Traceability links between requirements of a system and its source code are helpful in reducing system conception effort. During software updates and maintenance, the traceability links become invalid since the developers may modify or remove some features of the source code. Hence, to acquire trustable links from a system source code, a supervised link tracing approach is proposed here. In proposed approach, IR techniques are applied on source code and requirements document to generate baseline traceability links. Concurrently, software repositories are also mined to generate validating traceability links i.e. Histrace links which are then called as experts. Now a trust model named as DynWing is used to rank the different types of experts. DynWing dynamically assigns weights to different types of experts in ranking process. The top ranked experts are then fed to the trust model named as Trumo. Trumo validates the baseline links with top ranked experts and finds the trustable links from baseline links set. While validating the links, Trumo is capable of discarding or re-ranking the experts and finds most traceable links. The proposed approach is able to improve the precision and recall values of the traceability links.
Requirement traceability is defined as "the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both a forwards and backwards direction (i.e., from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through all periods of on-going refinement and iteration in any of these phases)" . Traceability links between requirements1 of a system and its source code are helpful in reducing system comprehension effort. They are also essential to ensure that a system's source code is consistent with its requirements and that all and only the specified requirements have been implemented by developers. Yet, during software maintenance and evolution, as developers add, remove, or modify features, requirement traceability links become obsolete because developers do not/cannot devote effort to update them . Yet, recovering later these traceability links is a daunting and costly task for developers. Consequently, the literature proposed methods, techniques, and tools to recover these traceability links semi-automatically or automatically . Requirements traceability has received much attention over the past decade in the scientific literature. Many researchers used information retrieval (IR) techniques, e.g., , , , to recover traceability links between highlevel documents, e.g., requirements, manual pages, and design documents, and low-level documents, e.g., source code and UML diagrams , , , . IR techniques assume that all software artifacts are/can be put in some textual format. Then, they computed the textual similarity between two software artifacts, e.g., the source code of a class and a requirement. Yet, while developers may not evolve requirements in synchronization with source code, they frequently update other sources of information, including CVS/SVN repositories, bug-tracking systems, mailing lists, forums, and blogs. These other sources of information to build improved traceability-recovery approaches are exploited.
1. Mine software repositories, e.g., CVS/SVN repositories, to support the traceability recovery process and improve the precision and recall of IR-based traceability recovery approaches.
2. Heterogeneous sources of information is taken as experts whose opinions can combine using a trust model to discard/re-rank the traceability links provided by the IR techniques to improve accuracy.
3. An automatic, dynamic, per-link weighting technique is used rather than some global static weights to combine the opinions of experts.
1) Histrace mines software repositories to create links between requirements and source code using information from the repositories. Histrace stores all the recovered links between requirements and software repositories in dedicated sets, e.g., Histrace commits and Histrace bugs, which are considered as experts whose opinions will be used to discard/rerank baseline traceability links. For example, Histrace mines CVS/SVN repository to link requirements and source code using commit messages and provide the set of expert Histrace commits.
2) Trumo combines the requirement traceability links obtained from an IR technique and discards/reranks them using an expert's opinions and a trust model inspired by Web-trust models. It compares the similarity of the recovered links with those provided by the experts and with the number of times that the link appears in each expert's set. It is not tied to any specific IR-based traceability-recovery approach and can use any expert's opinion to adjust the ranking of recovered links. For example, the experts can be Histrace commits and–or Histrace bugs, taking advantage of CVS/SVN repositories and bug-tracking systems.
3) DynWing computes and assigns weights to the experts in the trust model dynamically, i.e., on a per link basis. Dynamic-weighting techniques are promising to assign weights for each link. DynWing analyses each expert's similarity value for each link and assigns weights according to these values.
1. Use two experts, Histracecommits when mining CVS/SVN and Histracebugs. When mining bug reports.
2. DynWing is proposed, a dynamic weighting technique to automatically assign weights to different experts on a per-link basis.
3. DynWing with a PCA-based weighting is compared technique and with a static weighting technique to analyse the potential improvement of using different weighting techniques.
4. The impact of Trustrace on another IR technique, i.e., the Jensen-Shannon similarity model.
Trustrace uses software repositories, e.g., CVS/SVN repositories and bug-tracking systems, as experts to trust more or less some baseline links recovered by an IR technique and, thus, to discard/reranks the links to improve the precision and recall of the IR-based techniques.
IR-based RTAs process is typically divided into three main steps.
1. All the textual information contained in the requirements and source code is extracted and preprocessed by splitting terms, removing stop words and remaining words are then stemmed to its grammatical root.
2. All the stemmed terms are weighted using a term weighting scheme, e.g., term frequency and inverse document frequency.
3. An IR technique computes the similarity between requirements and source code documents. Finally it generates a ranked list of potential traceability links.
high similarity between two documents shows a potential semantic link between them.
To create traceability links, extract all the identifiers from source code and terms from requirements. Some IR techniques as an engine to create links between requirements and source code. IR techniques assume that all documents are in textual format. To extract source code identifiers, use a source code parser, e.g., a Java parser. The parser discards extra information, e.g., primitive data types and language specific keywords, from the source code and provides only identifier names. The extraction of the identifiers and terms is followed by a filtering, stopper, and stemmer process.
1. A text normalization step converts all uppercase letters into lower-case letters. This step removes non-textual, i.e., some numbers, mathematical symbols, brackets, etc., information and extra white spaces, from the documents. Some identifiers/terms could be combined with some special characters, e.g., under score. Then split all the joined terms to make them separate terms. For example, SendMessage and send message are split into the terms "send message".
2. The input of this step is normalized text that could contain some common words, e.g., articles, punctuation, etc. These common words are considered as noise in the text because it does not represent semantics of a document. Thus, in this step, we use a stop word list to remove all the stop words. English language stop words list is used as all our documents are in English.
3. This step is stemming. An English stemmer, for example, would identify the terms "dog", "dogs" and-or "doggy" as based on the root "dog". An IR technique computes the similarity between two documents based on similar terms in both documents. However, due to different postfix, IR techniques would consider them, e.g., access, accessed, as two different terms and it would result into low similarity between two documents. Thus, it becomes important to perform morphological analysis to convert plural into singular and to bring back inflected forms to their morphemes.
An IR technique converts all the documents into vectors to compute the similarities among them. To convert documents terms into vectors, each term is assigned a weight. Various schemes for weighting terms have been used Widely used weighting schemes are characterized in two main categories: probabilistic and algebraic models Probabilistic weighting models heavily depends on probability estimations of terms and algebraic weighting models depends on terms distribution in a document.
If a word appears in multiple documents then the term is not considered representative of documents content. The global frequency is also called inverse document frequency (IDF).
To build sets of traceability links, we use some IR techniques, in particular VSM and JSM. JSM and VSM are used to recover traceability links. Both techniques essentially use term-by-document matrices. Consequently, we choose the well known T F/IDF weighting scheme for the VSM and the normalized term frequency measure for the JSM. These two measures and IR techniques are building blocks for traceability.
Many traceability links recovery techniques use VSM as baseline algorithm. In a VSM, documents are represented as vector in the space of all the terms. Various term weighting schemes can be used to construct these vectors. If a term belongs to a document then it gets a nonzero value in the VSM along the dimension corresponding to the term. A document collection in VSM is represented by a term by document matrix, i.e., m ∈ n matrix, where m is the number of terms and n is the number of documents in the corpus.
Once documents are represented as vectors of terms in a VSM, traceability links are created between every two documents, e.g., a requirement and a source code class, with different similarity value depending on each pair of documents.
Where R is a requirement vector and C is a source code vector.
Histrace creates links between the set of requirements, R and the source code, C, using the software repositories Ti, i.e., in the following, T1 stands for CVS/SVN commit messages and T2 for bug reports. Histrace considers the requirements' textual descriptions, CVS/SVN commit messages, bug reports, and classes as separate documents. It uses these sources of information to produce two experts Histracecommits and Histracebugs. Histracebugs use CVS/SVN commit messages and bug reports respectively, to create traceability links between R and C through the Ti. Below, we discuss each step of Histrace in details.
Depending on the input information source (i.e., requirements, source code, CVS/SVN commit messages, or bug reports), specific pre-processing steps to remove irrelevant details from the source, (e.g., CVS/SVNcommit number, source code punctuation or language keywords) is performed, split identifiers, and, finally, normalize the resulting text using stop-word removal and stemming.
Histrace first processes source code files to extract all the identifiers and comments from each class. Histrace then uses underscore and the Camel Case convention  to split identifiers into terms, thus producing for each class a separate document.
1. Converting all upper-case letters into lower-case and removing punctuation.
3. Performing word stemming using the Porter Stemmer, bringing back inflected forms to their morphemes.
1. Are tagged as "delete" because they concern classes that have been deleted from the system and thus cannot take part in any traceability link.
2. Do not concern source code (e.g., if a commit only contains HTML or PNG files).
3. Have messages of length shorter or equal to one English word, because such short messages would not have enough semantics to participate in creating R2CTi.
1. Are still part of the source code.
2. Source code has been part of the commits. Histrace applies the same normalization steps on CVS/SVN commit messages as those for requirements and source code.
To build Histracebugs, Histrace extracts all the bug reports from a bug-tracking system. Usually, bug reports donot contain explicit information about the source code files that developers updated to fix a bug. All the details about the updated, deleted, or added source code files are stored in some CVS/SVN repository. Therefore, Histrace must link CVS/SVN commit messages to bug reports before being able to exploit bug reports for traceability. Histrace uses regular expressions, i.e., a simple text matching approach but with reasonable results, to link CVS/SVN commit messages to bug reports. However, Histrace could also use more complex techniques.
1. Extracts all CVS/SVN commit messages, along with commit status and committed files.
3. Links each CVS/SVN commit message and bug reports.
Trumo assumes that different experts Histracecommits (also known as R2CT1) and Histracebugs (R2CT2) know useful information to discard or re-rank the traceability links between two documents, e.g., requirements and source code classes. Trumo is thus similar to a Web model of the users' trust: the more users buy from a Web merchant, the higher the users' trust of this merchant.
Trumo combines the requirement traceability links obtained from an IR technique and discards/reranks them using an expert's opinions and a trust model inspired by Web-trust models. It compares the similarity of the recovered links with those provided by the experts and with the number of times that the link appears in each expert's set. It is not tied to any specific IR-based traceability-recovery approach and can use any expert's opinion to adjust the ranking of recovered links. For example, the experts can be Histrace commits and–or Histrace bugs, taking advantage of CVS/SVN repositories and bug-tracking systems.
To automatically decide the weights λi(rj , cs) for each expert, we apply a dynamic weighting technique. Existing techniques ,  to define weights use static weights for all the experts. Using the same static weight may not be beneficial for all the recovered links. Therefore, consider each link recovered by a baseline IR technique and by the different experts as an independent link and dynamically assign weights to baseline links and each expert. Choosing the right weight per link is a problem that we formulate as a maximization problem. Basically, we have different experts, i.e., CVS/SVN commits, bug reports, and others, to trust a link. Each expert has its own trust into the link. By maximizing the similarity value DynWing automatically identifies the experts that are most trustworthy and those that are less trustworthy.
DynWing computes and assigns weights to the experts in the trust model dynamically, i.e., on a per link basis. Dynamic weighting techniques are promising to assign weights for each link. DynWing analyses each expert's similarity value for each link and assigns weights according to these values.
The goal of is to study the accuracy of Trustrace when recovering traceability links against that of a single IR technique, JSM and VSM, using requirements, source code, CVS/SVN commits, and–or bug reports as experts. The quality focus is the accuracy of Trustrace in terms of precision and recall. It is also the improvement brought by the dynamic weighting technique, DynWing, with respect to a PCA based technique in terms of F1 score. The main goal is to recover traceability links with greater precision and recall values than that of currently available traceability recovery IR based techniques.
Trustrace has a better accuracy. Other factors that can impact the accuracy of traceability-recovery approaches. One of these factors is quality of source code identifiers. If there is a low similarity between the identifiers used by requirements and source code, then no matter how good an IR-based technique is, it would not yield results with high precision and recall values. To analyse the quality of the identifiers in our datasets and measure their similarity values which helps to identify poor semantic areas in source code. Compute the similarity value between the set of requirements R, all merged into a single document and the set of classes C all merged into the normalized term-by-document matrix to avoid any effect from the document lengths. Then, we use JSM and VSM to compute the similarity. The similarity between these source code and requirements shows how close two documents are in terms of semantics.
Trustrace is the topic which involves source code and requirements and software repositories it is done in order to provide consistency and accuracy to the links obtained. Previous methods implement JSM and VSM model but the main disadvantage of these models are poor accuracy and they requires manual pages and UML diagrams which has probability of low accuracy and leads to low precision and recall values. So by implementing software repositories to support traceability process which improves precision and recall values. It creates baseline links by mining source code document; it also implements two trust models namely DynWing and Trumo which is used to rank experts and also to find the trustable links with respect to experts correspondingly. The proposed system mines software repositories in addition to source code, which leads to high precision and recall values. It combines the mined results with IR techniques and achieves higher precision and recall values.
O. C. Z. Gotel and C. W. Finkelstein, "An analysis of the requirements traceability problem," Requirements Engineering., Proceedings of the First International Conference on, pp. 94-101, April 1994.
N. Ali, Y.-G. Guéhéneuc, and G. Antoniol, "Trust-based requirements traceability," in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Program Comprehension, S. E. Sim and F. Ricca, Eds. IEEE Computer Society Press, June 2011, 10 pages.
G. Antoniol, G. Canfora, G. Casazza, A. D. Lucia, and E. Merlo, "Recovering traceability links between code and documentation," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 28, no. 10, pp. 970-983, 2002.
A. Marcus and J. I. Maletic, "Recovering documentation-to-source-code traceability links using latent semantic indexing," in Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Software Engineering. Portland Oregon USA: IEEE CS Press, 2003, pp. 125-135.
J. H. Hayes, A. Dekhtyar, S. K. Sundaram, and Howard, "Helping analysts trace requirements: An objective look," in RE '04: Proceedings of the Requirements Engineering Conference, 12th IEEE International. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society, 2004, pp. 249-259.
J. I. Maletic and M. L. Collard, "Tql: A query language to support traceability," in TEFSE '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society, 2009, pp. 16-20.
J. H. Hayes, G. Antoniol, and Y.-G.Guéhéneuc, "Prereqir: Recovering pre-requirements via cluster analysis," in Reverse Engineering, 2008. WCRE'08. 15th Working Conference on, Oct 2008, pp. 165-174.
D. Poshyvanyk, Y.-G. Guéhéneuc, A. Marcus, G. Antoniol, and V. Rajlich, "Feature location using probabilistic ranking of methods based on execution scenarios and information retrieval," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 420-432, 2007.
M. Gethers, R. Oliveto, D. Poshyvanyk, and A. D. Lucia, "On integrating orthogonal information retrieval methods to improve traceability recovery," in Software Maintenance (ICSM), 2011 27th IEEE International Conference on, sept.2011, pp. 133 -142.
N. Ali, Y.-G. Guéhéneuc, and G. Antoniol, Factors Impacting the Inputs of Traceability Recovery Approaches, A. Zisman, J. Cleland-Huang, and O. Gotel, Eds. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2011.


text:
Traditional Arts>
karate>
Using Kata to Overcome Size
The Key Is to Customize Your Forms by Playing With Them!
When facing a real attack, creativity and fast thinking are crucial for overcoming an opponent. The human problem, however, is that in a moment of stress, people tend to resort to a single, familiar response — whether it works or not. The goal of martial arts training is to help the student develop the ability to solve various tactical problems in moments of crisis. To achieve this, several attributes must be cultivated. One of the most important is the flexibility of mind needed to make good tactical decisions. What may be surprising, however, is the method that traditional arts use to develop flexibility of mind: kata.
Kata, or forms, have been taught in the fighting traditions for hundreds of years. The thing that makes them so effective as a learning tool is what's overlooked in most modern schools, where forms are often treated like an annoying curriculum requirement. Classical forms are composed of actual self-defense techniques that are based on sound and reliable principles. So the first step is to actually practice forms "for real." This means that forms training must include not only the solo performances but also the bunkai, or two-person applications.
Now, some people say they practice bunkai, but they're misleading themselves if their practice consists of defending against stylized attacks that bear no relationship to what one is likely to see in a real-world encounter. And they're misleading themselves if the responses to those stylized attacks — supposedly, the movements from the form — depend on distance and anticipation to work. True bunkai is the purely functional use of movements from kata against common forms of aggression.
Note: To test whether you're practicing true bunkai, have your training partner attack with intensity and realism. If you can't make your application work, it probably is not true bunkai.
When kata are taught properly, the first step is to provide students with a simple, realistic and usable interpretation for each movement of a form. Each individual move is taught as a response to a realistic attack. And it's taught on the assumption that the attacker is about the same size as the defender. But what if you're a 5-foot-6-inch, 125-pound woman training in a dojo full of men who are 6 feet tall and north of 200 pounds? Clearly, the standard techniques won't work as standardly taught.
This is precisely what makes kata training so important. The secret lies, first, in understanding that kata are practical and that practicality is expressed in realistic bunkai, and second, in acknowledging that realistic bunkai is ultimately about understanding and applying the principles of a technique. In other words, if you have a practical use for a kata movement, you have one good technique. But if you understand the principles of that one technique, you have a thousand techniques.
So how can kata be taught and subsequently fine-tuned in a way that maximizes practicality and conceptual understanding? The answer is to give yourself permission to think creatively about forms so you come up with a variety of bunkai that work best for you. And to accomplish this, you must give yourself permission to play with the forms.
And how does one play with kata? Any way you want. A simple way to start is to change the timing and emphasis. For example, while performing a downward counter (gedan-uke), the emphasis is usually on the downward strike. Instead, emphasize the beginning of the movement when your hand comes up near your opposite ear. Suddenly, you discover another striking action hidden within the movement. Your downward counter isn't a low strike away from yourself; it's a rising strike that moves toward your own body.
Another way to play is to start with bunkai and work your way backward. Perform a bunkai you already know but on a differently sized or abled opponent. While performing the technique, pay attention to modifications that you make to execute the move effectively. Once you have identified a modification, try to apply it to the solo performance of kata play.
The point is to learn to think freely and creatively. Playing with kata is a form of free expression. This leads to creative thinking and to the discovery of principles of effective self-defense. And this, in turn, leads to different ways to solve tactical problems and ultimately leads to the skill one needs to make good tactical solutions under stress.
Now, some very traditional practitioners will object to the notion of playing with kata because it implies "changing" the forms — a notion that attacks the very heart of the traditionalist sense of orthodoxy. But playing with kata does not imply abandoning the "orthodox" versions, however they're defined within a given style or tradition. In fact, it's the custom of the authors to practice orthodox kata, then to perform a personalized, played-with version of the same forms.
Other instructors might object, claiming that it will create confusion if students are given permission to personalize their own art. But imagine what would happen if students were taught to think on their own — and not simply parrot the teacher's movements. Imagine how much more they could get done during class. Instead of struggling with students who can't get something to work, the students can play with the movement themselves and find alternative methods that work for them. In this way, playing with kata can solve some very important dojo problems.
For example, if students think there's only one correct way to perform a technique, they'll tend to sacrifice technique and muscle their way through the move when necessary to make it work. But when students are encouraged to adapt techniques to suit their strengths, they begin to work independently on improving their technique through proper body mechanics.
Another dojo problem revolves around the fact that karate is a male-dominated adult activity. But if you look at the kids classes, there's a more even mix of girls and boys. What causes girls to quit training?
There's no one single reason, but part of the problem is that girls are not being taught how to adapt techniques to make them work. Most girls, as they grow, find that they can't muscle their way through a technique against an adult male to make it work.
Sadly, most sensei don't have enough time or knowledge to teach a different way of doing the technique when this occurs. Nor should they. Instead, if all the students are given the freedom to play with kata and the corresponding bunkai, those girls — who might be in danger of quitting — can learn to think independently as they modify their moves.
Another dojo problem is that training partners don't always attack in a helpful manner. This is especially an issue for women training with men because the men sometimes will try to demonstrate their superior strength with female training partners. Students who have been taught to play with kata and modify them for different situations have a much better time adapting to meet changing circumstances — all the while, still using the framework of the kata. For students trained in this approach, kata aren't stagnant routines; they're living things that can be manipulated and shaped to fit a variety of combative circumstances.
Who knew that playing could be such a useful learning tool? Students who have been given permission to think creatively about kata will become better fighters. They will have already learned how to adapt to different situations and circumstances. Sparring will improve with the freedom to think outside the box.
And should the students find themselves in a self-defense situation, they will be prepared to think on the spot instead of freezing when a technique doesn't work like it was supposed to.
The ability to think is arguably one of the most important fighting skills anyone can learn. A good fighter has a good mind. Kata are the perfect tool for training a strong, effective mind — as long as you're given permission to analyze, adapt, shape, understand and play with those kata.
About the authors: April Taylor is a practitioner of Ryukyu kempo. She stands 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 125 pounds — and regularly trains with 200-pound men. Chris Thomas is a longtime practitioner of the martial arts and a renowned instructor whose articles have appeared in Black Belt since 1981. He is also April Taylor's dad. Click here to visit his website.
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FBAE DEAN GIVES LECTURE ON THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS IN LEBANON
December 9, 2019 – The Dean of the Faculty of Business Economics and Administration (FBAE) at Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU), Dr. Viviane Naimy, gave a lecture titled "The Triggers of the Current Financial Crisis". The lecture took place at the Abou Khater Auditorium and saw a very high turnout from faculty, staff, and students from various majors.
Dr. Naimy provided an overview of the current economic situation in Lebanon and elucidated the parameters that led to the crisis starting in 1992 through to October 17, 2019. She explained the specificities of the financial engineering operations and their impact on the economy. She also exposed the public debt snowball phenomenon and analyzed the process, conditions, and consequences of pegging the Lebanese Lira to the US Dollar. Dr. Naimy summarized the lecture by drawing an original model according to which the Lebanese economy was systematically operating. Dr. Naimy will be releasing a detailed examination of the ideas put forward in her lecture at a later date.
The lecture was followed by a Q&A session for all participants during which NDU President, Fr. Pierre Najem, echoed Dr. Naimy's conclusions saying, "We need to think beyond our individual benefits and instead about how we can bring about systemic change to the benefit of all. We need to think about the systems in place, and how we can bring about one which fosters justice and trust between its citizens."
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Indian app-based cab service provider Ola's license has been suspended by the Bengaluru RTO (Regional Transport Office) for next six months. As per this order, App based cab aggregator Ola cannot run any vehicles including cars, autos and bikes in the Bengaluru and all other cities of Karnataka for next 6 months. The licence has been suspended for "operating bike taxis" without permission, which was already banned in the state since the last one year.
"Prior to this, a notice must be sent to the company in question. Hence. on February 15, 2019, the Transport Department had sent Ola a notice, asking the company to respond to the findings of the probe. Ola sent its reply on March 3, 2019. As the company's reply was not satisfactory and did not provide any evidence which proved it did not violate norms, the Transport Department, as on March 18, 2019, has decided to suspend the license of Ola for a period of six months. Ola will have to submit the original copy of the license within three days of receiving a copy of this order." the transport department said in the notice issued in Kannada on March 18.
In February this year, Karnataka Transport Department officials had seized around 500 bikes which were operating as bike taxis for Ola and other such companies. In Karnataka, bike taxis are illegal due to lack of policy framework and is also strongly opposed by the Ola, TaxiForSure and Uber Drivers' Association in fear of loss of business.
Karnataka's transport department has suspended aggregator license given to M/s Ani Technologies Pvt Ltd, Ola Cabs, Bangalore for six months which means Ola Cabs will not be plying on roads across the state of Karnataka.
However, there is no any visible impact on the cab booking process, users in Bangalore are still able to book the cabs using Ola mobile app whereas, the option to book Ola Bike is missing there. So, it seems like Ola has only paused the Ola Bike services because the rest of all services by Ola are still operational.


A number of large companies are rushing to secure renewable energy at lower production cost to boost image where new wind deals PPAs were signed in Europe for 1.5 GW power, that was 1.3GW in 2017(WindEurope data). Some such companies are using these strategies to advertise. Overall in Europe PPAs signed by the firms led to the production of total 5 GW of energy. Some of the largest..


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Q: how to get the first and last days of a given month I wish to rewrite a mysql query which use month() and year() functions to display all the posts from a certain month which goes to my function as a 'Y-m-d' parameter format, but I don't know how can I get the last day of the given month date.
$query_date = '2010-02-04';
list($y, $m, $d) = explode('-', $query_date);
$first_day = $y . '-' . $m . '-01';

A: cal_days_in_month() should give you the total number of days in the month, and therefore, the last one.

A: // First date of the current date
echo date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m'), 1, date('Y')));
echo '
';
// Last date of the current date
echo date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m')+1, 0, date('Y')));

A: $month = 10; // october

$firstday = date('01-' . $month . '-Y');
$lastday = date(date('t', strtotime($firstday)) .'-' . $month . '-Y');

A: I know this question has a good answer with 't', but thought I would add another solution.
$first = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("first day of this month"));
$last = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("last day of this month"));

A: Try this , if you are using PHP 5.3+, in php
$query_date = '2010-02-04';
$date = new DateTime($query_date);
//First day of month
$date->modify('first day of this month');
$firstday= $date->format('Y-m-d');
//Last day of month
$date->modify('last day of this month');
$lastday= $date->format('Y-m-d');

For finding next month last date, modify as follows,
 $date->modify('last day of 1 month');
 echo $date->format('Y-m-d');

and so on..

A: Basically:
$lastDate = date("Y-m-t", strtotime($query_d));

Date t parameter return days number in current month.

A: You might want to look at the strtotime and date functions.
<?php

$query_date = '2010-02-04';

// First day of the month.
echo date('Y-m-01', strtotime($query_date));

// Last day of the month.
echo date('Y-m-t', strtotime($query_date));

A: Print only current month week:
function my_week_range($date) {
    $ts = strtotime($date);
    $start = (date('w', $ts) == 0) ? $ts : strtotime('last sunday', $ts);
    echo $currentWeek = ceil((date("d",strtotime($date)) - date("w",strtotime($date)) - 1) / 7) + 1;
    $start_date = date('Y-m-d', $start);$end_date=date('Y-m-d', strtotime('next saturday', $start));
    if($currentWeek==1)
        {$start_date = date('Y-m-01', strtotime($date));}
    else if($currentWeek==5)
       {$end_date = date('Y-m-t', strtotime($date));}
    else
       {}
    return array($start_date, $end_date );
}

$date_range=list($start_date, $end_date) = my_week_range($new_fdate);

A: ## Get Current Month's First Date And Last Date

echo "Today Date: ". $query_date = date('d-m-Y');
echo "
 First day of the month: ". date('01-m-Y', strtotime($query_date));
echo "
 Last day of the month: ". date('t-m-Y', strtotime($query_date));

A: In case of name of month this code will work
echo $first = date("Y-m-01", strtotime("January"));
echo $last = date("Y-m-t", strtotime("January"));

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


There are many ways in which you can Water Lawn Without a Sprinkler System. No doubt, sprinklers do a lot of help but what if you don't have such devices at your place. You can still water your lawn by opting for any other method, and that's precisely what we are going to discuss out here.
Now, to be straight, Sprinklers are costly. So if you wish to be a money-saver here, then you got many other options for Watering your beautiful lawn.
For all having lush green lawns, understand the real pain and sacrifices which you have to do for the maintenance of this. You will need ample amount of water for lawn care but with right conservation knowledge – you can control the Water Costs as well as maintain your lawn in the best way.
Now, this is the most basic of all. Here you can make use of a hose with a nozzle at one end. Just stand on one side with the spraying nozzle pointed towards the other side. Run the water supply and this way you can water the plants.
This method is found to be useful when you are dealing with small plants and flowers. But if you are working for the lawns, then hose method may be a bit slow method. You can go with this basic watering technique if you are planning to plant a seed.
Next, we have the Built-in Irrigation system. This is by far the most efficient and convenient method of watering. Still, the built-in system is found to be a costly investment.
The only work that you need to do is to set the timer, and that's it. The system will do its work when the exact time arrives. Here the main concern is the cost of installation, and they also require trenches to be dug up for all the pipes. They also need annual maintenance to be done. In the end, it does save you money and time in the long run.
This is the primary method of watering the plants, especially in places where there is a scarcity of water. In this style of watering, water drips from the pot or vessel in each it is kept. All the drippings go straight near the root portion of the plants.
In this manner, even at water shortage you can water the plants and maintain them in the perfect way. Another advantage of this method is that it keeps the leaves dry.
This prevents the formation of fungus, along with conserving the water. Good watering technique for the gardens, not much efficient for large lawns.
Why are we so much fussing about the watering ways? It has got only one answer, and that is – we want to conserve water in the best. So no matter what technique you are adopting, it must be effective for the plants and also best in water conservation.
If you have got a large lawn, then mowing the grass and taking proper care of it matters a lot. On an average, a standard garden requires one inch of water on a weekly basis. This rightly maintains the garden from conditions like over-watering or drought state.
Watering Tip: Make sure that you water your plants early in the morning. This is the best watering time in the whole day.
These are some of the Best Ways to Water Lawn Without a Sprinkler System. Do you have any other similar method of watering (without any sprinkler thing)? Then share us your stories in the comment section! We would love to hear from you guys. Follow us on WaterGadget for regular updates!


Home | Blog | UK | How Will Brexit Affect The Pound?
Theresa May is expected to continue talks with EU leaders in the coming days, after MPs backed a new proposal for her to renegotiate her Brexit deal. So where does the pound stand so far amidst Brexit?
January has been noticeably dominated by the Brexit proceedings, following a couple of parliamentary votes and prime minister Theresa May surviving a vote of no-confidence. This saw sterling surging to 11 week highs against the dollar! Pound pricing has certainly been interesting, as it has mostly failed to be deterred amid the various worst case scenarios which have been popularly publicised over the past month.
Since the referendum in June 2016, holidays and imported goods have become more expensive, but UK exports have been cheaper. Britons living abroad who are drawing on their UK pension have certainly suffered as the pound has declined.
With further volatility to be expected, we have to understand why the pound moves.
Since 1992, the pound has floated freely on currency markets, meaning that traders – buyers and sellers – now determine what it's worth. When the pound rises in value, more of the currency is being bought. When it goes down, more is sold. It's important to remember that there are factors other than political events which affect its value. These include inflation, or the cost of living, which held steady at 2.4% in October.
When inflation falls, this eases pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates. When interest rates are low, this can deter foreign investors from pumping money into the UK as it will earn less interest. This can also reduce the pound's relative value.
After the global financial crisis in 2008, countries whose economies suffered had weaker currencies. In recent years, traders have been looking much more at politics, rather than economic data, which means much faster trading and therefore a faster pace of change in price. That's the volatility traders talk about.
The two sharp declines in the pound can be seen clearly here in the 2008 financial crisis and in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum.
Why does it react to the chance of a softer Brexit?
Any talk of putting Brexit on hold has boosted the pound, as it gives business some more room to put plans in place.
A softer Brexit could be also good news for savers. Currency experts such as Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's head of foreign exchange strategy, Jeremy Stretch, think that a softer Brexit could provide a boost to the economy by providing an element of confidence and certainty to companies and consumers who, in turn, may decide to spend more or take on more staff. That increased economic activity could then prompt the Bank of England to raise interest rates, boosting returns for savers.
So what's better for the exchange rate? Deal or no deal?
As we've discussed, lots of different factors are at play, and they all feed into interest rates. However, Brexit is key to the current weakness of the pound. The morning after the referendum in 2016, the pound was down by more than 10% against the dollar and more than 7% against the euro – and it's never recovered. In the event of a no-deal Brexit it's likely that the pound will weaken because the financial markets don't like uncertainty. We've already seen that with the slump in December after Theresa May postponed the parliamentary vote on her Brexit deal.
Following the UK parliament's vote within the last week, it would prove tactless to build a view on sterling assets unless, and until, we have a clear path forward on the next steps as determined by Theresa May. Even if there is a deal, the pound-euro exchange rate is likely to fluctuate for months and years to come. All the experts agree that it's impossible to predict how exchange rates will behave in the coming weeks or months.
So how can you get the best exchange rate? Talk to Holborn! We can offer great rates and expert guidance to help you make the most of your money abroad. If you're transferring a significant sum to buy property overseas, using us could save you thousands. We can provide access to tools that help you manage the risk of a fluctuating currency market.
Are there any currencies the pound still strong against?
Yes! Post Office Money says sterling is stronger than a year ago against 25 percent of its 40 bestselling currencies, including the Turkish lira, Icelandic Krona, Brazilian real, Russian ruble and South African rand.


beets | Across three continents!!
Stir fry sesame seeds, finely shredded cabbage, carrots, green bell peppers, beet root leaves, steamed beet root with soya sauce, green chilli sauce and pepper powder. Add required amount of salt. My experience with beets tell me to steam them to retain their (betalains) pigments and health benefits. Drizzle, avacado oil and grated coconut.


text:
Tatarerne er den oprindeligt kinesiske betegnelse for de mongolske nomadefolk, som under Djengis Khan invaderede Europa omkring år 1200.

Tatarer var oprindeligt navnet på en stamme inden for den mongolske sproggruppe og træffes i denne betydning i kinesiske annaler fra det 9. århundrede. Senere overførtes benævnelsen misvisende på alle centralasiatiske mongolske folkeslag. Således henregnedes mantshuerne også til tatarerne, og herfra stammer betegnelser som tatar-general og tatar-by, hvor man mere korrekt ville sige mantshu-general og mantshu-by. I nyere tid bruges tatar kun om tyrkiske stammer, dog uden at være knyttet til nogen naturlig afgrænset gruppe. Frem til tiden lige efter 1. verdenskrig kunne skelnes mellem:
Volga-tatarer ved Volgas knæ i Kazan og omliggende guvernementer; til disse sluttede sig også Krim-tatarerne;
Aserbajdsjan-tatarer i det nordlige Iran og det østlige Transkaukasien; og
de sibiriske tatarer i det sydvestlige Sibirien.
I Altajbjergene levede nogle oprindeligt samojediske, men senere tatariserede småstammer (sojoter); tjuvasherne i det europæiske Rusland, som i det 20. århundrede talte en tatarisk dialekt, synes oprindeligt at have tilhørt den finske sproggruppe, og mange af Krim-tatarerne nedstammede fra græske eller italienske kolonister. De fleste tatarer var i begyndelsen af det 20. århundrede agerbrugere, og kun få var nomader. Næsten alle bekender sig til islam; dog fandtes der i Altaj nogle shamanister, og blandt de sibiriske og russiske tatarer nogle kristne. De sidst nævnte har helt sluttet sig til russerne og blev spredt over hele det russiske rige.

Nomadiske folk

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), the international agency responsible for the development of Caribbean tourism, has secured over US$250,000 in scholarship funds to assist Caribbean students pursuing further education in tourism–related subjects.
The CTO and Monroe College, which has been educating Caribbean students for the past twenty years, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to that effect at the Caribbean Week closing news conference today.
Monroe College will commit eighty three thousand, six hundred dollars (US$83,600) annually to the CTO, to provide scholarships and grants to at least 30 highly qualified Caribbean citizens, who are interested in pursuing full time studies or advancing their careers in the tourism sector.
These scholarships will be for first time students who register at Monroe College in the US or St. Lucia, or for the college's online course.
As part of the agreement negotiated by the CTO's New York office, the scholarship awards will range from US $4,500 to US $18,660 annually, and will be equally distributed over three semesters.
"It is expected that collaborative relationships can be established that will strengthen educational and business ties between the two parties while providing the highest quality of education to students enrolled at the institution," the two parties stated.
The deal is for three years in the first instance, but will be reviewed each year.
The relationship between CTO and Monroe College began late 2010 when a Trinidad and Tobago national, Ms. Tamika Keane, became the recipient of the first-ever scholarship offered by Monroe College as part of the CTO Foundation Scholarship Programme.
Founded in 1933, Monroe College is recognized as a leading provider of focused, career-oriented, quality education which integrates classroom learning with real-world experience. The College, which also has an offshore campus on the island of St. Lucia, is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Associations of Colleges and Schools in the United States.
The CTO offers scholarships and grants through its scholarship programme, the CTO Foundation, which was set up in 1997, and is registered in New York State as a Not-for-Profit Corporation.
The academic dean at Monroe College, Michele Rodney signed on behalf of the education institution, while the CTO chairman, Hon. Ricky Skerritt signed for the organization.


Mammas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Let them be chemical engineers and operations managers and such. Especially if they live in Southwest Louisiana.
As you can see, the best paying jobs aren't necessarily the most abundant. When you stop to consider that there are over 200,000 people living in the Lake Charles Metro Area and only 430 jobs for Chemical Engineers, for example, competition is pretty fierce.
These top 10 jobs represent only 10,710 positions in the area, which is roughly 6% of the total population. You better study hard and work hard if you want to land one them!
What's weird is that even the lowest paying jobs aren't all that abundant. Surprisingly, Gaming Dealers make the least amount of money, and there are only 910 of them in the area. Scarcity isn't always an indication of wage value.
Even more surprising is that the bottom 10 jobs account for even fewer positions than the top 10, making up only 10,060 employees, or approximately 5% of the total population.
The most abundant jobs make up 81,890 total employees, or about 41% of the total population. The best paying positions among these jobs are Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, with the lowest paying being Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations.
As of April 2018, average monthly rent in Lake Charles was $1,148/month, which makes up just 13% of the annual salary of the area's highest paying job (Chemical Engineer), a much larger 45% of the most abundant job in the area (Office and Administrative Support Occupations), and a whopping 81% of the lowest paying job (Gaming Dealer).
Conventional financial wisdom says that your rent or mortgage payment should make up no more than 30% of your total income, which means you'll need a job pulling down more than $46,000 annually to make the math work in Lake Charles, which eliminates all of the lowest paying jobs in the area, and all but two of the 10 most abundant positions.
Mammas, don't let your babies grow up to be...well, a whole lot of things, apparently.


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I am a keyboard player, starting from harpsichord and going all the way to the modern piano, through organ and fortepiano. It is thrilling to have instruments on loan from NMF, especially the two historical instruments I am lucky to play now. Every day I discover new expression possibilities.