We're all held captive by something, but as the Church we are called to be held captive by Christ's love for the sake of others.
We, the Church, are called to be salt and light; To preach the Gospel, the good news that God loves people and is reconciling the world to Himself and that a King has come and He wants us to bring heaven to earth.
God has placed a greatness inside every one of us. Sometimes the challenge is seeing ourselves, and the people around us with the same eyes The Lord looks at us with.
Pastor Kristina speaks about the power of a life transformed by the love of God and how, through a deep understanding of God's acceptance and love for us, we can begin to truly love others just like Christ.
Pastor Justin gives us an encouragement to accept the perspective that God has made everything beautiful in its time and that we have no need to fear the unknown because of this truth.
In the Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant not represented God's presence, but also was an invitation to relationship between God and Man. Pastor Craig reminds us of the importance of putting The Lord at the center of every aspect of our lives.
The final step in our four-part class designed to be the doorway into community at Victory Faith. Step four helps you make a difference by introducing you to Victory Faith Teams.
Don't go on this journey alone! Pastor Justin talks about how you can explore groups and get plugged in at Victory Faith.
The way God designed you helps reveal the great destiny he has for you. This is the second part of a four-part course, introducing you to everything you need to know about diving into life at Victory Faith.
A review of 2018 and a look into what we believe 2019 might hold for Victory Faith.
The first in a four-part course designed to introduce you to everything you need to know about diving into life at Victory Faith.
Valley Campus Pastor, Trevor Seaman, encourages us with the words of King David: "Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere".
Could it be we are not doing what the early church did? Are we acting like the 21st century American Church acts and expecting the results of the 1st Century Church got?
One word can change everything. As we are beginning this New year, Pastor Monie Lotze encourages us to seek God and find out what one word will guide the course of 2019.
Pastor Justin outlines the power and victory that lies in setting our sights on the more that God has for us in the new year.
Jesus was called the prince of peace, but what does a life in Christ's peace really look like?
Victory Faith's Senior Pastor, Craig Lotze, gives fresh perspective to the Christmas story.
A special video message by Pastor Justin Sabestinas. We are reminded that progress does not come without meaningful change. What is it that God is calling you to change to make more room for the dream of God in your life?
Pastor Monie challenges us to make thankfulness a part of our daily lives, reminding us that through a poster of gratitude, we allow God's presence in our lives to be magnified.
Pastor Craig finishes up our community series and warns against the temptation within relationships to become offended—challenging us to care for one another by living in unity together.


text:
Q: (failed) ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES requests in Chrome The page makes about 40 navigator.sendBeacon() calls to the same endpoint during and before rendering of the body, but sometimes a number of them result in a failed request with timing as "stalled".
I think I need to refactor the code and maybe queue the stringified objects and call sendBeacon() at a less busier timing, but I have no idea how
Thanks in advance!
The called function is
const fireAway = obj => {
  obj.hostname = _domain
  obj.referrer = _referrer
  obj.isMobile = _isMobile
  navigator.sendBeacon(_endpoint, JSON.stringify(obj))
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Falls Church, Virginia, February 23, 2017 — Pivotal Point, LLC (Pivotal Point) is pleased to announce recognition by Washington Technology on its Fast 50 for the second consecutive year, which highlights the fifty fastest growing small companies on the government contract market.
The Washington Technology Fast 50 List is published by Washington Technology. Washington Technology is the authoritative source of competitive intelligence for executives providing contract services to the government market. They rank the fastest growing small-business contractors in the government market. The rankings are calculated based on their compound annual growth rate from 2011 through 2015 for the final published 2016 list.


text:
Social Extinction
devouring society one malnourished dream at a time
How marriage has failed mankind
Mother-EFFIN long weekend.
I was off on Friday and the prospect of Tuesday pains me because each ticking second on that remorseless clock signifies that I'm one step closer to boarding that stinking bus tomorrow morning and heading back to my paradisiacal corporate monkey sector job.
I love time off work for all the obvious reasons; but also because it allows me time to think and think and fucking think. Too much thinking can be detrimental to my sense of ignorant well-being yet I crave it.
And I can read and read and mortify my humble ass into submission.
The End of Men, an apocalyptic tale of the doomed path of modern Man. And this morning, Safe times are tough times for heroes over on agnostic's blog.
The concepts distilled individually from both readings coalesced, were "married," in my holiday-relaxed mind.
Isn't it the natural inclination for a thinking person, when confronted with specific phenomena driven by the rapidly accelerating nature of human society, to wonder as to the Why and the How?
We seek to reverse engineer the phenomena. Perhaps take a step, or two, back. Take in the whole picture, which is difficult, for this means we must defang the qualities of modern history, most of which occurred in our pre-maternal absence. We must reassemble factual tidbits based on our knowledge of eras past and this involves a lot of [filling in the blanks].
For instance, Why and How have we reached a point in human history where females have claimed the historic male ability to triumph over the current landscape of humanity? Theories abound in this blogosector and most participants are not shy about pitching in their two cents. Personally I don't think the How is vitally important, yet that seems to be an equally discussed bone of contention. The Why is what matters. The Why is the only tool available to Man which will allow him to take control of his balls once again and perhaps his natural dominance over society. Maybe. The Why speaks to inherent flaws in our mentality which can be addressed, in theory, and perhaps overcome, whereas the How only speaks to how these flaws have manifested themselves in the gender dystopia of the modern age.
Do you hear it? The chorus of women's voices cheering in joyful, delusional unison? They do not seek to sort out the ramifications of such a society…for it is true that many women of our modern age are content to merely revel in the attention and glory of their ascendance without giving a second thought to the dystopic vision they marvel at.
"Why do we care? It's time for women to finally rule!"
Little do they realize or care that the same male dominance they denigrate is the one which built the society and infrastructure which affords women the time and resources to paint their nails and hair, to buy large houses which they can decorate in fits of extravagance, to drive expensive cars to nice restaurants where they can chatter glibly over plates of food. Male dominance built this world which womanhood enjoys the spoils of so selfishly. Women have hijacked the freedom and liberties man has created while distorting them in order to create a world that has neutered men. They have usurped man's arsenal and aimed it back at him and man can only watch the unfolding cultural shift from a position of utter powerlessness and humiliated weakness. I'm reminded of an X-Files episode in which the "villain" has the ability to manipulate his victim's thoughts and coerce them into taking their own lives; I feel that is the same dynamic womanhood has mimicked in order for man to essentially sublimate his superiority and trade it in for a sense of inferiority. Man has been tremendously weakened. I don't believe women have necessarily excelled to such stratospheric levels of academic and career achievement solely by virtue of intelligence or personal ethics. I think they have been helped and aided by the complicit help of man, en masse, as he has dropped out of relevant society and become a buffoon and co-conspiratorial wuss. I should not say "men" – I really mean "Man." For it's a group effort, with many, many outliers and glaring examples of men who have not fallen into the trap, but societal trends are written by groups, not individuals. And Man, the group, has fallen pitifully short in modern society. He has relinquished control to Woman, to his female counterpart, to his…wife.
Yes, his wife.
It's very obvious to me.
The most important consideration when explaining the fledgling supremacy of the human female is that this is a dynamic which has engraved itself into the soul of civilization over thousands of "civilized" years. It did not happen overnight, or even in the span of one generation. We'd like to think this, we'd like to blame Hollywood or feminism or the liberal nanny state, but these are merely symptoms of a deeper underlying cultural transformation that has been occurring for spans of time longer than we can comprehend in our limited, human lifetime world view. We give ourselves too much credit while we bitterly write this all off as a conscious effort on the part of assorted demographic groups who gather in complicit armies set to overturn civilization as we know it. Human social evolution is exponential; each evolutionary leap, each step, is fueled by a previous leap which in turn was also fueled by a previous leap…and thus a paradigm shift occurring now is really fed by countless layers of historic shifts which rested on the shoulders of a previous paradigm shift. In other words, change now is compounded, and would probably be nearly unrecognizable from the perspective of someone witnessing present events from a time machine in an era just 50 or 85 years ago.
The "officialized" state of marriage is the underlying cultural component which has laid the groundwork leading to our current gender dystopia. As I've said before, I feel uncomfortable criticizing marriage. I know enough happily married couples that I feel I must add that my opinion on marriage's responsibility for the state of our world is essentially a value-free assessment. The point is, I am speaking of a dynamic which spans thousands of years, not just a blip on the radar of time which a generation or two denotes. The occasional presence of a healthy marriage suffused with the natural gender roles on the part of husband and wife does not disprove the overriding ages-old effect that this institution has left on the current skewed gender roles in society.
Marriage is to blame.
The recognized union of man and woman in a mutual cohabitation which presumes that each part is relatively equal in the eyes of society. This is not natural, not in the primal, evolutionary sense.
Man and woman are evolutionary rivals.
This is key.
We are not enemies, contrary to the general impression you get from many in in the MRM. I dislike feeding into the MRA mindset…I find MRA types bitter and helpless and their subtle (and not so subtle) misogyny is not very amusing. I love women and I don't believe they are consciously banding together in order to defeat man. The forces of social nature are larger and embedded so deeply in our cultural being that they are untouchable to those looking to make individual marks.
Man and woman are rivals, therefore they function optimally when allowed to remain separated as much as possible save for moments nature sees fit to bring them together (ie, mating). That which enables and allows men and women to come together in order to "cooperate" under the mutual auspices of social arrangements which are constructed by societal laws and mores in order to create a dynamic of equality can only result in a skewed interrelationship resulting in the male losing his naturally endowed strength and woman's leeching off this strength in order to meet her own ends. This dynamic has had thousands of years of wedded generations to embed itself and distort primitive gender relationship. A rivalry implies separation of parallel goals while both parties nevertheless remain bonded by a common interest within the larger context. For man and woman, the larger context here is propagation of the species; yet, their immediate goals due to their conflicting natures are best left separate. Thus clarified, a dynamic in which the male rules absolutely is most natural and conducive to seamless breeding. In such a natural state of separation, the disparate goals will be allowed to exist and the species to flourish. However, brought together in an artificially induced union (god love religion!) nature is defeated and its aims foiled. Over thousands of years and countless generations of successive social embellishment carried forth on the shoulders of previous unnatural unions of male/female equality, women rise while men sink. Equilibrium naturally surfaces in the grand zero sum game. As I've noted, the evolution is exponential. We are in the midst of a flurry of rapid and visible changes in our time. At our stage, it doesn't take many generations to effect nearly instantaneous changes; for the change occurring in one generation today is representative of a long-standing systemic change which has been cemented in place for thousands of years. On the surface, even though it appears women have taken "control" overnight, the groundwork was laid ages ago when marriage became the standard by which gender expression was allowed to express iteself over ensuing generations.
As the purported equality of marriage has overwritten the original societal program, it has imprinted its template upon our culture. Women, liberated within the confined boundaries of marriage, found this liberation slowly seeped into mainstream society as the marriage mentality slowly guided man's relinquishment of power and masculinity, a paradigm which also shifted culture's mores and social structure. As men brought their married sensibilities to the world at large, and to groups which they occupied exclusively, as I outlined in a previous post, they became unwitting accomplices working to change the structure of society with the aid of their historically latent power, and failed at this crucial juncture to demand that societal structure adapt to their masculine vision. This masculine vision was stillborn within the egalitarian container of marriage. Marriage's greatest power was its insular nature which allowed man and woman to escape the tendrils of society's moral compass.
Man, tamed by marriage, was unable to bring his potent sense of masculinity to bear on the outside world. Over thousands of years he weakly participated in weakening his own evolutionary influence on society because at home he was forced to relinquish his masculine hold in the interest of mutual cooperation with a woman. This was compounded by the fact that his father learned similar coping skills and his father before him, and the father before and before, generations of gradual surrender of masculinity. A dew point of equilibrium was attained in recent memory and the scales of gender finally tipped irrevocably in the wife's favor, both at home and at large.
As with all grand societal paradigm shifts, the few outliers who eschew new roles live a solitary life of alienation for their lack of enthusiasm and willingness to join the common march exposes them to harsh and subtle ostracization.
The modern man who dares to maintain a tenacious grip on his bachelorhood is roundly purged from the playground of modern life (unless he is homosexual in which case he is excused, and in fact, revered by the feminized hordes). It is not easy to share cultural real estate with legions of those who have happily succumbed to the modern gender paradigm. To remain unmarried and actively free of any outward enthusiasm to join or humor the feminized social world will easily find you cast from its Club. You are a rogue state. You cannot be considered a vibrant or legitimate player and you will find yourself marginalized in the eyes of the sheep who have gathered to breathe life into the Hive and expand its insidious reach. In order to join the ranks of respectable society and be allowed to indulge in its empty plasticity, you must,
1) Be married
2) Humor the frivolity of a feminized culture
3) Check in any traces of odious masculinity at the door
Those men who dare to remain single past 35 while resisting female induced self-degradation willfully surrender their membership in pleasant society. Marginalization seeps downwards in the barest of daily minutiae.
As women's strength and influence grows, men's sense of their masculinity must flow and ebb in sync with capricious female demands or they must eject from the matrix.
Women have always dictated the definitions and concept of masculinity; from the primal and natural position of submissiveness, their definition of the masculine male was the traditional one we knew for nearly the entirety of human history.
Now, women, from a strength of power, define the masculine role as submissive and powerless, much like their own previous role in history.
And men have no choice but to follow their lead.
If they wish to partake in pleasant society.
Blog Managment
Anonymous commenting welcome – update for GDPR (5/28/18)
You look lost…
The Blogger's Page Notes
Random posts from the past...
Trump acceptance as a paradigm shift (aka, Overton Window).
The first step in fixing our broken society: just beat the bitch up if she asks for it..
A cursory examination of obese tailgaters
Hit me one more time.
The dad who gave his daughter a frozen doll is doing society a long-term favor.
Popular posts for the moment…
The moral conundrum of a human bisection **WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGERY** 05/06/2012
Generalizations about a single, 45-year-old man 11/18/2010
Is Ted Cruz's daughter autistic? 02/02/2016
Hoe down in Thailand and the essentials of bad taste 09/15/2014
Patsy Cline's dark past? 01/17/2011
Blood in the snow…video of Gernot Reinstadler's fatal 1991 accident surfaces. 02/10/2015
[anal repression on]…the travails of conversate. 08/21/2015
German military brass living and dying large in Iraq. 09/23/2015
The final words from PSA 182 02/11/2012
Will there be a coup in the United States in 2015 or 2016? Impression 1. 09/05/2015
"BLUE" JIMMY& BLIND DOG OZZY'S NEWS BLOG
Beyond Highbrow
Garbage in…
Goodbye, America (in a photo)
Hawaiian libertarian
Right View from the Left Coast
Roissy (by any other name)
THE ANTI-GNOSTIC
The Dreamin' Demon
Will S.' Random Weirdness Blog

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Studio Laptops
Developer Home
NVIDIA Quadro Experience
Apache Spark is an open-source framework for processing big data tasks in parallel across clustered computers. It's one of the most widely used distributed processing frameworks in the world..
To learn more about Apache Spark 3, download our free ebook here.
What Is Apache Spark?
In tandem with the monumental growth of data, Apache Spark has become one of the most popular frameworks for distributed scale-out data processing, running on millions of servers—both on premises and in the cloud.
Apache Spark is a fast, general-purpose analytics engine for large-scale data processing that runs on YARN, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, standalone, or in the cloud. With high-level operators and libraries for SQL, stream processing, machine learning, and graph processing, Spark makes it easy to build parallel applications in Scala, Python, R, or SQL using an interactive shell, notebooks, or packaged applications. Spark supports batch and interactive analytics using a functional programming model and associated query engine—Catalyst—that converts jobs into query plans and schedules operations within the query plan across nodes in a cluster.
On top of the Spark core data processing engine, there are libraries for SQL and DataFrames, machine learning, GraphX, graph computation, and stream processing. These libraries can be used together on massive datasets from a variety of data sources, such as HDFS, Alluxio, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, or Apache Hive.
Apache Spark components
Why Apache Spark?
Apache Spark continued the effort to analyze big data that Apache Hadoop started over 15 years ago, and has become the leading framework for large-scale distributed data processing.
As use of Hadoop grew with the popularity of big data analytics in the early 2010s, Hadoop MapReduce's performance limitations became a handicap,bottlenecked by its model of checkpointing results to disk. At the same time, Hadoop adoption has been hindered by the low-level programming model of MapReduce.
Apache Spark started as a research project at UC Berkeley in the AMPLab, with the goal of keeping the benefits of MapReduce's scalable, distributed, fault-tolerant processing framework, while making it more efficient and easier to use. Spark is more efficient than MapReduce for data pipelines and iterative algorithms because it re-uses multi-threaded lightweight tasks instead of starting and stopping processes. It also caches data in memory across iterations, eliminating the need to write to disk between stages. Spark uses a fault-tolerant distributed DataFrame to enhance parallel performance, and provide ease of use with SQL.
Spark became a top level Apache Software Foundation project in 2014 and today, hundreds of thousands of data engineers and scientists are working with Spark across 16,000+ enterprises and organizations. One reason why Spark has taken the torch from Hadoop is because its in-memory data processing can complete some tasks up to 100X faster than MapReduce. These capabilities are created in an open community by over 1,000 contributors across 250+ companies. The Databricks founders started this effort and their platform alone spins up over 1 million virtual machines per day to analyze data.
Why Spark is Better with GPUs
With each release of Spark, improvements have been implemented to make it easier to program and execute faster. Apache Spark 3.0 continues this trend with innovations to improve Spark SQL performance and NVIDIA GPU acceleration.
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are popular for their extraordinarily low price per flop (performance) and are addressing the compute performance bottleneck today by speeding up multi-core servers for parallel processing. A CPU consists of a few cores optimized for sequential serial processing. But a GPU has a massively parallel architecture consisting of thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for handling multiple tasks simultaneously. They're capable of processing data much faster than configurations containing CPUs alone. GPUs have been responsible for the advancement of deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) model training in the past several years. However, 80% of a data scientist's time is still spent on data preprocessing.
While Spark distributes computation across nodes in the form of partitions, within a partition, computation has historically been performed on CPU cores. Spark mitigated the I/O problems found in Hadoop by adding in-memory data processing, but now the bottleneck has shifted from I/O to compute for a growing number of applications. This performance bottleneck can be thwarted with the advent of GPU-accelerated computation.
To meet and exceed the modern requirements of data processing, NVIDIA has been collaborating with the Apache Spark community to bring GPUs into Spark's native processing through the release of Spark 3.0 and the open-source NVIDIA RAPIDS™ Accelerator for Spark. The benefits of GPU acceleration in Spark are many:
Data processing, queries, and model training are completed faster, reducing time to results.
The same GPU-accelerated infrastructure can be used for both Spark and ML/DL frameworks, eliminating the need for separate clusters and giving the entire pipeline access to GPU acceleration.
Fewer servers are required, reducing infrastructure cost.
RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark
RAPIDS is a suite of open-source software libraries and APIs for executing end-to-end data science and analytics pipelines entirely on GPUs, allowing for a substantial speed up, particularly on large data sets. Built on top of NVIDIA® CUDA® and UCX, the RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark enables GPU-accelerated SQL/DataFrame operations and Spark shuffles with no code change.
Apache Spark accelerated end-to-end AI platform stack.
Accelerated SQL/DataFrame
Spark 3.0 supports SQL optimizer plug-ins to process data using columnar batches rather than rows. Columnar data is GPU-friendly, and this feature is what the RAPIDS Accelerator plugs into to accelerate SQL and DataFrame operators. With the RAPIDS accelerator, the Catalyst query optimizer has been modified to identify operators within a query plan that can be accelerated with the RAPIDS API, mostly a one-to-one mapping, and to schedule those operators on GPUs within the Spark cluster when executing the query plan.
Accelerated Shuffle
Spark operations that sort, group, or join data by value have to move the data between partitions when creating a new DataFrame from an existing one between stages. This process is called a shuffle, and involves disk I/O, data serialization, and network I/O. The new RAPIDS Accelerator shuffle implementation uses UCX to optimize GPU data transfers, keeping as much data on the GPU as possible. It also finds the fastest path to move data between nodes by using the best of available hardware resources, including bypassing the CPU to do GPU to GPU memory intra- and inter-node transfers.
Accelerator-aware scheduling
As part of a major Spark initiative to better unify deep learning and data processing on Spark, GPUs are now a schedulable resource in Apache Spark 3.0. This allows Spark to schedule executors with a specified number of GPUs and allow users to specify how many GPUs each task requires. Spark conveys these resource requests to the underlying cluster manager, Kubernetes, YARN, or Standalone. Users can also configure a discovery script that can detect which GPUs were assigned by the cluster manager. This greatly simplifies running ML applications that need GPUs, as previously users were required to work around the lack of GPU scheduling in Spark applications.
Accelerated XGBoost
XGBoost is a scalable, distributed gradient-boosted decision tree (GBDT) ML library. It provides parallel tree boosting and is the leading ML library for regression, classification, and ranking problems. The RAPIDS team works closely with the Distributed Machine Learning Common (DMLC) XGBoost organization, and XGBoost now includes seamless, drop-in GPU acceleration. Spark 3.0 XGBoost is also now integrated with the Rapids Accelerator improving performance, accuracy and cost with GPU acceleration of Spark SQL/DataFrame operations, GPU acceleration of XGBoost training time, and efficient GPU memory utilization with in-memory optimally stored features.
In Spark 3.0, you can now have a single pipeline, from data ingest to data preparation to model training on a GPU powered cluster
NVIDIA GPU Accelerated, End-to-End Data Science
RAPIDS abstracts the complexities of accelerated data science by building on and integrating with popular analytics ecosystems like PyData and Apache Spark, enabling users to see benefits immediately. Compared to similar CPU-based implementations, RAPIDS delivers 50x performance improvements for classical data analytics and machine learning (ML) processes at scale which drastically reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for large data science operations.
Example Spark Use Cases
Spark's speed makes it a good choice for scenarios in which rapid decision-making is required involving multiple data sources. For example, one of the ways financial institutions detect credit card fraud is by analyzing the volume and location of transactions occurring on a single account. If the number of transactions is beyond the capacity of an individual, or if multiple transactions take place in various locations that are improbably distant from each other, then it's an indication that an account has been compromised.
Banks can use Apache Spark to create a unified view of an account holder based upon usage patterns. Machine learning can be applied to detect patterns that fall outside of norms based upon previously observed patterns. This can also enable the institution to better customize offers to the needs of individual customers.
Adverse drug interactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S., ahead of pulmonary disease, diabetes and pneumonia. Determining how multiple medications will interact to cause negative consequences for the patient is an exponentially complex problem that becomes more difficult each year as new medications are introduced.
Using Spark, data scientists can create algorithms that scan millions of case records and look for mentions of drug types. Combinations of certain medications can be correlated with outcomes and weighted by factors such as pre-existing conditions and medical history. The results can then be applied to the health records of individual patients to alert doctors and pharmacists to the likelihood of an adverse reaction before a prescription is written or filled.
Real-World Examples of Accelerating End-to-End Machine Learning with Spark
Building on its strategic AI partnership with NVIDIA, Adobe was one of the first companies working with a preview release of Spark 3.0 running on Databricks. At the NVIDIA GTC conference, Adobe Intelligent Services provided the evaluation results of a GPU-based Spark 3.0 and XGBoost intelligent email solution to optimize the delivery of marketing messages. In initial tests, Adobe achieved a 7X performance improvement and 90 percent cost savings. The performance gains in Spark 3.0 enhance model accuracy by enabling scientists to train models with larger datasets and retrain models more frequently. This makes it possible to process terabytes of new data every day, which is critical for data scientists supporting online recommender systems or analyzing new research data. In addition, faster processing means that fewer hardware resources are needed to deliver results, providing significant cost savings. When asked about these advancements, William Yan, senior director of Machine Learning at Adobe said, "We're seeing significantly faster performance with NVIDIA-accelerated Spark 3.0 compared to running Spark on CPUs. With these game-changing GPU performance gains, entirely new possibilities open up for enhancing AI-driven features in our full suite of Adobe Experience Cloud apps."
In order to predict customer churn for their tens of millions of subscribers, Verizon Media built a distributed Spark ML pipeline for XGBoost model training and hyperparameter tuning on a GPU based cluster. Verizon Media achieved a 3X performance improvement compared to a CPU-based XGBoost solution, enhancing their capabilities to do hyperparameter search for finding the best hyperparameters for optimized models and maximized accuracy.
Uber applies deep learning across their business, from self-driving research to trip forecasting and fraud prevention. Uber developed Horovod, a distributed deep learning training framework for TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, and Apache MXNet, to make it easier to speed up deep learning projects with GPUs and a data parallel approach to distributed training. Horvod now has support for Spark 3.0 with GPU scheduling, and a new KerasEstimator class that uses Spark Estimators with Spark ML Pipelines for better integration with Spark and ease of use. This enables TensorFlow and PyTorch models to be trained directly on Spark DataFrames, leveraging Horovod's ability to scale to hundreds of GPUs in parallel, without any specialized code for distributed training. With the new accelerator aware scheduling and columnar processing APIs in Apache Spark 3.0, a production ETL job can hand off data to Horovod running distributed deep learning training on GPUs within the same pipeline.
Why Apache Spark Matters to…
Spark 3.0 marks a key milestone for data scientists and data engineers collaborating on analytics and AI, as ETL operations are now accelerated while ML and DL applications leverage the same GPU infrastructure.
Data Science Teams
The magic of data science is frustrated by the many mundane tasks that are required to wrangle data into usable form. Much of that process involves sorting and ordering unstructured data like ZIP codes, dates and SKU numbers across millions or billions of records. The larger the data set, the longer the process takes. By some estimates data preparation can consume 80% of a data scientist's time.
Hadoop was a breakthrough technology for performing data analysis at scale, making it possible for data scientists to execute queries against very large data stores. However, processing times were often long, particularly when repeated scans needed to be run over an existing data set, as is often the case in sorting and data discovery.
Spark was purpose-built for iterative queries across large data sets. With speeds up to 100X faster than Hadoop/MapReduce, it was an instant hit with data scientists. Spark was also able to easily accommodate data science-oriented development languages such as Python, R, and Scala. Because most data scientists prefer to work with a single programming tool, Spark was able to easily adapt to individual needs.
Spark SQL also introduced a data abstraction concept called DataFrames that supports both structured and semi-structured data and that can be manipulated in a variety of languages. It allows the familiar language of SQL to be applied to unstructured data in ways that were never before possible. Spark ML provides a uniform set of high-level APIs, built on top of DataFrames for building ML pipelines or workflows. This provides the scalability of partitioned data processing with the ease of SQL for data manipulation.
Data Engineering Teams
Data engineers bridge the gap between data scientists and developers. Whereas data scientists select the right data types and algorithms to solve a problem, data engineers work with data scientists and developers for everything related to data pipeline creation for data extraction transformation, storage, and analysis to build big data analytics applications.
Spark abstracts complexity away from the storage equation. Because the framework can work with virtually any underlying storage, including the Hadoop Distributed File System, it's a more flexible framework than Hadoop and more adaptable to a combination of cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Spark can also easily incorporate streaming data sources, making it an appropriate engine for the next generation of internet of things applications.
Check out our free ebook all about Spark 3
Learn more about the RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark
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The office of student affairs is available to students for information and questions concerning the teaching activities of IBF.
Our academic advisors can help you with all of your questions related to the "Werkstoffingenieurwesen" (M.Sc.) course of study.
The IBF offers a variety of courses for different curricula. The topics range from the basics of metal forming technology to process chains and simulation methods.
The excursion of the IBF is part of the lecture "Neuere Entwicklungen in der Umformtechnik" and takes place annually during the Pentecost week.
A film about the important role of metal forming in the development of our industrialized society.


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Bangladeshi Sohel Murshed among world's top 2% scientists
Star Digital Report
Mon Nov 15, 2021 09:55 PM Last update on: Mon Nov 15, 2021 09:58 PM
SM Sohel Murshed. Photo: Collected
SM Sohel Murshed, a Bangladeshi professor at the Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) of the University of Lisbon in Portugal, has been named among the list of the world's top 2% scientists for the third consecutive year.
Stanford University, USA recently published the global ranking of top scientists.
The comprehensive list was prepared by analysing research data like publications, citations, h-index and other indicators from 1965 to 2020 covering more than 6 million scientists from all over the world.
Sohel Murshed, currently a visiting professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, USA, ranked 52nd among 703 listed scientists from Portugal.
Sohel originally from Narail attended Dhaka Residential Model College. He completed BSc and MEng in mechanical engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology (Ruet) and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), respectively.
After completing his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore with a scholarship, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at universities in Singapore and USA.
He has published 10 books and 32 book chapters in addition to more than 180 research papers in leading international journals and conferences.
Numbers of his papers have been classified as highly cited papers by the Web of Science.
From 2016 to 2020 he served as a delegate of Portugal to the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action where he was also a group leader.
In 2020, he received the prestigious ASEM-DUO Professorial Fellowship Award.
Prof Sohel Murshed previously worked as visiting professor in several overseas institutes and universities including Imperial College London.
He has regularly been serving as an expert panellist and evaluator for the European Commission and funding agencies of several countries.
Prof Murshed also holds membership of several international societies and organisations and frequently acts as a reviewer for many top international journals including the top one - Nature.
He is one of the globally leading researchers in the field of nano-thermofluids and his other research fields include renewable energy, microfluidics and advanced cooling technologies.
A dozen of the researcher including 2 postdoctoral fellows are working under him.


The Junior School had a great time working with Artist in Residence, Marian Rose, from June 11 to 15. Marian is a folk dance specialist who believes that dance and music are "powerful tools in creating a more connected, compassionate and joyful world". Our girls had the chance to celebrate the end of the school year by learning a wide variety of fun and energetic folk dances from around the world.
Parents were invited to join in on the fun at the Community Dance. Students and parents got the opportunity to dance together with the wonderful accompaniment of Marian on her accordion and special guests, the YHS Fiddle Club and Olivia Budd. On Friday, the students shared the dances they had learned with each other in a final celebration performance. See the fun firsthand in this video clip.


text:
Free Books / History / South Indian Culture /
Chapter XV. Vaishnavism In South India
This section is from the book "Some Contributions Of South India To Indian Culture", by S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar. Also available from Amazon: Some Contributions of South India to Indian Culture.
We have already shown under the section bhakti that the rudiments of Vaishnavism in the ordinary form and in the agamaic are traceable in the classical literature of Tamil. This form of bhakti had a course of development on much the same lines as Saivism in the Tamil country. In general outline, this would involve the substitution of Vishnu for Siva as "the soul-saving supreme being" whose grace is of paramount importance to the attainment of salvation by an individual. We have already pointed out that the most popular form in which Vishnu figures in early Tamil literature is that of several of his avataras of the pauranic character. It would be easy to quote references from the early classics to the avataras (descents of God) Rama and Krishna even in secular literature. Along with this, simultaneously, we find indubitable references to the agamaic four Vyuhas. But the idea of Vishnu is of course indicated by the general name Tirumal for the god. We thus find that, almost at the beginning of the Christian era, the features of northern Vaishnavism in all its variety were prevalent in the south. It is the course of further development of Vaishnavism that lends character to the movement and makes it a distinct feature of South Indian history.
prev: Ekantada Ramayya
next: Vaishnava Literature


text:
Appel Voted Against Allowing Iowans to Keep Their Insurance
Republican Iowa 3rd Congressional District candidate David Young said his opponent former State Sen. Staci Appel voted no on an amendment protecting Iowans.
Former President Bill Clinton greets Staci Appel at Senator Tom Harkin's 2014 Steak Fry.
All Americans Should Be Concerned for the President's Safety
David Young,
Iowa 3rd Congressional District Race,
Obamacare,
Staci Appel
(INDIANOLA) – After yesterday's successful first day of his tour with Sen. Charles Grassley, David Young today continued reiterating his support for allowing Iowans to keep their own health care plans, which is at odds with his opponent's legislative record in Des Moines.
Young noted that as a state senator, Staci Appel voted against an amendment stating, "No law shall restrict a person's natural right and power to secure the blessings of liberty to choose private health care systems or private health care plans." (Amendment S. 5340 to H.F. 2531, Iowa Senate Journal)
Young vowed that if elected, he will fight for the right of Iowans to choose a health care plan that is best for Iowans and their families.
"My opponent refused to stick up for Iowans and cast a vote allowing Iowans to keep their health care plans," said Young. "If my opponent can't even stand up for Iowans just miles from her home while in Des Moines, why should we trust her to look out for our interests all the way out in Washington, D.C.?"
Young notes that Appel also supports Obamacare, which could reduce access to Medicare Advantage plans that seniors rely on by 50 percent, and cuts hospital access. (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, April 22, 2010)
Life at Conception Bill Filed in the Iowa House
HF 2142, a bill that would protect the unborn at the moment of conception introduced into the Iowa House, must be passed out of committee this week.
How Much of Our Money Does State Government Really Need?
The FY 2013 year-end report on Iowa General Fund revenues shows that…
Deborah Thornton
Establishment, Not Ron Paul Supporters at Fault in St. Charles, MO Caucus Brouhaha
I stand corrected. When I make a mistake or have the facts…
Final Iowa Poll: Romney Leads, Santorum Surges
The Des Moines Register just released their final Iowa Poll for the…


Home2 Suites is a fresh take on a midscale, all-suite hotel. Our signature modern style is perfect & the sophisticated, thrifty traveler. Bright casual community spaces, indoors & out, are perfect for working, relaxing or mingling. Each Home2 is designed with your comfort & convenience in mind. We provide a complimentary breakfast every morning as well as complimentary Wi-Fi and parking. We also have an indoor pool, 24 hr fitness center, outdoor patios with grills, on-site laundry & a firepit. With our central location you can get to all major attractions within 10 minutes. We are located just a mile away from restaurants & shopping.
Renovated all suite property offering complimentary breakfast and evening social Mon-Wed.
Welcome government travelers to the newest Hampton property in the area, minutes from Minot AFB.


It´s strange that you choose to bounce the file instead of using duplicate function which doesn´t generate a new real file.
Snce DP does not exactly have a export stems function. Would I be able to rewire into ableton live and export the stems running into ableton?


text:
All Trident Marine UK Boats For Sale
'Trident Marine of Portchester, founded in the early 70s, famously built highly respected and long-legged blue water cruisers. They sadly ceased trading in the late 1990s after a chequered decade of intermittent trading. The Warrior 38/40 was one of its quiet successes; a solid, seaworthy and not slow for a heavy displacement, long keeled (rudder on a separate skeg) cruiser with serious offshore intentions and good liveaboard space below decks. About 125 were built. The design was launched as the 38 in the mid-80s and the early 90s extended to 40ft. The extra length was used mainly to enlarge the after cabins though these were never particularly large. The company offered. The company offered many alternative interiors, and a few home completed ones may have had almost anything. Mould quality was generally good and substantial, but the interior fit-out was variable, mainly adequate. This craft still commands a great price on the second-hand market.''
Trident Marine UK Challenger 35 £18,950
Trident Marine UK boats previously for sale
Warrior 38
Trident Vo...
Trident Wa...
Trident Ch...
Challenger 35


An unfinished quilt project in the ICI Ephemera Kabinett will jumpstart the 1996 Chronicle. The abandoned project included some quilted panels displaying terms related to AIDS. Embroidered on canvas in 26 pairs — two for each letter of the alphabet — white panels spell out the public face of AIDS, while red panels counter with more personal responses. In its first imagining, the 1996 AIDS Chronicle would dialogue with the national AIDS quilt.
Fortuitously, 1996 turned out to be the last year the AIDS Quilt was shown in its entirety on the Washington D.C. Mall. The quilt's display as a singular, political object — always an important function for the quilt — is often overshadowed by the attention given to the mourning function of the blanket's individual panels. In it's revised plan, the 1996 AIDS Chronicle aims to revive some of the discussions surrounding the AIDS Quilt's dual role as a public and private document. In doing so, it offers a template by which the ICI can examine the dichotomies of its own AIDS project.
After the AIDS/HIV articles are isolated, the remaining newsprint will be used to create strips of newsprint 'yarn.' The yarn will be knitted into a large unwieldy blanket. Its 'inconvenient' size points to both the immensity of the pandemic and our inability to 'hide' its unbounded consequences. The Canvas panels will be used to create a storage pouch for the finished blanket.
This entry was posted in Activities, AIDS and the ICI, Past Projects. Bookmark the permalink.


text:
'use strict';

var contactsController = angular.module('contactsController', []);
/* LIST*/
contactsController.controller('ContactsListCtrl', ['$scope', 'dataService', 'sharedContactProperties','$location',
        function ($scope, dataService, sharedContactProperties,  $location) {

    $scope.status;
    $scope.contacts;

            $scope.go = function () {
                $location.path('/contact');
            }

    dataService.getContacts()
            .success(function (conts) {
                $scope.contacts = conts;
            })
            .error(function (error) {
                $scope.status = 'Unable to load contacts data: ' + error.message;
            });

    $scope.deleteContact= function (id) {
        dataService.deleteContact(id)
        .success(function () {
            $scope.status = 'Deleted Contact! Refreshing contact list.';
            for (var i = 0; i < $scope.contacts.length; i++) {
                var cont = $scope.contacts[i];
                if (cont.id === id) {
                    $scope.contacts.splice(i, 1);
                    break;
                }
            }

        })
        .error(function (error) {
            $scope.status = 'Unable to delete contact: ' + error.message;
        });
    };

    $scope.queryContacts= function (search) {

        var query = {
                        "query" : search
                    }
        dataService.queryContacts(query)
        .success(function (contacts) {
            $scope.status = 'Retrieved contacts!';
            $scope.contacts = contacts;
        })
        .error(function (error) {
            $scope.status = 'Error retrieving contacts! ' + error.message;
        });
    };

      $scope.updateContact= function(id){

		sharedContactProperties.setContactId(id);
		$location.path('/contactupdate');
	};
}]);
/* UPDATE*/
contactsController.controller('ContactsUpdateCtrl', ['$scope', 'dataService','$location','sharedContactProperties',
        function ($scope, dataService, $location,sharedContactProperties) {

    $scope.status;
    $scope.contact;

     var id = sharedContactProperties.getContactId();

    dataService.getContact(id)
            .success(function (cont) {
                $scope.contact = cont;
            })
            .error(function (error) {
                $scope.status = 'Unable to load customer data: ' + error.message;
            });

    $scope.updateContact = function (contact) {

        dataService.updateContact($scope.contact)
          .success(function () {
              $scope.status = 'Updated Contact! Refreshing contact list.';
              $location.path('#contacts');
          })
          .error(function (error) {
              $scope.status = 'Unable to update contact: ' + error.message;
          });
    };

}]);
/* ADD*/
contactsController.controller('ContactsAddCtrl', ['$scope', 'dataService','$location',
        function ($scope, dataService, $location) {

    $scope.status;
    $scope.contact;

    $scope.addContact = function (contact) {

        dataService.insertContact(contact)
            .success(function () {
                $scope.status = 'Inserted contact! Refreshing contact list.';
                $location.path('#contacts');
            }).
            error(function(error) {
                $scope.status = 'Unable to insert contact: ' + error.message;
            });
        }

}]);

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
BeenVerified > People Search > Mark Irwin > Mark E Irwin in Brandon, Florida
Mark E Irwin of Brandon, FL
6** ***** Dr, Brandon, Florida 33510
Mark E Irwin may currently be 48 years old and lives at 6** ***** Dr, Brandon, Florida 33510. Mark might also have resided at 5*** ******* ** *** A, Louisville, Kentucky 40222. Possible relatives for Mark E Irwin include Stephen Irwin in FL, Sharman Hammers in KY, Ida Irwin in FL; we have 1 additional possible relatives on file for Mark. Other cities Mark may have lived in include Brandon, FL; Louisville, KY and Largo, FL.
6** ***** Dr, Brandon, FL, 33510
5*** ******* Ct *** *, Louisville, KY, 40222
1* **** Lee **, Largo, FL, 33771
1** ********* Sq *** **, Louisville, KY, 40218
7** *** Ave **, Largo, FL, 33770
Stephen Irwin FL 33770
Sharman Hammers KY 40222
Ida Irwin FL 33770
A***** H******* ** *****
Get notified every time we get new information about Mark E Irwin
Mark E Irwin
Background Records May Be Available for Mark E Irwin
Looking for a different Mark Irwin
Mark S Irwin
Mark A Irwin
FAQ: Learn more about Mark E Irwin
What is Mark E Irwin's address?
Mark E Irwin's address is 6** ***** Dr, Brandon, Florida 33510. Mark may also have lived in Louisville, KY and Largo, FL.
What is Mark E Irwin's age?
Mark E Irwin is 48 years old.


text:
Evolution of the Dinosaurs
Dinosaurs First Appear
What events led to the dominance of dinosaurs in the Mesozoic era?
Approximately 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, or the beginning of the Triassic period (and thus, the end of the Paleozoic era and the beginning of the Mesozoic era), there was a mass extinction. This extinction eliminated close to 90 percent of all the species present on our planet (extraordinarily close to total extinction on Earth). The extinction was not selective; it eliminated organisms in the oceans and on land, including many invertebrates, armored fish, and reptiles.
The true reasons for the extinction are unknown, although there are several theories. One is that a collision with an asteroid or comet caused dust and debris to fly into the upper atmosphere, cutting off sunlight and radically changing the global climate. Another idea is that the moving continents changed the climate, sea levels, and thus, habitats, causing some species to change and adapt, while others died out. Still another theory focuses on Siberian flood basalts, in which tons of volcanic material erupted over a huge area in Asia toward the end of the Permian period, changing the climate and certain habitats.
Whatever the scenario, species that survived did so by adapting to the ecological niches that became vacant, allowing them to further evolve. After the Permian extinction, and throughout the Mesozoic era, it was reptiles in general, and the dinosaurs specifically, that diversified the most and became the dominate species on the planet.


text:
87% Drop In Stone Pelting Incidents In 2020: DGP
Press Trust of India | January 2, 2021
Jammu: There was a 87.13 per cent dip in incidents of stone-pelting last year as compared to 2019 in Jammu and Kashmir, according to Director General of Police Dilbag Singh.
In 2019, there were 1,999 incidents of stone-pelting, of which 1,193 took place after the Centre announced abrogation of the special status of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir that year in August.
"There have been 255 stone-pelting incidents in 2020 as compared to the incidents in 2019 and the year (2020), witnessed a 87.31 per cent decline," the director general of police said.
The Centre on August 5, 2019, revoked Article 370, which gave special status to the erstwhile state, and divided it into union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
In 2018 and 2017, 1,458, and 1,412 incidents of stone-pelting were reported.
When compared to 2016, the dip in such incidents in 2020 was 90 per cent, according to officials.
https://kashmirobserver.net/2021/01/02/87-drop-in-stone-pelting-incidents-in-2020-dgp
In 2016, 2,653 stone-pelting cases were reported as the killing of Burhan Wani, a commander of the militant organisation Hizbul Mujahideen, had triggered violent protests across Kashmir.
In 2015, as many as 730 incidents of stone-pelting took place in Jammu and Kashmir.
After a dip in militancy in the mid-2000s, stones became a popular choice of weapon during protests. This trend has been there since the 2008 Amarnath-land row agitation in Jammu and Kashmir.
2010, 2016 and 2019 witnesses massive stone-pelting in the erstwhile state.
"Law and order situation is well under control. Our resolve for 2021 is strengthening and consolidating peace and normalcy in Jammu and Kashmir," DGP Dilbagh Singh said.


Setting up computer classrooms will not only impart IT education but also implement pedagogical techniques.
Smile Donor believes that in order to meet the challenges of 21st century, the new generation must be well versed with the utilisation of information technology. Computer rooms are an essential facility in all schools to impart not only IT education but also to implement modern pedagogical techniques.
With your support Smile Donor is successfully establishing computer classrooms in several schools including boarding school for disadvantaged girls. Help us expand our outreach to help needy students in our schools so that they can take advantage of computers in their education.


A big win for the Obama administration's strong position on the state secrets privilege continues to raise questions of why the administration has taken such an aggressive position and what new Justice Department guidelines concerning state secrets means for future litigation.
Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan centers on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) extraordinary rendition program. Plaintiffs—five foreign nationals—allege that they were arrested overseas and then transferred to American custody. They were then flown to Egypt, Morocco, and Afghanistan where they were subjected to physical and psychological torture. They contend that defendant Jeppesen Dataplan provided flight planning and logistical support services to the aircraft and crew on all flights transporting each of the plaintiffs to the various locations where they were detained and tortured, bringing suit against Jeppesen under the Alien Tort Statute.
Before Jeppesen could answer the complaint, the United States government intervened and moved to dismiss the complaint under the state secrets doctrine. General Michael Hayden, then-director of the CIA, filed a declaration stating that because highly classified information was central to the allegation, disclosure of such information cannot be avoided and would be harmful to U.S. national security and, therefore, the case must be dismissed. The district court granted the motion to dismiss and the plaintiffs appealed.
After the district court's ruling, President Barack Obama succeeded President George W. Bush. There was great hope among those who disdained President Bush's aggressive policies that President Obama would not embrace such a strong position on the state secrets doctrine. They had reasons to be hopeful as evidenced by President Obama's executive orders calling for: (1) closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay; (2) closing of the CIA's secret prison system, and; (3) ending the Agency's use of interrogation techniques that some describe as torture. But in oral argument before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, Justice Department lawyers held to the Bush administration's position: the whole suit must be dismissed. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, finding that the case can proceed to discovery where the judge can handle claims of state secrets on an individual basis.
On September 8th, the Ninth Circuit ruled for Jeppesen Dataplan and the U.S. government. By a vote of 6-5, the court held that based on its independent review of the evidence (which for classification reasons it was only able to describe vaguely (see pg. 13545)), at least some of it constitutes a state secret. The court assumed—but did not decide—that plaintiffs could make their prima facie case without the privileged evidence, but, nonetheless, the lawsuit must be dismissed because there is no conceivable way for the plaintiffs' case to proceed without creating an unjustifiable risk of revealing state secrets (pg. 13549).
In the background of this case is a memo signed by Attorney General Eric Holder from September 23, 2009, entitled "Policies and Procedures Governing Invocation of the State Secrets Privilege." The memo sets out a standard for invoking the privilege: disclosure of the materials could be expected to cause "significant harm" to national security. This is a higher bar than that set by the Supreme Court in the Reynolds opinion which created the state secrets doctrine (information could be withheld whenever there is "reasonable danger" of exposing national security information). The memo proclaimed that it will not invoke the privilege in order to conceal violations of the law or prevent embarrassment to the government (the "state secret" that was concealed in Reynolds was the poor condition of the crashed Air Force aircraft, not the critical national security secret represented by the government at the time). Invocation of the privilege is not allowed until it is approved by a review committee, then the Deputy Attorney General, and lastly the Attorney General.
Despite these new procedures, the Justice Department did not deviate from the Bush administration's strong position on state secrets in Jeppesen Dataplan (the opinion indicates that Attorney General Holder approved the invocation of state secrets, suggesting the new procedures were used (pg. 13529)). Additionally, Obama's Justice Department has shown that it is not averse to petitioning for dismissal of a lawsuit on state secrets grounds in other cases it did not inherit (see Jewel v. NSA). Perhaps the Obama administration felt a need for continuity with past executive branch positions. This hypothesis is unlikely given that Obama campaigned against Bush's aggressive use of state secrets. Moreover, his executive orders on Guantanamo, CIA prisons, and CIA interrogation techniques issued three days after taking office demonstrate that he is not afraid to switch executive branch positions in war-on-terror issues. The strong position on state secrets is additionally puzzling given the President's issuance of new guidelines concerning classified materials, which have an overall theme of decreasing the amount of classified material.
It may well be that the information that was truly "state secrets" that so pervaded the plaintiffs' claims that there was no chance that the litigation could proceed without causing the classified materials from being divulged, despite the Justice Department's new guidelines calling for invocation of the privilege only in the most pressing circumstances. Considering the Obama administration has not invoked the privilege in calling for dismissal of a lawsuit in a case begun after the issuance of Attorney General Holder's memo, we will have to watch closely to see if the more stringent guidelines have any effect.
Image courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.


Pooch & Mutt's range of functional, wheat-free and natural treats have been featured on the pages of Inside Kent and Inside Sussex's magazines. The December Issue of the premier luxury lifestyle magazine contains the perfect Christmas gift guide for any family member, and of course our pets too!
Pooch & Mutt's delicious hand-baked treats are an ideal present this Christmas to make sure your four legged family member can join in with the festivities!


Imagine a situation in which you have a file and you have no idea of its content or you don't know its format to create a parser.
The first thing to try is usually checking if there is compressed data in it and extracting it on the fly or you can use some information about the compressed and uncompressed size to write a file format parser.
The most used compression algorithm in the world is deflate, also known as zlib.
Just for the record, there is also the Gzip [url=http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1952.txt]RFC1952[/url] compression but it's mainly a container rather than a stream compression and it supports other algorithms, not only deflate.
The problem of compression algorithms is that without a CRC it's impossible to know if the decompressed data is valid or just a sort of "false positive".
In this case zlib gives excellent results and we can really scan a whole file extracting all the compressed streams almost without false positives.
Instead with deflate we will get many false positives and so it's up to us to understand if it's used for real or not.
There is a command-line tool of mine which is very helpful to scan the zlib and deflate streams, it's called offzip.
Like all the tools of mine there is a runtime help that is displayed when you launch the tool without arguments, so refer to it for any additional option.
It will scan the file "file.dat" searching for zlib compressed streams and will return the offset, the compressed and decompressed size and the total number of data found.
The "-z" option specifies the windowBits value used by the [url=http://zlib.net]zlib[/lib] library where a positive number is used for zlib and a negative one for deflate.
And how you know if there are false positives?
Simple, you will see lot of dots without the compressed/uncompressed sizes on the right and many error messages.
With deflate (-z -15) don't trust the results, often they are false positives except if you see many subsequent sequences.
Personally I find offzip very useful when I work on not-so-simple archives and I want a quick way to retrieve the compressed and uncompressed size values that I can search in the file with a hex editor to locate the header.
In this case I use the -x option that dumps the size values in hexadecimal format.
I take one of the two value, search it in 32bit little endian with the hex editor and then I check if there is also the other value close to it.
After you locate the header containing information about the archived files, it's more easy to have an idea of the structure used for each entry.
print "Use offzip -a on this file do dump the raw data:\nhttp://aluigi.altervista.org/mytoolz.htm#offzip"
It's something more appropriate for the Game Archive section since it's a topic related to a specific game.
When I tested the STREAM2 files they contained zlib data, probably you got a stream2 file containing non-zlib data too. That's perfectly possible because often there are archives which are just containers without information or have a very complex structure that can't be easily handled (except if you want to waste tons of time and effort on reverse engineering them) so the best and easiest solution is just scanning them with offzip.
Thanks for the reply, I have been doing scan for Macau_sunny.stream2 file. First, I using scan offzip -S, then using offzip -S -x -Q, the result is no valid full zip data found. Maybe this file, as you say before, containing non-zlib data. So, what I can do now for this .STREAM2 file ? Is it meant I can't do anything for this file either unpack it or export the textures inside it ?
Open a new topic in the Game Archive section and upload the file there. Here you are off-topic.
Thanks Aluigi for your suggest, I already open new topic about this. Also, I already upload the file via Mega, maybe as moderator you can help me to identify and unpack textures inside this .STREAM2 file. If you interest to help me, you can visit the new thread at : http://zenhax.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4824, thank you so much again for your work.
in the version of "Offzip 4.0" there is a parameter -D FD use a dictionary from file FD (File Description -i quess), what is this parameter, and where can I take samples?
it's the zlib dictionary (preset deflate dictionary).
Thanks for developing this great tool!
I have a question about using this tool, I use this tool unzipped a file where I downlaod from ONU ( optical network unit) and got 6 files, I would like to edit one of the 6 files and zip it back to one file in *.bin format and then flash it back to a ONU, is that possible with this offzip tools.
Thanks and look forward your feedback.
Yes that's possible, just use the -r option and the "same" other arguments you used for extraction.
Edit the files in output_folder and try to keep their size and entropy as same/lower than the original.
Yes output_folder will act as an input folder in this mode and config.bin will be edited by reinjecting the real-time compressed files in it.
If I understand the gzip documentation correctly, there should be a way of embedding the filename in the data.
Is it possible to use offzip to extract those names?
offzip is a scanner of deflate streams.
zlib is a container for deflate and it's the default type of data searched by offzip because it's the most used and has a very limited number of false positives due to the 32bit checksum at the end.
gzip is a container for various types of compression algorithms including deflate which is the most used, and yes, it "may" contain the original filename but in practice that's never implemented, indeed in all the gzip data I have seen in various games I don't remember one time in which the filename was stored in it.
Offzip doesn't scan the gzip containers but it can find the deflate streams used in them if launched with -z -15, and therefore there is no support for names in gzip.
I'm sorry if this is going off-topic now, and if I should post it in the relevant game thread, but didn't some of the PAKs for the Trials games do that?
No, the filenames are well visible in the file and easy to search in the hex editor.
Anyway the filenames are stored in one of the archived files.
Oh, sorry. Found them now.
Don't worry it's ok and I like to explain how these things work.
In the offzip output, what is the "info" column (the last column, after "spaces before")? By any chance is it giving details about the compression level of each file?
If not, is there any way to analyze a zlib-compressed file to determine it's compression level/settings? I have a zlib file that offzip can decompress into an XML file, but when I try to use Packzip to compress and re-inject that XML file, the file is different from the original. The file is part of a PS3 save game, and the game always says the file is corrupt after the re-compressed file has been injected, whether or not the XML file was modified.
I'd like to figure this out on my own so I haven't created a new post, but maybe I'm not the only person who'd like more info about the "info" column.
Thanks for the wonderful tools and site!


text:
Q: JS radio validation from a PHP $_POST form I have a form that has a variable number of radio buttons in it:
<input id='create' name="post[]" type="radio"  value="<? echo $newphrase; ?>" />

I wish to validate it to make sure that at least one button is selected. I have this code:
 function valbutton(thisform) {
 myOption = -1;
 for (i=thisform.post.length-1; i > -1; i--) {
 if (thisform.post[i].checked) {
 myOption = i; i = -1;
 }
}
if (myOption == -1) {
alert("You must select a radio button");
return false;
}
alert("You selected button number " + myOption
+ " which has a value of "
+ thisform.myradiobutton[myOption].value);
thisform.submit(); // this line submits the form after validation
}

This works for the validation , but then the $_POST values are not set.
theoretically  this line:
for (i=thisform.post.length-1; i > -1; i--) {
if (thisform.post[i].checked) {

should read like:
for (i=thisform.post[].length-1; i > -1; i--) {
if (thisform.post[][i].checked) {

But that obviously doens't work as it errors.

A: Solved using Ed Daniels idea of setting "CHECKED" to the radio button. Even though there are a variable number of buttons, it will just 'check' the last one generated, which is good enough in my case.

A: I'm not sure why you're using the array syntax (name="post[]") for a set of radio buttons. You're only ever going to get one value back at the server, that of the checked radio button.
(For a bunch of checkboxes, where any combination might be checked, it would make sense.)
name="post" in the radio button, and $_POST['post'] in your PHP, should work fine. I suspect that it will also fix your Javascript problem.

A: My recomendation would be to use http://pear.php.net/package/HTML_QuickForm


text:
Renault to Unveil BEV Limo Subscription Mobility
Paul Myles
TU-Editor
Renault's mobility sub-brand, Mobilize, will unveil its subscription-based limousine service using a luxury BEV four-door saloon at Munich IAA Mobility 2021.
The car, Mobilize Limo, is designed specifically for taxis, private hire vehicles and fleet use and will operate in as yet unspecified cities starting in Europe. The company is a joint venture created in 2018 between Renault and Jiangling Motors Group in 2018.
After the model's launch at the show, a fleet of 40 Mobilize Limo will then be deployed to validate the services it will offer throughout Europe starting in the second half of 2022. Aimed at the premium market, the car is 15.3ft long, 6ft wide and 4.8ft high, making it close in size to traditional D-segment vehicles and will be available in Metallic Black, Metallic Grey and Glossy White. Distinctive features, including flush door handles that pop out when the vehicle unlocks, LED headlamps, scrolling indicators and 17-inch smoke-finish lacquered alloy wheels.
Mobilize Limo comes with a high-performance 147bhp electric motor delivering 162ft-lbs of immediately available torque, claiming a 0-62mph time of 9.6 seconds and a top speed limited to 87mph. Drivers can choose between three driving modes (Eco, Normal, Sport) and intensity level for the regenerative braking can also be set to one of three options via the vehicle's settings.
Mobilize Limo uses a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery with a capacity of 60kWh claiming 280 miles (pending WLTP certification) between recharging sessions. The automaker claims that is enough to cover the average daily mileage of most professionals at around 150 miles per day of intensive use, with plenty remaining charge for those drivers used to covering more ground.
The car is compatible with the most common types of AC and DC charging systems, which means it can connect to all public charging stations and home wall box setups. It can also be recharged on a regular power outlet. With fast charging, the battery can topped up to around 150 miles in just 40 minutes.
Clotilde Delbos, CEO of Mobilize, said: "The first Mobilize model, Limo, is the new brand's response to the evolution of the ride-hailing market. This offer, which combines a vehicle and flexible services, fully illustrates Mobilize's ability to the changing needs of vehicle users. It also demonstrates a unique know-how resulting from the experience of the Renault Group in mobility services and RCI Bank and Services' strength in financing."
— Paul Myles is a seasoned automotive journalist based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @Paulmyles_
Tags: Mobility-as-a-Service, Jiangling Motors Group, Mobilize, Munich IAA Mobility 2021, Renault, Services, News, Services,


During our volunteering stint in Portugal this year, we have seen many different types of structures and buildings that have been built with natural materials and using various techniques. One technique that has interested me is timber framing. This traditional technique requires skilled builders that use green timber from local fallen trees with no nails, screws or cement.


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Credit: KUOW / Teo Popescu design
How would Seattle's mayoral candidates handle pandemic recovery?
David Hyde
Dyer Oxley
Seattleites are voting for a new mayor this year. We're asking all the 2021 primary candidates how they would address a range of issues facing the city.
This week, we ask about recovering from the pandemic.
QUESTION: The Covid-19 pandemic has affected nearly everything: Our economy/personal incomes, our work, our physical and mental health care, our relationships, and our kids. What's the one thing you'd do differently to tackle Seattle's Covid recovery?*
*This question was asked before Washington state opened up on June 30.
Clinton Bliss
"Integrity, Compassion, Wise Action. Independent Democrat."
Clinton Bliss is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary election.
Credit: Courtesy of the Bliss Campaign
"Re-open our city as soon as possible. We need to make a timeline and publish it so that people know that we will be opening up and that they need to take steps now to protect themselves. Make our city safe and accessible for residents, businesses and tourists by ending tent and RV living in our public spaces. As mayor, I will do all I can to cease the trend of enabling anti-social behavior and using addiction, mental illness or homelessness as a legal defense against any crime."
Colleen Echohawk
"Enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation, Candidate For Seattle Mayor."
(Receiving democracy vouchers)
Colleen Echohawk is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary.
Credit: Courtesy of the Colleen Echohawk Campaign
"Covid-19 illuminated the health equity issues in our city. Education, race, job, income and housing security all have as great an impact on our health as lifestyle choices and healthcare. An Echohawk administration will focus on the social determinants of health equity. Children who live in the south end have higher rates of asthma than their peers who live north of the ship canal. That is unacceptable. We will follow the data and address the issues of health inequity across Seattle."
Jessyn Farrell
"A former legislator, nonprofit leader, and working mom who knows how to make progress on tough issues."
Jessyn Farrell is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary election.
Credit: Courtesy of the Jessyn Farrell Campaign
"With the near universal experience of isolation during the pandemic, we have the opportunity to remake policy based on the importance of human connection. We can fight against all the ways isolation infuses our cultural narratives and policy choices and replace them with systems and policies that allow for cooperation, collaboration and connection, such as massive investments in childcare and opening up 100s of miles of our city streets to walking, biking, playing, shopping, and dining."
Lorena González
"President of the Seattle City Council and candidate for Mayor of Seattle."
Lorena González is a Seattle City Council Member running for mayor in the 2021 primary election.
Credit: Courtesy of the Lorena González Campaign
"Covid-19 has exposed and deepened the wealth gap and income inequalities that many of us felt for years leading up to this most recent economic crisis. Simply going back to the way things were before Covid will not solve this problem. That's why I will fight for a new normal that prioritizes progressive revenue, elevates labor standards, creates pathways to college and careers through expansion of programs, like Seattle Promise, and takes care of our working parents through household supports."
Bruce Harrell
"I'm running for mayor to reset city hall, unite Seattle around our progressive values, and move our city forward."
Bruce Harrell is a former Seattle City Council Member and candidate for mayor in the 2021 primary election.
Credit: Courtesy of the Bruce Harrell Campaign
"It's critical our community help lead and prioritize recovery. That's why I'll expand participatory budgeting, giving each of the seven council districts $10 million for projects specifically in those neighborhoods. This will require council members to actually work alongside their communities, investing in localized priorities: small business recovery, homelessness solutions, parks and open space, pedestrian and public safety strategies, and other projects that create jobs and better our city."
Rodney Holt (write-in candidate)
"I have the social aptitude to navigate through these perilous times and unite the people of Seattle."
Rodney Holt is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary election.
Credit: Courtesy of the Rodney Holt Campaign
"Include mental health therapy option in everybody's health insurance plans."
"'Ace' is a queer architect of color, small business owner, activist, millennial, renter, and transit rider."
Andrew Grant Houston is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary election.
Credit: Justin Khanna
"Keep public land in public hands. We know that investing in the programs that keep people safe, moving, and housed—rather than disinvesting in them—in times of economic downturn reduces the time it takes to bounce back. So the city will hold land to reduce the cost of housing and other development projects in order to allow the community to direct their funds towards services and other holistic investments that support Seattle's health and wellbeing."
Arthur Langlie
"I bring a new set of skills to this position as a builder of teams and solutions."
Arthur Langlie is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary.
Credit: Courtesy of the Arthur Langlie Campaign
"Vibrant and healthy parks and greenways are crucial for our health – and our economy. I want to see our parks restored as world-famous gathering places. Showing the pride our city has had for both a beautiful downtown and parks is not only important to our cities Covid recovery, but it will keep us all healthier. Children unable to play sports and enjoy parks is unacceptable. Sadly, we are seeing this take place currently such as in Ballard's Gilman Park and Capitol Hill's Miller Park."
Lance Randall
"I am a problem solver who will prioritize delivering results for our residents."
Lance Randall is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary election.
Credit: Courtesy of the Lance Randall Campaign
"I want to ensure that all Seattleites come out of our Covid recovery feeling mentally supported. I will Increase capacity of our behavioral health services and substance use treatment providers by identifying ways to provide necessary infrastructure. This can enhance the number of behavioral health and treatment use providers, and wherever possible, we will support the use of telehealth to support preferences since the Covid-19 pandemic."
Don Rivers
Don Rivers is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary.
Credit: Courtesy of Don Rivers Campaign
"We must first understand we are all in this together. There is no need to feel that your doing something wrong or not enough of to take of your family and still trying to provide. I will continue to work with our Federal agencies to bring funding to our city. To help Seattle during Covid recovery. I will also be doing a forensic audit of all departments to see how funding could be better allocated."
Bobby Tucker
Bobby Tucker is a candidate for Seattle mayor in the 2021 primary.
Credit: Courtesy of Bobby Tucker
"I will be a leader that leads by example. Letting the communities we've come to far to turn around, let's not rush and be wide open because this Covid is not 100% contained yet, so let's continue to be cautious."
NOTE: Each Seattle mayoral candidate was asked to describe themselves and answer the same questions. Follow the coverage leading up to the August primary at KUOW.org/elections. Stay tuned to KUOW's Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages for an opportunity to offer your own answers to these questions.
Colleen Echohawk is a former KUOW board member.
Candidates invited to participate in this survey but who did not respond by deadline: Henry Clay Dennison, James Donaldson, Stan Lippmann, Casey Sixkiller, Omari Tahir-Garrett.
KUOW asks: How would you address violent crime in Seattle?
KUOW asks Seattle: How can the city recover from the pandemic?


SPRINGFIELD, Mass. … The Houston Aeros have won the Robert W. Clarke Trophy as the American Hockey League's Western Conference champions for 2010-11, advancing to the Calder Cup Finals with a 4-3 victory over the Hamilton Bulldogs in a decisive Game 7 at Toyota Center in Houston on Tuesday evening.
Aeros captain Jon DiSalvatore scored the winning goal with 1:13 left in regulation as Houston regrouped after seeing a 3-0 series lead wiped out by the North Division champion Bulldogs.
Hamilton had been trying to become just the third team in the AHL's 75-year history to win a best-of-7 series after dropping the first three games.
DiSalvatore stuffed in a rebound off a mad scramble to the right of Bulldogs goaltender Drew MacIntyre for the game-winner. Former AHL rookie of the year Patrick O'Sullivan and Chad Rau picked up assists on DiSalvatore's fifth goal of the postseason.
The Aeros blasted off to a quick start, as Rau scored 7:03 after the opening face-off and rookie Casey Wellman buried an unassisted goal just nine seconds later.
But Hamilton was quick to answer. Dustin Boyd cut his team's deficit in half at the 9:13 mark, and defenseman Mathieu Carle cashed in on a power play at 13:21 to knot things up at 1-1.
Wellman put Houston back on top 2:42 into the second period, only to see Aaron Palushaj make the Bulldogs 2-for-2 on the power play just over seven minutes later.
The 3-3 deadlock would hold until DiSalvatore's heroics late in the third. Hamilton put tremendous pressure on Houston rookie goaltender Matt Hackett in the final minute, but the Bulldogs ended up on the losing end of Game 7 in the conference finals for the second straight year.
The 21-year-old Hackett (12-6) captured the win with 24 saves on net, while MacIntyre made 30 stops in the losing effort, dropping to 10-3 in Calder Cup Playoff games for his career.
The top affiliate of the NHL's Minnesota Wild, Houston was 46-28-1-5 for 98 points during the regular season, finishing second in the West Division and sixth in the overall league standings. Led by rookie head coach Mike Yeo, who won a Stanley Cup as an assistant with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2009, the Aeros defeated the Peoria Rivermen in the division semifinals (4-0), the Milwaukee Admirals in the division finals (4-3) and the Bulldogs in the conference finals (4-3) to reach the Calder Cup Finals for the first time since winning the championship in 2003.
The 2011 Calder Cup Finals – the AHL's 75th championship series – will begin Friday in Houston, with the Aeros taking on the Eastern Conference champion Binghamton Senators. The complete series schedule is below.


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Benjamin W Van Tassell, PharmD, BCPS, FCCP, ASH-CHC
Department of Pharmacotherapy & Outcomes Science
Smith Building, Room 636
Dept of Pharmacotherapy & Outcomes Science
bvantassell@vcu.edu
Benjamin Van Tassell is Vice-Chair for Clinical Research and Professor in the Department of Pharmacotherapy & Outcomes Science. He is currently completing a 4-year term as a VCU Blick Scholar and also serves as Vice-Chair on the VCU Institutional Review Board. He is a Fellow of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy and maintains clinical certifications as a Board Certified Pharmacotherapy Specialist and American Society of Hypertension Certified Hypertension Clinician. Dr. Van Tassell is a past recipient of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy New Investigator Award (2013) and VCU School of Pharmacy Teaching Excellence Award. Dr. Van Tassell maintains a research group in collaboration with the Division of Cardiology in the VCU School of Medicine that focuses on the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. He maintains a clinical practice site at the Center for Healthy Hearts in Richmond, VA.
B.A., Chemistry (University of Utah, 2001)
Pharm.D., (University of Utah, 2005)
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Residency - Pharmacy Practice (UCSF, 2006)
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Page last updated 04/19/19


Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) is a facility-based workforce planning methodology, initially developed with support from the World Health Organization (WHO). WISN provides a straightforward method to calculate the required workforce for individual health facilities, based on their workloads.
The Method provides health managers with a systematic way to make staffing decisions in order to manage their valuable human resources well. It is based on a health worker's workload, with activity time(standards) for each workload component.
Determines how many health workers of a particular type are required to cope with the workload of a given health facility.
Staffing Need Indicator does not have any download files registered with Launchpad.


City Breaks to Bilbao - A thriving metropolis, Bilbao is capital of the province of Biscay, located in the beautiful Basque Country. Perhaps best known for the magnificent and ultrra modern Guggenheim Museum, the city has many other fascinating architectural marvels like the Euskalduna Conference & Music Centre, Calatrava airport and Norman Foster's Underground.
Bilbao is very dynamic and a bustling and very interesting destination for visitors and, with its population of 1 million, it ranks as the 5th largest urban area in all Spain. A very privileged setting means that the city lies within a fertile area with mountains, forests and a lovely coastline with pristine beaches. A busy port area has brought wealth and employment to the region and Bilbao is an important commercial hub as far back as the 14th century when the city was founded.Once only famous for its shipyards and sooty chimneystacks, the city has undergone a pretty radical transformation since the opening of Frank Gehry's contemporary masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum, in 1997.
Nowadays, even the old city "Casco Viejo" has lots of character and is atmospheric and fun and the newer part of the city is choc full of amazing modern buildings, lovely green areas and plenty of lively bars and restaurants.


SCENTING WITH ESSENTIAL OILS – do you smell it?
The whole point to scenting with essential oils is because they are mood-enhancers and they will make a difference in how we feel, or perceive, our environment. In the early 90's a study was made where essential oil of petit-grain (Citrus aurantium) and grapefruit (Citrus paradisii) were used to scent the air in an underground pedestrian tunnel. Pedestrians were asked simple questions before entering the scented tunnel(1) and after(2).
How do you perceive the underground tunnel? Everybody without exception said it made them anxious and ill at ease.
Everybody without exception said they felt uplifted and calm.
Just a small example of what essential oils can do to your emotional world. Essential oils are basically balancing, meaning they will bring you to a good state of normality when you are upset in any way. Upset can also be over-the-top high and stressed out by something wonderful; essential oils will bring you back to a level where you will still feel wonderful, but in a balanced way. When you feel down or angry or scared, the oils will help you to balance that by their up-lifting properties.
For use of different oils, please see earlier posts where I present useful oils for different states of mind.
Aroma candles;….sort of. Essential oils are volatile and burn easily. I have experimented much with this and all that happens is that the oils smell slightly burned and the candle burns too high and gives off a blackish smoke. Essential oils in aromacandles are usually blends of synthetic fragrances that do nothing but smell good. This in itself can be enough if you are happy with that.
Aroma burners; Definitely. You fill the cup with water and 3-10 dr. of essential oils (depending on the size of the space you want to scent.) and light a tea-candle under. BUT; if there is not enough water so it burns away; the essential oils will get burned, leaving a not so nice smell and a almost impossible-to-remove-residue in the bowl. Aroma-burners can be a bit messy.
Electrical burners & bulb-rings; Easy to use and the oil will not burn since the heat is controlled. Good to use in children's room since it doesn't really need any supervision. Don't forget to unplug it!
Aroma-fans; These are the best. The essential oil is dropped onto a filter that fits on top of a fan. Electrical current (or batteries) moves the fan so the essential oils are dispersed into the air. This way the oils are never heated or warmed, making them keep maximum therapeutic power. Used in this way the essential oils effectively kill a large percent of airborne bacteria and pathogens.
Aroma stones; Good for personal use like in an office or your car. Scents a small area since there is no heat or motion to move the oils into the atmosphere.
Hot water / radiator; functions for momentary uses; like in the bathroom. Just a drop or 2 of essential oil in the hand-basin, rinse with warm water and the bathroom is beautifully scented. Essential oils on cotton-balls behind the radiator works fine if you are sure they will not catch on fire!!! Better to float essential oils on hot water in a bowl.
The thing to know is that essential oils are volatile; they "fly" easily which is also why they burn easily. Heat or motion (such as a fan) is always needed to disperse them.
The Japanese are very forward with the whole scenting business; they were already using essential oils in the ventilation-systems of big offices back in the mid-90's. They were/are also pioneering the use of scented billboards and scented video-publicity in public places. The idea is this: If you are constantly bombarded with an uplifting scent each time you see the publicity for, say a washing-powder, you will – almost automatically – buy that powder, since you are programmed by the scent to feel good whenever you see the packaging….brilliant! And it functions so well.
Essential oils will not cover up a smell or anesthetize your olfactory system. But they will make things smell nicer and they will definitely make you feel better, calmer and happier.


Miss Universe 1993 Dayanara Torres is expected to arrive in Manila for the Miss Universe 2016 beauty pageant.
It is not yet known if Torres will play a part in the pageant.
Nonetheless, she has been open about missing the Philippines, as one of her "throwback" Instagram posts shows.
The Puerto Rican beauty queen is expected to make a comeback in Philippine showbiz.
In December, she announced on Instagram that she has returned to the Manila Genesis management agency of Angeli Pangilinan-Valenciano, wife of Gary Valenciano.
Angeli Valenciano similarly confirmed via Instagram that Torres had sought to return under her wing.
Torres, the 1993 titleholder, crowned Sushmita Sen at the Miss Universe 1994 pageant held at the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City on May 20.
Sen is also set to return to the country as judge in the Philippine restaging of the pageant.
After the 1994 pageant, Torres landed a career in Philippine showbiz, appearing in local films and television and captured the hearts of Filipinos with her charm and talents.
She was romantically linked to actor, Aga Muhlach, who is now married to Charlene Gonzales, a finalist on Miss Universe 1994 pageant.
The beauty queen was married to pop Latin superstar Marc Anthony in 2000 but separated in 2002 and 2003, until they ultimately divorced in 2004.


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«Двійник диявола» () — драматичний фільм 2011 року режисера Лі Тамахорі, у головних ролях Домінік Купер, Філіп Квост, Людівін Саньє і Раад Рави. Прем'єра відбулася 22 січня 2011 року на Кінофестивалі «Санденс». Фільм заснований на книзі-біографії Латіфа Яхіа, двійника-«ловця куль» Удея Хуссейна.

Зміст
Що може знадобитися «Принцу», у якого є все? Хіба що двійник. На нього можна зіпхнути всю рутину, а в небезпечних ситуаціях він прийме удар на себе. Але й Двійник не залишиться без нагороди — він отримає все, що є у принца. Все, крім жінки, яка стане єдиним, що Двійник по-справжньому забажає.

Ролі
 Домінік Купер — Латіф Яхіа / Удей Хусейн
 Філіп Квост — Саддам Хусейн
 Людівін Саньє — Сарраб
 Латіф Яхіа — Хусейн Камель
 Раад Раві — Мунем
 Мехмет Ферда — Камель Ханна
 Дар Салім — Аззам аль-Тікріті
 Халід Лаїт — Яссем аль-Хелу
 Пано Масті — Саід Камунех
 Нассер Мемарзіа — батько Латіфа
 Амріта Ачар'я — школярка

Зйомки
Зйомки фільму проходили на Мальті.
На Мальті, на відміну від Іраку, автомобільний рух — лівосторонній. Тому в фільмі використані автомобілі з правим кермом, що не відповідає іракським реаліям.

Посилання

Фільми-драми США
Фільми англійською мовою

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