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Home / Our Use of Small Words and phrases Can, Uh, Expose Concealed Passions
Our Use of Small Words and phrases Can, Uh, Expose Concealed Passions
a single right after yet another, and for two reliable hrs they did a rotation, and what struck me was the sound during the area. The audio of words, D.C. Their goal was appreciate, generating smaller speak with people they did not know, in three-minute increments. I had long gone to report the night, Katherine Streeter for NPROne Friday night, or even sexual intercourse, or po sibly some mix of the two. They have been there for velocity relationship. The ladies sat at independent numbered tables while the men moved down the road, thirty adult males and thirty women of all ages gathered in a hotel cafe in Washington, which was placed on by a busine s known as Experts within the City
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Katherine Streeter for NPROne Friday night, thirty adult males and thirty women of all ages gathered in a hotel cafe in Washington, D.C. Their goal was appreciate, or even sexual intercourse, or po sibly some mix of the two. They have been there for velocity relationship. The ladies sat at independent numbered tables while the men moved down the road, and for two reliable hrs they did a rotation, generating smaller speak with people they did not know, a single right after yet another, in three-minute increments. I had long gone to report the night, which was placed on by a busine s known as Experts within the City, and what struck me was the sound during the area. The audio of words, of men and women chatting about individuals talking more than persons talking. It had been a roar. What had been these persons stating? And what can we find out from whatever they are indicating? That's why Melker Karlsson Jersey I called James Pennebaker, a psychologist considering the key lifetime of pronouns. About 20 decades back Pennebaker, who's within the University of Texas, Austin, received keen on wanting far more carefully for the text that we use. Or rather, he obtained thinking about seeking far more closely at a certain subset on the words and phrases that we use: Pennebaker was thinking about functionality words.For all those of you want me the grammatically challenged operate phrases tend to be the smallish terms that tie our sentences collectively. The. This. Although. I. And. An. There. That. "Function text are fundamentally the filler words and phrases," Pennebaker suggests. "These are definitely the words that we do not concentrate to, and they are those that happen to be so intriguing." In keeping with the way in which that Pennebaker organizes language, the words and phrases that we far more typically aim on in dialogue are content phrases, text like "school," "family," "live," "friends" terms that conjure up a selected graphic and relay additional with the material of what is getting reviewed. "I speak poor Spanish," Pennebaker clarifies, "and if I'm inside of a discu sion in which I am listening to the opposite man or woman converse, I am just making an attempt to learn what they are conversing about. I am hearing 'what, wherever, when' those people significant content-heavy terms. All those people little phrases between, I don't listen to individuals simply because they're way too elaborate to pay attention to." In fact, says Pennebaker, even in our indigenous language, these function words are e sentially invisible to us. "You are unable to hear them," Pennebaker claims. "Humans just aren't capable to get it done." But computer systems can, which can be why twenty years in the past Pennebaker and his graduate college students sat all the way down to establish themselves a pc application. The Linguistic Inquiry and Term Depend software that Pennebaker and his college students developed from the early 1990s has, like every pc program, a capability to peer into huge knowledge sets and discern designs that no human could at any time hope to match. And so soon after Pennebaker and his crew created the program, they used it to inquire an array of i sues that had earlier been far too difficult or complicated for individuals to check with. Some of people concerns included:Could you inform if someone was lying by very carefully examining just how they made use of function words? Looking only at a transcript, could you convey to from function words regardle s of whether someone was male or feminine, rich or bad? What could you convey to about interactions by checking out the way two people today spoke to each other?Which delivers us again to speed courting. Just one in the things that Pennebaker did was history and transcribe conversations that happened in between individuals on pace dates. He fed these discu sions into his method alongside with information about how the individuals them selves had been perceiving the dates. What he located amazed him. "We can forecast by analyzing their language, who'll go on the day who'll match at premiums a lot better than the men and women on their own," he says. Particularly, what Pennebaker found was that when the language type of two men and women matched, once they utilised pronouns, prepositions, posts and so on in identical means at similar premiums, they were much more likely to finish up over a day. "The a lot more similar [they were] throughout most of these functionality words, the higher the likelihood that [they] would go over a day within a speed courting context," Pennebaker claims. "And this is often even cooler: We can even look at … a youthful courting pair… [and] the more identical [they] are … utilizing this language style matching metric, the greater probable [they] will however be dating three months from now." This is not since similar individuals are interested in every other, Pennebaker says; men and women can be extremely different. It's that once we are all-around persons that now we have a real desire in, our language subtly shifts. "When two folks are having to pay close consideration, they use language during the identical way," he suggests. "And it can be 1 of those things which people do quickly." They aren't conscious of it, but if you seem carefully at their language, count up their use of "I," and "the," and "and," you could see it. It is really proper there. Pennebaker has counted text to higher realize a lot of items. He's seemed at lying, at leadership, at who will recover from trauma. But several of his most fascinating perform has got to do with electrical power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can simply inform who between two individuals has power inside of a marriage, as well as their relative social status. "It's incredibly straightforward," Pennebaker claims, "Listen to your relative use of the phrase "I." That which you discover is totally diverse from what the majority of people would feel. The person while using the greater standing makes use of the word "I" fewer. To reveal this, Pennebaker pointed to a Rourke Chartier Jersey few of his own email, a batch created long prior to he started finding out standing. Very first he shares an e-mail published by just one of his undergraduate students, a woman named Pam:Pricey Dr. Pennebaker: I had been element of your respective Introductory Psychology course very last semester. I've appreciated your lectures and i've discovered a great deal of. I obtained an e mail from you about undertaking some exploration along with you. Would there be described as a time for me to return by and communicate relating to this? PamNow think about Pennebaker's response:Dear Pam – This may be good. This 7 days isn't very good on account of a trip. What about upcoming Tuesday between nine and ten:thirty. It will eventually be excellent to see you. Jamie PennebakerPam, the lowly undergraduate, utilized "I" quite a few periods, when Pennebaker didn't use it at all. Now consider this email Pennebaker wrote to the popular profe sor.Pricey Famed Profe sor: The key reason why I'm crafting is I am a sisting to put alongside one another a convention on [a individual topic]. I've been getting in touch with a big team of people and several have precisely questioned for those who had been attending. I'd personally definitely love it in case you could appear… I really hope you can make it. Jamie PennebakerAnd the return e mail from Famed Profe sor:Pricey Jamie – Fantastic to listen to from you. Congratulations within the conference. The thought of a reunion can be a awesome one … and also the conference thought will offer us that has a semiformal strategy for catching up https://www.sharksshine.com/Tomas-Hertl-Jersey with just one another's existing exploration…. Isn't really there any method of getting the university to dig up a couple of thousand dollars to defray vacation bills for the conference? With all very best regards, Well-known Profe sorPennebaker suggests that when he encountered these email me sages he was stunned to discover that he himself obeyed this rule. He suggests he considered of himself as being a very egalitarian human being, and a sumed he would by no means talk to folks in another way thanks to their position. But looking back he suggests it helps make perception. We use "I" a lot more whenever we speak to a person with electric power mainly because we are additional self-conscious. We have been focused on ourselves how we are discovering and our language displays that. So could we use these insights to alter ourselves? Like Eliza Doolittle in My Reasonable Lady, could we bend our personalities by bending the text we use? Could we develop into much better? A lot more impre sive? More healthy? Immediately after 20 a long time of taking a look at these things, Pennebaker doubts it. "The phrases reflect who we are in exce s of [they] push who we're," he suggests. You cannot, he thinks, improve who you will be by transforming your language; you are able to only improve your language by transforming who that you are. He says that is what his investigation indicates. Pennebaker has collected several of this investigate inside of a reserve called The trick Life of Pronouns, but he suggests he feels the exercise of using personal computers to count and categorize language is basically only a starting. It is really like we just invented the telescope, he tells me, and there are a million new places to seem. In actual fact, considering that this information to start with ran, Pennebaker has utilized his big data computer system investigation to look at a variety of new i sues. He's become a form of literary detective, using the plan to ascertain if a dropped engage in was published by Shakespeare. (Benefits of that look for really should be printed shortly.) He is also striving to figure out if function words can predict students' functionality in university by means of an analysis of 25,000 admi sions e says. And he posted a whole paper over the usage of the filler phrases um, like, uh, I imply so you know. One with the things which he identified was which the usage of these words and phrases along with their purpose of bothersome more mature folks was linked with conscientiousne s. Pennebaker has several other initiatives underway likewise utilizing our easiest phrases for a window into our souls. An earlier model of this tale ran on NPR in 2012.
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Lopez, Johnson help Nets hold off Knicks, 98-93
NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 2: Joe Johnson #7 of the Brooklyn Nets goes to the basket against the New York Knicks on December 2, 2014 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. (Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)
AP Photo
NEW YORK (AP) Brook Lopez helped build the big lead and Joe Johnson stepped up when it was time to save it.
Lopez scored 23 points, Johnson added 22 and the Brooklyn Nets beat the New York Knicks 98-93 on Tuesday night, improving to 2-0 this season against their city rivals.
Lopez and Johnson took turns hurting the Knicks. Lopez scored 19 in the first half, and Johnson had 19 in the second half after being held without a field goal in the first two quarters.
''I thought early on Brook was dominating, just having his way, getting what he wanted out there,'' Nets guard Deron Williams said. ''And second half I think they paid a little more attention to him and other things were open, and Joe just asserted himself.''
Carmelo Anthony had 20 points, nine rebounds and six assists, but shot just 7 of 22 from the field and missed a potential tying 3-pointer with about 5 seconds left after coach Derek Fisher tried to signal a timeout that wasn't called. The Knicks lost their fifth straight and fell to 4-15.
''I thought that was a great look,'' Anthony said. ''I really don't know what's the situation with timeouts being called or anything like that. But you know, I got the ball, I looked over (and) I didn't see anything or anybody call timeouts, so I kept it going. I didn't want them to get a chance to set up, switch and trap and do things like that. I had a clean, 1-on-1 shot. I missed it.''
Williams finished with 19 points for the Nets, who won for just the third time in 10 games after blowing most of a 16-point, second-half lead. Lopez also had eight rebounds, and Johnson collected eight boards and six assists.
''I thought we played a lot better. A lot better tempo, a lot more aggression,'' Nets forward Kevin Garnett said. ''Good game for us.''
Jose Calderon had 19 points and seven assists for New York, and Amare Stoudemire added 17 points and nine rebounds in his third start this season.
It was a rare compelling finish in a series where lopsided matchups have been the norm. The previous five meetings had been decided by an average of 20.8 points - none by single digits.
This seemed headed that way for a while. The Knicks scored the first basket of the game but Brooklyn answered with the next 10 points and led by 11 late in the first quarter. Two 3-pointers from Williams and a pair of baskets from Johnson in an 11-2 burst midway through the third extended it to 71-55.
New York cut that to three, but Anthony's shot from behind the arc hit the back of the rim and Johnson closed it out with two free throws.
''I did try to signal for a 20-(second timeout) to get something drawn up,'' Fisher said. ''But Carmelo taking a pullup 3 is not the worst shot we can get. Something that we would have drawn up would have included that in some way, anyway.''
Nets: Garnett broke a tie with his coach last season, Jason Kidd, and moved into sole possession of sixth place on the career games played list with 1,392. Kevin Willis is fifth at 1,424. ... Lopez and Johnson tied for the highest-scoring half by a Nets player this season. Johnson had scored 17 points in both the first and second half against Detroit on Nov. 1.
Knicks: Guard J.R. Smith missed the game due to flu-like symptoms. He lasted just 5 1/2 minutes Sunday. ... Stoudemire had averaged 19.5 points and 10.5 rebounds in the last two games before getting the start. ... New York hadn't reached 80 points in either of its last two games.
The Nets, who came in 23rd in the league in rebounds per game, outrebounded the Knicks 49-40 and grabbed a season-high 21 offensive boards. Garnett led the way with 13 rebounds. ''Coach has been stressing rebounding,'' Garnett said. ''It's been one of the things that obviously we've been working on, been making an emphasis for the bigs to rebound better and tonight I just did.''
Nets: Host San Antonio on Wednesday.
Knicks: Host Cleveland on Thursday.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Chicago Sun-Times travel editor Lori Rackl is about to trade her passport and suitcase for a remote control and a La-Z-Boy. Just in time for the fall season, she's been named TV critic.
In announcing the appointment Wednesday, Sun-Times managing editor Andrew Herrmann said Rackl has excelled in a variety of roles since she joined the newspaper in 2004. Before being named travel editor in 2007, she covered the health beat and worked as features writer and general assignment reporter.
In becoming the Sun-Times' fourth TV critic in six years, Rackl succeeds Paige Wiser, who was fired last June after it was discovered she had fabricated parts of a Glee concert review. Wiser now writes Planet Paige, a blog on television and pop culture.
More surprising than Rackl's appointment was the decision to fill the position altogether. At a time of layoffs and cutbacks, TV critics have become an endangered species at newspapers across the country. That's especially true in Chicago where both the Tribune and the Daily Herald have eliminated the job in recent years and opted to rely on wire copy instead.
Reached in Ireland, where she was on a travel assignment, Rackl acknowledged that she never imagined becoming a TV critic ("I thought liking Jersey Shore would have automatically ruled me out," she joked), but said she was excited to take on the beat.
While editorial oversight of the travel section will be handled by Sun-Times features editor Amanda Barrett, Rackl still plans to contribute a monthly column on travel. "Travel writing has always been my passion, and I'm thrilled that the paper will let me continue to do that to some degree," she said.
A graduate of west suburban Addison Trail High School and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rackl is married to Sun-Times reporter Chris Fusco.


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You are at:Home»Marketing»Where do the biggest brands spend their marketing dollars?
Where do the biggest brands spend their marketing dollars?
By Mike O'Brien on	 June 11, 2016 Marketing
Different retailers have different priorities when it comes to their marketing budgets, but the most valuable brands – Amazon and Apple – are banking on search.
We all know Amazon is the undisputed king of ecommerce. From November 2014 to November 2015, the company raked in more than $71 billion in online sales, which is more than Walmart, Apple, Macy's, The Home Depot, Best Buy, Costco, Target, Gap Inc., Williams-Sonoma, Sears and Kohl's sold. Combined.
What is Amazon doing that the others aren't?
According to Fractl, a Florida-based content marketing agency which analyzed the marketing spend of these massive retailers, search gets the lion's share of Amazon's budget. During that year period, the ecommerce giant spent $8 million on TV and radio, a number that sounds very high in isolation. However, Amazon spent $54 million on print and $1.35 billion on search.
Among the other retailers, only Apple – called the most valuable brand in the world last year – and Etsy prioritize search to such a degree. Apple spent far more on TV and outdoor advertising than Amazon, though search still made up 86 percent of its spend. Search was an even higher percentage for Etsy: 91 percent, with 1.39 million going to search and $90,000 to other digital channels.
The Etsy finding was the most interesting to Lillian Podlog, project manager at Fractl, who noted that Etsy doesn't have the same juggernaut status as Apple and Amazon.
"With Amazon and Apple, you can ask what came first, their success or where they put their marketing dollars. Maybe at this point, they can do anything, but Etsy has the same tactic and if you look at organic search rankings, it's doing really well," she says.
Etsy saw among the highest ROI in the study. For every $1 spent on marketing, the online marketplace saw $1,600 in sales. Additionally, Etsy, along with Apple and Amazon, had a disproportionately high SEMrush rankings compared with the others, which means they saw higher organic traffic.
That's a common correlation among the brands analyzed by Fractl. Most of those with larger search spends have higher SEMrush rankings.
"So many people use ad blockers, so many people have blindness to display ads. Investing in search, whether its paid or building your SEO, requires you to really think about what kind of content you're putting on the Internet that would appeal to users and boost your SEO," says Podlog. "It requires you to be more thoughtful and considerate about what the customer really wants."
Among the only exceptions to that rule are Williams-Sonoma and The Home Depot. Digital makes up 51 percent of sales – and 57 percent of the marketing budget – for the former. Nearly a quarter of that budget goes to search, but Williams-Sonoma still doesn't rank particularly high. On the other hand, The Home Depot does, despite only spending 11 percent on search, instead prioritizing TV and radio.
Where do some of the other major players put their money?
Best Buy puts the majority of its dollars in TV and digital, favoring network channels and display advertising over cable and search.
Costco, on the other hand, largely eschews TV. Instead, the warehouse retailer allocates 57 percent of its marketing dollars to display and nearly all the rest to magazines and newspapers.
Macy's is another one with a heavy print focus. The brand spends $16 million on display and $32 million on search, which sounds like a lot of money, but is just a drop in the bucket by comparison. Macy's spends 5.5 times as much on TV and more than 8 times as much on print.
"Macy's is one of those companies that has an established name and an established consumer base, but if it wants to take some of Amazon's chunk of online retail, it has to invest more in those other channels," says Podlog. "Macy's has been around for so long, but I personally think that unless it changes the shape of its spending, it's going to suffer."
Nordstrom's priority is similarly on print – $27 million on magazines, compared with $6 million on search, $4 million on display, $5 million on TV and $2 million on outdoor – but the strategy is a bit different from that of Macy's. While Macy's spends most of its money on newspapers, Nordstrom goes for magazines, a medium that meshes better with the brand's luxury focus.
Netflix, despite being heralded as one of the premier digital disruptors, doesn't spend nearly as much money on digital advertising as one would assume. The streaming giant spends $1 million each on display and online video, and $17 million on TV with a particularly heavy focus on network. It makes to sense to Podlog, who points out that "people are watching TV, they're not on Netflix."
Target's marketing budget is probably the most balanced. The retailer spends 46 on TV, 22 on print and 28 percent on digital. The majority of that digital spend is allocated to search, but $23 million is still set aside for online video.
This article first appeared in www.clickz.com
Amazon Apple Best Buy Brands Content Marketing Agency Costco Digital Advertising Digital Disruptors Digital Marketing E Bay Gap Home Depot Macy's Marketing Dollars Netflix Nordtrom Search SEM SEO Target
Mike O'Brien
It's About Time: Six Tried-and-True Ways to Extract Content From Your SMEs


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Angband 4.0.x
Rating: A
Playing Time: 20-30 hours per winner, 150-200 hours total
Some time ago, I was feeling fed up with the vile piles of shit that were being pumped out by the major gaming companies, and so I got tempted to try out some roguelikes. Of the big 5 (ADOM, Angband, Dungeon Crawl, Nethack, and ToME), Dungeon Crawl was the one that seemed the most appealing to me at first, but knowing that the two major categories of roguelikes were Hacklikes and *bands, I gave Angband (then on version 4.0.1, though it got up to version 4.0.5 before I put it aside) a try as well.
Boy howdy, did I hate it at first. I mean, I'm usually all for games forgoing insulting tutorials and letting you just learn by playing, but that only works when the game is designed in a way that suits an organic learning curve. With Angband, there was so much information bombarding me that I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and I ended up getting killed by the loser peasants in town without even venturing into the dungeon.
I felt like there was something I just wasn't getting, so I looked around the internet and found a fantastic Let's Play of Angband by TooMuchAbstraction. After getting a better understanding of the basic mechanics and some tips on how to play, I went back in. And man, am I ever glad that I did.
Before I got into that, though, let me touch on some of its flaws.
Obviously, being a classic roguelike, you're not exactly in for a cinematic experience. As far as story goes, do the words "Excuse Plot" mean anything to you? Morgoth is an evil asshole, and you've gotten it into your head to delve into his dungeon and kill him. Get it done. It takes a lot of elements from Tolkien's Middle Earth works along with Dungeons & Dragons, but none of that really matters in the actual experience of playing the game.
Refining the start to be more accessible for new players might be an improvement, but really, once I got the hang of things, having nothing but my own caution to stop me from sinking like a stone through the first few dungeon levels in order to start getting worthwhile rewards faster was much appreciated.
In terms of the overall gameplay, there isn't a whole lot to say, but I mean that in a good way, because its simple elegance is a strength. Everything is turn based, so you've got all the time in the world to think through what you want to do before inputting that next keystroke. Field of vision and line of sight are asymmetric, so it's important to learn how to compensate for the former and manipulate the latter, particularly if you're a bloodthirsty player who tries to kill anything that isn't a significantly out of depth spawn (why yes, I did have a winner that killed all of the uniques, why do you ask?). The procedural generation of the dungeons does lead to some stupid bullshit, but the inclusion of templates for special rooms (also known as vaults) means that there are plenty of opportunities to take on handcrafted designs, albeit still with randomized loot and enemy spawns. Like many classic RPGs, there's an obvious Dungeons & Dragons influence, but Angband manages to do its own thing without relying on that.
That all having been said, the real treasure in Angband is that the overall game design is fantastic, managing to use RNG elements to add unpredictability and replay value without going so far as to feel like you need to be lucky to win, and the game mechanics work in a way that you can actually learn as you play, once you get past the initial information overload.
In contrast to the intricate mechanics of Hacklikes; specifically, applying situational resolutions to interactions based on the game's fluff and real world logic; Angband proved to be a remarkably straightforward game. Things work in generally consistent ways that aren't too hard to understand if you pay attention to the message log and apply some common sense. This isn't to say that the game was easy by any means. It had its challenges, but they're generally handled in a way that lets you not only learn about how to deal with that particular enemy but also how to extrapolate the solution to a broader scale. For instance, learning about dealing with summoners from encounters with weaker mages or demons gives you much-needed practice for dealing with quylthulgs or ainur later on, or merely annoying light hounds serve as preparation for the much more terrifying high tiers of the zephyr hound enemy group.
Really, the only game mechanic that was a little tricky was picking up on the secondary effects of the various types of elemental damage. Some of them are intuitively obvious (e.g. fire burns stuff), while others seem to almost be designed to catch you with your pants down the first time you come across them and to just serve as a complete pain in the ass whenever you're not fortunate enough to find resistance to them (nexus and chaos stand out). That'd probably be my main gripe about the game design after the initial hurdle, and it's the main thing that held me back from giving this game a perfect grade.
Aiding in learning about why you're getting your ass kicked is the monster memory feature. Basically, as you encounter enemies, see their special abilities, get hit by their attacks, etc., you fill in a database of information that can be accessed by that character AND all subsequent characters in the same user file. This is a wonderful feature, and I think it's far more useful than the generic "it hits VERY hard" type of information that the monster descriptions in Dungeon Crawl give. Now, granted, Dungeon Crawl gives its full descriptions all the time while Angband requires you to fill in the information bit by bit, so you're at a major disadvantage when you're encountering something new for the first time. Hell, sometimes that disadvantage can last for a long while, like not realizing that Omarax can summon other beholders until fighting him with a melee character instead of cheesing him from range or relying on teleport other. In the end, though, the fact that you can get such detailed information makes it far more valuable in the long run.
I suppose I should mention that you can also just cheat and give yourself the full information on all of the enemies with some simple file editing. A lot of people recommend that, but I didn't do it, and I think it lead to a better experience. A major roguelike like Angband is supposed to be a big time investment, so taking a shortcut like that seems wrong to me. Once you reach a certain level of power, it's possible to get a beefy pile of HP and multiple escape options that let you get out of almost any situation as long as you play smartly. It's not exactly foolproof, and I did lose a few characters on 70+ dungeon depths, but I think it's an acceptable risk, since the game is surprisingly lenient once you figure out how to leverage your advantages. After dungeon level 20 or so, it's exceedingly rare to just get straight fucked by the RNG, and deaths take happened because of mistakes are part of the learning experience.
While I'm talking about how I played it, I should also mention that I played with forced descent and randarts. The former disables stairs going up, so the game changes from a theoretically endless grind into a timed mission to get strong enough to kill Sauron/Morgoth with no more than 99/100 dungeon levels, respectively. The latter changes artifacts from having fixed properties to drawing from randomized pools of effects (similar to the differences between set/unique items and rare items in Diablo 2). Both of those options made the game far more enjoyable for me, since they incentivized improvising based on what you found rather than grinding until you get some idealized set of gear. One of my most memorable winners was a paladin who had to fight Morgoth at range since I simply didn't have good enough equipment to handle him in melee, and considering that paladins are probably the worst class for fighting at range, you can imagine that I was feeling a lot of trepidation going into dungeon level 100. That made the win all the sweeter.
Getting back to the actual game, though, another feature of Angband that added to the initial information overload but ended up being much appreciated is that the program allows for several sub-windows to display secondary information. It might not sound like much, but having a constant display of things like the visible monster list, the visible item list, your monster memory, or your inventory is a huge convenience.
Perhaps most important of all, though, is that it's just fun to play. You start out as a weak little @ who can't even deal with fighting certain types of bugs or molds, you spend the middle of the game needing to be wary of what types of enemies can potentially take you out in a single hit (which can be especially exciting when it comes to raiding vaults, where you need to balance the desire to see what those goodies might be against the risk of getting wiped out from a careless mistake), but by the end, you've grown into an entity capable of slaying a god. The character progression just feels so rewarding, and that comes strictly from the game itself, since I'm someone who didn't give two shits about Tolkien's works prior to playing this game.
Ultimately, for something that you can get for free and would have to go out of your way to not be able to run on any half-decent PC, it's hard to ask for anything more. Highly recommended, particularly for anyone more interested in challenging their mind than their reflexes and dexterity.
Total Playing Time: 150-200 hours
#gamereview


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(473012) 2015 HJ42 es un asteroide perteneciente al cinturón de asteroides, descubierto el 13 de septiembre de 2005 por el equipo del Spacewatch desde el Observatorio Nacional de Kitt Peak, Arizona, Estados Unidos.

Designación y nombre
Designado provisionalmente como 2015 HJ42.

Características orbitales
2015 HJ42 está situado a una distancia media del Sol de 3,157 ua, pudiendo alejarse hasta 3,762 ua y acercarse hasta 2,552 ua. Su excentricidad es 0,191 y la inclinación orbital 2,108 grados. Emplea 2049 días en completar una órbita alrededor del Sol.

Características físicas
La magnitud absoluta de 2015 HJ42 es 16,6. Tiene 2,332 km de diámetro y su albedo se estima en 0,082.

Véase también
 Lista de asteroides del (473001) al (473100)
 Cuerpo menor del sistema solar

Referencias

Asteroides del cinturón principal
Objetos astronómicos descubiertos por el Spacewatch
Objetos astronómicos descubiertos desde el Observatorio Nacional de Kitt Peak
Objetos astronómicos descubiertos en 2005
Wikiproyecto:Asteroides/Artículos de asteroides

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Keywords: Field Guides- Photographic REPTILES - India and Sri Lanka
A naturalist's guide to the reptiles of India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Das, Indraneil and Abhijit Das.
Oxford: John Beaufoy Publishing, 2017. Octavo, paperback, colour photographs. This easy-to-use identification guide to the 239 reptile species most commonly seen in south Asia (covering India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) is perfect for resident and visitor alike. High-quality photographs from the region's top nature photographers are accompanied by... More about A naturalist's guide to the reptiles of India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka
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A naturalist's guide to the reptiles of Sri Lanka.
de Silva, Anslem and Kanishka Ukuwela.
Oxford: John Beaufoy Publishing, 2017. Small octavo, paperback, colour photographs. This easy-to-use identification guide to the 150 reptile species most commonly seen in Sri Lanka is perfect for resident and visitor alike. High-quality photographs from the authors are accompanied by detailed species descriptions, which include size, distribution, habits and habitat... More about A naturalist's guide to the reptiles of Sri Lanka
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'The Rock' Obama!
There was a hilarious sketch earlier this year on "Saturday Night Live" in which President Obama is shown compromising his agenda in one congressional visit after another, until he finally loses his cool and morphs into "The Rock" Obama.
By Staff Writer | Updated on September 20, 2009
There was a hilarious sketch earlier this year on "Saturday Night Live" in which President Barack Obama is shown compromising his agenda in one congressional visit after another, until he finally loses his cool and morphs into "The Rock" Obama–portrayed by the host of that episode, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
The newly energized Obama tosses his disagreeable tormentors–including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi–out the White House window. We finally got a taste of "The Rock" Obama in his speech to Congress and the nation on health care reform.
President Obama deployed his most effective weapon–his powerful rhetorical skills–to marginalize his opponents and galvanize both Congress and the nation into action after a confrontational summer of town hall meetings.


In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith demonstrates how the division of labor is the chief source of productivity gains using the vivid example of a pin factory assembly line: "One [person]^1 draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it." With specialization oriented around function, each worker becomes highly skilled in a narrow task leading to process efficiencies. Output per worker increases many fold; the factory becomes extremely efficient at producing pins.
This division of labor by function is so ingrained in us even today that we are quick to organize our teams accordingly. Data science is no exception. An end-to-end algorithmic business capability requires many data functions and companies usually create teams of specialists: research scientist, data engineers, machine learning engineers, causal inference scientists, and so on. Specialists' work is coordinated by a product manager, with hand-offs between the functions in a manner resembling the pin factory: "one person sources the data, another models it, a third implements it, a fourth measures it" and on and on.
But the goal of data science is not to execute. Rather, the goal is to learn and develop profound new business capabilities. Algorithmic products and services like recommendations systems, client engagement bandits, style preference classification, size matching, fashion design systems, logistics optimizers, seasonal trend detection, and more can't be designed up-front. They need to be learned. There are no blueprints to follow; these are novel capabilities with inherent uncertainty. Coefficients, models, model types, hyper parameters, all the elements you'll need must be learned through experimentation, trial and error, and iteration. With pins, the learning and design are done up-front, before you produce them. With data science, you learn as you go, not before you go.
In the pin factory, when learning comes first we do not expect, nor do we want, the workers to improvise on any aspect the product, except to produce it more efficiently. Organizing by function makes sense since task specialization leads to process efficiencies and production consistency (no variations in the end product).
It increases coordination costs. Those are the costs that accrue in time spent communicating, discussing, justifying, and prioritizing the work to be done. These costs scale super-linearly with the number of people involved.^2 When data scientists are organized by function the many specialists needed at each step, and with each change, and each handoff, and so forth, make coordination costs high. For example, a data science specialists focused on statistical modeling will have to coordinate with a data engineer any time a dataset needs to be augmented in order to experiment with new features. Similarly, any time new models are trained the research scientist will have to coordinate with a machine learning engineer to deploy them to production, etc. These coordination costs act as a tax on iteration and can hamper learning.
It exacerbates wait-time. Even more nefarious than coordinate costs is the time that elapses between work. While coordination costs can typically be measured in hours—the time it takes to hold meetings, discussions, design reviews—wait-times are commonly measured in days or weeks or even months! Schedules of functional specialists are difficult to align as each specialist is allocated to several initiatives. A one-hour meeting to discuss changes may take weeks to line up. And, once aligned on the changes, the actual work itself also needs to be scheduled in the context of multiple other projects vying for specialists' time. Work like code changes or research that requires just a few hours or days to complete still may sit undone much longer before the resources are available. Until then, iteration and learning languish.
It narrows context. Division of labor can artificially limit learning by rewarding people for staying in their lane. For example, the research scientist who is relegated to stay within her function will focus her energy towards experimenting with different types algorithms: gradient boosting, neural nets, random forest, and so on. To be sure, good algorithm choices could lead to incremental improvements. But there is usually far more to gain from other activities like integrating new data sources. Similarly, she may develop a model that exhausts every bit of explanatory power inherent to the data. Yet, her biggest opportunity may lie in changing the objective function or relaxing certain constraints. This is hard to see or do when her job function is limited. Since the research scientist is specialized in optimizing algorithms, she's far less likely to pursue anything else, even when it carries outsized benefits.
Telling symptoms can surface when data science teams are run like pin factories, for example in simple status updates: "waiting on ETL changes" and "waiting on ML Eng resources" are common blockers. However, I believe the more insidious impact lies in what you don't hear, because you can't lament what you haven't yet learned. Perfect execution on requirements and complacency brought on by achieving process efficiencies can mask the difficult truth, that the organization is blissfully unaware of the valuable learnings they are missing out on.
The solution to this problem is, of course, to get rid of the pin factory. In order to encourage learning and iteration, data science roles need to be made more general, with broad responsibilities agnostic to technical function. That is, organize the data scientists such that they are optimized to learn. This means hiring "full stack data scientists"—generalists—that can perform diverse functions: from conception to modeling to implementation to measurement. With fewer^3 people to keep in the loop, coordination costs plummet. The generalist moves fluidly between functions, extending the data pipeline to add more data, trying new features in the model, deploying new versions to production for causal measurement, and repeating the steps as quickly as new ideas come to her. Of course, the generalist performs the different functions sequentially rather than in parallel—she is just one person after all. However, doing the work typically takes just a fraction of the wait-time it would take for another specialist resource to come available. So, iteration time goes down.
It is important to note that this amount of autonomy and diversity in skill granted to the full-stack data scientists depends greatly on the assumption of a solid data platform on which to work. A well constructed data platform abstracts the data scientists from the complexities of containerization, distributed processing, automatic failover, and other advanced computer science concepts. In addition to abstraction, a robust data platform can provide seamless hooks into an experimentation infrastructure, automate monitoring and alerting, provide auto-scaling, and enable visualization of debugging output and algorithmic results. These components are designed and built by data platform engineers, but to be clear, there is not a hand-off from the data scientist to a data platform team. It's the data scientist that is responsible for all the code that is deployed to run on top of the platform. And, for the love of everything sacred and holy in the profession, don't hand-off ETL for engineers to write.
I too was once lured to a function-based division of labor by the attraction of process efficiencies. But, through trial and error (is there no better way to learn?) I've found that more generalized roles better facilitate learning and innovating,^4 and provide the right kinds of scaling: to discover and build many more business capabilities than a specialist approach. And, while there are some important considerations^5 that may make this approach to organization more or less tenable in some companies (see footnote), I believe the full stack data scientist model provides a better starting place. Start with them, and then consciously (grudgingly) move toward a function-based division of labor only when clearly necessary.
There is further downside to functional specialization. It can lead to loss of accountability and passion from the workers. Smith himself criticizes the division of labor, suggesting that it leads to the dulling of talent—that workers become ignorant and insular as their roles are confined to a few repetitive tasks.^6 While specialization may provide process efficiencies it is less likely to inspire workers.
By contrast, generalist roles provide all the things that drive job satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.^7 Autonomy in that they are not dependent on someone else for success. Mastery in that they know the business capability from end-to-end. And, purpose in that they have a direct connection to the impact on the business they're making. If we succeed in getting people to be passionate about their work and making a big impact on the company, then the rest falls into place naturally.
↩ I took the liberty of modernizing Smith's use of pronouns.
↩ As J. Richard Hackman taught us, the number of relationships (r) grows as a function number of members (n) per this equation: r = (n^2-n) / 2. And, each relationship bares some amount of coordination costs. See: Hackman, J. Richard. Leading teams: setting the stage for great performances. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2002. Print.
↩ It's important to note that I am not suggesting that hiring full-stack data scientists results in fewer people overall. Rather, I am merely suggesting that when organized differently, their incentives are better aligned with learning vs. efficiency gains. Consider the following contrasting deptarment/team structures, each with 3 people. Fractional estimates and summed team sizes are illustrative only.
Specialist Model: organized for functional efficiency. Workers are not dedicated to any one business capability, rather their time is allocated to many.
Generalists Model: Full-stack Data Scientists optimized for learning. Workers are fully dedicated to a business capability and perform all the functions.
↩ A more efficient way to learn about this approach to organization vs the trial and error I went through is to read the book by Amy C. Edmondson called "Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy" (Jossey-Bass, 2014).
↩ This process of iteration assumes low cost of trial and error. If the cost of error is high you may want to rethink (i.e., it is not advised for medical or manufacturing). In addition, data volume and system availability requirements should also be considered. If you are dealing with petabytes or exabytes of data, specialization in data engineering may be warranted. Similarly, system availability (ie. uptime) and innovation are tradeoffs. If availability is paramount, functional excellence may trump learning. Finally, the full-stack data science model relies on the assumption of great people. They are not unicorns; they can be found as well as made. But they are in high demand and it will require certain conditions in order to attract and retain them (competitive compensation, company values, interesting work, etc.). Be sure your company culture can support this.
↩ Smith, Adam. An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Dublin: Printed for Messrs. Whitestone, 1776. Print. Page 464.
↩ Pink, Daniel H.. Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2009.
I am in a tiny room in a basement somewhere in Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters, wearing an early version of the HoloLens 2 headset. In front of me is a very real ATV, which is missing a bolt. Not quite at the corner of my vision — but certainly off to the side — I see a glowing indicator pointing to a bucket of the right bolts. I walk over, bend down to look more closely at the shelf, and grab one.
Back at the ATV, a holographic set of instructions hovers above it, telling me what to do and pointing to the exact spot where the bolt needs to go. After a couple of minutes, I've successfully fixed the thing — guided by holograms. I tap a holographic button on the guide to close out the instructions.
This sort of demo is quickly becoming commonplace for tech journalists like myself. But if you read the previous description closely, you'll find that there are three key pieces of technical innovation hidden in plain sight.
Here they are: I saw a hologram off to the side because the field of view in which they can appear is much larger than before. I bent down and didn't worry about an awkward headset shifting around because it was better balanced on my head. I pushed a button just by pushing a button because I didn't need to learn a complicated gesture to operate the HoloLens 2.
Those three things might not seem all that remarkable to you, but that's precisely the point. Microsoft needed to make the HoloLens feel much more natural if it really plans to get people to use it, and it has.
There's one more unremarkably remarkable thing: even though it was just a demo, I was playing the part of a worker because that's who the HoloLens 2 is exclusively designed for — workers, not consumers.
The Microsoft HoloLens 2 is available for preorder today for $3,500, and it's expected to ship later this year. However, Microsoft has decided that it is only going to sell to enterprise customers who want to deploy the headset to their workers. As of right now, Microsoft isn't even announcing a developer kit version of the HoloLens 2.
Compared to the HoloLens we first saw demonstrated four years ago, the second version is better in nearly every important way. It's more comfortable, it has a much larger field of view, and it's better able to detect real physical objects in the room. It features new components like the Azure Kinect sensor, an ARM processor, eye-tracking sensors, and an entirely different display system.
It has a couple of speakers, the visor flips up, and it can see what your hands are doing more accurately than before. There's an 8-megapixel front-facing camera for video conferencing, it's capable of full 6 degrees of tracking, and it also uses USB-C to charge. It is, in short, chock-full of new technology. But after four years, that should be no surprise.
Before we go any further, a disclosure: my wife works for Oculus, the VR division of Facebook. We don't discuss her work or the stories that I am working on. It doesn't affect how I think about this tech, and I have no idea if Facebook and Oculus are building anything directly competitive with this product.
The biggest complaint about the first HoloLens was simple: you only saw the holograms in a relatively small box, directly in front of you. Turn your head even a little, and they would disappear from your field of view. Worse, their edges would clip out of existence even when you were staring right at them. It was like looking at a digital world through a tiny rectangle.
The HoloLens 2 has a field of view that's twice as big as before. It doesn't quite fill your entire field of vision — there's still clipping — but it's big enough now that you no longer feel constantly annoyed by a letterbox. Microsoft says that each eye has the equivalent of a 2K display in front of it, but it's better to think of that as a metaphor than a precise spec. The exact spec is that it has a "holographic density of 47 pixels per degree," which means that the pixel density is high enough to allow you to read 8-point font.
Typically, when a tech product gets better specs like these, it happens through sheer force of technical iteration: faster processors, bigger batteries, more RAM, and so on. But that strategy wouldn't have worked for the display on the HoloLens 2. It needed to get lighter, not heavier. So Microsoft had to completely change over to a different kind of display technology.
Laser-based displays have become the thing to do for computers on your face. Intel's Vaunt project used lasers, and the North Focals smart glasses do, too. Although Microsoft is using some of the same basic components, it's taken them in a different direction and gone much further in developing what they can do.
The lasers in the HoloLens 2 shine into a set of mirrors that oscillate as quickly as 54,000 cycles per second so the reflected light can paint a display. Those two pieces together form the basis of a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) display. That's all tricky to make, but the really tricky part for a MEMS display is getting the image that it paints into your eyeball.
One solution that companies like North have used is a holographic film on the lens to reflect the image directly into your retina. That has lots of drawbacks: a tiny display and low resolution, for two. But the truly problematic part is simply ensuring the display is aimed right into your eye. You have to be custom-fitted for the North glasses, and the image can disappear entirely if they're misaligned.
Microsoft doesn't want any of those problems, so it turned to the same thing it used on the first HoloLens: waveguides. They're the pieces of glass in front of your eye that are carefully etched so they can reflect the holograms in front of your eyes. The waveguides on the HoloLens 2 are lighter now because Microsoft is using two sandwiched glass plates instead of three.
When you put the whole system together — the lasers, the mirrors, and the waveguide — you can get a brighter display with a wider field of view that doesn't have to be precisely aimed into your eyes to work. Zulfi Alam, general manager for Optics Engineering at Microsoft, contends that Microsoft is way out ahead with this system and that waveguides are definitely the way to go for mixed reality. "There's no competition for the next two or three years that can come close this level of fidelity in the waveguides," he argues.
Do you want a wider field of view? Simple. Just increase the angle of the mirrors that reflect the laser light. A wider angle means a bigger image.
Do you want brighter images? Simple again. Lasers, not to put too fine a point on it, have light to spare. Of course, you have to deal with the fact that waveguides lose a ton of light, but the displays I saw were set to 500 nits and looked plenty bright to me. Microsoft thinks it could go much brighter in the final version, depending on the power draw.
Do you want to see the holograms without getting specifically fitted for your headset? Simple yet again. The waveguide doesn't require specific fitting or measurement. You can just put the headset on and get going. It also can sit far enough in front of your eyes to allow you to wear whatever glasses you need comfortably.
Simple, simple, simple, right? In truth, it's devilishly complex. Microsoft had to create an entirely new etching system for the waveguides. It had to figure out how to direct light to the right place in the waveguides nearly photon by photon. "We are simulating every photon that comes from the laser," Alam says. The light from the lasers isn't just reflected; it's split apart in multiple colors and through multiple "pupils" in the display system and then "reconstituted" into the right spot on the waveguides. "Each photon is calculated where it's expected to go," Alam says. That takes a ton of computing power, so Microsoft had to develop custom silicon to do all of the calculations on where the photos would go.
A sort of free benefit of those cameras is that they can also scan your retinas to log you into the HoloLens 2 securely. It runs Windows, after all, and therefore it supports Windows Hello. They also track where you're looking, which enables some new user interactions I'll get to below.
Then there's power: lasers, oscillating mirrors, and custom chips to handle the computing for all of that must chew through battery. But Alam tells me that even with all of that, it still manages to require less power than the alternative. The mirrors oscillate in resonance, so it takes less energy to move them, sort of like they're the fastest metronomes ever. Lasers are also less lossy than LEDs, and custom silicon can be optimized to its specific task.
But if you're going to use a headset for "a few hours," it needs to be comfortable enough to leave on in the first place.
Alex Kipman, technical fellow - AI and Mixed Reality, Microsoft.
Here's how you put the HoloLens 2 on: you put it on like a baseball cap, twist a knob on the back to tighten the headband, and then you'll start seeing holograms. The end.
All of that is nice, but it's pointless if the headset is uncomfortable to wear. And though I never had it on for more than a 20-minute stint, I think it will hold up for longer periods.
Microsoft has a "human factors" lab where it loves to show off its collection of dummy human heads and high-speed cameras. Carl Ledbetter, senior director of design for the Microsoft Device Design Team, walked me through all of the prototypes and material Microsoft tried to get into the final product. He explained how Microsoft experimented with different designs and materials, ultimately landing on carbon fiber to save weight.
"The reality is [we have to] fit kids, adults, men, women, and different ethnicities around the world. Everybody's head is different," he says. Microsoft has a database of around 600 heads tracking the shape of the cranium, eye depth, the size and relative position of the nose bridge, and other variations. Ledbetter's team attached sensors to people's necks to measure muscle strain, to make sure the center of gravity was right.
The result is that the HoloLens 2 has a more forgiving and flexible fit. It simply does a better job of accommodating basic, physical human realities. You can flip the visor up so it's out of your field of view so you can make eye contact without removing the headset. The memory foam pad that rests on your forehead is removable and cleanable, and the thermals have been completely redesigned so heat is piped away from your head.
All of that really helps, but the most important thing Microsoft did was move the center of gravity right behind your ears instead of up by your eyes. The HoloLens 2 isn't really much lighter than the original HoloLens. It feels lighter, though, because it's balanced more naturally on your head. That balance makes a huge difference. The weight of it is less noticeable and should put less strain on your neck.
Ledbetter moved the weight by literally moving the heaviest part: the main processor and battery are now located in a module that sits on the back of the headset, with wires inside the headband running up to the display board and components in the front. That processor, by the way, is an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 850, and that's important because it addresses another basic human reality: we hate when the battery dies, and we hate plugging stuff in. An ARM processor means it can have a smaller battery.
""If you're going to be on battery, [it's] hard to find a product that's not running ARM today.""
The original HoloLens ran on an Intel processor, and it ran Windows. Since then, Microsoft has done a ton of work to get Windows working well on ARM. Those efforts are slowly coming to fruition on laptops, but Intel is still the order of the day on those machines where raw speed is usually more important to users than battery life. In general, there's a tension with Intel. It's not delivering the lower-power chips that mobile devices demand. Intel even reportedly had to lobby Microsoft to keep the Surface Go on its chips.
""I'm here to tell you that it's still not a consumer product.""
That's not exactly true. We have seen plenty of demos from Microsoft showing off games — including Minecraft — and other consumer applications for the HoloLens. So this move to the enterprise market is absolutely a pivot.
But it's a pivot that's part and parcel with Microsoft's larger corporate strategy. And just because it's no longer being positioned as a consumer product doesn't mean that it's not an important product — one that Microsoft appears to be committed to and is developing software for.
The first HoloLens required users to learn awkward gestures with names like "Air Tap" and "Bloom." You had to make these really specific hand gestures because that's all the first HoloLens' sensors could detect and understand.
The HoloLens 2 can detect and understand much more because of a new array of sensors for reading the room called the Azure Kinect. "Kinect" because that's the brand for Microsoft's cameras that can scan rooms, "Azure" because seemingly everything the company does these days is somehow connected to its cloud service and as a further signal that this is a business product, not an Xbox add-on.
I can't speak to how well Kinect is actually able to identify objects — Microsoft didn't demo any of that for us — but it theoretically works because the Azure Kinect sees the room at a higher resolution and because it is hooked up to cloud services that help it figure out what things are.
There's one aspect where I can definitively say that the higher fidelity is real: it's able to identify my hand and what it's doing much more easily. It can track up to 25 points of articulation on both hands in space, which means that you shouldn't need to use the Air Tap gesture to interact with holograms anymore.
In one demo, I paced around a room looking at various holograms that were set up on tables. As I reached my hands in, a box appeared around each one with little grab handles on the edges and corners. I could just reach in and grab the whole box and move the hologram around. I could also just grab one edge to rotate it, or two to resize it. When there was a button, I could stick my finger out and push it. I doubt that it's accurate enough to, say, let you type on a virtual QWERTY keyboard, but it's a big step up over the first generation, nonetheless.
Eye tracking also comes into play in how you interact with holograms. The HoloLens 2 can detect where you're looking and use that information as a kind of user interface. There were demos where I just stared at a little bubble to make it pop into holographic fireworks, but the most useful one was an auto-scroller. The closer to the bottom of the page I got, the faster the words scrolled, but then it stopped when I looked back up.
I didn't see the full top-level user interface, so I don't know if that's changing. But one thing absolutely isn't: it still runs Windows. It utilizes the shared code in Windows OneCore, which means you won't get a traditional Windows desktop shell, but you will be able to run any Universal Windows App on it. It also has the necessary drivers to let you connect a keyboard and a mouse to it over Bluetooth if you really want to.
""Is anyone born saying, 'there's going to be a close button'? No.""
Sareen is still thinking through some of the details of what the user interface will be, but the goal is to use many of the natural gestures you picked up as a toddler instead of making you learn a whole new interface language.
Microsoft is also making new software tools available to developers. One of the most important, Dynamic 365 Guides, will be a mixed reality app with templates to create instructions for repairing real-world things like that ATV. Other tools depend on Microsoft's cloud services. One is Azure Remote Rendering that lets the HoloLens offload some compute load to the cloud. It exists because the HoloLens 2 can only store and render a limited kind of detail for something like a 3D render of an engine locally. With Remote Rendering, some of the detail can come in real time from the cloud, so it displays potentially infinite levels of detail, allowing you to model and interact with the smallest parts of a holographic machine.
Finally, there's Azure Spatial Anchors. It lets you pin holograms to real places in the world. At a basic level, it's not all that different from what Apple and Google are already doing in augmented reality: letting multiple devices see and interact with the same virtual object. Microsoft's ambitions are much grander, though: it wants to create the infrastructure for a "world scale" set of holograms, and it's building tools that let developers use that infrastructure across platforms, including iOS and Android.
Solving that requires more than just GPS location and object recognition. Kipman talks a lot about distinguishing between identically boring conference rooms that are in the same spot on different floors. Tracking objects in space using optics is famously difficult. Walk in a circle around a building, and your position will drift, so the computer won't put your ending point at the starting point. It's a little fuzzy about how far along Microsoft has actually gotten toward solving these problems, but it's actively working on them.
I could do more than quibble with his summary of the history of computing and point out that there's also quite a history of underdogs calling for openness, but the larger point stands: Microsoft thinks that mixed reality is going to be a Big Deal.
Understanding what Microsoft's plans lately has required wading through a lot more jargon than it used to. With the HoloLens 2 specifically, expect a lot of discussion about "time-to-value" (how quickly a user can do something useful after getting a device from an employer) and "intelligent edge" (devices with their own computing power nevertheless connected to the cloud).
There's a cognitive dissonance for regular consumers with all of that talk. Kipman's protestations to the contrary, there is plenty of hype around the HoloLens 2. It's just directed at corporations now. Some of it is well-deserved. I think that the HoloLens 2 is a technical marvel. Just because it isn't being sold as a consumer device doesn't mean that it's not also an important piece of technology, something that could change our conception of what a computer should look like.
But we're used to consumer electronics companies doing their best to put such technical marvels on store shelves, translating that hype into gadgets in our pockets and on our heads.
For the HoloLens 2, the hype isn't about personal technology. It's just business.
Es beben Wald und Feld, die Erde wackelt. Nie wurde Leistung grandioser inszeniert. Aprilia Tuono V4 1100 Factory und KTM 1290 Super Duke R des Jahrgangs 2018 zelebrieren den Überfluss in seiner schönsten Form.
According to reports, the TSMC Nanke 14 Factory has experienced a production shutdown after substandard chemicals used in the manufacturing process ruined tens of thousands of wafers. These defects in the silicon wafers are not able to be detected until after the production run. Companies affected include industry heavyweights such as NVIDIA, MediaTek, Huawei Hisilicon, and some ARM server processors. The 16/12nm process is one of TSMC's main sources of revenue. TSMC does not know the financial impact of the loss at this time, but it is expected to be extremely high due to the advanced technology that uses these chips such as NVIDIA GPUs.
An augmented reality (AR) application that could be used with Google Glass has been filed by Tesla.


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Home / Video news / The Network has shown the cemetery of fighters "Ghost." Video
The Network has shown the cemetery of fighters "Ghost." Video
28.12.2017 Video news 132 Views
One of the terrorists who snimaet video, spoke about the situation.
In the Internet appeared the frames of the graves of Luhansk militants, who were eliminated in the Donbass for the last 6 months.
One of the terrorists who snimaet video, spoke about the situation: "Thanks to the commanders who were nagamandala: plus 20 corpses in 6 months of war."
Russian mercenary talks about the graveyard of one of the battalions of the 14th battalion of mercenaries "Ghost", who fights in the composition of the 2nd army corps, "LPR", near the village of Zholobok, on Bakhmutskaya route.
Tags cemetery fighters ghost network shown video
Fire in shopping Mall in India, killing 19 people. Video
The mayor of Vladivostok misspoke and sent graduates in the "last journey". Video
On the outskirts of Kiev ignited the van. Video
Fighters of "Azov" destroyed the headquarters of militants near Novoluganskoe. Video
The attack was on a building on which was erected the Russian flag. Fighters the …


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Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Africa: ATB Webinar
Sharing perspectives on the economic impact of COVID-19 on Africa, key leaders in tourism and the African economy want the continent to unite for future economic success.
Panelists in attendance at the webinar hosted by the African Tourism Board (ATB) have expressed their views and perspectives on the best approach which African nations should focus on in order to recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic which is now affecting most countries on the African continent.
African Tourism Board Chairperson Mr. Cuthbert Ncube said that Africa should come together when fighting the pandemic by taking on and observing all safety measures to ensure that people from the continent remain safe.
Mr. Ncube said that Africa should take a self-reliance approach and strengthen efforts to address a development agenda to rebuild its economy and tourism. He said Africa should stand together to fight the pandemic by all available means so as to make this continent a safe destination for tourists.
"Let us join our efforts in Africa to combat this pandemic through all means required to contain its spread in our continent," he said.
There has been negative thinking that Africa was going to suffer the most from the economic impact of COVID-19 which would then affect its economy and tourism. But there is something wrong with that sentiment as the continent is working hard to maintain its status as a safe tourist destination.
"If those who predicted the doom for Africa in this pandemic period were prophets, then they should have seen the coronavirus coming. That might make them false prophets," said the ATB Chairperson.
Former Zimbabwe Tourism Minister Dr. Walter Mzembi said during the webinar that a lot of stories have been told about Africa, but most important was to brand the continent's tourism and then create tourist packages for selling.
Dr. Mzembi further said that Africa ranked as an expensive destination or expensive to travel to its rich tourist resources.
"Let us cut travel costs then market Africa as the continent under a banner carrying a message of visit, trade, and invest in Africa," Dr. Mzembi said.
The former Zimbabwean Tourism Minister added that branding of Africa should be a priority while cutting down travel costs to the continent.
Professor PLO Lumumba who was among the webinar panelists said that now is the time that Africans must move within their own continent as tourists.
Prof. Lumumba, a prominent scholar in East Africa, suggested the introduction of a single passport for Africans that will allow them to move freely from one country to another. He said that there are about 230 million Africans living outside the continent who can come back to visit their own continent of origin and stimulate the continent's tourism growth.
Rich with land, flora and fauna, minerals, energy, marine resources, and inland waterways, Africa holds the necessary resources to provide an adequate response to the needs of its peoples.
Through its ATB HOPE Task Force, the African Tourism Board is currently organizing and hosting a series of webinar meetings that bring together the Board's Patrons, Executives, Ambassadors, and other key personalities to discuss a way forward at this time when Africa and rest of the world are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ATB HOPE Task Force is also focused on searching for the best approach to and a path for Africa's tourism and economic recovery during the post COVID-19 pandemic.
"Whereas we cannot control what has happened, we can control our reaction and response to it. Through a virtual platform, titled 'Africa's Rapid Economic Recovery Response,' we will have an engaging conversation on what we must do in order to ensure business and economic survival but remain afloat long after the pandemic has ended," organizers said.
The two-hour webinar that was held on Wednesday evening aired a perspective from the economic, tourism, risk management, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) sectors to better understand the impact and share ideas around Africa's Response Plan post-COVID-19.
The African Tourism Board is an association that is internationally acclaimed for acting as a catalyst for the responsible development of travel and tourism to, from, and within the African region. For more information and how to join, visit africantourismboard.com
Sandals Corporate University: Higher Education with a Higher Purpose
Africa Day Celebrates Virtually with African Tourism Board Uniting Mother Africa
Skal International Celebrates Earth Day
Burcin Turkkan, World President of Skal International, announced for Earth Day 2022 that the organization, a leading association of tourism industry professionals, will be prioritizing sustainability as a key commitment in the […]
Cyprus Airways launches new flight from Rome to Larnaca
Cyprus Airways launches new flight from Rome to Larnaca Cyprus Airways announces the launch of the new route from Rome, Italy to Larnaca, Cyprus starting from summer 2020, with two weekly flights […]


text:
Q: Task : To Create a Framework or SDK which could integrated into any iOS project As i have never created a framework or sdk please guide on how to create it .
Push notification features
1) Different type of push notification(text,custom,image) handling on receive of push notification
2) Whenever a user receive push notification a request will be going to server that the particular user have recieved the notification and hence will not send that notification again to same user.
i just want to know which will be the best possible of creating this .
I have read about cocoa touch framework and cocoa touch static library.
At the end of this i have to get into one file just like in android we create .aar and share .
So i have concluded to to create Cocoa static library and then share it. or there is better way to proceed
Thanks

A: Static library are the only option for hiding your private classes.
If you dont need to hide anything you can opt for framework and directly import it in any project.
1) Start the project

2) Put the file .a in your project in which you want to use

Please go through this link if you face any import errors.
https://www.raywenderlich.com/41377/creating-a-static-library-in-ios-tutorial
Hope it helps.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Johnny Rotten necessitava di un nuovo design di logo e ha lanciato un contest su 99designs.
È stato scelto un vincitore tra 88 design presentati da 29 designer.
A Place to Vent About Anything!
Rant Rooms is going to be a place to vent all of your frustrations about any topic that you please. Please make the logo fun and impressionable. This site is about getting out all of your pent up frustration and relieving the stress. Rant about your boss, your wife, husband, politics, religion, bankers, lawyers, your dog that craps on your new carpet, we don't care just Rant!


text:
Video: El Paso teens talk about drug violence
Teens in El Paso, Texas, talk about drugs, violence and death on both sides of the border.
Go to full story
Explore Latest Videos
Teens in El Paso, Texas, talk about drugs, violence and death on both sides of the border. Teens in El Paso, Texas, talk about drugs, violence and death on both sides of the border.
Guns in the mainstream
Republican pollster Frank Luntz got surprising results when surveying NRA members.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz got some surprising results when he surveyed NRA members about their views on gun control. Republican pollster Frank Luntz got surprising results when surveying NRA members.
The pill, then and now
The birth control pill turns 50 on May 9. Need to Know spoke to Erica Jong about the pill, sex and motherhood.
The birth control pill turns 50 next week. Need to Know spoke to feminist author Erica Jong about the pill, sex and motherhood. The birth control pill turns 50 on May 9. Need to Know spoke to Erica Jong about the pill, sex and motherhood.
Heather Armstrong on social media
Mommy blogger Heather Armstrong talks about the power of social media.
The Dooce.com blogger brought an appliance company to its knees in less than 140 characters. Mommy blogger Heather Armstrong talks about the power of social media.
Full Episode:
Full Episode: June 27, 2013
This week on Need to Know, Anchor Ray Suarez talk with three experts about Medicare's costly future.
Need to Know travels to Tucson, Arizona, where a years-long dispute over a Mexican-American studies program has tensions high.
Full Episode: June 7, 2013
Need to Know travels to Ohio to assess how workers are faring after the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs over the past 35 years.
Full Episode: May 31, 2013
How has health reform been working in Massachusetts? Dr. Emily Senay investigates.
On December 14, 1992, exactly 20 years before the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a student went on a sudden rampage at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Massachusetts.


text:
Q: Where should I check if username already exist in rest api? I am creating a rest application using Spring Boot. I've got three logical layers: controller, service, and repository. Where should I check if the given username and similar values already exist in the database?
In the controller layer, I check user input (length, size, etc.) Can I also check username existence here? For instance:
if(this.userService.existUserByUsername(request.getUsername()))
        throw new ResponseStatusException(
                HttpStatus.CONFLICT, "User with given username already exists");

Can I check it in the service layer by invoking the registry method (existByUsername) and throwing a custom error, then caught in the controller?
public void addUser(SignUpRequestDto signUpRequestDto){

    if(this.userRepository.existsByUsername(signUpRequestDto.getUsername()))
        throw new UserAlreadyExistException("User with given uusernamealready exist");
    else
        this.userRepository.save(this.convertSignUpRequestDtoToEntity(signUpRequestDto));
}

Or maybe I should rely on hibernate annotations on entities and handle these exceptions?
@NotNull
@Column(name = "username", unique = true)
private String username;

I really appreciate all feedback from you.

A:
Where should I check if the given username and similar values already exist in the database?

Probably in the same logical layer that the rest of your business logic lives.  Service layer?

In the controller layer, I check user input (length, size, etc.) Can I also check username existence here?

You can, of course.  It's probably not a good idea; parsing inputs to make sure that they conform to a schema that you understand is a boundary concern.  Using the inputs that you understand is a domain concern.

Can I check it in the service layer by invoking the registry method (existByUsername) and throwing a custom error, then caught in the controller?

You can - you may get some push back during code review about whether an exception is the right implementation mechanism to handle that.  There are alternative approaches, and trade offs between them, and contexts (throwing exceptions within a layer vs throwing exceptions between layers).


text:
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    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:id="@+id/activity_main">

<android.support.v4.widget.DrawerLayout
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools" android:id="@+id/drawer_layout"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    tools:context=".MainActivity">

    <LinearLayout
        android:orientation="vertical"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:background="@color/off_white"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content">

        <LinearLayout
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:orientation="vertical">

       <!-- Toolbar that fills the normal role of an ActionBar -->
        <android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar
            android:id="@+id/top_toolbar"
            android:background="@color/kw_red"
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="@dimen/abc_action_bar_default_height_material">
            </android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar>

       <!-- Toolbar for the sliding tabs -->
        <android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar
            android:gravity="top"
            android:id="@+id/toolbar"
            android:paddingTop="0dp"
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:background="@color/kw_red"
            app:contentInsetStart="0dp"
            android:layout_marginBottom="-4dp"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content">

            <com.mooo.ziggypop.candconline.SlidingTabLayout
                android:id="@+id/sliding_tabs"
                android:background="@color/kw_red"
                android:layout_width="match_parent"
                android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>
       </android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar>
        </LinearLayout>

        <FrameLayout
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
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        <android.support.v4.widget.SwipeRefreshLayout
            android:id="@+id/swipe_refresh_layout"
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content">

            <android.support.v4.view.ViewPager xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
                xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools" android:id="@+id/pager"
                android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent"
                tools:context=".MainActivity" />

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            <View
                android:layout_width="match_parent"
                android:layout_height="5dp"
                android:background="@drawable/toolbar_shadow"/>
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       </LinearLayout>

    <!-- android:layout_gravity="start" tells DrawerLayout to treat
         this as a sliding drawer on the left side for left-to-right
         languages and on the right side for right-to-left languages.
         If you're not building against API 17 or higher, use
         android:layout_gravity="left" instead. -->
    <!-- The drawer is given a fixed width in dp and extends the full height of
         the container. -->
    <fragment android:id="@+id/navigation_drawer"
        android:layout_width="@dimen/navigation_drawer_width" android:layout_height="match_parent"
        android:layout_gravity="start"
        android:name="com.mooo.ziggypop.candconline.NavigationDrawerFragment"
        tools:layout="@layout/fragment_navigation_drawer" />

</android.support.v4.widget.DrawerLayout>

</LinearLayout>


text:
Hunting Jet Provost T3
Owner/operator: 1 FTS Royal Air Force (1 FTS RAF)
Registration: XN504
MSN: PAC/W/10165
Location: Rufforth, North Yorkshire - United Kingdom
Nature: Training
Departure airport: RAF Linton-on-Ouse, North Yorkshire (EGXU)
Jet Provost T.3 XN504 crashed 14/3/1963: The engine failed to respond to a throttle increase while in the circuit at Rufforth, North Yorkshire. The crew ejected when they realized that they would not make the runway.
Crew were Lt. P L E. Ward (instructor) who ejected at 200 feet, and 85 knots IAS, and sustained minor injuries. The Student pilot - Lt. A. T. Pinney - ejected at 300 feet, and 95 knots IAS, sustaining minor injuries
Wreckage recovered by - and to - 60 MU RAF Dishforth, where formally struck off charge on 18/03/1963 as CAT 5(Scrap). Dumped at RAF Dishforth and later scrapped.
1. http://www.ukserials.com/losses-1963.htm
2. http://web.archive.org/web/20170421194554/http://www.ejection-history.org.uk:80/PROJECT/YEAR_Pages/1963.htm
3. http://www.jetprovostfile.org/t3-xn492-to-xn512/
4. http://www.aircraft-scrapyards-and-gi-airframes.org.uk/jet-provost/
28-Nov-2011 14:54 Dr. John Smith Added
07-Oct-2013 00:17 Dr. John Smith Updated [Departure airport, Source, Narrative]
14-Mar-2019 16:42 stehlik49 Updated [Operator, Nature]


text:
Running Ponies
Big Cats and Cologne: "They Roll and Cheek-Rub and Just Look to be in Heaven."
Late last year I was lucky enough to take a `behind the scenes' tour of the big cat facilities at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. I met one of their female tigers, plus three lions, including their magnificent male named Bruiser.
By Bec Crew on March 24, 2014
Late last year I was lucky enough to take a 'behind the scenes' tour of the big cat facilities at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. I met one of their female tigers, plus three lions, including their magnificent male named Bruiser. All I can say is that you have not lived until you've seen a lion's mane up close. Bruiser's was so clean, so fluffy. And the colour of perfectly baked scones.
Other than the plastic barrels and rubber balls, their enrichment storage room looked like a teenage girl's garage sale. Boxes upon boxes filled with well-loved stuffed animals; essential oils piled on high. A small, white crate filled to the brim with half-filled bottles of yellowish perfumes. It's all part of the big cats' month-long enrichment program that's been designed to keep their bodies, minds and senses active, and the inspiration comes from how researchers are getting big cats in the wild to come out of hiding.
Just over ten years ago, a team of scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) were trying to figure out how to count the remaining Asiatic cheetahs that were spread in isolated populations across the Dasht-e-Kavir desert of central Iran. It was estimated that there were less than 100 in the wild, so there was not much hope of getting the information they needed from camera traps or heading out there on foot. So George Schaller, Peter Zahler and Luke Hunter from the WCS asked Patrick Thomas, the mammal curator at the Bronx Zoo in New York, to come up with some alternatives.
The plan was the get the cheetahs to rub up against hair snares - basically a big brush nailed to a tree - because a small hair sample is all that's needed to extract an individual's genotype, just like a scat or tissue sample. Scent was the obvious lure, but what smells would attract these sleek, gorgeous, and highly elusive cats? Thomas tested scores of colognes and perfumes on the zoo's cheetahs, leopards, lions and tigers and found that that the overwhelming favourite was Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men.
In 2003, the team tested the scent on big cats in the wild in a private game reserve in South Africa, in preparation for Iran's Asiatic cheetahs. According to Dr Guy Balme, Director of the Panthera Leopard Program in Africa, the results were mixed. While the leopards and lions showed some interest - one female leopard rubbed the scent so much, she ended up in a fit of uncontrollable sneezes - the cheetahs didn't respond one bit. The team suspected that unlike the Bronx Zoo cheetahs, the wild cheetahs in South Africa had so much to smell, they couldn't care less about the cologne.
But late last year, Miguel Ordeñana from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles reported better luck with his pairing of Obsession with wild jaguars and camera traps in Nicaragua. According to Jason G. Goldman over at The Thoughtful Animal, the attraction probably has to do with a chemical compound called civetone, which is one of the world's oldest perfume ingredients. Originally extracted from the scent glands of civets but now made synthetically, civetone proved to be the perfect lure for jaguars. They'd rub themselves all over the perfumed spot in an attempt to replace the civet scent with their own, and get snapped by the camera trap in the process. I'll let Jason explain why Obsession's vanilla tones were likely to be the icing on the cake for these curious cats.
So back to our big cats in Sydney. I had a chat to Louise Ginman, the Unit Supervisor for Carnivores at Taronga Zoo, about what scents their lions, tigers and snow leopards love most.
BC: Do you use Calvin Klein cologne as part of the cats' enrichment program?
LG: We spray it around the enclosure in lots of little concentrated sprays, and when the cats come out and smell it, they literally roll onto the ground, rub their cheeks all over it, and rub their faces with it. I guess it's kind of like the reaction that you get from a cat when it's enjoying catnip, they just seem to be in absolute heaven.
BC: Where do you get the perfume from?
LG: We get so many donations, we ask our staff here for donations of perfumes that they don't like - because no one generally wants to give up the good stuff. Each animal is different, so different animals will respond to different smells. We notice out of all the animals that we give it to, we definitely get the strongest reaction from our lions and tigers and our snow leopards as well. They don't react to all perfumes - with some of them they're like, "meh," just like us I guess, some of them they're not real keen on. But others, like the Calvin Klein one, whatever is in that, cats love it. They really, really roll and cheek-rub and they just look to be in heaven.
And it's lovely that we can do something like that to help break up their day, and give them something to do. Often with carnivores, food is used a lot with enrichment because they really do respond well, but with a smell, it sort of opens up a whole new realm of the types of enrichment that you can do with them and ways of keeping the animal active and stimulated.
BC: Other than perfume, do you use other scents for the cats' enrichment programs?
LG: We use spices and essential oils – there are about 28 different essential oils that we give them. Our aim is to get that really nice, strong reaction from them where they really are enjoying something that we put in there. And they might spend five, ten, fifteen minutes just rubbing the one scent, and any kind of physical activity like that is good for them.
Nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger get the biggest reactions. They're the three best spices to use, but we also use things like cardamom, turmeric, fennel, all spice, cloves, and oregano. Fresh herbs as well - rosemary, lavender, thyme - we rub it around the rocks and logs.
And essential oils, the ones that work best are the strongest ones, like palmarosa and peppermint. There was one eucalyptus oil that our male tiger for some reason just loved. You might put something out there and one cat just has no interest whatsoever, whereas another one will just think it's the best thing in the world. They go straight to that spot, lie down and rub their cheek in it.
BC: What else do you do for enrichment?
LG: Whiskers Milk Plus on paper plates, and we hide food in cardboard boxes. We smear different types of food in a cardboard box and seal it really well so they have to use their teeth to break it apart. They love cardboard boxes. Instead of just sticking their head into the box and getting the meat out and being done with it, they will pluck at the boxes, break them up into tiny pieces and think it's wonderful.
It's exactly what they'd do if they caught some prey - before they'd eat it they'd pluck the fur, or they'd pluck the feathers before they actually eat the muscle meat. So they do the same thing with the cardboard box. It's to get them thinking and working and living a full life.
BC: Have you ever left them a challenge that was too hard?
LG: When I was a newer keeper, I put a big blue barrel into our snow leopard holding area, and I thought they'd love it and they'd jump on it and roll around it at nighttime. Well, it turns out that they didn't love it, they were actually scared of it and they didn't come into the den system that night to eat their dinner. When you're learning about these animals, sometimes you might give them something that's too hard for them.
One day, again when I was a newer keeper, I gave them a whole feathered chicken in a log, for our female tiger to use her paw to grab it and pull it back out. But it turns out she didn't want to use her paw, she wanted to just use her mouth, and she couldn't get it out. So then I had to shift her out of the area, go in, remove the chicken, and put it somewhere easier so then she could get it.
Rare rusty-spotted cat kittens born in Berlin
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Asiatic Golden Cats are World-First Test Tube Babies
Bec Crew is a Sydney-based science writer and award-winning blogger. She is the author of 'Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals' (NewSouth Press). Follow Bec Crew on Twitter
Recent Articles by Bec Crew
This Fuzzy, Golden Nautilus Hasn't Been Seen in Over 30 Years
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Let's be real: every one of us has a long list of tasks to complete each day. Some of us like to hand-write them down, others like to simply memorize them. But what if we forget the list at home? Or what if we forget what we tried so hard to memorize? Microsoft understands our struggle and came up with a solution: To Do! In order to keep our March theme going, we will talk about this wonderful and life-saving app today, which is yet another underdog of Office 365 – and way too underestimated!
What can you DO with To Do?
Plan your day – add to-dos from our Suggestions or enter new to-dos in My Day.
Set due dates and reminder times for each to-do to keep everything on track.
Add notes within each to-do's detail view.
Automatically sync your to-dos to Outlook tasks.
Access your lists and to-dos from anywhere. With our iPhone®, Android™, and Windows 10 web apps, you can log in to your account on all your devices.


If you're ready to start that tile or marble project and want the assistance of professionals, contact Flesher Marble & Tile. Besides having more than 100 years' experience, samples of our work are visible throughout Calgary. For more information and inquiries, please fill out the form below. It's time to give your project the longevity that comes with tile and stone enhancements. It's time to call today!


The Guardian knows nothing about your kind of healing, nor would he care to go into the question in detail, as he has no time for such matters. But he can lay down for your guidance certain broad principles: there is no such thing as Bahá'í healers or a Bahá'í type of healing. In His Most Holy Book (the "Aqdas") Bahá'u'lláh says to consult the best physicians, in other words doctors who have studied a scientific system of medicine; He never gave us to believe He Himself would heal us through "healers", but rather through prayer and the assistance of medicine and approved treatments. Now, as long as your healing is in no opposition to these principles, as long as you do not try and take the place of a regular doctor in trying to heal others, but only give them your kind of help through constructive suggestion—or whatever it may be—and do not associate this help with being a channel of the direct grace of Bahá'u'lláh, the Guardian sees no harm in your continuing your assistance to others. But you must conscientiously decide whether, in view of the above, you are really justified in continuing. He will pray for your guidance and happiness.


text:
Q: What would happen if Rogue touched or was touched by Death (Grim-reaper)? What would happen if Rogue touched or was touched by Death (Grim-reaper) ? Would she steal death's power and kill him instead? Seems like it might be a paradox...

A: No, in the case of an abstract (or cosmic) entity such as Death, it is unlike Rogue will be able to harness any of Death's abilities, mostly because Death does not have a body unless She wants to. For that matter, Death doesn't appear to have any powers, nor does she need them. If she wants you to die, you are dead.

*

*When Death manifests, it is wearing an M-Body, a construct created to allow her to interact with the physical universe. Otherwise she does not have a physical body for Rogue's mutant power to interact with.

*For the record, Rogue (Anna Marie) of the X-men has finally gained control of her powers and her ability to absorb the powers of anyone she engages in skin to skin contact. While she is not limited in what kind of powers she can imitate (mutant, mutate, Eternal or Deviant) there is a physical upper limit of power she can replicate effectively.

*We have never seen her attempt to take on the abilities of an Omega-Level mutant or a cosmic being such as the Silver Surfer. It is very unlikely an abstract manifestation such as Death would be within her power to replicate.

*However, the ability to kill an individual with her power is still within Rogue's realm of capability, by absorbing the psychic/soul/energy of her target.