What does it take to build a healthy smile?
Now's the time to get your free National Children's Dental Health Month posters, activity sheets and other resources featuring the Smile Builders!
Dental professionals can order free, full-color NCDHM 2019 posters and download four fun Smile Builders coloring and activity sheets at ADA.org/NCDHM. All materials are available in both English and Spanish.
Looking for more ways to celebrate NCDHM throughout February? Download the 2019 NCDHM Program Planning Guide for easy activities, program planning timetable tips, a sample NCDHM proclamation and more.


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The Game Is Readying Eminem Diss, Says Wack 100
During a recent Clubhouse session, Wack 100 revealed that Game is readying a Slim Shady diss on his upcoming single.
"We startin' a fire, the Black Slim Shady is coming," Wack said. "That ni**a better be ready, because this ni**a done went crazy."
When asked if he was coming for Eminem, Wack responded, "He's coming like a motherfu**er."
Wack thinks it will make for an entertaining battle, citing Em's history of beef with Machine Gun Kelly, Nick Cannon, and his own mother. "That ni**a Em is a disrespectful ni**a," added Wack. "He disrespect his own mama, my n***a, shit. He disrespect himself. This n***a talk about killing his baby mama, putting her in the trunk… Ain't no limits to where he gon' go with another motherfu**er."
Wack praised both MCs ("You got two crafty ni**as. Two disrespectful, two rappin' ass ni**as) while warning Em of what's to come. "That ni**a better be ready," he said. "One thing about Game, he already got a response. The first one gon' f**k the world up."
Someone in the chat suggested that Game's beef with Eminem could cause 50 Cent to get involved, but Wack wasn't bothered. "50 better sit his old ass down. He don't want them problems with Game. And if 50 jump on Em's song, they automatically lost."
Game previously voiced his thoughts on Eminem, claiming he was a better MC than the "Rap God." "I used to think Eminem was better than me. He's not," he said during his "Drink Champs" interview.
He also challenged Em to a Verzuz battle, but N.O.R.E. warned him that he doesn't want smoke with Em. "Yes, I do. The f**k you mean?" he shot back. "You tryna say that I don't want have no fade with the white man?"
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I'm sure everyone who knows Pokemon knows about Eevee. Voted the cutest by Pokemon fans, its eight different possible evolutions with different types and powers catch people's eye.
So, imagine your Eevee is ready to evolve but still can't decide what to evolve in to. As its trainer, that responsibility is yours! Take this quiz to find out which Eeveelution is best for you and your Eevee!
Favorite Pokemon type? NOTE: only allows 8 answers per question. If your favorite one is not on one question, tap "other"
What is your Eevee's personality?
Which animal do you like, out of these?
Which is your ideal place to live?
That amazing superpower you always wanted to have?
Which type of colors do you like?
How experienced as a Pokemon trainer are you?


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'Birds of Prey' New Trailer Shows Harley Quinn Bouncing Back From Breakup With Joker (Video)
Brian Welk
The Wrap January 9, 2020
Who needs the Joker? In this playful and colorful new trailer for "Birds of Prey," Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn spends some time moping over her breakup with Jared Leto's Joker from "Suicide Squad," including spraying some cheese whiz into her mouth. But in no time, she's back to her old fiendish self.
Robbie stars in the superhero team-up movie along with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Rosie Perez as they form an all-female squad of superheroes taking on the warlord Black Mask, played by Ewan McGregor.
They're forced to work together to save the life of a young girl and save themselves from the men who want them dead, and no man is going to keep them from having a good time doing it.
Also Read: 'Birds of Prey,' 'Sonic' and 'Top Gun: Maverick' Lead IMDb's Most-Anticipated Movies of 2020 (Exclusive)
"Psychologically speaking, vengeance rarely brings the catharsis we're hoping for," Robbie deadpans in the trailer. "Are we ready?"
"Birds of Prey," or more accurately, "Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn," marries some musical comedy elements to the more traditional superhero style, and this latest trailer is bursting with life. We catch a glimpse of an elaborate, Busby Berkeley-esque song and dance number, and Quinn even has a pet hyena in a bathtub that she's named Bruce "after that hunky Wayne guy."
Cathy Yan directs the DC movie that opens from Warner Bros. on Feb. 7.
Watch the new trailer for "Birds of Prey" above.
Read original story 'Birds of Prey' New Trailer Shows Harley Quinn Bouncing Back From Breakup With Joker (Video) At TheWrap


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Support CFR
The Elihu Root Lecture
The Elihu Root Lecture was inaugurated in 1958 to honor a founder of the Council on Foreign Relations who served as its honorary president from 1921 to 1937. This lecture invites a distinguished American to reflect on his or her professional experience and how it applies to contemporary American foreign policymaking. Past Root lecturers have included Robert S. McNamara, Jacob K. Javits, William Fulbright, George F. Kennan, George Ball, and McGeorge Bundy, among others.
Root Lectures
Elihu Root Lecture with General Myers
Speaker: Richard B. Myers, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Presider: John McWethy, Special Correspondent, ABC News
This meeting is not for attribution.
In Search of National Security
Speaker: Gary Hart, Of Counsel, Coudert Brothers
Presider: George E. Rupp, President, International Rescue Committee
This meeting is on the record.
Integrating Africa into the World Economy: The Challenges Ahead
Speaker: James D. Wolfensohn, President, World Bank Group
Presider: Henry Kaufman, President, Henry Kaufman & Company, Inc.
Economic Task Force on Russia - Session IV
American Power: Hegemony, Isolationism or Engagement
Speaker: Samuel R. Berger, U.S. National Security Adviser
Presider: Leslie H. Gelb, President, Council on Foreign Relations
U.S. Defense Priorities: Engagement and Isolationism
Speaker: William S. Cohen, U.S. Secretary of Defense
Presider: Peter G. Peterson, Chairman, The Blackstone Group; Chairman, Council on Foreign Relations
U.S. Trade Negotiations: Lessons Learned, Lessons Applied
Speaker: Mickey Kantor, Partner, Mayer, Brown & Platt, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce; former U.S. Trade Representative
Presider: Julia Chang Bloch


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Laptops Reviews
Dell XPS 13 9370 Review
By Roydon Cerejo | Updated: 13 March 2018 17:20 IST
The InfinityEdge display now has 4mm thin borders
Performance is very good but you lose out on full-sized USB ports
The Dell XPS 13 9370 with 4K UHD touchscreen costs Rs. 1,59,790
Dell's XPS laptop series has always been about premium build quality and performance. The ultra-portable XPS 13 (Review) has long been one of the best premium Ultrabooks you can get for your money. However, the company hasn't always been prompt in launching each new refresh in India. Take for example the 2017 Dell XPS 15, which debuted at CES in January that year but only made it to our shores last October - and let's not forget the XPS 13 2-in-1, which didn't arrive at all.
This year, Dell seems to be more proactive with its India go-to-market strategy, and barely a month after the company announced the 2018 edition of the XPS 13, it's already available here for purchase. Today, we'll be testing the top-end variant of the new XPS 13 9370 series, which boasts of a slimmer body, 4K UHD InfinityEdge touchscreen, and upgraded specs. Let's see what it's like.
Dell XPS 13 design and build quality
The new laptop is deceptively small, and even the box it ships in feels like it's too small for a laptop to fit inside. Taking a closer look at its actual dimensions, the new XPS 13 9370 is only marginally reduced in width and depth compared to the previous-gen XPS 13 9360, but Dell has shaved the thickness quite a bit, so it measures 11.6mm at its thickest point and just 7.8mm at the thinnest. We also found it to be very light, and it won't weigh your bag or backpack down when travelling.
Despite the size and weight, this laptop doesn't skimp on premium materials. The chassis is built from machined aluminium, and has a soft matte texture so it's relatively easy to keep clean even if you don't use a sleeve. We have the white and rose gold version, which according to Dell, is the only colour trim this particular spec will be available in for now. We're used to seeing XPS laptops in silver with a carbon fibre finish, but for this new colour combination, Dell has used a special woven glass fibre mterial on the palmrest area instead. It feels quite similar to the carbon fibre finish, and according to the company, it also has a stain-resistant UV coating to prevent it from yellowing over time.
The keyboard is pretty comfortable. The chiclet keys are evenly backlit with white LEDs and have a good 1.3mm of travel, which makes them comfortable to type on. The arrow keys do feel a bit cramped but that's something you might get used to with time. The trackpad is wide and offers smooth scrolling and gestures in Windows 10. The power button is placed in the upper right corner and has an integrated fingerprint sensor. Dell has also placed infrared sensors beside the webcam for face recognition. Both these methods can be used for logging into Windows 10 instead of typing in a password.
There's an array of four microphones facing forwards, along with a power LED. Due to the reduced thickness of the laptop, Dell has removed standard-sized Type-A USB ports, which is a shame. Instead of this, you get three USB Type-C ports and a single Type-C to Type-A adapter in the box. The two Type-C ports on the left are actually Thunderbolt 3 ports, while the one on the right has a USB 3.1 Gen. 2 controller. You can charge the laptop through any of these ports and even plug in an external monitor using an adaptor. You get a 1W speaker on each side of the laptop; a Noble lock slot for securing it; a microSD card slot; and a headphone/ microphone combo socket. We definitely missed having a full-sized SD card reader.
The star of the show is undoubtedly the 13.3-inch InfinityEdge display, which now sports thinner 4mm borders on three sides. There's still a thick chin below the screen for the Dell logo and camera. The display puts out 400nits of brightness, which we found comfortable under most lighting conditions. It does have a glossy finish but reflections aren't much of an issue thanks to the high brightness. The 4K UHD panel that we have is also a touchscreen but since this isn't a 2-in-1, we barely ever wound up using it. The aluminium lid offers very good protection and the screen doesn't warp even when you apply pressure from the outside. The hinge offers good torsion and stays in place at any angle.
Dell XPS 13 9370 specifications and features
At the time of writing this review, this particular variant isn't available on Dell's online store but we're told that it will be added soon. The specifications include an Intel Core i7-8550U CPU, 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. There's no dedicated graphics processor here so you'll have to make do with the onboard UHD Graphics 620 from Intel. The individual RAM modules aren't identified by diagnostic software, which shows that they are soldered onto the motherboard and are therefore not upgradeable. Other specifications include dual-band Wi-Fi ac with 2x2 MIMO antennas and Bluetooth by Killer Networks; an HD webcam; and a non-removable 52WHr battery.
The laptop ships with Windows 10 Home 64-bit along with a full copy Microsoft Office Home and Student 2016, and a 12 month subscription to McAfee LiveSafe. Dell also installs its own software including Power Manager, which lets you monitor your battery's health and set up profiles. There's a new app for 2018 models called Dell Mobile Connect, which lets you receive calls and texts from your Android or iOS device through Bluetooth, directly on your laptop. It even lets you make calls or reply to messages from within the app itself. It works well, though you can only connect one phone to the app at a time. With an Android phone, you can also mirror its screen on the laptop.
Dell XPS 13 performance and battery life
We found the new XPS 13 comfortable to use on our lap, and with light tasks, the exhaust fans weren't audible. There are vents on the bottom and behind the hinge for air circulation. In order to tame the heat from the components, Dell has used a Gore Insulation Solution, which makes it the first laptop to use this material. Gore (or Gore-Tex), a flexible material that's typically used in winter jackets, is intended to prevent the outer body from getting too warm to touch while dual fans and heatpipes push hot air out. In practice, this works well if you're not doing anything too CPU-intensive. However, fire up a game and the fans ramp up quickly, making them very audible. The metal bottom of the laptop gets hot after a while, and we found that the upper left of the keyboard also got slightly warm, though the palm rest stayed cool.
The XPS 13 can manage some 3D games, but at low visual settings and resolutions. The onboard Intel GPU is simply not equipped to handle heavy gaming. For instance, in Doom, we managed to get a playable framerate of 29fps but only at 1366x768 resolution using the Low graphics preset. The game doesn't look very good, and there's obviously a lot of visible aliasing, but it's playable. However, the CPU is a good performer as we saw in benchmarks such as PCMark 8, which gave us scores of 3,319, 4,674 and 2,931 points in the Home, Creative, and Work test suites respectively.
The SSD delivered a good overall score of 2.3GB/s in SiSoft Sandra's Physical Disk benchmark, and its speed shows in general usage too. The laptop boots quickly and apps load swiftly as well. 512GB is a decently large amount of storage for an Ultrabook. The HD webcam has a good field of view but the video footage is slightly noisy when it is used under artificial lighting. There's also no getting around the slightly odd perspective it offers due to its placement below the screen. Face recognition is quick although at times, when we had the XPS 13 on our lap, we had to either tilt it backwards or lift it a bit in order for the camera to see our face.
The 4K resolution at this screen size gives you a dense pixel count of around 331ppi, which makes everything look really crisp. Viewing angles are very good and there's good colour saturation as well. This panel also happens to support HDR, which makes the XPS 13 one of the few such laptops currently available. As long as you have it plugged in to a power source, compatible apps like Netflix automatically detect the screen as HDR-capable. The brightness has to be bumped up all the way to 100 percent for it to be effective. The result is nice, especially in shows like Stranger Things and Narcos, which both looked really good. The stereo speakers do a good job with audio as well, and the Waves MaxxAudio Pro software lets you tweak how sound is delivered. We noticed an audio skipping issue when streaming to Bluetooth headphones (Apple AirPods as well as the Sony WH-1000XM2), and hopefully this can be fixed with a future software update.
We were quite happy with the battery life of the new Dell XPS 13. Because of its 4K panel, we managed to squeeze out roughly 6-7 hours of ordinary use, which mostly involved working on Word documents and lots of Internet browsing. The laptop fared well in our intense Battery Eater Pro test too, which lasted for 2 hours and 23 minutes.
The XPS 13 9370 is a good iterative update of Dell's flagship ultraportable, with the top-end variant sporting an eye-catching 4K display with HDR support. However, this comes at a high price of Rs. 1,59,790, which is about Rs. 10,000 more than Lenovo's Yoga 920 Vibes Edition which shares the same core specifications and 4K display, though minus HDR.
Dell says that it will continue selling the existing XPS 13 9360 range, and most variants were updated with 8th Gen Intel Core CPUs late last year, so you have quite a few configurations to choose from. With the new XPS 13 9370 series, you get a slightly more compact design and slimmer borders for the display, plus the same speedy performance and premium build quality. If we could change some things, we would have preferred a full-sized SD card slot, which would definitely be useful, and perhaps a few more Type-C adapters included in the box.
Price (M.R.P): Rs. 1,59,790
Vivid 4K screen with HDR
Very well built
Comfortable keyboard
No SD card reader
Ratings (Out of 5)
Display: 4.5
Performance: 4
Software: 4
Battery life: 4
Value for Money: 3
Overall: 4
product Dell XPS 13 boasts of a 4K HDR InfinityEdge touchscreen with extremely narrow borders, as well as premium performance and materials.
Further reading: Dell XPS 13 9370, Dell XPS 13 9370 price, Dell XPS 13 9370 price in India, Dell XPS 13 9370 specifications, Dell XPS 13 2018 features
Roydon Cerejo Email Roydon
Roydon has written about technology and gadgets for more than a decade now and began his career reviewing PC components. He found his calling with laptops, smartphones, and cameras and is the go-to guy at Gadgets 360 for this technology trifecta. In his spare time, he likes watching horror films, obsessively organising his cable management pouch and plotting world dominion one pixel at a time.
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Q: Finding the joint pdf using the Jacobian Say I have two signals one which has the form $$X(t) = cos(100t + \Theta)$$ where $\Theta$ is a R.V. uniformly distributed between $0$ and $2\pi$ and another which has the form $$Y(t) = cos(100t + \Psi)$$ where $\Psi$ is uniformly distributed between $0$ and $2\pi$ as well as independent to $\Theta$. Given the sum of the two signals, $Z(t) = X(t)+Y(t)$ can be expressed as $$Z(t) = A cos(100t + \phi)$$
Find the joint pdf of magnitude and phase $A$ and $\phi$?
My attempt:
I use the sum to product trig identity to get
$$A = 2 cos(\frac{\Theta - \Psi}{2})$$
$$\phi = \frac{\Theta - \Psi}{2}$$
I compute the Jacobian and get $-sin(\frac{\Theta - \Psi}{2})$. Trying to make everything in terms of $A$ and $\phi$ by finding the inverses:
$$\Theta = cos^{-1}(\frac{A}{2}) + \phi$$
$$\Psi = -(\cos^{-1}(\frac{A}{2}) - \phi)$$
$$f_{A\phi}(a, \varphi) = \frac{f_{\Theta\Psi}(cos^{-1}(\frac{a}{2})+ \phi, \phi - cos^{-1}(\frac{a}{2}))}{|-sin(\frac{\Theta - \Psi}{2})|}$$
Because of independence (why? I get lost at this step)
$$= \frac{(\frac{1}{2\pi})(\frac{1}{2\pi})}{|-sin(cos^{-1}(\frac{a}{2}))|}$$
And the bounds are
$0 < cos^{-1}(\frac{a}{2}) + \phi < 2\pi$
$0 < \phi - cos^{-1}(\frac{a}{2}) < 2\pi$
Besides being unclear in the last type of why/what independence rule is being applied there I think the answer is obviously wrong? As I should get $\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} f_{A\phi}(a, \varphi) da = 1$ but I get $\int_{0}^{2\pi} f_{A\phi}(a, \varphi) da \approx 0.17135$ which is not $1$ unless I am checking the joint pdf incorrectly?
I also want to find $Pr(A \le \frac{1}{2}) = \int_{0}^{\frac{1}{2}} f_{A\phi}(a, \varphi) da \approx 0.012801$ but that probability seems too small though I know intuition tends to be wrong with probability.
Any guidance or correction is appreciated.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Trump-Kim Meeting
Foreign Policy Economy Environment Security Social Development Culture Magazine Video
Analogies, American Thought, and China's Rise
Jared McKinney
PhD student at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
It's no secret that humans like to use analogies to help them understand phenomena. By saying one thing, which presumably we have some comprehension of, is like another, which perhaps we know less well, we can infer certain conclusions. Because analogies simplify and familiarize, they are powerful interpretive devices. Yet this very power can lead us to distort the past and misunderstand the present.
In the United States, a handful of analogies have tended to dominate thinking on international politics: the "lesson of WWI," which is typically understood to be that inadvertent war can be catastrophic and so crises must be carefully managed; "the lesson of Munich," which is that aggression must be opposed straight away lest it triumph; the "lesson of Vietnam," which is that it's foolish to invade far-away lands of which we know little; and the "lesson of the Gulf War," which is that a supposed Revolution in Military Affairs has revived the ability of the U.S. military to achieve political objectives.
Famously, Barbara Tuchman's account of the causes of the First World War, The Guns of August, weighed heavily on JFK's mind during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet as David Stevenson has pointed out, Kennedy also had a second analogy close at mind: that of Munich, or of letting aggression triumph, on which he had written his senior thesis at Harvard. This second analogy has undoubtedly exercised the most influence in American politics. We invaded Vietnam in order to prevent another Munich, and the analogy continues to dominate American discourse, even though most commentators have long forgotten what actually happened at Munich. Vietnam, meanwhile, exerted a powerful pull on the American psyche, though for President Bush senior and most Washington, D.C. elites since, it has been something to overcome ("kick") rather than to learn from. And finally, the Gulf War (which was seen by Margaret Thatcher and Bush as a response to a modern-day Munich) instilled in American policymakers the efficacy of air power, fostering support for bombing campaigns in the Balkans and drone campaigns today.
In a new "Penguin Special," Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, has sought to illuminate China's rise with some unusual analogies. Against a strain of thought that tends to see contemporary China as uniquely unique—i.e., Chinese exceptionalism—Wasserstrom contemplates eight years in China (2008-2015) by using analogies that are perhaps unfamiliar but that are intended to acquaint readers with the commonalities a rising China shares with states of other eras. Happily, Wasserstrom ignores the four American analogies discussed above. Even so, his short book stimulates without satisfying.
To begin, Wasserstrom suggests that the PRC's forceful modernization of Tibet is akin to Japan's colonization and forced modernization of Manchukuo and even America's invasion of Iraq. In 2008, the year of the Olympics, he says, Bush and Hu Jintao "could have found some common ground. Each man, thinking of different quagmires – for Bush there was Afghanistan and Iraq, while for Hu there was Xinjiang and Tibet – could have commiserated with the other about how vexing it can be when people you 'liberate' aren't properly grateful for what you have done for them." The idea is simple: empires around the world have faced similar problems, and failed in similar manners, and that's something China has in common with Japan, Russia, and even the U.S.
For 2009, both the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC and the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wasserstrom observes that the improbability of collapse in Berlin in 1989 facilitated the fall while the probability of collapse in China following Tiananmen, which stimulated the Party to "shrewd diagnostic efforts to avoid suffering that predicted fate," enabled its continued rise. Learning from someone else's mistakes is much preferable to learning from your own.
For 2010, Wasserstrom looks to the Shanghai Expo, the largest in world history, and wonders if Chinese society is more Orwellian—defined by the state watching people—or Huxleyan—defined by what the people watch—and concludes it's somewhere in between.
For 2011, the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Wasserstrom compares post-Communist Russia with still-Communist China, and finds the similarities compelling, if imperfect.
For 2012, the year Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wasserstrom reflects on the endlessly reoccurring Western response to Chinese prizewinners: are they merely dreary drones of the Chinese regime or, on the other hand, bold dissidents, deserving of recognition? Wasserstrom seeks to complicate this overdrawn dichotomy by inquiring where Mark Twain in his day would have fit: as a dissident, no, but a critic, yes.
For 2013, Xi's first year as President, Wasserstrom compares the Western dichotomy of chicken or beef with commonly asked questions about Xi and China more broadly. "Reformer or conservative?" "Rule the world or collapse?" But of course, in China, chicken and beef is a common selection.
For 2014, the centenary of the First World War, Wasserstrom observes that other anniversaries are burnt into the Chinese psyche as the Great War is in the European psyche. The Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895 and the Korean War of 1950-53 are far more important anniversaries, it would seem, and teach different lessons.
And finally for 2015, Wasserstrom compares "the People's Pope and Big Daddy Xi." Both took office in March 2013; both were widely heralded as reformers; and both personalities were fêted with wide popularity, even veneration.
What should be made of these eight admittedly "imperfect analogies"? Wasserstrom's juxtaposition of a seemingly strong Soviet Union that collapsed and a seemingly tottering China that thrived is well warranted, if not uncommon. It's worth reflecting on the four principal explanations Chinese scholars offered for why the Soviet experiment failed: slow economic growth caused by the Party's anti-market philosophy; the generation of poor information because of ideological and propagandistic blinders; the centralization of decision-making, which led to slow and inefficient policies; and the prioritization of "political reform," i.e., the reduction in the Party's absolute control. The legacy and status of these four lessons would be well worth a separate essay.
Yet it remains an open question in my mind whether the occasional obscenity of Wasserstrom's analogies is a virtue or vice. Should the Japanese invasion of China and the American invasion of Iraq, both bloody and lawless, really be compared with China's reassertion of control in Tibet, a region long-connected to China, most recently in the Qing Dynasty? Comparing a declining Russia with a rising China, though of course some similarities can be found—for example, both are obsessively focused on status—is likely to obscure more than it uncovers, particularly basic facts. China's population is nearly ten times larger, its economy is diverse while Russia's is dependent on oil, and China is not, at least yet, alienated from the West. A wiser tack would be to imagine a China estranged from the global economic and political order, yet with ten times the resources and strength of contemporary Russia. In this picture, we have not a tottering midget but an angered giant: both may be unstable and dangerous, but in terms of comparison, they are not even in the same league.
So how should we understand China today? There is no obvious and memorable answer, at least not in Wasserstrom's book. The most analytically powerful answer indeed remains that of John Mearsheimer: we should compare China today to America in the late nineteenth-century. Then, the U.S. suffered from tremendous inequality, as does China today. Then, industrialization dominated the landscape, as it does in China today. Then, American cities rapidly expanded, and noise, slums, pollution, traffic jams followed; China today encounters these same realities. And then, geopolitically, the U.S. sought to control its "near seas": the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean (and conquered a few islands in the process).
Today, as all the hullabaloo of the Hague arbitration case dominates the news, it's worth remembering this fact: so far, China's rise, broadly conceived, is following in the footsteps of its neighbor across the Pacific. America's rise was not entirely peaceful, and yet it is often remembered fondly today; a century hence, it just may be that the territorial disputes that dominate discourse today will have been forgotten, and China's rise will be remembered matter-of-factly by most of the world. The alternative is almost too terrible to ponder.
China's Rise Global Governance
From Pax Americana to Pax Globalcana
He Yafei Former Vice Minister, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
What Is Hegemony? A Practical Proposal
Jared McKinney PhD student at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
Where Should China-US Relations Be Going?
Zhang Wenzong Associate Research Fellow, CICIR
Donald Trump and the Decline of US Soft Power
Joseph S. Nye Professor, Harvard University
As China Rises, the U.S. Should Stand Back and Allow other Asians to Rise Too
Doug Bandow Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
Digest Magazine
CHINA US Focus 2018 China-United States Exchange Foundation. All rights reserved. Disclaimer


CHARLOTTE, N.C., Sept. 26, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) strengthened warning labels on July 26, 2016 and issued a limitation-of-use directive on fluoroquinolone antibiotics. These antibiotics, which include Levaquin (levofloxacin), Cipro (ciprofloxacin), and Avelox (moxifloxacin) can be associated with severe and often permanent adverse events, also known as fluoroquinolone-associated disability (FQAD).
When a medication is proven to be associated with risks, the FDA or drug manufacturer communicates with healthcare providers across the country via Dear Health Care Provider (DHCP) letters, also known as Dear Doctor letters, intended to alert physicians and other health care providers about important new or updated information regarding a human drug or biologic.
Unfortunately, Dear Doctor letters have not been issued for fluoroquinolone antibiotics, and the strengthened warning statements are not reaching prescribing physicians, leaving many patients at risk.
The Quinolone Vigilance Foundation (QVF), an international non-profit, took matters into their own hands. The organization composed a Dear Doctor letter which they will distribute to doctors themselves.
"There is a definite disconnect between the FDA, drug manufacturers, and patients. We hope that this project can bridge the gap so that patient safety is a priority," says Rachel Brummert, Executive Director of the Quinolone Vigilance Foundation. "Unfortunately, the message about the disabling adverse events associated with fluoroquinolones is buried in an FDA press release and the information never reached doctors via Dear Doctor letters, leaving many patients and doctors unaware of the harm fluoroquinolones like Levaquin, Cipro, and Avelox may cause."
"Strengthening safety profiles on powerful, potentially dangerous medications is a step in the right direction. But it doesn't do much good if that information isn't reaching prescribing physicians. I fear for patient safety if doctors are not aware of the risks." continued Brummert.
The Quinolone Vigilance Foundation began the project this summer, and plans to have it completed by early 2017. Brummert noted that the current strategy of conveying the message in press releases is ineffective at reaching the appropriate audience in a timely manner. "We have been pushing for safety label warnings and communicating risks to physicians for a long time and we decided that patient safety is too important to wait for the FDA and drug manufacturers to take action."
Chris Butler, Vice President of QVF affirms, "While the FDA has finally admitted the risks of the adverse events of fluoroquinolone antibiotics outweigh the benefits, they have not taken appropriate action to notify the general public or physicians. The FDA believes a press release on their website is sufficient to warn doctors and patients. Those press releases can be buried in a few days and the doctors will never know of the updated Black Box Warnings. Patients and doctors have a right to know the dangers associated with these antibiotics".
Brummert and Butler hope that by issuing the Dear Doctor letters through the Quinolone Vigilance Foundation, the important information contained in the new FDA labels will reach a broader audience.
Unfortunately, fluoroquinolone-associated disability is a global problem, not just a national one.
Donna Schutz, Assistant Director and Australia Ambassador for QVF, states, "Australia is facing the same issue with most doctors being unaware of the serious warnings on fluoroquinolones. Even though Australia has stricter guidelines on the prescribing of fluoroquinolones, many Australian victims were not warned and their doctors believe fluoroquinolones are safe."
"It can often take years for FDA warnings to be updated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia. It is our hope that we will be able to expedite notifications and keep patients safe from dangerous antibiotics", Schutz adds.
Fluoroquinolones, in oral, IV, and topical forms are meant as a last resort for life threatening infections such as anthrax, plague, and serious cases of bacterial pneumonia. As little as one drop or one pill can cause adverse events hours, weeks, months or longer after administration. Therefore, it is imperative that doctors and patients are made aware of the serious risks.
The Quinolone Vigilance Foundation (QVF)--www.SaferPills.org- is an international non-profit, charitable foundation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, that helps raise awareness about fluoroquinolone antibiotics and their dangers among patients and medical professionals, and funds independent research on fluoroquinolone-associated disability.


text:
How Fire History, Fire Suppression Practices and Climate Change Affect Wildfire Regimes in Mediterranean Landscapes
Brotons, Lluís
Aquilué, Núria
de Cáceres, Miquel
Fortin, Marie-Josée
Fall, Andrew
Available data show that future changes in global change drivers may lead to an increasing impact of fires on terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Yet, fire regime changes in highly humanised fire-prone regions are difficult to predict because fire effects may be heavily mediated by human activities We investigated the role of fire suppression strategies in synergy with climate change on the resulting fire regimes in Catalonia (north-eastern Spain). We used a spatially-explicit fire-succession model at the landscape level to test whether the use of different firefighting opportunities related to observed reductions in fire spread rates and effective fire sizes, and hence changes in the fire regime. We calibrated this model with data from a period with weak firefighting and later assess the potential for suppression strategies to modify fire regimes expected under different levels of climate change. When comparing simulations with observed fire statistics from an eleven-year period with firefighting strategies in place, our results showed that, at least in two of the three sub-regions analysed, the observed fire regime could not be reproduced unless taking into account the effects of fire suppression. Fire regime descriptors were highly dependent on climate change scenarios, with a general trend, under baseline scenarios without fire suppression, to large-scale increases in area burnt. Fire suppression strategies had a strong capacity to compensate for climate change effects. However, strong active fire suppression was necessary to accomplish such compensation, while more opportunistic fire suppression strategies derived from recent fire history only had a variable, but generally weak, potential for compensation of enhanced fire impacts under climate change. The concept of fire regime in the Mediterranean is probably better interpreted as a highly dynamic process in which the main determinants of fire are rapidly modified by changes in landscape, climate and socioeconomic factors such as fire suppression strategies.
Changes in the Distribution of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in the Gulf of Maine 1979-2005
Golet, Walter J.
Galuardi, Benjamin
Lutcavage, Molly E.
The Gulf of Maine, NW Atlantic Ocean, is a productive, seasonal foraging ground for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), but commercial landings of adult size classes were up to 40% below the allocated total allowable catch between 2004 to 2008 for the rod and reel, harpoon, and purse seine categories in the Gulf of Maine. Reduction in Atlantic bluefin tuna catches in the Gulf of Maine could represent a decline in spawning stock biomass, but given wide-ranging, complex migration patterns, and high energetic requirements, an alternative hypothesis is that their dispersal patterns shifted to regions with higher prey abundance or profitability, reducing availability to U.S. fishing fleets. This study fit generalized linear models to Atlantic bluefin tuna landings data collected from fishermen's logbooks (1979-2005) as well as the distances between bluefin tuna schools and Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), a primary prey species, to test alternative hypotheses for observed shifts in Atlantic bluefin tuna availability in the Gulf of Maine. For the bluefin model, landings varied by day of year, latitude and longitude. The effect of latitude differed by day of year and the effect of longitude differed by year. The distances between Atlantic bluefin tuna schools and Atlantic herring schools were significantly smaller (p<0.05) than would be expected from a randomly distributed population. A time series of average bluefin tuna school positions was positively correlated with the average number of herring captured per tow on Georges Bank in spring and autumn surveys respectively (p<0.01, r2=0.24, p<0.01, r2=0.42). Fishermen's logbooks contributed novel spatial and temporal information towards testing these hypotheses for the bluefin tuna fishery.
Sea Otters Homogenize Mussel Beds and Reduce Habitat Provisioning in a Rocky Intertidal Ecosystem
Singh, Gerald G.
Markel, Russell W.
Martone, Rebecca G.
Harley, Christopher D. G.
Chan, Kai M. A.
Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) are keystone predators that consume a variety of benthic invertebrates, including the intertidal mussel, Mytilus californianus. By virtue of their competitive dominance, large size, and longevity, M. californianus are ecosystem engineers that form structurally complex beds that provide habitat for diverse invertebrate communities. We investigated whether otters affect mussel bed characteristics (i.e. mussel length distributions, mussel bed depth, and biomass) and associated community structure (i.e. biomass, alpha and beta diversity) by comparing four regions that varied in their histories of sea otter occupancy on the west coast of British Columbia and northern Washington. Mussel bed depth and average mussel lengths were 1.5 times lower in regions occupied by otters for >20 years than those occupied for <5 yrs. Diversity of mussel bed associated communities did not differ between regions; however, the total biomass of species associated with mussel beds was more than three-times higher where sea otters were absent. We examined alternative explanations for differences in mussel bed community structure, including among-region variation in oceanographic conditions and abundance of the predatory sea star Pisaster ochraceus. We cannot discount multiple drivers shaping mussel beds, but our findings indicate the sea otters are an important one. We conclude that, similar to their effects on subtidal benthic invertebrates, sea otters reduce the size distributions of intertidal mussels and, thereby, habitat available to support associated communities. Our study indicates that by reducing populations of habitat-providing intertidal mussels, sea otters may have substantial indirect effects on associated communities.
Confronting Uncertainty in Wildlife Management: Performance of Grizzly Bear Management
Artelle, Kyle A.
Anderson, Sean C.
Paquet, Paul C.
Reynolds, John D.
Darimont, Chris T.
Scientific management of wildlife requires confronting the complexities of natural and social systems. Uncertainty poses a central problem. Whereas the importance of considering uncertainty has been widely discussed, studies of the effects of unaddressed uncertainty on real management systems have been rare. We examined the effects of outcome uncertainty and components of biological uncertainty on hunt management performance, illustrated with grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) in British Columbia, Canada. We found that both forms of uncertainty can have serious impacts on management performance. Outcome uncertainty alone – discrepancy between expected and realized mortality levels – led to excess mortality in 19% of cases (population-years) examined. Accounting for uncertainty around estimated biological parameters (i.e., biological uncertainty) revealed that excess mortality might have occurred in up to 70% of cases. We offer a general method for identifying targets for exploited species that incorporates uncertainty and maintains the probability of exceeding mortality limits below specified thresholds. Setting targets in our focal system using this method at thresholds of 25% and 5% probability of overmortality would require average target mortality reductions of 47% and 81%, respectively. Application of our transparent and generalizable framework to this or other systems could improve management performance in the presence of uncertainty.
Plants Used In Artisanal Fisheries On The Western Mediterranean Coasts Of Italy
Savo, Valentina
La Rocca, Arianna
Caneva, Giulia
Rapallo, Fabio
Cornara, Laura
Artisanal fisheries in the Mediterranean, especially in Italy, have been poorly investigated. There is a long history of fishing in this region, and it remains an important economic activity in many localities. Our research entails both a comprehensive review of the relevant literature and 58 field interviews with practitioners on plants used in fishing activities along the Western Mediterranean Italian coastal regions. The aims were to record traditional knowledge on plants used in fishery in these regions and to define selection criteria for plant species used in artisanal fisheries, considering ecology and intrinsic properties of plants, and to discuss the pattern of diffusion of shared uses in these areas.
Information was gathered both from a general review of ethnobotanical literature and from original data. A total of 58 semi-structured interviews were carried out in Liguria, Latium, Campania and Sicily (Italy). Information on plant uses related to fisheries were collected and analyzed through a chi-square residual analysis and the correspondence analysis in relation to habitat, life form and chorology.
A total of 60 plants were discussed as being utilized in the fisheries of the Western Italian Mediterranean coastal regions, with 141 different uses mentioned. Of these 141 different uses, 32 are shared among different localities. A multivariate statistical analysis was performed on the entire dataset, resulting in details about specific selection criteria for the different usage categories (plants have different uses that can be classified into 11 main categories). In some uses, species are selected for their features (e.g., woody), or habitat (e.g., riverine), etc. The majority of uses were found to be obsolete (42%) and interviews show that traditional fishery knowledge is in decline. There are several reasons for this, such as climatic change, costs, reduction of fish stocks, etc.
Our research correlates functional characteristics of the plants used in artisanal fishery and habitats, and discusses the distribution of these uses. This research is the first comprehensive outline of plant role in artisanal fisheries and traditional fishery knowledge in the Mediterranean, specifically in Italy.
Golet, Walter
Cooper, Andrew
Lutcavage, Molly
Physiological Benefits of Being Small in a Changing World: Responses of Coho Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) to an Acute Thermal Challenge and a Simulated Capture Event
Clark, Timothy
Donaldson, Michael
Drenner, Matthew
Pieperhoff, Sebastian
Farrell, Anthony
Hinch, Scott
Lotto, Andrew
Evidence is building to suggest that both chronic and acute warm temperature exposure, as well as other anthropogenic perturbations, may select for small adult fish within a species. To shed light on this phenomenon, we investigated physiological and anatomical attributes associated with size-specific responses to an acute thermal challenge and a fisheries capture simulation (exercise+air exposure) in maturing male coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch). Full-size females were included for a sex-specific comparison. A size-specific response in haematology to an acute thermal challenge (from 7 to 20°C at 3°C h−1) was apparent only for plasma potassium, whereby full-size males exhibited a significant increase in comparison with smaller males ('jacks'). Full-size females exhibited an elevated blood stress response in comparison with full-size males. Metabolic recovery following exhaustive exercise at 7°C was size-specific, with jacks regaining resting levels of metabolism at 9.3±0.5 h post-exercise in comparison with 12.3±0.4 h for full-size fish of both sexes. Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption scaled with body mass in male fish with an exponent of b = 1.20±0.08. Jacks appeared to regain osmoregulatory homeostasis faster than full-size males, and they had higher ventilation rates at 1 h post-exercise. Peak metabolic rate during post-exercise recovery scaled with body mass with an exponent of b~1, suggesting that the slower metabolic recovery in large fish was not due to limitations in diffusive or convective oxygen transport, but that large fish simply accumulated a greater 'oxygen debt' that took longer to pay back at the size-independent peak metabolic rate of ~6 mg min−1 kg−1. Post-exercise recovery of plasma testosterone was faster in jacks compared with full-size males, suggesting less impairment of the maturation trajectory of smaller fish. Supporting previous studies, these findings suggest that environmental change and non-lethal fisheries interactions have the potential to select for small individuals within fish populations over time.
Time to Evolve? Potential Evolutionary Responses of Fraser River Sockeye Salmon to Climate Change and Effects on Persistence
Hague, Meran
Reed, Thomas
Schindler, Daniel
Waples, Robin
Meir, Eli
Evolutionary adaptation affects demographic resilience to climate change but few studies have attempted to project changes in selective pressures or quantify impacts of trait responses on population dynamics and extinction risk. We used a novel individual-based model to explore potential evolutionary changes in migration timing and the consequences for population persistence in sockeye salmon Oncorhynchus nerka in the Fraser River, Canada, under scenarios of future climate warming. Adult sockeye salmon are highly sensitive to increases in water temperature during their arduous upriver migration, raising concerns about the fate of these ecologically, culturally, and commercially important fish in a warmer future. Our results suggest that evolution of upriver migration timing could allow these salmon to avoid increasingly frequent stressful temperatures, with the odds of population persistence increasing in proportion to the trait heritability and phenotypic variance. With a simulated 2°C increase in average summer river temperatures by 2100, adult migration timing from the ocean to the river advanced by ~10 days when the heritability was 0.5, while the risk of quasi-extinction was only 17% of that faced by populations with zero evolutionary potential (i.e., heritability fixed at zero). The rates of evolution required to maintain persistence under simulated scenarios of moderate to rapid warming are plausible based on estimated heritabilities and rates of microevolution of timing traits in salmon and related species, although further empirical work is required to assess potential genetic and ecophysiological constraints on phenological adaptation. These results highlight the benefits to salmon management of maintaining evolutionary potential within populations, in addition to conserving key habitats and minimizing additional stressors where possible, as a means to build resilience to ongoing climate change. More generally, they demonstrate the importance and feasibility of considering evolutionary processes, in addition to ecology and demography, when projecting population responses to environmental change.


HomeSAABSAABHow much do you know about speedy Swedish cars?
British "The Telegraph" published in the Quiz section interesting Motoring Quiz "How much do you know about speedy Swedish cars?".
In this Quiz we're looking back at those old Scandinavian favourites for weekly motoring quiz, and asking visitor to test knowledge of speedy Swedes, old and new.
The horsepower rating for a 2002 9-5 Aero in USA specification is within 3hp to one of the choices and not as low as BHP rating in UK.
I knew Volvo had an 850R and later 850 T-5R but chose the wrong one for the year specific color. Kind of a trick question and I wonder if that was the same in all markets.


As your Will only takes effect once you have died, it is important to consider the practicality of how your finances would be managed if you were to lose capacity. This need not simply be a dementia issue, but can be a prolonged illness, a stroke, etc. In purely practical terms, if you were placed in care and needed someone to make sure that your bills were paid and your home sold for this purpose, who would be able to deal with these matters on your behalf?
Where spouses or civil partners own all their property and hold all their accounts jointly, such an arrangement is useful and forward-thinking, but not essential until the first of the pair has lost capacity or died. However, those in sole control of the access to funds needed for their daily care should consider the creation of LPA's as a matter of urgency.
The Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) replaced the previous, simpler form of Enduring Power of Attorney (EPA) in October 2007. Further changes were made to the form in 2015 when the registration documents were incorporated into the body of the main form, and some changes were made to the questions and choices to improve the system for users.
There are two different types of LPA's – Property and Financial Affairs, and Health and Care. They do very different jobs, and the first is clearly the most practically useful of the two. The second allows you to place the only form of legally recognised authority in your Attorneys, allowing them a greater authority with NHS/DWP/Care homes etc in relation to your care and medical treatment, and also allows you to leave instructions in relation to your end of life choices and authorities.
Although complex, the creation of an LPA is essential for anyone who wishes to exert any level of control over the management of their affairs and/or their medical care in the event of incapacity. Such incapacity need not merely be the result of a degenerative disease of the mind, but could also be the result of a tragic accident or progressive medical condition, and consequently decisions need to be taken while you are fit and well enough to certify to your own wishes.
The Lasting Power of Attorney Financial Decisions is the most commonly requested form of the document. As with the old Enduring Power of Attorney (EPA), this allows you to choose your own Attorneys who will manage your affairs, and provide guidance as to your wishes and even limit their powers to certain areas or decisions.
The complications of the system are primarily found in the forms of certification or your own capacity and your informed choices on the LPA document itself, and are designed to protect the vulnerable and ensure that you have fully understood the consequences and extent of your election.
Under an LPA dealing with personal health and care you can, if you wish, give your Attorney the right to make care decisions on your behalf, as well as granting them to the authority to make decisions as to what life sustaining medical treatment you should be given. Because of the serious and far reaching implications of this considerably more time would be spent on preparation and advice relating to such a document.
Have full capacity to make these decisions.
We recommend that the Certificate provider used at Section 10 is a GP or other registered medical practitioner who, by issuing the certification, is also confirming your capacity to execute the form as Donor.
Whether the person you wish to appoint is completely trustworthy.
The risk that your Attorney(s) may abuse their powers under the LPA.
That a sole Attorney may provide greater risk of abuse than two or more persons appointed together.
Whether the Attorney(s) has the necessary skills to manage your financial affairs.
Whether a family member or an independent person or a combination of both would be the best option for your Attorney(s).
Section 3 – How should your Attorneys make Decisions?
Appointing Attorneys together may provide a greater safe guard against abuse, although the drafting of the appointments must be exceptionally clear to ensure that no confusion arises as to the responsibilities of each individual Attorney, particularly in dealings with Banks and other third parties.
jointly and severally in respect of some matters and jointly in respect of other issues.
Please bear in mind that, where a 'joint' appointment is made, Attorneys can only act unanimously, should one of your Attorneys die or become unable to act through incapacity or any other reason, then the remaining Attorney can no longer act, and the Lasting Power of Attorney is nullified.
The Law Society suggest that perhaps you could appoint a family member to act for day to day matters and a professional to act for complex matters, but you should bear in mind the additional remuneration that will be required for a professional to act and also the possibility of conflict between the two.
Not be bankrupt or subject to a debt order of any sort.
ALL forms of LPA need to be registered with the OPG Before they can be used by your Attorney(s), and this process takes a minimum of five to six weeks (longer if there are any objections). The original document needs to be submitted to the OPG.
There is no time limit for registration of the LPA once created.
Clearly there may be circumstances when your Attorneys need to use the LPA urgently and, whilst it may be tempting to avoid the extra costs and administration of registering the LPA immediately after it is signed, if that is not done there will be this delay of five to six weeks or more before your Attorneys can act. If they need to take urgent action they cannot do so until the registration process is complete.
If there is any problem with the LPA and you have lost capacity then the LPA cannot be corrected and may be invalid.
If however, you register the LPA immediately after it has been signed your Attorneys can, unless the LPA is expressed only to be effective on incapacity, act immediately.


text:
Alzheimer's Drug May Impair Memory
by Rachael Rettner for My Health News Daily
A class of drugs being investigated to treat Alzheimer's disease may actually have the opposite effect of the original intent — they may impair memory, a new study in animals suggests.
The drugs, known as BACE1 inhibitors, are designed to prevent the formation of the protein plaques in the brain that are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. However, the new study suggests these drugs interfere with the brain's wiring, potentially affecting the formation of new memories. While the drugs aren't approved by the Food and Drug Administration, several companies are pursuing their development, and some have been tested in human trials.
The new findings are not a red light for BACE1 inhibitor development, study researcher Robert Vassar, a professor of cell and molecular biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said here today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting. But researchers should proceed with caution, Vassar said. "It's something the drug makers need to keep their eyes out for," Vassar told MyHealthNewsDaily.
The enzyme BACE1 is involved in forming amyloid beta proteins, which aggregate to form plaques. The drugs are based on the idea that blocking the enzyme could slow the disease, or help with symptoms. However, Vassar's study found BACE1 has another role in the brain, guiding the growth of axons — the long, slender appendages of nerve cells. In a sense, BACE1 is like an electrician, Vassar said, helping to wire up the brain.
In the study, Vassar and colleagues genetically engineered mice so they did not have the BACE1 enzyme. The mice had an incorrectly wired olfactory system, which is used for the animal's sense of smell. "It's like a badly wired house," Vassar said. While the wiring of this system takes place mainly during development, brain cells die and regenerate throughout life, so there is a continuous need for axon guidance, Vassar said.
Vassar said he suspects other parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, may be affected by BACE1 inhibition, and that the new results may explain why previous studies in mice lacking BACE1 showed certain defects, including mild impairment on memory tests.
It's not clear whether the same thing happens in people. And even if it does, these drugs may still have a use against Alzheimer's, Vassar said. "These BACE1 blockers might be useful at a specific dose that will reduce the amyloid plaques but not high enough to interfere with the wiring. Understanding the normal function of BACE1 may help us avoid potential drug side effects," Vassar said.
Pass it on: Studies in animals suggest a class of Alzheimer's drugs may have detrimental affects on memory, and development of these drugs should proceed with caution, researchers say.
Source:https://www.foxnews.com/health/alzheimers-drug-may-impair-memory


text:
\section{INTRODUCTION}
There is much ongoing research to develop Augmented Reality (AR) surgical guidance systems for improving laparoscopic surgery. The idea is to allow hidden structures such as organ vessels and tumors to be visualized in real-time, by registering imaging data from different modalities such as CT or MRI \cite{Puerto-Souza,Sylvain,Collins2017}. An important research objective is to register the second modality with the laparoscopic images automatically without the use of artificial tracking markers or external tracking equipment. Feature-based solutions were proposed \cite{Puerto-Souza,Haouchine}, however they fail in the case of textureless tissues where feature detection is extremely unreliable. Feature tracking \cite{Haouchine,KLT} is very fragile at textureless regions, and can suffer from drift and drop-off due to occlusion, sudden camera motion and motion blur. Furthermore feature-based solutions do not produce a dense 3D scene reconstruction, which is necessary for accurate inter-modal registration \cite{Collins2017}.

Several computer vision based solutions have been proposed for 3D reconstruction of laparoscopic scenes. Structure-from-Motion (SfM) \cite{Sun,Hu} is a well-established approach, however it requires offline batch processing and is not suitable for real-time application. Shape from Shading \cite{Collins2012} exploits the shading effect to deduce the scene's 3D structure, however it is weakly constrained problem and require multiple depth cues in a hybrid method, such as SfM/SfS as concluded by Collins et al. \cite{Collins2012}. Stereo-vision based solutions were also proposed \cite{Lin,Stoyanov2010} for dense scene reconstruction, however they are not applicable to monocular laparoscopes, which are by far the most common type.

Recently, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) systems have emerged as an excellent approach to reconstruct laparoscopic scenes and to compute the laparoscope's 3D pose in real-time. Typically, in the laparoscopic surgery an initial exploration is performed in order to explore the abdominal cavity. During exploration the surgeon does not manipulate the environment with tools, so the scene can be assumed to be rigid. This has been developed for both stereo  \cite{Mountney1,Mountney2} and monocular laparoscopes \cite{Grasa,Nader}. ORB-SLAM \cite{Raul} in particular shows remarkable tracking performance but at the expense of low map density \cite{Nader}. This is because it only reconstructs the 3D positions of sparse ORB features that have been matched in two or more keyframes.

We propose a SLAM based quasi dense reconstruction algorithm which is able to reconstruct the surgical environment using only a monocular endoscope and no extra tracking equipment. It works by densifying a sparse reconstructed map computed during exploration phase by e.g. ORB-SLAM, using pairs of keyframe images and correlation-based featureless patch matching. Only a small number of relevant keyframe pairs are selected, therefore keeping computation time low. Keyframe pairs are selected using their respective baseline in the covisibilty graph, and are treated as a stereo pair. Densification is then done in three main steps: \textit{initial feature based densification} where we do a 3D reconstruction of unmatched features (cf. Sec. \ref{initial_map_densification_section}), \textit{depth propagation} where we propagate the reconstruction to featureless regions (cf. Sec. \ref{depth_propagation_section}) and finally \textit{reconstruction post-processing}, where outliers are removed and the reconstruction is smoothed (cf. Sec. \ref{postprocessing_step}).

Semi-dense SLAM has been proposed in \cite{Engel,Mur-Artal} limiting the dense reconstruction to highly textured image areas. In contrast we densify regions with low contrast and without planarity assumption in low gradient regions as proposed in \cite{Alejo}. The advantage of densifying the sparse map after exploration phase is to maintain the per-frame computation time during SLAM, which is important to achieve reliable and robust tracking before and after the dense map  is estimated. Furthermore, unlike \cite{Alejo} we use densification based on Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC), which handles significant illumination changes that are common in surgical scenes \cite{Stoyanov2010}. The resulting quasi dense reconstruction can be used to accurately register pre-operative data to laparoscope's images, which is a vital component for AR surgical guidance.

\section{Quasi dense 3D scene reconstruction}

\subsection{Method overview}

We outline the proposed method in Figure \ref{fig:reconstruction_pipeline}.  We assume the laparoscope is pre-calibrated with fixed intrinsic using \cite{Zhang} immediately before exploration. During both SLAM and reconstruction densification we pre-process each frame to handle particular challenges of laparocopic image data (cf. Sec. \ref{pre-processing_step}). During exploration, SLAM is run until the end of this phase, which typically lasts no more than a minute. We use ORB-SLAM but any good feature-based SLAM approach could be used. The SLAM process is denoted by the top loop in Figure \ref{fig:reconstruction_pipeline}. This outputs a set of keyframes, their respective camera poses, a set of features detected in each keyframe and sparse 3D map. Next the three stages: feature based densification, depth propagation and reconstruction post-processing are run. Once finished, the laparoscope's pose can be tracked in the incoming laparoscopic frames in real-time using the sparse ORB-SLAM map.

\vspace{-2mm}
\begin{figure}[thpb]
      \centering
      \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{Pipeline.png}
      \caption{Algorithm pipeline.}
      \label{fig:reconstruction_pipeline}
   \end{figure}

\vspace{-2mm}
\subsection{Frame pre-processing}
\label{pre-processing_step}
We first detect and eliminate specular reflections to avoid introducing false features to the SLAM system. This is done by converting the RGB frame to HSV and thresholding the saturation component. All detected features in these areas are ignored. Most feature detectors (including ORB) work on monochrome frames. We compute these by converting the RGB frame to monochrome using the average of the green and blue channels. This is because they give the highest contrast for human tissue \cite{Tromberg}.

\subsection{Building the keyframe neighborhood graph}
We construct a neighborhood graph $G$ that connects pairs of SLAM keyframes. This is a sparse graph with typically $O(g)$ edges, where $g$ is the number of keyframes. Sparseness is necessary to keep processing time low. Each edge $(i,j)$ in $G$ corresponds to a stereo pair, and we use this for both feature-based densification and depth propagation. This is constructed as follows. For each keyframe $i$ we compute the stereo baseline $\alpha$ with respect to all neighbor keyframes as a ratio between sparse map median depth and the distance between the two keyframes. We add an edge $(i,j)$ if $\alpha$ falls within the range  $\alpha_0 \leq \alpha \leq \alpha_1$. The lower-bound $\alpha_0$ ensures there is sufficient baseline with which to reliably reconstruct points in 3D. The upper-bound $\alpha_1$ ensures that the keyframes are not too far from each other. We give the default values of $\alpha_0$ and $\alpha_1$ (and all other parameters defaults) in Table \ref{table:1}.

\subsection{Feature based densification}
\label{initial_map_densification_section}
We process each keyframe pair $(i,j)\in G$ as follows. We have two types of features detected in $i$: matched {\textit{f}} and unmatched features {\textit{f'}}. The matched features are those that have been already matched by the SLAM system in another keyframes, have been triangulated, and have been inserted into the map. Our goal is to reconstruct each feature in {\textit{f'}}. The process works by a cross-correlation search guided by epipolar geometry as illustrated in Fig. \ref{epipolar_geometry_fig}. This works by searching exhaustively over an epipolar line segment $l$  with a margin of 10 pixels using NCC matching with a $N$ X $N$ window. We then triangulate the matches and filter them for removing outliers according to three criteria: Matches with NCC score less than a threshold $\tau$ are eliminated. Matches with negative depths are eliminated. Matches with a parallax angle lower than $\gamma$ are eliminated. The triangulated 3D position of each matched feature that passes the filters is then inserted into the map.

We bound the length of the epipolar segment $l$ to keep computation cost low using median depth of all visible points in keyframe $j$. Two extreme points on the back-projected ray are used to bound $l$ which are ${P_{min}}$ and ${P_{max}}$. The two points depths are computed by averaging and doubling median depth of visible map points, respectively.

 \begin{figure}[thpb]
      \centering
      \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{epipolar_geometry_search_image.png}
      \caption{Epipolar guided search. ${KF_i}$ and ${KF_{j}}$ are current keyframe and its neighbor keyframe, respectively.}
      \label{epipolar_geometry_fig}
   \end{figure}

\vspace{-5mm}
\subsection{Featureless depth propagation}
\label{depth_propagation_section}
After feature-based densification, we further densify the map at featureless regions through a depth propagation algorithm. The process works on each keyframe pair $(i,j)\in G$ as follows. First we take all points that were matched in keyframes $i$ and $j$, and use their depths as seed depths which are then propagated to neighboring pixels. We then continue to propagate depth around seeds on best-first basis by popping a seeds queue, as proposed in \cite{Stoyanov2010}. New matches are added to the queue as the algorithm iterates until no more matches can be popped.

Consider a seed point with a 2D position $m$ in keyframe $i$ and $m'$ in keyframe $j$, with $N(m)$ and $N(m')$ spatial neighbored pixels, respectively in a $6 \times 6$ window. These seed matches are used to control the smoothness of the disparity estimation of all $N(m)$ and $N(m')$ pixels. For each neighbored pixel $u \in N(m)$ a NCC is used to find a corresponding match $u'$ in a $6 \times 6$ window centered in the corresponding spatial location in keyframe $j$, that has higher NCC score than $\tau$ and satisfy the smoothness constrain defined in eq. (1). We use $\beta$ to control the smoothness of the disparity estimation. NCC is used as a similarity measure during propagation step.

\vspace{-4mm}
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
N(m,m') = \left\lbrace (u,u'), ||(u-u')-(m-m')|| \leqslant \beta \right\rbrace
\end{split}
\end{equation}

\subsection{Outlier removal and denoising}
\label{postprocessing_step}
Because depth propagation operates on keyframe pairs, there will be some disagreement due to noise across different keyframe pairs, typically at very low-textured regions. We deal with this by a robust averaging and merging. First we detect any remaining outliers in the quasi dense map using point neighborhood statistics \cite{Rusu}. This works by eliminating points if they are unusually far apart from the nearest $\kappa$ points, according to a threshold $\rho$ multiplied by standard deviation of all points distances. We then remove noise using Moving Least Square (MLS) \cite{Alexa}. This works by fitting a local plane to each point using all $\eta$ nearest neighbors. The denoised point is then computed by orthogonally projected onto the fitted plane.

\section{Experimental results}
\subsection{Experimental design}
We evaluated our approach with a live in-vivo porcine experiment using a CT scan as ground-truth. In this experiment we reconstructed a porcine liver surrounding abdominal viscera, abdominal wall and diaphragm (cf. Fig. \ref{fig:res1}(e,f)) from 10 seconds exploratory video. Example frames are shown in Fig. \ref{fig:res1}(a). A CT was then acquired during 10 second expiration breath hold and is manually segmented by an expert to generate a 3D volume with 0.876mm x 0.876mm x 0.799mm voxel size and 749, 318 vertices, Fig. \ref{fig:RMSE_fig}(a).

Fig. \ref{fig:res1} shows the results of each step in reconstruction algorithm. Fig. \ref{fig:res1}(b) shows the sparse ORB-SLAM map from the initial exploration, where map points are shown in red and keyframes poses are the blue rectangles. Fig. \ref{fig:res1}(c), shows the newly added points, in blue after the feature based densification step. Fig. \ref{fig:res1}(d) shows the reconstruction after the featureless densification stage. Fig. \ref{fig:res1}(e,f) shows the reconstruction from different view points after outlier removal and denoising with normal ORB map point highlighted in red and the newly added points from feature based densification stage are highlighted in blue. Note that there are holes in the reconstruction due to specular reflections and regions of extremely homogeneous texture. More details can be appreciated at our video \cite{video1_myliver}. Another video \cite{video2_HamlynLiver} shows the reconstruction results of one liver sequence available at Hamlyn Centre Laparoscopic/Endoscopic Video Datasets \cite{HamlynDataset}.

\vspace{-2mm}
\begin{table}[h!]
\centering
\caption{Tuning parameters}
\begin{tabular}{||c | c | c | c | c | c | c| c | c ||}
 \hline
 $\alpha$ & $N$ & $\tau$ & $\gamma$ & $\beta$ & $\rho$ & $\kappa$ & $\eta$ \\ [0.5ex]
 \hline\hline
 [0.05,0.09] & 19 & 0.3 & [$2.14^{\circ}$,$90^{\circ}$] & 1.5 & 4 & 40 & 40 \\ [1ex]
 \hline
\end{tabular}

\label{table:1}
\end{table}

\vspace{-3mm}
\subsection{Implementation details and computation time}
The system is implemented in C++ with OpenCV and PCL libraries and executed on desktop PC with Intel Core i7 CPU @ 2.6 GHz and 4GB RAM. The average tracking time is 23ms with 1600x900 image resolution. Average time required for: feature based densification was 5ms per keyframe, depth propagation was 25ms per keyframe (time for matching and triangulating points), MLS denoising was 1min due to computing normal for each points and polynomial fitting. The total number of reconstructed points was 348, 068 point. After obtaining dense scene reconstruction, the endoscope pose is then tracked in 25ms on average because only the sparse ORB-SLAM map is considered.
\begin{figure}[H]
      \centering
      \subfigure[]{
          \includegraphics[width=0.22\textwidth]{histo1_mm.png}
	      }
      \subfigure[]{
          \includegraphics[width=0.22\textwidth]{histo2_mm.png}
      }
      \caption{Distances Distributions.}
      \label{fig:Histograms_fig}
   \end{figure}
\vspace{-6mm}
\begin{figure}[H]
      \centering
      \subfigure[]{
          \includegraphics[width=0.20\textwidth]{pig.png}
      }
      \subfigure[]{
          \includegraphics[width=0.20\textwidth]{RMSE3.png}
      }\\
      \vspace{-2mm}
      \subfigure[]{
          \includegraphics[width=0.20\textwidth]{RMSE4.png}
      }
      \subfigure[]{
          \includegraphics[width=0.20\textwidth]{RMSE2.png}
      }
      \caption{Alignment of reconstructed dense map. (a) Whole CT surface of the pig abdominal cavity. (b,c) ICP alignment from two viewpoints with the visible part of CT surface in the laparoscope images. (d) yellow, white and red points are CT model points, inliers and outliers map points, respectively.}
      \label{fig:RMSE_fig}
   \end{figure}

\begin{figure*}[h]
      \centering
        \includegraphics[height=4.5cm]{res1.pdf}
      \caption{Quasi dense reconstruction. (a) 3 Frames from the sequence. (b) normal ORB-SLAM map. (c) feature based densification. (d) depth propagation. (e,f) reconstructed scene from two different direction.}
      \label{fig:res1}
\end{figure*}

\vspace{-5mm}
\subsection{Registering the map to CT and measuring accuracy}
As with any SLAM system, our reconstruction is up to a similarity transform (i.e. an arbitrary scale and rigid coordinate transform). To evaluate accuracy we aligned the reconstruction to the CT model (cf. Fig. \ref{fig:RMSE_fig}(a)) using a best-fitting similarity transform. This was found by manually selecting 3 landmarks to roughly estimate the scale and initial orientation by Horn's algorithm \cite{Horn}. Then Iterative Closest Point (ICP) was run until convergence to refine the initial alignment. Fig. \ref{fig:RMSE_fig} (b,c) shows the alignment between CT model in yellow and reconstructed dense map in white.

Accuracy was measured by the euclidean distance of each map point to its closest point on the CT model's surface. The Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) was used to evaluate the overall error, which was 4.9mm. Fig. \ref{fig:Histograms_fig}(a,b) shows distances distributions of total number of map points besides the accumulative histogram. It can be seen that 85\% of points with lower distances than 6.7mm. Thus, thresholding errors lower than 6.7mm as inliers (85\%) and the rest as outliers(15\%), (cf. Fig. \ref{fig:RMSE_fig}(d)) reduces the RMSE error to 2.8mm. Those 15\% outliers were abdominal wall points and it is quite hard to correctly reconstruct them due to non-rigid deformation by the breathing cycle which prohibits correct re-projection \cite{Marcinczak}.

\vspace{-1mm}
\section{CONCLUSIONS}
We have presented a simple approach for quasi-dense 3D reconstruction of laparoscopic scenes, that robustly densifies a sparse SLAM reconstruction. Because densification is embedded in SLAM, we keep all the benefits of state-of-the-art feature-based SLAM system such a ORB-SLAM, including fast tracking, mapping and automatic relocalization. Our preliminary results on an in-vivo porcine dataset are very promising, with a RMSE of 4.9mm. Future directions include improving reconstruction accuracy by including multiple views in the reconstruction process of the same point. Reducing dense reconstruction computation time, especially the denoising stage. Additionally, we aim to use the reconstruction for automatic registration with a CT model.
\addtolength{\textheight}{-12cm}

\vspace{-1mm}
\section*{ACKNOWLEDGMENT}
This work is part of a project of the Investissements d'Avenir program ("Investing in the Future") called 3D-Surg, funded by BPIfrance. It is also partially funded by the Spanish government DPI2015-67275-P and Aragonese DGA T04-FSE.

\vspace{-3mm}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


(CNN) – Americans are focused on our country's efforts to treat ebola patients once they've reached the United States.
But the way to roll back the spread of Ebola is to stop it at its roots, and that means West Africa.
Specifically countries such as Guinea, Sierra Leona and Liberia, some thousands of American troops are going to be deployed in that area, and international aid organizations are on the ground as well.
International Rescue Committee CEO David Miliband deals with catastrophes on a regular basis, says the outbreak has the potential to spread even further.
"We're in a deadly race against time," Miliband, former foreign secretary for the United Kingdom, said.
To date, the world's largest outbreak of Ebola has killed more than 3,400 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - the nations hardest hit. Since March, more than 7,400 people have contracted Ebola in those nations, according to the World Health Organization. A handful of cases have been reported in Nigeria and Senegal as well.
"The danger is the exponential spread of the disease means that we could be talking of tens or hundreds of thousands (of deaths) within in a matter of months," Miliband said.
The CDC says infections could reach 1.4 million in four months.
For more of our interview with International Rescue Committee CEO David Miliband, check out the video above.


Experience the life of a celebrity for a day with a private flight to the Hunter Valley departing from Sydney. With a champagne in hand, marvel at the amazing scenery below as you cruise at low level. On the ground, enjoy a variety of wine and food tastings and a premium three course lunch.
Enjoy a day of VIP treatment with your someone special as you're whisked away to the Hunter Valley in a private light aircraft. Departing Bankstown Airport, track north over Parramatta towards the coast passing Sydney's iconic harbour and CBD. Soak in uninterrupted views of the Northern Beaches, Central Coast and Newcastle before reaching the picturesque Hunter Valley. Here you'll explore the area at a reduced speed, offering incredible photo opportunities of the rolling hills, valleys and vineyards below. At Cessnock Airport you will be greeted by your friendly and experienced guides who are there to take you around the famous wine region – in nothing less than a luxurious Mercedes-Benz vehicle.
You will enjoy guided tastings at three boutique cellar doors, meeting the winemakers and learning about their processes from grape to bottle. Indulge in an elegant three course lunch at a premium winery restaurant and sample some of the finest local chocolate, cheese and olive oil along the way. This tour visits some of the Hunter Valley's finest vineyards and restaurants with regular stops including Degen Estate, Blueberry Hill, Elbourne Wines, Muse Kitchen, Bistro Molines and Baume. After an exciting day of discovery, your guides will return you to Cessnock Airport where your pilot will be on standby to return you home.
Participants must be 18 years or older to consume alcohol; ID may be required.
If the weather is unsuitable on the day, the provider will make an assessment and contact the participant directly. In this case, the flight will be rescheduled at a more appropriate time or day.
This experience departs the provider's terminal in Bankstown Airport, Sydney.


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"My 2003 Z06 has 405 hp and is advertised as one of the most powerful production Corvettes ever produced...yet my brother had a 69 that was rated at 425 horsepower...some models had 450 hp....what's the story? What is the conversion factor from today's horsepower ratings to those of the 60's?"
James Watt is to blame here. Watt, you might remember, was the Father of the steam engine and the originator of the term, "horsepower." He created the term in his first attempts to persuade mine owners to substitute his steam engines for horses in hoisting coal. A horse, it was known, could work at the rate of 22,000 foot-pounds per minute but Watt arbitrarily made the unit of horsepower half again as much as the average horse - shrewd marketer that he was.
In the U.S. the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has, since 1903, defined one horsepower as the ability to lift 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute, or 550 pounds one foot in one second.
In Germany, however, the horsepower was established as the ability to lift 45,000 kg (there are 0.4536 kg to the pound) one centimeter (2.54 cm to the inch) in one minute, which translates to 98.629% of an SAE horsepower, and you'll just have to trust us with the math. The Germans, by the way, standardized the horsepower through a system of measurement called "JS," the abbreviation for the German term for horsepower, now classified as "DIN."
The DIN rating has been adopted by the International Standards Organization - ISO - as the European standard. Nowadays we have the JIS, or Japanese Standards Institute. It rates horsepower the same as the ISO, but both are different (not by much, but they're still different) from the SAE. For practical purposes, consider them all equal. Okay so far?
How horsepower is measured depends upon circumstances and history. Back before 1972 American manufacturers used SAE Gross horsepower to rate the output of their engines. To measure horsepower they mounted an engine on a test stand and hooked it up to a dynamometer (more on that later, too). It is important to note that the engines, as tested, had no accessories attached. Power was measured at the bare flywheel and the amount was, by definition, gross horsepower.
In 1972, American manufacturers phased in SAE Net horsepower. This is the standard on which current American ratings are based. This rating is measured at the flywheel, on an engine dyno, but the engine is tested with all accessories installed, including a full exhaust system, all pumps, the alternator, the starter, and emissions controls. Both SAE net and SAE gross horsepower test procedures are documented in Society of Automotive Engineers standard J1349.
Note: Because the test equipment used back in the "old days" to measure gross horsepower is different from today's setup, it is impossible to provide an absolute conversion from one to the other. A rule of thumb, however, is to assume that SAE Net is about 80% of SAE Gross. In the case of Jim's question above, the 1969 Vette's engine put out about 340 horsepower in today's ratings.
Hang on, now, because this gets worse. For decades those of us who've delved through road test magazines and vehicle brochures have used the term "brake horsepower." Simply put, nowadays brake horsepower is nothing more than another way of stating SAE Net horsepower, although before 1972 it referred to Gross horsepower.
However, it's the brake that measures all this, either in the form of a Pony Brake (a device that applies friction to the output shaft) or the Fan Brake (absorbs power by the resistance of a fan in air or water) or the Eddy Brake (uses a metal disk in a magnetic field.) These methods have generally been replaced by the dynamometer.
A dynamometer is nothing more than a heavy-duty electric generator that is either hooked up to the engine's flywheel on the test stand, in the case of the manufacturer, or driven by a car's wheels in the case of a chassis dynamometer. It measures the engine's power by measuring how many watts (yeah, James Watt managed to get the unit of electrical power named after him) of electricity the engine is capable of generating, or how many watts it takes to stop its turning.
HUH? FIRST WE WERE TALKING ABOUT HORSEPOWER AND NOW ELECTRICITY?
We told you to hang on, didn't we? You remember from our little history lesson above that horsepower is really kind of an arbitrary term. After all, when is the last time you measured how many pounds a horse could lift? In engineering circles, engines are rated in terms of thermal efficiency and output in watts (thousands of watts actually, or kilowatts.) As far as the SAE is concerned, one horsepower is the electrical equivalent of 746 watts. The JIS/DIN equivalent is 735.5 watts, but let's not quibble anymore.
Whichever standard one happens to choose (it's really where you live) the measurement technique is the same. The engine, or entire car, is hooked up to the dynamometer and run to full rev. The resultant number of kilowatts measured is converted to horsepower and there you are.
Back in the muscle car era the manufacturers loved to advertise horsepower. It got people into the showrooms and sold cars, as it still does. GM, in some cases, underrated its horsepower figures because of insurance and liability concerns, but always managed to advertise just a little more than the competitors. Power means speed, etc.


text:
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Newtonsoft.Json;

namespace IBM.Watson.Discovery.v1.Model
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Document conversion settings.
    /// </summary>
    public class Conversions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// A list of PDF conversion settings.
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty("pdf", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
        public PdfSettings Pdf { get; set; }
        /// <summary>
        /// A list of Word conversion settings.
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty("word", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
        public WordSettings Word { get; set; }
        /// <summary>
        /// A list of HTML conversion settings.
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty("html", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
        public HtmlSettings Html { get; set; }
        /// <summary>
        /// A list of Document Segmentation settings.
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty("segment", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
        public SegmentSettings Segment { get; set; }
        /// <summary>
        /// Defines operations that can be used to transform the final output JSON into a normalized form. Operations
        /// are executed in the order that they appear in the array.
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty("json_normalizations", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
        public List<NormalizationOperation> JsonNormalizations { get; set; }
        /// <summary>
        /// When `true`, automatic text extraction from images (this includes images embedded in supported document
        /// formats, for example PDF, and suppported image formats, for example TIFF) is performed on documents uploaded
        /// to the collection. This field is supported on **Advanced** and higher plans only. **Lite** plans do not
        /// support image text recognition.
        /// </summary>
        [JsonProperty("image_text_recognition", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
        public bool? ImageTextRecognition { get; set; }
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Running java .JAR server on a website hosting plan Is it possible to run a java server application on a web hosting plan such as hostgator.com, or do I have to purchase a dedicated server?

A: Shared hosting plans do not offer this kind of service. The only things that will run on these are web scripts like PHP (and with some disabled features).
The best option is to purchase a VPS or a dedicated server where you'll have a remote access and on which you will install everything required to run java apps.
You will also have to take care of the security of the server and this is a big responsibility.


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The 'Original' Round Tuit Blue Satin collection provides an elegant display at the dinner table, and will be a talking point amongst family and guests.


text:
DOJ Drops Insider Trading Investigation Into Sen. Richard Burr
New Program Aims To Bring More Civil Rights Lawyers To The South
U.S. Executes Dustin Higgs In 13th And Final Execution Under Trump Administration
'Grim Sleeper' defense focuses on DNA evidence
FILE- In this Feb. 16, 2016, file photo, Lonnie Franklin Jr., left, appears in Los Angeles Superior Court for opening statements in his trial in Los Angeles. Franklin has pleaded not guilty to killing nine women and a 15-year-old girl between 1985 and 2007 in one of the city's most notorious serial killer cases.
Al Seib/AP
Ashley Bailey | March 21, 2016
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Accused serial killer Lonnie Franklin Jr.'s legal team plans to poke holes in forensic evidence allegedly linking him to multiple victims, Franklin's attorney said in an opening statement Monday.
Franklin., 63, has pleaded not guilty to the murders of nine women and a teenaged girl in South Los Angeles that occurred between 1985 and 2007. He's been dubbed the "Grim Sleeper" because of an apparent dormant period between his alleged murders.
Investigators say they've linked DNA found on some of those murder victims to Franklin using a partially eaten pizza slice. They also say ballistics evidence links some of the murders to Franklin and to each other.
But Monday, defense attorney Seymour Amster said that evidence isn't foolproof—and picking it apart will form much of Franklin's legal strategy.
He said in many cases, the DNA swabs on victims' clothing and bodies yielded evidence of multiple DNA contributors—not just Franklin.
For instance, in the case of Barbara Ware, Amster said a swab of her mouth turned up Lonnie Franklin's DNA. But a swab on her shirt did not.
"They analyzed sperm fraction on the shirt and found at least three donors and one was a male. In that mixutre, they excluded Lonnie Franklin as being the potential contributor to that DNA sample on the shirt," he said. ""Picking and choosing is not a proper science."
Monday's statements come over a month into the trial. The prosecution, led by Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman, rested its case last week.
Attorneys spent much of the morning arguing some of the finer points in the case, outside the presence of the jury, and often to the frustration of Amster.
At one point, Judge Katheen Kennedy indicated Amster would have to refile a subpoena involving Los Angeles Police's chain of custody for some of the physical evidence involved in the case.
"I'm going to rest, we have no defense," Amster yelled. "I can not completely defend this man any further."
Kennedy, who asked Amster to calm himself down, called for a short recess, after which the trial resumed.
Franklin, dressed in a white collared dress shirt and a tie, black pants and black rimmed glasses, sat quietly throughout.
'Grim Sleeper' deliberations to start Wednesday
Grim Sleeper: Closing arguments detail brutality of murders
Defense to target DNA in 'Grim Sleeper' serial killing trial
LA church holds memorial service for 'Grim Sleeper' victims
Grim Sleeper: What you need to know as the long-awaited trial begins
Grim Sleeper trial: Prosecution opens with graphic photos
Timeline: The hunt for the Grim Sleeper
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