSTM & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & - & -  & - \\
&  &  T-CNN-2 & 7.70 & 11.63 & 12.33 & 12.62 & \textbf{11.55} & 8.31 & 12.07 & 12.74 & 13.03 & \textbf{11.99} & 2.10 & 59.11\\
& \multirow{2}{*}{freq} & F-BLSTM-2 & 5.41 & 9.37 & 10.13 & 10.65 & \textbf{9.38} & 6.13 & 9.89 & 10.62 & 11.13 & \textbf{9.91} & 1.92 & 45.32\\
&  & F-CNN-2 & 6.88 & 10.27 & 11.02 & 11.54 & \textbf{10.36} & 7.5 & 10.75 & 11.47 & 11.99 & \textbf{10.84} & 2.00 & 51.73\\
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Oracle IBM}    & 11.56 & 11.51 & 11.53 & 11.53 & \textbf{11.53} & 11.93 & 11.86 & 11.88 & 11.88 & \textbf{11.88} & 2.01 & 50.37\\
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Oracle IAM} & 11.05 & 11.03 & 11.05 & 11.03 & \textbf{11.04} & 11.33 & 11.3 & 11.31 & 11.29 & \textbf{11.30} & 2.23 & 71.45\\
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Oracle IRM} & 11.01 & 10.96 & 10.98 & 10.97 & \textbf{10.98} & 11.45 & 11.39 & 11.39 & 11.39 & \textbf{11.40} & 2.22 & 70.28\\
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Oracle IPSM} & 13.68 & 13.6 & 13.64 & 13.63 & \textbf{13.63} & 14.04 & 13.94 & 13.98 & 13.97 & \textbf{13.98} & 2.28 & 71.10\\
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Reference} & & & & & & & & & & & 2.35 & 73.01\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
}
\label{tab:sw}
\vspace{-0.25cm}
\end{table*}

\vspace{-7pt}
\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Experimental Setup}

Table \ref{tab:setup} summarizes the network setup and details of models we applied in our system development (F- and T- mean frequency and time-domain in the tables).
Parameters L (length of filters in encoder), N (number of filters in encoder), X (number of convolutional blocks in each repeat), R (number of repeats), P (kernel size in convolutional blocks), B (number of channels in bottleneck 1 $\times$ 1-conv block) and H (Number of channels in convolutional blocks) have the same definition as used in \cite{luo2018tasnet}. Please refer to \cite{luo2018tasnet} for more details on the structure of the separation network and its hyper-parameters.
For all of our time-domain networks hyper-parameters X/R/B/H/P=8/4/257/512/3 are fixed, and for the rest details are included in the Table \ref{tab:setup}. The gLN and BN in Table \ref{tab:setup} are also global layer normalization and batch normalization.
In addition, the selected pairs for IPDs are (1, 4), (2, 5), (3, 6), (1, 2), (3,4) and (5, 6) in all experiments.

We used KALDI \cite{povey2011kaldi} ASR recipe for WSJ (trained on clean non-reverberate data) to calculate the WERs.
For reference, the mix signal WER is 89.91\%, and we report the WER reduction rate obtained with each developed speech separation system.
In addition, scores for oracle ideal binary mask (IBM), ideal amplitude mask (IAM), ideal ratio mask (IRM) and ideal phase sensitive mask (IPSM) are all reported.

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{Experimental Result}
\vspace{-3pt}
We evaluate our proposed solutions in three different evaluation sets.
First, incorporating CNN separation network as well as Si-SNR loss function in spectrogram separation is evaluated. Table \ref{tab:sisnr} summarizes the results. This table only includes results from single-channel models.
Results confirm the effectiveness of the Si-SNR loss function over MSE. However, for the single-channel input, BLSTM structure slightly performs better than CNN structure.

Next, for time-frequency domain masking network we employ IPD and angle features to extract a target speaker. We evaluate the effectiveness of the multi-channel framework with Si-SNR loss function, comparing BLSTM and CNN separation network structures here.
Table \ref{tab:tgt} shows the results. Here, uPIT-SiSNR and TGT-SiSNR are compared against each other.
The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed multi-channel framework. However, better directional features \cite{lorrytgt} may be applied here to gain better performance on target speaker extraction.

Finally, we compare waveform separation against spectrogram separation, for both single-channel and multi-channel frameworks.
Table \ref{tab:sw} (in the table 1-ch means single channel input, m-ch means multi-channel input) shows the results including all Si-SNR, SDR, PESQ and WER scores to not only compare their performance for speech separation task, but also evaluate the impact of them on a speech recognition task. All models in this table are trained with uPIT-SiSNR loss function.
The results confirm that for multi-channel (using $|Y_0|$ + cos(IPD) + sin(IPD)) models, CNN separation structure helps to decrease the gap further between time and frequency domain models.
In all tables, Si-SNR and SDR scores are reported on 4 sets of angle-differences between the two overlapping speakers as well; which results show that for smaller angle differences, more informative inputs are required.

\vspace{-7pt}
\subsection{Discussion}
\vspace{-3pt}
Based on the results summarized in Tables \ref{tab:sisnr}, \ref{tab:tgt}, \ref{tab:sw}, we can confirm the effectiveness of CNN-based separation structure in frequency-domain. Although, for single-channel inputs F-BLSTM-1 slightly outperforms F-CNN-1 in terms of SDR and Si-SNR; in terms of WER, F-CNN-1 performs better and for multi-channel framework F-CNN-2 achieves better results than F-BLSTM-2 for all criteria.
Moreover, Multi-channel models always outperform single-channel models in terms of all reported criteria; F-BLSTM-2, F-CNN-2, and T-CNN-2 relatively gain +19.11\%, +35.5\%, and +20.26\% improvement in terms of SDR criterion, respectively.
F-CNN-2 decreases the gap between frequency-domain (with using phase of the mix signal) and time-domain separators; specially in terms of PESQ, results are competitive, 2.1 for T-CNN-2 and 2 for F-CNN-2.
In sum, utilizing multi-channel framework can benefit speech separation task. Although, frequency-domain separation improved with Si-SNR and better separation network design; it can improve further with using better phase component at the reconstruction layer.

\vspace{-7pt}
\section{Conclusions}
\vspace{-3pt}
In this study, multi-channel spatialized reverberant WSJ0-2mix dataset prepared and studied for alternative speech separation setups; including single and multi-channel models, target speaker extraction framework, different loss functions for both spectrogram and waveform input representations.
We improved the performance of frequency-domain speech separation with incorporating Si-SNR loss function (directly optimizing the separation criterion). In addition, we explored replacement of BLSTM separation network with CNN structure, which improved the performance for multi-channel inputs, with almost 10 times less number of parameters.
We reported PESQ, WER, SDR and Si-SNR scores, to not only evaluate the performance of the introduced models on separation task, but also on speech recognition task as well.
Incorporating separation network and loss function from TasNet into frequency-domain shown to be effective; with using CNN-separator, SDR relatively improved by up to +9\% on multi-channel scenario; and with Si-SNR loss function SDR improved by up to +16\% for single-channel models.
With multi-channel framework, SDR, Si-SNR, PESQ and WER relatively improved over the single-channel framework by up to +35.5\%, +39.62\%, +12.99\% and +46\%, respectively.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


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text:
Women's Basketball Secures First Home Playoff Game With Senior Night Win Over Yeshiva
Yeshiva 7 11 18 25 61
St. Joseph's 23 20 16 8 67
Pts: Tehilla Teigman - 19
Reb: Michal Alge - 19
Ast: 2 Players (#3, #55) - 3
Pts: Kelly O'Donnell - 14
Reb: 2 Players (#24, #33) - 11
Ast: Deserae Sequeira - 5
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — The St. Joseph's College (Brooklyn) (15-8, 11-5) had all 10 players score a point and withstood a fourth-quarter charge from Yeshiva University (6-15, 3-12) in a 67-61 Skyline Conference win at The Hill Center on Thursday evening.
Wearing pink jerseys for their annual Play4Kay game, senior Victoria Porcasi (Franklin Square, N.Y,/H. Frank Carey) had 12 points and classmate Caitlyn Staab (Lynbrook, N.Y./Kellenberg Memorial) had nine points and 11 rebounds in the wire-to-wire victory that assured the Bears would finish no worse than fourth in the league standings, assuring a first-round home game in the Skyline Conference Championship on Tuesday, February 19—the first playoff game at The Hill Center since opening in 2014.
Kelly O'Donnell (Brooklyn, N.Y./St. Edmund Prep) led St. Joseph's with team highs of 14 points and 11 rebounds and Lauren Quesada (Westbury, N.Y./St. Francis Prep) also finished with a double-double with 12 points and 10 rebounds.
Seniors Porcasi and Staab combined for seven points in an 11-0 run to open the contest and the Bears never trailed the rest of the contest. SJC held the Maccabees to just 2-of-21 shooting in the first 10 minutes, racing out to a 23-7 lead at the end of one quarter, with Porcasi netting eight points and O'Donnell adding seven.
A balanced scoring effort in the second with seven different Bears recording a field goal helped widen their advantage to 43-18 at the intermission.
After just managing just five field goals in the first half, Yeshiva came out of the lockers on a 7-0 run and looked to be the more aggressive team finishing forcing seven Bears turnovers and won the period, 18-16, against the Bears starters playing all 10 minutes.
The visitors didn't quit in the fourth and a 9-0 run shaved an SJC 21-point advantage to 12 with 4:20 to play. The Maccabees cut the deficit to single digits with less than a minute left, pulling as close as four but the Bears held off the comeback bid at the charity stripe.
For the Bears
O'Donnell (14 pts, 11 reb) and Quesada (12 pts, 10 reb) both recorded their 12th double-doubles of the season moving into a three-way tie for third with Old Westbury's Davida Warren.
Porcasi became the first Bear in their NCAA era to score 1,600 points reaching the mark exactly with 12 points on 4-of-7 shooting with a pair of three-pointers.
Staab (9 pts, 11 reb) fell one point shy of having three Bears finish with triple-doubles for the second straight game, after not having three in a game for 10 seasons.
Making her sixth career start, Alyssa Alioto (Staten Island, N.Y./Moore Catholic) set a career high with two blocks, also contributing four rebounds and two assists.
Full Game Program with Senior Reflections
Support the Bears in the Play4Kay National Free Throw Challenge
During the month of February, the Bears will join teams around the country participating in the Play4Kay National Free Throw Challenge. Teams are securing pledges and gifts for every free throw made during games in the month of February.
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Next up for the Bears
St. Joseph's has a day off before squaring off against Farmingdale State in their final regular season road game on Saturday (Feb. 9). Tip-off is noon with live stats and video available at SJCBears.com.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Oklahoma 'Muslim-Free' Gun Range Lawsuit Dropped
A federal lawsuit that had been filed against an Oklahoma gun range whose owner said he would not serve Muslims has been dropped.
The owners of Save Yourself Survival and Tactical Gun Range in Oktaha posted a sign three years ago proclaiming it a "Muslim-free" establishment. In March, range owner Nicole Neal removed the sign and replaced it with one barring "terrorists" from the range. Neal has also agreed to allow Muslims to shoot at the range in the future.
The Fatihah v. Neal lawsuit against the range was sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Oklahoma and the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Oklahoma branch, reported Religion News Service. The plaintiff was Raja'ee Fatihah of Tulsa, who serves as an Army reservist.
"We are pleased that the defendants in this case decided to take down their anti-Muslim sign and that they affirmed their commitment to complying with the law," said Heather Weaver, senior staff attorney for the Project on Freedom of Religion and Belief at the ACLU, in a media statement. "No customer should be excluded from a business based solely on their faith."
New Jersey Condo Can't Restrict Swimming On Basis Of Sex


text:
Wiccan Masons
Discussion in 'The Voting Booth' started by Payne, Nov 20, 2009.
How many people here are wiccan?
Huw Guest
Very interesting, masonicknight. Thanks for that.
In UGLE we don't publish an official list of this sort, and I suspect that most other GLs don't do so either, although our GL office stands ready to advise on what's appropriate when necessary. Interestingly, GLoCA includes the Scriptures of certain religions which I don't believe are generally eligible, because the usual teachings of those religions don't include a Supreme Being. However, I acknowledge the possibility that individual followers of those religions might hold a non-standard interpretation which does include a Supreme Being, in which case of course I've no objection - but again, that's a situation in which I'd want to ask a petitioner a couple of questions to satisfy myself that this is so.
Here in England, when we use an alternate VSL for a Candidate of non-Christian religion (as indeed we do fairly often), we keep the Bible open in addition to the Candidate's VSL, not closed as in GLoCA. In some of our overseas Lodges in countries which are religiously very diverse, it is standard practice to use several VSLs side by side. UGLE rules require that the Bible is always there as a VSL regardless of where the Lodge is, and other VSLs are used as appropriate for the place and the membership. I've heard of UGLE Lodges in India and south-east Asia where it is normal to use 6 different VSLs simultaneously at every meeting!
T & F,
Huw, May 21, 2010
rhitland Founding Member Premium Member
Brother knight your post got me curious to see if the GLoT prints a list as well. They do not and are a little more vague on that issue to allow almost any booh divinely inspired, next to the open bible of course. I also found some other neat stuff that might add to the convo.
Art. 18. Recognition Criteria of Other Grand Lodges. Fraternal recognition may be extended to a Grand Lodge when it appears to the satisfaction of this Grand Lodge, a Committee having first considered and reported thereon:
1.	That such a Grand Body has been formed lawfully by at
least three just and duly constituted Lodges, or that it has been
legalized by a valid act issuing from the Grand Lodge of Texas, or
from a Grand Body in fraternal relations with this Grand Lodge.
2.	That it is an independent, self-governing, responsible
organization with entire, undisputed and exclusive dogmatic and
administrative authority over the Symbolic Lodges within its
jurisdiction, and not in any sense whatever subject to, or dividing such authority with, a Supreme Council, or other Body claiming ritualistic or other supervision or control.
3.	That it makes Masons of men only.
4.	That it requires conformity to the following, which the Grand
Lodge of Texas considers necessary in a Masonic Body:
A.	Acknowledgement of a belief in God the Father of all
B.	Secrecy.
C.	The Symbolism of Operative Masonry.
D.	The division of Symbolic Masonry into the three degrees
E.	The legend of the Third Degree.
F.	That its dominant purposes are charitable, benevolent,
educational and religious; and that it excludes
controversial politics and sectarian religion from all
activities under its auspices.
G.	The Sacred Book of the Divine Law, Chief among the
Three Great Lights of Masonry, indispensably present
in the Lodges while at work.
5.	That it occupies exclusively its territorial jurisdiction or else
shares the same with another by mutual consent; and that it does
not presume to extend its authority, or presume to establish Lodges
in, a territory occupied by a lawful Grand Lodge, without the
expressed assent of such supreme governing Masonic Body.
Art. 397. (434). Religious Belief. A firm belief in the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the divine authenticity of the Holy Scriptures is indispensably necessary before a candidate can be initiated, but this Grand Lodge does not presume to prescribe any canonical books or what part thereof are inspired. It is the policy of this Grand Lodge to permit a candidate whose religious persuasion is based upon other than the Holy Bible to be obligated upon the % book of his chosen faith, and same may be situated upon the Altar in front of the Holy Bible during the conferral of the three degrees of Masonry. In which event, all esoteric references to "The Holy Bible" during the conferral of the degree(s) and the lessons appropriate thereto shall be substituted with "The Book of your (my) Faith."
(Revised 1995)
rhitland, May 23, 2010
JTM "Just in case" Premium Member
Sacred Book of the Divine Law
interesting that it doesn't specifically say "the bible"
JTM, May 23, 2010
Hi JTM.
JTM said: ↑
Note that this reference was in your recognition criteria, not in your rules for what you do at home in TX. So by avoiding saying "the bible" in the recognition criteria, you allow yourselves to recognise GLs in countries where some other Book (or perhaps combination of Books) might be the standard VSL instead of the bible. There may be one or two cases where you do in fact recognise such GLs.
Incidentally, your recognition criteria are noticeably different from ours in UGLE.
I also found this definition in the back of my Texas Monitor for the word Scripture-the sacred writing of any people
I wanted to compare it to what Webster's had as the definition- 1 a (1) capitalized : the books of the Bible —often used in plural (2) often capitalized : a passage from the Bible b : a body of writings considered sacred or authoritative
2 : something written <the primitive man's awe for any scripture — George Santayana>
Christopher Registered User
To me, the issue is very simply one of applicability. Freemasonry isn't for everyone. We already say that we don't take bad men and make them good; we take good men and make them better. Right there we've excluded a group of men (bad men) from Masonry, presumably on the basis that they won't get anything out of membership in our order. I think the same argument applies to anyone without certain beliefs which axiomatically underlie all of our ritual and teaching. They either wouldn't get anything out of our ritual, or they would feel left out by some of it.
For instance, we speak a lot about our Supreme Being as both a creator, and as a guiding figure in the world, someone who has a plan for mankind in general, and each of us personally. He/she is called the "Great Architect of the Universe", implying both that he/she is the source of all creation, and has an intelligent purpose in its design. We don't vet candidates for these same attitudes, but if I know a friend of mine is much more determinist-minded, and simply doesn't believe that Deity either drove the ordering of the universe or is involved in mankind, I'm reluctant to point him to the Fraternity. He's likely to find the ritual and teachings somewhat absurd because he doesn't share the beliefs that underlie them, that give them their applicability to the lives of the Brethren. I can only imagine how awkward the third degree must be for someone who doesn't believe in the immortality of the soul.
Another point. When Masons gather, for whatever reason, we pray. This is not only a very frequent activity for Masons, but one which serves to unite us, since where creeds differ, still I know of no established religious tradition, not even a polytheistic one, whose adherents do not reverently bow their heads to their God or gods in regular petition. For someone who believes in only a single deity, even if in all seriousness he believes his pet to be that deity, it's easy to join in and enjoy the prayer, especially if the one praying tries consciously to pray in an interfaith style. Where one only believes in a single deity, then only a single deity can be prayed to. Hence, the applicability of the Masonic style of prayer to all monotheistic/pantheistic/panentheistic brethren.
However, for a brother who believes in many deities, none of which is supreme over the others, I can only imagine a certain awkwardness during Masonic prayer. Which of their deities do they imagine is being prayed to on their behalf by the chaplain, if any? If they don't conceive of a single omnipotent, omniscient Deity, creator of all, and guider of earthly affairs, such as the chaplain is invoking, then perhaps they would imagine the chaplain is praying to no one. Or else that the god of the Masons is yet another god among the many, but one which they don't worship. Either way, prayer among the Brethren would serve not to unite the polytheist to his Brothers, but to divide him from them. At every Masonic convocation, he'd be reminded of how different he is from his Brothers. I think over time, he would simply stop coming to any Masonic functions, if only to avoid the awkwardness. I also think any attempt to pray in a manner that would suit both the hard polytheist and the monotheist/pantheist/panentheist, would be comical, at best.
I think if anyone attends a Masonic degree and tries to view it through the lens of someone who earnestly believes in a collection of less-than-omniscient, less-than-omnipotent deities, and denies a grand creator/father deity, he will find that the lessons of Masonry begin to look misguided at best, and comical at worst.
For this reason, I think it is as much in the interest of the candidate as it is in the interest of the Lodge that the candidate is fully informed, to a sufficient detail, the faith requirements of admission as given on the petition, and that the Lodge satisfy itself that the candidate meets those requirements.
Christopher, May 26, 2010
Seeker Registered User
Well said Bro. Christopher
Seeker, May 29, 2010
Christopher said: ↑
For instance, we speak a lot about our Supreme Being as both a creator, and as a guiding figure in the world, someone who has a plan for mankind in general, and each of us personally.
However, for a brother who believes in many deities, none of which is supreme over the others, I can only imagine a certain awkwardness during Masonic prayer. Which of their deities do they imagine is being prayed to on their behalf by the chaplain, if any? If they don't conceive of a single omnipotent, omniscient Deity, creator of all, and guider of earthly affairs, such as the chaplain is invoking, then perhaps they would imagine the chaplain is praying to no one. Or else that the god of the Masons is yet another god among the many, but one which they don't worship. Either way, prayer among the Brethren would serve not to unite the polytheist to his Brothers, but to divide him from them. At every Masonic convocation, he'd be reminded of how different he is from his Brothers.
We do talk of GAOTU as being the creator and of divine intelligence who will lend his hand the moment he is asked but I am not sure where the personal plan part comes in? I completely agree with the general plan being stated all in our ritual but not sure what part of the ritual refers to God having a specific plan for me or any other mason?
The second statement about prayer seems a pretty narrow scope on the power of prayer. The are the possibilities that said prayer might reach all of the Brothers Deities and each assist accordingly to the prayer or at the very least he might enjoy the energy which the ritual of prayer creates especially when said Brother believes the power of prayer grows according to the number of people involved. Seems to me they may love the ritualistic environment no matter who says the prayer or to which God they pray.
rhitland, Jul 2, 2010
Some good info on Wiccans I found
Do Witches believe in God?
Most Witches don't believe in the Christian concept of God. They believe in an unknowable Ultimate Deity. Witchcraft, being the oldest religion/philosophy on earth, has its own pantheon of Gods and Goddesses that are used in a way similar to the way Catholics use Saints. Please also refer to information from our Pantheist friend for more on this subject.
Wiccan believe that the spirit of the One, Goddess and God exist in all things. In the trees, rain, flowers, the sea, in each other and all of natures creatures. This means that we must treat "all things" of the Earth as aspects of the divine. We attempt to honor and respect life in all its many manifestations both seen and unseen.
these are the sires
http://www.wicca.org/
http://www.wicca.com/celtic/wicca/wicca.htm
owls84 Moderator Premium Member
Yeah I have reached a point that it is not my job to decide what god that person prays to but that they are good people and they pray to a god. The line says "a supreme being" not Jesus or Muhammad. Too often we are so quick to shun the different when we would be considered different ourselves somewhere else.
owls84, Jul 7, 2010
SSG_Morrison Registered User
owls84 said: ↑
Too often we are so quick to shun the different when we would be considered different ourselves somewhere else.
SSG_Morrison, Jul 7, 2010
Huw said: ↑
Hi again Rhitland.
That's always been so: it's a Landmark derived from the Old Charges of the operative masons. For example, the GL MS #2 (c. 1650) says "... so help me God and the holy contents of this Book", and other Old Charges have wording to similar effect. (Of course, in those days the Book would always mean a Bible.)
The ancient charges where written by men about their version of the most popular form of Masonry at the time, which we proudly adhere to in modern times but the craft had obviously existed for many many years before the ancient charges which ultimately means it was around before many sacred volumes of law where around. Freemasonry as we know it in Christian countries is firmly rooted in the Old Testament which tends us to assume the bible was all that has ever been used in a Masonic lodge but how could that be the case if we have been around since time immemorial? I found a great article I will post on Isalm and Freemasonry but I feel a quite from the paper is relevant.
For the Muslim mason, the Holy Quran is one of the three emblematical lights in masonry.
masonicknight Registered User
So very true Owls, so very true.
masonicknight, Jul 7, 2010
rhitland said: ↑
Fair enough, I may be reading too much into the degrees.
I suppose that's possible, but it still seems strange to me.
Christopher, Jul 21, 2010
Well the one thing I know about Masonry is that one could not read into it to much. It was not my intention to disolve this believe for you or any others but to hear philosphy on how you derived this conclusion. I cannot say for sure this is not indicated in the ritual but I am oblivious to its where abouts.
As for it being strange, to me this is what the craft is all about bringing knowledge and experience of the unknown and strange. I think it goes "concilates true friendship among those who mght otherwise have remained at a perpetual distance."
rhitland, Jul 21, 2010
peace out Premium Member
Viewing Masonry as a new EA, this thread contains the very essence of why I sought initiation. The level of civility and open mindedness is astounding. Try posting some of these in a Religious forum and see the closed minds. Amazing.
peace out, Aug 5, 2010
drowen Registered User
mch4970,
Religious entities would blow you out of the water for bringing up an advesarial religion. Masons don't talk about religion, nor politics inside the Lodge Room for a really good reason.
drowen, Aug 5, 2010
bpire2002 Registered User
I am a master mason and I do not recoginze any mason who believes in multiple gods. The end.
bpire2002, Aug 30, 2010
Hi bpire2002,
You may not as a Master Mason, but Grand Lodge of Texas and all other jurisdictions do. In the Masonic Tenets, there is no restriction placed on God. The question is who do YOU place your faith, not anyone else. If an individual who believed in a different God took an oath to a different God in whom they did not believe, the oath would not be binding. Might try some floor school to brush up on some of the primary tenets of the degrees.
drowen, Aug 31, 2010
Ashton Lawson Premium Member
I see there are 6 Wiccans in this thread. Help please, PM if you prefer.
I just wrote a paper on the cardinal virtue of justice from a Masonic perspective, and I referenced the Holy Books of several religions as well. Frustratingly, I had an extremely difficult time trying to find much of anything on how Wicca perceives justice. Can any Wiccans shed some light here? I could not locate an online copy of the Book of Shadow either.
The best I could come up with was a poorly written paper that essentially suggested the only real method of applying justice that a Wiccan adheres to, is trying to catch the attention of the Crone(?) and focus it onto the person who is need of justice. I had a very difficult time quantifying this into anything I could readily understand. Research is frustratingly hard to come by aside from how to work spells. If that's the answer, that's fine, but I am having trouble specifying methodology or practice.
Ashton Lawson, Aug 31, 2010


working mom – gym. wine. laundry.
Whirlwind. That has been life lately. With school and work now in full swing I am struggling to find any free time to be here!
K babe is now a big bad 9 month old (+1 week now).
I had to snap a picture of my set up for J when he had the baby for an entire day while I was working. In his defense he totally did not need this much assistance. Ha, I think I just felt better leaving them knowing that everything was laid out.
Had this delicious bowl of chickpea pasta with leftover vodka sauce.
And these little bowls have been my "desserts". I forget where I read this but someone said that if you are trying to decrease the amount of sugar you consume (if you have a dessert problem *hand held high*) you should do a chocolate and nut combo. So you still get some of that good stuff but it comes along with a healthy and filling snack.
Now back to hanging with my goof ball because I am at the hospital for another 12 hour shift tomorrow!


text:
Fusion energy pioneer Tokamak hires JP Morgan for huge fundraising
A British-based fusion energy pioneer has enlisted a leading Wall Street bank to raise a mammoth funding round amid growing hopes that its industry can help solve one of the world's biggest energy challenges.
Sky News has learnt that Tokamak Energy, which is based near Oxford, is working with JP Morgan on plans to secure a funding injection likely to be worth several hundred million pounds.
Discussions with prospective investors are understood to have been under way for some time, according to insiders.
Tokamak, which last raised funding in 2020, hopes to capitalise on a global wave of interest in energy produced from nuclear fusion.
Last month, the US Department of Energy reported a net energy gain from a fusion reaction, which Tokamak chief executive Chris Kelsall described as "great for the industry as more private and public investment flows into fusion technology".
Fusion breakthrough offers hope - but reality may be complicated
In a statement issued to Sky News on Thursday, Mr Kelsall said: "In the last 12 months we have achieved significant scientific milestones with our latest prototype spherical tokamak and have recently announced our future roadmap for the next phase of development towards competitive, commercial fusion.
"Tokamak Energy is evaluating opportunities with potential financial investors and strategic partners, to support our plans to demonstrate clean, grid-ready fusion power by the early 2030s."
The company was founded in 2009 as a spin-off from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy and now employs more than 200 people.
To date, it has raised $250m (£205m), comprising $200m (£164m) from private investors and $50m (£41m) from the UK and US governments.
Other players in the sector include First Light Fusion, which has engaged bankers at UBS on plans to raise new funding.
Most Britons still want Prince Harry at the King's Coronation
The majority of the British public think the Duke of Sussex should be invited to King Charles III's Coronation, a survey has found.
Tyre Nichols bodycam footage to be released as police culture blamed for beating
Bodycam footage has been released of the beating of Tyre Nichols which has seen five police officers charged with his murder.
Zelenskyy slams International Olympic Committee for wanting to lift ban on Russian athletes
Ukraine has invited the IOC chief, Thomas Bach, to visit his country's frontline after the body indicated it does not want to bar athletes from the Paris 2024 games based on their nationality.
Israel's government says a power imbalance has given judges and legal advisers too much sway over law-making and governance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to press on with the changes despite the opposition.
Zahawi should quit as party chair until tax inquiry ends, top Tory peer implies
Lord Young suggests ministers should feel able to step aside for the duration of any investigation
People in Bradford handed voter photo ID law reminder ahead of elections
PEOPLE in the Bradford district have been reminded to bring photo identification if they visit a polling station for this spring's elections.
The Bolton News
Community gathers for Ukrainian Christmas concert
The festive period may be a distant memory for many but Bolton's Ukrainian community took part in its Christmas concert last weekend.
Two killed and one injured after car strikes pedestrians in south Wales
Two people have died and another person injured in south Wales following a collision between a car and pedestrians. The crash happened on the B4273, Ynysybwl Road in Pontypridd, at 6.30pm on Friday and involved a black Ford Focus and three pedestrians, according to the local force, South Wales Police.
Dizzee Rascal's ex-fiancee 'attacked him with mobile phone', court told
The grime star is appealing against his conviction for assaulting Cassandra Jones on June 8 2021.


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text:
Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north west passage : and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833
The work Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north west passage : and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833 represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Manitoba Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.
The Resource Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north west passage : and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833
and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833
by John Ross : including the reports of Commander (now Captain) J.C. Ross, R.N., F.R.S., F.L.S., &c. and the discovery of the northern magnetic pole
Ross, John, Sir, 1777-1856
Ross, James Clark, Sir, 1800-1862
Arctic regions -- Discovery and exploration | British
Victory (Ship)
patent document
Context of Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north west passage : and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833
Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north west passage : and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833, by John Ross : including the reports of Commander (now Captain) J.C. Ross, R.N., F.R.S., F.L.S., &c. and the discovery of the northern magnetic pole, (electronic resource)

 Data from Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north west passage : and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833 - University of Manitoba Libraries

Data Citation of the Work Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north west passage : and of a residence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833
http://link.lib.umanitoba.ca/resource/s3uQpN_Hjrk/
http://library.link/resource/s3uQpN_Hjrk/


text:
MEET EDSON DIAZ-FUENTES, CO-OWNER OF SANTO REMEDIO
30 Jan 2019 Meet the Locals
Santo Remedio translates as 'holy remedy', the cure to the cheddar laden burritos and fajitas that many restaurants pass off as Mexican food. Owners Edson and Natalie have thrown out pile-em-high nachos in favour of unique sharing plates such as hibiscus flower enchiladas. Tex Mex this is not.
"It is authentic Mexican food that I used to crave and enjoy," says Edson who grew up in Mexico City. He is checking into the restaurant just three days after the couple's second child arrived a month early. Given a few sleepless nights, he is remarkably alert as he accepts felicitaciones from his staff.
Then again, the husband and wife team are used to dealing with the unexpected. In 2017, they opened a hugely successful Shoreditch restaurant, gaining the thumbs up from a royal flush of UK restaurant critics including Jay Rayner, Giles Coren, Grace Dent, Tom Parker Bowles and Richard Vines. Seven months later they had to close down overnight due to problems with the building.
"WE WERE A PACKED, 44-COVER RESTAURANT THAT WAS FULL FROM ONE DAY TO ANOTHER. IT WAS A LITTLE BIT SHOCKING."
Perhaps influenced by Natalie's career as a financial journalist, they took the unusual step of raising £45k through a crowd funding campaign, offering free meals in return for pledges. The only problem was that they had just three months to get the new site open.
"Normally it takes a year," says Edson, "We had a few teething problems. On one particular evening we had a full house, the fire alarm went off, the electricity went down and we couldn't charge bills. It was eventful!"
A year on, the scene is completely different. On this particular Thursday lunchtime, the downstairs seating area is packed with groups of workers from nearby Shard Quarter and More London. It is no wonder that the suits come here: the cheerful riot of palm printed wallpaper and colourful marketplace curios make it the perfect lunchtime escape.
At weekends, a new brunch service already attracts a dedicated following of local residents as well as disciples from the old Shoreditch site. The menu includes grilled pineapple and apple juice and the ominously titled 'Drowned and Divorced Eggs'. Ironically this dish is the result of a loving compromise after Edson and Natalie disagreed on whether to serve huevos ahogados (eggs drowned in tomato salsa) or huevos divorciados (served with conflicting fiery salsa roja and a cooler salsa verde).
Though not formally trained, Edson comes from the very best cut of chef, those that love eating. In his twenties he travelled around Mexico collecting culinary inspiration from each state. This was also where, in 2006, he met recent Oxford graduate Natalie (who is half-Mexican) at a beach party in Tulum.
"MY TRAINING IS THAT I EAT EVERYWHERE, I TRY EVERYTHING, I TAKE NOTE OF EVERYTHING AND I DOCUMENT. I HAVE A GOOD PALETTE MEMORY AND THAT HELPS ME CREATE DISHES FROM THE THINGS I TRY AND THAT I LOVE."
It was a skill that propelled him from learning the ropes in Mexico's Casa Oaxaca, one of the top 50 restaurants in Latin America, to becoming Head of Menu Innovation at the Wahaca Restaurant Group in the UK ('Wa-ha-ca' is the anglicised spelling of Oaxaca, making the discussion of Edson's CV somewhat confusing). For two years he worked closely with the company's co-founders Thomasina Miers and Mark Selby to help Wahaca grow in to a sizeable national chain.
Santo Remedio started from more humble beginnings as a supper club in a Brooklyn apartment where the couple lived for three years. When they returned to London, it expanded into hired venues serving 30-40 people and a street food business. A move to permanent premises was inevitable.
Following in the footsteps of Santo Remedio Shoreditch, the Tooley Street location has become a much loved neighbourhood restaurant. For the most recent Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) festival, staff placed pictures of lost relatives on a traditional altar alongside items that the departed enjoyed in life (this could be typically be Tequila or Mezcal, but never fruit, jokes Edson -"No one likes fruit. Put cigarettes, something grandma really used to like!").
What the restaurant did not expect was emails from regular customers asking if they could join in too. "They sent us pictures of their lost loved ones. It was really interesting as we were doing something that was more traditional rather than Halloween-like," Edson says.
The candlelit shrine not only represented a homage to the departed, but the success of a husband and wife's mission to deliver authentic Mexican culture to SE1.
EXPLORE THE NEIGHBOURHOOD - DIAZ-FUENTES'S GUIDE
Southwark Park, Gomm Road, SE16 2TX
It is a good space for cycling and has a football academy, playgrounds and green space for the little ones.
Watch House Coffee Shop, Tower Bridge, Cardamom Building, 31 Shad Thames, SE1 2YR
They have one shop on Bermondsey Street and have opened here on the site of a former spice factory.
Manze, 87 Tower Bridge Road, SE1 4TW
The Pie Shop. Just pie and mash with the options of gravy or liquor. Really good comfort food.
Santo Remedio: 152 Tooley St, London SE1 2TU
www.santoremedio.co.uk


Marketing leaders are perfectly positioned to orchestrate their company's customer experience-led future, but must put more emphasis on internal communications and designing a framework for their organisation to emotionally connect with consumers.
That's the view of Storyminers managing principal and founder, Mike Wittenstein, who was one of the keynote speakers at the recent Customer 360 Symposium with a presentation on the intersection of technology and customer experience.
The consulting group uses experience design as a business strategy, and has assisted clients across 25 countries enjoy more than US$1.5 billion in sales impact. Wittenstein also has a long history in experience design and marketing, setting up IBM's first customer experience practice in 1999 as well as working for interactive marketing agency, Gallileo.
One of the big challenges organisations face today is that their employees and operations are not geared towards a customer's emotional experience of their products and services, Wittenstein said. Existing processes for building products, along with an obsession with ROI, cost efficiency and maximising existing assets, have hindered organisations from making the wholesale changes necessary to meet modern customer expectations, he said.
Many are also struggling to gain the agility needed to reposition the ship in the face of rapid change.
Marketing is in the optimum position to orchestrate the changes necessary in becoming a customer-led business because they're already attuned to a customer's emotional level, Wittenstein told CMO.
"A large part of what people buy when they're buying an experience, and what differentiates it from other experiences, is how it makes them feel," he said. "Marketers need to raise their game on the feelings side and help the whole organisation understand that a customer is going to feel a certain way.
Unlike the HR department, marketing is the only function that can also tap into the emotional state of their organisation and foster that customer-oriented collaboration company-wide, Wittenstein claimed. And it's this buy-in that makes transformation possible.
"Marketing can step in and augment that voice of the employee not through measurement, but by creating safe places to have conversations," he said. "That's where the cultural aspects of delivering good customer experiences starts. Any time you can identify the experience and change the whole running of the company, you need to tackle the turmoil created as a result. It's all connected.
As an example of a sector struggling make the transition to customer centricity, Wittenstein pointed to technology providers.
"Tech companies are having to swim upstream now to meet the needs of their customers. They're realising they don't just need more product or that having the technology product solves the problem, they need to know the how – the culture, how to turn the battleship in its own width, and be able to change more frequently," he said.
As stewards of the brand, marketers have to make sure the business is actually going to deliver on what it promises, Wittenstein continued. This requires separating product from emotional experience, and designing the right operational and cultural principles to allow for innovation and new ways of interacting with customers.
"Focus less on hope and mission statements and corporate blah that doesn't mean anything, and more on where the conversations around innovation in the company needs to be," Wittenstein advised. "How do you be brave? How do you have a conversation with the boss? How do you explore those options on what customers need or employees to better understand what you need to do your job better?
A number of organisations have tried to address this need by launching innovation labs with separate teams. But for Wittenstein, these can actually restrict progress because they're not supported by wholesale operational change.
"The unguided approach [to innovation] is good to find the unknown unknowns, but it's a lot more effective to take a mindful eye towards design and then with intent, steer the innovation in a direction you are preparing the company to follow and to do that on purpose," he said.
Wittenstein was nevertheless quick to point out that customer experience is everyone's responsibility, not just the CMO.
"Customer experience is truly one of the first integrative disciplines that everyone can get their hands on," he commented. "Engineering used to be engineering, IT was for IT... but with customer experience, we're realising when you change a service, it changes every single part of the business.
As a way of fostering this customer-led change, Wittenstein advised CMOs to start partnering up with "design sciences", such as user experience, design thinking and behavioural design, to not only identify customer value and experience, but drive faster ideation and agility.
"The marketing toolkit is still largely based in a 'buy low, sell high' mentality, and is about getting the message in front of the customer and so on. It needs to move to a serving-based mentality," he said.
"If I were a CEO, I would charge my CMO with accelerating the speed of my ideation and innovation. I wouldn't set up a separate innovation team, make it a project program or put it under the IT office, I would make it marketing. I need ideas to turn my quickly and I need my people to feel more comfortable at the same time.
Creating shared experiences so staff have points in time and reference is another core ingredient. Storyminers does this with its retail clients by taking a team out shopping and then asking them how they liked the service and for details around delivering that service.
Another aspect of customer-led experience is recognising that the story that matters most isn't the one the company tells, but the one customers do, Wittenstein said. Again, this requires recognising the importance of emotional in interactions, he said, as well as listening to customers first.
"If you can put clues into the experience that customers naturally gravitate to, they'll want to talk about it," he said. "And if you make it so the customer discovers the biggest benefits for themselves, rather than forcing all that information onto one page, they like it more because they discovered something and are emotionally connected to it.
Another suggestion from Wittenstein is to bring in a business analyst that is value creation-based, rather than cost savings-based.
"Companies all too often look to make better use of their assets...You've got to be willing to leapfrog to be able to articulate the value the customers are getting," he claimed.
"Think of your favourite coffee place: What could they give you that's of more value? Most people think about getting more coffee, or charging less, or serving faster, or putting it in a cup that doesn't burn my hands, or a temperature gauge outside of the cup so I know what the contents of the inside of the cup are like. They focus on coffee because it's a coffee house.


TE Jordan Reed's availability for the remainder of the season is in jeopardy after he sustained a strained big toe.
Coach Jay Gruden said Reed would miss at least one week, although there's a chance he'll sit out the final three games for the reeling Redskins (6-7), who have dropped four in a row.
Gruden said it's not the same toe strain that hindered the 28-year-old Reed the previous two years and required surgery on both big toes after the season.
Reed was injured during the first quarter of Sunday's 40-16 loss to the New York Giants.
The 6-foot-2, 245-pound Reed has recorded 54 completions for 558 yards and two touchdowns in 13 games this season.
Reed played in nine games as a rookie in 2013, 11 in 2014, a career-high 14 in 2015, 12 in 2016 and six last season.
He has collected 329 catches for 3,371 yards and 24 touchdowns in 65 career contests since being selected by Washington in the third round of the 2013 NFL Draft.


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Fun and durable. My son loves cars and it is a great line from LEGO.
Product came well packed and quickly. Thank you so much!
The lego set was new and was just what my grandson wanted.
A must have for Lego and Mustang fans!
I enjoyed the challenge and the task of this build.


Kurian AW, Gong GD, John EM, Wittemore AS, et al.Breast cancer risk for noncarriers of family-specific BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations: Findings from the Breast Cancer Family Registry.Journal of Clinical Oncology," vol. 29(33), November, 2011.
Robson, M.D Do Women Remain at Risk Even If They Do Not Inherit a Familial BRCA1/2 Mutation "Journal of Clinical Oncology;" vol. 29(33), November, 2011.
Smith, A, Moran, A, Boyd, MC, et. al.Phenocopies in BRCA1 and BRCA2 families: evidence for modifier genes and implications for screening. "J Med Genet." 2007; vol. 44(1), January, 2007.
Noncarriers in BRCA1/BRCA2 families do not have increased risk of breast cancer?
Women from high-risk families live with awareness?
of their heightened risk. Even for women who test?
negative in a family with a known BRCA mutation, it is sometimes difficult to let go of the fear of cancer. In 2007, a British research study written by Smith et. al. suggested that female family members of BRCA1/BRCA2 mutation carriers who tested negative for the gene mutation still carried a 5-fold increased risk of developing breast cancer. Many well-regarded genetics experts disputed this finding. FORCE published an article on this study in a previous FORCE newsletter. A recent study by Dr. Allison Kurian, of Stanford University, pulished in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, refutes the Smith study and shows that noncarriers in BRCA families do not have an increased risk of breast cancer.
Researchers looked at 3047 families enrolled in the Breast Cancer Family Registry (BCFR) sites in Australia, Canada, and Northern California that have tested for BRCA mutations. Of those tested, 160 were found to have BRCA1 mutations and 132 had BRCA2 mutations. In order to calculate breast cancer risk for noncarriers, the no mutation carrying first degree relatives (FDRs) of BRCA positive breast cancer patients were compared to the FDRs of breast cancer patients without BRCA mutations. In this comparison the relative risk for breast cancer was not'significantly increased in non-mutation carriers from BRCA families compared with those from families who did not have BRCA. The comparison of 292 BRCA mutation carrying families to 2755 families without BRCA mutations in this study is the largest analysis of breast cancer risk for non-mutation-carriers from BRCA families.
In an accompanying editorial to Dr. Kurian's article, Dr. Mark E. Robson, Director of Clinical Genetics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering discusses the limitations of prior studies as well as how the Kurian study is different. Dr. Kurian's approach is considered more representative of the cancer risk in this population than Smith's study. The conclusion drawn from this and prior studies is that women who are mutation negative are not at a high enough increased risk to justify specialized surveillance or preventive strategies. While Dr. Robson cautions that this study, along with previous studies, does not exclude the possibility that mutation negative women are at a slightly higher cancer risk than women in the general population, it does show that the magnitude of the increased risk is not sufficient for noncarriers to be advised like their mutation carrying family members.


Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote "Music and wine are one." No matter where grapes are grown, wine is enjoyed, or songs are sung, it's undeniable that one complements the other. Now, Putumayo World Music has brought the two together on a unique collection for the music lover and the wine drinker in everyone. Indulge your senses with Music from the Wine Lands, a full-bodied selection of songs from the world's premier wine-producing regions and the 4th release in the Putumayo CD series that includes Music from the Coffee Lands, Music from the Chocolate Lands and Music from the Tea Lands.


text:
Suffragette (2015)
Anne-Marie Duff, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson, Carey Mulligan, David Lloyd George, Derby Day, Drama, Emmeline Pankhurst, Equality, Helena Bonham Carter, Historical drama, Laundry worker, Meryl Streep, Panks, Review, Sarah Gavron, True story, Voting rights, Women's rights
D: Sarah Gavron / 106m
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw, Romola Garai, Natalie Press, Geoff Bell, Samuel West, Finbar Lynch, Adrian Schiller, Meryl Streep
If you were to ask a hundred people, what was the Women's Social and Political Union, and what was its purpose, most, if not all, wouldn't be able to tell you. And yet the WSPU is perhaps one of the most important organisations in British history. Without its members and their tireless work, often in the face of police brutality and political intransigence, it's very likely that women in the UK would not have been given the right to vote as early as they were (and even then it wasn't until 1928). Suffragette, which looks at the Union's activities in the run up to World War I, makes clear the level of sacrifice some of its members had to make in order to change the British political system for the better.
The struggle is seen through the eyes of laundry worker Maud Watts (Mulligan), wife of Sonny (Whishaw) and mother of their son, George. Maud is hardworking, has gained a certain degree of respect in the workplace, but at twenty-four has little future beyond what she's already achieved. She appears to be accepting of her lot in life, but when a co-worker, Violet Miller (Duff), falls foul of their boss, Norman Taylor (Bell), Maud comes to her rescue and the two women strike up a friendship. Maud learns that Violet is a supporter of the women's movement, and while she admires Violet's courage and determination, she has no intention of becoming a suffragette.
An invitation to speak before then Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George (Schiller), is arranged for Violet, but she is unable to speak. Maud stands in for her, and is invited to tell her story. Lloyd George is clearly sympathetic, but when an announcement is made some time later, the law remains unchanged. Caught up in the violent struggle that ensues, Maud is arrested. She is questioned by Inspector Arthur Steed (Gleeson), who has been tasked with rounding up the Union's ringleaders, including its head, Emmeline Pankhurst (Streep). Maud denies being a suffragette, but when she's released a week later, it's obvious that people think she is. Sonny is upset by her involvement, and she promises to stay away from the WSPU and its members. But when a secret meeting, to be addressed by Emmeline Pankhurst is arranged, Maud can't help but attend.
From there, along with Violet and a local pharmacist, Edith Ellyn (Carter), Maud becomes more and more involved in the WSPU and its plans. Unable to deal with her increasing involvement, Sonny kicks her out, and refuses to let her see George. In the meantime, she leaves the laundry as well, and devotes her time to the Union. She takes part in the destruction of postboxes and telephone lines, and other acts of civil disobedience. She's arrested again, and Steed offers her a choice: inform on the Union's activities, or face longer spells in jail. With the women under both suspicion and surveillance, and with Pankhurst exhorting them to increase their attacks on the establishment, Maud has to decide if her future resides with the WSPU.
Suffragette wears its heart on its sleeve right from the start. As a movie about the struggle of women to gain the right to vote it takes an earnest, pragmatic approach, and while it often strays from the truth in its efforts to shoehorn Maud into the events that did happen (particularly in the scenes set at Epsom on Derby Day, when Emily Wilding Davison was run down by the King's horse), it also narrows its focus too much in its efforts to tell its story.
By choosing to tell the story of the WSPU's struggle through the eyes of Maud, a neophyte in terms of the political landscape of the times, Abi Morgan's script reduces the efforts and the sacrifices made by the real-life women of the time to the stuff of soap opera. From the disapproving looks of her neighbours as Maud walks home, to the reaction of Sonny after she goes back on her word, and even to the moment when she takes her long awaited "revenge" on Taylor for his bullying, rapacious behaviour, Maud's journey from reluctant laundry worker to political activist is dealt with in such a clichéd, tick-box way that it robs the movie of any real drama. Indeed, the only time the movie achieves any kind of dramatic focus is when it opts to have Maud force-fed (something that happened to Davison forty-nine times; ironically, force-feeding was introduced after fellow suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop was released from prison after being on hunger strike for ninety-one days).
With the politics of the time reduced to the simplest level possible, and the history of the struggle barely referred to, the movie operates in a kind of historical vacuum. And worst of all, it lacks passion. With everything that happens (and was happening at the time), Suffragette lacks a true sense of the anger and frustration that women must have felt back then. Morgan's script shows the determination they had, but between that and Gavron's emphasis on making sure that each scene moves on to the next as quickly as possible, any potential exploration of what women truly felt about their social and political situation back in the pre-War years is avoided. Instead, Maud is used as a kind of generic marker; if it happens to her then it happened to every woman, and that was very bad indeed (that sounds very simplistic, but then so is the movie).
On the performance side, Mulligan is dependable but is often asked to stand around observing while the likes of Duff and Carter do the heavy lifting. Gleeson does well as the Voice of Authority until a late script decision undoes all the good work he's put in 'til then, Whishaw is the generally supportive husband who soon turns horrible simply because the movie needs him to, Garai is lost in a supporting role that keeps her on the edge of things throughout, Bell is once again called upon to be unconscionably malevolent, and Streep's cameo lacks the gravitas it needs to be effective.
With radicalisation currently a hot topic, it would have been good to see Maud's joining the WSPU in terms of indoctrination; after all, with their civil disobedience stretching to blowing up Lloyd George's country home, it's likely that they would have been described as terrorists if the word had existed in that context back then. But it's an idea that's never taken up, and like so many other areas where the movie could have gained some much needed depth, the need to keep it simple overrides all other considerations.
Rating: 5/10 – a so-so retelling of events leading up to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I (which really helped the suffragettes and their cause), Suffragette adopts a pedestrian approach to events of the time, and never comes alive in the way its makers probably intended; it's ironic then, that in attempting to highlight the suffragettes' fight for equality, the movie ends up portraying that fight in less than heroic terms.
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text:
Military members, teacher, and sex predators among 71 arrested in Hillsborough human trafficking sting
Published January 11
FOX 13 News
Dozens arrested in Hillsborough County human trafficking bust
Josh Cascio reports
TAMPA, Fla. - There were 71 people arrested following a month-long human trafficking operation by Hillsborough County's undercover detectives, the sheriff said, adding that the agency won't slow down in tracking down "Johns" as Tampa becomes the Super Bowl host next month.
"All of these men have one thing in common: they did not care if the women they were going to have sex with were being exploited, forced to sell their bodies against their will," Sheriff Chad Chronister explained Monday.
During a press conference, he said "Operation Interception" involved undercover detectives posting online advertisements offering to meet up for sex. Female detectives posed as prostitutes.
"The reality is no one willingly chooses to enter the world of sexual exploitation," Chronister explained. "We have found that in many cases these individuals suffer from some type of victimization of rape or suffer from some type of substance abuse."
All suspects were men ranging from the ages of 20 to 62. The sheriff said they included active-duty military members, a Christian schoolteacher, a firefighter, a banker, construction workers, local business owners, and two registered sex offenders.
Detectives identified 28-year-old Ronnie Johnson III as a Hillsborough County firefighter. There is no word yet on his employment status with the agency.
They said Johnson had no previous arrest history within Hillsborough County.
Booking image for Ronnie Johnson III
Kevin Cameron, 43, was identified as a visual arts teacher with North Tampa Christian Academy. Officials said he had no prior arrest history in the county.
There is no word yet on his employment status with the agency.
Booking image for Kevin Cameron
Joshua Ellis, 39, was identified as a member of the Army Reserve and had no prior criminal history in the country.
Booking image for Joshua Ellis.
Markas Williams, 40, was identified as a member of the Air Force and had a prior DUI arrest in Hillsborough County back in 2000.
Booking image for Markas Williams
John Teugh, 33, is one of the registered sex offenders arrested during the undercover operation. He was found guilty in 2011 for using the internet to solicit a child for sex and traveling to meet the minor for sex in Citrus County, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
John Teugh (Image courtesy: Florida Department of Law Enforcement)
The announcement comes as law enforcement officials in the region promised to step up to prevent an increase in human trafficking before the Super Bowl.
Human trafficking awareness campaign ahead of Super Bowl
Tampa Bay area educators, law enforcement and victim's advocates are teaming up to share an important message ahead of the Super Bowl in Tampa, warning about the increase in human trafficking.
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"With less than a month away from the big game, our covert operations continue and will continue seeking those who choose to sexually exploit others in our community," Chronister said. "The Super Bowl should not be a venue where these types of crimes occur on the sidelines whether it's before the game, during the game, or after the game."
January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month and Florida ranks third in the country for the crime.


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