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Which GoT Characters Are Most Likely to Get Their Own Spin-Offs?
HBO promised not one, not two, but at least four spin-offs of George R.R. Martin's hit series Game of Thrones (GoT), however its main focus wouldn't be on any of the show's main cast. It makes sense – Westeros and the surrounding lands are thousands of years old, so its scope has to diverge from … More Which GoT Characters Are Most Likely to Get Their Own Spin-Offs?
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HBO will debut the seventh season of Game Of Thrones on July 16, which means we're less than a month away from a return to the Seven Kingdoms. It's one of the most popular shows on television, and with fans well aware that there are only two seasons remaining, people are expecting answers to some … More TV Binge Report: Our Biggest Questions For Game Of Thrones Season 7
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TV Binge Report: Sense8
During some TV binges, there is a specific moment when you just know for sure you're on board. While watching Sense8, that moment came for me in episode four. One character begins singing karaoke—specifically, "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes. As he sings, we see seven other characters, located over the world, begin to sing the … More TV Binge Report: Sense8
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It seems like all everyone has been talking about the past few weeks is Netflix's latest show—Stranger Things. Created by Matt and Ross Duffer and set in small-town Indiana in the 1980s, this show seemingly came out of nowhere. There was little buzz before its release, the premise was largely a mystery, and yet many … More TV Binge Report: Stranger Things
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TV Binge Report: Grey's Anatomy
Now, this is quite an ambitious binge. I say "is" rather than "was" because I am still working on it—I am currently around the middle of season 11, meaning I have spent roughly a full week of my life (spread out over a few months) watching this show. That's not at all disturbing, but I … More TV Binge Report: Grey's Anatomy
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TV Binge Report: Love on Netflix
Girl meets boy. Girl and boy have a lot of issues. Girl and boy treat each other like crap for a while and dance around their feelings. Maybe girl and/or boy learns something from this dysfunctional experience. This formula is more and more apparent in modern day television (and, unfortunately, modern day relationships). You're the … More TV Binge Report: Love on Netflix
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\section{Introduction and Related Work}

Humans routinely encounter a wide range of sounds. These ubiquitous signals range from speech and other humanly produced sounds, to sounds of other organisms, to sounds created by atmospheric interaction with the environment, to mechanically and artificially produced sounds \cite{gemmeke2017audio}. Sound enables communication, engages, and promotes understanding of the world around us. The sounds that we hear from this rich platter are typically transformed by reflections and resonances as the signal interacts with objects and structures. The resonant features of musical instruments, and the directionality of signal propagation affect the sound's timbral characteristics and intensity.
\newline
Humans also tend to favor sounds whose timbre is enriched by reverberation over sounds produced and recorded under anechoic conditions. Although the reasons for such preference are not entirely clear, studies that explore the acoustics of ancient caves inhabited by paleolithic humans suggest that the reverberant qualities of these caves might have functioned as the first auditoriums in which humans experienced sound\cite{fazenda2017cave}. It is conceivable that as early humans found safety and comfort inhabiting caves, they also found comfort in their dwelling's rich acoustical environment\cite{shipton201878}. Furthermore, this may suggest an evolutionary source of human preference for rich reverberant environments. As music developed, vocal sounds, performance practices, and musical instruments adjusted to the acoustical characteristics of the structures in which they were sounded and heard. Listening studies show a preference for reverberated sound. Humans also adjust their playing according to the environment (acoustic space) they are in. Expert performers adjust, often with little or no conscious awareness, how they execute a sound based on the architectural acoustical features. Musicians dislike playing in anechoic environments noting that "the lack of reflection or reverberation is acoustically stifling affecting their playing styles" \cite{maconie2010chapter}. Thus in this work, we allow a neural architecture to determine the optimal room (through the room's impulse response) in which to play a musical sound.
\newline
Neural architectures have revolutionized how people approach traditional signal processing ideas, with advancements in music synthesis via generative modelling\cite{dhariwal2020jukebox,verma2021generative}, audio understanding \cite{verma2021audio} to name a few. With these advancements, neural architectures have become powerful in understanding contents, and synthesis of the audio signals in problems such as speech recognition \cite{baevski2020wav2vec} and audio synthesis \cite{wang2017tacotron}. In the recent literature, neural architectures have been used to evaluate the quality of sound of interest. \cite{verma2019learning} first used a neural architecture to evaluate the sounds of a poor-quality cello, often used by amateur musicians with that of a high-quality cello, often used by expert players. By successfully allowing a neural architecture to rate the quality of the sound, they then used it as a loss function to map a cello sound from poor quality to high quality without having access to an aligned dataset. In some sense, this work is similar with the only difference being that here it is adapted to room impulse responses. There have been other works like using neural architectures to predict mean opinion scores directly e.g. to improve speech synthesis \cite{lo2019mosnet}. \cite{slaney2020auditory} came up with measures that can understand the perceptual qualities of speech signals. The ideas in these works are similar: Humans use some rules to rate audio samples, and a neural architecture can easily learn and mimic these features. The contributions of this work are as follows:

i) To the best of our knowledge across literature we are the first ones to use impulse response as a way to enhance the perceptual qualities of music signal (audio signal)

ii) We learn a perceptual score for the task of our interest using neural architecture and use it to evaluate musical signals that would be transformed using room impulse response. This in a way used correctly, can be used to enhance the perceptual score of a musical signal, by using the room acoustics itself as a perception enhancer filter.

The organization of the paper is as follows: Section 1 introduces the problem with related work. Section 2 describes the dataset used in our work along with the methodology used in section 3. We follow it up with results and Section 5 describing the conclusion and future work.

\section{Dataset} For simulation of various playing conditions, we use impulse responses that we simulated for improving speech recognition in reverberated environments \cite{ko2017study}. Similar to musical acoustics, for speech signals too, room acoustics changes various aspects of audio signals, such as timbre, volume envelops, and attack rate to name a few. The actual room impulse measurements are difficult to acquire, with techniques involving setups but not limited to balloon pops, sweeping sinusoidal signals, etc. \cite{abel2010estimating}. Due to the non-trivial nature of measure room impulse response, we started with using  \cite{ko2017study} as a primary source of IR measurements for our study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest possible resource of a collection of impulse responses in the literature that we came across. We also initially experimented with \cite{traer2016statistics}, which were about 271 real-world impulse responses but did not use them for our study due to the sheer diversity, richness, and size of the IRs generated by \cite{ko2017study}. In speech signals, impulse response measurements are primarily used as a data augmentation tool to enhance the performance, and robustness of speech recognition algorithms \cite{yoshioka2012making}. There are in total about 200 rooms uniformly distributed between small (1-10m), medium (10-30m), and large (30-50m) rooms. For each of the 600 rooms, the height is uniformly sampled from 2-5m with different absorption coefficients and different locations inside a room for every IR. This yields a diverse set of room acoustics.

To evaluate the perception of the sounds, we use recorded individual musical notes as described in \cite{romani2015real}. To acquire a consensus of what constitutes a 'good' versus a 'bad' musical sound, we ask professional performers to rate a collection of single notes in terms of performance quality describing attributes of pitch stability, timbre stability, richness, and attack. As each of these attributes are influenced by characteristics of the room acoustic we show that room acoustics alter the overall perception of musical notes. We choose three instruments, clarinet, flute, and trumpet, for a total of about 2000 notes. A neural architecture is used to mimic the function of human raters via convolutional architecture making it "human-inspired neural scoring function" to evaluate any sound of interest, in our case that passes through a room impulse convolution operation to simulate as if the note was played in a particular room.

\section{Methodology and Setup}
This section describes the methodology used by us, in the proposed work, in three sections. Firstly how to mimic room acoustic via synthetic impulse response, followed by a neural architecture that was used to rate the output of impulse responses.

\subsection{Mimicking Room Acoustics via Synthetic Impulse Response}
For the case of our study, we assume that there is no presence of noise (arising from outside sources or concerning imperfections in the acoustic measurement/noisy impulse responses/measurement noise from room impulse measurement). This can encompass a wide array of settings and can yield simple mathematical modeling and an elegant setup in our case. For the users interested in a systematic simulation of far-field musical sound, they can refer to several techniques one of them being \cite{chechile2017vampireverb}. Reverberation using signal processing algorithms is a field in itself, and \cite{valimaki2016more} describes three main categories of how to carry out reverberation using delay networks, convolution-based methods, and physical models of rooms. For the rest of our work, we would only use a convolution-based method without taking into account the measurement noise and other noises as described in \cite{ko2017study}. Multiple balloon pops were used to create the room impulse responses to recreate the acoustics of Hagia Sophia in Stanford's Bing Concert hall as described by work done \cite{abel2013recreation}. For the current work, we would assume that an impulse response simulated at a location point $p$, in a room $r$ is $h_{pr}[n]$. Then a signal played in an anechoic or reverberated environment $x[n]$ would sound in the room $r$ at point $p$, as $y[n] = x[n] \ast h_{pr}[n]$. For any sound of interest $ x[n]$, we have in total of 60,000 impulse responses.

\subsection{Neural Architecture} We particularly use a convolutional architecture to mimic the perceptual ratings of expert human evaluators. For this, we train small convolutional architectures on 5s of audio. The audio signal sampled at 16kHz was converted into its spectral representation in our case mel-spectrogram, with 10ms hop, and 96 bins yielding a spectrogram representation of shape 96 x 500 corresponding to the time steps for a 5s audio. This representation is fed to a 5-layer convolutional architecture with the following setup: We use 7x7 filters with strides of 5, with 16 filters in the first three layers. The dropout rate \cite{JMLR:v15:srivastava14a} was fixed to be 0.5 to heavily regularize these small architectures.  The number of filters is small, due to about 2000 notes present in the training corpus that has been rated by more than 3 musicians. The output of the last layer is flattened followed by a dense layer of size 256 followed by a single neuron that gives a score between 0 and 1, similar to \cite{verma2019learning}. We choose a score of 0 to represent poor sound quality, and a score of 1 to represent a sound perceived as 'musical'. We only use labels that are agreed upon by 2 or more raters. This is validated on about 200 sounds. The loss function chosen to be Huber Loss \cite{huber1992robust} between the predicted score and the actual rating, primarily to make training robust to outliers, that can perhaps arise from human raters.

We use heavy data-augmentation for musical signals like random volume scaling, random cut-outs, stripping timbral content from spectral, backbone \cite{verma2020framework},  flips (both vertical and horizontal), and adding random noise to improve the robustness of our predictions \cite{mcfee2015software}. These techniques are used in music signal understanding for applications such as audio understanding \cite{verma2021audio,hershey2017cnn} This is primarily done in our setup for two reasons. Firstly, they improve the performance of the task of interest.
Secondly, and more importantly, we have a small high-quality sample of professional musicians as human raters to depend on a variety of factors and not enable the neural architecture to latch onto one-two salient feature.

All architectures were trained for about 50 epochs with validation loss used to come up with the best architecture. Adam optimizer \cite{kingma2014adam} was used with a learning rate of 1e-4 and reduced till 1e-6 or earlier whenever validation loss does not start decreasing. We used Tensorflow \cite{abadi2016tensorflow} framework for all of our experiments.

\subsection{Connecting Perceptual Scores with Room Acoustics for Ranking } With the library of impulse responses simulated for a wide array of room sizes, materials, geometries, and point sources in a single room, we use all 60,000 impulse responses to simulate how a musical note would sound in a particular acoustic environment. To the best of our knowledge, no such study if musical context involving different room exists.
We take musical notes, and create 60k copies of them, mimicking the output of various room acoustics via a simple convolution operation of the musical signal with that of the impulse response of the simulated room. We then use our scoring function to evaluate each of the transformed audio signals, on the attributes learned by neural architecture and use it to pick the best room in which a note should be played. This can also be used to enhance and improve the quality of a sound through the interaction of the acoustical qualities of the space and the sound, and increase the saliency of the musical feature of interest.

\section{Results and Discussion}
This section shows how the room acoustics alter the timbral and the volume dynamics to alter the characteristics of a given note through some quantitative examples.
\subsection{Altering the energy dynamics}
Energy dynamics play a major role in defining perceptual qualities of a given note. \cite{romani2015real} had asked experienced musical raters to describe the characteristics on which they judged, and the timbral characteristics along with energy dynamics played an important role. We through an example here see how the room acoustics was able to alter the energy dynamics. Figure 2 describes a single musical note with little to no presence of energy modulation, sometimes thought of as a feature of aesthetics and exhibiting the overall skill of a musician. This 5s note was initially given a poor score ( less than 0.1) and boosted to be a high score (greater than 0.9), by altering the dynamics of the energy variations.

\begin{figure}[ht]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ica_energy.png}
    \caption{Figure describing a poor note played by a musician (above) and the same note below that was boosted by a room impulse response, as if it was played in a particular acoustic space. It was chosen by our algorithm to maximize the score to improve the quality of the note(below). Notice how energy modulations are present which is considered an embellishment, often ignored in a low-quality sound.
    }
    \vspace{-15pt}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Altering timbre} We via the same example show firstly how the timbre of the note changes. This is just for the sake of demonstration and such behaviour was observed in a wide-array of sounds. We can see in Fig. 3 as to how on left the spectral centroid changes, results in a higher, richer tone as compared to the original sound. Richer sounds are associated with bright, more complex enhanced tones, as compared to lower frequency tones. On the right, we show the optimal room impulse response. One could see how there is a repetitive structure present in the impulse response that can add structure, and energy modulations to the energy envelop that is absent in the note without the interaction with the room acoustics.

\begin{figure}[ht]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ica_timbre.png}
    \caption{Figure on the left showing the spectral centroid and on the right the room impulse response that enhanced the brightness of the sound
    }
    \vspace{-15pt}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Demonstrating Improvement Statistics of Notes}

We through an example, showed how we could alter a single musical note, both in timbre and energy dynamics. In order to show these behaviour across the dataset, we design the following experiment. For 250 notes from a held out validation set only for the low-quality note, we compute the distribution of the scores, and take only those that are below 0.5 or are classified by our algorithm to be of a poor quality. Next, we run it through our dataset of impulse responses, and find the optimum room acoustics to maximise the quality of the sound and note the value passed through our quality assessment architecture.
\begin{figure}[ht]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ica_enhance.png}
    \caption{Qualitative results of a sample subset of 250 musical notes, with low scores and their enhanced score computed as a probability distribution (left) and the distribution of the difference of the scores(right). The x-axis denotes the actual scores on left and the difference of the scores on the right.
    }
    \vspace{-15pt}
\end{figure}

The value (of the enhanced note) now is recorded. For demonstration purposes, we compute the histogram statistics of the following as seen in Figure 4.i) The distribution of the quality of the notes less than 0.5 and the distribution of the notes that are enhanced by picking the best room, and scoring it. ii) The distribution of the difference of the scores between the enhanced output and the initial output. Both of these scores in i) and ii) would lie between [0,1]. We again emphasize that we are using purely room acoustics as a filter to achieve it. We see from Figure 4, that we are able to enhance the score of a majority of sounds, although there still exist a small percentage of notes, that could not be improved upon. This is further validated by looking at the distribution of the difference of the enhanced scores with that of the poor quality notes.

\section{Conclusion and Future Work}
We have successfully demonstrated a pipeline capable of enhancing the perception of a sound with modeled room acoustics by using a large-scale library of recorded/simulated room impulse responses. Using a neural architecture to understand the perceptual properties of a sound, by mimicking human preference ratings we build a neural evaluator that can score an audio signal. This scoring mechanism is used to evaluate a musical sound played in thousands of different acoustic environments by using room impulse responses in our library. The best room acoustics is chosen according to the characteristics of the audio signal, which results in the highest score from the neural evaluator. Doing large scale listening experiments, is something that we have in our pipeline to further validate the current results. Extending this concept beyond musical notes is vastly interesting, and can be useful in a wide spectrum of applications, particularly in speech, with widespread adoption of smart speakers.

\section{Acknowledgements}
This work was supported by the Institute of Human-Centered AI at Stanford University (Stanford HAI) through a generous Google Cloud computing grant for the academic year 2021-22 to carry out computational experiments. We thank both the HAI as well as Google for the initiative. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Templeton Religion. We would like to thank Prof. Chris Chafe for his useful comments about this work. Prateek Verma would also like to thank Robert Crown Library at SLS, and its staff for providing such good workspaces while this work was done during the height of the Omicron surge in Winter 2022.

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Home > Student Works > TDs > Doctoral Dissertations > 2576
Development of a flat-panel x-ray source
Edwin Joseph Grant
Field Emission; MCNPX; Monte Carlo; X-ray source
"A novel flat-panel transmission type X-ray source was developed for both medical and industrial use. Depending on the geometry of the given situation, the flat-panel X-ray source could be used in tomography, radiography or tomosynthesis. Furthermore, the unit could be used as a portable X-ray scanner or an integral part of an existing detection system. The design incorporates a field emission cathode made of ultra-nanocrystalline diamonds (UNCD) doped with nitrogen. These field emitters show good electron output at low power and can be deposited over large areas as is the case with carbon nanotube "forest" (CNT) cathodes. This work presents the first generation of the UNCD based FEA prototype which was manufactured at the Center of Nanoscale Material, within Argonne National Laboratory, with standard microfabrication techniques. The prototype is a 3 x 3 pixel field emission array (FEA), with a pixel size of 225 µm by 225 µm and a pitch of 500 µm. The fabricated cathode was developed using a microfabrication process which allows for individual electrically addressable UNCD gated arrays on-chip which demonstrated monolithic integration of the electron extraction grid.
The transmission target consists of tungsten for X-ray generation, which is sputtered directly upon a thin aluminum sheet as an X-ray filter. A low voltage power supply allows for electron extraction between the cathode and the grid; while a high voltage power supply accelerates the electrons towards the anode. A low energy X-ray high purity germanium detector (HPGe) is mounted outside of the vacuum chamber for X-ray detection and measurement"--Abstract, page iii.
Lee, Hyoung-Koo
Committee Member(s)
Castano Giraldo, Carlos Henry
Alajo, Ayodeji Babatunde
Liu, Xin (Mining & Nuclear Engr)
Al-Dahhan, Muthanna H.
Department(s)
Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science
Ph. D. in Nuclear Engineering
x, 90 pages
Note about bibliography
Includes bibliographic references (pages 86-89).
© 2014 Edwin Joseph Grant, All rights reserved.
Dissertation - Open Access
Thesis Number
T 10997
Electronic OCLC #
Grant, Edwin Joseph, "Development of a flat-panel x-ray source" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 2576.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/doctoral_dissertations/2576
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Discussion in 'Computers, Cabling & Other Miscellaneous Hardware' started by Daemon, Jan 29, 2012.
I use a few grinches and have a mix of ssr's. Some 24v, some 230v and some non dimming power board 230v options as well which I have built.
I have recently inherited a few commercial 230v display items so i need to extend my ssr assortment a bit.
I was wondering if anyone has any other solutions I may not have considered yet besides modified ssr4's and modified power boards.
I would prefer to plug the display items in than cut the cords off but if that turns out to be the easiest option I will just modify some more ssr4's.
I recently purchased 2x computer metal power strips. Mine have 12 outlets. I then designed a smart pcb for 2x triacs and optos that fit between 2x sockets. At the power inlet end, I added 3x RJ45 socket plate.
Any chance of a few photos of them?
Sounds similar to my power boards but mine use crydon chips which do not dim.
I see 'pigtail' is a fairly common term but what exactly is it?
Can you show me an image or a link to what you mean so I can have a look at it?
Do the plug ends stay inside your weatherproof enclosure?


Montauk at the St. Patrick's Day parade: It's not all beer cups and bagpipes. How about the history of the place?
For those interested in such, Carl Fisher, the visionary prewar developer most responsible for the shape the "Miami Beach of the North" was to take, is the subject of a brick-thick biography by Jerry M. Fisher, his grandnephew. "The Pacesetter," first published in 1998, is just out in a new edition from the Friesen Press, a self-publishing concern out west.
Born in middle-of-the-country obscurity in Greensburg, Ind., in 1874, Fisher was an entrepreneur from his teenage years, moving from brilliant marketing during the bicycle craze to making Prest-o-Lite automobile headlamps to earning "Mr. Miami Beach" status as a developer. He was a co-founder and president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500, hence the book's title, and the builder of the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, yet partly as a result of declining to name these monumental projects after himself, Jerry Fisher points out in his preface, in 1938 "Who's Who" didn't know him from Adam.
A most American of stories.


This continues our series on teaching. If you have not already seen them, please check out the earlier essays by Joyce Havstad, Matt Haber, and Adrian Currie.
Does it Matter Where You Do Philosophy?
One sometimes hears it said that "you can do philosophy anywhere." Unlike historians, philosophers do not typically need to visit particular archives. And unlike field scientists, we don't have to travel to any particular location to collect empirical data. Unlike scientists who do experiments, we aren't tethered to our labs either. One former colleague of mine once said that as a philosopher, "I carry my lab around in my head." You can do thought experiments anywhere. If you're a philosopher, all you really need for your research is a laptop, an internet connection, and other people to talk philosophy with. And of course these days, your interlocutors could be anywhere, too.
Although there is much truth in the conventional wisdom that where you do philosophy doesn't matter, the western tradition also includes some important examples of what we might call site-specific philosophy (by analogy, perhaps, with site-specific dance, or theater). Plato's dialogues, for example—with the fascinating exception of the Phaedrus, which involves a field trip of sorts—take place in an urban setting. And it's not just any polis, but Athens. This context—this place—is so crucial to the philosophical action that at times it almost seems like the city itself is a character. Actually, in Plato's Crito, the place is (sort of) a character, when Socrates imagines the laws of the city showing up for a philosophical conversation. The problem of how people should relate to the place where they live their lives—in this case, the Athenian polis—is central to many of Socrates's conversations. It is no coincidence that when the chips are down, Socrates prefers to remain in his particular place, even if it means a death sentence, rather than accept the apparently milder penalty of banishment. Nor can his friends convince him to escape with his life and continue philosophizing somewhere else in exile. It's hard to imagine a more powerful statement about the embeddedness of philosophy in places, or a clearer rejection of the idea that it doesn't matter where you do philosophy.
Of course, other philosophers pushed back against this. Although the stoics drew much of their inspiration from the life of Socrates, they also embraced cosmopolitanism and insisted that their "polis" is the whole world. In doing so, they explicitly rejected the Platonic commitment to site-specific philosophy. It's a fun irony that the term "stoicism" derives from the name for a particular site: The stoa was the painted portico in Athens where the school got its start. Even cosmopolitanism emerged from a particular place, and a particular milieu.
This disagreement in the ancient world about the relevance of place to philosophy still resonates. What might a site-specific philosophy look like today? Could—and should—philosophy of science be done in a site-specific way? What would it be like to teach philosophy of science in a site-specific way?
Connecticut College students examining trackways at the Beneski Museum of Natural History in Amherst, MA. Thanks to our delightful host, Fred Venne, for giving us the complete "tour" of Connecticut Valley geological history. The trackways were collected by Edward Hitchcock in the 1830s. Photo by Derek Turner.
I've taught at Connecticut College for a good number of years now, but very little of my teaching thus far has been site-specific. For example, when I teach Intro to Philosophy, I usually design the course historically, using primary texts, starting with Plato's Gorgias or Symposium and moving on to other favorites from the western tradition. For such a course, the where does not matter much. You could teach the same course pretty much anywhere. Even my classes on environmental philosophy are somewhat disconnected from the place. You could relocate the class pretty much anywhere without any loss.
This year, however, our institution is launching a new general education curriculum. (You can read a little bit about it here.) One piece of that new curriculum involves rethinking introductory courses. We're shifting the emphasis from good old-fashioned introductory courses like Intro to Philosophy to interdisciplinary 100-level courses on cool topics, such as dinosaurs. This fall, I'm teaching such a course on "The Meaning of Dinosaurs"--an homage to M.J.S. Rudwick, whose classic book on the history of paleontology Joyce reviewed in an earlier post. The course provides a broad introduction to the history, philosophy, and social/cultural studies of dinosaur paleontology. We're discussing everything from the debate about Triceratops and Torosaurus, to The Land Before Time (I'm hoping that Leonard will write a philosophical review!), to the possibility that dinosaurs might be overrated.
It's a bit awkward to write publicly about a class that's underway—my students might be reading this. I'll wait to hear their assessment of things at the end of the semester. But one thing I've noticed is that for the first time ever, my teaching has gotten very site-specific. All of a sudden, now that I'm really trying to teach the philosophy of paleontology, I find myself wanting to help the students develop more of a connection to place. This has affected the content of the course, as well as the format. We're reading about the history of paleontology in New England, and also learning about New England's geological history.
And in keeping with Adrian's excellent advice from last week, we're doing field trips. Just recently, we visited the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College. This is a gem of a museum, a relatively easy day trip from our own campus in New London, Connecticut. The museum is in the very heart of New England's dinosaur country, although the specimens we're looking at in the picture below are not from this region.
At the Beneski Museum of Natural History. Interestingly, the Dryosaurus on the left is quite rare, and comes from the same formation in Wyoming as the Diplodocus forelimbs on the right. This was on the way to the collection of ichnofossils in the basement.
When we think of "dinosaur country," it's natural to picture harsh and exotic locations, like the Bisti Badlands of New Mexico, or the Gobi desert, places with names like "Hell's Canyon," or "The Flaming Cliffs," or "Bone Cabin Quarry." Places like Rocky Hill, Connecticut (home of Dinosaur State Park) and South Hadley, Massachusetts, do not top the list.
But they should, and the fact that they don't says much about the place of dinosaurs in our culture, and how our thinking about dinosaurs here in the U.S. is wrapped up in the mythology of the "wild west." The first recognizably scientific collection and description of dinosaur fossils in North America took place in western Massachusetts in the 1830s, several years before Richard Owen coined the term "Dinosauria." Edward Hitchcock, a professor at Amherst College (and later president of the college), collected many three-toed tracks from the Connecticut River valley. With no small amount of prescience, Hitchcock argued that these were made by giant birds—he called them "Brontozoa." His confidence in this interpretation grew when he learned that Richard Owen had successfully predicted the fossils of giant birds in New Zealand--the moas--based on examination of fragmentary evidence that someone had brought back to England. (Btw, this is another example of Cuvier-style inference from a sample of 1 that Adrian celebrates here.) Today, Hitchcock's collection lives in the basement of the Beneski museum.
Why is there a volcanic ridge in the middle of the Connecticut Valley? For much of the Triassic period, some 230 – 200 million years ago, western Massachusetts and central Connecticut was a rift valley, quite like the rift valley in East Africa today. At the time, the region lay near the equator, and the supercontinent Pangaea was just beginning to break up, with what is now Africa and Europe tearing away from what is now North America. You had mountains rising on either side of the rift valley, and a lot of volcanic activity in a region where the earth's crust was stretched and under pressure from below. If you know where to look, as Emily Dickinson apparently did, you can see lots of evidence of this episode. In the town where I live, there is a weird ridge called the "Higganum Dike" that runs for many miles southwest to Northeast, and is bisected by the Connecticut River. It's a volcanic basalt dike that formed around 200 million years ago when magma emerged from vents and flowed laterally across the ancient valley floor. No river flowed through the valley back during the Triassic, but shallow lakes and ponds attracted the local wildlife, including lots of dinosaurs that strolled along muddy shores.
In an earlier post, I argued that one central goal of paleontology is aesthetic: Empirical knowledge of deep prehistory can enhance and enrich our sense of place. Natural science can help enchant the landscape, and can deepen our aesthetic engagement with it. This, perhaps, is what's going on in Dickinson's poem, "Vesuvius at Home." But if this picture gets things right at all, then site-specific teaching also begins to make a lot of sense. Perhaps one goal of a course on the history and philosophy of dinosaur paleontology should be to help students develop more of a connection to the region, by learning more about its geological history, as well as the history of attempts by locals to make sense what they are seeing around them.
Chet Raymo and Maureen Raymo, Written In Stone: A Geological History of the Northeastern United States. Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 2001.


Another packed episode as we prepare for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2018. This episode we chat to Yomi & Corey about their Clockwork Watch event at this years festival. The event which leads up to a live immersive event on Saturday night features students from Kendal college and we have two of them on the show to discuss their involvement too. Ryan Cooke and Honor Short talk about their characters and how they worked with Yomi to develop this event. Check out the stories the students have created at the Clockwork Watch website.
We review Wolf by Rachael Ball and My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips & Jacob Phillips plus discuss the new Netflix animation Hilda based on Luke Pearson's comics.
Finally we all discuss the festivals opening event. Ian and Nikki discuss their opinions on Marvel vs DC then Pete and Mike join forces again for an extra long special and delve into their choices for which is the best. The cover art for this episode has been done by Pete too.
In this episode we chat to the creators of the SelfMadeHero published book Tumult, John Harris Dunning and Michael Kennedy. These two fine gentleman talk about the creative process of the book and their history within the industry and how it came to be. The book itself is a superb thriller which we reviewed in a previous episode.
Mike gives us a run down on the comics he's recently been reading and we review Unseen by Emma Donnelly and The Times I Knew I was Gay by Eleanor Crewes. Pete takes a well deserved holiday this episode however we are interrupted by a brief news report from The Clockwork Watch….
Check out our friends too at the That Comic Smell podcast if you want more comic goodness to listen too.
Matt Garvey is our guest on todays episode. He has written a whole host of comics including The Either, Chunks, White Noir and The Devil in Disguise. We talk about how he got into writing comics and how he goes about promoting them. Ensure you check him out on twitter as he is well worth the follow.
We talk about the new kick starter from Little Comic Heroes and their new anthology comic. They're a great cause and give comic kids to kids stuck in hospitals. We also review The Mind of James Svengal by Lyndon White and Jordan Sam Adams. A dark look into the twisted mind of a troubled man.
Pete finishes his look at the life and times of Kirby which we will look at putting together as a whole piece soon. Pete's put so much work into this so thank you Pete and make sure you check out his Monster Kids comic too. Mike reviews some comics he's been reading whilst on a work road trip. We look at the latest news from the festival and update you on Nikkis comic too. Now available to buy from her Big Cartel shop.
We took a trip out to Oldham to the Oldham Comic Con 2018 held on Saturday 12th May. We had a great time and it really was a well ran event. We grabbed a load of interviews which you can hear on the show. These include chats with Lee Overton & Pete Davis, John Slater & Mike West, Tazio Battin, Yasmin Sheikh, Sam Chapman, Dan Whitehead and Nigel from Mayamada. We also look at the new free comic Jack and Lucy by Rachael Smith and Jacob Phillips which looks at two troubled teens trying to figure out their personal problems.
Mike also has a treat for us this episode and chats to Rob Burman from Mantic Games. Mantic has created a board game based on the Hellboy comics and its currently on kickstarter. Mike talks to Rob about the kickstarter, the game itself and of course Hellboy. Pete continues the Kirby profile, this time between the years 1966 and 1970 where Kirby leaves Marvel for DC.
We shout out all the news from the festival too.
In this episode we chat to Jerome Saincantin about his role as a translator for Cinebook. Cinebooks are publishers of best selling European books in the English language. There titles include Valerian, Lucky Luke and XIII to name but a few. Jerome talks about the success of comics in Europe and which comics in particular we should be enjoying. We also chat to Joel Meadows about Portsmouth Comic Con which is being held on 5th and 6th of May 2018.
We review the Cinebook comic Orbital and give our spoiler free verdict on Avengers Infinity War. Pete continues his look at Kirby this time focusing on the early years at Marvel… 1961 to 1966. Mike talks about all of the annual geek event days around May including Star Wars day and free comic day.
We update you on all the latest news from the festival including the auction which starts on May 1st 2018.
We do treat you all so well as this episode we have two interviews. First we have a chat with Leonard Sultana from the website An Englishman in San Diego. We discuss his love of comics, the future of DC movies, the San Diego Comic Con and the UK con scene. We also have a chat with Chris Butcher and Andrew Butcher about the Toronto Comic Con and scene over there. We recorded this in October 2017 just before the LICAF at a joyful pub so ignore the background noise.
We talk about two new kick starters, one from The Etherington Brothers and the other Nick Prolix. We also shout out about the first lot of announced guests to the 2018 Lakes International Comic Art Festival… and its good. Keep an eye out too for a brand new show from us… called My Neighbour, it will be a monthly Ghibli based review show.
Mike talks about how his comic tastes have changed and how he's reading more. In particular he looks at Monstrous. Pete continues with part 5 of Jack Kirby's life looking at the years 1955 to 1958. A short time frame but a very important one in Jacks career. We close the show with some music from a local band based in Lancaster called Promethium. Some would say you need to bow to the god of metal but I say just rock. The track's called Shell Shock from their new album Faces of War.


If you are a fan of true life crime stories, do yourself a favor a make a point to watch Investigation Discovery, or ID as it's often referred to. It is without a doubt our favorite channels at the G house. It's one of the few things my wife and I can agree on to watch.
A nearly 40-year-old Evansville case will be in the spotlight this week on the new ID show Dead of Winter. The episode, titled "Midnight Mass," will look at the nearly 40-year-old murder of the Gilligan family in Evansville. Donald Ray Wallace, Jr. was convicted of the 1980 murders. He was sentenced to death and eventually executed.
The story airs this Thursday, February 21st at 9pm on Investigation Discovery.


text:
Lives Lost: Alabama Medal of Honor winner downplayed heroism
FILE- In this Sept. 15, 2014 file photo, President Barack Obama bestows the Medal of Honor on retired Army Command Sgt. Maj. Bennie G. Adkins in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Adkins was deployed three times to Vietnam with the Special Forces and is being recognized for actions during his second combat tour, in 1966, when he ran wounded through enemy fire to drag injured comrades to safety. Adkins died of coronavirus on April 17, 2020 at the age of 86. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
May 6, 2020 10:06 PM PT
Decades after the Vietnam War, retired Army Command Sgt. Maj. Bennie Adkins had a simple way of explaining how he survived mortar attacks and rifle bullets that killed so many people all around him.
"It was not my day," he'd say.
Then the coronavirus found Adkins and felled its first Medal of Honor recipient on April 17.
Adkins, 86, was an Alabama war hero who returned home to become an accountant, teach night courses to adults trying to better themselves and launch a nonprofit foundation awarding scholarships to veterans.
The resident of the small city of Opelika received the nation's highest military honor from then-President Barack Obama during a 2014 White House ceremony.
While deeply honored and humbled, Adkins deflected attention from his courageous actions fighting off waves of enemy attackers at a strategic point in South Vietnam.
"What I did is not heroic. What I did was ... that was my job. That was what I was trained for. That was I was paid for as a professional soldier and I was trying to do the job in a professional way," Adkins said in an oral history project for the Library of Congress after the award ceremony.
Adkins died three weeks after being admitted to the same hospital where one of his five children, Dr. Keith Adkins, works as a surgeon.
The son said his father was married for 60 years and gave back whatever he could around Opelika, an old railroad town of about 31,000 people near Auburn University, helping others not only in wartime but also at home.
"We want his legacy to be not just what he did in the military," said Keith Adkins, who wasn't involved in his father's care. "We want to show that character that he had and what it led him to do when he was out of the military."
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part of an ongoing series of stories remembering people who have died from coronavirus around the world.
Born on a farm in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl drought that reduced much of the topsoil in the central U.S. to powder, Adkins was in the middle of seven children.
"We learned to work, we learned to be conservative, and with a large family, we learned to share," he said.
More interested in women than academics after entering college, Adkins dropped out and was soon drafted. He liked the idea of the military as a career but wanted more than an administrative position or regular infantry job. So he applied for the Special Forces, made it through a lengthy training regimen and landed in Vietnam in 1963 for the first of three tours.
About three years later, at age 32, that Adkins fought the battle that brought him a lifetime of accolades.
A sergeant first class at the time, Adkins was in charge of a mortar crew at a U.S. military camp in the A Shau Valley of South Vietnam, near the border with Laos, when the Viet Cong opened fire on March 9, 1966.
He ran through exploding mortar rounds to drag several troops to safety, according to his medal citation, and then exposed himself to sniper fire to carry wounded comrades to medical care.
The main attack came a day later. Though wounded and with most of his crew dead or wounded, Adkins fought off waves of attackers from a mortar pit and then killed many more enemy troops from a communications bunker. Adkins suffered 18 wounds - including to an eye and his torso - but killed at least 135 enemy troops.
During the battle, Adkins recounted, bullets hit and killed a wounded man he was carrying on his back to safety. At another point, Adkins, a one-time baseball catcher, snagged a North Vietnamese hand grenade in mid-air another time and hurled it back at the enemy.
Finally ordered to evacuate the camp, Adkins escaped with a few others into the jungle and they were rescued two days later by a helicopter. That ending might have been much different - but for a tiger that was also in the jungle.
"This tiger could smell the blood on us, and surrounded us, and the North Vietnamese soldiers that had us surrounded was more afraid of the tiger than they were of us. They backed off and gave us room and we were gone again," said Adkins, who co-authored a 2018 book about his wartime exploits titled "A Tiger Among Us."
After retiring from the Army in 1978 after more than 20 years, Adkins earned a bachelor's degree in finance and master's degrees in management and education from Alabama's Troy University while running an accounting firm in Auburn.
For years, Adkins taught night classes at two colleges and a jail for adults seeking their high school equivalency degrees. And in 2017, he established The Bennie Adkins Foundation, which has provided about 50 educational scholarships to Special Forces soldiers.
"He was really committed to help others advance themselves," said Katie Lamar Jackson, who co-authored Adkins' book.
Adkins' family plans for him to be buried beside his wife Mary, who died last year, at Arlington National Cemetery. But it's impossible to say when that might happen because of the pandemic.
"We're not even going to have a local funeral now," his son said. "There is no way we can follow the social distancing rules and have a funeral."
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Blog Skilz > Website Niches > Which Affiliate Marketing Niches Work?
Affiliate marketing niches are everywhere! There's absolutely no end to profitable niches of people to market to online.
So stop thinking you just can't find one that works for you.
The first thing you need to get settled in your mind is just what a niche is and how it relates to your affiliate marketing efforts.
To help you get started try reading this post: What is a Website Niche?
1. Is there Money being spent online?
2. Are people passionate about their problems?
3. Are there any affiliate products for the niche?
4. Is there any competition?
When you're just starting out with affiliate marketing you should probably forget impulse buyers, and focus all of your energy and efforts on solving real problems for real people.
There are many thousands of people online everyday looking for answers in each of these niches.
Get it? Most any of those topics will have small groups of people within them, and affiliate marketing is about locating and isolating those smaller groups.
If you're having a difficult time coming up with a niche, stop everything and make your own list. The list above took me as long as it took me to type the letters, and I can think of thousands more, and they all work for affiliate marketing.
It's almost impossible to think of a problem that someone needs to solve without finding an affiliate product or network to provide the solution. So, in a nut shell, if you can think of a problem yourself or someone else is having, it's good for affiliate marketing.
And don't get hung up thinking a problem is something earth shattering, either. I am presently having a problem with which WordPress theme to use on an affiliate website.
I am about to spend time researching themes and websites that display and explain the benefits of various WordPress themes. Someone online is going to help me solve that problem.
My wife is trying to decide which strain of tomato plants will work best in our climate and soil? If you know anything about gardening you could start a tomato website, and help her out. Do a search on places like ClickBank and I would bet you can find an eBook to sell as an affiliate product. Get the picture, yet?
There's a lot of back and forth talk about how important passion is to picking a niche, so you'll have to answer that one for yourself. I can tell you that as a beginner, if you have no passion at all for what your blog is about — you're likely to get tired of it pretty quickly.
Check out this post if you're wondering how to get started with affiliate marketing.
Some marketers have many different affiliate niche sites, and their only passion is for making money. I can assure you there's nothing wrong with that business model, but for beginner bloggers I think it's bad news.
Affiliate websites are made up of content, a lot of content sometimes, and you are either going to write post yourself, or pay someone to write them. My own rule of thumb is about 100 post and 6 months to a year to get it going. Even though I am pretty good at researching and writing content — if my interest in the topic wanes — it's a real pain to make myself go on.
Not only are you going to be researching and writing blog post for your audience, you may be writing guest post to help get traffic to your site. If you're not interested in your niche, your writing will suffer and getting guest post will be almost impossible. You'll need some degree of passion to make your affiliate site work.
To be honest every niche isn't profitable online. Remember that a niche is any group of people attempting to solve a problem online, right?
A ton of people are trying to decide the best place to buy a car, but few are making automobile purchases online from affiliate sites. So I'm saying that's a niche, but not a profitable one.
On the other hand, millions of people are attempting to solve weight, relationship, and health problems online. And they're spending a ton of money on those niches too.
Here we are back to passion? This time the people who land on your website need to be passionate about solving their problems.
Dating, making money online, curing psoriasis or hemorrhoids are niches that people need urgent help with: they're passionate to solve the problem and willing to spend money to get it done.
Hobbies like cooking, travel, sports, golf, running are all places where there's a lot of passion and a lot of money being spent online.
It's a good idea to find affiliate products to promote before you get too deep into building your first affiliate website. You don't want to spend precious time building a site with content and links only to learn you can't find a product you really want to represent to your readers.
As you come up with ideas for your niche site. Not only do you want a product, but you will do much better with a product you really believe in. It won't take long for a reader to know whether or not you trust the product to solve their problem, or you're just a peddler?
Believe it or not, you need competition! To start with, you don't want to re-invent the wheel, and if there's no competition, it's a good sign there's no money to be made. So don't waste your time looking for affiliate niches that have no competition. There's a reason no one is going after that possible audience!
And back to not re-inventing the wheel. Don't be afraid to model your site after your competition. Now, I am definitely not saying to clone someone elses website, but why not study their affiliate site and take their strong points for yourself.
It's not difficult to come up with a niche that works for affiliate marketing online, but that's only the bare beginning. If you can see yourself operating and maintaining an online business that makes money for the long haul — do yourself a favor and learn affiliate marketing from the best!
Here's your Absolutely Free look into the Worlds Premiere Affiliate Marketing University. This is the place to learn how to to choose a niche, the best affiliate products to represent, how to start a website business, and what to do to make it profitable.
You'll be learning from people who have already made it work for themselves and are still quite involved in affiliate marketing as a long term business model. Have a look for free right now!
Are You Marketing To Search Engines Or Buyers?


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Letter to the Editor: Fact checking the OHV story
Lorne Fitch, Professional Biologist - When Winston Churchill was accused of lying, he termed his absence of truth a "terminological inexactitude", the Trump administration has coined "alternative facts" and what the OHV lobby engages in ranges from "careless with the truth" to outright whoopers. It's worth disassembling some of the whoopers told by some in the OHV group.
The first is the one about "purpose built ATV trials" that are, "properly designed and engineered", to be "environmentally integrated". This is nonsense; the routes used are old seismic trails, logging roads, pipelines, powerlines and ones carved out by cross country travel. Mr. Gary Clark of the Quad Squad would have us believe OHVs operate on yellow brick roads; nothing could be further from the truth.
OHV groups, like the Quad Squad, have, to their credit undertaken some small projects to deal with some of the issues. However, listening to Mr. Clark you would think they were the first, the only and the most significant agent of change on the landscape. The Habitat Branch of the Fish and Wildlife Division was active in the 1980s and 1990s and built or organized the construction of over 350 stream restoration projects. This was followed by Trout Unlimited who have undertaken dozens of restoration and clean-up projects. Following them have been industry related projects and ones done by Cows and Fish and the Oldman Watershed Council.
While the Quad Squad constantly reminds us of the money they have invested, remember the lion's share was from government grants. As to the "thousands of volunteer hours", while I'm sure there has been considerable effort, these are unaudited numbers and there is a tendency to add a zero or two to the actual number.
Rather than reading a scientific journal on the impacts of noise and traffic on wildlife, Mr. Clark invokes random observations of wildlife behavior to conclude the science is all bunk. He also contends wildlife numbers are going up in spite of OHV traffic, especially grizzlies and wolverines. Yes, grizzly numbers are up in southwestern Alberta, but the evidence suggests female bears, key to population persistence are avoiding the Forest Reserve, probably because of high traffic volumes. Wolverine populations are, based on the latest research, declining.
Lastly, Mr. Clark feeds a paranoia about science and distrust of those that provide us the results of science inquiry. Science seems ever under attack, by those who do not like the message, feel it impairs their freedom, limits their business and doesn't match their ideology.
Science holds up a mirror. Sometimes we don't like what's reflected but that doesn't mean the image is wrong, but rather we are confronted by reality.
Lorne Fitch, Professional Biologist


Join us and over 2200+ attendees for the world's largest super affiliate conference. Find the elite of the affiliate industry and explore endless networking opportunities.
During January 7-9, 2018, more than 6,000 digital marketers from over 70 countries will gather in Las Vegas for the performance marketing industry's premier global event, Affiliate Summit West 2018. Meet us there!
GSMA Mobile World Congress is the meeting place for the leaders of the mobile and related industries. Join us there to learn the new launches and announcements in all things phone, tablet and wearables.


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Schönherz ist der Familienname folgender Personen:

Edda Schönherz (* 1944), deutsche Fernsehjournalistin und Autorin
Richard Schönherz (* 1947), österreichischer Musiker
Zoltán Schönherz (1905–1942), ungarischer Kommunist und Widerstandskämpfer

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia