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Private Equity fund of American investment bank, Goldman Sachs, along with Norwest Venture Partners and Bertelsmann India Investments (BII) may invest $100 million in furniture e-tailer Pepperfry, reported ET Tech, citing sources privy to the development. All three investors are already investors in Pepperfry.
The funds raised will help Pepperfry expand its offline presence and diversify to strengthen its position in furniture market which is riding on a wave set off by Global giant like Ikea, a Siss company entered India last year.
Ikea, along with search giant Google, are contemplating to enter Indian e-commerce market as they both are coming up with their own e-commerce stores under their own brand names respectively, to sell their branded products under one roof.
Existing investors of Pepperfry are looking at investing $100 million into the company and according to the report, fresh equity will be issued in the proposed round in which the investors will seek to maintain their level of holdings in the company.
In July 2015, Goldman Sachs, Bertelsmann India Investments and Norwest Venture Partners, have contributed in $100 million Series-D rounding of funding of Pepperfry. This was followed by an additional 210 crore investment in September 2016.
Founded in 2012, by Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah, Pepperfry.com has raised a total of about $198 million in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised about $34 million in March last year, according to data by Crunchbase. NOtably, in the same month of same year, Pepperfry's rival, Urban Ladder, too had raised $12 million from Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital and Steadview Capital, in its second internal round of funding.
According to industry estimates, India's online home-furnishing and furniture retail market is expected to cross $1.1 billion in revenue this year, up from about $900 million in 2016.


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A new study published in JAMA suggests that there is danger in relying on "complementary" unproven treatments over well established conventional therapies.
Complementary and alternative medicine, commonly referred to as CAM, is the most commonly used phrase to describe medical therapies practiced outside conventional Western medicine. CAM contains a variety of healing philosophies and medical practices that are not currently accepted or used by conventional medicine. Complementary medicine consists of medical therapies that are most often used to supplement conventional medical treatments. Because these treatments are utilized in addition to conventional therapies, they usually focus on promoting wellness, managing symptoms, or stimulating the immune system. In contrast to complementary medicine, alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. CAM use by cancer patients has steadily increased throughout the past ten years. While research on CAM has also begun to increase, little is known about the safety and efficacy of most CAM therapies.
Researchers analyzed data from nearly two million patients with early stage breast, lung, colon, or prostate that had not spread to other areas of the body throughout the US and compared individuals who received only conventional cancer treatments to those who chose a "complementary" cancer treatment (such as herbs or acupuncture) along with at least one conventional cancer treatment. Conventional treatment was defined as surgery, radiation treatment, chemotherapy, and/or hormone therapy.
Were younger, female and have a higher socioeconomic status and educational level.
Lived on the Pacific Coast or in the Intermountain West regions of the United States and….
Were more likely to decline additional conventional treatments.
Chemotherapy was refused by 34% of those choosing unproven remedies, but by only 3% of the conventional treatment-only group.
So how does those self advocating for "complementary" therapies fare relative to their "conventionally" treated counterparts?
First and foremost, they did not live as long. The five-year survival was 82% in the 'complementary" treatment group compared to 87% for those treated with conventional therapy and they experienced a higher rate of death.
Although the study could not accurately directly compare "complementary" therapies to conventional ones it does serve to illustrate an important point. It may be risker to pursue alternative therapies that are not well studied, especially when well defined effective treatments are available.
According to an another study published in the European Journal of Cancer, cancer patients using complementary and alternative medicine appear to have higher mortality rates than cancer patients using only conventional medicine.
This study was conducted at multiple centers throughout Norway to measure the effect of CAM use on long-term survival of cancer patients. Of 515 cancer patients participating in the trial, 112 used CAM. During 8 years of follow-up, 358 cancer patients died. The researchers found that 79% (88/112) of cancer patients using CAM died, compared to only 65% (262/403) of cancer patients who did not use CAM. After adjusting data for potentially confounding factors, such as demographics, disease severity, and treatment factors, they reported that cancer patients not using CAM were significantly more likely to outlive cancer patients that utilized CAM. This effect was strongest among patients given good prognoses and was not associated with any specific CAM therapies.
There are in fact many types of alternative treatments that may be beneficial and today's doctors think of them as "integrative" not alternative. Appropriately studies integrative therapies have a role in contemporary cancer care and most oncologists are working to determine how best to use them.
· Discuss alternative therapies with your doctor to make sure they don't interfere with proven conventional therapies.
· Think carefully before declining proven conventional therapies to pursue unproven therapies.
· Do research on alternative therapies before using them; they have often been studied and reports on their effectiveness do exist.
· View your doctor as your partner in determining the best treatment and keep him/her informed with regard to what you are doing.
Risberg T, Vickers A, Bremnes RM, et al. Does use of alternative medicine predict survival from cancer?


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Home ▸ News Story ▸ Students Become Professional Translators in Donatella Melucci's Course
Students Become Professional Translators in Donatella Melucci's Course
Posted in News Story | Tagged Faculty, Italian, Student
Students enrolled in Donatella Melucci's course on Italian Translation face one of the most difficult assessments in all of higher education. Their work, once translated, is reviewed by the original Italian authors and its publishers before the final product hits bookstore shelves with their names attached.
Melucci, a teaching professor in the Department of Italian Studies, has authored, co-authored and edited numerous textbooks on the teaching of Italian as a foreign language. Outside of the classroom, she's also worked extensively as a translator. When the opportunity arose, Melucci fought to give students a firsthand, real-world work experience inside the classroom.
Rapper's Delight, Rapper's Rewrite
In the spring of 2019, the department hosted an event with Amir Issaa, a rapper and artist from Rome. Issaa read from, and answered questions about, his autobiography Vivo per questo (This Is What I Live For).
The cover for Amir Issaa's autobiography.
"During the presentation, Issaa mentioned that he'd like to have the book translated into English for an American audience," Melucci remembers. "We, my students and I, laughed and said 'well we can do that.' The conversation didn't stop there."
For advanced students, the work of translating represents the culmination of their studies, pulling on the linguistic and cultural skills they've assembled over years of tutelage, exams and practice.
"The Italian translation course brought the Italian language to life in a way that I had not experienced before," said Natalie Bazata (C'21). "The challenge of translating an entire book required a completely new application of my knowledge of the English and Italian languages."
"It was a very ambitious project and a big responsibility, but I knew it was a great opportunity for my students to learn in a meaningful way and to experience the connection between academic and professional work," Melucci wrote in an article for the magazine Words Without Borders. "While they were acquiring the skills to translate texts from Italian to English, they would have the unique opportunity of translating a contemporary author's book and potentially seeing it published."
The translation of Vivo per questo was published in a volume edited by Clarissa Clo of San Diego State University alongside essays from scholars, including Melucci, discussing Issaa's rap within the context of Italian hip-hop and placing his work in a transnational context. The volume won an award last year from Italy's Department of Cultural Heritage.
A Transformative Model for Language Education
In the classroom, Melucci witnessed her students grow by leaps and bounds through the project. Invigorated by that experience, she set out to make it a recurring phenomena – each semester students in her class would work in tandem to translate a book for publication.
"Throughout the project, it was incredible to see the growth in my students' language competence," Melucci wrote. "They learned that translation is not just about words — nouns, adjectives, verbs — but rather about transferring cultural content from one language to another so that the reader of the target language can read it and appreciate it."
The cover of Lorenza Pieri's novel, which was translated by Melucci's class.
With every passing year, an increasing number of Italian majors and minors have translated a book by the time they earn their degrees. Laura Benedetti's Un Paese di Carta (A Country of Paper) and Lorenza Pieri's Isole Minori (Lesser Islands), to name just a few. Additionally, students have gone on to work as translators after graduation.
During the summer of 2021, Melucci worked with two former students to finalize a contract to translate Giorgio A. Chiarva's Il Banchiere Galantuomo (The Gentleman Banker), a biographical novel following Amadeo Peter Giannini, the Italian-American founder of the Bank of America.
For students still in the classroom, translation isn't just barebones work. To fully understand the work they're translating, students must immerse themselves in culture, traditions and nuances. These deep dives, Melucci explains, offer incredible opportunities for lectures and discovery on new and interesting topics.
"Being a translator means being an intermediary who holds the tools to remove linguistic and cultural barriers and make literature and art accessible to a greater audience," Bazata said. "I finished the course with an enriched understanding of and appreciation for both languages and a commitment to continue this work in the future."
To help guide the students, Melucci makes a habit of inviting one professional translator to lecture, including Leonardo Rizzi, the translator of the My Brilliant Friend series Ann Goldstein and Prof. Sergio Portelli, who heads the Department of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies at the University of Malta.
"I noticed that her career as a translator is inextricably connected to her literary career as an editor and a writer," said Harry Rose (C'20), speaking of Ann Goldstein's virtual visit to the class. "It seems equally important to develop your own personal written voice in your native language in addition to having a solid knowledge of Italian in order to be a good translator.
For students studying Italian in the College of Arts & Sciences, Melucci's course offers an unparalleled real-world experience that should be a model for classrooms around the world.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


TKB Smart-club, the joint intellectual project of AS "TRASTA KOMERCBANKA" and magazine "Otkritiy gorod", was guested by Russian writer and radio journalist Alexander Genis, who used to live in Riga many years ago.
A. Genis is the author of many books and publications, e.g. "Amerikanskaya azbuka", "Vavilonskaya bashnya", and the co-author of "Russkaya kuhnya v izgnanii", "Rodnaya Rech", "Amerikana", written together with Pyotr Vail, another Russian writer.
At the meeting in TKB Smart-club Alexander Genis presented an excerpt from his yet unpublished work. The lovely, ironic language, his individual perception of things and events was highly appreciated by the attendees of the club. After the presentation Genis was asked a lot of question, he told about his life in exile in the United States, about the joint work with other writers: Sergey Dovlatov and Pyotr Vail, meetings with the famous philosopher Umberto Eco and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. It turned out that in addition to his literary talent, Alexander Genis has also a talent for cooking. He told the Club visitors about his attempt once to create a project "Russian Soups." Some trial videos of this project are available on Youtube.com. By the way, he was talking about food so "deliciously" that the guests of the club even promoted the idea to invite the writer to a culinary master-class.
A. Genis sincerely demonstrated his gladness for visiting his hometown Riga. He called Riga today is a Mecca for tourists. Moreover, in the course of the meeting the writer repeatedly affirmed his love for the city. In Riga, A. Genis managed also to meet his lectors and fellow students from the University of Latvia and his former colleagues from the newspaper "Sovetskaya molodyozh".
TKB Smart-club was established last year by AS "TRASTA KOMERCBANKA" together with the magazine "Otkritiy gorod". Many renowned people have already visited the club, e.g. Russian political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov, historian and publicist Leonid Mlechin, journalist and co-founder of NTV Evgeny Kiselev, actor and playwright Evgeny Grishkovets, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, TV journalist Marianna Maksimovsky, lawyer Mikhail Barshevsky and journalist Pavel Sheremet. This year TKB continues to develop the Smart-club and to invite interesting guests, whose opinions may be different from the majority, but seem interesting to club members, TRASTA KOMERCBANKA clients, supporters of "Otkritiy gorod", members of the private cigar club Churchill, and also for people from Latvia's political and business circles.


text:
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2 Alarming Findings About How Poor Sleep Hurts Your Heart
Sleep can actually affect cholesterol -- and poor sleepers are far more likely to smoke.
Sarah DiGiulio
04/29/2016 04:05pm EDT
yulkapopkova via Getty Images
Two new studies suggest not getting enough sleep might make you more likely to smoke and have high cholesterol.
Multiple studies have shown that poor sleep can up your risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity and cancer. But two new studies published last week -- one in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine and the other in the journal Scientific Reports -- uncover two more pieces of the puzzle. One reports poor sleep may actually increase the risk for engaging in behaviors that put a person at risk for these chronic diseases to begin with. And the second reports that poor sleep actually changes the way the body gets rid of cholesterol, and likely plays a role in increasing your risk of developing heart disease.
Here's what all this means for you:
People who don't get enough sleep are less likely to engage in heart healthy behaviors
A group of collaborating researchers from the University of Delaware, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and the University of Arizona College of Medicine analyzed data from a group of 439,933 adults in the U.K. and found that people who slept six or fewer hours a night were 45 percent more likely to smoke tobacco than those who slept seven to eight hours a night. Those who categorized themselves as night owls were 60 percent more likely to smoke than those who reported being morning people -- and the night owls reported having more sedentary habits and eater fewer fruits and vegetables.
While many people may think of lung cancer and respiratory issues when it comes to the health risks linked to smoking, the chemicals in tobacco smoke actually wreak havoc on our blood cells, too, and that can damage the heart and blood vessels. Over time, this increases the risk of chest pain, heart attack, heart failure, and death.
"We really wanted to understand the relationship between sleep and the major risk factors for cardiovascular disease," study co-author Freda Patterson, an assistant professor in the University of Delaware's Department of Behavioral Health and Nutrition, told The Huffington Post. "We found that people who did not get adequate sleep -- those who did not get the recommended seven to eight hours -- tended not to engage in heart healthy behaviors.
"Those who tended to be night owls or evening types also tended to have poor heart behaviors."
- Freda Patterson, assistant professor, Behavioral Health and Nutrition at University of Delaware
"And what was particularly new about these findings was that being a night owl or evening type was associated with poor heart behaviors," she said.
Night owls were more sedentary and ate fewer fruits and veggies
The 439,933 individuals in Patterson's study answered survey questions about how long they slept, when they slept (i.e. whether they were night owls or early-to-bed and early-to-rise-ers), how long they were physically active each day, and other lifestyle factors.
Participants who categorized themselves as morning types reported watching a little over eight minutes more of TV, spending about 18 minutes fewer on their computers, eating about a sixth of a serving more fruit and about a tenth of a serving more vegetables per day, on average, compared with the night owls.
The link between inadequate sleep and obesity has been well documented in scientific research, Patterson said. But she added that she and her fellow researchers were not aware of other studies that have shown a link between smoking and poor sleep, nor a link between sedentary behavior and poor sleep. The new findings showed a stronger link between sleep and sedentary behavior than between sleep and physical activity, she noted.
"People used to think that if you were physically active you weren't sedentary," Patterson explained. "Whereas we are starting to learn that even in people who are physically active and meet the physical activity recommendations, if they're highly sedentary, then they still have a fair bit of vulnerability to poor health."
Can improving sleep improve other health behaviors?
These new findings have important implications for public health, Patterson added.
"We think of chronic health risk factors [for chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes] as this core triad -- physical inactivity, tobacco use and poor dietary intake," she said. "And we know that these risk factors are fairly stubborn to change. It's very hard to find either community-based or clinical interventions that can help people change these behaviors in the long term."
Patterson and her colleagues looked at sleep to identify whether there was what she calls a "linchpin behavior" that might affect the other behaviors -- "something central to the co-occurrence of all of these risk behaviors," she said. And that's what led them to sleep.
The next step of their work is to look at whether improving sleep can help improve some of the other risk behaviors -- i.e., does improving sleep help more smokers quit? Help people eat healthier? Be more active?
The question, Patterson said, is, "If we improve on sleep, can we improve subsequent health behaviors or not?"
Not getting enough sleep affects your cholesterol
The other new study, conducted in Finland, found that even if a person is able to make health-promoting choices like eating right, being physically active and not smoking, poor sleep may still be hurting their health by raising cholesterol levels.
Though previous studies have connected poor sleep with increased rates of cardiovascular disease and higher overall rates of mortality, these new findings are some of the first data to pinpoint exactly how sleep loss affects cholesterol, a key component of cardiovascular disease risk, said study co-author Vilma Aho, a sleep researcher in the Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen (Sternberg) lab at the University of Helsinki.
"The study established that the genes that participate in the regulation of cholesterol transport are less active in persons suffering from sleep loss than with those getting sufficient sleep," Aho said. "This was found both in a laboratory-induced sleep loss experiment and on the population level."
Sleep loss lowers "good" cholesterol levels
The researchers looked at data from a total of 2,739 individuals, who all answered questions about whether they regularly got sufficient sleep. Each person also gave a blood sample so the researchers could analyze cholesterol levels and other biomarkers, including activity in the genes that help regulate cholesterol.
In people who didn't get enough sleep, the levels of high-density lipoproteins, or "good cholesterol" -- the type that gets rid of excess cholesterol and carries it to the liver -- were on average 10 percent lower compared to the individuals who reported getting enough sleep. Plus, the genes that help regulate cholesterol were found to be less active compared to bodies who got sufficient sleep, Aho said.
"The effect may may be clinically significant in some individuals, especially together with other risk factors."
- Vilma Aho, a sleep researcher in the Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen (Sternberg) lab at University of Helsinki
The difference in actual levels of "good" cholesterol are relatively small, Aho noted, "but the effect may may be clinically significant in some individuals, especially together with other risk factors."
The researchers also conducted an experiment for which 14 healthy adults volunteered to restrict their time in bed to four hours a night for five days, while six other adults spent eight hours in bed for five days. The levels of low-density lipoproteins, or "bad" cholesterol, actually decreased by about 10 percent in the individuals who restricted their sleep.
However, that finding doesn't necessarily mean that restricting sleep improves cholesterol levels. Aho said she suspects the decrease might actually have been caused by inflammation in those individuals not getting enough sleep, and noted that the more important takeaway is that cholesterol is influenced by restricted sleep in the first place. The data also showed that once again, the genes involved in cholesterol regulation were less active in individuals who restricted their sleep compared with those who slept longer.
The data from the experimental group of 14 showed that just one week of insufficient sleep changes the body's immune response and metabolism, and for both the large study of individuals and the controlled experiment, the genes that were involved in the body's normal ridding of bad cholesterol were less active for those who slept less, Aho said.
Taken together, the data suggest sleep loss does affect cholesterol, and over time, sleep loss affects cholesterol metabolism in a negative way.
"In the long run, if the sleep loss becomes chronic, cholesterol metabolism seems to shift to an unfavorable direction, which may increase the risk for developing cardiovascular disease," she added.
A Guide For Releasing Stress Before Sleep
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CHICAGO (CBS) — Some treatment rooms are getting a new name–and thousands of patients are getting some new hope–as the University of Illinois dedicates a research and care center to the late Comedian Bernie Mac.
Mac learned he had Sarcoidosis in 1983, but continued as a comedy headliner for years.
His widow Ronda McCullough cut the ribbon on the U. of I. clinic.
"The best I can really hope for is that there is a cure for the disease," she said. In the meantime, she wants patients to get the medical treatment they need.
With the support and naming of the Bernie Mac clinic, his widow Ronda is essentially underwriting the rheumatology research of Dr. Nadera Sweiss, who investigated chronic conditions like Sarcoidosis that cause inflammation.


The night scene will go strong all winter long once the shrimp begin to move (as long as it doesn't get too cold....) all the way through April. Twice a month for five days at a time the falling tide will start early in the evening. The rest of the time the tide will still fall - but not always at a convenient time.... Me, I'll start a trip almost any time at night if I can find an angler.... Some nights we're fly fishing - other nights it will be spinning gear and DOA shrimp.... Night trips are pretty convenient since they're only five hours and all of the fishng is really close by (all the bridges and docklights between Miami and MIami Beach hold fish at night -the trick is to find the ones the fish are liking each night...).
the shark and the boy were just about the same size... the rod had 15lb mono and they were pretty evenly matched... I was able to leader the critter and carefully removed the hook before it swam away in good condition (an 18" Arc DeHooker is the tool I use for getting back hooks from fish that have teeth....).
The next day it was all lures and sight fishing along the shallow shorelines around Whitewater Bay with Larry and Sean. Early on water temps were a bit low and we didn't begin seeing much until around 10Am. Most of the snook and reds we found (many more snook than redfish on Sunday for us...) were pretty sharp and were seeing us just about when we saw them.... That meant lots of missed opportunities up really shallow but we did find a bunch of trout in a bit deeper water. We caught and released most of them, keeping three for the table... When we shifted to shorelines with a bit deeper water both Larry and Sean hooked up with a couple of nice snook in the 22 to 24 inch range... Here's the pics.
This time of year I'm booking gift certificates as well as trips... Anyone can give a trip to their favorite angler for the coming year - contact me for details.
Be a hero, take a kid fishing!
Nice ****. I want to do a night trip in Feb Bob.


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Main » TV-series » Adventure Time season 9
Adventure Time season 9
Original name: Adventure Time season 9
Director: Pendleton Ward
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy
TV channel: Cartoon Network
Original release: April 5, 2010 – present
About TV show Adventure Time season 9
An eighth season premiered on January 23, 2017, and the show has been renewed for a ninth and final season.
Adventure Time Plot
In the land of Ooo, only fabulous beings, princesses, and other magical beings abound. Here, Finn and his best friend Jake, a talking dog, are experiencing new adventures and sometimes have to defeat the evil plans of the Ice King.
In the US, the first season from April 5 to September 27, 2010, was broadcast to the US cable network Cartoon Network. The second season was shown from 11 October 2010 to 9 May 2011. The third season was broadcast from 11 July 2011 to 13 February 2012. The fourth season was broadcast from 2 April 2012 to 22 October 2012. The fifth season was broadcast from 12 November 2012 to 17 March 2014. The sixth season has been aired since April 21, 2014. The seventh season was announced on 25 July 2014. On 29 September 2016 it was announced that Adventure Time ends with the ninth season in 2018.
Adventure Time season 9 release date
Adventure Time - Adventure with Finn and Jake is a US-American character series, which has been produced by Cartoon Network Studios since 2010. The pilot sequence was in the series Random! Cartoons as one of many short films at Nickelodeon. After the sequence on the Internet became more and more popular, Cartoon Network decided to produce a whole series.
TV show status
Example: 2019-12-03 - Official release/renewed date;
2019, to be announced - The date will be announced in 2019;
Completed - The season 8 is final;
Cancelled - The show has been canceled after season 8.
Adventure Time season 9 release date on Cartoon Network
Last updated: 2017-04-29 + Add official date
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Our white salt is perfect for thawing and deicing those areas where people walk - near to home - offices and other public buildings. Because it is white - it doesn't leave any marks or residue on carpets and entrances. It is almost entirely pure salt (apart from small quantities of harmless anti-caking agent - added to ensure is doesn't bind and clump during storage). Because of its purity - it is harmless to the environment and dissolves completely - doesn't clog up paths - roads or drainage systems - and leaves your property clean and clear - with nothing to sweep up. It is the optimum salt to spread either by hand or using a spreader. All our salt comes form sustainable sources.


NONIE & GEN'S WEDDING - I Blog, Therefore I Am.
The long-overdue blog redesign is now completed so it's now to write some posts. I've been so behind with my writing but I hope that I can update more frequently in the coming days. November is not my favorite month for nothing. This entry on my cousin's wedding is already delayed by two weeks.
My family, the rest of our clan, and I attended my cousin Gen's long-awaited and well-prepared wedding to Nonie two Saturdays ago, October 20. The wedding was held at a very beautiful quaint garden home in Antipolo City called Jardin De Miramar. I love out-of-town garden weddings! There's a certain tranquility, exclusivity and intimacy in them. Nonie and Gen truly made the right choice in holding their union in one.
Gen and Nonie met through their Church's Pastor five years ago and been in love since. Most of the guests were their Church friends (or otherwise known as the Bridal Shower Girls) who witnessed their love story through the years. The rites and program were very simple and it was mostly participated by family and close friends. Bonus points to the pastor for his very endearing sermon and good pieces of advice to the couple. And special kudos to Gen for choosing Josh Groban's "You're Still You" as part of her wedding march.
Since Gen is a year older than me and I am her "next in line" it was not a surprise that she got me as one of her Bridesmaids. Yeah, yeah, I am at it again. This is the ninth time I've been part of a wedding entourage. Six times as a Bridesmaid, thrice as a Veil Sponsor, and once as Maid of Honor to my dear Olen. Along with it are nine gowns in different colors and forms – from Maroon to Pink to Blue. Yeah, I truly am a Professional Bridesmaid and I dunno if I will be happy or sad about it. Aside from me, a number of my relatives were also chosen as part of the entourage.
I had fun in the wedding with my other cousins. It was truly a wedding worth attending. The scenery and the nice venue absolutely made up for the very long drive to Antipolo. I also overdid the photos so here's the link of the album at Multiply and a slideshow from Google Picasa.
Best Wishes, Nonie and Gen!
Wedding Season officially started for me! Next stop? Raymond & Patty, Carlos & Che and Rhett & Tisha! Whew!


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Anselmi ist ein italienischer Familienname langobardischer Herkunft.

Herkunft
Er wurde das erste Mal im Jahr 802 erwähnt, als Karl der Große den 24-jährigen Stammvater Anselmo de' Fighineldi (von Winild's Söhnen) in Florenz zum Ritter schlug. Die Nachfahren von Anselmo haben sich erst d'Anselmo und ab 980 Anselmi genannt.

Namensträger
 Albert Anselmi (1883–1929), US-amerikanischer Auftragsmörder
 Anselmo Anselmi (1859–1907), italienischer Lokalhistoriker
 Enrico Anselmi, italienischer Autorennfahrer
 Federico Anselmi (* 1982), argentinischer Rugby-Union-Schiedsrichter
 Giorgio Anselmi (1723–1797), italienischer Maler
 Giuseppe Anselmi (1876–1929), italienischer Sänger (Tenor)
 José Antonio Eguren Anselmi SCV (* 1956), Erzbischof von Piura
 Michelangelo Anselmi (1492–1556), italienischer Maler
 Nicolò Anselmi (* 1961), italienischer Geistlicher, Bischof von Rimini

 Rosina Anselmi (1876–1965), italienische Schauspielerin
 Tina Anselmi (1927–2016), italienische Politikerin

Siehe auch
 Anselm

Einzelnachweise

Familienname

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Q: Random Sample 1 row for each unique column value in R I have a dataset that consists of 2 columns idunique and match_no
Reproducible example here
idunique <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
match_no <- c(1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5)

df <- data.frame(idunique, match_no)

   idunique match_no
         1        1
         2        1
         3        1
         4        1
         5        2
         6        2
         7        3
         8        3
         9        4
        10        5

I need to randomly sample occurrences of match_no from the database and extract x amount of unique occurrences.
example output would a random subset of idunique based on randomly sampled match_no
  idunique match_no
        1        1
        5        2
        7        3
        9        4
       10        5

The real database is 6 million rows long with ~ 2000 duplicates of each match_no so I need the solution to be able to change the sample size.

A: With data.table, we can do
library(data.table)
setDT(df)[df[, sample(.I, 1), match_no]$V1]

A: df %>% group_by(match_no) %>% sample_n(1)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The story of Suikoden II is exceptional, its driving force is the huge array of characters that all have their own sense of personality and design thanks to the stories provided for each character. The gameplay is the standard turn-based system , however rather than an MP gauge that is reminiscent of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, it has a point system where all spells (or runes in Suikoden's case) have limited number of uses but if a character is skilled in magic, said character gets more uses and more powerful spells provided to them. Suikoden II also implements a formation system where each character is separated into certain categories: S (short), M (mid-range) and L (long range). Short-range can only attack the from the front, mid-range can be in either front line or rear guard but they are not superior in either, but long-range can utilise their full potential from the rear guard. Even though this not out of the ordinary I prefer it much more because to me there is a greater sense of strategy involved in managing your team so that you know when to fight your battles and when to escape due to the amount of resources (items/magic) you have at your disposal.
My sword is tingling… Riou, Nanami, leave this to me.
No matter how much you play this game or get used to the combat, it does not get repetitive because there is always something happening either from a gameplay perspective or a story perspective that is always moving things along so that it never gets tedious. The sense of joy and reward you get from seeing your castle develop over time is nothing short of overwhelming as you always feel you are making progress. Unfortunately, Suikoden II did not do well in the west due to competing with the Final Fantasy series in terms of release date and overall hype, which is a shame because Suikoden II is is an absolute gem of a JRPG which should not have been overlooked. The main reason it takes the No.1 spot is because well…..its story and character narrative really. Seriously the story of this game is truly fantastic, there are so many twists and turns that it could give Game of Thrones a run for its money!
This name alone is recognised by all JRPG aficionados, it is for most the mother of all JRPG's (and to others the SNES itself) yes it is Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger starts off with Crono going to the Millennial fair to see his friend Lucca show off her teleporter invention, however when Marle (an acquaintance Crono met at the fair) volunteers to try the machine gets accidentally sent to another timeline, it is up to Crono to rescue her but in his travels he learns of a greater evil called Lavos that threatens the future itself and it is up to Crono and friends to stop him.
Right from the get go Chrono Trigger is aesthetically very pleasing to look at thanks to the artist of Akira Toriyama (famous for Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Quest Series) but what makes the art direction standout is the various settings you will see within the game itself. As the game is based around time travel, you will see various settings from pre-historic, middle ages and even futuristic Sci-Fi and all of these locations are such a treat to see. There is so much variety in the character designs, monster designs and locales that you can truly say that Akira Toriyama's efforts did not go to waste as the game looks truly stunning in every artistic manner.
The gameplay utilises the ATB system ( Which is Final Fantasy's staple battle system) in where each character has an individual timer and can only take an action once that timer has expired. It is very similar to that of the Final Fantasy series in that regard, however instead of MP (Magic Points) we now have TP (Tech Points). Techs are used in this in the same way that magic is utilised in the Final Fantasy Series. Fortunately, there is one key difference that makes the battle system for Chrono Trigger much more exciting to look at and enjoyable to use….Co-op techs!. Basically, Co-op techs are where 2 or 3 party members combine their skills to use a special skill that combines various strengths and elements of their attacks into one big ultimate attack that looks impressive and is very powerful. These co-op techs are what made the gameplay for me as they were just fun! They were fun to use, fun to look at and fun to discover, it was an absolute blast and the best thing of all, is that it was not a gimmick in combat, it was actually useful and for me it was mandatory, as I would have been stuck on so many battles without it.
The reason Chrono Trigger takes the second spot is not because of its beautiful soundtrack, the great story or enjoyable gameplay, it is because it offers something that most JRPG's fail to offer nowadays and that is true replay-ability. With at least 13 different endings and the opportunity to create your own narrative, it is nothing short of astounding. The game also offers a New Game+ feature so that when you do want to collect all the different endings, you don't have to feel like you're backtracking as you have not lost the progress you have already made. Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece, there is no doubting that and it is enlightening to know that this game still stands the test of time today.
Since the release of Persona 3 on the Playstation 2, the Persona series has become the lifeblood of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, but the true top dog of the series is Persona 4: Golden. I would like to add at this point I normally would say Persona 4 should have taken this spot in the chart due to revitalising the series ,but as Golden specifically included so many extra features that defined the title (to the point of adding an extra ending) it would be nothing short of a travesty for it not to be here.
The story of Persona 4: Golden follows Yu Narukami (protagonist) moving into Inaba to live with his uncle and cousin but unfortunately shortly after moving to Inaba, people start getting murdered and it is up to Yu and his friends to find the culprit, However, in the process, they discover another world behind the television (I can relate to this) and obtain the power of "Persona" which Yu and his friends must use to solve the murder mystery and the secrets of the new world that harbour monsters known as shadows.
Persona 4 Golden tends to start off a little slow, many people I know have given up playing the game because there is no battle until 3-4 hours in, but once you obtain your first Persona the ball truly starts rolling. In Persona 4 Golden essentially certain characters in the story are given a time limit before they die and you only have a certain amount of days to rescue them. In this time you can go to the TV world level up your characters, obtain new Personas, fight secret bosses and get new items and money , or you can use this time to develop your relationships with characters in the town, which represent different Persona types and the more you develop your relationships with these characters the more powerful Personas you can obtain. Nearly every element of gameplay from dungeon exploring to making friends synergies so well, because of this every gameplay aspect compliments each other.
Where Persona 4 Golden truly shines, however, is in its story. The further you progress through the game the more you get to know your party/team and what a great team they actually are. From the bad puns of a talking teddy bear called Teddie, to the over enthusiastic martial art loving Chie, you cannot help but get attached to these characters and look forward to seeing how each one develops as you progress. The more the story unravels the more characters, Personas and friendships you can obtain. It all happens from doing whatever you feel like doing and never halts the progression of the game, which is a delight to see because unfortunately most of the time when you get sidetracked in other JRPG's it halts the momentum of the narrative and can hinder progression making the game feel less involving. Overall with its fantastic anime art style, the iconic soundtracks from Shoji Meguro, its wonderful story and immersive gameplay Persona 4 Golden is the complete package that no JRPG enthusiast should miss out on.
The Story is about Lloyd Irving and his friend Genis Sage accompanying the chosen (Colette Brunel) on their journey of world regeneration. The whole game is cel-shaded which at first glance is a bit of a shock as the animations look a tad static but as you continue you begin to realise that the way the game is animated and designed is somewhat charming and pleasant. This game uses a real-time battle system (similar to that of the Star Ocean series) which is fast, dynamic and easy to utilise. You can only play as one character at a time while the other characters are controlled by AI. I normally get quite worried when AI takes control of party members in games because normally they take actions that are not beneficial to the fight or otherwise not altogether helpful. Thankfully that is not the case in Tales of Symphonia, as characters will use items if their HP or TP levels are low, however if you are not a fan of this you can micromanage your team by setting up strategies for each team member, so they do not overuse items or put themselves in immediate danger when in combat. This provides great gameplay by allowing you to experience fast-paced combat without having to worry about teammates.
Tales of Symphonia does a fantastic job of incorporating a well-structured narrative and fast-paced gameplay which makes the game truly enjoyable and damn right fun. There is a multitude of side quests to complete, secret bosses to defeat and lots of weapons and costumes to collect. This game has so much content that you will never run out of things to do in this game. In one playthrough you could play the game for over 120 hours and still not have complete all of the sidequests. The reason Tales of Symphonia takes the number 4 on the list is because of the amount of sheer content compact into this game and because I personally believe that the Tales series has the best format of real time combat in any JRPG.
Capcom's Breath of Fire III is the tale of a young boy called Ryu the last of an ancient dragon race and his journey to discover what happened to his ancestors with the help of his friends.
Breath of Fire was one of those games where I instantly got absorbed by the impressive art direction, with its use of vibrant colour and anime art style it is nothing short of delightful. When I played Breath of Fire III the turn based combat is quite standard but still very fun…however, as you progress through the game you unlock the ability to transform into a dragon..which is just as cool as it sounds. At a certain point in the story you can transform by mixing any 2 genes you have collected together and transform into a dragon of your choosing, be it an ice dragon that specialises or a Fire Dragon that specialises in attack but makes your character look half human half dragon in the process, its very cool and very powerful which makes it an absolute blast to use. Even when playing the game again recently I discovered more combinations that I did not know about when originally playing (one was half knight and half dragon) and was one of the reasons I would highly recommend this game to a turn based JRPG fan that wants something slightly different.
Breath of Fire III does break the mould with some features which are quite the pleasant surprise, first of all, is the Master System in which you can assign yourself a master you find in the open world and in return provides you with new spells, stats and abilities as you level up. The second feature is the Faerie Village , which gives the player an opportunity to develop and design a town inhabited by faeries, which when you develop gives you access to unique mini games and items. Overall even though Breath of Fire does not have that many unique features standing out for it, the reason it takes the number 5 spot on this list is because if you had to follow an ingredient checklist on how to make a JRPG. Breath of Fire III would incorporate every JRPG staple making it the perfect comfort food for any JRPG fan.
Terrible author! Great article, off to buy suikoden 2!!


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More Details for 1972-11-23
N1 7L
Unmanned test of manned lunar mission launch vehicle serial number 7L. This article incorporated significant changes to the previous model, including roll 'steering' engines to prevent the loss of control that destroyed 6L. The rocket ascended into the sky, and the engines ran 106.93 seconds, only seven seconds before completion of first stage burnout. Programmed shutdown of some engines to prevent overstressing of the structure led to propellant line hammering, rupture of propellant lines, and an explosion of engine number 4. The vehicle disintegrated.
Kerosene fuelling completed at 01:30. Upper stages Block G and D were fuelled between 04:00 and 05:00. They were allowed to reach thermal equilibrium between 05:00 and 06:15. Between 06:45 and 07:55 all lines and umbilicals were removed from the vehicle. The tower was rolled back at 08:15. Launch was on schedule at 09:00. All was normal to T+50 seconds. Centre engine shutdown at T+94.5 seconds was normal. All was normal at T+100 seconds. Then at T+110 seconds all transmissions from the vehicle suddenly ceased. An examination of telemetry showed that the vehicle catastrophically disintegrated at T+106.94 seconds, only 7 seconds before the end of the stage one burn and separation of the second stage. Later it would be alleged the cause was a failure of the oxidiser pump in engine 4. Kozlov, Kuznetsov, and Dorofeyev all blamed the other for the failure.


Leon Haslam and Michael van der Mark power to victory in the Suzuka 8 Hours for Honda; Former 500cc world champion Kevin Schwantz finishes third for Suzuki.
Leon Haslam has emulated his World Superbike Championship team-mate Jonathan Rea by winning the iconic Suzuka 8 Hours endurance event alongside rookie competitor Michael van der Mark.
Still recovering from the broken leg he suffered in April after a crash at Assen, Haslam, van der Mark and local rider Takumi Takahashi stayed out of trouble to take the MuSASHI RT HARC-PRO Honda to victory.
A superb result for Haslam given the gruelling event and his slow road to recovery, his feat is arguably matched by that of young van der Mark, the 20-year-old winning the iconic race at his first attempt. Historically, a good performance at the Suzuka 8 Hours in front of the Japanese manufacturers has counted for much in terms of career prospects.
Suzuki filled the remaining podium spots, with Yoshimura's Josh Brookes, Takuya Tsuda and Nobuatsu Aoki coming home in second position, while the 'legends' Kagayama Suzuki team of Yukio Kagayama, Noriyuki Haga and Kevin Schwantz produced an excellent performance to get themselves onto the rostrum in third place.
Last year's winner Rea endured a day to forget after his team-mate Ryuichi Kiyonari crashed the FCC TSR at the half-way point and was forced to retire.
German WSBK round set to change venues?


The team behind the Transparent Trade Coffee project is continuing to leverage its robust online research to explore ways in which specialty buyers may make more informed decisions that promote sustainability and stability throughout their supply chains.
In its latest "Insight" report, the TTC team — part of a social enterprise arm of the Emory University business school in Atlanta — presents something of a call to action to specialty coffee buyers toward transaction transparency, proposing that if more roasters are willing to open their books to some degree, then they would help lead the creation of a kind of transaction guide for other specialty coffee buyers.
For now, TTC has conducted what it called "an extensive internet search" that revealed eight coffee roasters throughout the world with at least one published transparency report between the years 2014 to 2017. Those roasters — 49th Parallel, Barismo, Bird Rock, Counter Culture, Pact Coffee, Seattle Coffee Works, Temple Coffee, and Tim Wendelboe — published a combined 17 transparency reports in that time frame, with a combined 753 FOB (free on board) contract prices published.
Read the TTC insight for more detail, but in short, the group's analysis of the data pointed to three dominant factors affecting price: origin, quality, and lot size. The group also arranged the data to show that not only do all these factors matter, but that they are related, and support the idea that multi-tiered pricing schemes may be the way forward for buyers interested in obtaining a sustainable supply of quality coffee.
TTC, as its name implies, would naturally like to collect more data related to pricing transparency, potentially to create a more robust and practical transaction guide for buyers. The group is seeking "price data donors," while noting that its existing numbers do not disclose information about individual contracts, and that simple non-disclosure agreements could be applied.
The group is seeking 20 to 30 more roasters and five to 10 more importers to help flesh out the potential guide.


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The H6 series is speically engineered for high comfort and continuos wear. They provide effective noise protection for daily exposures up to 104db. The foam sealing rings provide a quality noise seal with low pressure for all day wearer comfort.


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Allenjoie és un municipi francès situat al departament del Doubs i a la regió de Borgonya - Franc Comtat. L'any 2007 tenia 682 habitants.

Demografia

Població
El 2007 la població de fet d'Allenjoie era de 682 persones. Hi havia 263 famílies de les quals 56 eren unipersonals (26 homes vivint sols i 30 dones vivint soles), 81 parelles sense fills, 96 parelles amb fills i 30 famílies monoparentals amb fills.

La població ha evolucionat segons el següent gràfic:

Habitants censats

Habitatges
El 2007 hi havia 274 habitatges, 262 eren l'habitatge principal de la família, 1 era una segona residència i 12 estaven desocupats. 257 eren cases i 17 eren apartaments. Dels 262 habitatges principals, 229 estaven ocupats pels seus propietaris, 22 estaven llogats i ocupats pels llogaters i 11 estaven cedits a títol gratuït; 4 tenien una cambra, 6 en tenien dues, 22 en tenien tres, 70 en tenien quatre i 160 en tenien cinc o més. 226 habitatges disposaven pel capbaix d'una plaça de pàrquing. A 112 habitatges hi havia un automòbil i a 136 n'hi havia dos o més.

Piràmide de població
La piràmide de població per edats i sexe el 2009 era:

Economia
El 2007 la població en edat de treballar era de 398 persones, 298 eren actives i 100 eren inactives. De les 298 persones actives 274 estaven ocupades (148 homes i 126 dones) i 24 estaven aturades (10 homes i 14 dones). De les 100 persones inactives 34 estaven jubilades, 38 estaven estudiant i 28 estaven classificades com a «altres inactius».

Ingressos
El 2009 a Allenjoie hi havia 280 unitats fiscals que integraven 756 persones, la mediana anual d'ingressos fiscals per persona era de 19.387 €.

Activitats econòmiques
Dels 15 establiments que hi havia el 2007, 1 era d'una empresa de fabricació d'altres productes industrials, 5 d'empreses de construcció, 4 d'empreses de comerç i reparació d'automòbils, 1 d'una empresa de transport, 1 d'una empresa d'hostatgeria i restauració, 1 d'una empresa financera, 1 d'una empresa de serveis i 1 d'una entitat de l'administració pública.

Dels 5 establiments de servei als particulars que hi havia el 2009, 1 era un paleta, 2 lampisteries, 1 electricista i 1 empresa de construcció.

L'any 2000 a Allenjoie hi havia 12 explotacions agrícoles que ocupaven un total de 504 hectàrees.

Poblacions més properes
El següent diagrama mostra les poblacions més properes.

Referències

 Résumé statistique Fitxa resum de dades estadístiques d'Allenjoie a l'INSEE.
 Évolution et structure de la population Fitxa amb el detall de dades d'Allenjoie a l'INSEE
 France par commune  Dades detallades de tots els municipis de França accessibles a partir del mapa.

Municipis del Doubs


In a much-needed upgrade, Lync 2013 gets bigger and a little bit better on Android devices.
There's been a Lync app for Android for a while, but it has not proven popular with users. For one thing, it would only run on Android phones, not tablets — even though you're using Lync for VoIP calls and video rather than voice calls on your phone. It was also on the basic side.
The new Lync client for Android (version 5.4) catches up with some of the features avaialble to iPad users, including one handy option that Lync admins will like: easy error logging. And it now runs on tablets, which shows up in little things like an icon that doesn't look as if it's been resized. More importantly, Microsoft has made video work at the tablet's larger screen size. Video still works in landscape mode, which is more useful on a tablet screen, but there are no major changes to the interface.
In fact, when you're setting up the Lync app on an Android tablet it feels as if you're doing it on a phone, because after filling in the email address and password you use to log into Lync, it asks you for your mobile number as a fallback for making calls when you're not on Wi-Fi. Although the settings page has an option for turning that off by requiring Wi-Fi for calls, it was greyed out on our test Nexus 7 (if you're on a tablet without a SIM you're not going to get online when you don't have Wi-Fi, and you can enter any phone number here, so it's only confusing rather than being a real problem). This also where you can enable logging to troubleshoot connection problems.
Logging doesn't save the contents of calls or chat, or your address book — it's just the details of the login requests and answers for the server, so the admin can tell whether the problem is with the server or the network connection. The default setting is to ask you before uploading logs to the server.
Setup also asks if you want to sync contacts onto your phone, which you might not want to do if you have a very large address book. However, you can collapse the Other contacts list and just see favourites to manage that. You can also search for contacts, but that only finds people in your company directory, not people in your phone address book; if you want general VoIP calling, you'll want to install Skype as well.
If you know you have a Lync meeting scheduled, you're more likely to have something prepared to show people, which might mean bringing your laptop — scheduled meetings imply a more formal setting, and perhaps screen sharing. If you're using Lync on a tablet you might be joining a meeting on the go, and your meeting list shows up in the app to support that. But you're also likely to hop onto Lync on your phone or tablet to chat or call with someone quickly because you have questions or ideas that won't wait. Two catchup features are useful here: you can tap the three dots at the top of a voice or video call to pop up a menu that lets you invite someone else into the call; and if you already have a group set up in your address book, you can send an invitation from the Android client to start a voice or video call or a group IM chat (or just send everyone an email without having to type in all their names in the mail client).
It's a year since the Lync 2013 client was released for Android phones, although some enterprising users found a way to sideload it to bypass the Play store compatibility check that blocked installing on tablets. This update doesn't just unlock Lync for Android tablets; it also adds key features already present in the iPad app. However, neither of these apps deliver the presentation and screen-sharing tools you get on the desktop Lync client . These are tools for keeping in touch with colleagues or customers when you're on the move, not a full replacement for what Lync can give you on your PC.


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News :: Environment : Human Rights : International : Media : Palestine : War and Militarism
The Shortwave Report 4/06/12 Listen Globally!
Email: outfarpress (nospam) saber.net
Address: PO Box 1162 Willits CA 95490	 05 Apr 2012
A weekly 30 minute review of international news and opinion, recorded from a shortwave radio and the internet. With times, frequencies, and websites for listening at home. 3 files- Highest quality broadcast, regular broadcast, and slow-modem streaming. Free to rebroadcast. Spanish National Radio, Radio Deutsche-Welle, Radio Havana Cuba, The Voice of Russia, and NHK World Radio Japan
Dear Radio Friend,
The latest Shortwave Report (April 6) is up at the website http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml in 3 forms- (new) HIGHEST QUALITY (128kb)(27MB), broadcast quality (16MB), and quickdownload or streaming form (6MB) (28:59) Links at page bottom
(If you have access to Audioport there is a highest quality version posted up there {35MB} http://www.audioport.org/index.php?op=producer-info&uid=904&nav=&)
This week's show features stories from the Spanish National Radio, Radio Deutsche-Welle, Radio Havana Cuba, the Voice of Russia, NHK World Radio Japan.
From SPAIN- Spain has proposed radical austerity measures in the face of massive demonstrations last weekend- nearly a million people took over the streets of both Barcelona and Madrid. The Colombian rebel group FARC has released 10 hostages they have held for more than a decade.
From GERMANY- This past week there has been a push to expand the 1999 international campaign to cease the use and manufacture of land mines. 80% of nations have signed the treaty, though Russia, China, and the US refuse to accept the terms.
From CUBA- A report on the upcoming Presidential election in Mexico, to be held on July 1st. Voting in the French Presidential election begins on April 22, and leading opposition candidate Francois Hollande has described his plan if elected. Nobel prize winning novelist Gunter Grass criticized Israel's policy against Iran in an infamous new poem. The Syrian government criticized the Friends of Syria conference held last weekend.
From RUSSIA- The BBC is airing an interview this week with "Curveball," an Iraqi defector who lied about mobile biological laboratories- Colin Powell repeated these lies to ensure the invasion of Iraq.
From JAPAN- North Korea says that the US and all other countries are invited to inspect the satellite launch scheduled for April 11. More waste water contaminated with strontium has leaked from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, further contaminating the Pacific Ocean. An Insight on the increase in Tibetan suicides done in protest of China's heavy handed control over the Tibetan people.
There is an article about the Shortwave Report by Cassandra Roos on line -
http://www.campusprogress.org/soundvision/780/big-stories-shortwaves
I was interviewed for an informative weekly radio show Mediageek, available at http://radio.mediageek.net
All that plus times and frequencies for listening at home. It's free to rebroadcast, please notify me if you're airing it and haven't notified me in the last month, please mention the website if you only air a portion. If you just want to listen and have a slow connection, try the streaming version- lower sound quality but good enough and way easier if you don't have a high-speed internet connection. If streaming is a problem because of your slow connection, download the smaller file- it takes 20 minutes or less, and will play swell in any mp3 player application (RealPlayer, Winamp, Quicktime, iTunes, etc) you have on your computer.
NEW TIME SLOT on KZYX! This program will be aired on Sunday afternoon at 4pm (PDST) on KZYX/Z Philo CA, you might be able to stream via < http://www.kzyx.org >
There are several other streams that work better- < http://www.freakradio.org >Freak Radio Santa Cruz now streams this program on Friday at 9:00am.(PDST)
NEWLY CORRECTED!!! The Shortwave Report may be downloaded as a podcast from < feed://radio.indymedia.org/en/podcast?keys=shortwave++
I hope you'll listen and air this if you're connected with a radio station. I am still wondering how to get financially compensated for the 25 hours I put into this program weekly- any ideas are appreciated. Any stations rebroadcasting this (or listeners) are welcome to donate for production costs. You can do so through the website. Many thanks to those that have donated! No Guilt! (maybe a little)
links for this week's edition-
< http://www.outfarpress.com/swr_04_06_12_128.mp3 > (27 MB) HIGHEST QUALITY
< http://www.outfarpress.com/swr_04_06_12.mp3 > (16MB) Broadcast Quality
< http://www.outfarpress.com/swr_04_06_12_24.mp3 > (6MB) Slow Modem streaming
Website Page-
< http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml >
¡FurthuR! Dan Roberts
-- "We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn."
-- Mary Catherine Bateson
http://www.outfarpress.com
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'The Wheel of Time' Episode 5 Continues to Explore the Tight Bond Between Aes Sedai and Warders
By Meghan O'Keefe Twitter @megsokay Dec 3, 2021 at 9:00am
The Wheel of Time Episode 5 "Blood Calls Blood" opens and closes on heartbreaking scenes highlighting the tight bond between the women of the Aes Sedai and their bonded Warders. Indeed, if there's one thing that The Wheel of Time on Prime Video takes pains to emphasize, it's how interconnected Aes Sedai and the Warders are, physically, emotionally, and mentally. So far, the show has explored both the platonic intimacy, the potential for sheer sensuality, and now the implicit pain of this bond. And honestly? I am 100% here for it.
Thrusting the Aes Sedai/Warder relationship this early on in the storytelling is going to help bridge many important moments later on. More importantly, it adds much-needed pathos and nuance to the characters of this world all together. The Wheel of Time is putting Warders front and center, as they should be. Giving the likes of Lan (Daniel Henney), Stepin (Peter Franzén), Maksim (Taylor Napier), Ihvon (Emmanuel Imani) and more the kind of attention they don't get in the early books helps to broaden the span of the show's world in a way that benefits non-readers and hard core novel fans alike. Warders deserve this kind of screentime! (And Aes Sedai deserve this level of humanization this early in the saga…)
Amazon's The Wheel of Time is based on Robert Jordan's 14+ book series of the same name. The first season adapts the first novel in the series, The Eye of the World, along with threads from the prequel New Spring and the first sequel, The Great Hunt. In fact, the show takes its inspiration from the whole entire series, introducing themes and characters well before they show up in Book 1 (and cutting key characters from the first season entirely). The story follows an Aes Sedai named Moiraine Damodred (Rosamund Pike) who has devoted her life to finding the reincarnation of the most powerful channeler in history, the Dragon. She and her Warder Lan travel to the Two Rivers, an isolated farming community, where they realize the Dragon could be one of a handful of youths.
Photo: Prime Video
While The Eye of the World details the ensuing journey with exacting detail, stopping in numerous cities, hamlets, and welcoming inns, Prime Video's show compresses it over a few episodes. We skip repetitive meetings in favor of going deeper with the foundations of Robert Jordan's world. Namely, the politics and peculiarities of the Aes Sedai themselves, starting with — but not limited to — their unique relationships with Warders.
One of the things Robert Jordan's writing does so well is slowly, but surely, build a wildly vast fantasy world brick by metaphorical brick. He starts with the familiar: a story of nobodies discovering they are somebody to a shadowy dark power. They must leave home with a wizened mentor with magical ability and lose their innocence in the process. But as Jordan's books go on, their scope expands beyond the perspectives of the Two Rivers folks. And as the story continues, the tight connection Aes Sedai feel with their Warders becomes all too important to the action.
By giving more screen time to the Warders than expected, The Wheel of Time series is not just setting up storylines to come but introducing these characters as people, and not "lapdogs with two legs." Moreover, the show is using poignant dramatic moments to emphasize how interconnected the Aes Sedai are with those who are bonded to them. It all adds to the drama of The Wheel of Time. It broadens the scope. It humanizes its seemingly superhuman characters.
Some Wheel of Time fans might be perplexed as to why the show gives so much time to these usually quiet characters, but I love it. It's a sage storytelling choice that not only plants seeds for what might yet still come, but also widens the reality all the characters live in. I love how much The Wheel of Time loves the Aes Sedai sisters' Warders.


One of the men accused of fatally shooting 19-year-old Anthony Singh outside an apartment complex in Antioch last year has been arrested on a murder charges, according to the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office.
Singh was shot at 3:28 a.m. on Aug. 19 in the 2200 block of San Jose Drive and died at the scene, according to police. Another victim who was also 19 was transported to a hospital and survived.
Terrence Webb, 40, was identified as a suspect and prosecutors filed charges against him on March 6. He was then arrested March 18. Webb and co-defendant Gale Young, 37, have both been charged with murder in the shooting, as well as attempted murder and street terrorism. A third co-defendant, 37-year-old Victoria Adrienne Collins, has also been charged with being an accessory after the fact and destroying evidence, as well as being a felon in possession of ammunition. Prosecutors say she has prior convictions for burglary, grand theft and identity theft in San Mateo County.
Webb also has a criminal history, having been charged with murder after a fatal shooting in the End Up nightclub in San Francisco on June 5, 2016, but those charges were ultimately dropped.
Webb, Young and Collins are all scheduled to appear in court April 8. Webb is being held without bail.


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AI has a privacy problem, but these techniques could fix it
Kyle Wiggers@Kyle_L_Wiggers	 December 21, 2019 4:44 PM
Artificial intelligence promises to transform — and indeed, has already transformed — entire industries, from civic planning and health care to cybersecurity. But privacy remains an unsolved challenge in the industry, particularly where compliance and regulation are concerned.
Recent controversies put the problem into sharp relief. The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, a division of the U.K.'s National Health Service based in London, provided Alphabet's DeepMind with data on 1.6 million patients without their consent. Google — whose health data-sharing partnership with Ascension became the subject of scrutiny in November — abandoned plans to publish scans of chest X-rays over concerns that they contained personally identifiable information. This past summer, Microsoft quietly removed a data set (MS Celeb) with more than 10 million images of people after it was revealed that some weren't aware they had been included.
Separately, tech giants including Apple and Google have been the subject of reports uncovering the potential misuse of recordings collected to improve assistants like Siri and Google Assistant. In April, Bloomberg revealed that Amazon employs contract workers to annotate thousands of hours of audio from Alexa-powered devices, prompting the company to roll out user-facing tools that quickly delete cloud-stored data.
Increasingly, privacy isn't merely a question of philosophy, but table stakes in the course of business. Laws at the state, local, and federal levels aim to make privacy a mandatory part of compliance management. Hundreds of bills that address privacy, cybersecurity, and data breaches are pending or have already been passed in 50 U.S. states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Arguably the most comprehensive of them all — the California Consumer Privacy Act — was signed into law roughly two years ago. That's not to mention the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires companies to seek authorization before disclosing individual health information. And international frameworks like the EU's General Privacy Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aim to give consumers greater control over personal data collection and use.
AI technologies have not historically been developed with privacy in mind. But a subfield of machine learning — privacy-preserving machine learning — seeks to pioneer approaches that might prevent the compromise of personally identifiable data. Of the emerging techniques, federated learning, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption are perhaps the most promising.
Neural networks and their vulnerabilities
The so-called neural networks at the heart of most AI systems consist of functions (neurons) arranged in layers that transmit signals to other neurons. Those signals — the product of data, or inputs, fed into the network — travel from layer to layer and slowly "tune" the network, in effect adjusting the synaptic strength (weights) of each connection. Over time, the network extracts features from the data set and identifies cross-sample trends, eventually learning to make predictions.
Neural networks don't ingest raw images, videos, audio, or text. Rather, samples from training corpora are transformed algebraically into multidimensional arrays like scalars (single numbers), vectors (ordered arrays of scalars), and matrices (scalars arranged into one or more columns and one or more rows). A fourth entity type that encapsulates scalars, vectors, and matrices — tensors — adds in descriptions of valid linear transformations (or relations).
In spite of these transformations, it's often possible to discern potentially sensitive information from the outputs of the neural network. The data sets themselves are vulnerable, too, because they're not typically obfuscated, and because they're usually stored in centralized repositories that are vulnerable to data breaches.
By far the most common form of machine learning reverse engineering is called a membership inference attack, where an attacker — using a single data point or several data points — determines whether it belonged to the corpus on which a target model was trained. As it turns out, removing sensitive information from a data set doesn't mean it can't be re-inferred, because AI is exceptionally good at recreating samples. Barring the use of privacy-preserving techniques, trained models incorporate compromising information about whatever set they're fed.
In one study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation were able to extract patients' genomic information from a machine learning model that was trained to predict medical dosage. In another, Carnegie Mellon and University of Wisconsin-Madison research scientists managed to reconstruct specific head shot images from a model trained to perform facial recognition.
A more sophisticated data extraction attack employs generative adversarial networks, or GANs — two-part AI systems consisting of generators that produce samples and discriminators that attempt to distinguish between the generated samples and real-world samples. They're trained to generate samples closely resembling those in the original corpus without having access to said samples and by interacting with the discriminative deep neural network in order to learn the data's distribution.
In 2017, researchers demonstrated that GANs could be trained to produce prototypical samples of a private set, revealing sensitive information from this set. In another study, a team used GANs to infer the samples that were used to train an image-generating machine learning model, with up to a 100% success rate in a "white-box" setting where they had access to the target model's parameters (e.g., the variables a chosen AI technique uses to adjust to data).
Fortunately, there's hope in the form of approaches like federated learning and differential privacy.
Quite simply, federated learning is a technique that trains an AI algorithm across decentralized devices or servers (i.e., nodes) holding data samples without exchanging those samples, enabling multiple parties to build a common machine learning model without sharing data liberally. That's in contrast to classical decentralized approaches, which assume local data samples are widely distributed.
A central server might be used to orchestrate the steps of the algorithm and act as a reference clock, or the arrangement might be peer-to-peer (in which case no such server exists). Regardless, local models are trained on local data samples, and the weights are exchanged among the models at some frequency to generate a global model.
It's an iterative process broken up into sets of interactions known as federated learning rounds, where each round consists of transmitting the current global model state to participating nodes. Local models are trained on the nodes to produce a set of potential model updates at each node, and then the local updates are aggregated and processed into a single global update and applied to the global model.
Federated learning has been deployed in production by Google, a federated learning pioneer. Google uses it for personalization in its Gboard predictive keyboard across "tens of millions" of iOS and Android devices. Alongside the Pixel 4 launch, Google debuted an improved version of its Now Playing music-recognizing feature that aggregates the play counts of songs in a federated fashion, identifying the most popular songs by locality to improve recognition. And the company recently debuted a module for its TensorFlow machine learning framework dubbed TensorFlow Federated, which is intended to make it easier to experiment with deep learning and other computations on decentralized data.
Of course, no technique is without its flaws; federated learning requires frequent communication among nodes during the learning process. Tangibly, in order for the machine learning models to exchange parameters, they need significant amounts of processing power and memory. Other challenges include an inability to inspect training examples, as well as bias due in part to the fact that the AI models train only when power and a means of transmitting their parameters is available.
Differential privacy
Federated learning goes hand in hand with differential privacy, a system for publicly sharing information about a data set by describing patterns of groups within the corpus while withholding data about individuals. It usually entails injecting a small amount of noise into the raw data before it's fed into a local machine learning model, such that it becomes difficult for malicious actors to extract the original files from the trained model.
Intuitively, an algorithm can be considered differentially private if an observer seeing its output cannot tell if a particular individual's information was used in the computation. A differentially private federated learning process, then, enables nodes to jointly learn a model while hiding what data any node holds.
The open source TensorFlow library, TensorFlow Privacy, operates on the principle of differential privacy. Specifically, it fine-tunes models using a modified stochastic gradient descent that averages together multiple updates induced by training data examples, clips each of these updates, and adds noise to the final average. This prevents the memorization of rare details, and it offers some assurance that two machine learning models will be indistinguishable whether a person's data is used in their training or not.
Apple has been using some form of differential privacy since 2017 to identify popular emojis, media playback preferences in Safari, and more, and the company combined it with federated learning in its latest mobile operating system release (iOS 13). Both techniques help to improve the results delivered by Siri, as well as apps like Apple's QuickType keyboard and iOS' Found In Apps feature. The latter scans both calendar and mail apps for the names of contacts and callers whose numbers aren't stored locally.
For their part, researchers from Nvidia and King's College London recently employed federated learning to train a neural network for brain tumor segmentation, a milestone Nvidia claims is a first for medical image analysis. Their model uses a data set from the BraTS (Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation) Challenge of 285 patients with brain tumors, and as with the approaches taken by Google and Apple, it leverages differential privacy to add noise to that corpus.
"This way, [each participating node] stores the updates and limits the granularity of the information that we actually share among the institutions," Nicola Rieke, Nvidia senior researcher, told VentureBeat in a previous interview. "If you only see, let's say, 50% or 60% of the model updates, can we still combine the contributions in the way that the global model converges? And we found out 'Yes, we can.' It's actually quite impressive. So it's even possible to aggregate the model in a way if you only share 10% of the model."
Of course, differential privacy isn't perfect, either. Any noise injected into the underlying data, input, output, or parameters impacts the overall model's performance. In one study, after adding noise to a training data set, the authors noted a decline in predictive accuracy from 94.4% to 24.7%.
An alternative privacy-preserving machine learning technique — homomorphic encryption — suffers from none of those shortcomings, but it's far from an ace in the hole.
Homomorphic encryption
Homomorphic encryption isn't new — IBM researcher Craig Gentry developed the first scheme in 2009 — but it's gained traction in recent years, coinciding with advances in compute power and efficiency. It's basically a form of cryptography that enables computation on plaintext (file contents) encrypted using an algorithm (also known as ciphertexts), so that the generated encrypted result exactly matches the result of operations that would have been performed on unencrypted text. Using this technique, a "cryptonet" (e.g, any learned neural network that can be applied to encrypted data) can perform computation on data and return the encrypted result back to some client, which can then use the encryption key — which was never shared publicly — to decrypt the returned data and get the actual result.
"If I send my MRI images, I want my doctor to be able to see them immediately, but nobody else," Jonathan Ballon, vice president of Intel's IoT group, told VentureBeat in an interview earlier this year. "[Homomorphic] encryption delivers that, and in addition, the model itself is encrypted. So a company … can put that model [on a public cloud], and that [cloud provider] has no idea what their model looks like."
In practice, homomorphic encryption libraries don't yet fully leverage modern hardware, and they're at least an order of magnitude slower than conventional models. But newer projects like cuHE, an accelerated encryption library, claim speedups of 12 to 50 times on various encrypted tasks over previous implementations. Moreover, libraries like PySyft and tf-encrypted — which are built on Facebook's PyTorch machine learning framework and TensorFlow, respectively — have made great strides in recent months. So, too, have abstraction layers like HE-Transformer, a backend for nGraph (Intel's neural network compiler) that delivers leading performance on some cryptonets.
In fact, just a few months ago, Intel researchers proposed nGraph-HE2, a successor to HE-Transformer that enables inference on standard, pretrained machine learning models using their native activation functions. They report in a paper that it was 3 times to 88 times faster at runtime in terms of scalar encoding (the encoding of a numeric value into an array of bits) with double the throughput, and that additional multiplication and addition optimizations yielded a further 2.6 times to 4.2 time runtime speedup.
IBM senior research scientist Flavio Bergamaschi has investigated the use of hardware at the edge to implement homomorphic encryption operations. In a recent study, he and colleagues deployed a local homomorphic database on a device equipped with an AI camera, enabling search to be performed directly on that camera. They report that performance was "homomorphically fast," with lookup taking only 1.28 seconds per database entry, which amounted to a 200-entry query in five minutes.
"We are at what I call inflection points in performance," he told VentureBeat in a recent phone interview. "Now, fully homomorphic encryption is fast enough in terms of performance that it's perfectly adequate for certain use cases."
On the production side, Bergamaschi and team worked with a U.S.-based banking client to encrypt a machine learning process using homomorphic techniques. That machine learning process — a linear regression model with well over a dozen variables — analyzed 24 months of transaction data from current account holders to predict the financial health of those accounts, partly to recommend products like loans. Motivated by the client's privacy and compliance concerns, the IBM team encrypted the existing model and the transaction data in question, and they ran predictions using both the encrypted and unencrypted model to compare performance. While the former ran slower than the latter, the accuracy was the same.
"This is an important point. We showed that if we didn't have any model for [our] prediction, we could take transaction data and perform the training of a new model in production," Bergamaschi said.
Enthusiasm for homomorphic encryption has given rise to a cottage industry of startups aiming to bring it to production systems. Newark, New Jersey-based Duality Technologies, which recently attracted funding from one of Intel's venture capital arms, pitches its homomorphic encryption platform as a privacy-preserving solution for "numerous" enterprises, particularly those in regulated industries. Banks can conduct privacy-enhanced financial crime investigations across institutions, so goes the company's sales pitch, while scientists can tap it to collaborate on research involving patient records.
But like federated learning and differential privacy, homomorphic encryption offers no magic bullet. Even leading techniques can calculate only polynomial functions — a nonstarter for the many activation functions in machine learning that are non-polynomial. Plus, operations on encrypted data can involve only additions and multiplications of integers, which poses a challenge in cases where learning algorithms require floating point computations.
"In domains where you can take 10 seconds to turn around your inference, [homomorphic encryption] is fine, but If you need a three-millisecond turnaround time today, there's just no way to do it," Ballon said. "The amount of computation is too high, and this goes back to the domain of engineering."
Since 2014, Bergamaschi and colleagues have experimented with hardware approaches to accelerating homomorphic operations. Historically, bandwidth has been the biggest stumbling block — while accelerators yield strong benchmark performance individually, they don't yield strong systems performance overall. That's because the data required to perform the operations requires a lot of bandwidth between processors and the accelerator.
The solution might lie in techniques that make more efficient use of processors' on-chip memory. A paper published by researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology advocates the use of a combined cache for all normal and security-supporting data, as well as memory scheduling and mapping schemes for secure processors and a type-aware cache insertion module. They say that together, the combined approaches could reduce encryption performance degradation from 25%-34% to less than 8%-14% in typical 8-core and 16-core secure processors, with minimal extra hardware costs.
New techniques might solve some of the privacy issues inherent in AI and machine learning, but they're in their infancy and not without their shortcomings.
Federated learning trains algorithms across decentralized edge devices without exchanging their data samples, but it's difficult to inspect and at the mercy of fluctuations in power, computation, and internet. Differential privacy, which exposes information about a data set while withholding information about the individuals, suffers dips in accuracy caused by injected noise. As for homomorphic encryption — a form of encryption that allows computation on encrypted data — it's somewhat slow and computationally demanding.
Nevertheless, folks like Ballon believe all three approaches are steps in the right direction. "This is very similar to going from HTTP to HTTPS," Ballon said. "We'll have the tools and capabilities to make [privacy in machine learning] seamless someday, but we're not quite there yet."


A comprehensive and well-planned tour at an honest price.
Enjoy a guided city tour of Cape Town.
Visit Table Mountain – a prominent landmark overlooking the city of Cape Town.
Enjoy an African sunset, at the iconic Victoria & Alfred Waterfront.
Marvel at the wonders of Cape Town on your Peninsula Tour.
Befriend the Penguins at Boulders Beach on your visit to Simon's Village.
Enjoy a scenic drive on the Garden route to Knysna.
Experience an extraordinary encounter with the wild at Bushveld.
Explore Sun City and try your luck at the Casino and Entertainment Centre.
Spend the day at the biggest theme park in South Africa – Gold Reef City OR Visit Lion & Safari Park and admire the magnificent beasts in their natural surroundings.
Service of Multilingual & Knowledgeable Tour Manager accompanying you throughout the tour.
03 nights at Hotel Cape Milner or Radisson or similar in Cape Town.
02 nights at Hotel Oubaai or similar in George / Knysna or similar.
01 night at Hotel Mabula Game Lodge or similar in Mabula.
01 night at Hotel Sun City Soho or similar in Sun City.
01 night at Hotel Centurion Lake or similar in Johannesburg.
07 Jain / Vegetarian/ Non-Vegetarian Lunches.
08 Indian Jain / Vegetarian / Non-Vegetarian Dinners.
George to Johannesburg or VV.
* Please contact us for current offers.
Day 1 Arrive in Cape Town – a coastal city in South Africa.
Welcome to Cape Town – South Africa. Cape Town is one of the most popular cities in South Africa. Its diversity, modernism co-exists with nature's bountiful blessings and makes it an ideal place to start your visit. On arrival, complete your immigration and customs formalities and then board your coach and proceed hotel. (Check-in after 15:00) Rest of the day is free for you to wander around and get familiar with the city.
Day 2 Visit the Table Mountain. Enjoy the evening at the famous Canal Walk.
Today enjoy a full day tour of Cape Town. Visit the Table Mountain (Table Mountain excursion is weather permitting), one of the world's 7 Wonders of Nature. Take the cable car to the top, for a panoramic view of the city and coastline. Continue through Signal Hills further on your Cape Town City Tour. See the historic Malay Quarter. Drive past the Parliament House, Slave Lodge, and the South African Museum, with its famed Bushmen exhibits. See the Castle and other interesting sights and indulge in a walk at the Company Gardens of Parliament House. If time permits also see the Clifton Bay and Sea Point.
Today evening proceed to the famous Canal Walk. Canal Walk Shopping Centre is Africa's leading super-regional retail mall. Its dominant presence attracts diverse shoppers from an extensive portion of the Western Cape, and further afield, with its comprehensive retail and leisure options. Canal Walk emerges as the world's most desirable brands with shopping convenience and entertainment with everyday leisure, all in a majestic set.
Day 3 Enjoy a full day tour of Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. Peninsula Tour including Hout Bay and Chapmans Peak. Meet the Penguins at Boulders Beach.
Today morning depart for a full day Tour of Cape Point, flank the cold Atlantic Ocean en route to Hout Bay – Once a fishing community now one of the most popular residential areas, the harbor still has a charm of days gone by. Enjoy the cruise to "Seal Island" (Weather permitting). Continue alongside the Indian Ocean, and stop to see and visit the Jackass Penguin Colony (Boulders Bay) – home to a breeding colony of over 2000 endangered African Jackass Penguins. Visit the Chapman's Peak to enjoy the most scenic and enticing view of Cape Peninsula. Later proceed towards Cape Point, and the Cape of Good Hope said to be the romantic meeting place of the two mighty oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian.
Day 4 Enjoy a city tour of Hermanus. Travel on the most scenic Garden Route. Enjoy a city tour of Knysna and embark on the Knysna Lagoon Cruise.
Day 5 Enjoy a full day excursion to Oudtshoorn – 'Feather Capital of the World'. A spectacular visit to the Cango Caves and the Wildlife Ranch.
Enjoy a full day tour of Oudtshoorn – a town in the Western Cape province in South Africa. The town is home to the world's largest Ostrich population with a number of specialized ostrich breeding farms such as the Safari Show Farm. Visit the Cango Caves –The Klein Karoo's oldest and most popular attraction and one of the world's natural wonders.
Gather the ultimate "ostrich experience" with thousands of ostriches to view from incubation stage to full-grown adults that visitors can ride at the Ostrich Farm. Visit the Cango Wildlife Ranch which is internationally recognized as one of South Africa's premier attractions in the Western Cape, providing visitors with a world-class experience like no other.
Day 6 Flight to Johannesburg. Enjoy the day exploring Mabula Game drive.
Early morning drive to the George airport for your flight to Johannesburg. On arrival, get transferred to Mabula Game Lodge. A premier destination situated among the breathtakingly panoramic views of the Bushveld. Revel in the sheer variety of animal, bird and vegetation, the diverse landscaping, the grassland plains, and the rocky ridges create an ideal habitat for the free roaming Big Five and other little creatures that will contribute to an enchanted wildlife experience.
Day 7 Enjoy the day exploring Sun City – The Kingdom of Pleasure.
Today morning gets transferred to the Man-made Sun City – The Kingdom of Pleasure. Sun City resort in South Africa is a premium destination, with two championship golf courses, numerous swimming pools, and a huge manmade lake. The vast number of options will surely get you spoilt. In the evening, take a chance to try your luck at the Casino and Entertainment Centre or just explore the resort on your own.
Today we drive to Johannesburg. On arrival, proceed on an orientation tour of Johannesburg city. Take a photo opportunity at the Nelson Mandela Bridge and proceed towards Newtown sites and Carlton Centre. Continue the drive through the high society neighborhood of Houghton to Constitution Hill. Later proceed to Gold Reef City – one of South Africa's top family attractions. Gold Reef City is located on a large Old Goldmine and is actually a combination of a Theme Park, and a Museum. OR Visit the Lion & Safari Park, to get closer than you could ever imagine to Africa's most incredible wildlife. The Lion and Safari Park is a 600-hectare wilderness reserve, and the park offers guests an incredible opportunity to get up close to many of South Africa's most iconic animals.
Day 9 Time to depart and fly back.
Single entry South African visa.
The tour will be operated subject to a minimum of 25 full paying passengers traveling together. In the event that the group size is less than 25 passengers, you will be given an option of traveling on another departure date.
The cost of the Passport, POE charges etc.
Any expenses of a personal nature such as porterage, laundry, wines, mineral / bottled water, food & drink not in the regular menus provided by us, mini bar and telephone calls.
The Mandatory driver tip of ZAR 40 per person per day is not included in the tour cost.
Meals are pre-set and a choice of menu is not available.
Meals will be provided as specified in the itinerary.
Surcharges incase applicable on certain departure dates.


Meraj designs and manufactures a full line of tubes, bars and profiles processing Draw Benches (Semi Auto, Hydraulic & Manual). Available are both gear box and motorized chain type units along with a full selection of features and accessories depending on the application and the customer requirement.
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Spherical die holder for self-alignment.
Round tooth type pneumatic clamps to avoid stock slippage.
AC Regenerative Drive for power saving.
Heavy duty, high reduction gear box.
Carriage driven by Duplex / Triplex type double sprocket & chain having rupture strength 6 times of the draw force.
Automatic & Semi-auto stock Discharge at Front Frame.