MEMO to my Paper Clips: Tread cautiously while negotiating language landmines regarding Mike Dunleavy's contract extension.
Trying to finish the nearly completed play (four years, $22 million) on the cheap cannot be worth chancing the prospect of sabotaging the season and annulling credibility gained since hiring him as coach and following his personnel suggestions.
Nobody's saying owner Donald Sterling should roll over at the bargaining table, somethin' he's notorious for doing, but lowballing bonuses, deferrals, etc., is not a particularly successful way to do business with a valued employee.
I know for a fact numerous teams – not one or two or three – are waiting by the phone eager to enlist Dunleavy (at the same $5.5M per, or decidedly more) should he become a free agent come summer.
You don't need a source to ascertain most. The identity of one team would surprise almost everyone, especially the current coach and his players.
A Jersey source reveals the Nets have offered Jason Collins ($6.1M and $6.2M left after this season) and a No. 2 pick for rising free agent Jamaal Magloire, whose low-post presence would take defensive pressure off Vince Carter and Richard Jefferson.
The Blazers countered by asking for a first rounder. They already own more than one longterm contract at that position.
Brendan Haywood (three years left at $5M, 5.5M and $6M) is always an option. Despite some decent outings of late, Haywood and Eddie Jordan, who prefers Etan Thomas' more-consistent energy, effort and execution, will never be boys.
While on the subject of unwanted centers, Adonal Foyle has only two full years guaranteed after this ($8.937M and $9.75M), not three as reported in this space. The Warriors only owe him $1M should they decide not to exercise Foyle's final year at $10.562M. Not that he's any more desirable on the trade market, but it makes swallowing his contract a little easier to digest.
Somehow, some way, VP Chris Mullin must clear salary-cap room within the next year or two in order to reward Andres Biedrins, Monta Ellis and Mickael Pietrus. Meaning Foyle and either Troy Murphy, Mike Dunleavy (where have I heard that name before?) or Jason Richardson must be excised for draft picks and lower contracts.
Murphy and Dunleavy are Don Nelson's favorite whipping boys at the moment, the difference being Dunleavy plays four positions and is in the game handling the ball when the jury's out and the verdict is up for grabs. Should Richardson fully recover from offseason knee surgery (it swelled following a promising 26-point, fiveassist performance the other night), it says here he'll be the one who's easiest to move in spite of a four-year, $50M obligation.
Marc Iavaroni my words, the Suns assistant will be a head coach next season after too many years as a treasured understudy. No disrespect to Sam Mitchell, who appears to have the Raptors in gear offensively and in synch defensively, at least at home, but Iavaroni either will reunite with former boss, Toronto president Bryan Colangelo, replace Mike Fratello in Memphis when his contract expires, or take charge somewhere else.
Had the Grizzlies' operations not been paralyzed by their everlasting ownership transition, I'm informed Jerry West would've substituted Iavaroni for Fratello last summer.
Expect the Memphis Commercial Appeal to brand my account "a frivolous rumor." That's the typical response by a nodding newspaper when it's beat by a national columnist on a local story; Google its childish reaction to my accurate report about the Celtics figuratively offering their whole team for Pau Gasol.
There were no insinuations about it being a threat to happen – certainly not as long as the team is frozen in time and unable to do anything constructive or destructive – only that the Grizzlies had been propositioned.
Who cares that lame duck owner Michael Heisley made a sucker's holler, strictly for show, about Gasol never being traded?
His watch is all but history.
All that matters now is what Brian Davis and Christian Laettner say, and the master plan of the incoming managing partners appears to be all about rounding up Vinnie Barbarino and 14 other minimumwage sweat hogs.
Who knows where that leaves the maximum-earning Gasol?
Memo to the Commercial Appeal: The word "rumor" is only used by those who have no clue what's happening behind the screens. I actually have real sources who divulge genuine info, or refute bogus material, spoken or written.
For instance, there's not a shred of truth to a Miami Herald report that had the Heat and my Paper Clips discussing a trade involving Corey Maggette. Not one word of dialogue along those lines ever took place. Moreover, it won't.
Pat Riley can offer nobody of consequence who can replicate what Maggette does for L.A.
It's that simple. If my Paper Clips are to part with their exceedingly athletic offensive gift – something they're not opposed to doing if it makes sense – they actually want somebody of consequence, not a draft pick, not $3M, in return.
This is all about everscheming Rob Pelinka trying to dream up a trade (James Posey and a firstround pick) for a irrational client who feels his sixthman status (even if his stats aren't suffering) is going to cost him money when he becomes a free agent, two seasons after this one, for crying out tears.
No wonder winning teams unravel so easily and losing teams remain gutter-glued into the Hereafter!
This just in: Ahmad Rashad traveled to South Africa to meet for a Thanksgiving meeting with Nelson Mandela. "I served all that jail time for this?" Mandela wondered.


text:
Merrill Gardens Selects Jobalign to Solve the Pain of Hourly Recruiting
SEATTLE, WA, April 2nd, 2019 – Jobalign, a leading recruiting technology focused on hourly job seekers, today announced the expansion of its services with Merrill Gardens, a national leading provider of senior living facilities.
"We at Merrill Gardens are constantly innovating and looking for ways to enhance our residents' experience and improve our operations. One of the biggest challenges we face in our industry today is the recruitment and retention of talent, and we are always looking for ways to improve this." explains David Eskenazy, President of Merrill Gardens. "Our team has been testing Jobalign for over a year, and we are very pleased with the results. Jobalign delivers on its promise to solve the pain of hourly recruiting. We now have a common tool that all 32 of our properties can leverage. Jobalign tracks success metrics, and lets us know what we need to do to be successful."
A key benefit of the Jobalign solution is that it promises to reduce the time it takes to recruit, while increasing candidate flow by up to 4 times, and ultimately reducing the costs of recruiting and being under-staffed. "If you want to reach hourly job seekers, you have to make it easy to communicate with them quickly," explains Doug Lotz, of Human Resources Manager at Merrill Gardens. "Jobalign helps us find qualified candidates and allows us to text with candidates in real time through their Candidate Text Messenger tool. Now our hiring managers connect with candidates immediately to conduct phone screens or set up interviews. More importantly, their support is fantastic, and they always partner with us to solve our issues." says Lotz.
Jobalign was designed and built to address hourly hiring challenges in the senior living and hospitality verticals. According to Jobalign CEO Doug Johnson, "We are experts in attracting, engaging, and helping senior living and hospitality operators connect with the job-seekers you are looking for today. Our promise is that your operational hiring managers will find our tools to be 1) easy to use and 2) effective. What's more, we're more than just a software solution: we will stand by you as a partner, train your staff, and work with you to ensure success."
About Merrill Gardens
At Merrill Gardens our focus is always on the people who live and work in our communities.
Our commitment comes from the deep roots of our family company. Our founder, Richard Dwight (R.D.) Merrill, came to the Pacific Northwest in the 1890's to establish timber holdings. He was an innovator, the first to practice sustainable forestry, and his tradition of attention and thoughtfulness eventually grew to include the business of caring for people.
Merrill Gardens started with one community in Seattle, Washington in 1993 and we now have thousands of team members across the country. Through innovative programs and a determined commitment to residents and team members, Merrill Gardens is one of the most respected senior living providers in the country. We have 32 communities in eight states offering independent living, assisted living and memory care and we are growing too, with several new communities in development.
Our company is still privately owned and family run, our chairman is a fourth generation Merrill family member. The management and resources of the R. D. Merrill Company ensure a long-term commitment to quality, built on a strong foundation of family, community, and entrepreneurial spirit.
About Jobalign
Hiring managers love that Jobalign makes it easy to attract, engage, and hire hourly workers. Hourly job seekers love the engaging and positive candidate experience and simple application from any device.
Jobalign is the nation's leading hourly recruiting technology that helps attract and communicate with hourly talent more efficiently. Jobalign enables job seekers to quickly and easily apply for positions through an optimized application experience. Jobalign allows recruiters to reach out directly to candidates through text, significantly reducing friction and abandonment rates while increasing speed and number of candidates received. Jobalign seamlessly integrates with enterprise applicant tracking systems to create an applicant profile while engaging the candidate throughout the hiring process.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q:  width returns 0 for IE and Chrome I have a table with three columns. I am using  tag to specify the width of a column. Sample code:

  <colgroup style="background-color:#FF0000;">
  <col width="100px" id="id1"></col>
  <col width="80px" id="id2"></col><col id="id3"></col></colgroup>

    ISBN
    Title
    Price

    3476896
    My first HTML
    $53

    2489604
    My first CSS
    $47

The problem is width of col ($("#id1").width()) returns 0 for IE and Chrome and it works fine in FF.
How do I get the actual width of col in chrome and IE?

A: Do the simple hack for older jQuery (col don't have width in Chrome, but it have first cell with width )

  <colgroup style="background-color:#FF0000;">
  <col width="100px"></col>
  <col width="80px"></col><col id="id3"></col></colgroup>

    ISBN
    Title
    Price

    3476896
    My first HTML
    $53

    2489604
    My first CSS
    $47

here - http://jsfiddle.net/YD5mM/2/

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
The Madison Journal
☰ Menu Post
Post Dashboard
Monthly Website Statistics
Wedding Policy
Most Read This Month
Most Read This Year
Most Read All Time
Newspaper E-Edition
Magazine E-Edition
Special Section E-Editions
Anniversaries/Birthdays
Submit School News
Domain menu for Madisonjournal (mobile)
Opinion: Good chance 2021 will be better than 2020
By Wyatt Emmerich , READ MORE > 2,823 Reads
On Fri, 01/01/2021 - 10:24 AM
This time last year we were experiencing the longest bull stock market in history, eleven years, from 2009 until early 2020.
"I wonder what will end it," I thought to myself. After all, all good things come to an end. Something has to give. What will be the precipitating event?
I must admit, I hadn't considered a worldwide plague. We've now all been there, done that. May 2020 rest in peace. We won't think fondly of this year.
The old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." 2020 was certainly an interesting year. I can mark "endure plague" off my list of life experiences.
My best life experience comparison was the Swine Flu of 2009. The CDC estimates over 12,000 people died then. Not even close to Covid-19.
The Spanish Flu is our best comparison, which is estimated to have killed 675,000 people in the United States. That was one out of every 154 people. The average age of death was 28 years old.
So far, Covid-19 has killed 336,642 or one out of every 980 people. The average age of death was 80.
In terms of life years, the Spanish Flu was probably 30 times worse than Covid-19. It could have been a lot, lot worse. Every dark cloud has a silver lining.
No doubt there are more Covid-19 deaths to come, but some powerful vaccines are on the way. In addition, the CDC estimates almost a third of the U. S. population has already been infected. Herd immunity is within sight. There is an end to this dark, dark tunnel.
I was born an optimist. That's just the way I am. I feel like we faced one of the great fears of mankind and survived. That gives me confidence about the future.
There have been many horror movies about some rapid-spreading virus wiping out humanity. Well, it didn't wipe out humanity, not even close. And now we have some powerful new vaccine weapons in our arsenal.
For a virus to do this much damage, it had to be in the sweet spot of viruses. Not too deadly to be contained, yet deadly enough to wreak havoc. Covid-19 was in that sweet spot.
Remember Ebola? Far more deadly, but it was so deadly it was containable. Other corona viruses spread rapidly. Indeed, 30 percent of common colds are caused by the five common cold corona viruses. We ignore them because they don't kill.
How do you contain a virus that causes no symptoms in half the people it infects? There's no way, despite our best efforts.
We tried the locking down. It was supposed to be two weeks, but turned into two months. I was impressed at how well our society did its best to contain this plague. Lots of good citizenry.
But when we came back out, it was still there. Our economy was in shambles. Disruption in our lives was causing one shut down death for every two Covid deaths. Suicide and overdose deaths skyrocketed. People were afraid to get treatment at hospitals for cancer and heart conditions. The shut downs were a mess.
So we went back to work and did our best, masks and all.
The vaccines are coming just as the virus has mutated and become even more contagious, even as its fatality rate drops to a fifth of what it was in the beginning.
Our hospitals were pushed to their limits, but they stood the test, powered by tens of thousands of brave doctors, nurses and hospital staff. What a heroic feat.
Our nation, indeed the world, faced one of the greatest apocalyptically horrible scenarios imaginable and we survived. Many of our elderly loved ones were denied some of the last years of their lives. And some of our younger citizens died as well, but our society and economy are still strong.
Befitting a free nation, there was a vigorous debate about the deadliness of the virus and how we should respond as a society. Some wanted to shut down permanently until a vaccine came. Others believed the shut downs were causing more harm than the virus itself.
In the end, there was legitimacy to both sides of the debate. As a whole, the nation muddled through as best we could, trying to contain the virus through social action while still preserving our economy. It was a work in progress.
It will take years of study and retrospect to properly understand what happened and how we should have best responded. Governing is never easy and it's extremely difficult during a unique crisis with no real road map. We did the best we could.
God works in mysterious ways. The new mRNA vaccines that we have now developed may end up saving far more lives in the near future than were lost during this past year. We may be on the cusp of winning our eons-old war with the viral hordes.
There are other cataclysmic bugaboos still out there threatening us: Global warming, a huge meteor colliding with Earth, destruction of the ozone layer, nuclear war, a computer virus global attack. The list is long and fear is plentiful.
As a believer, my fear is tempered by faith in God. He is in control. The Earth will end when he decides to end it.
Which doesn't mean humans should give up trying to solve the world's problem. God has given us the responsibility to be good stewards of the planet. God doesn't want to do it all himself. He wants a relationship with his creation. Working with God, in prayerful devotion, love, fear and respect, there is nothing humanity can't overcome.
This doesn't mean I am without fear. There is one thing I do fear. God's retribution if we turn away from him. The consequences of that will indeed be cataclysmic.
This new year we should renew our faith and obedience to God while being grateful that we have been given yet another chance.
Here's to a Happy New Year, with Covid-19 soon in the rearview mirror! Let's get our old lives back. Let the weddings, concerts and parties soon begin again.
Sign Up for Notifications of Local Breaking News
Start E-mail NotificationsStop E-mail NotificationsStart Mobile NotificationsStop Mobile Notifications
Ronnie Powell Holloway
Wayne King
Tiki Lavon Shivers
Norman Ray Tarver
Nancy Mae Brasher Green
Jackie Clayton Haddox
SBA Announces Approval of About 60,000 PPP Loan Applications
The U.S. Small Business Administration announced on Jan.
Pro-Initiative 65 groups say city of Madison's lawsuit could deprive Mississippians of their right to amend the state's constitution via ballot initiative
Freedom today is under attack
Despite large decrease in enrollment, Education Department seeks only slight decrease in K-12 funds from lawmakers
State procurement review board approves $156 million in exemptions from law requiring reverse auctions from state and local agencies
Legislature considering bills that could provide a pay hike for teachers and increase transparency
Most Read News Article
While reverse auctions are the law in Mississippi, the state's Public Procurement Review Board… READ MORE
Honoring the dream
Mississippi regulators want Mississippi Power to reduce its surplus generation capacity by 2027
The Mississippi Public Service Commission is ordering one of the state's two investor-owned… READ MORE
Bennie Thompson Says He Will Fight For Pumps Under Biden, But Points To Challenges
Missing child found, 1 arrested
1 dead, 1arrested in early morning homicide
Outdoors in the Sun: 'In the kitchen with Jeff'
State superintendent recommends waiving of passing requirements for statewide tests
1 killed in Wednesday shooting
Last night, (November 25) the Madison Parish Sheriff's Office received a 911 call regarding a male… READ MORE
More arrests made for juvenile homicide
Madison Parish Election Results
Juveniles arrested after shooting
2 killed in six-car accident
Delta expected to impact Tallulah today
Athletes work to get out vote
Many sports fans are dismayed by the growing political awareness and activism of athletes.
Copyright 2020 • The Madison Journal
300 South Chestnut Street. • Madison, LA 71282 • 318-574-1404
Emmerich Newspapers proudly serve the following Mississippi communities:
Click on the city name to visit its website.
ACKERMAN • CARROLLTON • CHARLESTON • CLARKSDALE • COLUMBIA • EUPORA • FOREST • GREENVILLE • GREENWOOD • GRENADA • HATTIESBURG • JACKSON • KOSCIUSKO • INDIANOLA • LOUISVILLE • MAGEE • MENDENHALL • McCOMB • NEWTON • PETAL • QUITMAN • SENATOBIA • WINONA • YAZOO CITY
As well as: DUMAS, Ark. • TALLULAH, La • FRANKLINTON, La.
For more information on how to extend your advertising message to these communities, click here.


If you're one of many Apple users who aren't all that pleased with the latest version of iOS 8 and want to return to the previous version, you can't. It's a frustration that a lot of users are facing as Apple will no longer allow you to downgrade to iOS 7. The best advice is to think twice about upgrading to iOS 8 but what can you do if you've already upgraded and want to jailbreak iOS 8?
Apple used to make it possible for users to downgrade their operating system. When they introduced iOS 8 users could go back to iOS 7.1.2 without any issue but that's not the case with the latest upgrade. When you connect your Apple device to iTunes, you'll be prompted to update the software. If you're unhappy or unsure, don't allow the updates to take place. Those with a jailbroken device running iOS 7 should be very careful but the advice applies to Apple user.
There are two main teams who come up with jailbreak solutions for Apple devices. The first is evad3rs. Their jailbreak software is available as a download from evad3rs.net. There's a $29 charge and no guarantees that it will work, although Evad3rs have a good reputation in this field. If you're offered a free jailbreak for iOS 8, it probably won't work or it could introduce something to your system so these are best avoided.
The guys behind Pangu are currently working on a hack for the software so there's nothing showing on their site. When it's available, there will be a charge to download. As with Evad3rs, these China based hackers have a good reputation for providing trustworthy software that does what it's supposed to do.
Whether using software from Pangu or Evad3rs is legal or not is unclear, but you're taking a risk when you download something that's not official so think very carefully before upgrading to iOS 8. To help you decide, check our our guide to iOS 8's features.


6 And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatted domestic animal together; and a little child shall lead them.
7 And the cow and the bear shall feed side by side, their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 And the sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.
9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.


text:
Oops! Relaxing the strike has brought relief to commuters in Paris
Passengers in Paris who were caring after a six-week miserable transport strike found their smiles again on Monday as some subway workers ended their walkout against a rival overhaul of France's pension system.
Announcing a weekend return to work after a 46-day strike by the UNSA union's subway wing, the French capital has seen a significant improvement in services since the start of a new week on Monday.
"It was very fluid," he said Traveler Eric Lebron, after taking a train and then taking the subway during the morning rush hour.
LeBron makes weekly trips from Switzerland to Paris, where he lives, and says the strikes, which began on December 5, have had a "catastrophic" effect on his journey.
"It's much better now," he said.
For the first time since Dec. 5, service on 11 of Paris's 16 subway lines has returned to full or almost normal, according to the RATP company, which operates the metro system.
However, not all strikers voted to return to work. The unions are divided over whether the government will accept the offer of a compromise or whether it will continue to push for a complete withdrawal of the pension reform plan. UNSA's subway branch said that while its strikers had decided to return to work, the union planned to continue protesting against "unfair" pension reform.
On five subway lines, services were disrupted, the RATP said.
On the Paris suburban train network, some passengers noticed improvement while others said they were still waiting longer than usual for trains.
"It's not better than usual, just like last week," said Pierre Butelup, a passenger who ventured into the morning cold on a platform west of Paris. "I waited for the train for about 10 minutes. Usually, one train arrives every three or four minutes. "
But student Leah Toussaint says the wait for the train at her university on Monday was much shorter than last week – just a few minutes.
"It's much better," he said.
John Leicester, Associated Press


text:
A Girls' Boarding Home Is Hell for Colin Farrell in Latest 'The Beguiled' Trailer
Charles Bramesco
It's almost as if Focus Features was waiting until they could tack on the Cannes Film Festival's coveted Official Selection palm-leaf to release the new trailer for The Beguiled. Hot on the heels of the news that Sofia Coppola's latest would make its world premiere on the banks of the Croisette, we're getting our second major look at this adaptation of Thomas Cullinan's 1966 novel. (Coppola has made it clear that her film will be an entirely different animal than Don Siegel's 1971 take on the material.) And from the looks of it, things are not going to turn out so hot for Colin Farrell.
He's in a bit of a tough spot as the male lead of the film, an ailing Civil War-era Union soldier who seeks refuge at a girls' boarding school in Mississippi. The ladies (an ensemble featuring Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman, and Elle Fanning) take him in and nurse him back to health, but the arrival of such a strapping and manly figure starts to provoke jealousy among the cloistered, virginal girls, and soon those tensions bubble over into terrible — yet, crucially, unseen as of now — violence. The trailer offers brief suggestions of the horrors awaiting him: a bloodstained smock, a call for some choloroform, and of course there's that horrified bellow of "vengeful bitches" from Farrell.
We commoners stuck in the U.S. will have to wait until June 23 to get a look at what looks like another classic Sofia Coppola joint, with all the feminine repression, muted-color costuming, and unspoken desire that implies. We'll be keeping a close eye on Cannes for the first reactions.
See the Full Cannes Lineup
Filed Under: Colin Farrell, Elle Fanning, festival fever, Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman, Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled
Categories: Movie News, Trailers


text:
Join the Reverse Rett 365 Club for your chance to win fantastic monthly cash prizes, whilst helping children and adults with Rett Syndrome at the same time.
Reverse Rett is a patient advocacy and research organisation focused on delivering treatments and a cure for Rett Syndrome to everyone affected.
Joining the 365 Club showcases the strength, commitment and solidarity of our community and gives you the chance to win something for yourself too!
LAST MONTH'S WINNERS
Deborah Fraser
Joanne Oliver
Next draw: Feb 23
Please read the Terms and Conditions via the Ts&Cs link below and then simply click 'join the club'. This will take you to the registration pages where you enter your details.
This will confirm your membership of the 365 Club and set up your payments of £5 per month.
£5 buys you one entry into the monthly cash prize draw. You will be entered into the monthly draw for each month that your £5 subscription remains active.
You can manage your subscription by logging in to your account at any time.
The draw for first, second and third prizes will take place on the last Thursday of each month.
What could I win?
The total prize money will be 35% of the funds raised each month, allocated as 20% for 1st prize, 10% for 2nd prize and 5% for 3rd prize.
With a membership of 365 participants: 1st Prize = £365 (20% of prize fund) 2nd Prize = £182.50 (10% of prize fund) 3rd Prize = £91.25 (5% of prize fund)
The remaining 65% goes to Reverse Rett and enables us to continue funding and facilitating critical research and advocating for those with Rett Syndrome right now.
What happens if I win?
If you win, we will get in touch with you via the email given on your registration form. The winning amount will then either be transferred to your bank account or a cheque will be sent to your given address, depending on your stated preference.
Unless you wish to remain anonymous (indicated by ticking the relevant box on the registration form), Reverse Rett will publish winners' names on our website and social media channels.
How are winners selected?
Winners are selected via a computerised randomiser, activated by a nominated independent member of the public.
Reverse Rett staff will not be eligible to enter and will be in no way involved in the selection of winners.
What are the 365 Club rules?
Please visit our Terms and Conditions page below for full details.
If you have any further queries please contact beth@reverserett.org.uk
What if my situation changes?
Of course we would love for you to remain subscribed and part of the 365 Club for as long as possible, but we also know that situations change.
We have therefore ensured that you are able to manage your subscription by logging in and making changes at any time.
Simply login below and use the 'manage my subscription' option.
If you have any further questions, or would like further information about the 365 Club, please contact us.
Upcoming Draw!
The May draw has been made and the winners will be announced shortly.
Make sure you sign up for next month's draw!
Thanks, and good luck!
Rett Registry -
Login T&Cs Privacy
Website © Reverse Rett 2023
Registered charity in England & Wales, charity number 1136809 and in Scotland, charity number SC046735. A company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales, company number 07278507.
Website by Lluis Mather at The Mather Group Limited


I wrote my post on Wednesday The Ups and Downs of being a Writer hoping that writing down how I was feeling would ease some of my stress. I didn't expect to get such a reaction to it. It was one of my top-viewed posts, it was re-tweeted on Twitter and it received lots of comments.
A lot of the time being a writer feels solitary, you can feel lonely pushing on to make your dream come true by yourself but seeing the response to my post, made me see that I'm not alone. Some of the response came from fellow writers who are also battling but others were from non-writers declaring their support and encouraging me to keep trying.
The consensus from all parties though seemed to be – don't give up.
I'm always saying this so it meant a lot for others to say it back to me. It meant a lot to know how many cheerleaders I have out there wishing my well. It made my day a whole lot brighter. So thank you.
You may have noticed that I added an image to the right of the blog, and changed my Facebook cover photo. It's one of my favourite quotes, said by Walt Disney who built an empire on a cartoon mouse despite people telling him he was crazy. I think it says everything we were trying to say. I hope it encourages us all today and tomorrow.
Love the quote and the post!
So true. It is in the core of my belief system!
really liked this 🙂 sometimes writing is so hard, when you have to face rejection and things like that… but at least we're not alone!


text:
relationship problems step kids
Relationship between language and culture in sociolinguistics
The Relationship Between Language & Culture and the Implications for Language Teaching | pdl-inc.info
Relationship between Language and Culture as quoted Abdul Chaer and Leonie in his Sociolinguistics that language is part of culture. Thus. As the papers in this issue show, the study of language, culture, and society has, the relationship between sociolinguistics and what we now call linguistic. The Relationship between Language and Culture. David ELMES*. Abstract . claims, though in its definitive phrasing is disputed by many sociolinguists, is.
As Spence argues, success and failure in a Chinese cultural framework influences not just oneself but the whole family or group. Therefore, teachers must remember to respect the culture in which they are located. Language teachers must realize that their understanding of something is prone to interpretation. The meaning is bound in cultural context. One must not only explain the meaning of the language used, but the cultural context in which it is placed as well.
Often meanings are lost because of cultural boundaries which do not allow such ideas to persist. As Porter argues, misunderstandings between language educators often evolve because of such differing cultural roots, ideologies, and cultural boundaries which limit expression. Language teachers must remember that people from different cultures learn things in different ways. For example, in China memorization is the most pronounced way to study a language which is very unlike western ideologies where the onus is placed on free speech as a tool for utilizing and remembering vocabulary and grammar sequences Hui When a teacher introduces language teaching materials, such as books or handouts, they must understand that these will be viewed differently by students depending on their cultural views Maley For instance, westerners see books as only pages which contain facts that are open to interpretation.
This view is very dissimilar to Chinese students who think that books are the personification of all wisdom, knowledge and truth Maley One should not only compare, but contrast the cultural differences in language usage. Visualizing and understanding the differences between the two will enable the student to correctly judge the appropriate uses and causation of language idiosyncrasies. For instance, I have found, during my teaching in Taiwan, that it is necessary to contrast the different language usages, especially grammatical and idiom use in their cultural contexts for the students to fully understand why certain things in English are said.
Thank you, and you? This question was very difficult to answer, until I used an example based in Chinese culture to explain it to them. One example of this usage: It was culturally and possibly morally significant to ask someone if they had eaten upon meeting. This showed care and consideration for those around you.
Even now, people are more affluent but this piece of language remains constant and people still ask on meeting someone, if they have eaten. If someone in a western society was greeted with this, they would think you are crazy or that it is none of your business. It has enabled them to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate circumstances of which to use English phrases and idioms that they have learnt.
Valdes argues that not only similarities and contrasts in the native and target languages have been useful as teaching tools, but when the teacher understands cultural similarities and contrasts, and applies that knowledge to teaching practices, they too become advantageous learning tools.
Implications for language policy Creators of second language teaching policies must be sensitive to the local or indigenous languages not to make them seem inferior to the target language. English language teaching has become a phenomenon in Southeast Asia, especially in Taiwan. Most Taiwanese universities require an English placement test as an entry requirement Information for Foreigners Retrieved May 24, Foreigners non-native Taiwanese which are native English speaking students however, do not need to take a similar Chinese proficiency test, thus forwarding the ideology that the knowledge of English is superior to the Chinese counterpart and that to succeed in a globalized economy; one must be able to speak English Hu The implications for language policy makers are that policies must be formed which not only include but celebrate local languages.
Policies must not degrade other languages by placing them on a level of lower importance. Policies for language teaching must encompass and include cultural values from the societies from which the languages are derived as well as being taught.
In other words, when making policies regarding language teaching, one must consider the cultural ideologies of all and every student, the teacher, as well as the culture in which the target language is being taught. The American Council on The Teaching of Foreign Languages has expounded on the importance of combining the teaching of culture into the language curriculum to enhance understanding and acceptance of differences between people, cultures and ideologies Standards One example where as policy makers did not recognize the importance of culture is outlined by Kimin which the Korean government had consulted American ESL instructional guidelines which stated that for students to become competent in English they must speak English outside of the classroom.
The government on reviewing this policy requested that all Korean English language students use English outside of the classrooms to further enhance their language competency. What they failed to consider is that while in America, English is taught as a second language and speaking English was quite acceptable in all locations, that in Korea, English is taught as a foreign language and the vast majority of the Korean population do not converse with each other in English.
Korean students speaking English outside of the classroom context were seen as show-offs. In a collectivistic culture, as is Korea, such displays of uniqueness are seen as a vice to be suppressed, not as a virtue Kim Thus policy makers must not rely on the cultural views and policies of others, but incorporate the cultural views of the students as well as considering the culture where the teaching is taking place.
Language teachers need to be informed about various teaching interaction-based methodologies, manipulate them and develop their own teaching methods compatible with the educational context to foster interaction between students Kim When creating policies, one must consider the cultural meanings of teaching materials used.
The Relationship Between Language & Culture and the Implications for Language Teaching
The materials may have a far broader meaning or encompass far more or less than what one has considered. An example of this is when the school I worked for decided that I introduce a discussion topic on holidays with one of my classes. The school did not enlighten me as to the cultural significance of holidays or what the Chinese equivalent of the word entails. This problem, as described by Yuleis that people have pre-existing schemata or knowledge structure in their memory of what constitutes certain ideas; e.
The culturally based schemata that the students had for holidays were considerably different than that of my own. Their ideology of a holiday was any day that was special, possibly where one did not have to go to school, a weekend, a birthday, or any other major happening.
When I asked the students what their favourite holiday was, I received many replies, all of which were not what I was looking for. I proceeded to tell them that Christmas was a holiday. This however, was a bad example as Christmas is not a holiday in Taiwan.
Finally, as this paper has shown, language and culture are intertwined to such an extent whereas one cannot survive without the other. It is impossible for one to teach language without teaching culture. The implications for language teaching and policy making are therefore vast and far reaching. The need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between language s and culture is brought about by an increased linguistic, social, and cultural diversity in many late modern societies today.
Vertovecis brought about by transnational movements of people, goods, and ideas, and by the fragmentation of traditional types of communities, ethnicities, and identities in the process. For example, it cannot be taken for granted that all Parisians speak in the same way, or that Finland is the country where all Finns live or which is, on the other hand, inhabited by Finnish people exclusively. Although culture-specific language practices and norms do exist, they are thus no longer as static as once assumed.
Harris, Roy Taylor and J.
Language and culture — Jyväskylän yliopiston Koppa
Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, Volume 1: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure. London and New York: Language and the study of diversity. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies,
Nbac christmas meet 2016
The relationship between dissociative proneness and alexithymia
Meet your makers lol members
Long distant relationship quotes
Ending no strings attached relationship
3 months new relationship images
Meet and
Meet you
The relationship
prevodyjednotek porn tube
he lets wife fuck her ex after high school reunion
beautiful huge boobs bbw loves the taste of cum


text:
(14122) Josties (1998 QA55) – planetoida z pasa głównego asteroid okrążająca Słońce w ciągu 3,37 lat w średniej odległości 2,25 j.a. Odkryta 27 sierpnia 1998 roku.

Zobacz też
 lista planetoid 14001–15000
 lista planetoid

Linki zewnętrzne

Planetoidy pasa głównego
Nazwane planetoidy
Obiekty astronomiczne odkryte w 1998

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The F4U Corsair proved to be one of the most-enigmatic air frames of World War Two. Developed as a carrier-launched fighter, its initial design was supposedly rejected by Navy pilots because the "birdcage" canopy provided poor visibility during carrier deck landings, and the enormous torque of its powerful Double Wasp engine made it unstable and likely to bounce. But according to the new Classic Warships Publishing book by aviation historian Dana Bell, it was supply chain considerations and the Navy's desire for a single carrier-based fighter that diverted the Corsair to the Marines. Flying off Pacific island airbases, USMC pilots loved the Corsair, both as a fighter and a fighter-bomber. Its speed made it vastly superior to anything the Japanese had, and it could handle heavy loads of ordnance. While the Navy fighter squadrons continued flying F6F Hellcats. the Corsair would return to carriers in the later "bubble top" or "raised cockpit" version covered in the second volume of the series.
The book opens with a three-page overview of the F4U's development and features, followed by a one-page range of serial numbers for Vought-, Brewster- and Goodyear-built aircraft. I confess I didn't know that Brewster build the F4U, so this was interesting, and of course, vital for those who want to model a particular air frame.
From p. 6-8 has photos of the prototype and early production models. After that comes an array of "off beat" Corsairs, including night fighters, a FAA plane, a Pratt & Whitney "test bed" aircraft for their Wasp Major engine (adding what looks to be another foot or more to the length of the nose), a Westinghouse jet test bed aircraft.
By p. 13 we're into photos of the Double Wasp (also known as the "Twin Wasp"), including a sharp, clear photo of the tubing and cylinder heads. We then work our way back through the accessory compartment (p. 15), the cockpit, windscreen and bombing window (pp. 17-25), than to the "turtle deck" (the domed panel behind the pilot seat), pp. 26-27, right through to the internal radio gear (p. 31).
Pages 32-33 are some vivid color drawings of the original Blue Gray upper and Light Gray underside scheme, followed by two pages of radio gear photos. Then it's back to two pages of color drawings showing the plane's more-common tri-tonal camo schemes of Sea Blue, Intermediate Blue and White.
Bell spares no details, including a full-page photo (p. 38) of the airplane's inflatable life raft. Then it's closeups of the two tail wheel variations and tail hook. While most Birdcage Corsairs served on land, the aircraft was first and foremost property of the US Navy.
Pages 40-41 are two color plates in crisp detail and stunning clarity, followed by two pages of tail wheel and wing framing details. This might seem like overkill to the casual kit builder, but having this information in one handy volume is an excellent investment for serious Corsair fans. The "geek squad" shots of the framing lead into a section on the plane's wings, flaps, landing gear doors, etc. Because the Corsair was intended for carrier operations, it had folding wings. Pages 46-48 have detailed photos of the fold points and all the "plumbing" associated with folding wings, including the wing fuel tank vent and tie-down rings.
Pages 49-50 cover the wheels and wheel wells, while p. 51 begins a section on armaments, from the six Browning .50 caliber machine guns to the 100 pound bombs intended to "suppress shipboard antiaircraft fire." A bonus is a spectacular, clear close-up of a Mark 41-2 bomb rack, and another photo of drop tanks with sway braces.
Bell has found a boatload of fresh Corsair photos, a number in original color, and the next part of the book has views of planes with their wings folded, Corsairs with their cowling panels removed to show off the engine, wrecked planes, one in British service, and a fine image of Medal of Honor winner Captain Ken Walsh taxiing on Marsden Matting (p. 63). The book ends with five more pages of interesting wrecks and three pages of quarter scale line drawings.
The Corsair was a mainstay of the USMC flyers in the Pacific, and the plane has gotten a lot of interest among modelers with Tamiya's outstanding kits in 1/32nd scale recently. I sorely regret that I didn't have a copy of it when I built my Birdcage, and I can't imagine building the "Bubble Top" variant in my stash without Volume Two of this series.
Thanks to author Dana Bell and CW Publishing for providing this review copy. Be sure to tell them that you saw it reviewed here on Aeroscale when ordering your copy. Volume Two is reviewed here.
Highs: A trove of high-quality, sharp, clear photographs of the "Birdcage" Corsair.
Verdict: Highly recommended for anyone building a "Birdcage" Corsair in any scale, but especially 1/48th and 1/32nd.
Our Thanks to Classic Warships Publishing!
Thanks, Rowan, for getting this one "live."


With automated ice storage and delivery, electronic controls for rake system, and an automatic door opening system the Vogt Ice Rake helps ensure the safety of your workers and minimize the number of points for potential ice contamination.
Modern Ice and our Freeze Force Technical Services Team engineers, design and integrate Vogt's equipment into your plant. This strategic partnership can help you achieve the goals you have for your business.


Brother MFC-J5520DW Windows 7 Driver. Review - Brother MFCJ5520DW is an economical inkjet ink-jet printer, launched in last August through (possibly) one of the most renowned laser printer maker. It offers wireless media and also All-in-One functionality along with an acceptable cost. I'll tell you even more about its benefits as well as feasible setbacks in the assessment here.
Besides printing, Brother MFCJ5520DW likewise checks, duplicates as well as facsimiles. Such a multifunctional laser printer may be beneficial for home usage, although many offices will most certainly gain from this All-in-One create. Also, thoughting as the low price, possessing all those functionalities in one plan should offer instead really good value.
The laser printer is run by a 3.7 ″ swipe touchscreen. A person commented it is actually vivid as well as easy to understand, which I don't doubt thinking about high quality from Bro products. Besides, certainly not every laser printer within this price type possesses a contact display screen to begin with. Input capability is actually the regular 250 web pages, although outcome tray contains only 50 slabs. There's additionally a multi-purpose holder that really takes maximum 80 web pages. Newspaper dimensions fall to 11 ″ x 17 ″. The scanning device and photo copier have ADF thus you could deal with a number of pages at once.
Brother MFC-J5520DW for PC Windows 7 Driver - Automatic duplex printing is made it possible for, permitting you to save some funds as well as paper. Indeterminate prints are actually sustained as well so acquiring orderly appearing photographes is actually be actually feasible. All the required links exist on this Brother: USB 2.0, Ethernet RJ-45 as well as a cordless adapter. Besides a direct hook up, the WiFi collaborates with a variety of mobile phones (Google.com Cloud Publish, AirPrint etc). Printer dimensions are 19.3 ″ x 13.6 ″ x 9.4 ″ (WxDxH). Sustained os feature Microsoft window XP-- 8.1. Mac OS X v 10.7.5 and also over likewise team up with this. There are actually motorists for Linux accessible, so getting the laser printer to connect with Ubuntu and other circulations need to be rather effortless.
The printer is vowed a maximum 22ppm black and 20ppm different colors ISO-based rate. To me, that will suffice, although white-collar worker in an industry would most likely disagree. The print top quality is an extremely subjective concern, along with a number of consumer reports recommending the high quality of photo prints ranges off average to excellent.
Around 30,000 pages is the maximum monthly role pattern from Sibling MFCJ5520DW. Recommendations vary between 250 as well as 1500 published pages a month. Thus if you would like to get on the much safer side you may publish ~ 40 pieces daily having this Bro. The 128MB memory is enough for daily publishing and tiny customer groups in SMBs, although big workplaces will perhaps take up the RAM swiftly.
Brother MFC-J5520DW for PC Windows 7 Driver - Along with the current ink price, cost per one B&W webpage using the LC209BK incredibly high return ink would be actually ~ 1.3 pennies. Along with the LC205 C/M/Y inks, a rate for one colour page will be around 7 cents. That's not much thoughting as the laser printer's acquisition price. If you publish 10-20 webpages a time, Bro MFCJ5520DW need to be actually somewhat economical. Of course, you do not have to invest money to ink as soon as possible. The color printer possesses starter containers, each with a turnout for 550 web pages.
Brother MFCJ5520DW ought to be actually a feasible resource for destinations and also tiny workplaces. Benefits feature a number of functions, quickly publishing speed and also affordable cost every page. People that acquired this item also applauded that for convenience of making use of and also arrangement. Some commented about image prints' below average quality which could certainly not delight professionals-- that is, naturally, easy to understand for the price. Also, USB wire is actually certainly not delivered so very bear in mind to get that separately. Altogether, this Brother ought to be actually a good buy for your everyday publishing necessities.
0 Response to "Brother MFC-J5520DW Windows 7 Driver"


text:
« S.C. Student Arrest: Arne Duncan Says 'Schools Must Be Safe Havens' | Main | New Discipline Rules Ineffective Without Training, Support, L.A. Teachers Say »
Ill. District's Treatment of Transgender Girl Violates Title IX, Ed. Dept. Says
By Evie Blad on November 2, 2015 5:32 PM | No comments
A school district in Palatine, Ill., must comply with federal law and allow a transgender girl to have unrestricted access to the girls' locker room, officials with the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights said in a letter released Monday.
"OCR finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the District is in violation of Title IX for excluding Student A from participation in and denying her the benefits of its education program, providing services to her in a different manner, subjecting her to different rules of behavior, and subjecting her to different treatment on the basis of sex," OCR regional director Adele Rapport wrote to Palatine, Ill.-based Township High School District 211 Superintendent Daniel Cates.
That letter to Cates is the latest phase of a standoff that has been brewing for weeks after a student there filed a complaint with the Education Department's office for civil rights.
It's also one of a series of moves the federal agency has made recently to advance its interpretation that Title IX covers gender identity as well as sex and gender, creating obligations public school districts must fulfill.
Township High School District 211 has been engaged in an unusually public struggle with the agency, with administrators holding press calls and making media appearances to challenge the Education Department's legal assertions. And in a written response to OCR's latest salvo, it showed no signs of backing down.
"We do not agree with [OCR's] decision and remain strong in our belief that the District's course of action, including private changing stations in our locker rooms, appropriately serves the dignity and privacy of all students in our educational environment," Superintendent Cates said in the lengthy statement. Cates' statement calls OCR's position "serious overreach with precedent-setting implications."
But Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon disagreed, saying the district's policy of providing private accommodations for transgender students "is not following the law."
"All students deserve the opportunity to participate equally in school programs and activities—this is a basic civil right," Lhamon said in a statement. "The district can provide access to this student while also respecting all students' privacy. We encourage the district to comply with the law and resolve this case."
Civil Rights Obligations
Some educational leaders seem surprised to learn that merely providing a transgender student access to a private facility or a single-stall faculty bathroom isn't an adequate accommodation in the eyes of transgender student advocates.
Such a solution makes students feel further singled out because of their gender identity and invite harassment from their peers, advocates say, and they also argue that it's unnecessary to create such a separation.
Accommodations for transgender students can create tensions in school districts. Although transgender students make up a small percentage of the population, advocates say a growing acceptance of gender identity issues have encouraged many children to "come out" earlier than they may have in previous years. That means more schools are facing questions about their responsibilities to students whose expressed gender doesn't match the sex they were assigned at birth.
When creating district policies on the issue, district leaders have been challenged by parents, students, and political groups who say issues related to transgender bathroom and locker room use threaten the privacy rights of other students. Recently, students in a Missouri district held a walkout to protest a new policy that allowed a transgender girl to use the girls' locker room. Four school board members resigned in the aftermath.
Further complicating the situation is a lack of legal clarity some districts have about the issue, education law experts say. Advocates for LGBT students have leaned on the Education Department to issue more specific civil rights guidance to states and districts about schools' responsibilities under Title IX in regards to uses like facilities, pronouns, and records for transgender students.
But the agency's interpretation does not carry the force of law, so such guidance may not be the final word many are looking for about an issue that can be controversial.
To this point, legal precedents on the issue are largely before state courts and civil rights boards, which means they don't hold weight elsewhere.
A federal judge recently dismissed a transgender student's Title IX argument in a preliminary hearing. That student has requested a new judge in the case, saying the current judge has called gender dysphoria a "mental disorder." He has also appealed the judge's initial ruling.
The Education Department filed an amicus brief in that case with the court of appeals, siding with the student. From that brief:
"Whereas the policy permits non-transgender students to use the restrooms that correspond to their gender identity (because their gender identity and 'biological gender' are aligned), it prohibits [the student] from doing so because, although he identifies and presents as male, the school deems his "biological gender" to be female. ... Treating a student differently from other students because his birth-assigned sex diverges from his gender identity constitutes differential treatment on the basis of sex under Title IX."
Staff Writer Corey Mitchell contributed to this post.
Further reading on transgender and LGBT student issues:
Calif. Transgender-Student Law Takes Effect, Amid Recall Push
School Bullying Policies Fall Short, Fail to Protect All Students, Report Says
N.Y. Governor: Education Department Must Enforce Transgender Student Law
Title IX Protects Transgender Student's Rights, Feds Say in Court Filing
Efforts Build to Track School Climate for LGBT Students
Follow @evieblad on Twitter or subscribe to Rules for Engagement to get blog posts delivered directly to your inbox.
Gender and Schools
LGBT and Schools
Transgender Students


text:
\subsection{Datasets}
We generate our alternative label dataset from the unlabeled set of NYUv2 \cite{Silberman2012} dataset, which comprises more than 400K frames of indoor RGBD video sequences.

To evaluate the effect of our pre-training on semantic segmentation, we use the 1449 segmented frames of NYUv2 that are split into train and test, with the class label mapping coming from \cite{gupta2013perceptual}. We also perform experiments on the Cambridge-driving Labeled Video Database (CamVid) \cite{brostow2009semantic}, which contains scenes from the perspective of a driving automobile.

We use the following three conventional evaluation metrics: \textbf{(i)} global accuracy, \textbf{(ii)} class average accuracy, and \textbf{(iii)} mean intersection over union (IoU). Global accuracy is computed as the ratio between the number of correctly labeled pixels and the total number of pixels. The class average accuracy represents a scoring measure that weighs all classes similarly. The mean IoU also presents a measure that equally accounts for all classes and does not favor high accuracies in frequently occurring object classes.
\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\setlength\tabcolsep{4pt}
\begin{tabular}{l|c|c|c}
\toprule
Pre-training Method & Global acc & Avg acc & mIoU\\
\midrule
no pre-training & 38.74 & 13.73 & 8.78 \\
height only & 50.66 & 24.27 & 16.35 \\
height 5 bins + normals & 51.98 & 25.28 & 17.38 \\
height 10 bins + normals & \bf{52.92} & \bf{26.16} & \bf{18.24} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\textbf{Ablation study.} This table shows the semantic segmentation network accuracy on NYUv2 when pre-trained from different versions of our proposed HN-network.}\label{tab:ablation}
\end{table}

\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figures/dataset_size.png}
\end{center}
   \vspace*{-3mm}
   \caption{\textbf{Effect of dataset size.} Semantic segmentation network accuracy on NYUv2 increases when pre-trained from a larger number of training images with HN-labels.}
\label{fig:dataset_size}
\end{figure}

\begin{table*}
\begin{center}
\setlength\tabcolsep{3.5pt}
\begin{tabular}{c|l|ccccccc|c|c|c}
\toprule
Arch & Pre-training Method & Wall & Floor & Cabinet & Bed & Bookshelf & Sofa & Dresser & Avg acc & mIoU & Global acc\\
\midrule
\parbox[t]{2mm}{\multirow{4}{*}{\rotatebox[origin=c]{90}{SegNet}}}&No pre-training & 77.57 & 74.91 & 42.36 & 13.25 & 6.58 & 22.42 & 3.17 & 13.73 & 8.78 & 38.74\\
&CIFAR100 pre-train  & 66.33 & 66.96 & 19.84 & 0.03 & 0.01 & 0.05 & 0 & 10.70 & 6.23 & 31.90 \\
&ImageNet pre-train & 81.54 & 86.1 & \bf{58.86} & 37.76 & 35.05 & \bf{38.25} & 4.35 & 25.40 & 17.34 & 50.58\\
&HN pre-training & \bf{83.26} & \bf{90.63} & 58.81 & \bf{58.40} & \bf{38.79} & 37.05 & \bf{14.24} & \bf{26.16} & \bf{18.24} & \bf{52.92} \\
\midrule
\parbox[t]{2mm}{\multirow{3}{*}{\rotatebox[origin=c]{90}{\small{DeepLab}}}}&No pre-training & 18.70 & 66.72 & 60.78 & 22.30 & 20.70 & 15.24 & 12.49 & 24.77 & 6.73 & 31.41\\
&ImageNet pre-train & 28.85 & 74.69 & \bf{87.98} & \bf{64.40} & \bf{56.22} & 59.10 & 50.78 & \bf{57.84} & \bf{34.27} & 61.70\\
&HN pre-training & \bf{32.00} & \bf{77.64} & 87.45 & 60.15 & 55.67 & \bf{60.51} & \bf{53.69} & 56.04 & 33.49 & \bf{62.98} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\textbf{Evaluation of our proposed method.} The accuracy on some of the most occuring object labels in NUYv2 is shown, as well as the global and average accuracies on all 40 classes. Our method is compared to three baselines. The first one does not use additional labels to pre-train, whereas the second and third baselines use manually annotated labels for pre-training.}\label{tab:results}
\end{table*}

\subsection{Training the HN-Network}\label{subsec:trainign HN}
To train our proposed HN-network using the generated alternative labels, we use 41K frames from NYUv2 sampled uniformly from all scenes. We use a fixed $n_n=2$ for normal bins, as indoor objects have surfaces that are mostly oriented either parallel or perpendicular to the floor plane. Our final label set contains $n_n \times n_h$ labels, with $n_h=10$, and we discard points that do not have depth information. Also, we use the softmax cross-entropy loss during training that discards pixels with unknown depth label. For all experiments, the input image size is $424$$\times$$560$, which enables us to only fit a batch of 4 images when training our HN-network. After 200K iterations in about 2 days, the training loss decreases to 4-5 times its initial value. We test our HN-network on NYUv2 test set. An example of the predicted height of the HN-network is shown in Figure \ref{fig:height_eg} and compared to the groundtruth. Clearly, the network is able to learn and predict the correct height bin, which is an essential prior to using the same representation for semantic segmentation.

\subsection{Training for Semantic Segmentation}
We use the trained HN-network to initialize our second network for semantic segmentation on RGB images, as described in Section \ref{sec:train_alter}.
\\

\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{l|c|c|c|c}
\toprule
Method / Epoch & 5 & 10 & 50 & 100\\
\midrule
No pre-training & 10.69 & 31.95 & 54.85 & 71.07 \\
CIFAR100 pre-train & 3.54 & 9.98 & 2.58 & 15.65\\
ImageNet pre-train & 24.97 & 27.1 & 42.4 & 85.87\\
HN pre-training & \bf{78.98} & \bf{81.70} & \bf{84.5} & \bf{86.03}\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\textbf{Evaluation on the CamVid dataset using SegNet architecture.} The global accuracy is shown at different number of training epochs} \label{tab:camvid}
\end{table}

\noindent \textbf{Ablation Studies: }
A comparison between different versions of our semantic segmentation method is presented in Table \ref{tab:ablation}. We fix all the learning hyperparameters and run our experiment with SegNet architecture for 40K iterations (equivalent to about 50 epochs on the NYUv2 dataset). We compare our results against training from scratch with weight filler from \cite{he2015delving}. Note that all measures are computed on 40 classes of NYUv2, which only contains 795 training images. Our network pre-trained with height labels achieved good performance, whereas adding the normal information boosted up the accuracy.

We also study the effect of training size on the final semantic segmentation accuracy in Figure \ref{fig:dataset_size}. In this case, we fix the number of iterations for the HN-network and semantic segmentation training. Our proposed method achieves good accuracy even with relatively small number of images with HN-labels. Higher accuracy is achieved with more training images, thus, exploiting the diversity among images in the larger set.
\\

\noindent \textbf{Semantic Segmentation Evaluation: }
Here, we compare our results to training from scratch, as well as, pre-training from the ImageNet and CIFAR100 \cite{krizhevsky2009learning} classification datasets. Semantic segmentation results on NYUv2 dataset are shown in Table \ref{tab:results} for both the SegNet architecture \cite{badrinarayanan2015segnet} and the DeepLabv3 architecture \cite{chen2017rethinking}. All fine-tuning experiments were done for for 40K iterations ($\sim$ 50 epochs). If we compare the size of ImageNet to that of our alternative label dataset, ImageNet is about 25 times larger and requires more time to train. Nevertheless, initializing from our proposed dataset outperforms the ImageNet initialization for both architecture types. This shows that ability of our method to generalize to other architectures and backbones without requiring any expensive manual labelling. CIFAR100 initialization shows a degradation in accuracy over training from scratch (MSRA initialization \cite{he2015delving}). This degradation is not unusual in the deep learning field, where training with atypical data would produce results closer to undesirable local minima.

Table \ref{tab:camvid} shows our experiments on the CamVid dataset using the SegNet architecture
with VGG16 encoder, which contains images collected from outdoor settings. Initializing from the HN-labels dataset is still beneficial in such a setting, mainly due to the similarity in the task. The main intuition is that training on HN labels has learned to describe low-level feature information for the visual content in the image. Nonetheless, there exist differences in the high-level information between indoor and outdoor scenes, and this is noticeable in the relatively lower improvement for the outdoor scenes. Also, our method achieves the final accuracy much faster than other methods. This shows that although most objects in the outdoor setting were not previously seen by our pre-training network, it has still learned to discriminate between different patches.

\begin{table}[!ht]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{l|c|c}
\toprule
Fixed Layers & ImageNet & Ours \\
\midrule
conv1 & 50.1 / 25.1  /16.9 & 54.1 / 27.9 / \bf{19.7}  \\
conv1-conv2 & 51.5 / 25.3 / 17.5 & 54.0 / 27.8 / 19.6  \\
conv1-conv3 & 51.5 / 25.3 / 17.4 & 52.9 / 26.9 / 18.7  \\
conv1-conv4 & 50.8 / 25.4 / 17.5 & \bf{54.4} / \bf{28.1} / {\normalfont 19.4}  \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\textbf{Effect of fixing layers relative to finetuning all layers.}(Global acc/Avg acc/mIoU). Although ImageNet pre-training leads to better performance when some layers are fixed, our proposed method would always outperform it in the same setting.}\label{tab:keep_layers}
\end{table}

We also try to initialize the segmentation network from our HN-network while keeping some layers intact. We finetune all other layers and stop at 40K iterations. The result on NYUv2 is shown in Table \ref{tab:keep_layers}, which shows how global accuracy varies with fixing more layers. As can be seen, fixing up to four layers improves the final accuracy. This result can be reasoned because of the significant difference between the dataset used for pre-training and the one used for finetuning. Nevertheless, this observation cannot be used as a general conclusion as best accuracies can be achieved by fixing different number of layers in different scenarios. This motivates our next experiment, which learns what to share among layers between the two networks.

\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{l|c|c|c}
\toprule
Method & Global acc & Avg acc & mIoU\\
\midrule
ImageNet pre-training & 50.58 & 25.40 & 17.34 \\
ImageNet cross-stitch & 50.94 & 25.33 & 17.35 \\
Ours - No stitching & 52.92 & 26.16 & 18.24 \\
Ours cross-stitch & \bf{54.25} & \bf{27.83} & \bf{19.46} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\textbf{Evaluation of the cross-stitching result.} The cross-stitch result is compared against no stitching and ImageNet pre-training.}\label{tab:results_cross}
\vspace{-10pt}
\end{table}

\begin{figure*}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figures/qual2.png}
\end{center}
   \vspace*{-3mm}
   \caption{Qualitative evaluation of our proposed HN-network as well as the output of the semantic segmentation network. From left to right: Input RGB image, groundtruth height label, output height label, semantic groundtruth label, and output semantic label.}
\label{fig:qualitative}
\end{figure*}

\vspace{3pt}\noindent \textbf{Cross-Stitching: }
 We also conduct an experiment to fuse the HN-network with the semantic segmentation network. Instead of manually selecting the layers to share, our cross-stitch network learns to weigh the amount of sharing required between the two streams. The results are shown in Table \ref{tab:results_cross}, where we compare the final cross-stitched network to the non-stitched network and to the network pre-trained on ImageNet. We observe in our experiments that the final semantic segmentation accuracy increases without the need to manually select the number of layers to share and that cross-stitching is an essential component of its final performance. This represents a better way of transfer learning than basic initialization.

\vspace{3pt}\noindent \textbf{Qualitative Results: } Figure \ref{fig:qualitative} presents a set of  RGB images from NYUv2 with their corresponding groundtruth height labels, predicted height labels from HN-network, along with the semantic groundtruth labels and the predicted  semantic labels after cross-stitching. These images show that the current technique is capable of aptly generating semantic labels for RGB images along with height labels as a by-product. Also, the relation between the two tasks can be observed in areas like the ground, where a single height label corresponds to a single semantic label.

\section{Introduction}
\input{intro}

\section{Related Work}
\input{related_work}

\section{Methodology}
\input{methodology}

\section{Experiments}
\input{experiments}

\section{Conclusion}
\input{conclusion}

{\small
\bibliographystyle{ieee_fullname}

\subsection{Alternative Category Representation}\label{sec:label_choice}
The motivation to this work is to look at the depth channel as a source for labeling RGB images. RGBD sensors are used to easily collect aligned color and depth image pairs. Our aim is to automatically generate labels that are not necessarily designed for the target task (semantic segmentation), but could afford helpful information for it. Successfully transforming depth into labels makes this method capable of generating \emph{free} labels as compared to the tedious, time consuming, RGB pixel labeling needed for semantic segmentation. The first intuitive use of depth is to train a network to directly regress the depth from a single RGB image. However, depth requires complex knowledge of the environment and varies with camera location/viewpoint.

With the complexity of indoor scenes, regressing depth necessitates a high capacity network and can be tedious to train. On the other hand, with additional effort, one can transform depth into height above ground, which is view-independent. Taking the ground plane as reference, one can also transform normals relative to the camera viewpoint, which depend on camera angle, to view-independent normal angles relative to the ground plane.

Our method uses height and normal information as the main precursor for pre-training. We choose to bin the height into $n_h$ bins (or levels) and normals into $n_n$ bins and train a model to output the correct normal and height level per pixel. Since it learns to generate features specific to segmentation, this pre-training is closer to our end goal of semantic segmentation than to pre-train with models trained on other tasks, \eg image classification. In fact, one can think of height bins as semantic segmentation with object part specific labels: chair and table lower legs, lower part of wall and door, table top, and sofa back, \textit{etc}. This type of grouping consistently clusters objects and their parts into specific bins. To highlight this point, Figure \ref{fig:height_stats} shows the height distribution of 40 indoor objects on a subset of NYUv2 dataset \cite{Silberman2012}. For every object, we show the percentage of its occurrence in every height bin. As expected, objects like floor (label 2) and floor mat (label 20) only occur within the lowest height bin, whereas ceiling (label 22) occurs within the highest bins. Other objects almost always occur in the same bin, such as bathtub (label 36) and counter (label 12). Furthermore, when considering other object classes, there exists an overall trend in height, with object parts falling in specific height bins. In light of these observations, training a network to distinguish between different height levels will inherently train it to distinguish between some object classes and/or their parts. This information is expected to be useful for the task of semantic segmentation.

\begin{figure}[!h]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figures/height_stats2.png}
\end{center}
\vspace{-5pt}
   \caption{\textbf{Object height distribution.} This colormap shows the distribution of height for various object classes in NYUv2 \cite{Silberman2012}. Colors represent the fraction of 3D points of the same label that are located at a particular height bin.}
\label{fig:height_stats}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Automated Label Collection}\label{sec:data_collec}
\noindent\textbf{Floor Identification:} Our method mainly relies on the floor plane as a reference for the proposed labels. To identify a possible floor plane, we first use the  camera intrinsic parameters to map the depth image into a 3D point cloud. Next, we compute the normals at each 3D point using the method of \cite{rosman2014augmented}. We then use the normals to estimate the scene layout orientation using the method of \cite{ghanem2015robust}. Once the orientation is obtained, the room is rotated to make the ground normal aligned with the upward direction. Afterwards, we choose the ground location as the first percentile of points along the upward direction. The first percentile is chosen instead of the minimum in order to make the method more robust to sensor errors especially at far distances. Our method takes into account that in most indoor images captured by RGBD sensors, a part of the ground is visible. In order to account for cases where the ground is not visible, we discard scenes in which the majority of the normals from points on the hypothesized floor plane (first percentile) are not aligned with the upward direction

\noindent\textbf{HN-Label Generation:} To transform depth into height, we calculate the distance between each 3D point and the floor plane. As for the normals, we compute the angle between every 3D point normal and the floor's upward direction. We only use one angle to keep labels consistent over multiple viewpoints. Normals and heights are then binned, and we define our proposed alternative categories as all possible combinations of the normal and height bins. Figure \ref{fig:view_indep} shows our proposed labels for the same scene from different viewpoints. Since we choose our labeling scheme to be view-independent, objects maintain the same labels throughout the scene recording.

\begin{figure}[!h]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figures/view_indep.png}
\end{center}
   \caption{\textbf{HN-labels for different images in the same room.} Our proposed labels are view-independent and are consistent among different viewpoints.}
\label{fig:view_indep}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Training with HN-Labels}\label{sec:train_alter}
Labels collected from height and normal information can be used to train the same network architecture used for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we choose the SegNet architecture \cite{badrinarayanan2015segnet} for this purpose, with an encoder network identical to the 13 convolutional layers in the VGG16 network \cite{Simonyan14c}, as well as, the DeepLabv3 architecture \cite{chen2017rethinking} with ResNetv2 layers \cite{he2016identity}. Note that our method can be easily implemented with any other architecture and that the  number of labels for semantic segmentation need not be similar to that of pre-training with HN-labels. In what follows, we will reference this trained network as the HN-network.

Once we train our HN-network with labels that are self-supervised, we need to transfer the representation to another network that learns to segment RGB images. In both the SegNet and DeepLabv3 architectures, the only difference between the two networks is the number of object classes, \ie  the number of outputs from the last convolution layer. Transfer learning can be done in two ways. The first way is to initialize all the layers of the semantic segmentation network with what was learned in the first network, and then finetune all the layers based on the manually labeled segmentation dataset. Another way of transfer learning is to keep some of the first layers unchanged, especially when the dataset used for pre-training is much larger than the dataset used for finetuning. This is motivated by the idea that  generic information is usually shared at early layers.

\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{figures/cross-stitch.png}
\end{center}
   \caption{\textbf{Proposed fusion of HN-network and semantic segmentation network (Cross-Stitch).} The HN-network is considered as a shared representation whereas the semantic segmentation network is task specific). At every max-pooling layer, the network gets to choose between the pre-trained layers and the task specific layers.}
\label{fig:cross}
\end{figure}

Choosing to finetune only part of the network raises an important question: how many layers should be fixed and how many should be finetuned? Instead of manually selecting which layers to share and which layers to be task-specific, one can model the problem as a multi-task learning problem, in which sharing can be learned between the networks. This is mainly inspired by the work in \cite{misra2016cross}. Our joint network architecture, named cross-stitch \cite{misra2016cross}, is shown in Figure \ref{fig:cross}. The shared representation part of the network is extracted from a network that was trained to output HN-labels, whereas the task-specific part learns to semantically segment. The shared representation part is kept fixed, reasoned by the large data that can be used to train that part. Sharing of layers is allowed at the first 4 max-pooling layers. We denote the output at every max-pooling by $L_{xs}$ and $L_{xh}$, where $x$ represents the index of the max-pooling layer. $L_{xs}$ refers to the output generated in the ``semantic segmentation network", whereas $L_{xh}$ refers to output from the HN-network. At every max-pooling layer, both representations are merged into $$L = \alpha_{xh}L_{xh} + \alpha_{xs}L_{xs}$$ and $L$ is used as an input to the subsequent layer of the semantic segmentation part of the network.

The final target is to achieve a higher accuracy in semantic segmentation only, especially when semantic labels are scarce. This differs from \cite{misra2016cross}, which aims at achieving a better joint accuracy in multiple tasks.

\noindent \textbf{Implementation Details: } Our method is implemented using the Caffe framework \cite{jia2014caffe} for the SegNet architecture and Tensorflow \cite{abadi2016tensorflow} for the DeepLabv3 architecture, both running on Titan X and Titan Xp GPUs. We use the same image input and output size for all of our networks. In the cases where depth sensors output a different size image, we compute the height on the original size image, then crop and reshape the color image with bilinear interpolation, while using nearest-neighbour interpolation for the labels. As for the training loss, we use the cross-entropy loss \cite{long2015fully} in all our networks.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Mobile Casino / Games / Texas Holdem
Best Texas Holdem Mobile Casino in 2022
Poker is played in every corner of the world, and Texas Hold'em is its best-known variant. Any player that loves poker, probably know how to play Texas Hold'em variant. This is due to many reasons because Texas Hold'em is a game where up to 22 or 23 people can participate.
The groups of 22 or 23 people for Texas Hold'em allows many to join in the same game. The popularity of this variant can also be related to the simplicity of the game, which has a fixed betting order in all rounds. Texas Hold'em arose in Robstown, Texas, at the beginning of the 20th century.
How to Play Texas Hold'em?
Texas Hold'em Strategy
Texas Hold'em Free Play
Texas Hold'em With Real Money
History of Texas Hold'em
Every game has its complexity, but Texas Hold'em is known worldwide for its simplicity and logic. The first question that any player should probably ask is if know how to play poker? Poker is a casino game in which players keep hidden cards and, from the cards shown, bets are placed. The total sum of bets falls on the player who maintains a deck with the best cards.
Texas Hold'em mode aims for a player to have the best possible combination in his five-card deck. In order to classify it, the cards are classified from the highest, the Ace, to the lowest, 2.
To start playing, the position of the dealer must be decided by the player of the highest card and proceed with the mandatory bets of the Poker game: small blind and big blind. The player to the left of the big blind will have to start playing. In each round, players must fold (playing all their cards), call (match the bet), raise or check (pass the turn), in case there's no previous bet.
After four rounds, five cards will be discovered and players will play with seven because they have two in their deck. The end of the game is determined by the moment when a bet placed cannot be exceeded by any other player.
To start playing, the position of the dealer must be decided by the player of the highest card and proceed with the mandatory bets of the poker game: small blind and big blind. These positions will be established to the left of the dealer, who once played the small blind and big blind, will begin to distribute two cards in two rounds.
Next, players will begin to take turns clockwise and decide if they will fold, call, raise, check or pass. Players will always have to increase the previously existing bet. In the first round, the big blind bet will be taken into account.
Also, in the first round, the dealer will reveal three cards in a movement known as the flop. Then a fourth will be revealed, which will be the turn and in the next round the fifth and last will be shown: the river. The objective of the game will be to bet, as long as the player gets a high sum of five of the cards. These can be the result of the combination between the five that are shown and the two that each player has individually.
Generally, the game ends when a bet cannot be exceeded. However, it can also be through the card showdown after the last round of the river.
Texas Hold'em is a game to think, plan and execute, with peace of mind but at the same time, with firmness and agility. Texas Hold'em poker moves millions of dollars in the world because there are great players who have been able to develop great strategies known globally.
It is true that when there is money involved, bets turn out to be more complicated, but the best players are the ones who take the risk to win. To plan an intelligent strategy in Texas Hold'em poker, players must first know the value of cards, especially before making the flop.
After the flop, even if a player has very powerful cards, the common cards can change any play, so don't think that it is always better to bet high. Another possible strategie may be to accumulate cards of the same appearance, in order to plan a ladder play. This can take many turns, and it will not always be convenient.
If some player has bad cards, it is recommended to wait for the flop and even the river, to see if in the last chances can turn the game and get the victory. Texas Hold'em is a game for strategy, but all players need patience.
It is normal to think that the purpose of casino games is to bet and win money. But it doesn't always have to be that way, especially if a player doesen't have experience. Currently, online and mobile casinos allow to play the best Texas Hold'em poker without betting a single penny.
Even if some people has interests not related with those of betting, playing for free Texas Hold'em is a great option to share with friends, Many of the online casinos have free multiplayer options. Texas Hold'em is a fun and exciting variant that will be with all the players, even if they don't want to bet.
Betting is a wise option, but it should be considered many factors. No one should decide to bet money lightly, without having a previous budget on what effects it could generate. Texas Hold'em is a casino game that is designed to bet, so it's good to always play responsibly.
To plan bets, it is important that the player establish a budget for losses. In addition, it is recommended that establish before when the player should leave and also, always to keep in mind that Texas Hold'em isn't a game that someone can play under the influence of alcohol or another substance.
The history of Texas Hold'em poker is directly associated with that of modern casinos. Although there's no accuracy about the origin of the game, it began to be played at the beginning of the 20th century in the town of Robstown, Texas. However, the game's popularization began in the 1960s in Las Vegas.
Texas Hold'em poker was characteristic for many years of the Golden Nugget Casino, located in Downtown Las Vegas. Due to the rules of the game, this poker's variant was popularized very quickly. Since the 1980s, the game began to become popular outside Nevada and with the advent of the internet, it has become widespread in every smartphone.
Guide to All Online Casino Poker Variations
When you set up an online casino account, the first game to play is most likely a slot machine. That's partly because most casinos package this game in most of their welcome bonuses. But deep down the waters lies arguably the most lucrative mobile casino game – video poker.
3 Stay Casino
4 TonyBet 7.5


text:
Home / Book Search / Non-Fiction / Art & Architecture / The Boys from The Bridge: The Story of Attenborough's Private Army
The Boys from The Bridge: The Story of Attenborough's Private Army
Author Name: Sebastian Abineri
The Boys from The Bridge: The Story of Attenborough's Private Army quantity
Categories: Art & Architecture, Memoir, Non-Fiction
Tags: Acting, Arts, Autobiography, Entertainment, Memoir
In 1975 the 20 year old Actor Sebastian Abineri having recently appeared in a BBC Play for Today portraying a Farm Labourer actually found himself three months later working as a Farm Labourer on a Suffolk farm whilst he waited for his next acting job!
He was in the middle of feeding the cattle when the Farmer told him that his agent was on the telephone.
Sebastian learned that he'd been invited by the renowned Casting Director Miriam Brickman to audition for a newly formed repertory company in the West End to be called the Lyric Theatre Company directed by the legendary Theatre and Film Director Lindsay Anderson.
Sebastian put down his pitchfork and hared down to London to meet him.
He was offered the job and spent nine months with the company where he worked with not only Lindsay Anderson but also Helen Mirren, Joan Plowright and Ben Travers the author of the famous 'farces'.
Miriam Brickman then cast him in the epic War Film "A Bridge Too Far" and he joined "Attenborough's Private Army" (APA) where with 50 other young actors he underwent two weeks of military training under the eagle eye of a former Director of the SAS to represent the gallant band of Paratroopers who heroically held Arnhem Bridge against insurmountable odds during the terrible battle in 1944.
Sebastian recounts in this story the extraordinary happenings which occurred during the making of the Film which included stars like Anthony Hopkins, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sean Connery and many others.
Sebastian also had the privilege of meeting several veterans of Arnhem who gave him little known information about the Battle which meant that it could have been a victory instead of a defeat and ended the War by Christmas 1944.
2 reviews for The Boys from The Bridge: The Story of Attenborough's Private Army
Phillip Law (verified owner) – July 23, 2017
I cannot recommend "The Boys From The Bridge" highly enough. As well as giving a fascinating insight into the making of one of the most famous second world war films ever made, it is also one of the funniest books I have ever read. The episode in which Sebastian Abineri recounts the scene in a West End play of him playing the very small part of a cabbie receiving a very small tip from Joan Plowright, literally had me crying with laughter. It is one of the funniest theatre stories I have ever read!
Adam Scott (verified owner) – July 30, 2017
Everyone should read "The Boys From The Bridge" I can't stress enough how good a read this book is, it's an insight into behind the scenes goings on during filming of "A Bridge to Far" but it starts in London with an hilariously funny audition for a play. The story then moves on to the joining of the "APA"(Attenboroughs private army) Sebastian Abineri recounts the story's of what happened during and after filming. Again I can't recommend this book enough.
Spangles, Glam, Gaywaves & Tubes
Passport to Fame: The Diana Dors Story
A Captain's Ransom: Modern Day Piracy & the Dangers
North of the North Wind
Battling Spirits and Kindly Hearts