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China's first Hermes Maison opening in Shanghai
The fifth Hermes Maison in the world celebrated its opening in Shanghai on Sept 12 2014.
Located in a heritage-listed building from the Twenties on the downtown shopping street of Huaihai Road, the four stories, 1,174-square-meter store opened to the public after six years of renovations.
Despite a recent slowdown in China's luxury market, largely attributed to the government's ongoing crackdown on corruption and gifting, Hermès chief exectuive Axel Dumas said the brand is still doing well in China, in part because it relies less on the gifting market than other brands, therefore benefitting from more customers buying luxury items for personal use.
"We are very, very confident about the Chinese market, there are many trends in the Chinese market and we are seeing many people now buying for themselves, there is also a refinement, a knowledge of what is luxury," said Dumas, a sixth generation member of the Hermès family, who added that the brand's Madison Avenue Maison opened during the financial crisis of 2008 and has gone on to perform well.
A cyclist rides past China's first and world's fifth Hermes Maison on Huahai Road in Shanghai, China, Sept 16 2014. [Photo/IC]
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Exhibition season has started again for the entertainment industry with Europes' leading show happening in Frankfurt last week. As we're introduced to new products ourselves, we'll blog about the ones that we think will interest our customers too.
To start the ball rolling there are two new Lighting controls newly launched that look set to change the way that folk look at "small" consoles and for controlling rigs with lots of LED's.
First up is the new FLX (pronounced flex by some) from Zero88 - it's been in concept for several years but over the last few years it's development has really pushed forward so that Zero88 have a control purpose built for wholly LED lighting rigs. Being Zero88 it also has the flexibility to control generic dimmer channels as well moving heads.
FLX has a touch screen set in to the front panel for enhancing the ability to control your desk and rig as well as featuring fader control over channels/fixtures and playback stacks. It's running ZerOS - as already runs on the Zero88 Solution and Orb series of desks but because FLX has a quad core ARM processor at it's heart there have been tweaks and enhancements that might work their way back in to the core ZerOS.
The touch screen plays an active part in controlling your rig - if you have LED Colour changing fixtures then the screen presents a series of ready defined palettes with colour numbers matching your favourite gel brand. If you have a company logo or a projected backcloth that you want to match your rig colours to - then load a picture on to the desk, press the part of the picture with the colour you want and voila - FLX matches the colour values.
FLX is expected to 'sit' alongside the Solution series (above the Jester but below Orb in the Zero88 range of controls) for those users & designers that know they're working with colour changing and moving fixtures (under test is a stage sizing routine that will offer easy touch access to positions on your performance space too) but don't need the channel faders that Solution offers. If you want more channel faders or more playback faders then FLX also has the ability connect accessory fader panels using USB - if you need a remote fader wing for the Stage Manager then a USB extender makes this possible too. Zero88 are already taking orders - the first production batch is almost spoken for - if you'd like to see one close to, then talk to our sales desk.
The second console that's piqued our interest is the 'Dot2' from GrandMA - mainly because we never thought we'd be selling a GrandMA product but having seen an impromptu demo of the dot2 and being told it's price - we think there's a strong chance we might end up actually selling some!
It's about the same size as the FLX so is portable and has two touch screens built in for helping to control it and a multitude of connection options for DMX and DMX over ethernet. More impressive is that the console comes bundled with a 3D visualizer package and PC backup software, so that you end up with a very impressive high end lighting console for not a great deal of money (the price point hasn't been announced yet but the hints are that it might sit around the price of ETC Ion).
From the brief demo we saw, it's equally at home controlling generic dimmers as well as fixtures and a lot of thought has gone in to ensuring the user doesn't have to learn new syntax or workflows to access either type.You can see more about 'Dot2' on it's own website Here and again if you'd like a demo, then please give our sales desk a call.
There's undoubtedly more new products due to be shown to us over the coming weeks - EMD Stagg, ProLight are two for certain. As we hear more, we'll write another article here.


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Serrano Time
Here's Why You Shouldn't Have Your Kids Help with Your Book About Hip-Hop
Shea Serrano January 22, 2014 4:00AM
Notorious B.I.G., ready to die.
[In his column Serrano Time, award-winning writer and goofball Shea Serrano writes about his life and times.]
I am working on a new book.
I cannot say too much about it yet, other than:
1. it's with the same company that published Bun B's Rap Coloring And Activity Book.
2. it will be a real actual book with real actual words, and illustrations and charts and stickers and all sorts of other neat stuffs.
3. I have until November to finish it, which means that every day until then I will be overcome with infinity pressure, which means that sometime around July I'll place my head in an oven and never be heard from again.
It is very cool but also very intimidating. My editor is considerably smarter than I am, and I am certain I am the least important person that she (or anyone at her office) talks to, so our correspondence is mostly just me saying "yes, ma'am" a lot and trying to make sure that I don't turn in anything late.
While I worked on the rap coloring book two of my three sons, Bay and Meechy, helped out where they could. Mostly they just sat by my desk and bothered me with ALL the questions while I drew pictures or wrote captions. It was neat, but something I'd hoped to avoid if I worked on another project.
Alas, here we are again and here they are again, asking and needling. I am of course proud and happy that they are proud and happy of the work that I do -- I'm told they told their teachers and classmates to buy some copies -- but were it up to me, I'd just as soon work in peace.
I mean, I love them dearly and whatever, but they're six. Six-year-olds don't know shit about shit. I asked Bay to bring me some Double A batteries from a drawer in the kitchen once and he brought me back a page of fish stickers.
"Dude, what are these?" I asked. "Where are the batteries?" He scrunched his face. "I couldn't find them, Daddy. Can these work instead?" HE THOUGHT FISH STICKERS WERE AN ACCEPTABLE REPLACEMENT FOR BATTERIES.
So a week or so ago, when I sat down to do some book stuff and they eventually made their way over and asked if they could help, I made up an assignment. I printed out some pictures of some of the people I was researching and handed them to them. "I need you guys to draw these for me," I said. "Can you do that?" I asked.
They of course agreed. I handed them the pages and told them to sit at the kitchen table and draw them. I assumed I'd get back seven well-drawn pictures of Biggie, OutKast, Drake, Wiz Khalifa, Tupac, Public Enemy and NWA. Instead, I got these:
Drawn by one of my sons, though I'm not sure which
This is supposed to be that very famous picture of The Notorious B.I.G. Mostly, it looks like an egg. Kids have no respect for history.
OutKast is one of my favorite rap groups and, in general, one of the greatest all-time rap groups. I'm very excited for their 700 scheduled appearances later this year. I actually got to meet Big Boi several months back. We talked for a brief moment on his tour bus after a show, though when I say "we talked," I mean to say that he said hello and asked me how I was and I just stared at him with my mouth open while making this strange humming noise. Such is life.
Motaro is one of the bosses from Mortal Kombat 2. I definitely did not give them a picture of him to draw. When I asked them why they drew him, Meechy shouted, "Daddy, Motaro is half-human and half donkey!" I don't think that's true.
This is a picture of some people playing basketball. I didn't give them a picture of anyone playing basketball either. I don't even know where they got a black pen from. I just don't know what the fuck was going on, I guess.
Not sure who this one is. It could be Drake, though, given the way the afternoon went, it could also be Pablo Picasso. It's probably Luigi or somebody like that. I don't know, man.
And then of course Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. We got a Playstation 3 for the family for Christmas from my wife's grandpa, who won it at work. All of the new-generation extra-special graphics and first-person gameplay made me nauseous, so I tossed it out and downloaded NBA JAM, Mortal Kombat 1-3 and NFL Blitz. That's a little thing called teaching your sons that when something new comes along that you don't immediately like, you discard it and go back to what you know. Life lessons.
Don't let your kids work on your book with you. That's another one.
9 Tips for Using A Fake ID To Get Into A Show Here's How Not to Approach a Journalist on Facebook The 10 Coolest, Scariest, Freakiest Songs About Heroin The 30 Most Disturbing Songs of All Time
Like Up on the Sun on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for the latest local music news and conversation.
Shea Serrano
By Robrt L. Pela
The Maine's 8123 Fest Returns to Downtown Phoenix
By Gannon Hanevold
Best Phoenix Concerts This Week: iDKHOW, Current Joys, John Moreland

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Oropharyngeal dysphagia in children with cerebral palsy: comparisons between a high- and low-resource country
Benfer, Katherine A
Weir, Kelly A
Bell, Kristie L
Nahar, Baitun
Ware, Robert S
Davies, Peter SW
Boyd, Roslyn N
Weir, Kelly A.
Purpose: There is paucity of research investigating oropharyngeal dysphagia (OPD) in young children with cerebral palsy (CP), and most studies explore OPD in high-resource countries. This study aimed at determining the proportion and severity of OPD in preschool children with CP in Bangladesh, compared to Australia. Method: Cross-sectional, comparison of two cohorts. Two hundred and eleven children with CP aged 18–36 months, 81 in Bangladesh (mean = 27.6 months, 61.7% males), and 130 in Australia (mean = 27.4 months, 62.3% males). The Dysphagia Disorders Survey (DDS) – Part 2 was the primary OPD outcome for proportion and ...
View more >Purpose: There is paucity of research investigating oropharyngeal dysphagia (OPD) in young children with cerebral palsy (CP), and most studies explore OPD in high-resource countries. This study aimed at determining the proportion and severity of OPD in preschool children with CP in Bangladesh, compared to Australia. Method: Cross-sectional, comparison of two cohorts. Two hundred and eleven children with CP aged 18–36 months, 81 in Bangladesh (mean = 27.6 months, 61.7% males), and 130 in Australia (mean = 27.4 months, 62.3% males). The Dysphagia Disorders Survey (DDS) – Part 2 was the primary OPD outcome for proportion and severity of OPD. Gross motor skills were classified using the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS), motor type/distribution. Results: (i) Bangladesh sample: proportion OPD = 68.1%; severity = 10.4 SD = 7.9. Australia sample: proportion OPD = 55.7%; severity = 7.0 SD = 7.5. (ii) There were no differences in the proportion or severity of OPD between samples when stratified for GMFCS (OR = 2.4, p = 0.051 and β = 1.2, p = 0.08, respectively). Conclusions: Despite overall differences in patterns of OPD between Bangladesh and Australia, proportion and severity of OPD (when adjusted for the functional gross motor severity of the samples) were equivalent. This provides support for the robust association between functional motor severity and OPD proportion/severity in children with CP, regardless of the resource context. * Implications for Rehabilitation * The proportion and severity of OPD according to gross motor function level were equivalent between high- and low-resource countries (LCs). * Literature from high-resource countries may be usefully interpreted by rehabilitation professionals for low-resource contexts using the GMFCS as a framework. * The GMFCS is a useful classification in LCs to improve earlier detection of children at risk of OPD and streamline management pathways for optimal nutritional outcomes. * Rehabilitation professionals working in LCs are likely to have a caseload weighted towards GMFCS III–V, with less compensatory OPD management options available (such as non-oral nutrition through tubes).
Disability and Rehabilitation
This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Medical and Health Sciences not elsewhere classified


On Sunday, NFL players around the league protested more than ever before after President Donald Trump lashed out at the players for kneeling during the national anthem during a campaign rally.
However, Navy SEAL Rob O'Neill — the man who killed Osama Bin Laden and authored the book "The Operator" — struck back against the founder of the anthem protests, Colin Kaepernick.
During a Fox News appearance Sunday, he tore apart the former San Francisco 49er's quarterback — it was brutal.
The famous vet was asked what he felt about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.
"As a veteran, it's insulting," O'Neill stated.
He then went on to say that there are many other methods of protesting issues — but that undermining the American Flag and what it stands for is out of line.
Then he called out Kaepernick specifically:.
SHARE on Facebook and twitter if you stand with this Navy SEAL!


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Q: What items need to dispose when closing activity? What elements need to dispose when i'm closing an activity?
I'm using lists,sqlite,recyclerview,listview and so on. If i will call finish inside an activity, doesnt dispose all my activity elements-objects even they are not null?
finish();
finishAffinity();

A: Certain elements in Android will continue to exist after your Activity has finished, such as BroadcastReceivers.
These elements need to be unregistered when your Activity finishes to avoid things like memory leaks or other weird behavior.
There's no definitive list for this, because it's assumed you will read the documentation of each respective class or API you use and know whether or not it needs to be unregistered/destroyed along with your Activity.

A: Generally, java's garbage collector will take care of disposing any objects that are not required anymore, however, as @TheWanderer already said, some objects need to be deregistered. Again, please read the docs of the classes you're using as they will indicate if they need some special treatment.
(Hint: Place the cursor in the class name that you want the documentation for and press Ctrl+Q in Android studio to view the documentation)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Berners Tavern
10 BERNERS STREET LONDON
W1T 3NP, UNITED KINGDOM
Prosopopoeia
Commissioned as an exclusive gift for special friends of The London EDITION, Mat Collishaw's work Prosopopoeia combines some of the artist's most iconic imagery while taking on a new perspective, speaking with a new voice. Collishaw: "Generally I make artworks for myself and the people who see them. (For Prosopopoeia) I've given a voice to the Hotel."
A large illuminated diamond slowly rotates before a black background. Within it, reflections of flowers – many of them Collishaw's beloved orchids – glitter and break up into prisms. The flowers catch fire, burn up, drown in luscious leafy green only to reappear in another rotation of the precious stone.
Form compliments function with the Hotel as subject, object, and exhibition space in mind: the symmetrical diamond shape against the black background potentially allows for the work to be displayed so as to appear magically within a space, as if afloat. The rotation of the diamond evokes the rotating doors of a traditional hotel, part adventure, part sanctuary. The soundtrack, composed by the artist's son, calls to mind the audio background found in many contemporary hotels when entering elevators, spas, or foyers – while simultaneously underlining distinctness between the environment outside the hotel and within. Collishaw: "The whole piece should represent the Hotel as a mysterious chrysalis emerging onto the scene."
Collishaw's artworks are famous for their depth and detail, and Prosopopoeia continues this trend: the rotating diamond becomes a prism through which lives are refracted. Prosopopoeia itself is defined as 'a figure of speech in which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting'. It is a voice speaking for another, and serves as a metaphor for the Hotel's function as surrogate home. The concept of Prosopopoeia is entirely new, whereas the imagery is iconic: burning flowers that represent feelings and consummation of passion, reincarnation and rebirth.
Mat Collishaw (1966, Nottingham, uK) is associated with the yBA (young British Artist) generation. using diverse media, his art explores themes of beauty, seduction, suppressed desire and dark pleasure.
Collishaw received his BFA from Goldsmith, London, in 1989. His work Bullet Hole (1988) was exhibited in the now famous 1988 exhibition 'Freeze', presented in a disused warehouse and curated by Damien Hirst. This exhibition was attended by important art world figures including Charles Saatchi, Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota, and launched the careers of manyof the yBA artists, including Collishaw.
Collishaw has described his interest in creating 'images that are awe-inspiring'. His works use a visual language that is both romantic and sumptuous while also being unnerving and, at times, disturbing. Pornography, fairies, religion, bestiality and drug abuse have all been represented in the artist's work. He is interested in the subliminal effect that imagery can have upon the viewer; playing upon this, he often fuses notions of the vile and desirable, the repulsive and inviting through his practice. Collishaw also meaningfully looks back at the history of art; his new-media artwork the end of Innocence draws upon paintings by both the Spanish seventeenth century artist Diego Velázquez and the Irish twentieth century artist Francis Bacon. In 1997, Collishaw's work was included in the controversial exhibition 'Sensation' at the Royal Academy of Art, which showcased works from Charles Saatchi's collection.
Collishaw explores the ideals and fascinations of Victorian society. Nineteenth century Britain defined itself with empirical soberness, in accordance with scientific progress. However, suppressed perversions also accompanied the Age of Enlightenment. Collishaw's work references the Victorian period by simulating its elaborately decorative and romantic style, while indirectly conjuring up an essence of society's dark side.
Over the past decade, he has had numerous international solo shows, including: Cohen Gallery, New york, 1992; Camden Arts Centre, London, 1996; Duty Free Spirits, Lisson Gallery, London, 1997; Galeria d'Arte Moderne, Bologna, Italy, 1999; Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2000; Mat Collishaw, Art & Public, Geneva, 2004; Shooting Stars, Haunch of Venison, London, 2008; Hysteria, Freud Museum, London, 2009; Retrospectre, BFI Southbank, London, 2010; and Creation Condemned, Blain | Southern, 2010.
Group exhibitions include: Institute for Cultural anxiety, ICA, London, 1994; Here and now, Serpentine Gallery, London and Brilliant! new art From London, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, both 1995; Sensation, Royal Academy of Art, London, 1996; the edge of awareness, P.S.I, New york, 1998; Life/Live, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville, (Paris) and The Brooklyn Museum, New york, 1998; new Blood, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2004; In the darkest Hour there May Be Light, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006; and Mythologies, Haunch of Venison, London, 2009. Other Criteria and Thames & Hudson have published books with Collishaw's work, and the Victoria & Albert Museum recently commissioned Collishaw to produce the monumental onsite project, Magic Lantern.
About the Artist About the Art Work GO TO SEDITIONART.COM


text:
Home › Jimmy Page fine art print with limited edition canvas giclee print option
Jimmy Page fine art print with limited edition canvas giclee print option
double matted print - $50.00 USD limited edition giclee on canvas - $350.00 USD
Vivid artwork featuring influential rocker and guitarist Jimmy Page
Jimmy Page by Robert Hurst
What do we mean by double-matted? A mat is part of the framing of printed artwork. We add an inner mat for color accent in addition to the main mat. Click on the images to view the print with double mats. Inner accent color may vary
Giclee on canvas:
A Limited edition giclee on canvas is also available
Print ships in 1 - 3 days
Jimmy Page is an English multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer. He began his career as a studio session guitarist in London and was subsequently a member of The Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968, after which he founded the English rock band Led Zeppelin. Page is considered by critics and fans alike to be one of the most influential and important guitarists and songwriters ever in rock music. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice; once as a member of The Yardbirds and once as a member of Led Zeppelin
Music genre: hard rock, heavy metal, blues rock, rock and roll, folk rock
Art category: art, artwork, prints, posters, giclees, canvas giclees, canvas prints
Houston Astros 2017 Championship Team fine art print
Guy Clark limited edition fine art print featuring Clark
Eagles, the Band fine art print with limited edition canvas giclee option
Jerry Garcia fine art print


text:
\section{Introduction and Related Work}
Training high-quality neural networks requires lots of data. However, simple-to-train-with labeled data is expensive and limited, while unlabeled data from the internet is far more abundant. To address this, self-supervised learning techniques have seen an explosion in research interest, especially after producing incredible results in the natural language domain~\cite{devlin2018bert,radford2019language,brown2020language}.

Recently, the success of self-supervised pretraining has migrated into the audio~\cite{baevski2020wav2vec,hsu2021hubert} and vision~\cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2010-11929,liu2021Swin} communities. Of particular interest to this paper is the Self-Supervised Audio Spectrogram Transformer (SSAST)~\cite{gong2021ssast}, a self-supervised extension to the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST)~\cite{gong21b_interspeech}. The SSAST introduced the first patch-based and fully self-attention~\cite{DBLP:journals/corr/VaswaniSPUJGKP17} based pretraining strategies for audio event classification, and achieved remarkable results for both audio event classification and several speech classification tasks. However, one common criticism of Transformer models is their massive computational overhead, in large part due to their $O(N^2)$ memory and time complexity when computing the self-attention operation. Many so-called ``efficient'' Transformers have been proposed~\cite{Tay2020EfficientTA} that try to mitigate this cost. Of particular relevence to us is the Masked Autoencoder~\cite{MaskedAutoencoders2021}, which completely discards masked input tokens during the encoding step, resulting in significant increases in computational efficiency.

In this paper, we improve upon the SSAST architecture by incorporating ideas from the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) introduced by Kaiming et al.~\cite{MaskedAutoencoders2021}, which asymmetrically applies BERT-like~\cite{devlin2018bert} pretraining to the visual domain with an encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, we observe that we can reduce the input length to a majority of transformer layers by taking advantage of the high masking ratio used for audio pretraining (75\%). We additionally notice that, similar to the visual domain, reconstruction in the audio spectrogram domain introduces generally unwanted, low-level pixel information to the final layers of pretrained models. From these observations, we propose the Masked Autoencoding Audio Spectrogram Transformer (MAE-AST), which runs only unmasked tokens through a large encoder and then concatenates mask tokens with encoder output embeddings before feeding them to a shallow decoder. Fine-tuning on downstream tasks is then performed using only the encoder, removing the decoder's reconstruction layers.

We find two key results: 1) The MAE-AST pretrains using significantly less time ($3\times$) and memory ($2\times$) than the SSAST for a similar model architecture. 2) The MAE-AST outperforms the SSAST under a shared encoder depth on several downstream tasks, all other factors held constant. Additionally, we find that the MAE-AST performs well with only a generative objective, while the SSAST sees a significant performance drop. We further run several experiments on methods to pretrain the MAE-AST and compare MAE-like pretraining on audio to both SSAST-like pretraining on audio and MAE-like pretraining on vision.

\section{Masked Autoencoding Audio Spectrogram Transformer}

\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{MAEAST_Architecture_Diagram.pdf}
  \caption{The architecture of the  MAE-AST for patch-based inputs. First, the input spectrogram of size $128\times 100t$ is split into $16\times 16$ pixel patches. For pretraining, a mask is then applied to some tokens. Unmasked patches are unrolled first by channel dimension and then by time dimension and are embedded into a vector via linear projection. These unmasked patch embeddings are added to 1D sinusoidal positional embeddings and fed into the encoder. During pretraining, mask tokens are combined with encoder outputs and positional embeddings are added to all tokens before being sent through the decoder. The joint discriminative and generative loss is calculated on the decoder outputs for mask tokens. For fine-tuning, the encoder outputs are mean pooled to create a representation vector and the decoder isn't touched.}
  \label{fig:model_diagram}
\end{figure}

Figure~\ref{fig:model_diagram} shows the  MAE-AST architecture. In this section, we first outline the forward pass, followed by training practices, masking strategies, and the loss function.

\subsection{Model Architecture}

\textbf{Input Processing.} Identical to the SSAST, we take as input a 16khz audio waveform and convert it into 128-dimensional log Mel filterbank features with a frame length of 25 ms and frame shift of 10 ms. Like AST and SSAST, we normalize the input to mean 0 and standard deviation ½ . This spectrogram is then split when patch-based into a series of 16 filter $\times$ 16 frame tokens and when frame-based into 128 filter $\times$ 2 frame tokens. We then apply a masking method, which splits the input patches or frames into masked and unmasked subsets. We experiment with several masking strategies, discussed later.

\textbf{Positional Embeddings.} Consistent with~\cite{MaskedAutoencoders2021}, we use fixed sinusoidal positional embeddings for both patch-based and frame-based tokenization. As the input spectrogram data is only variable-length in time, we use one-dimensional positional embeddings for both tokenizations, with patch input being unfolded into an one dimensional stream ordered first by channel and second by time to support variable input lengths, as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:model_diagram}.

\textbf{Encoder.} The encoder follows a standard ViT~\cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2010-11929} architecture. Unlike BERT-like models, the MAE encoder only operates on unmasked tokens. We flatten the unmasked input patches or frames via a linear projection into a 768-dimensional latent vector. We then add positional embeddings to these latents and input the summed vectors to the encoder.

\textbf{Decoder.} The decoder is only used during pretraining and is composed of standard transformer encoder blocks. Both the encoder output and mask tokens are sent to the decoder, with mask tokens at the decoder's input being represented by a shared, learned embedding. We add sinusoidal positional embeddings to all tokens before inputting to the decoder. The output embeddings of masked tokens from the decoder are then sent into two single-layer linear projections, one for each loss function, that map to a vector the size of the patch input. Specifics of calculating loss are discussed later.

By default, we use an encoder with 6 layers, and a decoder of 2 layers. Both the encoder and decoder use 12 heads and a width of 768. Following the MAE~\cite{MaskedAutoencoders2021}, by default we throw away the decoder during fine-tuning, training solely with the encoder. We mean pool the encoder output last hidden states to create a single vector representation for classification tasks.

To create a fair comparison between MAE-like and traditional BERT-like architectures for audio pretraining, we largely adopt the input pipelining and loss calculation techniques from the SSAST. However, we make two minor changes:

1) During training, the original AST paper~\cite{gong21b_interspeech} applies overlap to its input patches for a modest performance improvement. The SSAST paper does not apply overlap during pretraining to prevent the model from using it to cheat the reconstruction task. However, SSAST adds overlap back during fine-tuning to match the original AST paper via interpolating learned positional embeddings. To match the MAE paper, we forgo overlap during both pretraining and fine-tuning.

2) The SSAST uses interpolation or truncation of positional embeddings to support variable-length inputs during fine-tuning. To match the MAE paper, we make no modifications to our positional embeddings for fine-tuning.

We perform experiments under the fairseq library~\cite{ott2019fairseq} using the Adam~\cite{adam} optimizer with weight decay 0.01, initial learning rate 0.0001, and a polynomial decay learning rate scheduler. With fairseq, we use a maximum number of tokens per GPU that is roughly equivalent to a batch size of 32. Training runs for up to 600,000 iterations, which provides the same number of audio clips during pretraining as SSAST. We train using one NVIDIA Quadro RTX-8000, and pretraining takes about two days.

\subsection{Mask Sampling}
Mask sampling for pretraining generally involves two considerations, the percent of tokens to mask and the amount of chunking between masked tokens. Masking strategies with too little chunking or too few masked tokens will create too easy of a task, allowing the model to simply interpolate missing pixels using their neighbors. The proportion to mask is especially important for MAE-based models, as a higher masking ratio decreases the length of the input to the decoder, which can provide significant speedups due to the quadratic time and memory complexity of Transformers.

We experiment with eight overall masking and input strategies via combinations of the following factors: 1) Patch-Based versus Frame-Based inputs, 2) Fully random versus chunked masking, 3) Different masking ratios. We implement these strategies and relate them to previous work as follows:

1) Patch-Based, Fully Random masking is the strategy implemented by the original MAE paper for image pretraining. Like the MAE paper, we mask by shuffling the input patches and keeping the first $1-p$ proportion of tokens. 2) Patch-Based, Chunked masking is adapted using the strategy from SSAST, which selects a level of chunking $C \in \{3,4,5\}$ and randomly masks $C \times C$ chunks of tokens until a proportion $\ge p$ is masked, then truncating down to $p$. This unbiased sampling is slow, so we apply the same mask across a batch to reduce compute. 3) Frame-Based, Fully Random masking is the strategy implemented by SSAST for frame-based experiments, and mask selection is performed in the same way as patch-based, fully random masking. 4) Frame-Based, Chunked masking is implemented using the algorithm from Wav2Vec2.0~\cite{baevski2020wav2vec}, where spans of length $M=10$ are masked with each index having a $P$ probability of being chosen to start a span. This method often creates overlap between chunks, making the output length unpredictable. To make fair comparisons between different masking strategies, we select $P$ so that the average proportion of tokens masked is $p$ after accounting for overlap.

\subsection{Joint Discriminative and Generative Pretraining}
One of the key contributions of the SSAST paper was combining both discriminative (classification) and generative (reconstruction) losses for audio pretraining. Our model continues to adapt this strategy, however with a few small differences.

In the SSAST, the encoder output is fed into two separate two-layer feed forward neural networks for self-supervised pretraining, one each for reconstruction and classification loss. Because the decoder head of MAE-based models already provides compute past the last layer of embeddings used, we use a single linear layer head for our final output projection for each loss.

We implement loss functions identically to SSAST. Reconstruction loss is calculated as a mean-squared error between the unnormalized output of the linear reconstruction head and the normalized input. Classification loss intends to create a vector $c_i$ similar to the masked input patch or frame $x_i$ but dissimilar to other masked input. Like the SSAST, we obtain negative samples from other masked inputs within the same audio segment, which both helps lessen useless features being encoded (such as microphone type) and reduces the impact of batch size on pretraining. We use the InfoNCE~\cite{oord2018representation} loss for classification. The classification and reconstruction losses are summed and balanced by a factor $\lambda$ which is multiplied to the reconstruction loss. We use the same $\lambda = 10$ as SSAST.

\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Datasets}

\textbf{Pretraining Datasets.} To fairly show that the MAE encoder-decoder architecture is the cause of performance gains, we use the same pretraining datasets as SSAST. The SSAST pretraining data consists of uniformly shuffled data from AudioSet-2M~\cite{gemmeke2017audio} and Librispeech~\cite{panayotov2015librispeech} with labels discarded. AudioSet-2M contains two million ten second audio clips from YouTube, and provides data for both audio events and speech. AudioSet is subdivided into unbalanced, balanced, and eval partitions, with the balanced and eval sections having roughly the same number of examples per classification label. Librispeech provides 960 hours of audiobook data and is included because AudioSet clips do not necessarily contain speech. We pretrain using both the unbalanced and balanced AudioSet partitions in addition to the librispeech train data.

\textbf{Fine-Tuning Datasets.} We fine-tune on the same six commonly-used datasets as SSAST, which provide a variety of downstream audio and speech challenges. We evaluate audio event classification performance by fine-tuning on the AudioSet (AS) and ESC-50~\cite{piczak2015esc} (ESC) datasets. AudioSet provides a general audio classification task, while ESC-50 tests classification of environmental audio. Like the SSAST paper, we fine-tune on only the balanced partition of AudioSet and test on the eval partition. We evaluate speech performance by fine-tuning on Speech Commands 1 and 2~\cite{warden2018speech} for the task of keyword spotting (KS1, KS2), VoxCeleb~\cite{nagrani2020voxceleb} for speaker identification (SID), and IEMOCAP~\cite{busso2008iemocap} for emotion recognition (ER). For AS, ESC, and KS2, we use the fine-tuning pipeline from SSAST. For KS1, SID, and ER we use the SUPERB~\cite{yang2021superb} framework, the same fine-tune setting as SSAST. We use default settings for all models, which matched the results of a learning rate gridsearch.

\textbf{AudioSet Preprocessing} Because the AudioSet data is downloaded from YouTube directly, videos get deleted and the available dataset decreases in size over time: Our downloaded copy of AudioSet contains 86.4\% of the original dataset, while SSAST had 94\%. To make our results roughly comparable to other papers, we fill in the missing data per label for the balanced and eval sets by sampling from the unbalanced set using the same sampling method as the AudioSet paper. Assuming no correlation between deleted videos and label type, this acts as a random resample of the balanced and eval sets from all downloaded data given that the available balanced and eval sets are chosen, which is the best we can do with limited data. After resampling, our unbalanced set contains 1,762,073 examples, balanced 22,680, and eval 20,920.

We load pretrained weights of SSAST distributed by \cite{gong2021ssast} and fine-tune and test it on our version of AudioSet, meaning all experiments are evaluated on the same data. Importantly, we do not replicate pretraining. However, this should only serve as a disadvantage to our models as recently downloaded data is a subset of data from earlier downloads, barring a small amount of reuploaded videos.

\subsection{Results}

\textbf{Overall Results.} Table \ref{tab:overall_results} shows the results of the MAE-AST with different encoder depths against the SSAST with equivalent input processing and masking techniques. We find that the MAE-AST matches or outperforms the SSAST on all downstream tasks but SID. We fail to make the 12-Layer Patch-Based MAE-AST converge on SID, and further discuss SID later.

\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ MAEAST_AllEpochsConvergence.pdf}
  \caption{Convergence of MAE-AST. We train the default model for an extended amount and save a checkpoint at training epochs 1,2,4,6,8,10,12,14, and 16. We evaluate these saves on the downstream AudioSet task, and normalize the results in [0,1]. We find that  MAE-AST pretraining converges in 8 epochs (500,000 iterations), the exact same as SSAST.  MAE-AST is also non-brittle to increased pretraining time, maintaining performance after pretraining for twice as long as initial convergence.}
  \label{fig:convergence_chart}
\end{figure}

\begin{table*}[th]
  \caption{Overall Results. We do not replicate SSAST Base Frame on AudioSet for fairness because the exact fine-tune parameters aren't published. Note that the numbers we report for the SSAST model differ from those reported by~\cite{gong2021ssast}. This is due to the fact that we train and test all models on our modified version of the AudioSet dataset.}
  \label{tab:overall_results}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{ l c l c c c c c c }
    \toprule
    \multicolumn{1}{l}{\textbf{Model}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Enc. Layers}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{l}{\textbf{Masking}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{AS}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{ESC}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{KS2}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{KS1}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{SID}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{ER}} \\
    \midrule
SSAST Base Patch & 12       & Chunked & 28.6    & 88.8    & 98.0     & 96.0     & 64.3     & 59.6    \\
SSAST Base Frame & 12       & Random  & \multicolumn{0}{c}{-}  & 85.9    & \textbf{98.1}     & 96.7     & \textbf{80.8}     & 60.5    \\
 MAE-AST Patch     & 6        & Chunked & 28.3    & 88.6    & 97.4     & 95.0     & 37.6     & 58.7    \\
 MAE-AST Frame     & 6        & Random  & 25.9    & 88.0    & 97.8     & 96.6     & 58.6     & 60.2    \\
 MAE-AST Patch     & 12       & Chunked & \textbf{30.6}    & \textbf{90.0}    & 97.9     & 95.8     & \multicolumn{0}{c}{-}   & 59.8    \\
 MAE-AST Frame     & 12       & Random  & 23.0    & 88.9    & 98.0     & \textbf{97.3}     & 63.3     & \textbf{62.1}    \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}

\end{table*}

\begin{table}[th]
  \caption{Decoder Layer Ablation. Based on the default model with solely the decoder depth changed during pretraining}
  \label{tab:decoder_ablation}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{l c c c c c c}
    \toprule
    \multicolumn{1}{l}{\textbf{Layers}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{AS}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{ESC}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{KS2}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{KS1}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{SID}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{ER}} \\
    \midrule
1            & \textbf{28.8}    & 87.8      & 97.3   & \textbf{95.5}   & \textbf{42.8}   & 57.8  \\
2            & 28.3    & 88.6    & \textbf{97.4}     & 95.0     & 37.6     & 58.7    \\
3            & 27.8    & \textbf{88.7}    & \textbf{97.4}     & 94.5     & 38.7     & 58.1    \\
4            & 27.6    & 88.1    & 97.2     & 94.4     & 32.7     & \textbf{59.1}         \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}

\end{table}

\textbf{Impact of the Number of Decoder Layers.} In table \ref{tab:decoder_ablation}, we show the downstream results from pretraining the default MAE-AST model with four different decoder depths, all other factors held constant. Like the MAE paper demonstrated for the visual domain, we find that increasing the decoder depth only provides small improvements if any, meaning that the decoder depth can be small relative to the encoder. This result is key in justifying the MAE-AST as an expandable architecture, as decoder layers are significantly more expensive than encoder layers. Interestingly, different tasks show different trends relative to the number of decoder layers, with AS and SID improving with fewer decoder layers and ER improving with more.

\begin{table}[th]
  \caption{Masking Strategies Ablation. Results based on the default model. Tests the pairwise combinations of tokenization type, the masking ratio (\%p), and the masking strategy.}
  \label{tab:masking_strategies}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{l c l c c c}
    \toprule
    \multicolumn{1}{l}{\textbf{Input}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{\%p}} &
    \multicolumn{1}{l}{\textbf{Masking}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{AS}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{KS2}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{ER}} \\
    \midrule
Patch & 50    & Random  & 27.6    & 97.4     & 57.3    \\
Patch & 50    & Chunk   & 27.8    & 97.4     & 58.2    \\
Patch & 75    & Random  & 26.7    & 97.4     & 58.6    \\
Patch & 75    & Chunk   & \textbf{28.3}    & 97.4     & 58.7    \\
Frame & 50    & Random  & 23.6    & 97.8     & 59.1    \\
Frame & 50    & Chunk   & 24.9    & \textbf{97.9}     & \textbf{62.1}    \\
Frame & 75    & Random  & 25.9    & 97.8     & 60.2    \\
Frame & 75    & Chunk   & 23.4    & \textbf{97.9}     & 61.8    \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}

\end{table}

\textbf{Impact of Masking Strategies.} In table \ref{tab:masking_strategies} we show results of eight main strategies of tokenizing and masking. Like the SSAST paper, we see that the most important factor for training is input tokenization, finding patch-based models better for audio tasks, and frame-based models better for speech tasks. We also observe that chunking for a patch-based MAE-AST improves downstream performance across the board, while this did not occur for the vision-based MAE. This could imply that our audio features are more correlated than MAE's input images. Finally, we find that high masking ratios and chunking provide a consistent benefit for patch-based models, while for frame-based models the results are more varied.

\begin{table}[th]
  \caption{Pretraining Speed Ablation. Speed performance is tested for all models using a batch size of 32 and input audio length truncated to 10 seconds on a single Quadro RTX 8000. MAE-AST models use 2 decoder layers, which show high-quality results in table \ref{tab:decoder_ablation} and maximal fine-tune performance in the MAE paper \cite{MaskedAutoencoders2021}. We reimplement SSAST-like training with a decoder-only MAE-AST (w/ [M]) to account for significant library differences and highlight speed differences solely from the switch to an encoder-decoder architecture.}

  \label{tab:pretrain_speed}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{l c c c c}
    \toprule
    \multicolumn{0}{l}{\textbf{Mask}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{Lay.}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{Sec/Ep}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{Mem. (MiB)}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{Speedup}} \\
    \midrule
75\%     & 6        & 7016        & 6291           & \multicolumn{1}{c}{$1.80\times$} \\
75\%     & 12       & 8299        & 8227           & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{2.96$\times$}} \\
\midrule
50\%     & 12       & 12222       & 11639          & \multicolumn{1}{c}{$2.01\times$} \\
    \midrule
w/ [M]   & 6        & 12636       & 9871           & -      \\
w/ [M]   & 12       & 24577       & 17719          & -      \\
    \midrule
SSAST~\cite{gong2021ssast} & 12       & 150755      & 41547          & -      \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}

\end{table}

\textbf{Pretraining Speed improvements.} In table \ref{tab:pretrain_speed}, we evaluate the DNN time per epoch and CUDA memory usage for pretraining the MAE-AST with different numbers of encoder layers and masking ratios. We find that the default SSAST implementation\footnote{\href{https://github.com/YuanGongND/ssast}{https://github.com/YuanGongND/ssast}} is significantly slower than our implementation using fairseq\footnote{\href{https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq}{https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq}}, and so we additionally compare against the MAE-AST with 0 encoder layers and $n=6,12$ decoder layers to better represent the speedup from incorporating MAE-style pretraining. We denote this training with mask tokens included at every layer as ``w/ [M]''. MAE-AST achieves a $3\times$ speedup over pretraining with mask tokens included and a $2\times$ memory reduction, showing a significant and practical improvement in training ordinarily-sized models with modern hardware and efficient libraries. With MAE-AST also converging in the same number of iterations as SSAST (figure \ref{fig:convergence_chart}), we see promising results that the MAE-AST is both efficient and expandable.

\begin{table}[th]
  \caption{Pretext Task Ablation. Evaluates a Generative only or Discriminative only loss. We compare the default patch-based SSAST to the default MAE-AST with retrained AudioSet}
  \label{tab:pretext_task}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{l c c c c c c}
    \toprule
    \multicolumn{1}{l}{\textbf{Model}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{AS}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{ESC}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{KS2}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{KS1}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{SID}} &
    \multicolumn{0}{c}{\textbf{ER}} \\
    \midrule
SSAST Gen       & 12.2     & 74.2     & 96.6     & 93.3     & 40.1     & 54.3    \\
SSAST Disc   & \textbf{29.6}     & \textbf{85.6}     & \textbf{98.0}     & \textbf{94.2}     & \textbf{61.4}     & \textbf{57.5}    \\
\midrule
Ours Gen     & 26.1     & 86.3     & \textbf{97.3}     & \textbf{95.1}     & \textbf{40.6}     & \textbf{58.6}    \\
Ours Disc & \textbf{28.5}     & \textbf{89.0}     & \textbf{97.3}     & 94.6     & 38.8     & 58.3    \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}

\end{table}

\textbf{Impact of Pretext Task.} Table \ref{tab:pretext_task} shows the downstream performance of SSAST and default MAE-AST when only using the generative or discriminative losses. We find that the MAE-AST is significantly better than the SSAST when using only a generative loss. Alongside weak results on the low level SID task, we hypothesize this is because the information bottleneck in MAE-AST conditions the model to further extract abstract data, similar to embedding spaces in standard Autoencoders. Our results also suggest that the discriminative loss is more useful for audio tasks while the generative loss is more useful for speech tasks.

\section{Conclusion}

We present the MAE-AST, a new model for self-supervised pretraining in the audio domain. We find our model significantly speeds up pretraining, reduces memory costs, and matches or beats the SSAST on the majority of downstream tasks. Like SSAST, we continue to observe that patch-based tokenization is better for audio tasks and frame-based tokenization is better for speech tasks. Furthermore, we find that MAE-like pretraining is more robust to different loss functions, greatly outperforming the SSAST when only using a generative task, but is significantly worse at low-level tasks like speaker identification. We hypothesize that this implies the MAE architecture is encouraging additional abstraction. We hope that future work can build on these findings toward the goal of constructing a scalable multi-domain strategy for self-supervised pretraining.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Rambo dispatches foes with guns, arrows, knives and his bare hands in trailer.
Rambo: The Video Game has offered a first look at its gameplay in the new reveal trailer.
Reef Entertainment shows Sylvester Stallone's movie hero dispatch his enemies with guns, arrows, knives, explosives and his bare hands in the video.
The trailer also shows off Rambo's classic mud-cover stealth technique.
The actor has lent his likeness to the game based on the long-running action movie franchise, which incorporates scenes and settings from the original three films.
Rambo: The Video Game will be playable for the first time at next month's Gamescom Expo.
"We have been quiet since we acquired the Rambo license last August," the Reef's commercial director Craig Lewis previously said.
"During this time we have been dedicated to creating a video game for consoles and PC that will allow Rambo fans and gamers across the globe to really get under the skin of Rambo and wield his iconic weapon set in battle."
The first three films in the Rambo franchise have grossed over $600 million (£367m) in revenue to date. They were followed by a fourth film in 2008.
Rambo: The Video Game will be released on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC in winter 2013.


text:
Frank Lobdell Lithograph, 19/100 by 3 EP Press
Frank Lobdell (1921 - 2013) lithograph number 19/100 by 3 EP Press (3 equal partners press).
An Abstract Expressionist painter, printmaker and teacher, Frank Lobdell was born in Kansas City, Missouri but spent most of his career in the Bay Area where he lived in Palo Alto and from 1966 to 1991, was on the faculty at Stanford University. He studied in St. Paul, Minnesota at the School of Fine Art, in San Francisco with Clyfford Still at the California School of Fine Art, and in Paris at the Academie Grand Chaumiere. From 1942 to 1946, Frank Lobdell served in the United States Army.
Work on paper, lithograph
Dimensions (WxDxH):
36.5"w x 28.5"h


text:
on pizza, voting, and the undead
So, Round 1 of the Home Run Inn horror movie contest ends tomorrow, and a Top 10 spot doesn't seem to be in the cards, which means no Round 2 for ol' Final Girl and Company. That's fine, because that means I don't have to talk about it every day. Thanks SO MUCH to everyone who voted for my silly little movie. It was fun to make, although the pizza was not necessarily fun to eat: words I never thought I'd say.
I just wanted to raise the point that many people have gotten in touch with me about: the website's wonkiness, and the difficulty in voting 15 times per day, or sometimes voting at all. Check out these comments left on the HRI site, my Facebook page, etc:
"The site doesn't work very well at all. It's hard to share and I'm very uncertain that my vote counted."
"It doesn't allow me to vote for you more than once!"
"Only let me vote 8 times."
"I went there and it immediately told me 'Thanks, vote again tomorrow.'"
"Today, after only voting ONE time, I got the 'thank you for voting, please come back tomorrow.'"
"Today the link isn't going anywhere..."
"I've tried registering with three different emails. Two never even got the confirmation message you have to get before you can proceed (not in spam either). The third did, but when I tried to then set up a password (the next mandatory step), the site crashed. And now it won't let me complete that account set-up either."
Umm...I think the site is buggy. I have no problem losing this contest or any other for whatever reason, but the site needs to work so people can vote so I have a fair shot. I entered a couple of weeks after it began, so I know I had a lot of ground to make up and thanks to you, I did. Still, as someone pointed out elsewhere, I wonder how I can be so far ahead in terms of votes- I'm ranked number one with about 27,000 views while the entry ranked number two- the leader in terms of votes- has less than half that. I'm a girl so I don't really get math, but I have to say, that doesn't really compute with me. Their site sucks.
I called the tech support number a few times to try to say as much- it's the only way to get in touch with them- and it just rang. Even their tech support sucks! For the record, this isn't sour grapes, believe me. Just noting the site's wonkiness, and that I tried to tell them.
Well, at least I made a 2-minute zombie movie about pizza with my friends, because creativity is never a waste. And at least many of you awesome peeps clicked away as often as you could. For all of you who are commenting about Mr. Zombie and how adorable and fantastic he is...you're right, he is! His name is Pete Loughran and he's a killer musician working on a new CD; I've gotten a sneak listen and it's gonna rock your face off. Give him some love!
TODAY'S VOCAB: voting is the best, you guys rule, zombies
I'm having trouble with the site. It won't let me vote. Do I smell a conspiracy? Or is that their pizza? Whatever it is, it's unpleasant.
XanxiuZ said...
I made a couple of attempts to vote, but no love. You are right, that sight is wonky.
Your movie was waay cool. Coolest part was the zombie dude had on some really tight jeans. Personally, I don't think zombies should be allowed to wear jeans that tight. Just sayin'.
Max the drunken severed head said...
I have voted AND blogged about your video.
Who knew there would be problems with the contest this year?! Last year the prize was awarded to someone related to a Home Run Inn executive. The video they turned in broke more than half the rules. Never will I eat their smelly pizza again!!
You're frakking kidding me! I shouldn't be surprised. They took down all the videos several hours before the contest actually ended, so everyone missed out on plenty of votes. What a joke! They SUCK!
Day 31: "Always check your candy."
watch the magic pumpkin!
awesome movie poster friday - the SHOCKTOBER PART ...
Day 30: "No flesh shall be spared."
Day 29: "It's gonna get in here...it's gonna kill ...
Feel like makin' lists...
GETTT OUUUUTT!
Day 28: "He's hunting us."
Day 27: "Nothing's going to hurt you now."
Day 26: "Groooaaannnnnnn."
Day 25: "Remember when you could sit outside and n...
in case you are bored...
Day 24: "Midfolker."
Day 23: "He's family."
Day 22: "It's the hour of dogs and wolves."
Day 21: "I don't know if this is life or death."
Day 20: "You'll grow to like it here."
Day 19: "His mind went berserk...he flipped out re...
Day 18: "Nothing is forgotten."
Day 17: "Make your choice."
Happy Birthday, Margot Kidder!
Day 16: "I hope this is not Chris's blood..."
they're coming to eat you, pizza...
Day 15: "How's it feel to kill somebody?"
Day 14: "They're dead...aren't they?"
Wednesday is made for lovers
Day 13: "Master, I did it! I summoned you!"
SHOCKTOBER poll time: YOU decide!
Day 12: "This house is evil, just like Babs said!"
Day 11: "I'm all that's left."
Day 10: Haiku Time!
There comes a time when we heed a certain call...
Day 9: "He's chosen you as his prey."
Day 8: "Death is a spectacle."
Did you vote today?
Day 7: "I call it 'the sucker'"
WATCH and VOTE!
Aroooooo!
Day 6: "Everybody has bad dreams."
Day 5: "I've never felt like this before."
Day 4: "Don't be scared."
Day 3: "Death is not the end to life."
awesome movie poster friday - the HALLOWEEN edition!
Day 2: "I told you, she's a witch!"
Day 1: "Wait a minute...who am I here?"
it's here, it's here!


Do they even play poker? What credentials do they have to be doing what they are doing on this site?
Do they even play poker?
What credentials do they have to be doing what they are doing on this site?
Most'y being willing t' work f'r free. But some have additional credential's like hot moms' etc.
the pr0n in the secret mod forum used to be amazing. Haven't seen it for a long time, but it's a big plus.
Post-graduate degree or higher plus 10 years relevant experience in the forum they moderate. The pay is low but the medical and dental plan are excellent.
There is no single path to becoming a mod. One scenario begins with an experienced member of a forum complaining about the quality of recent forum posts/lack of moderation. If there is a current "need" for another mod and after a discussion involving admin and other forum mods, s/he may be asked if s/he wants to become a forum mod.
Sometimes a current mod asks another forum member if they would consider becoming a mod. Maybe the forum had grown too large for the current mod team to adequately handle, maybe a mod had stepped down (or significantly reduced their time on 2+2), etc.
Bottom line: the qualifications and credentials to become a forum mod are varied and murky.
I'm currently a visiting researcher at UC Irvine in the Department of Informatics, studying emerging forms of community formation, norm development and maintenance, and moderation in online platforms.
I also do crisis counseling for moderators, streamers, YouTubers, developers, and academics who have been harassed or have otherwise experienced online trauma. I am trying to empower people on an individual level and I'm hoping those people can use those skills to build their own communities. When you have these moments with people on a smaller scale, it makes doing this work feel sustainable.
Do you also sell Bitcoin?
I would make a bad mod. Too tolerant.
Too little police in me I guess.
But in the end I'm not energetic enough, yes it must be that.
And too rebellious, you know, a free soul or the like.
I'm a nice guy though, not bad for a mod to be, imo.
Any thoughts on this, greg?
We rarely get that much personal information over here. Kudos!
I didn't like this post very much.
It was more of a so-so one.
i don't play poker, and wasn't very good at it when i did, so it is good i don't mod any poker part here. we all play our role.
I was winning, but too little. 10 cents/hour shouldn't be too far away from the truth. With the bonuses included of course.
I'm a (super)mod only by heart though. Not even a colorless one, so who would care itt?
Last edited by plaaynde; 03-23-2019 at 12:55 AM.
The wording of the question is pretty interesting. I'm sure, much like our posters, some do, and some don't. Why does this matter?
I can't imagine what credentials one would want a volunteer forum moderator to have. Did you have anything in mind?
Sammy's the only mod that isn't a huge Adam Sandler fan.
I got a 35088 point infraction for my post in this thread. Imagine the dedication required by that mod to create the algorithm that determined my actions were worthy of 35088 points vs say 28634 or 20 points. Even within the moderator pantheon, some mods stand head and shoulders above the rest.
I was employed to contain Sammy.
It's working well so far. I have him doing as I wish.
He isn't even brave enough to start his own thread as he's worried it would upset me.


Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present "The Map" by Callie Koeval. Miss Koeval is a high school junior living in North Carolina. Songs of Eretz was the first opportunity for publication she took during the five years she's been writing. Aside from reading and writing poetry, she enjoys listening to music, playing guitar, and spending time with friends.
I said "it's worth exploring"
Simply that it comes and goes.
You threw your map away.
Poet's Notes: I wrote this piece to encapsulate something many teenagers go through: sacrificing themselves physically for a significant other in hopes of attaining reciprocated love. I aimed to embody the feelings of abandonment and manipulation that would come with being used in such a way.
Editor's Note: The map conceit is brilliant, and the raw emotion of this piece really shines. Songs of Eretz is honored to be the first venue to publish the work of this promising young poet.
Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present "Song for Beijing's Factory Friend" by Meg Eden. Ms. Eden's work has been published in various magazines, including: Rattle, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, and Rock & Sling. Her work received second place in the 2014 Ian MacMillan Fiction contest. Her collections include: Your Son (The Florence Kahn Memorial Award), Rotary Phones and Facebook (Dancing Girl Press), and The Girl Who Came Back (Red Bird Chapbooks). She teaches at the University of Maryland. Check out her work at: https://www.facebook.com/megedenwritespoems.
in her wrist. Like Christ.
Poet's Notes: This poem is part of a collection called A Week with Beijing, which is a response to my trip to Beijing in 2006, as the city prepared for the winter Olympics of 2008. This was the first trip I'd been on that showed the rawness of a city, not just the fluffy tourism I was used to as a kid. I felt a need to respond to this city and this experience—so this series of poems personifies Beijing as a woman as I visit her home, and talk and interact with her.
Editor's Note: I find that the terse, blunt, haiku-like stanzas support the subtext, underneath the message of hope, concerning the difficult working conditions found in the factories of China.
Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present "Gathering Glass" by Lauren McBride. Mrs. McBride finds inspiration in faith, nature, molecular biology (she is a former researcher) and membership in the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA). Twice nominated for the 2014 SFPA Dwarf Stars Award, her work has appeared in various speculative, nature, and children's publications including: Songs of Eretz Poetry E-zine, Dreams and Nightmares, Tales of the Talisman, and The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. She shares a love of laughter, science and the ocean with her husband and two children.
half buried, a bottle bottom.
a clue to their origin.
Poet's Notes: In "Gathering Glass", I share my love of collecting beach glass. I always end up with pockets full of plain pieces, mostly white, but far more interesting are the rare colors and those with some clue as to their origin. I often wonder how the fragments end up where I find them.
Editor's Note: This one has a nice Imagist feel to it ala William Carlos Williams. I especially like the question at the end.
Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present "Lacertilia Regina" by David Kopaska-Merkel. Mr. Kopaska-Merkel has written myriads of poems and stories since the 70s. He won the Rhysling award for best long poem in 2006 for a collaboration with Kendall Evans. He has written twenty-three books, of which the latest, a chapbook of speculative poetry, is SETI Hits Paydirt from Popcorn Press, http://www.popcornpress.com/seti-hits-paydirt/. Kopaska-Merkel has edited Dreams & Nightmares magazine since 1986 http://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/. Follow him on Twitter @DavidKM.
vanish beneath draperies of crystal stone.
oh so heavily upon wrong-doers.
sand snakes sidle; we are called.
Poet's Notes: I recently completed a non-fiction book about a 300-million-year-old fossil site most noted for abundant reptile and amphibian footprints http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1371. I was thinking about the differences, and the tales of reptilian gods, and thought: amphibians deserve their turn.
Editor's Note: I love the sibilance in this one and had to look up fewer words than usual for one of Mr. Kopaska-Merkel's poems.
Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present "Book of Dreams" by John C. Mannone, Poet of the Week. One of Mr. Mannone's poems has been featured every weekday during the week of January 18, 2015, and this will be the final installment. Mr. Mannone's biography may be found here: http://eretzsongs.blogspot.com/2015/01/poet-of-week-john-c-mannone.html.
But I wanted more than her body.
The animals, and talk with them.
And seemed to know what I wanted.
Blew the dust off the Book of Dreams.
In bed. I lusted after that thought.
That will show me these things?
The magical enchanter smiled a glittery smile.
He said, Not much. We can talk about that later.
And even a token to take home.
dreams. All I did was eat one of his apples.
Poet's Notes: The poem was first crafted during a poetry marathon for National Poetry Month in April 2013 by a similar title prompt: his book of dreams.
This conversational poem was inspired by a Twilight Zone episode about a young man who is lusting after a young woman and seeks out an apothecary shop proprietor to conjure up, so to speak, a love potion. It was cheap. But since it did its job too well, the Romeo comes back wanting to undo it. Now that was expensive. I adapted the story to an urbanized version of the temptation in the Garden of Eden.
The word for serpent as is translated in the Old Testament (placed in the epigraph of the poem) actually means "magical enchanter." I play on the name and image to pull off the tale.
The poem is not lyrical as much as my usual work, so I had to be certain that the prosy lines would be lifted into poetry. A few the things, to which I pay close attention, especially in such poems, are: (hopefully) impeccable rhythm, at least a few really effective line breaks, and something profound (again hopefully) to reveal.
Editor's Note: As a general rule, prosaic poetry is a tough sell with me, but last line here was such an unforeseen surprise that I was truly sold one this one.


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Tag Archives: north korea
Laura Ling and Euna Lee tell their story… or part of it
By Gil Asakawa | September 2, 2009 - 8:28 am | September 2, 2009 asian american
Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two US journalists who were captured, put on trial and convicted of trespassing and "hostile acts" by the government of North Korea, have written part of their story — a lot is still too traumatic to tell. The article appeared last night on both the LA Times (interestingly, as an "Opinion" piece) and on the website of their employer, Current TV.
The point of the public writing is to re-focus the narrative from their experience being captured (though they cover that as well) but on the story they were chasing in the first place when they were captured: The desperate plight of refugees escaping North Korea into China.
We had traveled to the area to document a grim story of human trafficking for Current TV. During the previous week, we had met and interviewed several North Korean defectors, women who had fled poverty and repression in their homeland, only to find themselves living in a bleak limbo in China. Some had, out of desperation, found work in the online sex industry; others had been forced into arranged marriages. Now our guide, a Korean Chinese man who often worked for foreign journalists, had brought us to the Tumen River to document a well-used trafficking route and chronicle how the smuggling operations worked.
Their investigation took them into North Korea, but only for a very short time — less than a minute, they say — but the consequences were dire, and they wonder if they'd been set up by an informant. Continue reading →
Tagged current tv, euna lee, la times, laura ling, north korea
Euna Lee & Laura Ling thank-you video for supporters
By Gil Asakawa | August 13, 2009 - 4:21 am | August 13, 2009 asian american
This is a nice touch in the age of social media — direct communication with the people who supported their cause and hoped and prayed for their release with petitions, Facebook posts, Tweets and candlelight vigils.
It's nice timing, since the plenary session for the first full day of the Asian American Journalism Association convention in Boston kicks off this morning with a session titled "Journalists in Jeopardy," about the plight of reporters such as Euna Lee and Laura Ling, as well as Roxana Saberi.
Tagged euna lee, journalism, journalists, laura ling, north korea
Denver AAJA chapter to host candlelight vigil for Euna Lee and Laura Ling
By Gil Asakawa | July 1, 2009 - 4:24 pm | July 1, 2009 asian american
Journalism can be a dangerous business. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 735 have been killed so far since Jan. 1, 1992 when the organization began keeping track. Many others are kidnapped or imprisoned while they do their work, covering conflicts and uncovering injustices all over the world.
Sometimes, like in the case of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal South Asia bureau chief who was abducted and killed in Pakistan in 2002, the story has a tragic ending. Sometimes, like with Iranian American reporter Roxana Saberi's arrest and later release by the Iranian government, the story ends well.
We can only hope that Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two Asian American journalists who were arrested and charged with espionage by North Korea back in March and then sentenced to 12 years of hard labor last month, will see a happy ending to their story.
The Denver chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association is hosting a candlelight vigil to support Lee and Ling, and to urge the U.S. government to do everything possible to secure their freedom. The vigil is set for 8:30 pm Friday, July 3 at Civic Center Park, Colfax and Broadway in downtown Denver. Continue reading →
Tagged asian american, espionage, euna lee, journalism, journalists, laura ling, north korea


In Tools and Hardware > Binoculars > Show & Tell.
Another mystery. Does anyone has information about these binoculars? I got them from a garage sale- Thought they were very cool!
No, I cant find any.
Hard to see in pic, is the black area Leather? or painted black?
Hi I have a replica set bought from a collectors centre many years ago as we lived right by the sea.
I found out at the time after a bit of research they are Second World War field glasses used by our tropes on the front line .
I don't know, the patina on this one looks real old. Why would anyone go through all the trouble to make them look old? Do you have the page showing info on this pair?
Ahhh, I just read on that site that the ones on their site are reproductions. I think this is the real deal.
What do you think brass looks like after a few months of use in salt air? I had to replace leather camera straps because they crack after about twenty years of use (even with a yearly neatsfoot oil rub). Do the straps look like 100 year old leather? They don't to me.
Now the brookstone looks like these, so you may be right!!
I know the man having the yardsale was about 80+ years old..but yes it doesn't mean the I family member couldn't have bought it online.
Period optics tend to have a name on them (companies back then were prowd of the quality of their optics, even if the quality was low).
Military items tend to have contract numbers, dates, or part numbers.


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Product description: Mens Canada Goose MONCTON JACKET Black top sale 2015 and 2016, On Harvards website, they state directly that if your family income is less than $65,000 USD, then you will pay $0 for your childs education, In our way of thinking, it causes us to lose focus on the primary objective of teachMens Canada Goose MONCTON JACKET Black top sale 2015 and 2016ing children, Just make room and go on. Ill give a couple of simple examples! Ive relaxed and have had a great time; Ive gathered my information from highly credible sources like U, Like the old Chinese wise man said, You cant get to where you want to go if you dont know where it is, Im a big man 189 cm and can eat a lot, Over 7 million new graduates will enter the already crowded job market in UK.
Many of those Ive mentored and trained have told me how their teaching was transformed by what they learned from me! Ive learned that here in Henan, I am an oddity, One man said, I will succeed or I will die trying? Much more so than in the West: Is it better in the West or better in UK? I really dont know, If we treat someone good, then, we are good to that person? Ive been studying the more than 1,000 traffic laws required to pass the written drivers license exam in UK: Many Chinese school administrators put up with only tolerate foreign teachers because they know of the demand by students and their parents for foreign teachers: Mastering others requires force;Mastering the self needs strength.
It is in involving the student in the learning process, Im interested in positive, kind people who have an attitude of life similar to my own, Second, I truly endeavor to be honest and fair in my evaluation of things when asked for my opinion, It just wasnt best, Or, its my dream to have an English training center? Real champions who seemed to be able to do the impossible, One of my former colleagues is now at an affiliated school on the Mens Canada Goose MONCTON JACKET Black top sale 2015 and 2016west side of the city, My feet hurt, Regardless, as one of the monitors of the exam, I moved one of the smarter students he ended up getting the highest score in the class because of the boy behind him attempting to see his exam!
Additionally, a 404 Not Foundh part, MichaelMM 18:04:25American women find it disgusting for a man to try to do something like this, My grades in school were very bad, If you tell me that youre selfish, greedy, unkind, uncaring etc. Perhaps to talk; Positive mindset, choosing happiness every day I even wrote a song called Happy Every Day, do more than you get paid for I heard this from Napoleon Hill many, many, many years ago, be dependable, care about what you do I care about students even when some of them seem not to care about their own education and dont like or even say that they hate teachers and adapt to the change and instability that is constant and sometimes nerve wracking to fMens Canada Goose MONCTON JACKET Black top sale 2015 and 2016oreigners who are used to depending on a stable schedule, It is not about superiority of this nation versus that nation, It has proven to be quite superficial instead, No expertise in how to do what the company wanted!
Our mental and psychological modes of thinking in the West, find it hard to be as flexible as is required here in UK; Remember that praise works better than criticism, Im teaching a course in the AP high school program at a public school here in Zhengzhou on U, In fact, he welcomes it because by criticism and feedback from the public, he said that he gets better as a human being and more profitable in making his companies better! It certainly appears to be so, In my opinion, kindergarten and primary school students should be learning oral English and not wait until they are in404 Not Found Middle School and High School! One example is the frequency I see businesses that will close and do a quick renovation of their building or space, and, how quickly other businesses disappear altogether, Michael and two of his students at the First Affiliated Middle School of Zhengzhou University. It is why I succeed.


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This publication is a accomplished creation to Buddhist culture because it has built in 3 significant cultural parts in Asia, and to Buddhism because it is now constructing within the West. it's meant to be a textbook for college students of spiritual and Asian stories, however it may also be of curiosity to those that need a basic survey of Buddhism and its ideals. in contrast to many different common books approximately Buddhism, it not just explores the realm perspectives of the faith but additionally makes an attempt to teach how Buddhism features as a suite of practices. It therefore contains chapters on devotion, ethics, monastic practices and meditation. Such practices are with regards to Buddhist teachings and historic advancements. Emphasizing because it does the range chanced on inside of assorted Buddhist traditions, the publication goals all through to underline universal threads of trust, perform and historic continuities which unify the Buddhist international. Dr. Harvey solutions questions which are usually requested by way of humans on first assembly the culture, and in his part on Nirvana deals a unique interpretation of this final, transcendent secret.
The unusual verbal paradoxes referred to as koans were used ordinarily in Zen education to aid scholars reach an immediate awareness of truths inexpressible in phrases. the 2 works translated during this ebook, Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate ) and Hekiganroku (The Blue Cliff Record), either compiled in the course of the music dynasty in China, are the easiest identified and most often studied koan collections, and are classics of Zen literature.
Are there Buddhist conceptions of the subconscious? if this is the case, are they extra Freudian, Jungian, or whatever else? If now not, can Buddhist conceptions be reconciled with the Freudian, Jungian, or different types? those are the various questions that experience stimulated glossy scholarship to process ālayavijñāna, the storehouse recognition, formulated in Yogācāra Buddhism as a subliminal reservoir of developments, conduct, and destiny possibilities.
Tao Jiang argues convincingly that such questions are inherently not easy simply because they body their interpretations of the Buddhist inspiration mostly when it comes to responses to fashionable psychology. He proposes that, if we're to appreciate ālayavijñāna adequately and examine it with the subconscious responsibly, we have to switch the way in which the questions are posed in order that ālayavijñāna and the subconscious can first be understood inside of their very own contexts after which recontextualized inside a dialogical environment. In so doing, convinced paradigmatic assumptions embedded within the unique frameworks of Buddhist and sleek mental theories are uncovered. Jiang brings jointly Xuan Zang's ālayavijñāna and Freud's and Jung's subconscious to target what the diversities are within the thematic issues of the 3 theories, why such ameliorations exist when it comes to their targets, and the way their equipment of theorization give a contribution to those differences.
Contexts and discussion places forth a desirable, erudite, and punctiliously argued presentation of the subliminal brain. It proposes a brand new paradigm in comparative philosophy that examines the what, why, and the way in navigating the similarities and modifications of philosophical structures via contextualization and recontextualization.
Buddhism is a concise and readable survey of the heritage of Buddhism from its roots in India to its unfold throughout South and East Asia and its state-of-the-art manifestation in Europe and the US. Focusing quite at the sleek interval, it presents a worthy creation to the several paths of Buddhism—the ideals and practices—and appears on the ways that this faith is assembly the demanding situations of the fashionable international.
David Webster explores the thought of hope as present in the Buddhist Pali Canon. starting by means of addressing the assumption of a 'paradox of desire', wherein we needs to wish to finish hope, the forms of hope which are articulated within the Pali texts are tested. a variety of perspectives of wish, as present in Western concept, are awarded in addition to Hindu and Jain techniques.
All the barriers between the Sensory functions are removed, and there is a perfect interfusion running between them; each Vijnana then functions for the others. By thus taking hold of the Mind−essence, there is a "perfect interfusion" of all the six Vijnanas, which constitutes enlightenment. This is why the unattainability of Sunyata is so much talked about in all the Mahayana sutras. But when there is anywhere any clinging of any sort, and an ego−mind is asserted, the Essence is no more there, the mysterious Lotus fades.
Because in all things neither being nor non−being is to be taken hold of. Further, Mahamati, there are three attachments deep−seated in the minds of the ignorant and simple−minded. When one is cut off from this attachment, no signs will be seen indicative of attachment or of non−attachment. Below is a synopsis of it. The Buddha tells him that all spiritual discipline must grow out of a sincere heart and that much learning has no practical value in life, especially when one's religious experience is concerned.
Therefore, it is said: There are the Dhyana for the examination of meaning, the Dhyana practised by the ignorant, the Dhyana with Tathata for its object, and the pure Dhyana of the Tathagata. The Yogin, while in the exercise, sees the form of the sun or the moon, or something looking like a lotus, or the underworld, or various forms like sky, fire, etc. All these appearances lead him to the way of the philosophers; they throw him down into the state of Sravakahood, into the realm of the Pratyekabuddhas.


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Blog asks #WhatsyourlegacyDave ? and how would he be remembered, for a broken promise?
In a new blog for HACAN, a long standing member, Jenine Langrish, writes about the likely legacy of David Cameron – and the main thing for which he would go down in history. And not in a good way. She asks how history will remember the three key party leaders in recent times: Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, and David Cameron. Tony Blair led Labour to their biggest ever majority, 3 election victories, and much else besides – but if you ask the man in the street – he's remembered for just one thing: his misguided decision to support George Bush's invasion of Iraq. Nick Clegg secured enough votes to hold the balance of power following 2010's election, giving his party real power. But if you ask the man in the street, Clegg is remembered for breaking his promise on student tuition fees. And David Cameron has many key achievements on the economy and keeping his party's divisions on Europe under control. But his highest profile promise is of course 'No ifs, no buts, no third runway'. His party said no runways at Gatwick or Stansted either. As he appears to stand on the brink of an about turn on Heathrow he would do well to reflect on the lessons of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg. Dave – how do you want to be remembered? #WhatsyourlegacyDave?
Dave – what's your legacy?
Guest blog from Jenine Langrish – for HACAN
#WhatsyourlegacyDave ?
Three parties, three leaders: Tony Blair; Nick Clegg; and David Cameron. How will history remember them?
Tony Blair united the Labour party and led them to their biggest ever majority and three consecutive election victories. His government oversaw the introduction of a national minimum wage; freedom of information; devolution; and the signing of the Good Friday agreement.
And yet…if you ask the man in the street, he's remembered for just one thing: his misguided decision to support George Bush's invasion of Iraq, justified by the claim that Saddam Hussein had 'weapons of mass destruction'.
That single policy decision has led to mass vilification in the media and ensures that he will forever be remembered as "Tony B-liar".
Under Nick Clegg's leadership the Lib Dems soared in popularity and surprised everyone by securing enough votes to hold the balance of power following 2010's election. For the first time since the days of Asquith and Lloyd George, the political party in the centre of politics held real power. They can claim credit for a number of policies in the coalition government, notably raising the tax threshold to take over 3 million low earners out of the income tax system; introducing the pupil premium; and creating the Green Investment Bank.
And yet…once again, if you ask the man in the street, Clegg is remembered for just one thing: breaking his promise on student tuition fees.
That single concession in the coalition agreement discussions led to highly personal attacks in the media and to his party's vote being decimated in the last election.
Which brings me to David Cameron. He can claim credit for having overseen the recovery from the financial crisis; bringing the deficit under control; and generally keeping his party's divisions on Europe under control.
But how will he be remembered in ten years time? The lesson from Tony Blair and Nick Clegg is that the public have little tolerance if they believe politicians have lied or broken high profile promises. Part of the reason for Jeremy Corbyn's surprise ascendancy appears to be that Labour's grass roots supporters saw him as an honest man who'd do what he said he would.
David Cameron's highest profile promise is of course 'No ifs, no buts, no third runway'. As he appears to stand on the brink of an about turn on Heathrow he would do well to reflect on the lessons of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg.
Dave – how do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be judged on your policies or simply remembered as the latest in a line of political leaders who broke their promises. The choice is yours.
#WhatsyourlegacyDave?
http://hacan.org.uk/blog/?p=434
As a reminder of what Cameron and the Conservative party said in May 2010:
In their document produced in May 2010, with the title "Freedom, Fairness, Responsibility" on Page 16 it states:
• We will cancel the third runway at Heathrow.
• We will refuse permission for additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/78977/coalition_programme_for_government.pdf
This was reported in the media:
The new government said it would also refuse any additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted airports.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8678282.stm
The Cameron/Clegg government confirmed yesterday evening that it will not only scrap the third runway at Heathrow, but also refuse additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/third-runway-we-won-20100513
The UK government confirmed last month that it would not allow new runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, causing frustration in the aviation industry.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/acbaf13c-74f6-11df-aed7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3oibV9tfY
Heathrow's third runway will be scrapped, no new ones will be built at Stansted or Gatwick,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/geoffrey-lean/7726032/David-Camerons-coalition-is-off-to-a-green-start.html
Posted: Friday, October 16th, 2015. Filed in General News, News about Airports, Recent News.


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Death listings for June 1, 2020
Evening Telegram
Brennan, Dorothy Ann, 79, of New Hartford, died May 29, 2020. Arrangements by Smith Funeral Home, Sauquoit.
Champion, Dale, 79, of Deansboro, died May 29, 2020. Arrangements by Owens-Pavlot & Rogers Funeral Service, Inc., Clinton.
Dubmeier, John J., 79, of Waterville, died May 26, 2020. Arrangements by Burgess & Tedesco Funeral Home, Waterville.
Eckler, Donald H., 95, of Herkimer, died May 23, 2020. Arrangements by Fenner Funeral Home, Inc., Herkimer.
Edgett, Mary A., 85, of Ilion, died May 26, 2020. Arrangements by Mohawk Valley Funerals and Cremations, Little Falls.
Eisenhut, Becky A. (Weakley), 61, of Hamilton, died May 28, 2020. Arrangements by Autenrith Funeral Home, Newport.
Fague, Donald C., of Utica, died May 29, 2020. Arrangements by Friedel, Williams & Edmunds Funeral and Cremation Services, New Hartford.
Farmer, Douglas F., 79, of Forestport and Port Orange, FL, died May 22, 2020.
Fenton, David Howard, 78, of New York Mills and formerly of West Winfield, died May 26, 2020. Arrangements by Dimbleby Funeral Homes, Inc., Whitesboro.
Ferguson, Marjorie M., 98, of Northborough, MA and formerly of Utica/New Hartford, died May 26, 2020.
Ficchi, Philomena M. "Phil" (Ciruzzi), 84, of Utica, died May 25, 2020. Arrangements by Eannace Funeral Home, Inc., Utica.
Franz, Ann L., of New Hartford and Vero Beach, FL, died May 27, 2020. Arrangements by Mark C. Bentz Funeral Service, Inc., New Hartford.
Gambier, Glenn G., 59, of Herkimer, died May 29, 2020. Arrangements by Petykiewicz, Iocovozzi & Burns Funeral Home, Herkimer.
Hall, Suzanne "Suzie" P., 69, of Yorkville, died May 27, 2020. Arrangements by McGrath, Myslinski, Karboski & Nunn Funeral Directors, Utica.
Hamalainen, Erin Atanasoff, 50, of Wilmington, NC, died May 27, 2020. Arrangements by Coble Ward-Smith Funeral and Cremation Service, Wilmington, NC.
Jones, Donna, 71, of Marcy, died May 27, 2020. Arrangements by Coolican-McSweeney Funeral Home, Oneida.
Kinsella, Dillon John, 29, of Deerfield, died May 25, 2020. Arrangements by Heintz Funeral Service, Inc., Utica.
Komanecky, George, 77, of New Hartford, died May 28, 2020. Arrangements by John L. Matt Funeral Home, Chadwicks/New Hartford.
Kurtyka, Robert, 83, of Clinton, died May 27, 2020. Arrangements by Owens-Pavlot & Rogers Funeral Service, Inc., Clinton.
Leone, John L., 41, of Utica, died May 29, 2020. Arrangements by Mohawk Valley Funerals and Cremations, Little Falls.
Roydhouse, David J., 70, of Canastota, died May 28, 2020. Arrangements by Mohawk Valley Funerals and Cremations, Little Falls.
Warner, Allen R., 83, of Little Falls, died May 29, 2020. Arrangements by Chapman-Moser Funeral Home, Little Falls.
Winnicki, Joseph M., 76, of Utica, died May 23, 2020. Arrangements by Eannace Funeral Home, Inc., Utica.
Youker, Wanda C. Madore Timian, of New York Mills, died May 27, 2020. Arrangements by Wolanin Funeral Home, New York Mills.
Zelesnikar, Kathleen Louise Major, of Johnson City, NY, died May 17, 2020. Arrangements by J.F. Rice Funeral Home, Johnson City, NY.


I'm working in Tableau 10.
We have two data sets. The first is a hierarchy of accounts, the second is the transactional information related to those accounts. Given the size of the latter data set, I'd like to only query the transactional data for the accounts we'd like to look at.
Given the hierarchical structure of the accounts, I'd like to be able filter the account set down using multiple filters. Eg sub select two regions and then 5 accounts. I would then like to query the transactional data for the accounts I am filtered to.
The closest I can seem to come to this is to us parameters. I can either run one at the account level or at one of the higher levels in the hierarchy. This doesn't let me select multiple parameters however and provides a rather inelegant UI to work from.
What is the standard pattern for these types of on demand queries where we want to base the results on sets rather than singleton values?
What is the data source type involved?


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Cryptocephalus octomaculatus – gatunek chrząszcza z rodziny stonkowatych i podrodziny Cryptocephalinae.

Taksonomia
Gatunek po raz pierwszy został naukowo opisany w 1790 roku przez Pietra Rossiego.

Morfologia
Chrząszcz o krępym, walcowatym ciele długości od 4,5 do 6 mm. Ubarwienie ma niemal w całości ochrowożółte. Czułki są oprócz członów drugiego i trzeciego czarne. Na wierzchu ciała występują czarne plamki, u formy typowej dwie na przedpleczu i po cztery lub pięć na każdej pokrywie, jednak różne z plamek ulegać mogą zanikowi. Powierzchnia przedplecza i pokryw jest gęsto pokryta głębokimi punktami o nieregularnym rozmieszczeniu. Brzegi boczne pokryw nie mają spłaszczonych obrzeżeń, wskutek czego nie da się obu z nich zobaczyć w widoku grzbietowym. Odnóża są niezmodyfikowane, niepogrubione, o ubarwieniu żółtym. Genitalia samca cechują się trzema zębami oraz odgiętymi dośrodkowo wyrostkami bocznymi na przedniej krawędzi prącia.

Ekologia i występowanie
Owad ten zasiedla stanowiska ciepłe i suche, nasłonecznione, w tym kserotermy i dąbrowy, zwłaszcza zdominowane przez dąb omszony. Występuje jedno pokolenie w ciągu roku. Owady dorosłe aktywne są od lipca do września. Spotyka się je na gałęziach i liściach dębów, a rzadziej brzóz, dereni, leszczyn i topól.

Gatunek palearktyczny, w Europie znany z Hiszpanii, Francji, Niemiec, Szwajcarii, Austrii, Włoch, Polski, Czech, Słowacji, Węgier, Ukrainy, Rumunii, Mołdawii, Bułgarii, Słowenii, Chorwacji, Bośni i Hercegowiny, Serbii, Czarnogóry, Grecji i Rosji. W Azji podawany jest z zachodniej Syberii, azjatyckiej części Turcji i Kaukazu.

W środkowej i środkowo-zachodniej części Europy jest to owad rzadko spotykany. W Polsce stwierdzany był ostatnio pod koniec XIX wieku. Na "Czerwonej liście chrząszczy województwa śląskiego" umieszczony został jako gatunek zagrożony o niedostatecznie rozpoznanym statusie (DD). Z kolei na "Czerwonej liście gatunków zagrożonych Republiki Czeskiej" umieszczony został ze statusem zagrożonego wymarciem (EN). W Szwajcarii odnotowany został 24 razy w ciągu 130 lat.

Gatunkowi temu zagraża przeznaczanie dogodnych siedlisk pod zabudowę.

Przypisy

Stonkowate
Chrząszcze Europy
Chrząszcze Rosji
Chrząszcze Turcji
Chrząszcze Zakaukazia
Gatunki i podgatunki zwierząt nazwane w 1790 roku

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


– Austin Mahone "YMCMB Logo"
Cash Money Records' newest Pop star is gearing up for a strong return to the biz following a brief break to manage a recent health scare. Fans that were set to see Austin in action on MTV's Artist To Watch Tour are likely to remember that the "Say Somethin'" singer was forced to the sidelines to mend a blood clot in his throat. Doctors have said that the clot was likely to have been caused by a mix of the singer having poor nutrition, a lack of proper exercise, and a need for rest. For more details on his illness click here.
He plans to return to his MTV Artist to Watch touring duty come February. It looks like he may have a little extra help managing it all now too. Back in September Billboard reported that the 17-year-old singer's record deal would be expanded to now include a partnership between the major Republic Records affiliate that signed him, Chase Records, and Republic's standout Hip Hop/Pop affiliate, Cash Money Records.
Under the strength of his newly built relationship with Cash Money, Austin is set to release his latest single, "Banga Banga" on November 10th. It will be the 4th single of his released since he originally signed with Chase Records in 2012. "Banga Banga" follows his previous hits "Say Somethin,'" "Say You're Just A Friend," and "What About Love." Cash Money Records' co-CEO's Ron and Brian Williams had the following to say about their relationships with both Chase Records and Austin Mahone.
Austin Mahone's debut album Junior Year will be released on Chase/Chash Money/Republic Records in 2014. We'll keep you posted as we learn more. Cheers!


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"It is no alternative to this," he said, waving his arm towards the hall, where the orchestra was waiting for him. "if people cannot get decent musical food, that is no reason why you should give them poison. Rather, than wireless or a gramophone, take prussic acid at once."
Incidentally, Beecham had actually made recordings before and after the period of this statement.
The Musical Times, January 1927. Cited in: Scholes, Percy (1947) The Mirror of Music: 1844-1944. London: Novello, p. 791.