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ACCT20074 Contemporary Accounting Editing Services
Corporate social responsibility is a becoming a measure of the company's performance. This helps to indicate a wide range of stakeholders, from consumers, employees to investors. The report evaluates the CSR and sustainability practices that are followed by The Star Entertainment Group. It is an ASX listed company functioning in the consumer's field offering various hospitality and leisure services across Australia. The report also analyses the CSR disclosure and reporting practices that is followed by the company in recent years. The report also discusses the company's current reporting practice and CSR reporting guidelines as per the Global initiative reporting. Next part of the report spotlights the CSR reporting practices and motivation for using the stakeholder's theories and legitimacy. At last, the report will discuss the findings and report the over system analysis of The Star Entertainment Group in the field of CSR and sustainability activities.
Analysis ofcompany'sCSR disclosure and reporting practice
With the changing technology and increased competition over the past few decades companies are needed to indulge in various activities for the sustainability and environmental responsibility. The concept of corporate social responsibility is gaining increased responses with the changing needs and awareness of the customers and other stakeholders. This has resulted to the introduction of the various guidelines and reporting system for such activities in Australia (Parliament of Australia, 2018). Sustainability reporting is the process of demonstration of the corporate responsibility with the help of measuring and reporting of the social, economic and environmental impacts and performance publically (Cooper, 2017). The disclosures can be made in the annual reports, sustainability report or there is also a provision of social impact report. It is also identified that the reporting of the sustainability is also voluntary in Australia (Parliament of Australia, 2018).
There are a number of reasons that leads to need of reporting the activities including informing to the shareholders and impact on the company's overall performance to improve the impacts. It is also done to tell the shareholders and other parties about the dealing with the non-financial and financial risks for the analysis of the key risks and analyse the performance (Parliament of Australia, 2018). There are some companies that are not interested in mandatory reporting the reason behind this is due to compliance costs and it might also possibly a situation of danger for the companies as due to mandatory compliance it is possible that companies will change the practices according to regulation rather than working in the best interest of the company (Depoers, Jeanjean, and Jérôme, 2016).
On the other hand, some main reasons for supporting the mandatory reporting are setting up of structures and systems for understand risks and impacts that are not addressed earlier. Another benefit is this practice will provide information to institutional investors towards non-financial risks associated with the company it will allow them to gain over all clear picture of the company (Parliament of Australia, 2018). The most important benefit is the accountability and transparency among the stakeholders towards the company. The main aspects that are needed to be reported under the mandatory reporting are cost effective, flexibility and comparability.
The Star Entertainment Group is ASX listed company that has several hotels providing various hospitality and other services at world class location of Gold Coast, Sydney and Brisbane. The company is introduced a five year strategy in year 2016 as sustainability strategy named 'Our Bright Future'. The company is aimed towards building the business capacity and deliver continuous improvements towards the environmental, governance and societal issues (Cooper, 2017). The four main pillars identified in the strategy were to be Australia's leading integrated resort, actively support guest well being, attract, retain and develop talented teams and develop world class properties (The Star Entertainment Group, 2018). One such achievement of the company is representation as global leader of Casino and Gaming industry.
The company is also awarded with Dow Jones Sustainability Index where the maximum score were gained in Anti-crime policy and measures and promoting responsible gambling. The organisation is also committed towards environmental sustainability and it is actively working to deal with the various environmental issues caused by it(de Paula, and Gil-Lafuente, 2018). Since the company is using more floor space which leads to more energy consumption so the company is recommendations to the contractors to control on water, energy, waste, biodiversity, material and management of suppliers (The Star Entertainment Group, 2018).
Energy efficiency will be the key for the best practices at The Star Entertainment Group (SGR) so the group is focused towards reduce HVAC load, utilising nature lighting and ventilation and in room technologies, installation of most energy efficient plant and controls, trailing new technologies that suit to the existing buildings (Depoers, Jeanjean, and Jérôme, 2016). The recent reported aspects are Star Sydney recycled almost 2.2 million kilograms of glass in past 8 years with the use of Bottle Cycler till the beginning of 2018. Similarly, 1200 tonnes of waste was converted towards green electricity since February 2017 to January 2018 (SGR, 2018). SGR also saved over $1.4 million by implementing over 26 energy efficient initiatives. There were 9900 soaps were produced via Soap Aid for disadvantaged communities across the various properties (SGR, 2018)
Figure 1: Materiality Index (SGR, 2018)
The environment Performance of the company towards the resource consumption is related with carbon emission, energy and water. the sustainability targets of the company are for 10 years time frame focusing towards the 30% reduction in the carbon emission till 2023 and 30% reduction in the portable water consumption intensity by 2023 both the targets are based on FY 2013 (SGR, 2018). It is also identified that the company reports national greenhouse and Energy reporting system to government on annual basis. The emission happens form the buildings, refrigerants and incidental sources (de Paula, and Gil-Lafuente, 2018). These are measured in tonnes and company has emitted 104950 tonnes of CO2 in year 2016 and 101465 tonnes in 2017. Similarly, energy saving by SGR after introduction of 12 energy saving projects were 1690 tonnes and $6 million on a total of 22 projects. The company has also replaced 90% of LED lights with compact fluorescents and switched to new lighting to consume 80% less energy and 50% less heat
Figure 2: Carbon Emissions (THE STAR ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, 2018)
SGR is also committed towards waste reduction and has increased recycling from 20% to 33% exceeding the estimated target of 10% by the end of 2016. One of its Hotels, The star Sydney succeeded to achieve a recycling rate of 41% across all operations in 2016. The Group has also installed devices to save water resulted to approximately 52282 kiloliters saving of the water. Upgradation in the water drainage system also leads to save 22000 kiloliters of additional water at Jupiters Hotel and Casino (THE STAR ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, 2018). The other factors such as climate are also considered for the socially responsible practices.
Analysis of the SGR reporting practice and CSR reporting guidelines
The star entertainment group is having a great focus towards the sustainability and the company is continuously following the various corporate social and sustainable goals. It is also indentified that the company and its employees are committed toward the reporting requirements for the various activities and operations that are carried out at the organisation to achieve sustainability. The core areas identifies where the company is putting efforts to minimise the pollution and other environmental aspects are energy, water, climate change. The company has also prepared year wise details of the information for the targets it has made and achievements (de Paula, and Gil-Lafuente, 2018). The company is also putting continuous efforts and inputted several changes in the lighting, water drainage and glass waste. There are lots of costs incurred in minimising the wastage of the various resources and it also leads to hamper the profitability of the organisation to some extent so the organisation is really working harder to attain more benefits in the form of cost perspective and wide range of performance areas.
Reduction in the energy consumption and continuous efforts towards the attainment of the goals of the United Nations sustainable developments is also covered by the company. It will also benefit the company to achieve cost reductions in long run through the reduction of the carbon per square meter. Global initiative reporting is the reporting standard that deals with the variety of standards that are to be followed and need to be followed by the companies to become sustainable. The GRI helps the government and business across the world to understand and communicate the impact of the sustainability issues. This helps to take real actions to develop social economic and climate benefits for everyone
Figure 3: Sustainability Materiality Assessment 2018 (Source: SGR, 2018)
The standards covered under GRI include GRI 302: Energy 2016, GRI 303: Water and Effluents 2018 and GRI 307: Environmental compliance 2016. The company is offering various services at different locations so it is needed to comply with various standards that are related to the company. It is identified that the company is continuously following the Global initiative reporting and the major emissions related to GHG are carbon dioxide (GRI, 2018). The other approaches that are applied by the organisation towards awareness of the sustainability are National Sustainability Roadshow and hosting some of the global events one such event hosted was Commonwealth Games (Architecture&Design, 2018).
GRI 307 that deals with environmental analysis compliance 2016 covers the various dimensions of sustainability including land, water, air and ecosystem. SGR is complying with this standard and also complying GRI 306 related to Effluents and wastage 2016 (GRI, 2018). This standard deals with the discharge of the effluents and treatment of waste the company is concerned with the issues related to water treatment and installed several systems that will help to save valuable water. The other practices related to social responsibility are $1.2 million benefit delivery to completion of 11 projects for energy and water pipeline. The company has also joined green building council for environmental friendly buildings and designs in future. It has installed more than 1200 indoor plants across the Sydney office. It has also provided assistance of more than 41787 meals donated to OzHarvest (THE STAR ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, 2018).
The Star Entertainment Group CSR reporting,conceptof legitimacy and stakeholder theories
The Star Entertainment Group is putting continuous efforts to maximize the interest of the stakeholders through the implementation of the various compliances relating to the corporate social responsibility and sustainability. The group continues to take a holistic approach to overcome number of factors that leads to energy consumption and environmental pollution. It is tracking its recycling and other records year by year to attain environment friendly approaches in the day to day operations such as electricity consumption, waste management, recycling and other emission related aspects(Gazzola, and Pellicelli, 2018).
These practices are motivating the employees and other stakeholders to be more confident and rely on the group. The stakeholder theory is the theory that depicts that the organizations that are operating in the competitive environment are required to comply with the benefits of all the stakeholders (Epstein, 2018). So it suggests following the practices such as corporate governance, CSR and sustainability which will help the company to overcome the various issues present in the society and surrounding environment. Stakeholder's theory is based on the morals, business ethics and values where the main idea is that the goodwill, success and prosperity of the organization are entirely dependent upon the relationship of the SGR with the stakeholders.
It also suggests that each and every decision of the company affects the stakeholders and it is become significantly important at the present time when customers and other stakeholders are aware of the various practices followed by the organizations. It has become mandatory for the organizations to comply the practices such as sustainability, corporate governance and other social causes. This also helps the organizations to attain benefits in long term through maintaining better relations with the stakeholders (Dixon, Connaughton, and Green, 2018).
The company is sing the concept of legitimacy and stakeholders theory as the various environment sustainability and resource saving will lead to create and develop trust among the stakeholders which will ultimately result to improve the confidence and trust of the various related parties towards the organization(Brueckner, Spencer, and Paull, 2018). In addition to this, the proper recording and accounting of the various activities in the financial reports will help to analyse the information in quantitative manner. This information is also presentable to the stakeholders it will also help the invertors to analyse the organization in measurable outcomes(Epstein, 2018). The group is also evaluating the achievements on continuous basis and reports the achievements in the annual reports and website which indicates the timely reporting and following of the CSR disclosures. This indicates that the company is practicing the legitimacy and stakeholder's theory is adopted by the whole group during the course of practice.
Comprehensive summary
The analysis of the practices at The Star Entertainment Group it is identified the organizations operating in the dynamic environment are needed to comply with the various needs as per the legislation and practices that are running. CSR disclosure and reporting is one of the practices which are mandatory to be followed by all the organizations that are operating in Australia. The companies adopt various practices for the purpose of social benefit and sustainability. These practices help to build and maintain trust among the investors and other stakeholders directly or indirectly associated with the company (Parliament of Australia, 2018). This is the reason SGR group is also complying with the standards and disclosing the activities and practices it adopts in practice. It also discloses all information for the transparent and disclosure principle of accounting.
This practice helps to depict clear and fair picture of the company. The company is complying with the principles of sustainability through controlling the carbon emission, recycling the glass waste and installing new systems for saving water. The company has also replaced lighting system in some of the hotels to control the energy consumption. These practices helped the company to save several millions of monetary and other resources and contributed towards saving the valuable resources under the concept of sustainability (SGR, 2018). The company has also continuously evaluated the performance and is improving year by year by contributing towards sustainable and social welfare. These practices also associate with the stakeholder's theory. This theory indicates the practices and approaches to be followed by the companies to attract and maintain long term relations with the stakeholders.
Stakeholders approach is the practice that will not only benefit the organization in short run but it will also support to save the resources and environment issues for long term sustaining of the organization. The company is also complying with the Global Initiative reporting which is the world wide spread organisation supporting the businesses to understand and communicate environmental and ethical issues and issues various guidelines to deal with such issues (GRI, 2018). The various standards introduces are related to the waste, environment, climate and other factors that are affecting the environment.
SGR is also participating in various events that are helping it to attain more sustainable practices such as energy saving up to 90% by installing energy saving lights, joined green building council and empowering women by including 50% female representation by 2020. It has also contributed to responsible gambling fund a sum of around $19.2million. This has resulted for the company to achieve the planned targets and sustainability goals in aggressive manner.
It can be concluded that The Global entertainment Group has taken several steps towards the attainment of the CSR disclosures and reporting practice. The major areas that the company is making disclosures are energy consumption, water, waste, biodiversity, materials and management of suppliers. It is also identified that it is mandatory for the organizations regarding CSR disclosure. SGR is following disclosure and reporting practices on continuous basis and which helped the group to evaluate its achievements and motivates it for achieve better practices towards sustainability. It is also analysed that the company is also following Global Initiative Reporting which are the initiatives that are followed across various counties. The group is continuously improving toward the achievement of the energy consumption, waste management and recycling. The analysis also depicts that the company is functioning in the path of stakeholder's theory and using the CSR reporting as a practice of legitimacy to maintain long term healthy relations with the stakeholders.
1. Architecture&Design (2018). Amanda Visser and The Star Entertainment Group's sustainability journey. Retrieved from:https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/people/amanda-visser-and-the-star-entertainment-group-s-s
2. Brueckner, M., Spencer, R. & Paull, M. (2018). Disciplining the Undisciplined?: Perspectives from Business, Society and Politics on Responsible Citizenship, Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability. Germany: Springer.
3. Cooper, S. (2017). Corporate social performance: A stakeholder approach. UK: Routledge.
4. de Paula, L.B. & Gil-Lafuente, A.M. ( 2018). A contribution to the sustainable management of supply chainusing fuzzy logic, COCREATING RESPONSIBLE FUTURES IN THE DIGITAL AGE: Exploring new paths towards economic, 238.
5. Dixon, T., Connaughton, J. & Green, S. (2018). Sustainable Futures in the Built Environment to 2050: A Foresight Approach to Construction and Development. USA: John Wiley & Sons.
6. Epstein, M.J. (2018). Making sustainability work: Best practices in managing and measuring corporate social, environmental and economic impacts. New York: Routledge.
7. Gazzola, P. & Pellicelli, M. (2018). Sustainable outsourcing in Italian SMEs. COCREATING RESPONSIBLE FUTURES IN THE DIGITAL AGE: Exploring new paths towards economic, 137.
8. GRI, (2018). GRI 305: EMISSIONS 2016. Retrieved from:https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/gri-305-emissions-2016/
9. GRI, (2018). GRI STANDARDS. Retrieved from:https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/#user-details
10. Parliament of Australia (2018). Sustainability reporting. Retrieved from:https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Browse_by_Topic/ClimateChangeold/responses/economic/sustainability
11. SGR (2018). Energy. Retrieved From:https://www.starentertainmentgroup.com.au/energy
12. SGR (2018). Waste. Retrieved From:https://www.starentertainmentgroup.com.au/waste
13. THE STAR ENTERTAINMENT GROUP (2018) ANNUAL REPORT 2018. Retrieved from:https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55f76728e4b0799db9586a8d/t/5ba87d05eef1a16551b7bb12/1537768809954/2018.09.24_2018+Annual+Report.pdf
14. The Star Entertainment Group (2018). Sustainability: Our Sustainability Strategy - 'Our Bright Future. Retrieved from:https://www.starentertainmentgroup.com.au/sustainability/
15. Depoers, F., Jeanjean, T., & Jérôme, T. (2016). Voluntary disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions: Contrasting the carbon disclosure project and corporate reports. Journal of Business Ethics, 134(3), 445-461.


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This Is What Creates Real Wealth
By Money Morning
It's a simple thesis, really: Wealth is created by real economic growth, not smoke and mirrors.
Real growth, in turn, has historically been created by new technology.
Compare the average per capita economic output and standard of living before the industrial era with what came after the invention of the steam engine. The gains were enormous.
In all areas, as the developing world has caught up to more-advanced nations in the use of technology, we have seen the differences in wealth between the two shrink or disappear altogether.
A cursory look at the history of science and technology reveals one glaring fact: The rate of change is constantly accelerating. More has been accomplished in the last few decades than in the previous few thousand years. Investors often say, 'The trend is your friend.' Technological innovation, therefore, is the mother of all friendly trends.
One of the biggest opportunities is profiting from the obsolescence of the 'old internet'.
The internet and its user base of billions worldwide are in the middle of a crisis — a bandwidth crunch that impacts us all. Every single year for the past five years, internet traffic has doubled with no signs of slowing down.
Since the internet boom of the 1990s, Internet infrastructure has not had a major upgrade in carrying capacity. Now, for the first time in more than a decade, we are on the edge of an immense spending cycle aimed at upgrading those 'old pipes'.
The critical shift in standard necessary to keep those 'pipes' from clogging is from decade-old 10G (10-gigabit) bandwidth capacities to the faster, higher-capacity 100G network. This new network bandwidth will become a global standard, running underground from city to city and undersea from continent to continent.
As with all creative destruction, there are innovators leading the way. Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled 'Backpack', a 100G optical switch they hope will support the usage of its nearly 2 billion users. With streaming video and virtual reality on the rise, Facebook is going to need the bandwidth to back it up.
But Facebook's efforts wouldn't be possible without the darling behind faster internet: fiber-optic networking.
The fast lane of the information superhighway travels on pulses of light, moving primarily through fiber-optic cables and secondly through satellite. Over long distances — and increasingly over short ones — fiber-optic technology supplies the communications medium of choice.
The need for fiber-optic innovation is critical as the use of Internet of Things and 'smart' devices rise.
There is no device that can't turn 'smart'. All that means is that if a device can benefit from an Internet connection, it'll inevitably be connected to it at some point in the future.
We're talking about:
Every appliance in every house, fighting with laptops and TVs for Internet access.
Every car you see on the road, downloading maps…and uploading vehicle data.
Every hospital bed, sharing patient data with doctors.
Your clothes, full of biometric threads that record data for your doctor.
Every scrap of data on every computer, getting backed up to the cloud.
Every plane in the sky, sending in sensor data of all kinds.
Every thermostat, street light, and piece of factory machinery, logging in.
Every vine in every vineyard or corn stalk in Kansas, talking to farmers.
According to one report, you could see as many as 50 billion connected 'things' online by 2020. Compare that to less than 9 billion today. Morgan Stanley puts that number much higher — at 75 billion.
That's over 10 times the number of people walking the planet. I can't emphasise that enough.
At a potential of value of $19 trillion, that's more than double the size of China's economic boom…it's triple the size of Japan's output…it's even bigger than the whole US economy.
Imagine taking all of our economic output and demand…along with all the wealth Americans have generated to get here…and tacking that onto the global market…in just a few years' time.
The point is big data cannot be stopped. And somebody is going to need to build internet infrastructure that can handle all the growth. At this rate, bandwidth infrastructure will become as important as road, water and electricity systems within the next decade.
Ray Blanco
Editor's note: The above article was originally published in Tomorrow in Review.
From the Port Phillip Publishing Library
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Money Morning
At Money Morning our aim is simple: to give you intelligent and enjoyable commentary on the most important stock market news and financial information of the day - and tell you how to profit from it. We know the best investments are often the hardest to find. So that's why we sift through mountains of reporting, research and data on your behalf, to present you with only the worthwhile opportunities to invest in. Become a more informed, enlightened and profitable investor today - by taking out your free subscription to Money Morning now.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Abstract: Recent observations show that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at increasingly rapid rates but current models have been unable to mimic the ice-sheet dynamics. In recent years, there has been a push to develop "next generation" land-ice models and codes for integration into global Earth System Models that accurately explains these dynamic behaviors. This talk will give an overview of the Albany/FELIX (Finite Elements for Land Ice eXperiments) next-generation land-ice dynamical core (dycore) that is under development at Sandia National Labs and based on the "First-Order Stokes" equations for the ice momentum balance. Typically, ice sheets are modeled using a quasi-static model in which a steady momentum-balance system for the ice velocities is coupled to dynamic equations for the ice thickness and temperature. I will discuss some of the advanced analysis capabilities in Albany/FELIX, namely a large-scale inversion approach we have developed for obtaining optimal ice initial conditions, our workflow towards quantifying uncertainties in land-ice models, and performance-portability of the Albany/FELIX code to new and emerging architectures using the Kokkos library. I will show results which demonstrate that the Albany/FELIX dycore is scalable, fast and robust for production-scale land-ice problems on state-of-the-art HPC machines.
Bio: Dr. Irina Tezaur (f.k.a. Dr. Irina Kalashnikova) is a Principal Member of Technical Staff (PMTS) in the Extreme Scales Data Science & Analytics Department (Org. 8759) at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA. Prior to joining this group, from October 2011 to September 2014, she was SMTS in the Computational Mathematics Department (Org. 1442) at Sandia in Albuquerque, NM. She received her Ph.D. in Computational and Mathematical Engineering (CME) from Stanford University in 2011. Her advisor at Stanford was Professor Charbel Farhat and I was a member of the Farhat Research Group (FRG). Her Bachelors and Masters degrees are in pure mathematics, awarded by the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Dr. Tezaur's research interests are numerical solution to PDEs, mixed/hybrid finite element methods, stability and convergence properties of numerical methods, Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) and simulation-based analysis of fluid-structure interaction that she currently applies to climate modeling.


Skip the festival of the dead this Halloween. If you want something really scary play Hard Halloween Sudoku! Adios Medium Halloween Sudoku! Hard Halloween Sudoku is where the big ghosts play! But do not leave this haunted house sudoku in a panic yet!


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A number of London Boroughs have issued a joint statement condemning the proposed expansion of the ULEZ scheme. This is what they issued:
Bromley Council were particularly vociferous with comments that included this comment from Councillor Colin Smith: "The 'scheme' isn't actually about air quality in the final analysis. The stealthy, unstated and cynical intention remains, under the guise of ULEZ, to erect a network of traffic cameras across the whole of the Capital which can then be used at the flick of a switch to introduce road price charging for all".
Together with the other London Boroughs opposed to the expansion they are considering a legal challenge and have issued a pre-action protocol letter. See https://www.bromley.gov.uk/news/article/440/lawfulness-questions-about-ulez-expansion for the full announcement.
The London Borough of Richmond has also come out against the ULEZ expansion and according to a report in the Daily Mail the borough of Sutton will refuse planning permission for ULEZ signs and other services such as electricity cables. They will not co-operate with TfL in any way.
Meanwhile central Government claims to have taken legal advice on blocking Sadiq Khan's ULEZ expansion and deny they can do this. But they have two options: 1) Change the Greater London Authority Act 1999 which is alleged to authorise this, or threaten to do so; or 2) Withdraw any further funding to TfL, or threaten to do so. No more financial support would kill off any expenditure by TfL to install the cameras and other equipment for the expansion and put the Mayor into an impossible financial situation.
The Government ultimately has the power to change legislation that covers London and that includes the power to remove the Mayor if necessary! So they should stop hiding behind legal sophistry and take some action.
It is difficult to understand why the Government is not taking action on this. Are they hoping that if Sadiq Khan proceeds he will become so unpopular he will lose the election in 2024? But that is simply too late. We need less playing at politics and more immediate action!
This entry was posted in Uncategorized by Freedom for Drivers Foundation. Bookmark the permalink.
3 thoughts on "London Boroughs Against ULEZ Expansion"
Janet Stiles on January 16, 2023 at 2:06 pm said:
It's good to read that there is mounting opposition to the extended ULEZ charge, however I believe you paragraph as below contains an error regarding the year of next mayoral election? Should this read 2024 not 2014?
"Are they hoping that if Sadiq Khan proceeds he will become so unpopular he will lose the election in 2014? But that is simply too late. We need less playing at politics and more immediate action!"
Freedom for Drivers Foundation on January 16, 2023 at 2:07 pm said:
Good point, I will correct the typo.
Keith on January 16, 2023 at 4:37 pm said:
This needs to be stopped it's not about emissions it's about money


This is a powerful birthday. You are meant to rule or lead in some manner. Even with a sensitive Pisces Sun sign, you are also a very proud and determined person who is charming and attractive. You are a trend setter, always looking forward. Independent and self-reliant, you do best in a job in which you set the pace and the schedule. You have many ideas how to improve the world around you, and you have an unmistakable idealistic streak. Famous people born today: Carrie Underwood, Chuck Norris, Sharon Stone, Shannon Tweed, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Paul Haggis.
Pluto continues to transit sextile your Sun this year as it did last year, and you are determined, ready to make changes, and in a great position to get rid of bad habits. This is a year in which to get your life back on track, as you have the willpower to do so. Others are bound to recognize your leadership skills and talents, or, at the very least, your potential. You want your life path and your objectives to reflect what you're really about. You benefit from being more decisive than usual, and your ability to concentrate and focus help you to achieve what you set out to do. A new project or goal begun this year has a good chance of being successful and long-lasting.
The year ahead can be an ambitious time and a supportive period for reaching your goals. This can be an inventive period that's good for breaking out of old patterns and making powerful changes.


I watched a fascinating documentary on Channel 4 about the making of War Horse a theatre production of the book written by Michael Morpurgo about the bond between a boy and his horse, intertwined with the First World War. The amazing thing about the production (I should say the most amazing thing, because every aspect looked brilliant) is the puppet horses. They are huge, skeletal beasts made of a wooden framework covered with gauze, and operated by three people. The open structure means that you can see the operators, but the framework cleverly suggests the bones and musculature of the horse, so that it's almost like looking at an anatomical diagram. The puppeteers are incredibly skilled, and manage to move this enormous structure in such a way that you completely forget about the puppeteers, the wood and the gauze, and just see a real, live horse. It was rather like the puppets in the production of His Dark Materials that I saw, but much more impressive because of the size and complexity of the puppets. The horses breathe, shift their ears and heads in very naturalistic ways, and even gallop across the stage.
The scenery and staging was wonderful too, with a ragged strip of backcloth like a torn-off strip of paper, on to which various scenes were projected. The rest of the set of the battlefield was constructed and lit to resemble the rather harsh, angular paintings of many First World War artists, like Paul Nash, and they had a live folk band along with recorded sounds to provide the audio backdrop. It all looked and sounded amazing.
However, I know that I could never go to see this play. Why? Well, I would have to be helped from the theatre in a soggy, howling, emotional mess: just watching the 'making of' programme made me cry. I had heard Michael Morpurgo on the radio the day before talking about the little boy who inspired the book, and had cried, then got completely choked up when I tried to tell Mr. Bsag about it (he hadn't heard the programme). On the TV programme, they showed a scene where Joey — the horse — gets caught in barbed wire, and had to turn away I found it so upsetting.
I don't cry very often, but there are certain things (often silly things) which are real triggers for me, and a theatre production involving horses, the First World War, and someone losing and then being reunited with a beloved friend is more or less a perfect storm of emotional triggers for me. I can sit there with tears running down my face, thinking "Oh, get a grip woman — it's just puppets for goodness sake!", but still not be able to stop crying.


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Q: Argument of \pgfkeys@temp has an extra }. (tikz and hyperref incompatibility?) I'm trying to use TikZ in a section heading, following the answers to TikZ in section heading, but for some reason it fails to build whenever hyperref is involved:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{tikz}

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pdflatex reports:
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If I remove the hyperref import everything works. What's wrong here?
I'm using:

*

*pdfTeX 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.20 (TeX Live 2019/Debian)

*texlive 2019.20200218-1

I also tried reordering the tikz and hyperref imports to no avail.

A: As suggested by @muzimuzhiZ, the solution is to hide the tikz commands from hypertex's PDF metadata using \texorpdfstring, e.g.:
\DeclareRobustCommand{\circled}[1]{\texorpdfstring{\fbox{\tikz[baseline=(char.base)]{
        \node[shape=circle,draw,inner sep=2pt] (char) {#1};}}}{#1}}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Queensland mum learns daughter's last words in book about her murder.
News in 5: Daughter's last words in book; Trump's awkward joke; Olympian's toddler drowns.
1. Mum found out murdered daughter's last words in an "unethical" book.
Eight years ago Sonia Anderson lost her daughter Bianca Girven, when her deranged boyfriend Rhys Austin strangled the young mum to death.
And she's only now finding out her daughter's last words.
The Queensland mother discovered her daughter's last utterings in a book about her murder, Killer Instinct, published by the forensic psychiatrist who interviewed Austin in a psychiatric hospital.
"I knew she had been strangled to death, I knew that apparently, he strangled her 10 minutes, I didn't know that was her last words," the distressed mother told Nine News.
Anderson said she's disgusted the book about her daughter has been written, slamming Dr Grant for "living off the misery of others".
It's unclear at this stage whether Dr Grant breached patient confidentiality to write his novel. Dr Grant has declined to comment.
2. Donald Trump's joke to Kim Jong-un didn't come off so well.
They said it couldn't be done, but Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un (with the guidance of advisers we're sure) managed to agree to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.
When the camera spun to the North Korean leader his face was vacant – with perhaps a tinge of annoyance.
Thankfully the joke falling flat didn't jeopardise any agreements made during the historic summit in Singapore on Tuesday.
"President Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] and Chairman Kim Jong-un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula," read a joint statement.
It however, did not give any details on how denuclearisation would be achieved. The document also made no mention of the international sanctions that have crippled North Korea's economy, for pursuing its nuclear weapons program.
Nor was there any reference to finally signing a peace treaty. The combatants of the 1950-53 Korean War are technically still at war, as the conflict, in which millions of people died, was concluded only with a truce.
3. The 19-month-daughter of a US Olympian has died after drowning in a swimming pool.
Emeline Miller, the daughter of America's most successful Winter Olympian Bode Miller, drowned in a Southern California swimming pool on Saturday. Paramedics unsuccessfully tried to revive her.
Posting on Instagram about the death of his 19-month-old daughter, Miller said the family is "beyond devastated".
The US ski and snowboard team tweeted their condolences upon hearing the news that one of their most successful athletes of all time had lost his daughter.
Miller has won six medals in the Winter Olympics, which is the most of any other US skier. He retired from the sport in October last year at the age of 40.
4. Victorian GP charged with sexual assault 'could have more than 20 victims'.
Police will spend days tracking down female patients, including a teenager, who may have been unknowingly sexually assaulted by a regional Victorian doctor.
The 68-year-old GP allegedly took 'intimate" images of more than a dozen women. He is charged with the sexual assault of one patient on whom he allegedly conducted a pelvic examination without gloves at Wangaratta's Ely Street Clinic in October.
She raised the alarm after noticing camera equipment during the examination, and police subsequently found allegedly "inappropriate" images of up to 19 patients on electronic equipment seized from the doctor's office and home.
"She's been very brave, and she obviously knew that something was unusual and that something didn't seem right and so she came to us," Acting Superintendent Joy Arbuthnot told reporters on Tuesday.
The GP was on Monday charged with sexual assault and intimate image capture over the October consultation. He was suspended from practising in January.
The number of charges is expected to rise as the investigation continues and more women come forward, Supt Arbuthnot added.
"It has an incredibly detrimental impact on victims and they way they go about their life … and how they feel about going to a general practitioner," she said.
The alleged victims, aged between 17 and 60, were identified following a forensic examination of the computer and camera equipment seized, with date and time stamps cross-checked against appointment records.
The unsuspecting patients can expect to be contacted throughout the week.
Supt Arbuthnot could not say how many images investigators found or how far back they date.
But police stressed there was no evidence any other doctor or staff member at the Ely Street Clinic had been aware of or involved in the alleged incidents.
A doctor speaking on behalf of the practice said it was closed on Tuesday "in order to deal with the problem".
The accused GP, who is not a member of the The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, has been bailed to appear at Wangaratta Magistrates Court on September 10.
5. David Warner's teammates "delighted" with his new job commentating cricket for Channel 9.
Ashton Agar says he's delighted banned former vice-captain David Warner's been given the chance to commentate on Australia's ODI against England at Cardiff.
Warner, who is serving a 12-month suspension following the sandpaper gate incident in South Africa, won't be travelling to the UK, with his role being as a TV analyst from a studio in Sydney.
However, Agar, who'll play only his fifth ODI in Australian colours in the series opener at The Oval on Wednesday, said he's pleased the controversial opener is in the right head space again following the huge fall-out from the incident in Johannesburg in March.
"I only became aware yesterday," Agar said.
"For him as a person that's a great thing to be back around cricket.
"He would have been mentally really hurt by that, his family would have been hurt, everyone was hurt.
"So for him to be back around the game he loves is only good."


Find the perfect baby gift for little ones aged from newborn up to 3 years old with our collection of luxury and stylish gifts for baby boys. Whether it's a gift for baby's first birthday or a unique christening present, whatever the occasion is, find something special or unique from our range of designers. Our extensive collection includes beautiful babygrow gift sets, adorable baby toys, practical bottle sets and much more.


Whether you're a debut author, a seasoned novelist, or simply looking to flex your creative muscles, daily creative writing prompts are an excellent way to maintain a regular writing routine.
Filter through 500+ creative writing prompts in genres such as fantasy and romance — all by the Reedsy team. We update this list regularly, so make sure to stay tuned!
In the future, romantic attraction is literal: each person is fitted with an electromagnetic bracelet which, they claim, will pull you to your soulmate. It's the day they turn the magnets on, and you're waiting.
You're a serial killer who murders anyone you see hitchhiking up your mountain. One day, you pick up a hitchhiker who kills anyone who picks them up.
You are legally allowed to commit murder once, but you must fill out the proper paperwork and your proposed victim will be notified of your intentions.
You hire two private investigators to investigate each other. One month later both come to you to present their findings.
20 years after your daughter was abducted a detective finds you to reopen the case. The detective turns out to be your daughter.
You are the world's greatest detective. With your near superhuman intellect, you have never failed to solve a case before. One day, you finally meet your match: a criminal so unbelievably stupid that you cannot possibly comprehend and predict what he's going to do next.
A genius serial killer has been killing successfully for a decade. His only weakness is that he can never, ever lie. He finally gets caught and is facing trial for all murders in court. Yet, he walks, acquitted of all charges.


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FIFA 20 release date and Volta Football mode revealed
ON Jun 8, 2019 @ 5:56PM
EA confirmed earlier today that FIFA 20 will introduce a new way to play called Volta Football.
Volta Football is similar to FIFA Street and lets players take part in 3v3, 4v4, 4v4 Rush, 5v5, and Professional Futsal across various arenas of different sizes from around the world. Players can also customize their own male or female avatar with a range of clothing, hairstyles, and tattoo options, before taking them into the game.
In addition to the above, Volta features a number of game modes for players to tackle, including the Volta Story Mode, Volta Kick-Off, the online Volta League, and Volta World, in which players will build their own squad. Watch the reveal trailer below:
Elsewhere in this year's entry, EA Sports is adjusting a number of gameplay elements. For starters, timed finishing will be harder to execute and more prone to error in pressured situations. As well as this, manual movement of the goalkeeper will be slower and goalkeeper movement will be locked once the shooter locks in a shot. Finally, a new system has been introduced for aiming free kicks and penalties.
FIFA 20 launches September 27th for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
Volta Football
EA Sports is taking FIFA back to the streets in FIFA 20's new Volta Football mode.
By Matthew Bennett | 06/8/2019 05:56 PM PT


I drew the weird picture no idea how it ended up in my file! :).
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If I have invited you but you would not like to be interviewed please delete yourself or just stay.


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Ulrich Wilhelm Kohlenbach (* 27. Juli 1962 in Frankfurt am Main) ist ein deutscher Mathematiker, der sich mit Mathematischer Logik und speziell Beweistheorie befasst.

Leben
Kohlenbach studierte nach dem Abitur am Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt am Main ab 1981 Mathematik, Philosophie und Linguistik in Frankfurt mit dem Diplom in Mathematik 1986 und wurde dort 1990 bei Horst Luckhardt promoviert (Theorie der majorisierbaren und stetigen Funktionale und ihre Anwendung bei der Extraktion von Schranken aus inkonstruktiven Beweisen: Effektive Eindeutigkeitsmodule bei besten Approximationen aus ineffektiven Eindeutigkeitsbeweisen). Nach der Habilitation in Frankfurt 1995 (Real growth in standard parts of analysis) war er Visiting Assistant Professor an der University of Michigan und war ab 1997 an der Universität Aarhus (ab 2000 als Associate Professor mit Tenure). 2004 wurde er ordentlicher Professor für Mathematik an der Technischen Universität Darmstadt.

Er befasst sich mit der Untersuchung mathematischer Beweise speziell in verschiedenen Bereichen der Analysis (Proof mining, ein Forschungsprogramm, das er ab Anfang der 1990er Jahre entwickelte) um daraus effektive Schranken in der Analysis selbst abzuleiten.

Kohlenbach war eingeladener Sprecher auf dem Internationalen Mathematikerkongress 2018 in Rio de Janeiro (Proof-theoretic Methods in Nonlinear Analysis).

Er ist Präsident der Association for Symbolic Logic (2016) und Herausgeber der Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. 2008 bis 2012 war er Vorsitzender der Deutschen Vereinigung für mathematische Logik und für Grundlagenforschung der exakten Wissenschaften. 2011 erhielt er den hoch dotierten Kurt Gödel Forschungspreis der Kurt Gödel Gesellschaft und der John Templeton Foundation.

Schriften (Auswahl)
 Applied Proof Theory: Proof Interpretations and Their Use in Mathematics, Springer 2008
mit Paulo Oliva: Proof Mining: A systematic way of analysing proofs in mathematics, Proc. Steklov Inst. Math, Band 242, 2003, S. 136–164

Weblinks
 Webseite an der TU Darmstadt

Einzelnachweise

Mathematiker (20. Jahrhundert)
Mathematiker (21. Jahrhundert)
Hochschullehrer (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
Absolvent der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Deutscher
Geboren 1962
Mann

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Janki () ist ein kleiner Ort in der polnischen Woiwodschaft Ermland-Masuren, der zur Landgemeinde Banie Mazurskie (Benkheim) im Powiat Gołdapski (Kreis Goldap) gehört.

Geographische Lage
Janki liegt im Nordosten der Woiwodschaft Ermland-Masuren, 20 Kilometer südöstlich der früheren und heute auf russischem Staatsgebiet gelegenen Kreisstadt Darkehmen (1938 bis 1946 Angerapp, ) bzw. 12 Kilometer westlich der heutigen Kreishauptstadt Gołdap (Goldap).

Geschichte
Das seinerzeitige Klein Jahnen war eine Försterei innerhalb des Staatsforstes Skallischen/Altheide und wurde 1874 in den neu errichteten Amtsbezirk Rogahlen (), der – 1939 in "Amtsbezirk Gahlen" umbenannt – bis 1945 zum Kreis Darkehmen (1939 bis 1945 "Landkreis Angerapp") im Regierungsbezirk Gumbinnen der preußischen Provinz Ostpreußen gehörte. Zu diesem Amtsbezirk gehörte Klein Jahnen auch, als der Ort am 30. September 1928 in die Landgemeinde Groß Jahnen () eingegliedert wurde.

1945 kam Klein Jahnen in Kriegsfolge mit dem gesamten südlichen Ostpreußen zu Polen und erhielt die polnische Namensform "Janki". Als kleine Waldsiedlung (polnisch osada leśna) ist es jetzt eine Ortschaft im Verbund der Landgemeinde Banie Mazurskie im Powiat Gołdapski, vor 1998 der Woiwodschaft Suwałki, seither der Woiwodschaft Ermland-Masuren zugehörig.

Religionen
Klein Jahnen war bis 1945 in die evangelische Kirche Rogahlen (1938 bis 1945 Gahlen, ) im Kirchenkreis Darkehmen/Angerapp in der Kirchenprovinz Ostpreußen der Kirche der Altpreußischen Union bzw. in die katholische Pfarrkirche Goldap () im Dekanat Masuren II (Sitz in Johannisburg (Pisz)) im Bistum Ermland eingepfarrt.

Heute gehören die evangelischen Kirchenglieder zur Kirche in Gołdap, einer Filialkirche von Suwałki in der Diözese Masuren der Evangelisch-Augsburgischen Kirche in Polen, während die katholischen Einwohner Jankis in die Kirche in Rogale, Filialkirche von Żabin (Klein Schabienen, 1938 bis 1945 Kleinlautersee) im Dekanat Gołdap im Bistum Ełk (Lyck) der Römisch-katholischen Kirche in Polen eingegliedert sind.

Verkehr
Nach Janki führt eine direkte Straßenverbindung über die Goldap () von Rożyńsk Mały (Klein Rosinsko, 1938 bis 1945 Bergershof). Eine Bahnanbindung besteht nicht.

Einzelnachweise

Ort der Woiwodschaft Ermland-Masuren
Gmina Banie Mazurskie


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With a 1960s Tribute Band, you will get a group of professional musicians that will take you back to the 1960s to when music was all about the 'Mersey Beat and 'Psychedelic' sounds!
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When you hire a 1960s Tribute Band, you will get a group of professionally trained musicians that will take you on a journey through time back to the 'far-out' 1960s! They will play a wide range of covers from some of the decades biggest artists including: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Doors, The Small Faces, The Mamas and the Papas, James Brown, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix, to name a few!
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Our fees for a leasehold residential property purchase are set out in the Fee Schedule and cover the essential conveyancing steps that will need to be taken on a typical leasehold residential property purchase by a single natural person with no mortgage.
Disbursements will also include a fee payable to the Land Registry for the registration of your purchase (and mortgage if relevant) after completion. Land Registry fees are based on a scale relevant to the value of the property and type of registration required. We have included the relevant scale fee in our Fee Schedule for that value of property assuming a simple electronic application for registering a transfer of whole (with mortgage if relevant).
Notice of Charge fee (if the property is to be mortgaged) – this fee is set out in the lease. Often the fee is between £5 to £50 plus VAT.
Reporting to you once registration is completed, accounting to you for any surplus monies on account and dealing with any service charge retention.
The fees specified in this table are all exclusive of VAT and disbursements..


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Team Liquid parent company Axiomatic raises $21 million in new funding round
by Lucas Chillerón
Axiomatic is the parent company of the successful esports organization Team Liquid. So far, it has already had multiple well-known and high-profile investors, such as basketball legend Michael Jordan. In a previous funding round held in October 2018, he joined the company as part of an investor group that also included Curtis Polk of the Charlotte Hornets and Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein, among others.
According to Unikrn's Dustin Steiner, however, a few new partners have now invested in Axiomatic. Team Liquid's parent has recently received $21.5 million in a new funding round. The total offering amount was $25 million, which makes for a pretty successful campaign overall. The names of the investors, though, have not been revealed.
Team Liquid is one of the most successful esports organizations in the world. Photo via: Team Liquid.
Whoever they are, they have joined Jordan, fellow NBA legend Magic Johnson, Golden State Warriors co-owner Peter Gruber, Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik, and Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis in supporting Steve Arhancet and company in the future. Currently, Team Liquid enjoys the pleasure of being one of the biggest esports organizations in the whole world.
Through time, it has signed myriad teams. Due to TL's professional approach, several of them are now some of the world's best in their respective games. These include Team Liquid's CS:GO, Dota 2, League of Legends, Super Smash Bros., Rainbow Six Siege, Fortnite, or Street Fighter divisions. Most of Team Liquid players are highly marketable, aside from being consistently good competitors.
Team Liquid´s League of Legends roster has found massive success within North America over the past year and a half. Photo via: LoL Esports.
TL's League of Legends roster, for example, got its third LCS title two weeks ago in the Chaifetz Arena, Sant Louis. Only one weekend later, Juan "Hungrybox" Debiedma would go on to win Pound 2019's Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. Axiomatic can definitely boast being the parent company of one of the most successful esports organizations of the moment. So it will be interesting to see what the raised amount is used for.
Maybe in building some improved facilities for some of its teams to practice out of Los Angeles? Maybe for global marketing purposes? The future is unknown for Team Liquid, but undeniably, these $21.5 million dollars will help to maintain the rising pattern it has experienced ever since its conception.
Lucas Chillerón
Kenneth Utama
Activision Blizzard workers cautiously optimistic after Microsoft acquisition
Aron Garst
Minna Adel Rubio


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Julia Lee – the woman who changed the face of Rugby League refereeing
Meet Julia Lee!
Julia Lee is the Founder and Director of Common-sense Initiative (CSI). She was the first female qualified Rugby League Referee in Great Britain and Australia in any code and had fifteen years' experience as a Match Official, reaching professional and International honours.
To date, no female in the UK has surpassed this achievement as a referee. She worked in Rugby League for over twenty years, beginning as a Development Officer in Leeds to eventually leading the Development Department, securing £29 million from Sport England.
Later, she was appointed to the role as the Director of the 2013 Festival of World Cups where over a fortnight, a total of 25 teams from 11 nations competed in 47 matches at eight different venues.
Julia, why did you choose to become a semi-professional men's rugby league referee and do what nobody else had done before?
I never intended to referee initially it was a dare for the first year it was a whirl wind with very little support and no referee training. I hated refereeing every game. Then I went to Australia for a year and they trained me on the basics. Once I had the foundations, I decided 'Why not, see how far you can go.' I then had to do everything any other match officials did, such as a fitness test exam and assessment.
I progressed based on my ability. Other women were in and amongst. In fact, I formed a women referees association to get more women involved, however, once they had to make a life choice, the majority dropped out. The system is not set up for pregnancy or female menstruation or life choices. It still isn't. If you miss a season, then you have to start again. If you are on your period, it is not taken into account. Some women came back after babies but never aspired above the community game.
Has anyone else done it since?
There are two women in the UK at the moment, Tara Jones and Caitlin Beavers. They both play Super League, are in the England team and officiate matches. Tara has done a Super League in goal and was voted National Conference Referee of the Year last season. They are both doing really well. There are two female professional match officials in Australia. They have been on the scene for ages and both have officiated in the Australian Super League.
Are there any examples of clubs are especially championing diversity?
All the clubs with a Foundation (all Super League clubs have to have this charity arm) have programmes around diversity. So there are some great examples of inclusive programmes for disability in particular (PDRL) but not so much around ethnicity or LGBT that I am aware of.
The governing body (Rugby Football League – RFL) and the Super League both come down heavily on racist and homophobic behaviour or comments. They do sometimes get it wrong but will hold their hands up to mistakes. There are some female directors on the Super League and RFL boards, not so many in clubs that I am aware of. I am not sure if the culture has changed – when I was there it was a very male culture.
The women's Super League teams are generally part of the Foundation. I think Leeds has now integrated its women's team into the club. One of the biggest problems in rugby league is that it is not a cash-rich sport. Most of the professional teams clubs money goes into getting the best male players and staying or progressing into the Super League.
Some of the clubs such as Hull KR, Leeds, Wigan, Featherstone and Bradford have a will to engage women players but do not have the money or resources to do it the way it should be done. Some clubs play lip service because they think they should. It is like going back in time: poor facilities, kit and no support beyond the name of the club.
The Rugby League World Cup 2021 (RLWC2021) is doing diversity really well, with women and wheelchair players on a level playing field. All players are getting the same pay and there is equal PR around each tournament. It is very well done and is the first time that women and wheelchair players have been given this parity.
Do you feel that Rugby League is just paying lip service to diversity? It it any better than rugby union in this regard?
I think they try really hard and as I say have a will. However, they struggle to really understand the problems or have the resources and money to do it effectively. Since the formation of the Women's Super League in 2017, the profile of the game has been unprecedented and is absolutely fabulous.
The games are being televised and some of the women are now becoming role models and personalities within the sport. This will help grow the game. It's needed to build a strong sustainable competition because, as yet, the depth is not there. It is hoped that the World Cup will help address some of this and it needs resources to support it.
I am not in a position to comment on the plans for the future. What I do know is that when WARLA (Womens Amateur RL) began in 1985, there were four self-funded international tours between 1996 – 2003 and the women sacrificed a lot so they could play the sport.
The women of this generation have a great platform and have a role to ensure that all women and girls can access the sport equally. There is no room for accepting second best. Internationally, the women's game has common issues in terms of male coaches coaching women in the same way they do the men, limited female international competition and domestic pathways.
There is very little resources distributed to the women's game in comparison to the men. Additionally, if budgets are tight then the female game will have its funding withdrawn. There is more money, resources and international opportunity in Rugby Union, however, I believe they face similar challenges.
Women's sport has grown and developed more in the last five years then ever before. It is a golden time. Women are begin to gain equality of opportunity (which does not mean parity to men). However, they are having the opportunity to be involved in sport at all levels and roles.
Why do you feel so little has changed in terms of female referees and touch judges in superleague?
It is really brilliant to see women commentators and players been given air time. My personal belief is that the last area to become true equality of opportunities is in officiating and coaching. As with many professions, being involved in these roles requires dedication, time and commitment over a long period of time.
It does not take into account having a family, or in some sports, the qualities a women can bring to that role. If a woman takes time off to have a baby, how many sports reinstate them at the level where they finished or do they have to start at a lower level? Do fitness tests take in to account when women are menstruating and that fact that they will not be able to perform at their best?
What would you like see change?
I'd like to see more female role models and decision makers in sport, individual abilities and skills to be embraced in sport, and to change the business of sport to be more inclusive. Difference would be celebrated to create a more diverse workforce. My ultimate dream would be that there is no longer a question as to whether women should be involved in sport, that they just are, and that there would be no mention of male or female they are just a player, official or coach.
More about Julia Lee
Julia set up Common-sense Initiative to inspire and empower young people and women to unlock and achieve their potential. She is a certificated Master Practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a hypnotherapist and ILM Level 7 coach. She uses her life journey, and sporting experiences to engage with young people and women through coaching and inspirational speaking.
Julia has recently launched a partnership with Janie Frampton, who was one of the first female football referees, delivering a worldwide Diversity in Leadership progamme with World Athletics sponsored by Seb Coe. They want to talk to companies who have a commitment to diversity and want to increase their talent pool.
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Gautam Adani: Growing High With Determination
Either you sit on the pile of cash, or you continue to grow- Gautam Adani.
Gautam Adani was born on 24 June, 1962 in a Jain family, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. He had to migrate with his parents from the town of Tharad located in the northern part of Gujarat. He attended his schooling from the Sheth Chimanlal Nagindas Vidyalaya school in Ahmedabad.
He pursued Commerce while completing graduation at Gujrat University, but as he was not interested in the study, so dropped out after the second year. He had a great interest in business and was ambitious and highly determined since childhood. But he did not have an interest in the textile business of his father. After his dropout, he was interested in studying businesses to start his own.
A Move Towards Dreams
Business is all about risk-taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence. - Gautam Adani.
He soon went to Mumbai in chase of his dreams. He wanted to start his own business, but he did not have enough money, so he started working in a Diamond company in Mumbai. He achieved good experience in that sector and started his shop, and started earning a good amount. This was the start of his business journey. He moved to Mumbai to work as a Diamon sorter for the Mahendra brothers and set up his own diamond brokerage business after a couple of years.
His elder brother asked him for help to run the job. He has faced two turning points in his life when the government relaxed import norms under open general license (OGL) for actual users. The second turning point came into existence, in the year 1995 when we decided to get into the port sector, as part of the overall strategy of the group to get into asset-building.
Import & Export Business
Business is all about taking risks and managing uncertainities. - Gautam Adani.
He was invited by his elder brother Mahasukhbhai Adani who bought a plastics unit in Ahmedabad to manage the operation, which brought a way to Gautam Adani and opened the doors to global trading through Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) imports. There he found the import and export market and decided to start a business in it.
He started importing, and gradually established Adani Exports, which is now known as Adani Enterprises. His business was growing high on the pavement of progress. This enabled him to start the export business as well, which got boomed soon.
He focused on his efforts and achieved success with high determination and optimism by expanding his business into the trading of metals, textiles, and agro products.
He got the fruit of his efforts, and he became a millionaire at the age of 20 years. After Liberalization, he started expanding in the infrastructure segment.
His goodwill associated with efforts once brought an opportunity from the Gujrat government. In 1993, the Gujrat government was in search of private companies for the work of Mundra port in Kutch, and Gautam Adani got the benefit of this opportunity. Today, the Mundra port is working at its peak of success.
Power Business
I could never take orders from anyone. - Gautam Adani.
He entered into the power business after the import and export business. He faced many challenges and difficulties in this business, but he started solving these problems step by step. He started many companies with the Adani Group, such as Adani Ports and Sez Limited, Adani Power, Adani Enterprises, Adani Transmission, Adani Green Energy, and Adani Gas. He also has some unlisted companies, such as Adani Wilmar, and has also entered into the aviation sector and data center.
He also acquired Reliance Power - the electricity transmission business, also the GMR - the Thermal Power Project, and also the L&T Kattupalli Port. He marks his attributes as being a great and talented entrepreneur who is taking efforts to escalate his business and keep it running on the pavement of progress. He is the 3rd richest person in India.
Currently, he is the president of the Adani Foundation, which is running its business in the states of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha.
His journey was not so easy. He struggled to acquire a good position, and became a self-made billionaire.
He had a good business knowledge which made him a good businessman. He established a monopoly and was ranked the third most remarkable individual in India. His high determination towards his aim and goal made him become the most successful industrialist and business person of his generation. His keen focus on his goals changed his life in a better way.
I will state without any hesitation that in my view - over the next three decades, India is the worlds greatest business opportunites. - Gautam Adani.
[The images are being taken from the registered companies and belong to their respective owners only.]


text:
MANCHESTER CITY WINS APPEAL AGAINST TWO-YEAR BAN FROM UEFA: BUT CAS IMPOSES 10 MILLION EURO FINE
Manchester City's two year suspension from European football was overturned by the court of Arbitration for sports (CAS) on Monday and also reduced their fine 10 million euros. This means that only will Manchester city be able to play in the elite tournament next season, but they will also retain their star player. In beginning of the year, UEFA had ruled the Manchester City had "serious breaches" of the FFP rule in information submitted them between 2012 and 2016 and failed to cooperate with the investigation. As an outcome, the team was banned for two years from European football and also asked to pay a fine.
The arbitral award was delivered by a panel of arbitrators in charge of matter comprising Rui Botica Santos (Portugal), Ulrich Haas (Germany) and Andrew McDougall QC (France), the court of Arbitration for sports (CAS) said the decision issued on 14 February 2020 by the adjudicator chamber of the CFCB should be set aside and replaced by the following
Manchester City has contravened Article 56 of the Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulation (FFPR)
Manchester City has to pay a fine of 10 million euros to the Union of European Football Association (UEFA), within 30 days from the date of issuance of arbitral award.
The CAS award emphasised that most of the alleged breaches reported by the Adjudicatory Chamber of the CFCB were either not established or time-barred. As the charges with respect to any dishonest concealment of equity funding were clearly more significant violations than obstructing the CFCB's investigations, it was not appropriate to impose a ban on participating in UEFA's club competitions for MCFC's failure to cooperate with the CFCB's investigations alone," the CAS verdict stated.
For ref: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-man-city-champions-league-ban-overturned-what-it-means-6503697/
https://www.firstpost.com/sports/as-cas-overturns-manchester-citys-two-year-suspension-from-european-football-heres-all-you-need-to-know-8591291.html


You are browsing the archive for Cluester.
In this post I present a simple technique that can be quite helpful when you hit the wall during your analysis and don't know what else to do. The idea relies on cluster analysis a.k.a. clustering. Notably, the implementation of this technique is very simple, but is hard to generalize – it depends very much on case and data. In an an example below I focus on Windows file system cluster analysis that are focused mainly on discovering minor, but grouped changes to the system – usually these are associated with a malware infection.
A typical computer forensics case deals with a tremendous amount of data and whether we analyze it in an automated fashion or walk our way through evidence manually we are pretty much wasting our time until we finally find the first clue. Purists could say here that we are not really wasting our time as we are slowly ruling out the possibilities and they are right, but I hope they will agree that such analysis are not fun. It can be quite frustrating, and more so as we know that finding that first trace of suspicious activity is what will shape further analysis – in fact it is what really kicks off the proper investigation (and this is also where the fun begins :)).
But finding that first piece of puzzle is not a trivial task. For many reasons. If you are lucky you may find malware still running in memory, the evidence has not been contaminated, or the clues are all over the place. In many cases though, the evidence may have been already contaminated by the attackers or 'helpful' IT staff that cleaned up the system before the data acquisition. There may be no malware involved at all as the case is dealing with a contraband, fraud, plagiarism or other issues. Also, in many production environment there is a lot changes introduced to the system on regular basis (e.g. via system updates, transaction records, logs, etc.), often saved into separate files generating large amount of small files. Analyzing such systems can be a real nightmare (e.g. a hundreds of thousands files on a single file systems).
Over the years investigators designed many techniques to sift through the data and adapted them into many useful tools and methodologies. We have got Timelines, Filetyping, various filtering, Least Frequency of Occurrence, and many other system- or artifact-specific analysis e.g. these of processes, registry, prefetch files etc.
A typical Windows system is a mess. Operating system files, applications, user profiles, data copied all over the place by users (often many of them), followed by the content of temp folders, cache directories, recycled folders, admin scripts, registry clutter, and production data (if it applies). And lots more.
How to reduce this data into something useful?
One easy way to make some sense of it is by using filtering e.g. by file typing. Files with specific extensions can be grouped together and such groups assessed one by one. This may work, but is also very inefficient. There could be literally hundreds of thousands files of the same file extension. There are also hundreds, often thousands of different file extensions on the system. On top of that, file extension is not necessary indicative of a file content (.exe file doesn't need to be an executable, and pictures or executable can be stored in files with misleading extensions).
Another way to look at the file system is to realize that file system changes are logically grouped and often happen in an atomic or almost-atomic way i.e. all at once within a short period of time – forming pretty much a sequence of 'file system updates'. These are clusters we will try to focus on here. These updates often happen on regular intervals and affect only specific paths. Knowing that one can try to build an improved timeline, based not on all timestamps, but on ranges of timestamps.
First, an example of a typical timeline is shown below – one can see that I have copied grep.exe to the system together with Cygwin DLLs that are necessary to run the grep.exe (as it was unable to resolve dependencies). I then ran it (as see with a Prefetch files). Next, I copied sleuthkit binaries into a tools directory and ran fls.exe creating a list file that I used for the purpose of this article.
As you can see, the sleuthkit binaries form a nice cluster. The script I used to generate the listing takes into account a number of files created at the same time and if the number of files is higher than 10, it pushes the file list to the right. Under normal conditions, the script wouldn't need to print them at all, but I do it here for the sake of clarity with a hint to the reader that such a large 'file update' may be potentially skipped in analysis. One can easily modify the script to either not show them at all or perhaps apply some more logic before presenting the output. Of course, completely ignoring it is a wrong idea as only by seeing the example above you can tell that I happened to drop some files on the system. Again, depends on what you are looking for, you need to define the criteria that form your clusters and push out of the sight things that are not interesting.
One simple improvement that can be made to the timeline and clustering is timestamp normalization. By normalization I mean a way to glue more timestamps together, even if they do not match perfectly. It can be done in many way, for example: if we assume that the window of atomic operation or almost-atomic 'file system update' is e.g. 10 or even whole 60 seconds, suddenly we will be able to increase our ability to assign more entries into a single cluster. More entries in a cluster, more chances for it to fall out of sight.
The first column is a normalized timestamp (normalized to minutes i.e. 60 seconds), then actual timestamp, then path.
Clustering is a very interesting technique, yet it would seem not widely used. Applied on top of a timeline it could help reduce the amount of data for manual review and most importantly – may immediately highlight suspicious artifacts based on specific criteria. As I mentioned earlier, in the example above I decide to remove from the view all these entries that form the clusters of 10 or more files. This is arbitrary, but doesn't have to be. It would be certainly helpful in finding malware, as malware rarely drops more than 10 files on the system, yet it would not helpful finding stashed content that has been copied in bulk. A lot more research is needed to find out how to utilize this technique widely and perhaps generate scenarios that can be converted into usable 'dynamic smart filters' that can be applied on top of any data.
The data can be manipulated and analyzed in many ways and ideally there should be an easy way to play with clustering parameters – I am not aware of any interactive tool that could do that in a generic way, but even simple toying around with Excel or a simple script can help here. If you know any free software that already does it, I would appreciate if you let me know.
Last, but not least, before even clustering is applied, one can remove entries using known techniques e.g. clean file hashes, known clean full paths, as well as data obtained from installer analysis extracted from case (run, collect data about file paths, apply as a whitelist), and other data that has a low chance for being interesting (e.g. directories outside of typical scope of system/user activity).
If you want to toy around with the idea, you can download Cluester – an example script that I used for this post.
Fixed typos, grammar mistakes, polished it a bit (that's what happens when you write posts at 2am ;).


As I aspire to join the noble profession of teaching law, it involves many years of education beyond the undergraduate level. I have been financially dependent on parents for more than 24 years, who also look after my maternal and paternal grandparents. Since the time my younger sister has enrolled for higher studies, I feel it an obligation to provide some financial relief to my parents who are looking after two generations. The financial assistance accorded through this esteemed Scholarship would assist me in becoming an independent person capable of contributing financially to my education.
Further, the Prof. R. P. Anand International Law Scholarship is highly prestigious and distinguished. The competitive nature of the scholarship makes it an accomplishment in itself that would enhance my resume and help me advance on my career trajectory. I would be privileged to be accorded recognition by this renowned Scholarship which would be highly advantageous when I apply for further studies and employment opportunities.
Your long term International Law career goals if any In these times of increased armed conflicts, I am intrigued by the manner in which international law can protect and implement human rights during conflict times where principles of distinction and proportionality are heavily challenged or diminished. I, therefore, aspire to pursue a doctorate in International Humanitarian Law to research on the same and contribute to the jurisprudence with the objective of reducing ambivalence that surrounds the evolving contours of international law. Thereafter, I am determined to become a member of the noble profession of teaching.


"World's Largest Trade Show For Photo Booth Professionals, Manufacturers and Suppliers."
OPhoto Booth Expo will be held February 24-27, 2020 at South Point with well over 4000 attendees expected. Photo Booth Expo is where new products and concepts are unveiled, it's where ideas are shared and deals are made. There's a full schedule of seminars, plus networking opportunities, parties, entertainment and much more.
Many vendors with actual on site presentation of each of there products. This is actually very helpful since you can actually see the quality and differences of each product and at the same time ask all the questions.
I'm new to the PBX experience, so I was overwhelmingly happy to find so much support from everyone from vendors to people who've had businesses for years. In excited about 2019 and about PBX 2020!!!
I was able to find a few products that I didn't know about and really liked. It was worth going to actually see what's out there.
Exhibitor will showcase all aspects of the photo booth business including legal strategies to structure your business for growth and expansion, the latest trends in social media sharing, hiring and managing a successful team, networking, branding, creative new markets and much more.


Please refer to the Adult 19+ section to see descriptions of our Aquafit and Aquatic Rehabilitative Programs, or check out our schedules online. Adults 55+ are welcome to participate in all Adult 19+ programs.
The Aquatic Centre is the perfect place to begin or continue your health and fitness journey. You are never too old to learn how to swim. Beginner and intermediate classes are available. Adults 55+ are welcome to participate in all adult programs.


text:
from FlatCAMObj import FlatCAMGerber, FlatCAMGeometry

def test_isolate(self):
    """
    Test isolate gerber
    :param self:
    :return:
    """

    self.fc.exec_command_test('open_gerber %s/%s -outname %s'
                              % (self.gerber_files, self.copper_top_filename, self.gerber_top_name))
    gerber_top_obj = self.fc.collection.get_by_name(self.gerber_top_name)
    self.assertTrue(isinstance(gerber_top_obj, FlatCAMGerber), "Expected FlatCAMGerber, instead, %s is %s"
                    % (self.gerber_top_name, type(gerber_top_obj)))

    # isolate traces
    self.fc.exec_command_test('isolate %s -dia %f' % (self.gerber_top_name, self.engraver_diameter))
    geometry_top_obj = self.fc.collection.get_by_name(self.gerber_top_name+'_iso')
    self.assertTrue(isinstance(geometry_top_obj, FlatCAMGeometry), "Expected FlatCAMGeometry, instead, %s is %s"
                    % (self.gerber_top_name+'_iso', type(geometry_top_obj)))

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


A recent study explores a new factor that may contribute to the risk of developing ASD: the concentration of heavy metals in a child's body.
The method used in this new study, however, manages to bypass many of these limitations. By looking at naturally shed baby teeth, the researchers explain, they have access to information that goes as far back as a baby's prenatal life. And by studying twins, Prof. Arora and colleagues were able to separate genetic influences from environmental ones.
To determine how much metal the babies' bodies contained before and after birth, the researchers used lasers to analyze the growth rings on the babies' teeth.
In much the same way that we can tell the age of a tree by looking at the growth rings in a cross-section of its trunk, the scientists were able to see different developmental stages correspond to different rings by looking at a cross-section of the babies' teeth.
Overall, the study suggests that either prenatal exposure to heavy metals, or the body's ability to process them, may influence the chances of developing autism.
Prof. Arora called the method "a window into our fetal life." He and his colleagues note, however, that more large-scale studies are needed to replicate and confirm their findings.


It is estimated £100 billion of private-sector investment is needed from now til 2020 to replace the ageing electricity infrastructure with a more diverse and intelligent localised energy grid. The UK's current supergrid infrastructure is inflexible resulting in dependence on interconnects to adjacent European and Irish electrical grids.
Energy management is a valuable means to address this challenge. It improves the UK's security of supply by reducing peak energy demand and decreasing the need for energy imports. Furthermore, it helps to reduce carbon emissions in a cost- effective way and thereby to mitigate climate change. Through investment in proven energy-efficiency technologies, the UK can solve its energy trilemma … the critical interplay between carbon emissions, the security of energy supply, and energy costs.
Capitas has been operating within the UK energy market providing financial assistance to customers on a range of energy-related projects for several years. Our energy finance team delivers structured finance facilities to help private and public sector organisations better manage commercial operations, implement cost-reduction programmes and mitigate risk whilst ensuring they adhere to government policy, legislation and directives. Your organisation can benefit from the experience and knowledge of our sector experts who work with leading Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Energy Services Companies (ESCOs), Aggregators and Suppliers.


text:
Q: Hello! is that anyway to write similar query without using union? is that anyway to write similar query without using union?
select sum(decode(p.sumsend,0,1,0)) recvcnt,
       sum(decode(p.sumsend,0,1,0)*p.sumserv) recvsum
  from some_table p
 where p.polefilter = 5
 union
select sum(decode(p.sumsend,0,1,0)) recvcnt,
       sum(decode(p.sumsend,0,1,0)*p.sumserv) recvsum
  from some_table p
 where p.polefilter != 5

A: If you are OK with having all 4 columns on one row, then one option is conditional aggregation:
select
    sum(case when polefilter =  5 and sumsend = 0 then 1 else 0 end) recvcnt1,
    sum(case when polefilter =  5 and sumsend = 0 then 1 else 0 end *  sumserv) recvsum1,
    sum(case when polefilter <> 5 and sumsend = 0 then 1 else 0 end) recvcnt2,
    sum(case when polefilter <> 5 and sumsend = 0 then 1 else 0 end *  sumserv) recvsum2
from some_table p
where polefilter is not null

On the other hand, if you want two rows in the resultset, then you can use aggregation and a case expression to define the groups:
select
    case when polefilter = 5 then 1 else 0 end as polefilter_is_5
    sum(case when sumsend = 0 then 1 else 0 end) recvcnt,
    sum(case when sumsend = 0 then 1 else 0 end *  sumserv) recvsum1
from some_table p
where p.polefilter is not null
group by case when polefilter = 5 then 1 else 0 end

Note that I changed the decode() functions to case expressions; both do the same thing, but the latest is standard SQL (and is somehow more flexible).

A: A query like the one below should work. Please provide sample data and expected output when asking a question next time.
  SELECT SUM (CASE WHEN p.sumsend = 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)                 recvcnt,
         SUM (CASE WHEN p.sumsend = 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END * p.sumserv)     recvsum
    FROM some_table p
GROUP BY CASE p.polefilter WHEN 5 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END;