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Promising Young Woman (2020)
Although its impact right now may be dampened by the pandemic, I am fairly certain this is a movie that will still be discussed in decades to come.
There are many reasons why it is rather special, something I believe anyone who watches it will appreciate, but I gave it 4.5 stars not 5 because it bears a few flaws, and it is these that I intend to waffle on about here. (Some spoilers...)
1) The movie is just a little reticent about showing us the full consequences of Cassandra's reverse-predatory entrapments.
2) It's not clear to me that there is a firm analogue between what happened to her mate Nina and what she then undertakes as a form of broad gender vengeance.
3) The whole relationship with Nina and Cassandra's response to what happened to her friend does seem a bit contrived as story impetuses go.
4) At around the end of the second act an old video with important ramifications for plot development makes an appearance in a manner that is not especially convincing.
5) The ending is really the only ending that would satisfy, yet it is clearly dependent on a chance outcome at the bachelor party. Call me old fashioned, but I kind of need my plots to feel a bit more inevitable, no matter how much apparent randomness they have to steamroller through.
More generally, the movie shifts from light to dark moods, sometimes in a manner that feels unearned. And yet clearly ambiguity and comedy are being used as a subterfuge, in some ways paralleling the way that the protagonist feigns drunkenness and vulnerability.
Director Emerald Fennell is Hammersmith-born and Oxford-graduated and arrives in LA after stints on Killing Eve. Let's hope this is the first of many extraordinary films she has in her locker. (She also appears as Camila Parker Bowles in The Crown, I'm told.)
And we're grateful for this reminder of what a genuine movie star Carey Mulligan is and should remain.
The OST is fab.
The Evilevers S01E03: 'The Misadventures of Jason Lever''
Jumping ahead a bit...to my most recent face off with our extraordinarily accident-prone neighbour Jason Lever. (I never promised a strictly chronological approach to this plot.)
Here he is, maskless, waving his mobile in my face — in front of my property — presumably attempting to intimidate me into scurrying back indoors or either doing or saying something he might subsequently be able to use against me. He achieved none of the above.
A bit of background...
In 2014, at a time when both Lever and I were out of Guatemala, his then girlfriend put up some security lights along the front of their property. Yet for some reason she decided that it would be just fine for this installation to continue over the property line and onto the surface of our external wall.
At the time my wife came out and spoke to the contractors from a firm most Antigueños are familiar with, and their response was, predictably, something along the lines of 'Only obeyink orderz'.
Lever soon returned from his mining gig and so she then had the opportunity to interrogate him personally on the matter. Rather than apologising and offering to rectify this inexplicable 'mistake' as soon as possible, he boasted rather brazenly that his plan was to continue all along the front of our facade. (The old POTUS45 bully's ploy of never backing off, only doubling down.)
This was possibly the most memorable early example of the one-sided lamppost-pissing contest that we have been subjected to here almost from the get-go.
Although she undoubtedly felt disrespected, my wife let this one go as it occurred a couple of years before Lever's attitude and behaviour towards her would become truly depraved, and there did at the time seem to be a shared interest in external illumination. (This was also a year or so before we successfully petitioned the Muni via the neighbourhood group to put up proper lighting along the street outside.)
Given subsequent events, I would have removed these security lights myself ages ago.
However, I have been repeatedly told by lawyers and the authorities that they ought to remain in place, not least as part of an extensive body of evidence relating to a pattern of apparently purposeful encroachment by the Levers.
So, when on Wednesday January 20 this year I spotted a builder up a ladder against my external wall, attempting to remove the little iron cage containing the security lights with a power tool, I came up quickly behind him and demanded that he desist and replace anything he had already removed from the surface of our property.
It was the same bloke that had been caught and filmed trespassing cuerpo entero inside our property just over two weeks previously on the 4th of January. On both occasions he had apparently waited for me to leave home before commencing his incursion, but this time I had only moved off up the road with my dog and had an unobstructed view. He chuckled awkwardly at my challenge and fled off back to the neighbouring house.
Soon Lever was out with his recording device, plus a small canister in the same hand he was gripping the phone, which I am going to presume was mace/pepper spray. He had seemingly come out in such a hurry that he'd not had time to hide it in his handbag.
Meanwhile, my wife had spotted the developing confrontation on our security cameras and went up to the terrace to make sure we had our own recording of any words exchanged.
Lever's play was very simple and really rather dumb: the lights and their cage were his property and had been installed entirely by accident on our wall. Though again, no apology.
He must really take me for one of the biggest fools that ever walked this earth. Suppose I choose to forget those earlier exchanges about this encroachment — going back over six years — I suppose I could just about concede that it might be possible for someone of near record-breaking cluelessness to affix a piece of ironwork on our exterior wall 'by accident'.
But this particular installation required work on both sides of our wall, including cabling that ran behind it across the property line, through our wire fence and over the top of the internal dividing wall.
Lever makes the point abundantly clear himself. 'It was connected to my power...and, so, what's your problem?'. He does have a disarming knack for incriminating himself.
My problem is surely this. Inside my home, someone knowingly ran an electric cable from a hole they made in our front wall over our side wall and into Lever's property which remained hidden for years behind foliage.
By definition this could never have been done as an honest mistake, and I fail to see how it might have been achieved without physical trespass. The illegal nature of this activity would have been blindingly obvious to the person undertaking it, no matter how clueless they might otherwise have been.
If any individual I had employed had been responsible for an error such as this, I'd have been in a real hurry to correct it and make amends. Not wait six years and then only try to remove the intruding device as part of a wider cover up.
The earlier trespass made by the same builder into our home followed my disconnection of the electric cable and was almost certainly undertaken in order to remove any remaining internal evidence.
Fortunately the fiscales at the Ministerio Público were provided with relevant images long before either incident, plus a report made by an independent technical expert on the range of other electrical installations he witnessed along the length of the Levers' side of our internal wall.
Anyway, I'd surely be forgiven from concluding here that Lever seems to be indicating that we in turn can attach whatever we like to the outside of his house just so long as we have no qualms about making the utterly bogus and plainly idiotic claim that we have no idea where the division is.
Yet, as ever, what he is really saying is that he did and will continue to do whatever he likes. It's all too obvious that he derives insolent gratification from gathering transgressions.
The serially-unfortunate Australian's pileup of mishaps now includes mistakenly using a water supply that didn't belong to him, attempting to empty his pool into our drains, unknowingly registering his utility bills and other accounts to our address and.. Well, the list goes on, and will be dealt with properly in a future episode.
Thanks to a malicious and mendacious denuncia made against us as a sort of legal blocking tactic by the Levers last October — consisting of allegations that even an eight year old would have been able to pull apart — I now know more than I used to about a Guatemalan statute that goes under the name of perturbación de la propiedad.
Here in Guatemala the pavement outside one's home is usually considered private rather than public property. Lever didn't quite step onto our banqueta, but his employee did — in fact this individual put a ladder on it and used that to ascend our external wall with a drill.
He was thus caught on camera in the act of trespass for a second time, having received a strong ticking off and verbal warning the first time back on January 4, which was captured on video. So let's be clear that there can be no excusing this subsequent 'accident', an invasion that inevitably followed two previous goofs relating to an undesirable hole in our front wall.
Meanwhile, Lever was invading my personal space, outside without a mask, seemingly attempting to intimidate me sufficiently to drive me away from the front of my own home.
For an individual already under investigation for violent crimes against both me and my wife (indeed I have been assigned police protection as a result), this is not a good look, particularly as he appears to have had a weapon in his hand.
Previous Episode - The Last Supper
The summer season in Monte Carlo ends expeditiously each year on the last day of August.
In a blink of an eye all the 'beautiful people' vanish and their briefly-vacated cabañas are soon reloaded with chaps who look an awful lot like David Farrar here in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947).
You can't see them in this screenshot, but yes, he's wearing leather sandals. Though a pair of wooly argyll socks would have completed the costume.
This dramatic transition in the prevailing sartorial climate occurs because the principality plays host every early September to the world's largest reinsurance convention, these days known as the Rendez-Vous de Septembre.
However, the 64th edition last year was cancelled along with a lot of other large gatherings in 2020.
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
We've waited over a year to watch this, in the end coincidentally during a week that featured Holocaust Remembrance Day. That reluctance has been grounded in my recollection of this acerbic review by Robbie Collin on Radio Five Live.
I'd listened to the podcast and so had not previously been aware just how prickly the atmosphere between him and Edith Bowman had become inside the studio.
I'd decided on the spot that Robbie was probably right, if only because the way Edith Bowman tends to set herself up as a counter-punching (and usually quite populist) alternative reviewer in rather stark contrast to Simon Mayo's more easy going facilitator/presenter guise.
This north of the border B team pair up had had a notable earlier clash of views over Bohemian Rhapsody, and that should have reminded me that I can agree with a scathing review and yet still essentially enjoy the movie on its own terms.
Now that I've seen this one, I have a slightly more balanced take on it. We're big fans of What We Do In The Shadows, but Nazis are more awkward satirical targets than vampires.
Robbie is probably right that this is the least successful thing Waititi has yet done, yet that does not necessarily make it the one note, one star flop he suggests it is.
While it is obvious that the figure of Adolf resides in Jojo's head, just how much else of this stylised end of the road for Nazism is supposed to be taken as realist?
Waititi's bloodsucker mockumentary follows a familiar format, and so these questions don't become quite as fraught as they did last year between this pair of BBC reviewers.
There's definitely something moving about the way this story plays out, even if it doesn't quite address the war, the Holocaust or the propaganda techniques of the totalitarian right with either its serious plot leftovers from the novel or the hit and miss comic elements that Waititi has injected into it.
That there were no Germans obviously involved somehow added to the awkwardness.
Also that the actress playing the Jewish girl in hiding, Thomasin McKenzie, appears not to be Jewish. She's certainly one of the best young talents that NZ possesses, but Scarlet Johannson (whose mother's family are Askenazi and who really is superb here as Jojo's good German mother) has had some flack in the past for being cast in roles supposedly requiring more authentic ethnicity.
As a child the most vivid vicarious experience I would have of the Holocaust would be coming across individuals with numbers tattooed on their arms.
The first time is the one that has really stuck. The man's name was Leon, and he was head of Monagasque government's Tourism and Convention Authority.
My father used to drag me along to brief, cheery meetings with him in his office in the Boulevard des Moulins and it was probably on the very first of these encounters with Leon — rolled up sleeves and veiled in cigarette smoke behind his big wooden desk — that I fixated on the numerical code etched into his skin.
Homegrown testing kit for covid-19...
The White Tiger (2021)
Back in 2009 I wrote what was (for me) a fairly extensive review of Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning novel The White Tiger, a story now encapsulated as an extraordinary movie directed by Rahmin Bahrani for Netflix.
Any sense that this might be an outsider's perspective on India is dispelled in this no-punches-pulled adaptation, far more in fact than a mere adaptation, thanks in part to the winning performance of Adarsh Gourav, yet also the sense that enough years have passed since publication to make this something of a period piece.
Targeting the vaccine...
Just over half of Britain's c4000 patients in ICU as a result of covid-19 are aged between 50 and 69.
Yet the first phase of the vaccine programme has targeted the oldest age-group, the 80+s, as these are the likeliest to die from the disease.
Robert Peston suggested on Coffee House recently that this has been an essentially political decision as Boris, in spite of all the rhetoric about protecting the NHS, is most concerned about the top line stat of covid-related deaths.
Here in Guatemala the calculus may eventually be slightly different. It would seem that people are dying younger (in part because they generally don't live so long) and, although I have no up-to-date stats on this, I suspect that hospitalisation is less effective here as a way of staving off pandemic mortality.
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock spoke this morning of 'relentless' pressure on the NHS and one can only suspect that public healthcare here, even with proportionally fewer infections, is already under severe strain.
And so we shall have to see where the Guatemalan government chooses to direct the first limited batch of vaccines that they have ordered.
As the ice sheet advanced and retreated over the north west of Europe, human beings repeatedly pushed up into the landmass that would become the British Isles. Yet there was no permanent settlement until around 15,000 BC.
The so-called Jurassic Coast was not then a coast at all and what is now the North Sea became a hot and humid zone of woodlands and wetlands: Doggerland, a landscape and lifestyle opportunity described thus by Peter Ackroyd in Foundation...
Oak woods, marshes covered by reeds, and open grasslands covered the land. It was a warm and humid world. Red deer and voles inhabited the landscape; but they shared it with elephants and macaque monkeys. Among them wandered groups of humans, twenty-five or more in each group, pursuing their prey. They fired upon the animals with flint arrowheads, and used carved reindeer antlers as axes; they carried wooden spears. We do not know how they were organized but the discovery of 'butchery sites', where tools were manufactured and food prepared away from the main settlements, suggests a measure of social control.
Modern identities like 'Celt' and 'Anglo-Saxon' are to some extent a vestige of nineteenth century nationalist posturing. Post-imperial migrations from what is now Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe were part of an older and deeper process. Ackroyd additionally notes how this prehistoric pedigree has persisted in the populations of England.
In 1995 two palaeontologists discovered that the material from a male body, found in the caves of Cheddar Gorge and interred 9,000 years ago, was a close match with that of residents still living in the immediate area.
My own paternal ancestors, these days designated as Celt-Iberians (later Britons) arrived at some stage before the Roman legions, when the waters had risen and the archipelago was taking its familiar modern shape.
I've long assumed they took the so called 'Atlantic route' in rudimentary boats, but this map suggests that they just as easily might have walked it.
The Evilevers S01E02 'The Last Supper'
And thus, unaware of the semi-severed connection between Jason Lever and that other con man 'Don Marco', we took ownership of the property adjacent to his in 2013.
Our first face to face encounter was not long in coming. We were walking our dogs on the road close to the old Spa, a few hundred yards from our main entrance, when Lever suddenly appeared from around the corner on his scooter and was duly chased by three of the dogs that reside at the Santiago de los Caballeros school there.
He stopped, apparently to introduce himself, but his opening remarks concerned his canine escort. When they follow me this way, he said, I like to stop and kick them.
Then, perhaps sensing our gathering dismay at this carefully packaged first impression, he continued: "But, if they continue to bother me, I'll give them some food..."
A moment of relief. Was he extricating himself? No.
"This will be their last meal..."
He described the crowning morsel thus: a big juicy steak packed with aspirin, "so they bleed out on the inside..."
Perhaps the most disturbing part of this was that there had been no question for either of us, at least at first, that Lever was trying to impress us, yet as the violent fantasy he projected grew darker, the insinuated threat that it betokened became ever less equivocal.
To all those that bother me, he seemed to be saying, I might start off with some reflex and fairly mindless aggression, but thereafter, if they don't back off, I will come up with something altogether more premeditated and vicious.
Several years later I would hear Lever boasting of how he lacks empathy, as if this were some sort of Australian superpower. But by that time we did not require any verbal confirmation.
Animal cruelty is a behavioural marker of delinquency, and worse.
That very first exchange with a man who thought this was an appropriate way to present himself to a couple out walking their three dogs, has remained vivid in my mind, increasingly leavened with hindsight.
At the time we were still resident in our original property in the village, a three storey town house, but the more extensive garden at the new place acted as a constant lure, and while we employed a builder called Edwin to establish basic level of habitability through 2014, we would show up with our dogs most afternoons just to enjoy the open space.
On one such occasion Edwin shared with us a short video he had made with his mobile phone. He had been working on some stairs and a narrow terrace along the inside of the front wall, which would provide our German Shepherd Jin with a zone of his own to patrol. From this position Edwin had a partial view into Lever's front garden as our neighbour was already being quite obstinate in his refusal to build his own wall.
Lever had appeared carrying a small black puppy that he had recently taken in and had started to repeatedly punch it in the belly. He then bent over and pushed the puppy's snout into one of the cactuses that were clustered there, rubbing it repeatedly back and forth, seemingly oblivious to the dog's wails.
This was one of the most disturbing things I have ever been made to contemplate, and I've seen some messed up shit.
And it was not an isolated incident. On numerous other occasions we could hear the abuse of this poor little puppy taking place next door and our own dog Mochi always used to go crazy with alarm and, dare I suggest, empathy.
Eventually Mochi would start to react frantically at the mere scent of our lurking neighbour. (She died last year from a mysterious internal bleeding that our vet tried unsuccessfully to treat with antibiotics.)
For us both it is a matter of profoundest regret that we did nothing about it at the time. This was what we have come to see as 'the period of appeasement' (the subject of a future episode), the span of two whole years where we repeatedly witnessed disturbing examples of unhinged behaviour, yet took no action because we ourselves were not the direct objects of it. The path of least resistance was to look away.
Though in the specific case of the animal cruelty our options were then fairly limited, as Guatemala had yet to pass its Ley de Bienestar Animal (2017).
Lever, apparently aware that we had become inconvenient witnesses to his callousness, made a ham-fisted attempt to apologise to me one afternoon in the village, when I bumped into him walking the puppy with his then girlfriend.
The problem, he explained, was that he had grown up with female dogs and was just not used to males.
Shortly afterwards the little black puppy disappeared and was replaced with two bitches.
PS: Edwin has gone on to become a witness to Lever's constant moronic and brutish harassment of my wife.
In this still taken from a security cam video (2018) he is standing in our entrance along with a colleague, conversing with V about another project when Lever whizzes by again insulting her both verbally and with an obscene gesture.
B.1.1.7.
This graph illustrates why the increased mortality associated with the so-called 'British' strain may in fact be a consequence of its contagiousness.
In other words, if a mutation of the novel coronavirus ups infectiousness while another increases the likelihood of dying, with a roughly proportional increment, it is really the speed and extent of the spread of the former which will tend to do the greatest harm in the population in the medium term.
Either way I think we Brits have got this covered!
Booooooooöm
We took in a classic movie this week, starring Karlheinz Böhm, son of the legendary Austrian conductor. You'll have to wait a day or so to find out which one.
Karl's grandiose Eroica, with its purposefully ponderous funeral march, was part of the soundtrack to my fresher year at Cambridge. Klemperer's was even more leisurely.
(If you want to hear how this symphony supposedly ought to sound, try Harnoncourt.)
Böhm senior also scored many a long car journey with my father — specifically his interpretations of the Brahms symphonies.
This symphony is perhaps a lasting testament to the dangers of idolising someone too early in life. Beethoven was certainly one of my totems as a student. He was in fact one of the first men to ever be commemorated by a statue. These days however, that's not such a good look.
In The Spectator last month Jonathan Biss declared the German composer his man of the year...
Aside from its greatness — which hardly needs to be explained, by me or anyone else — the reason Beethoven's music has had such special significance for me these past nine months is that it is the product of a person who was profoundly alone, and who found remarkable power and possibility in aloneness.
Nevertheless, a week or so later James Wood wrote in the LRB of how, as a child, he conspicuously failed to pick up his father's obsession with the music...
I disliked Beethoven's bombast: the melodramatic dynamic contrasts that seemed like huge arguments followed by wheedling tears; the endless endings of the symphonies, as the brassy orchestra wumps from tonic to dominant to tonic, over and over again. The beer-cellar heroism in major keys – the aspect of Beethoven that sometimes offended even Adorno as 'ham-acting', 'a mere "boom boom"'. Even the beauties of the famous slow movements – the Pathétique or Appassionata, say – seemed stiflingly 'noble' on a dull Northern English Sunday afternoon. The string quartets with their polite rustle.
I still stand amazed, especially with the stuff scribbled down by the 'deaf old bear', and yet as I grow older, the music and my prevailing moods seem further apart than they did thirty odd years ago in a corner room at Girton.
Perhaps old Ludwig was just a little too humourless for 2020, though he was nevertheless fond of a drink. Indeed, it has been suggested that he died as a result of the lead in his vino tinto.
The Evilevers: S01E01 'Pilot'
Over the past eight years I have accumulated enough material to write quite a juicy piece of fiction about the escalating incidents of encroachment and violent harassment that we have suffered at the hands of an Australian citizen named Jason Wade Lever.
It's really such a long and complicated story that I have fretted over how to share it, as I feel I now must. In narrative form, as protocol dictates, names and details would be altered, but here on this medium I shall be open and factual. And episodic.
Our first encounter with this individual in 2013 began with a description of torture and concluded with a thinly veiled threat (...of poisoning).
Veiled threats led to not-so-veiled threats, and to repeated acts of aggression in the streets of our village, with no care for who might get caught up in them: friends, family, children. Trespass, both digital and physical.
But in particular there has been a pattern of vile, misogynistic and frankly pervy abuse directed against my wife.
And then there is the stuff at which most well-balanced teenagers would turn up their noses: an intense and utterly infantile, six-week cyber-bullying campaign and behaviour like this — giving the finger to our security cameras while he wizzes by on a douche-ati.
A panza verde professional that came to hear of our plight and who, whilst not personally acquainted with Lever, occasionally mingles amidst the same ex-pat cliques, decided to conduct an investigation into this individual, entirely off his own bat.
When he presented his report to me in his office, it was a tale of alcohol and substance abuse plus mental problems, yet he added that Lever was pretty well liked within his own milieux, considered to be non-violent and widely believed to have put many of his past problems behind him by marrying a nice local girl.
That, however, is not the story I am going to tell.
But to begin with, like all good tales, it has a bit of a backstory...
Longer-termers around here will no doubt recall this rather sordid character, Jeffrey L. Cassman, who went by the name of Mark Francis whilst on the lam here in Antigua.
At the time this snap was taken at a gasolinera in Ciudad Vieja in 2010, Cassman had been wanted by the FBI for a couple of years, as he'd made a career of swindling a bunch of people back in his native Tennessee and nearby states.
It was a punter from Arkansas who eventually rang the bell on one of the 'fool proof' investment schemes touted by Cassman Financial, forcing the eponymous 'advisor' to flee south over the Tropic of Cancer with his spouse and then nine children. (Oh, and in excess of $350,000 that didn't really belong to him).
Ensconced in Antigua as 'Don Marco' he was soon up to his old tricks, not exactly full ponzi, but a friend of mine once shared with me a prospectus for a 'fool proof' tuctuc fleet start-up that JC had circulated, which insisted it would pay double digit returns from the first year onwards.
Eventually some of his ill-gotten gains from both here and stateside went into a local operation called El Ocelote SA, the name of which is still proudly displayed right inside the entrance to the business that now meets the world under the umbrella brand El Barrio. (It is also a company whose utility bills I discovered had been registered to my own private address, but more on that nonsense in future episodes.)
I have no reason to conclude that this estafador has ceased to be a sleeping partner of sorts there. He was certainly back in Antigua a couple of years ago, having announced proudly on the interwebs that he needed to check out his various business interests.
Before he was marched off in handcuffs, one Jason Lever, occasional miner, had also reportedly been Cassman's employee. And with Don Marco off to spend a four year sentence in federal lock-up (he pleaded guilty), Lever soon re-styled his image from employee to co-proprietor; the new alpha.
At the time we acquired this property next door to this still-single Western Australian larrikin, I had no notion of any connection between this pair, but its significance cannot now be discounted, because readers might remember how Mark Francis, auteur of GuateLiving, became my wholly uninvited digital snooper and stalker.
His blog is long gone, but not before I harvested it in its entirety.
Using his alter-ego, Cassman presented himself as a Latin mass exclusive, Catholic fanatic (years behind bars have not prevented him adding four more offspring to his tally), as a right-wing extremist (and one that has lately segued effortlessly into support for the insurrectionist-in-chief) and as an unrepentant xenophobe.
I generally hesitate to bandy about the R word, but the level of respect he showed to this country and its inhabitants whilst he skulked around here as an unwanted guest was almost certainly deserving of it.
Above all, a hypocrite, for the word on the streets after his arrest was that his extra-marital indiscretions had contributed to his downfall. Yet somehow his wife has stuck by him, even though he scammed her close family as well and had left her in a run down house with their now ten kids when he was carted off back to Nashville.
I never met him and it remains a mystery to me what I could have done to merit those flourishings of attention that began to appear like a morbid infatuation. This is the first time I have in a sense responded personally and proportionately to the drip drip of caustic abuse I had for almost two years.
Yet this experience was but a tiny part of this 'ripping yarn' recounted at some length elsewhere...
Even if the connection I intuit here is coincidental, the undeniable commonality for me is that men who are pretty much all facade and who derive pleasure from preying on others, also tend to suffer from simmering resentments.
And vendettas often have deeper, more twisted roots than one may at first be able to grasp.
The Endless (2017)
Let's suppose that on New Year's Eve last year some unfortunate event occurred (probably also rather unpleasant) and you found yourself shunted back to the beginning of the month. And then again, and again.
It would only take a moment's reflection to comprehend what that would entail on both a personal and more inter-personal scale. There would be the matter of Donald Trump as a bitter and twisted, lame duck President, forever. And depending on one's geographical location there would be restrictions to endure, endlessly, like not being able to get mullered with one's mates at the pub or hug (and thus possibly euthanise) granny.
This scenario is, if I may be so bold, marginally more interesting than the one at the heart of The Endless which asks how much '...and repeat' could be deemed preferable to the finitude of what vampires dread as the True Death.
Infinite temporal loops have become more usually a trope of movie comedies, with Groundhog Day as the generic term. In last year's Palm Springs we witnessed the standard set-up with some of the characters aware that they are loopy, but almost everybody else not.
Part of the trouble here is that we see characters temporally re-setting with what appears to be at best partial awareness, and this adds an element of that sort ambiguity that goes by the name of befuddlement. For we do kind of need to know what the cost is in terms of freedom of action.
I suppose the screenplay for this film began with the thought 'Say there was this UFO death cult, and...' yet the trouble is that the scenario imposes constraints on the central conundrum that are, in the main, unhelpful.
And the two main protagonists (played by the writer-directors themselves) indulge in a debate about whether to accept the terms of the loop that sounds like a pair of corporate bean counters debating whether it is time to shut down the Manchester office.
We watched this almost like consuming the starter after the main course that was Synchronic, the newest output from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. For that film they'd presumably been given more money and some better known actors as surrogates for their own double-act, yet the fundamental deficiencies were repeated.
Both stories need bigger characters; a bigger situation. And both address one of life's greatest metaphysical mysteries in a way that feels under-accomplished, like a B+ essay. That we exist in what could be an infinite reality full of finite material stuff is a thought that deserves just a bit better than this.
(If this had been pitched to me, I'd have said 'TV show'.)
Last Day(s)
Pear-shaped.
The eventual outline of 2020 and the one that 2021 also appears to be adopting, inexorably.
As the players took to the knee before yesterday's Premier League match between Arsenal and Newcastle, the commentator spoke of a year defined by an increase in social consciousness.
Given the inherently 'half empty' handicap applied to any retrospective on the past twelve months, this apparently cheery note jarred just a little. It would not be so hard to make the opposite case.
I suppose on a personal level, 2020 had its isolated pluses. There were Mila's kittens, my investment in Tesla, the discovery of the work of Lawrence Osborne...
Trump's denouement too, though this has yet to feel fully cathartic.
I'll be off later to acquire a bottle of champagne. As Dan Rather noted on Twitter today, it feels a bit like Christmas Eve.
Grand Armée
The Minard Map, touted by Tufte as the greatest statistical graphic of all time, shows the direction and (declining) human mass of Napoleon's Grand Armée on its path in and out of Russia.
Sadly, it should be possible to knock up something similar for Honduran 'migrant caravans'.
Druk / Another Round (2020)
Druk joins the greats of Thomas Vinterberg's back catalogue (The Hunt, Festen...) in the 'don't hold your breath for an American remake' bucket.
In this delightful film, four male, middle-aged, teachers at a gymnasium in the northern suburbs of Copenhagen decide to test the theory of Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, that we are all born with a blood alcohol content that is just a glass or two of vino too low — and that if we can attain and maintain a suitably elevated level during the daytime, our personal and professional lives will become so much more satisfying.
Each member of this quartet is experiencing an urgent desire for a form of re-flourishing, particularly Martin, a history teacher whose students are in open revolt with their parents against his bafflingly anaesthetic classroom style. For this role Mads Michelson rejoins Vinterberg. Has he ever been in a truly bad movie?
PS: I thought Druk (rendered as Another Round for the anglophone market) probably means drunk, but Google thinks binge drinking might be a better translation.
Synchronic (2019)
The past, present and future are 'local' not global phenomena. Modern science owes this revelation to Albert Einstein.
One month before his own death the physicist wrote a letter to the sister of his recently departed friend Michele Besso, in which he noted that the fact that one person passes before another 'means nothing' and that all our experience of time is in a sense, illusory.
Nevertheless, Italian pointy-head Carlo Rovelli has warned us against treating this memetic soundbite out of context, as something vocalised by an oracle. Einstein, he notes, was grieving and attempting to offer a shared comfort.
Nevertheless, a sentence within that letter forms the basis of the premise of Synchronic, which has the potential to be profound, yet limits itself to the shallowest of implementations — there's a new designer drug which messes with our pineal gland, apparently the part of our brain responsible for the conscious experience of the very personal, if not illusory, present. Younger people, whose pineal glands have yet to calcify, not only experience potentially dangerous temporal commingling, but actually travel back in time physically...for seven minutes.
From this point onwards, the more I try to explain this premise, the more arbitrary and generally silly it is going to sound. If chronology is an illusion established inside our minds, why would the physical body itself hop between times, for if the disappearing human form can be seen and filmed, then there is inherently a shared, objective element to all this. Exit Einstein.
The protagonist is at one point left trying to explain why his dog's lead, minus the actual dog, has returned to his original present, and says something remarkably similar to 'It's quantum, baby'. This is just lazy.
Still, as B movies go, and there do seem to be a lot of them around right now, this one is fairly engaging. On some levels it works better as horror than sci-fi. One is left with the impression that there is no point in the history of New Orleans that was anything other than a nightmarish ordeal. Even contemporary NOLA, garden district and all, is presented as a penumbral mind-trip.
Zoila Urízar Soto, aka La Canche; RIP
The passing of 'La Canche', so soon after her shrine-like shop beside La Merced, had us traipsing back down memory lane this afternoon.
We were trying to recall how many of the businesses which existed when we first met are still with us, and then proceeded to delve yet deeper into the era of my wife's childhood.
Bakeries have fared better than most. The San Antonio (Cuchi-Cuchi) and others were all up and running. Stationery shops were also doing quite well, at least until the pandemic. The Mariposa was there on the corner of the park, with an earlier incarnation of the Azmitia print shop a block or so away.
The vast majority of the long surviving restaurants tend to be Chinese, most prominently La Gran Muralla.
On the Calle del Arco the Fonda had long assumed its station but, believe it or not, there was no Pollo Campero to be found.
Cafe Ana was there on its own corner, decades before its near neighbourhood came to be dominated by the 'Panzón Verde'.
Helados Sarita sat roughly where one finds Café Condesa today, the latter one of those contemporary establishments like Doña Luisa, El Viejo Café and so on, whose job, like much of the rest of the city, is to look like they have been around forever, when they haven't.
Gilda Jolas's dance school was nestled into the arch and the Casa Troccoli was long established, though the present store is more of a reincarnation than a continuation.
As for Doña Maria Gordillo's traditional sweet shop, but of course.
What have we missed?
(La Canche, born in the same year as my mother, may have to be notched up as yet another victim of a local phenomenon which can be put down to the inadequate pension provision in Guatemala. I fear many of the over 65s here are continuing to run small retail businesses with unavoidable customer contact at a time when they really ought to be comparatively sheltered.)
The Evilevers S01E03: 'The Misadventures of Jason ...
Shadow In The Cloud (2020)
The Dangerous President vs Dangerous Precedent 'de...
The Serpent
Idle Curiosity
Ayatollah Time?
Happy 158th Birthday
The Enigma of Room 622
Venality and Social Awkwardness
Dark Web Donald
Daylight Robbery


text:
LARA FABIAN KICKS OFF HER "50" WORLD TOUR IN U.S.
Multiple award-winning Brussels-born pop star, Lara Fabian, kicks off her "50" World Tour 2019 to celebrate her 50 years of life and her 30-year successful music career selling over 20 million albums worldwide. From September 16-23, Fabian will hit four major US cities — New York City, Chicago, San Jose, and Los Angeles. She will continue on to 20 cities throughout Russia and Europe through March 2020. Her world tour features songs from her latest studio album, Papillon, released earlier this year.
WATCH THE MUSIC VIDEO FOR "PAPILLON" HERE
The globe-trotting artist had hit the international music circuit a year ago, promoting her 13th album, Camouflage, that she released in 2017. Camouflage was her first English-language album in over a decade. Her 14th studio album, Papillon marks Fabian's return to recording in French.
Fabian first took the US by storm with her 2000 smash hit, "I Will Love Again." The song was produced by Mark Taylor and Paul Barry, who also produced Cher's hit single "Believe."
Be sure to catch Lara Fabian when she comes to your city this September, and check out her latest album, Papillon, available on all streaming platforms.
50 World Tour 2019 (USA leg)
Mon. 9/16, @ 8:00 pm – Beacon Theatre, New York, NY
Wed. 9/18, @ 8:00 pm – The Chicago Theatre, Chicago, IL
Fri. 9/20, @ 8:00 pm – San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, San Jose, CA
Mon. 9/23, @ 8:00 pm – Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
For More Information: larafabian.ca
‹ MULTI-PLATINUM SELLING ARTIST & GRAMMY AWARD WINNER LEANN RIMES SIGNS WITH PARADIGM TALENT AGENCY	› Jamie Alimorad Releases New Single "Brighter Days" In Conjunction with American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
eighteen − seventeen =

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Running Access VBA sub from Batch I have about 8 Subs inside my access file that I would like to run externally from a batch file.
I have little experience with Batch so am not entirely sure where I start writing this, does anyone know if this is possible or could provide code that I could take a look at? I am struggling to find any info online.
Thanks,
Simon

A: Google:
Access command line
Get, for example, this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/209207

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


This is a sewing pattern (downloadable PDF) for little forest folk, a bunny and a squirrel. The pdf file consists of 23 pages (including pattern sheets) and is about 11 MB in size. You will need Adobe Reader (free) to view this pattern. Skill level is advanced beginners to intermediate. These little forest friends fit perfectly in the palm of your hand and are cozy in your pocket. Full instructions for a bunny and squirrel are included. They measure 3 1/2 to 4 inches tall finished. and can be hand or machine sewn. The pattern includes full sized pattern pieces, lots and lots of detailed step-by-step instructions with color photographs and supply and resource lists. Fabric notes: The pattern is designed for light wool but felt, flannel and cotton work as well. The shape will vary slightly depending on the give of the fabric. If you are a beginner I recommend light wool. An 8 X 16 inch piece of fabric is more than enough for one little creature.


text:
"Shareholder Capitalism" vs. "Inclusive Capitalism": A False Alternative
by Jaana Woiceshyn | Feb 23, 2020 | Business
Freeman depicts capitalism as a system where businesses focus on maximizing short-term stock price.
In my previous post, I discussed some corporate leaders' claims that capitalism is dead and their embrace of a "new" corporate purpose: serving all stakeholders equally instead of prioritizing profit maximization for shareholders. Since then, I had the opportunity to hear the popularizer of that idea, the business school professor Edward Freeman (PhD in Philosophy), to give a talk about it.
No wonder there is so much confusion about capitalism when those who teach at business schools do not have a clear understanding of capitalism.
Professor Freeman depicted capitalism as a system where businesses focus on maximizing short-term stock price through any means possible, omitting entirely capitalism's essential characteristics: the recognition of individual rights and private ownership of all property. For emphasis, Freeman called his version "shareholder capitalism" and blamed it for the 2008 global financial crisis.
What he really was describing was the prevailing mixed economy, where the government's role is not limited to protecting individual rights (as in capitalism) but extends to controlling the economy in various ways. For example, in the mixed economy of the United States, government regulates the financial industry and has promoted home ownership by mandating banks to give out mortgages to subprime borrowers. Such high-risk lending and other morally hazardous activities led many banks to a near failure, and they were then bailed out by the government.
In contrast to a mixed economy, an actual capitalist system would deter maximizing stock price through any means (such as boosting sales through deceptive advertising or hiding losses in subsidiaries). Property rights would be protected against fraud and theft through objective (rights-protecting) legislation and the court system.
Professor Freeman wasn't quite as bold as to declare capitalism dead (as was Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff), but he did claim that "there is no going back to [shareholder capitalism]." Instead, he wants "inclusive capitalism." He did not define what that means but implied that in such a system all stakeholders—employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and others—get to participate equally in managing the business and share in its earnings. This, of course, is not capitalism, either—but socialism (or "democratic" socialism, as Bernie Sanders prefers to call it).
Freeman assigned the task of transitioning from "shareholder capitalism" (mixed economy) to "inclusive capitalism" (socialism) to business, managers in particular. He suggested that business is the solution, "people collaborating to create values," to such a transition. He also added: "if we get government to work, that is a bonus."
For more than 30 years, Professor Freeman has been promoting his version of the stakeholder theory. Its substantive content amounts to requiring corporations to include representatives from each stakeholder group (whether they own shares or not) on their Boards and managers balancing all stakeholders' interests to serve them all equally.
Incomprehensibly, the stakeholder term has been embraced by business, and most corporations at least pay lip service to stakeholder equality. But that kind of egalitarianism is impossible to implement in business, as shareholders would not invest their capital to be distributed to all claimants but want to earn a deserved return on their investment. (Corporate leftists, such as Larry Fink, Tom Steyer, and Marc Benioff, would be exceptions).
Rather than being fooled by Professor Freeman's varieties of "capitalism" and following his advice on stakeholder management, corporations—their leaders and shareholders—should focus on maximizing profits for their shareholders as Milton Friedman argued. This is only possible by trading value for value freely with their employees, customers, suppliers, and creditors, for win-win outcomes, and would lead to greater human flourishing for all.
The best social system for business to maximize profits for its shareholders and trade freely with its other "stakeholders" is not mixed economy ("shareholder capitalism") or socialism ("inclusive capitalism"), but capitalism. Ayn Rand's definition of it is worth repeating: "a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned."
Government's role in capitalism is crucial, not just "a bonus," as Freeman suggested. Government must protect individual rights against the initiation of physical force and fraud. Without such protection, the ability of business to create value is seriously curtailed.
Capitalism is the system that corporate leaders and shareholders should understand and advocate if they want to maximize profits. I recommend reading Ayn Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal as a start.
How Does One Apply Rational Egoism in a Mixed Economy, Welfare State?
Quent Cordair Fine Art Gallery Demonstrates The Virtue of Independence
Clarity About Business Ethics
The Virtuous Circle of Profits and People
Celebrate Entrepreneurs Like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Don't Guillotine Them
How Labor Unions Can Be Anti-Labor
The Marxist Attack on Business in the Media and the Streets
TikTok, Trump and the Art of the Shakedown
Kudos to Trader Joe's
A Crucial Choice for Business: Conform to Social Pressure or Defend Freedom?
While the welfare state cannot be transformed into a free-market system overnight, businesspeople can help by speaking up (in forums open to them) when restrictions on freedom of business are being proposed by government and other groups.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the economic lockdowns governments around the world started imposing on businesses in an attempt to contain the coronavirus pandemic, it is the importance of independence.
Altruism is not the only moral code; there is an alternative that facilitates long-term profit maximization.
← Is Capitalism Dead? History of Steel and The Roots of Progress →


text:
\section{Introduction}

Person re-identification (ReID) with deep neural networks has made progress and achieved high performance in recent years.
However, many state-of-the-arts methods design complex network structure and concatenate multi-branch features.
In the literature, some effective training tricks or refinements are briefly appeared in several papers or source codes.
This paper will collect and evaluate such effective training tricks in person ReID.
With involved in all training tricks, ResNet50 reaches 94.5\% rank-1 accuracy and 85.9\% mAP on Market1501 \cite{zheng2015scalable}.
It is worth mentioning that it achieves such surprising performance with global features of the model.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\subfigure[Market1501]{
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.4\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{marketbase.pdf}
\end{minipage}
}
\centering
\subfigure[DukeMTMC-reID]{
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.4\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{dukebase.pdf}
\end{minipage}
}\caption{The performance of different baselines on Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID datasets. We compare our strong baseline with other baselines published in CVPR2018 and ECCV2018.}\label{fig:baseline}
\end{figure}

For comparison, we surveyed articles published at ECCV2018 and CVPR2018 of the past year.
As shown in Fig. \ref{fig:baseline}, most of previous works were expanded on poor baselines.
On Market1501, only two baselines in 23 baselines surpassed 90\% rank-1 accuracy.
The rank-1 accuracies of four baselines even lower than 80\%.
On DukeMTMC-reID, all baselines did not surpass 80\% rank-1 accuracy or 65\% mAP.
We think a strong baseline is very important to promote the development of research.
Therefore, we modified the standard baseline with some training tricks to acquire a strong baseline.
The code of our strong baseline has been open sourced.

In addition, we also found that some works were unfairly compared with other state-of-the-arts methods.
Specifically, the improvements were mainly from training tricks rather than methods themselves.
But the training tricks were understated in the paper so that readers ignored them.
It would make the effectiveness of the method exaggerated.
We suggest that reviewers need to take into account these tricks when commenting academic papers.

Apart from aforementioned reasons, another consideration is that the industry prefers to simple and effective models rather than concatenating lots of local features in the inference stage.
In pursuit of high accuracy, researchers in the academic always combine several local features or utilize the semantic information from pose estimation or segmentation models.
Such methods bring too much extra consumption.
Large features also greatly reduce the speed of retrieval process.
Thus, we hope to use some tricks to improve the ability of the ReID model and only use global features to achieve high performance.
The purposes of this paper are summarized as follow:
\begin{itemize}
  \item We surveyed many works published on top conferences and found most of them were expanded on poor baselines.
  \item For the academia, we hope to provide a strong baseline for researchers to achieve higher accuracies in person ReID.
  \item For the community, we hope to give reviewers some references that what tricks will affect the performance of the ReID model. We suggest that when comparing the performance of the different methods, reviewers need to take these tricks into account.
  \item For the industry, we hope to provide some effective tricks to acquire better models without too much extra consumption.
\end{itemize}

Fortunately, a lot of effective training tricks have been present in some papers or open-sourced projects.
We collect many tricks and evaluate each of them on ReID datasets.
After a lot of experiments, we choose six tricks to introduce in this paper.
Some of them were designed or modified by us.
We add these tricks into a widely used baseline to get our modified baseline, which achieves 94.5\% rank-1 and 85.9\% mAP on Market1501.
Moreover, we found different works choose different image sizes and numbers of batch size, as a supplement, we also explore their impacts on model performance.
In summary, the contributions of this paper are concluded as follow:
\begin{itemize}
  \item We collect some effective training tricks for person ReID. Among them, we design a new neck structure named as BNNeck. In addition, we evaluate the improvements from each trick on two widely used datasets.
  \item We provide a strong ReID baseline, which achieves 94.5\% and 85.9\% mAP on Market1501. It is worth mentioned that the results are obtained with global features provided by ResNet50 backbone. To our best knowledge, it is the best performance acquired by global features in person ReID.
  \item As a supplement, we evaluate the influences of the image size and the number of batch size on the performance of ReID models.
\end{itemize}

\begin{figure*}
\centering
\subfigure[The pipeline of the standard baseline.]{
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.6\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{standard.pdf}
\end{minipage}
}
\centering
\subfigure[The pipeline of our modified baseline.]{
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.8\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{ours.pdf}
\end{minipage}
}\caption{The pipelines of the standard baseline and our modified baseline.}\label{fig:arc}
\end{figure*}

\section{Standard Baseline}\label{SB}
We follow a widely used open-source\footnote[2]{\href{https://github.com/Cysu/open-reid}{https://github.com/Cysu/open-reid}} as our standard baseline.
The backbone of the standard baseline is ResNet50 \cite{he2016deep}.
During the training stage, the pipeline includes following steps:
\begin{enumerate}
  \item We initialize the ResNet50 with pre-trained parameters on ImageNet and change the dimension of the fully connected layer to $N$. $N$ denotes the number of identities in the training dataset.
  \item We randomly sample $P$ identities and $K$ images of per person to constitute a training batch. Finally the batch size equals to $B = P \times K$. In this paper, we set $P=16$ and $K=4$.
  \item We resize each image into $256\times 128$ pixels and pad the resized image 10 pixels with zero values. Then randomly crop it into a $256\times 128$ rectangular image.
  \item Each image is flipped horizontally with 0.5 probability.
  \item Each image is decoded into 32-bit floating point raw pixel values in $[0,1]$. Then we normalize RGB channels by subtracting 0.485, 0.456, 0.406 and dividing by 0.229, 0.224, 0.225, respectively.
  \item The model outputs ReID features $f$ and ID prediction logits $p$.
  \item ReID features $f$ is used to calculate triplet loss \cite{hermans2017defense}. ID prediction logits $p$ is used to calculated cross entropy loss. The margin $m$ of triplet loss is set to be 0.3.
  \item Adam method is adopted to optimize the model. The initial learning rate is set to be 0.00035 and is decreased by 0.1 at the 40th epoch and 70th epoch respectively. Totally there are 120 training epochs.
\end{enumerate}

\section{Training Tricks}
This section will introduce some effective training tricks in person ReID.
Most of such tricks can be expanded on the standard baseline without changing the model architecture.
The Fig. \ref{fig:arc} (b) shows training strategies and the model architecture appeared in this section.

\subsection{Warmup Learning Rate}

Learning rate has a great impact for the performance of a ReID model.
Standard baseline is initially trained with a large and constant learning rate.
In \cite{fan2019spherereid}, a warmup strategy is applied to bootstrap the network for better performance.
In practice, As shown in Fig. \ref{fig:lr}, we spent 10 epochs linearly increasing the learning rate from $3.5\times 10^{-5}$ to $3.5\times 10^{-4}$.
Then, the learning rate is decayed to $3.5\times 10^{-5}$ and $3.5\times 10^{-6}$ at 40th epoch and 70th epoch respectively.
The learning rate $lr(t)$ at epoch $t$ is compute as;
\begin{equation}
lr(t)=\left\{\begin{array}{ll}
{3.5 \times 10^{-5} \times \frac{t}{10} }  & {\text { if } t \leq 10} \\
{3.5 \times 10^{-4}} & {\text { if } 10< t \leq 40} \\
{3.5 \times 10^{-5}}  & {\text { if } 40< t \leq 70} \\
{3.5 \times 10^{-6}} & {\text { if } 70< t \leq 120}
\end{array}\right.
\end{equation}

\begin{figure}[htb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.99\linewidth]{lr.pdf}
\caption{Comparison of learning rate schedules. With warmup strategy, the learning rate is linearly increased in the first 10 epochs.}
\label{fig:lr}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Random Erasing Augmentation}
In person ReID, persons in the images are sometimes occluded by other objects.
To address the occlusion problem and improve the generalization ability of ReID models, Zhong \emph{et al.} \cite{zhong2017random} proposed a new data augmentation approach named as Random Erasing Augmentation (REA).
In practice, for an image $I$ in a mini-batch, the probability of it undergoing Random Erasing is $p_e$, and the probability of it being kept unchanged is $1-p_e$.
Then, REA randomly selects a rectangle region $I_e$ with size $(W_e, H_e)$ in image $I$, and erases its pixels with random values.
Assuming the area of image $I$ and region $I_e$ are $S = W \times H$ and $S_e = W_e \times H_e$ respectively, we denote $r_e = \frac{S_e}{S}$ as the area ratio of erasing rectangle region.
In addition, the aspect ratio of region $I_e$ is randomly initialized between $r_1$ and $r_2$.
To determine a unique region, REA randomly initializes a point $\mathcal{P} = \left(x_{e} , y_{e} \right)$.
If $x_{e} + W_{e} \leq W$ and $y_{e} + H_{e} \leq H$, we set the region, $I_{e} = \left( x_{e}, y_{e},x_{e}+W_{e},y_{e}+H_{e} \right)$, as the selected rectangle region.
Otherwise we repeat the above process until an appropriate $I_e$ is selected.
With the selected erasing region $I_e$, each pixel in $I_e$ is assigned to the mean value of image $I$, respectively.

In this study, we set hyper-parameters to $p=0.5, 0.02<S_e<0.4, r_1=0.3, r_2=3.33$, respectively.
Some examples are shown in Fig. \ref{fig:rea}.
\begin{figure}[tb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.99\linewidth]{rea.pdf}
\caption{Sampled examples of random erasing augmentation. The first row shows five original training images. The processed images are presented in the second low.}
\label{fig:rea}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Label Smoothing}
ID Embedding (IDE) \cite{zheng2018discriminatively} network is a basic baseline in person ReID.
The last layer of IDE, which outputs the ID prediction logits of images, is a fully-connected layer with a hidden size being equal to numbers of persons $N$.
Given an image, we denote $y$ as truth ID label and $p_i$ as ID prediction logits of class $i$.
The cross entropy loss is computed as:
\begin{equation}
L(ID)= \sum_{i=1}^{N}-q_{i} \log \left(p_i\right) \left\{\begin{array}{ll}
q_i = 0, y \ne i \\
q_i = 1, y=i
\end{array}\right.
\end{equation}
Because the category of the classification is determined by the person ID, we call such loss function as ID loss in this paper.

Nevertheless, person ReID can be regard as one-shot learning task because person IDs of the testing set have not appeared in the training set.
So it is pretty important to prevent the ReID model from overfitting training IDs.
Label smoothing (LS) proposed in \cite{szegedy2016rethinking} is a widely used method to prevent overfitting for a classification task.
It changes the construction of $q_i$ to:
\begin{equation}\label{LS}
  q_{i}=\left\{\begin{array}{ll}
  {1- \frac{N-1}{N} \varepsilon} & {\text { if } i=y} \\
  {\varepsilon /N} & {\text { otherwise, }}\end{array}\right.
\end{equation}
where $\varepsilon$ is a small constant to encourage the model to be less confident on the training set.
In this study, $\varepsilon$ is set to be $0.1$.
When the training set is not very large, LS can significantly improve the performance of the model.

\subsection{Last Stride}
Higher spatial resolution always enriches the granularity of feature.
In \cite{sun2018beyond}, Sun \emph{et al.} removed the last spatial down-sampling operation in the backbone network to increase the size of the feature map.
For convenience, we denote the last spatial down-sampling operation in the backbone network as last stride.
The last stride of ResNet50 is set to be 2.
When fed into a image of $256 \times 128$ size, the backbone of ResNet50 outputs a feature map with the spatial size of $8 \times 4$.
If change last stride from 2 to 1, we can get a feature map with higher spatial size ($16 \times 8$).
This manipulation only increases very light computation cost and does not involve extra training parameters.
However, higher spatial resolution brings significant improvement.

\subsection{BNNeck}

\begin{figure}[b]
\centering
\subfigure[The neck of the standard baseline.]{
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.25\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{neck.pdf}
\end{minipage}
}
\centering
\subfigure[Our designed BNNeck. In the inference stage, we choose $f_i$ following the BN layer to do the retrieval.]{
\begin{minipage}[b]{0.4\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{bnneck.pdf}
\end{minipage}
}\caption{Comparison between standard neck and our designed BNNeck.}\label{fig:bnneck}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure*}[htb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.99\linewidth]{em.pdf}
\caption{Two-dimensional visualization of sample distribution in the embedding space supervised by (a) ID Loss, (b) Triplet Loss, (c) ID + triplet loss and (d) ID + triplet loss + BNNeck.
Points of different colors represent embedding features from different classes. The yellow dotted lines stand for the supposed classification hyperplanes.}
\label{fig:eb}
\end{figure*}

Most of works combined ID loss and triplet loss together to train ReID models.
As shown in Fig. \ref{fig:bnneck}(a), in the standard baseline, ID loss and triplet loss constrain the same feature $f$.
However, the targets of these two losses are inconsistent in the embedding space.

As shown in Fig. \ref{fig:eb}(a), ID loss constructs several hyperplanes to separate the embedding space into different sub-spaces.
The features of each class are distributed in different subspaces.
In this case, cosine distance is more suitable than Euclidean distance for the model optimized by ID loss in the inference stage.
On the other hand, as shown in \ref{fig:eb}(b), triplet loss enhances the intra-class compactness and inter-class separability in the Euclidean space.
Because triplet loss can not provide globally optimal constraint, inter-class distance sometimes is smaller than intra-class distance.
A widely used method is to combine ID loss and triplet loss to train the model together.
This approach let the model learn more discriminative features.
Nevertheless, for image pairs in the embedding space, ID loss mainly optimizes the cosine distances while triplet loss focuses on the Euclidean distances.
If we use these two losses to simultaneously optimize a feature vector, their goals may be inconsistent.
In the training process, a possible phenomenon is that one loss is reduced, while the other loss is oscillating or even increased.

To overcome the aforementioned problem, we design a structure named as BNNeck shown in Fig. \ref{fig:bnneck}(b).
BNNeck only adds a batch normalization (BN) layer after features (and before classifier FC layers).
The feature before the BN layer is denoted as $f_t$.
We let $f_t$ pass through a BN layer to acquire the normalized feature $f_i$.
In the training stage, $f_t$ and $f_i$ are used to compute triplet loss and ID loss, respectively.
Normalization balances each dimension of $f_i$.
The features are gaussianly distributed near the surface of the hypersphere.
This distribution makes the ID loss easier to converge.
In addition, BNNeck reduces the constraint of the ID loss on $f_t$.
Less constraint from ID loss leads to triplet loss easier to converge at the same time.
Thirdly, normalization keeps the compact distribution of features that belong to one same person.

Because the hypersphere is almost symmetric about the origin of the coordinate axis, another trick of BNNeck is removing the bias of classifier FC layer.
It constrains the classification hyperplanes to pass through the origin of the coordinate axis.
We initialize the FC layer with Kaiming initialization proposed in \cite{he2015delving}.

In the inference stage, we choose $f_i$ to do the person ReID task.
Cosine distance metric can achieve better performance than Euclidean distance metric.
Experimental results in Table. \ref{ablation} show that BNNeck can improve performance of the ReID model by a large margin.

\subsection{Center Loss}

Triplet loss is computed as:
\begin{equation}\label{eq:tri}
  L_{Tri} = [d_p - d_n + \alpha]_{+},
\end{equation}
where $d_p$ and $d_n$ are feature distances of positive pair and negative pair.
$\alpha$ is the margin of triplet loss, and $[z]_{+}$ equals to $max(z,0)$.
In this paper, $\alpha$ is set to $0.3$.
However, triplet loss only considers the difference between $d_p$ and $d_n$ and ignores the absolute values of them.
For instance, when $d_p=0.3, d_n=0.5$, the triplet loss is $0.1$.
For another case, when $d_p=1.3, d_n=1.5$, the triplet loss also is $0.1$.
Triplet loss is determined by two person IDs sampled randomly.
It is difficult to ensure that $d_p < d_n$ in the whole training dataset.

Center loss \cite{wen2016discriminative}, which simultaneously learns a center for deep features of each class and penalizes the distances between the deep features and their corresponding class centers, makes up for the drawbacks of the triplet loss.
The center loss function is formulated as:
\begin{equation}\label{center}
  \mathcal{L}_{C}=\frac{1}{2} \sum_{j=1}^{B}\left\|\boldsymbol{f}_{t_j}-\boldsymbol{c}_{y_{j}}\right\|_{2}^{2},
\end{equation}
where $y_{j}$ is the label of the $j$th image in a mini-batch.
$\boldsymbol{c}_{y_{j}}$ denotes the $y_i$th class center of deep features.
$B$ is the number of batch size.
The formulation effectively characterizes the intra-class variations.
Minimizing center loss increases intra-class compactness.
Our model totally includes three losses as follow:
\begin{equation}\label{loss}
  L = L_{ID} + L_{Triplet} + \beta L_{C}
\end{equation}
$\beta$ is the balanced weight of center loss.
In our experiments, $\beta$ is set to be $0.0005$.

\section{Experimental Results}
In this section, we will evaluate our models on Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID \cite{ristani2016MTMC} datasets.
The Rank-1 accuracy and mean Average Precision (mAP) are reported as evaluation metrics.
We add tricks on the standard baseline successively and do not change any training settings.
The results of ablation studies present the performance boost from each trick.
In order to prevent being misled by overfitting, we also show the results of cross-domain experiments.

\subsection{Influences of Each Trick (Same domain)}

\renewcommand{\multirowsetup}{\centering}
\begin{table}[htb]\small
  \begin{center}
  \begin{tabular}{ l|cc|cc}
\hline
    			& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{Market1501} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{DukeMTMC}	 \\
  Model			& r = 1 	& mAP	&r = 1 	& mAP 	 \\
 	\hline
	\hline
Baseline-S		&87.7	&74.0	&79.7	&63.7			\\
+warmup         &88.7	&75.2	&80.6	&65.1           \\
+REA            &91.3	&79.3	&81.5	&68.3			\\
+LS	            &91.4	&80.3	&82.4	&69.3			\\
+stride=1	    &92.0	&81.7	&82.6	&70.6			\\
+BNNeck	        &94.1	&85.7	&86.2	&75.9		\\
+center loss    &94.5	&85.9	&86.4	&76.4		\\
\hline

  \end{tabular}
  \end{center}
  \caption{\label{ablation}The performance of different models is evaluated on Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID datasets. Baseline-S stands for the standard baseline introduced in section \ref{SB}.}
\end{table}

The standard baseline introduced in section \ref{SB} achieves 87.7\% and 79.7\% rank-1 accuracies on Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, respectively.
The performance of standard baseline is similar with most of baselines reported in other papers.
Then, we add warmup strategy, random erasing augmentation, label smoothing, stride change, BNNeck and center loss to the model training process, one by one.
Our designed BNNeck boosts more performance than other tricks, especially on DukeMTMC-reID.
Finally, these tricks make baseline acquire 94.5\% rank-1 accuracy and 85.9\% mAP on Market1501.
On DukeMTMC-reID, it reaches 86.4\% rank-1 accuracy and 76.4\% mAP.
In other works, these training tricks boost the performance of the standard baseline by more than 10\% mAP.
In addition, to get such improvement, we only involve an extra BN layer and do not increase training time.

\subsection{Analysis of BNNeck}

\renewcommand{\multirowsetup}{\centering}
\begin{table}[htb]\small
  \begin{center}
  \begin{tabular}{ c|c|cc|cc}
\hline
    		&		       & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{Market1501} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{DukeMTMC}	 \\
  Feature   & Metric	   & r = 1 	& mAP	&r = 1 	& mAP 	 \\
 	\hline
	\hline
    $f$ (w/o BNNeck) & Euclidean    &92.0	&81.7	&82.6	&70.6 \\
    $f_t$   & Euclidean             &94.2	&85.5	&85.7	&74.4		\\
    $f_t$   & Cosine                &94.2	&85.7	&85.5	&74.6		\\
    $f_i$   & Euclidean	            &93.8	&83.7	&86.6	&73.0       \\
    $f_i$   & Cosine                &\textbf{94.1}	&\textbf{85.7}	&\textbf{86.2}	&\textbf{75.9}		\\

\hline

  \end{tabular}
  \end{center}
  \caption{\label{tab:bnneck}The ablation study of BNNeck. $f$ (w/o BNNeck) is baseline without BNNeck. BNNeck includes two features $f_t$ and $f_i$. We evaluate the performance of them with Euclidean distance and cosine distance, respectively.}
\end{table}

In this section, we evaluate the performance of two different features ($f_t$ and $f_i$) with Euclidean distance metric and cosine distance metric.
All models are trained without center loss in Table. \ref{tab:bnneck}.
We observe that cosine distance metric performs better than Euclidean distance metric for $f_t$.
Because ID loss directly constrains the features followed the BN layer, $f_i$ can be separated by several hyperplanes clearly.
The cosine distance can measure the angle between two feature vectors, so cosine distance metric is more suitable than Euclidean distance metric for $f_i$.
However, $f_t$ is close to triplet loss and is constrained by ID loss at the same time.
Two kinds of metrics achieve similar performance for $f_t$.

In overall, BNNeck significantly improve the performance of ReID models.
We choose $f_i$ with cosine distance metric to do the retrieval in the inference stage.

\subsection{Influences of Each Trick (Cross domain)}

\renewcommand{\multirowsetup}{\centering}
\begin{table}[b]\small
  \begin{center}
  \begin{tabular}{ l|cc|cc}
\hline
    			& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{M$\to$D} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{D$\to$M}	 \\
  Model			& r = 1 	& mAP	&r = 1 	& mAP 	 \\
 	\hline
	\hline
Baseline		&24.4	&12.9	&34.2	&14.5			\\
+warmup         &26.3	&14.1	&39.7	&17.4           \\
+REA            &21.5	&10.2	&32.5	&13.5			\\
+LS	            &23.2	&11.3	&36.5	&14.9			\\
+stride=1	    &23.1	&11.8	&37.1	&15.4			\\
+BNNeck	        &26.7	&15.2	&47.7	&21.6			\\
+center loss	&27.5	&15.0	&47.4	&21.4			\\
-REA            &41.4	&25.7	&54.3	&25.5			\\
\hline

  \end{tabular}
  \end{center}
  \caption{\label{cd}The performance of different models is evaluated on cross-domain datasets. M$\to$D means that we train the model on Market1501 and evaluate it on DukeMTMC-reID.}
\end{table}

To further explore effectiveness, we also present the results of cross-domain experiments in Table. \ref{cd}.
In overview, three tricks including warmup strategy, label smoothing and BNNeck significantly boost the cross-domain performance of ReID models.
Stride change and center loss seem to have no big impact on the performance.
However, REA does harm to models in cross-domain ReID task.
In particularly, when our modified baseline is trained without REA, it achieves 41.4\% and 54.3\% rank-1 accuracies on Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID datasets, respectively.
Its performance surpass the ones of the standard baseline by a large margin.
We infer that REA masking the regions of training images lets the model learn more knowledge in the training domain.
It causes the model to perform worse in the testing domain.

\subsection{Comparison of State-of-the-Arts}

\renewcommand{\multirowsetup}{\centering}
\begin{table}[tb]\footnotesize
  \begin{center}
  \begin{tabular}{ ccc|cc|cc}
\hline
    		&		&       & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{Market1501} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{DukeMTMC}	 \\
  Type   & Method & $N_f$	   & r = 1 	& mAP	&r = 1 	& mAP 	 \\
 	\hline
	\hline
    \multirow{3}{1cm}{Pose-guided}& GLAD\cite{wei2017glad}        & 4  &89.9	&73.9	&-	&-		\\
                                & PIE \cite{zheng2017pose}          & 3  &87.7	&69.0	&79.8	&62.0		\\
                                & PSE \cite{Sarfraz_2018_CVPR}      & 3  &78.7	&56.0	&-	&-		\\
    \hline
    \multirow{2}{1cm}{Mask-guided}& SPReID \cite{kalayeh2018human}    & 5  & 92.5 & 81.3	& 84.4	&71.0		\\
                                & MaskReID \cite{qi2018maskreid}    & 3  &90.0	&75.3	&78.8	&61.9		\\
 \hline
    \multirow{6}{1cm}{Stripe-based}& AlignedReID \cite{zhang2017alignedreid}& 1 &90.6 &77.7 &81.2	&67.4 		\\
                                & SCPNet \cite{fan2018scpnet}       & 1  & 91.2	&75.2	&80.3	&62.6		\\
                                & PCB \cite{sun2018beyond}          & 6  & 93.8	&81.6	&83.3	&69.2		\\
                                & Pyramid\cite{zheng2018coarse}     & 1 & 92.8 &82.1	&-	&-		\\
                                & Pyramid\cite{zheng2018coarse}     & 21 & 95.7 &88.2	&89.0	&79.0		\\
                                & BFE\cite{dai2018batch}            & 2 & 94.5 &85.0	&88.7	&75.8		\\
   \hline
    \multirow{3}{1cm}{Attention-based}& Mancs \cite{wang2018mancs}        & 1 &93.1   &82.3	&84.9	&71.8		\\
                                & DuATM \cite{si2018dual}           & 1 & 91.4	& 76.6	&81.2	&62.3		\\
                                & HA-CNN \cite{li2018harmonious}    & 4 & 91.2	& 75.7	&80.5	&63.8		\\
    \hline
    \multirow{2}{1cm}{GAN-based}& Camstyle \cite{zhong2019camstyle} &  1 &88.1 	&68.7	&75.3	&53.5		\\
                                & PN-GAN \cite{qian2018pose}        &  9 &89.4 	&72.6	&73.6	&53.2		\\
    \hline
    \multirow{6}{1cm}{Global feature}& IDE \cite{zheng2018discriminatively}  & 1  & 79.5	& 59.9	& -	&-		\\
                                & SVDNet \cite{sun2017svdnet}  & 1  & 82.3	& 62.1	& 76.7	&56.8		\\
                                & TriNet\cite{hermans2017defense}  & 1  & 84.9	& 69.1	& -	& -		\\
                                & AWTL\cite{ristani2018features}  & 1  & 89.5	& 75.7	& 79.8	& 63.4		\\
                                & \textbf{Ours}    &  1 &\textbf{94.5}	&\textbf{85.9}	&\textbf{86.4}	&\textbf{76.4}		\\
                                & \textbf{Ours(RK)}&  1 &\textbf{95.4}	&\textbf{94.2}	&\textbf{90.3}	&\textbf{89.1}		\\
\hline

  \end{tabular}
  \end{center}
  \caption{\label{tab:sota}Comparison of state-or-the-arts methods. $N_f$ is the number of features used in the inference stage. RK stands for $k$-reciprocal re-ranking method \cite{zhong2017re}}
\end{table}

We compare out strong baseline with state-of-the-arts methods in Table. \ref{tab:sota}.
All methods have been divided into different types.
Pyramid\cite{zheng2018coarse} achieves surprising performance on two datasets.
However, it concatenates 21 local features of different scale.
If only utilizing the global feature, it obtains 92.8\% rank-1 accuracy and 82.1\% mAP on Market1501.
Ours strong baseline can reach 94.5\% rank-1 accuracy and 85.9\% mAP on Market1501.
BFE\cite{dai2018batch} obtains similar performance with our strong baseline.
But it combines features of two branches.
Throughout all methods that only use global features, our strong baseline beats AWTL\cite{ristani2018features} by more than 10\% mAP on both Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID.
With $k$-reciprocal re-ranking method to boost the performance, our method reaches 94.1\% mAP and 89.1\% mAP on Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, respectively.
To our best knowledge, our baseline achieves best performance in the case of only using global features.

\section{Supplementary Experiments}
We observed that some previous works were done with different the numbers of batch size or image sizes.
In this section, as a supplementary we explore the affects of them on model performance.

\subsection{Influences of the Number of Batch Size}

\renewcommand{\multirowsetup}{\centering}
\begin{table}[tb]\small
  \begin{center}
  \begin{tabular}{ c|cc|cc}
\hline
  Batch Size	 				& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{Market1501} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{DukeMTMC}	 \\
  $P \times K$			& r = 1 	& mAP	&r = 1 	& mAP 	 \\
 	\hline
	\hline
$8\times3$     &92.6	&79.2	&84.4	&68.1			\\
$8\times4$	   &92.9	&80.0	&84.7	&69.4			\\
$8\times6$     &93.5	&81.6	&85.1	&70.7    		\\
$8\times8$     &93.9	&82.0	&85.8	&71.5			\\
$16\times3$    &93.8	&83.1	&86.8	&72.1			\\
$16\times4$    &93.8	&83.7	&86.6	&73.0			\\
$16\times6$    &94.0	&82.8	&85.1	&69.9			\\
$16\times8$    &93.1	&81.6	&86.7	&72.1			\\
$32\times3$    &94.5	&84.1	&86.0	&71.4			\\
$32\times4$	   &93.2	&82.8	&86.5	&73.1			\\
\hline
  \end{tabular}
  \end{center}
  \caption{\label{batchsize}Performance of ReID models with different numbers of batch size.}
\end{table}

The mini-batch of triplet loss includes $B = P \times K$ images.
$P$ and $K$ denote the number of different persons and the number of different images per person, respectively.
A mini-batch can only contain up to 128 images in one GPU, so that we can not do the experiments with $P=32, K=6$ or $P=32, K=8$.
We removed center loss to clearly find the relation between triplet loss and batch size.
The results are present in Table. \ref{batchsize}.
However, there are not specific conclusions to show the effect of $B$ on performance.
A slight trend we observed is that larger batch size is beneficial for the model performance.
We infer that large $K$ helps to mine hard positive pairs while large $P$ helps to mining hard negative pairs.

\subsection{Influences of Image Size}
\renewcommand{\multirowsetup}{\centering}
\begin{table}[htb]\small
  \begin{center}
  \begin{tabular}{ c|cc|cc}
\hline
    	 				& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{Market1501} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{DukeMTMC}	 \\
  Image Size			& r = 1 	& mAP	&r = 1 	& mAP 	 \\
 	\hline
	\hline
$256\times128$ &93.8	&83.7	&86.6	&73.0           \\
$224\times224$ &94.2	&83.3	&86.1	&72.2           \\
$384\times128$ &94.0	&82.7	&86.4	&73.2			\\
$384\times192$ &93.8	&83.1	&87.1	&72.9			\\
\hline
  \end{tabular}
  \end{center}
  \caption{\label{imgsize}Performance of ReID models with different image sizes.}
\end{table}

We trained models without center loss and set $P=16, K=4$.
As shown in Table. \ref{imgsize}, four models achieve similar performances on both datasets.
In our opinion, the image size is not a pretty importance factor for the performance of ReID models.

\section{Conclusions and Outlooks}
In this paper, we collect some effective training tricks and design a strong baseline for person ReID.
To demonstrate the influences of each trick on the performance of ReID models, we do a lot of experiments on both same-domain and cross-domain ReID tasks.
Finally, only using global features, our strong baseline achieve 94.5\% rank-1 accuracy and 85.9\% mAP on Market1501.
We hope that this work can promote the ReID research in academia and industry.

However, the purpose of our work is not to improve performance roughly.
Compared with face recognition, person ReID still has a long way to explore.
We think some training tricks can speed up the exploration and there are many effective tricks not discovered.
We welcome researchers to share some other effective tricks with us.
We will evaluate them based on this work.

In the future, we will continue to design more experiments to analyze the principles of these trciks.
For example, when we replace the BNNeck with L2 normalization, what does the performance of this network become?
In addition, whether can some state-of-the-arts methods such as PCB, MGN and AlignedReID, etc. be expanded on our strong baseline?
More visualization also is helpful for others to understand this work.

\section{Acknowledge}
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61633019) and the Science Foundation of Chinese Aerospace Industry (JCKY2018204B053).

{\small
\bibliographystyle{ieee_fullname}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Credit: Brian Rozman/YES! Magazine.
In the "Road to Zero Wealth" report, Nieves and the others suggest,among other things, changes to the tax code to "stop subsidizing the already-wealthy." They believe that reforming the mortgage interest deduction and other tax expenditures would strengthen and grow the federal estate tax and create a net-worth tax on multimillion dollar fortunes—freeing up funds for investment in opportunities that allow low-wealth families to build wealth.


Climate change; biodiversity loss; depletion of natural resources; air, water and soil pollution… humankind is facing enormous environmental challenges. Given an imperfect human nature, designing the 'right' institutions is a vital factor for bringing about the necessary change towards an ecologically more sustainable development.
In this blog, we will share ideas on designing and implementing institutions, policies, and governance processes across the broad area of environmental and sustainability governance. Our group – the Research Group on Governance, Participation and Sustainability, based at Leuphana University Lüneburg – studies polycentric decision-making in the public realm, and in particular the involvement of broader sectors of society in this. Our research is as much about effective steering (achieving substantive change towards sustainability) as it is about fair decision processes and democratic structures. Our perspective is mainly from political science, but blends approaches and insights from other fields such as human geography, sociology and social-ecological systems. While we approach environmental governance issues mostly form a social science perspective, we collaborate with colleagues in the natural sciences and also with non-scientists.
Politics and policy on multiple levels, from the very local to the global, working across scales, and involving a variety of stakeholders and process forms, from top-down policy implementation to processes of social learning in collaborative networks are at the center of our research. We ask whether and how participation and collaboration foster environmental sustainability. How can sustainability transitions be governed? How can we meet the challenges of governing global social-ecological telecoupled systems?
We set up this blog to share our thoughts on exciting new ideas, concepts or findings; but also on critical thoughts on recent books and articles; reflections on conferences; or simply to recommend and spread contributions we find interesting and useful. We understand this blog as an open forum, and invite readers to comment on our posts. We hope readers will find our contributions useful, and by this hope to contribute to the discourse on environmental and sustainability governance.


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The School of Health and Social Work believes that the involvement of service users and carers is central to the development and quality of our courses. Service Users and Carers are a group of people who have experience of using health and social care services or have caring responsibility for those who have.
By working alongside those that have everyday experience of health care issues, our students are given a real opportunity to fully understand the needs and expectations of those they will be working with.
Service users and carers are frequently referred to as 'experts by experience' and this is exactly what they are. Why learn the theory without receiving advice from an expert!
In turn, involvement in the School's courses allows, service users and carers the opportunity to make a difference by, challenging and influencing the development of courses.
The School's Service User and Public Involvement Core Group (SUPI) aims to increase public involvement in the School's Health and Social Work courses. SUPI together with members of teaching staff are working together to ensure that the views and opinions of service users are represented as much as possible.
We have at least 50 service users who are directly involved with the School's activities, their experiences vary from caring to living with health conditions to experiences of hospital treatment. The School also works closely with a number of charities for example ViewPoint Hertfordshire, Carers in Herts, Healthwatch Hertfordshire, Welwyn and Hatfield Day Services and 2 local schools.
If you are a service user or carer and would like to be involved in the education of future health and social work professionals please email Sonya Prime SUPI Co-ordinator. For further advice, please check our frequently asked questions.
The School of Health and Social Work in Collaboration with the School of Life and Medical Sciences: Service User and Public Involvement Showcase 2018 "Co-Production - The Value of Service User, Carer and Public Involvement in Teaching, Learning and Research"
The Service User and Public Involvement (SUPI) Core Group of the School of Health and Social Work, in collaboration with the School of Life and Medical Sciences, hosted the second Service User and Public Involvement Showcase on Tuesday 3 July 2018.
The showcase consisted of a full day conference including plenary presentations from local, regional and national leaders in public involvement. In addition, there were presentations, workshops and posters from University of Hertfordshire academics, researchers, experts by experience and students on the themes of: Involvement across the life course; Co-production in research, teaching and learning; The impact of involvement on the student experience; Inclusion and diversity.


When a person sustains a serious blow to the head, the result can be a wide range of possible injuries that directly affect the brain's ability to provide basic functions. This may include the production or reception of language, which, when lost, is known as a part of a disorder called aphasia. This language disorder can occur in a number of different capacities, and some sufferers can experience a loss of their ability to create fluent language. When this is type of aphasia occurs it can also be known as Broca's aphasia or expressive aphasia.
The most notable symptom attached to Broca's aphasia is a lack of grammatical language production, known more simply as agrammatism. This form of speaking is occasionally called telegraphic speech, as it resembles the choppy phrasing and lack of grammatical words that characterized telegraphs.
When individuals suffering from this disorder become aphasic, the result can be an elimination of basic words such as prepositions, articles, and, occasionally, conjunctions. This may leave a person with the basic ability to speak in disjointed nouns and verbs, occasionally not even including the proper morphemes, or special word modifiers such as plurals or past tense markers. Without these markers, a listener can vaguely understand aphasic speech, but may need contextual information to grasp some of the details.
In addition to disjointed sentence construction, speech itself may become a labored event. People suffering from aphasia not only have problems creating complex language, but occasionally have issues producing that language as well. It is important to remember that this is a form of brain damage. The speech organs necessary to create these sentences and words are often undamaged, but the regions of the brain necessary to produce speech are compromised.
To learn more about aphasia, brain damage, and how negligence can cause this disorder, contact a personal injury lawyer.
If you have been injured in an accident, contact the Houston personal injury attorneys of the Williams Kherkher law firm for more information regarding your rights today.


text:
Q: delete button its deleting all the values When I click the delete button, it's deleting all the values. Is it possible to delete each value?
I'm providing the code below:
http://codepen.io/anon/pen/grRKEz?editors=1010
$('#localStorageTest').submit(function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    var email = $('#email').val();
    var name = $('#name').val();
    var message = $('#message').val();
    var div = "
"+name+""+email+""+message+"<input type='button' value='Edit' name='editHistory'><input type='button' value='Delete' name='deleteHistory'>
";  //add your data in span, p, input..
    //alert(div);

    $('.gettingValues').append(div); //apendd the div
    $('#localStorageTest')[0].reset(); //clear the form
    localStorage.clear();
 });

A: Since the form is appending the information wrapped in a div to your "gettingValues" div, then you can just delete the parent element.
Like this:
$('.gettingValues').on('click', "input[name='deleteHistory']", function() {
  //var div = "getting form values<input data-name='edit' type='button' value='Edit' name='editHistory'><input data-name='delete' type='button' name='deleteHistory' value='Delete'>"; //No need for this line.
  console.log("Data deleted");
  //$('.gettingValues').html(div); //Don't reset the html.
  if($(this).parent().hasClass('gettingValues')) return false; //Don't remove the container.
  $(this).parent().remove(); //Remove the containing div only.
  //deleteHistoryAPI(data);

});

Check out: http://codepen.io/gborbonus/pen/grRjjy?editors=1011


Question: What does PARP Inhibitor stand for (what is the full name)?
Question: What is Poly ADP-ribose Polymerase?
An enzyme that we all have, which repairs damaged DNA. So a PARP Inhibitor tries to block that enzyme from repairing cancer cells during chemotherapy.
Question: How does a PARP Inhibitor work? What does it do?
Question: When will PARP Inhibitors be available to the public?
We don't know. There are several large clinical trials underway. It could be awhile before it becomes available to the public.
For a detailed answer on what Olaparib is, click here.
Question: Who are doing the PARP Inhibitors clinical trials?
Astra Zeneca and Bi-Par Sciences. Some of Bi-Par Sciences PARP Inhibitor clinical trials are already entering Phase III. Others are still in preclincal testing and have yet to enter Phase I.
Question: Where can I get information on clinical trials?
Question: I have information on PARP Inhibitors for you. Who do I send it to?
where can i buy parp inhibitors drug in india for treatment of breast cancer of my relative.


text:
Analysis confirms possible black voter suppression in Florida
By Sue SturgisJune 26, 2007
tgriffinpressphoto_0.jpg
Tim Griffin -- a former aide to top Bush adviser Karl Rove and a key player in the U.S. attorney politicization scandal -- has long been haunted by charges that he was part of an illegal scheme to keep black Florida residents from voting in the 2004 elections. Appointed last year by President Bush to serve as a U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Griffin resigned earlier this month amid growing controversy over his role in possible voter suppression efforts.
Now a fresh analysis of voter data by the excellent TPMmuckraker blog suggests that the allegations against Griffin may be true.
The analysis started with a spreadsheet of names and addresses of more than 1,800 voters in Duval County, Fla. sent in an August 2004 e-mail obtained by BBC reporter Greg Palast. Griffin -- then the Republican National Committee's head of opposition research -- was copied on the e-mail, the subject line of which was "caging." That's a direct-marketing term for processing returns from a mailing. The technique has been used by Republicans in the past to generate a list of potentially ineligible voters by sending mail to them stamped "do not forward"; any returned mail is then used at the polls to challenge their residence.
To ascertain whether the "caging" list was made up mostly of African Americans, TPMmuckraker compared the names with the 2007 voter rolls from Duval County. As it turns out, most of those on the list were Democrats -- and most of those Democrats were African-American. Under the Voting Rights Act, it's against the law to target voters on the basis of race.
Michael McDonald, a George Mason University professor and elections statistics expert, says there's a very low chance that those results could come from a random sample of voters. But he also tells TPMmuckraker that there are other possible explanations for the findings:
If, for example, the list was generated in response to a mailing to new registrants as Republicans have argued, the skew might result from a disproportionate number of those new registrants being African-American Democrats. The results, he said, do not provide "a smoking gun" of a Republican attempt at voter suppression.
However, that's not how Griffin has defended himself from the charges, the blog points out:
Speaking two weeks ago, Griffin focused on the term 'caging,' saying that it's simply a direct mail term. "I didn't cage votes, I didn't cage mail, I didn't cage animals," he added. The allegations that he was involved in voter suppression, he said, were "ridiculous" and "so untrue" that he couldn't even respond to a question about them ... ."
But as TPMmuckraker asks:
If the "caging" list was really nothing more than a catalogue of returned mail, why were senior Republican officials concerning themselves with such clerical matters?
The revelation comes amid growing concern over other possible GOP voter suppression tactics elsewhere in the South. That includes an effort we've reported on extensively by the North Carolina Auditor, Republican Les Merritt, and his spokesperson, Chris Mears, to challenge legislation designed to boost voter participation by raising baseless allegations of possible voter fraud. Mears previously served as the political director of the state GOP, where he was involved in his own voting scandal.
ADDENDUM: Here's another excellent analysis of what happened in Duval County posted over at Daily Kos. Though the author has found serious weaknesses with Greg Palast's reporting, he confirms that the 2004 caging was racially biased in its effect. He also makes the point that documents obtained as part of a caging case in Ohio "revealed indisputable RNC involvement in caging (Tim Griffin and others), as well as concern about 'GOP footprints' if the caging efforts were brought to light." And he points out that a high-level official in the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign "suggested use of caging lists to challenge absentee ballots in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico."
(Tim Griffin photo from U.S. Department of Justice)
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Sue Sturgis
@sue_sturgis
Sue is the editorial director of Facing South and the Institute for Southern Studies.
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Not to be confused with the Hawaiian island Kauai, Kawaii means "cute". Kawaii is not only enjoyed, but it's a pursuit in Japan, somewhat defining the Japanese aesthetic currently. With Kawaii icons like Hello Kitty, Pokemon and the wide-eyed innocent look of anime, the Kawaii movement has grown world-wide.