Emilia Tomasulo strums her guitar to Jingle Bells during The Stepping Tones Pre-School Holiday Show on December 17.
The Janice Center celebrated the end of its Fall programming and the holiday season with two recitals, one show and a special Christmas Music Together program. In total, there were more than 100 dance, music and pre-school students that participated in the holiday-themed shows and recitals during a six-day span in December.
On Sunday, December 16, the Ballet and Hip-Hop Dance recital ushered in the show season at The Villa Roma's Club Forum nightclub. The 60 dancers performed 14 numbers to the delight of approximately 250 attendees at the Villa Roma Club Forum nightclub. The annual recital is typically a festive event and choreographer/Janice Center co-owner Tanya Cohen always comes up with a new wrinkle or two.
"I felt it may have been one of the best recitals in our 10-year history," said Cohen.
This year, in the ballet portion of the recital, Cohen included Shannon McCormick, a young lady with special needs who has been working privately at The Janice Center for more than a year. Guided by Gabby Cohen and flanked by all the other ballet groups, Shannon was amazing. What a memorable routine.
And the Parent-Child dance drew the biggest applause of the afternoon. More than 20 moms, dads, grandmothers and aunts joined their kids on stage and grooved to Let's Groove.
The following day on December 17, students at The Janice Center's Stepping Tones Pre-School put on their Holiday Show. The kids danced, sang and played instruments to a variety of holiday songs, including Dominick the Donkey, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Up on the Housetop and Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. About 45 parents, relatives and friends attended.
That night, instrumental and voice students played to a packed room at The Janice Center. Among the instruments featured were guitar, piano and trumpet.
Finally, on Saturday, December 22, The Janice Center debuted a special Christmas Music Together program including all holiday favorites. Thirty children and parents/grandparents/relatives enjoyed a full slate of Music Together activities including instrument playing, Limbo, parachute, drums, dancing and tunnel. The morning concluded with a visit from Santa Claus who gave each child a Music Together egg shaker.
The Janice Center's Winter-Spring programming has already started with a new session of Music Together (it's not too late to join). Getting started at the end of January is Hip-Hop stunting followed by the regular session of Hip- Hop. Ballet begins on February 16 and Kidnastics on March 1.
For more information on any of the Janice Center's programs, call 482-3324 or visit janicecenter.com.


text:
Kamal expresses firm resolve about LDC graduation
BSS, Dhaka
Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal,File Photo
Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal today expressed his firm resolve that Bangladesh would be graduated from the least developed country (LDC) status in the next triennial review meeting of the UN Committee for Development Policy (CDP) in February this year.
"We hope that we'll graduate from the LDC status and thus march towards a developing nation," he said.
The Finance Minister was briefing reporters virtually after chairing two separate meetings on the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase (CCGP).
Bangladesh is going to get recommended for the 2nd time for fulfilling the criteria of graduating from the LDC status in the triennial review meeting of the UN-CDP to be held in February 2021.
Kamal said upon fulfillment of some criteria, the UN CDP in a triennial review meeting give recommendations for graduation of a country to an upper level from the lower level.
He said if a country could pass two consecutive assessments by the UN CDP, then it gets recommended for graduation.
Bangladesh was recommended for LDC graduation by the CDP in its triennial review in 2018 as the country met the graduation criteria in Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, Human Assets Index (HAI), and Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI), he added.
The finance minister said if Bangladesh could fulfill all the three criteria in the 2nd review or assessment in February, then the country would be able to come out of the LDC bloc and thus move towards the next stage.
"We're hopeful that we'll overcome the 2nd assessment through fulfilling all the three criteria and move towards the upper tier…….We hope we'll graduate from the LDC status," he said.
Kamal said if Bangladesh could graduate, it would be an wonderful attainment for the country as well as a historic moment as Bangladesh is celebrating the centenary birth of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the golden jubilee of country's independence.
Mentioning that once the LDC graduation is completed, he said the nation could devote this prestigious achievement (LDC graduation) to the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the martyrs of the Great War of Liberation and the mothers and sisters who were violated during the war.
The CDP will review the country's performance based on these criteria in its triennial meeting on February 7, 8, and 9. If the country meets the criteria in this review, it would be recommended for graduation.
According to the CDP, a country gets a three-year transition period to prepare itself. During this preparatory period, it continues to receive benefits from specific international support in the areas of trade, development assistance, and general support.
Recent official data suggests Bangladesh has met the criteria in its GNI, HAI, and EVI, to get out of the LDC bloc.
The UNCTAD in its assessment shared with the government last month found the country was well ahead of the required thresholds in the three criteria.
Being an LDC, the country has been enjoying trade preferences, development financing that includes official development assistance, technical assistance, and other forms of support.
But, once it gets the recognition of a developing country by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the country will be given three more years as a "grace period" for preparation.
After this transition period, the country will no longer get such benefits.
Bangladesh was included in the LDC list in 1975. In 2015, it crossed the threshold of the World Bank-defined lower middle-income country and became eligible for graduation in 2018.
A country must cross the threshold on two of the three criteria in two consecutive triennial reviews to be considered for the graduation.
Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal today expressed his firm resolve that Bangladesh would be graduated from the least developed country (LDC) status in the next triennial review meeting of the UN Committee for Development Policy (CDP) in February this year. We hope that well graduate from the LDC status and thus march towards a developing nation, he said. The Finance Minister was briefing reporters virtually after chairing two separate meetings on the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase (CCGP). Bangladesh is going to get recommended for the 2nd time for fulfilling the criteria of graduating from the LDC status in the triennial review meeting of the UN-CDP to be held in February 2021. Kamal said upon fulfillment of some criteria, the UN CDP in a triennial review meeting give recommendations for graduation of a country to an upper level from the lower level. He said if a country could pass two consecutive assessments by the UN CDP, then it gets recommended for graduation. Bangladesh was recommended for LDC graduation by the CDP in its triennial review in 2018 as the country met the graduation criteria in Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, Human Assets Index (HAI), and Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI), he added. The finance minister said if Bangladesh could fulfill all the three criteria in the 2nd review or assessment in February, then the country would be able to come out of the LDC bloc and thus move towards the next stage. Were hopeful that well overcome the 2nd assessment through fulfilling all the three criteria and move towards the upper tier.We hope well graduate from the LDC status, he said. Kamal said if Bangladesh could graduate, it would be an wonderful attainment for the country as well as a historic moment as Bangladesh is celebrating the centenary birth of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the golden jubilee of countrys independence. Mentioning that once the LDC graduation is completed, he said the nation could devote this prestigious achievement (LDC graduation) to the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the martyrs of the Great War of Liberation and the mothers and sisters who were violated during the war. The CDP will review the countrys performance based on these criteria in its triennial meeting on February 7, 8, and 9. If the country meets the criteria in this review, it would be recommended for graduation. According to the CDP, a country gets a three-year transition period to prepare itself. During this preparatory period, it continues to receive benefits from specific international support in the areas of trade, development assistance, and general support. Recent official data suggests Bangladesh has met the criteria in its GNI, HAI, and EVI, to get out of the LDC bloc. The UNCTAD in its assessment shared with the government last month found the country was well ahead of the required thresholds in the three criteria. Being an LDC, the country has been enjoying trade preferences, development financing that includes official development assistance, technical assistance, and other forms of support. But, once it gets the recognition of a developing country by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the country will be given three more years as a grace period for preparation. After this transition period, the country will no longer get such benefits. Bangladesh was included in the LDC list in 1975. In 2015, it crossed the threshold of the World Bank-defined lower middle-income country and became eligible for graduation in 2018. A country must cross the threshold on two of the three criteria in two consecutive triennial reviews to be considered for the graduation. HM

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The enterprise is entering a new "post-digital" era, where success will be based on an organization's ability to master a set of new technologies that can deliver personalized realities and experiences for customers, employees and business partners, according to Accenture Technology Vision 2019, the annual report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) that predicts key technology trends that will redefine businesses over the next three years.
According to this year's report, "The Post-Digital Era is Upon Us — Are You Ready for What's Next?," the enterprise is at a turning point. Digital technologies enable companies to understand their customers with a new depth of granularity; give them more channels with which to reach those consumers; and enable them to expand ecosystems with new potential partners. But digital is no longer a differentiating advantage — it's now the price of admission.
In fact, nearly four in five (79 percent) of the more than 6,600 business and IT executives worldwide that Accenture surveyed for the report believe that digital technologies — specifically social, mobile, analytics and cloud — have moved beyond adoption silos to become part of the core technology foundation for their organization.


Agenda has announced the appointment of veteran medical oncologist M. William Audeh to the position of Chief Medical Officer.
The Chief Medical Officer reports directly to Chief Executive Officer Mark Straley and is responsible for translating complex laboratory science and personalised medicine diagnostics into actionable, patient centered solutions for clinicians.
Dr. Audeh brings nearly 30 years of experience as a medical oncologist, clinical researcher and faculty physician at the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Prior to joining Agendia, and in addition to his clinical practice, he served as the former Director of the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center, Medical Director of the Wasserman Breast Cancer Risk Reduction Program and Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.


2 bedroom house rental in the Jennings school district with a 1 car garage! House has 700 sq. ft. of living space with a total of 4 rooms. The eat-in kitchen comes equipped with a stove and provides plenty of space for a table.


No resulta nada fácil realizar el mantenimiento de una red de carreteras durante un horizonte, digamos de 20 años, cuando los presupuestos son muy restrictivos. Las consecuencias son nefastas para la calidad del servicio prestado por dicha infraestructura. El problema deriva del hecho de tener que elegir la mejor opción de mantenimiento, en el momento adecuado, con un presupuesto mínimo, de forma que todo ello permita maximizar la condición de servicio de la infraestructura. ¡Un problema nada fácil!
Para solucionar este tipo de problemas hemos propuesto un algoritmo heurístico novedoso capaz de generar soluciones óptimas en casos tan complicados como el que se presenta.
Os dejo el resumen, las palabras clave y la referencia por si queréis citar el artículo.
Abstract. Insufficient investment in the public sector together with inefficient maintenance infrastructure programs lead to high economic costs in the long term. Thus, infrastructure managers need practical tools to maximize the Long-Term Effectiveness (LTE) of maintenance programs. This paper describes an optimization tool based on a hybrid Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) considering Threshold Accepting (TA) with relaxed constraints. This tool facilitates the design of optimal maintenance programs subject to budgetary and technical restrictions, exploring the effect of different budgetary scenarios on the overall network condition. The optimization tool is applied to a case study demonstrating its efficiency to analyze real data. Optimized maintenance programs are shown to yield LTE 40% higher than the traditional programs based on a reactive strategy. To extend the results obtained in this case study, a set of simulated scenarios, based on the range of values found in the real example, are also optimized. This analysis concludes that this optimization algorithm enhances the allocation of maintenance funds over the one obtained under a traditional reactive strategy. The sensitivity analysis of a range of budgetary scenarios indicates that the funding level in the early years is a driving factor of the LTE of optimal maintenance programs.
Keywords: Maintenance program; Network management; Heuristic optimization; Asset management; Infrastructure management; Pavement.


Community Career Hub / Career Change / What To Do Next?
Now that you have explored the possibility of changing careers, you may want further advice, information and resources.
Discover further Community Career Hub resources below or contact a Learn Local organisation for further support and advice.
A career plan can help you find a job that suits your interests and abilities, and can help you outline the steps to getting the job you really want.
A good place to start is unpacking your career goals.
Consider how you can best use your skills, abilities, interests and values to achieve your career goals.
Read through our Career Plan section to find information, resources and links about how to manage your career change.
In researching and planning out a new career for yourself, you might have identified that you would like to return to study.
Check out the Preparing to Study section to find information, resources and links about how to prepare for study.
Also consider contacting a Learn Local organisation near you about available courses potential career pathways.
Know the job you want? Time to get prepared for work!
You may not need to do further study in order to fulfil your career change, but perhaps require support to get you into a new job or industry.
Go to the Preparing for Work section to find information, resources and links about how to have the most success when seeking employment.


text:
\section{Introduction}
\IEEEPARstart{S}{peech} enhancement plays an important role in noisy environments for many applications, such as speech communication, speech interaction and speech translation. Numerous researchers have done lots of efforts on separating the speech from its noisy version and various approaches have already been proposed in the last five decades. Conventional approaches include spectral subtraction~{\cite{boll1979suppression}}, statistical method~{\cite{ephraim1984speech, ephraim1985speech}} and subspace-based method~{\cite{ephraim1995signal}}, which has proved to be valid when the additive noise is stationary or quasi-stationary. However, their performance often suffers from heavy degradation under non-stationary and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions.

While moving head with deep learning, the supervised approaches gradually show their powerful capability on suppressing both stationary and highly non-stationary noise signals, which is mainly because of highly nonlinear mapping ability of deep neural networks (DNN)~{\cite{wang2014training}},~{\cite{xu2013experimental}}. In DNN-based algorithms, minimum mean-squared error (MSE) is often adopted as a loss criterion to update the weights of the network. Nevertheless, usage of this criterion directly may suffer from some problems. First, although MSE is the most often used criterion, it is not so relevant with speech perception~{\cite{hu2003perceptually, loizou2010reasons}}. Second, global MSE optimization usually obtains an over-smoothing estimation which omits some important detailed information. To solve these problems, many new criteria, that consider speech perception, have been proposed in most recent years~{\cite{martin2018deep, liu2017perceptually, kolbaek2018monaural, venkataramani2017adaptive}}. The first one is to use perceptually weighted MSE functions, which are proposed to weight the loss in different time-frequency (T-F) regions~{\cite{shivakumar2016perception, liu2017perceptually}}. The second one is to use objective metrics as loss functions, for examples, perceptual evaluation speech quality (PESQ)~{\cite{recommendation2001perceptual}}, short-time objective intelligibility (STOI)~{\cite{taal2010short}} and scale-invariant speech distortion ratio (SI-SDR)~{\cite{le2019sdr}} have been adopted as loss functions. In~{\cite{xu2019components}}, speech distortion and residual noise are considered separately in the loss function, which is called components loss (CL).

Note that all the above mentioned loss functions aim at suppressing noise as much as possible at noise-only segments. In other words, at noise-only segments, the amount of noise reduction is expected to be a positive infinite value. As we know, this aim could not be achieved in most cases for many reasons. First, the noise is often stochastic, and thus it is inevitable that the estimation accuracy is often constrained by a limited number of available observations~{\cite{zheng2011two, zheng2012statistical}}. Second, there are a great variety of noise signals, so that a DNN model cannot be expected to distinguish all of them correctly from the speech in each T-F unit. Therefore, when the noise cannot be suppressed totally as expected, some unnatural residual noise may degrade speech quality a lot~{\cite{gelderblom2018subjective}}, which needs to be considered carefully. In this paper, we derive a generalized loss function by introducing multiple manual parameters to flexibly make a balance between speech distortion and noise attenuation. More specifically, the residual noise control is introduced for voice communication~{\cite{gustafsson1998novel, braun2015residual}}. By theoretical derivations, MSE and other often-used loss functions can be included in the proposed generalized loss function.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section II formulates the problem. Section III derives the generalized loss in detail and introduces used network architecture. Section IV is the experimental settings. Results and analysis are given in Section V. Section VI presents some conclusions.

\section{Problem Formulation}
In the time domain, the noisy signal can be modelled as
\begin{equation}
\label{eq1}
\begin{array}{l}
 x\left( n \right) = s\left( n \right) + d\left( n \right),
 \end{array}
\end{equation}
where $s\left( n \right)$ is the clean speech and $d(n)$ is the additive noise. In the frequency domain, (\ref{eq1}) can be written as
\begin{equation}
\label{eq2}
\begin{array}{l}
 X_l\left( k \right) = S_l\left( k \right) + D_l\left( k \right),
 \end{array}
\end{equation}
where $X_l\left( k \right)$, $S_l\left( k \right)$, and $D_l\left( k \right)$ are, respectively, discrete Fourier transforms (DFT) of $x(n)$, $s(n)$, and $d(n)$ with the frame index $l$ and the frequency
bin $k$.

For practical applications, we only have the time-domain noisy signal $x(n)$ or its frequency-domain version
$X_l(k)$, the problem becomes how to estimate $s(n)$ or $S_l(k)$ from its noisy signal. It is common to
use Minimum MSE (MMSE) as a criterion in unsupervised speech enhancement approaches. Before introducing
MMSE, we first define the square error as
\begin{equation}
\label{eq3}
J_x \left[ {M_l\left( {k} \right)} \right] = \left| {f\left( {{S_l\left( {k} \right)}} \right) - g\left( {S_l\left( {k} \right), {D_l\left( {k} \right), M_l\left( {k} \right)} } \right)} \right|^2,
\end{equation}
where $M_l\left( {k} \right)$ is a nonlinear spectral gain function, $f(a)$ is a function with a variable $a$, and $g(a,b,c)$ is a function with three variables $a$, $b$, and $c$.
When $f(a) = |a|$ and $g(a,b,c) = |(a+b)c|$, $\mathop {\min }\limits_{M_l \left( k \right)} E\left\{ J_x \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\}$ results in MMSE
spectral amplitude estimator in {\cite{ephraim1984speech}}, where $E\left\{\bullet\right\}$ is the expectation operator. When $f(a) = \log(|a|)$ and $g(a,b,c) = \log(|(a+b)c|)$, $\mathop {\min }\limits_{M_l \left( k \right)} E \left\{J_x \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right] \right\}$ leads to MMSE
log-spectral amplitude estimator in {\cite{ephraim1985speech}}. More complicated forms of $f(a)$ and $g(a,b,c)$ can be chosen, for example, many perceptually-weighted
error criteria can be included, which can be referred to {\cite{hu2003perceptually}}.

For supervised approaches, the square error in the subband is often defined as the loss function in the fullband, which is
\begin{equation}
\label{eq4}
\begin{array}{l}
\mathcal{J}_x  = \sum\limits_{k \in \mathcal{K}} {\sum\limits_{l \in \mathcal{L}} {J_x \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]} }.
 \end{array}
\end{equation}
One can get that, when $f(a) = \log(|a|)$ and $g(a,b,c) = \log(|(a+b)c|)$, $\mathop {\min }\limits_{M_l \left( k \right)} \left\{\mathcal{J}_x \right\}$ is to minimize the MSE of log-spectral amplitude between the clean speech
and the estimated speech, which is the training target in {\cite{xu2013experimental}}.

Note that (\ref{eq3}) and (\ref{eq4}) are quite similar and the most obvious difference between them
is that $J_x \left[ {M_l\left( {k} \right)} \right]$ is the subband square error, while $\mathcal{J}_x$
is the fullband square error. The other difference is that the nonlinear spectral gain can be derived theoretically by
minimizing $E\left\{J_x \left[ {M_l\left( {k} \right)} \right]\right\}$ when the probability density function (p.d.f.) of the
speech and that of the noise are both given, while it is difficult to derive the nonlinear spectral gain by minimizing $\mathcal{J}_x$,
where this gain can often be mapped from the input noisy features after training the supervised machine learning model. In all, it seems that all subband square error functions can be generalized to the fullband ones as supervised training targets.
\vspace{-0.3cm}
\section{Proposed Algorithm}
\vspace{-0.1cm}
Only using MMSE as a criterion, it is difficult to make a balance between speech distortion and noise reduction. This section derives a more generalized fullband loss function.

\subsection{Trade-off Criterion in Subband}
In traditional speech enhancement approaches, speech distortion and noise reduction in the subband can be considered separately. The subband square error of the speech and the subband residual noise
can be, respectively, given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq5}
J_s \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right] = {\left| {f\left( {S_l \left( k \right)} \right) - g\left( {S_l \left( k \right),D_l \left( k \right),M_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^2 },
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\label{eq6}
J_d \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right] = {\left| {h\left( {S_l \left( k \right),D_l \left( k \right),M_l \left( k \right)} \right)}\right| }^2,
\end{equation}
where $h(a,b,c)$ is a function with three variables $a$, $b$, and $c$. When $f(a) = |a|$, $g(a,b,c) = |ac|$, and $h(a,b,c) = |bc|$, $E\left\{ J_s \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\}$
and $E\left\{ J_d \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\}$ become the MSE of the
speech magnitude and the residual noise power in the subband, respectively, which are identical with \cite[(8.31) and (8.32)]{benesty2009noise}.

By minimizing the subband MSE of the speech with a residual noise control, an optimization problem
can be given to derive the nonlinear spectral gain, which is given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq7}
\begin{array}{l}
\mathop {\min}\limits_{M_l \left( k \right)} E \left\{ {J_s \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]} \right\},\\
\;\;\;\;\;\;{\emph s.t.}\;\;E\left\{J_d \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\} = {\left| {\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta _l \left( k \right),D_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^2 },
\end{array}
\end{equation}
where ${\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta ,b} \right)}$ is a function of two variables $\beta$ and $b$. $\beta _l \left( k \right) \in [0\;1]$ could be both a frequency and frame-dependent factor that can be introduced to control the residual noise flexibly.

The optimal spectral gain in (\ref{eq7}) can be solved theoretically by the Lagrange multiplier method, which is
\begin{equation}
\label{eq8}
\mathop {\min }\limits_{M_l \left( k \right)} \left\{ \begin{array}{l}
 E\left\{J_s \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\} + \mu E\left\{ J_d \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\} \\
  \;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\; - \mu  {\left| {\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta _l \left( k \right),D_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^2 }  \\
 \end{array} \right\},
\end{equation}
where $\mu \ge 0$ is a Lagrange multiplier. When $f(a) = |a|$, $g(a,b,c) = |ac|$, $h(a,b,c) = |bc|$, and $\left|{\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta ,b} \right)}\right| = \beta E\{|b|^2\}$,
the optimal spectral gain can be derived from ({\ref{eq8}}) and the constraint in (\ref{eq7}), which can be given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq9}
M_l \left( k \right) = {{\xi _l \left( k \right)} \mathord{\left/
 {\vphantom {{\xi _l \left( k \right)} {\left( {\xi _l \left( k \right) + \mu _l \left( k \right)} \right)}}} \right.
 \kern-\nulldelimiterspace} {\left( {\xi _l \left( k \right) + \mu _l \left( k \right)} \right)}},
\end{equation}
where $\xi_l\left( k \right) = E\{|S_l \left( k \right)|^2\}/E\{|D_l \left( k \right)|^2\}$ is the \emph{a priori} SNR. It is not always possible to derive $M_l \left( k \right)$ mathematically, especially when
$f(a)$, $g(a,b,c)$, $h(a,b,c)$, and ${\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta ,b} \right)}$ have very complicated expressions. Moreover, it is uneasy to accurately estimate the noise power spectral density in non-stationary noise environments~{\cite{martin2001noise,cohen2003noise, gerkmann2011unbiased}}.
However, it seems that this optimization can be easily solved by supervised approaches. To transfer this problem, we need to
define the fullband square error of the speech and the fullband residual noise power to derive the loss function for supervised approaches.
\textbf{\vspace{-0.3cm}}
\subsection{Trade-off Criterion in Fullband}
The fullband MSE of the speech and the fullband residual noise can be, respectively, given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq10}
\mathcal{J}_s  = \sum\limits_{k = \mathcal{K}} {\sum\limits_{l = \mathcal{L}} {J_s \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]} },
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\label{eq11}
\mathcal{J}_d  = \sum\limits_{k = \mathcal{K}} {\sum\limits_{l = \mathcal{L}} {J_d \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]} }.
\end{equation}

The loss function without any constraints can be given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq12}
\mathcal{J}_x  = \mathcal{J}_s  + \mu \mathcal{J}_d,
\end{equation}
where (\ref{eq12}) is the same as the newly proposed components loss function as given in~{\cite{xu2019components}}.

The loss function with residual noise control is
\begin{equation}
\label{eq13}
\mathcal{J}_x  = \mathcal{J}_s  + \mu \mathcal{J}_d^{\rm con},
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{J}_d^{\rm con}  = \sum\limits_{k = \mathcal{K}} {\sum\limits_{l = \mathcal{L}} {\left| {J_d \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right] -  {\left| {\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta_l \left( k \right),D_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^2 } } \right|} }.\nonumber
\end{equation}

It is obvious that (\ref{eq13}) is a generalization of (\ref{eq12}), where (\ref{eq13}) reduces to (\ref{eq12}) when
${ {\left| {\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta_l \left( k \right),D_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^2 } \equiv 0}$. One can observe that $\beta_l \left( k \right)$
is both frequency and frame-dependent, so it can control the residual noise in each time-frequency bin.
\vspace{-0.3cm}
\subsection{A Generalized Loss Function}
We further generalize the subband square error in (\ref{eq5}) and (\ref{eq6}), the square is substituted by a variable $\gamma \ge 0$ and an additional
 variable $\alpha$ is also introduced on the spectra, then (\ref{eq5}) and (\ref{eq6}) can be, respectively, given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq14}
J_s^{\gamma,\alpha}  \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right] =  {\left| {f\left( {S^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right) - g\left( {S^\alpha_l \left( k \right),X^\alpha_l \left( k \right),M^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^\gamma  } ,
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\label{eq15}
J_d^{\gamma,\alpha}  \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right] =  {\left| {h\left( {S^\alpha_l \left( k \right),D^\alpha_l \left( k \right),M^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^\gamma  }.
\end{equation}

Analogously, with the residual noise control, the optimal problem in the subband becomes
\begin{equation}
\label{eq16}
\begin{array}{l}
\mathop {\min }\limits_{M_l \left( k \right)} E \left\{ {J_s^{\gamma,\alpha} \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]} \right\},\\
\;\;\;\;\;\;{\rm \emph{s.t.}}\;\;\;E\left\{J_d^{\gamma,\alpha} \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\} = {\left| {\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta^\alpha_l \left( k \right),D^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^{\gamma} }.
\end{array}
\end{equation}

By setting $f(a) = |a|$, $g(a,b,c) = |ac|$, $h(a,b,c) = |bc|$, and ${\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta ,b} \right)} = (\beta |b|)$, one can derive a generalized
gain function with the Lagrange multiplier method, which is
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:ParametricWF}
M_l \left( k \right) = \left( {\frac{{\left( {\xi _l \left( k \right)} \right)^{c_1 } }}{{\left(\mu _l \left( k \right)\right)^{\left(2 c_1c_2-1\right)} + \left( {\xi _l \left( k \right)} \right)^{c_1 } }}} \right)^{c_2 },
\end{equation}
where $c_1 = \alpha\gamma/(2\gamma-2)$ and $c_2 = 1/\alpha$, where (\ref{eq:ParametricWF}) is identical to \cite[(6)]{inoue2011theoretical}. Note that \cite[(6)]{inoue2011theoretical} is
given intuitively without theoretical derivation. When $\gamma=2$ and $\alpha=1$, (\ref{eq:ParametricWF}) reduces to (\ref{eq9}). When $\gamma=2$, one can get $M_l \left( k \right) = \left( {{{\left( {\xi _l \left( k \right)} \right)^\alpha  } \mathord{\left/
 {\vphantom {{\left( {\xi _l \left( k \right)} \right)^\alpha  } {\left( {\mu _l \left( k \right) + \left( {\xi _l \left( k \right)} \right)^\alpha  } \right)}}} \right.
 \kern-\nulldelimiterspace} {\left( {\mu _l \left( k \right) + \left( {\xi _l \left( k \right)} \right)^\alpha  } \right)}}} \right)^{1/\alpha }$, which has already been derived and presented in (\cite[(22)]{inoue2011theoretical}).

Similarly, the generalized loss function for supervised approaches can be given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq17}
\mathcal{J}_x^{\gamma,\alpha}  = \mathcal{J}_s^{\gamma,\alpha}  + \mu \mathcal{J}_d^{{\gamma,\alpha},\rm con},
\end{equation}
where the first item $\mathcal{J}_s^{\gamma,\alpha}  = \sum\limits_{k = \mathcal{K}} {\sum\limits_{l = \mathcal{L}} {J_s^{\gamma,\alpha} \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]} }$ relates to the fullband speech distortion and the second item
$\mathcal{J}_d^{{\gamma,\alpha}, \rm con}  = \sum\limits_{k = \mathcal{K}} {\sum\limits_{l = \mathcal{L}} {\left| {J_d^{\gamma,\alpha} \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right] - {\left| {\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta ^\alpha_l \left( k \right),D^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^\gamma } } \right|} }$
is introduced to control the residual noise.

Eq. (\ref{eq17}) is a generalized loss function that includes (\ref{eq12}) and (\ref{eq13}). This is because (\ref{eq17}) reduces to (\ref{eq13}) when $\gamma=2, \alpha=1$ and it can further reduces to (\ref{eq12})
by setting ${{\left| {\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta^\alpha _l \left( k \right),D^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right|^\gamma } \equiv 0}$. It is interesting to see that (\ref{eq3})
also can be separated into two components, where one is the MSE of the speech and the other is related to the residual noise. When $f(a) = a$ and $g(a,b,c) = (a+b)c$, we have
\begin{equation}
\label{eq18}
E\left\{ {J_x \left( {M_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right\} = E\left\{ {J_s \left( {M_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right\} + E\left\{ {J_d \left( {M_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right\},
\end{equation}
where $E\left\{J_s \left( {M_l \left( k \right)} \right)\right\} = \left| {1 - M_l \left( k \right)} \right|^2 E\left\{ {\left| {S_l \left( k \right)} \right|^2 } \right\}$ relates to the power of speech distortion and $E\left\{ {J_d \left( {M_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right\} = \left| {M_l \left( k \right)} \right|^2 E\left\{ {\left| {D_l \left( k \right)} \right|^2 } \right\}$ relates to the power of residual noise. $E\left\{J_x \left[ {M_l \left( k \right)} \right]\right\}$ is a combination of speech distortion and residual noise, so the fullband MSE loss function of a complex spectrum is also a special case of the generalized loss function in (\ref{eq17}). If $f(a) = |a|$ and $g(a,b,c) = |(a+b)c|$ are chosen, the decomposition of $E\left\{ {J_x \left( {M_l \left( k \right)} \right)} \right\}$ is more complicated than (\ref{eq18}), which will not be further discussed for limited space.

In this letter, we emphasize the importance of introducing the residual noise control. $f(a) = |a|$, $g(a,b,c) = |ac|$, $h(a,b,c) = |bc|$, and ${\mathchar'26\mkern-10mu\lambda \left( {\beta ,b} \right)} = (\beta |b|)$ are applied, although more complicated expressions can be chosen when taking the perceptual quality into account. Accordingly, we have
\begin{equation}
\label{eq19}
\mathcal{J}_s^{\gamma,\alpha}  = \sum\limits_{l = \mathcal{L}} {\sum\limits_{k = \mathcal{K}} {\left| {\left( {1 - M^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right)S^\alpha_l \left( k \right)} \right|^\gamma  } },
\end{equation}
and
\begin{small}
\begin{equation}
\label{eq20}
\mathcal{J}_d^{{\gamma,\alpha} ,con}  = \sum\limits_{l = \mathcal{L}} {\sum\limits_{k = \mathcal{K}} {\left| {\left| {M_l \left( k \right)D_l \left( k \right)} \right|^{\alpha\gamma} - \left| {\beta _l \left( k \right)D_l \left( k \right)} \right|^{\alpha\gamma}} \right|} },
\end{equation}
\end{small}
where $\alpha$ will be set to a constant value and $\beta _l \left( k \right)$ is a constant value over frequency for simplicity, that is to say, $\beta _l \left( k \right) \equiv \beta_0$ and $\alpha=1$ are used in the following.
We only study the impact of $\beta_0$, $\mu$, and $\gamma$ on supervised approaches.

\section{Experimental Setup}
\subsection{Dataset}
Experiments are conducted with TIMIT corpus, where 1000 and 200 utterances are randomly chosen as the training and the evaluation datasets, respectively. 125 types of environment noises~{\cite{xu2013experimental, duan2012speech}} are used for generating noisy utterances under different SNR levels ranging from -5dB to 15dB with the interval 5dB. For model test, additional 10 male and 10 female utterances are chosen to mix with unseen noise signals taken from the NOISEX92~{\cite{varga1993assessment}} with SNR ranging from -5dB to 10dB with the interval 5dB.

\subsection{Network Architecture}
\vspace{-0cm}
U-Net is chosen as the network in this letter, which has been widely adopted for speech separation task~{\cite{kolbaek2019loss}}. As shown in Fig.~{\ref{fig:u-net}}, the network consists of the convolutional encoder and decoder, both of which are comprised of five convolutional blocks where the 2-D convolution layer is adopted, followed by batch normalization (BN) and exponential linear unit (ELU). Skip connection is introduced to compensate for the information loss during features compression process. Note that the mapping target is the gain function and the sigmoid function is adopted to make sure that the output ranges from 0 to 1. Causal mechanism is introduced to achieve real-time processing, where only the past frames are involved in the convolution calculation. The tensor output size of each layer is given with $(Channels, TimeStep, Feat)$ format, which is shown in Fig.~{\ref{fig:u-net}}.
\vspace{-0.3cm}
\subsection{Loss Functions and Training Models}
This letter chooses three loss functions including MSE in~(\ref{eq4}), Time-MSE-based loss (TMSE)~{\cite{kolbaek2019loss}} and recently proposed SI-SDR-based loss~{\cite{kolbaek2019loss}} as baselines. AS T-F domain-based network is used, an additional fixed iSTFT-like layer is needed to transform the estimated T-F spectrum back into time domain for TMSE- and SI-SDR-based loss~{\cite{wichern2018phase}}. They compare with the proposed generalized loss function given in (\ref{eq17}) with (\ref{eq19}) and (\ref{eq20}). All the models are trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimized by Adam~{\cite{kingma2014adam}}.

\begin{figure}[t]

	\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{0.235cm}
	\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-0.1cm}
	\centering
	\centerline{\includegraphics[width= \columnwidth]{Network-Architecture}}
	\caption{The network architecture adopted in this study. Input is the noisy magnitude spectra and output is the estimated gain functions.}
	\label{fig:u-net}
	\vspace{-0.3cm}
\end{figure}

\vspace{-0.1cm}
\section{Results and Analysis}
\vspace{-0.1cm}
\subsection{Objective Evaluation}
This letter uses four objective measurements including noise attenuation (NA)~{\cite{gustafsson1998novel}}, speech attenuation (SA)~{\cite{gustafsson1998novel}}, PESQ~{\cite{recommendation2001perceptual}}, and SDR~{\cite{vincent2006performance}}. The testing results w.r.t. $\gamma, {\beta_0}$ and $\mu$ are shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:na_sa_pesq}, where $\gamma=1,2,3$, $\beta_0=-10{\rm dB},-20{\rm dB},-30{\rm dB}$ and $\mu=0.5,1,2,3,4$ are considered. The test results of three baselines are also presented as comparison. From this figure, one can observe the following phenomena. First, the increase of ${\beta_0}$ will decrease NA. This is because the residual noise control mechanism is introduced for optimization, which means, during the training process, the residual noise in the estimated spectra will gradually get close to the preset residual noise threshold. As a consequence, the characteristic of the residual noise is expected to be effectively preserved, which will be further confirmed by subjective listening tests in the following. Second, the increase of $\mu$ is beneficial to noise suppression and meanwhile introducing more speech distortion. As generalized loss can be viewed as the joint optimization of both speech distortion and noise reduction, a larger $\mu$ leads to smaller gain values, as (\ref{eq:ParametricWF}) states, where on the one hand more interference is suppressed and on the other hand, more speech components are inevitably abandoned. Third, the increase of $\gamma$ has a negative influence on NA and SD. Finally, among various parameter configurations, (2, -30{\rm dB}, 0.5), (2, -30{\rm dB}, 1) and (2, -20{\rm dB}, 1) can be chosen. This is because relatively better performance can be obtained for all the four objective metrics. One can observe that the three competing loss functions can get better performance in some objective metrics, while they may suffer much worse performance in others. For example, SI-SDR and TMSE have larger values of SDR, while their PESQ scores are even lower than the MSE, which is consistent with the study in {\cite{le2019sdr}}.

\begin{figure}[htbp]

	\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{0.235cm}
	\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-0.1cm}
	\centering
	\centerline{\includegraphics[width= \columnwidth]{NA_SA_PESQ_mu}}
	\caption{Test results in terms of NA, SA, PESQ and SDR, where the averaged PESQ score of the noisy signals is 1.80 and its averaged SDR is 2.51{\rm dB}.}
	\label{fig:na_sa_pesq}
	\vspace{-0.3cm}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Subjective Evaluation}
To evaluate speech quality of the proposed generalized loss (GL) function, a subjective evaluation test is conducted among GL and baselines, where we follow the subjective testing procedures of~{\cite{breithaupt2007cepstral}}. In this comparison, we choose the parameter configuration (2, -20{\rm dB}, 1) for the propose GL function. The experiment is conducted in a standard listening room, where 10 listeners participate. The listening material consists of 20 utterances, each of which includes one male and female utterance selected from TIMIT corpus and is mixed with one of five noises including aircraft, babble, bus, cafeteria, and car. Four SNR conditions are selected for mixing, i.e. -5{\rm dB}, 0{\rm dB}, 5{\rm dB}, 10{\rm dB}. Speech pause of 3{\rm s} duration is specifically inserted before each utterance. Then, the duration of each listening utterance is about 13{\rm s}. Each listener needs to write down the utterance index that they prefer considering both noise naturalness and speech quality. The same as ~{\cite{breithaupt2007cepstral}}, "Equal" option is also provided if no subjective preference can be given. To avoid inertia, the utterance index in each pair is shuffled. The averaged subjective results are presented in Table.{~\ref{tab1}}. From this table, one can observe that the proposed GL function with residual noise control achieves better performance in subjective testing, which can be explained as the proposed GL method can effectively recover speech components while preserving the characteristic of background noise to some extent compared with all the baselines.
{
	\renewcommand\arraystretch{1.2}
	\setlength{\tabcolsep}{18pt}
	\begin{table}[h]
		\tiny
		\footnotesize
		\caption{Results of subjective listening test. The numbers indicate the percentage of votes in favor of one approach. The choice "Equal" means no subjective difference.}
		\centering
		\begin{center}
			\begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c}
				\hline\hline
				\textbf{Methods} & \textbf{GL} & \textbf{MSE} & \textbf{Equal} \\
				\hline
				\textbf{Preference}  & 70.0\%  & 22.0\% & 8.0\% \\
				\hline
				\textbf{Methods} & \textbf{GL} &\textbf{TMSE} & \textbf{Equal} \\
				\hline
				 \textbf{Preference} & 66.5\% & 22.0\% & 12.5\% \\
				\hline
				\textbf{Methods} & \textbf{GL} & \textbf{SI-SDR} & \textbf{Equal} \\
				\hline
				\textbf{Preference} & 70.5\% & 23.5\% & 6.0\% \\
				\hline\hline
			\end{tabular}
			\label{tab1}
		\end{center}
	\end{table}
}

\section{Conclusion}
This letter derives a generalized loss function which can easily make a balance between noise attenuation and speech distortion with multiple manual parameters. In addition, MSE and other typical loss functions are revealed to be special cases. Both objective and subjective tests are conducted to show that it is important to control the residual noise for supervised speech enhancement approaches, where the residual noise becomes much more natural than before. Further work could concentrate on studying a combination of the residual noise control scheme with objective metrics-based loss functions to improve the naturalness of the residual noise.

\ifCLASSOPTIONcaptionsoff
  \newpage
\fi

\small

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


With UK holidaymakers spending an average of £1,300 on their summer holiday, finding a bargain can be a challenge. Whether you're on a tight budget….
Staying safe overseas is one of the biggest challenges travellers face, but the threats aren't all about money changing scams and train station muggings….
When it comes to planning summer holidays many travellers tend think of beach holidays but if you're looking for something a little different this year, a trip to Finland's northern region of Lapland….
Holidays with your loved ones can provide some of the most cherished moments of your lives, but they nearly always require meticulous preparation….


The bitter gourd is good for health. In Andhra Pradesh, the stuffed bitter gourd curry is most famous. Here you will learn how to prepare curry in 30 minutes.
After cooling the cooker, remove the Bitter gourd and squeeze to remove water from it. Keep it aside.


Alia Bhat is undoubtedly one of the biggest discoveries of the Hindi film industry in the recent times and during her recent visit on the sets of Sony Entertainment Television's Indian Idol 9, LV Revanth left no stone unturned to impress the gorgeous actress. His endeavour did not go in vein as Alia walked up to him on stage to greet and praise him for his phenomenal performance on the song 'Jeena Jeena'. However, as soon as Alia stood in front of him, Revanth dedicated the Ishq Wala Love song to her and danced with her. Alia could only smile looking at the admiration the young singer expressed for her.
After dedicating the song, Revanth enacted as if he is going to faint to have Alia impressed by his heartfelt rendition. However this turned out to be a déjà vu moment for the young actress. She mentioned it's funny that he enacted the fainting part because while filming the song in the snowy region, she actually fainted twice. Judge Farah Khan, who had choreographed 'Ishq Wala Love', also found it a déjà vu moment as she remembered the scenes of shooting for the song.
Alia Bhat also made the most of the opportunity of being on Indian Idol 9 set as she for the first time sang 'Humsafar' from her upcoming film. The contestants and the judges were mighty impressed with her performance. Alia expressed that she wanted to sing the song live and what better than doing so in a singing reality show filled with talented musicians.


A very basic question for historians is how to measure and compare the standard of living experienced by people in different historical settings. Is it possible to arrive at credible estimates of the standard of living in the Roman Empire, medieval Burgundy, nineteenth-century Britain, and twentieth-century Illinois? Can we say with any confidence that Romans had a higher (or lower) standard of living than a twelfth-century Burgundian?
One part of the problem is conceptual. What do we mean by the standard of living? Is there a specific set of characteristics that are constitutive of the standard of living -- say, nutrition, income, access to health remedies and education, quality of housing, personal security? And how should we take account of the unequal distribution of these characteristics across a given population? Should we be content with an estimate of an average level of nutrition -- even though this may reflect a misleading impression of the circumstances of the poorest segment of society? Should we hope to be able to arrive at an estimate of the standard of living of certain typical social actors -- landless workers, skilled laborers, merchants?
The second major problem we must confront is the availability and quality of historical data about wages, prices, and consumption. The series of wages and prices that are available in different countries are, of course, incomplete. And, more importantly, the commodities that satisfy basic nutritional needs are different in different countries and regions. So it is necessary to make assumptions about the nutritional equivalents in different cultures before we can begin to arrive at estimates of relative standard of living.
Robert Allen attempts to establish something like an empirical baseline for the real wage in different parts of Europe and Asia in his contribution, "Real wages in Europe and Asia: A first look at the long-term patterns". He compiles a large dataset of wage data for a number of European cities, and he makes careful inferences about comparable data for India, Japan, and China.
Allen notes that it is necessary to make a number of adjustments in order to estimate the cost of a wage basket in Asia, because of large differences in diet. Allen stipulates 143 kgs/year of rice for the Asian basket versus 208 kgs/year of bread in the European basket. And he converts prices and wages into silver to permit comparison of prices across Europe and Asia. Here is one of Allen's summary graphs comparing laborers' real wages in Japan (farm), Kyoto, England (farm), Oxford, and London.
The graph indicates a significant premium for laborers' wages in London, whereas Japanese and English farm wages are fairly similar throughout most of the period. And it indicates a "take-off" for London laborers' wage beginning in the mid-nineteenth century -- not paralleled by a similar take-off in Kyoto.
The wage comparisons undertaken in this paper support several important conclusions about living standards in pre-industrial Europe and Asia.
First, wages expressed in grams of silver were lower in China and India than in Europe. The views of the eighteenth century observers cited by Parthasarathi are confirmed. This is important since it was the proximate cause of Asia's competitive advantage in textiles and luxury manufactures and was, thus, the basis for Asian-European trade in the early modern period. Why these differentials persisted for hundreds of years is an important question in international and monetary economics that must be addressed to explain the dynamics of the world economy in this period.
Second, low Asian silver wages were matched by low Asian prices with the result that living standards in Asia were similar to those in many parts of Europe. Farm workers in Europe and urban workers in central and southern Europe did not enjoy higher living standards than their counterparts in Asia.
Contributions by Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong take up the issue of the supposed backwardness and stagnation of the Chinese rural economy at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy Pomeranz argued that England and the Yangzi Delta region had roughly comparable levels of productivity and similar levels of standard of living for poor people (laborers and peasants). In his contribution to this volume he pushes this argument forward with more empirical analysis of the standard of living in China. He attempts to handle the "commensurability" problem mentioned above by converting subsistence food commodities to calorie equivalents. He finds that Chinese data for seventeenth century laborers indicate a daily diet of 2,800 calories for adults in the eighteenth century (Kindle loc 532).
So Pomeranz's research here broadly confirms the view he advanced in The Great Divergence, that the standards of living in comparable regions of Europe and China were roughly the same; and he also confirms a significant decline in the standard of living for the bulk of the Chinese population in the nineteenth century.
Li Bozhong takes up the stagnation issue from a different point of view, a careful consideration of farm labor productivity in the Lower Yangzi region. This extends his important work in Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850. And his central finding is an important one as refutation of the standard involution interpretation of China's economic history; he finds that agricultural productivity rose from 1620 to 1850.
The issue of productivity is key to an assessment of the standard of living, because flat or declining productivity in a region with a rising population implies a falling standard of living -- the general "theorem" of Malthus. So Pomeranz's finding would be difficult to support if we were forced to conclude that agricultural productivity was constant or falling. But Li's careful and data-rich analysis indicates, to the contrary, that there was substantial gain in productivity from the Ming to the mid-Qing.
What is most valuable about this project is the empirical grip it provides on these important questions: What have been the dynamics of the standard of living across Eurasia from the middle ages to the twentieth century? And, eventually, what economic and demographic forces account for the inflection points and persistent differences in different regions that are documented? And, as all the contributors agree, one of the key discoveries is the fact of variation at every level, from regions of England to regions of Europe to the ends of Eurasia.
Cities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City , offers a collection of recent work in cultural studies that attempts to decode some of this dark imagery.
Several things are particularly interesting about the volume. Most basically, it represents an interesting conjunction of humanities perspectives and sociology. The articles are individually very good. And as a group they pose a series of important questions. How does a film set in Los Angeles or Shanghai serve to depict the city? Is there sociological content in a film that can contribute to a better sociology of the city? But also -- what can we say about the cultural currents that produce a particular vision of the city? Are there post-modern sensibilities and fears that lead filmmakers to turn the ambience dark?
The volume treats cities and their depictions in many parts of the world -- China, South Africa, Mexico, India, Europe, and the United States. What is unusual about the volume is the fact that it is not a collection in "film studies" or in "urban studies", but rather a series of contributions taking seriously representation and the represented. Moreover, there is no effort to force the perspectives taken into a common theory of "noir representation"; there are common themes that emerge, but each contributor brings forward a singular perspective, informed by the specifics of the region and genre that he/she studies. It is a project on the nexus between imaginative representation and existing social realities.
As the world becomes increasingly urban, dire predictions of an impending crisis have reached a feverish pitch. Alarming statistics on the huge and unsustainable gap between the rates of urbanization and economic growth in the global South is seen to spell disaster. The unprecedented agglomeration of the poor produces the specter of an unremittingly bleak "planet of slums." Monstrous megacities do not promise the pleasures of urbanity but the misery and strife of the Hobbesian jungle. The medieval maxim that the city air makes you free appears quaint in view of the visions of an approaching urban anarchy. Urbanists write about fortified "privatopias" erected by the privileged tow all themselves off from the imagined resentment and violence of the multitude. Instead of freedom, the unprecedented urbanization of poverty seems to promise only division and conflict. The image of the modern city as a distinct and bounded entity lies shattered as market-led globalization and media saturation dissolve boundaries between town and countryside, center and periphery. From the ruins of the old ideal of the city as a space of urban citizens there emerges, sphinx-like, a "Generic City" of urban consumers.
All the essays are interesting and insightful, but I was particularly interested in the Asian contributions -- India, China, and Japan.
First is Li Zhang's treatment of some current treatments of the dark side of Chinese cities (Shanghai and Shenyang) in "Postsocialist Urban Dystopia?". She treats the Sixth Generation and New Documentaries movements in contemporary Chinese filmmaking, focusing on two recent works (Wang Bing's West of the Tracks, about the decline of a rust-belt city in the Northeast, and Lou Ye's Suzhou River, about the lives of poor and disaffected people in Shanghai).
So there are several key themes here: First, there is a critical perspective on the rising inequalities and dispossession of ordinary people that have followed from China's growth policies; this is the documentary aspect of the films she discusses, and plainly reflects the filmmakers' interest in capturing an important and disturbing contemporary social reality in China. And second, there is a critical vision of the moral dislocations that China has undergone, from Maoist egalitarianism to capitalist and consumerist pursuit of wealth. Zhang captures this element of contemporary China in her discussion of both films, but especially in Suzhou River. There is squalor and poverty, to be sure, but more pervasive is the sense of moral ungroundedness.
Dombivli Fast is quite different from the films discussed by Zhang. It is reflective of the current social realities of Mumbai -- meaningless work, endless commuting on super-crowded trains. But it is more personal and introspective than the Chinese works, in that it focuses on one man and his family; it attempts to reveal his inner anxieties and thoughts. The dystopia here is not crushing poverty -- Madhav Apte and his family live a middle-class life in Mumbai. Here the dystopia is the pressure, stress, and callous injustice of society that drives Madhav to the breaking point.
David Ambaras takes up Tokyo in its cultural representations in "Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930." He too highlights the discrepancy between official, ideological expressions of the city, and the underlying grinding reality that modern cities often represent.
Ambaras doesn't work through cinema, but rather what he calls "slum discourse" and graphic pictorial representations of urban life. He highlights the popular and journalistic literature of the 1870s through the early 1900s as a barometer of the anxieties Tokyo residents experienced about their changing city. Stories of disease, child murder, beggars, and abject poverty permeate this literature.
It is worth sorting out the different perspectives on social knowledge represented in this volume. First, there is the question of knowledge of the object, the contemporary city. Does cinema shed light on the current social realities of Shanghai or Mumbai? Can cinema contribute to urban sociology? Second is the question of the mentality of a place and time; the way that contemporary Mumbai-ers or Shanghai-ers think of themselves and their society. Can cinema accurately capture some strands of social consciousness and anxiety that are real threads in the social landscape? Is cinema a legitimate form of ethnography? And third is the mentality and intentions of the creative class itself -- the filmmakers. Can the critic discover threads in the filmmaker's work that sheds important light on the preoccupations of this slice of contemporary society?
Finally, we can ask the question of perspectivalism: how many Shanghai's are there? Zhang refers to the Maoist preference for social realism or socialist romanticism; there are the entertainment-oriented Shanghai thrillers; there is the global Shanghai as an exotic backdrop to drama; and there is the noir representation of the social problems of the city. Can we say that one depiction is more veridical than the other? Or perhaps, can we say that several of these perspectives are compatible with the truth of Shanghai; and that optimism and pessimism are equally distorting frames for social perception?
Now that I've played with the Google Ngrams tool a little, I continue to think it's a powerful window into a lot of interesting questions. But I also see that there are patterns that emerge that are plainly spurious, and surely do not correspond to real changes in language, culture, or collective interest over time. It is easy to find examples of search terms that very plainly indicate that there is some kind of "instrument error", an observation that emerges because of an artifact of the method rather than a real pattern in the underlying behavior.
Fortunately it is possible to probe these areas of anomaly with the goal of figuring out what they mean. So let's see what happens when we pick out a set of common words that are not freighted with a lot of culturally specific significance. This will let us see more clearly how the instrument itself works.
Consider the color words red, green, yellow, blue, black. Let's graph the frequency of these terms in American English from 1800 to 2000. Before looking at the Ngram graph, let's consider what we would expect ex ante. Color words occur in books to designate -- color. Color terms are common words, so we might expect that they would remain fairly constant in frequency over time. So here is the null hypothesis about the frequency of common color terms: without a change in culture about color, we should expect the color words would remain roughly constant in frequency (flat curve). And the usage patterns for each term should be independent from the others. So we should expect a degree of independent random fluctuations in the frequencies of each color word, where "blue" bumps up in frequency in a given year and "red" bumps down.
Here are some ways in which the actual behavior of color terms might deviate from the null hypothesis. Some colors may be more in style than others at a time -- there may be a cultural preference for red over blue, so the frequency of red may be greater than the frequency of blue. And the frequencies may change as cultural preferences change; so blue may become more frequent than red in a later generation. More generally, literary taste may change by becoming more descriptive overtime -- with more frequent use of color terms -- or more formal, with less use of color terms. So it would be possible to explain persistent differences in frequency of color terms; shifting frequencies across different color words; and even a longterm rise or decline in the whole family of color words.
Now let's look at the actual graph of these word frequencies (link).
Here we can see behavior that flatly contradicts these reasonable ex ante expectations. First, there are stretches of time in which the color words covary extremely closely, to the extent that the graphs look identical in shape. This is true, for example, in the neighborhood of 1820. This is impossible to explain as anything else than an artifact of some sort. It is impossible to believe that the frequencies of several color words would fluctuate up and down with this degree of synchrony.
Here is another aspect of the graph that is also suggestive of artifact: the long wave of rise and fall in the frequency of all the color words between 1810 and 1920. It is not impossible that "color" became more important in literary language and then declined; but that seems improbable. So this long wave coordinated behavior of the color words seems to be more likely the effect of a database anomaly than a manifestation of a real trend.
Is there any reliable information in this graph? Yes. There is one feature of this graph that appears to have real significance, and that is the change in the behavior of "black" after 1960. Prior to that year the term behaves pretty much like all the other color words. After that year it takes off on a very different trajectory. And this abrupt and accelerating increase in the frequency of "black" seems to have everything to do with a real social and cultural change in the 1960s and forward -- the abrupt increase in those decades in the salience of race. There is a similar divergence between the behavior of "black" and all the other color words in 1860; the frequency of the word increases for a few years following the American civil war.
More tantalizingly, it may be significant that "blue" moves up from "yellow" to "green" in frequency over time. This is one element of the graph where the terms are not correlated with each other; instead, "blue" changes its position relative to other color frequencies.
This example shows that we need to be careful about the inferences we draw from the patterns that appear from Ngram searches. We need to always ask: "Does this pattern really correspond to a fact about underlying collective linguistic behavior, or is it the result of an artifact?" More fundamentally, we need to understand the sources of the artifacts we are able to detect -- spurious correlations, inexplicable long-wave changes in frequency, and others still to be discovered. And, finally, we should seek out techniques that can be applied to the results that serve to filter out the artifacts and focus on the real variations the data contain. We need some signal processing here to separate signal from noise. The Ngram tool is powerful, but we need to use it critically and intelligently.
Google's NGram Viewer is a really amazing new tool for researchers in literature and the humanities (link, link, link, link). What is perhaps not quite so evident is the power it may have for people interested in the evolution of the social science disciplines.
Basically the concept is a simple one. The Google Book project has now scanned and OCR'd millions of books published over the past several centuries. With the announcement of NGram Viewer, Google has shared a vast indexed database of words and phrases included in this full corpus. And its Viewer tool allows users to provide specific phrases and see a graph of the frequency of that phrase over time (1800-2000 by default). It is important to bear in mind that the project measures the frequency of the phrase, not the absolute number of occurrences; so as the volume of words increases decade by decade, a phrase with a .005% share has an increasing number of occurrences.
The "political economy" line shows a gradually rising trend from 1800 to 1890, and then declines through about 1950. Only in the 1980s does the term become more popular again -- perhaps corresponding to a resurgence of interest in the classical foundations of economic thought (Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa). The term "economics" has virtually no use prior to 1880; it then begins to increase in frequency, passing "political economy" in frequency in 1910, and climbing rapidly into the 1980s. The frequency of "economics" appears to be roughly eight times the frequency of "political economy" by 1980.
Through 1860 both terms are very infrequent. After 1860, however, "anthropology" takes off, and "ethnography" continues at a low level through 1960, roughly at the time when Geertz and other path-breaking anthropologists began redefining the field in the direction of "local knowledge" or ethnography. From that point on both terms increase in frequency (with a large dip for "anthropology in the 1970s), with anthropology remaining a 3:1 favorite.
Naturally enough, Einstein starts slowly in the early twentieth century, but then begins to rise in frequency after 1918 or so. He passes Hobbes for good in 1938 or so. Darwin, surprisingly enough, shows a falling trend through the century, recovering a bit after 1975. But we were looking for evidence of artifact, and this graph seems to provide it; to the eye, there is a similar periodicity in the frequency of all these authors throughout the century, with a low point in 1945 (the end of World War II), and for all but Newton, another peak around 1965 followed by a trough around 1980. So it isn't "political theory" that is oscillating in the ocean of words included in the universe of books, but intellectuals, philosophers, and scientists generally. And this suggests that there's something going on that may have more to do with the measurements than the reality; more investigation is needed.
In short, it seems promising to think that there are some very interesting patterns to be teased out using this tool, and they are patterns that never could have been identified without the databases that Google has created. A new form of our ability to probe and represent the growth of knowledge is made possible.
Every democracy I can think of has a meaningful (though usually small) proportion of citizens who fall on the extreme right by any standard: racist, White supremacist, hateful, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, nativist, nationalist, or violently anti-government individuals and groups. In the United States we have many, many organizations that are basically racist and potentially violent hate groups. They provide a basis for cultivating, recruiting and mobilizing like-minded followers, and they are sometimes co-opted by opportunistic politicians for their own narrow purposes. The Southern Poverty Law Center (link) and the Anti-Defamation League (link) do a great job and a needed service in tracking many of these organizations. (For example, SPL monitors 26 hate groups in the state of Michigan; link.) The umbrella term for these organizations and individuals is "hate groups" -- individuals and organizations who organize their views of the social world around intolerance of other groups and a motivation to harm or subordinate those other people.
A recent report by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (link) provides a detailed snapshot of how some of these racist groups have shown up in the Tea Party movement (link). The NAACP made a very careful statement about racist statements and provocations that had occurred at Tea Party protests in 2009 and 2010 (link), including the egregious incident that occurred in Washington in which Representatives Emanuel Cleaver, John Lewis, and Barney Frank were showered with vitriol. And this temperate and careful statement was derided by Tea Party leaders. The IREHR study goes a long way to document the concerns raised in the NAACP statement.
What I find really worth considering is the question of the fact of the very existence of these pockets of virulent racists and anti-semites in our society. I'm not thinking here of garden-variety racial stereotyping and prejudice, which is surely much more widespread, but of a kind of racism that extends to overt hostility and sometimes violence against the other group. It is hard to estimate the percentage of our society that falls in this category, though there are some public opinion surveys that help us make a crude estimate (Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence Bobo, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, Revised Edition and Schuman and Bobo, "Survey-Based Experiments on White Racial Attitudes towards Residential Integration" (link); Pew Research Center, "Race, Ethnicity & Campaign '08" (link)).
But here is the important question: why do a certain number of people in modern societies have these attitudes in the first place? Is it just a sort of basic fact about our population that a certain percentage of us fall in this mindset? Are there specific features of our informal system of acculturation that creates this minority of hate-disposed people? Are these the result of a sort of sub-culture of militia encampments, prison gangs, and biker groups who are somehow able to promulgate their hatred to new recruits? Is it ignorance, disaffection, and economic uncertainty that brings out these qualities in otherwise decent people? In short -- is it the organizations that produce the hate in some people, or is it the hateful individuals who create the organizations?
Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing is one kind of empirical study of a related question, the occurrence of murderous ethnic cleansing. Here are a few of his hypotheses.
Ethnic hostility rises where ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification, in the process capturing and channeling class-like sentiments toward ethnonationalism.
This "ordinary people as killers" theory (c) doesn't really seem to do justice to the problem at issue here. And the political opportunists who play the hate card aren't too hard to understand (a). It's really the people Mann includes under (b) that are of concern to me -- the true believers, the extremist White supremacists or virulent anti-Semites who become the local activists and paramilitaries that I'd like to understand better. And this population seems to be defined by the attitudes, motives, and ideologies that they bring with them, rather than the inter-group dynamics and political opportunism that Mann focuses on. So, once again, where does this mentality or psychology of activist hatred come from in our society (or in other contemporary societies)?
The easy answers are ready to hand. We might postulate a strand of political culture and thought in American society that reproduces hate and racism in some of the young people who are exposed to it. (Hate on the Internet falls in this category.) Or we might postulate a recessive "racist personality" type that is a portion of the human psyche (along the lines of the theory of the authoritarian personality). Or we might postulate that lack of opportunity and an enduring situation of defeated expectations pushes some young people into hate (skinheads in Britain or Germany).
But I don't find any of the theories very convincing by itself. So we seem to have an important theoretical issue here that is unresolved: where does "hate" come from?
The most vivid part of any undergraduate student's study of economics is probably the diagrams. Economists since Walras, Pareto, and Marshall have found it useful to express their theories and hypotheses making use of two-axis diagrams, allowing for very economical formulation of fundamental relationships. Supply-demand curves, production functions, and a graph of diminishing marginal product all provide a way of making geometrical sense of a given economic principle or hypothesis. They allow us to visualize the relationships that are postulated among a set of factors.
Mark Blaug has made a long and fruitful career out of his remarkable ability of placing economic thought into its context (Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962), The Methodology of Economics: Or, How Economists Explain (1992)). Now he has collaborated with Peter Lloyd to produce Famous Figures and Diagrams in Economics (2010), and the book is a marvelous contribution.
The book is organized into several large sections: Demand and supply curve analysis; Welfare economics; Special markets; General equilibrium analysis; Open economies; Macroeconomic analysis; and Growth and income distribution. Experts have been recruited to write short, technical but accessible essays on some 58 topics, including discussion of about 150 diagrams.
It is worth thinking a bit about what a diagram is, from a cognitive point of view. To start, it is not a data graph; a diagram does not generally provide a summary of actual economic variables over time, such as unemployment. But generally an economic diagram is not simply a graph of a given mathematical function either, plotting the value of a function over part of the domain of the independent variable. We need more than a graphing calculator to create a useful economic diagram.
We might imagine that economic diagrams are purely mathematical constructs, and we might suppose that we have little choice in the way that a diagram is constructed. But Edward Tufte has quite a bit to say on this subject in a series of books beginning with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . Essentially Tufte's message is that quantitative ideas can be conveyed in better and worse ways, and that much of the communication we do about quantities is misleading. Conveying a quantitative relationship through a diagram can be done more or less insightfully; it is up to the economist to find a concise way of representing the relationships he/she is interested in exploring.
One of my favorite economic diagrams is the one introduced by Mark Elvin to represent his theory of a high-level equilibrium trap in agricultural development in The Pattern of the Chinese Past .
The 2006 Economist article was occasioned by a deadly attack against a police camp by Naxal guerillas in Chhattisgarh State. The attack signalled the fact that this movement continued to possess organization, followers, and deadly intent. This map (reproduced from the Wikipedia article on the Naxalites) indicates the regions where the Naxalites currently have organizational presence; it is a large swath of rural India. Estimates of the number of active fighters range from 14,000 to 20,000, with several times these numbers of local supporters and militias.
Naxalite attacks have continued since 2006. Here is a chronology of attacks since 2006 compiled by NDTV (link). Particularly widely noted in the world press was an April 2010 attack against Central Reserve Police Force, killing 75 police personnel, also in the forests of Chhattisgarh (link). And the insurgency appears to be growing; in 2009 just under 1000 people were killed in Naxalite attacks -- almost triple the 2008 figures.
The leadership of CPI(M) has focused its mobilization efforts almost exclusively at the poorest of the poor and the most disadvantaged people within the caste system; and they have had particular success among tribal people living in India's forests. But extending back to the 1960s the movement also has had some appeal to educated elites in cities and universities -- people on the left who believe that India has made no serious efforts to ameliorate poverty or caste.
The main national parties in India, Congress and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have contested for control of the national government. But India's states have consistently demonstrated a wider range of parties and politics. West Bengal has been governed for decades by the Communist Party Marxist (CPM). Kerala has been governed through left-coalitions including the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)). Both these parties have renounced revolutionary violence and pursue a poverty-oriented set of economic and political policies. Other states are governed by right and center-right coalitions, with a rhetoric that is much more focused on Hindu nationalism and pro-market ideology.
Kohli's study of governability focuses on West Bengal, Gujarat, and Bihar, and his goal is to identify some of the political and social processes that have led to a national and regional governability crisis. Kohli finds substantial inter-state variability in governability across the three states he studies.
The situation of total breakdown of order in Bihar, for example, has resulted from corrosion of the authority vested in the social structure and absence of cohesion in political structures. Increasing power struggles in the society and a highly factionalized elite have provided a combustible political mixture that ignites periodically, and in Bihar even the forces of repression are ineffective. Political violence in Gujarat has had a more purposive quality than in Bihar. It results not primarily from a breakdown of social order but from the calculated mobilization strategies employed by competing elites.
So how is it possible for a violent rural insurgency to survive and grow in a modern democracy? There seem to be several primary factors. One is the familiar fact that insurgents establish their bases of operations in remote, lightly-policed regions. The Naxalite movement has managed to secure its "base areas" in forests and other poorly developed rural areas.
A second factor is the fact that Indian rural society is generally only lightly policed by professional police forces. India is a "weak state" when it comes to local presence in the countryside. The local presence of police is very thin on the ground, and easily overrun by trained guerillas. Third, the Naxalites direct their mobilization efforts to the most disadvantaged and disaffected segments of rural Indian society; so their anti-state message is relatively well received. And, finally, it would appear that the ideology of class and class antagonism has its own resonance in Indian political culture, far beyond the violent extremism of the Naxalite party. This movement was a splinter from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), which now governs West Bengal on the basis of its electoral successes (at least up until the present). But CPM rhetoric sounds many of the same themes of anti-capitalism and anti-globalization that the Naxalites advocate. So it is possible for elements of the left to become frustrated with the electoral program of CPM and develop new resonance with the radical program of the Naxalites.
The consensus view seems to be that the national and state governments in India have failed in efforts to suppress the Naxalite insurgency to date out of a failure of will, a degree of conflict of political interests in several states, and a failure to arrive at a winning strategy of police and military force combined with significantly more successful delivery of rural development successes. Villages that lack roads, clean water, education, and health clinics are certainly more likely to find a radical program of change more appealing, and India's states have had little success in improving the quality of life for India's poorest rural people.
If we think back over the history of sociology and political science since 1800, one thing that is striking is the trend away from the most macro-level frameworks of thought in the direction of more situated and proximate social and political arrangements. There was a tendency among the founders -- Montesquieu, Spenser, Comte, for example -- to pose their questions at the civilizational level. The largest social constructs were identified as worthy of study -- religions, kinds of governments, cultures. By the time we get to writers like Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill in mid-nineteenth century, we have thinkers approaching modern social life with a more limited gaze. They are more interested in particular, differentiating social and political arrangements, and they are interested in the particulars of human behavior within those arrangements. And they are much more interested in the empirical details, rather than general philosophical theories of democracy or religion.
Twentieth century thinking in the social sciences has generally continued this trend. What makes social science "scientific" is rigorous attention to empirical characteristics of the social world. There is generally even less patience with large philosophical theories of society and history. A good theory isn't of much interest unless it can be closely tied to particular bodies of empirical observation. It is hard to think of a 20th-century sociologist who took up the Comtean project of comparing the course of civilizations. And there is a growing consensus that the focus of social research needs somehow to capture the behavior of situated actors within socially specific arrangements -- in other words, a refinement of focus towards the more particular arrangements.
A partial exception to this trend is the field of comparative politics (Lichbach and Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure ). This is a paradigm that undertakes to discover similarities and differences in large political institutions across settings -- with the implication that there is some reason to expect that "developmental states" will have some important similarities whether in Brazil, Nigeria, or Syria. How does "electoral competition" work in the United States, Mexico, and Poland? Hw do anti-corruption regimes work in Indonesia, Singapore, and Hong Kong? Comparative politics specialists have accepted the need for careful empirical investigation, to be sure, and they are mindful of differences as well as similarities. But the field is more macro than many other areas of contemporary social science.
But Wallerstein's practice as a sociologist is far more defensible than this language would suggest. He was in fact sensitive to causal heterogeneity, contingency, and variation in the systemic relations he meant to capture -- particularity as well as universality. So he doesn't actually treat the modern world system as if it were analogous to a set of gravitational objects governed by fixed laws of nature.
This is where the metaphor of granularity comes in. It suggests the idea of a deliberate choice of levels of analysis, a deliberate selection of the zone of focus we choose for the investigation. Go too fine and you lose sight of the structures that will turn out to be interesting. Go too gross and, once again, those structures disappear. Then there is the important idea of heterogeneity -- the idea that stuff is not uniform in structure all the way down (link); so it matters what level we choose to focus on.
The scanning electron microscope image above (center) is illustrative of this fact with regard to the natural world. Carbon appears uniform at a gross level (anthracite), and it is also uniform at an atomic level. But there is an intermediate level of resolution where there are structures that are very important for the physical properties of the stuff; and we won't find these structures unless we look at this intermediate level.
Something very much like this seems to be true about the social realm as well. If we ask questions about "citizens" or "consumers", we have characterized the actor in a highly abstract way, with no indication or recognition of the more specific circumstances in which the actor conducts his/her life. If we provide more institutional, organizational, and motivational context, however -- that is, if we increase the level of resolution in our depiction of the social actor -- we are likely to find more illuminating features of behavior, and we are likely to find discriminating explanations for differences in behavior.
Perhaps an illustration is found in the kinds of social action that Erving Goffman investigates -- the stylized behaviors and interactions of restaurant workers, for example (link). Go too deeply into the personal stories of the persons involved and you lose what is distinctive about the social context of the restaurant. Aggregate facts about service workers everywhere, and once again, the distinctive behaviors disappear. And, if we abstract too severely from the specifics of the social setting of the restaurant worker -- that is, if we zoom our microscope out to the level of pure rational choice theory -- then we will overlook the differentiating social circumstances that influence behavior in real hotels and restaurants.
In seeking out the concept of granularity here, I've actually invoked several different contrasts: abstract to concrete, apriori to empirical, and macroscopic to microscopic. If we put all these together, we might say that a "granular" approach to a social phenomenon is one that achieves a degree of specificity in conceptual definition, a robust degree of empirical detail, and an intermediate analytical and representational perspective that permits discovery of the mid-sized structures that influence the behavior of the whole.


Systematic course for beginners and advanced - you can learn how to start and cultivate a meditation practice. You can also find a way to overcome stress and difficulties in daily life.
22.05 - How to meditate?
You can join this class as an AYI practice member or use half class from your 10 card or your 12 times course.
How exactly do you meditate? What are the benefits of meditation? How to overcome the difficulties during meditation? How to apply the meditation techniques in daily life? These are questions that I asked myself many times before having a regular meditation practice.
Growing a meditation practice is like growing plants – we need good seeds, soil, water, fertilizer, a fence to protect our tiny sprout. Like plants, children and relationships the meditation will reflect the effort we invest in it.
I would love to share my experience on these matters, as in the last year I have done 3 Vipassana meditation retreats (10 days silent meditation) and developed a steady self meditation practice since then, meditating each day, morning and evening.


text:
import datetime as dt
import pandas as pd
import config

def readIntentionFile():
    ''' Read intention file'''
    intentionFile = pd.read_csv(config.path + config.name + '.csv', sep=";", header=0)
    return intentionFile

def writeIntentionFile(intentionList):
    ''' Write intention file'''
    intentionList.to_csv(config.path + config.name + str(dt.datetime.utcnow().second) + str('.csv'),
                         sep=";", index=False)

def writeSameIntentionFile(intentionList):
    ''' Write intentione file'''
    intentionList.to_csv(config.path + config.name + '.csv', sep=";", index=False)

def createTempFile(intention):
    tempFile = open(config.path + '/temp.txt', 'w')
    for lines in intention:
        tempFile.write(str(lines) + '\n')

def getDefaultIntentionList():
    intentionList = readIntentionFile()['Intention'].tolist()
    return intentionList

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Powerful autolayout framework, that can manage UIView(NSView), CALayer and not rendered views. Has cross-hierarchy coordinate space. Implementation performed on rect-based constraints. Fast, asynchronous, declarative, cacheable, extensible. Supported iOS, macOS, tvOS, Linux.
Layout with CGLayout built using layout-blocks. To combine blocks into single unit use LayoutScheme entity (or other entities that has suffix Scheme).
To define block for "view" element use LayoutBlock entity, or just use convenience getter method func layoutBlock(with:constraints:).
You have to carefully approach the creation of blocks, because anchors and based on them constraints not have priority and is applying sequentially. Constraints should operate actual frames, therefore next layout block must have constraints with "views", that will not change frame.
Layout anchors are limiters, that is oriented on frame properties (such as sides, size, position). Any side-based anchors have three base implementations: alignment, limitation(cropping), pulling. Each this implementation have dependency on working space: inner and outer. Size-based anchors are represented by two implementations: size, insets. All layout anchors you can find in enum LayoutAnchor.
LayoutConstraint: simple associated constraint that uses var frame of passed element to constrain source rect. Use him to build dependency on external workspace.
AdjustLayoutConstraint: associated constraint to adjust size of source space. Only elements conform to protocol AdjustableLayoutElement can use it.
ContentLayoutConstraint: associated constraint that uses internal bounds to constrain, defined in 'layoutBounds' property of protocol LayoutElement. Use it if you need to create dependency on internal workspace. For example, element inside UIScrollView.
BaselineLayoutConstraint: associated constraint that depended on base line. Only elements conform to protocol TextPresentedElement can use it.
AnonymConstraint: constraint to restrict source space independently from external environment.
MutableLayoutConstraint: Layout constraint that creates possibility to change active state You can find all this constraints through convenience functions in related elements. Use him to build layout blocks.
In common case, adjust constraints should be apply after any other constraints (but not always).
For implementing custom layout entities and save strong typed code, use static func build(_ base: Conformed) -> Self method.
Framework provides LayoutGuide as analogue UILayoutGuide. It has possible to generate views and add them to hierarchy. To create layout element placeholders use LayoutPlaceholder class or him element specific subclasses (LayerPlaceholder, ViewPlaceholder). Also you can use placeholder based on UILayoutGuide: UIViewPlaceholder, to apply in Autolayout environment.
All examples of code you can see in Example folder.
For more details, see documentation and example project.
CGLayout is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.


text:
You are viewing a Web site, archived on 3:23:07 Dec 06, 2014 It is now a Federal record managed by the National Archives and Records Administration.
External links, forms, and search boxes may not function within this collection. [ hide ]
Representative Bradley Byrne
Representing the 1st District of Alabama
Town Halls
Invite Me to Speak
Baldwin County Office
Congressional Commendations
Additional Services and Resources
Economy and Jobs
Spending Cuts and Debt
Veterans Issues
Senior Citizens' Resources
Veterans' Resources
For more information concerning my work and views on Tax Reform, please contact me.
More on Tax Reform
Byrne Statement on Tax Day
Apr 15, 2014 Press Release
Representative Bradley Byrne (AL-1) released the following statement on Tax Day.
House Passes Responsible, Balanced Budget
Apr 11, 2014 Columns
Our country is on an unsustainable fiscal course. On our current trajectory, the debt will reach nearly 170% of our national Gross Domestic Product by 2040. In just 10 years, we will spend more on servicing the debt than we will on national defense. With China already holding $12.3 trillion of our debt, a 47% share, there is no question we must take bold action to stem the flood of spending and debt that threatens to pull our country under.
Byrne Responds to President Obama's Budget Proposal
Mar 4, 2014 Press Release
Washington, DC – March 4, 2014 – Representative Bradley Byrne (AL-1) issued the following statement in response to President Barack Obama's budget proposal released earlier today.
Byrne said: "The President signaled in his State of the Union address that he has little interest in working with Congress to find solutions that will move this country forward. Today, he is doubling down on that approach, submitting a bloated liberal wish list that will do little to pay down our debt, create jobs, or provide for a strong national defense.
Join the Conversation Online
hours: M-F 9-5:30pm
502 West Lee Avenue
Summerdale, AL 36580
11 N. Water St.
Ste. 15290
Footer Utility