text:
Q: Using HMAC with SHA-1 I am attempting to implement HMAC using SHA-1 as the base. Using SHA-1 algorithm from bouncy castle, and implement the HMAC computation. Also to use SHA-1 to hash the input password to get the key for the HMAC algorithm.  I've been trying to do this for a few hours but I really have a poor understanding of HMAC.  If anyone has any tips on how to do this it would be appreciated.  My code below is my implementation of SHA1, via a library function call,  I'm essentially just trying to implement it with HMAC.
public class HMACSHA1 {
static byte[] password;
static byte[] fileName = null;
static byte[] input = new byte[16];
static String File;
public static void main(String[] args) {
    Security.addProvider(Security.getProvider("BC"));
    if(args.length != 2){
        System.out.println("Invalid input");
        System.exit(-1);
    }
    File = args[1];
    try {
        password = args[0].getBytes("UTF-8");
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
        System.out.println("Unable to read password");
        System.exit(-1);
    }
    InputStream inputstream = null;
    try {
             inputstream = new FileInputStream(File);
    } catch (FileNotFoundException e2) {
        e2.printStackTrace();
        System.out.println("No input found\n");
        System.exit(-1);
    }

    MessageDigest hash = null;
    MessageDigest key = null;
    try {
        hash = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1", "BC");
        key = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1", "BC");
    } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (NoSuchProviderException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    key.update(password);
    byte[] HMACKey = key.digest();
    byte[] digest = null;
    int reader = 0;
    while (reader != -1){
        try {
            reader = inputstream.read(input);
        } catch (IOException e2) {
            e2.printStackTrace();
        }
        hash.update(input);
        digest = hash.digest();
        System.out.println(new String(Hex.encode(digest)));
    }

}
}

A: I am not familiar with Bouncy Castle, but you can work out the HMAC-SHA1 without external libraries using only what is provided with Java SE:
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import javax.crypto.Mac;
import javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec;

public String getHmacSha1(byte[] key, byte[] input) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException {
    SecretKeySpec signingKey = new SecretKeySpec(key, "HmacSHA1");

    Mac mac = null;
    mac = Mac.getInstance("HmacSHA1");
    mac.init(signingKey);
    byte[] digest = mac.doFinal(input);

    return Hex.encodeHexString(digest);
}

This is available since Java 1.4 according to the API.


text:
Q: htaccess replace all slash (two and more) by one slash I want to modify an .htaccess file to do 2 things:

*

*Force the addition of a slash at the end of each URL

*Replace the excess slashes (2 and more) by 1 single slash.

Here is a set of URLs and their expected result:
https://www.mywebsite.io/fr > https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/
https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/register > https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/register/
https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/register// > https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/register/
https://www.mywebsite.io/fr////register > https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/register/
https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/register///other////// > https://www.mywebsite.io/fr/register/other/

I manage to do the first step which is to force a final / but I cannot replace the extra /.
Can you help me with this problem?
Here is the content of my .htaccess file
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

## Force HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}/$1 [L,R]

## Force slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [L,R]

## Remove repeated slashs
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)/{2,}(.*)$ [N]
#RewriteRule (.*) %1 [R,L]

RewriteRule (.*)/{2,}(.*) $1/$2 [N]

RewriteRule ^(fr|en){1}(/?)$ content/index.php?lang=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(fr|en){1}(/){1}(registration){1}(/?)$ content/registration.php?lang=$1 [L]

A: Have it like this: (see comments inline)
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

## add https and trailing slash in same rule
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteRule ^(.*?)/?$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L,NE]

## Remove repeated slashs
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s[^?]*//
RewriteRule ^.*$ /$0 [R=301,L,NE]

RewriteRule ^(fr|en)/?$ content/index.php?lang=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^(fr|en)/registration/?$ content/registration.php?lang=$1 [L,QSA]

A: With your shown samples, could you please try following. I have also fixed your small issues of missing flags too in your question. Please make sure you clear your browser cache before testing your URLs.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

## Force HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}/$1 [L,R]

## make slashes to 1 at last or uri, in between slashes will be automatically moved to single slash.
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)(?:/+)$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^(fr|en)/?$ content/index.php?lang=$1 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(fr|en)/(registration)(/?)$ content/$2.php?lang=$1 [NC,L]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


FRANTIC behind-the-scenes negotiations on the terms of Palestinian participation in Middle East peace talks have moved into the home stretch.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin traveled to Egypt Wednesday, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Tuesday, and the Palestinian delegation has been meeting with United States officials in Washington.
After a four-month impasse, it now appears highly probable that talks between Israel and the four Arab delegations will start in Washington on or near April 20, the date set by the Clinton administration in concert with Russia.
"Everyone wants these talks," says a Western diplomat here. "They must go ahead."
The final decision on whether the delegations from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians will attend the talks is expected to be made in Damascus tomorrow.
On the surface, the summit in the Egyptian town of Ismailia between Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Rabin resulted in little more than hopeful platitudes.
The Israelis, bolstered by new US support, are sticking to their refusal to make further concessions on the remaining 396 Palestinians they deported last December for allegedly supporting the militant group Hamas. The issue is the key obstacle to the talks.
But Israeli officials say they are prepared to offer some form of political compensation to the Palestinians in Washington.
"Until April 20, Israel decided not to make any new gestures," Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Wednesday. "Right after that there will be an exchange of gestures between Israel and the Palestinians.... Peace is a process of exchanging gestures instead of exchanging blows."
THE one move the Israelis did make Wednesday was a virtual acceptance of Faisal al-Husseini into the Palestinian delegation.
Mr. Husseini is a widely respected descendant of one of Jerusalem's most famous nationalist families, and his participation would effectively end Israel's refusal to negotiate with residents of Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the 1967 war.
The city is holy both to Muslim and Christian Palestinians, as well as Jews, and is the natural physical and cultural heartland of any Palestinian state, a prospect most Israelis find unacceptable.
Although the Clinton administration was unwilling to push Israel beyond its proposal to return immediately 101 of the Palestinian deportees with the others to be repatriated by the end of the year, it proposed that Israel allow Husseini to join the delegation.
If the Palestinians return to the table, Rabin indicated that Israel would consider repatriating at least 50 Palestinian nationalists associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization who have beendeported since 1967 - a move that could bolster the PLO in its conflict with Hamas.
"We all want this [the return of PLO deportees], the Israelis and the PLO," an Arab diplomat in Cairo says.
IT is believed that one of the messages Mr. Arafat wanted Mubarak to make clear to Rabin was the need to undercut Hamas because its potent ideology of Islamic militancy was a threat to the entire region. Both the PLO and Hamas are contending for popular support in the occupied territories.
Palestinian negotiators apparently are heartened by the US promise to take a more direct role in the peace process, which has yielded no tangible benefits for the Palestinians since it began in Madrid in 1991.
But Arab analysts express concern that Rabin's stance in Ismailia indicated Israel's confidence in the depth of support it has received from the Clinton administration, which has insisted that the Palestinians must agree to come to the table before further concessions are made.
"Rabin was polite but harsh.... With American support they will make their concessions after the Palestinians agree to start the talks so as to appear as a magnanimous gesture," says Mohammad Sayed Ahmed, an Egyptian political analyst here.
At the heart of Palestinian concern is how much land they will be allowed to keep and over what period they gain independence.
During the Ismailia press conference Mr. Rabin said: "We don't want to annex the bulk of almost 2 million Palestinians who reside in the territories," and added that "land for peace" would be the basis of the negotiations.


"Airplanes and Ships and Jockeys" is a project based on photographs collected over the past three years. The book contains exactly what the title implies; images of airplanes, ships and jockeys. But in this case the airplanes have crashed, the ships are about to sink and the jockeys are about to fall of their horses.


text:
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. A History
In August 1981, artist and activist Tim Rollins was recruited by the principal of Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx to develop a curriculum that combined art-making with lessons in reading and writing for students classified as "at risk." On the first day of school, Rollins told his students, "Today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history." This book unfolds that history, offering the first comprehensive catalog of work created collaboratively by Rollins and several generations of students, now known as the "Kids of Survival." Rollins and his students developed a way of working that combined art-making with reading literature and writing personal narratives: Rollins or a student would read aloud from classic literary texts by such authors as Shakespeare and Orwell while the rest of the class drew or wrote on the pages being read, connecting the stories to their own experiences. Often, Rollins and his students (who later named themselves "Kids of Survival" or K.O.S.) cut out book pages and laid them on a grid on canvas before undertaking their graphic interventions. This process developed into the group's signature style, which they applied to literary texts, musical scores, and other printed matter. This book and the accompanying major museum retrospective document the history of the groundbreaking practice of Tim Rollins and K.O.S., with full color images of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. These include a caricature of Jesse Helms with an animal body drawn on the pages of Animal Farm; graffiti-like images painted in acrylic on the pages of Frankenstein; a gleaming pattern of fantastical golden horns on Kafka's Amerika; and a series of red letter A's on The Scarlet Letter.
Text: Berry Ian. pp. 220; 120 COL; paperback. Publisher: M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, 2009.
ISBN: 9780262013550| 026201355X
Drawings // Installation Art // Painting // Performance
Berry Ian, Rollins Tim & K.O.S.
Tim Rollins & K.O.S.: An Index
Richard Pettibone: A Retrospective
NY Art Now. The Saatchi Collection
Doubletake. Collective Memory & Current Art

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The Santa Cruz Classic dot is one of the most recognisable designs in the skate world. This is the long sleeve Dot logo tee, the dot being designed by Jim Phillips back in the 1970's. Super soft material makes this a really comfortable tee and I would highly recommend.
Looks good and it fits. One happy recipient!


Small format purchase order, AFG 91i-2, keeps track of purchases with 9 lines for product information. AFG 91i-2 purchase order also includes sections for; requisition number, quote number, authorization signature, pricing, and much more. AFG 91i-2 purchase order form comes with 2 holes punched on the bottom, for easy filing.
AFG 91i-2 purchase order is printed in blue ink on carbonless paper, consisting of 2 copies; white / yellow.
Personalize this product by adding your company name, address, contact information and numbering to AFG 91i-2 purchase order form, FREE of charge!


Kenneth P. Norquay, CMT hasn't left any messages.
Was in a roaring bull market, went sideways for quite a long time and has now just broken out to new highs. He can see no resistance from here and would put a stoploss at about $58, with the right to raise it.
(London Stock Exchange)Statistically both trusts and energy stocks are starting to come on. Good combination. For longer-term investors, he would suggest a stoploss of about 10%-15% below where it is.
Has broken out to new highs. Suggested stoploss would be around $35.
(A Top Pick Apr 17/07. Up 0.4% including dividends.) This is no longer a technical pick. It is now a fundamental pick. Will takeover go through or not? Had a stoploss and was stopped out of part of his position.
(A Top Pick Apr 17/07. Down 17%.) When the Cdn$ gained strength last summer, that was his exit point. If you are a short-term trader, this is not a bad Buy point as it allows you to put a very tight stop in.
(A Top Pick Apr 17/07. Down 10%.) Was in an uptrend until December and then headed down.
In a dynamic uptrend. Very sharp correction in January and is now consolidating. Formed a triangle from the 2 last highs. When it breaks through the top of the triangle with high-volume, that is bullish. If it breaks through the bottom, look out.
Went sideways for a while and has now just cratered. To play it, you need to wait for a reversal.
This one is in an uptrend and is still going up. Went through its resistance level from 07 and that is a very bullish sign. With gold going up at the same time, this is a very positive sign.
For an entry point, he would use any breakout beyond the 2 highs of November and March of about $1.60 and is accompanied by a lot of volume. Otherwise, it is in the sideways pattern at $1.40.
In an uptrend and has broken through new highs in the short term. The $48.50 .would be your stoploss.
Has a positive long-term uptrend in a market that is not really positive long-term. In the last 2 months it sold off with the rest of the market from a new high in January. Now consolidating. If it broke through the recent highs of $60, that would be a bullish signal.
Good solid uptrend until last summer and has been going sideways ever since. More or less in line with the rest of the market. Not a great chart.
Stock has been in a downtrend for a year and it's very serious right now. From a technician's point of view, the uptrend has been broken and the Sell point was at about $63. There could be another climax approaching. There was a climax reversal in January and the financials did bounce, but unfortunately it wasn't over.


"Thus Samuel grew and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fail. All Israel from Dan even to Beersheba knew that Samuel was confirmed as a prophet of the Lord.
It was the summer of 1979. I was a summer missionary assigned to the Kansas/Nebraska Baptist Convention. My assignment was to serve on a music team consisting of two girls and two guys. We provided music for VBS programs, lake resort worship services, summer camps, and church worship services.
We all arrived in Topeka, KS traveling from Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas. Orientation was a blur, then we embarked on our ten-week adventure. Every place in which we served proved to be an opportunity to see God's faithfulness as we lived in people's homes and engaged in their lives for one week before we were off to the next assignment.
Halfway through the summer, I received news that my grandmother had passed away. She had been ill, and I had said goodbye to her prior to leaving home. The people in the church we were serving that week heard this news and bought a roundtrip airline ticket allowing me to attend her funeral. That was an unexpected blessing and an opportunity for God to demonstrate His provision and faithfulness to many, especially me.
The last time I visited my grandmother prior to my mission trip, I was torn between wanting to be with her and my family and going to serve the Lord those ten weeks. She was a strong Christian and had been a significant influence in my life. I knew she wanted me to go and we were both at peace as to where she was going.
It was during that summer missions experience that I settled the issue of God calling me into vocational ministry. When I returned home, I shared the news with my parents. They were encouraging, and for the first time, they shared with me that when I was an infant they had dedicated me to the Lord for whatever He chose for my life. There was never any pressure on me from them to make that decision. It was the result of God working all of these things together according to His will.
God called Samuel at a young age and equipped him to serve by having his mother dedicate him to live with God's prophet Eli in the temple of the Lord. Whenever the Lord may call on you to serve Him in any capacity, be assured that He who calls you will also bring it to pass (1 Thessalonians 5:24).
Is there something in your life today that you believe God wants you to surrender to Him?
How might your obedience to God be an influence and leave a legacy that will benefit others going forward?
God's plan is for all family members to work together so that God is honored. Choose your favorite board game and enjoy playing together as a family.
Begin to pray today that God will use your life to influence others to follow Him. Share your decision with someone you trust.
Jim is passionate about working with Boomers and Seniors because they are the best! He is encouraged by their energy and hearts for the Lord and reaching others for Christ. When Jim isn't working he enjoys being with his family, preferably at the beach! He also enjoys musical theatre and the symphony. Jim and his wife, Nan, have been married over 35 years and have four adult children.


The QS-800A is a combination of Sansui's new QS matrix system 4-channel decoder and a high performance 200 watt stereo amplifier to amplify the rear channel signals for 4-channel sound reproduction.
The decoder features the exclusive QS Vario-Matrix circuitry which provides optimum separation among the reproduced sounds.
When added to a present stereo system, this decoder and the rear channel amplifier will work together to (1) decode encoded 4-channel program sources back into 4-channel, and (2) transform (synthesize) conventional 2-channel sources into 4-channel.
The QS-800A as a whole also offers complete provisions for reproducing discrete 4-channel program sources and for reproducing 2-channel sources in 2-channel stereo if you so desire.
As such, it is the most complete, most authentic means of upgrading your stereo system to immediate 4-channel status.
This website is not affiliated with or sponsored by Sansui. To purchase QS-800A spares or accessories, please contact the company via their website or visit an authorised retailer.


text:
Trump's Approval Rating Has Dropped. How Much Does That Matter?
Jun. 11, 2020 , at 7:00 AM
Filed under 2020 Election
President Trump's approval rating has taken a hit in recent weeks.
For the last three weeks, President Trump's approval rating has steadily ticked downward. It now sits at 41.1 percent,1 according to FiveThirtyEight's presidential approval tracker.
This is notable, because it's the lowest Trump's approval rating has been since the House of Representatives was in the midst of conducting its impeachment inquiry in November 2019.
It's not exactly hard to unpack why this is happening now. Trump has gotten consistently low marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and many Americans also don't approve of how he's responded to the protests following the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by police officers last month.
The question is: Just how much does this latest shift in approval numbers matter?
Trump, of course, has had an approval rating of 41 percent before. In fact, it has hovered between 40 and 45 percent for most of his presidency, making his approval rating the steadiest of any president since World War II.
FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast: Americans Dislike How Trump Is Handling The Crises
All VideosYouTube
So it's an open question where Trump's approval rating will go from here. It could have already hit its nadir, given how consistent the upper and lower bounds have been, in which case it might continue steadily along at this level. Or it could slide even further and match some of his most unpopular moments as president. For example, Trump's approval rating hovered between 37 and 38 percent in the last two months of 2017, following his "both sides" response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Of course, it's also possible his numbers could tick back up. Remember that, prior to this downturn, Trump's approval was actually the highest it had been since he took office in January 2017 — 45 to 46 percent, on average — likely thanks to a "rally-around-the-flag" bounce in response to his initial handling of the coronavirus crisis.
The important takeaway at this point, though, is that for all the talk of Trump being "Teflon Don," he isn't actually indestructible. The downward movement in his approval rating belies the notion that nothing matters when it comes to public opinion of this president — his actions and events can, in fact, affect his standing. And for that reason, his reelection chances could now be in real danger.
[Related: Is Public Opinion Turning Against President Trump?]
We don't know if Trump's approval will fall below 40 percent this time around, but it will matter whether Trump's approval is closer to 40 percent or 45 percent in November. Take the 2018 midterm elections. Then, Trump's approval rating was just shy 42 percent in our tracker. That was significant, considering that 90 percent of the voters who disapproved of the president backed Democrats in their House vote, according to the exit polls.
And already, with Trump's approval rating slipping below 42 percent once again, we're seeing poor numbers for him in head-to-head polls against the Democrats' presumptive nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden. Throughout April and May, Biden led Trump by about 4 to 6 points in RealClearPolitics' average of national polls, but since the start of the protests around Floyd's death, Biden's lead has increased to 8 points.
Other data points in recent national polls hint at how Trump's poor approval rating could hurt him in November, too. First, CNN/SSRS's early June survey found Biden winning 92 percent of voters who disapproved of Trump, which is roughly in line with what the 2018 exit polls found. Similarly, Emerson College found Biden winning 91 percent of those who disapproved of Trump in its early June poll. What these two polls suggest is that even if Trump gets overwhelming support from those who do approve of him — in particular Republicans — an approval rating of 40 percent probably won't be enough to win, especially if Biden is winning 90 percent of the voters who disapprove of Trump, as this is a much larger group.
[Related: How Popular Is President Donald Trump?]
This is doubly true if independent voters are also turned off by Trump, as they backed him by 4 points in 2016, according to the exit polls. And there's reason to believe Trump might already be in trouble with independents. That CNN poll found, for instance, Trump trailing by 11 points with this group, while a Monmouth University poll conducted in late May and early June had Trump down by 16 points. Other surveys have found Trump in slightly better shape with independents, although still trailing Biden. For instance, an early June poll from NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist had him behind by 4 points, and the latest survey from The Economist/YouGov had him down by 3 points. The margins here matter, but at this stage, the polls generally agree that Trump's losing among independents, which isn't a good sign for his reelection chances.
Of course, with roughly five months to go until Election Day, Trump has time for his approval rating to bounce back, just as it has previously. Trump's actions, as we've seen, can negatively affect his ratings, but it's also within his power to boost them. But the more Trump's approval rating hangs out around the 40 percent mark, the harder it is to imagine him attracting enough support to win reelection — especially given his inability to broaden his appeal. And as we've said before, Trump's base won't be enough.
As of 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 10.
Donald Trump (1467 posts) 2020 Election (1164) Joe Biden (484) Coronavirus (317) COVID-19 (294) Approval Ratings (109) Presidential Approval (44) 2020 Police Protests (35) Protests (29) Police Protests (11)


text:
Home Business VoIP hacking to hurt businesses
VoIP hacking to hurt businesses
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a subculture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerised or based on VoIP, phreaking has become closely linked with computer hacking. But is VoIP hacking about to hurt businesses?
Apr 11, Western Australia Police warned the state's businesses to change passwords and cap international calls on enterprise VoIP networks, after investigating several cases of scammers hacking the networks to commit fraud. The WA Police said three businesses have reported their VoIP networks hacked by opportunists using the networks to make calls to international numbers offering premium voice services – often owned by the attacker.
In total, the three businesses were set to have suffered losses of some $70,000 from the attacks. Similar methods were used in early 2009 in an attack that caused one small business to run up a $120,000 bill.
In Feb 11, an incident closer to home saw fraudsters hacking into two Guernsey firms' phone answering systems leaving them with bills for £28,000. The companies targeted in the phone 'phreaking' attacks were in the finance and legal sectors and had their systems hijacked over one weekend.
Guernsey Police's Commercial Fraud Department, said fraudsters guessed the password to the answerphone accounts and were then able to make calls all over the world, including to North Korea and Somalia. Experts think 'sophisticated "war diallers" and "password crackers" were the more likely method used to gain illegal access.
Most of us don't know and are not aware of the dangers of VoIP and the more widely that VoIP is being implemented across businesses the larger the danger.
As demonstrated, security breaches on VoIP systems already include the stealing of telephone numbers and using them to make calls which appear on a business' phone bill. Take the example of premium rate numbers such as 09 numbers that yield revenue for the carrier and the company that set up the number. The phone operator pays the firm as much as 90% of the generated revenue.
The scam normally involves a bogus operation, registered outside the EU, to hack into an unsuspecting business' PBX at a time when no one is working and once in hackers programme the PBX to automatically make these premium rate calls. No one is aware of the scam until much later as evidenced in the examples before.
Industrial competition is another area where we could potentially see a competing company or a third-party/hacktivist block a competitor's phone system and occupy phone lines. The phone system can be hacked to create a denial of service attack, preventing outbound calls from being made – suspending a competitor's ability to make calls which might require days to fix.
With spam taking up 80 percent of internet traffic – spam on the phone line could be the next major headache for businesses. While emails can be deleted in seconds if spam ever came on a phone line it would be a different story. Every time a phone rings in a business it is answered and most firms are unable to distinguish a genuine call from spam. With no real urgency shown by telcos to tackle the problem it can take months to resolve the issue by which time the spammer has made their money.
VoIP will make it easier to tap into phone calls so we could well see more incidents of phone-hacking. The idea of not securing VoIP network is almost as dangerous as using an internet connection without a firewall. However, there are technical solutions out there that can help. Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBC) can be deployed to protect the network from harm – we just need to start using them. It also helps if businesses set up the telephony system properly and incorporate the right controls to make changes.
VoIP hacking will hurt business but the best way to protect ourselves is to ensure the security is up to the job.
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Thirlmere is a reservoir constructed at the end of the 19th Century to supply water to Manchester. The Thirlmere dam raised the waster level and joined two existing lakes, Leathes Water and Wythburn Water. The area around Thirlmere provides a good range of camping and caravan sites as well as a great selection of attractions and things to do. Check out the key information on the right and then explore the Thirlmere camping and caravanning sites listed below.
In addition to the beauty of the Lake itself, there are also a number of attractions around Thirlmere, including The Threlkeld Quarry and Mining Museum, the many delights of Grasmere and Keswick, and great walks around the Helvellyn range.


Asking Price 170,000E Leasehold - Negotiable!
Business Broker Spain is excited to present such a rare opportunity of a fabulous sea front restaurant located in Javea. The restaurant is totally refurbished to the highest standard seating a maximum of 20 covers inside and 25 outside. Located in a prime location and with potential to increase trade as the owner closes for 3 months of the year.
This must be seen to be appreciated!


Hardening its stand against Pakistan, India Thursday indefinitely suspended cross-LoC trade at two points along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir effective Friday, following reports that it was being "misused" by elements from across the border to smuggle weapons, narcotics and fake currency.
Mirwaiz appeared before the National Investigation Agency for the second consecutive day on Tuesday for questioning in connection with a case related to funding of terror groups and separatist organisations in Jammu and Kashmir.
According to NIA officials, Mirwaiz was asked to appear before the agency on March 11 and March 18, but he expressed his inability to join the investigation in Delhi, maintaining that he fears for his security in view of "conditions of hostility".
Responding to NIA's third summon in the past one month, Mirwaiz agreed to come to Delhi for the investigation. He had refused two summons, earlier, citing safety concerns and asked to be examined in Srinagar.
Mirwaiz is the first separatist leader who has refused to appear in person before the investigating agency. He, however, has maintained that is ready to appear before the agency in the Valley.
The Mirwaiz-led Hurriyat Conference also convened an emergency meeting in Srinagar to discuss the issue. Hurriyat has said that a "hostile environment is being wilfully generated to cause harassment".
Signalling a new faultline, this is the first time religious leaders in Jammu and Kashmir across the Shia-Sunni, Salafi-Sufi divide have come together against what they call the government's crackdown.
In the weeks following the Pulwama attack, there has been a clamp down on separatist leadership in the Valley. On February 26, teams of the NIA conducted raids spread over nine hours at the homes of leaders across Srinagar.
PM Modi is in Kashmir on Sunday, February 3. Separatist leaders have called for a complete shutdown in protest of his visit.


Nanoparticles play an ever-larger role in a range of industrial and commercial products as well as in the study of molecular and particle aggregation phenomena. Advanced applications of nanotechnology have the potential to enable the precise location of cancerous tumors and prevent undesirable microbial growth and contamination in medical devices and consumer products such as textiles. But the analysis of nanoparticles can still be a highly challenging task. Whereas the physical properties of bulk materials remain constant regardless of their size, the size of nanoparticles often dictates their physical and chemical properties. It is essential, therefore, to be able to characterize nanoparticles in order to successfully commercialize them and understand their potential environmental, health and safety risks.
One significant challenge encountered in nanoparticle engineering is their sensitivity to small differences between seemingly similar particles. Slight variations in surrounding media can cause particles to aggregate, change size and react with their environment to oxidize or absorb contaminants. Understanding the time dependence of nanoparticle properties is vital for storage, environmental and health impacts, as well as for manufacturing and product stability. In addition, the regulations governing the use of Engineered Nanoparticles (ENPs) are not fully defined yet. A comprehensive approach to analysis is long overdue.
Methods for the analysis of nanoparticles have been available since the 1980s and light scattering offers one of the most versatile sets of characterization tools. The three most common variations of analytical light scattering include: multi-angle, dynamic and electrophoretic (MALS, DLS and ELS, respectively), which can all be used to characterize different properties of liquid-borne nanoparticles. Quantum dots and liposomes lend themselves particularly well to these light scattering techniques to enable the determination of size and size distributions, shape or conformation, and propensity for aggregation or flocculation.
Depending on the material, MALS and/or DLS may be used in determining nanoparticle size; the combination of sizes derived from MALS and DLS can give insight into the shape of a nanoparticle. MALS can also assess the structure of core-shell nanoparticles. Both MALS and DLS contribute to nanotechnology characterization and nowhere is this more evident than when these technologies are coupled to asymmetric-flow field-flow fractionation (A4F—a system analogous to a size exclusion chromatography separation, although this one optimized for particles) in order to assess high-resolution size and shape distributions of the particle ensembles. Recent investigations have been carried out to explore new applications of MALS to derive the size and structure distributions of a variety of nanoparticle structures using A4F-MALS.
In the environmental field, light scattering coupled to A4F has been employed successfully to characterize metallic and titanium dioxide nanoparticles that are used by scientists to trace seepage through aquifers, the accumulation of cosmetic constituents in wastewater, or leeching from food packaging into streams and rivers.
Nanomedicine covers a wide range of applications from standard drugs delivered in very small particles for enhanced bioavailability to magnetic nanoparticles used for diagnostic purposes. A4F-MALS already plays an important role in these applications since particle size determinations are a critical factor in making sure these particles go where they are supposed to and, if necessary, permeate vascular and cellular membranes. In contrast to A4F-MALS, standard sizing techniques such as TEM sample only a very small fraction of the particles that may not be representative. Light scattering techniques such as DLS or A4F-MALS sample a much larger ensemble. A4F-MALS, in particular, excels at providing well-resolved size distributions and can add additional insight as to the shape and structure information unavailable from most other analytical techniques.
The light scattering toolbox comprising MALS, DLS and ELS is an essential kit for scientists and engineers working in nanoparticle characterization. The development of reference materials for nanotechnology characterization and new studies into harnessing the power of combined analytical technologies such as AF4-MALS will undoubtedly contribute even more to the continued rapid evolution of nanotechnology in the years to come.


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Produced in association with Visible Knowledge Project
Black, Jeremy. Maps and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Maps and politics have been interconnected since the dawn of mapmaking and imperial conquest. This book makes a strong case for the political power of maps. Black buttresses his commentary with an abundance of illustrations.
Buisseret, David. ed., From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North American History Through Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
This is a collection of works by historians, geographers, and map librarians who discuss how to use maps in teaching and research. The topics covered range from the European Antecedents of New World mapping to Aerial Imagery.
Harley, J.B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in Historical Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001.
This is a posthumously issued collection of the writings of one of the leading scholars of philosophy of cartographic history and the meaning of maps in the last quarter of the twentieth century. See especially chapter 5, "Deconstructing the Map."
Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
This is an easy-to-read guide for what to look for and what to watch out for when you read a map. When you finish this book you will be a far savvier map reader.
Ristow, Walter W. American Maps and Mapmakers: Commercial Cartography in the Nineteenth Century. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986.
Ristow, who retired in 1978 as the Chief of the Map Division of the Library of Congress, brings together in this work commentary on the great variety of maps that appeared in the nineteenth century. This is a good starting point for anyone interested in maps of that period.
Thrower, Norman J. Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Initially published as Maps and Man in 1972, Thrower's book is a must for students of the history of cartography. Here, in very readable and concise prose, is the story of the development of mapmaking that treats both the scientific and artistic nature of cartography. It contains an extensive bibliography.
Tyner, Judith. "Persuasive Cartography," Journal of Geography 81 (1982): 140-44.
A dated, but concise, guide for keys to how maps can be used to stretch the truth.
Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: Gilford Press, 1992.
The titles of three chapters in this book explain it well. They are: "Maps Are Embedded in a History They Help Construct," "Every Map shows this...But Not That," and "The Interest the Map Serves is Masked."


advertisement Jim Reed: You just have to know how to arrest them and still make them like you. We call it technique. Pete Malloy: You know what this is? Jim Reed: Yes sir, it's a police car. Pete Malloy: This black and white patrol car has an overhead valve V8 engine. It develops 325 horsepower at 4800 RPM's. It accelerates from 0 to 60 in seven seconds; it has a top speed of 120 miles an hour. It's equipped with a multi channeled DFE radio and an electronic siren capable of admitting three variables, wale, yelp, and alert. It also serves as an outside radio speaker and public address system. The automobile has two shotgun racks, one attached to the bottom portion of the front seat, one in the vehicle trunk. Attached to the middle of the dash, illuminated by a single bulb is a hot sheet desk. Fastened to which you will always make sure is the latest one off the teletype before you ever roll. Jim Reed: Yes sir. Pete Malloy: It's your life insurance and mine. You take care of it and it'll take care of you. Jim Reed: Yes sir. You want me to drive? Pete Malloy: A wise man once said; great hazards accompany innovation. Jim Reed: Yeah. Who was that? Pete Malloy: Me!


text:
Q: How to open file with default application in SWT? I have for example .pdf file (path to that file). How to open this file in default application (probably Acrobat Reader) from SWT application (for example on Button click) ?

A: You should be able to use:
Program.launch(file);

to open the file (using the default application or creator).  From the javadoc:

Launches the operating system executable associated with the file or URL (http:// or https://).  If the file is an executable then the executable is launched.  Note that a Display must already exist to guarantee that this method returns an appropriate result.

Note that there are some peculiarities in Program.launch() (or at least there were, though these may have been fixed in more recent versions of the runtime.)  I don't really remember the specifics of the bugs, but we do some checks to work around some issues:

*

*If you're on a Unix platform, and you're specifying an absolute path, there may be trouble opening that file.  We prefix absolute paths with /. - so that /tmp/foo would be translated to /./tmp/foo - although I don't really remember the specifics of this bug any more than that.

*On Windows, if you're trying to open a UNC path - for example \\server\bar - you need to wrap the string in double-quotes.  For example: Program.open("\"\\server\bar\"");

A: Try Desktop.open:
Desktop.getDesktop().open(file);

A: Maybe this can help to find a decision: we ran into PermGen space trouble upon call Desktop.open() - which is in AWTpackage - out of our SWT application.
So I would prefer Program.launch() over Desktop.open() in a SWT-environment.


text:
Jordan Air Force 1 Retro
He is survived by his wife Jocelyn; Daughter Cindy (fianc John); Son Roland Pubols; Granddaughter Arianna; Brothers Merton (Joan), David (Jane) and Fred (Ellen). Memorial on Monday, April 24, 2017 at Kalihi Union Church, 2214 N. Apple introduced a "swim proof" watch, the Apple Watch Series 2. The new watch has built in GPS, a brighter display and faster processor than the previous Apple Watch.
But Lichtman counters by saying that system has correctly predicted every election since 1984 (specifically, his predictions have picked the next president correctly in all of those elections but 2000, when he Jordan Air Force 1 Retro picked Al Gore, who won the popular vote). And Lichtman has his own criticism for data based predictions."Polls are not predictors," he said Friday in an email.
"You don't have warm blood running in your veins if you're not affected by the way this guy died. It's horrific," said Hoon Chun, assistant head deputy district attorney for the office's Consumer Protection Division, who helped prosecute the case. If you split the costs between several neighbors, you will be able to afford bigger, better and more efficient solar panels or wind turbines. Energy independence is a communal idea, and sharing these facilities with your neighbors is a good way to contribute to the renewable energy movement..
And all this at nearly 40,000 feet in the air, above the Amazon. The pilots, unsuccessful in contacting anybody on the ground, desperately looked for a place to land. The confusion exists because, at its start, pneumonia symptoms can be similar to those of a cold, including cough, fever and shortness of breath. Unfortunately, that's where the similarities end.
Smoke will come out of the can. The smoke will burn. This way you can change your disposition and the photograph accordingly so as to get the very best look. On different days, you can invent different scenes and settings for the shoot; in time you may even come to enjoy this hobby and take many more beautiful and fascinating photographs..
Admiral Harris said that the US and Australia were "exploring greater integration of fifth generation fighter deployments to Australia". Both Raptors and the controversial F 35 Joint Strike Fighter are so called fifth generation planes combining stealth with powerful sensors and weaponry, though the F 22 is regarded as a better plane..
Rewind to 2008, when the Ralph Klein government, spurred by indomitable cabinet minister Shirley McClellan, Jordan Air Force 1 Retro gathered up its Jordan Air Force 1 Retro piggy banks its pension funds, the Alberta Sustainability Fund, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund and others to create one arm length investment management firm. AIMCo, the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, is a crown corporation with its own board of governors and only one mandate: That it make money.
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Home » Resources » Newsletters » February 2018 Newsletter: Learn How Things You Don't Know Can Impact Your Company's Future
February 2018 Newsletter: Learn How Things You Don't Know Can Impact Your Company's Future
Our Driving Concern Senior Program Manager Lisa Robinson speaks to issues and concerns all employers face when trying to make their workforce safe on the road.
Q: Did you know workplace deaths are on the rise?
A: The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a 7% rise in workplace deaths since 2015. Fatal work injuries reached 5,190 in 2016, the third consecutive annual increase and the first time in nearly a decade that workplace fatalities topped 5,000.
As I think about that, I also think of an expression that rings true in many work settings and applies equally to employers and employees: "They don't know what they don't know."
I have been working with a number of individuals at new and smaller companies interested in incorporating traffic safety into their workplace safety culture. I see firsthand how "they don't know what they don't know," because they don't know how to address risky driving behaviors that can impact the wellbeing of their organizations.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no A-to-Z manual that spells out why traffic safety makes dollars and sense. My job is to fill that information gap and serve as a human manual. Through the Our Driving Concern program, I work to supply free education, training and resources, all with the goal of helping employers combat the costly toll of crashes.
In 2016, Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate transportation incidents remain the most common fatal workplace event. Nearly 2,100 people died, with transportation incidents accounting for two out of five workplace fatalities. And yet your focus should extend well beyond work incidents.
Off-the-job crashes account for about 81% of employer health benefits costs and often involve employee family members. Half of crash-related injuries cause employees to miss work, whether they occur on the daily commute or on the job.
Driver distraction is one of the leading causes of crashes.
In Oklahoma, an average of 1,780 drivers using electronic devices have been involved in crashes over a five-year period from 2011-2015, according to data from the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office. During that time, more than 12 fatal crashes and more than 670 injury crashes occurred every year. Much of this pain is the result of our own choices, including cell phone use behind the wheel.
People think they are good multitaskers. Wrong. They've actually fallen for a myth.
The human brain cannot handle two thinking tasks at the same time, like driving and talking on the phone. Your brain toggles quickly between these two tasks, which can slow reaction time and cause crashes.
Everyone seems to think hands-free driving is safer. Hands-free devices are not safer, nor are they risk-free. Drivers talking on cell phones can miss seeing up to 50% of what is in their driving environment, including stop signs, red lights and pedestrians. Put the phone away. I like to say, "Alert today, alive tomorrow!"
It is important you are having conversations with your employees, co-workers and family members about risks associated with cell phone driver distraction. Take a minute and forward our eNewsletter to a colleague, encourage him or her to have a safety talk during a regular workplace safety meeting and also to take advantage of our free training sessions. You can learn what you don't know. Get started:
Watch: Distracted Driving: Your Employees Can Protect Themselves & Others
Share: Distracted Driving Posters and Tip Sheets
Reserve: Through the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office and the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office, arrangements can be made to use a distracted driving simulator
What You Need to Know about Impairment and Why It Matters
Most employers lack an understanding of impairment and its impact on the workplace.
The U.S. is experiencing an epidemic of drug- and impairment-related deaths. Since 2000, the rate of deaths from drug overdoses has increased 137%, including a 200% increase in the rate of overdose deaths involving opioids (prescription pain relievers and heroin). Despite efforts to fight the opioid epidemic, deaths from drug overdoses reached an all-time high in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The percentage of fatally injured drivers testing positive for drugs – 40% ─ is almost the same as those testing positive for alcohol. The most recent roadside survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 22% of drivers tested positive for some drug or medication.
According to the National Safety Council, the use and abuse of opioid painkillers, and the development and use of synthetic cannabinoids in the workplace has reached a zenith. NSC reports 23% of the U.S. workforce has used drugs non-medically. More than 20% of the workforce has misused painkillers. Even employees who take a regular dose of medication may be too impaired to work.
Drug overdoses now cause more deaths than car crashes, and painkillers contribute to more deaths than any other type of drugs. The positivity rate for amphetamines has nearly tripled in the U.S. workforce since 1997, from 0.3% to 0.9% in 2013. Also troubling is the positivity rates for opiates. The rate for these drugs has more than doubled over the last decade—oxycodone use alone has gone up 71% since 2005, according to Quest Diagnostics.
Off the job crashes account for 81% of employer crash-related health benefits costs, and half of crash-related injuries cause employees to miss work. According to NSC Injury Facts, the average economic cost of a crash is more than $1 million per death and more than $78,000 per nonfatal disabling injury. Employers pay significant costs associated with off-the-job crashes, including decreases in employee health, wellbeing and productivity, and increases in lost time from work and insurance costs.
Many people do not instantly picture suit-and-tie professionals when they think of a drug addict. They think of someone without a job, possibly living on the streets, dirty and unkempt. The reality, though, is that substance abuse is common among full-time employees in the U.S.
According the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, 10.8 million full-time workers in the U.S. have a substance abuse disorder. Substance abuse by full-time employees makes up over half (55.1%) of adults aged 18-24 with a substance abuse disorder. Substance use disorders cost the nation an estimated $276 billion a year, with much of the cost resulting from lost work productivity and increased healthcare spending. Seventy-six percent of people with drug or alcohol problems are employed.
In a 2014 survey on drug use, SAMHSA found there are 4.3 million current non-medical users of painkillers and nearly 2 million people have painkiller substance use disorders.
According to the NSC:
Employers with successful drug-free workplace programs report improvements in morale and productivity and decreases in absenteeism, accidents, down time, turnover and theft
Employers with long-standing programs report better health status among employees and family members and decreased use of medical benefits by these same groups
Learn: What You Should Know about Opioids
Live with Lisa: When Light Turns Yellow, It's Not a Signal to 'Punch It'
A yellow light is not a signal to "punch it," says Our Driving Concern Senior Program Manager Lisa Robinson.
In the latest of her Live with Lisa vlogs, she goes on to share a startling traffic safety fact: 35% to 40% of crashes in the U.S. are intersection-related crashes. Most result from human error, such as not scanning ahead or misjudging another's speed.
In Oklahoma, there were 72,176 crashes in 2016, according to the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office. That's nearly 200 crashes every day. As many as 4 in 10 of those crashes occurred in an intersection. Every crash has the potential to impact an employer's bottom line.
Work to reduce risky driving behaviors at your workplace. Watch/Share: Proceed with Caution When Arriving at Life's Intersections. Collect the Set (and play them on your office video monitors): Live with Lisa
No Need for Accountant: Calculate Cost of Crashes with Cool New Tool
In a SafetyFirst blog, Network of Employers for Traffic Safety Executive Director Joseph McKillips notes a serious car crash can have impacts that stretch beyond those in the passenger compartments. He describes one such crash in Houston. An SUV was hit by another vehicle while sitting at a stop sign, leaving the driver and passenger of the SUV severely injured.
McKillips writes: "They both went through multiple surgeries, doctor visits and rehab. They could not care for themselves or their family, and they were incapable of working for an extended period. Both are now fully recovered, but their time away from work and the financial aftermath suffered by them and their employer was substantial."
McKillips does not try quantifying the emotional toll of car crashes, but says employers can capture what collisions cost them thanks to a new tool from NETS.
Read: Companies Are Not Immune to Car Crash Costs
Put it to use at your workplace: Cost of Crashes Calculator
Study: Truckers Less Likely to Be Belted in Lighter Traffic
In a study conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, seat belt use by drivers of medium- and heavy-duty trucks and buses rose from 84% in 2013 to 86% in 2016. The important thing for employers, including fleet owners and fleet managers, to note:
Usage rates were higher on expressways (89%) compared to surface streets (83%)
Safety belt use in heavy traffic (86%) continues to be higher than in light traffic (83%)
In Oklahoma, more people are killed in rural crashes, according to the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office. One reason: It takes medical responders longer to reach crash scenes. In 2016, 133 of 244 (59.4%) unbelted crash fatalities were recorded on rural roads.
Seat belts save lives and can save your organization money. In Oklahoma, the average workplace motor vehicle crash costs $16,500. That figure climbs to $74,000 if an employee is injured and could top $500,000 if an employee is killed.
Use these free resources to help promote seat belt use at your organization:
What Happens When Unbuckled Bodies Collide in a Crash
Life is Better in the Company of a Good Co-Pilot
Handouts and Brochures: Seat Belts Save Lives
Courtesy Drivers Score Winning Points at the Cotton Bowl
Prior to the Cotton Bowl each of the last two years, Our Driving Concern Senior Program Manager Lisa Robinson addressed courtesy drivers at the invitation of officials looking to stage safer events.
Of the 53 people who attended her safety talk in December, 33 were return drivers from 2016. Robinson polled the drivers to learn more about the impact of her efforts. The results indicate a little chat can make a big difference:
Did you pay more attention to driving safely while you were working at the Cotton Bowl? Yes ─ 97%. No ─ 3%.
Did you share anything that was discussed or talk to anyone about traffic safety? Yes ─ 48%. No ─ 52%.
Did you pay more attention to driving safely after you worked at the Cotton Bowl? Yes ─ 79%. No ─ 21%.
Another takeaway: Employers are positioned to drive change. Putting traffic safety into your workplace safety culture is one way to do it. And one place to start is with a safe driving policy. Behaviors learned in the workplace often are mimicked at home.
Robinson's work at the Cotton Bowl was featured in a SafetyFirst blog post in January. The game? Ohio State defeated USC 24-7.
Newsletters Bureau of Labor Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Cost of Crashes Calculator, Cotton Bowl, distracted driving, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Injury Facts, It's Not a Signal to Punch It, Joseph McKillips, Life is Better in the Company of a Good Co-Pilot, Lisa Robinson, Live with Lisa, Network of Employers for Traffic Safety, NSC, Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office, Oklahoma Highway Safety Office, Our Driving Concern, Proceed with Caution when Arriving at Life's Intersections, Quest Diagnostics, Safety First Blog, Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, What Happens When Unbuckled Bodies Collide in a Crash, When Light Turns Yellow
Proceed with Caution When Arriving at Life's Intersections
Driving in the Rain: Turn Frown Upside Down


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Cassitty
Jump to: Pictorials (9) |
Pictorials (9)
Voluptuous (US) October 2005, Vol. 12, Iss. 10
Voluptuous (Voluptuous Xtra) (US) February 2005, Vol. 12, Iss. 2
Voluptuous (Voluptuous Xtra) (US) May 2004, Vol. 11, Iss. 5, pg. 1-9, "Cassitty Harmon: If 'V-Mag' had a Titty-Sucking award, here's our winner...hands-free!"
Voluptuous (Voluptuous Xtra) (US) November 2003, Vol. 10, Iss. 11, pg. 1-9, "Cassitty: She executes amazing feats of titty-sucking skill."
Score (US) August 2003, Vol. 12, Iss. 8, pg. 62-67, "Natural Born Buster: Get a load of Cassity Harmon. Then shoot your load."
Score (US) August 2003, Vol. 12, Iss. 8, pg. 62-67, "Natural Born Buster: Get a load of Cassitty Harmon. Then shoot your load."
Voluptuous (US) April 2003, Vol. 10, Iss. 4, pg. 19-25, "Cassitty: A new stacked-n-packed honey who's different from the rest."
Voluptuous (US) April 2003, Vol. 10, Iss. 4, pg. 19-25, "Cassity: A new stacked-n-packed honey who's different from the rest."
Voluptuous (US) 2003, Vol. 10, Iss. 13, pg. 94-99, "2003 Voluptuous Newcomer of the Year Finalist: Cassitty--Ms. Harmon is a V-Girl of unique tit-talents."
Biography | Other Works | Official Sites | Contact Info


The Mini Cone come with a choice of messages on both sides. Signs have caution symbol and the word 'Caution' followed by the message.
These cones are sturdy and stackable. The heavy base prevents them from blowing over or moving in most windy conditions. They are ideal for outdoor and indoor use, and have a hand grip for carrying.


The standard MPbox now with extra wide planks. With a gap of only 47mm between the boards especially suitable for small parts.
This MP Box is a collapsible/foldable pallet cage of reliable and solid construction which consists of four detachable walls fixed to a Europallet. The four walls are put together sturdily with centering pins and are fastened to the pallet with four bench hooks. The planks have extra width, making the openings in between more narrow.


Hello Folks., I know some of you will be interested in the history of my Mamod loco "Goblin" so the saga Begins in 2016 after seeing my Friends live steam loco run at another friends railway i said I would like a live steam loco to run on friends Railways In September 2017 the dream was realised for my 15th birthday I got a MSS/Mamod From Dream Steam In the uk the first runs were a success on blocks but I tested it on track then I realised that it wasn't getting enough heat to make it around the circuit, then I met my good friend David at a friends open day and he taught me some tricks of the trade to running a Mamod and it made 2 laps on one fire of solid fuel.
Then a few months ago I realised that I could get it rebuilt to make it a loco that runs well. Unfortunately the rebuild won't happen until the end of the year because the parts I need to get it rebuilt aren't available as I speak.
The saga will be continued when it's rebuild is completed.
Re: CCT No 1 "Goblin" the Continous saga of a Yet to be released beast.
Hi i do like these MSS locos plain and simple but fun to steam. These locos can be improved quite a lot and I will look forward to seeing your progress on this loco.


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\section{Introduction}
In morphologically rich languages, a word's surface form reflects syntactic and semantic properties that are expressed by the word. For example, most English nouns have both singular and plural forms (e.g., \textit{robot}/\textit{robots}, \textit{process}/\textit{processes}), which are known as the inflected forms of the noun. Some languages display little inflection. In contrast, others have many inflections per base form or lemma: a Polish verb has nearly 100 inflected forms \citep{Janecki1998} and an Archi verb has around 1.5 million \citep{kibrik1998archi}.

Morphological inflection is the task of, given an input word -- a lemma -- together with morphosyntactic features defining the target form, generating the indicated inflected form, cf. Figure \ref{fig:morphexample}.  Morphological inflection is a useful tool for many natural language processing tasks \citep{DBLP:journals/tacl/SeekerC15, DBLP:conf/acl/CotterellSE16}, especially in morphologically rich languages where handling inflected forms can reduce data sparsity \citep{DBLP:conf/acl/MinkovTS07}.

\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lll}
\textbf{Lemma} & \textbf{Features} & \textbf{Inflected form} \\
hug & V;PST & hugged \\
seel & V;3;SG;PRS & seels
\end{tabular}
\caption{Morphological inflection examples in English. A lemma and features are mapped to an inflected form.}
\label{fig:morphexample}
\end{figure}

The SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task consists of three separate tasks. We participate in Task 0 on typologically diverse morphological inflection \cite{vylomova2020sigmorphon} and Task 2 on unsupervised morphological paradigm completion \cite{kann-etal-2020-sigmorphon}.
\textbf{Task 0} consists of generating morphological inflections from a lemma and a set of morphosyntactic features describing the target form.
For this task, we implement a pointer-generator transformer model, based on the vanilla transformer model \citep{DBLP:conf/nips/VaswaniSPUJGKP17} and the pointer-generator model \cite{DBLP:conf/acl/SeeLM17}. After adding a copy mechanism to the transformer, it produces a final probability distribution as a combination of generating elements from its output vocabulary and copying elements -- characters in our case -- from the input.
As most inflected forms derive their characters from the source lemma, the use of a mechanism for copying characters directly from the lemma has proven to be effective for morphological inflection generation, especially in the low resource setting \citep{DBLP:conf/acl/AharoniG17,DBLP:journals/corr/MakarovRC17}.

For our submissions, we further increase the size of all training sets by performing multi-task training on morphological inflection and morphological reinflection, i.e., the task of generating inflected forms from forms \textit{different from the lemma}.
For languages with small training sets, we also perform hallucination pretraining \citep{DBLP:conf/emnlp/AnastasopoulosN19}, where we generate pseudo training instances for the task, based on suffixation and prefixation rules collected from the original dataset.

For \textbf{Task 2}, participants are given raw text and a source file with lemmas. The objective is to generate the complete paradigms for all lemmas. Our systems for this task consist of a combination of the official baseline system \citep{jin2020unsupervised} and our systems for Task 0. The baseline system finds inflected forms in the text, decides on the number of inflected forms per lemma, and produces pseudo training files for morphological inflection. Our inflection model then learns from these and, subsequently, generates all missing forms.

\section{Related Work}

\paragraph{SIGMORPHON and CoNLL--SIGMORPHON shared tasks.}
In recent years, the SIGMORPHON and CoNLL–SIGMORPHON shared tasks have promoted research on computational morphology, with a strong focus on morphological inflection.
Research related to those shared tasks includes \citet{DBLP:conf/acl/KannS16}, who used an LSTM \citep{DBLP:journals/neco/HochreiterS97} sequence-to-sequence model with soft attention \citep{DBLP:journals/corr/BahdanauCB14} and achieved the best result in the SIGMORPHON 2016 shared task \citep{DBLP:conf/sigmorphon/KannS16, DBLP:conf/sigmorphon/CotterellKSYEH16}. Due to the often monotonic alignment between input and output, \citet{DBLP:conf/acl/AharoniG17} proposed a model with hard monotonic attention. Based on this, \citet{DBLP:journals/corr/MakarovRC17} implemented a neural state-transition system which also used hard monotonic attention and achieved the best results for Task 1 of the SIGMORPHON 2017 shared task.
In 2018, the best results were achieved by a revised version of the neural transducer, trained with imitation learning \citep{DBLP:conf/conll/MakarovC18}. That model learned an alignment instead of maximizing the likelihood of gold action sequences given by a separate aligner.

\paragraph{Transformers.}
Transformers have produced state-of-the-art results on various tasks such as machine translation \citep{DBLP:conf/nips/VaswaniSPUJGKP17} language modeling \citep{DBLP:conf/aaai/Al-RfouCCGJ19}, question answering \citep{DBLP:conf/naacl/DevlinCLT19} and language understanding \citep{DBLP:conf/naacl/DevlinCLT19}.
There has been very little work on transformers for morphological inflection, with, to the best of our knowledge, \citet{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2005-01630} being the only published paper. However, the widespread success of transformers in NLP leads us to believe that a transformer model could perform well on morphological inflection.

\paragraph{Pointer-generators.}
In addition to the transformer, the architecture of our model is also inspired by \citet{DBLP:conf/acl/SeeLM17}, who used a pointer-generator network for abstractive summarization. Their model could choose between generating a new element and copying an element from the input directly to the output. This copying of words from the source text via pointing \citep{DBLP:conf/nips/VinyalsKKPSH15}, improved the handling of out-of-vocabulary words. Copy mechanisms have also been used for other tasks, including morphological inflection \citep{DBLP:conf/conll/SharmaKS18}. \textit{Transformers} with copy mechanisms have been used for word-level tasks \citep{DBLP:conf/naacl/ZhaoWSJL19}, but, as far as we know, never before on the character level.

\section{SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task}
The SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task is composed of three tasks: Task 0 on typologically diverse morphological inflection \citep{vylomova2020sigmorphon}, Task 1 on multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion \citep{Task1-2020-sigmorphon}, and Task 2 on unsupervised morphological paradigm completion \citep{kann-etal-2020-sigmorphon}. We submit systems to Tasks 0 and 2.

\subsection{Task 0: Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection}
SIGMORPHON 2020 Task 0 focuses on morphological inflection in a set of typologically diverse languages. Different languages inflect differently, so it is not trivially clear that systems that work on some languages also perform well on others.
For Task 0, systems need to generalize well to a large group of languages, including languages unseen during model development.

The task features 90 languages in total. 45 of them are development languages, coming from five families: Austronesian, Niger–Congo, Uralic, Oto-Manguean, and Indo-European. The remaining 45 are surprise languages, and many of those are from language families different from the development languages. Some languages have very small training sets, which makes them hard to model. For those cases, the organizers recommend a family-based multilingual approach to exploit similarities between related languages. While this might be effective, we believe that using multitask training in combination with hallucination pretraining can give the model enough information to learn the task well, while staying true to the specific structure of each individual language.

\subsection{Task 2: Unsupervised Morphological Paradigm Completion}
Task 2 is a novel task, designed to encourage work on unsupervised methods for computational morphology.
As morphological annotations are limited for many of the world's languages, the study of morphological generation in the low-resource setting is of great interest \citep{DBLP:conf/conll/CotterellKSWVMK18}. However, a different way to tackle the problem is by creating systems that are able to use data without annotations.

For Task 2, a tokenized Bible in each language is given to the participants, along with a list of lemmas. Participants should then produce complete paradigms for each lemma.
As slots in the paradigm are not labeled with gold data paradigm slot descriptions, an evaluation metric called best-match accuracy was designed for this task.
First, this metric matches predicted paradigm slots with gold slots in the way which leads to the highest overall accuracy. It then evaluates the correctness of individual inflected forms.

\section{Methods}
In this section, we introduce our models for Tasks 0 and 2 and describe all approaches we use, such as multitask training, hallucination pretraining and ensembling.
The code for our models is available online.\footnote{\href{https://github.com/AssafSinger94/sigmorphon-2020-inflection}{github.com/AssafSinger94/sigmorphon-2020-inflection}}

\subsection{Transformer}
Our model is built on top of the transformer architecture \citep{DBLP:conf/nips/VaswaniSPUJGKP17}. It consists of an encoder and a decoder, each composed of a stack of layers. Each encoder layer consists, in turn, of a self-attention layer, followed by a fully connected layer. Decoder layers contain an additional inter-attention layer between the two.

With inputs $\left( x_1, \cdots, x_T \right)$ being a lemma's characters followed by tags representing the morphosyntactic features of the target form, the encoder processes the input sequence and outputs hidden states $\left( h_1, \cdots, h_T \right)$.
At generation step $t$, the decoder reads the previously generated sequence $\left( y_1, \cdots, y_{t-1} \right)$ to produce states $\left( s_1, \cdots, s_{t-1} \right)$.
The last decoder state $s_{t-1}$ is then passed through a linear layer followed by a softmax, to generate a probability distribution over the output vocabulary:
\begin{equation}
    P_{\text{vocab}} = \textrm{softmax}(V s_{t-1} + b)
\end{equation}
During training, the entire target sequence $\left( y_1, \cdots, y_{T_y} \right)$ is input to the decoder at once, along with a sequential mask to prevent positions from attending to subsequent positions.

\subsection{Pointer-Generator Transformer}
The pointer-generator transformer allows for both generating characters from a fixed vocabulary, as well as copying from the source sequence via pointing \citep{DBLP:conf/nips/VinyalsKKPSH15}. This is managed by $p_{\text{gen}}$ -- the probability of generating as opposed to copying -- which acts as a soft switch between the two actions. $p_{\text{gen}}$ is computed by passing a concatenation of the decoder state $s_{t}$, the previously generated output $y_{t-1}$, and a context vector $c_t$ through a linear layer, followed by the sigmoid function.
\begin{equation}
    p_{\text{gen}} = \sigma(w [s_t;c_t;y_{t-1}] + b)
\end{equation}
The context vector is computed as the weighted sum of the encoder hidden states
\begin{equation}
    c_t = \sum\nolimits_{i=1}^{T} a^t_i h_i
\end{equation}
with attention weights $\left( a^t_1, \cdots, a^t_T \right)$.
For each inflection example, let the extended vocabulary denote the union of the output vocabulary, and all characters appearing in the source lemma.
We then use $p_{\text{gen}}$, $P_{\text{vocab}}$ produced by the transformer, and the attention weights of the last decoder layer $\left( a^t_1, \cdots, a^t_T \right)$ to compute a distribution over the extended vocabulary:
\begin{equation}
    P(c) = p_{\text{gen}} P_{\text{vocab}}(c) + (1-p_{\text{gen}}) P_{\text{copy}}(c),
\end{equation}
with
\begin{equation}
    P_{\text{copy}}(c) = \sum\nolimits_{i: x_i = c} a^t_i
\end{equation}
The copy distribution $P_{\text{copy}}(c)$ for each character $c$ is the sum of attention weights over all source positions where $x_i = c$.
Note that if $c$ is an out-of-vocabulary (OOV) character, then $P_{\text{vocab}}(c)$ is zero; similarly, if $c$ does not appear in the source lemma, then $\sum\nolimits_{i: x_i = c} a^t_i$ is zero. The ability to produce OOV characters is one of the primary advantages of pointer-generator models; by contrast models such as our vanilla transformer are restricted to their pre-set vocabulary.

\subsection{Multitask Training}

\begin{figure}[t]
\small
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lllll}
\multirow{ 2}{*}{raw} & grip & grips & V;SG;3;PRS \\
 & grip & gripped & V;PST \\
\midrule
\multirow{ 3}{*}{generated} & grips & grip & V;LEMMA \\
 & grips & gripped & V;PST \\
 & gripped & grip & V;LEMMA \\
\end{tabular}
\caption{English multitask training example (Task 0).}
\label{fig:multitask-exmp}
\end{figure}
Some languages in Task 0 have small training sets, which makes them hard to model. In order to handle that, we perform multitask training, and, thereby, increase the amount of examples available for training.

\paragraph{Morphological reinflection.}
Morphological reinflection is a generalized version of the morphological inflection task, which consists of producing an inflected form for any given source form -- i.e., not necessarily the lemma --, and target tag. For example:

\begin{align}
\textrm{(hugging; V;PST)} \rightarrow \textrm{hugged}.
\end{align}

 This is a more complex task, since a model needs to infer the underlying lemma of the source form in order to inflect it correctly to the desired form.

Many morphological inflection datasets contain lemmas that are converted to several inflected forms. Treating separate instances for the same source lemma as independent is missing an opportunity to utilize the connection between the different inflected forms.
We approach this by converting our morphological inflection training set into one for morphological reinflection as described in the following.

\paragraph{From inflection to reinflection.}
Inflected forms of the same lemma are grouped together to sets of one or more (inflected form, morphological features) pairs. Then, for each set, we create new training instances by inflecting all forms to one another, as shown in Figure \ref{fig:multitask-exmp}.
We also let the model inflect forms back to the lemma by adding the lemma as one of the inflected forms, marked with the synthetically generated LEMMA tag. The new training set fully utilizes the connections between different forms in the paradigm, and, in that way, provides more training instances to our model.

\subsection{Hallucination Pretraining}
Another effective tool to improve training in the low-resource setting is data hallucination \citep{DBLP:conf/emnlp/AnastasopoulosN19}. Using hallucination, new pseudo-instances are generated for training, based on suffixation and prefixation rules collected from the original dataset. For languages with less than 1000 training instances, we pretrain our models on a hallucinated training set consisting of 10,000 instances, before training on the multitask training set.

\subsection{Submissions and Ensembling Strategies}
\begin{table}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lr}
\hline \textbf{Hyperparameter} & \textbf{Value} \\ \hline
Embedding dimension & 256 \\
Encoder layers & 4 \\
Decoder layers & 4 \\
Encoder hidden dimension & 1024 \\
Decoder hidden dimension & 1024 \\
Attention heads & 4 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{The hyperparameters used in our inflection models for both Task 0 and Task 2.}
\label{tab:hyperparam-table}
\end{table}

We submit 4 different systems for Task 0. NYU-CUBoulder-2 consists of one pointer-generator transformer model, and, for NYU-CUBoulder-4, we train one vanilla transformer. Those two are our simplest systems and can be seen as baselines for our other submissions.

Because of the effects of random initialization in non-convex objective functions, we further use ensembling in combination with both architectures: NYU-CUBoulder-1 is an ensemble of three pointer-generator transformers, and NYU-CUBoulder-3 is an ensemble of five pointer-generator transformers. The final decision is made by majority voting. In case of a tie, the answer is chosen randomly among the most frequent predictions. Models participating in the ensembles are from different epochs during the same training run.

As previously stated, all systems are trained on the augmented multitask training sets, and systems trained on languages with less than 1000 training instances were pretrained on the hallucinated datasets.

\subsection{Task 2: Model description}
Our systems for Task 2 consist of a combination of the official baseline system \citep{jin2020unsupervised} and our inflection systems for Task 0.
The system is given raw text and a source file with lemmas, and generates the complete paradigm of each lemma.
The baseline system finds inflected forms in the text,  decides on the number of inflected forms per lemma, and produces pseudo training files for morphological inflection. Any inflections that the system has not found in the raw text are given as test instances.
Our inflection model then learns from the files and, subsequently, generates all missing forms. We use the pointer-generator and vanilla transformers as our inflection models.

For Task 2, we use ensembling for all submissions.
NYU-CUBoulder-1 is an ensemble of six pointer-generator transformers, NYU-CUBoulder-2 is an ensemble of six vanilla transformers, and NYU-CUBoulder-3 is an ensemble of all twelve models.
For all models in both tasks, we use the  hyperparameters described in Table \ref{tab:hyperparam-table}.

\section{Experiments}

\subsection{Task 0}

\paragraph{Data.}
The dataset for Task 0 covers 90 languages in total: 45 development languages and 45 surprise languages. For  details on the official dataset please refer to \citet{vylomova2020sigmorphon}.

\paragraph{Baselines.}
This year, several baselines are provided for the task. The first system has also been used as a baseline in previous shared tasks on morphological reinflection \citep{DBLP:conf/conll/CotterellKSWVXF17, DBLP:conf/conll/CotterellKSWVMK18}.
It is a non-neural system which first scans the dataset to extract suffix- or prefix-based lemma-to-form transformations. Then, based on the morphological tag at inference time, it applies the most frequent suitable transformation to an input lemma to yield the output form \citep{DBLP:conf/conll/CotterellKSWVXF17}.
The other two baselines are neural models. One is a transformer \citep{DBLP:conf/nips/VaswaniSPUJGKP17,wu2020applying}, and the second one is a hard-attention model \citep{DBLP:conf/acl/WuC19}, which enforces strict monotonicity and learns a latent alignment while learning to transduce. To account for the low-resource settings for some languages, the organizers also employ two additional methods: constructing a multilingual model trained for all languages belonging to each language family \cite{kann-etal-2017-one}, and data augmentation using hallucination \citep{DBLP:conf/emnlp/AnastasopoulosN19}.
Four model types are trained for each neural architecture: a plain model, a family-multilingual model, a data augmented model, and an augmented family-multilingual model.
Overall, there are nine baseline systems for each language.
We compare our models to an oracle baseline by choosing the best score over all baseline systems for each language.

\paragraph{Results.}

\begin{table}[t]
\centering
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{4.5pt}
\begin{tabular}{lr|r|r|r|r}
 & Sub-1  & Sub-2 & Sub-3 & Sub-4 & Base\\\hline
\multicolumn{6}{c}{Development Set}\\
\hline
Low & \textbf{88.71} & 88.02 & 84.90 & 84.07 & - \\
Other & 90.46 & 90.63 & 90.20 & \textbf{90.94} & - \\
All  & \textbf{90.06} & 90.02 & 88.96 & 89.34 & - \\
\hline
\multicolumn{6}{c}{Test Set}\\
\hline
Low & 84.8 & 84.8 & 85.5 & 83.9 & \textbf{89.77} \\
Other & 89.7 & 89.8 & 89.8 & 90.2 & \textbf{92.43} \\
All  & 88.6 & 88.7 & 88.8 & 88.8 & \textbf{91.81} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Macro-averaged results over all languages on the official development and test sets for Task 0. Low=languages with less than 1000 train instances, Other=all other languages, All=all languages.}
\label{tab:task0-results}
\end{table}

\begin{table*}[!tb]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lll|ll|ll|ll|ll}
 System & \multicolumn{ 2}{c}{Baseline 1} & \multicolumn{ 2}{c}{Baseline 2} & \multicolumn{ 2}{c}{Sub-1} & \multicolumn{ 2}{c}{Sub-2} & \multicolumn{ 2}{c}{Sub-3} \\
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{Test Set}\\
\hline
 & slots & macro & slots & macro & slots & macro & slots & macro & slots & macro \\
Basque & 30 & 0.0006 & 27 & 0.0006 & 30 & 0.0005 & 30 & 0.0005 & 30 & \textbf{0.0007} \\
Bulgarian & 35 & 0.283 & 34 & \textbf{0.3169} & 35 & 0.2769 & 35 & 0.2894 & 35 & 0.2789 \\
English & 4 & 0.656 & 4 & \textbf{0.662} & 4 & 0.502 & 4 & 0.528 & 4 & 0.512 \\
Finnish & 21 & 0.0533 & 21 & \textbf{0.055} & 21 & 0.0536 & 21 & 0.0547 & 21 & 0.0535 \\
German & 9 & 0.2835 & 9 & \textbf{0.29} & 9 & 0.273 & 9 & 0.2735 & 9 & 0.2735 \\
Kannada & 172 & 0.1549 & 172 & \textbf{0.1512} & 172 & 0.111 & 172 & 0.1116 & 172 & 0.111 \\
Navajo & 3 & 0.0323 & 3 & \textbf{0.0327} & 3 & 0.004 & 3 & 0.0043 & 3 & 0.0043 \\
Spanish & 29 & 0.2296 & 29 & \textbf{0.2367} & 29 & 0.2039 & 29 & 0.2056 & 29 & 0.203 \\
Turkish & 104 & 0.1421 & 104 & \textbf{0.1553} & 104 & 0.1488 & 104 & 0.1539 & 104 & 0.1513 \\
\textbf{All} &  & 0.2039 &  & \textbf{0.2112} &  & 0.1749 &  & 0.1802 &  & 0.1765 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Results for all test languages on the official test sets for Task 2.}
\label{tab:task2-results-average}
\end{table*}

Our results for Task 0 are displayed in Table \ref{tab:task0-results}. All four systems produce relatively similar results. NYU-CUBoulder-3, our five-model ensemble, performs best overall with $88.8\%$ accuracy on average. We further look at the results for low-resource ($<$ 1000 training examples) and high-resource ($>=$ 1000 training examples) languages separately. This way, we are able to see the advantage of the pointer-generator transformer in the low-resource setting, where all pointer-generator systems achieve an at least $0.9\%$ higher accuracy than the vanilla transformer model. However, in the setting where training data is abundant, the effect of the copy mechanism vanishes, as NYU-CUBoulder-4 -- our only vanilla transformer -- achieved the best results for our high-resource languages.

\subsection{Task 2}

\paragraph{Data.}
For Task 2, a tokenized Bible in each language is given to the participants, along with a list of lemmas. Participants are required to construct the paradigms for all given lemmas.

The languages for Task 2 are again divided into development  and test languages. Development languages are available for model development and hyperparameter tuning, but are not used during the final evaluation. The test languages are used for evaluation only, and do not have development sets. The development languages are: Maltese, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish. The test languages are: Basque, Bulgarian, English, Finnish, German, Kannada, Navajo, Spanish and Turkish.

\paragraph{Baselines.}
The baseline system for the task is composed of four  components, eventually producing morphological paradigms \cite{jin2020unsupervised}.
The first three modules perform edit tree \citep{Chrupala2020} retrieval, additional lemma retrieval from the corpus, and paradigm size discovery, using distributional information. After the first three steps, pseudo training and test files for morphological inflection are produced.
Finally, the non-neural Task 0 baseline system \cite{DBLP:conf/conll/CotterellKSWVXF17} or the neural transducer by \citet{DBLP:conf/conll/MakarovC18} are used to create missing inflected forms.

\paragraph{Results.}
Systems for Task 2 are evaluated using macro-averaged best-match accuracy \citep{jin2020unsupervised}. Results are shown in in Table \ref{tab:task2-results-average}.
All three systems produce relatively similar results. NYU-CUBoulder-2, our vanilla transformer ensemble, performed slightly better overall with an average best-match accuracy of $18.02\%$.
Since our system is close to the baseline models, it performs similarly, achieving slightly worse results. For Basque, our all-round ensemble NYU-CUBoulder-2 outperformed both baselines with a best-match accuracy of $00.07\%$, achieving the highest result in the shared task.

\subsection{Low-resource Setting}
As most inflected forms derive their characters from the source lemma, the use of a mechanism for copying characters directly from the lemma has proven to be effective for morphological inflection generation, especially in the low-resource setting \citep{DBLP:conf/acl/AharoniG17,DBLP:journals/corr/MakarovRC17}.
As all Task 0 datasets are fairly large, we further design a low-resource experiment to investigate the effectiveness of our model.

\begin{table}[b]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lrrr}
 System & Trm  & Trm-PG & Baseline\\
\hline
All  & 63.06 & 67.61 & \textbf{70.06} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Results on the official development data for our low-resource experiment. Trm=Vanilla transformer, Trm-PG=Pointer-generator transformer, Baseline=neural transducer by \citet{DBLP:conf/conll/MakarovC18}.}
\label{tab:low-res-results-average}
\end{table}
\paragraph{Data.}
We simulate a low-resource setting by sampling 100 instances from all languages that we already consider low-resource, i.e., all languages with less than 1000 training instances. We then keep their development and test sets unchanged.
Overall, we perform this experiment on 21 languages.

\paragraph{Experimental setup.}
We train a pointer-generator transformer and a vanilla transformer on the modified datasets to examine the effects of the copy mechanism. We keep the hyperparameters unchanged, i.e., they are as mentioned in Table \ref{tab:hyperparam-table}. We use a majority-vote ensemble consisting of 5 individual models for each architecture.

\paragraph{Baseline.}
We additionally train the neural transducer by \citet{DBLP:conf/conll/MakarovC18}, which has achieved the best results for the 2018 shared task in the low-resource setting \citep{DBLP:conf/conll/CotterellKSWVMK18}. The neural transducer uses hard monotonic attention \citep{DBLP:conf/acl/AharoniG17} and transduces the lemma into the inflected form by a sequence of explicit edit operations. It is trained with an imitation learning method \citep{DBLP:conf/conll/MakarovC18}.
We use this model as a reference for the state of the art in the low-resource setting.

\paragraph{Results.}
As seen in Table \ref{tab:low-res-results-average}, for the low-resource dataset, the pointer-generator transformer clearly outperforms the vanilla transformer by an average accuracy of $4.46\%$. For some languages, such as Chichicapan Zapotec, the difference is up to $14\%$. While the neural transducer achieves a higher accuracy, our model performs only $2.45\%$ worse than this state-of-the-art model.\footnote{We could probably obtain better results with appropriate hyperparameter tuning.} We are also able to observe the use of the copy mechanism for copying of OOV characters in the test sets of some languages.

\section{Ablation Studies}

\begin{table}[t]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lc|c|c|c|c}
Model:
 & 1  & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 \\
\hline
Copy & \checkmark & \checkmark &  &  & \checkmark \\
Multitask Train & \checkmark &  & \checkmark &  & \checkmark \\
Hallucination  & \checkmark & \checkmark & \checkmark & \checkmark &  \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{System components for the ablation study for Task 0. Each model is a transformer which contains a combination of the following components: copy mechanism, multitask training and hallucination pretraining.}
\label{tab:ablation-models}
\end{table}

Our systems use three components on top of the vanilla transformer: a copy mechanism, multitask training and hallucination pretraining. We further perform an ablation study to measure the contribution of each component to the overall system performance. For this, we additionally train five different systems with different combinations of components.
A description of which component is used in which system for this ablation study is shown in Table \ref{tab:ablation-models}.

\subsection{Results}

\paragraph{Copy mechanism.}
Comparing models 2 and 4, which are both trained on the original dataset, pretrained with hallucination and differ only by the use of the copy mechanism, we are able to see that adding this component slightly improves performance by $0.06-0.16\%$. When comparing models 1 and 3, the copy mechanism decreases performance slightly by $0.3\%$ for the high-resource languages and $0.11\%$ overall, but increases performance for low-resource languages by $0.68\%$.

\paragraph{Multitask training.}
Unlike the copy mechanism, multitask training actually consistently decreases the performance of the models. Looking at models 1 and 2, training the pointer-generator transformer on the multitask dataset decreases accuracy by $1.8-2.03\%$ for all three language groups. The same happens for the vanilla transformer with an accuracy decrease of $1.67-2.32\%$. A possible explanation are the relatively large training sets provided for the shared task, as this method is more suitable for the low-resource setting.

\paragraph{Hallucination pretraining.}
In order to examine the effect of hallucination pretraining on our submitted models, we now compare the pointer-generator transformers trained on the multitask data with and without hallucination pretraining (models 1 and 5). Hallucination pretraining shows to be helpful: it increases the accuracy on low-resource languages by $1.85\%$. The performance on the high-resource languages is necessarily the same, as only models for low-resource languages are actually pretrained.

\begin{table}
\centering
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{4.5pt}
\begin{tabular}{lc|c|c|c|c}
{Model:}
 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 \\
\hline
\multicolumn{6}{c}{Development Set}\\
\hline
Low & 88.20 & \textbf{90.00} & 87.52 & 89.84 & 86.35 \\
Other & 90.63 & \textbf{92.66} & 90.93 & 92.60 & 90.63 \\
All  & 90.02 & \textbf{92.04} & 90.13 & 91.96 & 89.63 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Ablation study for Task 0; development set results, averaged over all languages. Low=languages with less than 1000 train instances, Other=all other languages, All=all languages.}
\label{tab:ablation-results}
\end{table}

\section{Conclusion}
We presented the NYU-CUBoulder submissions for SIGMORPHON 2020 Task 0 and Task 2.

We developed morphological inflection models, based on a transformer and a new model for the task, a pointer-generator transformer, which is a transformer-analogue of a pointer-generator model.
For Task 0, we further added multitask training and hallucination pretraining.
For Task 2, we combined our inflection models with additional components from the provided baseline  to obtain a fully functional system for unsupervised morphological paradigm completion.

We performed an ablation study to examine the effects of all components of our inflection system. Finally, we designed a low-resource experiment to show that using the copy mechanism on top of the vanilla transformer is beneficial if training sets are small, and achieved results close to a state-of-the-art model for low-resource morphological inflection.

\section*{Acknowledgments}
We would like to thank the organizers of SIGMORPHON 2020 Task 0 and Task 2.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Ubisoft Says DLC Is Now Generally Accepted, No Longer Hated
Ron Duwell
Day-one DLC, micro-trasactions, free-to-play, platform exclusive and retail exclusive DLC. All are controversial decisions of a new age of gaming that focuses more on putting popular games into as many hands as possible rather than evolving game design. That being said, old-fashioned DLC has now become more generally accepted as the norm and is no longer universally despised, at least in the eyes of Ubisoft.
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These chessboards don't come with playing pieces, so they are great for replacing an old board, displaying a fun chess piece set, or just to have a spare on hand. Here are our top picks.


If you love sunflowers, this is the bridal bouquet for you! This arrangement is full of suflowers and accented with black-eyed susans and hypericum berries. The bouquet is hand-tied and finished with white bridal satin and pearl pins. Color and price can be adjusted to meet your event and budget needs. Please call for a consultation with our flower experts.


There's a number of things to think about while evaluating life insurance plans. The most important of these factors is to establish the overall amount of insurance coverage sought. Life insurance need can be the utmost of ones priorities once there are children in the home, just one wage earner, or there is not adequate saved money to look after the subsister for just about any length of time. Term life insurance, Permanent life insurance, universal life insurance, variable life insurance, survivorship insurance; the list and combinations seem countless. Have you any idea which life insurance policy is the right one for you? At L.A. Insurance Inc. we are able to help. Our dedicated squad of life insurance experts understand Florida's market and regulations & may get the right plan or combination of plans for your specific requirements.
Insurance coverage for a term or period of your life.
Reduce premiums for any higher insurance protection.
Rates may change following specific terms expire.
No equity cannot be used as cash value.
Precisely like it says permanent, not for a specific period.
Insurance coverage goes with you your full life.
Can create equity and also have cash value.
At what time to choose term life insurance?
Many people selecting term life insurance have a plan for long term assets and need specific insurance coverage for a period of their lives to watch over credit card debt, loved ones, & kids. for any individual with children it may make sense to use a term life insurance coverage to deal with the mortgage and income requirements, until their kids are old enough to make a living for themselves in this instance the term would expire around the instance your kids move out.
When to decide on whole life insurance?
Whole life insurance can be utilized in the retirement years as money wealth. It can offer equity for loans and have agreed on payments that don't escalate with time. Many times whole life insurance protection can pay dividends - although not all the time.