text:
\section{Introduction}

Automatically generating music conditioned 3D dances is an appealing but challenging task emerged in the research community of vision and graphics, which can significantly benefit various downstream applications in AR/VR, games, films and even the social networks.
Beyond human actions like walking, jumping and sitting with atomic functionalities, dancing is a type of artistic performances that focuses more on its choreography, \ie, sequential steps and movements with high kinematic complexity that are synchronized with the beats and rhythms of the music.
It is challenging for humans with professional training to generate expressive choreographies, no matter how hard a machine is to generate visually plausible dances accompanied with the music.

Most of the prior works~\cite{lee2019dancing2music,li2021dance,lee2018listen,tang2018dance_melody,li2020dance_transformer,zhuang2020music2dance,alemi2017groovenet} formulated the music conditioned 3D dance generation as a sequence generation problem, where each frame in the sequence describes the human pose by the joint-level rotations and translations.
However, rendering a long-term pose sequence with high kinematic complexity and coherent movements is still an open question.

In this paper, we would like to exploit a popular animation strategy~\cite{lasseter1987principles,thomas1995illusion} in the field of computer graphics, where the motion of characters is efficiently rendered by interpolating poses in keyframes through parametric curves.
This coarse-to-fine strategy is especially beneficial in our task since it both ensures kinematic complexity and motion conherency in the generated dances, where the poses in the keyframes can be generated and synchronized with the music beats due to their co-occurrence~\cite{lee2019dancing2music,li2021dance}, and the parameteric curves can be efficiently regressed so as to produce diverse motion patterns that are consistent with the rhythms of the music.
It also allows user-controlled temporal resolutions, and generates smooth sequences with fewer temporal flickers~\cite{williams2012animator}.
Moreover, formulating dances as a sequence of key poses and parametric motion curves would be seamlessly compatible with industrial animation pipelines.
Therefore, we would like to tackle the music conditioned 3D dance generation from this new perspective, and decompose this task into two easier sub-tasks, namely, the key pose generation and the subsequent parametric motion curve regression.

To this end, we propose DanceFormer, a two-stage music conditioned 3D dance generation framework that consists of two cascaded Transformer-like~\cite{vaswani2017attention} networks (called DanTrans), where the first one is to generate key poses and the second one is to regress the parameters of the motion curves between adjacent key poses.
At first, we employ an off-the-shelf beat track algorithm~\cite{ellis2007beat} to detect beats from the input music (\eg, around $30$ seconds).
The DanTrans for the key pose generation takes a sequence of music spectrum features centered at each beat as the input, and then generate a sequence of key poses that synchronizes with the sequence of the music beats.
And the DanTrans for the parametric motion curve regression employs a different sequence of music spectrum features that are extracted between adjacent beats, and feeds the generated key poses as well to regress the sequence of the parameters for each motion curve.
In our implementation, we employ the Kochanek-Bartels splines \cite{kochanek1984interpolating} to model motion curves, which benfits for rendering various movements from a small set of control parameters.

Each DanTrans contains a \emph{Wave Encoder} as a stack of transformer encoders to extract audio features, and a \emph{Motion Decoder} constructed by a stack of transformer decoders to auto-regressively predict key poses or parameters of the motion curves.
To be specific, the Motion Decoder contains a new  Kinematic Propagation Module (KPM) and a Structured Multi-head Attention Module (SMAM) to enhance the spatial correlation for the dance generation process based on the Kinematic topological relations of the human body. This motion decoder increases the physical significance and thus alleviates unreasonable predictions seldom appeared in real dances.
These DanTrans networks are adversarially trained in accompany with $\ell_2$ reconstruction losses.

In order to train the proposed DanceFormer, we also propose a new PhantomDance dataset that is produced by professional animators rather than reconstruction from 2D videos~\cite{lee2019dancing2music,li2021dance,lee2018listen} or by motion capture~\cite{zhuang2020music2dance,tang2018dance_melody}.
The reconstructed data can not ensure the accuracy due to the limitation of recent 3D reconstruction algorithms. The motion capture methods are more accurate but still suffer from noise, such as limb flickers and joint mismatches.
In contrast, our PhantomDance dataset is produced by a team of experienced animators instructed by professional dancers. The animated dances are encoded by poses from keyframes and motion curve parameters, which thus can produce more fluent and expressive human pose sequences that matches the input musics.

Extensive experiments are conducted on PhantomDance and AIST++ \cite{li2021dance}, demonstrating that DanceFormer attains state-of-the-art results and significantly surpasses other works both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Above all, the contributions are summarized as follows:

(1) A new perspective to model the music conditioned 3D dance generation as key pose generation and parametric motion curve regression, which follows the animation principles and simultaneously ensures kinematic complexity and motion coherency.

(2) A novel framework named DanceFormer that is consists of two Transformer-like networks called DanTrans, where the first network generates key poses and the second one regresses the parameters of the motion curves.
More importantly, the DanTrans networks calculates attentions in adaptive temporal ranges and explicitly enhances the kinematic correlation among the outputs.

(3) The PhantomDance dataset, as the first dance dataset crafted by professional animators instead of 3D reconstruction or motion capture, provides more smooth and expressive dances that are synchronized with music, and directly compatible with industrial animation pipelines.

\section{Related Works}

\subsubsection{3D Dance Synthesis}
3D dance synthesis has been addressed in a number of ways. The traditional methods were based on retrieval from the dance dataset~\cite{2010Retrieval,chao2004motion}.
Recently, deep learning models have been widely employed in this task, attaining visually pleasing results, such as those using convolutional neural networks~\cite{lee2018listen,zhuang2020music2dance}, recurrent neural networks~\cite{tang2018dance_melody}, or using variational auto-encoders~\cite{lee2019dancing2music} to enhance the diversity of the generated dances.
CSGN~\cite{yan2019csgn} generates the dance sequences by enhancing the skeleton-level relations with a graph neural network (GNN), but the proposed Kinematic Propagation Module (KPM) used in our DanceFormer adopts forward and inverse kinematic message passing to better involve the kinematic correlations.
ChoreoMaster~\cite{chen2021choreomaster} introduces a choreography-oriented choreomusical embedding framework, and use the embedding to retrieve dance snippets in the motion graph for the input music. Because it doesn't generate new dances, we don't compare our method with it.
As the Transformer~\cite{vaswani2017attention} achieves a great success in sequence-to-sequence generation tasks in NLPs, some of the most recent works on the dance generation also bring it into use.
\citet{li2020dance_transformer} presented a two-stream motion transformer generative model.
AI Choreographer~\cite{li2021dance} presents a cross-model transformer with future-$N$ supervision for auto-regressive motion prediction.
These works directly generate the sequence of human poses, while the proposed DanceFormer generates a series of key poses and accompanied parameters of the motion curves, which ensures necessary kinematic complexity, motion coherency, adaptive temporal resolutions in the generated dances, and moreover, compatible with the industrial animation software, such as Maya, Unity and \emph{etc}.

\subsubsection{3D Dance Dataset}
The widely used motion datasets, such as Human3.6M~\cite{ionescu2013human3} and AMASS~\cite{mahmood2019amass}, collected common actions like walking, running, jumping and sitting. However, these datasets are hard to adapt for the dance generation task due to the huge distribution gap between daily motions and the dance movements, as well as the absence of carefully aligned music-dance pairs.
In fact, high-quality 3D dance movements with synchronized musics are extremely hard to collect.
Many existing datasets are limited by quantity or quality of data. Some of them just use sequences of 2D keypoints to represent dances~\cite{lee2019dancing2music,lee2018listen}.
AIST++~\cite{li2021dance}, as the largest dataset up to date, presented a $5$-hours 3D dance set. But it gathered dances by reconstructing 3D poses from 2D multi-view videos, thus the accuracy of pose parameters may not guaranteed.
The other works use motion capture to build dataset~\cite{alemi2017groovenet,tang2018dance_melody,zhuang2020music2dance}, in which the pose reliability is better but misalignment between the dance-music pair is inevitable.
On the contrary, the proposed PhantomDance is the largest public 3D dance dataset up to date and its data quality is much higher than existing datasets thanks to careful labels from experienced animators with the help of professional dancers. The stored key poses and parametric motion curves also benefit for animations by industrial softwares.

\section{The PhantomDance Dataset}

\subsection{Data Collection}

We collect $260$ popular dance videos from more than $13$ genres from over $100$ different subjects (dancers) on YouTube, NicoNico and Bilibili, which have $9.6$ hours in total.
Then a team of experienced animators produced the 3D dance animations, as sequences of key poses and parametric motion curves.
An expert dancer provided professional instructions to teach the animators, thus improve the holistic expressiveness and detail richness of the animated dances, as well as the synchronization with beats and rhythms of the accompanied musics.
This dataset is named PhantomDance, and we will make it publicly available to facilitate future research.

\subsection{Data Formatting}

In our PhantomDance dataset, the dances can be animated in industrial animation software, such as Maya~\cite{derakhshani2012maya}, on a standard SMPL~\cite{loper2015smpl} character model with $24$ body joints.
We followed Human3.6M~\cite{ionescu2013human3} and provided a subject-invariant 3D human skeleton representation for all the $260$ motion files, with unified limb lengths.
The motion is parameterized as the parametric curves of root (the hip joint) position and the rotations of the $24$ skeleton joints.
For each sequence we take the root position on the first frame as the the origin of the 3D coordinate. And the rotations are expressed with quaternions. That is, there are $3 + 4 \times 24 = 99$ curves in each motion file.
Each parametric motion curve is represented as the Kochanek-Bartels Spline interpolated from labeled key poses synchronized with extracted music beats, where curve segment between adjacent two key poses can be controlled by a fixed set of parameters.

We use the parametric motion curves to represent dance movements because (1) its formulation is analytical and can be densely sampled with various temporal resolutions, which is very useful for real-time rendering; (2) its shape is in nature continuous and thus consistent with the aesthetic principles when evaluating dances.

\subsection{In Comparison to Previous Datasets}

Table~\ref{table:dataset} shows the comparison between our PhantomDance dataset with the other public music-conditioned 3D Dance Datasets.
The collected dances in PhantomDance mainly cover 13 genres, ranging from Urban Dance to Chinese Classical Dance, with extra genres from animes or idol groups which are hard to classify.
The beats per minute (BPM) of these dances range from $75$ to $178$.
Apart from labeling the detailed 3D positions and rotations of each pose, our dataset also provides the ground-truth music beats and parameters of each motion curve, thus directly facilitates animation or model learning that is compatible with industrial software.

Besides the aspect of dataset scale, the PhantomDance dataset also has high quality.
Motion data in the other datasets are collected from optical motion capture system~\cite{alemi2017groovenet,tang2018dance_melody,sun2020deepdance} or 3D reconstruction from multi-view videos~\cite{li2021dance}.
Motion capture systems can not totally avoid data noise like limb flicker and joint mismatch.
And video based 3D reconstruction suffers from more serious noise like foot slippery and limb twist due to the limitation of reconstruction algorithms.
Thus professional animators are needed for data correction.
In contrast, motion data in PhantomDance are produced by expert animators from scratch with the guidance of a professional dancer. And we have a strict quality checking process so that it costs about $15$ months to finish the dance labeling.
More details of our PhantomDance dataset and the qualitative comparison with the other datasets can be seen in our project page\footnote{https://huiye-tech.github.io/post/danceformer/}.

\begin{figure*}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/overview_v2.pdf}
\caption{{\bf Overview of the workflow of DanceFormer.}
         The networks in stage 1 take as input the music wave features in the neighborhood of each beat and output a sequence of key poses. Then the networks in stage 2 utilize the generated key poses and the music wave features between each two key poses to predict the motion curve in between. Each network adopts the proposed transformer-like network, called DanTrans. The DanTrans has a new transformer decoder, which uses the proposed Kinematic Propagation Module (KPM). Note that the attention module (Att. in the figure) is a structured multi-head attention.
         }
\label{fig:overview}
\vspace{-3mm}
\end{figure*}

\begin{table}[t]
\centering
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{
     \begin{tabular}{ c | c c c c c c }
     \hline
     Dataset & Pos/Rot & Beat & Curve & Genres & Music & Seconds  \\
     \hline
     GrooveNet & $\checkmark$/$\times$ & $\times$ & $\times$ & 1 & 3 & 1380 \\
     EA-MUD & $\checkmark$/$\times$ & $\times$ & $\times$ & 6 & 23 & 1849 \\
     Dance w/ Melody & $\checkmark$/$\times$ & $\times$ & $\times$ & 4 & 61 & 5640 \\
     AIST++ & $\checkmark$/$\checkmark$ & $\times$ & $\times$ & 10 & 60 & 18694 \\
     PhantomDance & $\checkmark$/$\checkmark$ & $\checkmark$ & $\checkmark$ & 13+ & 260 & 34667 \\
     \hline
     \end{tabular}}
     \vspace{-2mm}
     \caption{Our PhantomDance dataset \emph{v.s.} the other datasets, namely GrooveNet~\cite{alemi2017groovenet}, EA-MUD~\cite{sun2020deepdance}, Dance with Melody~\cite{tang2018dance_melody} and AIST++~\cite{li2021dance}.}
     \label{table:dataset}
\end{table}

\section{DanceFormer}

As illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:overview}, we propose the DanceFormer, a two-stage music conditioned 3D dance generation framework that consists of two cascaded transformer-like networks. Each network is named as DanTrans, where the first one generates key poses, and the second one predicts the parameters of the motion curves between adjacent key poses.
Each DanTrans network contains a wave encoder that is similar as the standard transformer encoder~\cite{vaswani2017attention}, and a motion decoder with a Kinematic Propagation Module (KPM) and a Structured Multi-head Attention Module (SMAM), which enhances the kinematic correlation for the dance generation process based on the Kinematic topological relations of the human body.
Adversarial learning is applied during the training in both stages.

\subsection{Stage 1: Key Pose Generation}

Following the rhythm (beats) is a basic principle in dance theory \cite{goodridge1999rhythm}, and previous studies also show that music beats and kinematic inflexions have strong consistency in time \cite{lee2019dancing2music,li2021dance}.
Thus we define the key poses directly as the poses on the beats, which is represented as position and rotation (in quaternion) of each skeleton joint, with the dimension of $(3 + 4) \times 24 = 168$.
We first leverage the a dynamic programming algorithm~\cite{ellis2007beat} to track the time of each beat in the music.
Our target in stage 1 is to generate a sequence of key poses to match these extracted beats.

The input sequential music features are music spectrum features between a window centered at each beat.
We use a window of size $0.8$ seconds in our implementation since the lowest beat per-minus (BPM) is $75$ in common dance musics (which is validated in our PhantomDance dataset, and also valid in other datasets).
We choose the Hamming window to tackle the window overlap in music with higher BPMs.
In each window, we calculate the $40$-dimensional form of MFCC~\cite{logan2000mfcc} that has $13$ coefficients of Mel filters cepstrum coefficients with the first and second order differences ($13 \times 2$ dimensions) and the energy sum (1 dimension).
We further append a $12$-dimension chroma feature to the feature of every beat and finally attain the inputs to the wave encoder.
And the motion decoder combines the encoded features with the right shifted outputs and sequentially predict the key poses, as indicated by the sequence-to-sequence prediction strategy based on the standard transformer~\cite{vaswani2017attention}.

\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figs/curve.pdf}
\caption{{\bf Motion Curves.}
         The figure shows an example of $4$-knot TCB spline parameterization for motion curves.}
\label{fig:curve}
\vspace{-3mm}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Stage 2: Parametric Motion Curve Prediction}

Based on the generated key poses, the DanTrans in stage 2 is targeted to generate the motion curves in between.

The motion curves are defined as the values of transformation parameters with regard to time. The transformation parameters are translation $(x, y, z)$ and rotation $(r_x, r_y, r_z, r_w)$ in quaternion of each joint.
We use a multi-knots Kochanek-Bartels splines~\cite{kochanek1984interpolating} to model each curve.
It is a sort of cubic Hermite spline that is used in animation editing softwares.
The Kochanek-Bartels spline is also named TCB spline because it has $3$ parameters: $t$ for tension, $b$ for bias and $c$ for continuity. While for a multi-knot TCB spline, we should also determine the intermediate knots and their tangents.
Figure~\ref{fig:curve} shows a example of motion curve parameterization.

In our implementation, we use one 4-knot TCB spline to fit one motion curve between two adjacent key poses, as an optimal tradeoff between fitting accuracy and representation compactness.
Since the endpoints in the curve are just on the key poses, we have $7$ control parameters to predict, namely the $t$, $c$, $b$ and the position of the two intermediate knots.

Similar to the DanTrans in stage 1, we extract the sequence of the MFCC features from the music between every two adjacent beats as the input for the wave encoder, and the motion decoder auto-regressively outputs the $7$ control parameters that are aligned with each MFCC feature.
Note that the motion decoder requires the right shifted output sequences as its input, which should be additionally concatenated with the two key poses at the beginning and the end of the curve, which are generated in stage 1.

\subsection{Network Structure of DanTrans}

DanTrans has a similar Network structure to the standard transformer~\cite{vaswani2017attention} as illustrated on the right of Figure~\ref{fig:overview}, except that the motion decoder employs the proposed Kinematic Propagation Module (KPM) and the Structured Multi-head Attention Module (SMAM) in each transformer decoder layer.
We employ a stack of $N=6$ transformer decoders in the motion decoder of each DanTrans.
Note that an additional KPM is applied at the beginning of the motion decoder for output embedding.

\subsubsection{Kinematic Propagation Module}

The Kinematic Propagation Module (KPM) are constructed on the basis of human body structure, \ie, the $24$ skeleton joint nodes with a tree topology. The networks consist of a stack of so-called FK-IK block as illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:KPM}.
Note that the fully connected layer (FC) represents the complete BN-Linear-ReLU module, while we use FC to represent it for simplicity.

\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figs/kpm.pdf}
\caption{{\bf The Kninematic Propagation Module (KPM) and the Structured Multi-head Attention.}
         Features are embedded and passed along the kinematic chains forward and inversely with fusion operations. Note that the endpoints of feature passing are root and leaf nodes, and we just show a part of them for clearer view.}
\label{fig:KPM}
\vspace{-3mm}
\end{figure}

The FK-IK block has two steps, \ie, the forward kinematic (FK) feature passing and then the inverse kinematic (IK) feature passing, respectively.
The forward kinematic feature passing step firstly performs a feature embedding on the root node and pass it to the neighbor child nodes along the kinematic chain.
After receiving the features from the parent node, the child node performs feature fusion and then conducts feature embedding by linear projection.
The FC layers are utilized for feature embedding and the fusion adopts the addition operation.
The backward kinematic feature passing step has a similar feature embedding and the passing process is performed from the leaf nodes to the root.
These procedures are similar to the operations of forward kinematics (FK) and inverse kinematics (IK) in computer graphics and robotics.
The FK-IK block attempts to encode features into the motion controlling parameter space and to bring physics constraints into the model.

For the output embedding process at the beginning of the motion decoder, we use a KPM with one FK-IK block. And for feed-forward process in the intermediate layers, we adopt a stack of 2 FK-IK blocks for each KPM.
All the KPMs have the same output feature size of $64$.

\subsubsection{Structured Multi-Head Attention}

The features outputted by KPM are arranged as the joint nodes, they naturally act as heads in the multi-head attention mechanism used in common transformers~\cite{vaswani2017attention}.
In the multi-head cross-attention, the encoded features from the input music are processed by two sets of 24 paralleled FC layers with the output size of $64$, which then act as the values and keys.
Note that no concatenation is needed after attention calculation since the features should maintain the body structure, and directly fed into the succeeding KPM module.
Thus this process saves computation compared to the typical multi-head attention that concatenates features from each head and uses a big linear layer for feature embedding.
The structured multi-head attention module, also shown in the right of Figure~\ref{fig:KPM}, defines the head as the node in the body structure, which has explicit physical significance. To some degree this design is more reasonable than the multi-heads in the original transformer.

\subsection{Training Objective}

We adopt an adversarial training strategy that regards each DanTrans network as an individual generator, and learns two discriminators to judge whether distributions of the generated sequences and the groundtruth ones are aligned or not.
Each discriminator consists of two modules to process the music feature and the output/groundtruth key pose sequence (in stage 1) or the parameters of the motion curves (in stage 2), and the processed features are combined and fed into the binary classifier to predict the authenticity of the outputs conditioned on the input music. All modules in the discriminator are 3-layer MLPs.
Moreover, when updating the generator, we also include an $\ell_2$ reconstruction loss to avoid unwanted solutions that are far away with real data.

\section{Experiments}

\subsection{Implementation Details}

Since most musics in PhantomDance have the verse-chorus form, we divide the $260$ dance animations into $1000$ sequences.
Among them $900$ pieces of music-dance pairs are used for model training, and the other $100$ are split into the test set. We carefully pick the test set to ensure it cover $13$ genres and the BPM range from $80$ to $180$.
We follow the official training/testing splits in AIST++~\cite{li2021dance}. To gather the ground-truth labels for the training of the DanceFormer, we use the beat track algorithm~\cite{ellis2007beat} to extract beats and fit the parameter motion curves from the provided pose sequences.
The DanceFormer is end-to-end trained using $4$ TITAN Xp GPUs with a batch size of $8$ on each GPU.
We use the Adam optimizer with betas $\{0.5, 0.999\}$ and a learning rate of $0.0002$.
The learning rate drops to $2$e$-5$, $2$e$-6$ after {$100$\emph{k}, $200$\emph{k}} steps.
The model is trained with $300$\emph{k} steps for \emph{AIST++} and $400$\emph{k} steps for PhantomDance.
The dimension of features in DanceFormer is $256$ unless otherwise specified.

\subsection{Evaluation Metrics}

\subsubsection{Normalized Power Spectrum Simularity (NPSS)}

It is an evaluation metric for long-term motion synthesis compared to Mean Square Error (MSE).
We just follow its official implementation \cite{gopalakrishnan2019neural_rnn} and compute NPSS in the joint motion space $\mathbb{R}^{T \times N \times 7}$ ($4$ for joint rotation represented as quaternion and $3$ for joint position).

\subsubsection{Frechet Distance (FD)}

It is proposed by AIST++~\cite{li2021dance} that has two metrics, namely PFD for position and VFD for velocity. We also employ it to calculate the distribution distance of joints.

\subsubsection{Position Variance (PVar)}
It evaluates the diversity of the generated dance.
In AIST++, a piece of music corresponds to more than one dance, but only one in PhantomDance. So we make a modification to the metric~\textbf{PVar} in the experiments on PhantomDance where we compute it along different music pieces which have identical length.

\subsubsection{Beat Consistency Score (BC)}

It is a metric for motion-music correlation. We follow~\cite{li2021dance} to define kinematic beats as the local minima of the kinetic velocity.
BC computes the average distance between every music beat and its nearest kinematic beat with the following equation:
\begin{equation}
BC = \frac{1}{|\cB^x|} \sum_{i=1}^{|\cB^x|} \exp\left(-\frac{\min_{\forall t_j^x \in \cB^x}||t_j^x - t_i^y ||^2}{2\sigma^2}\right)
\end{equation}
where $\cB^x = \{ t^x_j \}, \cB^y = \{ t^y_i \}$ are kinematic beats and music beats respectively and $\sigma = 3$.
Note that BC has a similar form to Beat Alignment Score (BA) proposed in \cite{li2021dance}, but they are different in essence.
BA forces every kinematic beat to match a music beat, but a dance usually has many small kinematic beats that occur between music beats.
Moreover, a music synchronized dance just need to ensure the most salient music beats are accompanied with the action emphasis (kinematic beats). So our proposed BC, which finds matched kinematic beat for each music beat, is more appropriate in this case.

\begin{table}[t]
 \centering
 \resizebox{\linewidth}{!} {
     \begin{tabular}{ c | c  c  c  c  c }
     \hline
     Component & NPSS $\downarrow$ & PFD $\downarrow$ & VFD $\uparrow$ & PVar $\uparrow$ & BC $\uparrow$ \\

     \hline
      \textbf{DanceFormer} & \textbf{8.03} & \textbf{114.03} & \textbf{0.55} & \textbf{0.912} & \textbf{0.785} \\
     \hline
     Curve to Frames & 14.55 & 1132.4 & 1.06 & 0.233 & 0.317 \\
     \hline
     KPM to Linear & 10.54 & 162.44 & 0.79 & 0.592 & 0.637 \\
     KPM to GNN & 10.34 & 146.43 & 0.69 & 0.647 & 0.692 \\
     \hline
     \end{tabular}
 }
\vspace{-2mm}
     \caption{{\bf Ablation study about our DanceFormer on the PhantomDance dataset.} $\downarrow$ means that lower results indicate better methods, and $\uparrow$ \emph{vice versa}.}
     \label{table:ablation}
\end{table}

\subsection{Ablation Study}

To validate the effectiveness of our DanceFormer, we conduct the ablation study on our PhantomDance dataset.

\begin{table}[t]
 \centering
 \resizebox{\linewidth}{!} {
     \begin{tabular}{ c | c  c  c  c  c }
     \hline
     Att Algorithm & NPSS $\downarrow$ & PFD $\downarrow$ & VFD $\uparrow$ & PVar $\uparrow$ & BC $\uparrow$ \\

     \hline
     Global & 9.73 & 151.53 & 0.72 & 0.649 & 0.737 \\
     Local & 9.01 & 125.59 & 0.68 & 0.744 & 0.763 \\
     Gaussian Local & 8.93 & 117.14 & 0.64 & 0.753 & 0.764 \\
     \textbf{Learned Local} & \textbf{8.03} & \textbf{114.03} & \textbf{0.55} & \textbf{0.912} & \textbf{0.785} \\
     \hline
     \end{tabular}
 }
 \vspace{-2mm}
     \caption{{\bf The comparison of different Attention mechanisms.} $\downarrow$ means that lower results indicate better methods, and $\uparrow$ \emph{vice versa}.}
     \label{table:att}
      \vspace{-5mm}
\end{table}

\begin{figure*}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/results}
\caption{{\bf Visualization of generated results of DanceFormer.}}
\label{fig:result}
\end{figure*}

\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figs/userstudy}
\vspace{-3mm}
\caption{{\bf Results of the user study.}  We conduct a user study to ask participants to choose the better dances from pairwise comparisons. The criteria includes the performance quality and matching the music. The number denotes the percentage of preference on the comparison pairs.}
\label{fig:userstudy}
\vspace{-3mm}
\end{figure}

\begin{table*}[!t]
\centering
 \resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{\begin{tabular}{ c | c | c | c | c | c || c | c | c | c | c }
 \hline
 \multirow{2}{*}{Method} & \multicolumn{5}{c||}{AIST++} & \multicolumn{5}{c}{PhantomDance} \\
 \cline{2-11}
 & NPSS $\downarrow$ & PFD $\downarrow$ & VFD $\uparrow$ & PVar $\uparrow$ & BC $\uparrow$ & NPSS $\downarrow$ & PFD $\downarrow$ & VFD $\uparrow$ & PVar $\uparrow$ & BC $\uparrow$ \\
 \hline
 Li et al. \cite{li2020dance_transformer} & 16.31 & 5595.91 & 3.40 & 0.019 & 0.359 & 18.34 & 7944.78 & 5.84 & 0.014 & 0.175 \\
 Music2Dance \cite{zhuang2020music2dance} & 14.74 & 2367.26 & 1.13 & 0.215 & 0.378 & 15.94 & 3147.89 & 3.74 & 0.267 & 0.223 \\
 AI Choreographer \cite{li2021dance} & 8.29 & 113.56 & 0.45 & 0.509 & 0.452 & 10.62 & 164.33 & 0.73 & 0.624 & 0.388 \\
 \hline
 DanceFormer & \textbf{6.01} & \textbf{84.32} & \textbf{0.34} & \textbf{0.734} & \textbf{0.782} & \textbf{8.03} & \textbf{114.03} & \textbf{0.55} & \textbf{0.912} & \textbf{0.785} \\
 \hline
 \end{tabular}}
 \vspace{-2mm}
     \caption{{\bf Dance generation evaluation on the AIST++ and the PhantomDance datasets.} Our method outperforms other baselines in terms of quality, diversity and beat consistency. Especially, due to our two-stage prediction schema, our model has superior performance in term of BC indicating that our model can generate dances which better match the given music. $\downarrow$ means that lower results indicate better methods, and $\uparrow$ \emph{vice versa}.}
    \label{table:comparison}
     \vspace{-2mm}
\end{table*}

\subsubsection{Effectiveness of Curve Prediction}

To evaluate the effectiveness of our curve prediction, we sample 60-FPS poses from the data and use a standard transformer to directly predict the sequence. The input sequences are extracted from a $0.5$s sliding window with a step of $1/60$ second on the music waves. Its result is the second line of Table~\ref{table:ablation} as ``Curve to Frame". The experimental result demonstrates the advantage of our pose-to-curve two stage generation framework.

 \subsubsection{Effectiveness of KPM}

 To study the impact of the KPM component, we first replace it with the standard feed-forward (linear layers) modules in vanilla transformer \cite{vaswani2017attention}. And the multi-head attention also comes back to the common form. The third line in Table~\ref{table:ablation} shows that the KPM has significant improvement in motion generation quality.
 %
 To further study the FK-IK processing, we introduce a comparison architecture which substitutes the FK-IK block with a 2-layer graph neural network (GNN)~\cite{scarselli2008graph}.
 %
 This GNN fuses the joint features according to the adjacency matrix of undirected graph defined by the joint structure.
 %
 The experimental result shows that GNN has better performances compared to the baseline (``KPM to Linear''), which proves that introducing spatial correlations benefits the representation of the learning model.
 %
 While the proposed KPM surpasses the trivial GNN by a large margin, validating that involving spatial correlation and physics constraints into the network brings in  significant improvements in the generation quality that is evaluated by NPSS, PFD and VFD.
 %

\subsubsection{Variants of Attention}

In our implementation, we find that local attention~\cite{luong2015effective} is more proper for the motion sequence generation task than the global attention in standard transformers.
It can be explained by the temporal locality of motions.
That is, the pose several seconds ago has no direct influence on the current pose.
Moreover relationship between motion state is stronger with the time going closer. So we further compare several attention algorithms and the results are shown in Table~\ref{table:att}. We use a sequence length of $17$ in the simple local attention experiment shown on the second line. And we add a Gaussian mask on the attention results before \texttt{softmax} with a standard variance of $4$. The result is on the third line and it has a slight improvement. Finally we use a learned mask to be optimized with the networks and obtain the best result. The trained mask has a triangle shape on the whole with some humps. Our DanceFormer employs this learnable local attention in our implementation.

\subsection{Comparison with Other Methods}

We mainly compare our method with AI Choreographer~\cite{li2021dance}, which to our knowledge obtains the state-of-the-art results for music-conditioned dance generation. The other two most related works, namely Li et al.~\cite{li2020dance_transformer} and Music2Dance~\cite{zhuang2020music2dance} are also compared.
The experimental comparisons are performed on both the AIST++ and our PhantomDance datasets.

\subsubsection{Quantitative Comparisons}

The results are viewed in Table~\ref{table:comparison}. Our method outperforms Li et al.~\cite{li2020dance_transformer} and Music2Dance~\cite{zhuang2020music2dance} by a considerably large margin. And it also surpasses AI Choreographer~\cite{li2021dance} significantly in the quality related metrics (a $30\%$ gain of NPSS, a $28\%$ gain of PFD and a $27\%$ gain of VFD), diversity metrics (a $46\%$ gain of PVar) and beat consistency metrics (a $93\%$ gain of BC).
The promising results on the dance quality metrics are mainly owing to the network structure of KPM that enhances the kinematic correlations. The generation diversity is ensured by the adversarial learning scheme.
Note that the upper bound of the metric BC is $1$, which means there exactly exists a kinematic beat at the time of each music beat. So our results have relatively high beat consistency score, which is due to the proposed two-stage framework of our DanceFormer.
Since no metric emphasizes the fluency of the dance performance, the advantages of motion curve formulation can only be well revealed in qualitative results, as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:result}.

\subsubsection{Qualitative Results and User Study}

Figure~\ref{fig:result} provides a sequence of frames about the generated dances by our DanceFormer. These results show that the proposed method can provide diverse movements with high kinematic complexity.
Video results accompanied with musics, including the comparisons with the other works can be found in the project page\footnote{https://huiye-tech.github.io/post/danceformer/}.

We also conducted a user study to evaluate the quality of the generated music-conditioned dances.
All the $100$ sequences of the validation set of PhantomDance were used for the study.
And then we collect the generated dances by our method and the compared baselines~\cite{li2021dance,li2020dance_transformer,zhuang2020music2dance}.
In addition, the ground-truth dances are also included.
The user study was conducted using a pairwise comparison scheme.
For each of the $100$ musics, we provide $4$ pairs in which our results occur with the results from the baseline methods or the ground truth.
Thus $400$ pairs were provided to the participants, and they were asked to make two choices for each pair:
``Which dance is a better performance (more fluent, graceful and pleasing)?'' and
``Which dance matches the music better?''.
There are $100$ participants in the user study.
Figure~\ref{fig:userstudy} shows the user study results, where our DanceFormer outperforms the other methods on both criteria.
Most of the participants rated that our method generates better dances in performance quality compared with other works, and even more participants held the opinion that the dances generated by our model better match the musics.

\section{Conclusion}
In this work, we propose a new perspective to model the music-conditioned 3D dance generation task.
Different from previous works that define the outputs as sequences of poses, we formulate them as key poses and in-between motion curves.
The curve representation makes the generated results more fluent and graceful.
Based on this formulation, we propose the transformer-based DanceFormer with the novel DanTrans architecture consisting of the KPM module for better modeling kinematic correlations.
DanceFormer thus yields high-quality results in the experimental comparisons.
Moreover, we propose the PhantomDance Dataset, the first music-conditioned 3D dance dataset that uses curves to represent body motion, and it is the largest 3D dance dataset with the best visual quality up to date.

\subsubsection{Acknowledgement}
This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 61906012, No. 62132001).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
2019 U.S. Junior Championships
The Field | Junior
Pairings & Results | Junior
The Field | Girls
Pairings & Results | Girls
Recap Articles
2019 U.S. Senior Championship
Pairings & Results
U.S. CHESS CHAMPS
HOME OF U.S. CHAMPIONSHIP CHESS & THE COUNTRY'S TOP PLAYERS
2016 Saint Louis Invitational - IM Norm Field
International Master
Federation:
2016 Saint Louis Invitational
Jaroslav Bures
Born in the Prostejov, Czech Republic, Bures currently studies civil engineering at the Czech University of Technology. Playing from the young age of 7, Bures soon belonged to the top Czech Youths representing his country on various World Youth and European Youth Championships. His best result is 18th place in the 2007 World Youth Championship in Kemer-Antalya, Turkey. He became an International Master in 2011 and has continued to play in both tournament and league games. He also placed 3rd in GM Invitational in Hungary, and 1st in IM Invitational in Czech Republic.
Konstantin Kavutskiy
FIDE Master
FM Kostya Kavutskiy is a professional chess player, author, and coach currently residing in Mountain View, California. He has two IM norms and high ambitions to eventually earn the GM title. His first book, Modernized: The Open Sicilian, was published in February 2015.
Hans Moke Niemann
Hans is a 12-year-old FM from Connecticut who was born in California but learned how to play chess when living in the Netherlands at 8 years old. Speed is Hans' game not only seen in his quick and blitz rankings but in the speed in which his rating rose from 1000 to 2400 in just over 3 years. Hans showed he can play slow time controls in Dallas in February this year when he achieved an IM norm performance (but didn't get the norm because he needed to have played 1 additional foreign player). Hans was a very competitive water polo player and cyclist but is focused primarily now on chess and plays basketball for fun.
Gauri Shankar
Gauri is a FIDE Master, originally from India, who moved to the United States when he was ten years old. He has four International Master norms, and is seeking to cross the 2400 elo mark to get his title. He works as a chess trainer in Chicago, where he currently resides, and is going to school majoring in marketing.
Seth Homa
Seth Homa is a FM and chess professional born and raised in Michigan. Seth has 2 IM norms (Golden State Open 2013 and St Louis Invitational 2014).
Angelo Young
Angelo was born in the Philippines and was Philippines National Junior Champion in 1982. He received three IM norms in 21 days. Besides being active as a professional chess player winning numerous recent events, he works as a coach teaching chess in Chicago, Illinois. He is two-time MVP for the Chicago Blaze in the United States Chess League.
Lefong Hua
FM Lefong Hua is a chess coach and trainer from Montreal, Canada. Lefong excelled at chess as a child, most notably finishing 5th place in the 1992 World Youth Chess Championships alongside future top GM's Aronian, Grischuk, and Bacrot. He is making his return to the tournament scene after 10 years, and is extremely motivated to earn the IM title and showcase his potential as a player.
Carissa Yip
National Master
Carissa Yip has been on a record-shattering pace ever since she started her first rated tournament at age 7. At age 9, she became the youngest ever to reach the title of Expert. Two years later she broke the record for youngest female to achieve the title of National Master at the age of 11 years, 5 months, and 18 days.
This is her first IM norm invitational tournament, and she is seeking her first IM norm.
Doug Eckert
Doug Eckert is a CPA and tax partner with Brown Smith Wallace. The 1983 and 1984 U.S. Junior Open Champion and finished 4th in the U.S. Junior Championship.
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2018 Today in Chess: Candidates
2017 Winter Chess Classic
2017 Saint Louis Winter Invitational
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2017 Sinquefield Cup
2017 Match of the Millennials
2017 U.S. Junior Championship
2017 U.S. Girls' Junior Championship
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
About the Monastery
Holy Relics
The Abbot
Former Abbots
The Holy Fathers on mercy
Spiritual Concerts
Metochion of St George
Metochion of St Achilles of Larisa
Metochion of Archangel Gabriel
Metochion of St John the Baptist
Skete of St Cyrill and Methodius
Skete of St Seraphim of Sarov
A Monk's Life
Mitres
A "strange" pilgrimage to a hidden diamond of Orthodoxy
14 June/27 June 2018 year of our Lord
Photios Sionis
We are releasing a certain text which a pilgrim from Greece, a young theologian, sent to us and shared on his Facebook profile, after his recent visit to our Monastery. In this text he reveals his impressions from his stay at the Monastery Почитувани читатели, sharing with us this beautiful picture he painted with his words. So the following text is a kind of testimony of the ignorance we often live in – so close as neighbors and cultures, and so far as brothers in Christ – because we don't know each other well enough. The love between the nations is born from getting to know the other, the friendship and communication.
We would like to thank Photios, already our friend and brother, for his kind words.
In the Holy Monastery of the Forerunner – Bigorski, near the town of Debar in the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, with God's help soon to be named North Macedonia, the Orthodoxy and the Orthodox monasticism are revived! I have been reading a lot about the centuries- long history of the Monastery, its glorious past, the very hard period of communism, its desolation, but also about the new fraternity which managed to revive the Monastery.
Still, no matter how much you have read and heard about it, nothing can be compared with the experience you get when you visit the Monastery. Therefore, I'm grateful to God's providence for giving me the chance to visit it.
We have passed the border at the border pass Niki, a few kilometers from Florina and headed towards the town of Debar, in the proximity of which the Monastery is situated. The road is wonderful, the surroundings green and rich with lakes, forests and rivers, as you pass the greatest national resort center in the country – Mavrovo. After the several hours long trip, late in the evening we reached our destination. A monumental Monastery stood before us. Entering inside, we came across the Elder of the Monastery, Fr. Parthenius, who welcomed us warmly with his immaculate Greek. When we venerated the impressive church dedicated to the Holy Forerunner of our Lord, we were invited to the great Reception Hall, to have a cup of tea with the Elder and get to know each other. The conversation was interesting, started with the political issues that have been burdening our countries for decades and ended with the brotherly love that we, Orthodox Christians should cherish among us.
We stayed in the Monastery for several days which gave us the time to get the real impression of it. Truly, the Monastery revealed to us the most beautiful side of Orthodoxy and its lost ecumenical and catholical character… Still, it can be found there… There nobody envisions the person according to his nationality, they are all very pleasant and willing to get to know you, to talk to you, to open up and let you "get" something from them, but also "get" something from you. Such was the brotherly atmosphere we were excepted in. Soon we concluded that in atmosphere like this nobody looses, but everybody wins. And we became aware of the magnitude of the deed of this brotherhood in the country. A deed which can be defined as God-pleasing, thanks to the Elder Parthenius. Under his guidance a true missionary and educational work is done, which has truly resurrected the Church.
This brotherhood is a tremendous example to be followed. Who could have imagined that a handful of monks would bring "spring", in a country where the dark and cold "winter" ruled for years? But the grace of God is there and bestows His blessing… For the Holy Spirit "goes and stays" wherever He wants.
We left, filled with praising thoughts, which moved me to put these thoughts in words. And if there's anyone doubting, I challenge him to visit the Monastery and convince himself, or, why not, prove me wrong.
Respectfully Yours,
Photios Sionis from Northern Greece.
Ознаки:
Bigorski Monastery
Love for the neighbour
A reaction to the scandalous letter that the Serbian Patriarch addressed to the Ecumenical Patriarch
A reminiscence: 20 years since the re-consecration of the Bigorski Church
Don't hate the sinner
We have only one enemy – ourselves
God's Providence
The website of Bigorski available in English
Monastery "St. John the Baptist - Bigorski"
The Nativity of Christ in Bigorski
Patriarchal Encyclical for Christmas 2019
The presents from Germany - great joy for the children
A German school donated Christmas presents for children to the Bigorski monastery
Our task (Part 3)
The President Pendarovski at Bigorski: If we have no respect the roots, we would have no future
The presents from Germany – great joy for the children
In the midst of desert beauty
The monastery was founded in the year of 1020 by the first Archibshop of Ohrid John of Debar.
It is built in the honour of the Forerunner and Baptist of our Lord, Saint John, for whom the Lord Jesus Christ himself said that there is no greater among those born by women.
Services and Sacraments
Craft of Icons
Craft of Mitres
© 2010-2020 Bigorski Monastery. All rights reserved.


The taxi is one of the public means of transport most used around the world. It's very normal to see them in cities and they are easy to find thanks to their colors.
With the new .TAXI domains all taxi companies or individuals will be able to create their own website, helping them to expand their services with the online market.
.taxi domains permit characters from 'a' to 'z', numbers from '0' to '9' and hyphens '-'.
IDN characters are permitted in .taxi domains.
.taxi domain registrations are immediate.
To be able to complete .TAXI domain transfers you'll need your current registrar to give you the domain's AuthCode or EPP-Key, with it you'll be able to verify your domain's ownership.
You can renew your .TAXI domain at any moment, this process can take between 20 and 30 minutes to complete.
It's possible to ask for the cancellation of your .TAXI domain, you'll have to do it opening a ticket (support area). Please note the domain cancellation involves no refund of the domain registration fee.
We allow the usage of DNSSEC on .taxi domains, thanks to it your domain will be able to take advantage of an additional security layer that DNS servers that are compatible with this tecnology can provide.
Since December 1st, 2016, in order to proceed with an ownership change of .TAXI domains, it's necessary that both the current and new owner accept this change. Once the ownership change is completed the domain is locked for transfers for a 60-day period, during this time the domain won't be able to be transferred to another registrar.
.TAXI don't have extra documentation.


text:
Driving into Clarksdale, MS is a bit like driving into the Great Depression era. The gas stations and fast food joints quickly give way to empty brick buildings with faded signs and logos. We stop in an empty lot to get our bearings. An older pickup truck pulling trailer pulls in and back up to a door at the side of the adjacent building. The door opens, greetings are exchanged and the men begin hauling out appliances and throwing them on the trailer, each appliance crashing onto the others. We are discussing how to get to the Blues Museum.
"It's down this road few more blocks. Then turn toward the railroad tracks." Lorraine says looking at the miniature map on the cell phone.
The pickup truck with its trailer mounded with white metal cubes pulls out on to the street and disappears around the corner. We follow, heading into town.
Well we have found it but there is no place to park and it doesn't look like it's open. Lorraine doesn't like the feel of the place. I look around. There's no one around except for three Black men working in the park across the street.
"I'll go ask them."
I walk across the street. They look up. One is holding a running weed trimmer.
"Excuse me." I say to the biggest man who is apparently the de facto leader of the group, "Can you tell me if the Blues Museum is open?"
The man holds his hand up to his ear.
Louder I say, "Can you tell me if the Blues Museum is open?"
The man looks at me, shakes his head and turns to the one with weed trimmer.
"Will you shut that damn thing off?" he bellows in a voice that could be heard over most any machine.
"I'm sorry sir. Could you repeat what you were sayin'?"
"Thank you, Yes. Can you tell me if the Blues Museum is open?"
"Well, to tell you the truth I cannot. We're not from around here. Ya see, we're the prisoners. Go ask that man over there. He's free."
"You mean you're not doing this voluntarily?" I say pointing at the weed whackers.
"No sir, we are not!"
I go ask the free man who directs us down an alley which leads to the back of a bank and then to the parking lot. As I return to the truck I notice the 3 black men are all wearing the same striped pants.
Alan Lomax arrived here in August 1941. It is here that he learns from Son House that Robert Johnson is dead. Son suggests he look up an up and coming player named Muddy. "Go out to Stovall Plantation and just ask for Muddy. They'll know who ya mean."
McKinley Morganfield was born in Rolling Fork in 1913 or 1915. No one is quite sure. His mother died shortly after he was born and he was raised by his grandmother as a sharecropper at Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale. His grandmother insisted he attend church and it was here he learned music in the Black gospel tradition. It was also his grandmother who gave him the nickname Muddy for his propensity to return home from playing along the creek covered in mud.
He began playing harmonica in his early teens and at the age of 17 sold the family's horse. He gave half the money to his grandmother and with the other half purchased a guitar from Sears & Roebuck for $2.50. Soon he was playing the juke joints on Stovall Plantation and learning from the touring blues musicians who stopped by the Plantation. This was his life when Alan Lomax came asking for Muddy.
When Morganfield heard a white man was asking for Muddy he almost ran away thinking that they'd discovered he'd been selling whiskey on the side but he decided to stay and face the man. When he found out that Lomax wanted to record him he took him to his cabin and played by trunk of Lomax' car into a recording machine. On hearing the recording played back he realized he could actually play music. "I can do it. I can do it." He shouted gleefully. Lomax returned in 1942 and recorded a second session. That second session gave Muddy ideas. The following year he headed up Highway 61 to Chicago with the aim of becoming a professional musician. Along the way he adopted the name Muddy Waters and in Chicago he discovered something new, the electric guitar.
Working in a factory during the day and playing the clubs at night Muddy Waters saved enough money to buy an electric guitar two years later. It was in the Chicago clubs he developed a style and sound that would change music. By the early 1950's he was the charismatic star of an electric band that displayed a mystical, sexual persona with songs such as "I Want to Make Love to You", "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Rollin' Stone" and "I Got My Mojo Workin'". The success of Muddy Water's style was not overlooked by a skinny young white boy from Tupelo, now living in Memphis and looking to hit the tour circuit and make his mark.
In 1958 Muddy Waters toured Britain. In the audience were young musicians just starting out. Among them Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Mick Jagger. Jagger would name his group after Muddy's song "Rollin' Stone".
Here is Muddy Water's 1955 recording of his song Mannish Boy.
Once we are inside the Blues Museum we are led to the one room cabin Muddy Waters grew up in. Nothing but boards nailed to a frame with newspaper glued to the walls to cover the cracks. It was impoverished sharecroppers living in quarters like this that developed a new and distinctly American form of music. Probably because no one had told then the right way to play music.
We leave Clarksdale on Highway 61 heading south, passing the crossroad where Robert Johnson is reputed to have made his bargain with the Devil. We are going on to Indianola to find the story behind the Kings.
bluesClarksdaleMississippi DeltaMuddy Waters


To the north of the Urmark in the realms of the Out Isles lies the land of the Nordane, the People of the Wolf. Their realm is called Normark, the Wilding and the Wolf Lands. It is a harsh land of strange and savage creatures, biting winds that howl with terrifying cries, and glowering skies that flash with angry thunder. The Nordane are held as close to beasts as Mortals can be, fur-clad and wild in mind and habit. In the heat of battle their warriors believe themselves possessed by the spirits of wolves, howling and snarling as they lay about them with their long iron swords. Their greatest warriors are said to shape-shift into wolf form at the height of battle. Amongst that savage race Chieftain Wyt Ironcraw is the most merciless of all, the greatest of warriors, and the unchallenged leader of his proud people. At his side cowers the Witch Abelatho, most cunning of all the cursed sisters, whose plots and plans none dare question. Her council of whispered words brings Kahavam to the Isle of Ymsarent and his destiny. To what purpose the Web of Weird foretells Abelatho alone can know. Contains one 28mm 'Heroic' white metal miniature. Provided with a 30mm display base.


We have a Panera that just opened near our house. Love the food, but the prices are ridiculous. You are better off staying at home, cooking your own food and spending time with your family. Next Chipotle?
James Tisch, former director of the NY Fed, is a member of the Rockefeller/CFR along with Yellen, Bernanke, Greenspan and every other Fed chairman since WW2. See member lists at cfr dot org.
I think he had no other choice than to speak the truth. How else can he explain the poor results of his company given that "economy is booming" as evidenced by all time high stock prices and MSM doing its best to support the false narrative?


text:
require_relative 'names'

module Fuby
  refine ::Module do

    def eastern_name
      names.join ' '
    end

  end
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


We're obsessed with all things shiny. Whether paired with your favourite LBD or chic separates, the minimalistic silhouettes of our unique designs are all about maximum impact.
Available in gold only. Approximately 4.5cm down.


3 As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, 4 nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship1 from God that is by faith. 5 The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. 6 Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.
8 Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, 9 understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, 10 the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers,2 liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound3 doctrine, 11 in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.
12 I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, 13 though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, 14 and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.


Crush peanuts and lay in a single layer on a parchment lined sheet tray.
In a medium mixing bowl, whip together peanut butter and butter, about 3 minutes. Add desired dosage of CrEATe Oil and whip.
Add powdered sugar, ½ a cup at a time. Incorporate completely.
Make round balls, just less than 1 inch in diameter. Press 2 jelly beans into the center of the peanut butter ball, and place on a paper lined sheet tray. Once all are complete, place in fridge.
Over 2 inches of simmering water, place a glass bowl with chocolate chips and shortening. Warm the chocolate over the water until completely melted, stirring with a rubber spatula, about 5 minutes.
Dip peanut butter jelly balls into chocolate mixture using a wooden skewer. Once coated in chocolate, place onto crushed peanuts.


text:
Canadiens Transactions
Joel Armia Agrees to 2-Year Deal with Canadiens
By The Canadian Press July 11th, 2019
MONTREAL — Joel Armia signed a two-year deal with the Montreal Canadiens on Thursday afternoon.
The contract has an average annual value of US$2.6 million and covers the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons.
Armia set new career highs for goals (13), power-play goals (2), and power-play points (6) in his first year with the Canadiens this past season. He also added 10 assists.
The 26-year-old Armia has played 237 career NHL games for the Buffalo Sabres, Winnipeg Jets, and Canadiens. He has 39 goals and 42 assists over his career.
Joel Armia of the Montreal Canadiens skates against the Arizona Coyotes. (Photo by Francois Lacasse/NHLI via Getty Images)
The 6-foot-4, 210-pound forward was acquired from Winnipeg in June 2018 along with goaltender Steve Mason, a seventh-round selection in 2019 and a fourth-round pick in 2020 in exchange for Simon Bourque.
Armia was picked in the first round (16th overall) by Buffalo in 2011.
2019 NHL Free Agency


Thanks for joining us here at the Disney Parks Moms Panel! I am thrilled to read that you are planning to enjoy a spacious, impressive 3-Bedroom Grand Villa at Disney's Animal Kingdom Villas - Kidani Village! Some of our favorite memories were made there. I am confident that you will love the location just as much as we have.
The entrances to these spectacular, 2-story Villas are located on the 4th floor. Other than this commonality, they are evenly distributed throughout the magnificent Disney Vacation Club Resort. When you browse images taken from the Savanna, you will notice that every so often, there is what appears to be a thatched dome above a private balcony. These indicate the location of a Grand Villa.
I hope that helps, Rita! Please let us know if you have any additional questions before your magnificent vacation!


Camden Public Library's annual outdoor summer film series screens PG-13 rated "Beasts of the Southern Wild" (2021, USA) on a big inflatable screen in Camden Amphitheatre, Atlantic Avenue. Free; bring lawn seating; no smoking, alcohol. Show starts at dusk, canceled or rescheduled if raining; check librarycamden.org.


Estate planning is often thought of as a purely financial endeavor. Without question, you must facilitate smooth and efficient asset transfers when you are planning your estate. However, incapacity planning is also an important piece of the puzzle.
Why would you have any reason to believe that you will ever become incapacitated? This is not a very pleasant subject to contemplate, but when you know the facts, you can see why incapacity planning is important.
There are various different causes of incapacity, and some of them are purely physical. Late in your life you may become unable to communicate, and short of this you may not be able to get around very well. This is one type of incapacity that can strike.
There is also the matter of mental incapacity. Alzheimer's disease is a very big threat to elder Americans.
If you want to learn about Alzheimer's disease, you may want to visit the Alzheimer's Association website. This website provides a great deal of good information about but Alzheimer's. According to the Alzheimer's Association, 40 to 45 percent of people who are at least 85 are suffering from the disease.
This is a telling statistic, and it is relevant to everyone because people are living longer and longer lives. The Social Security Administration has a life expectancy calculator on their website. If you use this calculator, you will find that a man who is 65 years old today is likely to live past the age of 84. Women have longer life expectancies than men, so you see a very clear picture.
It is very possible that you will live into your eighties and perhaps beyond, and if you do, Alzheimer's looms large.
If you were to become incapacitated without taking any steps to prepare for this contingency, the state could be petitioned to appoint a guardian to act on your behalf. You would have no control over the choice of a guardian. The state would control your fate.
You can prevent a guardianship and take the matter into your own hands when you are putting together a long-term plan for aging. This is typically done through the execution of incapacity planning documents called durable powers of attorney.
With these documents you name people to make decisions on your behalf in the event of your incapacitation. You could name a health care decision-maker, and a financial representative.
Durable powers of attorney are utilized because they remain in effect even if the grantor becomes incapacitated.
If you would like to put an incapacity plan in place, our firm can help. We offer free consultations, and you can contact us through this page to set up an appointment: Hartford CT Incapacity Planning.


text:
Mike Berners-Lee consults, thinks, writes and researches on sustainability and responses to 21st century challenges.
Mike is the founder of Small World Consulting an associate company of Lancaster University, which works with organisations from the word's largest tech giants to SMEs. Small World is a leader in the field of supply chain carbon metrics and management. He is a professor at Lancaster University where his research includes sustainable food systems and carbon metrics. He is the author of three acclaimed books.
His latest book, 'There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break years' is a practical and holistic tour of the 21st century's biggest challenges, laced throughout with practical guidance for individuals, businesses and politicians.
About his first book, 'How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint Of Everything', Bill Bryson wrote "I can't think of the last time I read a book that was more fascinating, and useful and enjoyable all at the same time"
His second book, 'The Burning Question', co-written with Duncan Clark, explores the big picture on climate change and the underlying global dynamics, asking what mix of politics, economics, psychology and technology are really required to deal with the problem. Al Gore described it as "Fascinating, important and highly recommended"
Photo Credit: Phil Rigby
...a beacon of common sense, clarity and – crucially – hope
Caroline Lucas, MP
Massively entertaining [and] massively important
Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
He shares his insights with warmth and wit, and his book could not be more timely
David Shukman, BBC Science Editor
There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years (2019)
There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
Feeding the world, climate change, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics, inequality, fake news – the list of concerns for the Anthropocene seems endless. Mike Berners-Lee explores how the big picture fits together, thinks practically and asks what on Earth should we do?
Mike Berners-Lee is a sustainability expert, professor at Lancaster University and the author of three acclaimed books.


Taking many short drives without allowing the engine to run at normal operating temperature for long. This means the condensation that forms while an engine is warming up does not burn off, and eventually mixes with fuel and oil that leak past the piston rings when the engine is cool. The ensuing mixture is acidic and causes damage to the cylinder walls.
The engine has no cylinder liners, and Porsche incorrectly believed that the engine block – which was made out of Nikasil – was strong enough that it didn't require them. The M48.50 engine didn't suffer from bore scoring because it had more oil spray, and therefore the pistons ran cooler than in the M48.00 engine – which meant they didn't expand as much within the cylinder walls and rub against them.
Engine rear coolant crossmember to both cylinder banks can slip out due to glue failure. Symptoms are a coolant leak coming from the rear of the engine. Fixing it usually requires removing the engine. An updated part was released which is threaded.
Unlike the M48.00, the M48.50 is not susceptible to bore scoring.
This engine suffers from the same issues as the M48.01.


The vows have been pledged, the rings exchanged and the bouquet's been thrown, so what better way to relax after all the bustle and excitement of your wedding day, than to spend your honeymoon at Abhainn Cottage, the ideal way to start your life together.
Whatever the special occasion, whether it be honeymoon, anniversary, birthday or just because, Abhainn Cottage is perfect for couples, where you and your loved one can get away from it all, and enjoy the peace and tranquillity of our cottage. Available all year round, Abhainn is the idyllic place for romantic get-aways and to enjoy some quality time together.
Our cosy cottage is the ultimate hideaway, where you can experience long walks in some of the world's most stunning rugged natural landscapes, where you'll hear nothing but the birds and the breeze. You'll be miles from the hustle and bustle of city life, and be able to enjoy some of the Scotland's best scenery.
Lazy days on pristine white sandy beaches.
Boat trips to deserted Islands.
Discovery days visiting the Island's historic monuments.
Barbecues, followed by champagne sunsets.
Pamper days with a spa treatment session in the cottage.
Romantic dinners in fine seafood restaurants, where only the freshest local produce is served.
Romantic walks on deserted beaches.
Enjoy a traditional Scottish Island Ceilidh, and a dram or two!
Winter nature walks on crisp clear days.
Afternoon winter sunsets, curled up on the sofa by the warm open fire, sipping champagne.
Enjoy relaxing days in with a day of pampering and spa treatments.
Abhainn Cottage offers spectacular views overlooking the river, wild countryside and the mountains of the Hebrides. This Hebridean holiday hideaway is the perfect location for a luxurious, romantic and rejuvenating break.
© 2019, Abhainn Cottage. All rights reserved.


text:
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/spring/news/article/High-speed-railway-project-gains-partner-14887532.php
High-speed railway project gains partner
By Paul Wedding, Staff writer
Updated 3:47 pm CST, Friday, December 6, 2019
The planned high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas would use overhead electrical lines and its own separated tracks to shuttle riders between the two metro areas, through mostly flat, rural land. The N700 train is shown in this photo illustration from Texas Central Railway, using images provided by Japan Railway Central.
The planned high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas would use overhead electrical lines and its own separated tracks to shuttle riders between the two metro areas, through mostly flat, rural land. The
Photo: Under Permission Of JR Central / Under Permission Of JR Central
Texas Central was at the North Houston Association's monthly meeting Thursday to give an update on their railway project, connecting a high-speed train from Houston to North Texas.
The latest news in the project was the announcement of a new agreement with Mass. Electric, who will work with Texas Central to help install the electrical systems and equipment, including power, signaling and communications. This company is the latest of many partners to join the rail project, which plans to transport travelers between Houston and North Texas in 90 minutes, including a stop in the Bryan-College Station area.
"Since this is the first true high-speed train in the United States, we are creating a new industry," Texas Central Managing Director of External Affairs Holly Reed said. "We have been putting together a dream team of partners that have exceptional experience that are helping us get to operation."
ON HOUSTON CHRONICLE.COM: Company announces $14 billion deal to build Texas Bullet Train, but is still long way from the end of the line
Mass. Electric has completed numerous transportation projects nationwide, such as phase two of the Houston Light Rail project, the DART Green Line in Dallas and Union Station in Denver. The rail system itself will be based on a railway in Japan, the Shinkansen N700S train system.
"This project draws on our extensive experience in delivering high-quality rail systems safely and effectively," Mass. Electric Project Director Mark Williams said in a news release. "We are excited to play a key role in the nation's first high-speed train project."
The project hasn't been without its opposition. U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-The Woodlands) wrote a letter to Federal Railroad Administrator Ronald Batory last month opposing Texas Central's efforts.
"The proposed Dallas to Houston route would threaten the property rights of Texas landowners whose farms, ranches and homesteads sit along the route—land that has at times been in families for generations," Brady wrote. "Our government was created to protect our liberties—not to take them away—and I will fight against any permits from Washington D.C. that would grant this private company the ability to seize property without the consent from landowners."
Brady continued by stating the project's cost has already increased nearly 90 percent and that economic and safety questions have gone unanswered.
"While I strongly support infrastructure that addresses the dynamic growth of Texas, transportation improvements need to work for local communities, not against them," Brady wrote.
RELATED: Opponents of Houston-Dallas bullet train trumpet ruling that company is not a railroad
Reed said one of the key differences between the rail project and public infrastructure projects is that it's investor-owned and not a government project.
"Everything is fundamentally different because it's not a government project," Reed said. "Everything is data-driven and has a fiscal discipline around it that the free market investors drive."
Reed said they are working with landowners to come to agreements as it relates to building the railway across the state. Most of the railroad will be elevated, she said, giving access to the ground underneath. They currently have more than 30% of all parcels in alignment, and more than 50% of those parcels under contract coming out of Houston.
"The vast majority of Texans are very supportive of the project," Reed said. "In the rural areas we do have support from a wide variety of people. There are some folks who are opposed. We do our best to answer their questions and resolve those issues but building any infrastructure project like this, it can be disruptive, and you can't build a major infrastructure project without having some impacts."
Reed said Texas Central works to make sure those impacts are minimized, and said the FRA came in to give them the least impactful pathway between Houston and Dallas.
TOP HITS: Get Houston Chronicle stories sent directly to your inbox
Texas Central's website indicates its preferred route, referred to as Build Alternative A, runs from Houston roughly along U.S. 290 through northwest Harris County before turning northward near Binford Road and heading into Waller County.
Texas Central is still waiting for two federal approvals before they can take the next steps in the project, Reed said. They are waiting for environmental and safety approval, and Reed said they are optimistic they will receive those approvals next summer. Should that happen, Reed said they would start construction before the end of 2020.
The current schedule for the project is to have a train leaving every 30 minutes from each end, with each train able to hold up to 400 people.
"Once this is up and running, we really think that it's a catalyst for other opportunities," Reed said. "People will come here from around the world to see what was done and how it was done."
paul.wedding@hcnonline.com
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Conroe Courier Turns 125
Conroe's snow day this week in January 1940
Spring Headlines
NW Houston sports highlights: Tomball girls soccer opens...
'Sports Night at the Pearl' set for Jan. 25
Chamber to host Go Wild Chili Cook Off
Spring ISD teacher charged with indecency with a child,...
County plans to acquire Raveneaux Country Club


text:
India's 2016 female archers, Laishram, Majhi, and Kumari, have matched India's best Olympic archery performances.
India's female archers have beaten Columbia in their first round 'Women's Team' event at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Bombayla Laishram, Laxmirani Majhi, and Deepika Kumari, will now face a difficult clash against Russia in the Quarter-Finals.
And by August 8, 2016, they could be Olympic medallists, as the 'Women's Team' final will be played late on August 7 in Brazil.
'Men's Individual'
Indian archer, Atanu Das, also began impressively. On his Olympic debut, Das qualified in fifth place in the 'Men's Individual Archery Ranking Round'.
His score of 683/720 sets up a first-round clash with Jitbahadur Muktan of Nepal, who is ranked in 60th position.
The Indian will take on Muktan for a place in the last 32 on August 9, 2016.
Atanu Das, and Indian fans alike, will be reassured by the fact that Muktan qualified with a score of 607/720. And that is 76 points less than Das scored in the ranking rounds.
'Women's Individual'
Despite India's female archers doing well as a team, they struggled in the individual ranking round.
Deepika Kumari was top of all female archers at the halfway point of the round. However, she ended up with a score of 640/720 which earned her a ranking position of 20th. Kumari will now face Kristine Esebua of Georgia, ranked 45.
Laishram is ranked at 24, and will compete against Laurence Baldauff of Austria, ranked 41. Both Kumari and Laishram will face their opponents on August 10.
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Laxmirani Majhi, meanwhile, qualified in 43rd position and will face the 22 ranked Alexandra Longova of Slovakia. They will face off on August 8.
Indian archers to break records?
India's 2016 female archers, Laishram, Majhi, and Kumari, have matched India's best Olympic archery performances. The nation have now reached the Quarter-Finals of the 'Women's Team' event in 2004, 2008 and 2016.
Meanwhile, an Indian archer has never made the last eight of the individual archery events. But Atanu Das, and India's three female archers will be looking to change that over the coming days.
The Olympic 'Men's Individual' final in archery is set to be played on August 12. The 'Women's Individual final, meanwhile, will be contested on August 11.
Click here for a complete guide to the Indian Olympic Team.
Keiran Samra
Keiran is a passionate English graduate with a love for all things sport. He enjoys time with his two dogs, listening to Bhangra and R&B music, and playing football. "You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."
Images courtesy of the Official Facebook pages of Atanu Das and Deepika Kumari
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GPS Co-ordinates: S19° 50' 36.892", E14° 7' 43.541"
Perched on the rim of the Grootberg Plateau, the Grootberg Lodge stands sentinel over the Klip River Valley. It's 11 rock and thatch chalets gaze out over the gorge, where Black Eagles hunt just below the level of your private deck. 12 000 hectares have been set aside by the Khoadi /Hoas community for conservation and tourism and it is through this pristine wilderness that you meander either on foot or by car to encounter the inhabitants of this remote biosphere, it is the first middle-market establishment in the country that is 100% owned by the conservancy. Desert elephant, Black Rhino and Lion are some of the more impressive mammals to be found, but not to be outdone you'll find a myriad of smaller mammals, birds, reptiles, insects and plants. For travellers making the journey between Etosha and Swakopmund, this lodge provides the ideal midway stopover, whilst allowing guests to experience the true wilderness that is Damaraland.
There are 11 en-suite chalets with hard wood decks. Each Chalet has its own veranda.
Guided walk down the mountain to the Klip River Springs: The guide takes the people down the mountain up to the Klip River springs, usually 3 hours walk. Then an open 4x4 vehicle will be collecting the people, whilst the guests enjoy some snacks and drinks in the valley after the walk.
Morning rides to the spring's: Riding to the springs, the ride lasts three hours and the guests will enjoy a champagne breakfast under the shade of a tree.
Elephant tracking: On a open vehicle, the guide takes the guests in the surrounding farms in search of the elusive desert elephants. Lunch in the bush. Departure at around 7.30am and back at the lodge in the early afternoon.
Himba trip: Departure after breakfast at around 7.30 AM. The guide takes the people in an open vehicle to a Himba village 1 ½ hour away from the lodge going through beautiful makalani palm farms and dried riverbeds. Lunch stop in the bush.
The majority of the route is on a tarred road.
The last 90 km on the C40 from Kamanjab to the Lodge is on a gravel road.


In the summer of 1912, my grandmother, accompanied by her younger sister, Irene or Renie, sailed back to England. This time, they traveled in relative luxury on the Mauritania. May and Renie were reunited with their oldest sister, Frances. The family posed for this picture in the garden. After visiting with family, they realized a shared dream to travel. Together, they explored Wales and Ireland.
I still have their journals!
My grandmother, Jessie May Sproston, was born in Runcorn, Cheshire, England on May 3, 1878. She lived in a small, two-story row house at 59 Waterloo Road with her parents, two sisters and two brothers. Her father, Job, was a sail maker and worked on the docks that lined the shores of the Mersey River, a few hundred yards from their small home. With the advent of steam ships, Job was soon out of work. Job left England for America. My grandmother and the rest of her family sailed from Liverpool on the SS City of Richmond. They traveled in steerage. They arrived in New York harbor on May 30, 1891. She was 13 years old.


Let's take a look at your values. Students often find it difficult to get their darks dark enough. It can feel reckless to make that kind of commitment that those values require, but rest assured. Assertive darks will save you time and trouble later.


I have had such a tough week, according to my mind. I have had kid issues, homeschool issues, PCS issues, family issues, just the normal stuff surrounding the stress of our move.
However, this morning I am humbled. None of my issues are what April's issues are. Nothing can compare to what those in the path of the storms of this week are enduring. My God has not asked me to walk this valley and desert…and for that I am humbled. Please pray for those who have lost so much, and yet their faith is secure in the One who sits on His throne, yet weeps for the pains of His children. How weak my faith looks to me today!
You can donate to April's family here.


text:
Lophiaspis — це вимерлий рід ранніх непарнопалих, ендемічних для південної Європи в період раннього та середнього еоцену, які жили від 55.8 до 37.2 млн років. Останки були знайдені у Франції, Іспанії та Португалії.

Примітки

Роди ссавців
Фауна еоцену
вимерлі ссавці

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Facebook Games Level Up
DMG Entertainment
Sr. UX/UI Designer (Games)
QA Manager
Tangent Games LLC
CG Spectrum
Concept Design Mentor (Online/Remote)
by [Design, Interview, Social/Online]
October 12, 2010 Page 1 of 3
Developers of traditional games often dismiss titles on Facebook as mere "Skinner boxes" -- devices that use scheduled reinforcement to reward repetitive actions. They are activities, not games, say critics, who call them too simplistic, too repetitive, too "grindy." And they are driven by the business model -- not by the fun.
But it may be time for naysayers to take another peek. Facebook games have grown increasingly sophisticated and could become the equivalent of "real games," leaving critical developers in the dust.
At least that's what three high-profile Facebook game developers predict.
Take Brenda Brathwaite, who has been creative director at Lolapps -- a developer of 11 Facebook games -- for five months now, but who has been in game development since 1981, during which time she was credited on 22 game titles.
"The main difference is that the typical hardcore game is designed for synchronous play -- for instance, you could easily take the next week off and do nothing but play Civ V," she says.
"But so-called Facebook -- or social -- titles are designed for asynchronous, scheduled, or appointment gaming that is conducive to a little play here, a little there. They are for people with, say, five minutes of game time, five times a day."
However, the rule sets are frequently not all that different, she says.
"In a Facebook game, people basically go in, they click, click, click, click, click, and they get out, hopefully with some kind of a reward. But it's easy to say that about any kind of game. Take Doom. You click, click, click, click, click and blow shit up. In our game Critter Island, you need to collect hundreds of stars. I find it endlessly amusing picking those things up. Why? I don't know. And I don't care.
"Likewise, I find it endlessly amusing to beat on creatures in World of Warcraft. Why? Who knows? In all these examples, it's just something relaxing and enjoyable for me to do. I don't look at the 20 minutes I've blown and say, 'Damn! I could have been reading Ulysses! I don't necessarily think games must have some higher social purpose. As long as they are fun, I'm okay with that... and so are many gamers out there for whom casual clicking is exactly what they want."
Critter Island
But others crave something beyond mindless clicking, which is the reason some Facebook developers are creating alternate choices.
"That's why games like FarmVille and YoVille are increasingly adding new mechanics to keep the user base interested," Brathwaite explains. "The designs are becoming more complex and giving players more and more to do -- like recruitment mechanics, for example. Not only do I get to help my friend and my friend gets to help me, but we get to work together toward some greater goal.
"And these ideas that are proliferating in some of the older games are spreading out to new games. That's what happened when we released Critter Island. I know we don't have the world's sexiest graphics -- we haven't entered the 3D arms race yet because there's only so much you can push across a pipe like Facebook. But we have certainly entered the 2D arms race."
Brathwaite calls the additional complexity "retention features" -- regardless whether it is additional social interaction, "more opportunities for the players to make decisions or do things or feel they've been super-rewarded.
"The bottom line is that you want people to keep coming back to play your game, and so it needs to keep evolving," she says. "If the player feels they've completed all the game has to offer, that there's nothing else to do, they'll get bored and move on. You need to keep them intrigued."
DMG Entertainment — Beverly Hills, California, United States
[07.12.19]
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134540 item_feature /view/feature/134540/facebook_games_level_up.php Loading Comments


Think hard for a moment, what can one hundred dollars really buy you nowadays? A dinner out? A new pair of jeans? How about some running shoes? Not likely. Providing you are not shopping the bargain bin at Walmart, our money just doesn't seem to stretch as far anymore and when it comes to technology in the era of things like smartphones, tablets and computers that are ten times or more this amount, then it really gets you nothing. This is what makes this next product so remarkable, the team at Pine64 have managed to create a functional laptop that not only looks great but costs just $99!
Let me first start by saying, this is not some high-end gaming laptop or some budget (crappy) low-spec Windows PC, this is a fully-fledged community backed Linux device that offers some impressive versatility and allows users to develop or tinker with this emerging platform. Coming in both an 11.6 inch and 14-inch variant, the stunning Pinebook, as it is known, features an HD LCD screen with a Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor, a full-size keyboard and large multi-touch touchpad all wrapped in a classy white clamshell frame that is frankly reminiscent of a Macbook and it looks just great!
Internally we also find specs that find a great balance between performance and price, in particular – 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM Memory, 16 GB eMMC 5.0 (upgradable up to 64GB) of flash storage, Wi-Fi 802.11bgn and Bluetooth 4.0, a front facing camera and an enormous 10000mAH Lithium Polymer Battery. While this may seem underwhelming to those in the know, here is the thing, Linux is a very light operating system and doesn't need high end internals to function well and this runs like a dream. Connectivity is also functionally sufficient with two USB 2.0 ports, a MicroSD card slot, a headphone jack and a mini HDMI out port.
Fire up the laptop and you are greeted with an adapted version of KDE neon that includes a bootable and installable remixed live image that works on the Pinebook. The result, users are immersed in the clean and robust Plasma desktop environment. It is also worth noting that the KDE team has successfully addressed many bugs in the entire software stack, resulting in an improved experience for all KDE Neon and Plasma users. The overall usability of the interface is quite nice, it does take some re-learning for novice users but day to day operation like web browsing and video watching do work, if you don't task it too much with HD video encoding or multiple application multitasking. Best of all, if the OS is not your cup of tea, you can in fact load the Android OS instead through their very informative Wiki page.
To conclude, this is not going to be quite the steal of the century but comes close. We do have a few gripes like the underwhelming keyboard, dull screen and at times lethargic processor but for someone that just wants to get online to check their email, this is perfect. It is also ideal for those that want a foolproof device for programming or better yet the hobbyist that is intrigued by what Linux offers. If you fall into any of the above categories then we say – go for it, because to put it plainly, you are not going to find anything close to this price point.


This entry was posted in Uncategorised on 1st November 2016 by admin.
The 1st Grundisburgh Scout Group was originally formed in 1921 but the records other than this have been lost.
In 1936 the Group was established again however due to the Second World War it was disbanded.
In 1956 the Group was reformed and since then for over 50 years has provided scouting to Grundisburgh and the surrounding villages.
In 1963 a building in the village was transported to the Grundisburgh Playing Field and since then it has been the Headquarters for all our Scouting adventures and activities up to the present date.


This is your extraordinary opportunity to own a home in the highly sought after Olympic Manor community, a wildly popular corner of northwest Seattle Enjoy the Sound and Mountain View from the large patio or from inside the Wall of Glass in the Great Room. This View in Olympic Manor is protected! You and your guests' will be thrilled being outdoors while you host a barbecue, or whatever you would like to imagine in this gorgeous setting.
The home itself has 4 bedrooms, a family room, a great room, a living room,a reccreation room, an office space, a bonus room, a wine cellar, and tons of storage areas. It has been frreshly painted and partially remodeled and waiting for your finishing touches to make it your own. In the winter, there are 2 fireplaces to cozy up to as well. All appliances are included, in addition to a home warranty for your ease of mind.
Being so close to downtown Ballard you can enjoy the many wonderful Ballard Restaurants and fun Ballard Night Life. Being so close to Puget Sound, you can also follow 85th straight west and go on down to the beautiful Golden Gardens Park where you can play in the sand, picnic or have a party with a bonfire while you view the sunset and the mountains! So close to everything and a quick ride into downtown Seattle as well.


A central part of the law and civics education is learning to advocate for those in need. That is exactly what these students were able to do. They tackled such topics as teen drug use, kindergarten readiness, prison recidivism and gang membership.
One group, for example, proposed a new app to Bitwise Industries that would help keep juveniles from reoffending. Senior Marissa Bane's group focused on kindergarten readiness. "We came to realize it's actually one of the biggest issues, and that if a kid doesn't go to kindergarten or if they aren't prepared, then they are more likely to be held back or fall behind," she said. Her group's solution was to add an early childhood education book to First 5 California's new-parent kit given out in maternity wards in local hospitals.
Sixteen groups presented policies to a panel of judges made up of the president of the local bar association, a 5th District Court of Appeal judge and a Fresno Superior Court judge. Of these 16 groups, six made formal presentations at a public event at the Veterans Memorial Building in Old Town Clovis. Local business leaders, members of the newly minted Fresno Youth Commission, and Fresno and Clovis mayors Ashley Swearengin and Nathan Magsig, respectively, were just a few of the people in attendance.
For me, it is a teacher's dream come true. Seeing those connections made from the classroom to the real world is what education, especially civics education, is all about. It's what makes me have hope for tomorrow.
Moira Harada teaches in the Law and Policy Lab at CART. This article was written in collaboration with the Fresno County Civic Learning Partnership, which aims to support and highlight outstanding civic education projects in Fresno County schools. For more information or to get involved, go to www.fresnociviclearning.com.


text:
Q: Are the Java 10 copyOf factory methods suitable for defensive copies in constructors When implementing an immutable class that has an aggregate initialized by a Collection given to the constructor, the constructor must make a defensive copy of the Collection, to prevent the caller subsequently mutating the aggregate.
Before Java 10, that would result in code like this:
class Thing
{
   private final List<Widget> widgets;

   public Thing(List<Widget> widgets) {
      this.widgets = Collections.unmodifiableList(new ArrayList<>(widgets));
   }

   public List<Widget> getWidgets() {
      return widgets;
   }
}

Java 10 added List.copyOf() and friends, which create an unmodifiable copy of the given Collection. That suggests for Java 10+ we can instead write code like this:
class Thing
{
   private final List<Widget> widgets;

   public Thing(List<Widget> widgets) {
      this.widgets = List.copyOf(widgets);
   }

   public List<Widget> getWidgets() {
      return widgets;
   }
}

Am I correct?

A: The design intent and the implementation of List.copyOf and the other copyOf methods is to do exactly as you would like, and it should be suitable for making defensive copies. The idea is that List.copyOf always makes a copy, unless it can prove that not making a copy is safe.
Additional context from the List.copyOf specification is:

Returns an unmodifiable List containing the elements of the given Collection, in its iteration order. The given Collection must not be null, and it must not contain any null elements. If the given Collection is subsequently modified, the returned List will not reflect such modifications.
Implementation Note:
If the given Collection is an unmodifiable List, calling copyOf will generally not create a copy.

The key assertion is the last sentence in the first paragraph, which says that if the argument is subsequently modified, that modification doesn't occur in the returned list. That is, the returned list is conceptually always a copy.
Note also that "unmodifiable List" is a link to a particular section of the List specification where it describes the List instances returned by List.of, List.copyOf, and stream's Collectors.toUnmodifiableList.
The instance returned by Collections.unmodifiableList is not an "unmodifiable List" in this definition. Rather, it's an unmodifiable view. Such views explicitly permit modification of the backing collection, if one has a reference to the backing collection, and if that collection is itself modifiable.
Yes, the distinction between "unmodifiable list" and "unmodifiable view" is confusing, but it's what we've settled on. Sorry. An alternative at one point was "immutable". But this is inaccurate, as those instances can in fact be mutable, so we've avoided use of "immutable" for these cases.
In any case, the actual behavior reflects this specification:
var list1 = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList("a", "b", "c"))
var list2 = Collections.unmodifiableList(list1)
var list3 = List.copyOf(list2)
var list4 = List.copyOf(list3)
list2 == list3
==> false
list3 == list4
==> true
list1.add("d")
list2
==> [a, b, c, d]
list3
==> [a, b, c]

In other words, List.copyOf does make a defensive copy of the unmodifiable view, and this behavior is required by the specification.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange