Shania Twain: The nice Rocker with the good mood Show Hamburg (dpa) - Shania Twain became in the 90's the star as emancipated feminist Rock Diva. She rose to the superstardom in country, here contrary that created buzz recently with soft-rinsed Ballads like "Forever and For Always". The difference is so extreme that one expects from her Live appearances an answer, who or which side of the 38 year old Canadian real face is. The prelude concert of her Germany tour in Hamburg showed: Shania Twain is nevertheless a Rocker. But a nice, always radiating smiling Country Rocker. Shania Twain is someone, who in the middle was singing tickets or touched stretched hands of the fans. Who rose in the concert donations for children and invites the public merrily hopping [???] Twain's volume is perfect a good mood factory. The nine musicians radiate around the stage, play with the fans and spread sense of happiness in a charm attack to which no Griesgram[?] can resist. And it works. In the hall shoulder at shoulder spectator between 20 and 60, dances and the faces relaxed and happy. Whether cordialness and good mood on the stage are now genuine or played, is in the long run no matter, if one will umworben [???] so dear and engaged. The Show is much closer in music at the old rockin times than yo the new singles. Because of the many guitars on the stage also the ballads sounds more knackin. Three dancing violonists provide for a breath of Country music, with which Shania Twain celebrated once first successes. High points are the fast hits "That Don't Impress ME Much", "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!", "Ka-Ching!" and "I'm Gonna Getcha Good". Lift-off again and again fireworks. For a song Twain invited a girl from the hall to singing on the stage. Later turns out: the girl comes from California. It laughs in the hall, someone calls "unit deformation", the surprised Twain is jokeful over-on-board ends in such a way that one does not know no more, whether it is genuine. The complex Show is arranged unusually open. The stage is a landing directly in the center of the enormous hall, open after all sides. For a song Shania Twain emerges suddenly on the grandstand. Fans are before-let direct for a few minutes again and again to the stage. Democracy gives it also for the volume: The musicians get a microphone pressed into the hand and may introduce itself and with the public applausing. At the end of the two hours Twain inspires that Hamburg public, when she appears to the addition in a HSV leotard. The striking mixture from Rock, Pop and Country might have risen from Twains marriage with the music producer Robert John Lange, who set once for not at all soft of volume such as AC/DC or Def Leppard behind the automatic controllers. They write her songs together. The life of the singer was not so easy also, as it would let her sunny image assume. When she was 21 years old, her parents died with a car accident, and them had to provide for her four younger brothers. Already as a child she rose frequently around clock at night, in order to sing in various clubs - because of their age she was allowed only on the stage, when no more alcohol was sold. For harmony and security Shania Twain seems to long herself also privately: If are not on route, the pair with a small son lives withdrawn in Switzerland.
Hamburg (dpa) - Shania Twain wurde in den 90er Jahren zum Star als emanzipierte feministische Rock-Diva. Den Sprung zum Super-Star hier zu Lande schaffte sie dagegen jüngst mit weichgespülten Balladen wie «Forever And For Always».
Der Unterschied ist so extrem, dass man sich von ihren Live-Auftritten eine Antwort erhofft, wer oder was die 38-jährige Kanadierin denn nun wirklich ist. Das Auftaktkonzert ihrer Deutschlandtournee in Hamburg zeigte: Shania Twain ist doch eine Rockerin. Aber eine nette, immer strahlend lächelnde Country-Rockerin. Shania Twain ist jemand, der mitten im Singen Eintrittskarten von der Bühne signiert oder ausgestreckte Hände der Fans abklatscht, im Konzert zu Spenden für Kinder aufruft und dem Publikum wie ein Teenager fröhlich hüpfend zuwinkt.
Twains Band ist eine perfekte Gute-Laune-Fabrik. Die neun Musiker strahlen um die Wette, spielen mit den Fans und verbreiten Frohsinn in einer Charme-Offensive, der kein Griesgram widerstehen kann. Und es wirkt. Im Saal tanzen Schulter an Schulter Zuschauer zwischen 20 und 60, die Gesichter entspannt und fröhlich. Ob Herzlichkeit und gute Laune auf der Bühne nun echt oder gespielt sind, ist letztlich egal, wenn man so lieb und engagiert umworben wird.
Musikalisch ist die Show viel näher an den alten rockigen Zeiten als an den neuen Singles. Dank der vielen Gitarren auf der Bühne klingen auch die Balladen knackiger. Drei tanzende Geiger sorgen für einen Hauch von Country-Musik, mit der Shania Twain einst die ersten Erfolge feierte. Höhepunkte sind die schnellen Hits «That Don´t Impress Me Much», «Man! I Feel Like A Woman!», «Ka-Ching!» und «I´m Gonna Getcha Good». Immer wieder gehen Feuerwerke hoch.
Für einen Song holt sich Twain ein Mädchen aus dem Saal zum Mitsingen auf die Bühne. Später stellt sich heraus: das Mädchen kommt aus Kalifornien. Lachen im Saal, jemand ruft scherzhaft «Schiebung», die Überraschung von Twain ist so überbordend, dass man nicht mehr weiß, ob sie echt ist.
Die aufwendige Show ist ungewöhnlich offen gestaltet. Die Bühne ist ein Podest direkt in der Mitte des riesigen Saals, offen nach allen Seiten. Für einen Song taucht Shania Twain plötzlich auf der Tribüne auf. Immer wieder werden Fans für ein paar Minuten direkt zur Bühne vorgelassen. Demokratie gibt es auch für die Band: Die Musiker bekommen ein Mikrofon in die Hand gedrückt und dürfen sich selbst vorstellen und mit dem Publikum blödeln. Am Ende der zwei Stunden begeistert Twain das Hamburger Publikum, als sie zur Zugabe in einem HSV-Trikot erscheint.
Die knallige Mischung aus Rock, Pop und Country dürfte Twains Ehe mit dem Musikproduzenten Robert John Lange entsprungen sein, der einst für überhaupt nicht weiche Bands wie AC/DC oder Def Leppard hinter den Reglern saß. Die Songs schreiben sie zusammen. Das Leben der Sängerin war auch nicht so leicht, wie es ihr sonniges Image vermuten ließe.
Als sie 21 Jahre alt war, starben ihre Eltern bei einem Autounfall, und sie musste für ihre vier jüngeren Brüder sorgen. Schon als Kind stand sie häufig um ein Uhr nachts auf, um in diversen Clubs zu singen - wegen ihres Alters durfte sie erst auf die Bühne, als kein Alkohol mehr verkauft wurde. Nach Harmonie und Geborgenheit scheint sich Shania Twain auch privat zu sehnen: Wenn sie nicht auf Tour ist, lebt das Paar mit einem kleinen Sohn zurückgezogen in der Schweiz.
- the cool Canadian Shania Twain starts its Germany route Hamburg in Hamburg (packed to the roof). The Bestuhlung of the interior could itself have saved the organizers. Already after few clocks the 13,000 spectators in the sold off Color LINE arena jump up, vibrate themselves in the clock of the music, whip in the rhythm, groelen also. With a umjubelten concert in Hamburg the Canadian hit queen Shania Twain on Saturday evening began her Germany route. The Grammy winner starts with two good hits the evening and provides so from the beginning for omitted tendency: "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!", a hit of her multiple platinum album "Come on Over" (1999), and the new single "UP" set the quantity in motion. Garniert one aims the dragging along music with interspersed fireworks effects. 20 Songs get the fans of the beautiful musician in the Hanseatic city to hear, among them the Party kracker "Ka-Ching!", "That Don't Impress ME Much", "I'm Gonna Getcha Good" and the ballads "Forever and For Always" and "When You Kiss ME". The multicolored mixture from Pop, Country and Rock, from in-usual melodies and dancable rhythms, which made Twains Songs in the past months also the usually-played radio hits, functions also on the stage excellently. And a kind Déjà vu-feeling creeps nevertheless after half of the concert - too much resemble each other in the long term melodies, rhythms and arrangements of most Songs. And also the pyrotechnic effects, which illuminate the stage again and again, do not surprise someone anymore. The approximately 100-minute Show is just as perfectly styled as the 38 years old musician. Twain, which is to be admired in this evening in three different exactly co-ordinated Outfits, offers a thought out high polish concert to its fans. Everything is arranged, no effect is omitted, will leave nothing to the coincidence accurately. Over the stage hangs an enormous star shaped lighting system, which sets the Protagonistin of the evening always into the right light. The large oval stage is placed in the center of the arena and Twain is nearly nonstop in the circle on the way, so that as much as possible the faithful fans on close contact with its star can go. And there Twain sing, touches and signs autographs simultaneous, makes in this evening many humans happy. The north American secures herself additional sympathies, when she comes for the additions in a far HSV fan leotard over the Jeans on the stage. Public near the Canadean appears also, when she exactly gets a girl in the center of the concert from the quantity on the stage and turns together with it its rounds over the oval. Also a donation collection for a child aid project builds the 38-years old into the show and recompences a donating fan family with a common Polaroidfoto on the stage. And in order to make the illusion of a family celebration perfect, the musicians the nine-piece band, of whom some looks like a Comicfigur, dance omitted at the edge of stage like the small guests on a child birthday. After more than one hour Twain succeeds then with "The Woman in ME (Needs The one in You)" then nevertheless still again to surprise the public. The song begins with a tender Keyboard Intro, to which gradually play the violin themselves associate, before the sound of an acoustic guitar takes over the guidance. The headlights are directed suddenly toward rank in the arena: Twain sits with a guitarist on a backrest in the middle in the public and gives to the fans with a haunting ballade the high point of the evening. Also to the grand final there is again an Aha effect. On Shania Twain rains it with the ending song "Rock This Country" spark of the cover, on the public falls a sea from white and lila chad as on the freshly baked millionaires with the RTL Show "who becomes millionaire?". Fulminantes fireworks accompany the last clocks - a magnificent conclusion for a successful party.
Great reviews! They really love her in Germany..it should be good for the CD too..
I thought of her last night as I watched boring TV!


text:
Q: How to smoothly change drawable resource during MotionLayout transition? I want to change image in fab button during transition, but i haven't found how to do it with xml because CustomAttribute tag supports only drawable colors as values. My solution is to set TransitionAdapter to MotionLayout and change drawable in onTransitionChange function.
motionLayout.setTransitionListener(object : TransitionAdapter() {
            var fromStart = true
            var wasChanged = false

            override fun onTransitionChange(
                motionLayout: MotionLayout?,
                startId: Int,
                endId: Int,
                progress: Float
            ) {
                if (!wasChanged) {
                    if (fromStart && progress >= 0.5f) {
                        fab.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_done_black_24dp)
                        wasChanged = true
                    }
                    if (!fromStart && progress <= 0.5f) {
                        fab.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_add_black_24dp)
                        wasChanged = true
                    }
                }
            }

            override fun onTransitionCompleted(motionLayout: MotionLayout?, currentId: Int) {
                wasChanged = false
                fromStart = !fromStart
            }

        })

But in this case image changes immediately. Is there any way to make the transition smooth like in regular transition in MotionLayout?

A: There is a great way to animate the change between two images in MotionLayout. However, it may be a little tricky with the Fab interaction. As shown in this blog post, you can use an ImageFilterView and set the source and alternate source, then crossfade between them. Grabbing code directly from the blog post linked above, here's an example of what an ImageFilterView looks like in your MotionLayout
<android.support.constraint.utils.ImageFilterView
        android:id="@+id/image"
        android:background="@color/colorAccent"
        android:src="@drawable/roard"
        app:altSrc="@drawable/hoford"
        android:layout_width="64dp"
        android:layout_height="64dp"/>

Where android:src is your first image that you want and the app:altSrc is the second image that you want to crossfade to.
Below, also grabbed directly from the blog post, is what the constraints will look like in your motionScene.
<ConstraintSet android:id="@+id/start">
        <Constraint
            android:id="@+id/image"
            android:layout_width="100dp"
            android:layout_height="100dp"
            android:layout_marginStart="8dp"
            motion:layout_constraintBottom_toBottomOf="parent"
            motion:layout_constraintStart_toStartOf="parent"
            motion:layout_constraintTop_toTopOf="parent">
            <CustomAttribute
                motion:attributeName="crossfade"
                motion:customFloatValue="0" />
        </Constraint>
    </ConstraintSet>

    <ConstraintSet android:id="@+id/end">
        <Constraint
            android:id="@+id/image"
            android:layout_width="100dp"
            android:layout_height="100dp"
            android:layout_marginEnd="8dp"
            motion:layout_constraintBottom_toBottomOf="parent"
            motion:layout_constraintEnd_toEndOf="parent"
            motion:layout_constraintTop_toTopOf="parent">
            <CustomAttribute
                motion:attributeName="crossfade"
                motion:customFloatValue="1" />
        </Constraint>
    </ConstraintSet>

Where you set the crossfade value as a custom attribute. Not sure how this will play with the Fab but this is the best way I know how to animate between two images.

A:
Try using TransitionDrawable to animate and change
  FloatingActionButton drawable smoothly.

 private fun setMotionListener() {
        val transitionDrawable = TransitionDrawable(
            arrayOf(
                bitmapDrawableFromVector(this, R.drawable.ic_add),
                bitmapDrawableFromVector(this, R.drawable.ic_remove)
            )
        )
        transitionDrawable.isCrossFadeEnabled = true
        credits.setImageDrawable(transitionDrawable)

        motionLayout.setTransitionListener(object : MotionLayout.TransitionListener {
            override fun onTransitionTrigger(p0: MotionLayout?, p1: Int, p2: Boolean, p3: Float) {
            }

            override fun onTransitionStarted(p0: MotionLayout?, p1: Int, p2: Int) {
            }

            override fun onTransitionChange(p0: MotionLayout?, p1: Int, p2: Int, p3: Float) {
            }

            override fun onTransitionCompleted(p0: MotionLayout?, p1: Int) {
                transitionDrawable.apply {
                    if (p0?.currentState == p0?.endState)
                        startTransition(0)
                    else
                        reverseTransition(200)
                }
            }
        })
    }

Be aware that VectorDrawables won't be cross-faded in
  theTransitionDrawable, You'll need to convert them into
  BitmapDrawables first. See the below code -

 private fun bitmapDrawableFromVector(
        context: Context,
        drawableId: Int
    ) = BitmapDrawable(context.resources, getBitmapFromVectorDrawable(context, drawableId))

    private fun getBitmapFromVectorDrawable(context: Context, drawableId: Int): Bitmap? {
        val drawable = ContextCompat.getDrawable(context, drawableId)
        val bitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(
            drawable!!.intrinsicWidth,
            drawable.intrinsicHeight,
            Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888
        )
        val canvas = Canvas(bitmap)
        drawable.setBounds(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height)
        drawable.draw(canvas)
        return bitmap
    }

Thanks.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
/***
* Inferno Engine v4 2015-2017
* Written by Tomasz "Rex Dex" Jonarski
* [# filter: public #]
***/

#pragma once

#include "fiberSystem.h"
#include "base/containers/include/inplaceArray.h"

namespace base
{
    namespace fibers
    {

        //---

        /// a collector of fences that we want to wait on, implements simple helper for WaitForMultipleObjects behavior
        class BASE_FIBERS_API WaitList : public base::NoCopy
        {
        public:
			WaitList();
            ~WaitList();

            /// wait for all fences to complete, handles fences added in the mean time
            CAN_YIELD void sync();

            /// push a fence to wait for
            void pushFence(WaitCounter fence);

        private:
            threads::SpinLock m_lock;
            base::InplaceArray<WaitCounter, 16> m_fences;
        };

        //---

    } // fibers
}// base

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The Latest Slap in the Face of GLSM!
Grand Lake St. Marys is the only designated "distressed watershed" in the state and the only support for these impaired watersheds is more funding to farmers who are the polluters. When will the time come when the State of Ohio will penalize the polluters rather than reward them with more money which does little to stop the pollution.
GLSM is the third most polluted lake in the country and the Ohio River is the most polluted body of water in the U.S. The entire state is becoming a cesspool.
Now I've learned that the liquid chemical the state is using to prevent roads from icing is radioactive fracking residue.
As guess the next thing to expect is Ohio's children will start to being born deformed and or having brain damage. Thanks to the DeWine administration nothing is going to change. See the article below.
Map of the three Ohio watersheds selected to participate in the National Water Quality Initiative. (NRCS Image)COLUMBUS, Ohio — For the eighth consecutive year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will offer an opportunity for agricultural producers in three Ohio watersheds to apply for assistance to install conservation practices that protect water quality through the National Water Quality Initiative (NWQI).


text:
Richard Zach
2005-06-24 rzach
Papadimitriou's Turing (A Novel about Computation)
Christos Papadimitriou has a novel called Turing (A Novel About Computation). (He also has a few other excellent textbooks on technical stuff, but y'all know that.) I didn't know about the novel before, and so when I went to the MIT Press website, I noticed that it's on sale! Only 9 bucks (US) for the hardcover! Here's the content blurb:
Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing's idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing's mother) abandons Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears on Alexandros's computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient Greece — "discourse, dialogue, argument, proof… can only thrive in an egalitarian society" — and the Arab scholar in ninth-century Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics, including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional newsgroup in the book's afterword.) As Turing's lectures progress, the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco — and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel.
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Resumen de lecturas compartidas durante noviembre de 2020 | Vestigium on The significance of the Curry-Howard isomorphism
New details on why Tarski was reluctant to leave Poland before WWII – Richard Zach on Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic
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Nothing short of winter is going to keep a cycling enthusiast indoors. Thankfully, America is fast on the heels of Europe by embracing cycling. More and more road is being dedicated to cyclists, in the form of bike lanes. While almost every city is open to cyclists, some cities have a more advanced riding culture than others.
Before you go exploring the best biking cities in the US, you need to have a perfect bike for city biking. If you are a man, you should consider having one of these bicycles for men. Both men and women can go for seven speed bike as it can be very good for all kinds of biking. Now, here are five of the top biking cities in the US you should explore on your new two wheeler.
San Diego has many trails where you can go biking with your family. Carlsbad Coastal Rail Trail is just one of the trails that you ought to try out, and when you see it, you will understand why. It runs along train tracks. It provides excellent riding for kids because it is far from the traffic, yet very close to the trains at the same time.
There are cycling trails in the city's most beautiful places such as around the San Diego Zoo, along the Ocean Beach and along Balboa Park; the biggest urban cultural park in the US. As long as you are a biking enthusiast, the city of San Diego takes care of you whether you own a bike or not. If you do not have a bike, the city has a bike share program that has put bikes in different stations around the city as well as various bike rentals that rent out bikes at a small fee per hour.
With many incredible places for riding in Denver and with miles upon miles of dedicated cycling lanes, this is the place to be on saddle back. This city has trails that crisscross to every part. Cyclists are able to bike easily on the 30 miles trail that passes through the Denver Botanical Gardens. You may also head to the Golden Triangle Museum District to visit any of the nine museums and the galleries.
To popularize the biking tradition, this city has about 850 miles of paved trails and a good number of off-road trails and biking lanes. Next time you go biking in Denver, ensure that you cycle along the Cherry Creek bike path.
This path takes you to the famous Castlewood Canyon state park, which gives you a chance to check out stunning rock formations. You will also see the remains of the Castlewood Dam that gave way in 1933, flooding the city of Denver.
Although Missoula is best known for horse riding, you will be surprised to know bicycles rule the roads of this small city in Montana. Many bike paths give access just any corner of the city. There is also a large variety of mountain biking trails found just outside the city. Trails such as the Rattlesnake trail will take you blasting past the black bears. The Patee Canyon Trail gives you an opportunity to ride the Mount Sentinel trail.
The city of Missoula is home to the renowned Adventure Cycling Association, which is one of the leading bicycle travel organizations in the US.
Tucson City in Arizona is one of the biggest riding destinations in the US and every year, many cyclists come to train here. The weather is sunny, warm and dry, just perfect for riding. In addition, there are plenty of sceneries to check out. From steep passes on the mountains, many miles of back roads and open desert vistas, Tucson never has a boring moment for a cyclist. You must ride up Mt. Lemmon, The Loop (100 miles of paved path) and Saguaro National Park. In the city itself, there are more than 700 miles of paths designated to bikes.
Austin is among the cities in the US that have a bike zoo. You will get a chance to ride the pedal-powered 80-foot rattlesnake. This city is also home to the Lance Armstrong Bikeway that stretches over 6 miles long and cuts right across the heart of this city. The Texas Hill Country provides you with amazing cycling trails along the beautiful ranches. Other trails that you will want to try out include Veloway, Roy and Ann Butler, Goodwater Loop to name but just a few of them.


text:
In March 18, 2019, we honored our 2019 neighbor of longstanding, Ginger Lief.
Hedy Campbell, who conceived of this initiative recognizing neighbors of long-standing, made the following remarks:
"I'm especially pleased to introduce Ginger Lief to you, as she is the first among our Residents of Long-Standing with whom I've had the pleasure to serve as a Block Association board member. She joins several of the organization's founders and stalwart volunteers as she becomes our 30th inductee.
Ginger was born in Rhode Island but was raised in California. She got her first taste of New York City when she visited with a group of friends during her sophomore year of college. After graduation, it didn't take long for her to decide to move here. Upon moving to the city, she lived for a year at a residential hotel for women on the east side. As a member St. Bartholomew's church, she had access to a bulletin board that led her to her first apartment on the west side. Some years later, her membership in a Broadway Presbyterian Church youth group led to a tip that resulted in her move to the Master Apartments, where she's now lived for 50 years and has the second longest tenure among residents there.
During much of that time, Ginger supported herself by working in the Columbia University Department of Planning. She worked there for many years, long enough to "give myself my own fellowship, enabling me to continue investigations into my interests and calling." One can discern from her apartment hunting history that those interests center around the church. She's proud of her many years in ECW, the Episcopal Church Women, an almost-150-year-old national organization that is dedicated to the betterment of women and girls throughout the world. Ginger has served the group in many capacities, including as vice president of the national board and as editor and contributor to Communique, the organization's publication, and locally as president of the diocese chapter.
She is also an active member of St. Michael's Church on W. 99th St. She is deeply committed to working toward empowerment for women and remarked, as our conversation touched on the Me Too movement, that "There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
Along the way, Ginger found time to earn a master's degree in business, become a licensed social worker, and earn a master's degree in divinity. Yet she also found time to become a volunteer in the early days of the Block Association, responding first to a fund-raising appeal to help the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing purchase the Marseilles, then to a call for volunteers for the spring fair. Isn't it poignant that she is receiving this honor tonight in the facility that resulted from that successful fund-raising effort?
Ginger has been a Block Association board member for many years, using her passion for history to carve out her role as our archivist. She's responsible for having collected what came to be an archive of Block Association newsletters, currently housed at the Bloomingdale branch of the public library, and has been the driving force behind all of the various events that have in one way or another celebrated the history of our neighborhood.
Please join me in congratulating Ginger on her inclusion in the Residents of Long-Standing Hall of Fame and thank her for her steadfast dedication and service to her community."


text:
2022-11-03 November 3, 2022
June 28, 2022 @ 3:54 am - December 3, 2022 @ 8:15 pm
Neptune Retrograde in Pisces
Neptune, currently at home in Pisces, spends about 14 years in each sign, and retrogrades each year for approximately five months at a time. When it comes to illusion, Neptune […]
July 19, 2022 @ 11:21 am - December 23, 2022 @ 5:31 am
Chiron Retrograde
While Chiron is only a comet, it does receive a great deal of attention, including during its retrograde period. Chiron is known as the Wounded Healer, and that healing can […]
October 23, 2022 @ 3:52 am - November 16, 2022 @ 2:08 am
Venus in Scorpio
In Scorpio, Venus is in its sign of detriment, or its fall position, being opposite its home in the sign of Taurus. Relationship and money matters may not go as […]
Sun in Scorpio
When the Sun arrives in intense Scorpio, it leaves behind the hesitance of Libra, who always weighs everything. There is no gray, only black and white. Scorpio is an extreme […]
October 28, 2022 @ 1:10 am - December 20, 2022 @ 10:32 am
Jupiter (Retrograde) in Pisces
Jupiter continues its retrograde and takes one more dip back into the sign of Pisces, where it will go direct on November 23rd, at 28°. It will complete its Pisces […]
October 29, 2022 @ 3:22 pm - November 17, 2022 @ 4:42 am
A direct Mercury makes its way into intense Scorpio. The intensity can be felt in passionate conversation, with the need to get to the truth, or to speak the truth, […]
October 30, 2022 @ 9:26 am - January 12, 2023 @ 5:56 pm
Mars Retrograde in Gemini
Mars only visits a sign about every two years, and normally stays for about six weeks. This particular transit will be a lengthy one, stretching from August 20, 2022 through […]
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text:
Sounders Suffer Heartbreaking Loss in LA
posted by Jackson Felts - Apr 30, 2018
With a beautiful new 350 million dollar soccer-specific-stadium playing host to Los Angeles FC's inaugural home match for the franchise, the pomp and circumstance created an electric setting on Sunday night in L.A. The Seattle Sounders came in playing from behind the eight ball with Chad Marshall out due to a neck sprain and Roman Torres scratched from the lineup minutes before kickoff.
Despite the injuries, Gustav Svensson and Kim Kee-hee played impressively as a centerback duo and the back four held LAFC off the scoreboard for 92 minutes. However, in the 93rd minute, in added time of the second half, a Laurent Ciman free kick got past Stefan Frei for the match's lone goal, sending LA fans home happy and Sounders supporters left with hearts broken.
The 1-0 loss in Los Angeles marks the third 1-0 loss of the season for the Sounders, in a season that has seen difficult lineup choices in fixture congestion and multiple major injuries. Now 1-4-1, the Sounders must focus on getting healthy and returning home to play Columbus next Saturday at 1 p.m. (Listen on Sports Radio 950 KJR, pre-game at 12:30 p.m.)
Perhaps more important than getting Marshall and Torres back in the back-line will be finding a way to score. With 13 shots and six on goal, Seattle had many great chances to score on Sunday in LA, but never found the back of the net. Alex Roldan, the rookie midfielder from Seattle University, started his third consecutive match and also found multiple chances to break the scoreless draw.
Winger Victor Rodriguez, who didn't appear in the 18 on Sunday, needs to get healthy as well, and may at the end of the day be the solution to the club's offensive issues. Jackson Felts, Pete Fewing, and Wade Webber break down the 1-0 and preview Columbus next week in the postgame show, which you can listen to below.
Watch Head Coach Brian Schmetzer talk about the 1-0 loss below as well as Stefan Frei discussing his missed save to allow LAFC to break through in added time.


This morning I took the kids to Farm Country at Thanksgiving Point. It was a little on the chilly side to be outside but the kids enjoyed it and the lines were very short because of the weather.
I love visiting in the spring and seeing all of the baby animals. They had chicks and ducklings on display cuddling and playing with each other.
Outside the goats were roaming their pens. When Cason saw the goats he said "Mommy, they are having a birthday party! They are all wearing birthday hats." I am not quite sure why their horns were taped green.
The peacock looked beautiful fanning out his feathers for us.
The kids favorite thing to do by far however was to ride the ponies. They just sat atop the animals and went around for a few minutes, filled with excitement and grinning the entire time.


follow RightBrain warm light and cold dark feelings.
of felt health climate passage.
ego-listening for WinWin reweaving integrity.
staged and restaged nights of awesome starlit wonder.
filled with publicly naked mendacity.
to those born already elite.
of once healthy bilateral systems.
for ego-cooperative robust bicameral relationship development.
and with those more appositionally apart.
with Here full-spectral holonic systemc structures.
and historical red meat disagreements.
invites therapeutic love and grace and positive karma.
yin loving yang loving yin…etc.
I think that's the end of this ThoughtSystem.
usually, and more casually, outside any safe inside sanctuary.
Not as healthy as empowerment with our WinWin developing kids.
through ego/eco-justifying quiet resonant Voices of mutual hope.


For your test results please telephone the surgery on 01892 863326 after 3:00pm. Test results have to be checked by the doctor, you may be advised when to telephone the surgery to receive any test results, generally between 5 to 7 days after the test was taken for blood test results. Results for X-rays, scans etc can take 2 or 3 weeks before they are received at the surgery.
Please note that the practice has a strict policy regarding confidentiality and data protection and we will only release test results to the person to whom they relate unless that person has given prior permission for the release of this data or they are not capable of understanding the results. It is your responsibility to check your results and to make an appointment to discuss them with your doctor if you are advised to do so.
The receptionists may not be able to give full results over the phone if the result is complicated, or if the Doctor wants to see you about the result, and will then offer you an appointment. If you have had tests done as part of your annual review, and have a follow-up appointment as part of the review, the results will be discussed with you at the appointment.
For information on what your laboratory test results mean please visit Lab Tests Online UK www.labtestsonline.org.uk. Whilst we make every endeavour to contact you in case of an abnormal result, we recommend that you follow up any tests that you have had done, within the time scale given above, and are always happy to discuss these with you if you have any concerns.


text:
Q: gnuplot: how to sum over an arbitrary list For gnuplot, I have a large list of (randomly generated) numbers which I want to use as indices in a sum.  How do I do it?
Here is what I mean.  Let's say the list of numbers is
list = [81, 37, 53, 22, 72, 74, 44, 46, 96, 27]

I have a function
f(x,n) = cos(n*x)

I now want to plot the function, on the interval (-pi,pi) which is the sum of the f(x,n) as n runs through the numbers in list.

A: If you can control how your list looks like, try the following:
num = 10

# Let the numbers be in a space separated string.
# We can access the individual numbers with the word(string, index) function.
list = "81 37 53 22 72 74 44 46 96 27"

f(x,n) = cos(n*x)

set terminal pngcairo
set output "sum_cos.png"

set xrange [-pi:pi]
set samples 1000

# Build the plot command as a macro.
plt_cmd = ""
do for [n=1:num] {
   plt_cmd = sprintf("%s + f(x,%s)", plt_cmd, word(list,n))
}

# Check what we have done so far.
print plt_cmd

titlestring = "{/Symbol S} cos(n_i*x), i = 1 ...".num

# Finally plot the sum by evaluating the macro.
plot @plt_cmd title titlestring

This is the result:


Tray chique: It's unclear what platform Renault might use for ute, but the Nissan Navara seems most logical choice.
RENAULT Australia is actively working on a business case that could see the double-diamond logo adorn the nose of a locally sold ute.
Speaking to GoAuto this week, managing director of Renault Australia Justin Hocevar said that senior Renault management officials had discussed the possibility of a shared-platform utility, and that the local arm is already working on the business model to bring the ute to Australia.
Any ute product would have a wide range of potential markets around the world besides Australia and south-east Asia.
As to the vehicle's origins, Mr Hocevar cast doubts on reports that the ute would be based on Nissan's recently revealed D23 Navara.
"There have been announcements around a shared platform utility – it's a shared product, but not necessarily that," he said, when asked whether the Navara is the potential platform source.
"It's not necessarily what you said." He would not be drawn on what alternative platform may be used, or what configurations the new ute might be offered in.
Mr Hocevar was more forthcoming about the potential of the Renault-badged ute joining an expanded SUV line-up in Australia.
As GoAuto previously reported, Mr Hocevar believes the Renault ute would not be a threat to the Nissan Navara's sales.
Other platform sources for the Renault ute could include the CMF (Common Modular Family) platform that unederpins Renault-Nissan Alliance products including the X-Trail and forthcoming Renault Kadjar.
Engines could potentially include Nissan's VR38DETT 3.0-litre V6 petrol and the 2.5-litre, four-cylinder diesel currently in use in the Koleos.
Renault would join Volkswagen as the only the second European marque to offer a ute in Australia. Most light-commercial utes sold here hail from Thailand, and include the top-selling Toyota HiLux, Ford's increasingly popular Ranger, the Holden Colorado, Isuzu D-Max, Mitsubishi Triton and the Mazda BT-50.


text:
Q: How to set Run Configuration and Debug Configuration in Eclipse to choose the class that has the main method as the start-up class? I am using Eclipse for Java EE, Mars 2.
I have two classes in my Java (Swing application) project:

*

*Program.java (has the main method)

*Foo.java

If I right-click the editor while Program.java is open, the context-menu presents the commands Java Application and Run Configurations under the Run As menu.
The same happens if I right-click the editor surface while Program.java is open and choose Debug As from the context-menu. I see the two sub-menu items namely, Java Application and Debug Configurations.
However, when I have Foo.java open, right-clicking the editor surface presents only one sub-menu item named Run Configurations or Debug Configurations upon choosing Run As or Debug As respectively.
So, every time I want to run my project and I accidentally right-click the editor surface area while Foo.java is open, I then have to go to the editor tab that has Program.java open and right-click again and choose the right menu item.
I am suspecting there is a way in the Run Configurations and Debug Configurations dialog boxes to tell Eclipse to choose the Program.java class to run as the start-up class since it has the main method.
How do I do that?

A: You should turn to "Project->Properties" and then select "Run/Debug Settings". There you should be able to configure your project so that it always "runs" the same.
Alternatively, some workaround that I often use when doing JUnit testing on different classes: on top of your eclipse window, there are these buttons

The pulldown icon there opens a "history" of your last run/debug/... "runs". So, once you got your program "run"; you can just use that history to invoke it.

A: Right click on Foo.java and in Run Configurations dialog, add main class, like below :

A: Another Solution is setting your launching configuration in window -> preferences
and you can run your project using F11 key (or any key that you can config) i


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text:
Industry news and education for inkjet printing
SHOP LEXJET.com
Zero GTag:
Posted on July 28, 2011 by Regan Dickinson Posted in Case Studies & Profiles
Photographic Sculpture: A Three Dimensional Inkjet Printed Interpretation
Mark Lewis' fine-art photography almost demands a three-dimensional interpretation. And, in a community known worldwide as a Mecca for sculpture – Loveland, Colo. – Lewis has yearned to find a way to interpret his work in three dimensions.
Inspired by the graphics used for the King Tut exhibit at the Denver Museum of Art, which used gauzy, translucent fabric banners as a focal point for the exhibit, Lewis formed a concept for his own exhibition. Lewis called his LexJet account specialist, Michael Clementi, to brainstorm about inkjet printable materials he could use to bring his concept to life. Clementi recommended Polyvoile FR fabric and Lewis began testing the material on his Epson Stylus Pro 9880.
"I started to think about all the 3D things I've been working on, and had the idea that if I had a 3D space, I could put up my 2D artwork on the wall, like a gallery presentation, and then hang my new abstract figures on these banners and suspend them throughout the room, leaving areas for people to walk through. The idea was to create one large piece of art comprised of individual pieces that combine into one large art object that can be walked into," explains Lewis.
Lewis secured space at Aims Community College in nearby Greeley, Colo., and set up the display, mixing framed photo prints on the walls with Polyvoile banners hung throughout the space. The banners are abstract representations of Lewis' Zero G series of nude studies.
Lewis explains, "The Zero G originals on the wall are a few years older and incorporate figure nudes with an illusion of weightlessness, so they look like they're floating in air or water. The translucent Polyvoile banners that are 7 feet tall and 2-3 feet wide, are extreme abstract figures that almost look like they're made out of lightning and movement. The photographic process is very different for the abstract pieces than it was for the Zero G process.
"The Zero G series is an illusion based on light," Lewis continues. "The second, abstract version is the same concept with much longer exposures of 6-8 seconds. I'm using my studio strobe flash, but I'm manually firing it. I have either camera or model movement, and sometimes I'll use materials like painter's plastic or sheer cloth material and a fan. As the material and model are moving then I'm popping up these individual flashes, and in between the flashes I have a bright hot light on. It sinks in low light exposure in between the strobes, and then the strobes capture those individual seconds within the six seconds. I'm getting a choppy freeze-frame effect. You end up with a big, blurry photo that looks like you can't use it for anything. I take it into Lightroom, look at the figures inside that mess, trim everything away that I don't want, and it leaves a part of those exposures and then I add a color temperature to it. I call it an organic process, because it's like a big shrub that needs to be trimmed."
The summer exhibition at Aims Community College has been a big hit. It's an unusual interpretation of creative art that makes people think about light, images and perception. The exhibition will run through September, then Lewis will install a similar one in Loveland.
One of the Zero G images by Mark Lewis that form the basis for his fine art photo exhibition, Energia, at Aims Community College in Greeley, Colo.
"That was the first experimental presentation of what I'd seen in my mind for a long time. I got everything printed up with no problem and had seams put in for the pole pockets. Once it was installed, I was very satisfied with the outcome. It was my first attempt to get dimension in photography that I felt was very successful," says Lewis. "One of the questions that comes up a lot when people see it is how difficult it is to print. I never had a misprint with the material and it has worked perfectly every time. It was quite simple to print. I just followed the directions given to me by LexJet. I had to change pixel density to 720 and some minor adjustments like that, but I've printed in black and white and full color and have been pleased with every print I've made with it."
Here's a video of the exhibition…
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Who: Holy Rosary School & Parish Students in grades 6, 7, and 8 during the 2016-2017 school year. Also, High School Students may attend as youth mentors.
We will start with a pizza in the school hall and walk to Arts West in the Junction to watch Peter and the Star-Catcher, snacks, prayer and sleep over in the School Hall, fun projects and more! Join us for a night of Faith & Fun!
In order to participate you must register!
Questions: Email Nicole or Ruth at youth@holyrosaryseattle.org or call Jennifer at (206) 937-1488 ext. 214.


I was busy machinating my PPT slides for my lecture to my MIB/MBA students on Brand Logos, once coiffed, i was supposed to hit the hay and before doing just signed in to face book to update my status on Sachin Tendulkar who won ICC awards , i saw a fervency on face book, yes it was wild like a forest fire.
When you are in USA the first best thing that attracts your attention among the retail segment is the most stylish brand logo of the clothing brand GAP. During my trip to the United States, GAP certainly invoked lot of aspirations and i cherish those few shirts i bought which are in my wardrobe. The world is changing and every one needs to adapt them towards the change. But it looks like GAP is changing for the sake of changing.
5th of October 2010 the internet and social net working sites were busy hashing out about the brand GAP. Hey, folks, it is not any about any promotion or sale or about CSR. It is about CHANGE!!
GAP has dropped its Iconic Logo, the US clothing retailer in their re branding strategy has moved from GAP to Gap. According to Marka Hansen President GAP Inc, "Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that." Gap wants their customers to take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today. Marka claims, "we chose this design as it's more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward." Here is the OLD vs NEW….
This re-branding strategy with specific focus on the GAP logo has invoked lot of buzz around the change, consumers of 2010 and there on are going to be more vocal and will express their views in the wildest form, get ready marketers and brand strategist. You are in and will be in a HOT spot. Power has shifted from brand proprietors to consumers – even the Iconic brands know that successful campaigns have to consistently engage consumers, who will in turn use their mighty word of mouse to disseminate the messages. Time has arrived, where marketers will have to cede their brand to the consumer. We will increasingly witness how brands can be seriously damaged by consumers who choose to vent their frustration or anger online.
Customer views on face book !!
Given the passionate outpouring from customers that followed, Gap decided to engage in the dialogue to get their feedback on board and work together as they move ahead and evolve to the next phase of Gap. From this online dialogue, it's clear that Gap still has a close connection to their customers, so tapping into this energy is right.
Marka Hansen appeal on the Gap Facebook Page that says ,"We plan to ask people to share their designs with us as well. We welcome the participation we've seen so far". Promptly some of them used their designing skills to showcase their creativity to the world and Gap. The one that i was deeply impressed (Kudos Mike Monteiro) and of course this design got the reaction of Mark , CEO Gap Inc.
Marketing is changing and so does Branding, Both had become interactive. Brands are what customers say. Consumers can make or break a brand. Word of mouth has become the most powerful medium, it is time corporates understand the passion and perception the consumers have towards the Brand. But if my intuition is right, the strategy adopted by Gap is towards crowd sourcing then this case might turn into a viral marketing strategy ( I expect Gap to go back to the old design or a complete new design). If not this case proves a point on how consumers react if their not happy .Share your thoughts on the new Gap Logo and the buzz around it.
I am wonder struck, awesome post !!
This post has actually made me think deep on how a logo can create huge impact on the customer no matter hw big can brand be.
Getting opinions from customers all over the world is the biggest blunder forced on their own identity . coke has spoilt its brand only because of its blind test with Pepsi. , even gap is trying out something similar. So taking feedback's and opinions from their customers is not the only way what is needed to 'fill the gaps'.
the old one still gives me the unique GAP feeling but the new gives no evident freshness in the redesign and seems to be very generic.
My Predictions worked, Gap is returning to its old design.Marka ,President of Gap announced, "At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We've been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we've made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels. This shows the power of the Customer..wait and watch you will find more of these now on …not just with GAP but with every other brand the customer is PASSIONATE.
haha…not bad !! so it was just a marketing gimmick to be in media for a while…Welcome back GAP !!
Class BLOG. Your predictions came true. I enjoyed branding and got the lesson.Please give me your contact details, wish to interact.!
just outstanding post!! wonderful way of prescentation !!!
It seems to be a new method of ad created by GAP to bring the attention of people on dem..
I was looking for this. Thanks a lot.


Carter C. Lassiter provided the second generation of family leadership that enabled the growth of City Transfer and Storage into a full-service interstate moving and storage firm with specialized expertise in cranes and rigging.
In recognition of his career and service to the transportation industry, Carter was inducted into the North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame on October 7, 2008. He is the first mover ever to be inducted.


Today was an amazing day with the sun shining and nice a breeze going on. The only thing that put a damper on my excellent sunny day was witnessing this bad choice by a fellow sun lover.
As a woman I can say if I ever see anything like this on a guy, I would run the other way and run VERY fast. My advice to guys, stick with straight or boot cut jeans, they work with pretty much all body types and they look so much nicer and put together and saves the rest of us from disasters like this.
Previous PostDo we not use full length mirrors anymore?


I usually do simple 1h workshops for fairs.
Children can come learn to make a simple monster or animal and take it home with them.
This exercise is particulary suited for book fairs, salons and exhibits where children come and go or assist by classes.
For other workshops, please feel free to contact me directly so that I may create a workshop adapted to the time, number and age of the participants.


text:
I Mean, C'mon, What's Not to Love?
(Note: Although this review will not contain spoilers for The Madness Underneath, it may inadvertently reveal plot surprises from its predecessor, The Name of the Star. As always, I recommend reading books in a series in order.)
Ever since Rory Deveaux's explosive run-in with a ghostly Jack the Ripper-like killer, she's been kept in Bristol under the close watch of her parents. She misses her friends in London desperately, especially her fellow Shades, with whom she could discuss the bizarre business of ghost-hunting. No one in Bristol knows the truth about her. No one can know. Not her parents, not her therapist, no one. Rory can't tell them that she sees ghosts and she especially can't tell them about her new-found ability to send apparitions away forever—all on her own. Somehow, Rory has become a human terminus. She carries inside her the very power the Shades need to eliminate London's malevolent spirit population. The Shades need to know what's going on with Rory, but she's been told to keep quiet, not to contact her ghost-fighting colleagues. Ironic, since she needs them now more than she ever has.
When her therapist decides—seemingly out of the blue—that Rory needs to return to London in order to regain the control she's lost over her life, Rory's shocked. And thrilled. She needs the Shades and they need her, especially since there's a new killer in town. Rory's convinced the grisly murders aren't what they seem, but the others aren't so sure. Can she persuade the Shades to help her investigate before it's too late? And, if it comes to that, will be able to use her new powers against another entity, no matter how sinister it might be? As Rory struggles to understand herself and her place among the ghost hunters, she'll face her greatest challenges yet. Maybe she'll even come out of them alive.
If you loved The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson (like I did), you'll love The Madness Underneath (available February 26, 2013). Everything that drew me to the first book—humor, strong voice, appealing characters, etc.—continued to charm me in the second. Rory's as lovable as ever. Her new adventures, while not wholly original, still intrigue and entertain me. Again, while there's some gore in the story, the novel's surprisingly clean. If you're hesitating on this series (I was, thinking it would be dark and bloody), don't. It's fun, engaging, and getting better with each book. I mean, c'mon, what's not to love here?
(Readalikes: The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson; it also reminds me of Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake)
If this were a movie, it would be rated: PG-13 for mild language (no F-bombs), violence/gore, and sexual innuendo
To the FTC, with love: I received and ARC of The Madness Underneath from the generous folks at G.P. Putnam's Sons (a division of Penguin Young Readers Group). Thank you!
Labels:B Grade Books,Ghosts,Maureen Johnson,PG 13-rated Books,World Settings: England,YA Novels
I still haven't read the first one. And I can not get over the cover of this book. It's so different than the first book. It throws me every time.
Suey 20 February, 2013 17:30
I'm getting behind in the Maureen Johnson books! Man, stress!


text:
Colonial Pipeline attack exposes ransomware "pandemic"
CISA urges organisations to take action to strengthen cyber security following US critical infrastructure attack
The ransomware attack that shut down the entire network of US fuel pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline - the source of nearly half of the US East Coast's fuel supply - has been described as one of the most disruptive digital ransom operations ever reported.
President Biden was notified of the attack on Friday and the FBI has confirmed that a relatively new ransomware group, known as DarkSide, is responsible for the incident.
In total, the network shutdown has affected 5,550 miles of pipe, stranding countless barrels of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel on the Gulf Coast.
Former CISA director Chris Krebs took to Twitter on Saturday to declare that as these types of ransomware attacks have gotten out of control, more comprehensive approaches are needed. He said ransomware was fast becoming a "global pandemic".
"Coming out of a ransomware weekend, every CEO should convene the senior leader team and review security, incident response plan and business continuity plan (how long to restore backups? We do have backups? What do we do in the meantime?)," he tweeted.
In a statement, the CISA said: "We are aware of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident. We are engaged with Colonial and our interagency partners regarding the situation."
"This underscores the threat that ransomware poses to organisations regardless of size or sector. We encourage every organisation to take action to strengthen their cybersecurity posture to reduce their exposure to these types of threats."
Brooke Cooper, principal solutions manager, Third Party Risk Management at Fusion Risk Management says the current crisis points to how crucial is a reminder of the need for robust contingency planning.
"One vital aspect that is often overlooked when it comes to attacks on critical infrastructure and the catastrophic situation they cause is operational resilience. As we see with the current issue with the Colonial Pipeline Company, preparedness and backup plans must be built in to every facet of third party management.
"The closure of the pipeline demonstrates that resilience is not just about a product, but the entire reliance on an infrastructure of stability and reliability. Preparedness involves considering what other alternatives or resources are at your disposal."
"Always consider back-up alternatives. For example, what did we learn from the ship grounding in the Suez, which backed up all manners of business for weeks and forced costly re-routing? Single points of failure can and will happen. We must reflect on them and imagine how to do things differently. What are the alternatives and the costs? Then document, plan and test.
"Failure is not an option and the reliance on items whether that's a chip or a major energy pipeline demonstrates the critical business value of preparedness.
"The necessity of testing and executing plans has been especially highlighted with recent events including the global chip shortage, the Suez incident and now the shutdown by The Colonial Pipeline Company. While they show the fragility of delivery systems, they also prove which companies are the most forward-thinking and prepared."
Colonial Pipeline


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I'm a software developer having 5 years of software development experience in c#, wpf, mvvm, entity framework, linq, xaml, and to some extent - wix. I also participate in various machine learning and data science competitions hosted on various crowdsourcing platforms such kaggle, topcoder, and innocentive. Until now I've also completed more than 20 moocs from universities such as MIT, Stanford, UT Austin, etc on subjects such as programming, machine learning, data science and others.
Involved in developing and supporting desktop applications using .net Framework for local clients. Pivotal in developing Win Forms and WPF applications. * Developed applications from scratch which required performing extensive research on available tools and technologies on windows platform. * Developed and extended custom controls in WPF. * Hands-on experience using WiX toolset for developing windows installer packages.


Nurses fulfill an essential role within the intensive care unit (ICU) team. They contribute to improved clinical outcomes, fewer complications as well as errors and hence to reduced morbidity and mortality. ICU nurses co-operate closely with physicians as well as with colleagues and interact with the family of the patient (Blot et al., 2011, 2014; Brock et al., 2013; Coburn and Gage-Croll, 2011; Courtenay et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2015). These collaborations can lead to ethical conflicts, in particular when nurses feel insufficiently involved in medical decisions (Falco-Pegueroles et al., 2016). ICU nurses have unique working conditions, characterised by a high technical environment and the continuous handling of seriously ill patients requiring highly specialised training and education (Endacott et al., 2015). In this regard, the ICU differs from many other departments (Cartledge, 2001; van Dam et al., 2013). The specific working conditions of ICU nurses render them vulnerable for burnout. Similar to nurses in other departments, night shifts, work-related stress, the number of days off, conflicts with colleagues or patients, the relationship with their supervisors and the organisation influence the risk on burnout among ICU nurses. For nursing staff, poorly organised services are associated with higher stress levels. Stress triggers burnout, moderated by the way nurses cope with stressors (Cartledge, 2001; Embriaco et al., 2007; Ntantana et al., 2017; Ramirez et al., 1996; Vifladt et al., 2016). Besides overall stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms seems to play a role as well. In a survey among 370 ICU nurses and 121 general ward nurses, Mealer et al. (2007) found anxiety and depressive symptoms to be common in both groups. ICU nurses, however, had an increased prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms as compared with general ward nurses (Mealer et al., 2007). The experience of stress has been repeatedly demonstrated as a major determinant for burnout (Embriaco et al., 2007; McHugh et al., 2011). Burnout has a negative impact on mental health, especially when resilience is low (Arrogante and Aparicio-Zaldivar, 2017). Burnout reduces the quality of ICU team communication, leading to lower quality of care (Galletta et al., 2016). In addition, staff rotation and absenteeism become significantly more common inflicting higher costs to health care organisations (Cartledge, 2001; Embriaco et al., 2007). Besides the risk for burnout, stress and poor job satisfaction also contribute to increased turnover intention among ICU nurses. Factors associated with the intention to leave the ICU include high workload, stress-related health problems and night shifts (Cartledge, 2001; Courtenay et al., 2013; Embriaco et al., 2007; van Dam et al., 2013). The issues of burnout, absenteeism and turnover intention also have important socio-economic consequences as it threatens the availability of ICU nurses (Dessy, 2009; Embriaco et al., 2007). The key issue in these challenges is job satisfaction. High levels of job satisfaction are associated with lower intention to leave, burnout, and absenteeism among health care staff (Castle et al., 2007; Gardulf et al., 2008).


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The Little Film Company to handle worldwide sales of Ethel and Ernest
Roger Mainwood	News, The Little Film Company to handle worldwide sales of Ethel and Ernest	Leave a comment
The Little Film Company is a worldwide film sales and marketing company that also theatrically distributes, finances, and executive produces independent motion pictures and consults for diverse media companies. TV Cartoons Ltd and producer John Coates has appointed the LA based company, headed by Robbie Little, to handle worldwide sales of the Ethel and Ernest feature film. For more about their involvement please visit the news section of their website:
http://www.thelittlefilmcompany.com
Raymond Briggs' The Snowman voted third most memorable festive TV show
Roger Mainwood	Raymond Briggs, The Snowman voted third most memorable Christmas TV show	John Coates, Raymond Briggs, TVC	1 Comment
The UK newspaper The Telegraph carries a report today (Ist Dec 2010) on the nation's viewing habits at Christmas.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/8171547/Quarter-of-British-households-argue-on-Christmas-day-over-television.html
A survey, commissioned by TV channel Gold, gives details of what the public say are their most memorable festive TV programmes.
"In third place with 25 per cent was another animation, Raymond Briggs' The Snowman in 1982, featuring Aled Jones singing Walking in the Air"
Actually Aled Jones didn't sing 'Walking in the Air' in the film. The correct credit should go to Peter Auty, who went on to become a well known opera singer. The mix up occurs because Aled Jones sang on the recording of 'Walking in the Air' that reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1985.
For Christmas 2010 The Snowman will be broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on Friday 24 December at 1:20pm. Since its first broadcast in 1982 the film has been broadcast on Channel 4 every year except one.
The Sun newspaper ran an interview with Raymond (Dec 23rd 2010) with the headline "I Hate Christmas" – although it turns out it is the run up to Christmas that Raymond is objecting to rather than Christmas day itself !
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3315333/I-hate-Christmas-says-The-Snowman-creator.html
The Snowman was directed by Diane Jackson (1941 – 1992)
Obituary:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dianne-jackson-1477251.html


ArtRage - Software Download Center - spyware removal, anti-spam, anti-virus, audio/video tools and more!
ArtRage is a unique painting software, that lets you draw on virtual canvas, using virtual drawing tools and produce a realistic (digital) painting. It provides several drawing tools, including chalk, crayon, felt pen, pencil and oil paint, as well as a virtual palette knife and different canvas style to choose from. It even comes with a virtual water glass to dip your paint brush... and can load an image of your choice to use it as virtual tracing paper for your painting. The interface is nicely designed and provides maximum work space while keeping all tools and option easily accessible. You can use ArtRage with a mouse, but it works particularly well if you have a graphics tablet, or even a TabletPC. The paintings can be saved or exported to JPG, BMP, PNG format.


Have you ever wondered how computers are able to recognize images? For example, when you see an image like this, you immediately know that it is a cat. But how does the computer know?
Then, it scans this entire image a bunch of times, each time looking for one specific feature. Imagine a detective looking for small clues in an image, like sharp corners. He starts by putting his magnifier on the top left corner of the image and slowly scans to the right. When one row is finished, he moves on to the next row. The algorithm we're going to build will want to do the same thing! It scans the image with a "magnifier", too.
Now the detective starts scanning! There are a few patterns that the detective is interested in: blobs, circles, colors, and edges. He prepares a few reference objects where each represents a blob, a circle, a color, an edge, etc. He puts the reference object on the image and scans over the image, looking for areas of overlap between the reference and the scanned region.
You see that our "circle filter" aligns very well with this cat's eye. Suggesting very strongly that there is a circle in this image. Mathematically, it's no harder than elementary school Math 🙂 It does an element-wise multiplication, and add up all the numbers.
Doing an element-wise multiplication gives us a matrix of all zero's, and the sum is also a zero. This suggests that the probability of having a round shape at this location is very low.
Now that we scanned this "round shaped filter" over the entire image, we're left with a 7×7 array of numbers (because the filter scans over each row and column 7 times). This is called an activation map or feature map. Now, a "round shaped filter" might not be enough to identify anything interesting on its own. We would want a few other filters (e.g., color, blobs, edges) and scan over this image in the same fashion.
Let's say we have 10 of these filters. Now we're left with a new "image" of size 7x7x10. So far, we've completed one convolutional layer! We usually apply a nonlinear function after each convolutional layer — the purpose of doing this is to increase computational efficiency. Researches and studies have found that ReLU works the best among other nonlinearities and the network can train a lot faster with it. In the ReLU layer, it applies the mathematical function f(x) = max(0, x) to all input values. Namely, it converts all the negative values to 0.
We started with an image of size 10x10x3. We then fed it into a convolutional layer to learn features about the image. The depth of the output volume is our number of filters (i.e., the number of times we scan over the entire image). We apply ReLU to increase computational efficiency. Then we apply pooling to reduce spatial dimensions. We repeat this process a couple of times before we jump into the final classification step.
The input feature map is the representation of the input in pixel values.
A filter (or kernel) is an array of numbers, and these numbers are called weights. Therefore, a filter is also called a weight vector. This weight vector is the same when we slide over the entire image — that is so called weight sharing.
A neuron receives some inputs, performs a dot product and optionally follows it with a non-linearity. As per our example, the neurons on the conv layer take the input feature map as an input, computes dot product with the filter (to find out how much they overlap), and follows with ReLU to increase computational efficiency.
Got it? Now, let's make a prediction!
The last layer is a fully-connected (FC) layer. This means that each neuron in this fully connected layer is connected to all neurons in the previous layer. In the FC layer, the input 2D arrays are flattened into a 1D array, and each value gets a vote on which class it might belong to. Some values get larger votes because they think they match some classes better. These votes are expressed as weights. You can think of this process as an election. In practice, multiple FC layers are used where each intermediate FC layer can vote on "hidden" categories, which lets the network learn more sophisticated combinations of features and thus leading to better predictions.
In this example, we see that the probability that the input image is a bird is 0.98, which ranks the highest. Therefore, we predict that it's a bird! It's amazing, isn't it?
Wait a second. It sounds like a cool story, but where do the features come from? How do we find the weights in our FC layers for the election?
That comes to the training part of the network. Like any other typical supervised learning problems, we want to minimize the loss between predicted label and the actual label. We initialize random weights, forward pass the training images with those weights through the whole network, calculate the loss function, perform backward propagation to determine which weights contributed most to the loss, and perform weight update so that loss will decrease in the next iteration. We repeat this training iteration many times. In the end when the model converges, the model has learned the weights and hopefully is ready for testing.
Wait a second. Is it really ready for testing yet? How do we know how many layers, how many features to use in each conv layer, what are the filter sizes in each conv and pooling layer, how many hidden neurons for each extra FC layer, or what is the value for strides? Here comes to the play of hyperparameter tuning. Unfortunately, hyperparameter tuning is more of an art than science. There is no standard for this. Researchers tend to tune them from experience and community knowledge. The reason is that the network largely depends on the type of data you use. Typical hyperparameter tuning techniques include grid search, random search, hand-tuning, and Bayesian optimization. After you've found your optimized set of hyperparameters, you are ready to go!
Then we have just described a famous model called AlexNet! AlexNet, released by Alex Krizhevsky, won the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) and beat the second place by a significant margin. AlexNet started a deep learning revolution. It was a major milestone in the history of deep learning.
In 2014, a newer model with smaller filters and deeper networks came out, and it was VGG. It was the 2nd place in the ILSVRC that year. Instead of 8 layers like in AlexNet, VGG used 16 layers. It entered the ILSVRC competition, and it proved that the depth of the network is a critical component for good performance. The pain point, however, is that VGG has 140 million parameters, which costs a lot of memory and is extremely slow to train. It is currently the most preferred model in the industry for feature extractions. The winner, GoogLeNet, drastically reduced the number of parameters by implementing something called an inception module and improved with computational efficiency. In 2015, the residual network (ResNet) won the ILSVRC competition. It was so-called "revolution of depth". It featured skip connections and a heavy batch normalization. In 2016, a newer model ResNeXt pushed ResNet to a next level. I encourage everyone who's interested in deep learning to read their papers to learn about the details!
Disclaimer: details of the training process and hyperparameter tuning process are omitted because they are beyond the scope of this blog post. Special thanks to Rudi Chen for reading over and reviewing this blog post.


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Home POLITICS I Never Attacked Obi – Ekweremadu
I Never Attacked Obi – Ekweremadu
Former Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, says at no time did he attack the former governor of Anambra State and presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Mr. Peter Obi, asking the public to discountenance such reports as the work of mischief-makers, who deliberately twisted his innocuous statement out of context.
Ekweremadu said he had no reason whatsoever to attack Obi's ambition, noting that they enjoyed good relationship as brothers and friends, who were both entitled to the political opinions and pursuits.
He was reacting to a news story, which he said that Ndigbo "would never vote for Peter Obi", describing it as political mischief.
He said: "My attention has been drawn to the work of mischief makers, who claimed that I attacked my friend and brother, Mr. Peter Obi, over his presidential ambition. This is far from the truth, as there was no reason to do so in the first place. We are both adults and entitled to our respective political pursuits and inclinations.
"I have also read a statement by one Ugwuoke Ibem Ugwuoke, gloating over the unfortunate attack on my person when I spent several days in Germany a few years ago at my personal cost to meet with several foreign investors for the betterment of Igboland at the invitation of Ndigbo in Germany and with the full knowledge of several Igbo Governors and leaders.
"I have also read his wild insinuations and misrepresentations of my person over my political dispositions, when in actual sense I have stuck out my neck in defence of Igbo interest on a good number of occasions.
"Where was he when in 2007 I led South East Senators to negotiate the release of the leader of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Chief Ralph Uwazuruike from detention?
"Where was he when I took the necessary steps, including galvernising the South East Senate Caucus and notable Ndigbo to see to the release.
~Uche Anichukwu SPA to Ekweremadu.
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<https://www.yourapp.com> is replaced with the URI (with the correct protocol) to which Zoomdata should redirect the browser upon successful login and authorization by the user.
In your application on the page receiving the redirect, extract the access_token parameter from the URI that loaded the page. Popular sites like Stack Overflow can provide guidance on how to extract parameters from the URI used to query a page. For example, see Get URL parameter... in js.
After you have extracted the access token, your application can use it to request a transaction.


Established in 2003, for the past 15 years, the dental practice has specialized in restorative, cosmetic and preventive dentistry as well as Orthodontics.
The Company was started in 2003 by a prior owner. The current owner purchased the practice in 2010. The business has not been relocated and has been in the same location for over 15 years.
The business occupies a 1,915 sq. ft building and pays $4,940 per month and runs annually from May 1st – April 30th. The current lease expires April 30, 2021. The lease is set to increase by 3.5% to $5,110 staring on May 1, 2019. A new buyer will be able to negotiate a new lease with the landlord.
The owner believes the business has the capacity to increase revenue by 35%. There is also an adjacent vacant office that a new buyer could use to expand.
The Owner genuinely desires an effective business transition with seamless customer service through to the buyer. They will train a buyer for 30 days. An additional consulting contract can be obtained.
Seller wants to relocate to California to be with family.


SSRG contributed to policy discussions concerning free and open source software at a meeting with representatives from European open source communities and policy makers from the European Parliament. Based on research conducted by SSRG, a representative from SSRG contributed urgent policy issues. The meeting was organised by OpenForum Europe (OFE) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) on 29 January 2016 in Brussels.
Discussions amongst participants during the meeting.


Whether you live in China or are just travelling there, it is good to be prepared in case of emergencies. That could include learning how to ask some important questions. In this lesson, someone gets the help they need to deal with a theft.


Indian Tandoor is a cornerstone in the San Diego community and has been recognized for its outstanding Indian cuisine, excellent service and friendly staff. Our Indian restaurant is known for its modern interpretation of classic dishes and its insistence on only using high quality fresh ingredients.
Our menu is extensive & offers a wide variety of choices for every taste. We are using iMenu4u Platform for Ordering Food Online which provides 10% Discount on first order after registration and time to time special deals. We hope you will continue to use our services and recommend it to all your friends.
Indian Tandoor offers delicious dining and takeout to San Diego, CA. Indian Tandoor is a cornerstone in the San Diego community and has been recognized for its outstanding Indian cuisine, excellent service and friendly staff.


At Trifork Machine Learning we help companies to innovate by exploring how Machine Learning can help them in their business. Many of our clients have large amounts of textual data that we want to make sense of. This blog post showcases how we can apply Topic Modelling to automatically extract valuable information from real data.
Whenever we are dealing with unstructured textual data, we are often confronted with a huge amount of it. Imagine being a law firm, publishing agency or a historian; the sheer number of documents created and collected makes them very difficult to navigate. If we are lucky, there's a great archival system in place, but often all we have to work with is just a collection of text documents. We could use a little help here to get an idea of the topics of our documents, without having to read them first. For this, we can use a technique called Topic Modelling. I have used Trifork blog posts to showcase how to use Topic Modelling to get value from a large collection of free-form text. In this blog I will explain the experiment which you can find in this jupyter notebook.
Imagine we have a large collection of documents that we want to understand without going through the arduous process of reading each and every one of them. Since we don't have any prior information that tells us the content or subject of each document we have what we call in Machine Learning an unsupervised problem.
Topic Modelling is a great option for this task, since it is an unsupervised technique that aims to find latent topics or themes in a collection of documents. We refer to the topics as latent because they are unknown to us, hence the need for an algorithm to uncover these latent topics.
For this experiment we use posts from the Trifork blog as our collection of documents. These posts are manually assigned a category at posting time and, while we will not make use of these categories to discover the topics, we can use them to validate the outcome of our Topic Modelling. The data is pre-processed using a common pipeline for NLP tasks: tokenization, removing stop words, lemmatization and removing punctuation (which you can see in a jupyter notebook in the repository).
Let's try to understand how Topic Modelling discovers latent topics in textual data. There are several algorithms for this task: Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). These algorithms are not limited to the Topic Modelling domain, for instance, they are also used in recommender systems. In this experiment I will use NMF since it is a popular approach.
A document is a mixture of topics.
A topic is described by several words.
The essence of NMF is to find the k number of topics present in a collection of documents and to determine the degree to which each document and individual word belongs to each topic. The input to the algorithm is a matrix indicating whether a word is present in a document or not (this is called a Bag of Words matrix).
Matrix W contains scores that indicate how much each document belongs to a topic.
Matrix H contains scores that indicate how much each word belongs to each topic.
Using these scores, we can determine the top-n topics to which each document belongs and hopefully give a human interpretable definition to each topic based on their top-n words. Nicolas Gillis gives a nice explanation of the mathematics behind this algorithm if you're keen to learn more .
For the experiment I used the scikit-learn library in Python, which includes an implementation of NMF. Once you have trained an NMF model, you can get the two output matrices and explore the scores. In the image below you can see the vector with the scores for each topic for a given blog post (document). This blog post chiefly belongs to topic 11 (index 11) with a score of 0.6366 and to a smaller extent to topics 1 and 2. Note that these are not probabilities so they should not add to 1.
Snippet of the vector representing a blog post.
Selecting a good number of topics.
Interpreting the result. The resulting topics are represented by a set of words and not by a name or anything that gives them meaning. Therefore, it is up to us to interpret the set of words and identify the meaning behind the topic, if any.
To select the correct number of topics we need a quantitative way to evaluate if the topics are meaningful. The Topic Coherence-Word2Vec (TC-W2V) metric measures the coherence between words assigned to a topic, i.e.: how semantically close are the words that describe a topic. We can train a Word2Vec  model on our collection of documents that will organise the words in a n-dimensional space where semantically similar words are close to each other. The TC-W2V for a topic will be the average similarity between all pairs of the top-n words describing the topic (we define similarity to be 1 when the distance between the words in the n-dimensional space is 0). We then train an NMF model for different values of the number of topics (k) and for each we calculate the average TC-W2V across all topics. The k with the highest average TC-W2V is used to train a final NMF model. In this case, k=15 yields the highest average value, as shown in the graph. The paper on Topic Coherence  also provides several interesting heuristics to help with the analysis and interpretation of the retrieved topics.
Pandas DataFrame showing the words per topic.
From this we can see that the model has found, amongst others, topics about Java, Spring tutorials and the Axon Framework which match the manually assigned categories in the Trifork's blog top menu bar, as seen below.
Top menu bar of Trifork's blog with the predefined categories.
To get a deeper understanding of the topics that have been identified we use pyLDAviz. This tool allows you to interact with the topic distribution; showing us the words assigned to each topic, and the frequency of their usage in the topic and across the corpus. Below you can see the interactive visualisation for the NMF model that I have trained (note that the topic indices in the visualisation do not correspond to the ones shown before). We can see how topic 1 englobes topics 3, 4, 5, 6: topic 1 is about Spring and other frameworks (Axon, Elastic search) commonly used with Spring. Also, it intersects with topics 2 and 7 which are business-related topics, probably about conferences and similar events where these technologies are discussed. There are also smaller topics farther away, whose documents likely aren't related to the other topics as much. As an example, if I were interested in reading about containers I would start with documents assigned to topic 9 in the visualisation (topic 8 in the topics above since they were numbered differently).
You can click on the topics (the circles) in the interactive image below.
Finally, we can also manually explore the documents that are assigned to each topic by using matrix H and checking which topic has the highest score for each document. You can find this process in the jupyter notebook.
After these steps we have a much clearer picture of the content covered in Trifork's blog posts, with our effort expended on automation instead of reading through each and every document. If we wanted to read about the Axon framework we would get the documents assigned to such topic. Moreover, on top of this relatively simple example, we can now develop functionality to automatically assign labels to new blog posts and help authors categorise their work. As you can see, Topic Modelling is a powerful way to navigate and get an insight into the nature of a text corpus, enabling other processes such as summarisation, text analytics and predictive tasks.
 Gillis, N. (2014). The why and how of nonnegative matrix factorization. Regularization, Optimization, Kernels, and Support Vector Machines, 12(257).
 O'Callaghan, D., Greene, D., Carthy, J., & Cunningham, P. (2015). An analysis of the coherence of descriptors in topic modeling. Expert Systems with Applications.


This evening, a bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would fund the government for the rest of fiscal 2015. This appropriations bill combines all twelve appropriations bills that Congress works on during the year and condenses it into a single omnibus bill. This omnibus makes appropriations for all federal agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
NSF: $7.3 billion for FY15. This is a $172 million increase over FY14 appropriations. No policy riders were included in this year's omnibus that would restrict research funding in any field.
NIH: Nearly $30.1 billion for FY15. This is a $150 million increase over FY14 appropriations. This is not higher than biomedical inflation, and thus the agency will see another year of declines in purchasing power. That said, some specific NIH projects will receive a boost. For example, an additional $25 million is directed to the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative. The agency will receive $238 million in emergency funding for Ebola research. This is in addition to its appropriation.
Due to logistical and rules issues in the U.S. Senate, Congress will not be able to pass the full measure before it goes on recess on Dec. 11. We expect that Congress will pass a short, 2 to 3 day continuing resolution, delay the recess and pass the bill early next week.
For more information on funding for federal science agencies, follow the ASBMB Policy Blotter!