text:
\section{Introduction}

The algorithms of {\it ab initio} electron-correlation methods are dominated by matrix multiplications.
Implemented naively, such multiplications are often nonscalable with respect to either computer size or system size.
The scalability with respect to computer size means the extent to which an algorithm lends itself to a facile and efficient
parallel execution on a large number of computing processors, which is, nowadays, on the order of millions.
The scalability with system size concerns with the size-dependence of the computational cost,
which ranges from $O(n^5)$ for the second-order many-body perturbation (MP2) method \cite{Moller_1934} to an exponential function of $n$ for the full configuration-interaction method,\cite{ Knowles_1984, Sherrill_1999}
where $n$ is a measure of system size such as the number of electrons or of basis functions.

Consider the four-index integral transformation.\cite{Yoshimine_1973, Abe_2004_1} This is a necessary step for most electron-correlation calculations,
and is the rate-determining step of MP2.\cite{headgordon1988, frisch1990,frisch1990_2}
In it, two-electron integrals in the atomic-orbital (AO) basis are transformed to those in the molecular-orbital (MO) basis
via four consecutive quarter transformations (which are binary matrix multiplications). This is a hard step to program and even harder to parallelize for the following reasons:
Neither the AO-based nor MO-based two-electron integrals fit in core memory, and so they (together with the partially transformed integrals) have
to be stored on disks at a large I/O cost. The AOs and MOs have opposing characteristics---AOs are spatially local but non-symmetry-adapted, while
MOs are spatially extended and symmetry-adapted---hindering their data-local storage across processors,
which is prerequisite for efficient parallelization. Each of the four quarter transformations comes at a $O(n^5)$ cost, raising a high barrier
for {\it ab initio} electron-correlation calculations, as compared to preceding reference mean-field calculations, which can be completed at a $O(n^2)$ to $O(n^3)$ cost.

There are at least two general approaches to combating the nonscalability: One is to exploit the sparsity of
the matrices, such as that brought to by spatially localizing MOs.\cite{Pulay1,Yang_1995,Kohn} This will divide a large matrix multiplication
into many smaller ones, each associated with a local domain, potentially lowering size-dependence of cost all the way down to $O(n^1)$.
Each of the small matrix multiplications can be taken care of by an individual processor with minimal interprocessor communications,
exposing efficient parallelism. The price one pays for this remarkable scalability is its limited applicability
only to {\it spatially extended large systems} (additionally, to those that have local electronic structures, barring, e.g., metals and charge transfer).

The other approach is to not exhaustively use all matrix elements during the multiplication in favor of stochastically sampling
only a small portion of them according to their importance.\cite{Thom2007, Ohtsuka2008, Booth2009, Cleland2010, Ohtsuka2010, Ohtsuka2011, Shepherd2012, Petruzielo2012, Willow2012, Neuhauser2013, Neuhauser2013b, Willow2013, Ten-no2013, Willow2013b, Booth2014, Cytter2014, Ge2014, Willow2014, Willow2014a, Willow2014b, Doran2016, Johnson2016, piecuch,Neuhauser2017, Takeshita2017, Jeanmairet2017, Garniron2017, Ten-no2017, Johnson2018,Spencer2018,  Doran2019, Filip2019, Dou2019, Caffareld2019, Li2019, Doran2020a, Doran2020b,DoranQiu} For instance, the Monte Carlo MP2 (MC-MP2) method\cite{Willow2012,Willow2013b,Doran2016} recasts the MP2 energy formula
into the sum of two 13-dimensional integrals, which are evaluated by the MC integration method, eradicating the four-index integral computation, transformation, or storage.
Each processor can be tasked with a completely independent
MC integration in a parallel execution. Only the final results from surviving processors need to be averaged
with near perfect parallel efficiency on
up to thousands of CPUs (central processing units) or on hundreds of GPUs (graphical processing units).\cite{Doran2016}
Size-dependence of cost is not known {\it a priori}, as it depends on the suitability of weight functions adopted for importance sampling in
the high-dimensional space. Our numerical observation\cite{Doran2016} indicated that it is $O(n^3)$, two ranks lower than the deterministic MP2's $O(n^5)$ cost.\cite{headgordon1988, frisch1990,frisch1990_2}
Note that some incarnations of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC)\cite{Ceperley:1980uz, Luchow:2000ji, Foulkes, Kolorenc:2011hv, AustinLester, Wagner,Toulouse2016, Kunitsa}  solve the Schr\"odinger equation essentially exactly also at a $O(n^3)$ cost.
The tradeoff for this greater scalability is the introduction of statistical errors.\cite{Ceperley_error}

It is of interest to study whether the reduced scaling of stochastic algorithms still holds for {\it spatially compact  large systems} such as heavy-element compounds.
They have a large number of electrons and basis functions, but in a small volume, and therefore the local-correlation approach would not work.
Stochastic algorithms such as QMC including MC-MP2 could be among the few that can potentially reduce size-dependence
of cost in such crowded systems. For heavy-element compounds, it is imperative to include the effects of special theory of relativity.\cite{Yanai_2004,Nakajima_2005,Liu_2010, Wullen_2012,Liu_2020} A relativistic MP2 theory
based on the Dirac--Hartree--Fock reference is well established,\cite{Dyall_1994, Laerdahl_1997, Laerdahl_1998, Abe_2004,Abe_2005} and its conventional
algorithmic hotspot is still the four-index integral transformation,\cite{Abe_2004_1, Abe_2006} which
is a $O(n^5)$ procedure. The objective of this article is to demonstrate numerically that the Monte Carlo algorithm of the four-component relativistic MP2
method
preserves the reduced scaling for such spatially compact, crowded systems by eradicating the integral transformation step.
Numerical evidence obtained in this study suggests that the scaling may be as low as
$O(n^2)$.

\section{Four-component relativistic MP2 theory}

Here, we succinctly review only the salient aspects of the four-component relativistic quantum chemistry\cite{Grant_1979, Grant_1988} as a basis of the relativistic MC-MP2 algorithm described
in the next section. The Monte Carlo algorithm is not limited to the four-component relativistic approach and should be equally valid for
the two-component (A2C),\cite{ZORA_1995, Lenthe_ZORA} exact two-component (X2C),\cite{Liu_X2C, Saue_X2C} and quasi-four-component (Q4C)\cite{Liu_Q4C, Peng_Q4C}
approaches not to mention the one-component and nonrelativistic ones.\cite{Willow2012, Willow2013, Willow2013b}

The Dirac--Coulomb(--Breit) Hamiltonian\cite{Dyall_book} for a molecule with $n_\text{elec}$ electrons and $n_\text{nuc}$ nuclei is written as
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{H} = \sum_i^{n_\text{elec}} \hat{h}_\text{D}(i) +  \sum_{i < j}^{n_\text{elec}} \hat{g}_{ij} + \sum_{I < J}^{n_\text{nuc}} \frac{Z_I Z_J}{|\bm{R}_I-\bm{R}_J|},
\end{eqnarray}
where $Z_I$ and $\bm{R}_I$ are the charge and position, respectively, of the $I$th nucleus, and $\hat{g}_{ij}$ is the electron-electron interaction operator defined later.
Here, $\hat{h}_\text{D}(i)$ is the one-electron Dirac Hamiltonian for the $i$th electron given by
\begin{equation}
\hat{h}_\text{D}(i) = c \bm{\alpha} \cdot \bm{p}(i) + \beta  c^2 + V_\text{nuc}(i),
\end{equation}
where $c$ is the speed of light, $\bm{p}(i)$ is the momentum operator that is equal to $-i (\partial /\partial x_i, \partial /\partial y_i, \partial /\partial z_i)$,
and $V_\text{nuc}(i)$ is the nuclear-attraction potential defined later, while
$\bm{\alpha}=(\alpha_1,\alpha_2,\alpha_3)$ and ${\beta}$ are $4\times4$ matrices of the forms,
\begin{eqnarray}
{\alpha}_k &=&
\left( \begin{array}{cc}
\bm{0}_2 & \bm{\sigma}_k \\
\bm{\sigma}_k & \bm{0}_2 \\
\end{array} \right), \,\,\, (k = 1, 2, 3), \label{alpha} \\
{\beta} &=& \left( \begin{array}{cc}
\bm{1}_2 & \bm{0}_2 \\
\bm{0}_2 & -\bm{1}_2 \\
\end{array} \right),
\end{eqnarray}
where $\bm{1}_2$ and $\bm{0}_2$ are the $2 \times 2$ unit and null matrices, respectively, and $\bm{\sigma}_k$ ($k= 1, 2, 3$) are the Pauli matrices.\cite{Dyall_book}

The nuclear-attraction potential $V_\text{nuc}(i)$ in the point-nucleus approximation is given by
\begin{eqnarray}
V_\text{nuc}(i) = - \sum_{I}^{n_\text{nuc}} \frac{Z_I}{|\bm{r}_i - \bm{R}_I|}.
\end{eqnarray}
The interaction operator $\hat{g}_{ij}$ between
the $i$th and $j$th electrons is written as
\begin{equation}
\hat{g}_{ij} = \frac{1}{r_{ij}} -  \frac{\bm\alpha(i) \cdot \bm\alpha(j)}{2r_{ij}} - \frac{(\bm\alpha(i)\cdot \bm{r}_{ij}) (\bm\alpha(j) \cdot \bm{r}_{ij})}{2 r_{ij}^3},
\end{equation}
where $\bm{r}_{ij} = \bm{r}_i - \bm{r}_j$, $r_{ij} = |\bm{r}_{ij}|$, and
$\bm{\alpha}(i)$ is the $\bm\alpha$ matrix-vector of Eq.\ (\ref{alpha}) acting on the $i$th electron.
The first term is the Coulomb interaction, while the other two terms are the Breit interaction.\cite{Liu_2010, Liu_2014} In this work, only the Coulomb interaction
was retained with the Breit interaction neglected. As it will become evident in the next section, however, including the Breit interaction
will be straightforward in the MC-MP$n$ methods because the associated integrals are evaluated numerically. Likewise,
the use of finite nucleus models\cite{Abe_2008} should also be much easier in the MC algorithm than in the deterministic ones. These may be considered in a future study.

An eigenfunction (spinor) of $\hat{h}_\text{D}(i)$ is a four-component complex vector,
\begin{eqnarray}
\varphi_k =
\left( \begin{array}{c}
\varphi_{k}^{L\alpha} \\
\varphi_{k}^{L\beta} \\
\varphi_{k}^{S\alpha} \\
\varphi_{k}^{S\beta} \\
\end{array}
\right),
\end{eqnarray}
where $L$ and $S$ stand for the large and small components of the spinor, respectively, while $\alpha$ and $\beta$ signify spin.
Eigenvalues are divided into two groups: One with positive energies ($E > mc^2$) and the other with negative energies ($E < -mc^2$).
The positive energies correspond to electrons with large $L$ amplitudes, while the negative energies to positrons with large $S$ amplitudes.

A wave function of the mean-field (Dirac--Hartree--Fock) theory is the Slater determinant of positive-energy spinors occupied by electrons, which minimizes
its expectation value of the Dirac--Coulomb(--Breit) Hamiltonian. The spinors are expanded in a four-component basis set as
\begin{eqnarray}
\varphi_k = \sum_{\mu}^{n_\text{bas}}
\left( \begin{array}{c}
C_{\mu k}^{L}\, \chi_{\mu}^{L\alpha} \\
C_{\mu k}^{L}\, \chi_{\mu}^{L\beta} \\
C_{\mu k}^{S}\, \chi_{\mu}^{S\alpha} \\
C_{\mu k}^{S}\, \chi_{\mu}^{S\beta} \\
\end{array}
\right). \label{C}
\end{eqnarray}
Each component basis function is a product of a radial Gaussian function and spherical harmonic, although the MC algorithm can use any basis function.
The $L$ and $S$ components of a basis function
have to satisfy the kinetic balance condition,\cite{Ishikawa_1984, Nakajima_2005}
\begin{equation}
\left( \begin{array}{c}
\chi_{\mu}^{S\alpha} \\
\chi_{\mu}^{S\beta} \\
\end{array} \right)
= i (\bm\sigma\cdot \bm{p})\
\left( \begin{array}{c}
\chi_{\mu}^{L\alpha} \\
\chi_{\mu}^{L\beta} \\
\end{array} \right),
\end{equation}
to avoid a variational collapse. This causes the $S$-component basis set to be about twice as large as the $L$-component one, although an innovation
was introduced by one of the authors that keeps the sizes of these basis sets equal.\cite{Yanai_2001-114}
In either case, the number of basis functions is typically two to three times greater
in a four-component relativistic calculation than in the corresponding nonrelativistic one, making the integral evaluation and subsequent transformation arduous.\cite{Abe_2004_1} Time-reversal symmetry renders each eigenvalue at least doubly degenerate for an even number of electrons so that the corresponding two spinors
form a Kramers pair.\cite{Dyall_book} This along with spatial symmetry (double group symmetry)\cite{Dyall_book} can be exploited
to reduce the number of unique integrals and thus its computational cost in a deterministic algorithm. The exploitation of
symmetry, however, seems incompatible with the MC algorithm.

The zeroth-order M{\o}ller--Plesset perturbation (MP0) energy is the sum of occupied spinor energies, which double counts
the electron-electron interaction energy and is thus too negative.
The sum of the MP0 and first-order (MP1) energies recovers the Dirac--Hartree--Fock energy. The second-order correction, therefore,
accounts for the electron-correlation effect for the first time, and is given by\cite{Dyall_1994, Dyall_book, Laerdahl_1997}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{FinalMP2}
E^{(2)} = \frac{1}{2}\sum_{i,j}^{\text{occ.}} \sum_{a,b}^{\text{vir.}} \frac{(ia|jb)[(ai|bj) - (bi|aj)] }{ \epsilon_i + \epsilon_j - \epsilon_a - \epsilon_b} ,
\end{eqnarray}
where $i$ and $j$ run over all occupied positive-energy spinors, while $a$ and $b$ over all virtual positive-energy spinors, and $\epsilon_p$
is the $p$th spinor energy. That the negative-energy spinors do not enter the summations is called the no-pair approximation.\cite{Sucher_1980, Auts_2012, Liu_2014}
For an even number of electrons, this formula can be compressed considerably by using time-reversal symmetry and turned into the so-called
Kramers-restricted formula.\cite{Dyall_1994, Laerdahl_1997, Laerdahl_1998} We do not consider this here because, again, the MC algorithm seems incompatible with symmetry advantages.
There are other fast MP2 methods such as the resolution-of-identity\cite{RIMP2} and local approximations,\cite{localMP2} which should be compatible with and complementary to the MC algorithm.

In Eq.\ (\ref{FinalMP2}), $(ia|jb)$ is a two-electron integral in the Dirac--Hartree--Fock spinor basis, defined by\cite{Almou_2016}
\begin{eqnarray}
(ia|jb) = \iint d\bm{r}_1 d\bm{r}_2\, { \varphi_i^{\dagger}(\bm{r}_1)\varphi_a(\bm{r}_1) \hat{g}_{12}\,  \varphi_j^{\dagger}(\bm{r}_2) \varphi_b(\bm{r}_2)},
\end{eqnarray}
which is related to the same in the AO basis functions via MO coefficients $\{ C^L_{\zeta p} \}$ and $\{ C^S_{\zeta p} \}$ as
\begin{eqnarray}
(ia|jb) &=& \sum_{\mu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\nu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\kappa}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\lambda}^{n_\text{bas}}
C^{L*}_{\mu i} C^L_{\nu a} C^{L*}_{\kappa j} C^L_{\lambda b} (\mu^{L\alpha} \nu^{L\alpha}|\kappa^{L\alpha}\lambda^{L\alpha})
\nonumber\\ && +
\sum_{\mu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\nu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\kappa}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\lambda}^{n_\text{bas}}
C^{L*}_{\mu i} C^L_{\nu a} C^{L*}_{\kappa j} C^L_{\lambda b} (\mu^{L\alpha} \nu^{L\alpha}|\kappa^{L\beta}\lambda^{L\beta})
\nonumber\\ && +
\sum_{\mu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\nu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\kappa}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\lambda}^{n_\text{bas}}
C^{L*}_{\mu i} C^L_{\nu a} C^{S*}_{\kappa j} C^S_{\lambda b} (\mu^{L\alpha} \nu^{L\alpha}|\kappa^{S\beta}\lambda^{S\beta})
\nonumber\\ && + \dots \,\,\, (\text{12 terms})
\nonumber\\ && +
\sum_{\mu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\nu}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\kappa}^{n_\text{bas}} \sum_{\lambda}^{n_\text{bas}}
C^{S*}_{\mu i} C^S_{\nu a} C^{S*}_{\kappa j} C^S_{\lambda b} (\mu^{S\beta} \nu^{S\beta}|\kappa^{S\beta}\lambda^{S\beta}) \nonumber\\
\label{transformation}
\end{eqnarray}
with
\begin{eqnarray}
&&(\mu^{L\alpha}\nu^{L\alpha}|\kappa^{L\beta}\lambda^{L\beta}) \nonumber\\
&&= \iint d\bm{r}_1 d\bm{r}_2\, { \chi_\mu^{L\alpha*}(\bm{r}_1)\chi_\nu^{L\alpha}(\bm{r}_1) \hat{g}_{12}\,  \chi_\kappa^{L\beta*}(\bm{r}_2) \chi_\lambda^{L\beta}(\bm{r}_2)},
\end{eqnarray}
etc., although the actual implementation of this step is more compact and efficient than these equations may imply.\cite{Abe_2004_1}
Nonetheless, the four-index integral transformation [Eq.\ (\ref{transformation})] is the algorithmic hotspot of the four-component relativistic MP2, having a $O(n^5)$ cost, if we assume $n \propto n_\text{elec} \propto n_\text{bas}$. In the MC algorithm, this step is altogether eliminated along with the need to store original, partially, or fully transformed integrals. This algorithm is now described.

\section{Monte Carlo relativistic MP2 algorithm\label{sec:MC}}

Using the following Laplace transform,\cite{Amlof_1991,Haser_1992}
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{1}{\epsilon_i + \epsilon_j - \epsilon_a - \epsilon_b} = - \int_0^{\infty} d\tau\,  \exp \left[(\epsilon_i + \epsilon_j - \epsilon_a - \epsilon_b)\tau\right],
\end{eqnarray}
we convert Eq.\ (\ref{FinalMP2}) into the sum of two 13-dimensional integrals,\cite{Willow2012} i.e.,
\begin{eqnarray}
E^{(2)} &=& -2 \iiiint d\bm{r}_1d\bm{r}_2d\bm{r}_3d\bm{r}_4 \int_0^\infty d\tau\,\frac{1}{r_{12}r_{34}} \nonumber\\
&& \times \,\left\{  \text{vec}\left[ \bm{G}^-(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau)\right]^T \cdot \text{vec} \left[ \bm{G}^+(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_1,\tau)\right] \right\}
\nonumber\\&& \times\,
 \left\{ \text{vec}\left[ \bm{G}^-(\bm{r}_2,\bm{r}_4,-\tau)\right]^T  \cdot \text{vec} \left[ \bm{G}^+(\bm{r}_4,\bm{r}_2,\tau)\right]  \right\} \nonumber \\
&& + \iiiint d\bm{r}_1d\bm{r}_2d\bm{r}_3d\bm{r}_4 \int_0^\infty d\tau\,\frac{1}{r_{12}r_{34}} \nonumber\\
&& \times \,\left\{  \text{vec}\left[ \bm{G}^-(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau)\right]^T \cdot \text{vec} \left[ \bm{G}^+(\bm{r}_4,\bm{r}_1,\tau)\right] \right\}
\nonumber\\&& \times\,
 \left\{ \text{vec}\left[ \bm{G}^-(\bm{r}_2,\bm{r}_4,-\tau)\right]^T  \cdot \text{vec} \left[ \bm{G}^+(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_2,\tau)\right]  \right\} , \label{MCMP2}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\tau$ has the physical meaning of imaginary time, and
$\text{vec}[\dots]$ is the vectorization operator that
reshapes a $m \times n$ matrix
into a $mn \times 1$  column vector. Green's function traces, $\bm{G}^\pm(\bm{r}_d,\bm{r}_o,\tau)$, are $4 \times 4$ matrices defined by
\begin{eqnarray}
&& \bm{G}^+(\bm{r}_d,\bm{r}_o,\tau) \nonumber\\
&& = \sum_{a}^{\text{vir.}} \varphi_a(\bm{r}_d) \varphi_a^\dagger(\bm{r}_o) \exp(-\epsilon_a \tau) \nonumber\\
&& = \sum_{a}^{\text{vir.}} \left(
\begin{array}{c}
\varphi^{L\alpha}_a(\bm{r}_d) \\
\varphi^{L\beta}_a(\bm{r}_d) \\
\varphi^{S\alpha}_a(\bm{r}_d) \\
\varphi^{S\beta}_a(\bm{r}_d) \\
\end{array}
\right) \left(
\begin{array}{cccc}
\varphi^{L\alpha*}_a(\bm{r}_o) &
\varphi^{L\beta*}_a(\bm{r}_o) &
\varphi^{S\alpha*}_a(\bm{r}_o) &
\varphi^{S\beta*}_a(\bm{r}_o)
\end{array}
\right)
\nonumber\\&& \times
\exp(-\epsilon_a \tau), \\
&& \bm{G}^-(\bm{r}_d,\bm{r}_o,\tau) \nonumber\\
&&= \sum_{i}^{\text{occ.}} \varphi_i(\bm{r}_d) \varphi_i^\dagger(\bm{r}_o) \exp(-\epsilon_i \tau) \nonumber\\
&&=  \sum_{i}^{\text{occ.}} \left(
\begin{array}{c}
\varphi^{L\alpha}_i(\bm{r}_d) \\
\varphi^{L\beta}_i(\bm{r}_d) \\
\varphi^{S\alpha}_i(\bm{r}_d) \\
\varphi^{S\beta}_i(\bm{r}_d) \\
\end{array}
\right) \left(
\begin{array}{cccc}
\varphi^{L\alpha*}_i(\bm{r}_o) &
\varphi^{L\beta*}_i(\bm{r}_o) &
\varphi^{S\alpha*}_i(\bm{r}_o) &
\varphi^{S\beta*}_i(\bm{r}_o)
\end{array}
\right)
\nonumber\\&& \times
\exp(-\epsilon_i \tau).
\end{eqnarray}

For example, one of the factors in Eq.\ (\ref{MCMP2}) is more explicitly written as
\begin{eqnarray}
&& \left\{  \text{vec}\left[ \bm{G}^-(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau)\right]^T \cdot \text{vec} \left[ \bm{G}^+(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_1,\tau)\right] \right\}  \nonumber\\
&& =
O^{L\alpha L\alpha}(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau) V^{L\alpha L\alpha}(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_1,\tau) \nonumber\\&&
+ O^{L\alpha L\beta}(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau) V^{L\alpha L\beta}(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_1,\tau) \nonumber\\&&
+ O^{L\alpha S\alpha}(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau) V^{L\alpha S\alpha}(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_1,\tau) \nonumber\\&&
+\dots \,\,\, (\text{12 terms}) \nonumber\\&&
+ O^{S\beta S\beta}(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau) V^{S\beta S\beta}(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_1,\tau)
\end{eqnarray}
with
\begin{eqnarray}
O^{L\alpha L\beta}(\bm{r}_1,\bm{r}_3,-\tau)  &=& \sum_{i}^{\text{occ.}} \varphi^{L\alpha}_{i}(\bm{r}_1) \varphi^{L\beta*}_{i} (\bm{r}_3) \exp(\epsilon_i \tau), \\
V^{L\alpha L\beta}(\bm{r}_3,\bm{r}_1,\tau)  &=& \sum_{a}^{\text{vir.}} \varphi^{L\alpha}_{a}(\bm{r}_3) \varphi^{L\beta*}_{a} (\bm{r}_1) \exp(-\epsilon_a \tau),
\end{eqnarray}
etc. The other factors of Eq.\ (\ref{MCMP2}) and the remaining 15 $O$ and 15 $V$ functions are defined analogously.

Rewriting Eq.\ (\ref{MCMP2}) as
\begin{eqnarray}
E^{(2)} =  \iiiint d\bm{r}_1d\bm{r}_2d\bm{r}_3d\bm{r}_4  \int_0^{\infty} d\tau\, {f}(\bm{r}_1, \bm{r}_2, \bm{r}_3, \bm{r}_4, \tau),
\end{eqnarray}
where $f$ is the sum of the two integrands, we evaluate the right-hand side by the Monte Carlo (MC) method\cite{Willow2012,Doran2019} as
\begin{eqnarray}
E^{(2)} \approx \frac{1}{N} \sum_{n=1}^N \frac{{f}(\bm{r}_1^{[n]}, \bm{r}_2^{[n]}, \bm{r}_3^{[n]}, \bm{r}_4^{[n]}, \tau^{[n]})}
{w(\bm{r}_1^{[n]}, \bm{r}_2^{[n]}) w(\bm{r}_3^{[n]}, \bm{r}_4^{[n]}) w(\tau^{[n]})} \equiv I_N,
\end{eqnarray}
where $I_N$ is the MC estimate of the integral at the $N$th MC step.
Electron-pair coordinates at the $n$th MC step, $(\bm{r}_1^{[n]}, \bm{r}_2^{[n]})$, are
coupled through the Coulomb potential $1/r_{12}$ and are distributed in the six-dimensional space
randomly but according to a judiciously chosen weight function, $w(\bm{r}_1^{[n]}, \bm{r}_2^{[n]})$.
Electron-pair coordinates, $(\bm{r}_3^{[n]}, \bm{r}_4^{[n]})$, are essentially the same, whereas $w(\tau^{[n]})$ dictates a random distribution
of the imaginary-time coordinate, $\tau^{[n]}$, at the $n$th MC step.\cite{Doran2019}

We shall reuse the weight functions\cite{Willow2012,Willow2013,Doran2019} that have been found effective for the nonrelativistic case.
The weight function for electron pairs is the integrand of a two-center Coulomb-repulsion integral
for the sum of contracted $s$-type Gaussian-type orbitals:
\begin{eqnarray}
w(\bm{r}_1^{[n]}, \bm{r}_2^{[n]}) = \frac{1}{N_g} \frac{g(\bm{r}_1)g(\bm{r}_2)}{r_{12}}
\end{eqnarray}
with
\begin{eqnarray}\label{basisSet}
g(\bm{r}) &=& \sum_{I=1}^{n_{\text{nuc.}}} \left\{c_{1}(I) N_{\zeta_{1}(I)}\exp\left({-\zeta_{1}(I) |\bm{r}-\bm{R}_I|^2}\right) \right.
\nonumber\\ && \left. + c_{2}(I) N_{\zeta_{2}(I)}\exp\left({-\zeta_{2}(I) |\bm{r}-\bm{R}_I|^2}\right) \right\},
\end{eqnarray}
where $N_\zeta$ is the normalization coefficient of each primitive Gaussian-type orbital. The overall normalization factor,
\begin{eqnarray}
N_g = \iint  {d}\bm{r}_1d\bm{r}_2\, \frac{g(\bm{r}_1)g(\bm{r}_2)}{r_{12}},
\end{eqnarray}
can be evaluated analytically.\cite{Obara1986} A random distribution of the electron-pair walkers according to this weight function is achieved by the Metropolis algorithm.\cite{Metropolis}
It may be noticed that the Coulomb potentials, $1/r_{12}$ and $1/r_{34}$, in the integrand $f$, which have singularities everywhere,
are canceled out by the same in the weight functions.

The weight function in the $\tau$ dimension is given by\cite{Doran_2019}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{tauWeight}
w(\tau) = \lambda \exp({-\lambda \tau}),
\end{eqnarray}
which is normalized. The exponent $\lambda$ is parametrized by the energies of the highest-occupied and lowest-unoccupied molecular orbitals (HOMO and LUMO) as
\begin{eqnarray}
\lambda = 2(\epsilon_{\text{LUMO}} - \epsilon_{\text{HOMO}}).
\end{eqnarray}
A random distribution of the imaginary-time walker according to the weight function, Eq.\ (\ref{tauWeight}), can be directly generated by
the inverse-CDF (cumulative distribution function) method (i.e., without any rejected moves of the Metropolis algorithm). In this case,
the inverse CDF can furthermore be obtained analytically.\cite{Doran2019,Doran2020b}

The redundant-walker algorithm\cite{Willow2013b} provides an essential speedup for the MC-MP2 algorithm and is invoked in the relativistic MC-MP2 also.
It propagates $m \gg 2$ electron pairs (walkers), $(\bm{r}^{[n]}_{1p},\bm{r}^{[n]}_{2p})$, $(1 \leq p \leq m)$, and permute their coordinates in all ${}_mC_2$ distinct ways when evaluating
the quotient of Eq.\ (\ref{MCMP2}), i.e.,
\begin{eqnarray}
E^{(2)} \approx \frac{1}{N} \sum_{n=1}^N I^\prime_n \equiv I_N
\end{eqnarray}
with
\begin{eqnarray}
 I^\prime_n = \frac{1}{{}_mC_2} \sum_{p < q}^{m} \frac{{f}(\bm{r}_{1p}^{[n]}, \bm{r}_{2p}^{[n]}, \bm{r}_{1q}^{[n]}, \bm{r}_{2q}^{[n]}, \tau^{[n]})}
{w(\bm{r}_{1p}^{[n]}, \bm{r}_{2p}^{[n]}) w(\bm{r}_{1q}^{[n]}, \bm{r}_{2q}^{[n]}) w(\tau^{[n]})}. \label{redundant}
\end{eqnarray}
It achieves a theoretical speedup by a factor of $(m-1)$ because the sampling is boosted by a factor of ${}_mC_2$ at an $m/2$-fold increase in the cost of walker propagation,
although the rate of speed up does not go up indefinitely with $m$ owing to saturation.
See Ref.\ \onlinecite{Doran2016} for the observed performance of this algorithm.

The statistical uncertainty $\bar{\sigma}_N$ in $I_N$ is given by
\begin{eqnarray}\label{uncertainty}
\bar{\sigma}_N = \frac{\sigma_N}{\sqrt{N/N_\text{b}}}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\sigma_N$ is the the standard deviation concurrently accumulated (excluding the initial burn-in steps) as
\begin{eqnarray}
\sigma_N^2 = \frac{N_\text{b}}{N} \sum_{n=1}^{N/N_\text{b}} \left[ \frac{1}{N_\text{b}} \sum_{n^\prime=1}^{N_\text{b}}  I^\prime_{(n-1)N_\text{b} + n^\prime}- I_N \right]^2.
\end{eqnarray}
Here, $N_\text{b}$ is the block size in the Flyvbjerg--Petersen algorithm,\cite{Blocking} preventing underestimation of the standard deviation due to autocorrelation.

The whole algorithm can be easily and efficiently parallelized.\cite{Doran2016} Simply, each processor is tasked to perform its own independent MC integration using
a distinct random number seed. It periodically records the number of MC steps, $I_N$, and $\bar{\sigma}_N$, with no interprocessor communications whatsoever.
Only at the end of the calculation, weighted averages of the integrals from all surviving processors need to be taken.
In this way, the algorithm is guaranteed to achieve near 100\% parallel efficiency, be fault-tolerant, be asynchronous, and be indefinitely restartable with a variable number of processors.

\section{Numerical demonstrations}
For eight molecules, the relativistic four-component MP2 energy was obtained using the MC method:\ $\text{H}_2$ ($0.74\,\AA$), $\text{H}_2\text{O}$ ($r_{\text{OH}} = 0.96\,\AA$, $r_{\text{HH}} = 1.51\,\AA$), $\text{CuH}  $ ($1.54\,\AA$), $\text{AgH}$ ($1.70\,\AA$), $\text{AuH}$ ($1.57\,\AA$), $\text{Cu}_2  $ ($2.40\,\AA$), $\text{Ag}_2  $ ($2.68\,\AA$), and $\text{Au}_2$ ($2.59\,\AA$).  The basis functions used were contracted Gaussian-type orbitals:\cite{Yanai_2001-114, Yanai_2001-115}\ H [8s2p]/(3s2p), O [14s9p2d]/(5s4p2d), Cu [18s147d]/(8s6p3d), Ag [25s21p12d]/(11s9p4d), and Au [29s25p15d10f]/(11s8p5d3f). The weight functions are defined in Table \ref{basispam}.
The number of walkers [$m$ in Eq.\ (\ref{redundant})] used are given below.
The Flyvbjerg--Petersen block size of $N_\text{b} = 100$ was used.
A Dirac--Hartree--Fock calculation must precede the MC-MP2 step and was performed deterministically
with the UTChem software,\cite{utchem,Yanai_2004} furnishing
the MO coefficients and orbital energies.
The benchmark deterministic relativistic MP2 calculations were also carried out with UTChem.
The MC-MP2 calculations were executed on an Intel core i9-10900K with 5.3 GHz and on the Cori (Haswell) supercomputer of NERSC.

\begin{table}
\caption{The weight-function parameters [Eq.\ (\ref{basisSet})].\label{basispam}}
\begin{ruledtabular}
 \begin{tabular}{lllll}
Atom   & $c_1$  &  $\zeta_1$ & $c_2$  &  $\zeta_2$ \\
 \hline
 H &  0.25  & 0.06 &  0.15  &  0.6   \\
 O & 0.8 & 0.2  &  1.0  &  0.4   \\
 Cu  & 0.8 & 0.35 &  2.0  &  0.6   \\
 Ag & 0.1 & 0.1 &  0.8  &  0.6   \\
 Au & 0.05  & 0.6  &  4.0  &  0.8   \\
 \end{tabular}
\end{ruledtabular}
\end{table}

\begin{table}
\caption{The relativistic second-order energies, $E^{(2)}$, and statistical uncertainties, $\bar{\sigma}$,
obtained by the MC-MP2 method after $10^5$ MC steps with eight electron-pair walkers ($m=8$). The benchmark $E^{(2)}$ obtained
by the deterministic MP2 method (as implemented in UTChem) are also shown.\label{results}}
\begin{ruledtabular}
\begin{tabular}{lccc}
& MP2 & \multicolumn{2}{c}{MC-MP2} \\
\cline{2-2} \cline{3-4}
Molecule    & $E^{(2)}\,/\, E_\text{h}$ & $E^{(2)}\,/\,E_\text{h}$ & $\bar{\sigma}\,/\,E_\text{h}$ \\
\hline
H$_2$   & $-0.0184$    &  $-0.0183$ & $0.0008$ \\
H$_2$O & $-0.2252$     & $-0.2248$ & $0.0106$ \\
CuH     & $-0.4618$    &  $-0.4634$ & $0.0198$  \\
AgH     & $-0.3212$    &  $-0.3243$ & $0.0152$ \\
AuH     & $-0.8424$    & $-0.8441$ & $0.0325$ \\
Cu$_2$  & $-0.8918$    & $-0.8931$ & $0.0371$\\
Ag$_2$  & $-0.6172$    & $-0.6146$ & $0.0235$ \\
Au$_2$  & $-3.0345$    & $-3.0316$ & $0.1432$ \\
\end{tabular}
\end{ruledtabular}
\end{table}

 \begin{figure}
  \includegraphics[width=1\columnwidth]{Fig1.eps}
  \caption{The error (in m$E_\text{h}$) in the relativistic MC-MP2 energy of AgH from the deterministic value as a function of the number of MC steps. Each for four traces
  uses a different number ($m$) of electron-pair walkers.}\label{errors}
 \end{figure}

  \begin{figure}
      \includegraphics[width=1\columnwidth]{Fig2.eps}
   \caption{The statistical uncertainty $\bar{\sigma}$ (in $\text{m}E_\text{h}$) in the relativistic MC-MP2 energy of AgH  as a function of the number of MC steps. Each for four traces
  uses a different number ($m$) of electron-pair walkers.}\label{vars}
 \end{figure}

In Table \ref{results} are presented the relativistic MC-MP2 energies ($E^{(2)}$) for the eight molecules mentioned above, using eight electron-pair walkers ($m=8$)
at $10^5$ MC steps. The MC algorithm can reliably reproduce the deterministic results within the estimated statistical uncertainty $\bar{\sigma}$ even with
the relatively short MC runs.
Although the MC-MP2 algorithm might most resemble the variational Monte Carlo method among the QMC variety, its energy is not bounded from below by the correct MP2 energy
and can be more negative than the latter.
The uncertainties systematically increase with the number of electrons.
Figure \ref{errors} shows a typical convergence behavior of $E^{(2)}$ as a function of the number of MC steps for AgH using four different numbers of the electron-pair
walkers ($m = 6$, 8, 10, and 12). Figure \ref{vars} plots the corresponding statistical uncertainty ($\bar{\sigma}$). They attest to the acceleration of convergence with increasing
$m$ by the redundant-walker algorithm.

 \begin{figure}
 \includegraphics[width=1\columnwidth]{Fig3.eps}
  \caption{Wall time (in seconds) required for the relativistic MC-MP2 calculation to reach the relative statistical uncertainty ($\bar{\sigma}/|E^{(2)}|$) of 0.1 as a function of the number of electrons, $n_\text{ele}$. Two different values of the electron-pair walkers ($m=8$ and $12$) are considered. A line corresponding to quadratic cost scaling $O(n_\text{ele}^2)$
  is also plotted to guide the eyes. \label{ele}}

 \end{figure}

 \begin{figure}
 \includegraphics[width=1\columnwidth]{Fig4.eps}
  \caption{Wall time (in seconds) required for the relativistic MC-MP2 calculation to reach the relative statistical uncertainty ($\bar{\sigma}/|E^{(2)}|$) of 0.1 as a function of the number of basis functions, $n_\text{bas}$. Two different values of the electron-pair walkers ($m=8$ and $12$) are considered. Lines corresponding to quadratic and cubic cost scaling $O(n_\text{bas}^2)$ and $O(n_\text{bas}^3)$ are also plotted to guide the eyes. \label{spinor}}
 \end{figure}

The computational cost of the MC algorithm can be measured by the wall time spent by the processor in a serial calculation to reach a given relative statistical error ($\bar{\sigma}/|E^{(2)}|$).\cite{Doran2016} The number of MC steps to reach the relative error can vary depending on molecules.
These costs are plotted as a function of the number of electrons in Fig.\ \ref{ele} and of the number of basis functions in Fig.\ \ref{spinor}. In both plots, the cost function
are roughly quadratic with molecular size ($n_\text{ele}$ or $n_\text{bas}$) regardless of $m$ (the number of electron-pair walkers), although the last few data points
may be taken to suggest asymptotic cubic scaling.
Note that nonrelativistic MC-MP2 is shown\cite{Doran2016} to display $O(n_\text{ele}^3)$
 cost scaling for spatially extended molecules, which is already a vast improvement over the $O(n_\text{ele}^5)$ scaling of the conventional, deterministic MP2.
It now appears possible that for crowded and large (but spatially compact) molecules with heavy elements, relativistic MC-MP2 can achieve even more favorable
scaling of $O(n_\text{ele}^2)$. In the future, we shall further increase the number of electrons without spatially expanding the molecule to verify this scaling.
Our algorithmic analysis and observed timing data (not shown) clearly indicate that the cost per MC step is precisely quadratic with either $n_\text{ele}$ or $n_\text{bas}$. Therefore, for these crowded molecules,  the number of MC steps to reach the same relative uncertainty is roughly the same. This is also borne out in Table \ref{results}, where the relative uncertainties seem comparable
after $10^5$ MC steps. It may be speculated that this is due to the fact that both $E^{(2)}$ and $\bar{\sigma}$ are dominated by similar numbers of valence spinors
regardless of molecular size.

 \begin{figure}
 \includegraphics[width=1\columnwidth]{Fig5.eps}
  \caption{Number of MC steps taken in 30 minutes of wall clock time as a function of the number of processors executing the MC-MP2 calculation for Au$_2$ ($m=8$)
  on the Cori (Haswell) supercomputer of NERSC.\label{parallel}}

 \end{figure}

Figure \ref{parallel} plots the number of MC steps that can be carried out during the 30-minute wall clock time limit of a job queue on a NERSC supercomputer
as a function of the number of processors executing a
MC-MP2 calculation for Au$_2$. Increasing the number of processors by a factor of 64 (from 64 to 4096 processors), we have observed a 59-fold speedup, i.e.,
strong scalability of 92\% for a fixed job size. This high parallel efficiency is expected because the algorithm is inherently parallel with no interprocessor communications. We can even let the calculation
be terminated by the job scheduler with no loss of data or waste of computational efforts. The data from various calculations can furthermore be concatenated to produce
more converged energies. Some points in this plot are slightly above the line of perfect scalability relative to 64 processors, displaying small superscaling behavior.

\section{Summary}

The Monte Carlo four-component relativistic MP2 algorithm has been developed. It is scalable
with respect to both system size and computer size. For crowded, but spatially compact molecules with heavy elements, where the local-correlation approach
cannot apply,
this stochastic algorithm displays tentative $O(n_\text{ele}^2)$ scaling and certainly no worse than $O(n_\text{ele}^3)$, which is a vast improvement over
the $O(n_\text{ele}^5)$ scaling of the conventional MP2 algorithms. It can be implemented easily into a nearly perfectly scalable parallel algorithm with no interprocessor communications, which is also fault-tolerant, asynchronous, and indefinitely restartable.  We furthermore expect that it lends itself to facile extensions to  the Breit interactions, finite nucleus effects, and explicit correlation.\cite{tennoyamaki}

\section{Data Availability Statement}
A dataset is retrievable as a compressed file  at
https:$//$hirata-lab.chemistry.illinois.edu$//$CruzJCP2022.zip.
It contains UTChem basis set and output files as well as spinor expansion coefficients for
the eight molecules considered in this study. It also compiles the MC-MP2 output files for the energies and statistical uncertainties as a function of blocked MC steps for the eight molecules. The raw data used for plotting Figures 1 through 4 are also included.

\acknowledgments
J. C. Cruz thanks CONACYT for the scholarship 620190.
T. Yanai thanks JSPS KAKENHI (Grant No. 21H01881 and 21K18931) for financial support.
S. Hirata thanks the Center for Scalable, Predictive methods for Excitation and Correlated phenomena (SPEC), which is funded by
the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences,
Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Division, as a part of the Computational Chemical Sciences Program.
S. Hirata also thanks Grant No.\ DE-SC0006028 funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC award m3196 (2022).
The initial phase of this work was performed at Institute for Molecular Science, Okazaki, Japan.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Comedy Central's music and comedy festival returns with big names.
The second annual Clusterfest will take place at the Civic Center Plaza and Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on June 1 and will feature Amy Schumer and Jon Stewart.
As for musical performances, the lineup includes a variety of genres from Third Eye Blind to Salt-N-Pepa. A revised lineup released April features ohn Mulaney, Nick Kroll, the Wu-Tang Clan, T-Pain, Jeff Ross, Bianca Del Rio and Michael Rapaport.
Attendees can also can also look forward to the live debut of the musical-comedy trio of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer as The Lonely Island.
Other comedians set to perform are Trevor Noah, Tiffany Haddish, David Cross, Michael Che and Desus and Mero, among others.
Aside from the music and comedy, Clusterfest will also feature interactive attractions like a President Trump Twitter library, a South Park county fair and Nickelodeon's Double Dare game.
Three-day general admission tickets range from $199 to $289.


Documentary producer, director and cameraman. He is a graduate of the Polish Film School in Łódź, immigrated to the USa in 1981 and has since directed and produced over 40 documentaries. His "School Prayer. A community at war" received an Emmy Award. Sławomir's independent works focus on critical social, political, and environmental issues. His director of photography credits includes two Oscar Nominations.


text:
upperaustria.com / Travel to Upper Austria
By plane to Upper Austria
You can travel conveniently by plane to the provincial capital, Linz, to explore Upper Austria!
The Blue Danube Airport at Linz is served by national and international scheduled flights from Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, London and Vienna, provided by Lufthansa, Ryanair and Austrian Airlines. The airport is situated very close to the provincial capital, Linz, which you can reach by bus, train or taxi, or using the free airport shuttle service.
Other airports with international connections, from which you can quickly reach Upper Austria, include Vienna International Airport and Salzburg W.A. Mozart Airport.
The direct rail connection to Linz from Vienna Airport via the Vienna Hauptbahnhof, or main railway station, takes 1 hour 43 minutes with no changes.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Tags: SC Church Shooting | Congress | Confederate | Flag | cemetary | parks service
House Scraps Vote on Confederate Flags at Federal Cemeteries
ANDREW TAYLOR Thursday, 09 July 2015 10:12 AM
The Republican-controlled House has scrapped plans to vote on approving the display of the Confederate flag at historic federal cemeteries in the wake of protests from Democrats.
Officials said Thursday the legislation that included the issue would be pulled from the floor for the time being. The decision came as Democrats accused Republicans of wanting to approve the display of a painful reminder of a racist past.
It also coincided with a vote in the South Carolina Legislature to remove the Confederate Flag from a pole outside the state capitol.
The decision reversed a House plan for an on-the-record vote on whether Confederate flags can briefly decorate rebel graves at Park Service-run cemeteries and if their sale should be banned in national park gift shops.
The intended vote was announced after Southern lawmakers complained they were taken by surprise two nights ago when the House voted — without a recorded tally — to ban the display of Confederate flags at federal cemeteries and to strengthen Park Service policy against its sale in gift shops.
The earlier voice vote came on an amendment to a measure funding the National Park Service, which maintains 14 national cemeteries, most of which contain graves of Civil War soldiers.
Park Service policy is to briefly permit display of the flag in cemeteries located in states that commemorate Confederate Memorial Day, which appears to limit its display to the Andersonville and Vicksburg cemeteries in Georgia and Mississippi.
"Congress cannot simply re-write history and strip the Confederate flag from existence," said Rep. Steve Palazzo, R-Mississippi. "Members of Congress from New York and California cannot wipe away 150 years of Southern history with sleight-of-hand tactics."
Momentum against the flag's display on public land skyrocketed after last month's slaughter at nine worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Democrats were outraged about the GOP maneuvering, which was orchestrated by Rep. Ken Calvert, R-California, on Wednesday night.
"We should make sure that we uphold what this House stood for yesterday, which is to say no to racism, which is to say no to hate speech," said Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minnesota.
© Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Congress, Confederate, Flag, cemetary, parks service
Thursday, 09 July 2015 10:12 AM
Ghislaine Maxwell has formally requested a new trial, less than a month after her conviction on sex trafficking charges. . . .


Exactly 190 of Arizona's 6,520 healthcare administration professionals work in Flagstaff. The number of healthcare administration professionals in Flagstaff has grown by 138% from 2006 to 2010. Overall employment in Flagstaff has also increased.
Salaries for healthcare administration professionals in Flagstaff have increased. Flagstaff healthcare administration professionals made $100,700 per year, on average, in 2010. Four years earlier in 2006, healthcare administration professionals in Flagstaff made an average salary of $61,470 per year. The growth in the salary of healthcare administration professionals in Flagstaff is faster than the salary trend for all careers in the city.
Healthcare administration professionals make a median salary of $94,710 per year in Flagstaff. The difference in pay between the healthcare administration professionals in the lowest pay bracket and those in the highest pay bracket is approximately 310%. Those in the lowest 10% of the pay bracket earn less than $39,260 per year, while those in the highest 10% of the pay bracket earn more than $160,990 per year.
Healthcare administration professional salaries in Flagstaff are, on average, higher than salaries earned for professionals in related fields.
There are 2 accredited healthcare administration schools in the city. Many of Flagstaff's healthcare administration professionals are graduates of one of these schools.
There is one degree and certificate program in healthcare administration offered by Flagstaff's healthcare administration school.
In 2010 approximately 60 students completed healthcare administration courses.
The number of healthcare administration faculty, growth in the field of healthcare administration academia and healthcare administration faculty salaries in Flagstaff, is all data we are currently in the process of collecting. If you are involved in teaching healthcare administration courses to students at the associates degree in healthcare administration, and bachelors degree in healthcare administration levels, please take a moment to anonymously submit your information to help us build a valuable database resource for the benefit of current and future faculty in the field of healthcare administration in Flagstaff. Once you have submitted your information an outline of the data we have collected up until now will be available for you to view.


text:
Non Performing Loans Ratio
Czech Republic: Labour Force Participation Rate
Data available from 2001 - 2018.
CEIC Blog
Czech Republic's Labour Force Participation Rate increased to 60.5 % in June 2018, compared with 60.3 % in the previous quarter.
Czech Republic's Labour Force Participation Rate is updated quarterly, available from December 2001 to June 2018, with an average rate of 59.2 %.
The data reached an all-time high of 60.6 % in September 2017 and a record low of 58.1 % in March 2012.
This data was taken from the Czech Republic indicator pages on the CEIC website. More detailed data and analysis can be found in the CEIC Global database - get in touch for a free demo to gain access.
11th March 2019 Czech Republic: Labour Force Participation Rate
China's Diverging Prices and Its Monetary Policy in 2020
China: Total Social Financing
China: Foreign Trade
Electric Vehicles and the Developments in key Markets
India: Industrial Production Growth
Poland: Inflation Rate
Colombia: Consumer Confidence Index
The Lipstick Effect in India
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The CourtroomSupreme Court
SC: Stranger Cannot File an Appeal Under Section 96 of the CPC Unless He Is an 'Aggrieved Person'
By Sakshi Rathore
High CourtNiti Pandey - January 15, 2021 0
Sakshi Rathore
The Hon'ble Supreme Court heard the case of V.N.Krishnamurthy v Ravikumar. The Bench consisted of Hon'ble Justices Arun Mishra, B.R. Gavai and Krishna Murari. The question before the Court, in this case, was whether the Appellants held the locus to question the Judgment and Decree passed by the Trial Court and whether the High Court can reject the leave to appeal.
Brief Facts
The dispute relates to land situated in village Jakkur, Bengaluru. Respondent No. 5 and 6 were the owners of the land in dispute for which they executed a registered agreement of sale in favour of the Respondent, Karnataka State Khadi and Village Industries Worker's House Building Co-operative Society Ltd. They also executed a general power of attorney in favour of the office bearers authorizing them to enter into a sale transaction of the suit property on their behalf. The power of attorney gave absolute rights to do all acts necessary for the sale of the property. As a result, a sale deed was thereafter executed in favour of the Appellants.
The disputed property being ancestral property and the Plaintiffs being co-owners, the Defendant had no right to execute the sale agreement was the ground for the Petition. Further, since the sale agreement did not culminate into a sale transaction, the same is time-barred by the law of limitation. The Trial Court ruled in favour of the Plaintiff. The Defendants then preferred an appeal to the High court which stood dismissed. An appeal was thereafter filed in the Apex Court.
Court's Judgment
Section 96 and 100 of the CPC provides for preferring an appeal from any Original Decree. It does not enumerate the categories of persons who can file an appeal. However, it is a settled legal proposition that a stranger is not permitted to file an appeal unless he satisfies that he falls in the category of 'aggrieved persons'. The term 'person aggrieved' does not include a person who suffers from psychological or imaginary injury but one whose rights or interests have been adversely affected.
Although the Appellants contended that they were "aggrieved persons", the Courts did not find it convincing as no material placed on record could demonstrate the same. Further, the entire Plaint was silent about the sale deed executed in favour of the Appellants by the General Power of Attorney holders. Thus, the Appellants were not 'aggrieved persons'. This led the Court to dismiss the appeal.
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Eight candidates are running for mayor in Green Bay. Here are their responses to a questionnaire on the issues and their priorities.
GREEN BAY – Voters face an important choice this spring as eight people vying to be the city's first new mayor in 16 years.
The candidates will face off in a Feb. 19 primary, and the top two will move on to the April 2 general election.
The candidates are Paul Boucher, Patrick Buckley, Patrick Evans, Eric Genrich, Joe Moore, Nick Mortensen, Mark Steuer and Guy Zima.
Early voting in Green Bay begins Jan. 29.
To help educate voters, the Press-Gazette asked candidates to complete questionnaires and a short video. Each candidate submitted responses to our questions, and all but Guy Zima consented to a video interview.
Candidates were asked to keep their responses to roughly 100 words or less. Answers that exceeded the limit were edited for length while preserving the intended message.
Click on the links below to read about each candidate and his positions on the issues.


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text:
← Can you Learn Japanese Solely for a Job and More Money?
2-Minute Anki →
Jalup Listen – Adam & Yuki Show
The biggest request I've gotten over the years is for more easy and fun listening material, that is going to help reinforce the Japanese you already know. But that's not enough! How about if that listening covers interesting news, events, or other fun recent topics? Still need more? How about a Japanese script included, and the ability to discuss and ask any questions "in Japanese" to the person who recorded it?
Jalup Listen is starting now!
On Jalup's newly revamped Patreon account, for a pledge of $3 or $7 a month, you will get access to one or both of our brand new audio series.
1. Jalup Listen
A few episodes (of 30-60 seconds each) produced a week.
Recent topics covered such as news, science, technology, Japan trends, etc.
The "topic keyword(s)" of each episode explained to you in the audio.
A full Japanese script
Downloadable, high quality audio
The ability to discuss in Japanese each episode with Yuki (the voice behind the series) in the comments section
2. The Adam & Yuki Show
I'm a pretty private person, but I thought starting my own audio show with Yuki might give me a chance to reflect more upon my own Japanese adventure in detail, including many things I've never talked about on Jalup. It gives me an opportunity to be more casual and non-rehearsed, rather than the (somewhat?) polished articles of this site, and you get to hear my Japanese.
A few episodes produced a month (1-2 minutes each, taken from live conversations)
Adam and Yuki talk together in Japanese about Japan, learning Japanese, and the many wild adventures Adam has had.
Get to know the man behind Jalup and a behind the scenes look at his life.
A full Japanese conversation script
The ability to discuss in Japanese or English each episode with Yuki & Adam in the comments section
I'm hoping we can grow this into something much bigger, and really level up your listening. Check out the first two episodes of each series for free.
Jalup Listen 1: Cat Day
Jalup Listen 2: Olympic Figure Skating
Adam & Yuki 1: How Old Were you When you First Visited Japan?
Adam & Yuki 2: First Time Abroad Ever was Japan?!
If more people support Jalup Listen and the Adam & Yuki Show on Patreon it will give me the ability to increase the amount of episodes per month.
Sign up through Patreon
What an episode looks like on Patreon:
The Adam & Yuki Show
Personal Japanese Advisor
Jalup Listen – Adam & Yuki Show — 17 Comments
Rai on 02/22/2018 at 7:38 pm said:
This idea is amazing and I'm in it for sure. Hope a lot more people will sign up for it so it can grow and grow. Also it's not too expensive, 3 a month is really nothing.
Adam on 02/23/2018 at 9:55 am said:
Thanks! Yes, I'm excited for it, and hope there is enough support to make it grow.
Dominik Bleidorn on 02/23/2018 at 3:09 am said:
Yea,cool! It is always a bit of a hassle to find some good audio to listen to. And three dollar a month is a fair price
I'll max you out on good audio :)
sumsum on 02/23/2018 at 6:54 am said:
I'm in! :) Currently a bit tight on money, but I think I can manage that much ;) I will put the clips on my mp3-player right away!
Thinking about it some more, 3-5 a week sounds huge, that's basically every other day a new clip! I really hope this catches on :)
I mean the clips are short but to me that seems just right, especially if there's new material so regularly.
And if it catches on, I hope to expand this to even more clips, including other voices (male), etc. There's a lot of possibilities with where to go with this.
Andrew Cave on 02/23/2018 at 11:17 pm said:
It's a very good idea that could definitely benefit from a male voice too. Also, a back and forth with male and female would rock. Either way, I'm excited!
Adam on 02/24/2018 at 10:33 am said:
Maybe I'll even jump in occasionally with my voice…?!
Andrew on 02/24/2018 at 3:34 pm said:
Sounds great to me! Another idea that may be interesting if you go with having more than one person, is to have episodes where those involved have a conversation (maybe unscripted) about whatever topic. Or even the situations series but with more than one person? One thing I like about unscripted is people make mistakes and speak differently because they haven't practiced and it sounds more like real life and forces you to try to understand mistakes. Also, people speak more slowly when they are trying to think of something they want to say at that moment which our mind has to adjust for. Anyways, I love this new series idea.
Just some ideas. It feels strange speaking in here after basically 2 years of lurking haha.
Thanks for the additional suggestions. And welcome to the talking (non-lurking) part of the Jalup community :)
Chase Kolozsy on 02/24/2018 at 8:55 pm said:
This is awesome! I'm going to subscribe right now :')
Chase lives! And thanks for joining :P
Manga Sensei on 03/18/2018 at 12:50 am said:
Now, this is something worth listening. ;)
Kou on 06/25/2018 at 7:24 pm said:
Why did this end? (I'm unable to read the patreon post)
Andrew on 06/26/2018 at 6:26 am said:
I believe there wasn't enough support. It appeared to me as if they were essentially working for free (or pretty close).
From the Patreon post:
"Unfortunately, that support/engagement never grew large enough to be able to continue them like we had planned. We had a lot of fun, and would've liked to see it go further, but it is what it is.
We will be discontinuing both series at the end of this month (June)…"


text:
(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2012)
When my father died five years ago, my siblings and I did not hold a memorial service in his honor. We were each of us so wounded by our father's incessant criticism and disapproval of us that his death unleashed our long suppressed anger toward him, and being so angry we could not see our way to put on a show of loving memories. But now I wish to speak of his goodness and the gifts he gave me. I wish to propitiate his ghost, something my father would have scoffed at, and to communicate my gratitude for his presence in my life.
When my sisters and brother and I were little kids, my father told us the most wonderful bedtime stories, and sometimes we would be the characters in those stories, which was especially thrilling to me. Imagine being a character in a story! My father would just make up the stories without the help of a book, and my brother and sisters and I marveled that he could do that. I am certain that my fascination with stories and story telling began with listening to my father invent those magical stories for us.
My father taught me how to plant trees when I was six-years-old, and we planted many trees together over the years—fruit trees, redwoods, birches, and pines. He would show me where to dig the hole, and I would dig as big and deep a hole as I could. Then he would deepen and widen the hole considerably; and I would admire how strong he was and how easily the ground yielded to him. Then we would refill the hole halfway with a mixture of peat moss and compost and soil. I remember we stirred this mixture in the hole with our bare hands, and then we would place the baby tree atop this mixture and fill in the hole. With the leftover soil, we would construct a circular basin around the tree and I would fetch the hose to fill this basin with water again and again until the ground around the tree was saturated. And thereafter my weekly chores included watering the young trees.
Speaking of trees, one day when I was ten, my father and I were in a nursery and he saw a little olive tree selling for what he thought an exorbitant price. Our house was surrounded by huge old olive trees that dropped thousands of olives every year, many of which subsequently sunk into the soil and were covered with leaves and eventually sprouted into baby olive trees. My father spoke to the nurseryman and learned that the nursery would pay three dollars each for hearty one-year-old olive trees, as many as they could get.
"Now there's a great way for you to make money," said my father. "Pot up olive seedlings, tend them for a year, and sell them to this nursery. Fifty times three is 150 dollars!"
So we got fifty one-gallon pots and I eagerly potted up fifty olive seedlings, placed them in the dappled shade under one of our ancient olive trees, and cared for them diligently for a few months until life intervened and I forgot all about them.
Ten years later while visiting my parents for Christmas, I was wandering around their overgrown yard and came upon the sole survivor of those fifty seedlings, now a tiny bonsai olive tree which I potted in a long shallow bonsai pot, adorned with a miniature granite boulder, and gave to my father to add to his collection of a dozen bonsais. My father was most delighted with that miniature olive tree.
My father loved to body surf and taught me to body surf not long after I learned to swim. Our family went to Los Angeles for a week every summer when I was a boy, and we always went to the beach for a few of those days. The water was warm, the waves perfectly formed, and we would shout for joy when we got good rides. Body surfing was truly my father's bliss, and after he spent a couple hours in the water he was always so sweet and happy.
My father took our family camping and backpacking every summer. He taught us how to pitch a tent, build a fire, light a Coleman lantern, and many other things a person needs to know to be a good camper. He also taught me how to fish, how to prepare my pole and reel and line, how to bait a hook, how to cast, how to set the hook when a fish strikes, how to play the fish, how to kill the fish, how to clean the fish, and how to dip the fish in cornmeal and fry it on a skillet over a campfire.
When I was in my twenties and became a vagabond for a few years, I was essentially a highway backpacker, and virtually everything I needed to know in order to survive I had learned from my father, including mending my clothes with needle and thread and repairing my backpack and boots with an awl.
Some of my fondest memories of my father are of him fishing for trout in the high Sierras. He was an avid fly fisherman and for some years he even made his own flies. We often had our camps on the shores of small lakes at the base of granite peaks, and it was my father's particular delight to set out from camp and try his luck all the way around the lake. When he hooked a trout, he would let out a musical hoot that resounded in the otherwise silent wilderness, and I would watch him play the fish, his slender pole bending, his face alight with delight.
I was crazy for ballgames from the moment I could walk, and though my father wasn't the least interested in sports, he would sometimes play catch with me on the lawn when he came home from work. He was left-handed and I loved watching him throw the baseball—a perfectly natural curve ball. I was tireless and my father was often tired after a long day of work, so he would set a limit on how many throws he would make, a number we would count down together. When we got down to one, my father would call out a new number, and we would play a while longer, and I was overjoyed by his generosity.
When I was twelve, I helped my father install a backboard and basketball hoop atop a tall pole on the edge of our sloping driveway, and every day for the next five years, rain or shine, I shot hoops out there for hours on end. I was often out there shooting hoops when my father got home from work, and sometimes he would watch me shoot a few before going inside. When he was in a good mood, my father would compliment me on my skill and maybe try a shot or two; and I always loved it when he gave my favorite game a try.
My father was a successful psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he taught clinical psychology to psychiatric fellows at Stanford Medical School. He also helped found a ward for psychosomatically ill adolescents at Stanford Children's Hospital, an accomplishment he was very proud of.
I wrote and published several books while my father was alive, and he was extremely critical of all of them. As for my music, my father barely acknowledged that I was a musician and once asked me, "Why do you write such sad music? You should write music that makes people happy."
I didn't think my father would ever like anything I created. But a few months before he died, I sent him the manuscript of my novel Under the Table Books, and he wrote me a letter in which he praised the book and predicted it would one day be a great success. I read his words over and over again because I could hardly believe my eyes. And even more astonishing to me was how he signed his letter,
My son! Love, Dad
Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, father, son, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books
"Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose." Albert Einstein
A wintry April day—rain, cold, our two woodstoves hard at work translating matter into energy so we may carry on in comfort. Yesterday we celebrated the idea of spring, if not the reality, with the delivery of four cords of firewood from Frank's Firewood of Boonville, so now several days of stacking wood are upon us. I am graduating from my seventh Mendocino winter, and Frank's fantastic firewood has kept me snug and warm through every one of them. Thank you, Frank!
Yesterday also brought an email from a friend with the subject heading Data Plague, with a link to an article from the New York Times about Big Data, a hot topic in the world of computer science and technology. Big Data is the incomprehensibly large amount of raw data piling up from all electronic activities that leave digital traces, including scientific research and social media. For instance, every minute of every day some forty-eight hours of video are uploaded to YouTube: the equivalent of eight years of content each day.
According to the Big Data article, many people in government and academia and private industry are interested in mining this rapidly growing data universe, and President Obama has earmarked 200 million dollars for his Big Data Research and Development Initiative. And just last month the National Science Foundation awarded 10 million dollars to Berkeley's A.M.P. Expedition, which stands for "algorithms machines people," a team of U.C. Berkeley professors and graduate students working to advance Big Data analysis.
As usual, no one asked my opinion about any of this, but here are my thoughts on the intrinsic and extrinsic value of Big Data. Once upon a time there was this emperor, see, and he wasn't actually wearing any clothes, but because he was the emperor everyone had to pretend he was wearing clothes even though he wasn't.
"The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization." John Kemeny
Stacking firewood, one might surmise, is something like trying to make sense of Big Data. There on the driveway (in cyber space) is a huge jumble of firewood (pile of data) composed of many separate pieces of wood (bits of data). Over time, I will get all that wood neatly organized in eight or nine stacks in the woodshed, and over more time I will burn those stacks to heat our home. Meanwhile, the Big Data geeks will try to organize their ever-expanding pile of data bits (measured in petabytes, one million gigabytes, and exabytes, one billion gigabytes) and then…and then nothing.
"Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics." Gregory Bateson
Eight years of Youtube video uploaded every day? That's 240 years per month! Joe points his phone camera out the bus window as we make our way through Chinatown. Okay. Cool. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Here are Margaret and Binny eating ice cream. Good. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Ralph's three-legged cat named Popsicle is eating a mouse. Ew! Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Becky's Great Dane Buffy rolls on something dead. Hardee har har. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Here are millions of videos of people looking into their cameras and making silly faces. Yes! Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. And here is Zigmund Olafson, pulling down two hundred grand a year (of taxpayers' money) as Permanently Visiting Professor of Theoretical Cyber Whatever at U.C. Berkeley running 1700 centuries of such stuff through a super computer in the basement of ADE (Algorithms Digest Emptiness) and after nine months of data digestion and crunching and analysis discovering that…kittens and puppies are cuter than heck!
"We'll judge our success by whether we build a new paradigm of data." Michael Franklin, director of A.M.P. Expedition.
A new paradigm of data? Puh-leez. How about a new paradigm of excellent and affordable healthcare for everybody? How about a new paradigm of equitable taxation? How about a new paradigm of funding our parks and schools? How about a new paradigm of peaceful resolution of conflicts? How about a new paradigm of closing all the insanely dangerous nuclear power plants and insulating our homes and solarizing every viable rooftop? How about a new paradigm of generosity and love? Oh, no. What we need is a new paradigm of data. And just what might that new paradigm of data look like? We have absolutely no idea, but we'll let you know if we think we're successful in building that paradigm after we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, feeding digital stuff into really fast computers. Okay? Cool. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube.
"I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure." Stanislaw J. Lec
Of my many unhappy experiences with publishers, one of the saddest had to do with a chunk of data that followed me around like the Hound of the Baskervilles and is no doubt following me still. This chunk of data suggests that my second, third, fourth, and fifth novels did not sell many copies. Never mind that the various publishers involved did absolutely nothing to promote or distribute my books, and in most cases suspended all support for the books before they were published. No, the data says the books did not sell, which translates in corporate parlance to "Todd does not sell."
Being reminded of this damning data every time I approached an agent or publisher, I nevertheless continued to try to interest mainstream publishers in my work for many years, with and without the services of literary agents. Of course, agents are privy to this same database, and so I was a pariah to most of them. But eight years ago, shortly before moving to Mendocino, I succeeded in interesting an agent in representing my novel Bender's Lover, a metaphysical love story comedy thriller set in San Francisco and having to do with music, friendship, and power. I warned this agent about the damning data that was following me, but she seemed undaunted. "After all," she said, "those sales figures are over twenty years old and this book is so good that…"
She sent copies of my tome to fourteen editors in New York, eleven declining to consider the manuscript because of the aforementioned database. Three said they would give the book a read, and lo a miracle occurred (or so we thought.) A senior editor at Viking went mad for the book, called my agent with a fat offer, and asked that we all get together for a conference call the next day, which we did. My oh my, did we have fun, a ménage á trois love fest during which we designed the cover and cast the movie and read aloud our favorite parts from Bender's Lover; and for the next forty-eight hours I believed the curse had finally been lifted from my career and I would at last be allowed to ascend to my rightful place in the pantheon of American novelists.
This delightful editor's last words to me were, "I don't anticipate any problems, since I have carte blanche here, but as a formality I do have to run this by a couple people in Sales and then I'll call you with my formal offer. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be getting this book. It's going to be huge."
Alas, Sales nixed the deal because the data says Todd doesn't sell, never mind how old the data or what the data is based on. Never mind anything except the raw little numbers, which in truth are miraculous for being more than zeros.
My agent's voice was trembling as she gave me the sorry news, and then she took a deep breath and said, "So…under the circumstances, I don't think there's really any point in our continuing to work together. Do you?"
Cue the howling hound!
And that is just one of many reasons I do not care much for data, big or small.
Tags: Albert Einstein, Anderson Valley Advertiser, Bender's Lover, Big Data, data plague, editors, Frank's Firewood, Gregory Bateson, Hound of the Baskervilles, John Kemeny, mathematics, Stanislaw Lec, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books, Youtube
"If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all." Pearl S. Buck
Reading Bruce McEwen's tragic Hug A Kid, Go To Jail, I thought, "My God, there but for the grace of luck and chance and (in my system of belief) the intervention of angels, I, too, might have been arrested for child molestation and been sent to prison and labeled a sex offender for the rest of my life—on several different occasions. What? How?
When I was in my late thirties and living in Sacramento, I played basketball every morning at a neighborhood park. Three days a week I met my friend Bob there for rousing games of one-on-one, and two days a week I shot around by myself. Along with the basketball court, the park featured a big lawn and a swing set and a public bathroom. So one morning I was shooting hoops and these two moms showed up, each with a cute kid in tow, and they wandered to the far end of the park and spread out a big blanket for playtime and snacking and reading and whatnot.
As I continued shooting hoops, one of the kids, a girl, skipped across the lawn to the restroom adjacent to the basketball court and entered the little cinderblock building on the side marked WOMEN. A moment later she let out a blood-curdling scream, and in the next moment I was on my way into the restroom to rescue her. But some unseen power grabbed hold of me, and a loud inner voice said, "Don't go in there. Whatever you do, don't go in there!"
The girl screamed again—bloody murder!—and I turned on my heels and sprinted across the lawn toward the moms, waving my arms and shouting, "Your little girl is screaming in the bathroom."
One of the mothers jumped up and raced to the restroom and found her daughter bruised and bleeding from a head wound sustained when she slipped on the wet floor and smacked into the ceramic sink. The mom carried her daughter out into the sun and said to me, "Thanks so much. We couldn't hear a thing over the leaf blowers. We've got ice. She'll be fine. You know kids. Always falling down."
Then the mom and I exchanged long looks, her look saying, "I understand why you didn't go in there," and my look saying, "I didn't go in there because I was afraid I might be accused of trying to harm her."
But what if I had gone in there and picked up that little girl and…well, I didn't, though she might have been bleeding to death. Or she might have been in the clutches of a child molester. I was furious for days after, thinking about how if I had tried to help a hurt child I might have…I mean, what if she had said to her mother, "He touched me."
"I am fond of children—except boys." Lewis Carroll
In 1969, twenty years before that Sacramento restroom incident, I was traveling around America in an old GMC panel truck with my friend Dick Mead. On a blistering hot August day we pulled into Starved Rock State Park in Illinois, got a camping spot, and went exploring. That was when I saw fireflies for the first time. There was a huge old swing set overlooking a beautiful meadow, and I was swinging on a swing, marveling at the hundreds of little blobs of light floating and flitting over the meadow in the waning light of day, when suddenly a cute little pigtailed girl took the swing next to mine.
"I can go higher than you can," she said, kicking off and swinging hard.
"Oh, yeah," I said, being twenty. "We'll see about that."
So we swung together, going higher and higher, and she laughed and I laughed, and then we stopped pumping and allowed our swings to go lower and lower until we were barely swinging, and then she started pumping again and going higher, and I pumped, too, and caught up to her. Then we let ourselves swing to a stop and she said, "Hey, you want to do the spider? Me and my dad do it all the time. It's so fun."
"What's the spider?" I asked.
And before I could blink, that cute little pigtailed girl was straddling my legs, facing me, gripping my wrists and shouting, "Okay, go!"
And I was instantaneously consumed with terror. "Uh, no," I said, standing up and shaking free of her. "I have to go now. Nice meeting you."
"But it's so fun," she said plaintively. "You'll love it."
What if I'd gone ahead and done the spider with her and her father had come looking for her and caught us in the act? What if a park ranger had seen the longhaired stranger from California spidering with that little girl? Or what if that little girl had gone back to her family and when her mother asked, "Where were you, honey?" the little girl had replied, "Oh, I was playing with a nice man on the swings."
And during further questioning the little girl had admitted, "Yes, we were touching there because we were doing the spider."
"What is a home without children? Quiet." Henny Youngman
I worked in a Day Care Center when I was in my twenties and again when I was in my fifties. There are many truths about little kids, but one of the largest truths about them is that they are keenly interested in genitals, their own and those of others. They, the children, are particularly interested in the genitals of adult males, which are the most obvious of adult human genitals. Little boys are particularly interested in these larger versions because little boys possess smaller versions and are fascinated by the size discrepancy and the possibility that they, too, might one day have larger equipment.
I remember during my initial indoctrination as an employee of the day care center, how we were told that when a child touched us "there", it was imperative to instantly put an end to such touching, and to make sure the children knew that such touching was absolutely verboten. Never mind that a large part of my job was helping kids pull their pants down so I could wipe their butts and then help them pull their pants up. Never mind that when the kiddies wet their pants or spilled paint or juice over themselves, it was my job to strip off their sodden poopy pissy clothes, to render them naked and wash them clean and clothe them anew. Never mind that any one of those delightful creatures at any time might have reported to a parent, "He touched me," which report might have led to my arrest.
"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold." Helen Keller
For five years in the 1990's I ran the Creative Writing department for a summer school for the arts. Ambitious and talented teenagers fifteen to nineteen-years-old were my charges, and among these teens were many sexy young women. I had never taught at any level before then and so had not previously been on the receiving end of the romantic crushes of students.
I will never forget one particular summer evening on the campus of Mills College where our school was being held, a one-month intensive wherein the students lived and breathed their art and the influence of mentor artists. I was walking across the greensward on my way to the music building to find a piano to play, when someone called, "Todd," and I recognized the voice of Dawn, one of my students.
I stopped, and a moment later Dawn was beside me. I thought her the most beautiful and alluring of my students, and I knew of her crush on me because when I worked with her group of writers she responded to nearly everything I said as if she might at any moment have an orgasm. Then, too, she would linger after class and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me as I tried to concentrate objectively on the excellent erotica she'd written and about which she very much wanted my feedback.
"Hey," she whispered on that memorable evening, her honeyed breath warm on my cheek. "You and me alone in the dark. Finally."
"Hey, Dawn," I said, trying to be cool. "What's going on?"
"What's going on is I want you," she said, pressing close. "And you want me. And you know it. And I know it. And I'm way over eighteen and I'm on the pill so we've got nothing to worry about. Please? Please take me somewhere and make love to me? Please? Or we can do it right here and I'll make you feel so good you won't believe it."
"Nope," I said, breaking away and running for my life.
And had she been crazy or vindictive, she might easily have gone to the school administrators and said, "He followed me last night and touched me."
Thankfully she was not crazy or vindictive, though she did show up the next morning for our short story section wearing practically nothing, and brazenly handed me a note—crimson ink on lilac-scented stationery—that said, "Any time, any place. I am so ready for you."
Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, Bruce McEwen, children, crushes, fireflies, He Touched Me, Helen Keller, Henny Youngman, Lewis Carroll, Pearl S. Buck, swings, teens, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." Henry David Thoreau
The calendar says it is springtime, but the temperature and relentless rain say winter continues apace, this being the second year in a row that a very wet March will save Mendocino and Northern California from terrible drought. Yes, we are starved for sunlight and the woodpile is shrinking at an alarming rate, but the ongoing deluge bodes well for salmon and redwoods and huckleberries and forest frogs, so we shall not complain.
On Sunday we attended a gathering at the home of a recently deceased friend of Marcia's, his children and grandchildren and ex-wives and friends filling his moldy old house and spilling outside to honor his memory. I was impressed by his large collection of paperback books from the 1950's and 60's, many of them stuck to various shelves and to each other with the mysterious glue of time. When I pulled on a volume of Kazantzakis, the book broke into several pieces, ditto a Kerouac tome, so thereafter I contented myself with reading the spines and forming an impression of the person from the books he read.
But I was most impressed by the dust that coated everything in the house and gathered in drifts in corners and indentations—dust as a measure of many years passing wherein the man left large parts of his life untouched. And I have been thinking about this dust ever since and seeing it on the surfaces of things at our house, particularly on books we will almost surely never look at again.
So on Tuesday, housebound by the pouring rain, I emerged from my den to find Marcia confronting several shelves of CDs and books in the living room, shelves of things we still love and things we once loved and things we never loved but kept because someone gave them to us or because we couldn't think where else to put them. Now, however, inspired by the dead man's dust and the coming of spring, we emptied the shelves, mopped up the dust, and put back only those books and recordings we wanted to keep for the next leg of our journey. The rest we will give away and never think about again.
"Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself." Lily Tomlin
In 1971, having only recently learned to play the guitar, I felt certain that if I could convince a record producer at Columbia or Warner Brothers to listen to me sing my jazzy folk songs I would be the next big thing—James Taylor meets Bob Dylan meets Carlos Jobim—or so I fantasized. A highly impressionable teen growing up in the San Francisco Folk Rock scene of the 1960's, I watched dozens of obscure musicians vault from garage bands and cafés onto the world stage and saw no reason why I couldn't achieve the same kind of success. Yes, I was delusional, but without delusions I never would have done most of the things I tried to do.
I found, however, that my ears and psyche could not tolerate Really Loud Music, so Acoustic Folk Rock became my genre. The record companies were in Los Angeles, so that's where I went, my Aunt Dolly providing a base of operations for me in the living room of her cluttered home. For money I sought work as a gardener, papering Dolly's neighborhood with flyers and receiving an unexpected response that created a whole new career trajectory for me.
"I don't need a gardener," said a woman most definitely from New York and certainly Jewish. "But I've got a garage full of stuff I need to sort through and my back is not so good, so…"
Elaine had a two-car garage packed to the rafters with boxes of books, clothing, barbells, golf clubs, photographs, paintings, suitcases, furniture—tons of stuff she and her deceased husband had been stacking in there and forgetting about for thirty years. Now she wanted to go through everything and see if there was anything she wanted to keep. I would carry her things out into the light of day and she would decide what would stay and what would go and what would come into the house to live with her. She paid me two-fifty-an-hour plus lunch, and I could keep anything she didn't want.
On my second day of working for Elaine, an elderly British fellow stopped by, chatted with Elaine, and then asked me if I might do the same kind of work for him, only in his case it was an attic he wanted to explore. "More of a crawl space, actually," he said, bowing politely. "Accessible by ladder. What's wanted is a strong back and good balance. To bring things down and take them back up. Boxes of books mostly. Rugs. And I'm not sure what else."
So began two months of helping elderly people sort through piles of stuff in their garages and attics and spare bedrooms, with my evenings devoted to recording songs on a neighbor's reel-to-reel tape recorder pursuant to my becoming a rich and famous troubadour. My most profitable find in those two months of excavation was a mint condition Danny Kaye album, a massive book-like thing containing eight 78-rpm records, each in a separate sleeve. I made a trip to a famous used record store in downtown Los Angeles and sold Danny for sixty dollars! I probably could have gotten more, but sixty was a fortune to me.
The work was one part schlepping and five parts listening to the oldsters tell stories about their various things. Some people wanted to throw everything away, others were more interested in discovering what they had kept. Everyone I worked for was a unique individual, yet to me there was a sameness to everybody's stuff, and a sameness to their feelings about the stuff—regret and annoyance larded with nostalgia. So I vowed never to accumulate more than I could carry with me on a train, even when I became famous and wealthy. So much for vows we make at twenty-two.
Miracle of miracles, I did actually talk my way into a meeting with a record producer at Columbia, a kindly longhaired guy with gold records on the walls of his office who listened patiently to three of my songs before stopping the tape player and saying, "You've got a beautiful voice. What say we stay in touch and see how you're doing a couple years from now? I wish I could sign you, but you're just learning, you know? No offense, but you need time to develop your talent. Maybe start a group. Imagine some guy with a really rough voice harmonizing with your sweet tenor. Could be great. Think about it. You've got potential. And I'm not just saying that."
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." Joseph Campbell
Fast-forward forty years to Todd and Marcia creating stuff we hope people will buy from us—CDs, books, and note cards—Marcia vastly more successful than I, and with far fewer products. Her Cello Drones for Tuning and Improvisation sells like hotcakes, whereas my creations…well, let us just say that as I peruse the many boxes in my office full of my creations that hardly sell, I, too, experience regret and annoyance, but not larded with nostalgia. No, my regret and annoyance are larded with amazement at the audacity (delusion?) of hope.
Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, Cello Drones, delusion, Henry David Thoreau, hope, Joseph Campbell, Lily Tomlin, Marcia Sloane, Stuff, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books, woodpile


Interview: Seth Casteel, Author And Photographer Of 'Underwater Puppies' Seth Casteel explains the logistics of shooting his latest book: "I'm wearing a dog costume so that the dogs can feel like I'm one of the pack. ... Just kidding. ... I usually just wear a wet suit."
Let's just say it. There has been a lot of really bad news - terrorism, war, disease. So for a change, we bring you puppies. A few years ago, animal photographer Seth Casteel became a sensation. His photos of dogs underwater went viral. What followed was a book deal and a New York Times bestseller. Now Seth Casteel has another book coming out. It is possibly the only thing cuter than underwater dogs, underwater puppies. As for where he got the idea to do photo shoots of dogs underwater?
SETH CASTEEL: Not even my idea, actually, it was the dog's idea - which makes sense.
GREENE: You were like, I'm going to jump in, too.
CASTEEL: I'm jumping in. So, yeah, I got a little point-and-shoot underwater camera, took few snapshots and that was the beginning of the series of underwater dogs.
GREENE: And for people who can't picture an image right now, explain what this breed of dog looks like.
CASTEEL: So a small dog, big personality. They come in various colors, and they have long, flowing hair. One of my favorite breeds for sure, but this is the little guy, Buster, who started the whole thing. I actually have a giant tattoo of his face tattooed on my arm.
GREENE: So you feel like you owe a lot to this dog?
CASTEEL: Oh, yeah. This little dog changed my life. I was just telling somebody the other day, you know, the original book "Underwater Dogs" it really shouldn't have my name on the cover, it should say, "Underwater Dogs By Buster."
CASTEEL: With a little help from Seth Casteel.
GREENE: Love that. So why puppies? Why'd you decide to use puppies in this new book?
CASTEEL: Well, after dogs happened, and dogs was such a random project that happened and became successful out of nowhere, changed my - literally overnight, and I was thinking about the things that I wanted to do. What's the next project?
I thought, hey, puppies. Can I do puppies? And what I found out was not only could I do it, but I needed to do it for a couple of different reasons.
Number one, swimming pool safety, super duper important for all the listeners out there with their pets. So many people forget that our swimming pools - as much fun as they are - they are a danger, and they can be a danger to our children and to our fur-children. And they will learn. I mean, a lot of these puppies that I work with - for "Underwater Puppies" I work with over 1,500, all it took was a few times putting them in the water and teaching them where the exit is, and they figured it out.
GREENE: Fifteen-hundred puppies and many, if not all of them were rescue puppies, right? That seemed important to you.
CASTEEL: Yeah, that's another big part of why I wanted to make this book. I got started in photography back in 2007 just through volunteering at local animal shelters to take better pictures to get the dogs and cats adopted. I though, hey, let's use some incredible, adoptable puppy ambassadors just to show people how terrific these little guys are.
GREENE: Well, OK, I need to hear the logistics of all this. When you are swimming with a puppy and getting these underwater shots - take me there.
CASTEEL: ...So that the dogs can feel like I'm one of the pack.
GREENE: And they feel like they belong, OK. That's good to know.
CASTEEL: I usually just wear a wetsuit just in case, you know, if you spend 12 hours in a pool with a bunch of dogs, inevitably you're going to get scratched up a little bit. So I do wear a wetsuit, but I just hold my breath. That's about it. I'm underwater sometimes just a few seconds, sometimes 30 seconds, 60 seconds. By I have my wetsuit on, and I bring the toys. I bring the fun, and we just have a blast.
GREENE: And, Seth, let me just ask you this. What do you think it is about puppies that sort of gets this reaction from people?
CASTEEL: You know, puppies lift our spirits. They don't care who you are, what you've been doing, where you're going. They just want to love you, and they just want to be your friend. And I think that's always going to make us feel good.
GREENE: It's been a lot of fun talking to you. You really do bring the fun. Seth, thanks a lot.
CASTEEL: Thanks, man. I appreciate being here.
GREENE: The book, "Underwater Puppies" comes out this month. This is NPR News.


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Hilton Launches Mobile-Friendly Online Newsroom for Company News, Travel Stories, Trends and Exclusive Content
New all-in-one site gives media direct and easy access to subject matter experts, photography, infographics, video content and more
MCLEAN, Va. - Hilton (NYSE: HLT) today announced the launch of its new Hilton Online Newsroom, Newsroom.Hilton.com, geared to help media easily access timely, trend-driven stories and source company news and background about Hilton, its 14 brands and 5,400+ properties worldwide in 106 countries and territories.
The global Hilton Online Newsroom is the first site to bring together all of Hilton's 14 brands under one media home (with sub-homes for each brand). Designed to be mobile friendly for reporting and fact-checking on the go, Hilton Online Newsroom will publish a variety of social-ready content including breaking news, feature stories, photo slideshows and videos optimized for seamless media download and sharing. Visitors to the site can also subscribe to receive updates whenever new content is posted by opting in at newsroom.hilton.com/alerts.
While it was in a soft launch state, the site was populated with tips, trends, story ideas, expert insights, and timely content featuring developments from around the globe and will continue to publish around breaking news, events, corporate initiatives and more.
The Hilton Online Newsroom will also publish additional trend-based stories focusing on seasonal and pop-culture zeitgeist – such as the growing popularity of rooftop bars with amazing views, awe-inspiring pools from around the world, tips for travelers running fall marathons, and a forthcoming story on travel destination recommendations inspired by award-nominated television shows. Visitors to the site can also find updates about Hilton's innovations, such as the high-tech Connected Room, and about how the industry is evolving to meet travelers' changing needs and preferences.
Editorial content for the Hilton Online Newsroom will be cultivated by a team of reporters with previous experience at national print, television, and digital outlets. Topics will span great destinations, wellness, food and beverage, sustainable travel, technology, brand innovation, business travel, the award-winning Hilton Honors guest loyalty program and more. Hilton executives, business leaders and subject matter experts will provide timely insights on the latest business, travel and lifestyle developments, ranging from customer loyalty and culinary trends to hotel design and sleep innovation.
"With thousands of hotels around the world, millions of guests, and nearly 100 years of innovating to create unique experiences, Hilton is distinctly positioned to share and discuss trends and data and publish a mix of content that only a travel brand with our legacy and presence can," said Craig Dezern, Vice President of Brand Communications. "As news cycles move faster and media rely on a wider variety of resources for news and information, we recognize the need to provide reporters with easy-to-use assets, background and inspiration for authentic and compelling stories."
The Hilton Online Newsroom lives online at http://newsroom.hilton.com/
The site represents all 14 Hilton brands, along with corporate news, all under one hub –with sub-homes for each brand: Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts, Canopy by Hilton, Curio Collection by Hilton, DoubleTree by Hilton, Tapestry Collection by Hilton, Embassy Suites by Hilton, Hilton Garden Inn, Hampton by Hilton, Tru by Hilton, Homewood Suites by Hilton, Home2 Suites by Hilton and Hilton Honors.
Visitors to the site can also subscribe to receive updates whenever new content is posted by opting in at newsroom.hilton.com/alerts.
All users will have access to easy-to-download assets, including hi-res photos and video.
Hilton leaders will regularly publish first-person blog content on important company initiatives.
Hilton (NYSE: HLT) is a leading global hospitality company with a portfolio of 17 world-class brands comprising nearly 6,000 properties with more than 954,000 rooms, in 117 countries and territories. Dedicated to fulfilling its mission to be the world's most hospitable company, Hilton earned a spot on the 2019 World's Best Workplaces list, and has welcomed more than 3 billion guests in its 100-year history. Through the award-winning guest loyalty program Hilton Honors, more than 100 million members who book directly with Hilton can earn Points for hotel stays and experiences money can't buy, plus enjoy instant benefits, including digital check-in with room selection, Digital Key, and Connected Room. Visit newsroom.hilton.com for more information, and connect with Hilton on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.
Binoli Dua
Hilton +1 703 883 6774
Hilton Corporate Communications 7930 Jones Branch Drive
McLean, Virginia 22102 hiltonpr@hilton.com
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