In the blazing hot month of May last year, my colleague and I landed in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh. The purpose of our visit was to learn more about the fabulous work of Jan Swasthya Sehyong, JSS, (www.jssbilaspur.org), had been doing; share the ASER-Pratham (www.asercentre.org, www.pratham.org ) efforts within the early childhood health, nutrition and development space, and to brainstorm a journey together, if feasible.
The near 24-hour train journey, a good part of which was spent sliced between the upper and lower berths of the three-tier seating, had left my younger colleague a little less chirpy than what he was when we started from New Delhi. I too struggled to pull myself together, given the fact that I am a mother of two and older than my colleague. Although physically we were a bit drained, we were brimming with excitement to meet the JSS team.
We had heard so much about the good work the very-motivated doctors at JSS had been doing that our physical state did not dampen our excitement. Meeting the teams at JSS rejuvenated us. After anchoring training sessions for the teams involved in young child programmes, we took to the field under 45 degree heat.
We almost looked like sun warriors with our faces covered to block the heat wave that seemed to be fighting for an entry into our eyes, noses, and lungs and bones!
What was amazing was observing team members practice the in-class training content in field and not take any short cuts and in many cases, even take extended sessions!
It's been several months since that visit and distance has kept us from frequent face-to-face interactions as we would have liked. We resolved to overcome this challenge using technology.
The enthusiastic JSS program coordinator often got us all connected through Skype. Print as well as audio- visual material were shared with the JSS team over emails and drop box. We decided to have at least two virtual connects with the entire team – once when the material was shared to orient the team on the same and once after the teams had used the material in community to hear their experience. To keep the momentum going we set up a WhatsApp group through which pictures of action on-ground were shared.
Sincere commitment and strong will have kept us going against all odds. JSS teams have been through three of the 10 KIRAN module themes so far. Hope this iron will grows stronger and firmer in the months to come.
ASER Centre's KIRAN – Knowledge and Involvement for transforming Research into Action for Nutrition – is an effort to address the important early-year domains such as nutrition (food and feeding), health (immunization, basic health awareness, water and sanitation) and the different stages of development. Parental awareness around these issues could go a long way in creating a healthy environment for children at home. Phulwari programme run by JSS aims to provide a crèche facility to all children (six months to 3 years) living in any of the programme villages that JSS serves. The programme supplies supplementary nutritional food, and conducts activities to boost cognitive development among children. The K.I.R.A.N methodology was to be explored to meet the need of engaging with mothers on early years nutrition, health and development issues. Spending a few days with JSS led to the mutual decision of using KIRAN material on early years nutrition, health and development as well as our experiences from training Pratham teams to integrate this dimension into the ongoing JSS Phulwari programme in two districts across all the JSS program villages.


Garment dyed & sand washed for an exceptionally soft + comfortable fit!
We set out with a simple objective to create the best pair of cutoffs we could dream of. In order to pull it off, we first needed to develop the perfect fabric: something that was remarkably comfortable but could also take a bit of beating - A fabric that would actually become better with time and wear. Next it was on to fit: We wanted modern without too much excess in the rise and leg proportion along with an ideal inseam length. After much deliberation between our design team and the production crew over at Save Khaki, we achieved our objective,...the perfect pair of Beach Cutoffs.


Deep breaths raise your bodys blood oxygen levels, which can help increase your energy and alertness by lowering blood pressure and slowing your heart rate. The idea is to breathe deeply into your belly, not your chest. While sitting upright, inhale slowly through your nose and feel your abdomen push out, then exhale slowly through your mouth. Alternatively, a method used for quick energy in yoga calls for quick inhaling and exhaling through your nose while your mouth is closed. It is recommended to take 3 of these rapid breaths within a second, and repeat up to 15 seconds.
If you have an office job like so many Americans, try getting a little exercise either on your lunch hour or if you get a shorter break throughout the day. A study from California State University, Long Beach suggested that the participants had a longer time of increased energy after taking a 10 minute walk than they did if they ate a candy bar or other sugary quick fix. The reason that a little brisk exercise works better than a store bought solution is that walking pumps oxygen through your veins and muscles.
Your brain is made of 83% water, so it just makes sense that if youre dehydrated its not going to function as well as it could or should. Fatigue isnt the only symptom of dehydration of course, it can also cause depression, confusion, aggravation, constipation, and headaches. Make sure you drink plenty of water, or eat foods that have high water content like fruits and vegetables. Excess caffeine can cause dehydration, so be sure to balance it carefully.


Take a stroll around the ancient capital of Mann and discover the interesting facts and stories that this town has to tell. Capital of the Island until 1869, Castletown is made up of small winding streets, picturesque fishing cottages along the harbour and a Viking castle that towers over the centre of the town.
Visit the famous Castle Rushen, one of the best preserved medieval castles in the world and listen to stories of the Lords of Mann that once resided there as well as the varied and fascinating history of this market town. Walk along the harbour which home to the world-famous Tin Bath Races as well as the site of the old Brewery and the large fishing vessels from its days as a thriving fishing port.
On the trail you can also see various curiousities and attractions, such as the Nautical Museum, Old House of Keys and Hango Hill, which was an old execution site and now provides stunning views across Castletown Bay to Langness Lighthouse in the distance.
The walk is mostly flat and takes around one hour to complete.
There are various cafes and restaurants along the way to stop for a bite to eat, and public toilets can be found at the Castletown Civic Centre off Market Square or at the Train Station just along the river.


text:
Jared Kushner confidant Ken Kurson in plea negotiations with prosecutors in cyberstalking case, filing says
Published Fri, Nov 20 20203:58 PM EST Updated Fri, Nov 20 20205:16 PM EST
Dan Mangan@_DanMangan
Ken Kurson, a confidant of President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, is in plea negotiations with federal prosecutors who last month charged him with cyberstalking three people, a court filing indicates.
Kurson, who was editor of the New York Observer newspaper when Kushner owned it, is accused of repeatedly visiting his victims at work, making false complaints with their employers and "malicious cyber activity."
The complaint says Kurson blamed one victim, with whom he had been friends for more than two decades, "for the dissolution of his marriage."
Ken Kurson and Jared Kushner attend The New York Observer Celebrates Robert Kurson's New Book PIRATE HUNTERS at The Rusty Knot on June 15, 2015 in New York City.
J. Grassi | Patrick McMullan | Getty Images
Ken Kurson, a confidant of President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, is in plea negotiations with federal prosecutors who last month charged him with cyberstalking three people, a court filing Friday indicated.
In a joint filing by the political consultant Kurson, his lawyer, and prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, federal court, the parties cited those plea talks as they asked a judge to extend the deadline for the filing of either an indictment or another type of charging document typically used when a defendant has agreed to plead guilty.
"They are engaged in plea negotiations, which they believe are likely to result in a disposition of this case without trial," the filing said.
However, it is possible that the case could be resolved without a guilty plea by Kurson, who is free on $100,000 bond, either because he opts to go to trial, or because he would be allowed to participate in a pretrial diversion program, such as anger management.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ramon Reyes agreed to the request, which extends the filing deadline from Dec. 4 to Feb. 4.
Marc Mukasey, Kurson's defense lawyer, declined to comment, as did John Marzulli, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.
While he was editor, Kurson advised the then-presidential candidate Trump for a speech that he delivered to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2016. Kurson later sat in the Trump family box at the Republican National Convention that year.
More recently, he founded a news website, Modern Consensus, which focuses on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. He also serves on the board of the cryptocurrency company Ripple.
The Maplewood, New Jersey, resident, was arrested on a criminal complaint in October, two years after he withdrew his name from consideration for a Trump administration appointment to the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The New York Times reported in July 2018 that two doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York accused Kurson of harassment and that the FBI was notified about their claims as the agency conducted a background check of Kurson for the board seat. The background check led directly to the criminal complaint against him.
The second victim was a co-worker and supervisor of the first victim. The third victim was married to the second victim and worked for a news publication, the complaint says.
The complaint also says FBI agents found evidence that between September 2015 and December 2015, Kurson accessed the email and social media accounts of two of the victims without their knowledge and installed keystroke logging spyware on one victim's computer.
There was also evidence that Kurson contacted victims' employers to make claims that include a "false allegation of improper contact with a minor," according to the complaint.
He used the aliases "Jayden Wagner" and "Eddie Train" in making the false claims, the complaint said.
It also said that in his 2018 questionnaire for a background check by the FBI for his would-be board appointment, "Kurson made multiple false statements and misrepresentations, including falsely certifying that he had never used any other names or aliases." It is a federal crime to lie on such a questionnaire.
At the time of Kurson's arrest, his lawyer Mukasey said, "Ken Kurson is an honorable man, a loving dad, and a brilliant writer. This case is hardly the stuff of a federal criminal prosecution."
"He will get past it," Mukasey said.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Newsletter January 8, 2021
Time to review your vision
Is Your Business Still Heading in the Right Direction?
Brutal. That's how I'd describe 2020. And 2021 isn't shaping up much better. Here we are in our third national lockdown with all the challenges this brings to UK businesses. It's hard to keep ploughing on when the ground you stand on is constantly shifting.
This is why you need faith. Balanced by realism about your current situation. I've been re-reading Jim Collins' seminal books, 'Good to Great' and 'Great by Choice' over Christmas. He describes the experience of James Stockdale – the highest-ranked American prisoner-of-war in the Vietnam War, calling it 'the Stockdale Paradox'.
Stockdale was locked up for a long, long time – over eight years. In this time, many of his fellow prisoners gave up the will to live. They were the optimists. The ones who were saying, we'll be out by Christmas or Easter or their next birthday and eventually ran out of hope. In contrast, Stockdale lived day to day, accepting the reality of his situation. But he never lost faith that he would make it out alive and it would become the defining event of his life.
It's easy to see the parallels. You need to plan for the worst, but hope for the best. As 2021 kicks off, it's time to revisit your vision and purpose. Are you still heading towards the same long term goal? Did this serve you last year? Was it alive in your business or do you need to do more to push it down to staff? Going through this process will help to pull your head up out of the nightmare of COVID, no matter how bad it gets. You'll recognise that growth rarely goes in a straight line. And that 2020 was just a blip. I'm here to tell you, 'Keep the faith. You will come back bigger and stronger'.
How To Drive Innovation Inside Your Organisation with Pete Newell
Are you wondering how your business can innovate better? Are you confusing methodologies and activities with the process of actually keeping and creating a pipeline of innovation?
Then don't miss this hugely insightful episode all about innovation, with the internationally recognised innovation expert, Pete Newell.
Pete finished his 32-year military career with a 3-year tour running the US Army's skunkworks – or in layman's terms, he was the Director of the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF). He had a remit to go and find problems and solve them, using commercial technology to solve a battlefield problem.
Out of the 300 problems he was tasked with solving, he found resolutions for 20 of them. An incredible hit rate.
When he realised he couldn't stay in that role indefinitely, Pete retired from the military to found BMNT, an innovation consultancy and early-stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in US national security, state and local governments, and beyond.
Pete is also founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic programme originally taught at Stanford University.
"[This is] the only class they take in their academic career that allows them to use everything they use in university or network they build to work on a real problem with real people to give them real experience that leads to real jobs."
So to find out what the fundamental things are inside an organisation that you need to do to drive innovation in your business, don't miss this fantastic conversation
Reach or Miss
This podcast is about the customer-focused entrepreneur. Hayut Yogev chats with Guy Kawasaki, John Lee Dumas, Michael Stelzner, Kate Erickson, Chris Brogan, Mark Schaefer, Joe Pulizzi, Marcus Sheridan and more successful entrepreneurs and opinion leaders about their Customers Approach and Focus. The goal is to help entrepreneurs and startup founders to reach business success with the right strategy, marketing and sales approach.
3 Tenets of a Strong Remote Culture
Because of the pandemic, we are now engaged in the largest behavioral experiment in the history of work. The questions we had previously been asking about the future of work in an era of advanced technology are no longer just about the future — they're about now. And among the most pressing questions is: How can we build and sustain a robust culture in our organization if we rarely see each other in person? Can we maintain a shared and strongly felt set of norms, values, and beliefs? Can we really Zoom ourselves to the same level of closeness, collaboration, and mentorship without physical co-location?
Why honing your company's culture should be a top priority in 2021
Now more than ever, leaders are analyzing, debating, and trying to predict what the new year will bring. We have never before experienced such uncertainty and unpredictability affecting all areas of business.
Hire more for skills, less for industry experience
COVID-19 has forced companies to rapidly adapt to changing talent needs. More than 70 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment insurance from March through December. Now, more organizations are converting what were furloughs early in the pandemic to permanent job losses.
Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
From the author: "For the last two years, I've interviewed nearly two hundred world-class performers for my podcast,The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it's the first time they've agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview, and the show is on the cusp of passing 100 million downloads. This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and 'inside baseball' you won't find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new 'guests' you haven't met. What makes the show different is a relentless focus on actionable details. Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I've used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration. I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It's changed my life, and I hope the same for you."
The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries
The Lean Startup is the approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late.
Now is the time to think Lean.
MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR MONDAY
Organise a Review of Your BHAG, Purpose and Values
To kick off 2021, block out a day for your Executive Team and Senior Management to review your BHAG, Purpose and Core Values. Use this larger team to do the acid test. Did your business use the values all day, every day in 2020? If not, discuss what you could do differently this year to make it happen. This merits a full day to do the exercise justice and re-connect your team with the vision.
Prescription For Growth Workshop, Foundry Farm near Salisbury – TBA
A special workshop presented by Justin Roff-Marsh (author of The Machine) and hosted by Dominic Monkhouse at Foundry Farm near Salisbury. Join 21 of your peers (owners and senior executives from mid-sized businesses) and design a simple (but detailed) plan to expedite the growth of your organization.
Scaling Up Business Growth Workshop, Foundry Farm near Salisbury – 18th of March 2021
When the going gets tough, attitude trumps everything. Don't let COVID-19 beat you into the ground and take your business. Treat this pandemic as an accelerator. The "one thing" you've been looking for to pivot, re-evaluate or simply get shit done. Join us on our farm in Wiltshire to walk through our Scaling Up growth programme.
Acetech Summit, Whistler – April 2021 (re-scheduled)
An exclusive annual gathering of high-growth tech CEOs. This powerful three-day summit will transform how you define success and deliver growth in 2021 and beyond.
"Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."
Roald Amundsen at the South Pole
Dominic offers business coaching and management development, strategy planning and organisational change, using tried and tested methods to launch your organisation onto an unparalleled growth trajectory. His programme is a function of his broad experience, his deep expertise and a proven process used by over 2,700 firms worldwide.
Blog January 8, 2021Is your business still heading in the right direction?


text:
I am an idiot
LA Shuttle
MP3 D/L
Outrages: The Big List
Seller Warning
The RV Lifestyle
What is an atheist?
Why We Can't Talk
Flexible Reality
Proud Member of the Reality Based Community
May 1971 Vietnam Protest in D.C. – comparison w/today
Whatabout that 70 Million?
Trump v Raffensberger: Jan 2021
Three cheers for socialism
Fighting COVID at home
Wounded Knee revisited
Historical Snapshot
Business vs Government
You must remember this: SCOTUS vs PAXTON et al
Historical parallels with today's Republican Party
A litany of "why liberals think Trump supporters are stupid"
Perched on a bubble
What's holding up the COVID Relief Bill?
Media conversions in the Canton/Woodstock Georgia area
Why the Homestead Act of 1862 is important today
On the issue of healing the political divide
The short history of the Confederacy
Electoral maps: Now & Then
Lessons Unlearnt
With two days left until the 2020 General Election
Originalism is a straight-jacket
An ancient story
COVID infectious guy saved by free healthcare wants to prevent others from receiving care
« Massage in the time of COVID
Administration corruption map »
trump issues order requiring meat packing plants to stay open
WASHINGTON (AP) Apr 28th, 2020 — President Donald Trump took executive action Tuesday to order meat processing plants to stay open amid concerns over growing coronavirus cases and the impact on the nation's food supply.
The order uses the Defense Production Act to classify meat processing as critical infrastructure to try to prevent a shortage of chicken, pork and other meat on supermarket shelves. Unions fired back, saying the White House was jeopardizing lives and prioritizing cold cuts over workers' health.
More than 20 meatpacking plants have closed temporarily under pressure from local authorities and their own workers because of the virus, including two of the nation's largest, one in Iowa and one in South Dakota. Others have slowed production as workers have fallen ill or stayed home to avoid getting sick.
"Such closures threaten the continued functioning of the national meat and poultry supply chain, undermining critical infrastructure during the national emergency," the order states.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 1.3 million food and retail workers, said Tuesday that 20 food-processing and meatpacking union workers in the U.S. have died of the virus. An estimated 6,500 are sick or have been exposed while working near someone who tested positive, the union says.
As a result, industry leaders have warned that consumers could see meat shortages in a matter of days. Tyson Foods Inc., one of the world's largest food companies, ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times and other newspapers Sunday warning, "The food supply chain is breaking."
"As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain," it read.
Tyson suspended operations at its pork plant in Waterloo, Iowa after a slew of infections, and Smithfield Foods halted production at its plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, after an outbreak infected 853 workers there.
The 15 largest pork-packing plants account for 60% of all pork processed in the U.S., and the country has already seen a 25% reduction in pork slaughter capacity, according to UFCW.
A senior White House official said the administration was trying to prevent a situation in which a "vast majority" of the nation's meat processing plants might have temporarily closed operations, reducing the availability of meat in supermarkets by as much as 80%.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the order before its release, said the White House was also working with the Labor Department to provide enhanced safety guidance for meatpacking workers. That will include trying to minimize the risk to workers who may be prone to serious complications from the virus, including strongly recommending those over the age of 65 and with preexisting conditions stay home.
The order, which was developed in consultation with industry leaders including Tyson and Smithfield, is designed, in part, to provide companies with additional liability protections in case workers get sick.
Trump on Tuesday said the order would address what he described as a "legal roadblock." It will "solve any liability problems where they had certain liability problems and we'll be in very good shape."
But UFCW International President Marc Perrone said that more must be done to protect the safety of workers.
"Simply put, we cannot have a secure food supply without the safety of these workers," he said in a statement, urging the administration "to immediately enact clear and enforceable safety standards" and compel companies to provide protective equipment, make daily testing available to workers, and enforce physical distancing, among other measures.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said the administration should have acted earlier to put safety measures in place.
"We only wish that this administration cared as much about the lives of working people as it does about meat, pork and poultry products," he said.
And Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7, which represents 3,000 workers at the JBS meat processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, said the order "will only ensure that more workers get sick, jeopardizing lives, family's income, communities, and of course, the country's food supply chain."
The administration is working with companies to help them secure protective equipment, like face shields and masks, and ramp up testing, the official said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have issued extensive guidelines on steps companies and workers should take.
Protecting workers can be especially challenging at plants that typically employ thousands of people who often work side-by-side carving meat, making social distancing all but impossible. Some companies have been working to reduce infections by checking workers' temperatures, staggering breaks and altering start times. Owners said they have also done more to clean plants and added plastic shields between workstations.
When outbreaks have happened, local public health agencies have pushed in some cases for temporary closures so they can limit wider outbreaks in communities and conduct mass testing to determine who is carrying the virus. Some plants have also briefly closed for deep cleaning and to install new safety measures.
Yet concerns about working conditions persist and have led some to walk off the job. In central Minnesota, some workers at the Pilgrim's Pride poultry plant walked out Monday night to protest the company's record on worker safety.
Mohamed Goni, an organizer with Greater Minnesota Worker Center, said workers have complained the company is not sharing information about sick colleagues, has not implemented social distancing on the line, and that workers who were sick returned after just two or three days, and some workers who developed symptoms were not allowed to leave when they asked to go home.
"The company refused, saying there would be a shortage of workers," Goni said, adding that 80% to 85% of the plant's workers are Somali.
"They have other family members living with them — elderly, children, people with underlying conditions. So if one of them brings that to their homes, it's going to be more worse and a more serious problem," Goni said.
Cameron Bruett, head of corporate affairs for JBS USA and Pilgrim's, said in an email that employees are never forced to work or punished for an absence due to health reasons.
"We will endeavor to keep our facilities open to help feed the nation, but we will not operate a facility if we do not believe it is safe. The health and safety of our team members remains our number one priority," Bruett said.
In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem has said she hopes to see a reopening plan for Smithfield this week, but sidestepped questions Tuesday about whether she agreed with Trump's order, which might have prevented the Sioux Falls plant from shutting down if it had been in place earlier.
"We need to keep (plants) running, but we also need to protect people," Noem said.
Associated Press writers Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Iowa; Amy Forliti in Minneapolis; and Stephen Groves in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, contributed to this report.
April 28th, 2020 | Category: Uncategorized
Flexible Reality Links
Brian Koberlein's "One Universe at a Time"
Brainpickings: Arts & Letters
Greenhouse Gas Information
Mark Thoma's Economist's View Blog
Media Bias Fact Check Analysis
Microwaving Vegetable Done Right
Uglyhedgehog: Photography Blog
Tikun Olam
Techrights
Tom Dispatch: World View - Foreign Affairs
Hellen Faire on It's time for these 101 ridiculous science 'facts' to die
perachtis on Wounded Knee revisited
perachtis on Jeffrey Goldberg's Article in The Atlantic
Greg Raven on "This I Believe" – by Lori Gallagher Witt
perachtis on We are living in a failed State
Copyright © 2021 Flexible Reality - All Rights Reserved


text:
More in Tweets
Kangana Ranaut Seeks Quashing Of FIR From Bombay HC, Says Her Tweets Didn't Incite Violence
Kangana Ranaut is migrating to Koo. Hopefully, she will let Twitter breathe.
Feb. 17, 2021, 11:39 a.m.
Twitterati Rejoice As Retweets Return To The Way They Used To Be
People are thrilled retweets are back to normal after Twitter rolls back automatic 'Quote Tweets'.
Dec. 17, 2020, 12:37 p.m.
'Tooter', India's Alternative To Social Networking Site Twitter Goes Viral
'Tooter' has been active since July 2020 and works a lot like Twitter. It has even got a similar blue and white interface to Twitter.
15 Best Tweets Of The Week, Including Hilarious Cardi B Edits
Twitter Is Testing A New 'Quotes' Counter
Aug. 10, 2020, 11:40 a.m.
The 17 Best Tweets Of The Week, Including Beans, Donald Trump Memes, and Speed Racer
Aug. 7, 2020, 3 p.m.
The 14 Best Tweets Of The Week, Including Cake... Lots Of Cake
Here Are The 20 Best tweets Of 2020, So Far
Twitter's Audio Tweets Reveal A Bigger Accessibility Problem
June 22, 2020, 12:20 p.m.
Here Are The 14 Best Tweets Of The Week
Twitter Starts Rolling Out Audio Tweets
People Are Using Twitter's New Audio Tweet Feature To Mostly Troll And Joke
June 18, 2020, 11:10 a.m.
New Meme Has Some Great Ideas For What To Put Up Instead Of Christopher Columbus Statues
Twitter Finally Allows Users To Schedule Tweets Via The Web App
Twitter is launching two new features: The ability to save a tweet as a draft, as well as the ability to schedule a tweet to send at a specific time.
'Retweets With Comments' Now Available On Twitter For Android And Web
Not too long ago, Twitter announced a new feature to make it easier for users to find 'Retweets with Comments'. At the time the feature was available only to iOS users. Now, Twitter has announced that the feature is being rolled out for Android and Web users.
We Collected The 17 Best Tweets From This Week Because... Why Not?
May 8, 2020, 8 p.m.
We've Rounded Up The 20 Best Tweets From This Week
May 1, 2020, 3:20 p.m.
Here Are The 10 Best Tweets That Got Us Through The Week
Do Yourself A Favor In 2020: Mute Elon Musk
Jan. 6, 2020, 12:10 p.m.
'Avengers: Endgame' Was The Most Tweeted About Movie Of 2019 And We Aren't Surprised
This was inevitable!
FM Nirmala Sitharaman Blames the Generation For Economic Slowdown. Millennials React With Hilarious Twitter Protest
Millennials these days won't cause economic meltdowns because they can't handle their own!
Pakistan PM Imran Khan Turns His Official Residence Into A Wedding Venue. Trolls Are Triggered!
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was recently found using his house as a wedding residence and that caused the internet to outrage!
Aug. 5, 2019, 2:58 p.m.
Mahershala Ali Is The New 'Blade' And Fans Think He Is Perfect!
After months of speculation, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige confirmed that they're making a 'Blade' solo movie and it's going to star Mahershala Ali!
Elon Musk Reveals His Plan To Drink Coffee On Mars And Twitter Can't Stop Making Jokes
Elon Musk tweeted about his plans regarding drinking coffee on Mars as SpaceX geared up for Falcon Heavy Rocket launch.
Terrible Twitter Bug Is Sending 'Unfollow Notifications'. Users Could Get Real Petty!
Let the Twitter wars begin!
Twitter Thread About Women Carrying Protection On Their Daily Runs Is Worrisome
A tweet by Amanda Deibert started a thread of responses from women, who revealed things they carried along on their morning runs to protect themselves. The thread paints a rather terrifying picture of women's safety.
Did You Spot These Fandom Camps At the Met Gala? Memers Did!
There Were More Fandoms Represented At the Met Gala Than You Think!
Coldplay's Chris Martin Tweets His Love For Shah Rukh Khan, and We Kinda STAN
How do you resist the Badshah's charm? You don't.
These films in 2018 had Anurag Kashyap jealous and he should be
Bollywood really did produce films that prompt a filmmaker's envy


HOME / 10 "DO NOT DO" rules before buying a home.
1. DO NOT change your job and even less decide to become self-employed as you will be required minimum 2 years income taxes. Lenders want income stability so you are less likely to default on the loan.
2. DO NOT change banks or you will be required a lot of information in order to source your deposits.
3. DO NOT buy anything once you have prequalified with your loan officer. Any new purchase will increase your debt-to-income ratios and thus might result in a loan denial.
4. DO NOT buy furniture on credit before closing. EVEN if you are promised no interest payments until the future. Loans have been denied at closing day due to new debts undisclosed at application. Lenders and Banks review your credit again on closing day.
5. DO NOT be late on your credit card payments nor increase its balances. Your loan approval is based on first credit score enquire. Any other credit move might result in loan being denied in the middle of the process.
6. DO NOT make any cash deposits 2 months prior a loan submission!
Limit your deposits preferably from your work related compensation. All deposits need to be sourced and explained or else banks and lenders might not accept your asset account. Your down payment needs to be "sitting" in your account for at least two months prior to application (known as "seasoning") so funds don't just appear "out of nowhere".
7. DO NOT lie on your loan application. Sounds simple, right? Omitting recent debts not showing on credit or liabilities you have or fudge your income is fraud.
8. DO NOT co-sign a loan for anyone. Even if you're not the one making the payments on that loan, it will show up on your credit and thus increase your debt-to-income ratio.
9. DO NOT make too many inquiries on your credit. Looking for new credit translates into higher risk for lenders. If your inquiries are related to your mortgage search, it usually doesn't affect your credit score because the assumption is you are rate shopping. But opening credit accounts within a short period of time represents some risk and your credit could take a hit. It's probably not a huge factor in your calculating your ability to repay a loan but why take a chance at this juncture?
10. DO NOT spend the money you will need for closing costs. Part of the price of financing a loan is the closing costs and you'll likely have some responsibility for paying them. Make sure you have enough saved for your share of the obligation.


Just-baked and hot out of the oven Savory, Oven-Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Sage. Click on other pix to enlarge and read captions.
These 'Red Jewels' have been scrubbed and are ready to slice--leave skins on for maximum nutrition.
The orange flesh of sweet potatoes is full of beta carotene.
You'll need a Dutch oven or heavy pot with lid to roast the vegetables in. Use olive oil and/or butter for roasting and add the onions first.
Stir the chopped sweet potatoes together with the onions.
After the first roast of onions and sweet potatoes, add the garlic, sage leaves and chile pepper, if desired.
Here's a favorite combo: savory, oven-roasted sweet potatoes served with wilted greens or kale salad and baked tofu (which was cooked at the same time as the sweet potaotes).
This recipe is easy and oh-so delicious--sort of like a sweet potato hash. The sage is a lovely seasonal complement to the sweetness of the vegetables, however thyme or oregano could also be used. The chile pepper adds a nice pungent touch; it is optional.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Put oil and/or butter into large heavy soup pot, Dutch oven or ovenproof casserole dish, which has a lid. Add the onion and stir to coat. Add the sweet potato and toss with onion; season well with salt and pepper. Place the pot (without the lid) into the hot oven and set the timer for 15 minutes.
Carefully remove hot pan from oven and add the sage, garlic and chiles. Cover the pot and return to the oven. Set the timer for 35 minutes. Remove the pot from the oven and test for doneness. The sweet potatoes should be soft and tender. If they are not, return to the oven for 10 minutes more at 350 degrees F. Let stand, covered for 5 to 10 minutes until ready to serve.
These are so delicious just as they are and I love serving them with wilted greens--it is a great combo of flavors. They are wonderful on pasta, pizza, served with protein like tofu, bean burgers, fried eggs, poultry or meat. They are good rolled up in enchiladas and added to soup, beans or rice.


text:
Outmigration: Only District 6 Retains Its Black Population
Chris Roberts • 03/14/2012 4:00 am
San Francisco's Boom 2.0 is in real estate as well as technology. While some of the condominium high-rises built in South of Market over the last decade remain half-full, new construction continues, and more residential skyscrapers are planned. This makes District 6 — which includes SOMA, South Beach and Mission Bay — the city's most populous and most densely populated.
District 6 is also the city's lone exception to a troubling sociological phenomenon. African-American residents continue to vacate San Francisco, with the city's black population shrinking from 60,000 in 2000 to 48,000 in 2010, according to census figures — a decrease of 20 percent. But there's no such exodus in District 6, where 15 percent of the city's overall black population now lives, up from 10 percent in 2000. And that figure grows if you include residents who identify as black and another race.
But that doesn't mean these newcomers are moving on up next to Joe Montana and Willie Brown in SOMA high-rises: Many are instead moving into SROs in the Tenderloin and along the Sixth Street corridor. The city's Skid Row — and Treasure Island in the bay, also counted as District 6 — houses 5,421 of the district's 7,500 black people. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a Philadelphia lawyer to figure out why," says Rev. Amos Brown, the pastor of Third Street Baptist Church and president of the local chapter of the NAACP.
"I don't think it's by choice," said organizer Macio Lyons, who sits on the city's Osiris Coalition, a council of black leaders. "They're getting in where they can get in." According to a pair of reports on this issue, the African-Americans moving to the Tenderloin are either poor, just out of jail, or without the support of family or community structures. The unemployment rate for black San Franciscans is double that of non-blacks even in boom years, which is partially why the median income for blacks is about half that of whites.
A staggering 14 percent of black men have been arrested for a felony; with the black middle class long since fled to Vallejo or Antioch, the families who stay often take public or subsidized housing, which isn't open to people with a criminal record. That leaves the TL, with its cheap or city-subsidized rooms operated by nonprofits or slumlords.
What stings the most is that this is nothing new: One of the reports, on economic disparity, was published in 1993; the other, dealing with the crisis of outmigration, was released in 2009. Both identified jobs and education as key issues.
To its credit, Mayor Ed Lee's administration addressed jobs in the Tenderloin with one of his very first moves in office, but economic benefits from the much-ballyhooed Twitter tax break have yet to trickle down to black residents, who "are not tied into the economic pipeline of this city," said Sharen Hewitt, a longtime organizer and activist for Visitacion Valley's notorious Sunnydale housing projects, who sat on the task force that created the outmigration report.
If the city's current leadership can figure it out, it will have solved a problem that dates to the 1960s. And if it can't? "The endgame," Hewitt said, "is total removal," for which the TL and District 6 are merely a way station.
Tags: Columns, National Football Conference, National Football League, NFC West, San Francisco 49ers
State Poised to End Mandatory Minimums for Drugs
Cyclists and Stop Signs: New Legislation Would Change Law
By Christopher B. Dolan and Emile A. Davis
Confronting Discrimination: Strength in Numbers
By Christopher B. Dolan and Vanessa C. Deniston
By Grace Hase


text:
Feast Gone Awry Brings Creativity to the Table
A dose of Michigan expertise rescues a meal in China
By Ruth Mossok Johnston Special to The Christian Science Monitor
March 26, 1998 | SHANGHAI, CHINA
'Whether it's the sourcing of food products, or the cultural cooking differences from chefs located globally, I've always been fascinated by the shear adventure of cooking," says Michigan chef Keith Famie. "This was an adventure, minus the simplicity," he says speaking of an event that took place last fall in Shanghai.
The plan seemed straightforward enough: a feast in Shanghai to celebrate the opening of a Michigan trade office in China. A Chinese customs curve ball couldn't have been foreseen. After months of planning and packing the best of the state's products, Chef Famie was in Shanghai to organize and coordinate the event.
Then came the glitch: China's customs office wouldn't allow the products to enter their country.
With the clock ticking and a rented portable phone glued to his ear, Mr. Famie tried for three days to untie the Gordian knot, only to become more entangled.
He spent three hours on a Shanghai street corner trying to enter the carefully guarded American embassy and nine long hours at the customs office at the airport trying to release his treasured Michigan dried cherries and blueberries, frozen pickerel, pumpkin butter, dried morel mushrooms, black walnuts and cherry-pecan sausage..
As President Truman said, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Famie didn't need to get out of the kitchen. He had to create a new one.
"I'm used to living on the edge. I don't plan it that way, it's just what usually happens," he says.
The proverbial "edge" was an understatement. Ninety plus dignitaries and business people were there anticipating a meal laden with Michigan products, and national sponsors back in the US were expecting their level of commitment to be recognized in China. The determined Famie was there to make it happen. Not just for them, but for himself and the Wisne family who owns Fort, a Birmingham, Mich., restaurant where Famie, is chef.
Toni Wisne Young was to arrive in Shanghai from the States on Friday night, and Famie was still without products and behind schedule.
A new menu was quickly drafted (just in case the food wasn't released), jobs were assigned, production schedule completed, and minds were reassured and redirected.
With his sous chef Donna Brown, Famie knew that on Saturday when he was still struggling with customs, Ms. Brown and her crew, pastry chef Ralph Macioce, and waiter Mathias McGuire would be feverishly working in the kitchen of the Portman Shangri-La Hotel, prepping whatever they could.
All Saturday, they kept in touch with Famie by portable phone, waiting for their leader to call with good news. But the good news never came. Plan B was now in effect - a new, revised menu; one utilizing the talents of Michigan chefs, rather than their state's products.
Out of adversity, not only came great opportunity, but great irony - the Shangri-La's new executive chef, Richard Ney, happened to be a native of Michigan. Chef Ney was willing to pitch in with every aspect of the dinner.
Ney supplied the Fort staff with the necessary ingredients, a few additional sets of hands, and all the equipment necessary to pull the dinner together.
A customs call at 11 p.m. came that night, as they were dining at a local restaurant: finally, some good news - the nonfood and display items were to be released. So, after a multitude of foreign and local phone calls, and some high-powered maneuvering, Famie's persistence had saved the day - or most of it..
What was this Michigan-Shanghai dinner about anyway? It was to be the bridging of relationships, the flavor of friendship, the commitment to excellence. And that was certainly delivered on Sunday - along with the nonfood, display items.
Michigan and China worked together to make this thing happen, and splendidly, with a long buffet table beautifully decorated by Mathias, a revised menu directed by Famie, and a lot of sweating and chopping.
A long row of chaffing dishes and platters adorned with delectable delights were presented.
American business executives and associates living in Shanghai, and honored Chinese guests sampled the flavorful and unusual delicacies including Whitefish Wonton (using local Asian smoked fish), Duck Breast with Blackberry, Shiitake, and Molasses Sauce, Chicken-Chutney- Mushroom Terrine.
But most of all, relationships were formed, friendships were kindled, and a commitment between the state of Michigan and China, was certainly enhanced.
Duck Breast With Blackberry- Shiitake-Molasses Sauce
1 carrot, peeled and finely diced
1 celery rib, finely diced
1 cup diced shiitake mushrooms
1 cup fresh or frozen blackberries
1 tablespoon molasses
2 cups chicken, duck, or veal stock
1 small sprig fresh thyme, chopped
Heat 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan; add carrots, celery, and shiitakes. Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes stirring constantly.
Add blackberries. Cook for another 3 minutes while stirring. Add molasses, pepper, and stock. Simmer 10 to 15 minutes on low heat. Press ingredients through a fine stainer. Pour juices back in saucepan and cook on medium heat; whisk in 1 tablespoon of butter. Set aside.
FOR THE DUCK:
4 6-ounce duck breasts with the skin on
(Large head of steamed Chinese cabbage)
In a hot saut pan, add olive oil. Saut duck breasts, skin side down, until thoroughly browned. Turn duck and brown the meat side. Place duck on an oven-proof dish; bake in pre-heated 400 degree F. oven until medium rare (8-10 minutes). Let rest 10 minutes before slicing.
Slice duck and arrange on a bed of steamed Napa (Chinese) cabbage; top with sauce.
Cover Story Return to China: One reporter finds a nation that has gone from bicycles to bullet trains
Cover Story 'Last Boat Out of Shanghai' has four stories at once personal and universal
Cover Story Disney opens 'distinctly Chinese' Shanghai park
https://www.csmonitor.com/1998/0326/032698.feat.food.2.html


Questionable questionnaires: the tool of the fool. | Helping the best to get better!
← Methodology of training 2.0 – Component 1: Individuality.
Questionable questionnaires: the tool of the fool.
I bet you have filled out questionnaires like we all had to do at one time: a paper form (or a digital one) with questions, yes/no, multiple choice or open questions, to be answered by you for other people to know more about you.
And sometimes there is no problem in doing that, the answers are easy and based on facts, like for athletes: what sports do you do, when did you start in your sport, what is you birthdate, your weight or your height? All reasonable easy to answer, but not completely accurate, take for instance your weight and height in your passport probably filled out a long time ago and often estimated instead of measured.
No, my problem is that I see more and more questionnaires being used as a "scientific" tool to derive useful information from individuals or groups.
Here are my objections: most questions aren't about objective measurable information, like bodyweight or birthdate, but just a subjective self-estimation, in my case about your health or about stress.
And I see a huge problem here: first of all these questions are subject to be blurred by intentions: the intention of the questioner and the intention of the one who has to answer the questions. An example: the weird question we have to answer when travelling to the USA: it goes something like: "do you seek to espionage, sabotage, export violations, or any other illegal activity while in the US?" yes/no.
I wonder how many people have answered this question with: yes…….. (and if they did, why they did it).
Have you ever re-read your own curriculum since the last time you applied for a job? Is that the "real" you or did you skip, ignore, forget, or play down your less desirable qualities? And during a job interview you are asked whether you are, let's say "stress-resilient" or a "team player". Would you really have answered that you are a fragile as Chinese porcelain when it comes to stress, or that basically you are a nervous wreck that tends to crack under pressure….? Or that in reality you are a pure individualist who likes to work according to his/her own rules?
No, of course not, because of the intentions of the questions, you just give socially desirable answers.
And these are answers that you probably have enough (self-)knowledge about.
But what about the question: do you possess an adequate mental resilience? What is adequate and what is resilience? It depends on your definition and your frame of reference.
We even see questionnaires being used as a measure of heath and I cannot disagree more with that.
Our car comes with a manual and has a dashboard that shows us objectively what is happening with our car, the temperature of oil and water, the amount of petrol left, the RPM and the speed, etc.
Our organism just did not come with a manual, nor do we have a dashboard, so that makes it hard to tell if we have a headache from drinking too little coffee or if it is because of a brain tumor. We cannot judge if the pain on our left part of our upper body is because we slept on our left shoulder or if this is the sign of a heart attack. That is why the expression "listening to your body" is ridiculous, our body does not speak like a dashboard, but just mumbles at most, "pain, pain" without the slightest indication of what the cause is. If our body could speak like a dashboard, we'd never have to take an X-ray, MRI, ECG or take blood…..
Even worse you can have a disease for a long time, even for years, like hypertension, diabetes or a tumor, without any noticeable sign or symptom.
That makes the filling out of a questionnaire for the purpose of measuring e.g. health a questionable activity.
A field in which questionnaires often are used is nutrition where dieticians make you write down what you ate over e.g. the last week. Here the differences between the results of the questionnaire and the real caloric intake by measurement are no less than shocking; there is up to 40% underreporting of calories!
You can see this phenomenon when you watch weight-loss programs on TV where a family with a weight-problem is visited by a weight-loss consultant who places cameras in the house and asks the people how much they ate that day. "How many spoons of gravy did you take with your potatoes?" "One, I always take only one spoon". Studying the recordings however show that this person took 5 spoons of gravy with his potatoes. He probably wasn't lying to the consultant, he knew everything was recorded, still, his perception was very distorted.
Yes, of course, I can see the advantages of using questionnaires to get information: it's cheap, it's fast and it's very efficient, but there is a huge price to pay in terms of value and reliability.
I don't believe that somebody has a normal blood pressure because they wrote it down, I don't believe that people are getting overweight from only drinking water, just because they filled it out on a form. I refuse to believe that people are sick or healthy, stressed or not, or that athletes are tired or "in good shape" just because they say so or filled out the questionnaire. Questionnaires are not a proper alternative for objective testing or measurements. It's not that I believe that people intentionally lie in their answers, I believe they honestly don't really know or their answers are tainted by their subjective perception or their beliefs.
Questionnaires: be very critical when using them.
Scholler, D.A; Foreyt, J; Thomas, D; Self-report–based estimates of energy intake offer an inadequate basis for scientific conclusions; Am. J Clin. Nutr.Vol.97, No.6, 2-13, pg.1413-1415.
Kipnis, V; Midthune, D; Friedman, L: Bias in dietary-report instruments and its implications for nutritional epidemiology; Public Health Nutrition, Vol.5, Issue 6a, 2002, pg.915-923.
Schatzkin, A; Kipnis, V: A comparison of a food frequency questionnaire with a 24-hour recall for use in an epidemiological cohort study: results from the biomarker-based Observing Protein and Energy Nutrition (OPEN) study; Int.J.Epidemiology, Vol.32, 2003, pg.1054-1062.


A team of professionals will offer you a bespoke service thanks to their sound knowledge of the business world, the transformation of companies and their understanding of the various industries and services.
Because all our clients are unique, so we are for them. Our ethic drives us to offer our clients a personalised service based on a sound knowledge of their markets and the competition.
An experienced team of direct approach recruitment specialists.
Specialist partners: a qualified search team with the same objectives in terms of quality, confidentiality and responsiveness.
Partners, Career Transition Consultants and Certified Coaches who assist our candidates through the various stages of their career and contribute to their personal development.
We enjoy managing a network of talented men and women and guiding them in their career choices, and our vocation ensures commitment, loyalty and dedication.
We offer our clients a personalised service based on a sound knowledge of their markets and the competition. We can therefore vouch for the strategic information we receive and guarantee the utmost confidentiality.


text: CREATE TABLE ${0} (id int, str text, num int);

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


>> inconsistent IPv4/IPv6 business relationships (peering, etc).
>> to its fullest.  Select another carrier.
> when Cogent is one of them?
I know that the following IPv4 as-paths appear to enumerate transit paths where the providers can do IPv6 transit as well.
If HE does not take advantage of those existing IP transit connections for whichever IP version I'm not sure where I would cast blame.  Perhaps those ports don't have IPv6.  I have my own opinions about peering disputes which you can obtain privately.


text:
Home Entertainment & Pop Culture Leisure & Nightlife
Alternate titles: British Commonwealth Games, British Empire Games, British Empire and Commonwealth Games
https://www.britannica.com/sports/Commonwealth-Games
Official Site of Commonwealth Games Federation
Commonwealth Games - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
Commonwealth Games - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
public games and contests
Notable Honorees:
Cathy Freeman Prakash Padukone Milkha Singh Marjorie Jackson
Commonwealth Games, also called (1930–54) British Empire Games, or (1954–66) British Empire and Commonwealth Games, or (1966–74) British Commonwealth Games, quadrennial sports competition embracing athletics (track and field), gymnastics, bowls, and swimming events for both men and women, and boxing, cycling, shooting, weight lifting, and wrestling for men only. Rowing, shooting, badminton, and fencing have also been included occasionally. Participants must be amateurs and must be qualified by birth or residence in some member country (or a dependency of a member country) of the Commonwealth.
The Reverend Astley Cooper of Yorkshire, Eng., broached the idea of such games in 1891, and the inaugural British Empire Games were held at Hamilton, Ont., in 1930. Eleven countries sent teams for a program of athletics, lawn bowls, boxing, rowing, swimming, and wrestling, and the English team emerged with the largest share of medals. It was agreed that the games would be held in varying Commonwealth cities at four-year intervals, preferably midway between the Olympic Games. The games have been held except in the years 1942 and 1946. Women were included from the outset, and women's athletics events began to be included in 1934.


I love transforming pieces of furniture, and dressers are among my favorites, especially when said dresser is free. I got this dresser on New Year's Eve, and I've had it in storage ever since. It was in a friend's neighborhood, and when se called me to tell me it was on the side of the road it was already dark. I just snatched it up, and covered it with plastic till the next day. It has some issues for sure, and there was a lot of junk inside all the drawers. That is candle wax all over the top of it. When I dug it out of storage a couple of weeks ago, I started examining the drawers. Two of the original drawers were missing their guides, so I removed the guides from the top two drawers and decided to do away with them and add shelves. I scraped all the candle wax off, and used some TSP and some sandpaper to get a good surface for painting. I cut some thin plywood shelves and used my edge banding on the front of the plywood to give it a nice edge. (this is just a dry fit) Do you remember when I routed the drawers on the tall black cabinet? I recently saw Diane's winning entry in the BHG Final Four Challenge and I was inspired to change up these drawers. By adding some thin plywood, suddenly one drawer looks like two! Then I remembered I had these small picture frames that I got from my sister a couple of years ago. I played around with some configurations, sent jamie some pictures to ask her opinion, and we decided on this. I grabbed one of my drawer pulls that I used on that black cabinet to see how it looks. I'm liking it! I used Gorilla Wood Glue to attach the small frames to the thin plywood, while my combination square to make sure the sides were even all around. I used clamps to hold the frames in place till the Gorilla Wood Glue dries. The drawer guides were broken, and I was unable to secure them with staples or screws, so I used my Gorilla Epoxy. It stinks, but it WORKS! I also used the Gorilla Wood Glue to hold down the top shelves. NOTE: I have removed the decorative piece on the bottom that makes this piece look like a dresser and added 1×6's ripped to the proper size to allow the drawers to open. I sanded all the drawer fronts to remove the original finish. Are you still with me? This is becoming one very long tutorial. I hope you're learning something. This is where I wish I had noticed something, and made a change. Can you spot it? I grabbed a bunch of scrap plywood pieces, and I should have paid more attention when cutting them that the grains matched better. By the way, I used my nail gun to attach the plywood and the frame to the drawer. This is after 1 coat of Minwax Golden Oak, but I think they look too new. I was going for a more "used/aged" look. I added some Minwax Jacobean all over, adding it a little heavier in some places, I like it better now. It was time for the dresser to head to the paint booth for it's primer makeover with my Homeright Finish Max Pro . I was so excited to see how the drawers were going to look, I had to insert one just to get a look. I bought a gallon of a white semi-gloss in Behr Premium Plus Ultra. I love the white and wood tones together, do you? I got these three options of hardware from my friends at D Lawless Hardware. The top left is Antique Copper Cabinet Label Holder, the top right is Matte Chrome Cup Pull the bottom right is Antique Copper Cup Pull with Screw Heads. Again, I sent the picture to Jamie to get her opinion. We were both in agreement, that the Label Holder one best suits this piece. I drilled tiny pilot holes and installed the pulls with some antique copper screws using my tape measure to the distance. In order to add these wheels to the media center, I attached a small piece of 2×4 on each corner and used 1 7/8" drywall screws to secure them. If you look closely, you can see that I drilled a pilot hole before inserting the screw. Can you believe that it is the same piece as that free dresser? It was such a fun project to work on, I can't wait for it to find a new forever home.
Have you changed up a dresser into something else?
Now that's a transformation! I would have been tempted to pass on that one, but you totally saved it! And I love the label holder pulls too!
You did a great job on this one. I DO LIKE the wood and white paint. Jamie and you both have a great eye for detail…I like that hardware.
love the white and the wood! looks really beautiful!
You never cease to amaze with your ideas, Gail! As Sylvia said – I'd love to give this piece it's forever home and would in half a heartbeat! I've always loved rich woodtones and with the white, they really stand out. Loving it!
Love it….love the drawers. Great job.
Wow you sure are talented. I just love this piece. Wish I could turn an old piece of furniture into a masterpiece.
I have once question: How do you keep gorilla glue from hardening?
I buy the stuff use it once, make sure the air is all out, but when I try to use it again, it is hard as a rock….
Gorilla Wood Glue? I store mine for months before I go through the bottle, and I've never had it harden. I've had it dry up on the spout that I have to clean off, but that's it.
So totally awesome!! The drawer fronts are genius, truly! I love love love it!!! Yea Gail!
What a great makeover! Unbelievable that it's the same piece.
What a cool transformation you did on that Gail! I noticed the grain right away lol But it still looks awesome!
Great Job! What an amazing makeover. Have a great week!
LOVE this transformation!!!! Great job!!!
That's how excited I am, I can only type exclamation points, haha. This is SO COOL. I still have a $10 dresser sitting in the garage from last summer that I never got to. Maybe I can bust that out when it stops raining!
I would be happy to give this fab piece a forever home. Too bad I live near Seattle. Another amazing make over!
Turned out great, again! The wood drawers with the white cabinet looks beautiful.
The dresser – er – media center looks great, Gail! So inspired!
This turned out beautifully! I love the look of the drawers! Great job. I love working with free things…it makes it easier to try something different and new!
I appreciate how you show all the steps! It looks great.
I love this! It came out beautifully. The pulls you picked are perfect!


text:
Learn about our new home at the Hospital for Endocrine Surgery—a dedicated endocrine surgery hospital with no COVID patients
Adrenal Basics
Adrenal Gland Overview
Adrenal Gland Anatomy
Adrenal Gland Function
Adrenal Gland Symptoms
Common Adrenal Problems
Rare Adrenal Problems
State-of-the-Art Treatments
Hospital ER Adrenal Mass
Adrenal Surgery
Basics of Adrenal Surgery
8 Types of Adrenal Surgery
BEST: Mini Back Scope Surgery
Why Mini-Back Scope is Best
Partial Cortical-Sparing Surgery
Robotic Adrenal Surgery
Old Fashioned Open Surgery
Surgery in Children & Elderly
Choosing an Adrenal Surgeon
About Dr. Carling
Benign Adrenal Tumors
The Basics of Adrenal Tumors
Symptoms of Adrenal Tumors
High Blood Pressure Adrenal Tumors
Lab Testing of Adrenal Tumors
X-rays & Scans for Adrenal Tumors
Adrenal Incidentaloma
Risk of Cancer in Adrenal Tumors
Conn's Syndrome: Primary Hyperaldosteronism
Primary Hyperaldosteronism (Conn Syndrome Tumors)
Symptoms of Conns Syndrome
Complications of Conns
Scans and X-Rays for Conns
Adrenal Vein Sampling for Conns
Surgery for Conns Syndrome
Cushing Syndrome: Primary Hypercortisolism
Overview of Pheochromocytoma
Symptoms of Pheochromocytoma
Diagnosis of Pheochromocytoma
Lab testing for Pheochromocytoma
X-rays for Pheochromocytoma
Pheochromocytoma in Children
Surgery for Pheochromocytoma
Overview of Adrenal Cancer
Adrenal Metastasis
Carling Adrenal Center
Surgery videos UPDATED
About Our Center
Become Our Patient
Adrenal Blog
Read our Adrenal Blog!
Adrenal blog covering adrenal tumors, adrenal cancer, adrenal disease and adrenal surgery, from the expert surgeon-scientists at the Carling Adrenal Center.
Robotic Adrenal Surgery and Robot Minimally Invasive Adrenal Surgery
Robotic adrenal surgery is occassionally performed by surgeons to remove adrenal tumors. Robotic adrenal surgery has no advantages, but quite a few disadvantages. The pros and cons of "minimally invasive robotic adrenal surgery" are discussed. Robot-assisted adrenal surgery is NOT the preferred way to remove adrenal tumors and the robot is not used by any adrenal surgery experts world-wide.
What is Robotic Adrenal Surgery?
Robotic adrenal surgery (also called minimally invasive robotic adrenal surgery) is a surgical technique where the surgeon uses a "surgical robot" to assist in the dissection and removal of an adrenal gland. In general, the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages and robotic adrenal surgery is typically perfomed by surgeons who use the robot for other operations (like the prostate) and then adapt the technique for adrenal operations. We know of none of the world's experts at adrenal surgery who perform robotic adrenal surgery routinely.
The Robotic (robot-assisted) adrenalectomy approach is similar to laparoscopic trans-abdominal adrenalectomy (LTA) operation discussed as number 2 on the "8 Types of Adrenal Surgery" page except in the LTA, the surgeon holds the instruments in his hands, and in the robot-assisted operation, the instruments are held by a machine (the "robot") while the surgeon sits across the room manipulating the robotic hands on a TV screen. In BOTH the robotic adrenalectomy and the laparoscopic adrenalectomy, the operation is performed through the front of the abdomen with the instruments needing to work around and past all of the abdominal organs (bowel, stomach, spleen, liver, pancreas, etc) to get to the adrenal gland which is in the back behind all abdominal organs. In almost every case we know of, the reason a surgeon would use the robot due to inexperience with adrenal surgery, and not having performed enough minimally invasive adrenal operations; i.e. the Mini Back Scope Adrenalectomy (MBSA).
Why should laparoscopic and robotic (through the belly) adrenalectomy be avoided? Read more on our adrenal surgery blog
Does the Carling Adrenal Center Perform Robotic Adrenal Surgery?
Dr. Carling is the busiest adrenal surgeon in America, and while he was the Chief of Endocrine Surgery at Yale University he had the opportunity to help develop and evaluate robotic adrenal surgery. It became clear, however, after performing quite a few, that this operative approach to the adrenal glands is not nearly as good as the Mini Back Scope Adrenalectomy (MBSA). Thus, Dr. Carling and all of Yale Surgery abandoned robotic adrenal surgery in about 2010 and virtually every other adrenal surgery expert worldwide has followed suit, coming to the same conclusions. Of all the highest-volume minimally invasive adrenal surgeons in the world, not a single one uses a robot-assisted approach.
There are several problems with robotic adrenal surgery. This technique leads to significant increased operative time and expense of the operation without any added benefit. It generally takes about an hour just to get the robot all set up--and the patient is under general anesthesia during this time, yet the operation hasn't even begun. It is well-known that the length of time under general anesthesia correlates directly with increased risk of nausea, vomiting, and other complications of anesthesia. Using the robot is associated with larger endoscopic incisions (scars) which cause more postoperative pain, longer hospital stays, longer time until the the patients can return to normal activities and work when compared to theMini Back Scope Adrenalectomy (MBSA). The differences are huge.
Another problem with the robot-assisted adrenal surgery technique is that the surgeon can't see things very well. Since the adrenal gland is in the back behind all other abdominal organ, the instruments and the scope (camera) must go through the front of the abdomen past all of the organs. Thus during the operation the bowel, spleen, liver, and the pancreas have to be dissected with the potential for injury. Moreover, intra-abdominal adhesions (scars) may have formed from previous operations such as bariatric surgery (gastric band, sleeve gastrectomy, gastric bypass), gallbladder surgery (cholecystectomy), liver surgery, stomach surgery, bowel surgery of any kind (colectomy, appendectomy, etc) or any previous kind of gynecological operations (C-section, hysterectomy, etc). The robot-assisted adrenalectomy uses an intraabdominal approach and thus have to deal with these adhesions which can lead to injury and complications during the dissection. In fact, robot-assisted adrenalectomy means that the patient is at risk of developing future intra-abdominal abdominal adhesions, which can lead to problems with small bowel obstruction, a fairly common complication of robot-assisted surgical techniques.
For these reasons, we do not endorse robot-assisted adrenal surgery. If your surgeon suggests using a robot to remove your adrenal gland, you should seriously consider other options and consult with a surgeon with more experience in adrenal surgery. To be clear, we believe using the robot for adrenal surgery is a gimmick. And once more, we know all the world's top adrenal surgeons, and all of them abandoned robotic adrenal surgery over a decade ago. There has never been a publication in a surgical journal that shows using the robot is superior to any other adrenal operation except the open operation which is a 1940's technology and should never be done unless the tumor is a cancer (rare). The opposite is true, however, with every expert worldwide saying robotic adrenal surgery is rarely, if ever, the best choice for any patient.
It is possible that robotic surgical systems in the future will become significantly better, more minimalistic, less expensive and cumbersome to use without the current potential increased harm to the patient. The surgeons of the Carling Adrenal Center are always monitoring the development of robotic surgical systems carefully. However, at this time, we do not endorse robot-assisted adrenal surgery.
Why Does My Surgeon Want to Perform Robotic Adrenal Surgery on Me?
In almost every case we know of, the reason a surgeon wants to use a robot is because they are a urologist who performs robotic prostate surgery. But in our opinion, the number one reason a surgeon would use this technique is due to inexperience with adrenal surgery, and not having performed enough minimally invasive adrenal operations; Mini Back Scope Adrenalectomy (MBSA). You should seek the advice of an expert--none of the world's top adrenal surgeons are urologists. Yes, we understand that using the robot is now the best way to perform PROSTATE surgery, and a few other operations, but because the adrenal gland is located in the patient's back, an operation that goes through the back and not through the front of the abdomen is a better choice for almost all patients.
What You Need to Know in One Sentence
If you need adrenal surgery, the best operation for almost everybody is 1) a minimally invasive SCOPE operation, 2) the scopes go through the patient's lower BACK and not through the patients front abdomen... a Mini Back Scope Adrenalectomy (MBSA) and 3) NOT a robot-assisted adrenalectomy.
If Not the Robot, What Operation Should Most People Have?
Our center, as well as all experts worldwide that we know of believe that the "Mini Back Scope Adrenalectomy (MBSA) is the preferred surgical approach for at least 95% of patients with adrenal tumors. High-volume, experienced adrenal surgeons do a better, safer, fasteR and less expensive adrenal operation than surgeons performing robot-assisted adrenalectomy.
Patients needing adrenal surgery travel from all over the world to have adrenal surgery with Dr. Carling, the most experienced adrenal surgeon. This page discusses how you can have your adrenal operation at the Carling Adrenal Center with Dr. Carling himself.
Become Our Patient Here
Mini Back Scope Adrenalectomy (MBSA) - the preferred adrenal operation for 95% of adrenal tumors.
More about our founder Dr. Tobias Carling - the most experienced adrenal surgeon in the world.
How to become our patient, and have Dr. Carling perform your adrenal surgery.
The 8 ways adrenal surgery can be performed - learn about the different types of surgery and when they are appropriate.
Adrenal.com is an educational service of Carling Adrenal Center, the world's leading adrenal surgery center.
Become Our Patient | About Carling Adrenal Center | About Dr. Carling
Phone: 813-972-0000| Fax: 888-481-1487| © Copyright 2023, All rights reserved. | Disclaimer & Privacy
Enter the email addresses of the people you want to share this page with.
Email addresses to send to
Enter a short message
Thank you for your question(s), they have successfully submitted and we will respond as soon as we can.
We know there is a lot of information on the site and it can be hard to take it all in. If you have a question for Dr. Carling, or for our office, we would be happy to help.
Let us know your question(s) and we will forward it to Dr. Carling, or to our office, and get back to you as soon as we can.
To help us direct the question I have questions about surgery I have questions about Adrenal diseases I have questions about insurance I would like to become a patient Other
Your question(s)
What is your age? The risks change with age, so that's why our doctors want to know.
Now Operating Exclusively at the Hospital for Endocrine Surgery
Great news! We have moved into our new home, the new Hospital for Endocrine Surgery. This hospital is dedicated to endocrine surgery only. There are no COVID patients in our hospital--it does not have a medical ward--just endocrine surgery. This is the safest hospital for you!
The new Hospital for Endocrine Surgery took 3 years to build, and we moved all our surgery to this beautiful new hospital in January, 2022. Having zero COVID patients is great for us, and great for you. There is no chance that we will have to cancel surgery--we are not affected by the virus. All our doctors and staff have been vaccinated and boosted. Vaccinated patients do not need a COVID test prior to surgery. Unvaccinated patients will be given a rapid COVID test when you arrive at the hospital. You can have one family member with you at all times. We are so blessed to have our new Hospital for Endocrine Surgery--it could not open at a better time!
We have been very busy performing adrenalectomies all year long and our protocols for safe care of our patients have been tremendously effective. We are operating at full capacity and are operating on patients from every state and many foreign countries. Many international patients are now coming because of the medical indications, and we test you with a rapid COVID test when you arrive at the hospital. We take special measures to make this the safest place in the world to have your adrenal operation. We promise to take great care of you!
NEW PATIENTS: It typically takes a few days for new patients to get into our system, receive their records, and have a consultation, and then be scheduled for surgery--so this process for new patients continues. We are the best in the world and we will perform your operation as soon as your specific situation requires. Once we can then review your records, we will get you scheduled for the safest, best adrenal operation in the world.


text:
Ouse Bridge may refer to:

 Ouse Bridge, York, a historic bridge in the centre of the city of York, England
 Ouse Bridge (M62), a bridge carrying the M62 motorway over the River Ouse near Goole, England
 Ouse Bridge railway station, a short-lived railway station in Norfolk, England

See also

 Ouse (disambiguation)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
\section{Introduction}
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-art performance in many computer vision tasks \cite{liu20163d}\cite{khalaf2016convolutional} and grown deeper and deeper. However, these high capacity networks suffer high complexity in both storage and computation especially when used in resource-limited platforms, such as mobile phones and embedded devices \cite{sun2016scalable}. Thus, many researchers have a significant interest in network compression methods for reducing the storage and computation costs.

With the observation that DNNs have a significant parameter redundancy, pruning methods have been widely studied for reducing the number of parameters in networks. In the earlier years, researchers prune weights in a network, but it has a limitation in accelerating network inference \cite{lecun1990optimal}\cite{han2015learning}. Afterwards, more and more works focus on pruning filters or channels which can result in a thinner model and significant accelerations \cite{zhou1226}\cite{he2017channel}\cite{hu2016network}\cite{li2016pruning}\cite{liu2017learning}\cite{luo2017thinet}\cite{molchanov2016pruning}\cite{srinivas2015data}. The main step of the above pruning methods is to measure the importance score of each filter. After that, they prune the least important filters followed by a fine-tuning process to recover the performance of the network.
Some methods are based on the magnitude of the filter \cite{li2016pruning} and some approaches exploit the information of feature maps to estimate the importance of the corresponding
 filter \cite{he2017channel}\cite{luo2017thinet}. Moreover, if two weights are similar, one of them is redundant and can be pruned \cite{srinivas2015data}, but it only considers the fully-connected layers and limits in accelerating convolutional neural networks.

\begin{figure}[!t]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.7]{filter_cluster_framework.pdf}
\caption{The flow chart of our proposed method (\emph{e.g.,} a convolutional layer including 8 filters and 4 clusters).}
\label{filter_cluster}
\end{figure}

In this paper, we propose a new filter level pruning method.  Our method is based on the fact that if two filters are similar, one of them is redundant and can be effectively removed \cite{srinivas2015data}.   But two filter sets are always dissimilar in a trained DNN. In order to force the two filter sets similar, we propose a new training algorithm which is achieved by adding a ``cluster loss" on the original loss function. The network can learn compact representations during training with backpropagation algorithm. As  shown in Fig \ref{filter_cluster},our method consists of three main steps: (1) Given a DNN, we define the clusters which each filter belong to and train the network with our proposed training algorithm. (2) After training, filters in each cluster are similar and one of them can be removed, besides, the corresponding filter channels can also be pruned. (3) At last, we fine-tune the pruned network to compensate the performance degradation.

We evaluate our proposed method on two bechmark datasets (CIFAR10 and CIFAR100) and demonstrate its competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches. For VGG-16, our method shows 2$\times$ speedup without loss in accuracy. With WRN-16-4, it achieves about 3.4$\times$  and 1.74$\times$ speedup within 1\% accuracy drop on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, respectively.

\section{Related Work}

As one of the most popular methods for accelerating network inference, pruning has been widely studied recently. In the earlier work, Optimal Brain Damage \cite{lecun1990optimal} prunes unimportant weights to reduce the number of parameters and prevent over-fitting. Recently, Han \emph{et al.} \cite{han2015learning} prune the weights which are below a threshold results in a very sparse model with no loss of accuracy. But such a non-structured sparse model has limitations of accelerating inference without specific hardware \cite{luo2017thinet}. Latter, researchers focus on filter level pruning which can not only reduce the memory footprint dramatically but also speedup network inference by any off-the-shelf library. Li \emph{et al.} \cite{li2016pruning} prune the less useful filters based on sum of absolute weights directly.

But the filter of small magnitude does not mean it is not important. Thus, the methods based on the information of activations are studied. Hu \emph{et al.} \cite{hu2016network} calculate the sparsity of activations after the ReLU function and prune the corresponding filters if the sparsity is high. Molchanov \emph{et al.} \cite{molchanov2016pruning} adopt a first-order Taylor expansion to approximate the change to loss function induced by pruning each filter.   He \emph{et al.} \cite{he2017channel} prune channels by a LASSO regression based channel selection and least square reconstruction. Yu \emph{et al.} \cite{yu2017nisp} prune the entire  network jointly to minimize the reconstruction error of important responses in the ``final response layer" and propagate the importance scores of final responses to every neuron.

 Besides the above methods which prune filters on a pre-trained network,  several methods add regularization or other modifications  during training.  For example,  Liu \emph{et al.} \cite{liu2017learning}    enforce channel sparsity by imposing L1 regularization on the scaling factors in batch normalization. McDanel \emph{et al.} \cite{mcdanel2017incomplete} utilize incomplete dot products to dynamically adjust the number of input channels used in each layer. Zhou \emph{et al.} \cite{zhou1226} introduce a scaling factor to each filter to weaken the weights step by step and prune the filters after training.

Meanwhile, other methods are well explored to compress networks. Knowledge distillation \cite{hinton2015distilling} first trains a big network (\emph{i.e.,} teacher network) and then trains a shallow one (\emph{i.e.,} student network) to mimic the output distributions of the teacher. Network quantization reduces the number of bits for representing each parameter and some low-bit networks are proposed \cite{courbariaux2016binarized}\cite{li2016ternary}\cite{zhuxiaotian}. Low-rank factorization decompose weights into several pieces \cite{howard2017mobilenets}\cite{lebedev2014speeding}. Note that our pruning method can be integrated with the above techniques to achieve a more compact and efficient model.

\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.9]{filter_cluster_prune.pdf}
\vspace{-0.3cm}
\caption{Pruning similar filters in a convolutional layer. Whenever two filters sets are similar, we remove one of them for A, while the corresponding channels of the output activations B can also be pruned.Moreover, the channels of filter in next layer can also be removed, but we need to add one channel to the other in each sets (\emph{i.e.,} from C to D) as shown in Eq (\ref{c}).  }
\label{filter_prune}
\end{figure}
\section{Our Method}
In this section, we first show how we prune the similar filters for a singe layer, then propose a new training algorithm for forcing filters in each cluster to be similar. Finally, we analyze the acceleration and compression of our method.

\subsection{Pruning Similar Filters}
We use a triplet $\langle Y_i, K_i, \ast \rangle$ to denote the convolution process in layer \emph{i}, where $Y_i \in \mathbb{R}^{H\times W\times M}$ is the input tensor, which has $M$ channels, $H$ rows and $W$ columns. And $K_i \in \mathbb{R}^{d\times d\times M\times N}$ is a filter bank with $d\times d$ kernel size, $\ast$ denote the 3D convolution operation which maps $Y_i$ to $Y_{i+1}$ using $K_i$, where $Y_{i+1}$ is the input tensor in layer $i+1$ (which is also the output tensor of layer $i$), Note that the fully connected operation is a special case of convolution operation.

Formally, the $j^{th}$ channel of $Y_{i+1}$ can be computed with the $j^{th}$ filter and the input tensor $Y_{i}$ using the 2D convolution operation $\otimes$ as follows :
\vspace{-0.5cm}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{a}
\textbf{$y^j_{i+1}$} &=& h(\textbf{$k_i^{j}$} \ast \textbf{$y_{i}$})= h(\sum_{m=1}^{M}{\textbf{$k_i^{jm}$} \otimes \textbf{$y^m_{i}$}})   \nonumber\\
&=& h(\textbf{$k_i^{j1}$} \otimes \textbf{$y^1_{i}$} +  \textbf{$k_i^{j2}$} \otimes \textbf{$y^2_{i}$} + \ldots +\textbf{$k_i^{jM}$} \otimes \textbf{$y^M_{i}$}),
\end{eqnarray}
where $h(\cdot)$ is the nonlinear function, such as sigmoid or ReLU, $y^m_{i}$ is the $m^{th}$ channel and $k_i^{jm}$  is the $m^{th}$ channel of the $j^{th}$ filter in layer $i$.   Note that we ignore the corresponding bias for simplicity. In the same way, $y^j_{i}$ can be computed as:
\vspace{-0.2cm}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{b}
\textbf{$y^j_{i}$} &=& h(\textbf{$k_{i-1}^{j}$} \ast \textbf{$y_{i-1}$})
\end{eqnarray}

Now let us suppose that $k_{i-1}^1=k_{i-1}^2$. This means that the corresponding feature maps are the same, \emph{e.g.,}  $y^1_{i}=y^2_{i}$ according to Eq (\ref{b}). For $j^{th}$ filter, replacing $k_{i}^{j2}$ by $k_{i}^{j1}$ in Eq (\ref{a}), we get the Eq (\ref{c}).
\vspace{-0.2cm}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{c}
\textbf{$y^j_{i+1}$}=h(\textbf{$(k_i^{j1}+k_i^{j2})$} \otimes \textbf{$y^1_{i}$} +  \textbf{0} \otimes \textbf{$y^2_{i}$} + \ldots +\textbf{$k_i^{jM}$} \otimes \textbf{$y^M_{i}$}),
\end{eqnarray}
where $\textbf{0}$ is the channel of all zero-value.
This means that whenever two filter sets in layer $i-1$ are equal, we can prune one of them safely. At the same time,  we modify the filter channels in layer $i$ (\emph{i.e.,} for each filter, we add one channel to the other). Fig. \ref{filter_prune} exhibits the operation clearly.
\subsection{Proposed Training Algorithm}
However, two filter sets could never be exactly equal in a trained CNN, and it's hard to find such two similar filter sets. To cope with it, we propose a new training algorithm to force several two filter sets to be equal. Let $K$ denote the weights in the network and $f(K)$ is our loss function, the optimization target can be formulated as:
\vspace{-0.5cm}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{d}
f(K) &=& E(K)+\delta R(K)+\lambda \sum_{i=1}^{L}{\sum_{t=1}^{T}{  \Arrowvert k_i^t-c_i^t \Arrowvert ^2    }}, \\
c_i^t &=& \frac{1}{\arrowvert S_i^t \arrowvert}\sum_{k_i^t\in S_i^t}{k_i^t},
\end{eqnarray}
where $E(K)$ and $R(K)$ refer to the cross-entropy loss and the regularization loss, respectively, $\delta$ and $\lambda$ are the tunable parameters to balance the loss terms, $\Arrowvert k_i^t-c_i^t \Arrowvert ^2$ denotes the ``cluster loss" of the $t^{th}$ cluster in layer $i$. Thus, the filters in each cluster $S_i^t$ are forced to be similar using the cluster loss and just one filter is kept after training.

If the clusters are changing during training, it may cause the training process difficult due to the high dimension of each filter and the non-balanced clusters.
Therefore, in this work, we can define the clusters $S_i^t$  which the filters belong to firstly and keep the clusters not change online. And the number of cluster in each layer is specified with the compression rate.

Specifically, let $N$ denote the number of filters in layer $i$ and $N\times p$ is the number of filters are pruned ($\frac{1}{1-p}$ is the compression rate). We restrict $p\leq 0.5$,  because the performance degrades severely when over half of filters are pruned. The size of each cluster $\arrowvert S_i^t \arrowvert$  is no larger than two for balance.  Thus, there are $N\times (1-p)$ clusters, where each $N\times p$ cluster contains two filters and each $N\times (1-2p)$ cluster contains just one filter. Note that one of  the filters in each cluster whose size is larger than one is pruned and the clusters of size equal to one are preserved.

\textbf{Analysis of Compression and Acceleration.}
According to Eq (\ref{c}) and Fig. \ref{filter_prune},  if a filter in layer $i$ is removed, its corresponding channel of filters in layer $i+1$ is also discarded. The size of each feature map is kept the same.
Since we preserve $N_i\times (1-p_i)$ filters in layer $i$. The speedup ratio $r_{s_i}$ and compression ratio $r_{c_i}$ of the pruned network for layer $i$ compared to the original network can be computed by $ r_{s_i} =r_{c_i} = (1-p_{i-1})(1-p_i)$.
Note that the feature maps in layer $i$ are also compressed $1-p_i$ times which saves a large proportion of runtime memory.

\begin{figure}[htbp]
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.48\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.32]{lambda_acc.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{.48\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.32]{lambda.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\caption{Accuracy after pruning filters (left) and the final ``cluster loss"  under different pruned ratio and different $\lambda$ (Eq (\ref{d})) for the WRN-16-4 model on CIFAR10 (right). }
\label{lambda}
\end{figure}
\section{Experiments}
We evaluate our proposed method on several typical networks and two datasets (CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100) \cite{alex2009learning}. We use TensorFlow \cite{abadi2016tensorflow} framework to implement network pruning and evaluate on Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPU.

\begin{figure*}[!htb]
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{vgg_10.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{resnet_10.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{wrn_10.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{cs_10.pdf}
\end{minipage}

\vspace{0.2cm}

\begin{minipage}[b]{0.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{vgg_100.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{resnet_100.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{wrn_100.pdf}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.247\linewidth}
  \centering
\includegraphics[scale = 0.343]{cs_100.pdf}
\end{minipage}

\vspace{-0.3cm}
\caption{A comparison of the performance  with different filter selection criteria and different pruned ratio. The first row is the VGG-16, ResNet-34 and WRN-16-4 network on CIFAR10, respectively. The second row is the models on CIFAR100. Our approach is consistently better (larger is better). Besides, the last column is the speedup and compression ratio of models.}
\label{acc}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Implementation Details and  filter selection criteria}
CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 both consist of a training set of 50000 and a test set of 10000 color images of size $32 \times 32$ with 10 classes and 100 classes, respectively. The training images are padded by 4 pixels and randomly flipped.

We evaluate three DNNs (\emph{i.e.,} VGG-16, ResNet-34 and WRN-16-4) on the two datasets, respectively. All networks are trained using SGD with batch size 128 and 300 epochs. The weight decay is 0.0005 and momentum is 0.9. The other hyper-parameters for the models are in  the following.
(1)The VGG-16 network is derived from \cite{li2016pruning}. The initial learning rate is set to 0.02, and is divided by 5 at each 60 epochs. We get the baseline accuracy on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 of 93.55\% and 73.23\%, respectively. (2) The ResNet-34 model replaces shortcut layer with a $1 \times 1$ convolutional layer of  ResNet-32 \cite{dong2017more}. The initial learning rate is set to 0.1, and is divided by 5 at each 60 epochs. We get the baseline accuracy on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 of 93.56\% and 69.82\%, respectively. (3) The WRN-16-4 network is adopted from \cite{zagoruyko2016wide}. The initial learning rate is set to 0.2, and is divided by 5 at each 60 epochs. We get the baseline accuracy on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 of 95.01\% and 75.99\%, respectively.

In addition, we compare our method with other state-of-the-art criteria, including (1) \textbf{Weight sum} \cite{li2016pruning}. This criterion measure the importance of a filter in each layer by calculating the sum of its absolute weights ($i.e.,$ $\sum{\arrowvert k_i^j\arrowvert}$); (2) \textbf{Average Percentage of Zeros (APoZ)} \cite{hu2016network}. APoZ measures the percentage of zero activations of a filter after the ReLU mapping. The APoZ of the $c^{th}$ neuron is $\frac{\sum\nolimits_n^{\hat{N}}{\sum{I(L_c(n)==0)}}}{\hat{N}\times N}$, where $\hat{N}$ is the number of training examples (we set $\hat{N}=50000$); (3) \textbf{Randomly pruning}. During pruning, it randomly selects and removes filters. Moreover, we also compare the methods with \textbf{Train from scratch} which trains a model from scratch, where the model has the same structure as the pruned network.

\subsection{The effect of $\lambda$}
Firstly, we explore the influence of $\lambda$ (Eq (\ref{d})) on the performance of our pruned method. We set the pruned ratio the same in every layer of the WRN-16-4 network. Fig. \ref{lambda} demonstrates the accuracy of the pruned model with different pruned ratio and  $\lambda$ and the ``cluster loss" after training the model with our proposed training algorithm.
As expected, cluster loss increases as filter pruned ratio and $\lambda$ increases.
In addition, the losses are always small, so one filter in each cluster can be pruned with minimal  degradation of accuracy. The performance of pruned network is similar with different $\lambda$. In the rest of experiment, we set the $\lambda$ to 0.05.

\subsection{Comparison with other filter selection criteria}
Fig. \ref{acc} shows the pruned results for VGG-16, ResNet-34 and WRN-16-4 on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 with different filter selection  criteria and different pruned ratios. Our approach is consistently better than other filter selection criteria under different pruned ratio. The method based on data (\emph{i.e.,} APoZ) is similar to other data-independent approaches. This may because the number of filters pruned is small and the gap of these methods is not obvious.  Training the pruned network from scratch is not always worse than other methods especially when the model is deep and wide. We can accelerate VGG-16 network 2$\times$ without loss in accuracy and speedup WRN-16-4 model on CIFAR10 about 3.4$\times$ with 1\% degradation on accuracy.  But the ResNet-34 is hard to compress, which may because the model is already compact and efficient.

\begin{center}
\begin{table}[t]
\small
\caption{A comparison of speedup  with other compression methods. Values in parentheses are the increased error.} \label{cp}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|}
  \hline
  Dataset & Model &  Error (\%) & Speedup  \\
  \hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\multirow{5}{*}{CIFAR10}} &  VGG-16 \cite{li2016pruning}   &   6.75 (-0.15)    &  1.52$\times$    \\
& VGG-16 \cite{liu2017learning}   &   6.34 (-0.14)    &  2.04$\times$   \\
& \textbf{VGG-16 (ours)}                                  &   \textbf{6.45 (-0.21)}    &  \textbf{2.77$\times$}  \\
\cline{2-4}
&  ResNet-56 \cite{li2016pruning} &  6.96 (-0.02)  & 1.38$\times$     \\
& \textbf{ResNet-58 (ours)}                              &  \textbf{6.18 (-0.01)}          &  \textbf{1.50$\times$}    \\
  \hline
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\multirow{4}{*}{CIFAR100}} &  VGG-16 \cite{liu2017learning}   &   26.74 (-0.22)   &  1.59$\times$           \\
&  \textbf{VGG-16 (ours)}                                &    \textbf{26.77 (-0.32)}  &  \textbf{2.03$\times$}       \\
\cline{2-4}
&  WRN-16-4 \cite{dong2017more} &  24.53 (+0.30)  & 1.18$\times$     \\
&   \textbf{WRN-16-4 (ours)}                                & \textbf{24.01 (+0.06)}  & \textbf{1.34$\times$}    \\
  \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{center}
\vspace{-1.5cm}
\subsection{Comparison with other compression methods}
Besides filter pruning methods, we compare the acceleration of our approach with other network compression methods in Table \ref{cp}. In general, different layer has different importance and  sparsity \cite{dong2017more}, and the method based training \cite{liu2017learning} can automatically find it. Even though, our approach can outperform other methods.

\section{Conclusion}
In this work, we introduce the cluster loss on the original loss function to force filters in each cluster to be similar during training, and prune one filter in every cluster safely. The compact model is inference efficient and requires no special hardware.
Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our proposed  method.
 In the future, we would like to evaluate our method on larger dataset and more vision tasks.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEbib}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


ROSEMEAD, CA. – January 4, 2019 – Don Bosco Technical Institute (Bosco Tech) will host its mathematics competition for fifth through eighth grade students on Saturday, February 2. The 47th annual event will offer awards to the highest scoring individuals and teams.
Event check-in is 8:00-8:45 a.m. and the competition begins at 9:00 a.m. To register, review rules and see sample test questions, visit www.boscotech.edu. Pre-registration is required and ends January 25; the cost to participate is $15 per student.
Bosco Tech is an all-male Catholic high school that combines a rigorous college-preparatory program with a technology-focused education. The innovative curriculum allows students to exceed university admissions requirements while completing extensive integrated coursework in one of several applied science and engineering fields, including the newly added Biological, Medical & Environmental Technology (BMET) program. On Niche.com's list of top boys high schools and Catholic high schools in California and the U.S., Bosco Tech boasts a college acceptance rate of 100 percent, with the majority of graduates pursuing STEM-related post-secondary majors and careers. The school is located at 1151 San Gabriel Boulevard, Rosemead, 91770. More information is available at www.boscotech.edu.