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Filed under Arts & Entertainment, Showcase
As recent award shows have strayed away from typical nominations, the Oscars may have not received the same memo
Mackenzie Fortino and Isabella Canizares, Staff Writers|February 23, 2019
The 91st Academy Awards ceremony will air on February 24 and bring with it controversy between the indie lovers and the mainstream movie fans. One side argues that the Oscars were designed to applaud the best of films regardless of status or rank in Hollywood, and for the ceremony to start to award blockbuster films goes against the very principles it was built on. The other believes the blockbuster films become so well-known because of the talent and creativity shown in the film.
Keep it Indie by Mackenzie Fortino
It seems as if the Academy has taken a step backwards from last year. This year's nominations signal a year of groundbreaking films not getting the recognition they deserve while blockbuster movies are getting above and beyond attention.
Films like "Call Me By Your Name," "Ladybird" and "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" all received nominations last year, despite being independent films with low budgets. "A Star is Born" and "Black Panther" are both well-funded movies which have received a lot of attention throughout their theater run and further promotion of these popular films is pointless as it outshines smaller, independent films. It's a joke to watch actors and actresses praise themselves in fancy clothes just to win awards they don't necessarily need.
There is nothing inherently wrong with famous celebrities like Christian Bale winning prestigious awards. However, I believe The Academy should showcase new films and actors, making that the focus of the ceremony.
It was refreshing to see Timothée Chalamet receive a nomination last year, and it would have the same appeal if Lucas Hedges was nominated, both being new actors. The Academy, however, has taken a step backwards and has left many young artists in the dark. While films like "BlacKkKlansman" and "If Beale Street Could Talk" both have powerful messages that deserve to be vocalized, the independent films that happen to provide the same passion regardless of a low budget, deserve the chance to shine in the spotlight.
Independent filmmakers put a lot of heart into their craft with no idea if it will be successful. However, movies like "A Star is Born" are born into that spotlight, with repeat Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper and pop-star Lady Gaga as the faces of the project. Famous faces of Hollywood, like frequent nominee Sam Rockwell, are set up for success no matter how good or bad the film is.
More specifically, one film that got completely snubbed from all award shows is "Hereditary." Directed and written by Ari Aster, the film adapts all the classic elements of horror into something new and unique.
With "Hereditary" as his debut film, the pool of Hollywood professionals underestimated Aster's talent in filmmaking. In a perfect world, he should have been nominated for (Best Director and Best Original Screenplay). Last year, "Get Out" won Best Original screenplay for its new twist on horror, and it would have been exciting to see a similar film receive the same recognition.
While "Roma" for Best Picture and Rami Malek for Best Actor in "Bohemian Rhapsody" are bright spots, most films this year did not have time for audience feedback . For example, Yorgos Lanthimos' "The Favourite" was released on December 26 and Adam McKay's "Vice" came out on December 25, with the Oscar nominations following not even a month later on January 22. While the acting and cinematography of these films are surely impressive, the timing is suspicious.
Instead of championing new talent, it seemed the Academy already had a favourite. Bo Burnham's "Eighth Grade," which started off as a small indie film, worked its way up from the Sundance Film Festival to the Golden Globes Awards. The film caught the attention of the public, captivating all age groups. The common man–the audience– should have more of a say in who is nominated; just because the subject is not as heavy as many of the other contenders does not mean it doesn't deserve and Oscar.
While the merit of these awards can be argued, they do exist and since the audience doesn't have much of a voice, The Academy should notice those who work their way up from the bottom.
Mainstream still quality by Isabella Canizares
While some indie-film fans may be bitter because of the lack of independent films nominated, the Oscar nominees are deserving this year. Denying films this honor because they are successful comes off hypocritical. While the lack of independent movies is disappointing, the films who did get recognized are excellent.
"Roma," a film about a young women working in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma in Mexico City. It broke barriers on ideas of Mexican culture and life to the mixed audience. Yalitza Aparicio was nominated for Best Actress for her role in "Roma," the first time a Latina actress has been nominated for this category in 14 years. With beautiful cinematography and a refreshing take on Mexican culture in film, it's no wonder the movie has raked in the most nominations this year.
Another equally impressive nomination goes to Rami Malek for Best Actor as his uncanny portrayal as Freddie Mercury in the movie "Bohemian Rhapsody." Universally praised for his acting, Malek practically transformed into Mercury, embodying his persona perfectly, keeping the audience captivated throughout the whole movie.
"Black Panther" is another standout this year and follows Marvel superhero T'Challa's return to the fictional African nation, Wakanda, to take his rightful place as king. It was one of the films nominated for "Best Picture" and makes history by being the first superhero movie ever to be nominated for Best Picture. This signifies great changes in the Hollywood industry.
However, regardless of these fantastic nominations, there is one category that seems to be lacking the most diversity. The nominees this year for Best Director are all male, which is a repetition of previous nominations, taking a significant step back from the recent past of diverse nominations.
The Oscars need to be more inclusive to all races and genders, and this step back is does more harm than good for the future of films.
In the end, regardless of issues of diversity and inclusiveness, there is no doubt that the films acknowledged by the Academy deserve their place at the podium. An Oscar win is one of the most prestigious honors a person can attain in the film industry, and it is bodes well that a more diverse group of people than ever are now eligible for the recognition.
Tags: eighth grade, hereditary, nominations, oscars, roma, the academy
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These days, when we think of Genericans, we think of vacuous, vapid,consumers. Lonely plastic-people who pretend that everything is all right. Urban folk, and rural folk, both are suspicious of such plastic people. In our cities and towns the problems are obvious. The poor folk aren't hidden. Our lives are lived in public. When we go to the streets of Generica (those streets with deceptively pretty names), everything looks the same…the pleasant exteriors betray the brokenness of their residents.
And in response, the Suburban church–the Church of Generica seeks to save these people by catering to their broken impulses. We feed the individualism by giving them individualized sermons (David Fitch can detail this phenomenon much better than I can). We try to attack the isolation by introducing small groups (which are usually pretty anemic and unoffensive…being centered on things like the Purpose Driven Life). And so the Generican Church tends to have the same ailments as the Generican people–and all their blessings as well (like resources and a value of excellence).
A spiritual crisis is growin in Generica. The people are dying there. They have money, but it has secured their sense of disillusionment. Materialism grows, but the people cry out for substance. They moved out to the burbs to find sanctuary, but they crave relationship.
But as missional pioneers emerge–those uniquely envisioned folks that can utter prophetic voice to their brothers and sisters in Generica–they flee to the cities with their obvious problems. Urban has its own challenges, to be sure, but it is easier to be missional in the city, in many ways, than it is to be missional in the burbs. Generica needs missional leaders. Missional leaders who reject the homogeneous unit principle (the idea that folks don't like crossing cultural boundaries so we should do church in a way that appeals to particular cultures rather than being mulit-ethnic in our approach), who reject consumerism and materialism, who embrace authentic community, who care about the poor and the marginalized should come back to the suburbs and minister there. Generica is growing in its diversity. Generia has its poor. And most of the churches in Generica tend to assume that issues of race and poverty and crime are urban issues. But new churches must come to Generica.
Churches that value social justice.
Churches that cross cultural boundaries.
Churches that build authentic community amidst fracture.
Who will respond to the cries for healing in the broken land of Generica?


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WWII veteran celebrates 100th birthday at bowling alley – and scores above his age
Posted 8:10 am, September 27, 2019, by Tribune Media Wire Service
WYOMING, Mich. — On Thursday afternoons at Park Center Lanes, the senior bowling league meets to crack the ball against the pins.
This Thursday, there was something a little more special in the air.
"There are very few 100-year-olds. I feel like I am pretty lucky." John Sinke told WXMI.
Sinke knew his birthday celebration was coming, but he didn't realize how big of an event it would be. From the bowling cake to the 'happy 100th birthday banner' hanging over his lane, and the special bowling pin commemorating his milestone, John was happy to celebrate with friends and family.
There were two things Sinke was hoping for during his birthday celebration; to beat his son and to continue to bowl a score above his age.
Sinke has been through a lot in his life, including fighting in World War II, being a decorated firefighter in Grand Rapids, surviving a heart attack and being hit by an ambulance.
While he wasn't able to give out the secret to a long life, he did say it runs in the family. Sinke said his mother lived until she was 97 and all his sisters lived into their 90s.
Bowling has been in his life for nearly 50 years and now it is something to get him out of the house. While his scoring has slowed, he can still compete with the best of them, bowling a 200 just last April.
As for Thursday?
"Well I got a 127 - that's terrible for me!"
Topics: WWII veteran
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Marines surprise WWII veteran by bringing birthday ball to his retirement home
'The highest honor available:' World War II veteran receives Congressional Gold Medal at 95th birthday party
Lawrence Brooks, 110, is believed to be the oldest living American World War II veteran
'He provided us with a strategy:' Marquette celebrates MLK's birthday
6-year-old Ohio boy finishes chemotherapy, classmates welcome him back with standing ovation
The world's oldest couple — ages 106 and 105 — celebrate their 80th wedding anniversary
Beautician keeps working as she celebrates 101st birthday
'They're very deserving:' WWII vets saluted at Milwaukee's Day of Honor
What are the odds? Twin welcomes twin daughters — born on his birthday
Teen SC school shooter gets life for killing 1st grader
World's first cloned cat celebrates 18th birthday
'It's a thrill:' 95-year-old WWII veteran receives high school diploma

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


TIP OF THE DAY NO. 28 – IS YOUR WAISTBAND TOO TIGHT?
TIP NO. 27 – IS YOUR WAISTBAND TOO TIGHT?
You might not be as slim around your waist as you would like to be, but ff your waistband is too tight you will have 'muffin tops' , and that is true even if you are slim – because pulling your waist in too tight will push up the flesh around your middle.
I know buying a size 10 jeans, or pants, or skirt, makes us feel better than buying a size 12, but it will be more becoming not to have your flesh pushed in the wrong direction.
So how can you avoid it – especially if you have a bigger waist?
The best way to avoid those 'muffin tops' is to buy pants without a waistband. They sit a little below the waist – like the one in the picture. They feel comfortable because they don't retrain your waist or pull it in.
Author Brigitte NiochePosted on February 11, 2013 February 10, 2013 Categories Beauty Tips for your body, Fashion, figure, Self ImageTags Comfort, jeans, Muffin Tops, Slim Looking, Waistbands1 Comment on TIP OF THE DAY NO. 28 – IS YOUR WAISTBAND TOO TIGHT?


Simple ideas for tropical front page can make your garden look elegant and beautiful. There are many important factors that you should consider when You want to enjoy a new look on Your landscape. You need to make the first observations on Your landscaping ideas before you make it look appealing and fun. The intensity of the House building, sunshine, wind direction, hardiness zone, soil type, and wind speed must be considered before you implement new gardening approaches on landscape ideas. By recognizing some of the hardiness zones in Your landscape, you can choose the right types of plants for your garden.
People who live in Arizona had to pick some flowers and plant drought tolerant because this area has a high intensity of sunlight. The next thing that you should consider in a tropical landscape ideas for front yard ideas related to the features and structure. You need to decide if you want to rock garden, a swimming pool and a grass surface, fish ponds or with an outdoor terrace. New project on the landscape would be nice if you can ask for some ideas of all members of the family including your children. Your kids will love to stay indoor to play. You need to provide a place that they can use to run or play with his pets.


Maybe we should look for a way to make the development of allacrost the same on all platforms. Like using code-blocks or something.
The compile problem (HOA_MAP::Debug-something-something) is because the vcproj is missing files. If we all would use the same tool it would be so much simpler.
Topic: Fix the website already!!!
Re: Fix the website already!!!
Wierd, drupal should have caught that.
No, if it's working on windows and on linux then it has to do something with osx. You right, I'm sorry.
However in that case I think it has to do with the hardware implementation of OpenGL in which case we can do nothing.
@Gorzuate: Is it not easier to create another application and check if the same problem occurs their?
If the new application doesn't have the problem we have something that we can compare it to. Otherwise we will be just suggesting solustions without knowing if we can fix it.


American Alligator. Photo: gailhampshire, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY 2.0 license.
If you roll an alligator on its back and hold it there, it will exhibit a strange behavior. After 15 or 20 seconds, the alligator will go limp and become unresponsive. It's called tonic immobility and, for a phenomenon so widespread in the animal kingdom, we know surprisingly little about it.
Now, new research reveals that tonic immobility in the alligator appears to be a form of fainting that arises, in part, from the unique features of the crocodilian heart.
Read the whole story at my 'Animal Minds' blog: Fainting Gators? Tonic Immobility in the Alligator.


-Responsible for the design and implementation of Data Warehouse Data Models for projects.
-Responsible for the design and development of the logical and physical data models for enhancements.
-Interact with IT Leads, SMEs, DBAs, ETL and BI Resources. Share the workload with other data modelers to support core requests, database refresh and model sync up requests.
Requirements: Have 10+ years experience; most recent 4 years in Financial Services.
Hands-on experience with Embarcadero; DB2, SQL and Data Warehousing a must.
Model maintenance via portal/website a plus.


Fruit develops rapidly from a single cell to become the produce that ends up on our tables. Flower fertilization through pollen is the start of a fruit. The fruit goes through the growth stages of cell division, cell expansion, fruit maturity, and fruit ripening, then ends in fruit senescence. It is essential to estimate fruit growth, especially during maturity and ripening. There are many growth metrics available depending on the fruit or vegetable. Find out which one is appropriate for you.
There are three parts to a fruit: the exocarp or skin, the mesocarp or the fruit flesh, and the endocarp. The initial stages of growth are similar in all fruits, where the fruit reaches maturity by accumulating solids. As different fruits begin to mature, they begin to follow different pathways.
The difference offers interesting ways to track their growth.
Phases of fruit development and growth. "Reproduced from Plants in Action, http://plantsinaction.science.uq.edu.au, published by the Australian Society of Plant Scientists.
The skin and flesh of the fruit can provide vital clues on the growth of the fruit. Since non-climacteric fruits have to remain on the trees or plants until the end, the development of their appearance can also be used to judge quality and readiness for harvest.
The skin of most fruits and vegetables change from green at the start. Changes in skin color occur due to pigments called carotenoids, which can be yellow, orange, red, green, purple, yellow-green, and orange-yellow. These are produced by fruits as part of the ripening process.
A change in internal and external color is one of the features used to see how the fruit is maturing and ripening.
The development of external color can be used to track the growth of the fruit and decide when it is ready for plucking, and it has the advantage of being non-destructive.
Checking internal color is a destructive process.
Though color charts are available for some fruits and vegetables such as peaches, apples, and tomatoes, in many cases some experience on the part of the grower is necessary to judge growth stages.
It is important to remember that the color development in fruits is also influenced by genetics, light, temperature, nutrient supply, crop-loads, and stress. So, color variations alone are not enough to track the growth of a fruit, as there can be variations year to year or within a region depending on many other factors.
Besides color, ripening also changes the texture and consistency of the mesocarp or flesh making it soft. Firmness is the crispness of a fruit. One of the easiest ways to measure it is by applying pressure. There are several instruments available to test firmness called pressure testers and penetrometers. These are destructive as a probe is inserted into the fruit or pressure is applied to deform a fruit.
External and internal color of the fruit, and firmness can give information about ripeness, however, individually or even all three of them together are not sufficient to judge the nutritional value or quality of the fruit. Farmers usually follow the growth of fruits to fix harvest time. Since climacteric fruits are harvested after they mature, and before ripening, external features are inadequate growth metrics to judge harvest time.
Production of carbohydrates spurs cell division, and its accumulation causes cell expansion and tissue differentiation. Here changes in size indicate growth of the fruit.
As the fruit grows to its full size, carbohydrates are converted to starch and sugars. There are several other compounds also formed such as organic acid, lipids, proteins, carotenoids, and volatile compounds. The fruit is a sink that attracts most of these compounds which are formed in the leaves as a result of photosynthesis.
These compounds are stored or metabolized as part of reactions, for example during the ripening and maturation. So, the concentration of these different components will change as the fruit develops. These changes help to accurately track fruit development. Some of the important compounds for this purpose are dry matter, starch, soluble solid content, titratable acidity, and Scoville units.
When water is removed from the fruit, what remains is the dry matter, and this is a measure of all the components of the fruit: the total soluble solids, fibers, etc. DM increases as the fruit develop. As DM is also correlated with the quality of fruit, it is growing popular as an indicator of growth. There are many techniques to measure DM on the field using small hand-held instruments depending on Near Infrared (NIR).
The development in fruits differs from the time they start to mature based on the starch-sugar dynamic, which is based on the fruit type. Even during maturation and ripening, carbohydrates are still being imported from leaves into the fruit in different forms.
Climacteric fruits retain their solids in the form of starch and fats during maturation. These are converted to soluble sugars only in the ripening stage on the plant or even post-harvest.
Non-climacteric fruits skip this stage of storing starch and directly produce sugars in their soluble form during maturation.
The content of starch can be estimated through DM; in some cases as in kiwis starch accounts for 50% of DM at the onset of maturity.
Fructose, sucrose, and glucose make up the soluble sugars concentration (SSC) of fruits and juices. As the fruit ripens their concentration increases making the fruit sweeter. BRIX can measure SSC.
Organic acids are produced within the fruits, unlike the rest of the solids, which are imported from leaves. They can be metabolized from sugars or produced from carbon dioxide the fruit absorbs. The presence of acids makes the fruit sour, and their level is called titratable acids. The acid produced depends on the fruit. Thus, for example, citric acid is present in citrus, while grapes have tartaric acid.
The presence of these acids is desirable in the right concentrations, as they prevent the fruit from being bland or too sweet. The levels of acid are high in the initial stages of fruit development, making them tart. However, their levels decrease as the fruit ripens.
Vegetables such as peppers and chillies are pungent due to the presence of the compound capsaicin. Wilbur L. Scoville developed the Scoville Organoleptic scale or test. Vegetables that are not pungent score zero on this scale, while habaneros score 300,000. The number indicates that the capsaicin has to be diluted 300,000 fold before it is undetectable.
Besides genetics, the pungency is affected by environmental factors such as temperature, hours of sunlight, moisture, and soil, and cultivational practices like fertilisers used. Scoville units of dried chillies will also depend on the conditions under which it is dried.
Estimation of the fruit composition can be used to measure all kinds of fruits whether they are climacteric or non-climacteric. It is important to note that in many cases there may be no single instrument that has universal application. For example, the instruments which measure ripeness based on DM content are useful for most fruits, except avocados. So consult your peers or the company selling tools to be sure you are buying the right product.
Copyright © 2017 Felix Instruments Inc.


This is a list of all the 126 people known in the database who have status "DC". You can sort the table by clicking/shift+clicking on headers. Note that the data import for things that were historically not handled by the NM website is still incomplete.


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Home Deconstructing Headlines Ummmmmm, Green Party launch war on NZ First???
Martyn Bradbury
Ummmmmm, Green Party launch war on NZ First???
"Join us despite our middle class watered down policies" is a mighty battle cry.
Ummmmm. I'm not sure what the fuck just happened there, but the Greens today for their campaign launch just opened war with NZ First, which could either be the stupidest or smartest thing they've done to date.
Attacking a NZ First + Labour Party Government as unacceptable was a strong position to take, but then to openly attack NZ First was so surprising that the actual audience didn't know whether they should clap because they were in so much shock at this open declaration of war.
There was a 'did she just say that' feeling about the pause in clapping.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
The Greens are more middle class than ever, and middle class identity politics have replaced environmental activism within the Greens. NZ First are an anathema to the Cosmopolitan Elitism that is the Wellington Twitter bubble that the Greens inhabit, so open warfare with NZ First is exactly the kind of dynamism the Greens need to try to inflame to prevent the obviousness of a NZ First-Labour minority Government from occurring.
Antagonism towards NZ First is what the middle class activist base want and it will make sure they turn up on election day, the problem is that Winston takes this shit personally and while exciting the base matters, burning bridges with Winston when he is likely to leap frog the Greens as the 3rd largest party means he's going to screw them if he cuts a deal with Labour.
This friction between the values of Green Party middle class identity politics activists and the cross burning banjo twanging jamboree that is NZ First was always going to be a hell of a tightrope to traverse, the Green Leadership have decided to inflame that energy rather than manage it.
The Greens won the battle today but look very far away from winning the War in September when Winston will want payback.
With Greens declaring war on NZ First, Winston is going to wake up to find a horses head made of tofu in his bed.
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Simon Bridges astounding anti-Semitism hypocrisy & The Spinoff's latest smear against Labour
WILD KATIPO July 9, 2017 at 6:19 pm
It is sad if it was as bad as that , here is the chance to be in government and having a hot headed approach could not only jeopardize that , but a change in government and a final end to National.
That should have been the priority and keeping the eye on the ball. But this is so typical of the division in NZ politics . Clamoring for the crumbs of power , they cut their nose off to spite their face. I hope it doesn't end in flames , a Labour led government with both the Greens and NZ First could be an incredibly dynamic one .
And a democratic one precisely because of the differences , – as opposed to the National government that is comprised of lapdogs.
Red Buzzard July 10, 2017 at 9:50 am
Cindy Lavache July 9, 2017 at 6:32 pm
Yeah, l agree with you Martin. I think it was dumb of the Greens to take on New Zealand First. Instead of taking on National, Maori or Act they've taken on one party they potentially will need to work with.
Who ever advised them to take this path was not playing the long game.
Frank Macskasy July 9, 2017 at 7:08 pm
Hang on a minute, Cindy. You say that the Greens should be taking on the Maori Party and ACT because – I'm assuming – they are stooges for the Nats?
But the very same could apply to NZ First. As has been pointed out, Winston Peters refuses point blank to declare whether he favours coalition with National or Labour.
So, if the Left ignores NZ First in the hope and prayer that Winnie picks Labours, we are essentially giving him a free pass.
Very clever of Winston; keep everyone guessing and in the process no one challenges him and his dubious policies. If that's not the best strategy since the Year Dot, I don't know what is.
I decline to play Winston's game and I'll be challenging his policies as and when necessary.
In Vino July 9, 2017 at 8:18 pm
I agree, Frank. Winston has a proven record of claiming to be anti-National govt, gathering in protest votes, then afterwards betraying them by forming Govt with National. He will do it again.
garibaldi July 10, 2017 at 11:34 am
Winston will screw the Greens anyway, so don't vote for him and his crew of misfits. Easy.
Priss July 12, 2017 at 4:14 pm
Spot on Frank, as usual.
Takere July 9, 2017 at 7:23 pm
Absolutely! The Green party strategy(ists) arent too clever or are playing high stakes poker? Winner takes all which is a problem for them as they dont have a track record at winning any electorate seats & ZNF have lined up Clutha Southland quite nicely. BiPolar Nick has a huge majority in Nelson of 7000+ so they'd have to have a top class candidate? Polling too for the Greens isn't as good as it has been in the last 3/4 elections either in the run up to this election….
Dave Macpherson July 9, 2017 at 7:19 pm
Those buggers are almost certainly going to have to work together if they want to see Govt change; should focus on their own policies & attack the National Govt
CLEANGREEN July 10, 2017 at 7:53 am
100% Dave I agree,
I was a Green Party member in HB in 1999-2001 until we as a group of green Party members we were actively fighting an Auckland developer to save a beach called (Aramoana) east of Waipawa from development and our astonishment HQ of Green Party told our Green group to leave the green party and form our own to group to fight this issue, so that has left us so badly beaten up since then, as we thought Green Party policy always was against private interests taking public beach areas for private developments!!!!!
Unbelievable! but I still want greens to join with labour/NZ First to form a new way forward now as we cannot allow any further destruction of our NZ by a corrupt Nactional Government.
Remember three years ago those three leaders joined together at a dinner party to photo opportunity to float their banner as "a Government in waiting" remember???
Simply now we must stick together; [- to defeat this evil Government and send them to the back benches come September.
Frank Macskasy July 10, 2017 at 9:25 am
Unfortunately, CG, as much as I share your desires to get rid of this hopeless government, a vote for NZ First is by no means a guarantee for that. Until Peters decides to trust the electorate with a degree of respect and tell us before hand, we simply don't know what we're getting if someone ticks "NZ First" on the Party Ballot. It would be like voters handing over our Party Ballots to Peters and allowing him to vote on our behalf.
At least with every other party we know what we're getting.
Robert Atack July 9, 2017 at 7:52 pm
Winston, can't stand the man, but one thing I support him on that the greeds don't is the banning of 1080 …. bastards
Tom Gardner July 10, 2017 at 10:18 am
Go Winnie! — but we need to use 1080 if we want to keep our birds
Red Buzzard July 10, 2017 at 10:45 am
isnt 1080 making the kea extinct?…not to mention the other birds
Citation, Red Buzzard? Repeating an old canard still doesn't make it any truer.
They used 1080 around the hills where we live and we now have tui, morepork, and kereru back again. Do you think that's a coincidence? Or have you closed your mind to that?
Grant July 9, 2017 at 8:47 pm
The same thing happened at the last election when the fake pre – election polls showed The Greens at 15%.
This went straight to their heads so they then thought it would be a good idea to should start thumping the negotiating table early by critiquing Labour's economic policies via mainstream media.
How did they think that would be perceived by your average Kiwi voter?
We all know how that ended up!
They go on about wanting to be truly 'progressive', not realising that your average Kiwi voter wouldn't have a clue what the word 'progressive' means when talking politics.
They need to replace the progressive word with another 'p' word….practical.
They should be saying , "we need to be a truly practical party, other wise we will always be impotent and in opposition ."
It's a pity because it's overshadowed their new water policy announcement which is a good one and dear oh dear very much along the lines of NZ.First's…..I wonder if it's rascist and xenophobic to stop the Chinese taking our pristine artisian water for free and making a fortune out of it ??
"It's a pity because it's overshadowed their new water policy announcement which is a good one and dear oh dear very much along the lines of NZ.First's"
…actually NZF policy is quite Green!
http://www.nzfirst.org.nz/environment_and_conservation
http://www.nzfirst.org.nz/policies
All of which is meaningless if Winston Peters decides to coalesce with National post-23 Sept. A Nat-NZF coalition will simply mean more dairying, more polluted waterways, more greenhouse gas emissions, the list goes on.
Whilst NZ First supporters like you, RB, are to be commended for engaging in the political system, the reality is that no-one – not even you, RB – knows what Peters will do. That is intolerable on so many levels.
fear-mongering?…the Greens are desperate for power, one wonders if they can work together with other parties …actually I think there is a greater danger of the Greens getting together with Nactional, especially if NZF gets more votes than them and joins with Labour
…the Greens have quite a few things in common with Nactional and they have not ruled out going with Nactional in the past…
eg remember: John Keys 'Red Peak' flag change ( James Shaw of the the Greens supported this); remember Nactional's budget ( the Greens came out and supported this. Labour and NZF did not) ; remember the attacks on Labour over the housing crisis in Auckland with foreigners buying up NZ housing and making the prices too high for New Zealanders ( the Greens joined with Nactional and accused Labour of racism); marijuana/cannabis reform ( conservative stance closer to Nactional than NZF or TOP) …
https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/greens-step-to-the-right
http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/green_party/
Ok, RB, you're a Winston Peters desciple. Got it.
Jack P July 10, 2017 at 11:54 am
The Greens have shot themselves in the foot and stumbled. To come out of the gates on the "racism" issue is weak and if that is the best they can do then I hope they are relegated to the likes of United Future or Act. I still don't get why people are upset with Winston because he won't pick a coalition partner. If he does go with National, National will be weakened and Winston won't sit back and let party policies like the TPPA pass. There is an old saying, " Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer." I prefer Winston than United Future, Maori, or Act. Think about it. I despise National but Labour looks too weak and the Greens are in la la land and NZ first is gaining because NZ First policies favour New Zealand.
The majority of the sheeple go for wiifm, consequently they follow the biggest bribes for them. Thus the Greens crap out because they are not into bribes like Nat and Labour are.
frank July 9, 2017 at 9:08 pm
this may be a good election to lose…hard as that may seem.
Sumsuch July 9, 2017 at 10:33 pm
Peters plays the racism card every 3 years, hence his reliable 10 %–have you not noticed?
You can call it' identity politics' as much as you like. What you mean is let the 'others' wait til thickness disappears from the human race.
Turea mentioned' truth' in a casual way, which I understand obliged NZ First's response. Are you supposed to stuff the truth down into the small intestine like we NZers did before the 70s?
mosa July 9, 2017 at 11:39 pm
I want a strong true left Labour party polling above 38% with a charismatic leader that really grabs the public and wins on a solid platform of real change and campaigns and governs for all those left out and screwed over by this dictatorship and gives us our country back !
And if the greens can get 10 % of the vote or less i want to see them in cabinet regardless of their vote because as a centre left government its time they played a part and this government must have a majority and not have to pander to Winston or anyone else.
MMP demands a strong party to control and have authority in parliament not a mish mash of personalities and parties none of which have large public support trying to run and sell a coalition of minor players.
If we are going to get REAL change and a CHANGED government Labour has to lead it and get back to its historical ideals and message that are more important now than ever in its 100 year history.
We cant wait much longer…surely its time.
Iain Mclean July 10, 2017 at 4:35 pm
Mosa;
We are living in a period of history that we should all try to understand.
ie; That all the main established parties (including the Greens) are controlled
by the same puppet masters.
See my entry at the bottom here;
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/06/23/the-broad-definition-of-gcsb-security/
And the rest of the world IS waking up fast.
Tim O'Shea July 10, 2017 at 12:12 am
It's time that a progressive party stood up to Winston's BS. How arrogant is he, expecting people to vote for him when he won't even confirm where those votes will take us – i.e. in one of two opposite directions!
Martyn – It's interesting that you refer to the Greens as the party of the middle class. Pretty much all of the genuine lefties I know have given up on New Labour's neo liberal duplicity and are putting their support being the only progressive party that has strong enough social justice and environmental protection focused policies – GP.
I don't know any young people who are inspired and motivated enough by Andrew Little to want to vote Labour.
That just leaves NZF in conjunction with their BFF Hobson's Pledge. Any party that buddies up with Don Brash, and thinks that Shane Jones should be their future leader doesn't deserve our votes.
David July 10, 2017 at 9:42 am
Good to see the Greens have found their voice again. People vote Greens from their hearts and value principles.
The Winston First party is inherently racist and has been from the start.
Is it a coincidence that Trump's cry is America First?
Those 'Progressives' who support Winston, expose their underlying venal pathology.
From Ms Martin;
"six years of trying to work constructively just washed away in around six minutes"
I would point out that NZ First launched the first salvo against progressive politics by threatening to hold a referendum on the so-called "anti-smacking" law.
Any notion that NZ First was a progressive party was "washed away" at that point.
both my 20+ something children …both former Green voters are voting elsewhere on last reports…NZF and TOP
Grant July 10, 2017 at 10:59 am
That's a very good point Frank.
But what both the Greens and N.Z First should be doing is attacking National , not each other……National has been so useless and dumb there is so much ammunition it's hard to know where to begin.
No party should be giving National a cruisey ride by airing their own petty differences in public..if they must , that should be done strictly behind closed doors.
fatty July 10, 2017 at 10:43 am
No point in a left wing government with NZ First at the table. I hope National form a government with Winnie so the left finally realise that conservative nationalism is not a leftist position.
But what's the point really?…Winnie has gone with National once, but some on the left have already forgotten this. The left in NZ have no faith in their own beliefs. Why do leftists capitulate to conservative nationalism? My god, have some self-respect and stand up for your beliefs
Fatty;
"No point in a left wing government with NZ First at the table."
I am sorry, but could not let your comment pass without a reply as it seems
quite misleading.
Surely you are aware of what NZF achieved under the Clarke Labour led Gvt. that you omit.
1. Winston was noted to be a successful Foreign Minister.
2. Instrumental in ending Telecom's disgraceful 15yr+ price extortion monopoly. (20?)
3. Involved in the buyback of a run down and asset stripped NZ Rail to restore.
4. Involved in doing same and saving Wellington Airport.
5. Fought 'tooth&nail' for the Gold Card that other countries already had, even
though with less benefits than those same countries deemed fit for purpose.
Without doing any research, these certainly have not been forgotten.
Besides, this 'left/right thing' does not really apply today.
A reply to Frank that seemed 'triggered' by the same word Nationalism.
"'Left and Right' today means the same thing.
It is just a Divide and Rule strategy of old.
The real struggle is between Globalism v Nationalism."
"First and foremost;
Simplistically, Nationalism is the desire of a nation to self-determination."
Bottom of comments here;
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/06/12/what-does-the-corbyn-result-in-the-uk-mean-for-new-zealand/
And while we are here already:
For Tracy Martin to argue for the removal of one sentence, in one small section
of the act, it generated a 'hit-piece' that was truly astounding.
Hysteria Revisited:
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/06/18/qa-review-disgusting-nz-first-want-legal-right-to-bash-children/
I don't think Helen Clark's term was anything to aspire to. That just cemented neoliberalism/third way.
I agree that mainstream politics is obsessed with globalism vs nationalism. On that argument I'm with the globalists because nationalism is toxic and not leftist. We need global socialism. Not nationalism. Competitive nation states is a horrible idea. I'm a communist, not a capitalist.
I disagree with your point the "Left and Right today means the same thing. It is just a Divide and Rule strategy of old."
There's a massive difference between socialism (left) and free market capitalism (right). They're not the same thing at all
Iain Mclean July 12, 2017 at 12:31 am
[Iain, there has been a request from TDB Admin not to reference 'Infowars' any more. The policy of this blogsite is that for various reasons we will not reference nor promote the material presented by those people.
In case you missed it, the policy was announced here:- https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/07/07/notice-to-all-posters/
I will delete any comments referencing 'Infowars', just as we delete ISIS propaganda and other questionable material. Please do not reference 'Infowars' or any other incarnation of that outfit. Thank you for your co-operation. – Scarletmod]
Sorry, left this bit out.
If you read you will find that they are both controlled by the same
peoples at the top levels. eg; Rothschild and Rockerfella's that we
can see. (Banking families) These are the ones who usually take
the rap when everything turns to shit.
I can tell with this that you have not read the Fabian stuff.
There is more but I will leave it at that. One step at a time.
peoples at the top levels.
Evidence for that, Iain? That's quite an assertion to make and you haven't provided much evidence.
It's unclear how bloated capitalists like Rothschild, Rockerfellers, Koch brothers, and yes – Donald Trump – could possibly benefit from socialism. In case you missed it, the Cold War was predicated on Capital vs Socialism. I don't even understand why we're debating this, unless you have an alternative ideology that you haven't shared with us? Does NZ First have anything to do with it?
The evidence is contained in the link provided in answer to Fatty.
Rockerfeller was a member of the Fabian Society.
It's all there,Frank.
That was my whole point in posting that info in the first place, to show that top Elites really do control both sides of the Established spectrum.
I am surprised you did not read the Fabian links when we had the discussion on Nationalism at the time.
(or before that)
You should know by now I am not one to put up frivolous links to support what I am saying.
"Does NZ First have anything to do with it?" And there you go again.
Absolutely nothing.!
Surely this is repetition that Scarletmod talks about? And it is also reflected in the "Notice" from Scarletmod above that seems most concerning.
(Confirms my opinion the Status Quo does fear NZF)
"While The Daily Blog welcomes viewpoints from a wide variety of sources, we have noticed lately an increasing amount of bad behaviour from some participants posting intemperate comments on this Forum. A number of them appear to be NZ First supporters."???
Surely this is subjective reasoning instead of objective?
I had not seen this Notice but it answers a few questions about denial of posts that I will cover in reply. Outright censorship/muzzling?
I take it then, that you did not read my links on the Fabian Society and the end goals of Fabianism?
It does take some investment in time.
After being a big fan of Helen initially and saw a bit of hope that she would create significant change to what had gone before,
I agree, just mirrored Blair's 'third way", which after reading the 'template' came as no surprise.
A groomed career politician from the start,if ever there was one,to inevitably to end up in the UN, where she failed.
She threw her last election for Key is my firm belief.
To pass the baton.
Key was sent here to do the exact same things he did.
He had work to do and sabotage of our media and journalism was the very first thing to happen,in very quick time.
The rest is history.
As soon as the arrival of Trump,he was off.
Done most of his work.
Now we have Jacinda Adern on the horizon,very much in the same mould as Helen. I am sure she thinks that. (Shudder)
She will do exactly the same as Helen.
It is all written out for her already.
Has she ever done a days real work in her life?
Same Uni to politics?
But she has revealed herself already with siding with the ABC's in the Cunliffe Affair. (Helen kept a low profile with Rodgernomics.)
Never forgive,never forget.
It's easy once you have the bigger picture.
Funny how you think someone is good looking when you admire and respect them. Now I think she is ugly, always trying to hide her buck teeth.
Anyway I digress and lament. It's a shame you did not follow the discussion with Frank and study the Philosophy link with the various degree's of the isms and the young educated
man on Globalism v Nationalism.
Good luck with your ideology on Globalism,
I don't know how old you are or if you have a family or not but all I can say is if this set of Globalist/Oligarchs win out,the future for any grandchildren will be a dire one indeed.
Search "Fall of the Republic" to catch up in a hurry.
Like two soldiers on opposing sides of the battlefield that
can still celebrate xmas day together.
Nick Morris July 10, 2017 at 11:00 am
I think the Greens are looking at the polling and are afraid New Zealand First are eating their lunch simply by hitting the hot button issues.
The Greens aspire to be a total party, while Winston knows his place is as a "God of the Gaps."
Should the Greens carve out the environment ans sustainability, (and stick with sympathy and agreement towards Labour on the more social matters: Jobs, Poverty Education and Health)?
This would be a bitter pill to swallow: accepting that they will never become the number one party of the Left, but a more coherent way to focus their message.
They may have erred under Russel Norman in aspiring to replace Labour on the Left and ended up as a Machiavellian Me-Too-Except-More-And-Better party. So now they are getting squeezed between a populist in the middle and a bland All-Things-Nice Leftish Party on the other side. Meanwhile, the Greens don't seem to want to be an Extreme Left Party like Mana – that's where they got lost before, so there is an identity crisis going on.
It is possible that a populist Centre party (with links to the Provinces and the country), a genuinely Left Party, and a totally focused Environmental party would make an excellent fit. But it can't happen if the Greens continue to harbour secret ambitions of conquest.
Archonblatter July 10, 2017 at 6:52 pm
@Nick Morris. Very good analysis.
Te Reo Putake July 10, 2017 at 11:00 am
I wrote here a few weeks ago that Winston was likely to make having the Greens outside the cabinet as a condition of going into Government with Labour. Turei has just guaranteed that outcome.
Welcome to another three years of not being in Government, Greens.
On the up side, at least a Labour/NZF coalition will be consistent on policy. 90% of current NZF policy is aligned with Labour policy*. The other 10% can be negotiated.
*I've actually taken the time to read NZF's policy, but I do realise it's easily over-ruled by whatever Winston wants at any given time.
Robert Atack July 10, 2017 at 11:56 am
As much as I don't want to give the natz amo @ 10cents per lt your single hamburger would cost $90.00
Takere July 10, 2017 at 1:14 pm
Not if its a tofu burger!
The sibling rivalry between the Greens, the "ingenue" & the much "older brother", Peters is a bit pathetic from both sides! FFS!
Yes the Greens polling is tanking, RNZ's PoP compared to Pundits PoP are reliable.Pundits PoP removes "Don't Knows" RNZ doesnt, and polling sources look the same?
The ingenue(s) should just focus on their own shit & stop poking the monster because between the pair of them, theyre jeopardising a change of Government! FFS!
Need to accept that the kids arent going to get on, theyre from different parents, generation and experiences! FFS!
Get on with it! FFS!
esoteric pineapples July 10, 2017 at 7:56 pm
I'm not sure we are going to get a truly progressive government until large numbers of those who came of age in the early 1960s start dying off.
not 'AGEISM' surely?
….and where are the elderly Greens?
….jumped off a cliff?
…or were they pushed?
richarquis July 11, 2017 at 9:48 am
Oh, come on. National have plenty of young supporters. The Boomers pass their beliefs on to their kids, you know, just like anybody else. Time isn't going to change things – Only a change in thought, or perhaps a proper election turnout, will do that.
Esoteric Pineapples;
Yes. The ones who were educated properly and did not have to suffer the
amount of toxins in our food supply and environment etc at such a young age.
You know – the ones that still eat, grow and cook whole foods.
But you could still be waiting though.
We might be around to see the 'running out of town' of the Current Controllers.
http://leozagami.com/ (Read his bio.)
Jack Ramaka July 11, 2017 at 4:53 am
…. and the 1.0 Million Couch Surfers actually get off theirs boards and vote ?
Wuhan coronavirus: Unconfirmed reports of infected person in NZ
Australia's National Digital ID is here, but the government's not talking about it
Indigenous languages matter – but all is not lost when they change or even disappear
ACT cannabis laws come into effect on Friday, but they may not be what you hoped for
Pulling out weeds is the best thing you can do to help nature recover from the fires


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text:
\section{Inroduction}

As a challenging computer vision task, human pose estimation aims to localize human body keypoints in images and videos. Human pose estimation has an important role in several vision tasks and applications such as action recognition~\cite{du2015hierarchical, li2019actional, yan2019pa3d, huang2019part, luvizon20182d}, human mesh recovery~\cite{pose2mesh, kundu2020appearance, kama, kanazawa2018end}, augmented/virtual reality~\cite{cimen2018ar, elhayek2018fully, xu2019mo}, animation and gaming~\cite{azure1, azure2, huwai, animepose}. Unlike the standard human pose estimation task,   whole-body pose estimation aims to detect face, hand and foot keypoints in addition to the standard  human body keypoints. The challenge in this problem is the extreme  scale variance or imbalance among  different whole-body parts. For example, the relatively small scale of face and hand keypoints make accurate localization of face and hand keypoints more difficult compared to the standard body keypoints such as elbow, knee and hip. Direct application of existing human pose estimation methods do not yield satisfactory results due to the scale variance problem.

Even though human pose estimation has been a well studied task for the past few decades,  the whole-body pose estimation task has not been sufficiently explored, mainly due to the lack of large-scale fully annotated whole-body keypoint datasets. The previous few methods~\cite{openpose, sn}, trained several deep networks separately on different face, hand and body datasets, and ensembled them during inference. These methods suffer from issues arising from datasets biases, variations of illumination, pose and scales, and complex training and inference pipelines.

Recently, in order to address the missing benchmark issue, Jin \etal~\cite{wholebody}  introduced a  novel dataset for whole-body pose estimation, called COCO WholeBody. COCO WholeBody extends COCO keypoints dataset~\cite{coco} by further annotating face, hand and foot keypoints.  In addition to the standard, 17 human body keypoints from the COCO keypoints dataset; 68 facial landmarks, 42 hand keypoints and 6 foot keypoints are annotated (Figure~\ref{fig:wholebody_annots}). Along with these 133 whole-body keypoint annotations, the dataset also has face and hand bounding box annotations automatically extracted from the extreme keypoints of corresponding whole-body part. Jin \etal~\cite{wholebody}  also proposed a strong baseline model named ZoomNet, which has set the state of the art. ZoomNet is a top-down, two-stage method based on the human pose estimation model HRNet~\cite{hrnetv2}. Given an image, ZoomNet first detects person instances using the FasterRCNN~\cite{faster} person detector, next it predicts 17 body and 6 foot keypoints using a CNN model. Later, to overcome the scale variance between whole-body parts, ZoomNet crops roughly detected hand and face areas and transforms them to higher resolutions using seperate CNNs to further perform face and hand keypoint estimation.

There are two main approaches for human pose and whole-body pose estimation; \textit{bottom-up}~\cite{paf, ning2017knowledge, ae, newell2016stacked, multiposenet, papandreou2018personlab, bulat2016human, pishchulin2016deepcut, sn, insafutdinov2017arttrack, insafutdinov2016deepercut, iqbal2017posetrack, jin2019multi, jin2017towards} and \textit{top-down}~\cite{chen2018cascaded, papandreou2017towards, mask, fang2017rmpe, hrnetv2, simple}.  Bottom-up methods directly detect human body keypoints and then group them to obtain final poses for each person in a given image. On the other hand, as in ZoomNet, top-down methods first detect and extract people, then apply pose estimation for each one separately. The grouping post-processing stage of bottom-up methods is more efficient than repeating pose estimation for each person instance. As a result, top-down methods slow down with the increasing number of people (Figure~\ref{fig:run_time}). However, compared to bottom-up methods, better accuracies are obtained by top-down approaches.

In this paper, to overcome the limitations of top-down methods, we propose a bottom-up whole-body pose estimation method. Our approach is inspired from center-point based bottom-up object detection methods~\cite{centernet, houghnet, centernet2, cornernet}. These methods can be easily extended to perform keypoint estimation task~\cite{centernet, houghnetjournal}. For example, CenterNet~\cite{centernet}, defines each keypoint with an offset to the center of the person instance and directly regresses them. However, due to large scale variance between whole-body parts, directly regressing all the whole-body keypoints to the instance box center yields  inferior performance.  To address the scale variance issue, we propose a hierarchical keypoint regression method. To this end, in addition to the standard body keypoints, we also define the bounding box centers of relatively small body parts such as face and hands with offsets to the person instance center (Figure~\ref{fig:kps}). Concurrently, we build another level of regression where we define each hand and face keypoints with an offset to their corresponding hand and face bounding box centers. We jointly train each level of regression hierarchy and regress all whole-body keypoints with respect to their defined center points.

We validated the effectiveness of our method through ablation experiments and comparisons with state of the art (SOTA) on the COCO WholeBody dataset. Our method significantly outperforms all bottom-up methods. It also outperforms the SOTA top-down method ZoomNet in detection of face and hand keypoints, while being significantly faster than ZoomNet.

Our major contribution in this paper is the proposal of a one-stage,  bottom-up method to close the performance gap between the bottom-up and top-down methods. In contrast to top-down methods, our method runs almost in constant time, independent from the number of persons  in the input image.

\section{Related Work}

\subsection{Human Body Pose Estimation}

We can categorize the current approaches for multi-person pose estimation into two: bottom-up and top-down. In the bottom-up methods~\cite{paf, ning2017knowledge, ae, newell2016stacked, multiposenet, papandreou2018personlab, bulat2016human, pishchulin2016deepcut, sn, insafutdinov2017arttrack, insafutdinov2016deepercut, iqbal2017posetrack, jin2019multi, jin2017towards}, given an image, body keypoints detected first, without knowing the number or location of person instances or to which person instances these keypoints belong. Later, detected keypoints are grouped and assigned to person instances.
Recently, center-based object detection methods \cite{centernet} have been extended to perform human pose estimation~\cite{centernet, houghnetjournal}. These methods represent keypoints with an offset value to the center of the person box and directly regresses them during training. In order to improve localization of keypoints, they also estimate the heatmap of each keypoint as in other bottom-up methods~\cite{openpose,ae,papandreou2018personlab, multiposenet}. At inference, using center offsets, they group and assign keypoints to person instances. Since bottom-up methods detect all people keypoints at once, they are fast.

Top-down methods~\cite{chen2018cascaded, papandreou2017towards, mask, fang2017rmpe, hrnetv2, simple} first detect person instances  in the input  image. Commonly, they use an off-the-shelf object detector (e.g. FasterRCNN~\cite{faster}) to obtain person boxes. Next, top-down methods estimate a single person pose for each cropped person box. By cropping and resizing each person box, top-down methods have the advantage to zoom into the details of each person. Therefore, top-down approaches are more capable of handling scale variance issues. As a result, state-of-the-art results are obtained by top-down methods and there is an accuracy gap between top-down and bottom-up approaches.  However, since a pose estimation model is run for each person instance, top-down methods tend to be slow on average, that is, they get significantly slower with increasing number of persons in an image (Figure \ref{fig:run_time}).

One may think that using human body pose estimation methods on a  whole-body pose estimation dataset (i.e. COCO WholeBody) could  be a solution for whole-body pose estimation. However, as it is stated in the COCO WholeBody dataset paper~\cite{wholebody},  due to the large scale variance between whole body parts, applying these methods directly results in suboptimal accuracies.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{./figs/wholebody.jpg}
\caption{A total of 133 keypoint annotations of COCO WholeBody dataset. In addition to 17 human body keypoints from COCO keypoints dataset, 68 face, 42 hand (21 keypoints for each) and 6 foot (3 for each) keypoints are annotated. Image source: https://github.com/jin-s13/COCO-WholeBody}
\label{fig:wholebody_annots}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Whole-body Pose Estimation}

Whole-body pose estimation requires accurate localization of keypoints on body, face, hand and feet. Detection of keypoints is well studied for each of these body parts independently, under face alignment~\cite{cao2014face, tzimiropoulos2015project, trigeorgis2016mnemonic, zhang2015learning}, facial landmark detection~\cite{retinaface, mtcnn},  hand pose estimation~\cite{oberweger2015hands, deepp}, hand tracking~\cite{sharp2015accurate, sridhar2015fast} and feet keypoint detection~\cite{openpose} topics.  However, there are not many works on the whole-body pose estimation mostly due to lack of a large-scale annotated dataset. Prior to the release of the COCO WholeBody dataset~\cite{wholebody}, OpenPose~\cite{openpose} attempted to detect the whole-body keypoints. For this purpose, OpenPose ensembles 5 separately trained models namely human body pose estimation, hand detection, face detection, hand pose estimation and face pose estimation. Due to these multiple models, training and inference of OpenPose are complex and costly. Our end-to-end trainable single network eliminates these drawbacks.

Hidalgo \etal~presented a bottom-up method called SN~\cite{sn}. Their model extends PAF~\cite{paf} for whole-body pose estimation. Similar to PAF~\cite{paf}, they predict heatmaps for each keypoint and use part affinity maps for grouping. SN model is trained on a dataset that is sampled from different datasets. Both SN and our proposed model HPRNet are bottom-up methods. However, SN falls short of handling scale variations between whole-body parts whereas hierarchical point representation of HPRNet overcomes this issue.

The first step towards having a whole-body pose estimation benchmark is the release of the COCO WholeBody dataset~\cite{wholebody}. Jin \etal~extended the existing COCO keypoints~\cite{coco} dataset by further annotating face, hands and feet keypoints (Figure~\ref{fig:wholebody_annots}). They also proposed a strong, two-stage, top-down model to perform whole-body pose estimation on the COCO WholeBody dataset. Similar to top-down human pose estimation methods, Jin \etal~\cite{wholebody} first obtain candidate person boxes in an image using FasterRCNN~\cite{faster}.  Next, using a single network called ZoomNet, detection of whole-body keypoints is performed on the person boxes. ZoomNet is composed of 4 sub CNN networks. First, FeatureNet processes input person boxes and  extracts shared features at two scales. Next, using features from FeatureNet, BodyNet detects body and foot keypoints.  BodyNet is also responsible for the prediction of the face and hand bounding box corner points to roughly extract face and hand areas. Later, cropped face and hand bounding boxes are fed to the FaceHead and HandHead networks to detect the keypoints on face and hands. They use HRNet-W32~\cite{hrnetv2} network for the BodyNet and HRNetV2p-W18~\cite{hrnetw18} network for the FaceHead and HandHead networks.

Even though bottom-up approaches are fast, they are not robust enough to handle the scale variance across the whole-body parts. However, we hypothesize that representing each keypoint with an offset value to a carefully selected location can handle the scale variance. Based on this, we extend the center-based human pose estimation method~\cite{centernet} to perform whole-body pose estimation by introducing hierarchical regression of keypoints. We also show that hierarchical regression of keypoints for small scale whole-body parts (i.e. face and hand) is more effective than  cropping and zooming into them.

\section{Model}

HPRNet is a one-stage end-to-end trainable network that learns regressing the whole-body keypoints. In HPRNet, the input image first passes through a backbone network and output of the backbone is fed to 8 separate branches, namely;  \textit{Person Center Heatmap}, \textit{Person Center Offset}, \textit{Person W \& H},  \textit{Body Keypoint Offsets}, \textit{Body Keypoint Heatmaps}, \textit{Hand Keypoint Offsets}, \textit{Face Keypoint Offsets} and \textit{Face Box  W \& H}. We show the network architecture of HPRNet in Figure~\ref{fig:model}.

\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=1.0\textwidth]{./figs/model.pdf}
\caption{Network architecture of the proposed HPRNet for the whole-body keypoint detection.}
\label{fig:model}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{Hierarchical Regression of Whole-Body Keypoints}

In HPRNet, we build a hierarchical regression mechanism, where we define each of the whole-body keypoints with a relative location (i.e. offset)  to a specific point on the person box.

We represent each of the (standard) 17 keypoints on the body with an offset to the center of the person bounding box. Unlike the body; face, hand and foot are small parts. Based on this, we define each of this parts with a relative location to their part center as follows; (i) each of 68 face keypoints is defined with an offset to the center of face bounding box, (ii) each of 21 left hand keypoints is defined with an offset to left hand bounding box center, (iii) each of 21 right hand keypoints is defined with an offset to right hand bounding box center, (iv) each of 3 left foot keypoints is defined with an offset to left foot bounding box center, (v) each of 3 right foot keypoints is defined with an offset to right foot bounding box center. Face, hand and foot bounding boxes are automatically extracted from the groundtruth keypoint annotations.

We regress the whole-body keypoints using L1 loss. The generic formulation of keypoint regression is presented in Equation~\ref{eq:offsetreg}. In the equation, $\hat{O} \in  \mathbb{R}^{H \times W \times k \times 2}$ is the regression output of keypoints $k$ for a specific whole-body part (i.e. body, face, hand), and $C_\mathrm{part}$ is the ground truth center of that part's bounding box.

\begin{equation}  \label{eq:offsetreg}
L_\mathrm{offset} = \sum_{k}\left|\hat{O}_{[k]} - C_\mathrm{part}\right|
\end{equation}

We treat the bounding box center of the face, left hand, right hand, left foot and right foot as a body part keypoint and define each of them with an offset value to the person box center (Figure~\ref{fig:kps}). We illustrate the hierarchical regression of whole-body keypoints in~\Cref{fig:hier_v1}.

At inference, after detecting all the keypoints in the input image, we group and assign them  to person instances. To achieve this, we get predicted person centers from the output of \textit{Person Center Heatmap} branch as in CenterNet~\cite{centernet}. Next, we obtain the offset values on the predicted person center locations of \textit{Body Keypoint Offsets} branch output. After that, we add these offsets to person centers to obtain the \textit{regressed} body keypoint locations. At the same time, we extract the \textit{detected} body keypoints from the outputted heatmap of the \textit{Body Keypoint Heatmaps} branch. At the last step, we match the \textit{detected} and \textit {regressed} keypoints based on L2 distance and only take the keypoints inside the predicted person bounding box.

Next, we group face and hand keypoints (and foot keypoints as well, if we are using the Hierarchical Model-I (\Cref{fig:hier_v1}). We obtain  predicted part centers from the output of \textit{Body Keypoint Heatmaps} branch. Then, we collect  the offset values on the corresponding predicted part center locations of \textit{Hand Keypoint Offsets} and \textit{Face Keypoint Offsets} branch output. Finally, we add these offsets to the part centers to obtain the face and hand keypoints.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.3\linewidth]{./figs/kps.pdf}
\caption{Keypoints that are regressed with offsets to the person instance box center in HPRNet. Blue keypoints are body keypoints as defined in COCO keypoints and COCO WholeBody datasets. Red points correspond to the face (18), left hand (19), right hand (20), left foot (21) and right foot (22) box centers. Each keypoint here (either blue or red) is defined with an offset to the center of person instance. }
\label{fig:kps}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Regression of Foot Keypoints}

Ideally, each labeled foot part in the COCO WholeBody dataset should have 3 keypoint annotations. However, more than 20\% of annotated feet  have missing annotations (i.e. they have one or two keypoints annotations, instead of three). These missing annotations present a challenge to HPRNet, since we automatically extract feet centers from the annotated extreme points. In the case of the missing foot keypoints, the obtained foot center point is not reliable. To deal with this issue, we treat the foot keypoints as body keypoints as shown in~\Cref{fig:hier_v2}, and represent them by their offsets to the center of the person bounding box.

\begin{figure*}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}{.2\linewidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width = \linewidth]{./figs/kps_hier_baseline.pdf}
 \caption{Baseline Model}
\label{fig:hier_baseline}
\end{subfigure}%
\hspace{1em
\begin{subfigure}{.32\linewidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width = \linewidth]{./figs/kps_hier_v1.pdf}
\caption{Hierarchical Model-I}
\label{fig:hier_v1}
\end{subfigure}%
\hspace{1em
\begin{subfigure}{.32\linewidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width = \linewidth]{./figs/kps_hier_v2.pdf}
\caption{Hierarchical Model-II}
\label{fig:hier_v2}
\end{subfigure}%

\caption{Hierarchical representations of whole-body keypoints. (a) Each of 133 whole-body keypoints is defined with an offset to the person box center. (b) Body keypoints and other part centers (i.e. foot, face and hand) are defined with offsets to the person box center. Foot, face and hand keypoints are defined with offsets
according to their corresponding part centers.  (c) Considering the sparsity of foot keypoint annotations, we define them with their offset values to the person box center. In both Hierarchical Model-I and Hierarchical Model-II, body keypoints are defined with offset values
 to the person box center. Each face and hand keypoint is defined with an offset to face and hand bounding box centers, respectively. }
\label{fig:hier_models}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{Network Architecture}

Given an input image of size $4H \times 4W \times 3$,  the backbone network outputs a feature map of size $H \times W \times D$. The backbone's output is fed to the following subsequent branches. Each branch has one convolutional layer with $3 \times 3$ filters followed by a ReLU layer and another convolutional layer with $1 \times 1$ filters.

\begin{itemize}
\setlength{\itemsep}{0pt plus 0pt}

\item \textit{Person Center Heatmap} branch outputs $H \times W$ sized tensor for person center point predictions.
\item \textit{Person Center Offset} branch predicts $H \times W \times 2$  sized  tensor for the relative displacement of center locations across the spatial axes. These offsets help to recover the lost precision of the center points due to down-sampling operations through the network.
\item \textit{Person W \& H} branch outputs  $H \times W \times 2$ sized tensor of widths and heights for each person instance center.
\item \textit{Body Keypoint Offsets} branch predicts offset values of 26 keypoints (17 body keypoints + 6 foot keypoints + Center of Face Box + Center of Left Hand Box + Center of Right Hand Box) to the person box center across the $x$ and $y$ axes.
\item \textit{Body Keypoint Heatmaps} branch outputs $H \times W \times 26$  sized heatmap tensor for the 26 keypoints.
\item \textit{Hand Keypoint Offsets} branch outputs  $H \times W \times 84$ sized tensor of offset values between 21 left hand keypoints and left hand box center; and the offset values between the 21 right hand keypoints and right hand box center across the spatial axes.
\item \textit{Face Keypoint Offsets} branch outputs  $H \times W \times 136$ sized tensor of  offset values between 68 face keypoints and face box center across the spatial axes.
\item \textit{Face Box  W \& H} branch outputs $H \times W \times 2$ sized tensor of widths and heights for each face. It is an optional branch.
\end{itemize}

For the optimization of the \textit{Person Center Heatmap} and \textit{Body Keypoint Heatmap} branches, we use the modified focal loss~\cite{retinanet} as in~\cite{cornernet, extremenet, centernet, houghnet}. We optimize the \textit{Person Center Offset}, \textit{Body Keypoint Offset}, \textit{Hand Keypoint Offset} and \textit{Face Keypoint Offset} branches using the L1 loss similar to the bottom-up object detectors~\cite{cornernet, extremenet, centernet, houghnet}. Finally, for the \textit{Person Box H \& W} and \textit{Face Box H \& W} branches, we use L1 loss and scale it  by 0.1 as in CenterNet~\cite{centernet}. We obtain the overall loss by summing the losses from all branches.

\begin{table*}
\caption{Comparison of Hierarchical Model-I (HM-I) and Hierarchical Model-II (HM-II) as in  Figure~\ref{fig:hier_models}. Training foot keypoints with offset values to the person box center outperforms the model when trained with offset values to the foot part centers. Both models are trained with DLA backbone. }
\centering
\resizebox{1.0\textwidth}{!}{
\begin{tabular}{lcccccccccccc}
\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Method} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{body}  & \multicolumn{2}{c}{foot} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{face} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{hand} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{whole-body} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{wholebody-mean} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-3}  \cmidrule(lr){4-5} \cmidrule(lr){6-7} \cmidrule(lr){8-9} \cmidrule(lr){10-11} \cmidrule(lr){12-13}
               &       \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} &  \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}   & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}\\ \hline
HM-I  & \textbf{55.5}  &  \textbf{63.4}  & 33.5 & 55.3 & \textbf{74.6} & 83.5 & 44.1 & 57.8 & 28.0 & 40.5 & 47.1 & 60.1  \\
HM-II &  55.2  & 63.1 & \textbf{49.1} &  \textbf{60.9} & \textbf{74.6} &  \textbf{83.7} & \textbf{47.0}  & \textbf{60.8} & \textbf{31.5} & \textbf{44.6} & \textbf{51.5}& \textbf{62.6}  \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}}%
\label{table:kp_foot}
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}
\caption{Comparing HPRNet with the baseline model. Both models are trained with DLA backbone.}
\centering
\resizebox{1.0\textwidth}{!}{
\begin{tabular}{lcccccccccccc}
\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Method} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{body}  & \multicolumn{2}{c}{foot} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{face} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{hand} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{whole-body} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{wholebody-mean} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-3}  \cmidrule(lr){4-5} \cmidrule(lr){6-7} \cmidrule(lr){8-9} \cmidrule(lr){10-11} \cmidrule(lr){12-13}
                 &       \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} &  \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  \\ \hline
Baseline  &  46.7  &  55.5  & 33.6 & 48.9 & 52.0 & 60.2 & 26.4 & 39.1 & \textbf{33.3} & 43.4  & 38.4 &  49.4 \\
HPRNet &  \textbf{55.2}  & \textbf{63.1} & \textbf{49.1} &  \textbf{60.9} & \textbf{74.6} &  \textbf{83.7} & \textbf{47.0}  & \textbf{60.8} & 31.5 & \textbf{44.6} & \textbf{51.5}& \textbf{62.6}  \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}}%
\label{table:kp_baseline}
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}
\caption{Comparison with the state-of-the-art on COCO WholeBody validation set. HG is Hourglass-104.}
\centering
\resizebox{1.0\textwidth}{!}{
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt}
\begin{tabular}{lrlrlrlrlrlrl}

\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Method} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{body}  & \multicolumn{2}{c}{foot} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{face} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{hand} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{whole-body} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{wholebody-mean}\\
\cmidrule(lr){2-3}  \cmidrule(lr){4-5} \cmidrule(lr){6-7} \cmidrule(lr){8-9} \cmidrule(lr){10-11} \cmidrule(lr){12-13}
&       \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} &  \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$}  & \textit{AP$^{kp}$} & \textit{AR$^{kp}$} \\ \hline
\midrule

\textit{Top-down methods:} & & & & & & & & & & \\
OpenPose~\cite{openpose} &  56.3  & 61.2  &  53.2  &  64.5  & 48.2 &  62.6 & 19.8  & 34.2 & 33.8 &  44.9  & 42.3 & 53.5 \\
HRNet~\cite{hrnetv2} & 65.9 & 70.9 & 31.4 & 42.4 & 52.3 & 58.2 & 30.0 & 36.3 & 43.2 & 52.0 & 44.6 & 52.0\\
ZoomNet~\cite{wholebody} & \textbf{74.3} & \textbf{80.2} & \textbf{79.8} & \textbf{86.9} & 62.3 & 70.1 & 40.1 & 49.8 & \textbf{54.1} &  \textbf{65.8} & \textbf{62.1} &  \textbf{70.6} \\
\midrule
\textit{Bottom-up methods:}  \\
PAF~\cite{paf} & 26.6 & 32.8 & 10.0 & 25.7 & 30.9 & 36.2 & 13.3 & 32.1 & 14.1 & 18.5 & 19.0 &  29.1 \\
SN~\cite{sn}  & 28.0 & 33.6 & 12.1 & 27.7 & 38.2 & 44.0 & 13.8 & 33.6 & 16.1 & 20.9 & 21.6 & 32.0 \\
AE~\cite{ae} & 40.5 & 46.4 & 7.7 & 16.0 & 47.7 & 58.0 & 34.1 & 43.5 & 27.4 & 35.0 & 31.5 &  39.8\\
HPRNet (DLA) &  55.2  & 63.1  &  49.1  &  60.9  & 74.6  & 83.7 & 47.0   & 60.8  & 31.5 &  44.6  & 51.5 & 62.6 \\
HPRNet (HG) &  59.4  & 68.3  &  53.0  &  65.4  & \textbf{75.4}   & \textbf{86.8} &  \textbf{50.4}  &  \textbf{64.2} & 34.8 &  49.2  & 54.6 & 66.8 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}}%
\label{table:sota}
\end{table*}

\section{Experiments}

This section describes the experiments we conducted to show the effectiveness of our proposed method. First, we present ablation experiments to compare hierarchical models I and II shown in Figure~\ref{fig:hier_models}.  Next, we compare our method with our baseline CenterNet~\cite{centernet} (\Cref{fig:hier_baseline}). Finally, we provide performance comparison with the state of the art and a run-time analysis.

\paragraph{\textbf{Implementation Details}}  We use Deep Layer Aggregation (DLA)~\cite{dla} backbone for ablation and baseline comparison experiments, and Hourglass-104~\cite{cornernet}  as our backbone network for  state of the art comparison. For all experiments, during training we resize the images to $512 \times 512$ pixels. At inference we use images with their original sizes without applying any scaling. We train all the models with a batch size of 32 for 140 epochs using the Adam optimizer~\cite{adam}. We set the initial learning rate to $1.25 \times 10^{-4}$ and divided it by 10 at epochs 90 and 120.  We trained all of the models on 4 Tesla V100 GPUs, and tested using a single GTX 1080 TI GPU. We used PyTorch~\cite{pytorch} to implement our models. All of our experiments are conducted on the COCO WholeBody Dataset~\cite{wholebody} and results are presented in keypoint AP (AP$^{kp}$) and keypoint recall AR (AR$^{kp}$) metrics without any test time augmentation. All results are obtained on the COCO WholeBody validation set.

\subsection{Hierarchical Model-I vs Hierarchical Model-II}

In Table~\ref{table:kp_foot}, we compare Hierarchical Model-I and Hierarchical Model-II (see Figure~\ref{fig:hier_models}). As it can be seen from the table, regressing foot keypoints as a part of the body keypoints, improves the foot AP$^{kp}$ significantly by 15.6 points (33.5 vs. 49.1). Moreover, hand and whole-body AP$^{kp}$s also improved about 3 points in this setup. Based on these results, for the rest of the experiments we use the Hierarchical Model-II.

\subsection{Comparison with Baseline}

To obtain the baseline results, we regress all the 133 keypoints to the person instance box center during training as in CenterNet~\cite{centernet} (see~\Cref{fig:hier_v1}). In Table~\ref{table:kp_baseline}, we compare HPRNet with the baseline model in terms of accuracy and recall. Our proposed HPRNet significantly outperforms the baseline results for all AP$^{kp}$ and AR$^{kp}$  metrics except the whole-body AP$^{kp}$.

\subsection{Comparison with the State-of-the-art}

Table~\ref{table:sota} presents the performance  of our models and  several established keypoint estimation models on the COCO WholeBody validation set. HPRNet performs best among the bottom-up methods. Other bottom-up methods especially fail to accurately localize foot keypoints. The performance gap between the second best performing bottom-up method and our method is 40.9 AP$^{kp}$ points on the foot keypoint detection. Similarly, our method outperforms other bottom-up methods for the body, face, hand and whole-body keypoint detection by a large margin. Among the top-down methods, ZoomNet outperforms well known OpenPose~\cite{openpose} and HRNet~\cite{hrnetv2}. Here, ZoomNet is a two-stage framework where at the first stage person candidates are extracted with FasterRCNN and at the second stage ZoomNet is run on these candidate boxes. HRNet can be seen as a one-stage counterpart of ZoomNet and finally OpenPose is a multi-model which requires separate training for each whole-body part.  HPRNet obtains state-of-the-art results on face and hand keypoint detection. Our model with Hourglass-104 backbone  outperforms ZoomNet on the detection of face keypoints by 13.1 AP$^{kp}$ points and hand keypoints by 10.3 AP$^{kp}$ points. These successful results on the face and hand keypoint detection, further shows the effectiveness of our proposed bottom-up hierarchical approach over the ZoomNet's zoom-in mechanism. However, for the detection of the body and whole-body keypoints ZoomNet performs best among all methods.

\paragraph{\textbf{Runtime Analysis}} Average run time of ZoomNet (including Faster RCNN for person detector) on a single image is 174.7 ms. Similarly, the average run time of HPRNet with DLA and Hourglass-104 backbones is 37 ms (26 ms for feedforward and 11 ms for keypoint grouping and assignment) and 101 ms (90 ms for feedforward and 11 ms for  keypoint grouping and assignment). HPRNet is significantly faster than ZoomNet. Moreover, as a top-down method, run time of ZoomNet increases as the number of people on an image increases. We compare the run time of our models and ZoomNet in Figure~\ref{fig:run_time}.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{./figs/runtime_plots.pdf}
\caption{Runtime analysis of ZoomNet and our models with respect to number of people in an image. As the number of people in an image increases, the runtime of ZoomNet linearly increases. Whereas, our models almost have constant run time.}
\label{fig:run_time}
\end{figure}

\begin{table}
\caption{Face detection results. HG is Hourglass-104. }
\centering
\resizebox{1\columnwidth}{!}{
\begin{tabular}{lccccccc}
 \toprule
 \textbf{Method} & \textit{AP}& \textit{AP$_{50}$} &  \textit{AP$_{75}$} & \textit{AP$_M$} & \textit{AP$_L$} \\
 \midrule
\textit{Face keypoints:} & & & & & \\

  ZoomNet  & 37.7 & 64.5  & 41.1 & 25.8 & 44.9         \\
  HPRNet (DLA) & 46.2 & 70.6  & 54.8 & 32.2 & 53.8         \\
   HPRNet (HG)          & 46.1 & 70.9  & 53.6 & 33.4 & 53.1         \\
\midrule
\textit{\textit{Face Box W\& H} branch:} & & & & & \\

HPRNet (DLA) & 55.8 & 82.3  & 66.2 & 40.0 & \textbf{63.6}         \\
HPRNet (HG) & \textbf{56.4} & \textbf{82.4} & \textbf{67.1} & \textbf{43.4} & 63.3         \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular} }
\label{table:face_detection_comp}
\end{table}

\subsection{Face Detection from Keypoints}

In this section, we studied the face detection task and compared HPRNet and ZoomNet.  We first extracted face boxes using extreme face keypoints and calculated AP scores as in object detection. Our model outperformed ZoomNet in face detection (46.2 AP vs 37.7 AP). Later, using an additional branch for face detection we train another model (see Figure~\ref{fig:model}). Our model with an extra face detection branch further improved the performance of HPRNet for face detection achieving 55.8 AP and 56.4 AP with DLA and Hourglass-104 backbones respectively. Results are presented in Table~\ref{table:face_detection_comp}.

 \section{Conclusion}

In this work, we introduced HPRNet as a bottom-up,  one-stage method for whole-body keypoint detection.  HPRNet handles scale variance among  whole-body parts by hierarchically regressing whole-body keypoints. We evaluated the effectiveness of our method through baseline comparison and ablation experiments on hierarchical structure of whole-body keypoints. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the detection of face and hand keypoints on the COCO WholeBody dataset; it also outperforms all other bottom-up methods in the detection of all whole-body parts. We conducted a run time analysis between HPRNet and ZoomNet and showed that in contrast to ZoomNet, HPRNet runs in constant time, independent of the number of persons in an image.

\section{Acknowledgements}

The numerical calculations reported in this paper were fully performed at TUBITAK ULAKBIM, High Performance and Grid Computing Center (TRUBA resources).

{\small
\bibliographystyle{ieee_fullname}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
This is Why Net Neutrality Must Be Protected: 50% Of All Indians Are Heavy Users Of Facebook & Whatsapp
By Mohul Ghosh Last updated Oct 8, 2015
"A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas." – Thomas Sowell
TNS Global, one of the largest research firms globally, has just released their latest research study on the Internet users all over the world. Their report, titled "Connected Life" states that more than 50% of all Internet users in India are hooked on to just two digital platforms: Facebook and Whatsapp.
The report says that 56% of all internet users in India use Whatsapp and 51% of them use Facebook.
Hence, Whatsapp for messaging and Facebook for networking are the largest and most influential web based services for more than half of all Indians!
Globally, the survey reached out to 60,500 Internet users across 50 countries; and if we compare worldwide stats, then 55% of all Internet users are either on Facebook, Whatsapp or Wechat (a Chinese instant messenger)
An interesting trend which has been confirmed by TNS is that, more and more young Internet users are opting for closed-messaging platforms, for more privacy. Globally, instant messaging apps have witnessed an increase of 12%, with maximum growth observed in Asia-Pacific region.
When it comes to top three social networks in India, then Facebook crushes them all. After 51% share of Facebook, at #2 is Linkedin with 3% share and Snapchat at 1% share. For instant messaging niche, Whatsapp with 56% share is being fought by Facebook Messenger with 28% share; while Yahoo Messenger is still surviving with 4% market share.
But, the scariest part is that, Whatsapp is owned by Facebook; which effectively means that Facebook is already holding a monopoly over 50% of Indian Internet users' information and details.
And this is why we must protect Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality, Internet.org & Regularization of Apps
If we observe news related with net neutrality, which happened in the last one year, we can spot a trend: Multinational companies are trying to control Internet.
Assocham has demanded that all messaging apps be regularized, which means that users will need to pay for using free messengers. Note here, that its not the messenger themselves which are asking for the regularization, but the Internet service providers who want a share in the booty.
On the other hand, Facebook is aggressively promoting Internet.org scheme, which will generate more Facebook users for them, and which will make them even bigger. Using free internet as a marketing tool, Facebook is attempting to control the Internet (remember, they are already controlling 50%+ in India!)
Regularization of free apps and thrusting Internet.org propaganda leads to only thing: Monopoly of existing Internet giants.
facebookNet NeutralityWhatsapp
Aadhaar Card Giving Rise To Increasing Online Frauds In India; Should Mobile Wallets Encourage Its Usage?
Amazon India Challenges Flipkart's Billion Day Sale With Great Indian Festive Sale; Thankfully Desktop Users Will Be Allowed To Shop!
Whatsapp Banned 23 Lakh Indians In 30 Days! Never Do This Or Else You Can Be Banned…
WhatsApp Message Deleted By Accident? These Users Can Undo Deletion!
Whatsapp Users Can Soon Use Animated Avatars During Video Calls: Find Out How It Will…
Whatsapp Testing Silent Exit From Groups: You Can Exit & No One Will Come To…
Whatsapp Will Have Advanced, Exciting Chat Filters Will Help To Locate Chats Easily:…
Big News For 200 Crore Whatsapp Users: Emoji Reactions On Your Chats Have Started!


Blue Valley set the tone early on Senior Night, scoring less than two minutes into the opening half and never trailed in their 62-27 rout of Shawnee Mission Northwest.
On just the fourth play of the game Tigers' quarterback Colton McCumber scrambled away from a defender and sprinted 70 yards to the endzone.
The Cougars answered with a long strike of their own on the ensuing possession when quarterback Ron Kapp hit Brian Morelan for a 94-yard catch and run. The extra point attempt barely left the ground, leaving Blue Valley ahead 7-6.
Special teams would be a struggle for Northwest throughout the game. After failing to capitalize on a McCumber interception, an 18 yard punt would give Blue Valley the ball on the Northwest 41. Five plays later Tiger running back Will Evans scored from two yards out.
Northwest attempted a fake reverse on each of their first two kickoff returns, and both times they lost yardage. But long plays would keep the Cougars in the game. Facing third down from their own 17 yard line, Kapp found Hayden Goodpaster for an 80-yard score. The two point conversion failed, and Blue Valley led 14-12.
It took the Tigers only five plays to score again, with McCumber scrambling 33 yards for his second rushing touchdown. After Northwest failed to gain a first down on its next possession, a 17 yard punt again gave Blue Valley the ball in Cougar territory. McCumber wasted no time, finding Gus Gomez for a 37 yard touchdown strike on the first play of the possession.
Offensive efficiency was the theme of the day for Blue Valley, who scored six touchdowns in their first 31 offensive plays, leading 42-20 at halftime. Heading the effort was McCumber, who carried the ball 12 times for 238 yards and a pair of rushing scores without a single snap in the fourth quarter. He added 100 yards through the air on 6 of 8 passing with a touchdown and an interception.
Northwest was able to capitalize on several big plays but often nullified potential drives with penalties, racking up five penalties for 55 yards in the first half alone. But the sometimes gaping holes in the defense did not escape Blue Valley head coach Eric Driskell.
The Cougars opened the first possession of the second half by throwing an interception to Blue Valley's Michael Maffey, who returned it 21 yards for a touchdown.
By the time Northwest scored their fourth and final touchdown they still trailed 48-27. On the ensuing kickoff, Blue Valley's William Evans bolted 95 yards for a touchdown. Evans also carried the ball 11 times for 45 yards and two scores.
Blue Valley scored again on their next possession, then forced a turnover on downs, and finished the game by taking the victory formation.


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Co-founder Helen has been in the design industry since 1986, adapting from Letraset to LinkedIn while working with many global and local brands. A Royals' season ticket, new grandson (and expanding shoe collection) keep Helen busy, as does her work with three local charities.
A massively experienced designer, having graduated from Newcastle over 25 years ago, Barney co-founded Cream Design in 1997. He loves watching his three sons play sport, cheering on the mighty Royals and keeping the ale belly at bay with some early-morning running and cycling.
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With over 20 years commercial and marketing experience with brands like Vodafone, Gillette and Reading FC, understanding clients' needs is second nature now that Emma is agency side. Out of office, she likes to get on her bike on her Tour de Berkshire. And when she's not cycling she's running (after her two young children).
We pride ourselves on working across a diverse range of sectors. From SMEs to major players, we apply our strategic creativity for maximum impact. Here are a few of the people we've been working with lately.


Somewhere deep in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, a modern-day fairy tale romance is about to come true again! When a young woman meets a dashing young man at a dance, she rushes out before he can get her name ... but in her haste, she has dropped her iPod. Now, in a In a world of online romance, where things may not be what they seem, true love will win, dreams will come true and a Prince Charming in jeans will step forward to win one girl's heart and dance happily ever after in Another Cinderella Story.


text:
Merry Hill shopping centre
Pictured: Primark launches huge store at intu Merry Hill - just in time for Christmas
Huge new Primark has now officially launched in intu Merry Hill
Oprah Flash
Newly extended Primark in Intu Merry Hill shopping Centre. (Image: Birmingham Mail)
The new and improved Primark has now officially launched in the Black Country at intu Merry Hill.
Boasting 60,000sq ft of retail space over two floors, having acquired the former BHS store, the new store is 70% bigger than before.
Until the new Birmingham shop opens its doors at the Pavillion, the intu Merry Hill branch is currently the biggest Primark store within the West Midlands.
Black Country Live attended the launch which included a tour around the newly refurbished space.
To watch the launch of the larger Primark at Merry Hill see below:
As well as recruiting more than 80 staff, the store has aimed to improve the customer experience by add four 'recharge' seating zones with phone charging capabilities and access to free wifi.
A new game-changing feature for the new store is the Trending section offering the latest fashion. This will be updated every four weeks.
Simon Gibbs, Retail Director UK and Northern Europe, Primark, said: "We are delighted to officially launch our newly refurbished and extended store at intu Merry Hill.
This high-end designer shop is bringing Gucci, Fendi and Burberry to Merry Hill
Our store is now over 70 per cent larger and will offer an enhanced shopping experience for our customers, with even more of our amazing fashion at amazing prices."
As part of the expansion, Primark has tripled its Beauty section, added an extra 33% to Ladies Wear and doubled the stockroom space.
Ofiicial opening of the New Primark store in Merry Hill 29th November 2018 with Dan Murphy Regional Centre Director Intu Merry Hill and Lee Johnson, Store Manager, Primark Picture by Shaun Fellows / Shine Pix
Wraps come off at Birmingham's giant new Primark - just in time for Christmas
There are now 52 tills across the store and the upper floor is dedicated solely to Kids Wear and Home sections.
For the first time in two years, you can enter Primark directly from the multi-storey carpark.
Will you be doing your Christmas Shopping at the new Primark?
Yes, I love the bigger store.
No, it's not for me.
Nick Round, regional managing director at intu Merry Hill, said:
"We're committed to making the retail offering at intu Merry Hill the best it can be and the opening of the larger Primark store gives us a great opportunity to provide an even better service for our shoppers."
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