text:
The Mathematics of Predicting the Course of the Coronavirus
Adam Rogers Megan Molteni
Epidemiologists are using complex models to help policymakers get ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the leap from equations to decisions is a long one.
People at a supermarket in Barcelona, Spain, practice social distancing.Photograph: David Ramos/Getty Images
In the past few days, New York City's hospitals have become unrecognizable. Thousands of patients sick with the novel coronavirus have swarmed into emergency rooms and intensive care units. From 3,000 miles away in Seattle, as Lisa Brandenburg watched the scenes unfold—isolation wards cobbled together in lobbies, nurses caring for Covid-19 patients in makeshift trash bag gowns, refrigerated mobile morgues idling on the street outside—she couldn't stop herself from thinking: "That could be us."
It could be, if the models are wrong.
Until this past week, Seattle had been the center of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. It's where US health officials confirmed the nation's first case, back in January, and its first death a month later. As president of the University of Washington Medicine Hospitals and Clinics, Brandenburg oversees the region's largest health network, which treats more than half a million patients every year. In early March, she and many public health authorities were shaken by an urgent report produced by computational biologists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Their analysis of genetic data indicated the virus had been silently circulating in the Seattle area for weeks and had already infected at least 500 to 600 people. The city was a ticking time bomb.
The mayor of Seattle declared a civil emergency. Superintendents started closing schools. King and Snohomish counties banned gatherings of more than 250 people. The Space Needle went dark. Seattleites wondered if they should be doing more, and they petitioned the governor to issue a statewide shelter-at-home order. But Brandenburg was left with a much grimmer set of questions: How many people are going to get hospitalized? How many of them will require critical care? When will they start showing up? Will we have enough ventilators when they do?
Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.
There's no way to know those answers for sure. But hospital administrators like Brandenburg have to hazard an educated guess. That's the only way they can try to buy enough ventilators and hire enough ICU nurses and clear out enough hospital beds to be ready for a wave of hacking, gasping, suffocating Covid-19 patients.
That's where Chris Murray and his computer simulations come in.
Murray is the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. With about 500 statisticians, computer scientists, and epidemiologists on staff, IHME is a data-crunching powerhouse. Every year it releases the Global Burden of Disease study—an alarmingly comprehensive report that quantifies the incidence and impact of every conceivable illness and injury in each of the world's 195 countries and territories.
In February, Murray and a few dozen IHME employees turned their attention full-time to forecasting how Covid-19 will hit the US. Specifically, they were trying to help hospitals—starting with the UW Medicine system—prepare for the coming crisis. Brandenburg says the collaboration could turn out to be, quite literally, life-saving. "It's one thing to know you may be getting a surge of patients," she says. "If you can make that more tangible—here's what it's actually going to look like—then we're in a much better place in terms of being able to plan for the worst."
But it's a big if. During a pandemic, real data is hard to find. Chinese researchers have only published some of their findings on the spread of Covid-19 in Hubei. The ongoing catastrophe of testing for the virus in the United States means no researcher has even a reliable denominator, an overall number of infections that would be a reasonable starting point for untangling how rapidly the disease spreads. Since the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 influenza, researchers worldwide have increasingly relied on mathematical models, computer simulations informed by what little data they can find, and some reasoned inferences. Federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health have modeling teams, as do many universities.
As with simulations of Earth's changing climate or what happens when a nuclear bomb detonates in a city, the goal here is to make an informed prediction—within a range of uncertainty—about the future. When data is sparse, which happens when a virus crosses over into humans for the first time, models can vary widely in terms of assumptions, uncertainties, and conclusions. But governors and task force leads still tout their models from behind podiums, increasingly famous modeling labs release regular reports into the content mills of the press and social media, and policymakers still use models to make decisions. In the case of Covid-19, responding to those models may yet be the difference between global death tolls in the thousands or the millions. Models are imperfect, but they're better than flying blind—if you use them right.
The basic math of a computational model is the kind of thing that seems obvious after someone explains it. Epidemiologists break up a population into "compartments," a sorting-hat approach to what kind of imaginary people they're studying. A basic version is an SIR model, with three teams: susceptible to infection, infected, and recovered or removed (which is to say, either alive and immune, or dead). Some models also drop in an E—SEIR—for people who are "exposed" but not yet infected. Then the modelers make decisions about the rules of the game, based on what they think about how the disease spreads. Those are variables like how many people one infected person infects before being taken off the board by recovery or death, how long it takes one infected person to infect another (also known as the interval generation time), which demographic groups recover or die, and at what rate. Assign a best-guess number to those and more, turn a few virtual cranks, and let it run.
"At the beginning, everybody is susceptible and you have a small number of infected people. They infect the susceptible people, and you see an exponential rise in the infected," says Helen Jenkins, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health. So far, so terrible.
The assumption for how big any of those fractions of the population are, and how fast they move from one compartment to another, start to matter immediately. "If we discover that only 5 percent of a population have recovered and are immune, that means we've still got 95 percent of the population susceptible. And as we move forward, we have much bigger risk of flare-ups," Jenkins says. "If we discover that 50 percent of the population has been infected—that lots of them were asymptomatic and we didn't know about them—then we're in a better position."
So the next question is: How well do people transmit the disease? That's called the "reproductive number," or R0, and it depends on how easily the germ jumps from person to person—whether they're showing symptoms or not. It also matters how many people one of the infected comes into contact with, and how long they are actually contagious. (That's why social distancing helps; it cuts the contact rate.) You might also want the "serial interval," the amount of time it takes for an infected person to infect someone else, or the average time before a susceptible person becomes an infected one, or an infected person becomes a recovered one (or dies). That's "reporting delay."
And R0 really only matters at the beginning of an outbreak, when the pathogen is new and most of the population is House Susceptible. As the population fractions change, epidemiologists switch to another number: the Effective Reproductive Number, or Rt, which is still the possible number of people infected, but can flex and change over time.
You can see how fiddling with the numbers could generate some very complicated math very quickly. (A good modeler will also conduct sensitivity analyses, making some numbers a lot bigger and a lot smaller to see how the final result changes.)
Those problems can tend to catastrophize, to present a worst-case scenario. Now, that's actually good, because apocalyptic prophecies can galvanize people into action. Unfortunately, if that action works, it makes the model look as if it was wrong from the start. The only way these mathematical oracles can be truly valuable is to goose people into doing the work to ensure the predictions don't come true—at which point it's awfully difficult to take any credit.
Models are helping scientists understand Covid-19 infections rates and hospitals plan for surges. This one—a generic version—illustrates the concept of how infection rates can be changed by social distancing measures.
Speaking at a White House briefing on Thursday, Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the Coronavirus Task Force, admonished the press against taking those models too seriously, even as New York governor Andrew Cuomo begged for federal help with acquiring ventilators and protective equipment for health care workers. "The predictions of the models don't match the reality on the ground," Birx said.
Responding to Birx in a thread on Twitter, Harvard infectious disease epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said Birx had been talking about work from his lab, which the federal government had asked for two days prior. In a preprint (so not peer-reviewed), his team had used an SEIR model with numbers tweaked to simulate the tightening or loosening of social distancing measures, as well as a potential flu-like seasonal variation in Covid-19 infections. He was varying R0, essentially. In the model, putting a stop to strict social distancing (without something like a vaccine or a cure coming along) allowed infections to climb right back up to their peak of about two critical cases per 1,000 people—which could be 660,000 Americans getting seriously ill or dying. And even with the strictest lockdown-type measures lasting from April through July, his team's model finds that the disease surges back in autumn.
Remember, the whole point of social distancing is to slow the epidemic, to keep the numbers of sick people at any one time below the maximum that the health care system can handle and stall so scientists can work on treatments. If Lipsitch's team is right, the characteristics of Covid-19 might require a cyclical flux between strict social distancing and viral resurgence, on and on, perhaps until 2022. If everything goes right, Lipsitch wrote—massive testing and quarantines of the ill, and aggressive social distancing—it'll be possible to keep numbers down and maybe shorten the timeline. But, Lipsitch said on Twitter, he didn't see any of that underway.
So in dismissing all that, was Birx making a policy determination to assume that the model's most Panglossian all-is-well prediction will turn out to be correct? "That was my impression of her comment," said Yonatan Grad, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and a lead author with Lipsitch on that study, speaking at a press conference on Friday.
Birx also took aim at an influential report published earlier this month by disease modelers at Imperial College London that predicted the deadly coronavirus could kill 500,000 Brits before the year was out. These chilling forecasts jolted Boris Johnson's UK government out of its plan to sit back and wait for herd immunity to take the British Isles.
The report, which also predicted 2.2 million American deaths if the government did nothing, got President Donald Trump's attention. Shortly after, the White House rolled out a 15-day social distancing challenge, encouraging Americans to stay home as an act of patriotism. Then the US economy tanked, and Trump got nervous about staying the course. So when one of the Imperial researchers, Neil Ferguson, brought new estimates to the UK parliament last Thursday that predicted a British death toll below 20,000, Trump's task force seized on the apparent walk-back. "Half a million to 20,000," Birx said during the Thursday press briefing. "We are looking at that, in great detail, to understand that adjustment."
Except Ferguson wasn't really walking back his estimates or his model. As he explained later in his own series of tweets, the new numbers resulted from two things: The UK government's implementation of social distancing measures, and a slightly higher R0 gleaned from new data from around Europe that suggests the outbreak is moving faster than at first believed—so more people are infected than anyone knows, with milder symptoms. Ferguson said this should lend more evidence, not less, to the importance of social distancing measures.
To be clear, Ferguson was doing exactly what any good scientist would do when presented with new data: updating the model. But these revisions came at a politically dicey moment. Only days before, the British media had begun telling people that maybe they didn't have to worry after all. A new study said that half the country had already contracted the coronavirus and were already immune to it. This is, in fact, not what the study said. But the two things hitting headlines at the same time created the public perception that maybe the virus wasn't so worrisome after all.
Produced by a group of researchers at Oxford, that other study had examined the number of observed deaths that occured in Italy and the UK prior to any social distancing interventions. The scientists then tried to ascertain which hypothetical—emphasis on hypothetical— circumstances could have led to those rapidly rising death tolls. One plausible explanation, they found, is exactly what the Imperial group's models suggest: The virus has just begun to spread in the UK and it is causing severe symptoms among a significant percentage of people. But equally plausible, according to their models, is that SARS-CoV-2 could actually have been circulating since January, possibly infecting up to half the population. For this scenario to work, most people would only get a mild version of the disease—only a tiny fraction of those infected would wind up in the hospital. In other words, in the first scenario, the epidemic is just taking off. In the second, it's already swept through the population.
If it's the second scenario, says Sunetra Gupta, the theoretical epidemiologist who led the Oxford work, "that would be great news," because it would mean a substantial chunk of the UK population is already immune. Nevertheless, even though it's only one of the scenarios that Gupta's model implies, the fact that it seemed to contradict Ferguson's work at Imperial College was enough for commentators and some media to tell a story of conflicting (and therefore untrustworthy) models.
To be clear, it does seem like some number of people, possibly a large number, transmit the virus without being diagnosed. They're House Infected posing as House Susceptible. That seems clear from researchers showing that in January, the strict travel measures that China imposed on people trying to leave Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, slowed the spread of the disease. That shows up in location data drawn from mobile phone apps; the extent of the disease followed people's travel patterns. When Wuhan locked down, that spread almost completely stopped. It bought time for the world to prepare—which large parts of the world, including the United States, squandered.
One clever study even tried to use a complicated model to estimate exactly how many undiagnosed, or "undocumented," cases the Chinese population had in January. The researchers—some at Imperial College and others in the US—broke the infected population into two groups, diagnosed and undiagnosed. (Or, in the language of this particular study, "documented" and "undocumented.") Through surveys and an app-based data collection project, the US team had actual data on how many people were wandering around at any given time with a respiratory virus; their calculations see that number peaking at more than 10 percent.
Using that as a kind of baseline, and combining it with location data for travel among 375 Chinese cities including Wuhan, the researchers tried various models to infer, given the number of overall infections and where they happened, how many undiagnosed infections had to have been out there. Their conclusion was stunning. Just 14 percent of infections were diagnosed, they wrote. Fully 86 percent of infected people were the walking ill, stealth transmitters of the virus. "Those undocumented infected people were about half as infectious. However, because there are many more of them, they are the dominant driver of the outbreak," says one of the creators of the model, Jeffrey Shaman, director of the Climate and Health Program at the Columbia University School of Public Health. "This virus needs these undocumented cases to successfully move through a society. If you're identifying cases, you're going to have a better handle on it."
For now, there's really only one way to figure that out: tests. Specifically, that means gathering blood from infected people, which would contain their antibodies to the virus. That's what Gupta has concluded, too. "Our motivation was to explore, conceptually, the extreme variation that could be underlying what we see," says Gupta. "What we see is just the tip of the iceberg. And the only way to see under the surface is to go out there and look for these antibodies."
One of her collaborators has already developed one of these so-called serological tests, which can tell scientists who has been exposed to the virus and therefore now has immunity. Over the weekend, the researchers began testing blood samples collected from healthy Brits over the previous two months. (Gupta declined to say where the samples came from, citing confidentiality.) She says it could be just a matter of weeks before they have a much better picture of how vulnerable the UK population really is. But until then, at least in the UK, it will continue to be a tale of two models.
One thing that models will try to predict next, given the tranche of new data that these first 80,000-plus cases in the US will yield, is when social distancing and shelter-in-place measures can end. "You don't make the timeline. The virus makes the timeline," Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN. But how will anyone determine that timeline? The role of children as spreaders of the disease still isn't clear. Nor is the role of adults with mild symptoms.
"One of the crucial things that has to happen is serology tests, testing large numbers of the population for antibodies," Jenkins says. This data would show whether a person has been infected—whether or not they had symptoms. Population wide, that can give you more certainty on the numbers of susceptible and recovered people. The tests really only work a week or so after a person contracts the virus, but that's valuable enough that the UK has purchased 3.5 million blood tests already, and researchers in the Netherlands have begun testing blood bank donations.
How Long Does the Coronavirus Live on Surfaces?
Plus: What it means to "flatten the curve," and everything else you need to know about the coronavirus.
By Meghan Herbst
"The modeling is going to be absolutely key for how we come out of this and what things look like longer-term. But for places in Western Europe and the United States, the scientific evidence is not particularly complicated. If you act soon, with a firmer response, you limit early deaths and get through the initial phase more quickly," Jenkins says. That's based less on models, she says, and more on research like a 2007 article about the "non-pharmaceutical interventions" different US cities used to respond to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Places that locked down more quickly had death rates half as high as ones that waited—and one of the coauthors of that study was the same Marc Lipsitch who tangled with the White House last week.
That paper's a lot clearer than a model, especially when so much about Covid-19 remains unknown. "One of the big dangers of modeling is that a model can get quite complicated quite quickly," Jenkins says. "And it's only as good as the data that go into it."
That's not the only barrier, either. The channels for model-makers to get to policymakers aren't clear. Even though governors across the US are touting models to justify their shelter-in-place orders and build-outs of critical care beds, it's just as easy for political leaders like Birx, a representative of the federal coronavirus response, to dismiss them—as a report from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins points out.
Just as happens with models of climate change, the presentation of a range of possible futures in epidemiological models provides a lever for political opposition. Conservative commentators and allies of President Trump, The Washington Post reports, are increasingly describing social distancing orders and pleas for medical aid as part of a deep state plot. On his radio show Friday, ultraconservative provocateur Rush Limbaugh said,"We didn't elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don't know. And how do we know they're even health experts?"
The president seems to share these sentiments. After Governor Andrew Cuomo based a request for tens of thousands of ventilators on model projections, the president told television personality Sean Hannity, "I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators." He based that opinion, he said, on "a feeling." Or maybe the president doesn't feel this way; two days later he tweeted that Ford and GM should start mass-producing ventilators, and he obliquely threatened to invoke the law he could use to make this happen. Maybe.
Lisa Brandenburg though, would take the models over a feeling any day. University of Washington Medicine hospitals got their first confirmed Covid-19 patient on March 7. Three days later, she reached out to Murray and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The following Tuesday, his team delivered a first round of projections for three scenarios: best, middle, and worst case. The worst case was bad. According to the models, UWM would have to accommodate an additional 950 Covid patients per day during the surge, which was due to arrive April 7. With around 1,500 beds across four hospitals, they would be overrun.
So Brandenburg's team got to work. They had already begun ordering more masks, gloves, face shields, and ventilators. They had opened a drive-thru testing station. Now they moved to deploy a surge plan, canceling all elective surgeries and trying to clear out as many beds as possible. They built wedding-party-size triage tents outside hospitals' emergency room departments to keep potential Covid-19 patients away from others seeking care. They called up ICU nurses who'd retired within the past five years. They began shuffling in nurses, respiratory therapists, and technicians from other departments, training them up on the specifics of critical care.
Murray's team embedded with Brandenburg's, providing them with daily updated projections as new data came in. In the most recent models from late last week, things started to take a turn—and for the first time, they were for the better. The curve is flattening out. In the new worst-case scenario, the number of patients has dropped by 20 percent compared with IHME's first report. The peak is now 10 days later, on April 17.
Across UWM's four hospitals, Covid-19 cases are down too. At the end of last week, doctors and nurses were caring for just over 60 Covid-19 patients, down from about 75 a few days prior. "It looks like the social distancing is helping," says Brandenburg.
She knows the projections can change any time, for the worse. And that's still what they're preparing for. But for the first time, she says, looking at those graphs she allowed herself to think that maybe, maybe, it was no longer a question of when Seattle would become the next Spain, the next Italy, the next New York. "For the first time I feel like, 'OK, maybe we are actually going to have all our plans in place,'" she says.
Other hospital administrators and local public health officials should take note. After word got out about the work IHME was doing for hospitals in Seattle, other health care providers around the US began sending Murray emails, asking for help with their own preparedness plans. As the individual requests piled up, his team decided to go public with their work last week, providing interactive state-by-state projections for how the nation's supply of hospital beds, intensive care units, and ventilators will hold up over the next few months.
The new coronavirus will spread through different regions at different speeds—depending on population density, transit patterns, and how well people are adhering to whatever social distancing measures are in place. So Murray's hope is that local policymakers can use the models to get a more fine-grained view on when their particular wave might be cresting. "We want to help them figure out when their worst week will be and to prepare accordingly, however they can," says Murray. His team plans to update their models every Monday, pulling in the latest death counts and adjusting for any changes to statewide social distancing policies. It's still too soon to say if Washington will be a success story. But at least right now, it appears to be an outlier.
According to IHME's models, 41 states will need more hospital beds than they currently have. Twelve states will need to boost their numbers of ICU beds by 50 percent or more. The models predict that over the next four months, these shortfalls will contribute to the deaths of 81,000 Americans, with the number of deaths per day peaking as soon as mid-April.
Even this estimate is generous. As epidemiologists have been pointing out on Twitter, Murray's models assume that states that haven't yet enacted strict stay-at-home orders will do so in the next week, in light of what's happening in New York—and that they'll achieve Wuhan-level lockdowns, which many public health experts are skeptical Americans can pull off. Indeed, plenty of states, mostly conservative-leaning and where case counts so far remain low, have resisted taking those steps. Even before Covid-19, scientists had trouble getting policymakers to pay attention to their warnings. Now they can't get enough data to make those warnings specific, and politicians are working to undermine what little the scientists are sure of. What was already a tragedy has evolved into a disaster, reaching toward catastrophe. And all of it was predictable.
It's time to do the things you keep putting off. Here's how
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Bored? Check out our video guide to extreme indoor activities
Blood from Covid-19 survivors may point the way to a cure
How is the virus spread? (And other Covid-19 FAQs, answered)
Megan Molteni is a science writer at STAT News. Previously, she was a staff writer at WIRED, covering biotechnology, public health, and genetic privacy. She studied biology and ultimate frisbee at Carleton College and has a graduate degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.
TopicscoronavirusCOVID-19modelingepidemiology

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
"""

@author: Adam Reinhold Von Fisher - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamrvfisher/

"""

#N Period Edge Ratio Computation for single issue with graphical displays

#Imports
from YahooGrabber import YahooGrabber
import numpy as np
import time as t
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.finance import candlestick_ohlc
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
from pandas.parser import CParserError

#Empty data structure assignment
tempdf = pd.DataFrame()
edgelist = []
MFEpoints = None
MFElist = []
MAEpoints = None
MAElist = []
nDay = None

#Variable assignment
#Ticker for testing
ticker = 'NUGT'

#For ATR + MFE/MFA calculation
atrwindow = 20

#For directional signal generation
donchianwindow = 20

#How many days to calculate e-ratio for
LengthOfTest = range(2, 50) #(2,3) = 2 day Eratio // assuming fill at "Entry Price"

#Request data
while True:
    try:
        #Get data
        Asset = YahooGrabber(ticker)
    except CParserError:
        continue
    break

#In sample Trimmer
Asset = Asset[-1000:]

#Make column that represents X axis
Asset['Index'] = Asset.index

#Format for mpl
Asset['IndexToNumber'] = Asset['Index'].apply(mdates.date2num)

#Format Dataframe to feed candlestick_ohlc()
AssetCopy = Asset[['IndexToNumber', 'Open', 'High', 'Low', 'Close', 'Adj Close']].copy()

#Timer begin
start = t.time()

#log returns
Asset['LogRet'] = np.log(Asset['Adj Close']/Asset['Adj Close'].shift(1))
Asset['LogRet'] = Asset['LogRet'].fillna(0)

#Donchian Channel calculation from params
Asset['RollingMax'] = Asset['High'].rolling(window=donchianwindow, center=False).max()
Asset['RollingMin'] = Asset['Low'].rolling(window=donchianwindow, center=False).min()

#Index copies
Asset['Index'] = Asset.index
Asset['RangeIndex'] = range(1, len(Asset.index) + 1)

#ATR calculation
Asset['Method1'] = Asset['High'] - Asset['Low']
Asset['Method2'] = abs((Asset['High'] - Asset['Close'].shift(1)))
Asset['Method3'] = abs((Asset['Low'] - Asset['Close'].shift(1)))
Asset['Method1'] = Asset['Method1'].fillna(0)
Asset['Method2'] = Asset['Method2'].fillna(0)
Asset['Method3'] = Asset['Method3'].fillna(0)
Asset['TrueRange'] = Asset[['Method1','Method2','Method3']].max(axis = 1)

#ATR in points not %
Asset['AverageTrueRangePoints'] = Asset['TrueRange'].rolling(window = atrwindow,
                                center=False).mean()
#ATR in percent
Asset['AverageTrueRangePercent'] = Asset['AverageTrueRangePoints'] / Asset['Close']

#Signal generation; long if new high and no new high on previous period, short
#if new low and no new low on previous period; if Donchian window or ATR is not calculated stay out of market
Asset['Regime'] = np.where(Asset['High'] > Asset['RollingMax'].shift(1), 1, 0)
Asset['Regime'] = np.where(Asset['Low'] < Asset['RollingMin'].shift(1), -1, Asset['Regime'])

#Stay flat if ATR has not been established // nan > 0 == false
Asset['Regime'] = np.where(Asset['AverageTrueRangePercent'] > 0, Asset['Regime'], 0)

#Find trade date when regime changes
Asset['OriginalTrade'] = 0
Asset['OriginalTrade'].loc[(Asset['Regime'].shift(1) != Asset['Regime']) & (Asset['Regime'] == -1)] = -1
Asset['OriginalTrade'].loc[(Asset['Regime'].shift(1) != Asset['Regime']) & (Asset['Regime'] == 1)] = 1

#Organize entry price & check for gap
Asset['EntryPrice'] = np.nan
#For all original trade days
for a in Asset['OriginalTrade'][Asset['OriginalTrade'] != 0].index:
    #If a long trade
    if Asset['OriginalTrade'][a] == 1:
        #Record previous high as entry
        Asset['EntryPrice'].loc[a] = Asset['RollingMax'].shift(1).loc[a]
        #Check for open higher than entry gap and reassign
        if Asset['Open'][a] > Asset['EntryPrice'][a]:
            Asset['EntryPrice'].loc[a] = Asset['Open'][a]
    #If a short trade
    if Asset['OriginalTrade'][a] == -1:
        #Record previous high as entry
        Asset['EntryPrice'].loc[a] = Asset['RollingMin'].shift(1).loc[a]
        #Check for open lower than entry gap and reassign
        if Asset['Open'][a] < Asset['EntryPrice'][a]:
            Asset['EntryPrice'].loc[a] = Asset['Open'][a]

Asset['EntryPrice'] = Asset['EntryPrice'].ffill()

#Make list of Original Trade DATES
tradedates = Asset[['OriginalTrade', 'Index', 'RangeIndex', 'Adj Close', 'AverageTrueRangePoints', 'EntryPrice']].loc[(
                               Asset['OriginalTrade'] != 0)]
#Number of signals generated
numsignals = len(tradedates)

#For number of e-ratio days to compute
for z in LengthOfTest:
    print('Calculating ' + str(z) + ' Day e-ratio')
    #For each value of RangeIndex on Tradedate
    for i in tradedates.RangeIndex:
        print('Calculating ' + str(z) + ' Day e-ratio for trade on ' + str(Asset['Index'].loc[Asset['RangeIndex'] == i][0]))
        #Assign computation space
        tempdf = pd.DataFrame()
        #Assign entry price
        entryprice = Asset['EntryPrice'].loc[Asset['RangeIndex'] == i][0]
        #Take H, L, C, sample data for number of days under study post trade
        tempdf['Close'] = Asset['Close'].loc[Asset.index[i:i+z]]
        tempdf['High'] = Asset['High'].loc[Asset.index[i:i+z]]
        tempdf['Low'] = Asset['Low'].loc[Asset.index[i:i+z]]

        #For long trades
        if tradedates['OriginalTrade'].loc[tradedates['RangeIndex'] == i][0] == 1:
            if len(tempdf) < z-1 :
                MFElist.append(np.nan)
                MAElist.append(np.nan)
                print('Not enough data for this calculation')
                continue
            print('Long entry at ', entryprice)
            #MFE
            maxup = max(tempdf['High'] - entryprice)
            #MAE
            maxdown = max(entryprice - tempdf['Low'])
            print('MFE in points = ', maxup)
            print('MAE in points = ', maxdown)
            #MFE assignment
            MFEpoints = maxup
            MFElist.append(MFEpoints)
            #MAE assignment
            MAEpoints = maxdown
            MAElist.append(MAEpoints)

        #For short trades
        if tradedates['OriginalTrade'].loc[tradedates['RangeIndex'] == i][0] == -1:
            if len(tempdf) < z-1 :
                MFElist.append(np.nan)
                MAElist.append(np.nan)
                print('Not enough data for this calculation')
                continue
            print('Short entry at ', entryprice)
            #MAE
            maxup = max(tempdf['High'] - entryprice)
            #MFE
            maxdown = max(entryprice - tempdf['Low'])
            print('MFE in points = ', maxdown)
            print('MAE in points = ', maxup)
            #MFE assignment
            MFEpoints = maxdown
            MFElist.append(MFEpoints)
            #MAE assignment
            MAEpoints = maxup
            MAElist.append(MAEpoints)

    #Rotating column name
    nDay = str(z)

    #Display results
    print(MFElist)
    print(MAElist)

    #To Series
    MFESeries = pd.Series(MFElist, index = tradedates.index)
    MAESeries = pd.Series(MAElist, index = tradedates.index)

    #Display
    print(MFESeries)
    print(MAESeries)

    #Assign MFE/MAE to tradedates
    tradedates[nDay + 'DayMFE'] = MFESeries
    tradedates[nDay + 'DayMAE'] = MAESeries

    #Clear lists
    MFElist = []
    MAElist = []

    #Adjust MFE and MAE for volatility - normalization
    tradedates[nDay + 'DayVolAdjMFE'] = tradedates[nDay + 'DayMFE']/tradedates['AverageTrueRangePoints']
    tradedates[nDay + 'DayVolAdjMAE'] = tradedates[nDay + 'DayMAE']/tradedates['AverageTrueRangePoints']
    #Add MFE and MAE values
    sumMFE = sum(tradedates[nDay + 'DayVolAdjMFE'].fillna(0))
    sumMAE = sum(tradedates[nDay + 'DayVolAdjMAE'].fillna(0))
    #Divide by number of signals
    AvgVolAdjMFE = sumMFE/numsignals
    AvgVolAdjMAE = sumMAE/numsignals

    #Calculate edge ratio
    edgeratio = AvgVolAdjMFE/AvgVolAdjMAE

    #Display results
    print('The ', z, ' day edge ratio is', edgeratio)
    #Add results to list
    edgelist.append(edgeratio)

#Get calculations ready for graphing
edgeratioframe = pd.DataFrame(index = range(2, len(edgelist) + 2))
edgeratioframe['EdgeRatio'] = edgelist
#Plot edge ratio
edgeratioframe['EdgeRatio'].plot(grid=True, figsize=(8,5))
#End timer
end = t.time()
#Timer stats
print((end - start), ' seconds later.')
#Display results
print('Max eRatio is', max(edgeratioframe['EdgeRatio']))

#Graphics
#X and Y axis scale figure
figure, axe = plt.subplots(figsize = (10,5))
#Assign axis labels
plt.ylabel(ticker + ' Price')
plt.xlabel('Date')
#Overlay
axe.plot(AssetCopy['IndexToNumber'], Asset['RollingMax'], color = 'green', label = 'RollingMax')
axe.plot(AssetCopy['IndexToNumber'], Asset['RollingMin'], color = 'red', label = 'RollingMin')
#axe.plot(Asset['IndexToNumber'], Asset['SMA'], color = 'black', label = 'SMA')

#Signal triangles..
axe.scatter(Asset.loc[Asset['OriginalTrade'] == 1, 'IndexToNumber'].values,
            Asset.loc[Asset['OriginalTrade'] == 1, 'EntryPrice'].values, label='skitscat', color='green', s=75, marker="^")
axe.scatter(Asset.loc[Asset['OriginalTrade'] == -1, 'IndexToNumber'].values,
            Asset.loc[Asset['OriginalTrade'] == -1, 'EntryPrice'].values, label='skitscat', color='red', s=75, marker="v")

#Plot the DF candlestick values with the figure, object
candlestick_ohlc(axe, AssetCopy.values, width=.6, colorup='green', colordown='red')
#Date formatting
axe.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m-%d'))

#For ATR
figure2, axe2 = plt.subplots(figsize = (10,2))
#Add labels
plt.ylabel(ticker + ' ATR Percent')
plt.xlabel('Date')
#ATR line graph
axe2.plot(AssetCopy['IndexToNumber'], Asset['AverageTrueRangePercent'], color = 'black', label = '4wkATRPercent')
#Date formatting
axe2.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m-%d'))

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Teachers and other educators attend a session on promoting achievement for all students at the annual Kindergarten Readiness Summit, Friday, March 3, 2017 at Sinclair Community College. JEREMY P. KELLEY / STAFF
Photo: JEREMY P. KELLEY / STAFF
Local school leaders look for ways to close racial achievement gap
Jeremy P. Kelley, Staff Writer
Educators came together in Dayton Friday to ponder solutions to two giant problems: Attacking the performance gap between black and white students and ending implicit racial and cultural bias in schools.
"The trend lines (of academic performance) for African-American boys are disheartening," said Tom Lasley, CEO of Learn to Earn Dayton, which put on the annual kindergarten readiness summit at Sinclair Community College. "They come to kindergarten behind, and the gaps get wider as they all mature. That's very, very challenging news for all of us who care about young people and their potential."
RELATED: Black students not closing gap in local school districts
The education issue begins at the earliest ages, with the percentage of students who test as "ready for kindergarten" varying widely by race. Montgomery County data shows that about 15 percent more white students than black students tested as ready in 2007, with that gap growing to 19 percent in 2011 and 24 percent in 2015.
Keynote speaker Walter Gilliam, director of Yale University's child development center, cited numerous studies showing that educators have implicit biases that can harm students.
RELATED: Preschool the unusual wrinkle in Dayton income tax plan
One study had multiple teachers grade the exact same paper with different "racially identifiable" names on them, with the teachers grading black and white students differently. Another told teachers to watch a group of students for behavior problems while using eye-tracking software, seeing that more teachers watched black students, especially boys, even though no students were misbehaving.
Photo: Staff Writer
"The whole early childhood movement is based in social justice – it's about giving every child an opportunity to succeed," Gilliam said. "I'm not naive enough to think every one of our kids is going to hit a home run. But I believe every one of our children deserves a chance at the plate, with a decent bat and a fairly pitched ball."
The debate has led to a renewed focus on equity of opportunity among local education leaders.
"The question is, can we have, as a community and as individuals, the courage to do what needs to be done to make sure that absolutely every one of our young people is successful and can compete in the world economy that's going to confront them as adults," Lasley asked.
RELATED: Preschool board plans marketing blitz in March
Summit participants included superintendents and teachers from nearly every school district in Montgomery County, and they attended breakout sessions targeting equity issues. These included using "restorative justice" rather than suspension and expulsion, connecting with families to understand obstacles at home, and improving teachers' cultural competence to understand and accept student differences.
Shelia Burton, assistant superintendent of Dayton Public Schools, said educators have to strike a balance of trying to be sensitive to the real challenges that students have, while also holding them to high standards.
"It's a tough line to walk particularly if we don't accept the fact that we're part of the issue," Burton said. "If we're going to solve this, it has to be the adults and the children, not just the children."
Burton said DPS is making some changes in curriculum and working with teachers to address implicit bias, while also providing students with resources like the Males of Color office and after-school programs.
OTHER EDUCATION NEWS
Dayton to launch online school
Dayton Public Schools gives treasurer raise, 3-year contract
School board argues, gives administrator $200,000 to walk away
Tests are free but controversy swirls over ACT plan
Three college students discussed challenges they had faced in school because of cultural issues. Sondos Issa, whose family emigrated from Palestine, recalled cultural and language barriers when her mother and teacher couldn't understand each other at elementary school meetings, leading other students to make fun of her, and Issa to close off her mother. She urged educators not to assume that immigrant parents don't care about their child's success if they don't understand the system.
David Cabogason explained just how much positive impact a teacher can have via simple support. He said in ninth grade, when his parents were going through a divorce and his mother was coming out as gay, he was terrified of what his older, southern teacher would say at their conference.
"She put a hand on my shoulder and said, David, I know what you're going through, it's going to be OK," Cabogason said. "At a tough time in my life, a little bit of kindness went a long way. … It still affects me today. I got reassurance at my lowest time in high school. I was supported, not judged."
As schools are devoting resources to issues of kindergarten readiness and equity, state Sen. Peggy Lehner said she was "disappointed and perplexed" that there was no increase in early childhood education funding in Gov. John Kasich's budget proposal after years of steady increases.
"If you look around the state, we have three cities that passed levies specifically to fund early childhood," Lehner said. "This should tell us that this is something the community values … and I'm going to continue to work to make sure the state of Ohio's budget reflects that. Education, from the top to the bottom, has always been a shared responsibility between the state and the local community."
40 percent: White students who are "kindergarten ready"
16 percent: Black students who are "kindergarten ready"
62 percent: White third-graders who are proficient in reading
31 percent: Black third-graders who are proficient in reading
Source: Learn to Earn Dayton review of all Montgomery County school districts
Tweets by JeremyKelleyDDN


A wintry coastal storm dumped as much as 6 inches of snow on Long Island Friday morning and inundated other parts of the tri-state with slush and strong wind gusts that may have played a role in a deadly crane collapse, Storm Team 4 says.
Snow began falling on Huntington Station by 3:30 a.m. It started as a slushy snow mixture but quickly turned to puffy flakes that lasted throughout the morning. In New York City, snow swirled as commuters trudged through slushy sidewalks on the way to the subways and bus stops.
Hauppage, in Suffolk County, saw the region's highest snow totals with 6 inches of powder. Other parts of Long Island saw between a dusting and 5.6 inches. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had the highest reported snow total in New York City with 3 inches.
The slushy storm was accompanied by strong wind gusts, Storm Team 4 says. A wind gust of 37 mph was recorded in lower Manhattan at 8:15 a.m., just nine minutes before a crane being lowered and secured toppled over, killing one person and injuring three more.
Chris Cimino's forecast for Friday, Feb. 5.
The system quickly moved out after noon on Friday, however and was replaced by sunshine and highs topping around 40 degrees.
The weather will continue to improve through the weekend, with highs topping out near 50 degrees on Saturday and Sunday.
But there's a silver lining to the white stuff and that's that it won't be accompanied by a long-lasting cooldown. Friday afternoon is expected to be sunny, if a bit chilly and breezy. Highs will be in the low 40s.
Things will warm back up by the weekend, with clear skies and highs topping out in the 40s on both Saturday and Sunday.
The cold could return on Monday, with temperatures dropping back down to the upper 30s. The skies will be mostly cloudy.


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text:
Game of Thrones star 'honoured' to be Battle Festival patron
The Game of Thrones actor who is the newest patron of Battle Festival said it is an honour to be a part of it.
Anton Lesser, who also starred in the BBC's Wolf Hall and is a regular for the Royal Shakespeare Company, was announced as a patron last month.
"It's a fantastic honour for me but I don't really know what being a patron comprises," he said.
"I think when they said to me, 'do you want to be a patron?', I thought, 'I wonder what I have to do'.
"But they assured me that it was just a matter of allowing them to use my name in vain and for what it's worth I'm just thrilled to be associated with it."
Lesser performed in last year's festival and was asked to get involved this year on the back of it.
"On the basis of last year they asked if I could come back and I said I would love to if I can fit it in and we've managed to carve out this weekend where I'm either not doing Game of Thrones or something else," he said.
"They've been brave because they had to wait to put the announcement out for quite a while because I wouldn't have liked to have committed and then have to turn it down at the last minute but it's worked out fine."
The actor visited Claverham Community College hear young people perform with professional musicians on Friday (October 9).
On Saturday, Lesser performed in Shakespeare in Battle, and in Love..., weaving the plays Love's Labour's Lost with Henry V together with classical music.
He said he wants to help them grow in any way he can, partly through his Game of Thrones fame, which he said could be valuable.
"It's limited because I'm a practitioner not really an organiser and I know nothing about organising festivals, but if I can lend a perspective from a performer's point of view in any capacity then of course I'll do that," he said.
"If people watch Game of Thrones and think, 'oh yeah I know him', but wouldn't think of coming to something like this, they might think, 'maybe I'll go and have a look, if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me'."
Lesser is one of three patrons of Battle Festival, along with Keane member Tim Rice-Oxley and music director Sir Andrew Davis.
He said he hoped to catch as much of this year's extravaganza as he could but was rushing to Brussels for another film on Sunday, but the actor said he hopes he can be a part of it again next year.
"It would be lovely to be asked and I'm really up for it so we'll just wait and see what happens," he said.
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General Information: Year after year skiers rate vail as their favorite ski place. There is also the nightlife, the restaurants and the shopping. Two distinct Alpine Villages await you. You will be steps away from the lifts or from the gondola and in the hub of all the activities. A real vacation/ski experience without the need of a car!
Types of Units: 2 bedroom/2 bath unit sleeps up to 6 with 1 king bed, 1 queen bed and pullout sofabed.
Area Attractions: Hiking, biking, fishing, horsebacking riding, tennis, golf and outdoor concerts and festivals.
Complex Amenities: in Vail Village, walking distance to downtown and shops. Spectacular views, fireplace, TV, VCR, tennis, common washer/dryer, outdoor heated pool.


Home / 2014 / Journal Articles / Mental Health / Outcomes / ReQoL / Measuring quality of life in mental health: Are we asking the right questions?
Janice Connell, J., O'Cathain, A., & Brazier, J. (2014). Measuring quality of life in mental health: Are we asking the right questions?. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 120, 12-20.


Places are limited for each section, so sign up early.
In 2019 the medieval music course of Besalú will focus on medieval musical instruments and specialized medieval singing.
The study of instruments will include techniques for instrumental accompaniment of vocal monophonic music, the performance of extant instrumental pieces from the original notation, the reconstruction of a larger instrumental repertoire developed from vocal compositions, and musical instrument making (guitterns, vielles, psalteries, and lutes) lead by our master luthiers.
For the voice, the course will also feature two specialized medieval singing workshops on troubadour music with Benjamin Bagby from Sequentia, and on liturgical solo singing and early polyphony with Katarina Livljanić from the Ensemble Dialogos.
A multidisciplinary study of musical instruments and their practice including voice accompaniment, instrumental music performance, ornamentation, musical functions, and symbolic meaning. For singers and instrumentalists.
Musical instrument lessons, hands-on performance of extant instrumental music, singing to the accompaniment of musical instruments, and expanding the medieval instrumental repertoire from vocal models.
Study and performance of troubadour songs contained in manuscript G (Milan, Bibl. Ambrosiana R71 sup.). Open to advanced singers and instrumentalists.
Study and performance of the French Instrumental Compositions (estampies, ductias) contained in the Manuscrit du Roi (13th century). Open to instrumentalists.
Construction of a guittern (Gothic) or a 3-string Romanesque vielle guided by the master luthier Asier de Benito.
Study of virtuoso liturgical chant and early polyphony (9th-11th c.) for soloists and a group of singers. Open to advanced singers.
Study and performance of the Italian instrumental pieces from the Ms London, B. L. Add 29987 (14th century). Open to instrumentalists.
Construction of Romanesque Psaltery, Lute, or Vielle guided by the master luthier Gonzalo Pieters.
Medieval Music Besalú: An Immersion Course on Medieval Music Performance in a Medieval Town Setting.
The medieval town of Besalú from the air.
Faculty Besalú (Magister Petrus), Flavit Auster flatu Levi.
What students say about the course.
Highlights from the 2014 course.
Interviews and performances from the 2013 International Course on Medieval Music Performance in Besalú.
Medieval Music Course of Besalú: Interviews and performances on JLTV (Los Angeles).
The International Course on Medieval Music Performance offers singers and instrumentalists the possibility to study monophonic and polyphonic repertoires composed in the 12th and 13th centuries.


Are BD-Live Capable Blu-ray Decks The Next Broadband STB?
Well, that was fast. Less than a week ago Sony announced that the PlayStation3′s 2.20 firmware would include BD-Live support, amongst other things, and it is now available. So gentlemen, and ladies, start your upgrades! Via EngadgetHD.


Turlock is a city of approximately 70,000 people in Stanislaus County, California. Initially a hub for regional agricultural production, Turlock started to become heavily urbanized in the 1980s -- largely as a result of population growth in the San Francisco Bay area -- and has seen enormous expansion since the turn of the century. Development all along the Highway 99 corridor has been exponential. The population explosion has led to the development of five massive shopping malls in the area, two of which are in Turlock.
The economic recession that affected the United States just after the turn of the century hit California particularly hard and resulted in a downturn in most spending patterns. Mall shoppers and tenants modified their needs as a consequence. As of 2011, many properties have seen a shift from outlets selling discretionary purchases -- such as couture clothing and footwear -- to lower-end vendors, such as dollar stores and discount food warehouse-style providers. While reflecting this pattern, the malls of Turlock still represent a thriving commercial tax resource.
Monte Vista Crossings (montevistacrossings.com) is an open-air shopping center comprising almost 640,000 square feet of gross leasable area. One of the largest open-air malls on the West Coast, the property hosts anchor stores including both AT&T Wireless and Verizon, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Borders Books, Circuit City, GameStop, both Home Depot and Lowe's, Kohl's, Office Max, Pier 1 Imports and Target. Monte Vista Crossings also is home to several hotels, gas stations and restaurants. The center is most easily accessed via the Monte Vista Avenue exit off Highway 99.
Countryside Plaza (myturlock.com) is a 326,000-square-foot open-air mall. Built in 1995, this low-rise property is reflective of the California ethos; decorated in pastel shades of coquina and taupe, the architecture is broken by small arches and turrets. The center hosts anchor stores Wal-Mart, Radio Shack, JCPenny and Staples. Numerous restaurants and food outlets also dot the mall. The center is most easily accessed via the Fulkerth Road exit off Highway 99.
Since the 1960s, the growth of Turlock has been restrained by a master plan that limits development westward beyond the Highway 99 corridor. Its north-south path delineates the point beyond which urban and commercial growth is severely restricted; however, with the massive growth of the San Francisco conurb, new malls are certain to be permitted to serve the influx of population. Interestingly, the Stanislaus County Fairground was the site of an internment camp following the attack on Pearl Harbor; more than 3,000 Japanese-Americans were imprisoned there.
Cagney, John. "Malls in Turlock, California." Travel Tips - USA Today, https://traveltips.usatoday.com/malls-turlock-california-57790.html. Accessed 19 April 2019.


My backyard provides God such a wonderful backdrop for my education. Gardening teaches me that many of nature's processes mirror our struggles. Take weeds for instance. What a wonderful metaphor for life's yucky stuff that embeds in our souls when we are not paying attention.
I hate weeding. Our backyard contains mulch beds for my herbs, lilies, azaleas, chrysanthemums and an array of other perennials. Not only is weeding physically tiring—hours of squats, tugging and pulling, but it's also messy. The weed in this picture didn't look like a weed at first glance. I figured that it was grass that had grown from the clippings that sprayed the mulch beds. So for a few weeks, I ignored the spot.
No big deal. Yes, the grass was growing in my mulch bed, but grass killer would take care of it when I got around to it. How many times do we assume that a behavior or a habit isn't a big deal? Or we know it could develop into a problem, but there is no urgency in our minds. We'll get around to it before it gets too bad.


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Barcelona Distances Itself From Ronaldinho Over Support for Controversial Bolsonaro
Barcelona are electing to distance themselves from former player and current club ambassador Ronaldinho following his support for Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro has received widespread criticism for extremist political views during his political career, the like of which have underpinned his current electoral campaign. Despite this, many Brazilians, including Ronaldinho and former teammate Rivaldo, have expressed their support for the politician who has been dubbed 'Brazil's Donald Trump'.
Lots of fans of #Ronaldinho and #Rivaldo were very disappointed to learn they were supporting Bolsonaro. But this generally won't play well in #Brazil, especially among voters who are in a nationalistic mood. https://t.co/TIN31XCfSI
— Charles Hoskinson (@cehoskinson) October 16, 2018
According to Sport, Bolsonaro's political stances are 'unacceptable' from Barca's point of view and the Catalan club have positioned themselves the controversial figure, who is currently leading the election polls in Brazil with 59 percent of the popular vote, compared to his closest opponent's 41 percent.
Ronaldinho, who currently acts as one of Barca's various club ambassadors, has publicly advocated Bolsonaro and called for the people of Brazil to vote for the controversial figure.
This has subsequently put the Catalan giants in a difficult situation. They are said to be unwilling to publicly position themselves against Ronaldinho, but they will making attempts to distance themselves from him following his recent comments.
Sport claim that Barca have decided to reduce Ronaldinho's presence in institutional events, sponsor events and Legends games. The 38-year-old currently has a commercial agreement with Barca which means he earns money for his participation in such events.
His situation is very similar to that of Rivaldo's, who also earns money for his participation in these institutional events. He regularly collaborates in legends matches and supporter events, so it is likely that his contribution will also be significantly decreased.


LORIS, SC - Myrtle Beach Area golf courses that offer stunning, often-spectacular views are commonplace. To say that Woodland Valley Country Club has a unique place in the Myrtle Beach Area golfing scene is certainly not an understatement.
Head Golf Professional at Woodland Valley, William "Willie" Love stated it this way, "Our course winds through the area's natural beauty and is untouched by the hustle and bustle often found on the beach courses." The course is truly located in a pristine setting.
Hardwood and pine trees line virtually every fairway. If memory serves me correctly, there are only two holes that parallel. Even the five or six houses found on the course do not intrude and spoil the beauty of this Russell Breeden designed masterpiece. As you gently wind through this handsome venue, you cannot help but feel relaxed, regardless of what direction your game is going. However, be careful and do not get lulled to sleep. Woodland Valley requires your "A" game. I left mine at home and it showed!
The course is a robust 6907 yards from the Championship tees; a challenging 6390 from the Back Tees, 5690 yards from the Middle tees and 4945 yards from the Forward tees. There is plenty of length available for the big hitters, but Woodland Valley is very accommodating to the golfer that can control his drives.
Of course the 150-yard marker is always a great target, but the course does present plenty of risk-reward opportunities. Gentle doglegs and generous fairways on quite a few holes present a chance for a well-placed driver to pay-off. Likewise bunkers, mounds and an occasional water hazard positioned on the top of the doglegs stand ready to catch shots that run through the fairway.
Gentle elevations and strategically placed hazards impact approach shots, but nothing that requires game altering tactics. Remember, Woodland Valley may appear to be a mountain course, but remember it's still close to sea level. Choose your clubs wisely. Weather can change the character of this course dramatically. Tree lined fairways disguise strong winds as gentle breezes. Just a little dampness on an elevated green eliminates roll. But, the fun is just beginning.
Once you've navigated both the gentle and dramatic doglegs; weighed all your club options and hit the perfect approach shot; it's now time to putt! Considering this is a public golf course with a modest maintenance budget, the greens are tremendous. Woodland Valley is one of the first courses in the Myrtle Beach Area to use Jensen Ultra Dwarf greens. Although recently over seeded, it was easy to see that these are truly good putting surfaces. Our putts were fast and the lines true. These greens are going to be in great shape and even more challenging within the next two weeks.
The first real test on Woodland Valley presents itself on the Par 5, 2nd hole. It's all you want at 555-yards from the White Tees and deserves the #5 handicap designation. Take your drive down the center to a slight knoll and you'll enjoy some extra yardage. I tried the right side thinking a little extra roll off the slope. Unfortunately, my ball stayed up and I brought the water on the left into play for my second shot from a pull/hook lie. Of course I over adjusted and pushed one deep into the woods on the right. A green that peaked in the center and runs toward the fringe finishes this challenging hole.
Number 6, the #1 Handicap hole is a relatively short 370-yard Par 4. Just 225-yards to the environmentally protected area requires an accurate drive. Be cautious the hole slopes down after the 150-yard marker. Water and a large trap protect a very difficult putting green. This hole is absolutely gorgeous.
Number 13 is a great example of a risk-reward opportunity. This severe dogleg left features a large trap that just begs you to fly-it and position yourself with a wedge into the green. A large trap on the far side of the fairway will catch any errant push/slice drives. The well placed drive leaves a downhill approach shot. Depending on the pin placement this is a great birdie opportunity hole.
Number 16 is an outstanding Par 3. All that's required on this 180-yard gem is a perfect shot that clears water and sand in the front, sand to the right, and woods to the left. The green is challenging and even hitting this one in regulation may require a three putt to get off.
This course has very few downsides, but two need mentioning. Yardage is not well marked and if exact measurement is critical to your game, you will have issues. Also, the beauty of the course is its tree-lined fairways, but with that comes a lack of sunshine in a few areas. Although the rain we've had over the past three weeks guarantees some great playing conditions this winter, some areas of the course will be very slow to dry.
Woodland Valley Country Club is a very pleasing venue. The staff is hospitable and the practice facilities from the driving range to the putting green to the chipping green are more than adequate. Most importantly the course is truly unique to the area and an absolute pleasure to play. It's the perfect stop on your way to the beach when traveling Route 9, or a fitting ending to a great golf trip on your way home.


text:
Q: memory_limit issue php script How exactly does ini_set() work?
I have the  following code .
ini_set('memory_limit', '4G');

Which throws this

PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 31457280 bytes exhausted

However
ini_set("memory_limit","30M");

works just fine.
How is that possible?
The second value is lower than the first.

A: HI Try following Code in your php ini_set function
  ini_set("memory_limit",-1);

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Understanding Policy
NewsWarrior Podcast
Industry Capabilities
From Trump to Biden
Russia Follows US to Withdraw from Open Skies Treaty
Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali Meets EAM Jaishankar In New Delhi
Forget Telegram, Signal, IS terrorists in India, Abroad Using Much More Secure Threema
No One Should Make the Mistake of Testing Army's Patience — Gen. Naravane on LAC Stand-Off
Why Indian Army's Drone Swarm Demo is Milestone in 'Disruption in Warfare'
Ladakh Soldiers Among First Set of Army Personnel to Get Covid-19 Vaccine
India to Allocate Three More Divisions to China Border
China's High-Speed, Armed Reconnaissance Drone Completes Maiden Flight
Image Courtesy: Jansatta
The Defence Planning Committee: 'A Whole of Ship' Approach for The Ship- Of- State
May 02, 2018 ; By: Rear Admiral Sudarshan Y Shrikhande, IN (Retd); 2
The author provides a fresh analysis of the DPC, suggests some changes in nomenclature, the role of the NSA in the architecture and explains why a whole of ship approach may be the key to future- readiness in many dimensions.
'Strategic Partnership' Within Instruments of the State
In the past few days of the Defence Planning Committee's promulgation, much has been written in support and a fair bit in criticism. Essentially, there are four inter-dependent lines of policy and strategy formulation, their monitoring as required in peace and conflict, their course corrections and execution, well known by the DIME acronym, viz. Diplomatic, Informational(including intelligence), Military and Economic.
If this framework is considered—and it obviously has been–then the move certainly seems much more than a dime's worth. Finally, there is what sailors call a 'whole of ship' approach to affairs of the 'ship- of- state'.
About a year ago in writing for this portal around the three- year mark of the present government, I had said ←, "There is much more that needs to be done in the areas of jointness, integration, reduction of personnel through better utilisation and a break from old ways of doing many things. If India is to advance and protect her interests, the instruments of hard-power need to be future-ready, self-reliant, dynamic, joint, and progressive. Hard power works in consonance with politico-diplomatic and economic instruments of statecraft and does not stand in the way of soft power employed in India's interests. In that sense, there is 'Strategic Partnership' in all the instruments of statecraft in any case."
In important ways, the DPC, due to its membership, incorporates the key functional players of the DIME. By putting them together, the basis of a "whole of ship" approach can now become the culmination of policies and planning. Therefore, those proposals that then need political approval by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) can be tabled faster. As far as can be surmised, many other proposals would be approved by the DPC itself in terms of 'Approval In Principle' at least and then sent for processing.
Some Thoughts on Nomenclature
While the promulgation order implies that policy formulation is very much within the DPC's charter, the name itself reflects the function of 'planning'. Second, given its charter, very high level composition, immense advisory and executive charters, it could be called a 'Council' in preference to Committee. Considering these two suggestions together, it could perhaps be renamed Defence Policy and Planning Council in the near future. Four more aspects may be germane:
In the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) framework, there is an Executive Council and a Political Council and the term is used advisedly.
The promulgation order pointedly says the DPC will comprise, inter alia, the Chairman COSC and the Service Chiefs. The COSC is already a committee that is part of the DP Committee. A "council" appellation could, therefore, be more appropriate.
The other implication is also self- evident: the Government has not closed the door on having a separate Chairman of the COSC. Else, it could have just said 'the Service Chiefs'one of whom would have been a rotational Service Chief as Chairman anyway. Some observers who have interpreted that the DPC may mean that a CDS is 'dead' before birth, may not be right. Since the CISC is currently member secretary, someday with the inclusion of a CDS/ Pmt Chairman COSC, his Chief of Staff/ VCDS/ Vice-Chairman could do the same role.
With NSA as Chairman, and HQIDS as the Secretariat of the DPC could bring to fruition the important charter that HQIDS has had since inception but one that often got subsumed in the turf rivalries and sensitivities that abound.
NSA as Chairman
Image Courtesy: Livemint
There have been some reservations about the NSA being Chairman. Those that allude to his professional background etc., are quite irrelevant and facile. Some arguments about the NSA already having a large charter, official as well as informally assigned, may be relevant as Nitin Gokhale ← has also pointed out. Over the last two decades, this important political but non- electoral/ministerial appointment is the security lynchpin for diplomacy, internal security, nuclear deterrence architecture and strategic forces as well as intelligence coordination. In a parliamentary system, this was well- advised after India became a nuclear weapon state. With the addition of defence (with its multi-discipline members), all instruments of DIME are aligned for the first time. Yes, the already high personal load on the NSA will increase, but NSAs have not, now or earlier, seemed to flinch from workloads! Moreover, there will be specialists and secretariats to draft policy and planning inputs as well as help execute them.
Next, the upholding of the nuclear deterrence architecture, steering it through periods of some deterrence instability (which is not the same as failure of deterrence) and readiness to take necessary measures in case of imminent threat or attack, the alignment of the NCA with the DPC is more than signalling. It strengthens overall deterrence effectiveness. It is ultimately the political trust and the authority vested in the office of the NSA that is far more critical than his/ her professional background. Moreover, it may not be inconceivable for a future NSA to be a military veteran. Would there be any basis then for the heads or veterans of central civilian services or intelligence services to think of this as a problem?
Image Courtesy: ABC News
For the first time, there are clear directions of the policy and strategy assessments and documents that are required. Those that would be public would be as important as those that would be classified, but for quite different reasons. In effect, a national security strategy (NSS) is actually an amalgam of more than a few strategies, despite the preference for the singularity in the title.
In analysing US NSS documents over some years now, a few realities are worth mentioning. Internally within the US, the NSS is meant to conclude debates about where the US should be headed, what it should do, what should it be concerned about. Sometimes, its publication starts off new debates, domestic and international! This is to be expected. Second, a NSS should provide reasonably clear guidance for other documents (public and classified). Third, to a palpable extent, it should reassure friends. Fourth, to quite an extent, it should worry those who may be inimical to our well- being and overall security interests. Finally, the absence of a public policy and strategy document does not automatically imply the absence of policy and strategy. However, the absence of classified guidance documents do make it more difficult for lower- echelon doctrinal and strategy documents to have the weight and veracity that they must have. It must be said here that the Indian Navy's initiatives in writing doctrine and strategy documents in the absence of such guidance more than a decade ago was path-breaking. With a NSS and other guidance, the lower hierarchy of documents will be all the more robust, useful and longer- lasting.
Future- Readiness
It is possible to put other aims of the DPC as a hope for making the hard power of the state future- ready. The composition enables formal group- think among key players and if there are adequately "untidy" discussions—meaning robust, well- prepared and honest arguments—the likelihood of tidy solutions to problems may emerge. (The reverse, i.e., tidy discussions and possibly untidy solutions is a cultural- social reality in and beyond officialdom; but it needs changing).
Image Courtesy: Hindustan Times
Future-readiness is of course dynamic. Its relevance spans organisational structures, threat assessments, capabilities required to avoid threats and to pose an adequate level of threat to ensure deterrence or victory. It also spans the organisational changes for indigenisation and self-reliance, force structuring and force readiness. Some salient aspects of future- readiness are as follows:
Candid assessments of the likely tactical and operational environments in say, 15, 25, 40 and 50 year time spans in which legacy hardware that we already have, that which is building or in the procurement pipeline, and that which needs to be effective in the environments in which they might deter and fight.
Neither platforms nor ordnance is automatically "strategic". All contribute to achievement of strategic aims by being effective, successful and largely survivable in the higher spectrum of conflict within the likely operational and tactical environments. For example, some merely illustrative questions to be asked of ourselves: What could be the anti-tank, anti-aircraft (manned and unmanned), anti-ship, anti-satellite, cyber-threat environments etc., we could face or impose in 10- 20- 40- 60 years' horizons? This is admittedly not easy because of conformism, comfort zones, business motives etc., and is not limited to the armed forces but also R&D, industry and bureaucracies.Yes, errors can be made in such estimates. These, however, would be much smaller than errors that will be made in the absence of such processes.
This, when combined with currently needed organisational restructuring, could help shift the general allure of what I have called "past- perfectness" rather than "future- readiness".
Autarky or Self- Reliance/ "Swavalamban" in Hindi. This too is mandated in the charter and does bring the main decision- makers together in the DPC or in the satellite groups around it.
Future-readiness may also require more money. Whether this is to be assessed as a percentage of GDP or as government expenditure, or on as required basis require decisions by the DPC if future-readiness, autarky and defence exports are to be ensured. Given the spirit and letter of the DPC, the likelihood of money being invested and spent wisely and in a timely way now seems more likely than at any time since 1947.
Consequentially, one hopes that some of the current sets of committees, groups, and even organisations will be disbanded or radically streamlined to help make the intent and purpose of the DPC become a reality. With decision makers being combined around one table, the implementation framework needs flattening/ shortening. The phrase 'wield an axe' to overcome some 'axes to grind' comes to mind…
Finally, if the ship- of – state is to sail with robustness, resolve and readiness, the whole of ship approach enshrined in the DPC may turn out to be the key. After all, the who's who of decision making are all now at the captain's table…
Rear Admiral Sudarshan Y Shrikhande, IN (Retd)
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BharatShakti.in)
Big Time Changes in the Production Policy Can Wait
India and the Nordics – An Innovative Partnership
Rear Admiral Sudarshan Y. Shrikhande , AVSM, IN (Retd)
RADM Shrikhande graduated from the NDA. His qualifications include Masters from the Soviet Naval War College, St Petersburg (1985-88) in ASW and Weapon Engineering; Msc From Staff College(1995), MPhil from the Indian Naval War College and highest distinction from the US Naval War College( 2003). He has served long years at sea, commanded three ships and been defense attaché in Australia and to other South Pacific nations. Ashore he has been commander War Room at NHQ, headed the IN's Tactical Evaluation Group and was a founding member as a captain of the IN's Strategy and Operations Council. In flag rank he has been head of Naval Intelligence; Chief of Staff of SNC; Joint HQ staff duties and in the nuclear forces command and Flag Officer Doctrines and Concepts before requesting early retirement in July 2016. As a veteran he continues teaching at several institutions including the NDC, all War colleges and the CDM as well as the NDA and INA spanning strategy, operational art, RMA, Peloponnesian War, Indo-Pacific geopolitics, leadership and ethics. He has participated in Track 1.5 discussions with China and the US and is associated with the Vivekananda International, Observer Research and the National Maritime Foundations, National Security Council Secretariat as well as other institutions.
Read More About: Rear Admiral Sudarshan Y. Shrikhande , AVSM, IN (Retd)
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Very well analysed. Keep it up
Yoginder sharma
Incisive and balanced appraisal of the proposed DPC. My compliments to the clear-thinking Admiral.
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©2020 Bharatshakti


oCanvas has a module called draw. This module is what handles the redrawing of the canvas. It contains a list of all added objects and methods for redrawing everything.
True if the canvas is cleared from all objects. Will be true until the next redraw happens.
Contains all objects that have been added to the canvas. Before version 2.0.0, this was an object, but is now an array. This is deprecated in version 2.1.0 and will be removed in the next major version. Use the children property of the core instance and display objects to find objects instead.
Contains the current canvas translation. This is always x: 0 and y: 0, except right when objects are being drawn, then the position is the same as obj.abs_x and obj.abs_y.


text:
Chevrolet News
2019 Chevy Colorado ZR2 Bison Tray Bed Concept Is an Expeditioner's Dream Truck
The overlander is an improvement on the already-capable AEV-tweaked Colorado ZR2.
byRob Stumpf| PUBLISHED May 15, 2019 7:13 PM
While most everyday Americans enjoy driving on smooth asphalt, there is a select group of enthusiasts who'd rather take the road less traveled. But what if we told you that you could take a modern truck and tweak it ever-so-slightly to make it enjoyable both on-road and off? The folks at American Expedition Vehicles (AEV) did just that with a brand new 2019 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2, and its even easy on the eyes.
Meet the Colorado ZR2 Bison Tray Bed concept, a truck created to test consumer interest in a few overlanding-oriented aftermarket bits for the current-generation Colorado. Along with wider high-arch fenders, the pickup features beefier 35-inch tires, custom bumpers, and even an AEV-built tray bed conversion.
AEV said that absolutely no lifting was required to fit the larger rubber. In fact, the only modification to the truck's suspension was a GM Performance Parts leveling kit, which was used to remove factory rake in the vehicle's front-end.
The company also notes that it fitted a GMPP steel driveshaft, but in doing so did not compromise the ZR2's factory suspension geometry in any way. Several additional GMPP upgrades are said to be planned for the truck; AEV didn't mention any specifics, but says it still has no plans to add any additional lift height.
The Bison bumpers are said to be the most complexly fabricated part added to the ZR2 concept truck and are presently being tweaked before making them available for public resale. No word on the availability of the fender flares or tray bed; however, the goal of the concept was to gauge overall interest in the parts AEV has designed for the truck—perhaps that might change in the future.
To prove the truck's worth, the vehicle took part in a three-day expedition which covered a section of the Altar Desert. Immediately following its workhorse duties, the truck began making its way to Overland Expo West in Flagstaff, Arizona—a show which is dedicated to overlanding enthusiasts from May 17 to May 19. In case you can't make it, be sure to tell the folks at AEV your thoughts on their hard work via Facebook.
Chevrolet NewsNews by BrandTrucks


text:
Q: Problems registering a dynamic type in a .Net Remoting Service I am using Emit to create some dynamic types in my project, particularly to replace "Decorators" around my service interfaces.
I am also doing this for the class registered with .Net Remoting as the WellKnownServiceType. However, .Net Remoting does not seem to be working very well with dynamically emitted types.
First, I got:
System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Dynamic, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=XXXX' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Of course the file doesn't exist, the assembly is dynamic, and I have set Emit to only "Run" the assembly, not SaveAndRun.
So, before registering the type, I call an Assembly.Load(type.Assembly.GetName()).
Now, I get:
System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingException: Requested Service not found
Server stack trace:
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.BinaryServerFormatterSink.ProcessMessage(IServerChannelSinkStack sinkStack, IMessage requestMsg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream, IMessage& responseMsg, ITransportHeaders& responseHeaders, Stream& responseStream)

The error appears only on the client side as an exception from the server. I don't see any errors in the server logs.
Anybody has clues on whether this is a "wellknown" issue, that dynamic types can not be used to host .net remoting services ?
Any hints or pointers to work around it ?
** UPDATE ****
I've stopped using Emit. Emit forced me to put an "InternalsVisibleTo" attribute in my core assemblies, which seriously affected obfuscation. Rather, I've switched to code generation using CodeDom namespace. It works beautifully. I can see the actual source code that does the job, which is very helpful when debugging.

A: I recently hit this exact same problem.
As you've probably noticed from the stack trace, the problem comes from Assembly.Load
Server stack trace:
   ...
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(...)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingConfigHandler.RemotingConfigInfo.LoadType(String typeName, String assemblyName)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingConfigHandler.RemotingConfigInfo.GetServerTypeForUri(String URI)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingConfigHandler.GetServerTypeForUri(String URI)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingServices.GetServerTypeForUri(String URI)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.BinaryServerFormatterSink.ProcessMessage(...)

You can provide an AssemblyResolve event handler to allow you to control the loading of your custom assemebly. vis:
AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve += delegate(object sender, ResolveEventArgs args)
{
    if (args.Name.Equals(type.Assembly.FullName))
        return type.Assembly;
    return null;
};


Poems Previously Unpublished by Paul Casey. He grew up between Ireland, Zambia and South Africa – working in film, multimedia and teaching. Paul has written, published and performed poems in five of his six spoken languages.
Paul Casey was born in Cork in 1968. He grew up between Ireland, Zambia and South Africa, working in film, multimedia and teaching. His second collection, Virtual Tides, is due from Salmon Poetry in early 2016. He has published poetry in five of his spoken languages along with articles in journals and anthologies in Ireland, the US, China, Australia, South Africa, Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina. A chapbook, It's Not all Bad, appeared from The Heaventree Press (2009) and in 2010 he produced a poetry-film based on Ian Duhig's idyllic poem, The Lammas Hireling. His début collection is home more or less (Salmon, 2012) and he was awarded a Cork City Artist's Bursary in 2013. He has recently had poems accepted by The Irish Examiner, Fulcrum, Colony, The Pickled Body, And Agamemnon dead, Crannóg, North West Words, Shamrock Haiku Journal, New Eyes on the Great Book, Over the Edge Anthology, Elysian, The Penny Dreadful, The Stony Thursday Book, Levure Littéraire, Southword and Brain of Forgetting. In 2014 he wrote and performed a collaborative piece with Afric McGlinchey, for Stephen J. Fowler's Enemies project.
Casey performs regularly at festivals and events, having been the featured guest at Poetry Africa, Godiva Festival, Cork Spring Poetry festival, Cúirt Festival of Literature, Dromineer Literary Festival, the Electric Picnic and the Troubadour in London. He has been recorded by RTE Radio for the Poetry Programme and Arena. In 2014 he read in the Guild Hall in Coventry for the state visit of president Michael D. Higgins. He is in residence each May during the Bealtaine festival, in four elderly homes around county Cork. He also curates the annual Unfinished Book of Poetry, featuring verse written by students from Cork city schools. He is the founder/director of the weekly Ó Bhéal poetry reading series in Cork city (www.obheal.ie).


After finishing the regular season with 100 points for the first time in his career, Nick Suzuki added a goal and five assists in the Owen Sound Attack's first-round sweep of the London Knights.
While team mates Brett McKenzie, Alan Lyszczarczyk, and Kevin Hancock were at times eliciting roars at the Bayshore — and silencing Knights fans at Budweiser Gardens — Suzuki quietly went about his business as one of the best young hockey players in the Canadian Hockey League.
The London-raised first-round pick of the National Hockey League's Vegas Golden Knights has all the tools on the ice. He can skate well, and he's got a professional shot, evidenced by his 107 Ontario Hockey League goals.
As the April 7 Ontario Hockey League Priority Selection draft draws near, it's a phrase that's about to get batted around ad nauseam.
We can talk about his goals, but Nick Suzuki passes the puck like no one in this league.
"Hockey sense, to me, is the ability to see what's going on on the ice and understand it in that split second and to be able to make a decision so it goes from your mind to your feet and your hands — like that," said Attack general manager Dale DeGray.
To DeGray, hockey sense is about processing the game. If we were talking about a piece of technology, Suzuki's hands and feet would be the hardware, and his hockey sense the software that makes it all perform at an exceptional level.
There were some recent examples of this processing in Owen Sound's opening round playoff series.
On Brett McKenzie's game-winning overtime goal in Game 2, Suzuki received a pass at the top of the right face-off circle and froze the entire Knights team. Every player in the white-and-green on the ice, and the goaltender, had their eyes on Suzuki expecting the shot. He wound up as if to shoot, but then fired a pass to a waiting McKenzie, who had snuck in backdoor and tipped the puck into a wide open net.
"We can talk about his goals, but Nick Suzuki passes the puck like no one in this league," DeGray said.
In Game 1, with the Attack and Knights tied at 1-1 and Owen Sound on the power play, Sean Durzi shot a puck in from the point. In a split second, and with his back to the net, Suzuki deflected the shot-pass two feet to his left onto the stick of a waiting, and probably surprised, Kevin Hancock — who fired it into the back of the net.
Suzuki even had the presence of mind, feel for the game, or hockey sense, to skate one stride to his right after the pass and block any attempt the Knights player had to get his stick in the way of Hancock's shot.
All of this took place in a split second in the middle of a playoff game, which appears like organized chaos without the benefit of slow motion replay and hindsight.
It's hard for someone to articulate how they see things on the ice. It's often abstract.
It's where the old adage "the best players rarely make the best coaches" comes from.
Suzuki said, like anything else, hockey sense comes from learning and studying the game.
All of this has led to another attribute highly sought after in hockey players — consistency.
Since being named the Alliance minor midget AAA hockey player of the year for the London Junior Knights in 2015, Suzuki has racked up the accomplishments. A first-round OHL pick, first-round NHL pick, rookie teams, all-star teams, gold medals in international play and now a top-five scorer in the OHL for back-to-back seasons.
His life in the OHL may be coming to an end. The Attack are currently embroiled in a playoff battle, but he could see some games at the end of the season and into the playoffs with the Chicago Wolves of the American Hockey League.
Next season, he might catch on with the Golden Knights, or he could play a fourth season in Owen Sound and try to take a run at Bobby Ryan's all-time scoring title. He'd need 91 points for the scoring crown in a season that'll be shortened, no doubt, by a roster spot on Team Canada's World Junior squad next year.
Wherever he plays next season Suzuki will no doubt continue to impress the people who know him best.


2018: A year in reflections.
I sit here, last of the festive mince pies being consumed and washed down with a cup of tea in the quiet that can only be found after 10pm at night. Candles are lit, my husband is out for the night and upstairs my daughter slumbers, balled up into the corner of her cot in such a way that is so undeniably her. And to the left of me sits a notebook, brown and unassuming, started at the beginning of December; my hundredth reattempt at journaling (it will stick this time). A few days ago, the day after Boxing Day, I began scribbling notes and memories and words and dreams and ideas. Most of them were the thoughts and feelings that follow me, at the tail end of this year, of 2018. Some of them belong to my brown notebook alone, they are a little too raw even for me, but some, some I thought I would share, simply because it feels good to.
Sometimes I feel like I have made my anxiety up. That I am undeserving of it being acknowledged at all. I brush it off as an "off day", and push on until sometimes I break and sometimes I don't. And then it perpetuates.
I was, and can still be, a person of laissez-faire attitude. Life goes on and I tended to be of the 'it will all turn out alright in the end camp', because usually it did. But then I gave birth, and it was pretty bad.