text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
\vspace{-.5em}
Self-supervised learning (SSL), which obtains supervisory signals from the input data itself, is an active sub-area of unsupervised learning~\cite{mohamed2022self,liu2021self}. Generally speaking, the SSL pipeline consists of a \textit{pre-training stage}, in which an upstream model is trained on a large quantity of unlabeled data with some pretext tasks, and a \textit{fine-tuning stage}, in which the upstream model is adapted for specific downstream tasks with annotated data.

SSL has recently gained popularity in the speech community due to its strong performance and low adaptation cost. By simply replacing the acoustic features with hidden representations from pre-trained upstream models~\cite{yang2021superb,chen2022wavlm}, or fine-tuning the entire model with additional task-specific layers~\cite{baevski2020wav2vec,hsu2021hubert}, SSL models have surpassed state-of-the-art downstream-only baselines for several tasks including speech recognition~\cite{baevski2020wav2vec,hsu2021hubert} and speaker recognition~\cite{chen2022large,fan2020exploring}. Furthermore, these pre-trained upstream models often require very small amounts of adaptation data; for instance, wav2vec 2.0 achieves a word error rate (WER) of 8.2\% on LibriSpeech~\cite{Panayotov2015LibrispeechAA} \texttt{test-other} after fine-tuning with 10 minutes of labeled speech~\cite{baevski2020wav2vec}.

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig/model_v3.pdf}
    \vspace{-2em}
    \caption{Our proposed Target Speaker Extraction (TSE) module (\textit{left}) and Joint Speaker Modeling (JSM) module (\textit{right}) for adapting SSL-based upstream models to multi-talker ASR.}
    \label{fig:model}
    \vspace{-1.5em}
\end{figure}

Despite their strong performance for various downstream tasks, most of the existing SSL models only focus on single-talker scenarios. The previous studies on pre-training and fine-tuning upstream SSL models for multi-talker scenarios are very limited~\cite{chen2022wavlm,chang2022end}. Such scenarios are usually more challenging due to the involvement of multiple speakers, quick turn-taking, and overlapping speech~\cite{ccetin2006analysis}.

In this paper, we focus on the fine-tuning stage of the SSL pipeline and investigate the adaptation of SSL-based upstream models to the multi-talker ASR task, for both segmented utterances and unsegmented mixtures. For the former, we build upon previous work on target speaker extraction and recognition~\cite{delcroix2018single,vzmolikova2019speakerbeam,medennikov2020target,wang2018voicefilter}; we use target speaker embeddings (extracted from enrollment audio) to direct the model to transcribe a specific speaker in the segmented utterance containing mixed speech. We perform a thorough analysis for several modeling aspects, including embedding type and dimensionality, fusion methods for the adaptation layer, and the effect of upstream models. For the case of unsegmented mixtures, we extend the TSE approach by iteratively decoding each speaker in the mixtures, and we also propose a novel \textit{joint speaker modeling} (JSM) technique that aggregates information from all speakers through their embeddings, and transcribes them simultaneously.

Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) we propose methods to adapt SSL models to the multi-talker ASR task based on the speaker embeddings; (2) we conduct a detailed analysis of different modeling aspects of target speaker extraction with SSL models; and (3) we evaluate our methods on both artificial and real datasets, namely LibriMix and AMI. Our code will be released at the time of publication.

\vspace{-1em}
\section{The multi-talker ASR problem}
\vspace{-.5em}
\label{sec:problem}
In conventional ASR, the input is a single-talker, segmented utterance $\mathbf{x}$ (in time or time-frequency domain), and the system is required to predict hypothesis $\mathbf{y} = f(\mathbf{x};\Theta_f)$, where $\mathbf{y}$ is a token sequence and $f$ is a function parametrized by $\Theta_f$ such as a neural network. In multi-talker ASR, the input is an unsegmented mixture $\mathbf{m}$ containing speech from multiple speakers (say, $K$ speakers), i.e., $\mathbf{m} = \sum_{u=1}^U \mathbf{x}_u$, where $\mathbf{x}_u$ is the $u$-th utterance and is shifted and zero-padded to the length of $\mathbf{m}$. Here, we assume that the additive noise and convolutive reverberations are included in the individual terms. Additionally, we may be provided enrollment embeddings $\mathbf{e}_k \in \mathbb{R}^d$ for the $K$ speakers in the mixture. The desired output is $\mathbf{y} = \bigcup_{u=1}^U \mathbf{y}_u$, where $\mathbf{y}_u$ is the transcription corresponding to $\mathbf{x}_u$. Depending on whether the mixture is segmented, two cases are possible.

\vspace{-1em}
\subsection{Segmented utterances}
\label{sec:segmented}
\vspace{-0.5em}

In this easier case, we assume that the spans and speaker identities for all $U$ utterances are known, such that $\mathbf{y}_u$ can be directly estimated: $\widehat{\mathbf{y}}_u = g_{\mathrm{S}}(\mathbf{m}, \Delta_u, \mathbf{e}_{k_u};\Theta_{g_{\mathrm{S}}})$, where $\Delta_u$ denotes the span of $\mathbf{x}_u$ in the mixture, $k_u$ is the speaker index corresponding to utterance $\mathbf{x}_u$. By repeating this inference $U$ times, we get the desired multi-talker hypothesis $\widehat{\mathbf{y}}$. In practice, $\Delta_u$ and $k_u$ may be obtained using speaker diarization.

\vspace{-1em}
\subsection{Unsegmented mixture}
\label{sec:unsegmented}
\vspace{-0.5em}

In this case, the individual segmentation of $\mathbf{x}_u$ is not known in advance, therefore utterance-level transcription is not feasible. If we assume that speakers are enrolled, we can instead perform \textit{speaker-level} transcription, i.e., $\widehat{\mathbf{y}}^{\prime} = \bigcup_{k=1}^K \widehat{\mathbf{y}}^k$, where $\widehat{\mathbf{y}}^k$ denotes the hypothesis for speaker $k$. This may be done by \textit{iteratively} decoding each speaker using a same single-talker parametrized model, i.e.,
\begin{equation}
    \widehat{\mathbf{y}}^k = g_\mathrm{S}(\mathbf{m}, \Delta, \mathbf{e}_k; \Theta_{g_{\mathrm{S}}}),
\end{equation}
where $\Delta$ is a dummy span indicating the entire duration of $\mathbf{m}$. Alternatively, we can define a multi-talker parametrized model $g_\mathrm{M}$ and perform \textit{joint} decoding of all speakers, i.e.,
\begin{equation}
    \widehat{\mathbf{y}}^{\prime} = g_\mathrm{M}(\mathbf{m}, \mathbf{E}_{1:K}; \Theta_{g_{\mathrm{M}}}),
\end{equation}
where $\mathbf{E}\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times K}$ contains all $K$ speaker embeddings.

In the next section, we will describe our proposed methods to use self-supervised models for both $g_{\mathrm{S}}$ and $g_{\mathrm{M}}$, so that we can handle segmented and unsegmented inputs.

\vspace{-1em}
\section{Adapting self-supervised models with speaker embeddings}
\label{sec:methodology}
\vspace{-.5em}
First, we will show how to adapt self-supervised models for the case of single-talker transcription (i.e., $g_{\mathrm{S}}$) using speaker embeddings. This model can be used for segmented utterances or iterative decoding of unsegmented mixtures. Thereafter, we will develop a multi-talker extension (i.e., $g_{\mathrm{M}}$) of the model to perform joint decoding of all speakers in the mixture. Since our methods rely on the architecture of the upstream SSL models, we will briefly describe them here.

We used three variants of the wav2vec 2.0~\cite{baevski2020wav2vec} class of SSL models: HuBERT~\cite{hsu2021hubert}, WavLM Base, and WavLM Base+~\cite{chen2022wavlm}. These models consist of convolutional and Transformer encoders. For all models, the convolutional encoder contains 7 layers that down-sample the audio input by a factor of 320, such that the extracted features (say $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{conv}}$) have a stride of 20ms and a receptive field of 25ms. The CNN encoder is followed by a 12-block Transformer encoder, which produces contextual output representations $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{trf}}$. Each Transformer block consists of a 768-dim self-attention layer with 8 heads and a 3,072-dim feed-forward layer. WavLM additionally uses relative gated positional bias in the self-attention layers~\cite{Chi2022XLMECL}.

\vspace{-.8em}
\subsection{Target speaker extraction (TSE)}
\label{ssec:TSE}
\vspace{-.5em}

We adapt SSL models for single-talker transcription through a ``target speaker extraction'' (TSE) component that models $g_{\mathrm{S}}$, as illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:model} (\textit{left}).
Specifically, we insert a \textit{speaker adaptation layer} between the CNN and Transformer blocks of the encoder. This layer adapts $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{conv}}$ using the speaker embedding $\mathbf{e}_k$ before feeding them to the Transformer encoder. By fine-tuning the model with multi-talker mixtures, speaker embeddings, and corresponding references, the adaptation layer learns to extract only target-speaker features from the CNN representations. The adapted CNN representations, $\widehat{\mathbf{h}}_{\mathrm{conv}}$, are passed to the Transformer encoder which produces speaker-specific contextual representations, $\widehat{\mathbf{h}}_{\mathrm{trf}}$. A linear projection layer maps $\widehat{\mathbf{h}}_{\mathrm{trf}}$ to the output dimensionality, and the CTC loss~\cite{graves2006connectionist} is used for end-to-end training.

In our experiments, we tried four different methods for the implementation of the speaker adaptation layer.

\begin{enumerate}[leftmargin=*,topsep=0pt]
    \item \textbf{ADD}: $\mathbf{e}_{k}$ is added to $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{conv}}$ through a linear projection.

    \item \textbf{CAT}: $\mathbf{e}_k$ is appended to $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{conv}}$ and the concatenated representation is projected back to the original dimension through a linear projection.

    \item \textbf{FiLM}: Feature-wise linear modulation~\cite{perez2018film} estimates a feature-wise affine transformation based on the conditioning information, i.e., $\widehat{\mathbf{h}}_{\mathrm{conv}} = \gamma(\mathbf{e}_k) \cdot \mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{conv}} + \beta(\mathbf{e}_k)$, where $\gamma$ and $\beta$ can be arbitrary functions. In our experiment, $\gamma$ and $\beta$ are two linear layers.

    \item \textbf{CLN}: In standard Transformer layers, layer normalization~\cite{ba2016layer} has been applied to normalize the distributions of intermediate layers, formulated as
    \begin{equation}
        \widehat{\mathbf{h}} = \frac{\mathbf{h}-\mathbf{\mu}}{\mathbf{\sigma}} \cdot \gamma + \beta
    \end{equation}
    where $\mathbf{\mu}$ and $\mathbf{\sigma}$ are the mean and standard deviation of input features $\mathbf{h}$, $\gamma$ and $\beta$ are learnable scaling and shifting parameters for the affine transformation. Conditional layer normalization (CLN)~\cite{pilault2020conditionally} replaces $\gamma$ with a speaker-specific scaling $\widehat{\gamma}(\mathbf{e}_{k})$, i.e.,
    \begin{equation}
         \widehat{\gamma}(\mathbf{e}_{k}) = w(\mathbf{e}_{k}) \cdot \gamma + b(\mathbf{e}_{k})
    \end{equation}
    Basically, it transforms $\gamma$ with a FiLM layer conditioned on the speaker embeddings $\mathbf{e}_{k}$. Different from the three above methods which take $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{conv}}$ as input, CLN is introduced to the bottom Transformer block by replacing the original two LNs.

\end{enumerate}

\vspace{-1em}
\subsection{Joint speaker modeling (JSM)}
\label{ssec:JSM}
\vspace{-.5em}

In principle, the TSE module can be used for the transcription of unsegmented mixtures by iterating over all speakers. However, this setup may be sub-optimal for multi-talker ASR since the hypothesis produced for a speaker is independent of other speakers. Some errors, like repetitive decoding of the same utterance, could be potentially eliminated if the model has an overview of all speakers presented in the speech. Furthermore, the TSE approach would require $K$ decoding iterations, resulting in higher inference time. Inspired by the architecture of target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD)~\cite{medennikov2020target}, we propose ``joint speaker modeling'' (JSM) as illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:model} (\textit{right}). We first use the TSE module to extract speaker-specific contextual representations $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{trf}}^k$ for all speakers in the speech mixture $\mathbf{m}$. Thereafter, the JSM module models $g_{\mathrm{M}}$ by computing $\widehat{\mathbf{y}}^{\prime}$ directly using $\{\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{trf}}^k|k=1,2,...,K\}$. In our implementation, the representations $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{trf}}^k$ are concatenated along the feature axis and projected back to the original dimension. The combined input then pass through a Transformer layer to get multi-talker contextual representations $\widehat{\mathbf{h}}_{\mathrm{trf}}$. Finally, a linear layer maps $\widehat{\mathbf{h}}_{\mathrm{trf}}$ to $K\times |V|$ output units (where $|V|$ is vocabulary size) to get token-level posteriors for each speaker. The model is trained with the sum of CTC losses over all $K$ speakers.

\vspace{-1em}
\section{Experimental Setup}
\label{sec:exp}
\vspace{-.5em}

\subsection{Data}
\vspace{-.5em}
We evaluated our method on LibriMix~\cite{cosentino2020librimix} and AMI~\cite{carletta2005ami} dataset. LibriMix is a synthetic dataset consisting of simulated speech mixtures.
In our experiments, we used the ``2-spk 16kHz max'' condition (hereby denoted as Libri2Mix). The training set consisted of 58 hours of speech mixtures created from LibriSpeech~\cite{Panayotov2015LibrispeechAA} \texttt{train-clean-100} while the \texttt{dev} and \texttt{test} set contained 11 hours each.

AMI~\cite{carletta2005ami} is a meeting-style corpus consisting of $\sim$100h of annotated audio/video recordings. Each meeting has 3 to 5 participants, and was recorded using headset microphones and two 8-ch microphone arrays. In our experiments, we use the so-called ``IHM-mix" evaluation condition, which is generated by mixing all headset recordings from the same meeting. The resulting audios contain a significant amount of overlap but no far-field artifacts, allowing us to evaluate our models specifically for overlapping speech.

Our proposed methods require enrollment utterances for speaker embedding extraction. For Libri2Mix, we collected 15 seconds of enrollment speech per speaker from the Libri-Light~\cite{librilight} project (excluding the LibriSpeech portion). For AMI IHM-mix, since the same speakers participate in multiple meetings, we used clean segments from other meetings as enrollment utterances. For example, if the speaker \texttt{FEE041} participated in four meetings \texttt{ES2011{a-d}}, the clean segments in meetings \texttt{ES2011{b-d}} would be considered for enrollment of \texttt{FEE041} in meeting \texttt{ES2011a}.

\vspace{-1em}
\subsection{Evaluation metrics}
\vspace{-0.5em}

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=1.0\linewidth]{fig/utterance_group.pdf}
    \caption{Utterance-based and utterance group-based evaluation schemes for segmented utterances and unsegmented mixtures, respectively.}
    \label{fig:evaluation}
    \vspace{-1.5em}
\end{figure}

The two tasks with segmented utterances (\S~\ref{sec:segmented}) and unsegmented mixtures (\S~\ref{sec:unsegmented}) require different evaluation schemes. Following \cite{kanda2021large}, we refer to these as \textit{utterance-based} and \textit{utterance group-based} evaluation, respectively, which are illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:evaluation}.

In utterance-based evaluation, the exact time boundary for each speaker segment is known. We perform inference on each speaker segment, and our hypothesis is compared with the reference to compute the word error rate (WER).
To evaluate unsegmented mixtures, we defined an ``utterance group'' as a set of utterances connected by speaker overlaps. In practice, a voice activity detector (VAD) may be used to estimate utterance group boundaries.
If the correspondence between the multi-talker hypotheses and references in an utterance group is unknown (as is the case in \cite{kanda2021large}), concatenated minimum-permutation WER (cpWER)~\cite{watanabe2020chime} may be computed instead of WER.
In our proposed model, the output order of hypotheses is determined by the order of speaker embeddings, therefore we can directly compute the WER between the hypotheses and references.

\vspace{-1em}
\subsection{Model configuration and baselines}
\vspace{-.5em}
The upstream models we used are all pre-trained with the same masked cluster index prediction loss~\cite{hsu2021hubert}. However, while HuBERT is trained only on single-talker audios, WavLM additionally uses simulated mixtures for pre-training, which makes it more suitable for multi-talker downstream tasks. HuBERT and WavLM Base are pre-trained using LibriSpeech (960h), while WavLM Base+ uses 94k hours of mixtures comprising large-scale diverse data, such as LibriLight~\cite{kahn2020libri},
VoxPopuli~\cite{wang2021voxpopuli}, and GigaSpeech~\cite{GigaSpeech2021}.

Besides the upstream model, the choice of pre-trained speaker embedding extractor and the dimensionality of $\mathbf{e}_k$ is also important towards the final performance. We compared the multi-talker ASR performance for three different embedding methods --- i-vectors~\cite{dehak2010front}, x-vectors~\cite{snyder2018x}, and ECAPA-TDNN embeddings~\cite{desplanques2020ecapa}. I-vectors are unsupervised embeddings that model the total variability between an utterance and the universal background model. X-vectors~\cite{snyder2018x} and ECAPA-TDNN embeddings, on the other hand, are extracted from discriminatively-trained neural networks after pooling layers. While the former uses conventional time-delay neural networks (TDNNs)~\cite{Peddinti2015ATD}, the latter applies several enhancements on the frame and segment pooling components through squeeze-and-excitation~\cite{Hu2020SqueezeandExcitationN} and channel-dependent attention, respectively. For speaker recognition, DNN-based embeddings have been found to outperform i-vectors; ECAPA-TDNN, in particular, has obtained state-of-the-art performance on the VoxCeleb benchmark~\cite{desplanques2020ecapa}. For our experiments, all these three embedding extractors were pre-trained on the VoxCeleb~\cite{nagrani2017voxceleb,chung2018voxceleb2} dataset, with a dimension of 400, 512, and 256 for i-vectors, x-vectors, and ECAPA-TDNN embeddings, respectively.

For segmented utterances, we compared our models with a baseline that does not use any speaker embeddings but is otherwise fine-tuned on the same data. For unsegmented mixtures, we implemented a permutation invariant training (PIT)~\cite{yu2017permutation} baseline as follows. We added a linear layer consisting of $K\times |V|$ output units on top of the pre-trained SSL model, where each of the $K$ sets is expected to transcribe a distinct speaker. The model was then trained using PIT, i.e., using the minimum sum of losses between all permutations of reference and hypotheses speakers. Since this model does not have a deterministic speaker ordering, we evaluated it using cpWER instead of regular WER.

\vspace{-1em}
\section{Results \& Discussion}
\label{ssec:main}
\vspace{-.5em}

\begin{table}[t]
    \centering
    \caption{WER (\%) on Libri2Mix and AMI IHM-mix for utterance-based evaluations. TSE used x-vectors fused by the CLN approach.}
    \adjustbox{max width=\linewidth}{
    \begin{tabular}{@{}lcc@{}}
    \toprule
        \textbf{Model} & \textbf{Libri2Mix} & \textbf{AMI} \\
        \midrule
        WavLM Base+ & 8.34 & 18.97 \\
        ~~ + TSE & \textbf{7.58} & \textbf{18.07} \\

    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}}
    \label{tab:main-seg}
\end{table}

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.8\linewidth]{fig/overlap_ratio.pdf}
    \vspace{-1em}
    \caption{WER decomposition by overlap ratio for AMI IHM-mix.}
    \label{fig:overlapratio}
    \vspace{-2em}
\end{figure}

\begin{table*}[t]

    \begin{minipage}{.29\linewidth}
      \caption{WER (\%) on Libri2Mix for different SSL-based upstream models with and without the TSE module.}
    \label{tab:upstream}
      \vspace{-0.8em}
      \centering
      \adjustbox{max width=\linewidth}{%
    \begin{tabular}{@{}lcc@{}}
    \toprule
        \textbf{Model} & \textbf{w/o TSE} & \textbf{w/ TSE} \\
        \midrule
        HuBERT Base & 13.04 & 11.62 {\scriptsize(\textdownarrow 10.9\%)} \\
        WavLM Base & 9.81 & 9.03 {\scriptsize(\textdownarrow 8.0\%)} \\
        WavLM Base+ & \textbf{8.34} & \textbf{7.58} {\scriptsize(\textdownarrow 9.1\%)} \\
        \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}}
    \end{minipage}%
    \hfill
    \begin{minipage}{.37\linewidth}
      \centering
        \caption{WER (\%) on Libri2Mix for different types and dimensionality of speaker embeddings.}
        \label{tab:spk_embed}
        \vspace{-0.8em}
        \adjustbox{max width=\linewidth}{%
    \begin{tabular}{@{}lcc@{\hskip 20pt}cc@{}}
    \toprule
        \multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{Embed. type}} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{CLN}} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{ADD}} \\
        \cmidrule(r{20pt}){2-3} \cmidrule(l{0pt}){4-5}
        & $d=64$ & $d=128$ & $d=64$ & $d=128$ \\
        \midrule
        i-vector & 7.82 & 8.04 & 8.25 & 8.54 \\
        ECAPA-TDNN & 7.87 & 8.14 & 8.00 & 8.65 \\
        x-vector & \textbf{7.58} & \textbf{7.65} & \textbf{7.86} & \textbf{7.91} \\
        \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}}
        \end{minipage}%
        \hfill
    \begin{minipage}{.28\linewidth}
      \centering
        \caption{WER (\%) on Libri2Mix for different fusion methods in the speaker adaptation layer.}
        \label{tab:fusion_methods}
        \vspace{-1em}
        \adjustbox{max width=\linewidth}{%
    \begin{tabular}{@{}ccccc@{}}
    \toprule
        \multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{Method}} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{utterance}} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{utterance group}} \\
     \cmidrule(r{2pt}){2-3} \cmidrule(l{2pt}){4-5}
        & \texttt{dev} & \texttt{test} & \texttt{dev} & \texttt{test} \\
      \midrule
        ADD & 7.52	& 7.63 & 12.13 & 14.28 \\
        CAT & 7.45 & 7.65 & 11.96 &	13.33 \\
        FiLM & 7.31 & 7.66 & 12.45 & 13.84 \\
        CLN & \textbf{7.09} & \textbf{7.58} & \textbf{11.04} & \textbf{12.32} \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}}
    \end{minipage}
    \vspace{-1.5em}
\end{table*}

\vspace{-.5em}
\subsection{Utterance-based evaluation of segmented utterances}
\vspace{-.5em}
We evaluated the impact of our proposed TSE module on Libri2Mix and AMI IHM-Mix using WavLM Base+, with x-vector embeddings fused by the CLN approach. These results are shown in Table \ref{tab:main-seg}. For utterance-based evaluation, the baseline WavLM system worked well even without any enrollment information. Despite the high overlap ratio of Libri2Mix, it achieved 8.34\% WER on the \texttt{test} set. Similarly, it obtained a competitive WER of 18.97\% on AMI.
Adding the TSE module improved the WERs by 9.1\% and 4.7\% relative on Libri2Mix and AMI, respectively. To better understand where the improvements came from, we analyzed the AMI WER across different overlap ratios, as shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:overlapratio}. Compared with the WavLM baseline, our TSE-enhanced model achieved comparable or slightly worse WER when the overlap ratio was low (below 50\%). However, it \textbf{outperformed WavLM by a clear margin for higher overlap ratios}.
We conjecture that for lower overlap ratios, WavLM is able to perform well because it transcribes the majority speaker in the utterance. For higher overlap ratios, it cannot predict the target speaker based on the majority duration, and TSE provides this additional information for such cases.

We further conducted several experiments on Libri2Mix to analyze the impact of different factors such as the upstream model, the embedding type and its dimensionality, and the fusion technique used in the speaker adaptation layer. These are described in the following sections.

\vspace{-1em}
\subsubsection{Effect of upstream models}
\vspace{-.5em}

During pre-training, the upstream model learns generalizable task-agnostic representations using SSL, the quality of which usually determines the performance of downstream tasks. In Table~\ref{tab:upstream}, we compared the multi-talker ASR performance for the three upstream models described earlier, using CLN-based fusion with x-vector speaker embeddings.

First, we observe that the WavLM models significantly outperform HuBERT, both with and without the TSE module, due to their enhanced speaker modeling ability and robustness to noise and speaker overlaps.
Pre-training on a large-scale diverse dataset (WavLM Base+) provided the best WERs, as expected. Nevertheless, adding TSE provides consistent improvements of 8-11\% across all models, indicating that explicit \textbf{speaker enrollment is complementary to mixture-based pre-training} scheme. For the following experiments, we used WavLM Base+ as the upstream model.

\vspace{-1em}
\subsubsection{Effect of speaker embeddings}
\vspace{-.5em}

In this section, we investigate the impact of speaker embedding type and dimensionality. For a fair comparison, we projected the speaker embeddings to the same dimension using principal component analysis (PCA)~\cite{pearson1901liii}. From Table \ref{tab:spk_embed}, we first observe that 64-dim embeddings outperform their 128-dim counterparts, indicating that there may be \textbf{extraneous information encoded in higher dimensions}. Next, even though ECAPA-TDNNs achieve SOTA performance on speaker recognition, they are outperformed by x-vectors when used in the TSE module (for both CLN and ADD fusion).

\vspace{-1em}
\subsubsection{Effect of fusion methods}
\label{ssec:fusion methods}
\vspace{-.5em}

In \S~\ref{ssec:TSE}, we described four different fusion methods for the speaker adaptation layer. Recall that ADD and CAT directly fuse the speaker embedding $\mathbf{e}_k$ to the convolutional representation $\mathbf{h}_{\mathrm{conv}}$, whereas FiLM and CLN estimate affine transforms based on $\mathbf{e}_k$.
Here, we compare their performance in both utterance-based and utterance group-based evaluation settings, as shown in Table~\ref{tab:fusion_methods}. On utterance-based evaluation, all these four methods have similar performance, with CLN slightly outperforming others. However, when the segmentation is unknown (utterance group-based evaluation), \textbf{CLN outperforms other methods by a large margin}.

\vspace{-1em}
\subsection{Utterance group-based evaluation of unsegmented mixtures}
\vspace{-.5em}

\begin{table}[t]
    \centering
    \caption{WER (\%) on Libri2Mix and AMI IHM-mix for utterance group-based evaluations of unsegmented mixtures.$^\dagger$PIT does not have a fixed speaker order, therefore the results are shown using cpWER.}
    \adjustbox{max width=\linewidth}{
    \begin{tabular}{@{}lcc@{}}
    \toprule
        \textbf{Model} & \textbf{Libri2Mix} & \textbf{AMI} \\
        \midrule

        WavLM Base+  &104.44 & 100.26 \\
        ~~ + PIT$^\dagger$  & 18.45 & \textbf{27.02} \\
        ~~ + iterative TSE  & 12.32 & 49.47 \\
        ~~ + TSE + JSM  & \textbf{10.68} & 28.40 \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}}
    \label{tab:main-unseg}
    \vspace{-1.8em}
\end{table}

From the above ablation experiments, we demonstrated that the combination of WavLM Base+ upstream model, x-vector speaker embedding, and the CLN fusion method provided the best WER performance.
Next, we used this configuration to conduct utterance group-based evaluations for unsegmented mixtures, and the results are shown in Table~\ref{tab:main-unseg}.

It is immediately clear that the single-talker WavLM baseline, which performed well on segmented utterances, failed miserably when the segmentation was not known, resulting in WERs above 100\%. This is because, without any additional information, the model does not know which speaker to transcribe in the unsegmented mixtures.
Joint multi-talker inference using permutation invariant training (PIT) helped the model overcome this limitation and the resulting system obtained decent results on the task, achieving a cpWER of 18.45\% on Libri2Mix and 27.02\% on AMI. Recall that since PIT does not have a deterministic speaker order, we use cpWER instead of WER to evaluate its performance.

Next, we evaluated an iterative decoding approach (described in \S~\ref{sec:unsegmented}) based on the TSE module. While this model conveniently outperformed PIT on Libri2Mix with a WER of 12.32\%, its performance on AMI IHM-Mix was sub-par.
Our error analysis revealed that this was because on AMI IHM-Mix, the model sometimes mistakenly transcribed other speakers when the target speaker didn't talk or only talked for a short period in the utterance group.
We had conjectured that \textbf{this problem of repeated decoding can be alleviated using the JSM module} described in \S~\ref{ssec:JSM}.
As expected, the multi-talker ASR performance was significantly improved after we jointly modeled the activities of all speakers using the JSM module. WERs improved from 12.32\% to 10.68\% on Libri2Mix, and from 49.47\% to 28.40\% on AMI IHM-mix. Although this WER may seem slightly worse than PIT, it is simply because the evaluation of PIT through cpWER is more forgiving. If we discard the speaker ordering in JSM and compute the best permutation word error rate, JSM will outperform PIT with a cpWER of 25.88\%.

\vspace{-1em}
\section{Conclusion}
\vspace{-1em}
\label{sec:conclusion}
In this paper, we investigated the adaptation of self-supervised models to the multi-talker ASR task using speaker embeddings, for both segmented and unsegmented inputs. For the former, we explored a target speaker extraction module that was found to be complementary to mixture-aware pre-training. For the latter, we proposed a novel joint speaker modeling approach to jointly decode all speakers in the mixture. Furthermore, we performed controlled experiments to study the impact of several modeling aspects in target speaker extraction with SSL models. Our experimental results on LibriMix and AMI demonstrated that self-supervised models can achieve substantially better multi-talker ASR performance by utilizing information from speaker embeddings. We will explore the possibility of applying our methods to other multi-talker tasks such as speaker diarization and speech separation in the future.

\small
\bibliographystyle{IEEEbib}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fridge/AgeOfEmpiresIII
Fridge / Age of Empires III
GameBreaker
WhatCouldHaveB…
Create New - Create New - Analysis FanficRecs FanWorks Haiku ImageLinks Laconic PlayingWith Quotes Recap ReferencedBy Synopsis Timeline
Fridge Brilliance
The Black family must have tremendous military and political power. Even accounting for Gameplay and Story Segregation for building a civilization at every single level, based on the enemies they are fighting (Circle of Ossus is well armed enough to occupy Havana and the Blacks are confident enough to launch an attack on an outpost of the Ottoman Empire away from their homeland) as well as the fact they have minimal oversight and orders from higher up suggests that the Blacks are an army onto themselves. A small scale version of an N.G.O. Superpower perhaps?
Morgan Black is over 30 at the time of the Siege of Malta in 1565. John Black, his grandson, is in his 20s during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). This looks like a pretty evident case of Writers Cannot Do Math until the end of the campaign, when it is revealed that while the Fountain of Youth was destroyed at the end of the first act, its water was still available and that Morgan (and probably Elizabeth) drank from it. Morgan is in fact still alive by the freaking 1810s, although as a very old man.
Aztec pyramids double as fortresses in III as they did back in II. At first, it looks silly, but then you realize that the Mesoamerican civilization's pyramids are not simple step pyramids, but the average person will have difficulty climbing up the stairs. Add in archers barraging you with arrows, and it becomes an impregnable defense.
John and Kanyenke's campaign is named "Ice". Several characters in "Ice", namely Kanyenke, Nonakhee and Washington, appear 20 years later in a campaign from The WarChiefs titled "Fire."
The Chinese Consulate can create alliances with the British, Russian, French and German civilizations. The end of the first Opium Wars had China signing several treaties (called Unequal Treaties ) with these countries, beginning what was called as the "Century of Humilliation".
Fridge Horror
When the player gets to the Imperial Age, they get the option of building a Capitol and researching three technologies that tremendously increase the gather rates for all sources of Food, Wood and Coin. Sounds awesome doesn't it? The names of these techs are, respectively, "Large Scale Agriculture", "Deforestation" and "Excessive Taxation". These three issues became real problems during the late 19th century and the 20th century, so, in a way, the player becomes the cause of agriculture spreading like wildfire, the loss of thousands of acres in woodlands, and crushing so many people under huge debts. "It's just a tech and it's just a game!" you might say. "I'm just improving my civ's gathering rates!" While this is absolutely true, not thinking about the consequences for these actions is exactly why many politicians of the 19th were responsible for the problems caused by Large Scale Agriculture, Deforestation and Excessive Taxation.
On a similar note: fishing boats can gather food from fish or coin from sperm and humpback whales. While gathering food from fishing site eventually exhausts the food from it, a whale as coin source is infinite! That's right: throughout a game, you can station a maximum of four fishing boats around a whale (and there is usually more than a single whale on the map) and have them gather coin uninterruptedly until you move them away from the coin source or they get destroyed. Needless to say, even though at first we thought we'd never run out of them, whales turned out to be a very finite source of coin as time went by.
Carib settlements have a technology called "Ceremonial Feast" that transforms your Carib warriors in "Feast warriors" with double hitpoints. The most notable Carib "ceremonial feast" in real life was the ritual consumption of body parts taken from their enemies, which made Carib warriors especially feared. This may be the reason why Carib blowgunners are also the only Native American outlaw units in the game.
There is a tied Inca prisoner in the second Moon Lake scenario, set 250 years after the first one. We later learn that the Inca prisoners Morgan freed from the Spanish in Florida drank from the Fountain of Youth and barreled some to take home to Peru. For how long was that guy prisoner? And was he how Beaumont learned of the Incas taking the water?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Roy Schoenberg, CEO of American Well, discusses his vision for the future of telehealth. Schoenberg heads the company's product development as well as the rest of its operations divisions. Roy and his brother, Ido, who serves as CEO of American Well, have worked together for many years, both as physicians and as entrepreneurs. Roy Schoenberg discusses his path to American Well and his vision for telehealth – whose impact on healthcare could be as dramatic as the one online sales had on the retail marketplace.
What prompted you and your brother to move from providing patient care to forming a telehealth company?
It wasn't a direct transition. American Well is our third company. At the time, practicing medicine, we both lived in hospital systems, and worked in intensive care units. The first company we formed – a company called MDSoft – was all about computerizing systems. This was many, many years ago. We created a computer system that connected to the different devices in an intensive care unit and collected all the information and tried to interpret it and present it to the physicians and nurses on the floor in a way that made more sense. When you walk into ICU everything is beeping and bleeping at you, and it's an overwhelming experience of trying to understand what's going on there. We created a system that consolidates all of that information and make sense out it, and only alerts and only presents information for the provider that needs intervention on. That worked very well. It was a very successful company and sold. So, we did well in that.
What about your second company?
The second company that we formed was already a second-generation. This was already the Internet age – the beginning of it. It was a company called CareKey, and that company established the notion of Web-based medical records – essentially what today are called PHRs, portable health records. This was at the time that HIPAA was enacted, and we had a solution over the Web that allowed patients to pretty much control their records and control the dissemination of their information, and luckily for us, all of the health plans out there realized that with HIPAA comes a great burden on them to communicate with patients because patients now have control over their information. So suddenly every plan out there decided they needed to have a patient portal and they needed to have a patient communication strategy that included a different set of tools – over technology, over the Web and telephony and everything else. We were ready with a very mature platform, so that company did well and got acquired by TriZetto.


text:
module ComatoseAdminHelper

  #  Checks the hidden_meta_fields class variable for a specified field name...
  def show_field?(key)
    !Comatose.config.hidden_meta_fields.include? key
  end

  # Used in the Page Form to build an indented drop-down list of pages
  def tree_select_box(nodes, selected= nil, hide= nil, label="Parent", add_initial=false)
    level = 0
    select_box = add_initial ? "<option value=0>No #{label}</option>\n" : ""
    selected = nodes[0].id if selected.nil? and not add_initial
    nodes.each {|node| select_box += add_select_tree_node(node, selected, level, hide) }
    select_box += ''
		select_box = select_box.html_safe
return select_box
  end
  # Called by tree_select_box
  def add_select_tree_node(node, selected, level, hide)
    padding = " " * level * 4
    padding += '» ' unless level==0
    hide_values = Array.new
    hide_values << hide if hide
    if node.id == selected
      select_box = %Q|<option value="#{node.id}" selected="true">#{padding}#{node.title}</option>\n|
    else
      if hide_values.include?(node.id)
        select_box = ''
      else
        select_box = %Q|<option value="#{node.id}">#{padding}#{node.title}</option>\n|
      end
    end
    node.children.each do |child|
      select_box += add_select_tree_node(child, selected, level + 1, hide) unless hide_values.include?(node.id)
    end
    select_box
  end

	def form_url(page)
		if page.id
			action="/comatose_admin/edit/#{page.id}"
		else
			action="/comatose_admin/new"
		end
	end

end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Bird Pebble Art Kit includes a 6″ wood (MDF) shape, pebbles, glue, eye bead, toothpick, hanger (for back of shape) and instructions. This kit is available in 6 colors. Choose color, quantity and packaging option on drop down lists. Save on party pack orders of 3, 6 or 12 kits. Suggested age: 8 yrs and up. Rating: intermediate. The estimated time to complete this project is 1.5 hours.


text:
Q: How can I authorize API access with just a Phone number and SMS Pin? I'm creating a backend that has a REST API that will be consumed from an mobile app. Because the app is mobile only we're not using an email and password to create account/login but instead a phone number and then they receive a pin number with an SMS message to confirm they own the number.
After I confirm the user is who they say they are with the pin number, how should I go about authenticating future API requests?
My first thought was to create a token and return it to the app. My second thought was to use OAuth but then i'm getting confused as to which method would work with the Phone number/SMS login method (2/3 leg, grants, etc..). I don't fully understand how this might work when using OAuth with our own apps (as opposed to OAuth with another provider). The token seems like the easier route.
If I use the token, is it bad to use the same token until the user is logged out? (over https). I'm assuming it's worth the extra work to make them expire a little longer than the avg. user session.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a turn key solution that works with phone numbers. I'm using Meteor but am expecting to roll my own with Node modules (by exposing connect on the Meteor server).
Any help is greatly appreciated!

A: Have you considered using Twitter's Digits? It comes with their Fabric package which was pretty great during our last app development. It allows you to register and verify users through their phone number via twitter services. The package is pretty simple to install and beside the server-side token validation, you avoid a lot of hassle.
Digits' documentation
And for the server side validation of the login:
Digits: how can I verify DGTSession tokens on my own server?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Engineers in South Korea are making final preparations for the launch of a small satellite Wednesday, hoping to forge a successful ending to a partnership of Korean and Russian rocket developers which has suffered two failed launches since 2009.
Liftoff of the Korea Satellite Launch Vehicle, or KSLV 1, is expected in a launch window opening at 0655 GMT (1:55 a.m. EST) and closing at 1030 GMT (5:30 a.m. EST) Wednesday. South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Tuesday the launch was targeted for 0700 GMT (2 a.m. EST), but officials will decide the exact time two hours before liftoff.
The 108-foot-tall rocket will take off from a launch pad at the Naro Space Center, a facility about 300 miles south of Seoul. Officials have until Feb. 8 to launch the rocket, or else wait at least several weeks for another opportunity.
Workers moved the two-stage booster to the launch pad Monday, made final fueling and electrical connections, and lifted the rocket vertical. The launch team conducted a countdown rehearsal Tuesday.
The KSLV 1 booster is composed of a Russian first stage and a South Korean upper stage. The first two KSLV launches in 2009 and 2010 failed to reach orbit, and the launcher now on the pad was grounded during two launch attempts Oct. 26 and Nov. 29.
In the two months since South Korea's last satellite launch attempt ended with an abort, North Korea scored its first successful space launch Dec. 12 as its southern neighbor labored to resolve a slew of technical issues.
The KSLV's Oct. 26 launch attempt was scrubbed several hours before the scheduled liftoff time by a fuel leak in the connection between the launch pad and the Russian-built first stage.
The Nov. 29 countdown was cut short by a problem in the Korean upper stage's steering system.
Moscow-based Khrunichev, which builds Russia's workhorse Proton rockets, manufactured the KSLV first stage and lent expertise in construction of the Naro launch pad and control center under a 2004 contract signed with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute.
South Korea has spent about $471 million in the Naro rocket program since 2002, according to Yonhap.
Wednesday's KSLV 1 launch is set to be the last chance for the joint Russian-Korean program to succeed. South Korea's partnership with Russia ends after the upcoming launch, and the rising Asian power is plotting an independent space program with a fully homemade rocket to launch around 2021.
Khrunichev's contribution to the KSLV 1 booster is based on the universal rocket stage designed for Russia's Angara launcher, which the country envisions will carry a wide range of satellites to space beginning as soon as this year. The Angara can fly with clusters of three to five universal first stages to haul heavier spacecraft to orbit.
A single kerosene-fueled RD-151 engine will generate 375,000 pounds of thrust to power the 10-story rocket off the launch pad. Produced by NPO Energomash, the RD-151 engine is a smaller version of the engine used on Zenit and Atlas rockets.
Passing the speed of sound in the first 55 seconds of flight, the KSLV will reach the upper atmosphere, release a clamshell-like aerodynamic nose shroud, and separate its Russian upper stage in the first four minutes of the mission.
The Korean-built solid-fueled upper stage will fire for 58 seconds to place the 200-pound STSAT 2C spacecraft in a 186-mile by 932-mile orbit.


The Tumble Forms Cricket Walker is a nonfolding child adjustable wheeled walker with a seat. These prone training walkers accommodate children 2 to 8 years of age, help stimulate walking movements, and serve as a link to more advanced walking aids. The walkers feature a ring-style support/hand grip which can be converted to a U shape, two sets of double front wheels and two single rear wheels, and a range of grwoth adjustments. OPTIONS: Saddle and trunk support. DIMENSIONS: Model 1745S (Small Cricket Walker): The frame height to saddle adjusts from 10.1 to 14 inches; the frame height with saddle adjusts from 13.5 to 17.4 inches; maximum length is 31.2 inches; maximum height is 28.1 inches; the support ring is 8.5 inches in diameter; and, the ring height adjusts from 9 to 12.9 inches. Model 1745L (Large Cricket Walker): The frame height to saddle adjusts from 14 to 17.9 inches; the frame height with saddle adjusts from 17.4 to 21.3 inches; maximum length is 33.9 inches; maximum height is 32 inches; the support ring is 8.5 inches in diameter; and, the ring height adjusts from 9 to 12.9 inches. WEIGHT: The small model weighs 16.5 pounds and the large model weighs 18.7 pounds.


text:
Азере — районы в Португалии.

 Азере (Аркуш-де-Валдевеш)
 Азере (Табуа)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
About KKF
Vietnam Signed Treaties
websites4kkf
Khmer Krom Federation at the Third Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on the Indigenous Issues May 10-21, 2004 in New York City Item 4 (a): Economic and Social Development Date: May 18, 2004 Speaker: Moni Mau Mr. Chairman and Distinguished Members of the UN Permanent Forum: My name is Moni Mau. I am honored to speak today on behalf of the Khmers-Kampuchea Krom Federation and millions of Khmer Krom people who are suffering under the colonization of the Vietnamese government in Kampuchea Krom. The Khmers Kampuchea Krom Federation's objectives are to preserve the Khmer Krom culture, tradition and secure the fundamental rights for Khmer Krom, and at the same time to maintain peace, political stability in Vietnam and the region. I would like to ask the United Nations member states who are current investors or will be potential investors in Vietnam to consider the following matters: – To consider seriously the indigenous rights of the Khmer Krom people in Vietnam according to the international laws. – To take inputs not only from the Vietnamese government or Vietnamese companies, but also work in collaborations with the Khmers Kampuchea Krom Federation to ensure that Khmer Krom rights are being considered. I also would like to recommend the economic and social solutions to the United Nations that our people desperately need help with: – The Vietnamese government must stop taking farmlands from the Khmer Krom. * The Vietnamese government must provide opportunities for the Khmer Krom to earn a living. We need them to open the factories in the areas where the Khmer Krom live and allow the Khmer Krom to work there. We need them to open the vocational schools and help the Khmer Krom learn the technologies and skills required to work the jobs in the factories. – The Vietnamese government must stop lowering the rice price in the harvest season and forcing our people to sell their rice below the market price. – Economic aid from foreigners must be monitored by the international community to insure that it equitably shared with the Khmer Krom. – The Vietnamese government must allow Khmer Krom to organize and participate in social activities without interference or monitoring. – The Vietnamese government must stop organizing Khmer Krom social activities for their public relation propaganda to lure economic aid from foreigners or to misrepresent to the world that the Khmer Krom have the same rights as the Vietnamese. – Placement of "watch dog" groups such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International in each of our provinces. The following are reasons to justify the above requests and recommended solutions: – The Vietnamese government gains billions of US dollars every year from Oil and Natural Gas extraction in our homeland and our sea. Hundred of millions US dollars more earned from tourism conducted on historic sites of the Khmer Krom people. – Many international companies are now investing in Vietnam and have ignored completely the indigenous rights of the Khmer Krom over those natural and cultural resources. Khmer Krom have been victims rather than beneficiary. – Most of the Khmer Krom are farmers. The farmland is our people's heart. But under the colonization of the Vietnamese Communists, most of our farmland was taken away. Our farmlands were used to build roads and irrigation systems or were given to Vietnamese farmers. The Vietnamese government has never paid our people for taking away their lands. Instead they have forced our people to become slave farm workers for the Vietnamese and have condemned our people to a life of poverty. – The Vietnamese government does not have any economic development plans to improve the lives of the Khmer Krom people. Most of these economic development plans are in the big cities, not in the countryside where the majority of the Khmer Krom people live. – The Vietnamese government has received millions of dollars in economic aid from foreign countries, but the Khmer Krom people do not receive a penny of those benefits. – The Vietnamese government does not allow the Khmer Krom to have any social activities without their approval. The few social activities that are allowed are not organized by the Khmer Krom people because our people are so poor and they must struggle just to earn their food. Mr. Chairman and distinguished Members of the Permanent Forum, it is time that the United Nations and the world scrutinize the situation of the indigenous people in Vietnam. Many rosy pictures have been painted over the suffering of my people, but the world has been misled and the Khmer Krom people are suffering terribly as I am speaking here today. On their behalf, I appeal to the United Nations and the world to pay close attention to the critical economic and social issues facing the Khmer Krom and to take action to help resolve their suffering. Thank you very much. Moni Mau
Environment Issues
Historical-Documents (1)
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Human Rights Monitor (52)
KKF Conferences (6)
KKF Press Releases (28)
Message (7)
People & Culture (1)
UNEMRIP Recommendations-KKF (3)
UNPFII Recommendations-KKF (31)
Happy New Year 2022: Message from KKF Executive President
FOR IMMEDIATE PRESS RELEASE: Vietnam Arrested a Khmer-Krom Man in Reprisal for Wearing a T-shirt with a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Logo
Vietnam: Arrest Indigenous for Distributing UN Document; Claim Undermine National Unity
Denied Recognition: Vietnam's refusal to recognize the indigenous and religious rights of the Khmer Krom
A Khmer-Krom Pregnant Woman Died at the Quarantine Center in Binh Duong
The Culture of the Khmer-Krom
Copyright © 2022 KKF | Khmers Kampuchea-Krom Federation


text:
Posts Tagged 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
aestheticism, aesthetics, artist, ascetic, disinterest, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard, On the Genealogy of Morals, power, will, Writer
Nietzsche on the Writer or Artist
In Art, Artist, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 5, 2011 at 9:23 am
The following post first appeared here at The Literary Table.
"[O]ne does well to separate the artist from his work, which should be taken more seriously than he is. Ultimately, he is no more than its pre-condition, the womb, the soil, possibly the manure and midden upon which, from which it grows—and thus, in most cases, something which must be forgotten before the work itself can be enjoyed. Insight into the origin of a work is a matter for physiologists and vivisectors of the spirit: but never one for the aesthetic men, the artists!"
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
It's easy, reading Nietzsche, to fall into anachronism: to consider his comments about divorcing the author from the text as indicative of something akin to the New Criticism, a hermeneutic that isolated texts from externalities such as authorial intent and that treated the aesthetic object as self-contained and autonomous. That is not at all what Nietzsche meant. For Nietzsche, the text, or the aesthetic object, is not isolated from externalities, but merely removed from and, in a way, prior to the author; the text is plugged into externalities, shaped and molded by them, so much so that the author is but the incidental medium through which the text speaks. The text, in other words, has its own authority apart from its creator, who, through the will, channels social and cultural energies to generate aesthetic output. The writer or artist is "no more than its pre-condition, the womb, the soil, possibly the manure and midden upon which, from which it grows." Discourse impregnates the writer or artist, who, thus implanted with ideas and alphabets, carries vocabularies through their prenatal stages and into a rebirth—or new expression—in the form of art.
According to Nietzsche, the objects and ambitions of the writer or artist as a thinking actor are not, or ought not to be, overstated because the writer or artist is the ultimate example of the effect of action and will. For the writer or artist is not independent from discourse and ethos—indeed, he is constituted by them, and so, by extension, is his textual production: the aesthetic object. We may forget the author; if anything, he or she only impedes the pleasure we derive from texts and aesthetics. The author is "something which must be forgotten before the work itself can be enjoyed."
Why does Nietzsche posit this view? What is he after? Among other things, he's criticizing the writers and artists who would have us believe that they are above and beyond others, somehow able to divine the real and the eternal. These writers and artists treat the ascetic ideal as part and parcel of aestheticism—i.e., they conflate the ascetic with the aesthetic to maximize their feeling of power. Although writers and artists promote themselves in this way, as if they had privileged access to universal yet remote knowledge, they realize, Nietzsche says, that on some level their ascetic ideal is an unreality or falsity—what Baudrillard might have called a hyperreality or simulacrum. The ascetic ideal is escapism: a fleeting respite from the reality of the will to power, the impulse that the writer or artist seeks to evade, suppress, and disguise. The conflict of the writer or artist lies in the desire to escape both to and from asceticism; for the intoxicating powers of the ascetic ideal are sobered by the boredom and angst of knowing that the ideal is but therapy and relief. That realization means that therapy and relief are themselves, paradoxically, the grounds for further escapism—for further therapy and relief.
All of this suggests that ascetic ideals do not signify. As Nietzsche says, ascetic ideals "mean absolutely nothing!" What is so remarkable about these ideals is that they are contingent and contextual such that they amount to nothing and everything at once, and that we will, despite ourselves, and despite our longing for meaning, chase after nothing rather than not chase at all. That, alas, is why the artist lacks independence in this world. That, alas, is why no artist is disinterested.
aristocrat, Epistemology, Friedrich Nietzsche, genealogy, knowledge, morality, On the Genealogy of Morals, philosophy, Precis, ressentiment, slave
Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals: A Critical Précis
In Art, Artist, Arts & Letters, Ethics, Humanities, Law, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Western Civilization, Writing on September 1, 2011 at 11:44 pm
We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason. We have never sought after ourselves—so how should we one day find ourselves? It has rightly been said that: 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also'; our treasure is to be found in the beehives of knowledge. As spiritual bees from birth, this is our eternal destination, our hearts are set on one thing only—'bringing something home.'
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Nietzsche employs an aphorism to open the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (GM). That approach seems fitting for this critical précis, the aphoristic epigram to which quotes none other than Nietzsche himself.
The opening declarative here—"We remain unknown to ourselves"—signals the ancient Greek imperative: "Know thyself." That Nietzsche converts the imperative to a declarative is suggestive. The imperative expresses a command: the emphatic utterance of an authoritative demand ("do this"). The declarative is a descriptive assertion: the positive utterance of fact or opinion. The imperative, if issued by the right person and not meant as merely advisory, presupposes the power to enforce or induce the substance of the command. A speaker that commands another to know himself assumes that the other will act, can act, or ought to act in accordance with what he, the speaker, orders. The speaker of a declarative statement, on the other hand, conveys information; the transmission of data from the speaker to the listener does not necessarily signify a desire that the listener act, or refrain from acting, in accordance with the data or the speaker's wishes.
Nietzsche uses the declarative to describe our epistemic state or to posit an idea about our epistemic state. His articulation necessarily undermines the idea that we already have answered the call to know ourselves. Either we have ignored the command to know ourselves ("We have never sought after ourselves"), or we have failed to comply with it—or both. To the extent that Western philosophy could, at Nietzsche's moment, be reduced to these two words—"know thyself"—Western philosophy had, if we believe Nietzsche's declaration, failed or decayed. What Nietzsche seeks to posit, in more assertive or, one might say, more declarative terms, is a radical rewriting and reinterpretation of knowledge itself. To know ourselves, we must know what we know and how we know it, or know what we think we know and how to overcome it. We have blurred the distinction between knowledge and morals; we have internalized weak epistemic truth claims across time; a genealogy of morals is necessary to trace and thereby illuminate our understanding of ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »


text:
First State FC: The new team in town
Posted by Andrew Speizman on July 3, 2021 at 10:00 am
Photo courtesy First State FC
This piece has been edited after publication.
It's late Saturday afternoon as I head south down I-95 from Center City. I wistfully spot the Commodore Barry Bridge in my rearview mirror and know I'm not going to a Union game, but ten minutes later I've crossed into Delaware, pulling off of I-95 and headed towards Abessinnio Stadium. I'm here to see Delaware's First State FC Midnight Riders play Motown FC – based, not in Detroit, but in Morristown, NJ.
First State FC is a member of the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL), the highest level amateur league in the country with over 90 teams competing nationwide. It provides, among other things, a spot for college players to hone their skills and perhaps get some added exposure. The inaugural season for the Midnight Riders — a nod to Delawarean Caesar Rodney's frantic ride to vote for the Declaration of Independence in 1776 — was set to be last year, but, like so many other things, the pandemic shut the league down — so 2021 it is.
It's a short walk from the (free) parking lot to the stadium and I find a spot in the bleachers right at midfield. Kickoff is promptly at 6:00 p.m. and the 250 or so fans immediately offer their encouragement. The first eight minutes are fast-paced and up and down the field but no dangerous attacks until the ninth minute when First State's Yushi Nagao, a Florida International University player from Japan, uses his stand-out pace on a break up the right channel. His shot is cleanly stopped by the Motown goalkeeper.
Just seven minutes later, off a Motown corner, First State is caught ball watching as the strike goes beyond the far post and Johannes Pieles one-times a low shot into the near post giving Motown a 1-0 lead.
First State's owner and general manager David Holloway felt a soccer void in Delaware. So, working with the NPSL, he founded First State, which became the highest level of men's soccer competition in the state. He also wants the team to be a staple of the community, provide visibility to the sport, and supply families with a cheap but fun night out — which it does, as ticket prices max out at just 10 dollars.
In the 25th minute, forward Hakeem Williams, a Wilmington University player from Jamaica, steals the ball from the Motown defender, dribbles to goal and muscles the ball past the goalie for the equalizer. Williams would put in an aggressive shift and earn MOTM.
As the half winds down things get a bit testy, as a hard challenge by Motown is immediately followed by a (weak) second yellow shown to First State forward Ben Assane. First State goes into the locker room with a 1-1 tie, but with the knowledge that they will have to play the remainder of the game down a player.
Most of the players are from Division I colleges and many are international, including several who have played on their respective national teams. But in a nod towards the community, First State also holds open tryouts and approximately 25% of the roster come via walk-ons. Head coach Chibsah Faisal, who is also an assistant coach at the University of Delaware, shares the GM's vision of a free-flowing, creative style of play – think classic Arsenal.
Down a man, most of the play is in the First State defensive third, though the first good chance of the half comes from First State midfielder Shawn Genus. The Motown goalkeeper uses outstretched fingertips to deflect the headed ball over the goal. Hakeem Williams has the next good opportunity but puts the ball over the net.
Motown turns the tides and has the next several chances, but the First State goalkeeper Gianluca Cersosimo, an Argentinian from Georgian Court University, makes high quality saves to keep the game tied.
It looks like First State will work the draw but in the 89th minute a blocked shot rebounds out 15 yards in front of the net and Johannes Pieles emphatically powers a drive into the near corner of the net, earning himself a brace and ultimately the game winner in the 1-2 final.
First State's final game of their inaugural season is on their home turf Saturday, July 3 at 6:00 p.m. It is definitely worth the ride down to see some quality, high energy soccer.
Author: Andrew Speizman Andrew is a soccer dad, soccer watcher - Sheffield Blades!, and a hack soccer player. He is also a contributor to the PSP. Soccer takes up an inordinate amount of my life. How did this happen?
Phil D says:
Do you consider a 4th tier mens program higher than a 2nd tier women's program because Coastal Atlantic FC plays in the WPSL, the women's equivalent of the NPSL so your assertion it's the highest club in Delaware is wrong. It might be the highest men's club in Delaware but CAFC was there first.
Peter Andrews says:
Phil — that's a totally fair point, and a definite oversight on our part. We've updated the piece to clarify that it's the highest club in men's soccer. Thanks.


The Pine Veneer Edging tape is pre-glued and comes in a 30mm width and 0.5mm thickness. Simply iron on the edging strip to your exposed edge and trim off the excess. Lengths available are 5 & 10 metre rolls, samples also available, select from the drop down box above.
The delivery was good but we have picked the wrong colour we have been informed by your selves that we can return the trim.


text:
Ludwigshafen, Germany – July 7, 2015 – BASF received the Texas Instruments (TI) 2014 Supplier Excellence Award during a ceremony held in Ludwigshafen. The award honors companies whose dedication and commitment in supplying products and services meet TI's high standards for excellence. BASF, receiving the award in the Chemicals category, was recognized by TI for its exemplary performance in the areas of Environmental & Social Responsibility, Technology, Responsiveness, Assurance of Supply, and Quality.
BASF Recognized for Excellence by Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments awards 2014 Supplier Excellence Award to BASF in Chemicals category
Award showcases BASF's strong commitment to deliver best-in-class products and services
BASF to continue delivering innovative, customized solutions for the semiconductor industry
"We are honored to receive this award from Texas Instruments as it demonstrates our uncompromised determination to deliver the best-in-class products and services for our customers," said Dr. Lothar Laupichler, Senior Vice President, Electronic Materials at BASF. "It is always rewarding to be recognized by our customers, and we will continue to deliver innovative, customized solutions to enable them to grow and succeed in the fast paced, competitive business environment."
PDF ( 31,1 kB )
Последнее обновление 7 июля 2015 г.


text:
Q: ASP.Net MVC image upload failing in Google Chrome I have an image upload form
<% using (Html.BeginForm("PictureValidateAndSave", "UserGallery", new {}, FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data"})) { %>

             Album Name:
             <%= Html.DropDownList("albumList") %>

             File Location:
             <input type="file" name="picture" accept="image/gif, image/jpeg" />

             Picture name:
             <input name="pictureName" style="width: 147px;"/>

 <input type="submit" value="Save" />

<% } %>

That posts back to the action
public ActionResult PictureValidateAndSave(long albumList, HttpPostedFileBase picture, string pictureName)

The code works accross all browsers but Google Chrome. My IDE is Visual Studio 2k8, and I haven't figured out how to debug on Google Chrome with it, however, I am throwing error messages, and I know that for some reason under chrome, the following check doesn't pass:
string mimeType = picture.ContentType;

// Check for the correct mimeType to define the extension
switch (mimeType)
{
    case "image/pjpeg":
        mimeType = ".jpeg";
        break;
    case "image/png":
        mimeType = ".png";
        break;
    case "image/x-png":
        mimeType = ".png";
        break;
    case "image/gif":
        mimeType = ".gif";
        // Conversion to image
        Image gifImage = Image.FromStream(picture.InputStream);
        FrameDimension dimension = new FrameDimension(gifImage.FrameDimensionsList[0]);

        int frameCount = gifImage.GetFrameCount(dimension);
        // Reject if its an animated gif
        if (frameCount > 1)
        {
            return RedirectToAction("UploadPicture", new { error = 3 });
        }
        break;
    default:
        return RedirectToAction("UploadPicture", new { error = 1 });
}

So apparently, under Chrome, the HttpPostedFileBase parameter picture isn't encoded right and loses its mime type, howwever, this might not be the only problem. What is excatly wrong with the HttpPostedFileBase parameter under Chrome, and how can I fix it?
Thank you for your attention, and thanks in advance for any help.

A: Just use hanselmans method, works perfect in chrome.

A: I've just debugged some of my code that uploads files to mvc and i get the exact MIME string from the HttpPostedFileBase in Firefox as i do in Chrome: "image/jpeg" and "image/gif" respectively. So i don't think there is a problem with the browser interpreting the file type.
Take a look at this answer. It has a lot of my code in it regarding uploading and typing the 'HttpPostedFileBase' data. It might get you un-stuck.


text:
Peer-to-peer services kick-start fifth computing revolution
Paul Fruitman
A fifth revolution of computing is unfolding as peer-to-peer services have turned PCs into servers, promising real-time sharing of applications, Microsoft Canada Co. president Frank Clegg told a Comdex Canada audience Thursday.
"There's so much processing power available at the edge of the network that we don't need the number of massive, expensive central servers that had been originally forecast to run our applications," Clegg said, opening a presentation featuring the bright lights, flashy product displays and tightly scripted support performances common to late-night infomercials.
"The new paradigm is: my PC — or any other device I want to use — should be able to interact directly with yours.
Clegg said the first four computing revolutions (the mainframe, the personal computer, the graphical user interface and the Internet) are giving way to the end-user empowerment revolution and Microsoft intends to take a leadership role in the paradigm shift with its .Net platform and XP operating system (OS).
He added that negativity surrounding the computer industry has been overblown and that the future looks bright for Microsoft and other technology companies.
"There's been a lot of talk about the demise of this industry this year, and, frankly, I'm not buying into it at all," said Clegg, citing Canada's heavy Internet use and a nine per cent increase of PC shipment in Canada during the first quarter of 2001. "We believe the opportunity is greater for the next decade than for the last 50 years."
Clegg also used his keynote address to announce the launch of a .Net-based initiative, Microsoft's bCentral.ca software services portal. The bCentral.ca portal offers subscription-based services designed to help small businesses build their Web sites, increase traffic and interact more efficiently with customers. The different services range in price from $179 and $270 per year. Some are also available on a monthly basis.
Responding to concerns that a subscription-based model would be more costly to the consumer, Clegg said .Net was not designed as a cash cow.
"The thing that's great about this environment is that people are going to use it and determine whether it's worth it," Clegg said. "There is absolutely no strategy to build in any automatic pricing increase."
Later, at a question and answer session at the Plesman Communications exhibitor booth, an employee of the Toronto Public School Board suggested to Clegg that the new licensing system would result in a 20 to 50 per cent increase for schools using Microsoft products. Clegg said the extent of cost increases will be determined by the operating systems organizations use.
"There is a new licensing that's out and it's not just to the public environment," Clegg said. "What we're saying is that if you're staying up to date with the technology, it's actually cheaper. If you're going to skip a release, it costs you more."
Clegg said .Net is about making computing more functional and offered demonstrations of upcoming releases to illustrate how Microsoft technology is working towards a higher level of user empowerment.
First up was Windows XP, set for release in October. With the help of Microsoft Canada XP product manager Erik Moll and a co-op student from Ryerson Polytechnic University, Clegg showed the Comdex audience how XP allows users to give control of their OSs to fellow employees or friends and affords real-time collaboration on documents.
Clegg said XP also enables users running XP on their computer at work to access their office system through a home computer running a Windows OS. While Windows 2000 and Windows ME allow for remote computing, XP promises to make the experience much more seamless.
Clegg touted the PC as the centre of the user-empowerment revolution, calling it the most powerful of the new .Net's "smart devices," but stressed that .Net is designed to extend to mobile computing devices like laptops, digital phones and personal digital assistants.
One of those smart devices on display Thursday was a Tablet PC slated for release in about a year. An attempt to merge the "simplicity of ink with the power of the PC," the Tablet is a paper-sized device that allows users to manipulate handwriting as easily as computer text. The fully operational PC will cost about as much as a laptop and is XP-equipped, to provide easy .Net access.
In an effort to answer security questions raised by .Net's all-encompassing framework, Clegg pointed to an agreement with VeriSign Inc. (www.verisign.com), signed earlier this week, that will see the security company providing authentication and security support for future .Net products.
"If we're going to successfully provide Web services to users and businesses, we need to prove to our customers that we have the strongest protection possible," Clegg said.
Mobile devices open access to enterprise
Novell exec draws IT lessons from auto industry
More from Paul Fruitman
New storage research enhances security fears
Paul Fruitman - August 13, 2003
Canadian patent holder claims global e-commerce rights
Paul Fruitman - July 21, 2003
Quebec hospital starts five-year patient record project


text:
Don't pass over these 8 new books for spring
By	Victor Wishna	 March 30, 2017 1:01 pm
Clockwise from top left: "Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem" (Other Press); "The Dog's Last Walk (And Other Pieces)" (Bloomsbury); "The Devil and Webster" (Grand Central Publishing); "Ugg for Gaza (and other stories)" (Dutch Kills Press); "All Grown Up" (Houghton Mifflin).
(JTA) — You know the story: When the Israelites made their exodus from Egypt, they fled in such haste that they did not have time to grab even some light reading. And it would still be some time until Moses announced that new first edition from Mount Sinai.
As Passover approaches, we don't want you to suffer the same misfortune. So here are eight intriguing new Jewish books, in a range of genres, that you can grab right now — printed on crisp papyrus or downloaded directly to your, ahem, tablet.
All Grown Up (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
"All Grown Up" by Jami Attenberg (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Zack Smith Photography)
From the best-selling author of "The Middlesteins" comes an exceedingly funny but also tautly wrought tale about Andrea Bern, an almost-40 Jewish New Yorker who is outwardly proud to be single and child free — but with some drugs and a little too much drinking on the side. When her niece is born with a tragic illness, Andrea's entire family and extended circle re-examines what matters most and exactly what it means to "act your age." Overall it's a punchy, poignant take on pushing against society's expectations, and what happens when life unexpectedly — as it always does — pushes back.
The Devil and Webster (Grand Central Publishing)
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
"The Devil and Webster" by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Grand Central Publishing)
Naomi Roth is both the first female president and the first Jewish president of Webster College, a fictional representation of one of those tony, liberal academic bastions we've been reading so much about recently. And, of course, it becomes the site of a student protest after a popular professor is denied tenure. But when Roth's own daughter joins the fray, and a charismatic Palestinian student emerges as the movement's leader, Naomi must contend with crisis on multiple fronts. Korelitz's sixth novel is a topical page-turner and literary mystery, and as the revelations flow, it becomes a reflection on how easily the truth can be bent.
The Dog's Last Walk (Bloomsbury)
By Howard Jacobson
"The Dog's Last Walk (And Other Pieces)" by Howard Jacobson (Bloomsbury/Jenny Jacobson)
Jacobson's newest collection of journalistic essays from The Independent — available now as an e-book; the hardcover lands this summer — allows you to digest and enjoy the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist's writing in smaller bites. (It's 90 short essays in a book of some 300 pages.) The prolific Jacobson waxes poetic — and provocative and playful and poignant, often from a distinctly Jewish perspective — on a wide range of tiny topics and broad observations with pieces such as "God is Me" and "How to Live Forever."
The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University Press)
By Lewis Glinert
"The Story of Hebrew" by Lewis Glinert (Princeton University Press)
In this meticulously researched but highly readable work of scholarship by Glinert, the Dartmouth professor tells not just a history of the Jewish language but, indeed, its story. From the opening lines of Genesis to its modern Israeli incarnation, Hebrew has packed more symbolic power than almost any other tongue. Hebrew has inspired both Jews and Christians, once provided a linguistic conduit to early Greek and Arab science — even the early American colonists used it to cast themselves in their own narrative as new Israelites. Such stories and quotes populate an entertaining account that should also serve as a fundamental text for any student of language or Jewish history.
Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem (Other Press)
By George Prochnik
"Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem" by George Prochnik (Other Press/Elizabeth Prochnik)
Part biography of Gershom Scholem — the 20th-century thinker whose "radical" reading of Kabbalah fueled the modern study of Jewish mysticism — and part memoir of Prochnik's own search for meaning in modern Jerusalem, this substantial tome is an intricate study of how people of faith struggle to reconcile their beliefs with the real world. Prochnik, a 2014 National Jewish Book Award winner (for "The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World"), delves into Scholem's evolution as a cultural Zionist in the face of nationalist passion in one narrative while wrestling with an inability to balance love for the Jewish state with the dehumanizing situation in Gaza and the West Bank in the other. It may not make for light reading, but those who enjoy probing the irreconcilability of the spiritual and the physical will find much to love in this book.
Uggs for Gaza (and other stories) (Dutch Kills Press)
By Gordon Haber
"Ugg for Gaza (and other stories)" by Gordon Haber (Dutch Kills Press/Basil Rodericks)
Whether you find the title intriguing, irksome or inspired, you'll likely be drawn into this debut short-story collection by Haber, who is known for his nonfiction writing on religion and culture. Funny often in a dark way, Haber's stories explore Jewish characters finding their way through remarkable situations: a Jewish infantryman in the Korean War, for example, or an adjunct professor who can't read his students' essays without vomiting. Then there's the poor schlub of the title story, who lies to a pretty girl about running a nonprofit that sends Australian boots to Palestinians — and ends up going through with it.
What to Do About the Solomons (Atlantic Monthly Press)
By Bethany Ball
"What To Do About The Solomons" by Bethany Ball (Grove/Atlantic Press)
In her fiction debut, Ball has formulated a fast-paced, multigenerational, dysfunctional family drama that also bubbles over with humor and intrigue — essentially what you might expect (or hope for) from a tale of a kibbutz family and its scattered, colorful offspring. With beautiful language and sordid details, the narrative bounces from Israel to New York to Southern California and beyond (and back and forth), with plenty of gossip gone wrong and dark secrets in between. Early critical responses are drawing comparisons to Nathan Englander and Jennifer Egan — or as a Booklist review put it, "Try Eudora Welty with sex and Jews."
Wherever You Go, There They Are: Stories About My Family You Might Relate To (Blue Rider Press)
By Annabelle Gurwitch
"Wherever You Go, There They Are" by Annabelle Gurwitch (Blue Rider Press)
This collection of essays from the actress and New York Times best-selling author provides ample comic relief and reflection as the rest of us gather 'round the seder table with our own "mishpocha." Of course, not all of us can claim a Southern Jewish lineage of "bootleggers, gamblers, and philanderers," but Gurwitch's clever and provocative prose should hit anyone's funny bone — while her social commentary, on topics such as wealth and Hollywood culture, and poignant exploration of shared traditions and rituals (both Jewish and otherwise) touches a deeper chord.
33 years after classic bar mitzvah episode, revamped 'Wonder Years' revisits the ritual
By	Philissa Cramer	 January 13, 2022 3:19 pm
A musician's project sheds new light on artistic life in the Terezín concentration camp
By	Jonah Goldman Kay	 January 13, 2022 12:49 pm
The Jewish Week's guide to the 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival
By	New York Jewish Week Staff	 January 11, 2022 3:22 pm
A trans Jew has created a nonbinary, open-source prayer book that aims to include all
By	Jaz Twersky	 January 11, 2022 2:38 pm
from Alma	This link opens in a new window


text:
Левашо́во () — селище міського типу, муніципальне утворення в складі Виборзького району на північному заході Санкт-Петербурга.

Чисельність населення за переписом 2002 року — 4095 чол.
Залізнична станція Октябрської залізниці  Левашово на дистанції Санкт-Петербург — Виборг (між станціями Парголово та  Пісочна).
Виникло як станційне селище при побудованій в 1870 році залізниці на Виборг. Назва походить від прізвища графа В. В. Левашова, який володів у другій половині XIX століття сусіднім маєтком Осиковий Гай. У Осиковому Гаю збереглась будівля колишнього палацу Левашова, зведена в останній чверті XVIII століття в стилі російського класицизму за проектом архітектора І. Є. Старова.

Населення — 5559 чол. (2021).

Транспорт

Станція
Залізнична станція Левашово Жовтневої залізниці на дисьанції Санкт-Петербург — Виборг (між станцією Парголово і платформою Пісочна).

Автобус
 75 (вулиця Жені Єгорової — Новосілки);
 84 (Пісочна — Сертолово — Новосілки).

Аеродром

Військовий аеродром «Левашово» планується зробити аеродромом спільного базування. Згідно з проектом, крім військової, там буде розташовуватися цивільна авіація. Інвестувати проект буде «Газпром», а «Газпромавіа» виступить в якості експлуатанта і авіакомпанії, яка буде там базуватися.

Див. також
 Меморіальне кладовище «Левашівська пустинь»

Примітки

Муніципальні утворення Санкт-Петербурга
Селища у складі Санкт-Петербурга
Виборзький район (Санкт-Петербург)


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text:
Veeam Expands Strategy: Availability for the Modern Data Center
Since it's inception, Veeam has been the "backup and recovery" company. Heck, "Backup and Recovery" was even in product names. With the release of the Veeam Availability Suite version 8, Veeam is expanding its branding to read "Availability for the modern data center".
When you look at the entire spectrum of data protection and system availability, Veeam is not really a newcomer to either. In fact, for years, Veeam has been synonymous with virtualization and backup needs around virtualization. Further, as a part of the product, Veeam provided additional capabilities to customers through the replication components in Veeam Backup and Replication.
However, as business become increasingly reliant on 24/7 availability – even in the SMB – new and affordable tools are needed to help. Just as we've moved from a focus on backup to one based on recovery, the industry is moving to embrace ongoing availability as the baseline for the modern data center. In the grand scheme of things, availability goes hand in hand with data protection, which is a foundation for availability. Without well-protected data, availability it just a pipe dream. Moreover, modern data protection is about far more than just making sure that data gets backed up. It also includes making sure that data remains safe from prying eyes.
It's a far more complex world that what we've seen in the past and is one chock full of moving parts, new threats, and new needs. With version 8 (V8) of the company's venerable data protection and replication software, Veeam is aiming to focus on this full spectrum of availability, including:
Making sure data gets backed up and can be recovered quickly. This has been a part of the Veeam product from the beginning.
Making sure that data gets replicated as needed to bring certainty to disaster recovery scenarios. Veeam has long demonstrated its capabilities in this area.
Closing the availability gap. Mission critical applications generally get attention when it comes to availability options. V8 aims to democratize availability and bring it to a wider range of applications at a reasonable cost.
Supporting 24/7 operations. Even tiny businesses these days operate across time zones and include online customers and more. Heck, even ActualTech Media's founders, the owner of this blog, operate in three different time zones and work crazy hours that don't conform to the traditional 9 to 5 mindset.
Making recovery faster. Veeam is already known for really good recovery, but the product just gets better with each release. V8 will feature Veeam Explorer for Exchange and Active Directory, tools that provide single item recovery support for these two common data center applications. I've used Explorer for Exchange and it's really, really good. Point and click easy.
Protecting data beyond backup. End-to-end encryption should be the minimum standard by which data center backups are handled today. Veeam does this. Veeam also supports using the cloud as a backup target, enabling off site backups for companies without requiring the build out of a secondary data center.
Veeam is also partnering with other technology vendors to boost the value proposition for shared customers. For example, Veeam has partnered with both NetApp and EMC to deliver functionality that improves the data protection and availability experience for customers of these vendors.
Here's a look at some of the features that are new to V8:
Backup from Storage Snapshots (HP and NetApp)
EMC Data Domain Boost
Veeam Cloud Connect
End-to-end encryption
Replication enhancements
Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, Active Directory
Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots (HP and NetApp)
The days of complexity and "point solutions" in the data center need to come to a close. There is simply too much effort put into making things work and IT. Reliance on an available technology infrastructure and environment is higher than ever before. IT can't implement solutions that have the potential to create more chaos than they control. Further, IT needs to keep costs at a reasonable level even while providing necessary levels of availability.
To learn more about Veeam's availability initiative, read the company's Sneak Peek: Veeam Availability Suite v8 document.
Cloud Disaster Recovery DR EMC NetApp Veeam
PernixData: Do You See What I C…Series C That is!
Why RAID Cannot Cope With Large Disks: Rebuild Times... February 18, 2014 | Alastair Cooke, vExpert


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text:
Una Ranked One Of The Safest Campuses In The Country
By Bryan Rachal, University Communications
FLORENCE, Ala. - When it comes to a safe campus, the University of North Alabama is one of the best in the state and one of the best in the country. BestColleges.com recently released a list of the 50 safest college campuses in the country and UNA made the list. UNA was one of only two Alabama schools listed in the top 50.
BestColleges.com compiled the list using the latest information from the IPEDS and College Navigator databases, both of which are sources maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics. The most recent set of data is for the 2011-2012 school year, though some individual data points reflect the 2012-2013 school year.
Dr. Ken Kitts, UNA President, said it's the University's goal to make this type of list. "We are pleased to find ourselves listed as one of the 50 safest college campuses in America. At the same time, this news is not surprising to us. We take campus safety very seriously and are intentional about taking steps to eliminate threats and provide students with a wonderful learning opportunity."
According to BestColleges.com, some of the things that set UNA apart include excellent alert services for students via LionAlert; the department also offers an emergency notification system via Nixle for parents and local community members. In addition to comprehensive patrol plans and security measures such as key-card entry, surveillance and emergency phones throughout campus, the department provides a variety of training sessions; these include the ALICE active shooter survival training and rape aggression defense courses.
Kevin Gillilan, UNA chief of police, said being recognized as one of the safest campuses is a very prestigious achievement. "The UNA Police Department takes pride in providing a safe atmosphere for our students, faculty and staff. It is our goal to continually enhance campus safety and our relationships within the campus community," he said.
"In an effort to improve our physical security, we have recently completed an upgrade to surveillance equipment in our parking deck, residence halls and science building. We will continue to assess the quality of programs, policies and technology utilized by our department and are strategically planning for the future," said Gillilan.
In recent years, the government passed the Clery Act, which requires universities to publicly post annual reports detailing any crime or fire incidents over the previous year. Overwhelmingly, the most common criminal offenses on college campuses today are sexual assault, theft and burglary.
To view the full list of the 50 Safest College Campuses from BestColleges.com visit: http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/safest-college-campuses/
The University of North Alabama is an accredited, comprehensive regional state university offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs through the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Education and Human Sciences, and Nursing. Occupying a 130-acre campus in a residential section of Florence, Alabama, UNA is located within a four-city area that also includes Tuscumbia, Sheffield and Muscle Shoals. UNA also operates a renowned collegiate athletic program in NCAA Division II's Gulf South Conference. The University of North Alabama is an equal opportunity institution and does not discriminate in the admission policy on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, disability, age or national origin.
http://www.una.edu/


The advisory is for all homes on Addison Court, Clapham Street, East Clapham Street, East Street, Merrick Street and Fairview Avenue north of Route 17.
The City will be starting up a new pump station for those neighborhoods.
The City Water Department is providing drinking water to all affected homes and will sample the water during the advisory April 10 to the 14th.


Hello everyone! I'm Sally from Australia. Together with another HSAA member, Ghana we went hiking to a lesser known area of Hiroshima, to a place called The Peace Pagoda or Bushartito. The Peace Pagoda was constructed in 1966 as a place to commemorate and serve as a resting place for all the souls lost in the A Bomb in 1945. This beautiful, shiny silver building can be viewed in many places around Hiroshima, including the harbour where you can take the ferry to Miyajima. It is a very beautiful monument for Hiroshima, and not very difficult to get to.
To get to the Peace Pagoda, simply take the North Exit from Hiroshima station, taking the left escalator down from the station. From here it is almost a simple straight line. You will find a large staircase that leads up to Tosho-Gu Shrine. You can go through the shrine on your way to start the hike. Exit the shrine to the right, and then take an immediate left turn up a steep hill. This path leads you to Kinko-Inari shrine, which is a set of gates or torii made in the same manner as the famous Fushimi-Inari Shrine in Kyoto – just in red. After following the torii up, you reach a beautiful lookout over Hiroshima. This is a lovely spot to rest, drink some water or eat a snack. We bought one of Hiroshima's famous Bake Cheese Tart at Hiroshima station. Nothing quite like it!
Before reaching the pagoda, there is a small detour point you can take. Instead of turning right at the top of Kinko-Inari shrine, you can head left to see the remains of some World War II gun batteries that were destroyed in the A Bomb. Then just a straight shot back right and you will quickly reach the pagoda. The views are so fantastic and beautiful.
After reaching the pagoda, there is some nice picnic spots in the area, or there's a famous steak restaurant called Mahogany that is just a few hundred metres down the hill into the Ushida residential area, which is home to a lot of nice houses.
You can also climb the Ushida-Alps from this point, or head to Ushidayama-Kannonji. We decided to save that for another trip! So it was just a quick 10 minute walk down to Hiroshima station. All in all, the walking is about one hour.
If you're looking for a relaxing day and a lunch pit on Hiroshima, I really recommend this beautiful area.


Cooking with Steve Weston, author of "In the Wild Chef"
Steve Weston, author of "In the Wild Chef", Will give a presentation and cooking demonstration about how to become a really good backcountry chef. Join us and learn how to eat better on your next backpacking or camping adventure. Copies of Steve's book will be available for purchase. This event is free and open to the general public. Feel free to bring a friend.


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Q: When should you create a subsystem? I'm looking into system architecture and can't seem to figure out when you should create a subsystem/what deserves its own subsystem.
Common examples I have seen include: Input Database Networking and User interface subsystems.

A: There cannot be a general guideline for this.

*

*Software projects are very diverse. Some are small and don't need any subsystems. Some are huge and consist of hundreds of subsystems that in turn have their own subsubsystems. Not every system has a database or a user interface.

*There are also many ways to define a "subsystem". A subsystem could be a separate class, a package, a library, a project, a microservice, or a number of other things. Sometimes it makes sense to organize code into a separate package, sometimes it makes sense to create a completely separate service. Both are a kind of subsystem, but they are on completely different scales.
One useful way to think about subsystems is Domain Driven Design (DDD). That is really not about systems, but about defining your problem domain. It then happens that many software projects span different problem domains. DDD suggests that we establish clear conceptual boundaries between those (a bounded context). A bounded context is a good candidate for some separate subsystem, but its up to you to decide how this should be represented in your software. This depends a lot on the complexity of that system, on your organization, and on your requirements.

A: I would say there is a general guideline. If you can isolate some part that does not have to know about the remaining part, you should split up your system. Often you will end up with one part serving the other (so you can speak of a subsystem).
The separated parts will likely be more useful, they can be applied in different scenarios. You will have created yourself some building blocks.
It is all about separating responsibilities. You should end up with blocks that only do one thing. Like store data or transport data. Then you will be in good shape, you can change one block or even replace it without breaking (having to do much work to) any of the other blocks.