text:
Deflate-gate report re-energizes stat geek's controversial fumbling analysis of Patriots
Eric AdelsonColumnist
May 7, 2015, 10:55 PM UTC
It began as an intriguing statistical correlation. It blew up into a national debate. Now it's a civil engineer's redemption song.
And it might also be evidence that make Tom Brady and the New England Patriots look even worse.
Back in January, after the deflate-gate story broke, a civil engineer named Warren Sharp put together some numbers that led him to a surprising finding: the Patriots are very, very good at holding onto the ball; and their ability to do so improved significantly after Brady and other quarterbacks pushed for a rule change allowing teams to provide their own footballs for games.
LeGarrette Blount didn't have a fumble in eight games with the Pats last season. (AP)
"Based upon the data we've collected and the probabilities, it definitely is extremely unlikely that their ability to hold onto the football would change so much and be as far away from the rest of the NFL," Sharp said back then. "It's extremely unlikely."
Sharp never leapt to the conclusion that the Pats' alleged deflation of footballs brought about their fumbling advantage – correlation doesn't mean causation – but many people took it that way. And several statisticians scoffed. After all, this guy runs a gambling site and suddenly he is some sort of stats wizard? One statistician called Sharp's work "98 percent bunk."
Sharp didn't expect to be vindicated.
"I didn't think they were going to find anything of merit that would implicate anybody," he said Thursday by phone, "or show potential proof of something in the past."
Then the Wells Report came out. And lo and behold, there was indeed evidence of something beyond one game against the Indianapolis Colts in bad January weather. This was likely more than just atmospheric conditions.
Whether there was something systemic that the Patriots were doing, with or without Brady's knowledge, is still not known and might never be known. But the fact that there was someone in the organization known as "The Deflator" indicates that there was a process to take air out of the ball.
That re-opened the door to the possibility that Sharp was onto something.
"I think the much-maligned study by Warren Sharp about the Patriots having a low fumble rate should be taken more seriously, for sure," wrote Benjamin Morris of the stats site fivethirtyeight.com. "I mean, though it had flaws, at a very minimum that author correctly identified that the Patriots' fumble rate has been absurdly small. I did my own calculations using binomial and Poisson models and found the same."
Morris took it a step further:
"Now that it seems likely that the Patriots were violating the rules to gain an advantage," he wrote, "the fact that they also had an extremely low fumble rate makes it more likely that the relationship between inflation levels and fumbling is real – and more likely that the Patriots have materially benefited from their cheating."
Disclaimer: "cheating" is not suggested by Sharp. But the proximity between the fumble rate and the possible deflation is gathering more credibility. Sharp's gun is suddenly smoking again.
A day after the Wells Report came out, Sharp's analysis had escaped the orbit of stat planet. Even NBC's Luke Russert tweeted the study.
"Now I actually have some validation in the field," Sharp said. "'Hey, this guy was right all along.'"
So what does this mean for football fans? That depends on if you want to jump to the conclusion that someone with the Pats started deflating footballs back in 2007. If you're in that camp, there was a material advantage to the new rule. It benefited not only Brady, but anyone on the Pats who carried the football. It actually may have benefited the other Pats more than it helped Brady himself. (Kevin Faulk, for example, had 23 fumbles from his rookie year in 1999 up until the 2006 season, and then only two after that in the next five years) And since turnover ratio is so closely tied to winning, having a key to controlling the football is not a minor advantage.
If you're in the camp that the Wells Report is a sting and a setup, then the stats don't prove anything other than the team is superb at playing the game – which we all knew already.
Like any good stat geek, Sharp is trying to avoid bias.
"I don't know that there is a conspiracy," he said. "I do know that if this was just a Brady thing, that it really helped the team out at the time."
Let's face it, the Wells Report really helped Sharp out at the time, too. Though don't expect him to become the next Nate Silver. He's keeping his day job.
And his peace of mind.


The Practice will accept patients from any part of the Isle of Lewis covered by postcode areas HS1 and HS2. Patients can be seen at Stornoway or Habost, whichever is most convenient.
You can register as a patient by visiting either surgery, Stornoway or Habost as appropriate, and completing the necessary registration forms. These forms are also available to download from our website, see the links below.
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When making an appointment, should you wish to see a specific doctor you may request this at the time and we will do our best to accommodate you.
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I've been a peruser for quite a while. I read with the desire of diversion or illumination. I've been an author for considerably less time, yet promptly recognize the momentous weight of these targets.
Correspondingly, there are two sorts of scholars. The first might be called mindful. These scholars make essential the requirements and wants of their perusers. They utilize a diagram and compose with a sorted out arrangement. The second might be called cathartic. They discount to cast whatever is inside. They don't maneuver their words to accomplish a more invaluable position, they simply keep running with them. They release their contemplations like tobacco out of a farm hand-now and then they luck out and hit the spittoon. They recount their stories as they happened, similarly as I do now.
Life is loaded with crucial minutes, and I can obviously review one that happened at the beginning of my fourteenth year of life. Coincidentally and honestly, I saw something I should see; I saw something not implied for me to witness. Be that as it may, nobody can un-see the seen. Goodness, how frequently I wished I could!
It was the center of summer, my first year of secondary school was swaying done in the water only a short separation away, and I was loaded with both uneasiness and foresight. My closest companion Cara Hale and I were spending the end of the week at her lake house over the fourth of July. Her folks, whom I'd developed to love, were facilitating a BBQ bash with music, firecrackers, and everything devoted. It was a grown-up party, so we were consigned to the upstairs which contained a TV room, little kitchen, room and washroom. We were outfitted with motion pictures and nail clean and anticipated "doing our thing" while the grown-ups celebrated underneath. Cara even proposed we sneak ground floor and "offer" a pirated jug of lager, our first.
It was truly simple peasy as every one of the grown-ups were outside, sprawled over the lakefront, viewing the intermittent firecrackers shooting their rainbow of hues over the water. We put the snatched bottles in the smaller than expected cooler upstairs and went outside to join the grown-ups for the show and for me to state goodnight and farewell to my folks and my Uncle Joe, who was Cara's father's companion since school.
As the gathering scattered and the commotion beneath died down with each crunching of the rock drive, we bolted the room entryway, diminished the lights, and opened our unlawful goods. I understood after the initial two tastes that I would just proceed sufficiently long to have all the earmarks of being partaking in the experience, and that wound up plainly less demanding to do with Cara chugging down her container and afterward "sharing" a large portion of mine.
Quick forward, past the snickering and tattling, and a hour or so later I wound up alongside a wheezing Cara while I lay conscious pondering what secondary school young men would resemble and how I'd wear my hair on that first day. I was so wide conscious, actually, that I chose to move out to the sitting territory and begin perusing "The Odyssey." I knew it would be allocated in green bean English, and I needed to get a bounce on it with a specific end goal to establish a decent first connection.
In the wake of turning on the little table light, I saw the lager bottles standing critically as proof of what we had done. We had never pondered how we'd discard them without getting got, we'd just contemplated how to get them without getting got. I knew whether Ms. H. saw them in the upstairs junk, Cara would be in profound. She had church-going, exceptionally strict guardians (regardless of their own inclination to party). My life was somewhat more adaptable.
I chose to take the containers first floor at that moment, while the house was snoozing, so I wouldn't need to stress over it the morning, particularly since I didn't know when (and in what condition) Cara may stir. I tenderly opened the upstairs entryway and, nearly without breathing, I gradually and unobtrusively started my plummet, one stair at any given moment. Mostly down, where the staircase turned towards the lounge room, I solidified. It was the sound that initially gotten my consideration; had it originated from me? At that point I saw them. The unmistakable face of Mrs. H. on the love seat underneath the unmistakable melon hued polo shirt now pushed up to the shoulders of my Uncle Joe. A similar wide tan shoulders that conveyed me on one an excessive number of long climbs with my outdoorsy family. Those notorious shoulders that would from now until everlastingly be polluted with the vision of Mrs. H's. brilliant red nails diving into them.


The Gruppierung nach Übereinstimmungsquoten table found in each of the four Text und Textwert (= TUT) volumes on the gospels offers a good high-level sense of the closest textual relationships in the Greek tradition. Unfortunately, this useful table is not present in the TUT volume of Acts. Recently, I have written a Python script to parse the Verzeichnende Beschreibung data and compute Gruppierung data for Acts (see below).
Due to Bezae's free character, basing agreements on exact matches tends to exaggerate Bezae's distinctiveness with the result that it may appear more isolated. (see Epp, "Textual Clusters," 2013) To mitigate this effect, I am including TUT's "variant" agreements (denoted as capital letters) as matches (unlike the TUT calculations which exclude these). For example, at Teststelle (= TS) 8 (Acts 2:31) I am counting Bezae's "singular" variant 2B (ενκαταλειφθη) as an agreement with the initial-text reading 2 (εγκατελειφθη), though this TS is not included in the Haupliste. The result is that in my calculations Bezae has 13 agreements with the initial text (including two additional TSS 2 and 57), rather than the 11 listed in the Hauptliste (4, 8, 21, 23, 26, 46, 58, 61, 62, 74, 75).
Also unlike the TUT Acts volume, I am not counting Bezae's five 1/2 readings (10, 35, 52, 55, 76) or its 1/2 variant (1/2L) as initial-text readings.
Posted on May 16, 2016 by Peter Lorenz.	This entry was posted in Textual Classification and tagged Acts of the Apostles, Codex Bezae, Text und Textwert. Bookmark the permalink.
← Why does Jerome not cite the Vulgate of the Pericope adulterae?


Would you please let me know the salesforce table are clustered or not? and if not, after we clustered our tables on local database , what will happen after each refresh?
DBAmp's sf_replicate stored proc currently creates a non-clustered index on the Id column. You could modify the sf_replicate to create a clustered index instead.
The sf_refresh stored procedure is unaffected by the clustering.
DBAmp's sf_replicate stored proc currently creates a non-clustered index on the Id column. You could modify the sf_replicate to create a clustered index instead. The sf_refresh stored procedure is unaffected by the clustering.
Just for confirmation, on SF_Refresh.
you mean SF_Refresh doesn't destroy clustered index in our tables when tables at salesforce side aren't created as clustered index tables.
Thanks Ben, Just for confirmation, on SF_Refresh. you mean SF_Refresh doesn't destroy clustered index in our tables when tables at salesforce side aren't created as clustered index tables. Is it correct?
1. SF_Refresh itself will not destroy clustered index. If you handle schema changes with the 'yes' parameter and force sf_refresh to call sf_replicate, then sf_replicate WILL drop the index and recreate it. Therefore, either do not use the Yes parameter of sf_refresh or modify sf_replicate to create clustered index instead.
This reply was removed on 2014-06-03.


text:
Disabled Musicians Make Music With Their Minds
D-briefBy Nathaniel ScharpingFebruary 16, 2016 12:30 AM
The members of the Paramusical Ensemble as they compose their piece "Activating Memory." (PACMF-15/Vimeo) A piece of music, composed in a fashion like no other before it, will be played later this month at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in the United Kingdom. The piece, entitled "Activating Memory," is the result of a decade-long project by researchers at Plymouth University and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. Four musicians, who are unable to speak or walk, used electrical signals from their brain to select musical passages while musicians played their selections in real-time. The researchers' brain-computer interface allowed the quartet to express their musical creativity without singing or picking up an instrument.
Professors Eduardo Reck Miranda and Joel Eaton created a Brain-Computer Music Interface that combines an electroencephalogram (EEG) with a computer to measure brain activity in the visual cortex. The computer displays four musical sequence options, and each option has a corresponding matrix of flashing lights. The four musicians choose the desired sequence by concentrating on the light matrix that corresponds to their choice. The choice is then sent to another musician who physically plays the part. The members of the ensemble could even modulate the volume by changing the intensity of their concentration. "One of the key things about this system is that not only does it give a user the interaction or the control of an instrument, it allows them to interact with each other. Through this technology, they can all get involved at the same time with something musical," said Dr. Julian O'Kelly, Research Fellow in Musical Therapy at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in the accompanying video. [embed]https://vimeo.com/150672397[/embed]
Peering Inside the Brain
Each musician in the Paramusical Ensemble wears a cap wired with electrodes, including one that sits above the visual cortex. When an image is held in the brain, the visual cortex produces a unique electrical pattern that the Brain-Computer Music Interface System identifies. By concentrating exclusively on the marker accompanying the piece of music they wish to play, the EEG can read and translate their brain activity into commands. The piece was composed by Miranda and performed for the first time last July with help from the Bergerson string quartet, who provided the physical instrumentation. Members of the Paramusical Ensemble select from short passages from Miranda's piece, and assembled them into a cohesive whole.
A New Experience
Rosemary Johnson, a member of the Paramusical Ensemble and former violinist with the Welsh National Opera Orchestra, was crippled in an automobile accident 27 years ago. The injuries from that incident robbed her of movement. Now, with a new way to transmit her thoughts, she can express herself musically once again. "The first time we tried with Rosemary we were in tears. We could feel the joy coming from her at being able to make music," said Miranda in a recent interview with the Telegraph. "It was perfect because she can read music very well and make a very informed choice."
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


=Venue= Union Theater, Madison, Wisconsin =Date and time= June 23, 2011 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm = Abstract = Refer to the ABSTRACT #91 on the [http://www.union.wisc.edu/arabidopsis/materials-2011/Arabidopsis%202011%20Book%20for%20Web%20low-res.pdf abstract book]. Gramene database ([http://www.gramene.org www.gramene.org]) is a curated resource for comparative functional genomics in crops and model plant species. Its strength derives from the integration of genome annotation and functional data with the use of ontologies and by applying a phylogenetic framework for genome comparison. In addition to Arabidopsis thaliana and A. lyrata, we host genome browsers for eight other species spanning a broad taxonomic range. Navigation and visualization tools promote interspecies browsing and the simultaneous display of multiple species based on whole genome alignments. Gramene additionally provides comparative information in the form of browsable phylogenetic trees and the assignment of orthology and paralogy relationships. Gramene's genetic diversity database holds genotype, phenotype, and germplasm data for the major population studies in Arabidopsis. Tools for searching and viewing SNP data include the display of diversity data in the context of functional impacts on gene structure. Platforms for conducting genome wide association studies (GWAS) currently employ external analysis tools Tassel and Flapjack. =Workshop Agenda= 7.30-7.40pm Gramene Database Workshop Introduction (Doreen Ware) 7.40-8.00pm Exploring the Plant Genomes (browse, search, upload personal data, analysis tools) (Josh Stein) 8.00-8.15pm Phylogenetic analysis tools and targeted query tools using Biomart: (Josh Stein and Doreen Ware) 8.15-8.35pm Comparative Pathways Networks and future directions (Pankaj Jaiswal) 8.35-8.50pm Exploring the Plant's Genetic Diversity (Doreen Ware) 8.50-9.00pm Q/A =Workshop material= ==Gramene website/database== Visit the project database website at [http://www.gramene.org http://www.gramene.org] ==Brochure== View/download the Gramene Brochure [[File:ICAR_2011_Gramene.pdf]] ==Presentation files== * Doreen Ware: Introduction ** [[File:Gramene_ICAR2011_introduction.ppt]] * Josh Stein: Genome database | Comparative Genomics | Phylogenomics | Variation | GrameneMart (BioMart) **[[File:Gramene_ICAR2011_genome_mart.ppt]] * Doreen Ware: Genetic Diversity **[[File:Gramene_ICAR2011_diversity.ppt]] * Pankaj Jaiswal: Pathway Database and gene Expression views **[[File:gramene_ICAR2011_pathway.ppt]] ==Gramene Tutorials== * Navigating Gramene [http://www.openhelix.com/cgi/tutorialInfo.cgi?id=50 view at OpenHelix] * Genetic Diversity [http://www.gramene.org/tutorials/diversity_intro view] * TASSEL: Demonstration of MLM association analysis [http://www.gramene.org/tutorials/tassel_mlm view] * Pathways [http://www.gramene.org/tutorials/pathways_intro view] * QTL [http://www.gramene.org/tutorials/qtl view] * Ensembl genomes^ [http://uswest.ensembl.org/info/website/tutorials/index.html view] ^These may be human genome Ensembl centric, however the tools and options work similarly on Plant Ensembl genomes hosted by Gramene. =Acknowledgements= We thank the ICAR 2011 organizers for providing us an opportunity to organize the Gramene workshop. The project is supported by grants NSF DEB-0723510, NSF IOS-0703908, and USDA CRIS 1907-21000-030.
Return to ICAR 2011 workshop.


The Camacho Liberty series was started in 2002 with the idea of releasing a very limited blend. This idea was the brain child of Christian Eiroa and each of the coffin's has his signature engraved onto the lid. Each cigar comes wrapped in tissue paper and encased in a very nicely constructed Spanish Cedar Coffin. The coffin itself smells fantastic, as if the cedar was just cut yesterday. On the coffin you will also find a sticker that shows you what number of this limited production cigar you have obtained. There was a total of 40,000 produced and the box I have was numbered as 9,438.
The cigar itself is made entirely from Honduran tobacco. The leaves are actually from Christian Eiroa's farm in the Jamastran region of Honduras. The wrapper is made up of Camacho's single production of Habano leaf. This of course is at this time and could very well change in the near future.
I was gifted one of these cigars and purchased a couple more for myself. I decided to light this one up with a similarly limited production beer which you can read more about at the bottom of the review in the Pairing section.
Today's pairing comes from the Scottish Brewery of Innis & Gunn. Their Oak Aged beer is one of my favorite blondes and makes a great pairing for almost any cigar because of it's woodsy flavors. This particular batch was a limited production run called "Canadian Cask" which was produced especially for Canada Day 2010 to commemorate Canada's birthday.
This beer is aged for 54 days in Whiskey barrels and mixed with a malted rye crystal to give it an incredibly unique and flavorful experience on the palate. This is only the second year Innis and Gunn has produced this brew and I definitely hope they continue the tradition.
This cigar paired well with this brew and I would definitely recommend it, they just worked so well together. Other pairings could be a nice scotch, oaky red wine, dark soda or a coffee.
Here's a picture of the box from this brew, it has a whole story about how it came to be and how it was made.
I haven't had too many Camachos either but I think I need to look into them a bit more for sure after enjoying this one.
And that beer, wow was it good! The one here is a limited release for Canada only but the Innis & Gunn Oak Aged is available year round and is a great blonde! Let me know if you have a chance to give it a try.
I have got to say that I have never had a Camacho before. I constantly walk by them at my local B&M. I do not understand why I never even look at them. Maybe I will need to check them out. Thanks Daniel, and I will also need to look for that beer….
Thanks for the review. I'm not much of a Camacho fan, but I'll have to give the Liberty a try.


Each month I work with writer Brandon Chuang for a Feast Magazine column called How To. Each month, Brandon interviews someone working in a field that he's unfamiliar with, and in some cases, gets the opportunity to actually do the work himself to really see how it goes. Columns in the past have included dishwasher in a busy and popular restaurant, bartender at a joint where every single person is a regular, coffee roasting, and most recently, a beer vendor at Busch Stadium here in St. Louis.


text:
Who's Who at Campus Watch
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CW Positions on Speakers
Keep Us Informed
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UCLA Honors Sharia Apologist Khaled Abou El Fadl
by Cinnamon Stillwell and Judith Greblya
https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/19956/ucla-honors-sharia-apologist-khaled-abou-el-fadl
[Editor's Note: A quote attributed to Professor George Bisharat of the University of California's Hastings College of Law has been corrected.]
Academic self-congratulation reached new heights at the University of California, Los Angeles on March 21, 2012, with "An Event Honoring Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl." Abou El Fadl—Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law and chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA—was feted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA School of Law Journal of Near Eastern and Islamic Law, the UCLA School of Law Muslim Law Students Association, and the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program. Eighty students, professors, and community members gathered to commemorate "the world's leading authority on Islamic law and Islam, and the prominent scholar in the field of human rights," according to the event description. In reality, Abou El Fadl is an apologist for radical Islam who routinely denies valid concerns over the human rights abuses inherent to Sharia (Islamic) law while charging its critics with "Islamophobia."
Cheryl Harris, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor of Civil Liberties and Civil Rights at UCLA, opened the event by hailing Abou El Fadl as a hero in "the struggle against Islamophobia in America." Persecuted for the "sins he has committed . . . from the sin of being a scholar to standing up against the egregious vilification of Muslims in the West," Abou El Fadl—in Harris's fevered imagination—is a victim of slander from both liberals and conservatives. Ratcheting up the melodrama even further, she then declared that "the Korematsu trope has been recycled in the post-9/11 world against Muslims," referring to the 1944 United States Supreme Court case deciding the constitutionality of the order to intern Japanese-Americans during WWII. This ludicrous comparison has been made on more than one such occasion; it never seems to lose its appeal to academic peddlers of victimhood.
Continuing this theme, George Bisharat, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, reveled in sinister—albeit imaginary—campaigns to stifle academic freedom. He focused on a March 2011 Hastings conference that he organized titled, "Litigating Palestine: Can Courts Secure Palestinian Rights?" The conference featured a roster of anti-Israel speakers advocating the delegitimization of Israel through U.S. courts—otherwise known as lawfare. Because of the radical, one-sided nature of the conference, local Jewish leaders expressed their reservations to Hastings dean Frank Wu, who subsequently canceled his welcoming address and the law school's official co-sponsorship. Bisharat objected to Wu's actions, telling the San Francisco Chronicle that "opponents had wrongly accused the conference of 'Israeli-bashing." Yet journalist Stephen Schwartz, who attended the conference and reported on it for Campus Watch, wrote:
In fact, that's exactly what took place at the conference. The anti-Israeli rhetoric of the participants was notably extreme, and even bizarre. . . . Hastings officials were correct in withdrawing their sponsorship and canceling the participation of their dean in this effort.
Bisharat's bitterness lingers, for he again chastised Hastings officials for withdrawing their sponsorship and, in the process, implied that a plot of sorts was behind the decision:
Our dean began to hear from alums who claimed to be upset over the lack of balance of the conference. . . . It was only later that we learned due to a leaked email was that this wasn't just a spontaneous act of a few individuals, but rather what had occurred was that the conference had come to the attention of the local Jewish Community Relations Council and it was the Council that reached out to Hastings alums and who essentially orchestrated and organized the campaign in conjunction with several other organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. So what initially presented itself as the action of a few individual alums who were upset with the conference turned out to be something considerably more threatening, I would say, and serious.
Sherman Jackson, who now occupies the Saudi-funded (and grandiosely titled) King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, followed, explaining that it was a "matter of duty to come and speak here today." Adding to the chorus of voices lauding Abou El Fadl's heroism against the supposed onslaught of American Islamophobia, Jackson—also known as Abdal Hakim Jackson—then noted:
I am an African-American convert to Islam. I live in a so-called democratic country. America has been a 'democratic' country for two-hundred years, and yet has a past of deep racial issues. . . . Fadl's struggle is our struggle as a nation. What happens to Khaled happens to us.
Having stated at a December 2009 convention that "his primary commitment was to Allah, not to America," Jackson's contempt for American democracy is no surprise.
Jackson congratulated the students in attendance for having the "courage to stand up against Islamophobia" by celebrating Abou El Fadl's storied career and concluded his talk with an Arabic adage: "Those who are silent in the face of injustice are dumb mutes." As an advocate for implementing the barbarism of Sharia law in the U.S., Jackson clearly does not apply the same standard to himself. Moreover, it takes no "courage" to participate in an event characterized by intellectual and political uniformity.
Echoing the previous speakers, Susan Slymovics, UCLA anthropology professor and director of its Center for Near Eastern Studies, concluded the evening with another fawning tribute to Abou El Fadl, whose "brave research," she claimed, "has raised awareness about racism and Islamophobia both domestically and abroad." If "raising awareness" about a phenomenon that does not exist—Muslims in America and throughout the West continue to thrive and enjoy the same rights and privileges as everyone else—and that is designed to silence legitimate criticism while avoiding much-needed reform is a mark of courage, then Abou El Fadl is the bravest of men.
Using the occasion as an opportunity to claim widespread Islamophobia and to bash Israel, the U.S., and the West—all the while demonstrating a comical capacity for self-regard—these four speakers provided a fitting tribute to Abou El Fadl, who has made a career out of doing exactly the same thing. He should feel honored, indeed.
Judith Greblya co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, which commissioned this work. Send email to jgreblya@aol.com and stillwell@meforum.org.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block may reached at:
chancellor@ucla.edu
U.S. mail
UCLA Chancellor's Office
Box 951405, 2147 Murphy Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1405
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Brown University Professor Can't Control Birzeit's Terrorists
Rutgers Professor to Jews: Better Dead than Zionist
by Andrew E. Harrod
Biden Should Allow Investigations of Academe's Foreign Funding Scandals to Proceed
by Winfield Myers
Erdoğan Spokesman İbrahim Kalin Has Left Georgetown, but Not Because He Wasn't Welcome
SFSU President Lynn Mahoney: Terrorist Leila Khaled's Enabler
Why Doug Lamborn Referred SFSU's President for Prosecution
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text:
Q: PHP default Post value I have some simple code what gets user inserted parameters. But how can I use $_POST to set a default value? For example, if a user is asked to input name and age and he chose to input only the name I need that $_POST sets age to 0.
My code what I use:
$name = $_POST['name'];
$weight= $_POST['weight'];
$size =   $_POST['size'];

And sometimes there can be only weight or size so I need to set up default value. I tried $size =   $_POST['size'] ?? 0; but it not worked.

A: You can use ternary operator to set default values for non-required fields.
$name = $_POST['name'];
$weight= (!empty($_POST['weight'])) ? $_POST['weight'] : 0;
$size =   (!empty($_POST['size'])) ? $_POST['size'] : 0;

Reference:-
empty()
Note:- You can do same for name also like:-
$name = (!empty($_POST['name'])) ? $_POST['name'] : '';

Remark:- Null coalescing operator ?? only worked in php 7+

A: The isset() function is used to check whether a variable is set or not. If a variable is already unset with unset() function, it will no longer be set. The isset() function return false if testing variable contains a NULL value.
Version:
PHP 4 and above
Test Code :
$name =  isset($_POST['name']) ? $_POST['name'] : '';
$weight= isset($_POST['weight']) ? $_POST['weight'] : 0;
$size =  isset($_POST['size']) ? $_POST['size'] : 0;

A: Try :
$size = (isset($_POST['size'])) ? $_POST['size'] : 0;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
God's WillLeofranc Holford-Strevens
Vol. 25 No. 10 · 22 May 2003
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Bilingualism and the Latin Language
by J.N. Adams.
Cambridge, 836 pp., £100, January 2003, 0 521 81771 4Show More
A poor gardener in Macedonia was riding a donkey when a soldier addressed him in Latin, asking him where he was taking the beast; unable to understand the question, he said nothing, whereupon the soldier knocked him off his mount. The gardener humbly explained in Greek that he did not know Latin; the soldier repeated his question in Greek, and received his answer. So runs an episode in the Golden Ass; although in the end the gardener beats up the soldier, the story indicates the need for subjects and citizens of the Roman Empire to know some basic Latin for their own sake. It also shows the soldier, even though he can speak Greek and is in Greek-speaking country, using Latin in order to remind the natives who is master.
This familiar narrative is cited in J.N. Adams's splendid new book, which surveys the knowledge and use of Latin by native speakers of other languages and the knowledge and use of other languages by native speakers of Latin. Adams brings to his subject the linguistic skills already displayed, within a smaller compass, in his monographs on Vulgar Latin texts (Anonymus Valesianus II and Claudius Terentianus) and on the Latin vocabulary of sex (1982) and veterinary medicine (1995). It complements the volume on Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word, edited by Adams, Marc Janse and Simon Swain.* Together with Bruno Rochette's Le Latin dans le monde grec (1997), which is mainly concerned with literature, these books have placed the study of language in the Roman Empire on a far firmer footing.
Until recently, most classical scholars had been content with the superficial impression, presented by the higher literature of Greek and Latin, that educated Romans were perfect in their Greek, whereas educated Greeks knew little or no Latin. In the last few decades it has become apparent that Greeks knew more Latin than they cared to admit; the suggestion that imperial Greek authors adopted themes from Roman literature is no longer taken for a slur on their ethnic integrity, and some scholars are willing to admit that Latin authors were capable of mistranslating and misunderstanding Greek. Juvenal used scribendi cacoethes to mean 'compulsive scribbling', unaware that a cacoethes was in fact a malignant tumour; he may claim the forgiveness of all who suppose that an inferiority complex is the mark of a wimp or that a quantum leap is long.
One of the easier mistakes in translating from a foreign language is giving a word the sense most familiar in one's own day. It is therefore small wonder that the Greek hupatos, used by the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On the Cosmos in the poetic sense of 'supreme', should be rendered in the Latin version attributed to Apuleius by its current meaning of consul; Adams's comment that 'even Greeks themselves may have had problems in understanding earlier literature' is borne out by the trouble that Dionysius of Halicarnassus has with some not very difficult Thucydides. A much more striking example of incomprehension, which has left its mark in modern languages and which Adams does not mention, concerns the Greek diatheke, a general term for 'disposition' but most commonly a will (as our lawyers speak of 'testamentary disposition'). This was rendered by an unknown Christian, whether a Latin-speaker misunderstanding Greek or a Greek-speaker misinterpreting his own language, testamentum, as if God could die and leave a will, as the none too bright Heracles imagines Zeus might do in Aristophanes' Birds. However, although Adams discusses Jerome, Augustine and other Christian authors intermittently, there is no general consideration of the effect on the Latin spoken by Christians of subliterary Greek, itself subject to Hebrew or Aramaic interference; valuable work on that has already been done by the Nijmegen School, even if one does not believe its hypothesis that Christian Latin was not merely Latin with a few strange words and expressions, but a separate language (which would logically exclude it from consideration in a book concerned with the pagan tongue).
As even this example shows, there are other forms of linguistic competence, both active and passive, than the ability to compose, or appreciate, works of literature: while we need not believe, as the Florentines of Petrarch's day did, that St Paul wept at Virgil's tomb, neither should we suppose that, even though his Roman flock spoke Greek, he could get by in that city without understanding a word of Latin. Nor indeed, although it has virtually monopolised the study of Roman bilingualism, was Greek the only foreign language with which Latin came into contact: Romans had dealings with the related Italic languages such as Oscan and Umbrian, the more distantly related Gaulish, and the unrelated Etruscan; no less important was Punic, the language of Carthage, longstanding trading partner turned bitter enemy. Other subjects of the expanding Empire spoke such languages as Iberian, Germanic, Egyptian and Aramaic; even if Romans could largely ignore the local speech and have their way by shouting loudly enough in Latin (or Greek), the speakers of those languages could not escape the influence of the master tongues.
Adams's focus is on languages as used by non-native speakers, rather than the permanent effect of one language on another even as spoken by monolinguals. However, this principle is not applied over-rigidly. Take the example of loan-words, which, as Adams remarks, 'as often as not are used by monolinguals and are thus not necessarily relevant to bilingualism'. English-speakers may talk about goulash and hussars without knowing Hungarian, and few know that coach has the same origin, namely kocsi, 'made in Kocs', as for a time the best coaches were. Similarly, most of the Latin terms for wheeled carriages were of Gaulish origin but had become fully naturalised, and so, in Gaul itself, were words meaning 'beer', but in other cases there is more sign of awareness that certain words were Gaulish, even if their users did not themselves speak that language: only a Gaulish slave could be called ambactus.
In general, literary Latin took little notice of languages other than Greek, though a late Roman epigram complains that no one can produce good poetry amid Goths hailing each other and calling in their own language for meat and drink to be supplied; the Gothic words – eils, scapia matzia ia (jah, 'and') drincan – though somewhat mangled, are easily recognisable. Adams quotes this poem, though not those that Venantius Fortunatus wrote in sixth-century Gaul exhibiting the Germanic rhuna ('rune'), harpa ('harp') and the name of the British crwth or fiddle, crotta.
The epigrammatist and Venantius were writing for people who might be expected to know what the words meant. Far more remarkably, in Plautus' comedy Poenulus ('The Little Carthaginian') the native speaker Hanno is allowed to deliver speeches in Punic, which Semitic scholars take seriously; Adams seems unnecessarily impressed by the suggestion that they were borrowed from the Greek original. Even if an Athenian playwright could find a Carthaginian to provide a Punic text, he could not expect the audience to endure more than the odd line, like the line of Old Persian that some scholars think they can find in Aristophanes; at Rome, after the Second Punic War, not only could Plautus have easily obtained an informant, but there would have been Carthaginian freedmen in the audience. How widespread knowledge of Punic was among Roman veterans is another question; Adams is right to read little into the possible derivation of the Roman greeting ave from Punic hawo 'live', since most English-speakers can recognise bonjour and guten Tag even if they do not know French and German, and many of them use ciao without knowing either Venetian (in which it is properly the word for 'slave') or Italian (as it is now thought correct to call the standard language), which has adopted it as a salutation.
Not only words might be borrowed, but structures. Since Romans associated the peoples of central Italy with magic, it is no surprise to find curse-tablets or defixiones in Oscan before they appear in Latin, and providing models of expression ('may he be able neither to speak nor utter') that the Latin texts imitate; conversely, later Oscan legal inscriptions seem to translate characteristic Latin formulae word for word. Unfortunately we have little idea how these things might have been expressed in Oscan before Latin influence made itself felt, in contrast to the Greek documents, especially those from Republican times, in which the unidiomatic and barely grammatical transference of Latin phraseology is painfully apparent even to us and must have been more so to those who received them.
A good example of contact phenomena is afforded by men's names. The Italic peoples had all adopted the Etruscan system of personal and family names, but had different means of indicating the father's personal name: in Latin it stood in the genitive after the family name and was itself followed by f. for filius; in Oscan it followed without a word for 'son'; in Umbrian it was made into an adjective and stood before the family name. However, some later Umbrian inscriptions use the Latin system, some Oscan inscriptions the Umbrian order, and some Campanian Latin texts omit f., as in Oscan. Etruscans did not always bother with the father's name in their own language, but added it to the Latin text of bilingual inscriptions; on the other hand, they frequently named their mothers, and carried the custom over into Latin. In Greek, where the family name did not exist, the father's name would simply be added in the genitive; official Roman texts in Greek, which translate f. in Roman names as huios, usually leave Greek names in the correct form, but sometimes insert huios there too. Dedication inscriptions on Delos vary in usage: sometimes Greeks erecting statues to Romans would give them their huios, sometimes Romans in their own inscriptions would leave it out.
In recent years, linguists have paid considerable attention to code-switching, the change in mid-communication from one language to another. Here literary evidence forms a greater part of the whole, since Romans who would have shunned Greek in the higher genres were happy to drop into and out of it in less exalted writing such as letters. This has sometimes been seen as a mark of intimacy and jocularity; Adams shows that although it is often found in such contexts, the true facts are far more complex. Cicero's readiness to drop Greek into his letters is sometimes a function of his addressee's attitude to the language; did the individual in question regard the use of Greek as the mark of superior cultivation or of cultural cringe? The abandon with which he uses Greek to Atticus suggests not merely a free and easy friendship, but also the two men's standing joke that Atticus, by virtue of his cognomen and his fluency in the language, was an honorary Greek. Sometimes the Greek is a literary quotation, sometimes a philosophical or other technical term, in either case asserting (sometimes from politeness) a cultural equality between writer and reader; in other letters Cicero uses Greek of his son in order to persuade the reader (and himself) that the young man is turning into the intellectual he wished him to be. On other occasions again Greek affords a euphemism for medical or other unpleasantnesses, just as Latin or French has done with us; literary Greek may also be used for security, as when ho Krotoniates, 'the man from Crotone', whom an uneducated letter-bearer would not know as the great athlete Milo of the sixth century BC, is used to denote the contemporary politician T. Annius Milo. Sometimes, too, the sheer richness and ease of word-formation that distinguished Greek from Latin made the Greek word more expressive or convenient than any Latin equivalent. This is a very rich chapter indeed, all the richer for the awareness of the distinction between literary and current Greek; Adams cites the theory that Caesar's last words, kai su teknon, literally 'you too, my child', mean not 'so even you have turned against me' but 'to hell with you too, lad.'
Whereas Greek was the language of higher culture, Latin was the language of superior power; this manifests itself in many ways, from the Latinised Greek already noted in official inscriptions to the inclusion, within texts written by native speakers in Greek and other languages, of Latin dates and numerals. It was not only a soldier in a novel who asserted authority over a Greek-speaker by addressing him in Latin that he did not understand: Romans of high position in Republican times delivered their speeches to Greeks in Latin, leaving their subordinates to translate them. Cicero, indeed, was attacked for letting Rome down by not doing likewise at Syracuse. (Augustus used Greek at Alexandria, but having become master of the Imperium Romanum by force of arms he could afford to.)
On the other hand, using the subjects' language could also be regarded as a display of superiority; that is Adams's interpretation of the third language in Pilate's inscription over the Cross, 'an act of offensive accommodation . . . meant to annoy the Jews'. One could wish to be told which Jews (the priestly authorities? Jesus' remaining followers?), and in what way they were to be annoyed; not everyone who passed by Golgotha could be presumed capable of reading Greek, let alone Latin. Perhaps the point was to remind the Jewish leadership that it was they, not Pilate, who had procured Jesus' execution; but in his separate chapter on Latin in Egypt Adams finds no such insult in Gallus' use of Egyptian along with Greek and Latin on his inscription at Philae; and, as he also notes, different people may interpret the same action in different ways. (Dr Johnson wrote of 'the insolence of condescension'; but in more hierarchical days the implication was sometimes not insolence but graciousness.) Nevertheless, Pilate – who, as a protégé of the disgraced Sejanus, may have felt under pressure of denunciation ('thou art not Caesar's friend') to a paranoid and somewhat pro-Jewish Emperor – made an exception to the Romans' normal practice of treating Greek and Latin as the only languages of the Empire. In any case, Adams is right to point out that this 'Hebrew' must have been Aramaic; he cites an article by Joseph Geiger, but the fact was already known to Rubens, who exhibits the correct language in more than one of his Crucifixions, though not to the crude forger whose handiwork, together with its authentication by Pope Alexander VI, is proudly displayed at S. Croce in Gerusalemme at Rome.
In the later Roman Empire Greeks were under increasing pressure to learn Latin; their efforts produce substandard Latin of a very different kind from that of poorly educated native speakers, as Adams shows by comparing translations of two Greek fables by Babrius with the letters of Claudius Terentianus (the bilingual soldier from second-century Egypt on whom he wrote in one of his monographs) and others from Vindolanda. The translations bear all too much resemblance to those produced by less able or willing schoolchildren in any age; but whereas their work is written down only once, by its hapless authors, the Latin renderings of Babrius were transcribed by another hand, which introduced further errors. Adams cites a parallel, an attempted Latin-to-Greek vocabulary of the Aeneid; but one would like to know rather more about how such things came to pass. Nevertheless, it seems ungrateful to ask for more when there is no space here to register all the wealth of learning displayed in this book on matters ranging from syntactical interference between Greek and Latin in dedications to the potters' texts from La Graufenesque, many of which switch repeatedly between Gaulish and Latin.
The relations between Latin and other languages resist simple summary; it is greatly to Adams's credit that he does not attempt to impose an artificial pattern on them, but only to bring out certain themes, from the various types of interference between languages to the use of Latin script by native speakers in place of the inherited writing system. The reader who completes this book will have ranged over a broad field from the sociolinguistics of code-switching to late Latin genitives in –aes instead of –ae, learning an immense amount and unlearning many errors (such as that the army insisted on Latin); despite its steep price, it is essential for all who would study the linguistic situation in the Roman world.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens, until his retirement in 2011, was consultant scholar-editor at OUP. He is the author of Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement.
Eating or Being Eaten: Animal Grammar
Peter opened Paul the door: The Case for Case
Dithyrambs for Athens: The difficulties of reading Pindar
More by Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Oxford, 494 pp., £65, November 2002, 0 19 924506 1.
Vol. 25 No. 11 · 5 June 2003
It is still a surprise and disappointment to be reminded, as Leofranc Holford-Strevens reminds us (LRB, 22 May), that Julius Caesar did not say 'Et tu, Brute' as he died under 23 dagger thrusts on the Ides of March. Footnotes to Shakespeare make clear that this phrase was just a stage tag, but what did Caesar say? Suetonius and Cassius Dio give two versions, one that he said nothing, only grunted, the other that he said, as Holford-Strevens reports, kai su teknon. That is, his last words were in Greek. Why? And what did he mean? J.N. Adams, the author of the book reviewed by Holford-Strevens, says that it was a form of code-switching for magical or apotropaic purposes. Clearly, the standard translation, 'You too, my child' (in Robert Graves's version), doesn't quite convey code-switching for magical purposes, and Marcus Brutus, to whom the words were addressed, was a bit old to be 'my child' (Caesar was not his father, despite the rumours). James Russell, whom Adams quotes, argued that the first two words were common in Greek curses and curse tablets of the time, and Caesar and Brutus, both good Greek speakers, would have been familiar with this sub-literary argot. So Caesar may have died with a curse on his lips, and perhaps 'child' was meant contemptuously. But how to render that into English? Adams and Russell (and Holford-Strevens) offer: 'To hell with you too, lad.' Is this the best the English language can do? Suetonius could have helped: he wrote a 'Guide to Greek Terms of Abuse'. Sadly, it is lost.
Rex Winsbury
London WC1
Vol. 25 No. 12 · 19 June 2003
If Cassius Dio is right about Caesar's last words, their meaning may not be all that hard to guess (Letters, 5 June). Caesar's skill with words is clear from his own writings, and it is hard to believe that his use of Greek, here of all times, was accidental, or that it escaped his notice that this particular form was common in curses. I have no idea about Greek inflectional endings, but the English translation has one fairly obvious meaning: 'You too will die bloodily because of this deed.' 'My child' is less easily explained. Given the closeness between Caesar and Brutus it could suggest Caesar's sadness that Brutus, too, would die. Or it could be a way of emphasising the first part of the warning. The meaning would be something along these lines: 'You too will die because of this; your death shall be child to mine.' On the other hand, this may be too complex a thought for someone being stabbed 23 times.
Dan Jameson
Haltwhistle, Northumberland


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text:
\section{Introduction}

Thanks to its grazing incidence optics, {\it NuSTAR} (Harrison et al. 2013) is providing, for the first time,
source-dominated hard X-ray ($>$10 keV) observations of Active Galactic Nuclei
(AGN). The hard X-ray spectra can thus be studied in much greater detail than before,
and spectral parameters determined with unprecedented precision and robustness.

The intrinsic X-ray spectra of (radio-quiet) AGN is believed to be produced by Comptonization
of the accretion disk photons in a hot corona, with coronal temperatures well in excess of 10 keV
(e.g. Perola et al. 2002, Malizia et al. 2014).
One of the main goals of the {\it NuSTAR} AGN program is to determine the
coronal parameters (temperature, optical depth, location, geometry) and, at the very least, the exponential
high-energy cutoff which, together with the power law index, encodes information about these
parameters.

Precise measurements of the high-energy cutoff (Brenneman et al. 2014a,b, Marinucci
et al. 2014a, Balokovi{\' c} et al. 2014, Ballantyne et al. 2014), or interesting lower limits
to it (Matt et al.
2014, Marinucci et al. 2014b) have already been obtained by {\it NuSTAR} for several AGN.
In this paper we study
the high-energy spectrum of the bright, nearby ($z$=0.006181) Compton-thin (Wang et al. 1999)
narrow line Seyfert 1 Galaxy (Nagar et al. 2002), NGC~5506.

NGC~5506 has been observed by all major X-ray satellites. In the first XMM-{\it Newton} observation,
clear evidence of narrow, neutral, and ionized iron lines
were found (Matt et. al 2001, Bianchi \& Matt 2002,
Bianchi et al. 2003), but no evidence has ben found of a broad component. One was later
found by Guainazzi et al. (2010), albeit rather weak, when analysing all eight XMM-{\it Newton}
observations obtained between February 2001 and January 2009
(see also Patrick et al. 2012 for {\it Suzaku} results). Simultaneous XMM-{\it Newton} and {\it BeppoSAX}
observations permitted the search for a high energy cutoff, which was found to be
at 140$^{+40}_{-30}$ keV,
but with large systematic uncertainties due to ambiguities in the modeling (Bianchi et al. 2003, 2004).

This paper is structured as follows: Sec.~2 describes the observation and data reduction;
Sec.~3 presents the spectral analysis, while the results are discussed in Sec.~4.

\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[scale=.52]{ngc5506_600s_3to8to75keV.eps}
\caption{Upper panel: FPMA and FPMB light curves in the 3-8 keV and 8-75 keV energy ranges.
Bins of 600 s are used. Lower panel: the (8-75 keV)/(3-8 keV) ratio.}
\label{lc}
\end{figure*}

\section{Observations and Data reduction}

NGC~5506 was observed with \nustar\ (OBSID 60061323) on 2014~April~1, as part of a snapshot
survey of AGN selected from the \swiftbat\ all-sky survey (e.g. Baumgartner et al., 2013).
The observation was coordinated with the \swift\ observatory (OBSID 00080413001), which
observed the same target starting just 12 hours later, on 2012~April~2. The \nustar\ and
\swift\ observations are sufficiently close in time that they can be considered simultaneous
as there is no evidence for spectral variability on this time scale (see Fig.~\ref{lc}). The
combined data
therefore provide an instantaneous broadband snapshot of the X-ray spectrum of NGC~5506 in the
0.8--80~keV band. The total \nustar\ and \swiftxrt\ exposures are 56~ks and 2.6~ks, respectively.

The \nustar\ data were reduced in the standard manner described in detail in Perri et al. (2013).
We used HEASOFT~v\,6.15.1, NuSTARDAS~v\,1.3.1, and CALDB version 20131223. Following the event
filtering using the {\tt nupipeline} script, we extracted the source spectrum from a circular
aperture 80\arcsec ~in radius centered on the peak of the point source image. The background
extraction region covered the free area of the same detector, excluding the $\simeq$110\arcsec
~region around the source in order to avoid flux in the Point Spread Function wings. The spectrum and the
corresponding response files were generated using the {\tt nuproducts} script. We bin the
spectra for modules FPMA and FPMB to a minimum of 20~counts per bin before background
subtraction, and fit them simultaneously, without coadding. The cross-normalization constant
is left free to vary in all our fits (with the instrumental normalization of FPMA fixed at unity).

We used online resources provided by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC) for \swiftxrt\
data reduction,\footnote{http://www.asdc.asi.it/mmia/} HEASOFT~v\,6.13 and CALDB
version 130313 were used for processing. The spectrum was extracted from a region with a radius of
20\arcsec ~centered on the brightest peak of emission, and the background was sampled from an annular
region extending between 40\arcsec ~and 80\arcsec ~around the source. For spectral fitting we
use the source spectrum binned to a minimum of 20~counts per bin before background subtraction.
The cross-normalization constant is left free to vary in all our fits. We find it to be consistent
with the expected systematic uncertainty of $\simeq10$\% determined from cross-calibration between
 \nustar\ and \swiftxrt\ (Madsen et al., in prep.).

\section{Spectral analysis}

The analysis of the {\it NuSTAR} light curves shows the presence of flux variability of the order of 20\%,
but without any significant spectral variability (Fig.~\ref{lc}). A hint of a hardening
of the spectrum at lower fluxes is apparent, but it is easily explained by a small
contribution from reflection from distant matter. Therefore, we used the spectra integrated
over the entire observation.
In all spectral fitting we combined the {\it NuSTAR} and \swiftxrt\ spectra, and included Galactic
absorption with a column density of 3.8$\times$10$^{20}$ cm$^{-2}$.

All spectral fitting was done using the public package {\sc xspec}. The reader
is referred to its webpage\footnote{http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xanadu/xspec/}
for informations on the fitting code and for
details on the various spectral models applied here. Unless otherwise stated,
all quoted errors correspond to 90\% confidence levels for one interesting parameter.

First, we fitted the spectra with a simple, absorbed power law with an exponential
high-energy cutoff ({\sc cutoffpl} model in {\sc xspec}).
The fit is unacceptable ($\chi^2$/d.o.f.=1989/1090), mostly due to a prominent iron line and
curvature at high energies (see Fig.~\ref{badfit}).
As both features are suggestive of reflection, we added
an {\sc xillver} component (actually the {\sc xillver-a-Ec2} version, which includes both
the angular dependence of the emitted radiation and a primary power law with an
exponential cutoff\footnote{http://hea-www.cfa.harvard.edu/$\sim$javier/xillver/}).
This results in a dramatic improvement in the quality
of the fit ($\chi^2$/d.o.f.=1150/1085).
Further improvements are found by adding a {\sc mekal}
component (absorbed only by Galactic material)
to account for some residuals in the soft X-ray band, which are likely
due to the extended emission found by {\it Chandra} (Bianchi et al. 2003), and which result in
$\chi^2$/d.o.f.=1144/1083; and adding
Fe {\sc xxv} and Fe {\sc xxvi} narrow lines, following Matt et al. (2001)
($\chi^2$/d.o.f.=1135/1081). The best fit parameters are listed in Table~\ref{tablebestfit},
while the spectra, best fit model and data/model ratio are shown in Fig~\ref{bestfit}.
 The various spectral components are shown in Fig.~\ref{model}).
The normalization of the reflection component corresponds to a standard $R$ parameter (defined
as the solid angle of the reflecting matter in units of 2$\pi$) of about 0.7.
The observed 2-10 keV flux is 4.87$\times$10$^{-11}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$;
when corrected for absorption,
the flux is 6.23$\times$10$^{-11}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ corresponding to a luminosity of
5.26$\times$10$^{42}$ erg s$^{-1}$. This flux is at the lower end of the range of fluxes found so
far for this source (Guainazzi et al. 2010).

Undoubtedly, the most interesting result relates to the high-energy cutoff. Figs.~\ref{contour}
and~\ref{contour2},
which show the correlation between the high-energy cutoff vs. the power law
 index and the normalization of the reflection component, respectively,
indicate that the cutoff
is very high (best fit value around 700 keV). Even with this very large value, the high-energy
cutoff is constrained on both its lower and upper ends at the 3$\sigma$ level. This shows the amazing
capability of {\it NuSTAR} to measure this parameter (at least for a bright source with a relatively
simple spectrum like NGC5506), even for energies much higher than the 79 keV upper limit to the
{\it NuSTAR} energy range.
Even allowing for some remaining systematic errors in the effective area,
which may affect the upper bounds of the contours in Figs.~\ref{contour}
and~\ref{contour2}, and given
the fact (see below) that the result is robust against different modelling of the continuum,
we can affirm that the cutoff energy is, at the 99.97\% confidence level, higher than 350 keV
(see the Appendix for further details).

The reflection component appears to be moderately ionized. Indeed, forcing the reflecting
matter to be neutral results in a fit which is worse at the 99.99\% confidence level, according
to an F-test. The measurement of the cutoff energy, however, remains basically unchanged.
The iron abundance is 1.6 times higher than (but almost consistent with) solar,
while the inclination of the reflecting surface with respect to the
line of sight is found to be less than 44$^{\circ}$. In an obscured source, in
which the inclination angle of the accretion disk and the broad line region
is supposed to be high, this may indicate that the surface of the
reflecting matter (which in the fitting model is assumed to be a slab) is misaligned with
the disk surface, as indeed expected if it has a toroidal geometry.

Regarding the iron lines, we note that the flux of the neutral component
(if fitted separately from the reflection component) is 6.87$(^{+0.71}_{-1.05})$$\times$$10^{-5}$
ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$, consistent with most XMM-{\it Newton} observations but somewhat
larger than the last two ones (Guainazzi et al. 2010).
The fluxes of the He- and H-like lines
are also consistent with most XMM-{\it Newton} observations, but a bit lower in case of
two observations (Guainazzi et al. 2010).
They are consistent with Suzaku measurements (Patrick et al. 2012).

Guainazzi et al. (2010) suggested the presence of a weak, broad component of the iron line.
Therefore, we added an {\sc xillver-A-Ec2} component blurred by relativistic effects ({\sc kdblur}
model). The $\chi^2$/d.o.f.=1127/1076 tells us that this component is required only at the 82\%
confidence level, according to an F-test. That the reflection is mostly due to distant matter
is corroborated by the fact that the flux of the neutral iron line (when fitted separately
with a narrow gaussian) is consistent with the values found in past observations, despite the
large variations in the flux of the continuum.
Not surprisingly, given the weakness of the relativistically
blurred reflection the system parameters (among them the black hole spin)
are unconstrained, and all other parameters --
including the high-energy cutoff -- remain basically unchanged.

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[angle=-90,scale=.32]{badfit.ps}
\caption{Spectra, best fit model, and data/model ratio when fitting with an absorbed, cutoff
power law. Black refers to \swiftxrt\ data, red to {\it NuSTAR} FPMA and green to
{\it NuSTAR} FPMB.
The background is also plottes, showing that the source is larger than the background
in the whole band.}
\label{badfit}
\end{figure}

\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\caption{Best fit parameters for the model composed by
an absorbed, cutoff power law, a reflection component and
ionized iron lines. See text for details.}
\begin{tabular}{cc}
\hline\hline
N$_{\rm H}$ (10$^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$) & 3.10$^{+0.21}_{-0.20}$ \\
$\Gamma$ & 1.91$\pm$0.03  \\
$E_c$ (keV) &  720$^{+130}_{-190}$  \\
$\xi$ (erg cm s$^{-1}$) & 22$^{+15}_{-7}$ \\
$A_{Fe}$ & 1.63$\pm$0.58 \\
$i$ & $<$44$^{\circ}$ \\
I$_{\rm Fe XXV}$ (ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$)  &  $<$14.1$\times$10$^{-6}$ \\
I$_{\rm Fe XXVI}$ (ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$) & 8.4($\pm$6.4)$\times$10$^{-6}$ \\
\hline
\label{tablebestfit}
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[angle=-90,scale=.32]{xillver_lines.ps}
\caption{ Spectra, best fit model, and data/model ratio for the model composed
of an absorbed, cutoff power law, a reflection component and ionized iron lines
(see Table~\ref{tablebestfit}). Colors as in Fig.~\ref{badfit}. }
\label{bestfit}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[angle=-90,scale=.32]{ngc5506_model_new.ps}
\caption{Best fit model for the model composed of: an
absorbed cutoff power law (in red), a reflection component (in blue),
ionized iron lines (in orange). The top black line is the total spectrum.}
\label{model}
\end{figure}

Finally, assuming as customary that the primary power law spectrum is due to Comptonization of thermal
disk photons by hot electrons in a
corona, we tried to estimate the coronal parameters by substituting the cutoff power law
with a Comptonization model, namely {\sc comptt}. For simplicity,
the parameters of the reflection component,
apart from the normalization, were kept frozen to the best fit values found with the cutoff
power law. A slab geometry and seed photon temperature of 20 eV have been adopted.
The fit is good ($\chi^2$/d.o.f.=1135/1084). The optical depth is found to be
0.02$^{+0.19}_{-0.01}$, and the coronal electron temperature 440$^{+230}_{-250}$ keV  (consistent, within
the errors, to the standard 2-3 factor between temperature and cutoff energy).
Similar results are obtained with a spherical geometry,
apart from a larger optical depth (about 0.09), as
expected (in the spherical geometry the optical depth is the radial, thence effective, one while
in the slab geometry the vertical - thence lower than effective - optical depth is used).
Using instead the  {\sc compps} model, a temperature of about 270 keV and an optical depth
of  0.06 (0.14) are found for the slab (sphere) geometry.

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[scale=.38]{ngc5506_fig4.eps}
\caption{ Power law photon index and high-energy cutoff contour plot,
calculated for the model
composed of an absorbed, cutoff power law, a reflection component and ionized iron lines.
}
\label{contour}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[scale=.38]{ngc5506_fig5.eps}
\caption{Normalization of the reflection component and high-energy cutoff contour plot,
calculated for the model
composed of an absorbed, cutoff power law, a reflection component and ionized iron lines.
}
\label{contour2}
\end{figure}

\section{Discussion}

We report on a joint {\it NuSTAR} and {\it Swift} observations of the bright,
obscured Narrow Line Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC~5506. The hard X-ray spectrum is composed of an absorbed
(column density of about 3$\times$10$^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$) power law (with $\Gamma\sim$1.9) with an
exponential high-energy cutoff,
plus a moderately ionized reflection component, and ionized iron lines.
The presence of relativistically blurred reflection is not required by the data.

The most interesting result is the measurement of the high-energy cutoff, which demonstrates
the capability of {\it NuSTAR} to constrain this. The best fit value is
720$^{+130}_{-190}$ keV (90\% confidence
level for one interesting parameter). Even at the 3$\sigma$ level, the cutoff value is formally
bound on both
sides (see Fig.~\ref{contour}). Even allowing for possible systematic errors, we can conservatively
put a firm lower limit to the cutoff energy of about 350 keV at the 99.97\% confidence level.

This is the highest lower limit to the cutoff energy found so far in an AGN by {\it NuSTAR}, and it is
definitely inconsistent with values found in other AGN studied by {\it NuSTAR},
e.g. in SWIFT~J2127.4+5654 (108$\pm$11 keV, Marinucci
 et al. 2014a), MCG-5-23-16 (116$\pm$6 keV, Balokovi{\' c} et al. 2014),
IC~4329A (186$\pm$14 keV, Brenneman et al. 2014), and 3C~382 ($214^{+147}_{-63}$ keV in one of
the two {\it NuSTAR} pointings, Ballantyne et al. 2014)
Other lower limits, like those found in Ark~120 ($>$190 keV, Matt et al. 2014), 3C382 ($>$190
keV in the other {\it NuSTAR} pointing) and in
NGC~2110 ($>$210 keV, Marinucci et al. 2014b), while interesting, are nevertheless
lower than the one found here in NGC~5506.

The above results, which suggest that very high cutoff energies do exist but are not too
common, are still in agreement with the predictions of X-ray background (XRB) synthesis models.
Gilli et al. (2007) showed that even a mean value of 300 keV
would already saturate the XRB at 100~keV. Therefore, sources like NGC~5506 should be
the exception rather than the rule.

While the number of AGN with a precise and robust measurement of the high-energy cutoff
is still too small to search for correlations with system parameters, we cannot help noting
that this parameter is quite different in the two best studied narrow line Seyfert 1
galaxies observed so far by {\it NuSTAR}, namely NGC~5506 and
SWIFT~J2127.4+5654 (even if we must note that NGC 5506 has X-ray properties, like e.g. the
power law index and the variability pattern, more similar to broad than that to narrow lines Seyfert
1s). The black hole mass of NGC~5506 is unfortunately very poorly known, with
estimates ranging from 5$\times$10$^6$ to 10$^8$ solar masses (see Guainazzi et al. 2010
and references therein), and the Eddington ratio is correspondingly uncertain, ranging
from 0.007 to 0.14 (assuming that the bolometric luminosity is 20 times the 2-10 keV one).
If the low value (indicated by the black hole mass measurement based on the central velocity
dispersion) is the correct one, the two strictest lower limits to the
cutoff energy, NGC~5506 and NGC~2110, are both found in sources with relatively low accretion rates,
perhaps indicating inefficient cooling of the corona due to the low UV/soft X-ray flux.

\section*{Acknowledgements}

This work has made use of data from the {\it NuSTAR} mission,
a project led by the California Institute of Technology,
managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank
the {\it NuSTAR} Operations, Software and Calibration teams for
support with the execution and analysis of these observations.
This research has made use of the {\it NuSTAR} Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS) jointly
developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of
Technology (USA).
GM, AM and AC acknowledge financial support from Italian Space Agency under grant
ASI/INAF I/037/12/0-011/13, GM and AM also from the European
Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement
n.312789. MB acknowledges support from the Fulbright
International Science and Technology Award.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Easter is coming. Easter Bunny will soon come to us. Get ready to Easter with our ideas. Here are 7 Decorating Ideas for Easter special for you to do it yourself. Easter eggs, easter wreaths, and other ideas are the synonym of easter. Check out all ideas!


So often the focus is on new Mommies but lets not forget about the Daddies! This "I love Daddy" bib is embroidered and will be used and cherished for years to come. It represents that special bond between boys and their Daddies.
All of a baby's basic feeding needs and more are met in this, made in America, embroidered, 100% cotton velour terry bib. Why is this top quality bib so supper absorbent and soft next to baby's delicate skin? Because there is no polyester in our fabric. It will continue to wear and wash beautifully and coordinate with a multitude of boys clothes. This blue bib is for a boy and there is a Mommy version for boys available, in addition to a Daddy version and a Mommy version for baby girls.


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    <meta charset="utf-8">
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Little Lighthouse Preschool is a ministry of Lighthouse Fellowship Church.
We provide a Christian environment in which the spiritual, educational and social needs of preschool children can be met.
Instilling biblical concepts and planting seeds for His Kingdom are truly the passion of our program.
We will be using the Frog Street Press Curriculum. It offers a variety of exciting and stimulating activities geared to the children's ages and development.
and social and emotional growth.
We offer a structured program within a caring, loving, and nurturing atmosphere.
experience new things and to feel secure and capable in God's world.
We founded our preschool on the premise that learning should be an exciting experience for our children.
We believe parents and teachers are partners in children's care and education. We have an open door policy, and you are welcome all of the time!
Copyright © 2018 Little Lighthouse Preschool - All Rights Reserved.


Felt is a really unique crafting material. It is affordable, easy to find and easy to use. You can create beautiful Christmas ornaments with felt, which will add a handmade touch and warm look to your home. I have gathered 10 easy to follow tutorials for felt Christmas ornaments. They have easy to follow instructions and plenty of photos and most of them have free printable templates, too.
A very delicate and unique snowflake just like a real one.
The tutorial has step by step photos, instructions and a helpful free template.
Three beautiful felt ornaments for the Christmas tree.
This tutorial has easy to follow instructions, a lot of ideas for embellishment, many photos that will fire up your imagination, as well as a free template with the three different shapes.
A very interesting ornament, simple yet impressive.
The tutorial has instructions and step by step photos. No template but you won't really need one.
These beautiful cut away ornaments are fun and very easy to make.
This tutorial has step by step instructions and photos. There is also a free template with the tree different shapes.
Fun and whimsical ornaments, which only take a few minutes to make.
The tutorial has easy to follow instructions, step by step photos and a template for one of the shapes.
Five different shaped, stunning felt baubles for unique Christmas decorations.
The tutorial has instructions, a lot of embellishing ideas and beautiful photos. The free template has five different bauble shapes.
Yummy felt Christmas puddings for unique Christmas decorations and gifts.
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Cute Santa ornaments for a fun Christmas tree.
Besides the free template, this tutorial has step by step instructions and photos.
Felt baubles created with thread or hot glue and embellished with sequins.
This tutorial has step by step instructions and photos. There is not a template, as it's not needed.
Lovely vintage-style felt Christmas baubles.
In this tutorial you will find step by step photos and instructions along with a free template.


text:
Smollensky's sold to private equity firm for £6.5m
20 September 2007 by Christopher Walton
Smollensky's, the grill restaurant chain famous for its 21-year flagship on London's Strand, has been sold to a private equity firm for £6.5m, Caterer has learnt.
The operator, which has nine sites in London and the South-east, has been snapped up by the Grill Group, a holding company backed by private equity house Octopus.
The move follows Smollensky's appointment of corporate restructuring specialist Kroll to "look at a way forward" after a period of financial struggle. It has been forced to close its Twickenham, Oxford and Wapping outlets in the past 12 months.
The Grill Group has been newly created to take on Smollensky's. It also owns the Shire Group, a holding company that operates the five-strong Pastiche bistro chain in the Midlands and five Le Frog bistros in the North-west, under the stewardship of chief executive officer Paul Lilley.
Lilley insisted that Smollensky's was still fundamentally a good business, describing the takeover as "sensible".
"You look at its sites in Canary Wharf and on the Strand, where it has been for 21 years, and think it is a good suite of sites for the London market," he told Caterer. "This is a very solid nucleus. Furthermore, the brand name has some value because it's well-known."
Lilley, who provided consultancy for Aberdeen Steak House when it went into receivership in 2002, added that with the Grill Group now turning over £14m a year there was the potential for further acquisition activity but said he wanted to concentrate on growing all three brands organically.
Sandra Thomson, the turnaround consultant who joined Smollensky's as chief executive in 2004, has now left the company.
Smollensky's Metro, Sutton, Surrey >>
Sandra Thomason: The saviour of Smollensky's? >>
Smollensky's adds to collection >>
CatererSearch restaurant news >>
By Christopher Walton
E-mail your comments to Christopher Walton](mailto:Christopher.Walton@rbi.co.uk?subject=Smollensky's sold to private equity firm for £6.5m) here.
[The Caterer Blog](http://www.caterersearch.com/blogs/catering-news-blog/) Catch up with more news and gossip on the Caterer Blog here
[Newswire For the latest hospitality news, sign up for our e-mail news alerts.
TagsBusiness
Chez Gérard, London
Restaurateurs say farmers are pushing up beef prices
George hotel pair move to Norfolk inn


Veggie tacos made using spring onions, peppers, chilis, tomatoes, romaine lettuce and avocado.
Portobello, avocado and hot sauce sandwiches - OMG!
good life spinach and azuki bean burger with cheezly Edam melted on top ( first time I tried it and yuck!) in between two pieces of seeded whole grain bread with garlic veganaise and tomato, cucumber, spinach, watercress and rocket, mixed bean sprouts and radish sprouts.
Is that coffee with added tahini & molasses or a coffee-style beverage made of tahini & molasses? I suspect the latter. Full of calcium!
I've been kinda busy lately doing 10 or 12 hour days (its bonfire period so I think I am going to be in work for the next 18 days without a day off).
Wow that's pretty extreme, hopefully you're getting paid good overtime or are at least going to get some time off!
This thread is inspiring me to have a more exciting/healthy diet!
Bread from fresh ground barley, br rice and rye with rice milk to wash it down, veggie and bean stew (kidneys, chard, pumpkin, and yellow squash, onion, bay and rosemary) and millet.


text:
A Dyson EV is coming in 2020
Chris Davies - Sep 26, 2017, 11:44 am CDT
Dyson has announced plans to build an electric vehicle, the biggest departure yet for the British company best known for its vacuum cleaners and fans. The news was shared by founder and engineer James Dyson with employees today, along with the target of a 2020 launch for the as-yet-unnamed EV. According to Dyson, there's already a considerable team – and budget – working on the problem.
By introduction, Dyson pointed out that this isn't actually the company's first automotive effort. Back in the 1990s, Dyson had a team working on a diesel exhaust capture system that promised to collect soot emissions from trucks and other vehicles. While it apparently worked, the company found no automakers were interested in implementing it.
That pushed Dyson to explore the potential of his own vehicle, becoming less reliant on the whims of other companies. "Some years ago, observing that automotive firms were not changing their spots," he explained to staff, "I committed the company to develop new battery technologies. I believed that electrically powered vehicles would solve the vehicle pollution problem."
Now, the same battery and motor technology that powers vacuums like the Cinetic Big Ball Animal and connected vans and purifiers like the Pure Hot+Cool Link will be turned to powering an EV. "The latest digital motors and energy storage systems power the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer and cord-free vacuum line," Dyson points out. "We've relentlessly innovated in fluid dynamics and HVAC systems to build our fans, heaters and purifiers."
Details on the new vehicle are scant, mind. That's by intent, with the CEO warning that the auto industry is fiercely competitive and that it's too soon for Dyson to tip its hand. Still, there's no denying the broader roadmap.
"At this moment, we finally have the opportunity to bring all our technologies together into a single product," Dyson confirmed. "Rather than filtering emissions at the exhaust pipe, today we have the ability to solve it at the source. So I wanted you to hear it directly from me: Dyson has begun work on a battery electric vehicle, due to be launchd by 2020."
The company currently has a team of more than 400 people working on the project, including Dyson's own engineers and "talented individuals from the automotive industry." Further recruitment is planned. They have an impressive budget, too, with £2bn ($2.7bn) earmarked to the vehicle's development.
The big question, of course, is just what sort of EV Dyson has in mind. While the obvious conclusion would be a Tesla-rivaling car – and indeed, the storyline of an rich, environmentally-minded engineer setting out to do what traditional automakers would or could not has clear parallels between James Dyson and Elon Musk – it's not the only possibility. Gogoro, for example, arguably has more in common with Dyson as we know it now, with its interchangeable batteries currently powering all-electric city scooters.
Rumors of a Dyson EV began circulating in early 2016. Then, a subsequently-redacted government grant disclosure apparently confirmed the project, though the company would not commit to it publicly. The year before, Dyson had acquired a long-life battery startup.
James Dyson just announced to @Dyson employees that we've begun work on a battery electric vehicle, due to launch in 2020. pic.twitter.com/yUZNvIsYIi
— Dyson (@Dyson) September 26, 2017
Topics DysonEV