(RNN) – Large protests were held in New York City, Chicago and other parts of the country on Thursday from people demanding that special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation not be interfered with by new acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker.
The most visible of the protests took place in Manhattan, where what appeared to be hundreds of people marched downtown, along Fifth Avenue on which Trump Tower sits, into Times Square, and ultimately to Union Square.
The protesters carried signs that said "Hands Off Mueller" and "Protect Mueller" and the hashtag #ProtectMueller trended on Twitter.
In other cities across the country, people posted pictures of their own gatherings under the #ProtectMueller banner, from Massachusetts to Florida to Texas.
Activists had called for protests the day before, in the wake of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions' resignation that left Whitaker in charge of the special counsel investigation.
From the investigation's outset until Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had been its official overseer.


text:
Q: Changing Series/List of OrderedDicts to Pandas DataFrame So I have a dataframe of 533,668 active business registries from the County Assessor's office in an excel spreadsheet. I want to get the Addresses (currently all in one column) broken up into the AddressNumber, StreetName, StreetType, UnitNumber, City, State, etc., and I have a library (pyusaddress), which can parse through the column. I used
`def clean_address(row):
    try:
        prep_address = usaddress.tag(row)
        address = prep_address[0]
    except usaddress.RepeatedLabelError as e :
        print(e.parsed_string)
        print(e.original_string)
        address = 'Duplicate Address'
    except TypeError:
        address = "Invalid Address"
    return address

address_list = active_businesses['STREET ADDRESS'].apply(clean_address)`

The problem with this is that I get a list of OrderedDicts, which I then need to parse through to get a dataframe. I tried a for loop, but it was incredibly slow, so I wanted to know if anyone had any better ideas?

A: the apply method is basically a for loop under the hood. You may get a better performance throught the np.vectorize method which works pretty much the same and has given me a better performance in the past. Refer to this post Performance of Pandas apply vs np.vectorize to create new column from existing columns
Regarding OrderedDicts there is nothing much you can do than try to parse it in a efficient way, maybe this thread can help you in that sense How to create a Pandas DataFrame from a list of OrderedDicts?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Colour printing, scanning, and copying can be done by a small office or a busy household using the Lexmark X2240. This all-in-one entry-level device is good for basic office applications on a variety of media, but has been discontinued by Lexmark and criticised by users for its sub-par speed and mediocre quality.
This compact device weighs 4.1kg and measures only 163mm tall, 308mm deep, and 445mm wide. The standard input capacity is good for 100 pages of standard paper, and PC connectivity is possible via high-speed USB 2.0. The Lexmark X2240 is integrated with thermal inkjet technology that uses the 4-colour inkjet system. The flatbed CIS scanner is located on top of the small control panel to the right-hand corner.
The Lexmark X2240 multifunction printer supports many types and sizes of media, allowing users to get creative with their printouts and colourful projects. The X2240 is fairly quiet and does not emit disruptive noise. Black ink is a standard, so users do not need to swap ink cartridges. The Lexmark X2240 is also praised for its high resolution printing at up to 4800x1200dpi in colour and 2400x1200dpi in monochrome, which makes text look sharp and crisp.
The Lexmark X-2240 may not be the best colour printer because of the photo print quality and the sluggish print speeds at only 7ppm in draft colour. Text print speeds are average, clocking in at only 13ppm in black-and-white. The scanner's quality could use improvement, too, and the copier could be faster. The Lexmark X2240 inkjet printer cannot be shared by a small group because of the absence of built-in networking options.


If you have a question about your registration, transcript, courses, course descriptions, veterans' educational benefits, grades, graduation, diplomas – You are in the right place!
The Office of Student Records places service to students, faculty, administrators and staff first among its priorities. Personalized attention and a commitment to effective and efficient service are important values in the administration of the Office of Student Records. The Office of Student Records is the only "records" office authorized to issue academic transcripts and diplomas. Other services provided include: conducting system training for new faculty and staff; providing support for colleges in setting up their term course offerings; assisting the colleges and students with registration; grade reporting; scheduling classes into the space available in the general classroom pool; continually verifying the accuracy of all system data; verifying student enrollment status; creating and disseminating standard and specialized reports to the colleges and departments for planning and decision-making purposes; reviewing, analyzing and suggesting revisions to current policies and processes or addition of new ones where appropriate; and assisting the with commencement.


The 5th annual Toronto Wings and Wheels Heritage Festival was once again held in Downsview Park by the Canadian Air & Space Museum.
The weather was excellent again all weekend, and the show seems to get better organized every year!
My personal highlight this year was finally able to watch the Aero L-29 Delfin fly!
The replica Silver Dart that flew in February 2009 in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, celebrating 100 years of Canadian flight. This aircraft will be on display at the Canadian Air & Space Museum for the next few years, then it will be moved to its new permanent home in Baddeck.
Of course, there is the "Wheels" portion of this festival!


MASTER CORE EXCEL 2010 TOOLS FORMULAS AND FUNCTIONS FOR BUILDING POWERFUL, RELIABLE SPREADSHEETS!
Excel expert Paul McFedries, author of the MrExcel Library, shows how to use Excel 2010's core features to solve problems and get the answers you need! Using real-world examples, McFedries helps you get the absolute most out of breakthrough Excel 2010 improvement from Sparklines to the brand-new version of Solver. Along the way, you'll discover the fastest, best ways to handle essential day-to-day tasks ranging from generating account numbers to projecting the impact of inflation.Becoming an Excel expert has never been easier! You will find crystal-clear instructions, insider insights, even complete step-by-step projects for building timesheets, projecting cash flow, aging receivables, analyzing defects, and more.
This entry was posted in Reviews on October 15, 2014 by richardmoyer.


text:
import {MdError} from '../errors/error';

/**
 * Exception thrown when attempting to attach a null portal to a host.
 * @docs-private
 */
export class NullPortalError extends MdError {
  constructor() {
      super('Must provide a portal to attach');
  }
}

/**
 * Exception thrown when attempting to attach a portal to a host that is already attached.
 * @docs-private
 */
export class PortalAlreadyAttachedError extends MdError {
  constructor() {
      super('Host already has a portal attached');
  }
}

/**
 * Exception thrown when attempting to attach a portal to an already-disposed host.
 * @docs-private
 */
export class PortalHostAlreadyDisposedError extends MdError {
  constructor() {
      super('This PortalHost has already been disposed');
  }
}

/**
 * Exception thrown when attempting to attach an unknown portal type.
 * @docs-private
 */
export class UnknownPortalTypeError extends MdError {
  constructor() {
      super(
        'Attempting to attach an unknown Portal type. ' +
        'BasePortalHost accepts either a ComponentPortal or a TemplatePortal.');
  }
}

/**
 * Exception thrown when attempting to attach a portal to a null host.
 * @docs-private
 */
export class NullPortalHostError extends MdError {
  constructor() {
      super('Attempting to attach a portal to a null PortalHost');
  }
}

/**
 * Exception thrown when attempting to detach a portal that is not attached.
 * @docs-private
 */
export class NoPortalAttachedError extends MdError {
  constructor() {
      super('Attempting to detach a portal that is not attached to a host');
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Z. Alexander Looby
Zephaniah Alexander Looby (April 8, 1899–March 24, 1972) was a lawyer active in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was born in Antigua, and moved to the United States in 1914. He attended Howard University as an undergraduate where he became a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Looby earned his bachelor's degree from Howard University in 1922. He went on to earn a law degree from Columbia University in 1925 and a doctorate in jurisprudence from New York University in 1926.cite news|title=Looby played vital role in Nashville's integration|work=The Tennessean|first=Jeff|last=Walter|date=March 25, 2003]
After graduating from New York University, Looby moved to Nashville where he took a job as an assistant professor at Fisk University. In May, 1951, Looby was elected to the Nashville, Tennessee City Council, along with another lawyer, Robert Lillard, the first African Americans to be elected since 1911.
He helped found the Kent College of Law in Nashville, and he defended the students arrested in the Nashville sit-ins. As a result of his support of the students, his house was dynamited on April 19 1960. Neither he nor his wife were harmed in the bombing.
Looby died on March 24, 1972, at Hubbard Hospital after a prolonged period of illness. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Nashville.
In 1976, the government of Nashville named a new library and community center in Looby's honor. In 1982, the Nashville Bar Association posthumously awarded him membership, which had been refused him in the 1950s.
*Sarvis, Will. (2003). "Leaders in the Court and the Community: Z. Alexander Looby, Avon N. Williams, Jr., and the Legal Fight for Civil Rights in Tennessee, 1940-1970", "Journal of African American History" 88:1 (Winter 2003): 42-58.
Puchong-Sungai Besi Highway
Transfer of training
Alexander MacDonell — Alexander MacDonell † Catholic Encyclopedia ► Alexander MacDonell First Bishop of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, b. 17 July 1760, at Inchlaggan in Glengarry, Scotland; d. 14 January, 1840, at Dumfries, Scotland. His early education was… … Catholic encyclopedia
Nashville sit-ins — Nashville s sit in campaign targeted downtown lunch counters such as this one at Walgreens drugstore. The Nashville sit ins, which … Wikipedia
Timeline of African-American Civil Rights Movement — African American topics History Atlantic slave trade · Maafa Slavery in the United States Military history of African Americans … Wikipedia
Coretta Scott King — Speaking in Nigeria in 2003, age 75. Born April 27, 1927(1927 04 27) Heiberger, Alabama, U.S.[1] … Wikipedia
List of people from Tennessee — The following is a list of prominent people who were born in the U.S. state of Tennessee, live in Tennessee, or for whom Tennessee is a significant part of their identity:A*Roy Acuff (1903–1992), musician; born in Maynardville *Charlie Adams;… … Wikipedia
Civil rights movement — See also: Protests of 1968 and African American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it… … Wikipedia
Jesse Jackson — For Illinois s 2nd district Congressman, see Jesse Jackson, Jr.. Jesse Jackson … Wikipedia
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — Abbreviation NAACP … Wikipedia
Rosa Parks — For other uses, see Rosa Parks (disambiguation). Rosa Parks Rosa Parks in 1955, with Martin Luther King, … Wikipedia
African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) — American Civil Rights Movement redirects here. For the earlier period, see African American Civil Rights Movement (1896–1954). Prominent figures of the African American Civil Rights Movement. Clockwise from top left: W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X,… … Wikipedia

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: QTreeView - Sort and Filter a model I am trying to create a QTreeView which displays some sorted information. To do this I use a QSortFilterProxyModel between the view and my model.
The problem is that I want to limit the number of rows to the first n rows (after sorting). The filter function from the model receives the original sourceRow so I cannot use it.
I've tried chaining two QSortFilterProxyModel: the first for the sorting and the second for the filtering. But it seems that the second proxymodel(filtering) doesn't receive the rows sorted....
Is there another way to do it?
Has anyone use this technique(chaining of 2 proxy models) and it works?
thank you
EDIT:
I've tried with the rowCount and it doesn't work.
I've also tried to chain 2 proxy models but the problem is that the view calls the sort function for the model it receives. So if the first proxy sorts and the second filters the sort will be called on the filter model and the data won't be sorted.
EDIT2: I've looked into the qt source code and the filtering is done before sorting, so in the filterAcceptsRow() I don't know any sorting order.

A: Just out of curiousity, have you tried overriding the rowCount method and just return 25 (or whatever n is in your case)?  It might be as simple as that... well, if you'll always have at least n items.
Otherwise, you could try chaining the models.  I don't know why it wouldn't work, but I've never tried something like it myself.

A: After trying a number of overcomplicated ways to solve this I've done a small hack for my problem: after I insert/remove a row I call setRowHidden to hide the first n rows.
This is not the most elegant solution and is particular for my needs, but I am unable to find a better alternative.
I like to mention that on gtk, because the filter and the sort proxy models are separated, this can be done fairly easy.
I'm still hoping someone can provide a better solution to this.


text:
Music Post No Bills
The rise of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival
Miguel Zenon
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, founded in 2007, has never pretended to be comprehensive either geographically or stylistically (the majority of the performers play variations on postbop, which is "mainstream" to most ears), but it's always presented what might be the best single-day opportunity to brush up Chicago's jazz scene. The free multivenue event is consistently loaded with talent, but this year, under the hand of new director Kate Dumbleton, it's even better. The fest now spans two days, with five sets on Sunday in addition to well over 30 on Saturday; the bill also includes some relatively musically adventurous acts, as well as a number of local groups that live and (usually) work outside the south-side scene (among them Sun Rooms and the Zach Brock Trio). There are also a few nonlocals on the schedule, including superb trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, who leads a quintet on Sunday afternoon at 1 PM, and remarkable Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenon, who plays a rare solo set on Saturday night at Rockefeller Chapel.
Zenon, a 2008 MacArthur fellow, has focused most of his creative energies lately on ambitious, programmatic efforts, including a series of recordings recasting musical traditions of his homeland and "Puerto Rico Nació en Mi: Tales From the Diaspora," a multimedia work exploring similar ideas. Earlier this summer he released a collaborative album with French pianist Laurent Coq called Rayuela (Sunnyside), which takes its name and inspiration from a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Though elements from the story were used to compose the music, there aren't any clear references to place-rooted styles in the songs (the story happens in Buenos Aires and Paris), but they're terrific by any standard. The music features a versatile band, with Dana Leong doubling on cello and trombone and Dan Weiss alternating between trap kit and tabla, which gives the music a broader palette. Below you can check out "La Muerte de Rocamadour," one of Zenon's compositions.
La Muerte de Rocamadour
I don't know if he's planning any particular slant to his solo concert, which closes Saturday night's activities at 11 PM, but he's never given a solo recital in Chicago before, and the gorgeous high-ceilinged interior of the Rockefeller ought to be a simpatico setting. Also worth catching on Saturday: Chicago native Greg Ward presenting the local debut of his rugged trio Phonic Juggernaut (with drummer Damion Reed) at 2:30 PM, cellist Tomeka Reid leading a trio with bassist Joshua Abrams and guitarist Matt Schneider at 5:30 PM, singer Dee Alexander debuting her Evolution Arkestra (a merging her mainstream band with her more exploratory Evolution Ensemble) at 7 PM, and drummer Dana Hall leading a quartet (with reedist Geof Bradfield, bassist Clark Sommers, and vibist Justin "Justefan" Thomas) through a program of Andrew Hill music at 9 PM. Of course, the close proximity of the various stages and the caliber of the talent makes wandering around Hyde Park at will just as worthwhile. The full lineup, show times, and venue locations are at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival website.
Music Post No Bills Hyde Park Jazz Festival Miguel Zenón Kate Dumbleton Wycliffe Gordon jazz Greg Ward Sun Rooms Dee Alexander Dana Hall Tomeka Reid Zach Brock Laurent Coq La Muerte de Rocamadour Rayuela Audio


"... Greedy feature selection for glycan ..."
"... ● Inference using sampling ● Learning an HMM with sampling ● From the finite HMM to the infinite HMM ● Recent developments (in sampling and modeling) ● Applications to speech and language processing ● Focus on unsupervised learning for discrete distributions 3 Graham Neubig – Non-parametric Bayesian ..."
The two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet distribution derived from a stable subordinator.
"... The two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet distribution, denoted pd(ff; `), is a distribution on the set of decreasing positive sequences with sum 1. The usual Poisson-Dirichlet distribution with a single parameter `, introduced by Kingman, is pd(0; `). Known properties of pd(0; `), including the Markov ..."
"... analysis of the transmission eigenvalue problem for a ..."
"... The Dirichlet distribution and its compound variant, the Dirichlet-multinomial, are two of the most basic models for proportional data, such as the mix of vocabulary words in a text document. Yet the maximum-likelihood estimate of these distributions is not available in closed-form. This paper descr ..."


text:
Blagojevich Aide Resigns; Timing of Charges Stirs Legal Debate
The chief of staff to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) resigned yesterday after wiretapped conversations revealed his role in what prosecutors describe as a sweeping "pay-to-play" scandal, a case that has grown more complicated and legally controversial since the two men were arrested before...
The chief of staff to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) resigned yesterday after wiretapped conversations revealed his role in what prosecutors describe as a sweeping "pay-to-play" scandal, a case that has grown more complicated and legally controversial since the two men were arrested before…


We know that some foundries continue to successfully use Quiptec Mold Manipulators that are some twenty-years old. However, a foundry is a harsh environment, and from time to time an upgrade or refurbishing is ideal. Quiptec takes pride in undertaking such work.


On July 1 last year, Maharaja's college came to national spotlight when a student, Abhimanyu (who goes by only one name), 20, was murdered within the college premises after a row over political posters turned violent. Even though the college is known for its fervent campus politics, this was the first time in its history that a person was killed on campus.
Rahul Gandhi deciding to contest from Wayanad has been encouraging for KSU members in Maharaja's college.
In "central", the open space located in the middle of Maharaja's college, an erstwhile royal palace facing the Arabian Sea, is the malakha kulam or angel's pond. This is a rather small pond with a curiously sculpted angel standing in the middle, with its arms raised to the skies. One of those arms holds a communist flag — a clear declaration of who holds the reigns in this college, which has long been considered the epitome of Kerala politics.
Located in Cochin, Maharaja's college was set up in 1845 by the Royal Kingdom of Cochin as an English school, to enable members of the royal family to communicate with Englishmen who were coming to the city then. Since then, it has evolved into a multifaceted arts and science institute, becoming a full-fledged college in 1875 and acquiring its current name in 1925, educating many thousands of students every year in its undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Even though colleges and universities across the state are known for their strong student politics, Maharaja's leads the pack.
Among the college alumni are the former defence minister, AK Antony, Swami Chinmayananda, founder member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Chinmaya Mission, and TM Thomas Isaac, a prominent leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Kerala's current finance minister.
On July 1 last year, Maharaja's college came to national spotlight when a student, Abhimanyu (who goes by only one name), 20, was murdered within the college premises after a row over political posters turned violent. Even though the college is known for its fervent campus politics, this was the first time in its history that a person was killed on campus. Abhimanyu belonged to the left-wing Students' Federation of India (SFI) and is considered a martyr by Left parties across the state and the country at this point. The political divisions within the campus have deepened since his death.
The Student's Federation of India (SFI), which is the student's wing of the CPI (M), holds office in the college today. It has done so for the last 35 years, even though the Kerala Student's Union (KSU), the Indian National Congress' students' wing in Kerala, has a prominent presence on campus. Both KSU and SFI remain true to their parent parties' ideologies.
In the student election held in September 2018, SFI won the posts of chairman, vice chairman and general secretary with margins of 800 votes or above.
The college has 2800 students in all. It also won all 14 seats in the college panel. Other political outfits such as the Akhila Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), the RSS' student affiliate, has a presence in the college as well, but only a handful of students profess allegiance to the party. "I think the BJP and ABVP gained a lot of support during the recent protests related to women entering the Ayyappa temple. While it might not affect campus politics, I think it will definitely have an effect on the upcoming elections, especially here in Kerala.
Things are slowly beginning to change," says Vishnu Sharma, a second-year political science student and one of the more vocal members of the ABVP.
With general elections due in days, student members of all political parties have been campaigning within the college campus as well as outside. Both the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the United Democratic Front (UDF), led by the CPI (M) and INC respectively, have put up relatively young leaders to contest for this high-profile Lok Sabha seat, Ernakulam (the central part of the city of Kochi). The candidates, P Rajeev of the LDF and Hibi Eden of the UDF, were student leaders in their college days and served as state secretaries for the SFI and KSU before moving up their parent party's ranks. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), meanwhile, has asked the Union Minister, KJ Alphons, to contest from here.
While the SFI members have been campaigning for LDF's P Rajeev, some of them are pragmatic about the party's chances at the Centre. "Given the current situation, I hope the Congress comes to power in Delhi, since they are at least better than the BJP. Once the communist party becomes stronger, we hope to challenge these parties in the central level as well, as we do so in Kerala," said Atul Krishna of SFI.
On July 1, 2018, Abhimanyu, a member of SFI, was putting up party posters on the college walls with his "comrades" when his group got into a tussle with members of the Campus Front of India (CFI), an affiliate of the Popular Front of India (PFI), an organisation that was created for the socioeconomic welfare of the Muslim community in India, especially in Kerala. The clashes ended with Abhimanyu being stabbed to death right outside the college gates. A CFI member was arrested, and the party has kept a low profile ever since, on campus and outside.
The murder led to a spurt in political sympathy for SFI and, as a consequence, for the CPI(M) in Kerala. Kerala is infamous for political violence with media reports suggesting that there have been more than 170 political killings in Kerala in the last two decades. With the CPI(M) on one end and the RSS-BJP combine on the other, more than 60 people have been killed in political violence. The INC and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), too, have lost about a dozen members each due to political vendettas.
"It is the Left parties who started all of this political violence. We believe campuses are a field for change and condemn political murders happening anywhere in Kerala," says Al Bilal, member of the CFI from Calicut University. After Abhimanyu's murder, CFI has not been part of active politics in Maharaja's college.
"They are what we call communal terrorists.There is no place for such organisations in our college," says Atul Krishna of SFI when talking about CFI.
A portrait of Abhimanyu occupies pride of place next to a graffiti of Bhagat Singh in the student union office. "We still miss him terribly and hope to carry forward his legacy," says Atul Krishna of SFI.


The "High Pressure Water Jet" (H.P.W.J.) Technology proposed by RubberJet is suitable for the disintegration mainly of medium and large tires ". The "H.P.W.J." Technology for the recycling of ELT it is extremely innovative and completely ecological as it is based on the disintegration of the tires out of use through a high pressure water jet process.
The process of disintegration and recovery of tires out of use of RubberJet is based on the use of equipment that exploits the energy of water at very high pressure (from 2,000 to 3,000 bar) to break up the tires themselves.
From the point of view of product enhancement, the RubberJet process innovation has an important impact especially on the chemical characteristics of the powder, which is "devulcanized" and, as such, with a technological value far higher than the traditional Powder.
The RubberJet plant is a new generation process that uses a "H.P.W.J." technology protected by industrial rights protected at national and international level.
• The ELT is stripped and not shredded, thus obtaining a complete separation of the rubber from the metallic residues.
• Higher purity of the final product materials ( RJP™ and RJG™ ).
• Devulcanization obtained together with the disintegration treatment.
• Absence of fumes and fine dust.
• Reduction of energy costs.
• Very low machine downtime.
• Savings on ordinary maintenance costs.
• 100% Environmental friendly (it is used only water without chemicals agents).
The "High Pressure Water Jet" (H.P.W.J.) technology opens up a completely new market segment, making it possible for the first time in the world to process Truck and OTR tires (eg: earth-moving machines) or special ELT tires (hard rubber ELT) or tracks, two categories of tires whose treatment with traditional systems is today uneconomic.
BE PARTNER WITH US AT YOUR MINING SITE!


wordfreq is a useful dataset of word frequencies in many languages, and a simple Python library that lets you look up the frequencies of words (or word-like tokens, if you want to quibble about what's a word). Version 1.5 is now available on GitHub and PyPI.
wordfreq can rank the frequencies of nearly 400,000 English words. These are some of them.
These word frequencies don't just come from one source; they combine many sources to take into account many different ways to use language.
Some other frequency lists just use Wikipedia because it's easy, but then they don't accurately represent the frequencies of words outside of an encyclopedia. The wordfreq data combines whatever data is available from Wikipedia, Google Books, Reddit, Twitter, SUBTLEX, OpenSubtitles, and the Leeds Internet Corpus. Now we've added one more source: as much non-English text as we could possibly find in the Common Crawl of the entire Web.
We've got enough data to support 9 new languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Norwegian Bokmål, and Romanian.
Korean has been promoted from marginal to full support. In fact, none of the languages are "marginal" now: all 27 supported languages have at least three data sources and a tokenizer that's prepared to handle that language.
We changed how we rank the frequencies of words when data sources disagree. We used to use the mean of the frequencies. Now we use a weighted median.
Using a weighted median of word frequencies is an important change to the data. When the Twitter data source says "oh man you guys 'rt' is a really common word in every language", and the other sources say "No it's not", the word 'rt' now ends up with a much lower value in the combined list because of the median.
Why use only non-English data in the Common Crawl?
Mostly to keep the amount of data manageable. While the final wordfreq lists are compressed down to kilobytes or megabytes, building these lists already requires storing and working with a lot of input.
There are terabytes of data in the Common Crawl, and while that's not quite "big data" because it fits on a hard disk and a desktop computer can iterate through it with no problem, counting every English word in the Common Crawl would involve intermediate results that start to push the "fits on a hard disk" limit. English is doing fine because it has its own large sources, such as Google Books.
A language can be represented in wordfreq when there are 3 large enough, free enough, independent sources of data for it. If there are at least 5 sources, then we also build a "large" list, containing lower-frequency words at the cost of more memory.
There are now 27 languages that make the cut. There perhaps should have been 30: the only reason Czech, Slovak, and Vietnamese aren't included is that I neglected to download their Wikipedias before counting up data sources. Those languages should be coming soon.
Getting wordfreq in your Python environment is as easy as pip install wordfreq. We hope you find this data useful in helping computers make sense of language!
The wordfreq module is an easy Python interface for looking up the frequencies of words. It was originally designed for use cases where it was most important to find common words, so it would list all the words that occur at least once per million words: that's about 30,000 words in English. An advantage of ending the list there is that it loads really fast and takes up a small amount of RAM.
But there's more to know about word frequencies. There's a difference between words that are used a bit less than once in a million words, like "almanac", "crusty", and "giraffes", versus words that are used just a few times per billion, such as "centerback", "polychora", and "scanlations". As I've started using wordfreq in some aspects of the build process of ConceptNet, I've wanted to be able to rank words by frequency even if they're less common than "giraffes", and I'm sure other people do too.
So one big change in wordfreq 1.4 is that there is now a 'large' wordlist available in the languages that have enough data to support it: English, German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. These lists contain all words used at least once per 100 million words. The default wordlist is still the smaller, faster one, so you have to ask for the 'large' wordlist explicitly -- see the documentation.
The best way to get representative word frequencies is to include a lot of text from a lot of different sources. Now there's another source available: the Reddit comment corpus.
Reddit is an English-centric site and 99.2% of its comments are in English. We still need to account for the exceptions, such as /r/es, /r/todayilearned_jp, /r/sweden, and of course, the thread named "HELP reddit turned spanish and i cannot undo it!".
I used pycld2 to detect the language of Reddit comments. In this version, I decided to only use the comments that could be detected as English, because I couldn't be sure that the data I was getting from other languages was representative enough. For example, unfortunately, most comments in Italian on Reddit are spam, and most comments in Japanese are English speakers trying to learn Japanese. The data that looks the most promising is Spanish, and I might decide to include that in a later version.
wordfreq is part of a stack of natural language tools developed at Luminoso and used in ConceptNet. Its data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
Examples in Chinese and British English. Click through for copyable code.
In a previous post, we introduced wordfreq, our open-source Python library that lets you ask "how common is this word?"
Wordfreq is an important low-level tool for Luminoso. It's one of the things we use to figure out which words are important in a set of text data. When we get the word frequencies figured out in a language, that's a big step toward being able to handle that language from end to end in the Luminoso pipeline. We recently started supporting Arabic in our product, and improved Chinese enough to take the "BETA" tag off of it, and having the right word frequencies for those languages was a big part of it.
I've continued to work on wordfreq, putting together more data from more languages. We now have 17 languages that meet the threshold of having three independent sources of word frequencies, which we consider important for those word frequencies to be representative.
The English word list has gotten a bit more robust and a bit more British by including SUBTLEX, adding word frequencies from American TV shows as well as the BBC.
It can fearlessly handle Chinese now. It uses a lovely pure-Python Chinese tokenizer, Jieba, to handle multiple-word phrases, and Jieba's built-in wordlist provides a third independent source of word frequencies. Wordfreq can even smooth over the differences between Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
Greek has also been promoted to a fully-supported language. With new data from Twitter and OpenSubtitles, it now has four independent sources.
In some applications, you want to tokenize a complete piece of text, including punctuation as separate tokens. Punctuation tokens don't get their own word frequencies, but you can ask the tokenizer to give you the punctuation tokens anyway.
We added support for Polish, Swedish, and Turkish. All those languages have a reasonable amount of data that we could obtain from OpenSubtitles, Twitter, and Wikipedia by doing what we were doing already.
When adding Turkish, we made sure to convert the case of dotted and dotless İ's correctly. We know that putting the dots in the wrong places can lead to miscommunication and even fatal stabbings.
The language in wordfreq that's still only partially supported is Korean. We still only have two sources of data for it, so you'll see the disproportionate influence of Twitter on its frequencies. If you know where to find a lot of freely-usable Korean subtitles, for example, we would love to know.
Let's revisit the top 10 words in the languages wordfreq supports. And now that we've talked about getting right-to-left right, let's add a bit of code that makes Arabic show up with right-to-left words in left-to-right order, instead of middle-to-elsewhere order like it came out before.
Wordfreq 1.2 is available on GitHub and PyPI.
Originally posted on September 1, 2015.
Often, in NLP, you need to answer the simple question: "is this a common word?" It turns out that this leaves the computer to answer a more vexing question: "What's a word?"
Let's talk briefly about why word frequencies are important. In many cases, you want to assign more significance to uncommon words. For example, a product review might contain the word "use" and the word "defective", and the word "defective" carries way more information. If you're wondering what the deal is with John Kasich, a headline that mentions "Kasich" will be much more likely to be what you're looking for than one that merely mentions "John".
For purposes like these, it would be nice if we could just import a Python package that could tell us whether one word was more common than another, in general, based on a wide variety of text. We looked for a while and couldn't find it. So we built it.
wordfreq provides estimates of the frequencies of words in many languages, loading its data from efficiently-compressed data structures so it can give you word frequencies down to 1 occurrence per million without having to access an external database. It aims to avoid being limited to a particular domain or style of text, getting its data from a variety of sources: Google Books, Wikipedia, OpenSubtitles, Twitter, and the Leeds Internet Corpus.
The 10 most common words that wordfreq knows in 15 languages. Yes, it can handle multi-character words in Chinese and Japanese; those just aren't in the top 10. A puzzle for Unicode geeks: guess where the start of the Arabic list is.
Those who are familiar with the basics of information retrieval probably have a couple of simple suggestions in mind for dealing with word frequencies.
One is to come up with a list of stopwords, words such as "the" and "of" that are too common to use for anything. Discarding stopwords can be a useful optimization, but that's far too blunt of an operation to solve the word frequency problem in general. There's no place to draw the bright line between stopwords and non-stopwords, and in the "John Kasich" example, it's not the case that "John" should be a stopword.
Another partial solution would be to collect all the documents you're interested in, and re-scale all the words according to their inverse document frequency or IDF. This is a quantity that decreases as the proportion of documents a word appears in increases, reaching 0 for a word that appears in every document.
One problem with IDF is that it can't distinguish a word that appears in a lot of documents because it's unimportant, from a word that appears in a lot of documents because it's very important to your domain. Another, more practical problem with IDF is that you can't calculate it until you've seen all your documents, and it fluctuates a lot as you add documents. This is particularly an issue if your documents arrive in an endless stream.
We need good domain-general word frequencies, not just domain-specific word frequencies, because without the general ones, we can't determine which domain-specific word frequencies are interesting.
The counts of one resource alone tend to tell you more about that resource than about the language. If you ask Wikipedia alone, you'll find that "census", "1945", and "stub" are very common words. If you ask Google Books, you'll find that "propranolol" is supposed to be 10 times more common than "lol" overall (and also that there's something funny going on, so to speak, in the early 1800s).
If you collect data from Twitter, you'll of course find out how common "lol" is. You also might find that the ram emoji "🐏" is supposed to be extremely common, because that guy from One Direction once tweeted "We are derby super 🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏", and apparently every fan of One Direction who knows what Derby Super Rams are retweeted it.
Yes, wordfreq considers emoji to be words. Its Twitter frequencies would hardly be complete without them.
We can't entirely avoid the biases that come from where we get our data. But if we collect data from enough different sources (not just larger sources), we can at least smooth out the biases by averaging them between the different sources.
You have to agree with your wordlist on the matter of what constitutes a "word", or else you'll get weird results that aren't supported by the actual data.
Do you split words at all spaces and punctuation? Which of the thousands of symbols in Unicode are punctuation? Is an apostrophe punctuation? Is it punctuation when it puts a word in single quotes? Is it punctuation in "can't", or in "l'esprit"? How many words is "U.S." or "google.com"? How many words is "お早うございます" ("good morning"), taking into account that Japanese is written without spaces? The symbol "-" probably doesn't count as a word, but does "+"? How about "☮" or "♥"?
The process of splitting text into words is called "tokenization", and everyone's got their own different way to do it, which is a bit of a problem for a word frequency list.
We tried a few ways to make a sufficiently simple tokenization function that we could use everywhere, across many languages. We ended up with our own ad-hoc rule including large sets of Unicode characters and a special case for apostrophes, and this is in fact what we used when we originally released wordfreq 1.0, which came packaged with regular expressions that look like attempts to depict the Flying Spaghetti Monster in text.
But shortly after that, I realized that the Unicode Consortium had already done something similar, and they'd probably thought about it for more than a few days.
Word splitting in Unicode. Not pictured: how to decide which of these segments count as "words".
This standard for tokenization looked like almost exactly what we wanted, and the last thing holding me back was that implementing it efficiently in Python looked like it was going to be a huge pain. Then I found that the regex package (not the re package built into Python) contains an efficient implementation of this standard. Defining how to split text into words became a very simple regular expression... except in Chinese and Japanese, because a regular expression has no chance in a language where the separation between words is not written in any way.
So this is how wordfreq 1.1 identifies the words to count and the words to look up. Of course, there is going to be data that has been tokenized in a different way. When wordfreq gets something that looks like it should be multiple words, it will look them up separately and estimate their combined frequency, instead of just returning 0.
wordfreq supports 15 commonly-used languages, but of course some languages are better supported than others. English is quite polished, for example, while Chinese so far is just there to be better than nothing.
The reliability of each language corresponds pretty well with the number of different data sources we put together to make the wordlist. Some sources are hard to get in certain languages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for example, not much of Twitter is in Chinese. Perhaps more surprisingly, not much of it is in German either.
The word lists that we've built for wordfreq represent the languages where we have at least two sources. I would consider the ones with two sources a bit dubious, while all the languages that have three or more sources seem to have a reasonable ranking of words.
When we were still figuring this all out, we made several 0.x versions of wordfreq that required an external SQLite database with all the word frequencies, because there are millions of possible words and we had to store a different floating-point frequency for each one. That's a lot of data, and it would have been infeasible to include it all inside the Python package. (GitHub and PyPI don't like huge files.) We ended up with a situation where installing wordfreq would either need to download a huge database file, or build that file from its source data, both of which would consume a lot of time and computing resources when you're just trying to install a simple package.
As we tried different ways of shipping this data around to all the places that needed it, we finally tried another tactic: What if we just distributed less data?
We don't care about the frequencies of words that occur less than once per million words. We can just assume all those words are equally informative.
We don't care about, say, 2% differences in word frequency.
Now instead of storing a separate frequency for each word, we group the words into 600 possible tiers of frequency. You could call these tiers "centibels", a logarithmic unit similar to decibels, because there are 100 of them for each factor of 10 in the word frequency. Each of them represents a band of word frequencies that spans about a 2.3% difference. The data we store can then be simplified to "Here are all the words in tier #330... now here are all the words in tier #331..." and converted to frequencies when you ask for them.
Some tiers of word frequencies in English.
This let us cut down the word lists to an entirely reasonable size, so that we can put them in the repository, and just keep them in memory while you're using them. The English word list, for example, is 245 KB, or 135 KB compressed.
But it's important to note the trade-off here, that wordfreq only represents sufficiently common words. It's not suited for comparing rare words to each other. A word rarer than "amulet", "bunches", "deactivate", "groupie", "pinball", or "slipper", all of which have a frequency of about 1 per million, will not be represented in wordfreq.
wordfreq is available on GitHub, or it can be installed from the Python Package Index with the command pip install wordfreq. Documentation can be found in its README on GitHub.
Comparing the frequency per million words of two spellings of "café", in English and French.


Wellcome to the Ebu Access Cast 09. As you will see March was very busy month for many updates in the assistive tech industry, as well as in the European Union which are very important for visually impaired community. Jakob, Mario and Tanja this time prepared many news, demos and the first guest interview for our podcast, so let's jump straight into the action and check what do we have in store for you this time.
Seeing AI got new March update with few very interesting features among which we would recommend detection of objects on the pictures. If you stay untill the end of the episode, you will be able to hear how that sounds in the demo section.
It seams that image recognition thru the artificial intelligence is slowly but surely becoming the trend inside of the assistive tech. Why do we say that? Because Vispero Group prepared new JAWS update for March, and one of its many features is also the possibility of recognising the images. If you haven't updated your version of JAWS for Windows, right now is ideal time to do it.
Spring has come for NVDA users as well because new release 2019.1 just saw the light of day, with almost 50 different improvements since the last official version. Besides many new features added, we would like to point out improved support for MS Office products, especially Office 2016 and Office 365. If you are using one of those products, please test the newest version of NVDA and let us know how do you like it.
Smart devices can be used for many different things, and playing games is definitely one of them. While many sighted people play lots of games on their smart devices, with blind and visually impaired population this is not the case unless the games are designed with accessibility in mind. This time, we bring to you the article about designing and finding the games for Android platform.
If you are happy owner of Google Home check out the following article about possible games which you can play on it.
Many people with different tipes of dissabilities will be happy to hear that European Accessibility Act is behind the corner. Therefor, we are bringing to you news from the European Parliament about it.
The end of February brought up an very interesting article from European Disability Forum with a detailed study about the state of digital accessibility of public government websites around Europe. Unfortunately, European Parliament didn't show up as the best student in class this time.
If you think that you herd everything well than you are very very wrong, because we brought up the first interview for the Ebu Access Cast. We Sat down with Alejandro Moledo from European Disability Forum and talked about the upcoming European Accessibility Act as well as current state of the accessibility of the websites of the European governments. Once more we would like to say a huge thank you for explaining everything to our listeners. We look forward to have you again in the future shows for the upcoming topics.
At the end of this episode Jakob Rosin prepared 2 demos for you, The first is short coverage of KOBOLD VR200 ROBOT vacume cleaner, and second talks about new improvements in Seeing AI.
Do you think you have something to say, well don't be afraid, send us an e-mail or drop us the tweet on our Ebu Access Cast twitter page. We will be back with you in April, but untill than be happy and safe!


I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of this tea for weeks now! I knew I would be in for a treat because it happens every year. Arya has never let me down! When my shipment finally arrived I could hardly wait to tear into it! I opened the bag and was overwhelmed with the aroma of fresh ripe oranges with a subtle floral and nutty accent. As is usually the case with first flush Diamond, there was also a hint of dark chocolate. I am always taken aback by the intoxicating aroma of this exquisite tea!
Arya's Spring Diamond is made in very limited quantities and only by demand so our supply is extremely limited in the best of years. This year, however, first flush was off to a very slow start. There were no Christmas rains followed by drought conditions early in the season. Even as late at March 15th all but one tea garden appeared practically dormant. When the rain finally came it was accompanied by cold, gloomy conditions. Fortunately, the sun finally came out by the end of March to warm things up and by the first of April the tea bushes started to flush. The good news is that we have a first flush Diamond. The bad news is that the limited quantities are even more limited due to the short season.
I first ordered this first flush Diamond in 2014 for my personal collection. I usually go for Arya's famous first flush Ruby, but after experiencing their Spring Diamond I knew I had to have it again! First flush Darjeeling teas are prized for their light brisk flavor that is ever so delicate, yet mildly intense. They are highly aromatic and rich in complexity.
The Arya Estate names all of their teas after precious jewels. It goes without saying that their Spring Diamond is the cream of the crop, the best of the best. Spring Diamond is carefully hand-plucked solely from the prized AV2 cultivar from the highest section of the estate where the slow growth concentrates the juices and nutrients in the leaf resulting in the most complex flavors and aromas. The dry leaf is a bit longer than the normal classic graded Darjeeling first flush leaf, and it has an attractive bloom due to an abundance of fine gold and silver downy hairs on the leaves. The leaves are elongated and wiry, well rolled and twisted in various shades of brown with a hint of green. The profusion of silver and golden tips is evidence of the remarkable handling during processing. The rich aroma of the dry leaf is a complex mixture of ripe oranges laced with dark chocolate and a hint of caramel with floral and nutty undertones.
The infused leaf opens beautifully to reveal the original size of the tea leaf. It has a lively brown color with the golden and silver tips turning a pale yellow. The leaf set of one and two leaves and a bud is fully intact--once again, evidence of the superior handling during processing. The infused leaf has a sweet aroma with a hint of citrus and mint together with complex nutty, floral, and fruity nuances.
The liquor is slightly darker than the classic clonal first flush Darjeelings. Diamond has a light and bright golden brew that is brisk and mildly astringent with a buttery mouthfeel. It is instantly sweet with notes of caramel, mint and citrus together with nutty undertones. It has a long lingering finish that is sweet and minty. All in all, this is definitely a tea to be savored!
Located in the foothills of the Himalayas of northeastern India, Darjeeling is renowned for producing the "Champagne of Black Teas". It is one of the four main tea growing regions in India and, at 6,000 feet, the highest in elevation. Formerly called Sidrabong the Arya Estate (which means "respectable" or "best" in the Indian language) is a relatively small tea garden that was established in the eighteenth century by a group of Buddhist monks, whose original dwelling is preserved on the property to this day. It is fully certified bio-organic and is strongly committed to environmental sustainability. The Estate actually has the distinction of having the first private hydro-power generator in Asia! As a small organic tea garden, Arya's focus has always been on producing artisan teas of exceptional quality.


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Julian Assange trial: Mounting evidence to stretch extradition hearing for up to four weeks
12:08am Dec 20, 2019
The duration of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's extradition trial is set to quadruple as more witnesses come forward and evidence mounts to over 40,000 pages.
The Australian appeared via videolink in Westminster Magistrates Court on Thursday for a case management hearing.
He's been charged in the US with 17 counts of spying and one count of computer hacking in relation to WikiLeaks' release of thousands of classified Pentagon files regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, most of which were allegedly provided by former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
The 48-year-old Assange has been held in London's Belmarsh prison since his sensational April 11 arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had lived in asylum for almost seven years.
Julian Assange. (AAP)
Assange sniffled as he sat unshaven and wearing glasses, a white shirt and a mauve sweater.
Barrister Edward Fitzgerald QC outlined that amid the mounting evidence up to four weeks, rather than the original five days, were needed for his client's trial.
Mr Fitzgerald outlined that there were dossiers of evidence about espionage charges against Assange and evidence relating to Manning.
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There was also psychiatric evidence about his client, about Spanish proceedings regarding alleged spying on Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy and public denouncements of the Australian by members of the US administation.
US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. (EPA)
He said the written evidence already totalled more than 40,000 pages and there would be up to 21 witnesses, 16 of which will likely give evidence in court.
Mr Fitzgerald raised the prospect of further evidence coming to light before the trial.
"There are developments in the proceedings day by day ... we can't say that's the guillotine, that's it," he told the court.
"Given the gravity of the issues and the number of issues, it may well take the full period."
But defence lawyer Clair Dobbin expressed concern about an extension from five days to up to four weeks as lead prosecutor James Lewis QC, who was not present, was unlikely to be available.
"We hadn't understood that it was going to be suggested that four weeks be set aside," she said.
An artist's impression of Julian Assange in court on October 21, 2019. (AAP)
But District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected her suggestion of April 20 as an alternative trial date, saying that the prosecution had been pushing to commence proceedings and that a further delay may "impact the process".
She ordered the prosecution and defence to sort out a trial date before the next directions hearing on February 24.
Property News: 7 tips to keep your indoor plants alive while you're on holiday - domain.com.au


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This New Online Platform Is Giving a Voice to Young Fashion Designers in Arab Nations
By Brooke Bobb
Lisa BouteldjaPhoto: Courtesy of Sarah Ben Romdane / @sarahtatabre
People are inundated with myriad ways to read fashion content online. Outside of what we're overstimulated by on our social media feeds every day, there are countless blogs dedicated to niche personalities and personal style, and hundreds of websites that tell us what to wear and what not to wear, who's copying who on the runways, and which designers are the next big thing. Despite the fact that there seems to be a surplus of ways to digitally digest trends and model info and industry gossip, Tunisian journalist and onetime editor of Style.com/Arabia Sofia Guellaty always felt shortchanged. Frustrated by the fact that the Arab world was underrepresented within the online fashion space, she launched Mille World.
The website officially opened for business in January 2018 as a platform offering fashion, beauty, and lifestyle commentary based on Arab youth culture. Through original reporting, videos, and photo shoots, Guellaty and her team feature subjects ranging from underground movements and skater crews in Dubai to up-and-coming designers who have trained abroad and started businesses in places like Beirut and Amman. Mille editors also pay much attention to what it means to be self-expressive in nations with social and religious constructs that can make doing so seem nearly impossible. Currently on Mille, there is one article titled "The Egyptian Photographer Discovered by Jonathan Anderson" and another called "5 Body-Positive Lingerie Brands You Must Know." Others include "The Rise of the Token Hijabi?" and "A Look Inside Saudi's First Female Focused Street Style Book." Guellaty and her staff, which includes advisers like model Elisa Sednaoui Dellal and European president of Next Models Saif Mahdhi, are aiming to capture the attention of the next generation of Arabs, and just as important, to present them to the rest of the world in a new light.
As Guellaty explains, "We really wanted to create the best content we could ever create for an Arab audience but also from Arabs." She adds, "Who better than me or my female colleagues to explain to you what being a woman in fashion, an Arab woman in fashion, means today? It's a somewhat controversial identity for someone looking in, but being Arab has never truly been explored on a large scale within the digital space."
Guellaty acknowledges that for the vast majority of Europeans and Americans looking to westernized cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the perception of Arab style can often be limited to giant, shiny super-malls and luxury label megastores like Hermès, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton. This is in part because, in those places in particular, there has never been a strong push to create a separate sartorial identity from Europe and the U.S. Drive through Dubai and you won't see many individual boutiques with a focus on local designers. This outlook doesn't just apply to retail either. "We have a Miss Lily's in Dubai," Guellaty notes, referring to the trendy New York hot spot that serves Caribbean food and juice. "Why would we ever have a Miss Lily's in Dubai when you could have a Miss Fatimah's, and it could be so funky and cool?" She adds, "We could do well to not emulate something else."
Identity is the crux of Mille World. Everyone who works for Guellaty resides in the Middle East or northern Africa and is Arab born and raised. No one in the Mille office is afraid to talk about the female body, nor are they reluctant to promote politically outspoken streetwear labels like the Lebanese brand Prince Politique and Kuwait's first streetwear brand RS.
Guellaty is particularly excited about a sister-owned, Amman-based label called Nafsika Skourti. "Their last collection was titled the Lowest Place on Earth," she says. "This is how the Dead Sea is promoted to tourists, and it has a negative connotation, so they wanted to reclaim that narrative."
Guellaty makes a point of showcasing the region's independents. "What I find interesting is that when I ask for integrated content, both global and local labels are asking me to work with these little groups of rappers or skaters in Dubai. That's who they want representing their brands." She adds, "Generally speaking, what I see, in terms of fashion, is that we are breaking away from the clichés more and more. I think we are still very brand loyal, there are a lot of fans here of Balenciaga and Vetements and Off-White, for example, but on the other hand, we're very proud of our local designers. Arab pride is very big right now."
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text:
Phil Tufnell
Question of Sport's ratings plummet after Sue Barker was replaced by Paddy McGuinness
A Question of Sport
Viewings figures for iconic BBC show Question of Sport are reportedly not looking good, two seasons on from Sue Barker famously being given the chop, and replaced with Paddy McGuinness
A Question Of Sport star Matt Dawson 'gutted' to leave show after 17 years
New hosts of A Question of Sport include Paddy McGuinness, Olympian Sam Quek and Strictly Come Dancing's Ugo Monye
New Question of Sport host and two new team captains unveiled in huge BBC shake-up
Sue Barker is leaving Question of Sport along with team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson and a new line-up will take the quiz forward
I'm A Celeb 'blew £500,000 on axed plans for ex-winners to return for 2020 series'
I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here
A string of high profile former I'm A Celeb stars and winners were reportedly lined up - and already social isolating - to feature in the current series before ITV abruptly changed plans
Alex Scott hit by racist trolls after A Question of Sport gig 'confirmation'
Alex Scott
Former England footballer Alex Scott has reportedly been chosen to replace Sue Barker as the host of A Question of Sport but is now facing vile messages from trolls
Alex Scott 'lined up to replace' Sue Barker as A Question of Sport presenter
Classic A Question of Sport presenter Sue Barker will reportedly be replaced by footballer and former Strictly Come Dancing star Alex Scott
Fuming Question of Sport fans demand hosts are reinstated in new petition
Angry fans of Question of Sport, which recently axed host Sue Barker and team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson, have launched a new petition to keep the popular trio onboard
Question of Sport slammed for axing Sue Barker who admits she was 'removed'
A Question of Sport stars Sue Barker , Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell have been axed from the show, leaving fans furious
Question of Sport host Sue Barker 'sad' to be axed from show after 23 years
EXCLUSIVE: The tennis ace will be stepping down from the show, along with team captains Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell, when the BBC 'revamp' the format
Question of Sport major shake-up as Sue Barker, Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell leave show
EXCLUSIVE: Team captains Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell are also following 64-year-old Sue - who earns £200k at the BBC - out of the door in a shock revamp
I'm A Celebrity's past winners - how many do you remember?
Harry Redknapp is the 18th King or Queen of the Jungle since the ITV reality show started back in 2002.
I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here's past winners and where they are now
A real mix of talents have been crowned King or Queen of the jungle over the years, but what happened to them after they headed back home?
Strictly's Graeme Swann reveals his secret ambition if he wasn't a cricketer
Strictly Come Dancing's Graeme Swann has revealed what he would have loved to do if he was not a cricketer - and Zoe Ball was rather confused on It Takes Two
Phil Tufnell reveals all about going off the rails after his mum died
Ex-cricketer-turned-TV-star Phil Tufnell, 52, on being happy with his fame, why men have to open up and going off the rails...
I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here past winners - where are they now? From Tony Blackburn to Scarlett Moffatt
A real mix of talents have been crowned King or Queen of the jungle over the years
Will Amir Khan win I'm a Celebrity? We look at how other sports stars fared in the jungle
From British boxing legends to superstar swimmers, the games in the jungle have proven a challenge for elite athletes
I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here winners and losers - a look back at the champions and the ones who walked away
Not everyone survived the jungle...
A Question of Sport set for big changes as BBC puts iconic quiz show out to tender
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The Jump: Phil Tufnell gets himself in a spin on ski slope during training
The former spin bowler looked to be struggling along with Stacey Solomon - but Heather Mills looked at home on the snow


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Warning MetroWest at risk of not happening unless Government steps in with cash
There has been little progress in the 10 years since the project began
Kate WilsonPolitical Editor
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North Somerset Council has been asked to write to the Secretary of State for Transport urging him to find the millions of pounds in funding needed to reopen the Portishead railway line.
Scrutiny councillors at the authority spent nearly two hours discussing the MetroWest phase one project - which includes an hourly train service between Portishead and Bristol - during a meeting on Wednesday (July 18).
The scheme has been plagued with uncertainty after failing to make little progress in the past 10 years .
One of the big problems is the route needs major investment to re-lay sections of track which have been ripped up.
A viable shared timetable will also need to be created with the freight companies which use part of the line.
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The railway line has been plagued by uncertainty (Image: Michael Lloyd)
And of course there is the ever increasing cost of the project – which has so far only been partly funded.
Around £70million has already been secured for the project from various councils and funding bodies.
But there is still £47million left to find and, after being rejected for government funding in May , the council risks running out of time to get the cash in time to move on with the next stage of the project .
The council is not giving up and has already approached the Department of Transport again for the cash - this time from a different pot of funding.
MetroWest - a railway for Portishead
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How the line could get another chance
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But now North Somerset's strategic planning and economic development scrutiny panel said it wants the council to write to Transport Secretary Chris Grayling asking him to find some funding for the project quickly.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling (Image: Getty Images Europe)
Speaking during the meeting, committee chairman Charles Cave said the government needed to be aware that without funding the project could be at risk of not happening.
Cllr Cave added: "North Somerset is unlikely to be able to commit themselves to expenditure without having the funding, or promise of funding behind it.
"If that's the case it's going to cause a delay to this project and we need that to be kept to an absolute minimum."
Members were asked to support the proposal to Mr Grayling, as well as North Somerset MP Liam Fox and MP for Bristol South Karin Smyth, in the hopes it would put pressure on the government to find the cash needed.
Heatwave alert triggered for Bristol
Elfan Ap Rees, Brian Allinson and Nigel Ashton when the decision was made to call the project MetroWest. (Image: Michael Lloyd)
Cllr Cave said the government needed to be urged to "get on with it" and find additional funding "through whatever vehicle it might be".
"This project is so important for the people of Portishead. There has been lots of building going on there but no infrastructure apart from some improvements to junction 19 of the M5," he added.
"I know what it's like trying to get in and out of Portishead by car, especially during rush hour. There is basically one road in and out so the traffic around junction 19 is a nightmare."
Part of the Portishead to Bristol line. (Image: Michael Lloyd)
Main road between Backwell and Nailsea to close for two weeks
There were some concerns expressed by councillors that merely writing a letter to the Transport Secretary at this stage would not have a great affect and that a face-to-face meeting was needed.
But members were told council leader Nigel Ashton and members of the executive had already met with Mr Grayling on more than one occasion to discuss the project and that these meetings were likely to continue.
North Somerset Council
NailseaWhy HGV's are being banned from this busy town centreCouncil wants new weight limit to stop HGV's using Nailsea High Street as a cut through


A highly skilled artist in oil, watercolour and pastel. Gordon Hales was born in Matlock, Derbyshire and studied at Leicester College of Art and Northampton School of Art. His favourite subjects were "ships and the sea, the Thames, men at work, the streets of London, the half-light".
He was a member of the RSMA, an Associate of the RBA, a member of the Langham Sketch Club, Wapping Group of Artists, the Artists' Society and a founder-member of the London Muster of Artists. He lived and worked for most of his life in Watford, Hertfordshire.


Massachusetts' gubernatorial candidates are having an important discussion on the impact of the arts in the Commonwealth on Tuesday, July 15—and Emerson's Elma Lewis Center for Civic Engagement, Learning, and Research hopes you can attend.
MassCreative is exploring the possibility of transporting constituents by bus from Boston to attend the forum.
The Hanover Theatre is located at 2 Southbridge Street, Worcester, Massachusetts.


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Tag Archives: Murder on the Orient Express
Film & TV News: November 23
November 23, 2015 Motion State Staff	Leave a comment
Stephen Colbert and J.J. Abrams turned out in force (get it?) this past Saturday for the Montclair Film Festival kickoff fundraiser and buddy-buddy interview. Highlights included an audience prizewinner bluntly inquiring as to how many Ewoks J.J. could take in a fight, Colbert springing J.J.'s acting reel from Six Degrees of Separation on him, and the pair peering up into the fourth tier where I was seated and making remarks like "you're in low orbit" and "my neck hurts".
Kenneth Branagh will be directing and starring in the long-in-the-works Murder on the Orient Express remake, which hopefully will be so many zillion times better than Shadow Recruit.
Ready to feel old? Toy Story turned 20 years old yesterday. Yep. Thankfully, if you want to feel young again, you can just rewatch Toy Story.
Continue reading Film & TV News: November 23 →
DaredevilGods of EgyptJ.J. AbramsJack Ryan: Shadow RecruitJessica JonesKenneth BranaghMistress AmericaMurder on the Orient ExpressSix Degrees of SeparationStar Wars: Episode VII - The Force AwakensStephen ColbertThe LeftoversThe Walking DeadToy StoryZoolander 2
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
August 27, 2015 hangmantitan	Leave a comment
Did you know that Albert Finney was young once? Weird, right? He occupies such the Old British Guy post nowadays that his Young British Guy seems like a completely different actor. Time, of course, has a bit to do with that, as Finney's had a long career full of great roles (Murder on the Orient Express), not-so-great roles (Looker) and, at present, increasingly smaller roles than he deserves (Skyfall). But it's not just the passage of time that makes a return to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a film I first saw in college, a bit of a jarring experience. That's because the difference isn't so much Old British Guy vs. Young British Guy at all — it's Old, Lovely British Guy vs. Young, Dickhead British Guy.
Come on, you say, that's simplifying it a bit too much. It certainly is. Finney's Arthur Seaton, the prototypical angry young man at the center of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in fact has more than a few responses to such "insults" that approach perfection here. His entire social stance is a refutation of the notion that you or I or Doreen (Arthur's girlfriend) or Brenda (Arthur's other girlfriend) or anyone else would presume to know the first thing about him. A bit from his famous soliloquy:
Mam called me barmy when I told her I fell off a gasometer for a bet. But I'm not barmy — I'm a fighting pit-prop that wants a pint of beer, that's me…but if any knowing bastard says that's me I'll tell them I'm a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come. I'm me and nobody else. Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not. Because they don't know a bloody thing about me.
Continue reading Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) →
Alan SillitoeAlbert FinneyBig FishErin BrockovichJohn OsborneLook Back in AngerLookerMartyMurder on the Orient ExpressRonald NeameSaturday Night and Sunday MorningSkyfallThe EntertainerTom Jones
Parenthood (1989)
May 16, 2015 hangmantitan	Leave a comment
Parenthood might be the first time Ron Howard really showed his talent as a director. Grand Theft Auto and Night Shift were passable as Howard found his directorial voice, and Gung Ho and Willow were larger productions that achieved different levels of success as Howard matured. I'd entertain an argument for Cocoon as the first glimpse of the great director Howard would one day become, mostly for the subtle mix of fantasy, sentimentality, humor and drama. But Parenthood, although admittedly very different, is the better film. With a burgeoning cast that can only be described as an ensemble, Howard's brilliance lies in making that ensemble feel more like — oh no, he's going to say it — a family.
There are the young ones — Kevin, Taylor, Justin, Patty, "Cool" and Garry (a pipsqueak Joaquin Phoenix) — each content in their kid ways to run around with head-in-bucket (in Justin's case) or figure out the square root of 8,649 (in Patty's case [it's 93]). There's Garry's older sister Julie and her boyfriend/husband Tod. There's the next generation, the brunt of the Buckman clan led by Steve Martin's Gil, and the spouses of each Buckman sibling. And then there's the patriarchal generation, with Grandpa Frank played by the great Jason Robards, utterer of the greatest line in cinema history (from Once Upon a Time in the West — either ya knowhadimean or ya don't).
Continue reading Parenthood (1989) →
Apollo 13Avengers: Age of UltronCocoonEdTVGrand Theft AutoGung HoJason RobardsJoaquin PhoenixMurder on the Orient ExpressNight ShiftOnce Upon a Time in the WestParenthoodRon HowardSteve MartinThe Flight of the PhoenixThe Spanish PrisonerTom HulceWillow


There is so much excitement in the air for football lovers around the globe, as this year's most prestigious soccer fiesta just started.
The World Cup is played every four years and usually have 32 teams participating for the world's biggest price in football. This year's competition will not fall short of excitement with world class players like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr, Robert Lewandowski, Antoine Griezmann, David DeGea, Romelu Lukaku, Eden Harzard, Sergio Aguero, Victor Moses, Alex Iwobi, Gabriel Jesus,Sadio Mane, Mo Sallah and many more – all representing their respective countries, fighting for the gold.
Africa as a continent has five countries represented in this year's World Cup, which is being hosted by Russia. The Nigerian team, which is also known as the Super Eagles, will be playing in Group D alongside South America giants Argentina, as well as Croatia and this year's debutantes: Iceland. The tournament kick-started yesterday, on the 14th June 2018, with Russia who won over Saudi Arabia with 5 – 0.
The Super Eagles have already been identified as the best-dressed team for the World Cup 2018. Nigeria Kits are manufactured by international brand Nike that confirmed that the kits were sold out 3 hours after being launched in London.
How prepared is Nigeria for the World Cup?
Nigeria has played some friendly matches in preparation to this year's World Cup, with disappointing performances and results. The loss against Serbia, the 1-1 draw against Congo DR, the 2-1 loss to England and a 2-0 loss to the Czech Republic. With these preparatory games played, we have to dig deeper and analyze the 23 men strong team and how they played and where we believe they must improve.
What we have seen so far, from the Nigeria Coach Gernot Rohr, is that the Super Eagles been playing a 4-3-3 formation during the qualifying stages of the tournament and did not lose a single game. As a matter of fact, the team swept aside their opponents with wide goal margins. However, this formation has not worked for in the last few games due to the fact of lack of balance in the midfield. A typical example was the friendly match against England. Ogenyi Onazi, Joel Obi, and John Mikel Obi started the game, but it wasn't until the Coach made numbers of substitution and switched to 3-5-2 formation that the Super Eagles came back to draw the game during the second half. Alex Iwobi scored Nigeria's only goal in the match and we could clearly see that the coach must find balance in the midfield because it is the link between the defense and the attackers.
The team also has to work on several other areas, such as defending set pieces. It is important that Nigeria doesn't leave any stones unturned if we want to go far and even win this year Mundial event.
Over 180 million Nigerians are counting and trusting that our Super Eagles will soar – and possibly even be the first African team to win the World Cup.


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Vans Warped Tour 2010
8/2/10, at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Bonner Springs, KS
Amongst other things, summertime means awesome tours and music festivals. Of all of the staple festivals, Vans Warped Tour is considered to be one of the elites. It always features some of the top mainstream bands in the punk and metal genres and there's also usually a handful of Christian market bands that get the opportunity to play for mostly unchurched crowds. Family Force 5, The Classic Crime, Anberlin, Underoath and Maylene and the Sons of Disaster are just a few examples of Christian artists that have had spots on Warped Tour in years past. At the Bonner Springs, Kansas, stop of the 2010 Warped Tour, there were five Christian market artists present: Confide, Haste the Day, Poema, Flatfoot 56 and Deas Vail.
This was my first Warped Tour, as it's never really been something of interest for me in the past. However, this year, I was a part of the Tooth & Nail street team (yes, Tooth & Nail's presence was there, despite only two of its artists having a spot on the tour). Due to the street teaming, I didn't catch a lot of the action (nor did I have too much of an idea of what bands were playing when until later in the day). But I happened upon Confide's 11:00-ish set, coming in during their performance of "Now or Never" from their latest album, Recover. They were playing amazingly, with the crowd surprisingly riled up for such an early set. They finished the song and lead vocalist Ross Kenyon said "God bless you guys!" and that was it. So, sadly, I missed all of Confide's performance save for the last song. So, having to judge by that alone, Confide did a fantastic job at this year's Warped Tour. Unfortunately, Kansas in the summer isn't a prime time to have a completely outdoors event, as the sun beats down on anyone, causing exhaustion and near-dehydration to run rampant (especially with Sandstone Amphitheater charging four stinkin' dollars for a bottle of water or Gatorade - and that's not including the tip that all the vendors ask for... talk about highway robbery). So, walking around the amphitheater passing out fliers and trying to find other bands that caught my attention was more of a chore than it would usually be. As much as I hate being rained on, I was almost begging for the traditional Warped Tour downpour I've heard about for the last two summers. I came across a breast cancer awareness tent called the Girlz Garage. I remembered talking to Poema at a show a couple months prior, and remembered they were going to be playing the Girlz Garage, so I stopped in to say "hi." Vocalist/pianist Shealeen Puckett told me that they were going to be playing an acoustic set there at 3:00, so I put it on my schedule.
As I walked up the large hill to get stuff I left in my car, I was about drained, yet relieved as I came back in to see that the stage by the entrance was being decimated by Solid State entity Haste the Day. Having not been a huge fan of them in the past, I was impressed with their set. They looked like they were hot and ready to be done with their set, but they kept going regardless. The crowd was bouncing beach balls around (a summertime festival requirement it seems) and having a great time, while there seemed to be some new members playing along with the group. Vocalist Stephen Keech told the crowd that they believe in a God who loves us all despite whatever we've done, to which some cheered, and others mocked (from what it sounded like). They concluded their set with an older song, "Burning Bridges" (from the album of the same name), much to the audience's approval. While they were playing, a band called Reverend Peyton's Big D*mn Band was setting up next to them, looking...interesting. I was tempted to stay and check them out, but I had more duties with Tooth & Nail to perform. So I went about, covering at the merch booth and passing out more fliers until 3:00, when Poema was getting set up in the Girlz Garage. They were sans piano, due to an amp problem, but they still sounded good with Elle Puckett on her acoustic guitar, and their live band Jake and Christian, with Shealeen just providing her vocals. It was a short set, as another band was poised to start their set shortly after at a nearby stage, no doubt drowning out the acoustic Poema set. They started with "2 AM," sounding as good as ever. They followed it up with "Echo Off The Sky," then asked if anyone wanted to hear a particular song. I thought "Blue Sweater" would be good, which someone then shouted out to them. So they played it next, and concluded their short set with a new song "Boys and Bugs." With about twenty or so seconds left of "Boys and Bugs," the band at the nearby Kevin Says... Stage started their loud and raucous set.
Little did I know (until I heard the songs) that that band just so happened to be Chicago, Illinois, Celtic punk rock band, Flatfoot 56. Despite just having released their newest album, Black Thorn, to rave reviews from media sources like Alternative Press, I was a little surprised that they were playing Warped, and a little more surprised that they had as big of a crowd as they did. Surprised, yet pleased. They put on an amazing show, with some songs from Black Thorn (like "Smoke Blower") but a lot more from their national debut, Knuckles Up (including the title track, "The Rotten Hand," and "Chi-Town Beat Down"). The crowd was really into it, with several people sporting legitimate tall mohawks and liberty spikes that were excited for a real punk rock band to be playing. Several times the band encouraged the crowd to make a circle pit in the middle of the floor. Tobin Bawinkel, who is one tall glass of water, said "Everyone does circle pits now, but let's show them that we had it first!" It was mentioned that this was the last Warped date for Flatfoot this year, and Tobin said "So, since it's the last date for us this year, we're gonna play a song we haven't played yet on this tour, 'cause I think it's appropriate. It was on the soundtrack for the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?" to which they played a punk rocked version of "I'll Fly Away." Keeping with the message and theme of that song, they ended their set with their version of "Amazing Grace." I was glad to see that they were pretty bold about where they stand.
Sadly, I didn't get a chance to check out Deas Vail's show, which I was looking forward to. I did check out a few other bands (and I heard some from a distance). A lot of mainstream bands like Attack! Attack!, Whitechapel and Set Your Goals (just a few I could hear from the Tooth & Nail booth) sounded great with good song structuring and fantastic instrumentation, yet in between songs, there were so many f-bombs that it was nearly unbearable. A lot of the profanities weren't even the ones they use to get a point across, but ones they use in a misguided attempt to sound cool. A combination of that and all the shirts with harsh profanities on them (not to mention the girls in bikinis and the occasional bra...and the dudes in biker shorts and nothing else?) made for a bit of an unappealing day. Warped is almost over for this year, but if you went this year, I hope you checked out the great performances from Haste the Day, Poema and Flatfoot 56. I also enjoyed Truth being there teaching people about the dangers of tobacco (despite the fact they didn't really teach anybody anything there, but gave away shirts and bracelets and other things that had cool facts on them. And despite the fact that their van was playing a lot of Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, 3OH!3, Miley Cyrus and other music that just about made me sick to my stomach). So while Warped was (and always is) littered with a lot of filth, there's also some great stuff to check out there. I don't necessarily recommend it to anyone who only enjoys Christian music, though. But if you bear through it all, there's some fun times to be had (just remember to bring plenty of money for all the water you'll need to drink).
-- written by Scott Fryberger, 8/3/10