What three things do Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela have in common? The first commonality is that they are among the top 10 leading exporters of petroleum worldwide, which is another way of saying that they are the biggest accumulators of foreign cash on the planet.
Commonality No. 2: Gasoline prices in those nations are lower than they are in the United States. The swollen river of revenues that flows into their national treasuries enables these governments to subsidize the price of motor fuel sold to their citizens. In Iran, the portion of federal revenues spent on maintaining price caps on gasoline approaches an astonishing 40%.
This is worth a moment's rumination. Under this arrangement, the profits from petroleum exports are immediately distributed to the car-driving public in the form of inexpensive gasoline. However, that kind of share-the-wealth policy presents trade-offs to their governments. Yes, rising oil prices will fatten their treasuries, but the outflows required to hold down domestic gasoline prices will also swell, potentially offsetting the revenue increase.
Moreover, the artificially low price of motor fuel encourages more domestic consumption, which eats into the percentage of petroleum that can be sold to foreign countries. This becomes particularly problematic in nations that are struggling to keep extraction volumes from declining, as with Mexico, whose output peaked in 2004. Since then export volumes have fallen by 15%, due to plummeting yields from Cantarell, which until recently was the world's most productive oilfield outside Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the combination of declining petroleum exports and subsidized gasoline is guaranteed to result in permanent economic austerity for that nation.
Considering the finite nature of their chief exports, these nations would do well to reinvest their windfalls into domestically developable sources of wind and solar energy, to name two energy sources that do not have decline curves associated with them. However, that brings up Commonality No. 3, which is their shared aversion to all energy sources that have the capacity to displace oil and natural gas in some capacity. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar certainly figure prominently in that category.
It is nothing short of amazing to watch these nations squander their colossal fortunes on ephemeral social control measures that only hasten the drawdown of their most economically valuable resource. Subsidizing gasoline is simply a wealth distribution scheme that discounts the future for the present. Its legacy will be to leave billions of people without the capital to invest in building up a sustainable energy future.
Under more enlightened regimes, these nations would be plowing their retained earnings into technologies that harvest locally available self-replenishing energy sources to serve future citizens. They would make it a point of emulating Germany, a nation bereft of native oil and gas reserves but certainly not lacking in foresight and political will. Cloudy skies and weak winds notwithstanding, Germany is deploying considerable amounts of social and financial capital to retool its energy infrastructure so that it can take full advantage of its modest solar ration.
In contrast to Germany, there is not a single commercial wind turbine operating in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Russia. While Mexico and Iran look like go-getters by comparison, their efforts to date amount to less than one-half of Wisconsin's current wind generating capacity. Moreover, even at this late date, oil-exporting nations have invested only a piddling amount of their capital investments in solar energy.
Among the economic activities neglected is renewable energy development. Like Russia, with which Alaska shares a "narrow maritime border," Alaska does not have a single utility-scale wind turbine in operation, a rather remarkable statistic given its sprawling size and a wind resource that in certain locations can be accurately described as "screaming." But as long oil revenues are sufficient to allow Alaska to dispense with a state income tax, renewable energy development will remain in a deep freeze.
When asked to elaborate on that point, Palin's antipathy towards renewable energy was revealed. "I just don't want things to get out of hand with incentives for renewables, particularly since they imply subsidies, while ignoring the fuels we already have on hand," Palin said.
Had those words been uttered by the Secretary General of OPEC, they would have been forgotten in a matter of seconds. Coming from someone who could become the next vice president, however, is cause for consternation, in that she is clearly recommending a course of action that would invariably lead to greater dependency on oil.
Certainly, the Palin prescription would reverse the decline in oil revenues propping up Alaska's state government. But the amount of petroleum that could be extracted in 2020 from Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf is trifling compared with current U.S. imports of Mexican crude. Even if a mini-surge of petroleum materialized as a result of a McCain-Palin energy policy that put Alaska's wishes above the best interests of the other 49 states, it wouldn't even compensate for the declining yields from such aging oilfields as Cantarell or Prudhoe Bay, let alone achieve the chimerical goal of energy independence.
Like the other petrostates of the world, Alaska has no Plan B to fall back on when its endowment of fossil fuels is no longer sufficient to support a state government in the style to which it is accustomed. Let us hope and pray that the voters of the other 49 states see the "drill, baby, drill" mantra for the folly it is, and reject it out of hand in favor of an energy policy that stresses energy security through conservation and renewable energy development.
"Palin's Petropolitics." Klare, Michael T., The Nation, September 17, 2008.
"Gas Subsidies and Iran." Cohen, Dave, Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas – USA, July 5, 2007.


text:
Back You are here: Home News Mish Mash Sofia To Welcome Sting In June
Sofia To Welcome Sting In June
British musician Sting has announced extra dates to his current tour by touring in Eastern Europe and Bulgarian capital city Sofia is on the itinery for his current 'Symphonicity' tour' .
Bulgaria's capital city of Sofia has been added to the European part of British Rock Legend Musician Sting.The event will be held at the Geogi Asparuhov Stadium on 7 June this summer.The world tour which started last year is a reputoir of his hits throughout his career and will be performing with a symphony orchestra and band.
The icon, who turns 60 this year, first found fame with The Police in the late 70's and enjoyed tremendous fame before embarking on an equally successful solo career as a musician, song writer, performer and actor with a career span of over 30 years.
This will be the stars third visit to Bulgaria in 2011, his first trip was back in 1996, when he played at the National House of Culture in Sofia. Members of fan clubs will have the chance to purchase tickets online two days before they will be on sale to the genereal public. Pre sales will start on February 23rd for a limited time only.
Tickets for the event will go be on sale from February 25th and are available to purchase at the NDK (National House of Culture, Sofia) and also online at ticket pro Bg, but as there are just a few dates available, tickets are set to sell out quickly.
Sting whose real name is Gordon Sumner will also be performing in Serbia, Romania, Hungary and Slovenia as well as Bulgaria.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Military/History Related Hobbies
Alternate Timelines
What if...there was no Cold War!
Would the world have been much different today? If so, which aspects?
Technology less advanced?
Would Soviet Russia have survived longer?
Would certain regimes in the world have lasted longer?
Would the Middle Eastern theatre have been more constant and calm?
Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.- Napoleon
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.- Herman Melville
Bwaha
We'd have Moon bases, possibly have captured asteroids and turned them into orbital factories and habitats, maybe even have gotten a manned mission to Mars.
Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd! - Richard Feynman
Originally posted by Bwaha View Post
Based on what? If anything the Cold War was the primary driver of space exploration. Look at how little we've done since the space race ended.
"Artillery lends dignity to what might otherwise be a vulgar brawl." - Frederick the Great
How would no Cold War happen?
But, aside from that, frisco is right... The primary impetus for missile development, particularly ICBM's was a nuclear war between the West and Soviet Union.
I'd say we'd still be flying around in four engine prop planes, would have never gone to the Moon, might not even have put satellites in space yet, not have invented all sorts of packing and preservation techniques for every product, and a whole plethora of other things.
The Electronics Revolution would have come to a crawl. We might still be using large solid state components like were around in the 60's or even vacuum tubes simply because they are perfectly adequate for commercial applications.
Peace and tranquility tend to retard progress by making people comfortable with the way things are. Conflict and adverse conditions drive progress. No Cold War, no East - West conflict, technological innovation stagnates.
broderickwells
TAG's right in most respects here. The Cold War was in part a function of two competing political systems arguing as to which won WWII, and who was winning the peace. Hence the Space Race, two Germanies, Koreas, Viet Nams and Chinas, and a whole lot of shonky athletics results.
Ruhi Soylu
I think you guys are wrong, yes wars can be reason to advance tech but trade also a factor, if cold war never happened would that mean colonialism survived or not, if it doesnt that mean free capitalist would happen.
If nations have free trade without colonialism and without trade restrictions that mean best and cheapest product going to sell, that means new industrializing nations will go to a race of production and quality with the rest of the world, The thing made computers smaller is not the war its consumer market, and for selling more you have to invent new things, make things better, that is simple.
But the other hand if russia would not be there there would not be an end to colonialism, like first world world war europe would not keep their promises to usa and a cold war between british and usa (Who want to freely access british colonies) would have happened.
And without space race space thech would never developed.
Originally posted by Ruhi Soylu View Post
The thing that made computers smaller, faster, and better was first and foremost military necessity. Making smaller and reliable components and solid state electronics was primarily a need of the military for missiles, aircraft, and portable communications systems.
Commercial uses saw little use for many military developments that led to better commercial technology once they matured. Travelling wave tubes for example, or high frequency tubes for radar that became the basis for induction heating equipment.
With computers it's the same. The Silver - Nickel battery was developed for use with aircraft and missiles due to its compact size and high capacity. It was costly at first so commercially it'd have been a fail.
IBM created the 8088 using off the shelf technology largely developed by the military and made cheap enough for commercial use. What made the 8088 / PC computer a success was open architecture. That allowed software developers to make a wide range of common use software that was useful to business.
The Internet started out of military necessity as ARPANET so DARPA, NASA, and other research agencies and universities could share data over long distances.
The massive improvement in communications, satellites, and interconnectivity was mostly driven by military need first and commercialized afterwards.
Without the Cold War driving a need, all of that stuff would have languished. Worse, if the Social-Welfare state took hold in the US earlier the US, like Europe would have had far more limited funding to do research on anything.
History shows that peace breeds lethargy and complacency in societies. It is adversity and conflict that lead to innovation and technological advancement at the highest rate.


text:
package org.apache.ignite.internal;

import java.util.Map;
import org.apache.ignite.mxbean.TransactionMetricsMxBean;
import org.apache.ignite.spi.metric.MetricExporterSpi;
import org.apache.ignite.spi.metric.ReadOnlyMetricManager;
import org.apache.ignite.spi.metric.ReadOnlyMetricRegistry;
import org.apache.ignite.spi.metric.jmx.JmxMetricExporterSpi;
import org.apache.ignite.transactions.TransactionMetrics;

/**
 * Transactions MXBean implementation.
 *
 * @deprecated Check the {@link JmxMetricExporterSpi} with "name=\"tx\"" instead.
 *
 * @see ReadOnlyMetricManager
 * @see ReadOnlyMetricRegistry
 * @see JmxMetricExporterSpi
 * @see MetricExporterSpi
 */
@Deprecated
public class TransactionMetricsMxBeanImpl implements TransactionMetricsMxBean {
    /** */
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 0L;

    /** */
    private final TransactionMetrics transactionMetrics;

    /**
     * Create TransactionMetricsMxBeanImpl.
     */
    public TransactionMetricsMxBeanImpl() {
        this(null);
    }

    /**
     * @param transactionMetrics Transaction metrics.
     */
    public TransactionMetricsMxBeanImpl(TransactionMetrics transactionMetrics) {
        this.transactionMetrics = transactionMetrics;
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public long commitTime() {
        return transactionMetrics.commitTime();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public long rollbackTime() {
        return transactionMetrics.rollbackTime();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public int txCommits() {
        return transactionMetrics.txCommits();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public int txRollbacks() {
        return transactionMetrics.txRollbacks();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public Map<String, String> getAllOwnerTransactions() {
        return transactionMetrics.getAllOwnerTransactions();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public Map<String, String> getLongRunningOwnerTransactions(int duration) {
        return transactionMetrics.getLongRunningOwnerTransactions(duration);
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public long getTransactionsCommittedNumber() {
        return transactionMetrics.getTransactionsCommittedNumber();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public long getTransactionsRolledBackNumber() {
        return transactionMetrics.getTransactionsRolledBackNumber();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public long getTransactionsHoldingLockNumber() {
        return transactionMetrics.getTransactionsHoldingLockNumber();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public long getLockedKeysNumber() {
        return transactionMetrics.getLockedKeysNumber();
    }

    /** {@inheritDoc} */
    @Override public long getOwnerTransactionsNumber() {
        return transactionMetrics.getOwnerTransactionsNumber();
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Home » Questions » Virtual CD RW - Mac » How do I install Virtual CD-RW?
Home » Questions » How do I install Virtual CD-RW?
1. Register. Double click the Registration app.
2. Install. Double click the Install package.
← How do I install Music Transformer?


Cloud Foundry UAA Release, versions prior to 71.0, allows clients to be configured with an insecure redirect uri. Given a UAA client was configured with a wildcard in the redirect uri's subdomain, a remote malicious unauthenticated user can craft a phishing link to get a UAA access code from the victim.
2019-04-15: Initial vulnerability report published.


Jenga Classic Game Just $7.87 + FREE Shipping with Prime!
You are here: Home / Great Deals / Amazon Deals / Jenga Classic Game Just $7.87 + FREE Shipping with Prime!
Head over to Amazon and get the Jenga Classic Game for just $7.87, down from $14.99. Shipping will be FREE with Amazon Prime or an order of $35 or more.


The Impact Project is a national social media campaign that aims to publicly honor people who have left a positive impact on others, often without knowing so.
Mickey E. White, MS, LPC-Intern, NCC, is a third-year doctoral student in Counseling at the University of North Texas.
For questions, updates, information on starting a state branch, or other concerns regarding the ALGBTIC State Branches, please contact one of the State Branch Committee Co-Chairs.
Jordan Westcott is a Masters student in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
Not a Member of ALGBTIC?
Whitney P. Akers, Ph.D., NCC, LPCA, ACS is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Counseling at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke and a counselor in private practice in Greensboro, NC.
Please take a few minutes to check out Publications by ALGBTIC Members.


text:
The Inner Experience
Notes on Contemplation
Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon
Now in paperback, revised and redesigned: This is Thomas Merton's last book, in which he draws on both Eastern and Western traditions to explore the hot topic of contemplation/meditation in depth and to show how we can practice true contemplation in everyday life.
Never before published except as a series of articles (one per chapter) in an academic journal, this book on contemplation was revised by Merton shortly before his untimely death. The material bridges Merton's early work on Catholic monasticism, mysticism, and contemplation with his later writing on Eastern, especially Buddhist, traditions of meditation and spirituality. This book thus provides a comprehensive understanding of contemplation that draws on the best of Western and Eastern traditions.
Merton was still tinkering with this book when he died; it was the book he struggled with most during his career as a writer. But now the Merton Legacy Trust and experts have determined that the book makes such a valuable contribution as his major comprehensive presentation of contemplation that they have allowed its publication.
Praise For The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation…
"Merton speaks to us even now -- and freshly -- with these perceptive insights into the contemplative life." — Paul Wilkes, author of Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life
HarperOne, 9780060593629, 192pp.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is widely regarded as one of the most influential spiritual writers of modern times. He was a Trappist monk, writer, and peace and civil rights activist. His bestselling books include The Seven-Storey Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Mystics and Zen Masters.
William H. Shannon is Professor Emeritus, at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. He is the founding president of the International Thomas Merton Society, the general editor of the Thomas Merton letters, and coauthor of The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia with Christine Bochen and Patrick F. O'Connell. He is the author of the much acclaimed biography of Merton, Silent Lamp, as well as a number of books on spirituality, and has been published in many journals. He lives in Rochester, New York.


The provisional NOR for the 2018 European Championships is published. See http://www.a-cat.eu/en/ for further details.
– all National Associations shall submit there entries by filling out the Collective Entry Form.


In March and April the Tryon Garden Club will offer a series of guided Spring Walks that focus on the wildflowers in the Pearson's Falls Glen. Admission is $10 plus the Pearson's Falls admission fee. Tuesday, March 26 10:30 and 1:30 Tuesday, April 9 10:30 Thursday April 25 8:30 (John Cely - birding) Friday April 26 1:30 (join a wildflower photographer) Wednesday May 1 8:30 Call the Pearson's Falls, 828-749-3031 to register. Spaces fill quickly!


text:
Cities / Spain
Madrid is Spain's capital and is the Iberian Peninsula's largest city, and is the 16th most livable city in the world (as of 2021). The city is in the heart of Spain and is relatively small with a population of 3.2 million people.
The climate in the city is said to be the continental Mediterranean where summers are hot, especially during July and August with average temperatures above 24°C (75°F). Winters are cool with an average temperature below 6°C (43°F) and frosts and snowfalls are usually observed during this season.
Located on its western portion is the Sierra de Guadarrama, with Peñalara as Madrid's highest mountain at 2,428m (7,966ft) above sea level. The eastern side of the mountain is located in the municipality of Rascafría and its western side is located in the province of Segovia.
Retiro Park
Parque del Retiro certainly lives up to its name, which in English means "Park of the Pleasant Retreat". The park is now open to the public, but until the 19th century belonged to the Spanish monarchy, and is one of the biggest parks in Madrid. Its history of belonging to the royalties is evident in its grandeur and romantic appearance.
It boasts unbelievable gardens lined with white statues, a large monument to Alfonso XII that overlooks a large pond where people are encouraged to take out small boats, as well as the Crystal Palace. Here is where you'll find serenity (even as the park is surrounded by the current city of Madrid) and an unforgettable, relaxing afternoon.
Once the centre of Old Madrid, Plaza Mayor was built in the late 1500s and is one of the larger, central plazas in the city. At the plaza's centre sits a bronze, equestrian statue of Philip III, constructed in 1616
When you arrive, you'll find yourself in an open rectangular area surrounded by historic buildings with period architecture. The plaza often holds big events, so perhaps you will be lucky enough to see markets, football games, or public exhibitions.
This is a great place to spend the afternoon picture-taking, perusing shops, visiting the popular Bakery House on the square, or simply soaking up the sun and watching the world go by.
Plaza de Cibeles sits in the heart of the city, at the intersection of the Paseo del Prado and Calle Alcalá. This area has become what many envision when Madrid is mentioned.
At the centre of the plaza is the Cibeles Fountain, made and named for the Phrygian goddess, Cybele. The goddess sits in a chariot while two lions pull her.
Other large, impressive works of architecture fill the plaza including Banco de España (Bank of Spain), the Palacio de Linares and of course the Palacio de Cibeles.
Plaza de Cibeles has plenty of grandiose for visitors but also amazing architecture and monuments very symbolic of the city of Madrid. Don't miss out on seeing this area before you leave!
La Puerta del Sol is the most centrally located square in the entire city of Madrid. So, when we talk about seeing and experiencing the heart of a city, this is it! Since 1962 this has been the location for the live broadcasting of the New Year celebration, comparable to Times Square in New York. This is also the place where you can see the clock famous for signalling the beginning of the new year and the eating of the twelve grapes.
This square truly has its all-modern significance for the locals, history (it was at one time around the 15th century one of the gates that surrounded and protected the city), sight-seeing (plenty of statues, famous buildings, and landmarks), and food and shopping areas!
Reina Sofia National Museum
Here is Spain's best collection of 20th-century art. Most of the art is also Spanish. The museum houses three main collections which are divided by theme and year, splitting the 20th century into three artistic eras: The Irruption of the 20th Century: Utopias and Conflicts (1900-1945); Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945-1968); From Revolt to Postmodernity (1962-1982).
In addition to its excellent collection, it also offers national and international exhibitions, taking place temporarily throughout the year.
Prado Museum
This is Spain's main national art museum, one of the world's most impressive collections of art, and a perfect example of Spanish art and heritage. It has everything from painting and sculpture to decorative arts and drawings.
There are three main routes available to visitors that have been organized so that people may best see the masterpieces it offers. What better way to understand Spanish culture and history through the ages than by an informative walk through hallways and exhibitions of some of the best art on the planet?
Mercado San Miguel
Whilst you're at Plaza Mayor make sure you visit the Mercado San Miguel w and sample the culinary delights. Opened in May 1916 as a local food market, this is a great meeting point for food lovers and an afternoon of amazing food and wine.
With over 20 stands from local stores to Michelin star chefs, you'll find paella, baked goods, ice cream, tapas, cheese, fish and shellfish, and the best Iberian ham there is. You won't go hungry here!
Alcala Gate (Puerta de Alcalá)
This neoclassical monument stands proudly in the city centre, adjacent to the entrance to El Parque del Buen Retiro and in the Plaza de la Independencia (Independence Square). Originally this was to be a gate, which King Charles hoped would be a passage to the road to the city of Alcala.
Over the years there have been songs written about it, events held because of it, and important cultural traditions performed through it.
Royal Palace (Palacio Real)
This palace was home to King Carlos III until King Alfonso XIII and is now open to the public. It remains their official residence even though it is no longer where the royal family calls home. Every Wednesday people are welcome to gather and watch the changing of the guard outside of the palace doors.
It is a beautifully designed, large, white building whose appearance demands instant awe and admiration. It's a must-see if you're into architecture and the histories involving the royal families of Spain!
Almudena Cathedral (Catedral de Nuestra Señora la Almudena)
The turbulent and frustrating history involving the construction of this cathedral dates back to the reign of King Philip. After declaring Madrid the capital of Spain he wanted a cathedral in the city, but opposition from the archdiocese in Toledo postponed its creation. Over the centuries, civil war and fuss over the originally intended style it was to be built in would further complicate the process. Finally, the cathedral was officially considered finished in the year 1993.
To stand in front of this cathedral is to see the final product of centuries of struggle, and it is a unique experience indeed!
Gran Via
Madrid's "Great Way" is many things: a high-end shopping street, a great example of early 20th-century architecture, and one of the city's liveliest areas.
Here is where you'll find movie theatres, hotels, shopping malls, and all the ornate, well-designed buildings you could ever hope for. The Metropolis Building, the Telefonica headquarters, and the Edificio Grassy are some of the big attractions in architecture that can be seen here.
This is a street that bustles perpetually with activity and an exciting half-day experience!
Next Copenhagen
Previous Lisbon


This season we are all about the grunge trend, and we love mixing boy and girl elements by incorporating feminine touches with tomboy plaid. For this DIY we worked with one of our designers to give a vintage flannel a cool update by adding some sheer fabric, floral patches, and studs. Watch the DIY come to life in this adorable video!
To win this flannel: tweet the link to this blog post and leave a comment with your Twitter handle!
Follow FP Jana and FP Brigette on Twitter!
@megmarieb This is way too cool! I love it!
Such an amazing idea, love this mixture so much !
Killer grunge! This Seattleite loves it!
EEEEEE I love that sheer fabric so much.


text:
Startup Spotlight: SALT
We sat down with Joe Dalton, founder of SALT, to talk about the journey to date and plans for the future of the business.
How did you come up with the idea for the business?
Having spent the best part of 5 years leading the leisure boat funding proposition at Lombard, part of the NatWest Group, I had become all too familiar with the frustrations experienced by all parties involved in boat finance – the customer, the boat retailer and us, the lender. Turn around times were slow, everything was rather old fashioned, too much paperwork, to much duplication of effort.
I'd had a keen interest in the financial technology revolution of the past decade and seen innovative startup companies making a real difference to the customer experience in all sorts of areas of finance, and it was obvious that the process didn't need to be so painful.
It was during a sabbatical from NatWest in 2020 that the idea of Salt was born. I'd taken sometime off, which as it turned out was exactly the catalyst I needed to kick start my venture. I'd joined a couple of friends on a 31ft sailing boat heading from the UK, down to the Canary Islands and across the Atlantic. It was the most incredible experience and further cemented my love of being out on the water.
I wanted to help more people experience a love for the sea and, given my knowledge and skills in finance, the choice was obvious - I would tackle the lacklustre boat finance experience and drag boat buying into the 21st century. The first drafts of the Salt business plan were literally scribbled down on a note pad in the middle of the Atlantic.
Why does the industry need the solution you're providing?
Boat buying is a time consuming and complex process. There is much to think about. From what type of boat to buy, who to buy it from, how to sail it. There's the insurance, maintenance, where to keep it. How to pay for it is just one of many complex choices. Helping would-be sailors and boat owners navigate any part of this will support the wider industry, from marinas to boat retailers.
Salt is simplifying the financing of leisure boats, but our purpose goes beyond this. In the future we plan to add additional services in partnership with other industry players, such as boat insurance, warranty and other related products. By removing some of the complexities and making things simple, boating enthusiasts can spend more time enjoying the oceans responsibly.
We are one of many companies currently working to simplify boating in one form or another and in doing so, drive growth in an industry we all love.
What have you enjoyed most about starting your own company?
Every week brings successes and challenges. I thrive off both. The elation at solving one issue is quickly replaced with the pressure to solve the next. This gets me excited for every day and I love to look back at where we were a month ago, half year ago, a year ago, and take pride in the progress the Salt team are making.
What challenges did you have to overcome at the beginning of your journey?
The challenges have been endless and ongoing! From structuring the companies, to opening a bank account, raising our first ever investment to going through it all again in our second round. Little things like correctly documenting committee and board meetings, to more complex negotiations with banks on wholesale funding products I knew little about. The only thing that has got me this far has been the great people I've surrounded myself with!
Any bits of advice for entrepreneurs getting started in this space?
You've got to love the industry you are working in, you've got to believe you can make a real difference and you've got to realise you won't get there alone!
What's the plan for the future of the business? Where do you see the company in 3-5 years?
We will be launching in the UK early next year when our lending license is approved by the regulator. Our initial goal will be to focus on perfecting our digital boat funding proposition. As time passes, working with our partners, we want to make adding other services such as insurance as easy as ticking a box.
When the time is right, I want to see Salt bringing its solutions to a wider audience globally. We plan to establish a Salt community through which we can spread our influence beyond the provision of professional services, simplifying boating so that more people can enjoy spending time on the water today and tomorrow.
Call for startups to pitch at GALAXIA Electric Boat Show
savvy navvy to launch crowdfunding round
AllOY joins ABYC's first autonomous vessel task force


More information about steel tube packaging.
A coil wrapping machine for wrapping a generally toroidal body having a opening therethrough by having an elongated length of wrapping material has supports for a body to become wrapped using the central axis of the opening with the body in a predetermined position along with a shuttle for carrying a spool of wrapping material and for the controlled dispensing of the wrapping material. A wrapping frame has four transfer assemblies being positional with the opening within the body. The transfer assemblies include first and second transfer assemblies each getting rails for receiving the shuttle at one side and driving the shuttle towards the opposite sides of the rectangular array. Third and fourth transfer assemblies have a shuttle carrier and method for driving the shuttle carrier from one side of the transfer assembly to another side thereof, the third and fourth transfer assemblies being situated at opposite sides from the rectangular array and interconnecting ends from the first and second transfer assemblies. The shuttle carriers are each modified to get a shuttle in the rails of among the first and second transfer assemblies, carry the shuttle along the length of the one of the third and fourth transfer assemblies for conveyance towards the carrier on the other third and fourth transfer assemblies while dispensing wrapping material to wrap the coil.
This invention pertains to a machine for coil wrapping an web of paper or film around a never-ending coil or even the like, particularly a coil of metal strip, and also to this type of machine which transfers an web spool from one part of the machine to anther.


text:
Va. Court to Hear Argument
The Supreme Court of Virginia will hear an oral argument Oct. 16 from The Falls Church (Anglican), which has asked it to overturn a ruling by Fairfax County Circuit Judge Randy Bellows.
Henry D.W. Burt, secretary of the Diocese of Virginia, announced the hearing late Tuesday on the diocese's website:
Today, the Supreme Court of Virginia informed us that it will hear the Falls Church Anglican's petition for appeal on Tuesday, October 16 at 1 p.m. This hearing consists of a 10-minute oral argument by the attorneys for the Falls Church Anglican, who will seek to persuade the Court to hear their appeal on the merits. The Supreme Court will decide whether it will hear the case in a few weeks after the hearing. If the appeal is accepted for argument, it is likely to be heard in the first half of next year.
While the litigation process unfortunately does continue with regards to the Falls Church, it is far outshone by the tremendous excitement and energy in Dayspring, the diocesan-wide initiative for ministry in the properties that have returned to the mission of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Virginia. Each Dayspring congregation's faithfulness to God's call is breathtaking. Please look to the Fall 2012 issue of the Virginia Episcopalian magazine to read more about their stories.
The Falls Church described its appeal June 1:
Today, The Falls Church Anglican filed a Petition for Appeal with the Virginia Supreme Court, asking that Court to review and overturn the decision of Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows in the lawsuits filed by The Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. Judge Bellows ordered The Falls Church Anglican to transfer to the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia all of the church's real property, approximately $2,800,000 in funds contributed by its members prior to 2007, and most of its personal property (bibles, hymnals, furniture, etc.). The Attorney General of Virginia today filed a brief in support of the church's request for review of the trial court's treatment of funds contributed by donors.
The church's Petition [PDF] requests review on a number of legal and constitutional grounds. At the broadest level, the Petition shows that the trial judge failed to follow the Virginia Supreme Court's 2010 directive to resolve this church property dispute by "application of neutral principles of law" — principles "developed for use in all property disputes" — and instead justified transferring the church's property based primarily on the denomination's internal canons. The trial court's ruling [PDF] thus violates the U.S. and Virginia Constitutions by giving a denomination unilateral powers to override civil laws, powers not granted to any other entity, whether religious or secular, in Virginia.
Judge Bellows originally ruled in favor of The Falls Church and other congregations that had left the Diocese of Virginia, but he reached different conclusions after the Virginia Supreme Court overruled him and sent the matter back for further review.
Photo by Morgan Riley (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Diocese of VirginiaThe Falls Church
+Waldo Appoints Unity Panel
A Fragment Is a Fragment
Wyoming Elects Bishop; Roundup of S. Ohio, Va., S.C.
Bishop Roundup: Oklahoma, Vermont, Virginia, West Texas


text:
\section{Introduction}
Electrical distribution poles are critical infrastructure for the modern world as they help to supply electricity into local communities.
As the integration of the renewable energy sources and increasingly complication of modern power system~\cite{li2018integrating}, the electrical distribution devices and whole power delivery system face unprecedented challenges to guarantee the transmission security.
As such, it is important to perform regular monitoring and maintenance on the poles.
One recent method~\cite{6995104} to perform this is by manually analysing from imagery data produced from helicopter and/or drone inspections.
However, as more data is generated, this manual process becomes time consuming, labour intensive and expensive.

A distribution pole condition is generally described as a textual description highlighting potential issue/condition of an individual pole component (\textit{i.e.,~} grade 4 corrosion in the first cross arm).
Careful inspection of each individual component is time consuming.
In this work, we tackle this problem by utilising and adapting recent methods in deep neural networks~\cite{simonyan2014very, RN224}.
Specifically, we confine ourselves on pole cap missing condition.
Pole cap missing condition is chosen as it poses two problems of which are interest to the community: (1) pole cap size is significantly smaller than the other objects; and (2) rare occurrences of pole cap missing condition.

Several recent works have shown the issue in the current state-of-the-art deep neural network methods in handling small objects~\cite{redmon2017yolo9000, hu2017finding, wu2011numerical}.
For instance, Hu and Ramanan~\cite{hu2017finding} train separate detectors for different scales to detect small faces.
In this work, we propose a two-stage zoom-in detector that will first detect the distribution pole and then detect the pole cap by focusing at the most likely location of pole cap in the cropped distribution pole image.

Once the pole cap has been identified, the next step is to train a binary classifier which detects the condition of the pole cap.
As there is a highly imbalanced distribution between the normal cases (\textit{i.e.,~} pole cap exists) and abnormal cases (\textit{i.e.,~} pole cap missing), we propose to perform resampling and reweighing approach.

The main idea of our paper is illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:idea}.
Our contributions can be summarized as follows.
\begin{figure}[tp]
\centering
    \includegraphics[width=1\linewidth]{idea.pdf}
    \caption{The illustration of the proposed electrical distribution pole inspection method}
\label{fig:idea}
\end{figure}

\begin{enumerate}
\item we propose an automatic pole inspection system that will first locate the pole component and then perform automated condition analysis on the component
\item we propose the two-stage zoom-in detection method as the first component in the system to solve the tiny object detection problem
\item we propose the negative sample resampling and reweighting approaches to target the large with-in class variance and lack of positive samples
\item we provide results, analysis from experiments.
These results will provide useful insights for tackling problems in performing fully automated distribution tower condition analysis
\end{enumerate}

\section{Related works}
We first discuss the recent works in distribution pole inspection.
Then related works in the deep neural network will be discussed.
\subsection{Electrical distribution pole inspection}
Many distribution pole inspections are still performed by the inspection team travelling on foot~\cite{5345712}.
They use varied methods such as visible spectrum cameras, infrared cameras, binoculars, and corona detection camera to perform the visual inspection on the pole and attached components such as conductors, transformers and insulators.
This type of inspection is labour intensive and time consuming.
Extreme weather and difficult terrains can also present challenges.

To that end, helicopter inspection can be utilised~\cite{6820566}.
The inspection can then be performed online or offline.
The image size produced by this type of inspection is usually very large compared to the objects of interest such as tower components.
This leads to the tiny object detection problem.
Note that, the data we used in this paper was produced from this type of inspection.

Various individual tasks are performed in the inspection of the distribution pole targeted on different parts of the whole pole~\cite{nguyen2018automatic}.
They can be inspected online by the inspectors and on-site inference system or offline by the image analysis tools~\cite{LI20081}.
In this paper, we mainly focus on the pole cap missing problem and pole type classification, which will help determine the type of faults on the body of the pole.

\subsection{Deep neural network}
There has been a big leap forward on the performance of vision-based applications due to the deep learning methods~\cite{RN224, simonyan2014very, krizhevsky2012imagenet, wu2018deep}.
In this work, we primarily aim at tiny object detection problem and training deep neural network classifier with imbalanced data.

\noindent
\textbf{Object detection -- }We utilise Faster R-CNN~\cite{RN224} to address the pole component localization task.
It is one of the state-of-the-art detection methods which has been proven to be effective for various real-world detection tasks. Faster R-CNN introduces the Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully-convolutional network that simultaneously predicts the object bounding box and objectness score at each position. With a simple alternating optimization, RPN and Fast R-CNN~\cite{girshick2015fast} can be trained to share convolutional features.

As to the backbone deep neural network, we use VGG16~\cite{simonyan2014very} for both the classification and detection.
VGG16 improves from AlexNet~\cite{krizhevsky2012imagenet} by replacing large filters with small $3\times3$ filters.
It has been shown that stacked smaller size kernel filters are better than filters with larger size kernel.
The VGG16 net achieves the top-5 accuracy of 92.3\% on ImageNet.

\noindent
\textbf{Dealing with imbalanced data -- }Resampling networks~\cite{Shrivastava_2016_CVPR, Ahmed_2015_CVPR, GHAZIKHANI2013535} on the hard samples is an effective method to improve the performance.
Shrivastava~\textit{et al.}~~\cite{Shrivastava_2016_CVPR} proposed to use an automatic selection of hard examples and iteratively make training more effective.
Ahmed~\textit{et al.}~~\cite{Ahmed_2015_CVPR} resampled the fully connected (top) layer of the network using a set containing as many of the difficult negative sample pairs as positive sample pairs to improve the performance.
Ghazikhani~\textit{et al.}~~\cite{GHAZIKHANI2013535} introduce the general resampling and reweighting usage in imbalanced data stream problem.

Reweight~\cite{eigen2015predicting, badrinarayanan2015segnet} is a technique used for rebalancing the class distribution to solve the imbalanced dataset problem in deep neural network.
It is often used in the image segmentation problem where classes with small numbers of pixels appear.
Its main idea is to modify the weight of the loss function for each sample from each class to balance the contribution to the loss from each class.

\subsection{Current deep neural network based pole inspection methods review}
Although considerable improvement~\cite{6995104, 6693261, 7502544, watanabe2018electric, zhang2018using} has been performed in the automation of the distribution pole inspection,
there are only few a works utilising the recent deep neural networks~\cite{10.1007/978-3-319-59126-1_21, RN381}.
Nordeng~\textit{et al.}~~\cite{10.1007/978-3-319-59126-1_21} and Nguyena~\textit{et al.}~~\cite{RN381} both propose to use Faster R-CNN to develop the component detection system.
In contrast to these works, we use the prior of the top half image of sample to perform the two-stage zoom-in detection which is able to increase the performance.
The two major challenges of tiny object detection and extremely imbalanced dataset are also discussed in~\cite{RN381}.
However, in this work, we propose an integrated inspection system to solve them in a complete pipeline.

\section{Proposed Framework}
We first introduce the two-stage zoom-in detection approach to handle objects of tiny size in a large image.
Also, to deal with the problem of lacking positive samples, we propose iteratively resampling and reweighting approaches to maintain data balance during each re-training by replacing negative samples only.

\subsection{The two-stage zoom-in detection}
\label{zoom-in}
The two-stage zoom-in detection method is simple yet effective when detecting small objects.
The main idea of this method is to reuse the current existing deep learning method to detect and crop out the important sub-region of the original large image with a coarse detector before detecting the target tiny object in the cropped sub-region with the second detector.

In the scenario of the pole cap assessment task, the proposed two-stage zoom-in detection approach first detects and crops the whole pole and searches for the cap in the cropped smaller image more effectively.
Instead of a single stage detection approach operating on the original large image, our method performs pole cap detection in a much smaller image.
Therefore, the pole cap remains "visible" in a reasonable size when feeding into the network.
We use the state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN~\cite{RN224} methods to first detect the whole pole object in the original image.
Then, after the region of the whole pole is detected, we reuse a second Faster R-CNN model to detect the pole cap.

The illustration of the two-stage zoom-in detection is shown in~\rfig{fig:zoom}.
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{zoom_in_two_stage.pdf}
    \caption{The illustration of the two-stage zoom-in detection}
\label{fig:zoom}
\end{figure}
As we can see the green bounding box of the whole pole is detected and cropped using the first Faster R-CNN model.
Then, the sub-region is cropped again by half to get the top part where contains the cross-arms and pole cap.
This can be done with simple entropy/edges comparison as the pole base area is sparse.
Finally, we use our second pole cap detector to locate the cap within the upper half of the whole pole region.

\subsection{The negative sample resampling and reweighting approach}
In well maintained assets, the probability of abnormal condition is assumed to be very low.
This affects the data distribution which is significantly skewed towards the negative exemplars.
As such, we propose a data resampling approach which is also inspired by~\cite{Shrivastava_2016_CVPR}.
First, we sample the same amount of negative training samples as the positive samples from the large negative sample pool.
Also due to the lack of positive data, we use transfer learning method to deal with this task rather than training the model from scratch.
In this task, we use the VGG-16 model pretrained from the large-scale ImageNet dataset.
However, this pretrained model is not sufficient to address the data imbalance problem.
Thus, we propose the resampling method to target the skew dataset problem.
The resampling method performs several iterations of the training process by fixing the small positive set and the same balanced amount of negative from the sample pool.
The benefit of the resampling method lies in that the model can be trained to be adaptive to the large intra-class variation with a large number of both negative and positive samples.
Meanwhile, the method can still keep the classification capability of the model for the small sample side.

Furthermore, we also propose a reweighting scheme to target the problem.
The key idea of reweighting lies in balancing the contributions from each class to the objective function.
We multiply a reweighting coefficient on the loss function of each sample with respect to its class to offset the contribution from the minor class which has a much lesser frequency.
By this way, the reweighting method can divert the attention of classifier to the class while training.
Therefore, the classifier gets larger penalty when misclassifying a sample from minor class than major class.
For example, when performing the classification task on 10 positive samples vs 1000 negative samples, the reweighting scheme could make the classifier penalized 100 times larger in misclassifying one positive sample than in one negative sample.

\section{Experiments}
In this part, we will introduce four experiments and their different settings: pole cap detection, pole cap missing and wood pole type classification with proposed resampling, and pole cap classification with the proposed reweighting method.
\subsection{Experiment setting}
We used a dataset comprising 103,649 entries, each of which is an individual sample with its description.
However, there are no detection labels provided.
Therefore, we manually labelled various objects including pole cap, cross arm, pole, whole pole for 428 image samples.
We split the 428 image samples into training dataset with 216 samples and testing dataset with 212 samples to perform the pole cap detection experiment.
We finetune the Faster R-CNN model with VGG16 network as backbone pretrained from the COCO dataset for our detection task and finetune the VGG16 network pretrained from ImageNet dataset for our classification task.
We perform 20,000 epochs on all the tasks and use Average Precision for detection task and ROC curve and AUC metrics for classification task.
\subsection{Results and analysis}
\textbf{Zoom-in detection:} We perform two-stage zoom-in detection as discussed in~\rsec{zoom-in} and compare it with the pole cap detection directly from the original image.
We use the primary challenge metric Average Precision (AP) according to the protocol in~\cite{coco, lin2014microsoft} to evaluate the results.
The results are shown in~\rtab{tab:map}.

\begin{table}[htp]
\centering
\caption{Results of two-stage zoom-in detection}
\begin{tabular}{ccccc}
\cline{1-3}
    & baseline detection & two-stage zoom-in detection &  &  \\ \cline{1-3}
mAP &        0.507        &             0.796            &  &  \\ \cline{1-3}
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:map}%
\end{table}

As in the results, our two-stage zoom-in detection largely outperforms the baseline detection method, which demonstrates the efficacy of our method.

\noindent\textbf{Resampling approach:} From our observation, the dataset for the pole cap is extremely imbalanced.
There are only 110 available positive samples compared to 103,561 negative samples.
We first perform the two-stage zoom-in detection and crop the pole cap part for each image in the dataset and crop the respective pole cap areas.
To make the most of our current data, we set 88 positive training data (80\% of all positive samples) and 22 positive testing data (20\% of all positive samples), then we divide all the negative data in half and set one half as negative training data pool (where we will conduct the resampling loops) and negative testing data.
Then, we iteratively sample the same amount of negative training data as the positive training data from the negative training data pool to continue retraining the classifier.
After each training loop, we perform testing on the testing set.
To better assess the performance of the pole cap missing classification, we introduce the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and Area Under the Curve (AUC) metrics~\cite{roc} to evaluate the performance, since the AP is mostly used for detection task and is no longer discriminative metric for classification in extremely imbalanced dataset.
the results are shown in~\rfig{fig:retrain}.

\begin{figure}[ht!]
	\centering
	\begin{subfigure}[t]{0.23\textwidth}
		\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{loop_results_v3.png}
	\caption{pole cap results}
	\label{fig:retrain}
	\end{subfigure}
	\begin{subfigure}[t]{0.23\textwidth}
		\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{loop_pole_type_v2.png}
	\caption{pole type results}
	\label{fig:pole_type}
	\end{subfigure}
	\caption{The results of the negative sample resampling approach for pole cap and pole type}
	\label{fig:retrain_all}
\end{figure}
As we can see, our method is effective since AUC significantly improves when more iterations are performed (we show 1,2,3 and 5 loops).

Similarly, we perform the same resampling experiment on the wood pole type classification, since this is also a case of extremely imbalanced examples in our dataset according to the statistics in~\rtab{tab:stat}.
\begin{table}[htbp]
  \centering
  \small
  \caption{The statistics of pole type from our sample dataset}
    \begin{tabular}{cc}
    \toprule
    Pole\_Type & \multicolumn{1}{c}{Counts} \\
    \midrule
    Aluminium & 1 \\
    Concrete & 1027 \\
    Nailed & 2558 \\
    Rebutted & 671 \\
    Steel & 10 \\
    Unknown & 48 \\
    Wood  & 99330 \\
    Wood Multi/Trans & 2 \\
    Wood x2 - PT & 2 \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}%
  \label{tab:stat}%
\end{table}%

In this experiment, we consider the wood pole type as negative samples and all other pole types as the positive samples and have the same configuration of the experiment as in pole cap above.
The results are shown in~\rfig{fig:pole_type}.
As we can see, the results of the negative sample resampling approach for wood pole type also show decent performance.
The resampling approach improves the AUC score within several loops similar to the pole cap results above.
However, the results are not as good as the case of the pole cap.
We suspect that this is because of large intraclass variation in the negative samples and too few resampling iteration loops.

\noindent\textbf{Reweighting approach:} For the reweighting scheme experiment, we gradually increase the imbalance of the training dataset of the pole cap from the balanced case to 12 times more negative samples than positive samples.
We use AUC metric and also test on the testing dataset with number of samples equal to 20\% of the training set.
The results are shown in \rtab{tab:reweight}.
\begin{table}[htbp]
  \centering
  \small
  \caption{The results of the reweighting scheme}
  \begin{tabular}{ccccc}
    \toprule
          & 1 (balanced) & 3     & 6     & 12 \\
    \midrule
    Baseline & 0.941 & 0.912 & 0.853 & 0.991 \\
    Reweighting & 0.956 & 0.951 & 0.954 & 0.992 \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}%
  \label{tab:reweight}%
\end{table}%

As we can see, the results of our reweighting method are consistently better than the baseline.
This demonstrates the efficacy of our method.

\section{Conclusion}
In this paper, we focus on the automatic pole inspection task.
The tiny object detection and extremely imbalanced dataset are two of the main challenges impeding the practical usage of the automatic inspection.
Three novel approaches are proposed to confront those challenges: two-stage zoom-in detection, resampling, and reweighting.
The two-stage zoom-in detection method is able to focus on the small pole cap object gradually from the whole image through detecting the whole pole intermediately.
The resampling and reweighting schemes can iteratively adapt the model to the large intra-class variation of major class and balance the contributions to the loss from each class.
Several experiments show the efficacy of our methods.
In future work, we plan to jointly fuse the resampling and reweighting approaches together, as well as consider multi-modal data~\cite{liu2018multi} to further improve the performance of the framework. Automatic keywords or report generation~\cite{liu2017best} functions for the inspection could also be developed from this framework.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEbib}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Q: Change xml syntax highlighting in Kate I have just downloaded and installed Kubuntu and I was using Kate to modify XML files.  I don't like the pink color of the attribute values.  How could I change it?

A: Under Settings/Configure Kate .../Fonts & Colors you can change any color (and other appearance features) of Kate.
Select the Highlighting Text Styles tab and then the Markup/XML scheme. There you can change all colors for XML files.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
NAC gets permission to operate flights to Saudi Arabia
March 7, 2022, 12:11:57 PM |
KATHMANDU: National flag carrier Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) has received permission to operate flights to Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah of Saudi Arabia.
According to NAC's Executive Chairman Yubraj Adhikari, the Civil Aviation Office, General Authority of Civil Aviation of Saudi Arabia, has provided approval to make two-way flights to three cities of Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah of Saudi Arabia.
Earlier, Executive Chairman Adhikari and other officials had visited Saudi Arabia for the process to receive approval.
The NAC said it plans to operate three flights a week from Kathmandu-Riyadh-Kathmandu from next month in the first phase.
The Saudi Arabia government had given approval to the NAC for operating flights in 2002 and 2020 as well but it did not happen then due to lack of aircrafts and poor management.
Monday March 7, 2022, 12:11:57 PM |


Coffee Table, Unfinished Furniture Coffee Table was posted January 21, 2016 at 8:41 pm by Therefugecoffee.com . More over Unfinished Furniture Coffee Table has viewed by 2113 visitor.
Do you want to start something new, that no other people have? Try the Unfinished Furniture Coffee Table and follow every detail in the picture.
Coffee Table, Best Coffee Tables For Small Living Rooms was posted January 13, 2016 at 2:41 am by Therefugecoffee.com . More over Best Coffee Tables For Small Living Rooms has viewed by 2818 visitor.
Do you want to start something new, that no other people have? Try the Best Coffee Tables For Small Living Rooms and follow every detail in the picture.
Coffee Table, Coffee Dining Table Convertible was posted January 7, 2018 at 4:54 am by Therefugecoffee.com . More over Coffee Dining Table Convertible has viewed by 3844 visitor.
Do you want to start something new, that no other people have? Try the Coffee Dining Table Convertible and follow every detail in the picture.
Coffee Table, Coffee Tables For Small Living Rooms was posted February 18, 2016 at 2:41 am by Therefugecoffee.com . More over Coffee Tables For Small Living Rooms has viewed by 2463 visitor.
Do you want to start something new, that no other people have? Try the Coffee Tables For Small Living Rooms and follow every detail in the picture.


text:
Transfer round-up: Arsenal open talks to sign 26-year-old, Liverpool FC lead race for 19-year-old
Read today's top transfer news and rumours on The Grapevine - The Sport Review's football transfer gossip column
Thursday 10 May 2018, 11:46 UK
The Sport Review's football transfer gossip column is published every day Photo: The Sport Review
The latest football transfer gossip column from The Sport Review, featuring all of the latest Premier League transfer news and rumours.
Here, we look at some of the top football transfer stories from the British and world media in The Sport Review's Grapevine, published every morning in the lead-up to the January transfer window.
It was a busy January transfer window in the Premier League as most of the top teams brought in significant reinforcements for the second half of the season.
Now the attention turns towards the summer, and the players who could be moving clubs ahead of the 2018-19 season.
We'll keep you up to date with the very latest transfer news concerning your club in our daily gossip and rumours column.
With the summer transfer window just around the corner, The Grapevine has the very latest football transfer news from the Premier League's top clubs in the round-up below.
Latest football transfer news:
Manchester United are set to face competition from Paris Saint-Germain for the signature of Ryan Sessegnon, 17, this summer.
Full story: The Daily Mirror
Arsenal have opened talks with Bayer Leverkusen about the possibility of signing 26-year-old goalkeeper Bernd Leno this summer.
Full story: Bild via The Daily Express
Jose Mourinho has admitted that Manchester United will look to make some "quality" signings this summer.
Full story: The Daily Mail
Arsenal and Manchester City are leading the Premier League interest in signing Norwich City star James Maddison, 21.
Liverpool FC are leading the race to sign Diogo Leite, 19, from FC Porto this summer.
Full story: The Guardian
Jack Wilshere, 26, is on the verge of signing a new three-year contract with Arsenal after the north London club improved their offer.
Jose Mourinho has insisted that he is expecting to see Paul Pogba remain at Manchester United beyond the summer transfer window.
Liverpool FC want to loan FC Barcelona star with view to permanent deal – report
Arsene Wenger delivers latest update on Jack Wilshere Arsenal contract


With the advent of Globalization, there is complete transformation in business practices. The initiative taken by Indian government is attracting more and more MNCs to set up businesses in India. Similarly many Indian companies are already into offshore businesses. India's contribution in world trade is only about 2 percent, which presents a huge opportunity in this area. This requires professional competence and knowledge about the current happenings in the global trade. Understanding foreign trade operations is therefore increasingly important for today's business graduates. BBA (Foreign Trade) Programme offers an understanding about the fundamentals of foreign trade. The course prepares students with the concepts and processes involved in operation of foreign trade and its governing forces with present times. It teaches students the skills needed to manage and create global companies. The course imparts knowledge about Global Business Environment, Foreign Trade Policy of India, Export Procedure and Documentation, Import Management, International Finance, Global Marketing etc. In addition, it will also provide a comprehensive knowledge of international trade bodies/multilateral agencies and their role/scope in foreign trade.
Students are exposed to practical learning through industry visits, port visits, institute industry interface in terms of workshops and seminars by banks, export/import firms, related government departments, summer internships, certificate programmes etc. Classroom sessions are designed in a way that would help students in understanding the concepts of the discipline and their application. We provide a good mix of theoretical knowledge as well as application of the concepts. A Major Research project on any area of Foreign Trade has to be undertaken by a student on a topic approved by the Institute under the guidance of a faculty member.
There is now a growing demand of personnel skilled in foreign trade. Completing a degree in this domain can open the doors for a series of career opportunities. After completing this course, Graduates may find positions in domestic or global companies in a variety of industries. They are eligible for jobs in Export firms, Logistics Companies, Dry Ports, Custom Clearing Houses, Quality Control Division, International Marketing, International Finance and Banking, Merchandisers, International Trade Regulatory Bodies, Export Promotion Councils, Buying Houses, State Trading Corporations, Shipping Companies, Marine Insurance etc. and one can even start his/her own export business. Job profiles will be Foreign Trade Analyst, Financial Analyst, Product Manager, International Marketer, Management Analyst/Consultant, Trade Specialist, Business Development Manager, Export Managers, and Brokers etc.
Duration: 3 Years Degree Programme Consisting Six Semesters.
Admission Procedure: Admission is done by applying through online form prescribed by Department of Higher Education, followed by Personal Interview.


text:
Business Hours & Holidays
Las Vegas Justice Court
200 Lewis Ave.
Cutomer Service Lobby is Open:
Excluding Holidays - See Below
PreTrial Services is open 24/7 at CCDC
Holiday Date Observed
New Year's Day Tuesday - January 2, 2023*
Martin Luther King, Jr's Birthday Monday, January 16, 2023
President's Day Monday, February 20, 2023
Memorial Day Monday, May 29, 2023
Independence Day Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Labor Day Monday, September 4, 2023
Nevada Day Friday, October 27, 2023
Veteran's Day Friday, November 10, 2023
Thanksgiving Day Thursday, November 23, 2023
Family Day Friday, November 24, 2023
Christmas Day Monday, December 25, 2023
New Year's Day (2024) Monday – January 1, 2024
*If a holiday falls upon a Sunday, the Monday following must be observed as a legal holiday.
**If a holiday falls upon a Saturday, the Friday preceding must be observed as a legal holiday.
Your Link Name


Metallic Blue. ** OVER £890 OF OPTIONAL EXTRAS ** ONE REGISTERED OWNER FROM NEW WITH DEALER SERVICE HISTORY, LAST SERVICED AT 75K. GREAT FAMILY 7 SEATER WITH EXCELLENT MPG AND CHEAP ROAD TAX., Upgrades - Climate Control - 2Zone El. Air Conditioning, Special Paint - Metallic, Standard Features - Air-Conditioning, Cruise Control, DAB Radio, Park Assist/Front&Rear Park Sensors, Alloy Wheels (16in), Computer, Electric Windows (Front/Rear), Hill Holder, In Car Entertainment (Radio/CD/MP3), Rain Sensor, Tinted Glass, Tyre Pressure Control, Whiplash Protection System, Alarm, Bluetooth Telephone Connection, Multi Device Interface (MDI)(USB/iPod Connection). 7 seats, Blue, Internet Special Offer Price - PX Welcome On Site Price Only - Prestige Cars At Trade Prices, Price Checked Daily For Piece Of Mind, RAC BuySure Approved Dealer, Call And Reserve Your New Vehicle Now. Located In Bristol Near The M4 from London And M5 from Birmingham, And Just Over The Bridge From South Wales And Cardiff, And Within Easy Reach Of Anyone With Access To The M5, M4, M6 or M25 Motorways Inc London - UCOB - USED CARS OF BRISTOL - Bristol's Car Supermarket - Approved | Trusted | Award-Winning.


text:
How to be 'the cool Aunty' at Christmas (and all times).
Thanks to our brand partner, Fisher-Price™
When your brothers and sisters have kids, everything changes.
You find yourself completely obsessed with your niece or nephew, wanting to spoil them rotten and watch their eyes light up when you play and explore the world with them. You want to show your friends photos of them. You want to see them grow into little humans with little personalities and big imaginations.
Let's be honest, you're the second mum to this lucky child, but… considerably cooler. And yes, there are many perks to being "the cool Aunty". You get all the positives of having an awesome niece or nephew, with none of the responsibilities of being their actual parent. THE DREAM!
But there's occasionally competition for the role of "the cool Aunty". Especially around Christmastime, when getting the gift they'll love the most is a high priority on every awesome Aunty's list. Then there's the added pressure of getting something their parents are OK with too.
Of course, you don't have to be an actual Aunty to be the "cool Aunty". You can be the older step-sister, or even just a cool older cousin.
Luckily, there are some simple ways to keep your "cool Aunty" cred. We asked around the Mamamia office to see how our awesome Aunties get it right. Because let's be honest, it's the best to be the best.
The Cool Aunty goes overboard or goes home.
Eloise knew she was the cool Aunty when she FaceTimed her nephew to let him know she couldn't come over. He went into full meltdown.
"Being the cool Aunty is harder for me because I've lived on the other side of the country for almost his entire life. What it does mean is that I end up going a little overboard when I see him," Eloise said.
Eloise and her nephew. Image: Supplied.
"Last Christmas I bought a 6ft tall inflatable T-Rex costume and put it on in 35-degree weather just to entertain him. He wasn't super keen on it, so I cracked it out at Easter as well. I will publicly humiliate myself just to keep a grin on his face, he's my best friend," she added.
We Need To Apologise
Mamamia Out Loud
Jurassic Aunt. Image: Supplied
The Cool Aunty knows how to spoil.
For Nicolle, being the cool Aunty is the result of having no kids of her own. This means those kids are spoilt with both love and... lollies.
"My nieces and nephews are all pretty young still, so they don't know that I am the 'cool' aunty yet. However, I am child free so I actually give up my time to hang out with them, play with them, buy them things, I always FaceTime my nieces and nephews in Perth," said Nicolle.
Being an Aunty who lives far away can be tricky. Nicolle begs her sister to babysit when she's in town, and because she doesn't see them that often, presents are very important.
Nicolle and her nephew. Image: Supplied.
The Cool Aunty thinks outside the box.
Being the cool Aunty doesn't actually have to have anything to do with literally being an Aunt. Families are structured in a million different ways, so for Rachael being the cool older cousin is equally as rewarding.
Rachael bought her five-year-old cousin a Ukulele for his birthday this year, "purely to annoy his parents".
Rachael and her nephew. Image: Supplied.
"He took it with him everywhere he went, including swimming lessons. He absolutely loved it, and I've been his favourite ever since. His parents hated it and are still mad at me for it," she said.
The Cool Aunty bribes the tribe.
Then of course, there is bribery.
Janine says that bribery is the number one way to be the best Aunty.
"Giving them the best presents, like the toy they can't put down or their favourite shirt, always makes me the coolest," she said.
"I gave my nephew a soft toy lion named 'Liam', who my nephew cannot put down and must take to bed each night. My sister gave my nephew a ride on toy car for his birthday which he also absolutely loves and wears the best smile while driving it. We are both competitive and want to win the coolest Aunty status," she added.
She added that the reward for "coolest" Aunty is being the first one the nephew runs up to for a big cuddle: "The prize is just them".
For Janine, bribery always works. Image: Supplied.
The Cool Aunty really, really gets their interests.
When Rikki was little, her Aunty won her heart through... BLING.
"My Aunty was the best when I was little because she was the only one who would paint my nails for me and glue on bling - the bling was EVERYTHING," she said.
But she admits for her own nephew the competition is a little more... niche.
"I visited my extended family over the long weekend and when we were sitting around the pool, enjoying the sun, I heard my nephew humming on the deck chair next to me. Listening for a bit I cottoned on to what he was signing and jumped up off my chair and started finishing off his lyrics to Eminem's 'Lose Yourself'," she said.
"Before I knew it, he was on his feet rapping away in unison - it was so awesome! When we finished up he yelled out 'Oh my God Aunty Rik, I didn't know you knew that song. You are so cool!'," she added.
Rikki and her nephew. Image: Supplied.
Relationships with Aunties and cool older cousins are the best. They are a surrogate parent, a babysitter, and a friend.
It's a special relationship that truly lasts forever (especially if you're the coolest).
What are you getting your little niece or nephew this Christmas?
Your baby's first year and beyond is full of memorable moments and milestones and probably just as many memorable times when you need a helping hand too.
Fisher-Price are here for you – with innovative babygear designed for your convenience, peace of mind and your baby's comfort and safety.
family-time
Greeny 3 years ago
NB should add NOT here having a go at the child...it's more i feel their parents will never let me be the Aunty i would love to be!
Except...except what if you go all out like other Aunty's but you'll actually never be a 'good enough' Aunty to their kid! Makes me pretty sad that (whilst i love and adore ALL of my other 'nieces and nephews' (friends kids)) that i will never be the Aunty i would love to be to my own blood! 😥 But it's okay, at the end of the day i still love my lil blood one (and more on the way) but at least being an Adoptive Aunty is still pretty cool! 😊💚


text:
Q: Can i use VideoCapture cap(0); from Kinect? Videocapture cap(0); is function in OpenCV. But i have Kinect. So i want open the video used Kinect. How can I use kinect?

A: Kinect camera has its own packages and libraries. You can not run it or open it directly using "VideoCapture" function. First of all you need to look into here and install the packages. And you can also look into here if your operating system is Linux.


Together with 91 other European manufacturing associations, Europacable calls upon the European Commission to take action to ensure the EU remain a competitive global industrial power playing in a fairer world market.
Europe is the cradle of the manufacturing industry and has been at the forefront of industrial revolutions and technological innovations. The industry directly employs over 34 million people across all Member States, in supply chains comprising hundreds of thousands of SMEs and larger suppliers. It also indirectly accounts for millions of additional jobs in related sectors.
Yet as other countries around the world put their industries first, the time has come to raise the alarm about considerable challenges the European manufacturing industry is facing.
– commit to implement this Action Plan in a timely manner and regularly report on progress.
Please click here to read the Joint Declaration for an ambitious EU industrial strategy launched yesterday in the run-up to the Competitiveness Council on Monday and the EU Industry Day on 28 February.


AFSCME 18 is the designated union for public employees throughout New Mexico.
For years, public employees in New Mexico have been forced to pay union dues as a condition of employment, allowing unions to take their members for granted. However, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that public employees can no longer be required to financially support a labor union against their will. (Janus v. AFSCME, 2018).
It is important to know that AFSCME 18 may continue to automatically withhold dues from employees pay even if they never signed up for membership in the first place. The best way to ensure the deductions stop is to submit a request to the union in writing.
Yes. AFSCME 18 has been empowered by the state to represent those in your workplace. Employees are not allowed to negotiate their own compensation or handle their own grievances with their employer, nor can they hire another person or entity to represent them.
In exchange for this unusual benefit, AFSCME 18 is legally obligated to represent all employees in the workplace, including those who choose not to join the union as members.
No. All provisions of the collective bargaining agreement between the union and your employer will continue to govern your employment. Your wages, health benefits, retirement and anything else governed by the collective bargaining agreement will remain unchanged if you opt out of AFSCME 18.
The IRS requires unions' 990 tax return to be a public document, and these can be found online at sites like this. AFSCME 18 reports using the Employer Identification Number EIN 85-0237912.


text:
Metropolitan's Greek & Roman Galleries – Kaufman – Washington Post
"The Glory That Was…; At the Met, Greek and Roman Antiquities Galleries Given a Grand Makeover," The Washington Post, Apr 25, 1999, Start p. G.06
Antiquity may resonate in Washington's pedimented federal buildings, but a student of ancient Greece or Rome would be hard pressed to find a single classical vase or terra cotta in the capital's otherwise rich public collections.
And not for want of interest. One recalls the excitement stirred by "The Greek Miracle," a 1992 exhibit that brought ancient masterpieces from Athens to the National Gallery. Ordinarily, however, if Washingtonians seek to ponder relics of the civilization that gave rise to democracy, they had better plan a day trip.
As of last week, the destination of choice is New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Met has just reinstalled the largest and most comprehensive display of Greek art in the Western Hemisphere, a chronology of 1,200 works spanning the 6th through 4th centuries B.C. Many of these objects have not seen the light of day for years–not since the 1940s, when the wing designed to house them began to be taken over for other uses, including temporary shows, shops and a restaurant.
The reopening completes the first half of a planned $150 million reinstallation of the museum's entire collection of Mediterranean antiquities. The final phase, over the next three to five years, will create new galleries for Etruscan, Roman, Cypriot, Hellenistic and South Italian art. The restaurant will be turned back into a Roman sculpture atrium named after New York collectors Shelby White and Leon Levy, who gave the museum a cool $20 million.
"Anyone who understands the role of classical art in the Western tradition will recognize the importance of returning this work to public view," said Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director. "In a world that is increasingly looking at the transitory and the fashionable, it is a major museological statement, I think, to go back to fundamentals, namely to the roots of Western civilization in antiquity."
The creation of a Greek and Roman museum within the Met is the centerpiece of its five-year, $400 million capital campaign–which now stands at around $340 million and has attracted an astonishing 75 gifts of $1 million or more from individuals and foundations.
The project is spearheaded by Carlos A. Picon, the Oxford-trained curator in charge of Greek and Roman works. Picon's installation presents a delightfully varied and lucid journey through the history of Greek art, juxtaposing ceramics, bronzes, terra cottas, jewelry and marbles that trace stylistic developments and often bear images that shed light on social themes and religious beliefs.
The director encouraged a "less is more" approach–don't overwhelm the eye with 200 amphorae–and surely one of the virtues of the beautiful scheme by chief designer Jeffrey L. Daly is its lack of clutter.
The newly refurbished galleries' central spine is the corridor that links the Fifth Avenue entry hall and the restaurant. Once one of the grandest sculpture galleries in America, the 140-by-27-foot expanse had become a dingy passageway to a cafeteria and a parking garage. Newly restored as the Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery in honor of a $12 million gift from the pharmaceuticals executive, the cavernous barrel-vaulted, marble-paved chamber–a direct descendant of Roman imperial baths–again contains the large-scale statuary for which it was built.
Four doorways have been cut through the walls to allow circulation into the six nobly proportioned flanking galleries, and three skylights covered since World War II have been reopened to create a light-flooded space whose grandeur befits the greatest collection of classical art in America.
Here's a tour of the new galleries:
* The Robert and Renee Belfer Court for early Greek art. Named in honor of the New York investor who donated $6 million, the gallery contains Cycladic marbles of harpists, a 3,200-year-old lidded sarcophagus, a luxurious bronze tripod with prancing horses and sphinxes on the rim, and an enormous grave-marker amphora with painted stick figure scenes of the funeral.
* Greek art of the 6th through 4th centuries B.C. The Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery contains large-scale marble statues, mostly Roman copies of lost Greek bronzes, including that of Protesilaos, the first Greek to die in the Trojan War; a victorious athlete tying an award ribbon around his head; and the "Wounded Amazon." Large vases with sporting and equestrian scenes once were filled with oil and presented as prizes at the Panathenaic games.
* Archaic Greek sculpture. This gallery is named for Judy and Michael H. Steinhardt, a retired hedge-fund manager who gave $4 million. Its Athenian funerary monuments include two of the collection's greatest treasures: the "New York Kouros," a life-size marble nude that marked the grave of a young Attic aristocrat, and a 14-foot column depicting a similar youth in profile with perhaps his little sister and topped by a painted sculpture of a sphinx. Vases, bronzes and terra-cotta plaques illustrate customs and beliefs about death and the afterlife, the Homeric myths, warfare and the social gatherings known as symposia.
* Greek art of the 6th century B.C. The Bothmer Gallery recognizes the Met's curator for the past half century, Dietrich von Bothmer. Among its miscellany of objects are painted vases and cups, bronze figurines, armor, jewelry, bronze mirrors and engraved gems and coins, many with scenes illustrating life in ancient Athens. Don't miss the large wine-mixing bowl by the master Euphronios, which shows Sleep and Death carrying a fallen Greek warrior from a Trojan battlefield.
* Greek art of the 5th century B.C. The Wiener Gallery, honoring investment manager and philanthropist Malcolm Wiener, contains reliefs and terra-cotta figurines portraying theater, musical contests, voting and the gods of the pantheon. One characteristic gravestone shows a family gathered around a seated man, perhaps the deceased; another bears a touchingly beautiful relief carving of a girl gently nuzzling her pet doves.
* Greek art of the 5th and early 4th centuries B.C. The Stavros and Danae Costopoulos Gallery honors the family of Athenian trustee Yannis Costopoulos, chairman of Alpha Credit, Greece's largest bank. Artworks and equestrian armor from Athens in the age of the Acropolis are displayed, including a wide cup whose interior has a finely painted scene of a goddess holding a scepter and offering a libation bowl before an altar. In the showcase nearby is a silver example of the same kind of vessel.
* Greek art of the 4th century B.C. The Spyros and Eurydice Costopoulos Gallery recognizes other members of the wealthy Greek banking family. In it are colossal gravestones that take the form of vessels used in funerary rites. There are also animated Tanagra statuettes and lavish finery including the gold sheathing for a scabbard meticulously worked with a scene of Greeks battling barbarians, plus a group of gold items donated by trustee Christos G. Bastis.
[Illustration]
PHOTO; COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; CHART; TWP Caption: The Head Of Pan In Relief Adorns The Side Of A Bronze Box Mirror, Dating To The Late-4th Century B.C. A Gold And Rock-crystal Bracelet, With Ram-head Terminals. A Marble Column Finial In The Shape Of A Sphinx, Circa 530 B.C. NEW GREEK GALLERIES OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (This Graphic Was Not Available)
Archive Select Month July 2019 April 2019 December 2018 November 2018 September 2018 April 2018 December 2017 October 2017 August 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 November 2016 August 2013 July 2012 March 2012 February 2012 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010


Doug Broome is a skilled professional in Monroe, NC local with over 25 years of experience working with the local police and fire departments. He has a passion for serving the public and enjoys finding hard-to-get answers. During the time he worked for the fire department he also trained as a Private Investigator - putting his knack from finding answers and his love for helping others together. Doug Broome started Doug Broome Investigative Group to take decades of work and training, and offer his services to those in need.
Doug Broome has the intuition, skill and tools necessary to obtain the information you need to take well-informed actions. Services are available 24/7, so call anytime at 704-361-1405 for private investigator services in Monroe, North Carolina and the surrounding areas.
Call Us Now for Help Getting Answers!