text:
World Series Four times the fun for PVI Virtual Media
Thursday, October 25, 2007 - 3:21 pm
World Series fans around the world are in for a virtual treat as PVI Virtual Media Services is providing new technology that will allow a single operating system to integrate different virtual advertisements from four separate international feeds during the 2007 Major League Baseball World Series. Multiple international outputs of virtual ads behind home plate will be operated by a single person, which will replace the need for multiple systems and numerous on-site trucks.
The new fully-automated system will be a boon to technical directors, who previously risked mixing up which virtual ads were meant for which international outlet during live telecasts.
"Major League Baseball International is excited to debut PVI's new virtual technology via the MLBI world feed of the 2007 World Series," said Paul Archey, Senior Vice President, International Business Operations, Major League Baseball. "Our relationship with PVI has continually established new frontiers in sports broadcasting, accommodating surging demand from our valued partners and providing an entertaining viewing experience for fans around the world."
PVI will deploy the system during international broadcasts of the World Series to Canada, Japan, Latin America and Mexico. Previously, PVI provided virtual advertising integration during telecasts of the MLB All-Star Game in July and the 2006 World Baseball Classic.
"We're excited to showcase our new technology on the international stage," said Samuel McCleery, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing, PVI Virtual Media Services. "As its audience continues to swell, PVI is dedicated to our continuing partnership with Major League Baseball International and to facilitating its growth through the creation of innovative technologies and applications that support their advertising goals and transform the television viewing experience for baseball fans worldwide."


text:
"The Fence", Award-Winning Short Film About Britain In The 80s
Set on the rough and ready streets of 1980's Bristol, United Kingdom. This short film follows a council estate boy and his scoundrel friends as they rip through the estates. Motorcycles, cars and punch ups to be expected!
Skinny Home In Toronto As Prototype For Parking-Space Homes?
Architecture, Cities, Design, Videos
When Cyril Borovsky bought a 16-foot-wide strip of land in Toronto sandwiched between two bungalows, he knew the only way to fit more than one bedroom on the tiny footprint was to think cubically. Using a steel frame and performing much of the work himself- with just a boom lift and makeshift pulley-, he went up four floors.
"Too Long At The Fair", Short Film About The Brutal Reality Of Adulthood
After a mishap at an important client's party, Charlie and Val find themselves in the hole and desperate for funds. They meet a charming divorcee, and an adventurous day awaits—but life has taught them that the promise of L.A. has its ups—and its downs.
shortoftheweek.com
Repopulating A Japanese town
As the Japanese populace shrinks and ages, and young people leave the suburbs and rural areas for cities, more and more communities are becoming ghost towns. The municipality of Okutama, on the outskirts of Tokyo, has come up with a novel solution: Give away houses to young families for free.
Wikkelhouse: Pick Your Modular Segments & Click Them Together
The "Wikkelhouse", or "wrap house", is a truly customizable home composed of 5-meter-square (53-square-foot) modules that click together to create any-sized structure. Once "printed", the basic units can be customized: kitted out as a bathroom, a kitchen or combined bunk rooms can create larger rooms.
Money Laundering: The Art Of Cleaning Dirty Money
Crime, Explainers, Videos
Money laundering is the lifeblood of our profession of organized crime. Without it, there's no point in committing crimes in the first place if the money we get isn't usable. Here's how money laundering works.
What Happened When A Tiny Nation Got Filthy Rich Overnight
Nauru, an island in the South Pacific, is known for its high rate of poverty and unemployment. Only a few decades ago, the island was listed among world's richest countries while it was a major phosphate exporter but as the resources exhausted, the national systems started to fail.
The German Island With A Population Of 16
The 16 residents who live on the tiny German island of Oland must cope with extreme flooding on a regular basis. But they have no intention of leaving.
How Governments Shut Down The Internet
Politics, Tech, Videos
Governments around the world are shutting down the internet, saying it's needed to prevent protests or cheating on exams. But critics say blocking expression and access to information violates human rights. Here's how internet shutdowns work.
The Unhackable Email Service
Ladar Levison built an encrypted email service called Lavabit that counted a prominent figure among its users: Edward Snowden. When the FBI demanded Levison decrypt Snowden's communications, he had two options, either hand over the encryption key or destroy his servers. He chose the latter.
Inside London's £18BN New Railway
Join Fred Mills inside London's new Tottenham Court Road (TCR) station – part of the £18BN Elizabeth Line that is being constructed by Crossrail beneath the UK's capital.
The Man Who Cheated Vegas Casinos For Years And Stole Millions
When one man discovers a way to beat the system, Vegas becomes his playground. From slot machine alone he steals millions with the authorities none the wiser, but when he pushes the limits and increases the risks, things take a turn for the worst.
Motorized Photographs Of Sunset Blvd. And Other L.A. Streets
Art, Cities, Photos, Videos
Commissioned by The Getty Museum to the painter, draftsman, photographer, and bookmaker, Ed Ruscha. Utilizing The Getty Research Institute's preservation and digitization of over a million images from Ed's Streets of Los Angeles photo series, and excerpts from Jack Kerouac's "On The Road."
The Most Extreme Railway In The World
At 430 miles long, the formidable Mauritania Railway, nicknamed the "backbone of the Sahara," boasts some of the longest and heaviest trains in the world. Its journey begins in Zouerat, Mauritania, and runs across the searing desert to the port city of Nouadhibou, on Africa's Atlantic coast.
Italy's Crumbling Motorways: How The Genoa Bridge Collapse Exposed A National Scandal
The state of Italian motorways is a national scandal. There are about twenty badly-damaged motorway bridges in Italy currently under investigation. There are also 200 illegal tunnels, which don't comply with European standards and 1,000 viaducts which haven't been monitored for years.
The Story Of A German Conman
It was one of the biggest white-collar scams in German history. In the 1990s, Manfred Schmider and his company FlowTex took investors for more than two billion euros. Today, the conman himself can't believe how easy it was to get away with a major fraud.
Inside Belarus, Europe's Last Dictatorship
Politics, Videos, World
In October 2016, Alexander Lukashenko swept to his fifth term as the Belarusian president, marking 22 years in power. The autocratic regime still employs the use of internet surveillance, censorship, and intimidation to exert control over its people and press.
The Radioactive 'Capital' Of The World
Science, Videos, World
Jachymov, a small uranium mining town in the northwest of the Czech Republic, has been key in the field of radioactivity research. More than a century ago, Marie and Pierre Curie based their revolutionary work on radioactivity on material brought from there.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Cast, Crews From Hit Chicago Shows Join CSO Musicians at Picket Line
The contract between the musicians' union and the orchestra expired March 10
Published at 12:32 pm on March 19, 2019
Cast and crew members from popular musicals and television shows, like "Hamilton," "Chicago Fire," and "The Chi," joined musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the picket line Tuesday as the group continues its push for better compensation.
The musicians' strike has now entered its second week, with union members refusing to enter Orchestra Hall, instead picketing daily on South Michigan Avenue. The strike has already led to concert cancellations as negotiations continued last week.
The contract between the musicians' union and the orchestra expired March 10.
Marcus Beam 29 mins ago
Chicago Investment Manager Allegedly Swindled $500K From Women He Met Online
Chicago Weather 18 mins ago
The Chicago Federation of Musicians said that while competing orchestral associations have increased musician wages and benefits, CSO Musicians have seen their compensation, retirement and health benefits stagnate.
"The arts in Chicago are part of what makes our city great and a destination for audiences from around the world," The Chicago Symphony Orchestra said in a statement. "The current strike has led to canceled concerts. The Association remains committed to reaching consensus on a new agreement that provides our exceptional musicians with a generous and sustainable compensation package, and we look forward to resuming negotiations soon."
Joining the musicians and showing their support at the picket line Tuesday were cast and crew members from hit shows like "Hamilton," "A Bronx Tale," "Chicago Fire," "The Chi," "Little Shop of Horrors," The Second City and more.
Illinois' congressional delegation was also expected to join the line Tuesday afternoon.


text:
Q: Rust AsMut copying rather than taking mutable reference? My understanding of AsMut is that it is supposed to provide a generic way to take an argument which is "equivalent* to a mutable reference, i.e. it can be cheaply converted to a mutable reference.
However, I have encountered the following example code, I am trying to use AsMut just to be generic over slice, arr and Vec, but it seems to just be copying my array, rather than passing a mutable reference to it and modifying it in place:
    pub fn uses_asmut<T, M>(mut m: M)
    where M: AsMut<[T]> {
        m.as_mut().swap(0,1);
    }
    #[test]
    pub fn test_swap() {
        let arr = [1,2];
        uses_asmut(arr);
        assert_eq!(arr, [2,1]);
    }

(note, I know something must be wrong since I apparently pass ownership of arr to uses_asmut as an argument, but then the borrow checker doesn't complain on the next line when I use arr again!  If I change it to uses_asmut(&mut arr) the test passes, but I think the code as written shouldn't even compile!)

A: The conversion should be cheap. But you're passing the array by value, and that was never said to be cheap. You could pass &mut arr to not copy the array.
When we say the conversion should be cheap, we mean "don't do something like str::from_utf8_mut()" that needs to scan the whole string. Indeed, the conversion from [T; N] to [T] is extremely cheap: so cheap, that it happens automatically by the compiler (coercion).
But it does not mean it is equivalent to mutable reference, because it is not a mutable reference. It is a generic type. If you want a mutable reference, take a mutable reference. You can even use AsMut, like &mut impl AsMut<[T]>.
There is no way AsMut could prevent you from moving (or copying) things but also not require you to type the &mut at the call site.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
2018 Alpaca Farm Dead Celebrity Montage by RobinJRichards
LorinBurte
Get off my lawn!
ChrisRosenberg
The odds of me winning a quiz are sufficiently low to not compel me to have something witty here.
The following shuffled off this mortal coil during the calendar year 2018.
1 LorinBurte 512 98 18
3 DreierR 365 94 18
4 BradburnA 354 92 18
6 RautY 351 86 00
6 Svoyager-11 351 86 00
8 griffism 317 82 18
9 CasaleggiL 301 80 00
10 randalleng 299 77 00
14 wouterst 288 69 18
15 WareD 287 67 00
16 GoodmanDL 280 64 18
19 Timm 274 57 00
20 crm 270 54 00
22 SteveWilliams 256 50 00
24 MoyseyC 254 46 00
25 McGeeDean 249 44 00
29 ArunH 199 35 00
32 BIngram 183 28 00
33 ElendilPickle 179 26 00
34 EggCzar 174 23 00
37 JonesRW 160 17 18
38 KleinJ 151 14 00
40 YuC 135 10 00
41 SokolM 103 7 00
42 MitchellWA 83 5 00
43 RJRouge 80 3 00
44 GarstJ 64 1 00
JAN: John Young is the only astronaut to have flown on Gemini, Apollo and STS missions (including the first on Columbia) during his career. He was a member of this Apollo mission alongside Ken Mattingly and Charles Duke.
FEB: John Mahoney had a memorable career in stage and screen, garnering two Emmy nominations (but no wins) for his role as Martin, the blue-collar father of two painfully pretentious white-collar sons on this sitcom.
MAR: Tom Benson, who took his string of car dealerships and funneled the money into pro sports, was the colorful and proud owner of an NFL and an NBA franchise that play their games yards apart from each other, the latter doing so in the Smoothie King Center. Name that NBA team. (City and Mascot required).
New Orleans Pelicans [He also owned the New Orleans Saints]
APR: Larry Harvey is credited for establishing this music festival on a San Francisco Beach in 1986, often called a week long "fringe culturefest," "a hallucinogenic state fair," and "a full-scale countercultural declaration of independence."
MAY: Billy Cannon, winner of the 1957 Heisman Trophy, played for this SEC school. He is best known for a certain 89 yard punt return against Mississippi on Halloween night that same year.
LSU /Louisiana State
JUN: Frank Carlucci served as both a National Security Adviser and Secretary of Defense under this US President.
JUL: Sergio Marchionne is credited for turning around two vastly different car companies on two continents that would later merge in 2009. Name either company.
Fiat / Chrysler
AUG: Aug 16th saw the death of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, cementing the idea that that date is not a good day to die as a musician. Give the other two noted musicians who both died on August 16th albeit 39 years apart. (edited at 8:45 pm, December 14, 2018 (EST))
Elvis (1977) and Robert Johnson (1938)
SEP: Marty Balin, who died in San Francisco, was a founding member of this rock band, who had major hits with "Lather," "White Rabbit," and "Somebody to Love."
Jefferson Airplane [Will not accept: Jefferson Starship or Starship]
OCT: In a death that has an inadvertent yet comical connection to yours truly, "Whitey" Bulger was offed in a West VA prison. His death announcement in Boston preempted the end of my second episode of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." You know, when things were getting good? Good times. So what was "Whitey" Bulger's real first name?
NOV: William Goldman as a Screenwriter/novelist/playwright who won two Academy Awards for two radically different historically based films set around eighty years apart. Name either one.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid / All the President's Men
DEC: Ken Berry was best known for several TV and film roles, one of which was Vint Harper on the TV sitcom "Mama's Family." What job did Vint Harper have on the show?


A special thanks also to Helen Howard for her work as A charter member of the Friends of the Joryville Park volunteer group and for her many hours of work in and for the park. Helen was instrumental in having road directional signs installed on the roads leading to the park. She has also worked very hard in removing grafitti from park tables and in doing other clean-up work. After cleaning the tables, she has skilfully applied new coats of paint to the tables to make them presentable again. Unfortunately, this has been a recurring job for her.


text:
Description
===========
Installs packages required for compiling C software from source. Use this
cookbook if you wish to compile C programs, or install RubyGems with native
extensions.

Requirements
------------
Chef 0.10.10+ and Ohai 0.6.12+ are required. For the latest list of supported
platforms, please see the `metadata.rb`.

**Note for OmniOS**: Currently, OmniOS's Ruby package is built with
GCC 4.6.3, and the path is hardcoded, as the gcc binaries are not
installed in the default $PATH. This means that in order to install
RubyGems into the "system" Ruby, one must install `developer/gcc46`.
[An issue](https://github.com/omniti-labs/omnios-build/issues/19) is
open upstream w/ OmniOS to rebuild the Ruby package with GCC 4.7.2.

Attributes
----------
| Attribute      | Default | Description                       |
|----------------|:-------:|-----------------------------------|
| `compile_time` | `false` | Execute resources at compile time |

Usage
-----
Include the build-essential recipe in your run list:

```sh
knife node run_list add NODE "recipe[build-essential::default]"
```

or add the build-essential recipe as a dependency and include it from inside
another cookbook:

```ruby
include_recipe 'build-essential::default'
```

### Gems with C extensions
For RubyGems that include native C extensions you wish to use with Chef, you
should do the following.

1. Set the `compile_time` attribute to true in your wrapper cookbook or role:

    ```ruby
    # Wrapper attribute
    default['build-essential']['compile_time'] = true
    ```

    ```ruby
    # Role
    default_attributes(
      'build-essential' => {
        'compile_time' = true
      }
    )
    ```

1. Ensure that the C libraries, which include files and other assorted "dev"
type packages, are installed in the compile phase after the build-essential
recipe is executed. For example:

    ```ruby
    include_recipe 'build-essential::default'

    package('mypackage-devel') { action :nothing }.run_action(:install)
    ```

1. Use the `chef_gem` resource in your recipe to install the gem with the native
extension:

    ```ruby
    chef_gem 'gem-with-native-extension'
    ```

License & Authors
-----------------
- Author: Seth Vargo (<sethvargo@gmail.com>)
- Author: Joshua Timberman (<joshua@opscode.com>)
- Author: Seth Chisamore (<schisamo@opscode.com>)

```text
Copyright 2009-2014, Chef Software, Inc. (<legal@getchef.com>)

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
```

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


HAMBURG The United States, Russia and Jordan reached a ceasefire and "de-escalation agreement" for southwestern Syria on Friday, as the U.S. government under President Donald Trump made its first attempt at peacemaking in the country's six-year-old civil war.
BEIJING/MOSCOW Russia's largest natural gas producer Gazprom will start supplying fuel to China through Siberia on Dec. 20, 2019, Gazprom Chief Executive Alexei Miller told reporters, after a meeting with China National Petroleum Company (CNPC).
MOSCOW Russia and the United States are still discussing the timing of the first face-to-face encounter between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, expected to take place at a G20 summit in Germany later this week, a Kremlin aide said on Monday.
MOSCOW A meeting next week near Paris between French President Emmanuel Macron and Russia's Vladimir Putin will be an opportunity for both leaders to get to know each other, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said on Friday.
BEIJING Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Moscow was opposed to any new countries acquiring nuclear weapons, but that the world should talk to North Korea rather than threaten it.


text:
Philadelphia connection will be key for Stanford women
Categories College, Girl's/Women's
Phillylacrosse.com, Posted 11/28/08
The four-time defending league champion Stanford women's lacrosse team – led by a Philly group that includes a new coach and several key returnees – faces what must be regarded as one of the most demanding schedules in school history when it begins play for the 2009 season in February.
First-year coach Amy (Umbach) Bokker, a Phoenixville graduate and 1991 high school All-American, announced a schedule that will include three East Coast trips and games against four 2008 NCAA tournament teams.
"It's always been my philosophy to put yourself against the best during the season, so you go into the postseason ready to play," said Bokker, who spent the past 12 season as coach at George Mason (school-best 12-5 last season).
This year's Stanford team will feature Bess Siegfried (Agnes Irwin) and Julie Christy (Conestoga) at midfield, Amanda Schwab (Harriton) at attack and Ashley Aruffo (Episcopal Academy) at defense.
Siegfried, a senior, had 13 goals and 16 assists last year while leading the team with 17 caused turnovers and adding 16 groundballs. Christy, a junior, had 15 goals and 10 assists and paced the team with 35 draw controls while earning all-conference honors. Schwab had a solid sophomore season, notching 10 goals and three assists in three starts while sophomore Aruffo had two goals in a reserve role.
This local group will be vital to the success of a team that went 12-8 last year and defeated Denver, 9-8, for the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) title. Of the Cardinal's 10 nonconference opponents, eight had winning records last season. The other two each went 8-9.
Among Stanford's opponents are NCAA 2008 runner-up Penn, semifinalist Syracuse, quarterfinalist Maryland, and Notre Dame, another NCAA tournament team. Stanford plays all four on the road. Those four teams were a combined 32-4 at home last season.
Stanford begins the season with a pair of MPSF games, at Oregon Feb. 7 and with a home opener Feb. 12 against first-year program Fresno State, which will be playing its first-ever road game.
As difficult as the schedule is, Stanford went a combined 8-4 last year against its 2009 opponents. And against those tournament teams, Stanford went 2-1, including a stunning 10-8 home victory over Penn. The Quakers only other loss came in the NCAA final.
Highlighting the home schedule will be William & Mary, which was captained last season by new Stanford assistant Jaime Sellers, and is the alma mater of Bokker.
Stanford also will play host to the MPSF tournament April 23-26 at Laird Q. Cagan Stadium.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under College, Girl's/Women's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
READERS COMMENTS (0)
Registration open for Springside Chestnut Hill Academy Summer Lacrosse Camp (for boys) on June 20-24
Phillylacrosse announces second Instagram T-Shirt Contest: Send us your top highlight
.@1stStartLax Philly lacrosse schedule
Updated list of Philly girls' HS, club coaching openings
Registration open for 27th Annual Coach Finn Jersey Shore Camp for boys on Aug. 1-4 at Stone Harbor
Registration open for @DynastyEliteLax Summer Boot Camps at YSC Sports on June 21-23 & July 12-14
Updated list of Philly boys' HS, club, youth coaching openings
Haverford College, DeSales co-hosting Prospect Day at DeSales on Feb. 6
Registration opens for Blue Ox Summer Lacrosse Camp (B/G) at Indian Springs on June 20-23
Registration is open for @DynastyEliteLax Supplemental Tryouts on April 19 & 26


The Surgeon General's first report on oral health observes that dental cavities are the most common childhood health problem – 5 times more common than asthma. More than 50% of children ages 5 to 9 have at least one filling.
Poor children are two times more likely to suffer from cavities than their more affluent peers. More than 51 million school hours are lost to dental-related illnesses and the corresponding pain can cause problems with learning, eating, and speaking. "We have the technology and know-how to ensure that everyone can improve their oral health, but not everyone has access to it," notes Dr. Nottingham, one of South Florida's best dentists.
"Oral care is an integral part of overall health care. Dental visits can prevent a number of problems – such as infections – which, left untreated, can spread to the rest of your body," points out cosmetic dentistry specialist Dr. Nottingham.


Warwick School in 110 Objects is an online museum marking Warwick School's 1,100th anniversary in 2014. The museum is inspired by the History of the World in 100 Objects, a series of talks on BBC Radio 4 which were based on artifacts in the British Museum.
This online museum explores different facets of Warwick School through 110 items. Each object, artifact or memento tells a different story, reflecting something of the life and history of the school. Objects have been nominated by current boys, staff, old boys and members of the wider school community. A number of the objects are on display in the school museum and many can be seen around the school today.


By now, you may have noticed that many of the laws of consulting take the form of paradoxes, dilemmas, and contradictions, and that they are often humorous. Perhaps this format has surprised you. Perhaps you thought that the consultant, of all people, must be logical, single-minded, and, above all, serious. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First of all, consultants deal in change. Most people — that is, most groups of people — function quite logically most of the time. And most of the time they don't need consultants. The time they do need a consultant is when logic isn't working. Usually they have arrived at some paradox, dilemma, or contradiction. They are, in a word, stuck.
"Stuck" reminds me of one of my "technical" consulting assignments when a computer was literally stuck.For no logical reason, the company's payroll program would start to process the record for the first employee and then would sit there, doing nothing — and doing it 10,000,000 times per second. The programmers confronted me with a long, logical list of reasons why this couldn't possibly be happening — but, of course, it was happening. and if the payroll wasn't computed in a few hours, there would be hell to pay.


text:
Dopravný úrad > TRANSPORT AUTHORITY About us
Filling Department – Business hours
Cash Register – Business hours
Other organization units – Business hours
TRANSPORT AUTHORITY About us
Transport Authority was established by the Act No. 402/2013 Coll. on Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Postal Services and on Transport Authority and on amendments of several acts, coming into force on 1 January 2014 as a state administrative body with nationwide competence in the area of railways and other guided transport, civil aviation and inland waterway transport.
a) undertakes activities in the area of railways and other guided transport, civil aviation and inland waterway transport within the scope and under conditions set by the above mentioned Act
b) cooperates in the area of its powers with the Ministries and other state administration bodies, with the European Union bodies, International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC), European Railway Agency (ERA), Independent Regulators´ Group – Rail (IRG – Rail), European Network Rail Regulatory Bodies (ENRRB), AQUAPOL, Danube Commission and Border River Commission (KHV),
c) acts in accordance with other binding legal regulations.
Professional competence, duties and powers of the Transport Authority are set in binding legal regulations provided for the area of railways and other guided transport, civil aviation and inland waterway transport, especially the following Acts:
• Act No. 143/1998 Coll. on Civil Aviation (Civil Aviation Act) and on Amendments of Some Acts,
• Act No. 338/2000 Coll. on Inland Navigation and on Amendments of Some Acts,
• Act No. 513/2009 Coll. on Railroads and on Amendments of Some Acts,
• Act No. 514/2009 Coll. on the Transport on Railroads.
The Transport Authority is a budgetary organization coupled through financial relations
with the State budget by means of the budgetary chapter managed by the Ministry of Transport, Construction and Regional Development of the Slovak Republic.
For oversight and supervision over flight navigation services and activities concerning the European Aviation Safety Agency, also the resources outside the state budget are used.
The Transport Authority is in its activities independent, professional and transparent. State administration bodies, entities, state power authorities, nor any other persons may manipulate the Transport Authority in its activities.


text:
Le parc naturel Obô de São Tomé (PNOST) a été créé en 2006 sur l'île de Sao Tomé, en même temps que le parc naturel Obô de Principe sur l'île de Principe. Ces deux espaces de Sao Tomé-et-Principe visent une reconnaissance internationale à travers un statut de parc national, mais en 2019 l'UICN ne leur avait pas encore assigné de catégorie.

Qu'est-ce que l'obô ?
« Obô » désigne les épaisses forêts réputées primaires de São Tomé. C'est en quelque sorte une « jungle » que les Portugais, dès leur arrivée au , cherchèrent à dompter en la défrichant pour cultiver d'abord la canne à sucre, puis le café et le cacao, au sein de plantations nommées « roças » – du verbe roçar qui signifie « débroussailler ». Le  marque un tournant, avec l'indépendance et la crise. L'activité se réduit et le patrimoine architectural est à l'abandon. L'obó reste en marge de la vie économique et sociale du pays, mais l'écotourisme nourrit quelques espoirs.

Histoire
En 1999, une loi sur la Conservation de la faune, de la flore et des aires protégées avait déjà classé Obô comme « parc naturel ». Le texte de 2006 le crée officiellement et en précise les contours et le statut.

Territoire
Le PNOST recouvre un peu moins du tiers de la superficie de l'île et s'étend sur trois zones discontinues, réparties sur 4 des 6 districts de l'île (Caué, Lembá, Lobata et Mé-Zóchi) :
 la plus étendue, au centre-ouest du pays, un massif montagneux qui inclut le Pico de São Tomé – point culminant de l'île – et le Pico Cão Grande.
 la zone de Praia das Conchas et de Lagoa Azul au nord,
 la zone de la mangrove du Malanza au sud.

Flore
108 espèces végétales ont été dénombrées dans le parc, dont 31 figurent sur la liste rouge de l'UICN.

Faune
On a recensé 4 espèces de mammifères, 20 espèces et 8 sous-espèces d'oiseaux, 6 espèces et 1 sous-espèce de reptiles, 5 espèces d'amphibiens, des dizaines, voire des centaines d'espèces d'invertébrés.

Notes et références

Bibliographie

  António Almeida, Sandra Ribeiro, Helena Botelho, « Parque Nacional de Obô: Conhecimento e perceções acerca da sua importância em alunos de S. Tomé », in AmbientalMente sustentable, 2017, , , à télécharger
 Jean-Michel Lebigre, « L'obó de São Tomé (République de São Tomé e Príncipe) : un exemple d'hinterland forestier insulaire », in Cahiers d'Outre-Mer, , , ,
  Plano de Manejo. Parque Nacional Obô de S. Tomé, 2009-2014, 214 p.,

Aire protégée à Sao Tomé-et-Principe
District de Caué
District de Lembá
District de Lobata
District de Mé-Zóchi

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


MOUNT HOLLY — A Bordentown City man pleaded guilty Monday for his role in an elaborate Internet scheme that cost victims more than $30,000 in precious metals and rare coins.
Robert Boucher Jr., 45, of East Chestnut Street, was "duped" himself by the mastermind of the scam, whom he identified in court as a Malaysian man he never met and corresponded with only online.
Boucher admitted that he sold stolen property, coins and precious metals to local pawnshops and kept some of the proceeds, but that he sent most of the money to his unknown Internet friend.
Superior Court Judge Jeanne T. Covert accepted Boucher's plea to a disorderly-persons offense of receiving stolen property and sentenced him to three years of probation. Covert also ordered him to pay more than $840 a month during that time to pay off about $30,375 in restitution.
Burlington County Assistant Prosecutor Robert Perry and defense attorney JeromeBallarotto described the case as "unique," with the defendant being a victim of the larger scheme he participated in.
Boucher said in court Monday that he "met" his accomplice on the Internet sometime in April 2011 and that the man told him "he was stuck in Malaysia" and could not conduct business on his own.
Boucher said he even sent the man his own money, including his rent, and corresponded with him in more than 100 emails.
Even when he confirmed his suspicions that the items he was selling were stolen, he continued to work with the Internet scammer, Boucher admitted.
Now he is on the hook for the full restitution to the victims, money his attorney said he will pay back with the help of his family.
Covert acknowledged that Boucher "was duped in some respects." She said the term of three years of probation would allow for more supervision over the restitution payments.
In the past, law enforcement officials have warned of Internet scams like the one Boucher was caught in, and of similar schemes in which people send money in hopes of getting a larger return once unknown recipients can improve their own circumstances and access their own money to send.


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\section{Introduction}
Over the past years, face recognition has been and is still one of the most important and fundamental computer vision problem. Significant progresses have been made in face recognition, ranging from the family of sparse representation \cite{wright2009robust,wagner2012toward,zhang2011sparse} to the application of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) \cite{sun2014deep,sun2014deep2,taigman2014deepface}. While achieving impressive recognition accuracy in controlled environments (some of them even surpass the human performance at certain tasks), most of them also show strong robustness to occlusion and illumination. However, these algorithms largely depend on well-aligned training and testing samples. Research \cite{shan2004curse} has demonstrated that even slight misalignment can globally transform the entire images, greatly reducing the recognition accuracy. Even the CNN that achieves the state-of-the-art performance nowadays needs to align the training and testing faces to the same position, since misaligned query faces can greatly degrade its performance \cite{schroff2015facenet}. Thus current face recognition techniques can benefit from an efficient and well-performing face alignment algorithm.
\par
In this paper, we only consider the face alignment methods based on subspace learning and sparse representation \cite{huang2008simultaneous,yang2012efficient,wagner2012toward}. Although there are other types of face image registration methods that can handle larger face variation in expression and pose, e.g. active appearance models \cite{cootes2001active}, active shape models \cite{cootes1995active} and unsupervised joint alignment \cite{huang2007unsupervised}, their complexity is usually too high for efficient alignment while ours is far more efficient and suitable for real-time situations. Besides, the facial landmarks based methods only focus on accurately detect the facial key points, while ours aligns the face based on the whole training samples and focus on benefiting the subsequent recognition.
\begin{figure}[!t]
\centering
\renewcommand{\captionlabelfont}{\footnotesize}
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{4pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-12pt}
\includegraphics[width=3.37in]{fig1.pdf}
\caption{\footnotesize . An Illustration of the MRLR. The red bounding box denotes the input estimate and the green one is the output estimate. The whole algorithm works in an iterating style.}\label{fig1}
\end{figure}
 \subsection{Related Work}
 \cite{wright2009robust} reported the sparse representation based classification (SRC), which seeks to represent an aligned testing image by the linear sparse combination of training images. The basic assumption for SRC is that all the training and testing samples need to be well aligned, so SRC performs poorly with misaligned faces. To overcome such shortcoming, \cite{huang2008simultaneous} proposed the transform-invariant sparse representation (TSR). They add deformations in training set, simultaneously recovering the image transformation and representation coefficients. However, TSR aligns testing image to global dictionary and thus easily gets trapped in local minima. To avoid that, robust alignment by sparse representation (RASR) \cite{wagner2012toward} aligns the testing image to training samples of each subject, then warps training set and testing image to a unified transformation for recognition. The exhaustive subject by subject search effectively finds the global optima, but it is extremely time-consuming, especially when the subject number is large. Therefore RASR detrimental to efficiency and scalability. \cite{yang2012efficient} proposed the efficient misalignment-robust representation (MRR) for face recognition. With the carefully controlled training set, they perform the singular value decomposition (SVD) and use principal components to approximate the global dictionary, significantly enhancing its real-time ability. However, SVD operation therein is still time and memory consuming, preventing MRR from being applied in large-scale datasets. Using the principle components of dictionary instead of the original one inevitably reduces alignment accuracy.
 \begin{figure*}[!t]
\centering
\renewcommand{\captionlabelfont}{\footnotesize}
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{4pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-12pt}
\includegraphics[width=5.25in]{faceiter.pdf}
\caption{\footnotesize . An Illustration of the MRLR iteration procedure. The left image is the input uncropped face. We use the Viola-Jones detector to generate an initialized estimate, and obtain the locality-constrained dictionary (LCD) for it, while the LCD is to compute the new transformation. Then we iteratively update the face transformation and the corresponding LCD until convergence. The bar plot denotes the label distribution of the LCD. It shows that the LCD contains increasingly more training samples from the same class as the testing face after each iteration.}\label{faceiter}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Motivations and Contributions}
In summary, current prevailing sparse representation based face alignment methods contain several major shortcomings:
\begin{itemize}
\item Time-consuming: \cite{wagner2012toward,zhuang2013single} need to align the face in an exhaustive manner using sub-dictionaries that are constructed by every individual. Suppose the dataset contains more than a thousand individuals, these algorithms will work extremely slow.
\item Easy to introduce background noise: \cite{wagner2012toward,zhuang2013single} align the training set to the testing sample (e.g. \cite{wagner2012toward,zhuang2013single}), which may introduce background noise if the testing sample is largely off-centered and break the low-dimensional linear illumination model \cite{basri2003lambertian}.
\item Unsatisfactory subspace: \cite{huang2008simultaneous,yang2012efficient} use the global dictionary to perform the alignment. The global dictionary contains various uncorrelated face samples and produces a unsatisfactory subspace for alignment.
\item Unable to benefit from outside data.
\end{itemize}
\par
In order to address the above problems, we propose a misalignment-robust locality-constrained representation (MRLR) for robust face recognition. Fig. \ref{fig1} briefly illustrates the MRLR. Inspired by the locality-constrained linear coding \cite{wang2010locality}, the locality is introduced to the dictionary construction for alignment. Specifically, we combine a locality adaptor to the $l_2$ regularized penalties for $\bm{x}$. Because we also use $l_2$ norm to constrain $\bm{e}$, an efficient analytical solution can be derived. While updating the face transformation, we simultaneously update the locality-constrained dictionary, as shown in Fig. \ref{faceiter}. Our contributions are summarized as follows.
\begin{itemize}
\item The proposed locality-constrained representation avoid the exhaustive search in every subject of the training set, greatly reducing the computational time and making the alignment scalable to large datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that locality has been introduced to improve the performance of face alignment.
\item MRLR uses the locality adaptor and the $l_2$-norm to penalize the the representation term and the error term. We derive an analytical solution for the optimization. Moreover, we can accelerate the analytical solution by making use of the block structure of the deformable dictionary. Thus the inverse of a large-size matrix can be further avoided, making our model even more scalable and efficient.
\item MRLR simultaneously optimize the transformation and update the corresponding locality-constrained dictionary, which largely avoids the unsatisfactory local minima.
\item MRLR can take advantage of outside data to better construct the locality-constrained dictionary. Outside data can be effectively used to benefit the alignment performance.
\end{itemize}
\begin{figure*}[!t]
\centering
\renewcommand{\captionlabelfont}{\footnotesize}
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{2pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-10pt}
\includegraphics[width=6.2in]{fig2.pdf}
\caption{\footnotesize . A face alignment example using different constraints, key point based method and MRLR. The red box is the initial estimate and the green box denotes the final alignment. After performing face alignment, we use the SRC to perform the face recognition. The stem diagram on the right shows the corresponding sparse representation coefficients of the aligned face after performing SRC. We can see only (d) and (f) show discriminative representation results. Note that, the corresponding sub-dictionary in (d) means we only use the sub-dictionary that is constituted by faces whose label is the same as the testing face. The uncorresponding sub-dictionary in (c) is constituted by faces that do not belong to the testing face.}\label{fig2}
\end{figure*}
\section{The Proposed Method}
\subsection{The MRLR Model}
We arrange the given $n_i$ training samples from the $i$th class as columns of a dictionary $\bm{D}_i=[\bm{d}_{i,1},\bm{d}_{i,2},\cdots,\bm{d}_{i,n_i}]\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n_i}$ where $\bm{d}_{i,j}\in\mathbb{R}^m$ denotes the $j$th vectorized training sample of the $i$th class. Combining all the dictionary from each subjects, we can obtain a global dictionary $\bm{D}=[\bm{D}_1,\bm{D}_2,\cdots,\bm{D}_k]\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ where $n=\sum_{i=1}^k n_i$ and $k$ is the number of subjects. Suppose that the query face $\bm{y}$ belongs to the $i$th subject, ideally it can be approximately represented by $\bm{D}_i\bm{x}$ in which $\bm{x}$ is the representation coefficients. However, due to the misalignment problem, such linear subspace representation may be invalid. Therefore we introduce a transformation that models the warping to the original face. Instead of observing the $\bm{y}$, we observe the warped face $\bm{y}_w=\bm{y}\circ\tau^{-1}$ where $\circ$ denotes a nonlinear operator and $\tau$ belongs to a finite-dimensional group of transformations acting on the image domain (e.g. similarity transformation). The linear subspace representation $\bm{x}$ of the warped face can not reveal the true identity. Naively applying recognition algorithm is inappropriate. On the other hand, the potential subspace corresponding to $\bm{y}$ is also unknown, so it is difficult to align it. Fortunately, by leveraging the high similarity of face, we can construct a suboptimal local dictionary for alignment, and update the local dictionary according to the latest transformation. After several iterations, it eventually converges to the accurate transformation. After the true deformation $\tau^{-1}$ is found, then we can apply its inverse $\tau$ to the testing face and obtain the aligned face $\bm{y}_w\circ\tau$.
\par
The global dictionary with $l_1/l_2$ constraint usually recovers the unsatisfactory transformation (see Fig. \ref{fig2}), because it is prone to local minima under the interference of atoms from the other subjects. Inspired by \cite{wang2010locality}, we introduce the locality constraints to the dictionary. The reason lies in two folds. First, locality-constrained dictionary only uses the most similar atoms to the query, effectively avoiding unsatisfactory local minima caused by dissimilar atoms, as shown in Fig. \ref{fig2}. Second, using locality-constrained dictionary  requires no exhaustive search in every subject and leads to highly efficient solving algorithm. The model of MRLR is formulated as
\begin{equation}\label{MRLRm}
\small
\min_{\bm{x},\bm{e}}\ \|\bm{c} \odot \bm{x}\|_{2}^{2}+\|\bm{e}\|_{2}^{2}\quad\ \textnormal{s.t.}\ \ \bm{y}_{w}\circ \tau=\bm{D}\bm{x}+\bm{e}
\end{equation}
where $\odot$ denotes the element-wise multiplication between two vectors, and $\bm{c}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ is the locality adaptor that attaches different penalties to the coefficients $\bm{x}$. The locality adaptor activates the most correlated atoms for the testing sample, while suppressing the uncorrelated ones. Unfortunately, the model in Eq. \eqref{MRLRm} is difficult to solve due to the non-linearity. A small deformation in the transform $\tau$ can be linearized as $\bm{y}_{w}\circ (\tau + \Delta \tau)=\bm{y}_{w}\circ \tau+ J\Delta \tau$ where $J=\frac{\partial }{\partial r} \bm{y}_{w}\circ \tau$ is the Jacobian of $\bm{y}\circ \tau$ with respect to $\tau$ and $\Delta \tau$ is the step in $\tau$.  If an initial $\tau$ is given, we can repeatedly search for an optimal $\Delta \tau$ to update $\tau$ and $J$. A final transformation $\tau$ can be obtained to align the warped image.
\par
The efficiency of the MRLR model lies in two folds. First, we enforce the $l_2$ norm constraints on both $\bm{c}\odot \bm{x}$ and $\bm{e}$, and derive an analytical solution for MRLR, which is much faster than solving $l_1$ norm minimization. In fact, the performance of the $l_2$ constraints are similar to the $l_1$ constraints in the case without occlusion \cite{zhang2011sparse}. Second, we take advantage of the block structure of matrices to design a highly efficient algorithm, which obtains exactly the same solution in shorter time. The MRLR algorithm is summarized as follows.
{
\begin{algorithm}[h]
\small
    \caption{The MRLR algorithm for Face Alignment}
    \label{alg1}
    \begin{algorithmic}[1]
    \REQUIRE~The dictionary of training samples $\bm{D}$, the warped testing image $\bm{y}_w$, the initial transformation $\tau$ (it can be obtained by any off-the-shelf face detector, e.g. Viola-Jones detector), a constant $\sigma$.
    \ENSURE~The aligned face $\bm{y}$\\
    \WHILE {not converge or reach maximal iteration}
    \STATE Compute the locality adaptor: $\bm{c} \leftarrow \exp(\frac{\bm{D}^T\bm{y}}{\sigma})$, for all $i$, $\bm{c}_i \leftarrow max(\bm{c})-\bm{c}_i$.
    \STATE $j\leftarrow 1$.
    \WHILE {not converge or reach maximal iteration}
    \STATE $\hat{\bm{y}}_{w}(\tau_{j-1})\leftarrow\frac {\bm{y}_{w}\circ \tau_{j-1}}{\|\bm{y}_{w}\circ \tau_{j-1}\|_{2}}$, $J\leftarrow\frac {\partial}{\partial\tau_{j-1}}\hat{\bm{y}}_{w}(\tau_{j-1})|_{\tau_{j-1}}$.
    \STATE $\begin{aligned}
& \Delta \tau=\arg\min \limits_{\Delta \tau,\bm{x},\bm{e}}\ \|\bm{c} \odot\boldsymbol{x}\|_{2}^{2}+\|\bm{e}\|_{2}^{2}\\
& \textnormal{s.t.}\quad \hat{\bm{y}}_{w}(\tau_{j})+J\Delta\tau=\bm{D}\bm{x}+\bm{e}
\end{aligned}$.
    \STATE $\tau_j\leftarrow\tau_{j-1}+\Delta \tau$.
    \STATE $j\leftarrow j+1$.
    \ENDWHILE
    \STATE $\tau\leftarrow \tau_j$, $\tau_0\leftarrow \tau_j$.
    \ENDWHILE
    \STATE Output the final aligned face $\bm{y}=\bm{y}_w\circ\bm{e}$.
    \end{algorithmic}
 \end{algorithm}
 }
\subsection{Efficient Solving Algorithm}
This section presents a highly efficient solution for the MRLR algorithm. By analyzing Algorithm \ref{alg1}, we find the optimization in step 6 dominates the overall computational time. Although it has an analytical solution, it contains the inversion operation of a large-size matrix. We aim to take advantage of the block structure of the matrix to decompose the inversion. We first reformulate the optimization in Step 6 as
\begin{equation}\label{reMRLR}
\small
\begin{aligned}
&\Delta \bm{\tau} = \min \limits_{\Delta \tau}\|\bm{C} \bm{x}\|_{2}^{2}+\|\bm{e}\|_{2}^{2}\\
&\ s.t.\ \ \hat{\bm{y}}_{w} + J\Delta \tau  =\bm{D}\bm{x}+\bm{e}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
where $\bm{C}$ is a diagonal matrix with the diagonal elements being the locality adaptor vector $\bm{c}$. We can further substitute $
\bm{e}=\hat{\bm{y}}_{w}-\left[ \bm{D},-J\right]
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \bm{x} \\
    \Delta \tau \\
  \end{array}
\right]
$ into Eq. \eqref{reMRLR}, we have
\begin{equation}\label{MRLR2}
\small
\begin{aligned}
& \Delta \tau=\arg\min \limits_{\bm{x},\varDelta \tau}\ \|\bm{C}\bm{x}\|_{2}^{2}+
\left\|\hat{\bm{y}}_{w}-[\bm{D},-J]
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \bm{x} \\
    \Delta\tau \\
  \end{array}
\right]
\right\|_{2}^{2}    \\
& \quad \  =\arg\min \limits_{\bm{x},\Delta \tau}
\left\|
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \hat{\bm{y}}_{w} \\
    \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\right]
-
\left[
  \begin{array}{cc}
    \bm{D} & -J \\
    \bm{C} & \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\right]
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \bm{x} \\
    \Delta\tau \\
  \end{array}
\right]
\right\|_{2}^{2}    \\
& \quad \  =\arg\min \limits_{\bm{z}}
\left\|
\bm{u}-R\bm{z}
\right\|_{2}^{2}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
where $\bm{u}$, $\bm{R}$ and $\bm{z}$ denote $
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \hat{\bm{y}}_{w} \\
    \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\right]
$, $\left[
  \begin{array}{cc}
    \bm{D} & -J \\
    \bm{C} & \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\right] $ and $\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \bm{x} \\
    \Delta\tau \\
  \end{array}
\right]$ respectively. It becomes a least square problem whose analytical solution is $\bm{z}=(\bm{R}^{T}\bm{R})^{-1}\bm{R}^{T}\bm{u} $. As one can see, the computational complexity is still high due to the large size of $\bm{R}$. Actually, the efficiency and the scalability can be greatly boosted if we make good use of the block structure of the matrix $\bm{R}$.
\par
Using the block matrix inversion, we can rewrite the analytical solution as
\begin{equation}\label{solutionz}
\small
\begin{aligned}
& \boldsymbol{z}\ =(\bm{R}^{T}\bm{R})^{-1}\bm{R}^{T}\bm{u} \\
& \quad  =\left(\left[\!\!
  \begin{array}{cc}
    \bm{D}^{T}\! &\!\! \bm{C}^T \\
    -J^{T}\! &\!\! \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\!\!\right]
\left[
  \begin{array}{cc}
    \bm{D}\! &\!\! -J \\
    \bm{C}\! &\!\! \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\right]\right)^{-1}\!
\left[
  \begin{array}{cc}
    \bm{D}^{T}\! &\!\! \bm{C} \\
    -J^{T}\! &\!\! \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\right]
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \hat{\bm{y}}_{w}\!\! \\
    \bm{0} \\
  \end{array}
\right] \\
& \quad  =
\left[\!\!
  \begin{array}{cc}
    \bm{D}^{T}\bm{D}+\bm{C}^{T}\bm{C} & -\bm{D}^{T}J \\
    -J^{T}\bm{D} & J^{T}J \\
  \end{array}
\!\!\right]
^{-1}\!
\left[\!\!
  \begin{array}{c}
    \bm{D}^{T} \\
    -J^{T} \\
  \end{array}
\!\!\right]\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}_{w} \\
& \quad  =
\left[\!\!
  \begin{array}{cc}
    \bm{Z}_{1}^{-1} \!\!\!& \!\!\!\!
    \begin{aligned}
    &\!\!\!\!(\bm{D}^{T}\bm{D}+\bm{C}^{T}\bm{C})^{-1}\\
    &\!\!\!\!\ \ \ \times(\bm{D}^{T}J)\bm{Z}_{2}^{-1}
    \end{aligned}
    \\
    \begin{aligned}
    &\ \bm{Z}_{2}^{-1}(J^{T}\bm{D})\times\!\!\!\!\\
    &(\bm{D}^{T}\bm{D}+\bm{C}^{T}\bm{C})^{-1}\!\!\!\!
    \end{aligned}\ \!\!\!\!
    & \!\!\!\!\bm{Z}_{2}^{-1}\\
  \end{array}
\!\!\right]
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \!\!\bm{D}^{T} \!\!\!\!\\
    \!\!-J^{T} \!\!\!\!\\
  \end{array}
\right]\hat{\bm{y}}_{w} \\
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
We denote $\bm{D}^{T}\bm{D}+\bm{C}^{T}\bm{C}$, $\bm{D}^TJ$ and $J^TJ$ as $\bm{T}_1$, $\bm{T}_2$ and $\bm{T}_3$ respectively. In particular, $\bm{T}_1$ and $\bm{T}_1^{-1}$ can be pre-calculated before the inner iteration from Step 4 to Step 9. The other variables $\bm{Z}_{1}$ and $\bm{Z}_{2}$ can be represented as $\bm{Z}_{1}^{-1}=(\bm{T}_{1}-\bm{T}_{2}\bm{T}_{3}^{-1}\bm{T}_{2}^{T})^{-1} $ and $\bm{Z}_{2}^{-1}=(\bm{T}_{3}-\bm{T}_{2}^{T}\bm{T}_{1}^{-1}\bm{T}_{2})^{-1}$. Eq. \eqref{solutionz} can be represented as
\begin{equation}
\small
\bm{z}
=
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \bm{x} \\
    \Delta \tau \\
  \end{array}
\right]
=
\left[
  \begin{array}{c}
    \bm{Z}_{1}^{-1}(\bm{D}^{T}\hat{\bm{y}}_{w})-\bm{T}_{1}^{-1}\bm{T}_{2}\bm{Z}_{2}^{-1}(J^{T}\hat{\bm{y}}_{w}) \\
    \bm{Z}_{2}^{-1}\bm{T}_{2}^{T}\bm{T}_{1}^{-1}(\bm{D}^{T}\hat{\bm{y}}_{w})-\bm{Z}_{2}^{-1}(J^{T}\hat{\bm{y}}_{w}) \\
  \end{array}
\right]
\end{equation}
\par
Note that the purpose of the face alignment is to search a deformation step $\Delta \tau$, so computing $\bm{x}$ is unnecessary. Without computing $\bm{x}$, we can save greatly reduce the computation. Moreover, as mentioned in \cite{wang2010locality}, since $\bm{c}$ usually imposes weak constraint on only a few atoms, suppressing most of the atoms. We can simply keep the smallest $s,(s\ll n)$ entries in $\bm{c}$ and force other entries to be positive infinity. This strategy further accelerates the coding, as we present in complexity analysis and experiments (This strategy is termed as MRLR2, while the former proposed one is termed as MRLR1). Detailed complexity analysis refers to the supplementary material
\begin{figure*}[t]
\centering
\renewcommand{\captionlabelfont}{\footnotesize}
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{2pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-10pt}
\includegraphics[width=6.95in]{exp1.pdf}
\caption{\footnotesize . The region of attraction. (The amount of translation is given as a fraction of the distance between eyes) (a) Translation in the Y-direction only. (b) Translation in the X-direction only. (c) In-plane rotation only. (d) Scale variation only.}\label{exp1}
\end{figure*}
\section{Experiments}
We conduct experiments on the face database (Extended Yale B \cite{georghiades2001few} and CAS-PEAL \cite{gao2008cas}) with controlled laboratory conditions to comprehensively evaluate MRLR in terms of region of attraction, recognition rate, running time and scalability. Then practical face recognition performance are evaluated by the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset \cite{huang2007labeled}. The experimental results show that MRLR achieves competitive performance with much less running time and scales better in large datasets. Moreover, MRLR is able to make use of outside data to improve alignment, benefiting the subsequent recognition in the scenario where only one sample each person is available.
\subsection{Implementation details}
In MRLR2 and MRR, the length (the number of atoms) of dictionary for alignment is fixed to 20 for fair comparison. We basically follow the same setting in \cite{wagner2012toward}, 10 classes after first stage are remained in MRR and RASR, and one project matrix of 500 rows is used in TSR. The illumination dictionary in \cite{zhuang2013single} follows its original setup, and the amount of illumination atoms is 30 in all experiments. The maximum iteration of outer and inner loop for MRLR in these methods are consistently set to 3 and 30.. The $l_1$-minimization algorithm uses the Augmented Lagrange Multiplier \cite{yang2010fast}.
\subsection{The region of attraction}
The region of attraction evaluates the robustness against 2D deformations. We compare MRLR with TSR \cite{huang2008simultaneous}, RASR \cite{wagner2012toward}, MRR \cite{yang2012efficient} and SIT \cite{zhuang2013single} on Extended Yale B database, which includes 2414 images of 38 subjects. We use the uncropped images of 28 subjects in experiments. 32 training images per category are randomly selected, and the rest are used for testing. All the training images are resized to $80\times 70$. We get access to the ground truth of eyes and add perturbation to them. Then we calculate the corresponding recognition accuracy under various initial transformations. One can see that MRLR performs well and stably within a certain range of misalignment, e.g. 20 percent translation in x direction (14-16 pixels), 20 degree rotation or 30 percent scale variation. It significantly enhances the robustness of practical recognition, because the average misalignment of a face detector safely falls within 10 percent translation and 8 percent scale variation. TSR performs relatively poor even in small perturbations. It is mainly because aligning testing image to the entire training set is more prone to local minima, resulting in inaccurate alignment. Using single sample per class, SIT achieves similar performance with TSR due to the limited representation ability. Compared to MRLR1, MRLR2 and RASR, MRR performs slightly worse on robustness to deformation. MRLR1 and MRLR2 perform almost the same as RASR, demonstrating that locality-constrained representation effectively avoids local minima.
\subsection{Face recognition in controlled environments}
\begin{table}[!b]
\centering
\renewcommand{\captionlabelfont}{\footnotesize}
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{4pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-8pt}
\fontsize{8pt}{\baselineskip}\selectfont
\caption{\footnotesize . The recognition accuracy and running time on Extended Yale B and CAS-PEAL datasets.}\label{tab1}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|}\hline
\bb{Method} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{Extended Yale B} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{CAS-PEAL}\\
\cline{2-5}
& Recognition & Running  & Recognition  & Running\\
& Rate &  Time &Rate &  Time\\\hline\hline
TSR	& 81.61 & 7.396 & 86.96 & 4.2695\\
RASR & 92.42 & 9.7587 & 89.92 & 5.4466\\
MRR	& 90.95 & 0.7773 & 90.00 & 0.5684\\
SIT	& 84.53 & 9.9823 & 86.76 & 6.0329\\\hline
\textbf{MRLR-SS} & 77.12 & \textbf{0.1566} & 81.31 & \textbf{0.1384}\\
\textbf{MRLR1} & 92.31 & 0.6207 & 89.76 & 0.3307\\
\textbf{MRLR2} & \textbf{92.53} & 0.1783 & \textbf{90.43} & 0.1462\\\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
We conduct the recognition experiments on both Extended Yale B and CAS-PEAL datasets. For Extended Yale B, we adopt the same settings in the previous section. For CAS-PEAL, 20 subjects were chosen, each of them including more than 32 images. We randomly selected 20 images per subject and resized them to $80 \times 70$ for training, then test on the remaining 12 images. Because SIT \cite{zhuang2013single} trains on single sample per category, we also reduce the training set in MRLR to single sample per category for fair comparison (termed as MRLR-SS). The initial $\tau_0$ are automatically given by Viola-Jones detector \cite{viola2001rapid}. Table \ref{tab1} gives the recognition rates and average running time.
\par
As we discuss above, unsatisfactory local minima in global dictionary leads to poor performance (81.61\%) in TSR. With less amount of subject (from 32 to 20), local minima is alleviated and TSR is able to perform better. RASR performs very well in both Extended Yale B dataset (92.42\%) and CAS-PEAL dataset (89.92\%). However, such subject by subject search is time-consuming, it averagely costs 9.76 and 5.45 seconds on each testing image when the amount of subjects are 28 and 20, respectively. On the other hand, the recognition rate of MRLR2 is 92.68\% and 90.43\%, slightly better than RASR. Most importantly, it takes only 0.18 and 0.15 seconds to deal with a testing image, roughly 4, 55 and 41 times faster than MRR, RASR and TSR respectively. With single sample each subject, SIT achieves 84.53\% and 86.76\% recognition rate in two datasets respectively, better than the single sample version of MRLR. Because the dictionary for alignment consists of illumination dictionary (outside samples) and single training sample per class, it shares the same scale with RASR, resulting in similar running time.
\subsection{Scalability}
We vary the number of subject from 10 to 100 and resize the images from $40\times 35$ to $160\times 140$, to evaluate the scalability of our algorithm. Table \ref{tab2} and Table \ref{tab3} show the experimental results. One can observe that TSR, RASR and SIT cost too much time, far from being applicable in real-time systems. The running time of TSR remains relatively stable as the dimension increases, but rises linearly with more subjects. MRR maintains excellent real-time capability with the growth of the subject number. However, its running time rises dramatically when the resolution of image increasing. Unlike the abovementioned approaches, MRLR1 and MRLR2 are not very sensitive to the dimension or number of subjects, preserving competitive performance. MRLR2 costs the least running time and the lowest increasing rate as we enlarge the dimension or number of subjects, showing the best scalability among state-of-the-art approaches.
\begin{table}[!h]
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\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-4pt}
\centering
\fontsize{8pt}{\baselineskip}\selectfont
\caption{\footnotesize . Running time (s) under different dimensions (image size).}\label{tab2}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
Method & $\!40\!\times\! 35\!$ & $\!64\!\times\! 56\!$ & $\!80\!\times\! 70\!$ & $\!120\!\times\! 105\!$ & $\!160\!\times\! 140\!$\\\hline\hline
TSR & 3.645 & 3.861 & 4.270 & 4.672 & 5.468\\
RASR & 3.499 & 4.452 & 6.110 & 10.324 & 17.111\\
MRR & 0.133 & 0.342 & 0.593 & 2.259 & 5.997\\
SIT & 3.564 & 4.637 & 6.565 & 11.035 & 19.215\\\hline
\textbf{MRLR1} & 0.085 & 0.195 & 0.331 & 0.569 & 0.940\\
\textbf{MRLR2} & \textbf{0.066} & \textbf{0.118} & \textbf{0.146} & \textbf{0.303} & \textbf{0.505}\\\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\begin{table}[!h]
\renewcommand{\captionlabelfont}{\footnotesize}
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{4pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-7pt}
\centering
\fontsize{8pt}{\baselineskip}\selectfont
\caption{\footnotesize . Running time (s) under different amount of classes.}\label{tab3}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
Method & 10 & 20 & 40 & 70 & 100\\\hline\hline
TSR & 2.1533 & 3.2825 & 5.5280 & 8.4034 & 11.5327\\
RASR & 2.7377 & 4.6596 & 8.8647 & 15.4644 & 22.1281\\
MRR & 0.5776 & 0.5928 & 0.6082 & 0.6394 & 0.6994\\
SIT & 2.86 & 5.1996 & 9.9817 & 17.6875 & 27.1734\\\hline
\textbf{MRLR1} & 0.1977 & 0.2819 & 0.513 & 0.8552 & 1.4096\\
\textbf{MRLR2} & \textbf{0.1318} & \textbf{0.1373} & \textbf{0.1559} & \textbf{0.197} & \textbf{0.2616}\\\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\subsection{Face recognition and verification in the wild}
In this section, we test MRLR in practical scenario. LFW dataset contains 13,233 images of 5,749 people, while 4,069 people have only one image. This dataset is very challenging since it is collected in the uncontrolled wild scenario, including blur, various illumination, crossing age, occlusion or misalignment. We present two experiments, face recognition and face verification on LFW database to evaluate the performance of MRLR. In recognition testing, we choose 20 persons with more than 20 images, forming a subset with 1534 samples. We randomly select 20 samples each subject as training set, and test on the rest. The experimental results are shown in Table 3. It is worth noticing that there are many testing images including 3D deformation. Although aligning a 3D warped image to frontal face is beyond the scope of our approach, we do not manually exclude these images, for the purpose of evaluating the performance of our method in practical scenario. It is clear that MRLR performs best among these misalignment-robust recognition algorithms, outperforming RASR for 1.55\% in recognition rate. Furthermore, the single sample version of MRLR beats SIT with a significant margin. It is mainly because the illumination dictionary is not informative enough to represent such sophisticated intra-class variation in each subject.
\par
To address the problem of insufficient training images when aligning, we propose to use outside data to improve alignment. Making fully use of the similarity of face, the outside data that belong to neither the training subjects nor the testing subjects, also enhances the accuracy of alignment. With the outside data, MRLR performs better even in the scenario where there is only one sample per subject.
\begin{table}[!h]
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\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{4pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-7pt}
\centering
\fontsize{8pt}{\baselineskip}\selectfont
\caption{\footnotesize . Recognition accuracy (\%) on LFW dataset.}\label{tab4}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
Method & Accuracy & Method & Accuracy\\\hline\hline
TSR & 73.63 & \textbf{MRLR-SS} & 72.47\\
RASR & 81.43 & \textbf{MRLR-SS} with outside data & 80.42\\
MRR & 78.84 & \textbf{MRLR1} & \textbf{82.98}\\
SIT & 55.91 & \textbf{MRLR2} & 81.75\\\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\par
Face verification represents another task. Given two face images, the goal is to decide whether the two people pictured belong to the same individual. Many breakthroughs have been achieve by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) \cite{krizhevsky2012imagenet,simonyan2014very}. However, the training data also need to be loosely or accurately aligned, so that the verification accuracy can be further boosted. In \cite{sun2014deep,sun2014deep2,sun2014deeply}, similarity transformation is used to align training and testing images according the facial landmarks. \cite{taigman2014deepface,schroff2015facenet} also state that accurate 3D aligning do help the subsequent face verification. In this experiment, we train a simple neural network consisting of 7 convolution layers and 2 fully connected layers, jointly supervised by softmax loss and contrastive loss. The specific deep model description is given in the supplementary material. The deep model is trained on roughly 600 thousand outside samples (These samples and LFW do not share the same individuals.) and test on LFW, following the standard unrestricted protocol. The feature of each image are taken from the output of the first fully connected layer, and their Euclidean distance are calculated for binary classification. The pairs whose distance exceeds the threshold are regarded as negative. We compare landmarks based (IntraFace \cite{asthana2014incremental}) method and MRLR by aligning the testing image, and carry out ten-fold cross validation testing on 6000 pairs. The results are reported in Table \ref{tab5}.
\begin{table}[!h]
\renewcommand{\captionlabelfont}{\footnotesize}
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{4pt}
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-7pt}
\centering
\fontsize{8pt}{\baselineskip}\selectfont
\caption{\footnotesize . Verification accuracy (\%) on LFW dataset.}\label{tab5}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
Method & No. of points & Distance & Accuracy (\%)\\\hline\hline
Intraface & 5 & L2 & 98.05$\pm$0.64\\
Intraface & 5 & PCA+L2 & 98.00$\pm$0.68\\
Intraface & 12 & L2 & 98.09$\pm$0.60\\
Intraface & 12 & PCA+L2 & 98.15$\pm$0.49\\
Intraface & 49 & L2 & 98.22$\pm$0.61\\
Intraface & 49 & PCA+L2 & 98.32$\pm$0.47\\\hline
\textbf{MRLR2} & N/A(Image Set) & L2 & \textbf{98.68}$\pm$\textbf{0.51}\\
\textbf{MRLR2} & N/A(Image Set) & PCA+L2 & \textbf{98.77}$\pm$\textbf{0.45}\\\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\section{Concluding Remarks}
In this paper, we propose an efficient misalignment-robust locality representation algorithm, MRLR, for face alignment. The locality constraint therein avoids the interference of the uncorrelated atoms and the exhaustive search in every subject, greatly reducing running time while still preserving accurate alignment. Moreover, motivated by the block structure of dictionary, we propose an efficient solving algorithm to speed up the alignment. Besides, MRLR is easily extended to one-shot face alignment and can benefit from outside data. Computational complexity analysis and extensive experiments show that MRLR considerably reduce the running time with even better performance.
{
\bibliographystyle{aaai}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Q: How to use Ising Spin model for prediction of time series "Phase" I am investigating a 2d Ising Spin Lattice.
I have been able to generate a Monte Carlo app that gives me the changing spin matrix through my iterations - like the many examples on the web.
However, I am trying to predict an independent variable (atmospheric pressure). I believe it is possible to measure the pseudo "Magnetism" and "Energy" of the timeseries using the Ising approach - but I am not sure how to do that. I assume it entails flipping the "spin" based on the timeseries changes, but I am not really sure weather that is the right approach.
If anyone could give me some advice that would be great.
EDIT 1
I have a series of pressure readings:
 Xt :1..N

Instead of using Metropolis flip where
deltaE = 2 * J * Si * sumOf(Sneighbours)
if (deltaE < 0 || exp(-deltaE/TEMP) > rand())
       Si+1 = -Si

I need to set
Si+1 = someFunctionOf(Xt)

But I don't know what "someFunctionOf" should be.
If I did I could update the Lattice from Xt, and workout a "live" Magnetism and I am hoping that might tell something about the current phase of pressure changes.


Organizing an effective meeting requires knowledge of psychology, social networking, and primarily people skills – particularly for managers who are expected to produce beneficial outcomes through their employees. Many corporations tap into services offered by motivational speakers in order to offer insight into how people are driven to succeed in their careers. Any employee can face a host of issues at the workplace, and getting through them can be difficult. Often it takes new ideas on how to deal with adversity at the workplace, and motivational speakers can give people new insight into different ways of thinking about difficult issues.
BWW provides leadership solutions to emerging managers and business leaders. Small businesses often lack the resources to tap into a large network of leaders and acquire the know how to succeed. For this reasons, organizations like BWW step in to offer services to businesses that either don't have the resources available or don't know how to exploit them.
BWW is meeting at the Marriot Wardman Park – just a short walk from our Washington DC bed and breakfast – for a motivational seminar and networking event that will focus on improving outcomes at the workplace. The conference will take place January 22nd – 26th. We hope to see some of the attendees around our breakfast table during the conference.


The Ingest micro-service provides a means to add new digital content into the curation environment for active management by the Program. Using terms defined by the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model, the Ingest service accepts Submission Information Packages (SIPs) and converts them into Archival Information Packages (AIPs). This process may involve the use of other micro-services: the Transformation service to transcode objects into normative forms defined by internal standards; the Characterization service to produce relevant descriptive information for management in the Inventory service; and the Storage service to manage object files.
All of the enumerated values (file type, digest type, response form) are case-insensitive.


text:
Biden hosts police chiefs as Democrats try to contain political fallout from violent crime spike
Published Mon, Jul 12 20216:09 PM EDT Updated Mon, Jul 12 20217:00 PM EDT
Annika Kim Constantino@annikakimc
President Joe Biden met with U.S. police chiefs and elected officials at the White House Monday to discuss his plan to address a continuing nationwide surge in gun violence.
Biden was joined at the White House by Attorney General Merrick Garland, New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams, a community intervention leader as well as several mayors and police chiefs from major cities to discuss his strategy, which was unveiled last month.
During the meeting, Biden encouraged communities to utilize $350 billion from the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan passed by Congress in March, to improve public safety.
U.S. President Joe Biden, center, speaks during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, July 12, 2021.
Sarah Silbiger | UPI | Bloomberg | Getty Images
"We recognize that we have to come together for the first responsibility of democracy: to keep each other safe," Biden said before the meeting. "And that's what the American people are looking for when it comes to reducing violent crime and gun violence."
Biden was joined at the White House by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams, community intervention leader as well as several mayors and police chiefs from major and mid-size U.S. cities to discuss his gun crime prevention strategy, which was unveiled last month.
The meeting comes amid an epidemic of gun violence in several of the nation's largest cities, a growing political issue for Democrats and the central theme of Republicans' effort to take over the House and Senate next year.
The Biden administration faces a large hurdle in trying to balance addressing gun violence with the continued push for police reform in the U.S. following the murder of George Floyd last year, especially as the president has tried to move away from Democrats' "defund the police" messaging.
During the meeting, Biden encouraged communities to utilize $350 billion from the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan passed by Congress in March, to improve public safety. This includes bolstering law enforcement and expanding community services that prevent crime.
A memo sent out by the administration Monday provided examples of how cities are using the funds.
New York City, for example, proposed to use more than $44 million to expand community violence intervention models and re-deploy an additional 200 police offers to perform administrative functions to the field.
Other cities listed in the memo include Washington, which proposed to use $59 million to add police cadet slots, community services and financial assistance that would help citizens involved with gun violence transition back into the community.
"The American rescue dollars that are going directly to local governments like ours is allowing us to not only have the officers we need, but to have the community violence interrupters that we need to fund pilot programs that will help returning citizens … and this all supports the ecosystem to make cities safer," Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said in an interview with MSNBC.
But the American Rescue Plan is only one part of Biden's comprehensive strategy to curb violent crime.
The strategy also strengthens federal gun law enforcement by establishing a new "zero-tolerance" policy for gun dealers who violate federal gun sales laws and delegating new power to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, to revoke dealer licenses on first offenses.
Other federal efforts brought by the strategy include the establishment of five new federal strike forces led by the ATF to monitor and intercept firearm smuggling along several significant gun trafficking corridors between major cities.
Federal statistics show significant increases in homicides nationwide, with a 30% spike in 2020 over the previous year.
Across the country, mayors and police chiefs have struggled to explain what's behind the rise in mass shootings, homicides and other violent crimes.
Experts point to a perfect storm of factors that collided during the pandemic. They include a surge in private gun sales, widespread unemployment and Covid stay-at-home orders that left people trapped inside with little to do.
At the same time, protests against police killings of Black people may have diverted police resources away from traditional policing, and eroded public confidence in law enforcement.
Many of the factors believed to have contributed to the rise in violent crime are difficult to quantify, however.
And given that policing in America tends to be highly localized, Biden's options at the federal level are limited.
-- CNBC's Christina Wilkie contributed to this report.


text:
namespace PoGo.GameServices.Models
{
    public class GoldAttribute : AchievementValueAttribute
    {
        public GoldAttribute(object value) : base(value)
        {
        }
    }
}


text:
Utah businesses ready to rush for a share of new federal coronavirus aid
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Heart Beads Jewelry in Murray, temporarily closed on Wednesday, April 15, 2020. Thousands of small business in Utah struggling financially with the COVID-19 crisis are hopeful after Congress gave initial approval to another $331 billion in payroll loans — although officials said the money will go fast.
By Tony Semerad
| April 22, 2020, 5:52 p.m.
| Updated: 7:21 p.m.
Editor's note: The Salt Lake Tribune is providing readers free access to critical local stories about the coronavirus during this time of heightened concern. See more coverage here. To support journalism like this, please consider donating or become a subscriber.
Many Utahns are preparing to go after a piece of Congress' latest COVID-19 financial relief for businesses, which could begin flowing as soon as Friday.
They are so eager, in fact, officials are worried there could be another logjam of applications.
The U.S. Senate approved $483 billion for a new coronavirus aid package Tuesday, which includes $331 billion more for payroll loans meant to help small businesses keep paying their workers — after $349 billion in the Paycheck Protection Program was allocated in a matter of days.
"It's hard to fathom $350 billion going that quickly," Derek Miller, CEO and president of the Salt Lake Chamber, said late Tuesday. "But I think what it tells us is just how great the need was and the great need that continues."
The House of Representatives is expected to vote Thursday on the latest package, which also has $75 billion for hospitals battling COVID-19 and $25 billion to expand testing for the virus.
The head of the Utah Bankers Association said Wednesday that with House approval, loan processing could resume shortly after the bill is signed by President Donald Trump.
With nearly 5,000 banks and credit unions now able and poised to process and submit loans, the bottlenecks could be even worse, said association executive director Howard Headlee.
"Everybody understands the process now," he said. "The money will go much faster."
Nearly $3.6 billion from that prior round of the Paycheck Protection Program has gone to more than 21,000 businesses in the Beehive State with 500 workers or less. The Tribune was among the businesses to receive a loan.
"They keep on calling this a stimulus plan. It's not a stimulus," Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said, shortly after the Senate approved replenishing the program. "There's no economy to stimulate right now. This is a rescue plan. This is a relief plan helping people get money during a very difficult economic time."
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And the way the original relief package was written, Romney and others noted, if the loans are used to pay workers and cover other COVID-19-related business expenses, they don't have to be repaid.
The latest bill puts $50 billion more into a separate emergency disaster loan program for businesses, which carry a 3.75% interest rate and do have to be paid back.
Wasatch IT, a technical support company in Murray, got a $400,000 paycheck protection loan in the first round and its co-owners Spencer and Bahar Ferguson said the money has helped them keep nearly 35 workers on staff through the crisis.
"We're giving our people the ability and confidence to know that their job is here and not having that fear they may be on the chopping block," company president Bahar Ferguson said Tuesday.
Officials say thousands of other businesses saw their loan requests through local banks and credit unions stalled last week in the crush of applications.
Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, said many then "were caught in the frustration of Washington politics" over the money not being replenished sooner, given the demand.
"We have been hearing from so many businesses that are just caught in the limbo of their applications, waiting to know if the funding is going to be there and they're trying to hold on employees," McAdams said.
The first round of funding also drew criticism after it was reported that several large national restaurant chains including Shake Shack and Ruth's Chris Steak House got loans in spite of their size. Some have returned the money.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Tuesday defended the program, noting that more than a million businesses with 10 workers or less drew loans too, "so there is very broad participation by really small businesses."
But, Mnuchin added that he was gratified some larger firms were giving their relief funds back. "The intent of this money was not for big public companies that have access to capital," he said.
Romney said such anomalies were likely in a program dispensing that much cash at a historic pace — and that it's likely more abuses will surface.
"If you want to get money out quickly to help the millions upon millions of Americans that are out of work or about to be put out of work, you can't spend all your time looking at the two or three cases where something went wrong," the Utah Republican said. "That's going to happen."
Sylvia Castro, executive director of the Suazo Business Center in Salt Lake City, said many minority business owners in Utah who didn't have well-established ties to a local bank or credit union were at a disadvantage in getting loans the first time. And by the time some of them got up to speed, the program had already closed.
"It just went by so quickly that it kind of took us all by surprise," said Castro.
This time, the newly approved paycheck protection money includes $60 billion aside for lending through small and medium-sized banks and credit unions, with the aim of steering more money to small, rural and minority-owned businesses.
tsemerad@sltrib.comFollow @tonysemerad
Utah's home sales slow down as coronavirus effects take hold
More than 100,000 Utahns have filed for unemployment because of the coronavirus
Utah's small businesses hit by COVID-19 losses plead for more state help
Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare to send two large COVID-19 response teams to New York
Another Utahn dies of COVID-19 as Davis Hospital says its first patient with the virus is now recovering at home
Ross Douthat: The Biden opportunity


The intimidation skill is a social skill involving the threat of force, violence, and other unpleasantries. With it you can scare people into helping or running from you. Those who practice intimidation intensely can scare off larger groups of people, demand obedience from others, and break fear's grasp over people.
If you have at least one minute to interact with someone, you may make someone temporarily more "helpful". The base DC for this check is 15 + their Hit Dice+ their Strength modifier + any save modifiers they posses against Fear effects. Each intimidation attempt lowers the target's actual attitude towards you by one step, regardless of whether the check succeeds or fails. If you beat your target's check result, you may treat the target as friendly towards you, but only for the purpose of actions taken while it remains intimidated. The target retains its normal attitude toward you, but will chat, advise, offer limited help, or advocate on your behalf while intimidated. The duration of this effect depends on your check result. As long as your attempt is successful and you are still present at its expiration, you are entitled to an intimidation check as a standard action to extend the effect without the normal rush penalty.
Success: The target believes that bad things will happen if they don't try to placate you. They are treated as friendly towards you for 1d6 minutes. If you exceed the DC by 5, the target believes that bad things will happen if they don't try to placate you. They are treated as helpful towards you for 1d6 hours or until they witness you being defeated. If you nexceed the DC by 10, the target is really, really scared of you. They are treated as helpful whenever you interact with them, but they go out of their way to avoid you and may be difficult to track down. They probably leave town or go underground as soon as possible even. This effect lasts until their CR increases or they witness you being defeated.
Failure: Though you may actually be scary, the target isn't moved and remains uncooperative. You suffer a -10 penalty to further attempts to intimidate them. If you fail the check by more than 5, the The target thinks you're rather annoying when you try to be scary. They openly mock you, provide you with incorrect or useless information, or otherwise frustrate your efforts. You suffer a -15 penalty to further attempts to intimidate them, but could always make an example of them.
You may attempt to scare off an enemy rather than, or in addition to, trying to stab them in the face. As a standard action, you may attempt to shake the resolve of one target who is either adjacent to you or within your threatened area. This is a [Fear] effect. The base DC for this check is 15 + their Hit Dice + their Strength modifier + any save modifiers they posses against Fear effects. The DC is further modified by the difference between your Hit Dice and your target's Hit Dice; it is easier to shake the resolve of a creature weaker than yourself than it is a creature stronger than yourself. You gain a bonus or penalty to your check as indicated in the conditions listed above, including a -10 penalty to your checks for each additional attempt you make on a target. If you didn't scare them the first time, you're not likely to if you try again. The exact effects are dependent upon your check result.
Note that the conditions generated do not stack with additional uses of this ability or with uses of this ability from other sources.
Success: The target is shaken for 2 rounds, plus 1 additional round for each 2 points your check exceeded the DC. If you exceed the DC by 5, the target is frightened for 1 round, plus 1 additional round for each 2 points your check exceeded 5 more than the DC. After this duration they are shaken for 4 more rounds. If you exceed the DC by 10, the target is panicked for 1 round, plus 1 additional round for each 2 points your check exceeded 10 over the DC. After this duration they are frightened for 3 rounds, and then shaken for 4 more rounds.
Failure: You fail to shake the resolve of your opponent. And since you're unlikely to succeed on a second try, it's time to find a new target or try old fashioned killing.
When you attempt to disarm an opponent and fail, you may continue your swing, attempting to sunder their weapon instead. This ability may be used once per minute.
It's easy to project an air of confidence and menace when you know what you're doing. You can get multiple creatures to run from you instead of fighting. When you use the Shake Resolve ability you may target all individuals in your threatened area by accepting a -5 penalty to your check. For the purposes of this ability, your threatened area is considered to reach an additional 5 feet for every 2 ranks in intimidation above 6 you possess. You may exclude any targets within this area that you like from the effect. You must have line of sight to a target to affect them. No matter how many targets you attempt to affect with this ability, you only make one check. That result is then compared to the DCs for each target. This ability otherwise functions like the Shake Resolve ability.
When you score a critical melee hit, you may make a free demoralize attempt against that opponent. You may use this ability once per minute.
You don't just shake the resolve of your enemies with your actions and combat prowess, but with your very presence. You don't even have to know a creature is present to make it run from you instead of fighting. When you use the Shout Them Down ability you may reduce your effective reach by 5 feet to eliminate either the line of sight requirement, but the target must still be able to hear or otherwise recognize your presence. This ability otherwise functions like the Shout Them Down ability.


Invisible convection currents are revealed using a very colorful demonstration.
Cool, crisp, clean mountain air has long been an important reason why people move to Colorado, USA. Unfortunately, the air in the city of Denver isn't quite as clean as it has been. By the 1970s, pollution over the city had a name—the "brown cloud." Denver's location at the foot of the Rocky Mountains makes it prone to temperature inversions in which warm air higher in the atmosphere traps cooler air near the ground. This condition prevents pollutants from escaping into the atmosphere. However, the phenomenon of temperature inversion is not unique to Denver, as evidenced by numerous reports of similar brown cloud sightings over major cities throughout the world. This demonstration provides a great illustration of what's really happening in the atmosphere as hot and cold air masses meet.
Use yellow food coloring in the warm water and blue food coloring in the cold water. Each bottle must be filled to the brim with water.
Carefully slide the card out from between the two bottles. Make sure you are holding the top bottle as you remove the card. Watch what happens to the colored liquids in the two bottles with the card removed.
The second part of the experiment is similar to the first. This time, you need to place the cold water (blue) on top of the hot water (yellow). Repeat Steps 3 and 4 and carefully remove the card. Watch what happens this time.
Hot air balloons rise because warm air in a balloon is lighter and less dense than cold air. Similarly, warm water is lighter or less dense than cold water. When the bottle of warm water is placed on top of the cold water, the more dense cold water stays in the bottom bottle and the less dense warm water is confined to the top bottle. However, when the cold water bottle sits on top of the warm water bottle, the less dense warm water rises into the top bottle and the cold water sinks into the bottom bottle. The movement of the water is clearly seen as the yellow and blue food colorings mix, creating a green liquid.
The movement of the warm and cold water inside the bottles is referred to as a convection current. In our daily life, warm currents of water occur in oceans. The warm Gulf Stream moves northward along the American Eastern Seaboard and crosses the Atlantic Ocean all the way to Europe. Convection currents in the atmosphere are responsible for the formation of thunderstorms as warm and cold air masses collide.
Although the colored liquids that mix are more interesting to watch, the other set of warm and cold water bottles helps to illustrate an important phenomenon that can occur in the atmosphere in cooler months. During daylight hours, the Sun heats the surface of the Earth and the layer of air closest to the Earth warms. This warm air rises and mixes with other atmospheric gases. When the Sun goes down, less dense warm air higher in the atmosphere blankets the colder air closer to the surface. Because the colder air is more dense than the warm air, the colder air is trapped close to the Earth and the atmospheric gases do not mix. This is referred to as a temperature inversion.
You can take this activity to the next level with a cool demonstration using the Split Demo Tank! Fill one side of the tank with cold (blue) water, and the other side with hot (yellow) water. Remove the divider between the tanks and the water swirls together. As things calm down in the tank, the hot water ends up on top and traps the cold water underneath it. You can use a spoon to stir the two liquids together. To stir up things in the atmosphere, you'll need a pretty good wind or even a storm.
What are the results of a temperature inversion in the atmosphere? Air pollution is much more noticeable during a temperature inversion since pollutants such as car exhaust and particulates are trapped in the layer of cool air close to the surface. As a result, state agencies in many parts of the country oxygenate automobile fuels during winter months with additives like MTBE in an attempt to reduce the harmful effects of trapped pollution. It is this trapped pollution that causes the brown cloud effect. Wind or precipitation can often alleviate the brown cloud by stirring and breaking up the layer of warm air that traps the cold air and pollution near the surface of the Earth.


We provide training sessions face-to-face at our dedicated training facilities at 7 London Circuit, Canberra, or at your office by request.
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