The Series 2500 "considered the stalwart of metal roof panels" maintains a profile with more than fifty years of history in the field. The 2500's 2" high side seams include factory applied sealant and are mechanically locked to provide the ultimate watertight seal while creating a monolithic joint that will stand the test of time. The 2500 can be installed over solid substrates or structural framing and can accommodate roof slopes as low as ½" per foot when using the double-locked seam profile.
The Series 2500-"C" is a curved standing seam metal roof panel designed for barrel vault roofs and other arching design elements. The 2500-C can be curved in the factory to radiuses tight as 16'-4″ and field curved to a 200' radius. Otherwise this standing seam roof panel is same as the Series 2500 and is available in several steel or aluminum gauges and in a wide variety of colors.


Content: This 6-week session will be fun for both you and your dog. Canine Adventures tests your dog's reliability in real life situations by using the skills learned in our other classes. Each week will present a new and increasing level of challenge in new locations including parks, hiking trails, downtown areas, shopping centers, dog shows, restaurants and more. Canine Adventures will challenge all dogs and owners in a fun environment.
Schedule: Classes meet once a week for 6 consecutive weeks on the same day of the week and at the same time all 6 weeks unless otherwise noted. The length of each class is 1 - 1 1/2 hours.
Location: Each week, you will receive an email a day or two before class indicating giving you specifics about the adventure. All Adventures will depart from the CT Humane Society in Newington at 2pm, except Week 1. Note that Week 1 will depart at 10am.


Suzanne Gutierrez heads our Clinical Research Division. She began her career in medicine in 1983, and has extensive experience as a clinician and administrator. For over 15 years, she served as the Clinic Director for Cypress Medical Center, South Florida Affiliated Health and Rehabilitation Center and Cypress Creek Chiropractic Center. She continues to be an outstanding leader in the Infinity Clinical Research organization.
From 2001 until 2010, she served as the Director of Operations for Sunrise Medical Group's Fort Lauderdale and Pembroke Pines offices. She also worked as a Site Coordinator and Programs Administrator for new medical groups joining Sunrise Medical Group, Inc. Sue is now responsible for the oversight of all Infinity Clinical Research Operations.
Penina comes to us with over 20 years of administrative and regulatory experience. Her background includes advocacy for seniors, program administration, Canadian Customs and Excise enforcement as well as volunteer recruitment and management. Her eye for detail has made her a natural for her role in Regulatory and Compliance. Her compassion and caring nature with patients and organizational skills compliment our team.
Michele Fistel began her research career in 1999, and has a wide range of experience in a myriad of clinical trials in Neurology and Colo-rectal Surgery but also has extensive clinical experience having served as a nurse since 1974. Michele earned her practical nursing degree from Saint Barnabas Medical Center School of Practical Nursing in Livingston, New Jersey.
She is ACRP certified and is also trained to perform psychometric assessments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and MS studies. We are fortunate to have Michele as part of the Sunrise Neurology team.
Fanny Gully is an experienced clinical research coordinator, specializing in Parkinson's, Migraine and MS. Fanny holds a Bachelor's in Business Administration from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega University in Lima, Peru. In addition to CNS clinical trials, Fanny also has Rheumatology experience. She is trained in Good Clinical Practice and Human Research Subject Protection.
Adriana comes to us with over 10 years of experience in research. Her experience with studies involving migraine, back pain, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and more, make her a perfect fit with our company. Adriana has a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and is a Medical Assistant. This combination of knowledge, skills and abilities qualified her to open her own consulting firm, which provided quality assurance for major clinical research. We are fortunate to have her on our team as a coordinator.
Becky Nembhard has worked in the clinical research industry since 1988, with experience ranging from basic science to post-marketing trials. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in Biology with Minors in Chemistry and Psychology from Middle Tennessee State University. As an Independent Clinical Research Associate for a major Contract Research Organization, and as a consultant with over 17 years of research experience, Becky has served in many capacities and has expertise in numerous therapeutic areas. We are very fortunate that she brings her vast knowledge base to us to lead our Plantation Cardiology Site.
Jorge Riveros brings extensive experience to Infinity Clinical Research having conducted clinical trials in phases I to IV. Jorge is a foreign medical graduate and earned his Doctor of Medicine degree from Juan N. Corpas Medical School in Colombia. There he worked as a physician for over 10 years in private practice and served as a medical director for several HMO's in Colombia. Jorge is a Certified Clinical Research Coordinator, and is also trained as a Clinical Rater for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease studies.
He has worked as a Senior Clinical Research Coordinator and Research Manager in the areas of Neurology, Psychiatry, Cancer, Cardiology and Gastroenterology. We are very fortunate to have Jorge with his specialized background and skills as a Clinical Coordinator in our Hollywood Neurology research site.
Lucy Vargas leads our Pulmonary research site and has extensive experience in all phases of research and in many clinical indications. She earned her Occupational Associates Degree in Medical Laboratory Technology in 1988 from Eastern Technical School in New York City and began her research career at that time.
She went on to obtain training and become a Registered Medical Assistant in 2002 earning her certification from the National School of Technology. Lucy is a shining star in our Pulmonary Research Division.


PITTSBURGH (AP) — Sidney Crosby let one chance to bury the New York Islanders slip away. The Pittsburgh Penguins star wasn't about to let it happen twice.
Crosby finished off a 2-on-1 by sneaking a wrist shot past Chris Gibson 3:48 into overtime to give the Penguins a 3-2 win Saturday. Pittsburgh's captain failed to convert on a rush moments earlier, but an outlet pass by Justin Schultz freed up Crosby once again.
"Thought I had a good opportunity to shoot and missed one right before that so glad to see it go in," Crosby said after picking up his 22nd goal of the season.
Derick Brassard's first goal with Pittsburgh tied it with less than nine minutes to go in regulation. Patric Hornqvist added his 18th goal of the season for the Penguins. Phil Kessel picked up two assists to become the sixth American-born player to reach 400 career assists. Tristan Jarry overcame a comically ugly start to finish with 25 saves.
Jarry's night began by giving up a goal to New York's Brandon Davidson just 1:11 into the game. Davidson flipped a slow backhand from outside the right circle only to see it go into the net when Jarry tripped and fell backward to the ice .
"It was a little easier when I came back to the bench and seen 90 percent of the guys laughing at me," Jarry said. "It's a tough thing to swallow but I'm glad we won."
"To be honest, I can't but it was great," Gibson said. "I loved every single second of it. I'm really happy with my game except that last goal and the loss there."
"The last two games I struggled a little bit and I didn't think my game was where I wanted it to be at," Jarry said. "I thought tonight was a good bounce back performance for me and I think it's something I can grow on."
NOTES: Pittsburgh G Matt Murray missed his third straight game since getting a concussion in practice Wednesday. ... Pittsburgh scratched D Matt Hunwick, F Carter Rowney and C Zach Aston-Reese. ... New York scratched Ds Dennis Seidenberg and Sebastian Aho and F Ross Johnston. ... The Islanders went 0 for 2 on the power play. The Penguins were 1 for 2. ... Pittsburgh is 7-1-1 in its last nine games against New York.


text:
Tim Tebow Swears by Coffee with an Incredibly Unusual Addition
The way he takes his coffee is as unconventional as his throwing motion.
Erin Mosbaugh
Of all the ridiculous beverage fads sweeping the nation, bulletproof coffee is probably the most absurd—coffee laced with butter that allegedly has all sorts of health benefits.
And of all the ridiculous athletes in the country, Tim Tebow is a leader of the pack. So it makes sense that the ultra-religious, media-hyped quarterback would be an acolyte of the cultish beverage, as he revealed in a Delish interview about his eating and drinking habits.
Here's his complete bulletproof recipe from the piece:
He mixes half-regular, half-decaf coffee—"I don't want that much caffeine," he says—before stirring in "a tap of heavy organic whipping cream," a sliver of butter, a little unsweetened almond milk, and two-to-three drops of liquid Stevia, English Toffee flavor. The end result is a bit unsettling at first, given that the coffee has an oily film on top, but the smooth drink tastes remarkably like a Toffee Nut Latte—or, as Tebow describes it, "a little bit like a milkshake."
"It really kickstarts your day," he says. "It's fantastic."
What's the deal with the bulletproof? Delish credited a man named Dave Asprey with starting the trend. Asprey apparently created a coffee blend that, according to his site, uses "Upgraded Coffee blended together with grass-fed unsalted butter and Brain Octane Oil." In essence, Asprey and his follower claim that the combination has a "massive impact on" cognitive function (even though that's really never been a huge secret).
Delish also unearthed a few other interesting things about Tebow's diet: he doesn't calorie count (something we're seeing is common amongst athletes), instead opting to just dine until he's full, and he prefers to eat things with higher fat because items that are low-fat tend to gain extra sugar. He also loves La Croix sparkling water and hates fat-free Greek yogurt.
The enigmatic Tim Tebow: a man as unconventional as his throwing motion.
[via Delish]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Magento 2.3.3: Translate in javascript with two variables I want to translate the following javascript line in Magento 2.3.3:
$.mage.__('Please enter between ' + min + ' and ' + max));
I have tried the following:
$.mage.__('Please enter between %1 and %2').replace('%1', min, '%2', max));
But that doesn't work.
The two variables are numeric values and comes from:
var min = <?php echo $fieldOptions[$option->getTitle()]['min'] ?>;
var max = <?php echo $fieldOptions[$option->getTitle()]['max'] ?>;
My CSV file contains:
"Please enter between %1 and %2","Vänligen ange mellan %1 och %2"
Thanks,

A: Thats not how replace works. You have to make two replace or make a function.
'Please enter between %1 and %2'.replace('%1',min).replace('%2',max);

Or a dummy function example:
'Please enter between %1 and %2'.replace(/%1|%2/gi,
  function(m) {
    return m == '%1' ? min : max;
  }
);

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
video-marketing-budget-20180807
Next Article: Video marketing on a shoestring budget? It can be done with these 4 steps
BLOCKCHAIN BUSINESS FEATURES SYNDICATED TAIWAN TECHNODE
TechNode
, 07 Aug, 2018
Taiwan's crypto scene is booming, but still needs a clearer regulatory framework to thrive
When it comes to regulating crypto, there seems to be little consensus on what is appropriate and what is not
The article Taiwan's crypto scene is booming, but still needs a clearer regulatory framework to thrive by Nicole Jao originally appeared on TechNode, the leading English authority on technology in China.
The world witnessed the explosive rise of blockchain last year, the popularity of cryptocurrencies, in particular, has reached a fever pitch. Under current regulatory frameworks, many aspects of cryptocurrency are still operating in murky waters. Yet, when it comes to regulating and policymaking, there seems to be little consensus on what is appropriate and what is not. Countries around the world have come up with their own playbook—Japan and Singapore have pursued a more open-handed approach, while the US and China have taken a more stringent stance.
Last year, the Chinese government's move against cryptocurrency prompted an exodus of crypto exchange services and related businesses out of the country. China-born crypto exchange Binance recently relocated to Malta, seeking a fresh start in a regulatory environment much favorable for crypto businesses. Furthermore, a flow of capital and talent have diverted to neighbouring markets like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. But unlike the former two, Taiwan has not yet developed a clear framework to regulate cryptocurrency.
Over-regulation could bottleneck innovation. What is seen across the board is heavy-handed and inflexible regulatory actions driving industry players to more lenient markets. Having a more lenient regulatory environment has, in a way, become an appeal for blockchain companies overseas to land in Taiwan; however, lack of clear guidelines has hindered industry growth in that businesses would need to feel their way through as they go.
Recognising that this is a window of opportunity to attract capital and more global players to set up shop, the government has shown stronger interest and eagerness to start the ball rolling over the past couple of months. On May 22, Taiwan formed a self-regulatory organisation (SRO) and a parliamentary group, which aim to build trust and between industry incumbents, legislators, and policymakers and develop industry standards.
The tide is turning
The small island in East Asia made its name as an electronics and hardware manufacturing hub more than a decade ago. Carrying a heritage in manufacturing and traditional industries, the Taiwan market has always been considered as more conservative towards something as uncertain as cryptocurrency. Recently, however, it has emerged as a hotspot for blockchain and cryptocurrency—although still can't be compared with blockchain hubs like Singapore or Silicon Valley, it is gaining more recognition.
Also Read: What will it take for the next generation of crypto exchanges to succeed? Here are 5 must-have features
It took sometime before the blockchain industry gained a more solid footing in the hardware-focused Taiwan. Ryan Terribilini, CEO at Formosa Financial, told TechNode the local blockchain ecosystem has been growing and developing rapidly over the past year. Terribilini was an early comer to the Taiwan crypto scene, who worked for currency exchange and remittance platform Ripple prior to Formosa Financial, a financial services provider for blockchain companies.
"I see a consensus forming that there needs to be some form of regulation, but what is not clear is what that will ultimately lead to," Terribilini said. People participating in the ecosystem are currently policing themselves: they know how the game is played better than the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) does, he added.
"We want to make sure that Taiwan's environment for blockchain industry is regarded as a positive environment, both locally and internationally," and coming up with some standard guidelines is useful in that it sets the tone for the development.
The Taiwan Crypto Blockchain Self-Regulatory Organisation (TBSRO), which formed in May, is led by legislator Jason Hsu, a big proponent of blockchain and crypto. The organisation acts as an instrument to bring the industry together to decide on common guidelines. It is also a mechanism to minimise the need for excessive government involvement.
Taiwan is not the first to see self-regulation as a middle path to regulate blockchain and cryptocurrency. In March, after the US$500 million Coincheck hack, 16 Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges came together and formed a self-regulatory body, the Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA). Cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea are also moving towards self-governance. The Korean Blockchain Association has also developed a self-regulatory framework to assuage worries over money laundering, tax evasion, among other emerging issues.
The founding reception of the self-regulatory organisation and the parliamentary coalition for blockchain was joined by over 200 industry leaders, including Binance founder CZ (1st row, 2nd from left) and Maicoin CEO Alex Liu (1st row, 5th from right) . Formosa Financial and Kyber Capital were in attendance as well. Image Credit: Business Nex Media
Also Read: Philippines government is planning to build a US$100M crypto hub in the country
It is obvious that the overall sentiment in Taiwan is changing. In the past, the government has taken a hands-off approach in regulating new technologies. Even though it is still cautious about cryptocurrency, it is becoming more supportive. Apart from establishing a parliamentary coalition, which aims to unite the island's lawmakers to build a better-defined regulatory framework, the National Development Council and Financial Supervision Commission both declared long-term support for the development of blockchain technologies.
Needing clarity in crypto regulations
Lack of clear regulations is one of the major roadblocks restricting the growth of the industry. Today, many crypto activities including ICOs are in a grey area in Taiwan because there is no actual regulation on cryptocurrency.
What is happening on the island now is allowing grassroots industry organisation to gauge what the best practices and potential regulatory frameworks should be. It then will come down to the legislators' ability to work with regulators to make sure everything is clarified for financial institutions and businesses.
Many financial institutions in Taiwan are also concerned about money laundering, Terribilini said. There's currently no inclusion of cryptocurrency in money laundering laws—which makes banks very hesitant to work with blockchain companies. "Until there is regulatory clarity, the banks won't support or participate in the ecosystem as much as they can," he told us.
Even so, large exchanges in Taiwan are already actively working on building better trust mechanisms. "Running an exchange should require AML [anti-money laundering] compliance, so having a trust structure sets the bar for the industry and serves as a reference for regulators on policy making," Nick Chang, the general manager of Taiwan's largest digital asset exchange Maicoin, told TechNode.
Maicoin is a digital asset trading platform that matches user orders with partner exchanges outside of Taiwan. This year, the company branched out to MAX, a full-featured exchange service. The company said it has been and will continue to communicate with the government on AML, KYC (Know Your Customer), and ICO related policy making.
Also Read: These 5 geeky discoveries showcase how mainstream crypto has become
Having a clear policy in place will help exchange services better protect customers from financial fraud. On top of establishing a crime-reporting hotline with the law enforcement, Maicoin said it will continue to implement the latest KYC solutions to raise the difficulty for fraudulent activities. "We have seen some success, but we still seek more engagement from the government on this aspect."
Once regulators have a clearer definition of what cryptocurrency is, then they can figure out how to regulate ICOs and other activities. At this stage, cryptocurrencies and the tokens issued through ICOs are still classified as commodities. However, Taiwan's Central Bank recently signaled that regulating cryptocurrencies under the existing AML laws could take into effect as early as the end of the year (in Chinese).
ICO is an alternative funding method for businesses. Chang said the SMEs (Small and medium-sized enterprises)–the main contributor to the island's economic growth–can benefit greatly from ICOs if was formally regulated.
Finding a unique niche
Many are racing to build the next favorite landing spot for blockchain companies. Perhaps for Taiwan, it is not about playing catch-up with established blockchain hubs, but more about filling a unique niche.
Taiwan has many advantages compared with financial hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore "primarily because it is a regional technology power in Asia," Thomas Hu, founder and CEO of Hong-Kong based venture capital firm Kyber Capital, said in a written response to TechNode.
The island has a rich history in hardware and electronics manufacturing, which serves Taiwan particularly well as it requires a lot of hardware innovations, such as in mining chips, to develop new blockchain technology and applications. Specialisation in hardware-software integration also gives Taiwan a leg-up.
Also Read: More than just tech, your blockchain or crypto platform needs a killer tagline
Taiwan is home to some of the world's largest semiconductor companies and chipmakers like TSMC and MediaTek. Its legacy in electronics and hardware has fostered a talent pool, Hu said, "many Taiwanese engineers and scientists are making important contributions to algorithms and system designs underpinning the crypto industry, especially in Ethereum." Comparing with other markets, Taiwan is a place to hire engineers at a much more reasonable cost.
Founded in 2015, Kyber Capital invests in early-stage ventures that focus on blockchain applications, financial technologies, and new financial services. Kyber Capital is one of the early investors of Maicoin and CoolBitX, a Taiwan-based cryptocurrency hardware wallet company.
Aside from having a relatively lenient regulatory environment, Taiwan's geographic location also makes it more appealing to overseas blockchain companies. Being in Asia, a multitude of crypto communities, finance, and tech centers are in the vicinity. Hu added that "its geopolitical 'safe distance' from Mainland China also creates a 'safe harbor' effect, attracting crypto talents and capital globally."
Hu pointed out that although Hong Kong and Singapore have become known as global financial hubs, such status can hinder the industry's development as industry incumbents might see little upside in adopting blockchain technology. Besides, what these cities lack is something that Taiwan has plenty: the tech talents that propel blockchain innovations. All in all, they serve a different function as financing platforms for blockchain and crypto companies who are seeking access to capital markets.
Gaining access to capital in Taiwan, in comparison, is more difficult not only because the market lacks the depth and breadth, but also because local VC firms and institutional investors are still very conservative. "These disadvantages are actually blessing in disguise, as successful startups are very lean and mean. We feel these are critical factors in surviving the increasingly fierce competition in the global crypto industry," Hu said.
Also Read: 3 trends that will take crypto to a new level
Although the crypto and blockchain scene in Taiwan is still nascent compared to its peers in Asia, it is seeing rising interest from crypto exchange services and startups overseas, including Binance who ran into regulatory roadblocks in Hong Kong and Japan.
"This is partially due to the relatively lenient regulatory regime in Taiwan and the willingness among local banks to service crypto companies, especially exchanges," Hu said. The regulatory sandbox regulation is also a significant milestone. Lawmakers passed the Financial Technology Innovation and Experiment Act (more commonly known as the Financial Regulatory Sandbox) last December, which grants tech companies more leeway when experimenting with innovative financial services. Taiwan is the fifth to implement such financial sandboxes after Britain, Singapore, Australia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The regulatory sandbox will likely attract more international blockchain and cryptocurrency companies to set up shop in Taiwan.
The crypto space is heating up as more capital pours in. "The technology hurdles such as blockchain scalability and crypto asset security are less worrisome than the issues of governance," Hu said. The market needs to filter through the fluff and scrutinise the commercialization prospects of many ICO projects. More specifically, the industry needs to invest in infrastructure. The financial industry increasingly views cryptocurrencies as an emerging asset class and is looking for ways to gain more exposure, but existing trading and custody infrastructure adopted by many crypto industry players are still not up to speed to meet the safety requirements of legacy financial institutions.
The article Taiwan's crypto scene is booming, but still needs a clearer regulatory framework to thrive first appeared on TechNode.
Image Credit: Thomas Tucker on Unsplash


Vaikom: Chief Editor of Kesari Dr N R Madhu has stated that the Communist Party today stands in the grave yard of shattered ideology, owing to utter despair glaring at the party's face. Pointing out the Communists' style of indulging in anti-national activities while resorting to canards, he said that they have always been betraying the nation by joining hands with anti-national forces.
Speaking at the occasion of Taluk meet of Vaikom chapter of Bharatiya Vichara Kendra, Dr Madhu said that the party which once considered Russia as its father and China as its mother has now given the place to Pakistan. "With Pakistan's aid, they have ensured that there is a spate of explosion in India, where scores of Indians are killed. When Indian judiciary awarded people like the former with death penalty, the commemorative sessions for them, hailing them as martyrs," he said.
Lashing out at Kerala's Marxist bigwig Pinarayi Vijayan, Dr Madhu said that the former is the living ghost of Stalin, the person responsible for indulging in the most heinous genocides in the world. "There are three Yama 'Rajan's' who have sworn allegiance to Vijayan, executing the murders of scores of Swayamsevaks," he said.
There is no doubt that Communism is a dead ideology. The sooner the CPM and their supporters in Kerala realize this, the better.


text:
Conscience, Christ, and the Ballot Box
November 5, 2012 By Joel Beeke
As I said in a previous blog post, my conscience is convinced that I must vote for Mitt Romney. That has predictably generated some discussion. It's not surprising that there are various brothers and sisters in Christ who agree or disagree, some of the latter including dear friends whom I love a great deal.
In this post I would like to clarify a few matters and offer a prayer for the election tomorrow that I hope many can echo in their own prayers.
1) Accountable to God for Our Vote. When I put our voting responsibilities in the light of Judgment Day, I am not invoking God's wrath against those who vote for someone other than the Republican candidate. I am however reminding us of our accountability before God. As Christians we must do all things, including politics, in the fear of the Lord. Sins of commission and omission may bring fatherly discipline and a loss of reward on the great Day. The very fact that we are redeemed by the blood of Christ demands that we be holy (1 Peter 1:15–19).
2) No Excuse Not to Vote. In the blog post, I addressed two groups of people. My strongest words were reserved to Christians who do not vote for any presidential candidate. I believe that to fail to vote is to remain silent when God has given us a political voice to speak against abortion and immorality. Regardless of whom you mark on the ballot, the Christian should vote. The lives of millions of children are at stake, and God calls us to stand for the orphan in the political and judicial system (Isa. 1:17).
What Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote concerning the Nazi holocaust is equally true of today's abortion holocaust: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil; God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."
3) Need for Unified Opposition to Evil. The other group I addressed was believers who intend to vote for a third party candidate in the presidential election. I have empathy for them. I recognize the righteousness of supporting third party candidates where the main parties have lost their way. I also long to see godly and experienced Christians running in the primaries to gain Republican nominations.
However I do think that in this present election so much is at stake that we cannot afford to be fragmented among various presidential candidates. The Obama administration is not the run-of-the-mill liberalism we have seen in previous years. It is driving our nation full speed over a cliff of socialism and immorality into an abyss that is profoundly anti-Christian.
I understand that some believers have scruples of conscience against voting for Romney because he is only a moderate conservative and also not a Christian. My aim was, and is, to persuade their consciences that Christians need to use common sense. I freely admit that we don't have an ideal candidate, but this is a time to stand together against evil that the other party advocates so blatantly with its bold stand for unbiblical, homosexual marriage and its unabashed support for abortion.
4) Sovereignty, Responsibility, and Urgency. I have full confidence in God's providence over all things. Whoever rules the United States in 2013 will be appointed by God. At the same time, God's sovereign providence does not remove our moral responsibility, nor the suffering that poor choices bring. We should foresee these consequences and be motivated to choose wisely. There was indeed a strong tone to my exhortation and it was a tone of urgency. God's sovereignty does not make us passive or emotionless, but empowers us to take action.
5) The Supremacy of Christ. Jesus Christ is the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev. 17:14), including all Presidents of the United States. Even though the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing, God has enthroned His Christ and He will reign (Ps. 2:1–9). All men, whether kings or beggars, must bow the knee to Christ or suffer His wrath (Ps. 2:10–11). But because this King shed His precious blood, all who trust in Him, no matter how sinful they have been, will be blessed by God (Ps. 2:12).
Let me close with a prayer for election day.
Our Father, Lord of heaven and earth, Thou art very great. We praise Thee for Thy name is above all blessing and praise. Thou canst do immeasurably above all that we ask or think. Thou hast made the heavens and all their host, the earth and seas and all that fills them, and the angels of heaven do worship Thee.
Thou hast blessed our nation with an abundance of food and wealth. Thou hast revealed Thy law and gospel in Thy Holy Scriptures. Thou hast sent Thy Son to give His life a ransom for many. Thy servants have testified to our people.
Yet, O God, our land is bathed in the blood of innocents. We have taken Thy gifts, and made them our idols. We have hardened our hearts, and listened not to Thy commandments. We have turned Thy holy gospel into a license to sin. We have celebrated that which Thou dost condemn. We are a proud nation, and Thou dost hate pride.
Have mercy, O God, have mercy upon us! Thou dost not change, and therefore Thy people are not consumed. Forgive America for its many sins. Forgive each of us for all our sins. In wrath remember mercy. Thou didst promise that for the sake of ten righteous men Thou wouldst spare wicked Sodom. O God, hear the prayers of those who delight to fear Thy name, and do not give this nation over to a lie.
Thou art the Most High, who doth rule over the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever Thou wilt. If the heart of the king is in Thy hand to turn it as Thou pleasest, certainly then Thou rulest over the votes of the people. Direct their votes, we pray Thee, to those that will govern our nation with wisdom and lead us in ways that are right. Grant to us a president, senators, representatives, judges, governors, and other officials who will do us good and not harm. Give us a government under which Thy people, Thy church whom Thou dost love, may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.
Yet, Sovereign Lord, our deepest prayer is that Thou wouldst do whatever is necessary in the United States so that Thy name be hallowed, Thy kingdom come, and Thy will be done, both here and throughout the world, now and in all generations to come. Glorify Thyself in Thy church and in Thy Son now and forevermore. Amen.
Propaganda: Giving the Puritans a Bad Rap
A new rap song by Propaganda has caught the attention of a number of Christians in the blogosphere (lyrics here). It styles itself as a series of questions to a pastor who loves to quote the Puritans, criticizing them for their culpability in the slavery of African-Americans. The rap repeatedly uses the phrase "your precious puritans" in a way that is ironic, to say the least. It is sad that "precious" becomes a piece of sarcasm, for the Lord Himself said to His people that we are "precious in my sight" and "I have loved thee" (Isa. 43:4).
To his credit, Propaganda promotes the gospel of Christ in other raps, and says that he has learned a lot from reading the Puritans. But his rap song forcefully portrays them as deeply flawed men, profoundly guilty for their participation in the Atlantic slave trade and slave economy.
What should we make of this? The subjects of slavery and racism are huge, difficult, and beyond the scope of a single blog post. However, I would like to offer some perspective on Propaganda's rap song. There are three dimensions to Propaganda's song: emotional, historical, and theological. While these are intertwined, I think it will help to look at them one at a time.
(1) Emotional Dimension.
You don't have to read between the lines to see the pain and anger in this song. He raps about "bewilderment," "heart break," and an "anger" that "screams." Furthermore, he is not speaking just for himself, but as the voice behind "our facial expressions," presumably the African-Americans in the church. White people reading or hearing the rap are also drawn emotionally into the pain in the "shackled, diseased, imprisoned face." Propaganda's lines pierce.
The enslavement of African-Americans was a horrific and shameful evil. It remains a stain upon our national history, a sin that only the blood of Christ could cleanse away. To read of the conditions of our fellow human beings in this bondage is painful indeed. Yet, like the Holocaust and the present international atrocity of abortion, slavery must be faced in order that we may renounce it fully and strive to end all human trafficking that continues today.
His imaginary conversation with a pastor is an important reminder that this has implications for preaching and pastoral care. The moral and relational effects of slavery are multi-generational, and we should not pass lightly over the suffering experienced today by African-American citizens in America and our brothers and sisters in the church.
But Propaganda's song does not set a good example for us. Whatever his personal views may be, his rap portrays the Puritans in a starkly negative light. Some have commented that the song really isn't about the Puritans, but is a clever, artistic work designed to make us question ourselves and to treat no one as inerrant. We will return to this theological point in a moment, for it has value. But making that point does not justify depicting godly Christians in such a manner.
It is naïve to say that the song does not make us recoil in horror away from the picture it paints of the Puritans. Surely many people who hear the song will be moved to anger and disgust towards the Puritans and resentment towards those who quote them, unless they come to know them better. The song could create a false shame in lovers of Puritan literature, and also give ammunition to those who are eager to write off biblical and Reformed Christianity as bigotry.
Perhaps someone might object that Propaganda's song is just historical fact. Is that true? This brings us to the second dimension of his rap.
(2) Historical Dimension.
He characterizes the Puritans as "the chaplains on slave ships"—those who "purchased people" and believed that white men bore God's image in a way that black people don't. He also says, "Their fore-destined salvation contains a contentment in the stage for which they were given." These words imply that the Puritan doctrine of predestination was a weapon of oppression that taught people to be passive.
In reality, the Puritan's doctrine of unconditional election does not foster arrogance, but instead places people on an equal playing field before God as sinners utterly dependent on unmerited grace. The biblical teaching of God's providence does not make us passive towards wicked men, but inspires courageous activism to resist evil because we believe a sovereign God hears our prayers and is working out His plan through our efforts.
Furthermore, the Puritan view of authority and servitude contained the seeds that ultimately grew into anti-slavery doctrine. They taught that masters could not treat servants and slaves as mere property like a block of wood, but as human beings with rights. Puritans like William Gouge did believe in corporal punishment, but warned strongly against cruelty that would wound or disable people. William Perkins and the Westminster Larger Catechism also recognized that "man-stealing," the root of slavery, was a sin condemned in Scripture (Ex. 21:16; 1 Tim. 1:10). Some Puritans opposed the Atlantic slave trade, like Jonathan Edwards. Some Puritans followed this to the logical conclusion and opposed all slavery, such as Richard Baxter and Samuel Sewall. After the Puritan era ended and slavery grew in the magnitude of its evil, heirs of the Puritans such as Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and Alexander McLeod became strong advocates of the abolition of the bondage of African-Americans.
(For specific quotations and Puritan sources, click here.)
My point is this: if we view the Puritans only through the lens of their slave ownership, then we draw a lop-sided and inaccurate picture of their character and views. Their theological system held the key to unlock the slave's chains.
We must recognize that because of the sin and darkness that remain in the church, it takes a long time, sometimes generations, for the seeds of truth present in our theology to grow up and bear fruit in our practice. How many things will future generations see in us that will make them exclaim, "How could they tolerate that and still be godly Christians?" So we need to show a lot of grace to each other.
This brings me to the third and final aspect I want to consider in Propaganda's rap song.
(3) Theological Dimension.
The rapper ends on a surprising note. After reflecting on his own fallibility and blind spots, he says, "So I guess it's true. God really does use crooked sticks to make straight lines. Just like your precious puritans." The rap has a theological point, that the sovereign God uses flawed men and women to bring goodness and truth to the world. Amen! If that were not the case I would resign from ministry today. If we did not believe in God's sovereign grace, we would have to view the Psalms as suspect because David committed adultery and murder, and the writings of Peter as of dubious value because he denied the Lord Jesus three times. I am thankful that Propaganda made this point.
However, I believe that Propaganda's point needs more balance. It is true that believers in Christ still have much remaining corruption. The best of us have grievous sins, whether we are talking about the seventeenth century or the twenty-first century. But we are more than "crooked sticks." We are the saints of God. We are not hypocrites, mere pretenders wearing a Christian mask, but sincerely repentant sinners walking in the light of God. Paul thanked God for the exemplary faith, hope, and love in believers (1 Thess. 1:3, 7). He could even say, "Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ" (1 Cor. 11:1).
So while we need to be honest about the sins of our spiritual forefathers, let's be careful not to view them or portray them as if they were nothing but sinners. Slavery is a big issue, but we should not make it the defining issue in how we view people lest we fall into another kind of idolatry. The examples and teachings of the Puritans, while not flawless, are very valuable to all who would know the living God. This is not putting someone on a pedestal, but following in the footsteps of the faithful (1 Thess. 1:5–6; 2 Tim. 3:10). The Puritans really are "precious," not just to white people, but to all who love God and the Bible.
Flying Home from Africa
July 31, 2012 By Joel Beeke
Woodcutter in Mozambique
In the next few posts I would like to return to the end of my trip to Africa, and update you as well on events since then.
The long trek home began in the back end of a large, bouncy truck, included a quick stop at a souvenir shop, where we watched three men carve figurines from beautiful, dark wood. They will spend an entire day on one piece and then be grateful to sell it for $5. The average full-time employee in Mozambique earns $4 a day or about $110 a month. Most of the shops are owned not by local people, but by the Chinese and other nationalities. You can imagine this may create some tensions.
Nampula has 400,000 people but no malls and no large stores. They did have a Shoprite Store for a few years, which was great, as the local people could then get almost everything they needed at one stop. But its owners in South Africa became suspicious that embezzlement was taking place, and before they could investigate the whole building burned to the ground.
On the flight from Nampula to Johannesburg I sat next to a white woman who grew up in Zimbabwe. She looked much older than she was. She and her husband, who are Christians, have tried to start several businesses throughout their lifetime, but all to no avail. Customers often don't pay for services rendered. Moreover, each time they acquired a few earthly possessions, thugs broke into their home and stole it all—even down to food from the cupboard and drinks from the fridge. They have been left "penniless many times," she said. Now they are in dire straits and pray daily for God's provision.
To go from the poverty of Nampula to the luxury of the Johannesburg airport is a bit of a culture shock. The 17-hour overnight flight from South Africa to Washington, D.C. (with one drop down in Senegal), went well despite my exhaustion. I enjoyed editing Dr. Andrew Woolsey's doctoral dissertation on the development of covenant theology. What a ground-breaking book this is! I am so glad that Reformation Heritage Books is going to publish it.
My flight landed three hours late in Washington D.C., so I missed my flight to Chicago. That was the beginning of a strange 10-hour saga in which I tried to get tickets to Chicago and on to GR—first, successfully; then, unsuccessfully, as my boarding passes didn't register after all. Meanwhile, Mary called me and told me that my dear mother was dying, which made getting home all the more urgent. Finally, I got on standby to Chicago. Because the plane stayed at the gate for an extra hour to take on additional customers, I then missed my Grand Rapids connection.
All the Chicago-Grand Rapids flights were full for the remainder of the day and evening, but in God's kindness, I managed again to get on by standby. The fact that my mother was dying did not help at all, but having "Silver Elite" status as a "frequent flyer" did, as I was put at the head of the standby list on both occasions. Had that not been the case, I would not have been able to make it home at all that day. As it was, I didn't arrive home until 8:00 p.m. It took me 39 hours to get from Mozambique to Grand Rapids—the longest airport trek of my life. One could fly around the world in that amount of time!
Our family went straight from the airport to Kalamazoo to see my dying mother. After praying, singing, and talking, we said a second tearful goodbye, telling her that we would meet her on the other side, God willing, to spend an eternity together praising Christ. We then drove up to Grand Rapids to see Johanna Mast, who was in the same condition as my mother. After visiting with them, and working our way through pre-arrangements for a potential funeral, I finally arrived home just before midnight.


Two-thirds of voters want a referendum on British membership of the European Union before the next general election, a new opinion poll has found.
The results are a blow to David Cameron, who last week said that while he was prepared to call a referendum at some point, now was not the time given the economic crisis facing the Eurozone.
He rejected a call by many Conservative backbenchers for the issue to be put to voters before or at the general election, which is due to be held in 2015.
The poll, by YouGov for The Sun newspaper, found that only 29 per cent of the public backed the Prime Minister's "wait and see" stance.
In total, 67 per cent wanted a referendum within the next few years while 19 per cent did not and 14 per cent were unsure.
If given a choice today, nearly half, 48 per cent, would favour British withdrawal from the EU compared to 31 per cent who want to remain within the Union.
However, if Mr Cameron is able to carry out his promise to renegotiate Britain's role within Europe, a significant majority would support staying in the EU, by 42 per cent to 34 per cent. The rest are unsure.
The poll also found that 65 per cent of voters wanted the Prime Minister to set out a clear timetable stating which powers he wishes to see returned to Britain from Brussels, and when he hoped to achieve this. Only 24 per cent backed him to negotiate new terms "when the time is right".
Last week, Mr Cameron called on his party to show "patience" over the referendum issue. Asked if they trusted him to deliver a referendum after renegotiating a fresh settlement with Europe, only 29 per cent of voters said they gave their "total trust," while 32 per cent said they "do not trust at all" and 30 per cent "do not trust a lot".
Overall, just 23 per cent said that British membership of the EU was a "good thing," compared to 36 per cent when the same question was posed eight years ago. Another 43 per cent said it was a "bad thing," compared to 33 per cent in 2008.
The campaign for a referendum is led within the Conservative Party by the Fresh Start Group, which will tomorrow release a report suggesting which powers should be repatriated, including justice, energy, agriculture, defence, and worker rights.
They say that Mr Cameron should take advantage of ongoing talks to save the Eurozone, which could result in a new EU Treaty, to address the matter.
Writing in The Sun, MPs Andrea Leadsom, Chris Heaton Harris and George Eustice of Fresh Start, said: "The UK needs to put Europe on notice that we're deadly serious about going in a very different direction.
Mr Cameron receives some consolation from the poll, which shows that he is trusted more than most other senior politicians to stand up for Britain's interest.
Only William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, had the trust of more of the public, with 37 per cent, one per cent more than the Prime Minister.
Just 28 per cent trust Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, with 20 per cent saying they trust Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister.
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister, is trusted by only 19 per cent to stand up for Britain, the same figure as for Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, and one per cent more than George Osborne, the Chancellor.
Asked to name the best thing about British membership of the EU, 41 per cent said free trade, 21 per cent the freedom to live in other countries, the same figure as peace and stability, and 19 per cent raised cooperation on such issues as anti-terrorism measures and the environment.
The worst thing about membership according to voters is immigration from Eastern Europe, at 45 per cent, interference with how member states are run, at 40 per cent, cost at 31 per cent and bureaucracy 30 per cent.


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A Day in the Life of Parksville
Parksville lifter pumped for first meet
Local teen takes aim at powerlifting title at Taranis Open competition in Victoria
J.R. Rardon
Billy Buhler
When Parksville teen Billy Buhler took up weight training two-and-a-half years ago, his motivation was simple.
"I was a fat kid," he said. "I was trying to get less fat."
Buhler, now 17, has a rather more weighty goal for this weekend, when he takes aim at the B.C. powerlifting record book in his first competition.
He will compete in the annual Taranis Open on Sunday in Victoria, with qualifying lifts that already place him among the top age-group lifters that have ever entered the meet. He will tackle the squat, bench press and dead lift in the 14-18 year-old class at 105 kilograms (231 pounds).
"Billy's probably the strongest 17-year-old we had in the gym, and we've been open 15 years now," said Dale Nagra, owner of Parksville's Bodyworks Fitness and one of Buhler's trainers at the gym.
Buhler, a 2016 Ballenas Secondary School graduate, grew up playing hockey, baseball and lacrosse, and also spent a year on the Ballenas wrestling team. Since taking up weight training, he said, he has gotten not only physically stronger, but mentally stronger and more confident.
He also became something of a student of the discipline, studying history and following some of his favourite lifters through YouTube videos and other programs.
It was while watching some of his "power idols" that the seed of powerlifting competition began to grow in his mind late last year. He brought up the subject with trainer and training partner Alex Adams.
"He asked me, 'What do you want to do, get lean for the summer, or compete in powerlifting?'" said Buhler. "Because the training is different. I was at a crossroads, and with this competition coming up, I decided I wanted to try powerlifting."
One of the differences in training is that Buhler could pretty much eat what he wanted, as the former "fat kid" worked to bulk up from 220 pounds to near the 231-pound maximum in his class during the 10-week training for the Taranis Open.
But training is about much more than getting big, said Nagra, who said Buhler's dedication to the sport and his workouts should offset his lack of experience in competition.
The teen works at Eat Fresh Market, and when his work schedule cuts short his morning training, he'll return to the gym after work for a second workout.
"He is as dedicated as anyone I've known," said Nagra, a former powerlifter who set a Canadian record in the bench press while competing two decades ago.
"He knows that if you miss a workout, your competition is still training."
Lifting has become so central to Buhler's existence that he has worked it into his career plans. He will take the coming year off from school, then plans to enrol in university, with a major in business.
"I'm going to be lifting for the rest of my life," he said. "I have a plan for a business that involves fitness and weightlifting."
"He's going to be my competition," Nagra joked.
Buhler admits he's had a couple of recent setbacks while preparing for the coming competition. Adams, who had been planning to spot and serve a support role for Buhler during the meet, plays with the Vancouver Island Raiders football club and will have to play a game that day.
Also, Buhler just last week learned the silicone sleeves he'd used for his knees while squat lifting were not allowed in the competition.
Nagra stepped into the breach to serve as Buhler's spotter and support crew — the equivalent of a boxer's corner man — and will apply the traditional supportive knee wraps as well as providing feedback on the youth's lifts and generally ensuring all Buhler has to worry about is making the lift.
But Nagra said he doesn't need to worry about providing motivation.
"He's going to have so much adrenaline, especially this being his first competition," Nagra said. "I won't have to pump him up."
Buhler has personal-best lifts of 290 pounds in the bench press, 440 pounds in the squat and 500 in the dead lift. He will get three lifts in each discipline to establish a combined weight total in Sunday's meet.
Asked if he knew who his competition would be in the meet, Buhler hesitated a beat.
"I am the competition," he said with a small smile. "I'm not coming to take second place; I'm coming to take first place."
Reds looking for redemption
Ravensong Breakers swimmer earns silver and records
Naked Naturals has tentative deal for $2.5M purchase of town-owned land in Qualicum Beach
Business plan includes a new grocery store, 32 units of rental housing and parking
Oceanside RCMP seek help identifying a suspect following theft from Parksville liquor store
Incident occurred in early December
Council passes resolution regarding construction of roundabout in Qualicum Beach
Town hopes to get additional funds from a Beautification Grant
Clinic helps retired Parksville educator return to running
ORCA Learn to Run program to start Feb. 5
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The YBBS > The New News > Unemployment Spreads Distress In U.S. Home Loans
View Full Version : Unemployment Spreads Distress In U.S. Home Loans
Unemployment spreads distress in U.S. home loans
http://www.reuters.com/article/economicNews/idUSN2927878020090730
NEW YORK, July 30 (Reuters) - Cities in the U.S. Sun Belt states of California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona dominated the record foreclosure spree in the first half of the year, but distress in other regions emerged as joblessness spread, RealtyTrac said on Thursday.
Metro areas with populations of at least 200,000 in those four states accounted for 35 of the 50 highest foreclosure rates.
Mortgages have failed the fastest in the areas with the greatest overbuilding, purchases by speculators and reliance on riskier loan products to improve affordability.
But the source of the mortgage trouble has swung from lax lending standards to unemployment.
Some of the areas with the most severe foreclosure activity have started to show improvement as price cuts and first-time buyer tax credits lure purchasers.
With the unemployment rate near a 26-year high and many employers cutting wages, more consumers in areas that were initially spared in the foreclosure explosion are now behind in their home loan payments.
More than 20 percent of areas with above-average foreclosure activity were in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arkansas, Illinois and South Carolina in the first half of the year. That shift points to growing unemployment more than to fallout from subprime and adjustable-rate loans, RealtyTrac said in its midyear metropolitan foreclosure market report.
While total foreclosure activity kept rising, "some of the markets that had the highest saturation of foreclosures over the past few years have seen declining rates, while new markets like Provo, Utah, and Boise, Idaho, have seen large increases," James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, said in a statement.
"As unemployment rates increase in different parts of the country, it's very likely that we'll see similar patterns develop elsewhere," he said.
Home prices through May plunged more than 32 percent from their mid-2006 peak, with losses varying sharply depending on region, according to Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller indexes.
A rise in foreclosure properties pressure prices of other homes for sale.
"As unemployment rises, we are seeing a change in the financial profile of the people seeking our help," Suzanne Boas, president of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Atlanta, said this week.
"We are serving an increasing number of people who work in professional services and skilled trades," she said. "These people have maintained solid incomes their entire lives, but are now in financial trouble and are reaching out for counseling to help avoid foreclosure."
In June, 72 percent of homeowners who got foreclosure prevention counseling from the agency, which serves all 50 states, were either unemployed or reported a drop in income.
RealtyTrac this month reported a record 1.9 million foreclosure filings on more than 1.5 million properties in the first six months of this year. The pace picked up after various temporary freezes ended in March. For details, see [ID:nN15368203].
The company forecasts 4 million filings for the year.
SOME LIGHT AT TUNNEL'S END
Las Vegas, Nevada, had the highest metro foreclosure rate, with 7.45 percent, or one of every 13 households with a loan, getting at least one filing in the first half of the year. Filings include notice of default and auctions.
Cape Coral-Fort Myers area in Florida had the second highest rate and Merced, California was third. Both reported a slight decrease in foreclosure activity from the previous six months but a higher pace than the first half of 2008.
Other metro areas in the top 10 were the California cities of Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Stockton, Modesto, Bakersfield and Vallejo-Fairfield; the Phoenix metro area and Orlando, Florida, metro area.
Foreclosure activity rose in all but Stockton and Modesto from the prior six months and from the first half of 2008.
Stockton had a 4 percent drop in the first half from the prior six months and a nearly 13 percent fall from the first half of 2008.
Other hard-hit areas showed declining foreclosure activity in the first half, including Detroit and Cleveland, RealtyTrac said.


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text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}

For human manipulation, neural receptors inside human fingers provide information of mechanical interaction and thus play a pivotal role in dexterous manipulations \cite{johansson1996sensory}. Similarly, artificial tactile sensors have been adopted and demonstrated to be effective in robotic systems for tasks including sensing object geometry \cite{johnson2009retrographic}, contact force \cite{vlack2005gelforce,yuan2015measurement,ma2018dense}, and detecting contact slippage \cite{yuan2015measurement,li2018slip}.
However, tactile sensing technology makes progress slowly for reasons including fabrication difficulties, limited resolution, multiplexing complexity, etc. \cite{dahiya2010tactile}. Apart from difficulties in hardware development, the inherent high dimensionality of tactile signals also challenges algorithms on information interpretation.

Among multi-modality tactile signals, detection of contact events (e.g. contact making, slippage, etc.) is irreplaceable for action adaptation. Also, anticipatory control policies support dexterous object manipulation by avoiding long time delays in human nervous system \cite{johansson1996sensory}.
To mimic human touch feedback, multiple works have put efforts in integrating tactile sensing into contact events detection \cite{yuan2015measurement,dong2018maintaining}. However, few previous work has extensively studied contact event perception. Neither thorough contact event categorization nor generalizability of analytical methods is presented in previous works. Besides, for the nature of the high dimensionality of tactile signals, model-based methods have exceptional difficulties in interpreting useful contact information from raw readings. Data-driven methods are superior in learning patterns from high dimensional data. Therefore, some works have explored interpreting contact slip with learning methods \cite{li2018slip,veiga2015stabilizing,su2015force,van2018slip}.
As far as we know, thorough contact event categorization and classification utilizing deep learning frameworks have not been explored, given its important role in reactive grasp manipulations.

Two major problems that hinder the processing effectiveness of tactile readings are: 1) unavailable suitable neural network; 2) lack of properly labelled tactile sequence data.
Artificial functionality of sensing contact events that provides ground truth labelling for tactile sequences is not yet available as a tool. Therefore, we design a scheme taking advantage of the human sense of touch to label tactile sequences.
Towards the goal of tactile signal interpretation, we propose a neural network to process spatiotemporal readings and collect 6650 trials of contact sequence as a dataset. Raw tactile images are retrieved from FingerVision (first named in \cite{yamaguchi2016combining}) tactile sensor we developed \cite{zhang2018fingervision} (see Figure \ref{fig:training_objects}(a)) that outputs deformation images of the elastomer. A robot can employ the model in predicting and detecting contact events, preventing the robot from lifting target objects without enough contact and guaranteeing stable grasping by applying extra gripping force when unstable contact events appear. This work presents the first attempt to classify contact events into explicit 7 categories, and experimental results demonstrate that incorporating predictions and detections of contact events can substantially improve the grasping capability.

\textbf{Contributions}:
1) Collect a dataset containing vision-based tactile sequences with careful labelling by human expert is collected.
2) Propose a network capable of predicting and detecting tactile contact events that is critical to robotic grasping systems.

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.98\textwidth]{./figures/example_tactile_raw_displacement.png}
    \caption{Examples of tactile raw images (first row) and the corresponding images of displacement vector fields (second row) collected by FingerVision. Displacement vectors are represented in HSV color specification space: Hue=Direction, Saturation=1, Value=Magnitude.}
    \label{fig:example_raw_disp}
    \vspace{-0.4cm}
\end{figure}

\section{Conclusion and Discussion}
\label{sec:conclusion}

Humans manipulate objects with smooth transitions between contact phases by predicting and detecting contact events. In this paper, we try to endow the robot with similar capabilities. To this goal, we develop a contact event prediction and detection network, consisting of classification and sequence prediction subnetworks. We collect a contact sequence dataset of size 6650 with careful labelling by a human expert. Taking a separate training and evaluation scheme, the results show that the subnetworks outperform baselines on inference tasks given tactile sequences. Jointly, we integrate the networks together and implement real grasp experiments, of which the results show that the proposed framework grant robotic grasping system with new skills and improve overall performance.

In our work, we attempt to predict and detect contact events in the absence of visual modality and proprioceptive input. However, we observe that for contact making and breaking, PixelMotionNet is incapable of capturing changes that happen in relatively short time, which leads to an inaccurate prediction. On one hand, this stems from limited frame rate of hardware set up. On the other hand, vision and proprioceptive signals could potentially alleviate this problem by building a robotic perception system based on multi-modality sensor fusion. This raises an interesting direction as our future work.

\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:exp}

In this section, we present settings of the network training and baseline comparisons first, then describe the implementation of reactive grasping experiments with integration of the proposed network.

\subsection{Network Training and Baseline Comparison}

We train separately the sub-networks considering better convergences and more convenient model evaluations. After separate training, our cascaded network takes in tactile image sequences and predicts jointly the probabilities of each class, as shown in Figure 2(a). All networks run on a computer with Intel i7-6700K CPU and NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti GPU, with batch size of 16, Adam optimizer \cite{kingma2014adam} and early stopping mechanism to prevent overfitting. To regularize the networks in the training phase, an extra weight decay with value of 0.05 is added. Considering the relatively small dataset size, small initial learning rates $4 \times 10^{-5}$ and $6 \times 10^{-5}$ are employed and decreased with training epoch for classification and video prediction network, respectively. For both training, dataset was split into training set and validation set with ratio of $9:1$ sampled randomly with a fixed random seed. After split, resulting support for each class is evenly spread.

For classification network, two additional baselines are selected. One is ConvLSTM, of which we flatten the output and then feed the vector to two FC layers. The another is a cascaded Convolution neural network (CNN) with a vanilla LSTM (CNN+LSTM). Three models are all built with relatively shallow structure bearing the goal to achieve real-time capability for decentralized processing of tactile units.

For the video prediction network, quantitative evaluation of the proposed PixelMotionNet, state-of-the-art models PredNet \cite{lotter2016deep} and ConvLSTM \cite{xingjian2015convolutional} are presented. Models are trained only on a subset of 4 classes in the dataset without rolling, making contact, and breaking contact data, considering the degradation of video prediction performance when encountering these abrubtly varying events with hardly observable temporal coherences. Mean square error (MSE) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) \cite{wang2004image} are metrics used for evaluation.

\subsection{Performance Evaluation}
Following performance evaluations are all on the validation set.

\textbf{Classification network.} Performances of LSTM and baseline models on tactile sequence classification are summarized in Table~\ref{tab:baseline_comparison}. Here evaluation metrics including forward propagation time $T_f$, accuracy, average precision, average recall, average F1-score over all classes, $N_{in}$ with which models achieved the best performances, and end epochs during training are given.

From the experimental results, LSTM outperforms the other two baseline models in all aspects except for the forward propagation time. ConvLSTM is superior in model size and acceleration on forward propagation for its weights sharing convolution layer compared to the fully connected structure in the vanilla LSTM. LSTM network overall achieves an accuracy peak of 98.50\% costing short forwarding time with $N_{in} = 12$.

\begin{table}[]
\centering
\small
\caption{Best performances and properties of models.}
\label{tab:baseline_comparison}
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{2.7mm}{
\begin{tabular}{cccccccc}
\toprule
Model & Acc(\%) & Prec (\%) & Rec (\%) & F1 (\%) & $T_f$ (ms) & $N_{in}$ & End Epoch \\ \midrule
ConvLSTM & 87.86 & 88.01 & 88.12 & 87.92 & \textbf{2.7} & 11 & 95\\
CNN+LSTM & 92.14 & 92.19 & 92.13 & 92.1 & 32.7 & 10 & 78\\
\textbf{LSTM} & \textbf{98.50} & \textbf{98.63} & \textbf{98.39} & \textbf{98.50} & 9.4 & 12 & 55\\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
}
\vspace{-0.4cm}
\end{table}

\begin{table}[]
\centering
\small
\caption{Evaluation of models on predicting future frames, w.r.t. the future frame index.}
\label{tab:video_metrics}
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{ccccccc}
\toprule
Model & Metrics & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 \\ \midrule
\multirow{2}{*}{ConvLSTM} & MSE & 0.642$\pm$2.2930 & 0.940$\pm$3.600 & 1.310$\pm$5.7200 & 1.560$\pm$7.4700 & 1.800$\pm$9.4300 \\
 & SSIM & 0.950$\pm$0.0100 & 0.940$\pm$0.0200 & 0.970$\pm$0.0300 & 0.850$\pm$0.0400 & 0.830$\pm$0.0400 \\
\multirow{2}{*}{PredNet} & MSE & 0.304$\pm$0.1580 & 0.259$\pm$0.1660 & 0.341$\pm$0.2110 & 0.483$\pm$1.0900 & 0.649$\pm$1.3900 \\
 & SSIM & 0.976$\pm$0.0009 & 0.974$\pm$0.0040 & 0.967$\pm$0.0040 & 0.956$\pm$0.0059 & 0.940$\pm$0.0069 \\
\multirow{2}{*}{\textbf{PixelMotionNet}} & MSE & \textbf{0.024$\pm$0.0005} & \textbf{0.061$\pm$0.0049} & \textbf{0.107$\pm$0.0142} & \textbf{0.179$\pm$0.1060} & \textbf{0.301$\pm$0.1680} \\
 & SSIM & \textbf{0.990$\pm$0.0001} & \textbf{0.988$\pm$0.0002} & \textbf{0.979$\pm$0.0006} & \textbf{0.970$\pm$0.0018} & \textbf{0.957$\pm$0.0029} \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
}
\vspace{-0.4cm}
\end{table}

\textbf{Video prediction network.} Quantitatively, from the results in Table~\ref{tab:video_metrics}, PixelMotionNet is superior in both metrics compared to the other two baselines. We notice that the farther the network predicts, the larger the divergence between the prediction and the ground truth is. Furthermore, variations of predictions rise as future frame index increases, which is reasonable since the pixel value expectations of the future frames are less predictable as the network predicts further into the furture. Qualitatively, in Figure~\ref{fig:image_prediction}, the predicted future frames are illustrated aside with the ground truth frames to show how well the prediction network performs on the validation set. The PixelMotionNet captures the motion of force concentration and pixel values successfully (the result is more than copying the last image of the input sequence). It can be also seen that as the models predict more frames into the future, blurrier the images become, which is consistent with the quantitative analysis.

\subsection{Experiments in Real-time Grasping}

Since what we concern more in practice is how well the contact event prediction and detection networks help robotic manipulation, we directly perform real-time grasping experiments integrating the proposed network instead of evaluating it on a test dataset. In the grasping experiments, we install the FingerVision sensor on a Robotiq 2-finger gripper mounted on a UR10 robotic arm, as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:grasp_scene_obj}(a). This section is supplemented with a video document.

\textbf{Contact detection experiment.} To evaluate the performance of our framework in detecting contact making, we test the grasping success rate with and without our tactile contact detection on 10 objects with different shapes, sizes, and materials, as presented in Figure \ref{fig:grasp_scene_obj}(b). We first choose the grasping sites and measure the required gripper openings with ruler manuly, with which the objects can be narrowly grasped and lifted. Then we add a small noise with standard deviation $\sigma_n=1$ mm to simulate noises in non-contact measurements, e.g., vision, and test if the gripper can grasp and lift the objects. For open-loop operation, the gripper closes until it reaches target opening, while for close-loop grasp, the gripper adjusts its opening until the network indicates contact making event. 10 trials are executed on each object in both groups. The number of successful trials for each object and average success rate are summarized in Table~\ref{tab:grasping}. The success rate of these 10 objects is $46\%$ without contact detection while $98\%$ with the contact detection, reflecting that the contact detection facilitates the grasping significantly.

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{figures/example_prediction_images.png}
    \caption{Tactile sequence prediction by PixelMotionNet: ground truth sequence vs. predicted sequence.}
    \label{fig:image_prediction}
    \vspace{-0.4cm}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[thb]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.4\columnwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=3.5cm]{figures/grasping_scene.png}
  \caption{Experiment scene}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.4\columnwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=3.5cm]{figures/objects}
  \caption{Grasping objects}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Real-time grasping experiments are performed on 10 distinct-shape objects. Grasping sites are denoted by blue dots in (b).}
\label{fig:grasp_scene_obj}
\vspace{-0.4cm}
\end{figure}

\textbf{Stable grasp under slippage.} Complementary to the above experiments, a further ability test of the proposed framework to help stabilize grasped object under external disturbance by predicting and detecting slip occurrence is performed. In this experiment, a gripper with the tactile sensor holds the object, then weights are loaded on top of the object one by one to trigger slip on the contact surfaces, as illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:slip_sustain}. Different outcomes under increasing loads are given in Figure \ref{fig:slip_sustain}(b) and (c), without and with slip prediction by our framework respectively. With same initial gripper opening, while gripper lost stable contact after 3 weights were loaded without slip prediction, it maintained stable grasp with all 7 weights loaded by actively controlling the gripper's opening when slip prediction is provided. Qualitatively, slip prediction mechanism enhances the ability of the grasping system under external disturbances.

Overall, the experimental results suggest that the proposed framework is able to cover multiple phases of robotic grasping and enhance grasping system performance substantially.

\begin{figure}[thb]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.25\columnwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=2.5cm]{figures/initial.png}
  \caption{Initial state}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.25\columnwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=2.5cm]{figures/fail.png}
  \caption{Slip occurs}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.25\columnwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=2.5cm]{figures/success.png}
  \caption{Stable grasp}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Slip happens in (b) without slip prediction while grasp remains stable with slip prediction in (c) under increasing load. (Better shown in video)}
\label{fig:slip_sustain}
\vspace{-0.4cm}
\end{figure}

\setlength{\tabcolsep}{4pt}
\begin{table}[t]
\centering
\small
\caption{Grasping Success Rates}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c c c}
\toprule
Detection & Box & Ball & Chess & Yellow & Bottle & Cup & Cone & Rabbit & Mouse & Power & Average \\
\midrule
Without & $2$ & $3$ & $6$ & $6$ & $2$ & $6$ & $5$ & $6$ & $5$ & $5$ & $46\%$ \\
\rowcolor[gray]{1.0}
With & $10$ & $10$ & $10$ & $9$ & $10$ & $10$ & $10$ & $10$ & $9$ & $10$ & $\mathbf{98\%}$ \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:grasping}
\vspace{-0.5cm}
\end{table}
\section{Related Works}
\label{sec:related_works}

\textbf{Contact event detection.} Previous studies on human contact event detection have proven its importance for the interaction with environment. During a reaching and picking operation, four types of mechanoreceptors in human hand respond to contact events with different firing patterns, cooperatively extracting spatiotemporal features associated with mechanical contact events \cite{johansson1996sensory}.
Most of the previous works on contact events studies focused on slip detection. Analytical methods with hand-crafted features have been presented in literatures.
Heyneman et al. \cite{heyneman2016slip} proposed two features based on spectral analyses extracted from dynamic tactile sensors that could be used to discriminate hand/object and object/world slip.
Yuan et al. \cite{yuan2015measurement} presented entropy feature of the deformation fields from vision-based tactile sensor Gelsight to segment sensing area into slipping and stable regions with properly selected thresholds.

Since the generalizability of these model-based methods with hand-crafted features
were not tested in large number of repetitions and on different contact properties, data-driven methods, by comparison, are more appealing.
Su et al. \cite{su2015force} proposed to classify tactile signals into slip and stable categories with a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) using BioTac tactile sensor \cite{wettels2008biomimetic}. However, classification performance was not adequate for robotic operations (accuracy around 80\%).
SVM \cite{cortes1995support}, random forest \cite{liaw2002classification}, Long-short-term-memory (LSTM) network \cite{hochreiter1997long} and convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) \cite{xingjian2015convolutional} have been applied to various tactile sensors \cite{veiga2015stabilizing, van2018slip, zapata2019learning} to generate slip/nonslip classifications.
In this work, we provide a finer categorization of contact events by borrowing insights of neuron firing patterns triggered by distingshed contact events during human manipulations \cite{johansson1996sensory}. Based on these categories, we propose a classification network and conduct extensive evaluations.

\textbf{Video prediction.} We are interested in predicting future frames of tactile image sequences in an unsupervised learning fashion. Currently, the state-of-the-art models of video prediction are PredNet \cite{lotter2016deep} with a inter-frame difference feed-forward operation, network in \cite{finn2016unsupervised} with pixel-transformation-based module called Dynamic Neural Advection (DNA), etc. ConvLSTM \cite{xingjian2015convolutional} units are building blocks of these two models, which extract spatial and temporal features simultaneously. While both two models successfully predict future frames with more natural looks and fewer defects, they are more suitable for videos involving only rigid body objects.
In our work, we propose a pixel motion network (``PixelMotionNet") that explicitly predicts the velocity of each individual pixel's value that is added afterwards to the current frame to obtain a future frame. This network shows superior performance on tactile sequence prediction by comparison.

\section{Learning Contact Event Detection and Predicting }
\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{figures/network_new.png}

    \caption{Network structure for contact events prediction. (a) Network structure.}
    \label{fig:network}
    \vspace{-0.3cm}
\end{figure}

In this work, we propose a LSTM-based neural network architecture as a spatiotemporal video sequence classifier for vision-based tactile data. In this section, a pipeline for tactile image sequence processing is introduced first and then description of the neural network structure is given.

\subsection{Tactile Image Preprocessing}
Instead of directly feeding the raw tactile images into neural networks \cite{calandra2017feeling}, we preprocess raw images (see Figure \ref{fig:example_raw_disp}) to acquire displacement fields. The sensor surface undergoes different deformations while making contact with different objects.
By tracking the motions of the markers and then applying interpolation (for smoothness), the displacement vector fields are retrieved. In Figure \ref{fig:example_raw_disp}, 2-D displacement vector fields are color-coded in HSV space to facilitate better visualization, in which color and intensity represent direction and magnitude of vectors, respectively.

we extract tactile displacement images iteratively and then stack samples within a time window of $t_w$ as a sequence. Let $D[n]$ be the tactile image at $n^{th}$ sample in the sequence $S$, $N_s$ be the length of the tactile sequence and $f_s$ be the sampling frequency. $D[n]$ has two channels, $dX[n]$ and $dY[n]$, which are projection components of $V_d$ along X and Y axes respectively, on a grid of size $N_h \times N_w$. Then the collected sequence $S$ can be represented as

\begin{equation}
    S = \{D[n]\  |\  D[n]=\left(dX[n], dY[n]\right)^T, n=0, 1, ...,N_s\}
    \label{eq:sequence}
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation*}
    \begin{split}
        dX[n]\{i, j\} &= \langle \vec{V}_d\{i, j\}, \vec{e}_1 \rangle \vec{e}_1 \\
        dY[n]\{i, j\} &= \langle \vec{V}_d\{i, j\}, \vec{e}_2 \rangle \vec{e}_2 \\

    \end{split}

\end{equation*}
$i=0,...,N_w$ and $j=0,...,N_h$ and $\vec{e}_1$, $\vec{e}_2$ denote the orthonormal bases for the X and Y axes on the sensor's coordinate system respectively.

In our configuration, the system runs at frequency $f_s=30$ Hz, and time window $t_w=1$ s, therefore each sequence contains 30 samples of deformation images. To further reduce the forward-propagation time of the network, we resample the original sequences with a stride of 2, thus the length of each resampled sequence $N_s=15$. After  interpolation, entries of each $dX[n]$ and $dY[n]$ are of shape $30\times30$. Succinctly, we have $D[n] \in \mathbb{R}^{C_h\times N_h \times N_w}$, where $C_h$ denotes the number of channels ($C_h=2$ in our case).

\subsection{Network Architecture}

The collected dataset is in the form of $I=\{S^1,...,S^K\}$, with $K$ being the number of samples. Corresponding to each sequence, label $y^i \in \mathbb{R}^C$ is in the one-hot encoding, where $C$ denotes the number of classes. The proposed network in Figure \ref{fig:network} consists of two subnetworks: Contact event detection network and video prediction network.

\textbf{Contact Event Detection Network.} The event detection network is a long-short-term-memory network (LSTM). Input to this network is sequences of tactile images $S_v = \{D_v[1], ...,D_v[N_s]\}$, where $D_v[n] \in \mathbb{R}^{M\times 1}$ and $M=1800$.
To estimate the probabilities of a sequence $S_v$ that belongs to certain class, the last hidden state vector at position $n=N_s$ is fed into two cascaded Fully-Connected (FC) layers and a Softmax layer.
To avoid overfitting in the training phase, two Dropout \cite{srivastava2014dropout} regularization layers with possibility of 0.5 are added, as depicted in Figure 2(b). Loss of the network is a reduced multi-class cross entropy between ground truth encodings and the corresponding predicted probability vectors.

\textbf{Video Prediction Network.} The network PixelMotionNet is composed of convolution/upsampling and ConvLSTM modules with a skip connection and an additive operation, as illustrated in Figure \ref{fig:network}(a). The model predicts the value expectation of each pixel in the next frame depending on spatiotemporal features propagated from previous image frames, inspired by the pixel transformation module presented in \cite{finn2016unsupervised, jaderberg2015spatial}. Upsampling layers recover feature maps back to the original size for the additive operation between the predicted pixel motion map and the current frame. Future frame prediction can be seen as a small modification by the pixel motion prediction map on the current frame. Different from \cite{finn2016unsupervised}, correlations between value changes of pixels in this study are only constrained by the sizes of the convolution kernels, instead of a spatial extent parameter. For multiple-frame prediction scenario, estimated next frames are circulated as new inputs back to the prediction network iteratively.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.25\columnwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=3.0cm]{figures/sensor.png}
  \caption{}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.74\columnwidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=3.0cm]{figures/Example_of_training_objects.PNG}
  \caption{}
\end{subfigure}

\caption{FingerVision sensor (a) and objects used for data collection (b).}
\label{fig:training_objects}
\vspace{-0.5cm}
\end{figure}

The problem of spatiotemporal sequence prediction is to predict the most likely future sequence with length $N_{p}$ given the previous $N_{in}$ observations. For the PixelMotionNet, the loss function used during the training phase is $L^2$-norm of the difference between the ground truth images and the predicted ones. Suppose the future frame sequence is $\hat{S}$, $\hat{S}$ is computed by the following transformation function given an input sequence $S = \{D[1],...,D[N_{in}] \}$

\begin{equation}
    \hat{S} = \{\hat{D}[1+N_{in}],...,\hat{D}[N_{p}+N_{in}] \} = \mathcal{T}(S, \theta_v)
\end{equation}
and the loss is given by
\begin{equation}
    \mathcal{L} = \frac{1}{N_{p}}\sum^{N_{p}}_{k=1} (\hat{D}[k+N_{in}] - D[k+N_{in}])^2
\end{equation}
where $N_{in}$ and $N_{p}$ are lengths of the input frames and future frames, $\theta_v$ is the learned parameters of the prediction network, $\mathcal{T}$ is the transformation function of the PixelMotionNet.

\section{Data Collection}

Tactile image sequences span across temporal and spatial dimensions. When the tactile sensing area undergoes certain contact events, the tactile images evolve accordingly. In previous works, automatic and outcome-associated contact events labelling methods were adopted. In \cite{su2015force}, an IMU-based slip detecter was used to automatically annotate tactile readings during grasping into slip or nonslip. In \cite{li2018slip, veiga2015stabilizing, calandra2017feeling}, external cameras monitor relative motions between grippers and objects, or extra contact making/breaking detection networks are pre-trained as grasp success/failure discriminators. Object dropping from gripper is a consequence of unstable contacts, and the labelling of the tactile image with success or failure of grasping is reasonable only for stability estimation. However, dynamic grasping adjustment on the fly requires more temporal accuracy on labeling time windows during when contact events happen.
\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{figures/data_samples.png}
    \caption{Example network input image sequences with different labels. Extra resampling with stride of 2 is applied for visualization and saving space.}
    \label{fig:network_input}
    \vspace{-0.3cm}
\end{figure}

In this work, labelling of data is handled by a human expert. The reason why human involved in  this procedure is that automatic data collection requires a  heuristic rule system or pretrained  discriminator to help label tactile squences, which is unavailable or asks for human prior to guide another labeling process to traine the discriminator beforehand. In comparison, labeling with the aid of human sense of touch is superior in temporal accuracy and more direct. When collecting each tactile sequence, one hand of the expert holds object and drives motion that associates to a targeted contact event on tactile sensing area. At the same time, the other hand triggers the corresponding labelling action for this sequence. According to \cite{johansson1996sensory}, for human, the time gap between tactile sensing of external stimuli and execution of the muscle contraction is roughly 100 ms, therefore, roughly 3 frames could be mislabelled with our annotation method. We classify contact events into 7 sets with unique contact behaviors spatiotemporally: 1) Translational slip: object sticks with the sensor surface and slips translationally; 2) Rotational slip: object sticks with the surface and slips rotationally; 3) Rolling: object rolls on the surface with contact maintained (for round edge) or experiences short contact breaking and remaking (for flat surface); 4) Stable: object moves with relatively small/no motion on the surface; 5) Noncontact: no object is making contact with the surface; 6) Making contact: object makes contact within the sequence; 7) Breaking contact: object breaks contact the current sequence.

To guarantee the generalizability of the network trained on the dataset to wide range of objects with different geometry, hardness, elasticity, texture, we selected 10 objects as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:training_objects}. Apart from properties of the selected objects, we applied forces and drove motions randomly by hand while collecting the data. Force intensity is in the range of 0$\sim$20Nand the duration is 0.5$\sim$2s for each interaction. For each class, we collected around 500 sequences. With skipping resampling (stride 2) and removal of out-of-class samples, we generated 6650 tactile sequences in total. Examples of tactile sequences with labels are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:network_input}. The collected dataset is publicly available at \href{url}{https://sites.google.com/view/tactile-event-corl2019/home}.

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