text:
Das Dorf Flanitz ist ein Gemeindeteil der Gemeinde Frauenau im niederbayerischen Landkreis Regen.

Lage
Es liegt etwa zwei Kilometer nordwestlich von Frauenau auf einer Sattelfläche westlich oberhalb des Tals der Flanitz.

Geschichte
Flädnitz wurde 1356 erstmals urkundlich erwähnt. Es ist eine Gründung des Klosters Niederaltaich und dessen Propstei Rinchnach. 1717 wurde Flanitz mit 14 Höfen erstmals in der Herdstättenbeschreibung erfasst.

Im Konskriptionsjahr 1752 bildete Flanitz eine Obmannschaft im Landgericht Zwiesel und bei der Bildung der Steuerdistrikte 1808 einen Steuerdistrikt. Dieser umfasste die Obmannschaften Flanitz, Griesbach und einen Teil der Obmannschaft Frauenau. Der Ort Flanitz bestand in diesem Jahr aus 15 Anwesen.

1813 war Flanitz als selbstständige Ruralgemeinde vorgesehen, welche die Orte Flanitz, Zell, Althütte, Lüfteneck, Reifberg und Griesbach umfassen sollte. Bei der endgültigen Festlegung der Gemeinden mit dem Edikt von 1821 wurde Flanitz jedoch ein Teil der Gemeinde Unterfrauenau. Zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges hatte es 315 Einwohner. Die Bemühungen um eine eigene Schule blieben erfolglos. Bei der Volkszählung 1987 hatte Flanitz 151 Einwohner.

Sehenswürdigkeiten
 Dorfkapelle. Sie wurde 1840 erbaut. Die beiden Figuren des hl. Nikolaus und des hl. Wolfgang stammen aus dem 18. Jahrhundert.

Vereine
 Freiwillige Feuerwehr Flanitz. Sie wurde 1922 als Kompanie Flanitz der Freiwilligen Feuerwehr Frauenau gegründet.
 Eisschützenverein EC Flanitz
 Jagdgenossenschaft Flanitz
 Schützenverein Flanitz

Literatur
 Manfred Burkhardt: Regen: Landgerichte Zwiesel und Regen, Pfleggericht Weißenstein. Historischer Atlas von Bayern I/XXIV, München 1975, ISBN 3 7696 9895 9 (Digitalisat)

Weblinks

Einzelnachweise

Ort im Landkreis Regen
Frauenau
Dorf


Corporate businesses place people under the flag of a promise, speak on their behalf and lock their CVs for a period of time. The more people are aligned under the flag, the higher the speaker volume, isn't it? But instead of volume and frequency, more and more companies understand the need of more refined internal marketing programs to make employees belong where they work. Employees, especially in services brands, are actually the most important stakeholders. Programs can be complex but always tailored to the company's specific challenges. There are no universal recipes whatsoever.


text:
http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-russia-vnesheconombank-ceo-putin-2017-3?utm_source=hearst&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=allverticals
Kushner Companies and Russian individuals exchanged suspicious money transfers at the height of the 2016 race, ex-Deutsche Bank employee says
Sonam Sheth, provided by
Published 4:25 pm EDT, Monday, May 20, 2019
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
A former Deutsche Bank employee discovered several suspicious money transfers between Kushner Companies and Russian individuals in the summer of 2016.
At the time, Donald Trump was the Republican nominee for President of the United States, and Russia's election interference campaign was well underway.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and the head of Kushner Companies, has repeatedly come under scrutiny over the role he played in the Trump team's outreach to the Russian government during the election and transition period.
Kushner is a frequent target for foreign governments working to influence US policy: officials in at least four different countries reportedly discussed ways they could manipulate Kushner by taking advantage of his business dealings and financial difficulties.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
A former Deutsche Bank employee told The New York Times she flagged a series of suspicious money transfers between Kushner Companies and Russian individuals at the height of the 2016 US election.
Tammy McFadden used to work at the bank's anti-money laundering division and was terminated last year. She told The Times she discovered the transfers in the summer of 2016. At the time, Donald Trump was the Republican nominee for president, and the Russian government's effort to interfere in the US election and propel Trump to the Oval Office was well underway.
When McFadden discovered the transfers from Kushner Companies to the Russians, she concluded they should be reported to the US government. Usually, a report like McFadden's would be reviewed by a team of anti-money laundering experts who work separately from the private-banking division, McFadden and two other former Deutsche Bank managers told The Times.
Read more: Ukraine's top prosecutor says he has no evidence of wrongdoing against Joe Biden or Hunter Biden as Trump allies push for them to be investigated
But in this case, the sources said the report went to managers in New York who were part of the private-banking division. They decided McFadden's concerns were unfounded and decided not to submit the report to the Treasury Department's financial crimes unit.
Deutsche Bank has long been under scrutiny for its lax lending standards, as well as its willingness to do business with Trump when most other banks refused to work with him because of his financial troubles.
The House Financial Services Committee and the New York Attorney General's Office, both of whom are investigating Deutsche Bank's links to the Trump family, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The House Intelligence Committee, which has signaled an interest in the bank in connection to its Russia investigation, also did not respond to a request for comment.
McFadden's discovery of the transfers between Kushner Companies and Russian individuals raises new questions about Jared Kushner's potential involvement in outreach between members of the Trump campaign and individuals associated with the Russian government during the 2016 election.
Read more: The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee reportedly subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. to answer questions about the Russia probe
Kushner is a frequent target for foreign countries working to influence US policy
Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and the head of Kushner Companies, was a key figure in the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. A significant thread in the probe examined whether the Russians sought out business dealings with Trump or those in his circle to gain leverage over the future president.
Kushner came under scrutiny for his involvement in several episodes that investigators believed may have amounted to a quid pro quo between the campaign and the Russian government.
In one instance, Kushner met in December 2016 with Sergey Gorkov, a Russian banker who is the head of the state-controlled Vnesheconombank (VEB). VEB is under US sanctions, and Gorkov is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Read more: Trump Organization and Trump family sue Deutsche Bank to prevent it from complying with congressional subpoenas
Reuters reported in 2017 that the FBI was examining whether Gorkov suggested to Kushner that Russian banks could finance Trump associates' business ventures if US sanctions were lifted or relaxed.
That same month, Kushner also met with Sergey Kislyak, then-Russia's ambassador to the US, to discuss opening a secret back channel of communication between the incoming Trump administration and the Russian government.
Kushner in June 2016 was one of three top Trump campaign officials who met with two Russian lobbyists offering compromising material on the Hillary Clinton campaign. The meeting was originally pitched to Donald Trump Jr., who also attended, as being "part of Russia and its government's support" for Trump's candidacy.
Russia isn't the only country suspected of leveraging Kushner's financial situation to make inroads with the Trump team.
Last year, the Washington Post reported that officials in at least four foreign governments discussed ways they could manipulate Kushner by using his business dealings and governing inexperience to influence White House policy.
Among those nations, the Post reported, were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel, and Mexico.
NOW WATCH: Here are 7 takeaways from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation
Ukraine's top prosecutor says he has no evidence of wrongdoing against Joe Biden or Hunter Biden as Trump allies push for them to be investigated
Barr and Pelosi reportedly joked about whether she brought handcuffs to arrest him after Democrats' contempt vote
House Democrats are investigating whether lawyers tied to Trump helped draft Michael Cohen's false testimony
SEE ALSO: Trump Organization and Trump family sue Deutsche Bank to prevent it from complying with congressional subpoenas

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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text:
/* Task Description */
/*
	Create a function constructor for Person. Each Person must have:
	*	properties `firstname`, `lastname` and `age`
		*	firstname and lastname must always be strings between 3 and 20 characters, containing only Latin letters
		*	age must always be a number in the range 0 150
			*	the setter of age can receive a convertible-to-number value
		*	if any of the above is not met, throw Error
	*	property `fullname`
		*	the getter returns a string in the format 'FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME'
		*	the setter receives a string is the format 'FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME'
			*	it must parse it and set `firstname` and `lastname`
	*	method `introduce()` that returns a string in the format 'Hello! My name is FULL_NAME and I am AGE-years-old'
	*	all methods and properties must be attached to the prototype of the Person
	*	all methods and property setters must return this, if they are not supposed to return other value
		*	enables method-chaining
*/
function solve() {
	var Person = (function () {
		function Person(firstname, lastname, age) {
			this.firstname = firstname;
			this.lastname = lastname;
			this.age = age;
		}

		Object.defineProperty(Person.prototype, 'firstname', {
			get : function (){
				return this._firstname;
			},

			set : function (value){
				if (!arguments[0]) {
					throw new Error('Enter value for first name!')
				}
				if (typeof (value) !== 'string') {
					throw new Error('Invalid string!');
				}

				if (value.length <3 || value.length > 20 ) {
					throw new Error('Value must be btw 3 and 20 chars');
				}

				if (!(/^[a-zA-Z]*$/.test(value))) {
					throw new Error('Value must be only in Latin letters!');
				}
				this._firstname = value;
				return this;
			}
		});

		Object.defineProperty(Person.prototype, 'lastname', {
			get : function (){
				return this._lastname;
			},

			set : function (value){
				if (!arguments[0]) {
					throw new Error('Enter value for last name!')
				}

				if (typeof (value) !== 'string') {
					throw new Error('Invalid string!');
				}

				if (value.length <3 || value.length > 20 ) {
					throw new Error('Value must be btw 3 and 20 chars');
				}

				if (!(/^[a-zA-Z]*$/.test(value))) {
					throw new Error('Value must be only in Latin letters!');
				}
				this._lastname = value;
				return this;
			}
		});

		Object.defineProperty(Person.prototype, 'age', {
			get : function (){
				return this._age;
			},

			set : function (value){
				if (!arguments[0]) {
					throw new Error('Enter value for age!')
				}
				if (value <= 0 || value >= 150) {
					throw new Error('Bla bla')
				}
				this._age = value;
				return this;
			}
		});

		Object.defineProperty(Person.prototype, 'fullname', {
			get : function () {
			return this.firstname + ' ' + this.lastname;
			},

			set : function (value) {
				var _fullname = value.split(' ');
				this.firstname = _fullname[0];
				this.lastname = _fullname[1];
				return this;
			}
		});

		Person.prototype.introduce = function () {
			return 'Hello! My name is ' + this.firstname + ' ' + this.lastname + ' and I am ' + this.age + '-years-old';
		}

		return Person;
	} ());
	return Person;
}
module.exports = solve;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Task Force Urges Trump to Develop Better Cyber Deterrent
New administration challenged to confront Russia, China in cyber space
Morgan Chalfant - January 5, 2017 3:50 PM
Donald Trump's administration needs to develop new policies to better deter and respond to nation-states engaging in hostile behavior in cyber space, according to a task force on cyber security at a U.S. foreign policy think tank.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies' task force on cyber policy, chaired by Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), released a comprehensive set of recommendations on Thursday for the incoming administration to better deal with cyber espionage, crime, and attacks amid rising concerns over hacking threats from Russia, China, and other foreign nations.
The task force recommended that Trump's administration develop a new international strategy to adjust to the current global security environment in which Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are increasingly looking to cyber space to target the United States. The incoming administration must also focus more on reducing and controlling cyber crime and raising the costs of launching cyber attacks on the United States, in addition to securing critical infrastructure to prevent hostile actors from exploiting vulnerabilities, the report stated.
The task force noted that the Obama administration has made "uneven progress" on the issue of cyber security and that nation-states and hostile actors have grown more skilled in hacking and more willing to exploit cyber vulnerabilities.
"There has been an erosion of American influence and the arrival of assertive challengers. Russia's use of cyber as an instrument of state power is impressive and worrying," the task force said. "Significant incidents—such as North Korea's and Iran's hacks against Sony and the Sands Casino, and the Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—reflect a growing willingness to use cyber tools against us."
"Our cyber opponents have found ways around American deterrence as it is currently implemented," the report states. "Few companies or agencies can prevent, or even detect, efforts by our most advanced opponents to gain access to their networks. At the same time, Russian active measures in cyber space show that vulnerabilities can be exploited for more than the theft of data."
The task force, also chaired by cyber security experts Karen Evans and Sameer Bhalotra, recommends that the new administration consider organizational improvements at government agencies, including by strengthening the Department of Homeland Security's focus on cyber–possibly by making cyber security an independent operational component agency at the department, like Customs and Border Patrol.
The new White House also needs to bolster its system for managing cyber security policy and decisions, the task force recommended, and appoint a cyber security coordinator to advise Trump as an assistant to the president.
The task force's report was released the same day that intelligence community leaders testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on foreign cyber threats and addressed shortcomings of the Obama administration's policies for deterring and responding to cyber aggression.
"The Russians are a peer competitor in cyber. If you look broadly beyond the Russians to cyber at large, the level of capability of nation-states and actors around the world continues to increase," Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, said in response to questions from Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.).
"I can't think of a single significant actor out there who is either decreasing their level of investment or getting worse in their trade craft or capability," Rogers said.
Marcel Lettre, the current undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said the government has more work to do on cyber deterrence and response to cyber attacks.
"We have a lot more work to do to put the right deterrence and response framework in place on cyber," Lettre said. "This is somewhat of a new domain of operations and in some cases warfare, and in my personal opinion the next administration would be well-served to focus very early on those questions and continuing to develop our overarching policy, a comprehensive approach and an increasingly robust and refined deterrence framework."
Lawmakers largely focused on the recent conclusions of the intelligence community that Russia directed cyber attacks on U.S. individuals and organizations, including political institutions, in order to influence the 2016 presidential election. Intelligence officials are preparing to release a report on the investigation into the attacks next week, after briefing President Obama, President-elect Donald Trump, and Congress on the findings.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate panel that the investigation found that Russia waged a "multi-faceted campaign" to influence the election, which also involved propaganda, disinformation, and so-called "fake news."
The intelligence community first accused Russia in October of directing cyber attacks to meddle in the presidential election. The Obama administration retaliated against Russia last week for the hacking, announcing sanctions on state entities and individuals and expelling Russian intelligence operatives from the United States.
Some lawmakers including McCaul, who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, have criticized the Obama administration's lack of responses to cyber aggression from Russia and China.
"I am pleased to see the Obama administration is finally responding to Russian meddling, including by sanctioning key operatives and expelling Russian spies from the United States. But these actions are long overdue," McCaul said last week. " I have urged the administration to respond to the election-related hacks, and for years I have pressed them to stand up to Russia and other cyber intruders. Instead, President Obama's 'look-the-other-way' foreign policy has emboldened Moscow time and again and opened us up to attack."
Trump is set to receive a briefing from high-level intelligence officials on the Russian hacking on Friday. The president-elect has been skeptical of the intelligence community's conclusions about Russia being behind the cyber attacks, opening him up to criticism from some lawmakers.
This entry was posted in National Security and tagged Cyber Security, Donald Trump, Intelligence, MIchael McCaul, Russia. Bookmark the permalink.
Morgan Chalfant is a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon. Prior to joining the Free Beacon, Morgan worked as a staff writer at Red Alert Politics. She also served as the year-long Collegiate Network fellow on the editorial page at USA TODAY from 2013-14. Morgan graduated from Boston College in 2013 with a B.A. in English and Mathematics. Her Twitter handle is @mchalfant16.


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This year's competition will be focused on the addition of a Major League Soccer (MLS) expansion franchise. It will require a team of three (3) or four (4) undergraduates to select a host community and complete a bid document (modified feasibility study). More detailed information is included on the case study guidelines and scenario document (linked above). Teams will have one (1) month to complete the paper portion of the competition with final submissions due on February 8th by 5pm CST. All completed submissions are due to Dr. Adam G. Pfleegor at adam.pfleegor@belmont.edu.
Dr. Bass is an Assistant Professor, Sport Management Program Director, and Associate Chair in the Department of Health, Sport, and Exercise Sciences at the University of Kansas. In addition to his academic roles, Dr. Bass also serves as the Vice President and Associate General Management of Kaw Velley FC in USL League 2.
Dr. Smith is an Assistant Professor and the Sport Management Program Coordinator in the Department of Sport, Exercise, Recreation, and Kinesiology at ETSU. Dr. Smith also has previous experience working with the MLS league office.
Dr. Odio is an Assistant Professor of Sport Management in the School of Human Services at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Odio's research focuses on organization behavior and human resources.
We are excited to host your team for this year's case study competition in SMASHville!


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Delicious keto hot chocolate, no dairy required!
These tasty treats have been helping me burn body fat since the start! I recently updated this recipe to a non-sweetened version, but if you aren't quite ready to kick the added artificial sweeteners quite yet, try out this version.
This recipe is an easy way to not only add more fat into your breakfast, but it also amps up boring old eggs! Top with extra garlic & herb butter and serve with your choice of bacon or sausage to have a breakfast that will keep you energized all morning long.
Ok, ok – alcohol can sometimes doom any diet, especially a ketogenic diet. There are some people who can get away with a drink or two and still live to keto on! Yet there are others who just want to throw their hands in the air like they just don't care, all diets be damned! But only until they come crawling back on Monday with weekend regret and sore arms.
When you start to feel a scratch in your throat or a drip from your nose, it is time to heat up a good old fashioned Keto Cold Buster Tea. Ok, it is something I made up, so there is nothing old fashioned about it, but it works. That's my point, it works!
Every single time my husband sees chicken out for dinner, he begs me to make Chicken Bacon Alfredo. Recently I made another chicken dish with garlic butter and he still kept looking for the Alfredo sauce. Even when I told him I didn't make it, he did not believe me. This dish is just that tasty!
Adding delicious sauces to your meals is a great way to get more fat into your high-fat, low-carb diet. It is also a delicious way to stay satiated. Use this creamy pesto sauce to top entrees like chicken, shrimp or even eggs!


text:
Arup scoops four prestigious engineering awards
Lucy Chakaodza UKIMEA Press Office,London
Built environment consultancy Arup has won four Institution of Structural Engineers' Scottish Structural awards.
The awards ceremony, held in Glasgow on 27 October, celebrated the best structural projects completed by Scottish design engineers within the last two years.
Lucy Chakaodza UKIMEA Press Office
[email protected] +44 (0) 20 7755 8711 London, local time - 07:48 PM
Arup is excited to have been presented with four awards out of a possible ten categories, which reflected the industries' focus on good design, sustainability, and environmental responsibility:
The University of Strathclyde's Learning & Teaching Building: Best Modern (Post 1960) Building Refurbishment Project
Arup were integral to the creation of this project, delivering the structural engineering design for the refurbishment and adaptive re-use of two existing buildings (one Grade B listed) with a significant new-build hub building constructed around and between both buildings. Arup's involvement supported the University to create a sustainable building that enhances the student experience and places their journey and wellbeing at its heart.
Glasgow Queen Street Station in partnership with Network rail: Best Clear Span Structure Project
The third busiest railway station in Scotland, Glasgow Queen Street Station's striking design has made it the figurehead for the continued decarbonisation of Scotland's Railways. Its uplifting and inclusive character aims to delight those who use it, celebrating the passengers' choice of travel on greener, cleaner trains.
St. Enoch Centre - East End Leisure in partnership with Sovereign Centros: Best Project in Leisure
With a new multi-screen cinema and an additional 100,000 sq ft of retail and leisure space, the redevelopment of the St Enoch Centre has created a world-class retail and leisure destination in a key location at the heart of Glasgow city centre.
Scottish National Galleries - South Portico Temporary Works in partnership with Tilbury Douglas: Best Specialist Structure Project
Arup carried out the complex temporary works design of the £17m redevelopment of the Scottish National Galleries, one of Edinburgh's most prominent buildings. The project involved close co-ordination with the main Contractor and Project Team within a very congested site.
Best Clear Span Structure Project - Glasgow Queen Street Station
We are delighted to be recognised for our efforts and the quality of our skills on these projects. I'm very proud of the work carried out by our structural engineering teams in the North, as well as across the UK, and would like to thank them and all our project partners for contributing to this achievement. " Allan Driscoll Director
Learn more about one of our award winning projects
Glasgow Queen Street Station


A widowed immigrant mother dying of cancer fears her schizophrenic teenaged son is turning into a school shooter.
A troubled neurosurgeon is derailed by the haunting memories of his wife's death.
A high school girl experiences unsettling visions that question the nature of her reality.
A mysterious woman hides out in a house under construction to battle her innermost demons.
A mood film for the 2016 A/W collection of fashion label, KOROVILAS.
A woman struggling with grief becomes obsessed with a monolithic, abandoned building.
The personal and professional lives of two method actors bleed together.
In a dystopian world short on food and water, a trio of scavengers roam the wilderness trying to survive.
A bored teenager discovers the powers of his imagination at the laundromat.
A man dreams of crucifying himself.
Two women on Regent Street at rush hour, with commentary by Gertrude Stein.
A musical cover of the "The Partisan", set against images of refugees and war.


text:
\section{Introduction}

Liver fibrosis is a major health threat with high prevalence~\cite{poynard2010prevalence}. Without timely diagnosis and treatment, liver fibrosis can develop into liver cirrhosis~\cite{poynard2010prevalence} and even hepatocellular carcinoma~\cite{saverymuttu1986ultrasound}. While histopathology remains the gold standard, non-invasive approaches minimize patient discomfort and danger. Elastography is a useful non-invasive modality, but it is not always available or affordable and it can be confounded by inflammation, presence of steatosis, and the patient's etiology~\cite{Tai_2015,Chen_2019,Lee_2017}. Assessment using conventional \ac{US} may be potentially more versatile; however, it is a subjective measurement that can suffer from insufficient sensitivities, specificities, and high inter- and intra-rater variability~\cite{Manning_2008,Li_2019}. Thus, there is great impetus for an automated and less subjective assessment of liver fibrosis. This is the goal of our work.

Although a relatively understudied topic, prior work has advanced automated \ac{US} fibrosis assessment~\cite{Mojsilovic_1997,Wu_1992,Ogawa_1998,meng2017liver,liu2019ultrasound}. In terms of deep \acp{NN}, Meng \textit{et al.}{}~\cite{meng2017liver} proposed a straightforward liver fibrosis parenchyma VGG-16-based~\cite{Simonyan15} classifier and tested it on a small dataset of $279$ images. Importantly, they only performed image-wise predictions and do not report a method for study-wise classification.  On the other hand, Liu \textit{et al.}{}~\cite{liu2019ultrasound} correctly identified the value in fusing features from all \ac{US} images in a study when making a prediction. However, their algorithm requires exactly $10$ images. But, real patient studies may contain any arbitrary number of \ac{US} scans. Their feature concatenation approach would also drastically increase computational and memory costs as more images are incorporated. Moreover, they rely on $13$ manually labeled indicators as ancillary supervision, which are typically not available without considerable labor costs. Finally, their system treats all \ac{US} images identically, even though a study consists of different \textit{viewpoints} of the liver, each of which may have its own set of clinical markers correlating with fibrosis. Ideally, a liver fibrosis assessment system could learn directly from supervisory signals already present in hospital archives, \textit{i.e.},{} image-level fibrosis scores produced during daily clinical routines. In addition, a versatile system should also be able to effectively use all \ac{US} images/views in a patient study with no ballooning of computational costs, regardless of their number.

We fill these gaps by proposing a robust and versatile pipeline for conventional ultrasound liver fibrosis assessment. Like others, we use a deep \ac{NN}, but with key innovations. First, informed by clinical practice~\cite{Aube_2017}, we ensure the network focuses only on a clinically-important \ac{ROI}, \textit{i.e.},{} the liver parenchyma and the upper liver border. This prevents the \ac{NN} from erroneously overfitting on spurious or background features. Second, inspired by \ac{HeMIS}~\cite{Havaei_2016}, we adapt and expand on this approach and propose \ac{HVF} as a way to learn from, and perform inference on, any arbitrary number of \ac{US} scans within a study. While \ac{HVF} share similarities with deep feature-based multi-instance learning~\cite{ilse2018attention}, there are two important distinctions: (1) \ac{HVF} includes variance as part of the fusion, as per \ac{HeMIS}~\cite{Havaei_2016}; (2) \ac{HVF} is trained using arbitrary image combinations from a patient study, which is possible because, unlike multi-instance learning, each image (or instance) is strongly supervised by the same label. We are the first to propose and develop this mechanism to fuse global \ac{NN} feature vectors.  Finally, we implement a \ac{VSP} that tailors the \ac{NN} processing based on $6$ common liver \ac{US} views. While the majority of processing is shared, each view possesses its own set of so-called ``style''-based normalization parameters~\cite{Huang_2017} to customize the analysis. While others have used similar ideas segmenting different anatomical structures~\cite{Huang_2019}, we are the first to apply this concept for clinical decision support and the first to use it in concert with a hetero-image fusion mechanism. The result is a highly robust and practical liver fibrosis assessment solution.

To validate our approach, we use a cross-validated dataset of $610$ US patient studies, comprising $6976$ images. We measure the ability to identify patients with moderate to severe liver fibrosis. Compared to strong classification baselines, our enhancements are able to improve recall at $90\%$ precision by $22\%$, with commensurate boosts in partial \acp{AUC}.  Importantly, ablation studies demonstrate that each component contributes to these performance improvements, demonstrating that our liver fibrosis assessment pipeline, and its constituent clinical \ac{ROI}, \ac{HVF}, and \ac{VSP} parts, represents a significant advancement for this important task.

\section{Methods}

We assume we are given a dataset, $\mathcal{D}=\{\mathcal{X}_{i}, y_{i}\}_{i=1}^{N}$, comprised of \ac{US} patient studies and ground-truth labels indicating liver fibrosis status, dropping the $i$ when convenient. Each study $\mathcal{X}_{i}$, in turn, is comprised of an arbitrary number of $K_{i}$ 2D conventional \ac{US} scans of the patient's liver, $\mathcal{X}_{i}=\{\mathbf{X}^{1}\ldots \mathbf{X}^{K_{i}}\}$. Fig.~\ref{fig-alg} depicts the workflow of our automated liver assessment tool, which combines clinical \ac{ROI} pooling, \ac{HVF}, and \ac{VSP}.

\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figures/figure-algorithm.png}
\caption{Algorithmic workflow depicting the clinical \acs{ROI} pooling, \acs{HVF}, and \acs{VSP}. We use plate notation to depict the repeated workflow across the $K$ images in a \ac{US} study.} \label{fig-alg}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Clinical ROI Pooling}

We use a deep \ac{NN} as backbone for our pipeline. Popular deep \acp{NN}, \textit{e.g.},{} ResNet~\cite{He_2016}, can be formulated with the following convention:
\begin{align}
    \hat{y}^{k}  &= f\left(g\left(\mathbf{A}^{k} \right); \mathbf{w}\right) \mathrm{,} \label{eqn:simple_image} \\
    \mathbf{A}^{k}&=h\left(\mathbf{X}^{k}; \theta\right) \mathrm{,} \label{eqn:simple_image2}
\end{align}
where $h(.; \theta)$ is a \ac{FCN} feature extractor parameterized by $\theta$, $\mathbf{A}^{k}$ is the \ac{FCN} output, $g(.)$ is some global pooling function, \textit{e.g.},{} average pooling, and $f(.; \mathbf{w})$ is a fully-connected layer (and sigmoid function) parameterized by $\mathbf{w}$. When multiple \ac{US} scans are present, a standard approach is to aggregate individual image-wise predictions, \textit{e.g.},{} taking the median:
\begin{align}
    \hat{y} = \mathrm{median}(\{\hat{y}^{1}\ldots \hat{y}^{K}\}) \mathrm{.} \label{eqn:median}
\end{align}

This conventional approach may have drawbacks, as it is possible for the \ac{NN} to overfit to spurious background variations. However, based on clinical practice~\cite{Aube_2017}, we know \textit{a priori} that certain features are crucial for assessing liver fibrosis, \textit{e.g.},{} the parenchyma texture and surface nodularity. As Fig.~\ref{fig:roi} demonstrates, to make the \ac{NN} focus on these features we use a masking technique.  We first generate a liver mask for each \ac{US} scan. This is done by training a simple segmentation network on a small subset of the images.
\begin{figure}[t]
\center
\begin{tabular}{ccc}
     \includegraphics[width=.25\textwidth]{figures/orig_image.png} & \includegraphics[width=.25\textwidth]{figures/mask.png} & \includegraphics[width=.25\textwidth]{figures/clinical_roi.png} \\
     (a) \textbf{US Image} & (b) \textbf{Liver Mask} & (c) \textbf{Clinical ROI}
\end{tabular}
\caption{(a) depicts an \ac{US} image, whose liver mask is rendered in (b). As shown in (c), the clinical \ac{ROI} the mask is extended upward to cover the top liver border.}
\label{fig:roi}
\end{figure}
Then, for each scan, we create a rectangle that just covers the top half of and 10 pixels above the liver mask, to ensure the liver border is covered. The resulting binary mask is denoted $\mathbf{M}$. Because we only need to ensure we capture enough of the liver parenchyma and upper border to extract meaningful features, $\mathbf{M}$ need not be perfect.

With a clinical \ac{ROI} obtained, we formulate the pooling function in \eqref{eqn:simple_image} as a masked version of global average pooling:
\begin{align}
    g(\mathbf{A}; \mathbf{M}) = \mathrm{GAP}(\mathbf{M}\odot\mathbf{A}) \mathrm{,} \label{eqn:roi_pool}
\end{align}
where $\odot$ and $\mathrm{GAP}(.)$ denote the element-wise product and global average pooling, respectively. Interestingly, we found that including the zeroed-out regions within the global average pooling benefits performance~\cite{chen2020anatomyaware,pelvic_yirui}. We posit their inclusion helps implicitly capture liver size characteristics, which is another important clinical \ac{US} marker for liver fibrosis~\cite{Aube_2017}.

\subsection{Global Hetero-Image Fusion}

A challenge with \ac{US} patient studies is that they may consist of a variable number of images, each of a potentially different view. Ideally, all available \ac{US} images would contribute to the final prediction. In \eqref{eqn:median} this is accomplished via a late fusion of independent and image-specific predictions. But, this does not allow the \ac{NN} integrate the combined features across \ac{US} images. A better approach would fuse these features. The challenge, here, is to allow for an arbitrary number of \ac{US} images in order to ensure flexibility and practicality.

The \ac{HeMIS} approach~\cite{Havaei_2016} to segmentation offers a promising strategy that fuses features from arbitrary numbers of images using their first- and second-order moments. However, \ac{HeMIS} fuses convolutional features early in its \ac{FCN} pipeline, which is possible because it assumes pixel-to-pixel correspondence across images. This is completely violated for \ac{US} images. Instead, only \textit{global} \ac{US} features can be sensibly fused together, which we accomplish through \acf{HVF}. More formally, we use $\mathcal{A}= \{\mathbf{A}^{k}\}_{k=1}^{K}$ and $\mathcal{M}= \{\mathbf{M}^{k}\}_{k=1}^{K}$ to denote the set of \ac{FCN} features and clinical \acp{ROI}, respectively, for each image. Then \ac{HVF} modifies \eqref{eqn:simple_image} to accept any arbitrary set of \ac{FCN} features to produce a \textit{study-wise} prediction:
\begin{align}
    \hat{y}  &= f\left(g\left( \mathcal{A}; \mathcal{M}\right); \mathbf{w}\right) \mathrm{,} \label{eqn:all_hvf} \\
    g(\mathcal{A}; \mathcal{M}) &= \mathrm{concat}\left(\mathrm{mean}(\mathcal{G}), \mathrm{var}(\mathcal{G}), \max(\mathcal{G})\right) \mathrm{,} \label{eqn:hvf}\\
    \mathcal{G} &= \{ \mathrm{GAP}(\mathbf{M}^{k}\odot\mathbf{A}^{k})\}_{k=1}^{K} \mathrm{,}
\end{align}
Besides the first- and second-order moments, \ac{HVF} \eqref{eqn:hvf} also incorporates the max operator as a powerful hetero-fusion function~\cite{Zhou_2018_fusion}. All three operators can accept any arbitrary numbers of samples to produce one fused feature vector. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply hetero-fusion for global feature vectors. The difference, compared to late fusion, is that features, rather than predictions are fused. Rather than always inputting all \ac{US} scans when training, an important strategy is choosing random combinations of the $K$ scans for every epoch. This provides a form of data augmentation and allows the \ac{NN} to learn from image signals that may be suppressed otherwise. An important implementation note is that training with random combinations of images can make \ac{HVF}'s batch statistics unstable. For this reason, a normalization not relying on batch statistics, such as instance-normalization~\cite{Ulyanov_2016}, should be used.

\subsection{View-Specific Parameterization}

While \ac{HVF} can effectively integrate arbitrary numbers of \ac{US} images within a study, it uses the same \ac{FCN} feature extractor across all images, treating them all identically. Yet, there are certain \ac{US} features, such as vascular markers, that are specific to particular views. As a result, some manner of view-specific analysis could help push performance further. In fact, based on guidance from our clinical partner, \ac{US} views of the liver can be roughly divided into $6$ categories, which focus on different regions of the liver. These are shown in Fig~\ref{fig-view}.

\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
    \includegraphics[width=1.0\textwidth]{figures/new_fig_3/completefigure.png}
    \caption{Liver views in our dataset. Blue square: position of the \ac{US} probe. Liver cartoons adapted from the DataBase Center for Life Science (\url{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:201405_liver.png}), licensed under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International}
    \label{fig-view}
\end{figure}

A naive solution would be to use a dedicated deep \ac{NN} for each view category. However, this would drastically reduce the training set for each dedicated \ac{NN} and would sextuple the number of parameters, computation, and memory consumption. Intuitively, there should be a great deal of analysis that is common across \ac{US} views. The challenge is to retain this shared analysis, while also providing some tailored processing for each category.

To do this, we adapt the concept of ``style'' parameters to implement a \acf{VSP} appropriate for \ac{US}-based fibrosis assessment. Such parameters refer to the affine normalization parameters used in batch-~\cite{Ioffe_2015} or instance-normalization~\cite{Ulyanov_2016}. If these are switched out, while keeping all other parameters constant, one can alter the behavior of the \ac{NN} in quite dramatic ways~\cite{Huang_2017,Huang_2019}. For our purposes, retaining view-specific normalization parameters allows for the majority of parameters and processing to be shared across views. \ac{VSP} is then realized with a minimal number of additional parameters.

More formally, if we create $6$ sets of normalization parameters for an \ac{FCN}, we can denote them  as $\Omega=\{\omega_{1} \ldots \omega_{6}\}$. The \ac{FCN} from \eqref{eqn:simple_image2} is then modified to be parameterized also by $\Omega$:
\begin{align}
    \mathbf{A}^{k}&=h\left(\mathbf{X}^{k}; \theta, \omega_{v_{k}}\right) \mathrm{,} \label{eqn:vsp}
\end{align}
where $v_{k}$ indexes each image by its view and $\theta$ now excludes the normalization parameters. \ac{VSP} relies on identifying the view of each \ac{US} scan in order to swap in the correct normalization parameters. This can be recorded  as part of the acquisition process. Or, if this is not possible, we have found classifying the \ac{US} views automatically to be quite reliable.

\section{Experiments}

\textbf{Dataset.} We test our system on a dataset of $610$ \ac{US} patient studies collected from the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan, acquired from Siemens, Philips, and Toshiba devices. The dataset comprises $232$ patients, among which $95$ ($40.95\%$) patients have moderate to severe fibrosis (27 with severe liver steatosis). All patients were diagnosed with hepatitis B. Patients were scanned up to $3$ times, using a different scanner type each time. Each patient study is composed of up to $14$  \ac{US} images, corresponding to the views in Fig.~\ref{fig-view}. The total number of images is  $6\,979$. We use $5$-fold cross validation, splitting each fold at the patient level into $70\%$, $20\%$, and $10\%$, for training, testing, and validation, respectively. We also manually labeled liver contours from $300$ randomly chosen \ac{US} images.

\textbf{Implementation Details and Comparisons.} Experiments evaluated our workflow against several strong classification baselines, where throughout we use the same ResNet50~\cite{He_2016} backbone (pretrained on ImageNet~\cite{imagenet_cvpr09}). For methods using the clinical \ac{ROI} pooling of \eqref{eqn:roi_pool}, we use a truncated version of ResNet (only the first three layer blocks) for $h(.)$ in \eqref{eqn:simple_image2}. This keeps enough spatial resolution prior to the masking in \eqref{eqn:roi_pool}. We call this truncated backbone ``ResNet-3''. To create the clinical \ac{ROI}, we train a simple 2D U-Net~\cite{Ronneberger_2015} on the $300$ images with masks. For training, we perform standard data augmenation with random brightness, contrast, rotations, and scale adjustments. We use the stochastic gradient descent optimizer and a learning rate of 0.001 to train all networks.
\begin{table}[t]
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{5pt}
\centering
\caption{Ablation Studies}\label{tab1e-ablation}
\begin{tabular}{cccccc}
\hline
\textbf{Method} &  \textbf{Partial AUC}&  \textbf{AUC} & \textbf{R@P90} & \textbf{R@P85} & \textbf{R@P80}\\
\hline
\hline
ResNet50 & $0.710$ & $0.893$ & $41.0\%$  & $61.7\%$  & $74.6\%$ \\
\hline
Clinical ROI & $0.744$ & $0.908$ & $46.1\%$ & $59.2\%$  & $82.1\%$ \\
\hline
Global Fusion & $0.591$ & $0.845$ & $30.2\%$ & $36.0\%$  & $49.8\%$\\
\hline
GHIF & $0.691$ & $0.885$ & $36.7\%$ & $41.0\%$  & $65.0\%$\\
\hline
GHIF (I-Norm) & $0.762$ & $0.907$ & $57.1\%$ & $71.1\%$  & $80.6\%$\\
\hline
GHIF + VSP (I-Norm) & $\mathbf{0.783}$ & $\mathbf{0.913}$ & $\mathbf{63.4\%}$  & $\mathbf{78.3\%}$  & $\mathbf{84.2\%}$\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

For baselines that can output only image-wise predictions, we test against a conventional ResNet50 and also a ResNet-3 with clinical \ac{ROI} pooling. For these two approaches, following clinical practices, we take the median value across the image-wise predictions to produce a study-wise prediction. All subsequent study-wise baselines are then built off the ResNet-3 with clinical \ac{ROI} pooling. We first test the global feature fusion of \eqref{eqn:hvf}, but only train the ResNet-3 with all available images in a \ac{US} study. In this way, it follows the spirit of Liu \textit{et al.}{}'s global fusion strategy~\cite{liu2019ultrasound}. To reveal the impact of our hetero-fusion training strategy that uses different random combinations of \ac{US} images per epoch, we also test two \ac{HVF} variants, one using batch-normalization and one using instance-normalization. The latter helps measure the importance of using proper normalization strategies to manage the instability of \ac{HVF}'s batch statistics. Finally, we test our proposed model which incorporates \ac{VSP} on top of \ac{HVF} and clinical \ac{ROI} pooling.

\textbf{Evaluation Protocols.} The problem setup is binary classification, \textit{i.e.},{} identifying patients with moderate to severe liver fibrosis, which are the patient cohorts requiring intervention. While we report full \acp{AUC}, we primarily focus on operating points within a useful range of specificity or precision. Thus, we  evaluate using partial \acp{AUC} that only consider false positive rates within $0$ to $30\%$  because higher values lose their practical usefulness. Partial \acp{AUC} are normalized to be within a range of $0$ to $1$. We also report recalls at a range of precision points (\acs{R@P90}, \acs{R@P85}, \acs{R@P80}) to reveal the achievable sensitivity at high precision points. We report mean values and mean graphs across all cross-validation folds.

\textbf{Results.} Tab.~\ref{tab1e-ablation} presents our \ac{AUC}, partial \ac{AUC} and recall values, whereas Fig.~\ref{fig:aucs} graphs the partial \acp{ROC}. Several conclusions can be drawn. First, clinical \ac{ROI} pooling produces significant boosts in performance, validating our strategy of forcing the network to focus on important regions of the image.
Second, not surprisingly, global fusion without training with random combinations of images, performs very poorly, as only presenting all study images during training severely limits the data size and variability, handicapping the model.
\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=.7\textwidth]{figures/Figure_1.pdf}
    \caption{Partial \acs{ROC} curves are graphed, with corresponding partial \acsp{AUC} found in the legend. Partial \acs{AUC} scores have been normalized to range from $0-1$. Both \acsp{ROC} and \acsp{AUC} correspond to mean measures taken across the cross-validation folds.}
    \label{fig:aucs}
\end{figure}
For instance, compared to variants that train on individual images, global fusion effectively reduces the training size by about a factor of $10$ in our dataset. In contrast, the \ac{HVF} variants, which train with the combinatorial number of random combinations of images, not only avoids drastically reducing the training set size, but can effectively increase it. Importantly, as the table demonstrates, using an appropriate choice of instance normalization is crucial in achieving good performance with \ac{HVF}. Although not shown, switching to instance normalization did not improve performance for the image-wise or global fusion models. The boosts in \ac{HVF} performance is apparent in the partial \ac{AUC} and recalls at high precision points, underscoring the need to analyze results at appropriate operating points. Finally, adding the \ac{VSP} provides even further performance improvements, particularly in \acs{R@P80}-\acs{R@P90} values, which see a roughly $4-7\%$ increase over \ac{HVF} alone. This indicates that \ac{VSP} can significantly enhance the recall at the very demanding precision points necessary for clinical use. In total, compared to a conventional classifier, the enhancements we articulate contribute to roughly $8\%$ improvements in partial \acp{AUC} and $22\%$ in \acs{R@P90} values. Table 1 of our supplementary material also presents \acp{AUC} when only choosing to input one particular view in the model during inference. We note that performance is highest when all views are inputted into the model, indicating that our pipeline is able to usefully exploit the information across views. Our supplementary also includes liver segmentation results and success and failure cases for our system.

\section{Conclusion}
We presented a principled and effective pipeline for liver fibrosis characterization from \ac{US} studies, proposing several innovations: (1)  clinical \ac{ROI} pooling to discourage the network from focusing on spurious image features; (2) \ac{HVF} to manage any arbitrary number of images in the \ac{US} study in both training and inference; and (3) \ac{VSP} to tailor the analysis based on the liver view being presented using ``style''-based parameters. In particular, we are the first to propose a deep global hetero-fusion approach and the first to combine it with \ac{VSP}. Experiments demonstrate that our system can produce gains in partial \ac{AUC} and \acs{R@P90} of roughly $7\%$ and $22\%$, respectively on a dataset of $610$ patient studies. Future work should expand to other liver diseases and more explicitly incorporate other clinical markers, such as absolute or relative liver lobe sizing.

\bibliographystyle{splncs04}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


During a ceremony that took place in Tripoli, His Excellency, the Ambassador of Germany to Libya, Mr. Oliver Owcza, and The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Libya Resident Representative, Mr. Sultan Hajiyev, signed an agreement to increase Germany's contribution to the Stabilization Facility for Libya (SFL), now Stronger for Libya, by further 2.5 million euros. Also present at the signing were the co-chairs of the Facility's Board, Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Libya, Ms. Maria Ribeiro and the SFL's chief Libyan counterpart, Hon. Minister of Planning, Dr. Taher Jehaimi.
Germany, which helped launch of the multi-donor initiative in 2016, has supported it ever since, and is the largest contributor of the Facility. The SFL recently announced a new strategy aimed at strengthening the legitimate and internationally recognized state authorities and fostering national unity for all Libyans.
After this new contribution, the funding committed by the German Government to the SFL totals 13.5 million euros.
Since April 2016, SFL has provided quick rehabilitation of critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, boosted the capacity of municipalities and the engagement between the central government and municipalities, as well as supported local governments to develop conflict management processes.
So far, approximately two million people are benefitting from services restored by the Facility in Benghazi, Kikla, Ubari, Sebha, Sirt, Bani Walid and Greater Tripoli. The new SFL—Stronger for Libya will continue to enhance the capacities of the country to deliver services to its citizens, now giving an effective voice to women and youth, and ensuring that local strategies flow from, are linked to, and contribute to reaching the national goal of recovery and stabilization.


Protection of the elderly has been tradition in Greece from the classical times. Nowadays due to the financial crisis many Greek families are no longer able to effectively help and support their elders. The role of nursing homes has therefore become significant.


text:
Tag Archives: Gabriel Oak
The surprising pro-masculinity message in the "Far From the Madding Crowd" film
Man helping a woman with proper handgun marksmanship
So, I have about a half-dozen older and/or experienced Christian women who advise me and assist me in various ways. The wisest and most experienced is calm and thoughtful Dina. She has a very stressful job dealing with demanding women, and what she admires most in men is "masculinity", which she defines as a man's ability to tell a woman what is right and wrong, what God expects from her, what she should be doing with her life, and guiding her and providing for her through the steps to get there.
What makes Dina angry is when a man makes a fool of himself for youth and beauty, abdicating his role as moral and spiritual leader because of attraction / lust. According to Dina, men who have self-control think about what a woman should do that is morally right, with the goal of her producing a return for God. Men who are swayed by youth and beauty are willing to give up that leadership role in exchange for attention and/or sex.
So, with that said, Dina asked me to watch a recently-made movie called "Far From the Madding Crowd", based on a novel by Thomas Hardy. I immediately said "no" because I know about Thomas Hardy from Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where he presents Tess as the helpless victim of Providence. I really hate that view of women, where they can do reckless, selfish things and then blame everyone but themselves for the destructive consequences of their own free-will decisions. But Dina said "wasn't I right about the debate between David Robertson and Matt Dillahunty?" I said yes, and watched the movie. And of course, she was right, as she almost always is. This movie is a punch in the face to the radical feminism that seems to have infected so many young women, even in the church.
Here is a review of the movie by Rebekah, posted at her blog. Unfotunately, the post has been deleted, but here is an excerpt.
Rebekah writes:
What does this 19th century tale offer to modern audiences? This latest rendering emphasizes something actually surprising and unexpected given that it is made in our age of radical feminism. It is Gabriel Oak's character that shines the most, not the proto-feminist Bathsheba. […]In Bathsheba and Gabriel we see how men and women support one another in such a way as to ensure a flourishing in any role that fate might thrust on them.
[…]The relationship between Gabriel and Bathsheba, though unequal in earthly terms of authority and wealth, is one of mutual dependence. We see Oak taking on a role of both counselor and conscience with Bathsheba – roles that in her striving towards independence she struggles to admit her need for. She is not unlike the modern feminist in this regard, nor is she unlike all of us in our relationship with the Lord. Her struggle is best seen in the various times she repels Gabriel only to find herself in desperate situations in which only he can help. The filmmakers' clever use of a recurring theme of Bathsheba galloping after Gabriel on a horse when he is needed is particularly moving (and surprising) here. In the end, the film resists the urge to pander to our more extreme modern views on what women require to thrive.
Gabriel Oak also seems to be an embodiment of the biblical virtue of selflessness. We see in his actions towards Bathsheba the Philippians admonition to refrain from "being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity," but rather "in humility, be moved to treat one another as more important than yourself." Indeed, vanity itself can be seen as a fateful character flaw of every major character apart from Gabriel. He alone is able to move past rejection and carry on. In fact, he is required to go so far as to be under the authority of the very woman who rejected his offer of marriage and, despite his continuing affections for her, witness her being courted and then married by another far less worthy man, Frank Troy. No other major character is able to accomplish this challenge to their pride. Though Bathsheba does eventually overcome the rejection of her husband, she only does so after tremendous tragedy and with the selfless and steady support of Gabriel.
Gabriel respects her independence, but, like a good shepherd, stays close by to protect and guide her. Though he cannot protect her from her free-will choices, he does warn her. He then remains faithful to her in the midst of the trouble she brings upon herself. In this, he is not unlike our God, for he allows her to stray, all the while letting her know of a better course when asked. And, she does ask.
In an important scene at a party, where Bathsheba must decide whether or not to marry a particularly obsessive suitor, when she asks, "Tell me what to do, Gabriel," he simply tells her to "Do what is right." Is that not like our Lord? Gentle shepherd, indeed, for our wild, independent hearts. In this, I see Gabriel as most suitable for the role as the husband written of in the epistle to the Ephesians. He loves Bathsheba "just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her…"
Men and women both struggle with self-centeredness, but men usually work themselves out of it by studying hard things in school, and doing hard work that pays. Men have a natural desire to provide for others, and it is actually a duty laid out for them in the Bible. As a result of studying and working at things they don't like, men typically are better at resisting their feelings and desires. In fact, if you ever want to make a woman less self-centered and emotional, leading her to study STEM and work a demanding job is a good plan. Dina has multiple STEM degrees, and a very difficult, challenging work history.
I would be suspicious of men who don't prioritize providing, (as in 1 Tim 5:8), because working and saving gives a man practical experience at self-denial. When a man gets accustomed to working to share with others, it helps helps him to lead a woman to do the same: deny her feelings and desires, and make prudent decisions that will allow her to love and serve others – including God – in a sustainable way. Over the long-term, this practice of effective, self-sacrificial love will be worth more to the woman than the short-term pursuit of fun and thrills. To provide for a woman means to look into her future, and make a decision today to set aside something that will help her to deal with what the future has in store for her.
Dina's advice to young women
I asked Dina to take a look at the draft of this post before I hit "Schedule" and Dina said:
What I would advise to all young women is not to expect a Gabriel Oak to be waiting for you at the end of your reckless years of hooking up, partying and wasting your youth on fun and men who have no desire to lead you to God or guide you to goodness. Don't expect the hot stud that your friends approve of to turn into someone with the character of Oak with the magic powers of your premarital sex life. Find a man who doesn't give in to your every whim, because if he does, you will only resent him for it, and blame him, for being what you thought you wanted him to be. Find a man who leads, one who demonstrates self control, self denial, who can provide and protect. And most importantly, respect him for doing it.
Sound advice from the Dina, young ladies. By the way, Dina's favorite drama is the BBC production of "North and South" from 2004. I also give it a 10/10.
ChastityChivalryComplementarianComplementarianismEphesiansFar From the Madding CrowdFeminismFeministGabriel OakHusbandMasculineMasculinityMoral LeaderProtectorProviderSelf-ControlSelf-DenialSpiritual LeaderWifeWisdom
Here is a review of the movie by Rebekah, posted at her blog.
A man leading a woman upward: another in a series of posts designed to defeat feminism
So, with that said, Dina asked me to watch a recent movie called "Far From the Madding Crowd", based on a novel by Thomas Hardy. I immediately said "no" because I know about Thomas Hardy from Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where he presents Tess as the helpless victim of Providence. I really hate that view of women, where they can do reckless, selfish things and then blame everyone but themselves for the destructive consequences of their own free-will decisions. But Dina said "wasn't I right about the debate between David Robertson and Matt Dillahunty?" I said yes, and watched the movie. And of course, she was right, as she almost always is. This movie is a punch in the face to radical feminism, and the leading man is indeed a masculine leader, according to Dina's definition of masculinity.
Here is a review of the movie by another lady I admire, Rebekah, up at her blog "The Thoughtful Christian Parent".
Men and women both struggle with self-centeredness, but men usually work themselves out of it by studying hard things in school, and doing hard work that pays. Men have a natural desire to provide for others, and it is actually a duty laid out for them in the Bible. As a result of studying and working at things they don't like, men typically are better at resisting their feelings and desires. In fact, if you ever want to make a woman less self-centered and emotional, leading her to study STEM and work a demanding job is a good plan. Both Dina and Rebekah – like all of my female advisors – have STEM backgrounds, and demanding work histories.
I would be suspicious of men who don't prioritize providing, especially as they get older, because it is the experience of self-denial and endurance that helps a man to want to lead a woman to do the same: deny her feelings and desires, and make prudent decisions that will allow her to love and serve others – including God – in a sustainable way. Over the long-term, this practice of effective, self-sacrificial love will be worth more to the woman than the short-term pursuit of fun and thrills. And men know this – we can look ahead and see where a woman needs to be, and then coach her on the interim steps, however difficult those may seem in the moment.
Sound advice from the Dina, young ladies. By the way, Dina's favorite drama is the BBC production of "North and South" from 2004. I also give it a 10/10. If you're looking for a good movie to get for Christmas, I recommend asking for that one.
Rebekah's comments on the post
Rebekah wrote to me privately to react to the post:
I think you've touched on something important that's a pitfall for women today – and really, men, too, but maybe less so – we live in a time of radical autonomy PLUS radical "feelings" orientation. Yes, I agree, women might be more prone to being affected by these because we do tend to be more feelings oriented. Plus, the pendulum has swung w.r.t. women's rights compared to Hardy's day.
Yet, can I say that from my virtuous single women friends I hear that it is hard to find a man that acts like a grownup? They are finding that many men watch porn and play video games after work each evening. They are not being responsible with their hearts – porn WILL affect their marriage one day. It's a huge temptation for them. I think this is a major pitfall that men face today.
And, notice that each of these pitfalls – of men and women – feed and reinforce the other.
I would recommend STEM for everyone since the humanities have become so radicalized. I wanted to be an English major, as well, but my father wouldn't let me because of the leftist values in those departments. STEM is a much safer bet and much surer return for the $$ spent.
That's a generalization, though. I have a friend that majored in English at Hillsdale – a very conservative university. She's amazing and brilliant. So, there are exceptions – I am sure you'd agree.
I am glad you liked the movie. And, I agree "North and South" is excellent – one of my favorite books and movies.
There are exceptions, I do agree.
Finally, I have some advice for Christian men. If you pick women who will advise you, don't pick women who just want attention and control over you. Pick women like Dina who understand your male nature and will attempt to persuade you with facts and arguments, not feelings and sex appeal. And whatever you do, don't marry someone who cannot communicate and disagree with you in an analytical way. That becomes a nightmare when they have the leverage of no-fault divorce to hold over you.


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Dagaalty (2020)
Directed by: Vijay Anand
Stars: Santhanam, Rittika Sen, Yogi Babu, Radha Ravi, Santhana Bharathi, Rekha, Namo Narayanan, Manobala, Brahmanandam, Scarlett Mellish Wilson
Streaming Date: 29 Apr 2020
Dagaalty is a Tamil language comedy film starring Santhanam in the lead. The movie opened with poor reviews on January 31st, 2020. The basic storyline of Dagaalty is very simple and done to death variety. However, the take-off is different, even though farfetched and is the only interesting creative aspect of the movie. A multi-billionaire from Mumbai, Vijay Samrat (Tarun Arora) draws the picture of a girl. He asks his goons to search for the girl in the painting throughout the country. Whoever brings her to him gets ten crores as a gift. When the information reaches Guru (Santhanam), he finds the girl and takes her to Mumbai. Once handed over to Vijay Samrat, Guru realizes the mistake that he has done. How he manages to save her from Samrat by entering his house is the overall plot. Vijay Anand directs the movie. He also provides the story and has written the film. Ritika Sen is the heroine in the entertainer. Radha Ravi, Manobala, Stunt Silva, Yogi Babu plays the vital comedic cum supporting parts whereas Brahmanandam makes a short appearance, as well. Vijay Narain provides the music. https://youtu.be/bRpl_g66gZs
Pitta Kathalu on Netflix: Packed with Known Faces and Novel Themes
Dagaalty


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I thought you might like to know that Amanda Vickery will be giving some lectures in England in relation to her new book, Behind Closed Doors. Here is a link to her web page where she has kindly included my review of her book among much more exualted reviewers!
There will be one next week at The Georgian Group premises at 6 Fiotzroy Square,(which some of you may recognise as being used for some of the location filming of the BBCs production of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South )but sadly, this ,I a now informed , is fully booked.
Snow permitting I will be attending the one Professor Vickery is giving at Fairfax House, York, on the 18th March which is part of the York Literature Festival and at the same time I hope to be able to undertake some research into the Knight family in and around South Yorkshire..
Have a lovely time, Julie, and enjoy your Knight family research also (as if you had to be TOLD!); looking forward to the results of both.
I'm going mob handed so the Knight research – in South Yorkshire- should be fine.
I cannot wait to hear your reports. I will do my part with the weather gods to ensure that nothing gets in the way of your journey!
I am pea green with envy — I'd love to attend that lecture, but it's a bit far from New York . . . Can't wait to hear your report, as well as any Knight family secrets you manage to uncover!
Lets hope I uncover some interesting ones! I'd love you to be able to attend that lecture with my husband and me too ;-)What fun we should all have….
pea green with envy and gazing at my unsigned copy of her new book…..sigh…..
Oh yes! My husband is making snide comments about the title–what Does go on behind closed doors, my dear?–but I'm reading it slowly to prolong the pleasure.
I can thoroughly recommend her new book too, Julie; Behind Closed Doors is thoroughly splendid. Easier to read than The Gentleman's Daughter. Professor Vickery's style is so much more polished and accessible this time.


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Casa do Caminho Abrigo is an orphanage that was founded in 1982. It is situated in Xerém, Brazil. Casa do Caminho provides shelter and complementary education to give children and adolescents, living in a risky situation (mainly between 4 and 18 years), a chance for a better future. The children and adolescents arrive at Casa do Caminho through the juvenile court and foster care (). The orphanage home gets its financial support mainly from Casa do Caminho Language Centre, Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro.

Casa do Caminho Abrigo offers a wide variety of learning opportunities for children and adolescents in vulnerable situations while the organization maintains itself by offering products and services.

References

Orphanages
Child-related organisations in Brazil

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia