Half-Moon Investigations by Eoin Colfer (Author) and Sean Patrick Reilly (Narrator): I knew when smoky jazz filled the car that I was in for trouble, and I was right. The combination of Eoin Colfer's dime-store humor and Sean Patrick Reilly's melodramatic brogue made me believe I entered the world of a P.I.
Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke (Author) and Brendan Fraser (Narrator): I had the biggest crush on Brendan Fraser back in high school, which is why I picked up this recording in the first place. But after the first few minutes, I forgot whose voice I was listening to and got totally enthralled by the story.
Heist Society by Ally Carter (Author) and Angela Dawe (Narrator): This action-packed story works so well as an audiobook I can't imagine it any other way. Although I love Carter's writing so much that if I had read it first I probably wouldn't be able to imagine it in audio form.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (Author) and Various Artists (Narrator): There are a lot of wonderful audio productions of this series, but perhaps my favorite is the one produced by HarperAudio featuring Kenneth Branagh, Patrick Stewart, Lynn Redgrave and more. It was like listening to a story behind a story--with each narrator you actually hear how passionate they are about the book they're performing.
Joyful Noise by Paul Fleischman (Author) and Various Artists (Narrator): It makes sense that you would want to listen to poetry read aloud, but this book is simply amazing when performed by two voices. Unfortunately, this audiobook has become difficult to find (I still have it on tape even though I no longer have a tape player). Hopefully this will be remastered so a new generation of listeners will be able to get the full effect of poems for two voices.
Jazz by Walter Dean Myers (Author), James Williams (Narrator) and Vanesse Thomas (Narrator): This is the perfect example of when great writing and great performance come together to make something bigger than the sum of its parts. It utilizes the musical talents of real jazz musicians to compliment the poems and illustrations of a beautiful book.
Wizard Heir by Cinda Williams Chima (Author) and Robert Ramirez (Narrator): I read the first book in this series and then listened to the second, and I can't tell you which way I enjoyed it more. The action is so compelling when read aloud, yet I wanted it to go faster so I eventually had to pick it up and read the third one myself.
Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales by Nelson Mandela (Compiler) and Various Artists (Narrator): I don't know if there has ever been this much buzz about an audiobook before, but with people like Charlize Theron, Samuel L. Jackson, Matt Damon, Whoopi Goldberg, Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman lending their voices to raise funds for children affected by HIV/AIDS in South Africa, it's really not surprising. What is surprising, however, is the quality of the production and how uniquely beautiful each story is. And both the traditional musical performance and the PDF of bright, bold illustrations included with the recording sets this production apart.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Author) and Jeff Woodman (Narrator): I was extremely skeptical when I picked up this audiobook. After all, how would they be able to turn the magic of an illustrated novel into an audio production? But I couldn't stop listening. This production does one of my favorite books of all time the justice it deserves.
I would be amiss if I didn't mentions that Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book ), Sara Zarr (Story of a Girl ) and Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian ) recorded their own books. These authors have an unique ability to make characters come alive both on the page and through voice.
If you want more recommendations, the ALA's new Odyssey Award recognizes the best audiobook produced for YA/children, and AudioFile Magazine presents The Audie Awards for many different categories.
This post is the last in a three-part series dedicated to Molly Jaffa, who loves audiobooks only slightly less than I do.


It comes in advance of Matilda Mård's first project as Many Voices Speak, 'Away for All Time,' out October 28.
There's an episode where Dominique Dunne makes a guest appearance, just a few years before she was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. She plays a girl from the street and she is singing "Blue Moon" on her audition for the music school. Even though it's staged as a failed audition, there was something in her shaky performance that unexpectedly moved me deeply. The cover is as much a tribute to the original song as it is a tribute to Dominique Dunne.
Mård's first EP as Many Voices Speak, Away for All Time, out October 28 on Hit City USA, constantly borrows from this tension between pop and despair. She drowns every line and every hook in melancholy, flipping major chords into something mournful. "Blue Moon," an outtake from the record, doesn't waver or shake in the same way that Dominique Dunne's did, but it retains every bit as unexpectedly affecting. Listen to it below.
Lead photo by Julia Mård.


text:
You are here: Home / Uncategorized / Raphael Sutton Named New Executive Director of American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
Raphael Sutton Named New Executive Director of American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
February 7, 2014 Comment Off 21 Views
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, JANUARY 29, 2014: David Hirsch, President of the Board of the American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (AFIPO), announced today that the Board has voted to appoint Raphael Sutton, currently a Vice President at JP Morgan Private Wealth Management, as Executive Director of AFIPO effective February 3, 2014. The appointment follows the unanimous recommendation of a search committee of the Board.
Mr. Sutton was born and raised in Israel, served in the Intelligence Corps of the IDF, and holds degrees in law and economics from Tel Aviv University, and an MBA from Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is admitted to practice law in Israel, and was an associate at an Israeli patent law firm before becoming Editor-in-Chief of The Israeli Wine Magazine, the premier such publication in Israel, for 3 years. Since his 2007 graduation from business school, Mr. Sutton has provided wealth management advice and solutions at JP Morgan to individuals, foundations, and not-for-profit institutions. He has also been a very active volunteer leader for the American Friends of Tel Aviv University.
Mr. Hirsch said, "We are delighted to have found someone who combines so many ideal qualities needed for this complex and exciting position. Raphael brings strategic focus, personal charm and charisma, and the ability to work with a wide range of North American and Israeli donors and cultural leaders. The entire Board looks forward to Raphael taking us to another level of support and partnership with the IPO."
Mr. Sutton noted, "The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is a national symbol and a flagship of Jewish culture. Since it was established, the IPO has been a source of inspiration and pride to millions all over the world. It is a great honor for me to have been selected to work on behalf of the orchestra and I look forward to building relationships with supporters of diverse ages and interests who care about what the IPO does and what it represents."
AFIPO is the North American support organization for the 77-year-old Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the world's great classical ensembles and a beacon of Israeli culture in its extensive appearances at home and around the world. Its activities take place on a national scale, in conjunction with IPO tours to North America, as well as performances by smaller ensembles. The IPO recently completed a long-awaited renovation of its Tel Aviv home, the Bronfman Auditorium, with philanthropic support from around the world. Further planned expansion of its spaces will accommodate the musicians and vibrant educational services to Israelis from schoolchildren (Sulamot and Keynote) to aspiring professional classical musicians.
Mr. Sutton is married to Dr. Gal Altberg, a senior fellow in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore. Dr. Altberg completed her pediatric residency at Mt. Sinai Hospital and studied at Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. They have one child.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
\section{Introduction}

Human action recognition is an active research in recent years. Due to being light-weight, privacy-preserving and robust against complex conditions~\cite{shi2017learning,si2019attention,chen2021lstm,song2018spatio}, 3D skeleton is becoming a popular modality for capturing human action dynamics~\cite{hou2016skeleton,yan2018spatial,sun2021multi,zhang2020context}. Majority of previous skeleton-based action recognition approaches~\cite{liu20173d,wang2017scene,xiao2019action,zhang2020sar} are developed with a fully-supervised manner. However, in order to learn a good action representation, supervised methods require a huge number of labeled skeleton samples which is expensive and difficult to obtain. It impels the exploration of learning skeleton-based action representation in an unsupervised manner~\cite{lin2020ms2l,rao2021augmented,su2020predict,li20213d}. Often unsupervised methods use pretext tasks to generate the supervision signals, such as reconstruction~\cite{gui2018adversarial,zheng2018unsupervised}, auto-regression~\cite{kundu2019unsupervised,su2020predict} and jigsaw puzzles~\cite{noroozi2016unsupervised,wei2019iterative}. Consequently, the learning highly relies on the quality of the designed pretext tasks, and those tasks are hard to be generalized for different downstream tasks. Recent unsupervised methods employ advanced contrastive learning ~\cite{lin2020ms2l,rao2021augmented,li20213d} for instance discrimination in a latent space and have achieved promising results.

\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[height = 50mm]{./figure/fig1}
	\caption{Illustrations about the proposed CPM and previous contrastive methods. (a) contrastive learning methods with negative~\cite{lin2020ms2l,rao2021augmented}. (b) contrastive learning methods without negative~\cite{chen2021exploring,grill2020bootstrap}. (c) the proposed Contrastive Positive Mining (CPM) method.}
	\label{fig:motivation}
\end{figure}

Although contrastive methods can improve the learning of skeleton representation, there are several issues, as illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:motivation}, in the current methods. Fig.~\ref{fig:motivation}(a) shows that the conventional contrastive learning methods require negatives~\cite{lin2020ms2l,rao2021augmented}. They only regard different augmentations of the same instance as positives to be drawn close during the learning, while other instances in the queue, usually formed by training samples in the previous round of epochs or batches, are all regarded as negatives and pushed apart from the current instance. Although these methods consider the correlation of current instance with others, there are inevitably instances in queue that belong to the same category as the current instance (marked with red rectangular box) and these instances are mistaken as negatives, which could degrade the learned representation. To address this issue, as shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:motivation}(c), this paper proposes to search for the instances in queue that are likely to be the same class of the current instance, then to consider those instances as non-self positives (marked with green rectangular box) and draw them close to current instance so as to improve the learning.

Fig.~\ref{fig:motivation}(b) shows the conventional contrastive learning methods without negatives~\cite{chen2021exploring,grill2020bootstrap}. The positive setting is similar to the previous methods illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:motivation}(a). Only different augmentations of individual instance are used as positive, consistency among current instance and the non-self instances with the same class are ignored during learning, limiting the representation ability for intra-class diversity. Besides, although non-negative manner avoids the instances of same class being pushed apart, the correlation of different instances are not considered.

Notice that contrastive objective of both methods (i.e. with or without negatives) is on individual instances, which challenges learning a feature space for all instances. To overcome the above shortcomings, as illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:motivation}(c), the proposed method extends the contrastive objective from individual instances by keeping a queue of instances and mining the non-self positives in the queue to boost learning. Specifically, a novel Contrastive Positive Mining (CPM) framework is proposed for unsupervised skeleton 3D action recognition. The proposed CPM is a siamese structure with a student and a target branch, which follows the SimSiam~\cite{chen2021exploring}. The student network is trained to match the target network in terms of the similarity distribution of the augmented instance in reference to all instances in a contextual queue, so that the non-self positive instances with high similarity can be identified in the queue. Then a positive-enhanced learning strategy is proposed to leverage the mined non-self positives to guide the learning of the student network. This strategy boosts the robustness of the learned latent space against intra-class and inter-class diversity. Experimental results on NTU-60~\cite{shahroudy2016ntu}, NTU-120~\cite{liu2019ntu} and PKU-MMD~\cite{liu2020benchmark} datasets have validated the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

To summarize, the key contributions include:
\begin{itemize}
	\item A novel Contrastive Positive Mining (CPM) framework for unsupervised learning of skeleton representation for 3D action recognition.
	\item A simple but effective non-self positive mining scheme to identify the positives in a contextual queue.
	\item A novel positive-enhanced leaning strategy to guide the learning of the student network via the target network.
	\item Extensive evaluation of the CPM on the widely used datasets, NTU and PKU-MMD, with state-of-the-art results obtained.
\end{itemize}

\section{Related Works}
\subsection{Unsupervised Contrastive Learning}
Contrastive learning is derived from noise-contrastive estimation~\cite{gutmann2012noise}, which contrasts different type of noises to estimate the latent distribution. It has been extended in different ways for unsupervised learning. Contrastive Prediction Coding (CPC)~\cite{oord2018representation} develops the info-NCE to learn image representation, with an auto-regressive model used to predict future in latent space. Contrastive Multiview Coding (CMC)~\cite{tian2020contrastive} leverages multi-view as positive samples, so that the information shared between multiple views can be captured by the learned representation. However, there often lacks of negative instances for the above methods. To solve this issue, a scheme called memory-bank~\cite{wu2018unsupervised} is developed in which the previous random representations are stored as negative instances, and each of them are regarded as an independent class. Recently, MoCo~\cite{he2020momentum} utilizes a dynamic dictionary to improve the memory-bank, and introduces the momentum updated encoder to boost the representation learning. Another way to enrich the negative instances is to use large batch-size such as in SimCLR~\cite{chen2020simple}. Particularly, SimCLR samples negatives from a large batch and shows that different augmentation, large batch size, and nonlinear projection head are all important for effective contrastive learning. However, these methods all regard different augmentations of the same instance as the only positives, while other instances in the queue including the ones with same category are all considered as negatives which cannot fully leverage capability of contrastive learning due to highly likely mixture of positives in the negatives.

To deal with this issue, some negative-sample-free approaches are recently developed. SimSiam~\cite{chen2021exploring} shows that simple siamese twin networks with a stop-gradient operation to prevent collapsing can learn a meaningful representation. Barlow Twins~\cite{zbontar2021barlow} proposes an unsupervised objective function by measuring the cross-correlation matrix between the outputs of two identical networks. BYOL~\cite{grill2020bootstrap} learns a potentially enhanced representation from an online network by predicting the representation from a given representation learned from a target network with slow updating. However, these methods do not consider consistency learning among current instances and the non-self instances with the same class.

\subsection{Unsupervised 3D Action Recognition}
Unsupervised methods~\cite{srivastava2015unsupervised,luo2017unsupervised,li2018unsupervised} for video based action recognition are well developed, while few works are specifically for skeletons. LongT GAN (Generative adversarial network)~\cite{zheng2018unsupervised} is an auto-encoder-based GAN for skeleton sequence reconstruction. P\&C~\cite{su2020predict} employs an encoder-decoder learning structure, the encoder is weakened compared with decoder to learn more representative features. ASCAL~\cite{rao2021augmented} is a momentum LSTM with a dynamic updated memory-bank, augmented instances of the input skeleton sequence are contrasted to learn representation. MS$^2$L~\cite{lin2020ms2l} is a multi-task learning framework, with both pretext tasks and contrastive learning. CrosSCLR~\cite{li20213d} adopts a cross-view contrastive learning scheme and leverages multi-view complementary supervision signal. However, these methods either require pretext tasks or a large amount of negative samples, or rely on the reconstruction.
\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[height = 45mm]{./figure/fig2}
	\caption{Overview of the CPM framework. CPM includes two stages. In the first stage, the student branch is trained to predict the inter-skeleton similarity distribution inferred by the target network, so as to excavate non-self positive. Then in the second stage the information of mined positives is injected into the target branch through similarity distribution regularization to guide the learning of student, which achieves positive-enhanced learning (different colors in distribution and contextual queue represent the embeddings of different instances, '+' means mined positive).}
	\label{fig:overview}
\end{figure}

\section{Proposed Method}
\label{sec:proposed_method}

\subsection{Overview}
Fig.~\ref{fig:overview} shows the basic framework of CPM. CPM adopts siamese twin networks as inspired by SimSiam~\cite{chen2021exploring}.
3D skeleton sequences are randomly augmented. Assume that a skeleton sequence $s$ has $T$ frames, $V$ joints, and $C$ coordinate channels, which can be represented as $s\in{{\rm{R}}^{C \times T \times V}}$. To augment $s$ into different versions $x$ and $x'$, a skeleton-specific augmentation strategy is needed. Different from the augmentations implemented for images, augmentation of skeleton sequences needs to be effective for learning spatial-temporal dynamics. In this paper, shear and crop in the spatial and temporal domain are to augment samples. Specifically, shear is applied as a spatial augmentation and is implemented as a linear transformation that displaces the skeleton joint in a fixed direction. Skeleton sequences are multiplied by a transformation matrix on the channel dimension, so as to slant the shape of 3D coordinates from body joints at a random angle. Crop is to pad a number of frames to a sequence symmetrically, then the sequence is randomly cropped into a fixed length~\cite{rao2021augmented,li20213d}.

The siamese encoders with identical network structure are to encode the augmented skeleton sequences, as shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:overview}, in a latent feature space. One branch is referred to as the student and the other serves as the target~\cite{tarvainen2017mean}. ST-GCN~\cite{yan2018spatial} is adopted as the encoder networks.
The siamese encoders consist of several GCN layers and embed the two augmented skeleton sequences $x$ and $x'$ into a latent space. In each layer, human pose in spatial-dimension and joint's motion in temporal-dimension are alternatively encoded, i.e. a spatial graph convolution is followed by a temporal convolution.

After the siamese encoders, a projection MLP $g$ is attached to project the vector $h$ and $h'$ in the encoding space: $z = g(h)$, $z' = g(h')$, where $z$ and $z'$ are assumed to be mean-centered along the batch dimension so that each unit has 0 mean output over the batch. The projection MLP consists of two layers, the first one is followed by a batch normalization layer and rectified linear units. After the projection MLP, a prediction MLP $p$ with same architecture of $g$ is attached to the student branch to produce the prediction $p(z)$, while the stop-gradient operation is used in the target branch with the output $sg(z')$. In addition, a "first-in first-out"~\cite{he2020momentum} contextual queue $Q = [{a_1},...,{a_N}]$ is used to measure how well the encoded augmented instance by student network matches that by the target network with respect to the instances in the queue.

The key idea of the proposed method is to use the output of the student network to predict the output of the target network. More specifically, our objective is to train the siamese encoders such that the student network matches the target network in terms of the similarity distribution of the augmented instance in reference to all instances in the queue.

\subsection{Similarity Distribution and Positive Mining}

Similarity between the encoded feature of the augmentations and the instances in queue is first calculated and similarity distribution for the student network and the target network are calculated through softmax. The learning process is to train the network so that the similarity distribution of $x$ with respect to the instances in the queue can predict the distribution of $x'$. Compared with the previous methods, this strategy has the following advantages. No strict definition of positives/negatives is required and the match on similarity distribution over the instances in the queue is more reliable than that over individual instances. Since the similarity between the augmented instances and instances of the same class in the queue is expected to be high, resulting in an implicit mining of non-self positive instances in the queue.

Let $Q = [{a_1},...,{a_N}]$ be the queue of $N$ instances, where ${a_i}$ is the embedding of the $i$-th instance. The contextual queue comes from the preceding several batches of target network, which is updated in "first-in first-out"~\cite{he2020momentum} strategy.  Similarity distributions, $d_i$ and $d'_i$, between $\bar p(z)$ and ${a_i}$ and between  $\bar z'$ and ${a_i}$ are computed as follows, respectively,
\begin{align}
	{d_i} = \frac{{{e^{\bar p(z) \cdot {a_i}/\tau }}}}{{\sum\limits_{j = 1}^N {{e^{\bar p(z) \cdot {a_j}/\tau }}} }}\       \ \
	\label{eq1}
\end{align}

\begin{align}
	{d'_i} = \frac{{{e^{\bar z' \cdot {a_i}/\tau '}}}}{{\sum\limits_{j = 1}^N {{e^{\bar z' \cdot {a_j}/\tau '}}} }}      \ \
	\label{eq2}
\end{align}
where $\bar p(z)$ and $\bar z'$ are $l_2$ normalization of $p(z)$ and  $z'$. The overall similarity distributions, $D$ and $D'$ of the two arguments in the latent space with respect to the instances in the queue are,
\begin{align}
	D = \left\{ {{d_i}} \right\}, D' = \left\{ {{d'_i}} \right\}, {\rm{ }}i \in N \ \
	\label{eq3}
\end{align}

The idea is to training siamese encoders to match $D$ with $D'$. In this paper, we adopt to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between $D$ and $D'$, i.e.,

\begin{align}
	L = {D_{KL}}(D'||D) = H(D',D) - H(D') \ \
	\label{eq4}
\end{align}

By minimizing $L$, prediction $p(z)$ can be aligned with $z'$. Meanwhile, instances that belong to the same class could be pushed close in the latent space, while those from different classes are pushed apart.

The similarity measures provide information for mining the positive instance in the queue. Specifically, given one instance's embedding $z$ and the corresponding queue $Q$, instances in queue with top-k high similarity are considered as positives, i.e.,

\begin{align}
	\Gamma \left( Q \right) = {\rm{Topk}}\left( Q \right) \ \
	\label{eq5}
\end{align}
which generates the index set of positive instances,
\begin{align}
	{D'_ + } = \left\{ {{d'_i}} \right\},{\rm{ }}i \in {N_ + } \ \
	\label{eq6}
\end{align}
where $N_ +$ is the index set of non-self positive instances. These positives can be used to facilitate a positive-enhanced learning as described below.

\subsection{Positive-enhanced Learning}
The non-self positives can be used to boost the representation learning. Intuitively, it is reasonable to inject the information of mined positives into the target branch to guide the learning of the student encoder. To do this, it is proposed to regularize the similarity distribution of the target branch ${D'}$ in each batch, so as to make use of the non-self positives iteratively. Specifically, we set the similarities of the $K$ mined positive instances in target branch to 1, which means those instances are considered the same action category with current instance. This strategy is referred to as ``positive-enhanced leaning''. The positive-enhanced similarity distribution can be expressed as,
\begin{align}
	d^e_i = \left\{ {\begin{array}{*{20}{c}}
			{ \frac{{{e^{{1}/\tau' }}}}{{\sum\limits_{j = 1}^N {{e^{\bar z' \cdot {a_j}/\tau'}}} }}\ ,{\rm{ }}i \in {N_ + }}\\
			{d'_i,{\rm{ otherwise}}}
		\end{array}} \right. \ \
		\label{eq7}
\end{align}

Then we train distribution of student to continue predicting the regularized target distribution, so that the student is guided to learn more informative intra-class diversity brought by the non-self skeleton positives knowledge we inject,
\begin{align}
		L' = H({D'_{NP}},D) - H({D'_{NP}}) \ \
		\label{eq8}
\end{align}
where $D'_{NP}=\{d^e_i\}$ is the non-self positive-enhanced target distribution. Compared to Eq.(4), Eq.(8) intends to pull positive instances closer.

\subsection{Learning of CPM}
In the early training stage, the model is likely not stable and capable enough of providing reasonable measures of the similarity distribution to identify the positives in the queue. Therefore, a two-stage training strategy is adopted for CPM: the student branch is first trained to predict the similarity distribution inferred by the target network without enhanced positives in Eq.(4). When it is stable, the model is trained using the positive-enhanced learning strategy in Eq.(8).

\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:results}
\subsection{Datasets}

\textbf{NTU RGB+D 60 (NTU-60) Dataset~\cite{shahroudy2016ntu}}: NTU-60 is one of the widely used indoor-captured datasets for human action recognition. 56880 action clips in total are performed by 40 different actors in 60 action categories. The clips are captured by three cameras simultaneously at different horizontal angles and heights in a lab environment. Experiments are conducted on the Cross-Subject (X-Sub) and Cross-View (X-View) benchmarks.

\textbf{NTU RGB+D 120 (NTU-120) Dataset~\cite{liu2019ntu}}: NTU-120 is an extended version of NTU-60. There are totally 114480 action clips in 120 action categories. Most settings of NTU-120 follow the NTU-60. Experiments are conducted on the Cross-Subject (X-Sub) and Cross-Setup (X-Set) benchmarks.

\textbf{PKU-MMD Dataset~\cite{liu2020benchmark}}: There are nearly 20,000 action clips in 51 action categories. Two subsets PKU-MMD I and PKU-MMD II are used in the experiments. PKU-MMD II is more challenging than PKU-MMD I as it has higher level of noise. Experiments are conducted on the Cross-Subject (X-Sub) benchmark for both subsets.

\subsection{Implementation}

\textbf{Architecture}: The 9-layer ST-GCN~\cite{yan2018spatial} network is chosen as the encoders. In each layer, the spatial graph convolution is followed by a temporal convolution, the temporal convolutional kernel size is 9. A projector of 2-layer MLP is attached to the output of both networks. The first layer is followed by a batch normalization layer and rectified linear units, with output size of 512, while the output dimension of the second layer is 128. A predictor with the same architecture is used in the student branch, while the stop-gradient operation is applied in target branch. The contextual queue size $N$ is set to $65536$, $32768$ and $16384$ for NTU-60/120, PKU-MMD I and PKU-MMD II datasets, respectively.

\textbf{Unsupervised Pre-training}: LARS~\cite{you2017large} is utilized as optimizer and trained for 400 epochs with batch size 512, note that the positive-enhanced learning is conducted after 300 epochs. The learning rate starts at 0 and is linearly increased to 0.5 in the first 10 epochs of training and then decreased to 0.0005 by a cosine decay schedule~\cite{loshchilov2016sgdr}. All experiments are conducted on one Nvidia RTX3090 GPU using PyTorch.

\textbf{Linear Evaluation Protocol}: The pre-trained models are verified by linear evaluation. Specifically, a linear classifier (a fully-connected layer followed by a softmax layer) is trained supervisedly for 100 epochs while the pre-trained model is fixed.

\subsection{Results and Comparison}

\textbf{Unsupervised Results}: The performance of the proposed CPM is compared with the state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods on the NTU and PKU-MMD datasets and results are shown in Table~\ref{tab1}. Following the standard practice in literature the recognition performance in terms of top-1 classification accuracy is reported. Note that, if not specified, the experiments including ablation study are conducted on the joint data. 3S means the ensemble results of joint, bone and motion data.
The obvious performance improvement compared with the recent advanced unsupervised counterparts~\cite{li20213d,thoker2021skeleton} has been obtained and demonstrates the effectiveness of CPM. In addition, CPM (3S) outperforms the supervised ST-GCN~\cite{yan2018spatial} on both NTU and PKU-MMD datasets.

\setlength{\tabcolsep}{4pt}
\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\caption{Performance and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods on the NTU and PKU-MMD datasets.}
\label{tab1}
		\begin{tabular}{lllllll}
			\hline
			\multicolumn{1}{c}{Architectures}
			&\multicolumn{2}{c}{NTU-60 (\%)}
			&\multicolumn{2}{c}{NTU-120 (\%)}
			&\multicolumn{2}{c}{PKU-MMD (\%)} \\
			\cmidrule(l){2-3} 	\cmidrule(l){4-5} \cmidrule(l){6-7}
			\multicolumn{1}{c}{}
			&\multicolumn{1}{c}{X-Sub} & {X-View}
			&\multicolumn{1}{c}{X-Sub} & {X-Set}
			&\multicolumn{1}{c}{Part I} & {Part II} \\
			\hline
			\slshape{Supervised}&&&&&&  \\
			C-CNN + MTLN~\cite{ke2017new}&\makecell[c]{79.6}&\makecell[c]{84.8}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-} &\makecell[c]{-}  \\
			TSRJI~\cite{caetano2019skeleton}&\makecell[c]{73.3}&\makecell[c]{80.3}&\makecell[c]{67.9}&\makecell[c]{62.8}&\makecell[c]{-} &\makecell[c]{-} \\
			ST-GCN~\cite{yan2018spatial}&\makecell[c]{81.5} &\makecell[c]{88.3}&\makecell[c]{70.7} &\makecell[c]{73.2}&\makecell[c]{84.1} &\makecell[c]{48.2} \\
			\hline
			\slshape{Unsupervised}&&&&&&  \\
			LongT GAN~\cite{zheng2018unsupervised}&\makecell[c]{39.1}&\makecell[c]{48.1}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{67.7}&\makecell[c]{27.0} \\
			ASCAL~\cite{rao2021augmented}&\makecell[c]{58.5}&\makecell[c]{64.8}&\makecell[c]{48.6}&\makecell[c]{49.2}&\makecell[c]{-} &\makecell[c]{-} \\
			MS$^2$L~\cite{lin2020ms2l}&\makecell[c]{52.6}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{64.9} &\makecell[c]{27.6}\\
			P\&C~\cite{su2020predict}&\makecell[c]{50.7}&\makecell[c]{76.3}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-} &\makecell[c]{-}\\
			ISC~\cite{thoker2021skeleton}&\makecell[c]{76.3}&\makecell[c]{85.2}&\makecell[c]{67.9}&\makecell[c]{67.1}&\makecell[c]{80.9}&\makecell[c]{36.0}\\
			CrosSCLR (joint)~\cite{li20213d}&\makecell[c]{72.9}&\makecell[c]{79.9}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-}&- &\makecell[c]{-}\\
			CrosSCLR (3S)~\cite{li20213d}&\makecell[c]{77.8}&\makecell[c]{83.4}&\makecell[c]{67.9} &\makecell[c]{66.7}&\makecell[c]{84.9}&\makecell[c]{-}\\
			CPM (joint)&\makecell[c]{78.7}&\makecell[c]{84.9}&\makecell[c]{68.7}&\makecell[c]{69.6}&\makecell[c]{88.8}&\makecell[c]{48.3}\\
			CPM (3S)&\makecell[c]{\textbf{83.2}} &\makecell[c]{\textbf{87.0}}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{73.0}} &\makecell[c]{\textbf{74.0}}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{90.7}}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{51.5}}\\
			\hline
		\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.4pt}

\textbf{Semi-supervised Results}: The CPM is first pre-trained on all training data in an unsupervised way, then the classifier is fine-tuned with 1\% and 10\% annotated data respectively. Table~\ref{tab2} shows the semi-supervised results on the NTU-60 dataset. The results have shown the proposed CPM performs significantly better than the compared methods.
Compared with MS$^2$L~\cite{lin2020ms2l} and ISC~\cite{thoker2021skeleton}, CPM improves the performance by a large margin and shows its robustness when fewer labels are available for fine-tuning.
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{4pt}
\begin{table}
	\centering
	\caption{Semi-supervised performance and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods on the NTU-60 dataset.}\label{tab2}
	\begin{tabular}{llll}
		\hline
		Architectures&Label fraction (\%)&X-Sub (\%)&X-View (\%)\\
		\hline
		LongT GAN~\cite{zheng2018unsupervised}&\makecell[c]{1}&\makecell[c]{35.2} &\makecell[c]{-}\\
		MS$^2$L~\cite{lin2020ms2l}&\makecell[c]{1}&\makecell[c]{33.1}&\makecell[c]{-}\\
		ISC~\cite{thoker2021skeleton}&\makecell[c]{1}&\makecell[c]{35.7}&\makecell[c]{38.1}\\
		CPM&\makecell[c]{1}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{56.7}} &\makecell[c]{\textbf{57.5}}\\
		\hline
		LongT GAN~\cite{zheng2018unsupervised}&\makecell[c]{10}&\makecell[c]{62.0} &\makecell[c]{-}\\
		MS$^2$L~\cite{lin2020ms2l}&\makecell[c]{10}&\makecell[c]{65.2} &\makecell[c]{-}\\
		ISC~\cite{thoker2021skeleton}&\makecell[c]{10}&\makecell[c]{65.9}&\makecell[c]{72.5}\\
		CPM&\makecell[c]{10}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{73.0}} &\makecell[c]{\textbf{77.1}}\\
		\hline
	\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.4pt}

\textbf{Fully Fine-tuned Results}: The model is first unsupervisedly pre-trained, then a linear classifier is appended to the learnable encoder. Both the pre-trained model and the classifier undergo a supervised training using all training data~\cite{zbontar2021barlow}, results are shown in Table~\ref{tab3}.
On both NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets the fully fine-tuned CPM outperforms the supervised ST-GCN~\cite{yan2018spatial}, demonstrating the effectiveness of the unsupervised pretraining.
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{4pt}
\begin{table}
	\centering
	\caption{Fully fine-tuned performance and comparison on the NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets.}\label{tab3}
	\begin{tabular}{lllll}
		\hline
		\multicolumn{1}{c}{Architectures}
		&\multicolumn{2}{c}{NTU-60 (\%)}
		&\multicolumn{2}{c}{NTU-120 (\%)} \\
		\cmidrule(l){2-3} 	\cmidrule(l){4-5}
		\multicolumn{1}{c}{}
		&\multicolumn{1}{c}{X-Sub} & {X-View}
		&\multicolumn{1}{c}{X-Sub} & {X-Set} \\
		\hline
		C-CNN + MTLN~\cite{ke2017new}&\makecell[c]{79.6} &\makecell[c]{84.8}&\makecell[c]{-}&\makecell[c]{-} \\
		TSRJI~\cite{caetano2019skeleton}&\makecell[c]{73.3}&\makecell[c]{80.3}&\makecell[c]{67.9}&\makecell[c]{62.8} \\
		ST-GCN~\cite{yan2018spatial}&\makecell[c]{81.5} &\makecell[c]{88.3}&\makecell[c]{70.7}&\makecell[c]{73.2} \\
		CPM&\makecell[c]{\textbf{84.8}}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{91.1}}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{78.4}}&\makecell[c]{\textbf{78.9}}\\
		\hline
	\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.4pt}

\subsection{Ablation Study}\
\textbf{On positive mining}: To verify the effectiveness of positive-enhanced learning, we pre-train the CPM (w/o. PM) without identifying the positive instances and, hence, positive-enhanced learning, other settings are kept the same. Performance of CPM and CPM (w/o. PM) is shown in Table~\ref{tab4}. On the NTU-60 X-Sub and X-View tasks, CPM improves the recognition accuracy by $3.1$ percentage points and $3.2$ percentage points, respectively. On the NTU-120 X-Sub and X-Set tasks, $3.9$ percentage points and $4.9$ percentage points improvements are obtained by CPM. This demonstrates that identification of positive instances and the positive-enhanced learning strategy do improve the representation learning.

		\setlength{\tabcolsep}{4pt}
		\begin{table}
				\centering
				\caption{Benefit of positive mining.}\label{tab4}
		\begin{tabular}{lll}
				\hline
				Datasets& CPM (w/o. PM) (\%)& CPM (\%)\\
				\hline
				X-Sub (NTU-60)&\makecell[c]{75.6}&\makecell[c]{78.7}\\
				X-View (NTU-60)&\makecell[c]{81.7}&\makecell[c]{84.9}\\
				X-Sub (NTU-120)&\makecell[c]{64.8}&\makecell[c]{68.7}\\
				X-Set (NTU-120)&\makecell[c]{64.7}&\makecell[c]{69.6}\\
				\hline
				\end{tabular}
		\end{table}
		\setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.4pt}

\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[height = 50mm]{./figure/fig3}
	\caption{Precision of positive instances identified by CPM and CPM (w/o. PM) on different datasets.}
	\label{fig:Statistical Analysis}
\end{figure}

To further verify how well the non-self positives in the queue can be identified for the positive-enhanced learning, Fig.~\ref{fig:Statistical Analysis} shows the precision of the positives selected by CPM and CPM (w/o. PM) in one epoch in the top-100 identified positive instances. The results show that even CPM (w/o. PM) is capable of identifying many true positives. This is in significant contrast to the methods in~\cite{lin2020ms2l,rao2021augmented} where all instances in the queue would be considered as negatives. When positive-enhanced learning is applied, the precision has been significantly increased and so that the learned representation is more robust against the intra-class diversity.
\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[height = 45mm]{./figure/fig4}
	\caption{Effect of the number $K$ of top positives on the proposed CPM in the NTU-60 X-View task.}
	\label{fig:top-K mined positive}
\end{figure}

\textbf{On the value of $K$}: Hyper-parameter $K$ refers to the number of positives identified in the queue. This study shows how $K$ affects the performance. Experiments have shown that when $K$ is 100, best results are obtained on the NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets. Results on NTU-60 X-View are shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:top-K mined positive}. It is found that too large or too small $K$ both decreases the performance. A large value of $K$ could include unexpected false positives with low similarity that misleads the learning. A small value of $K$ might ignore too many true positives that would potentially decrease representation ability to accommodate intra-class diversity. Good performance was observed when $K$ is $50$ and $25$ for PKU-MMD I and PKU-MMD II datasets, respectively. It is conjectured that choice of $K$ may depend on the scale of the dataset.

\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[height = 45mm]{./figure/fig5}
	\caption{Effect of different temperature $\tau'$ on the performance in the NTU-60 X-View task.}
	\label{fig:temperature parameter}
\end{figure}
\textbf{On the value of $\tau'$}: Fig.~\ref{fig:temperature parameter} shows the performance of CPM (w/o. PM) using different $\tau'$ with $\tau$ fixed to 0.1~\cite{fang2021seed}, the optimal performance is obtained when $\tau'$ is 0.05. A large value of $\tau'$ could lead to a flatter target distribution so that the learned representation becomes less discriminative. A small value of $\tau'$ would suppress the difference in similarities between the positive and the negative, leading to many false positives included in the positive-enhanced learning. If $\tau'$ is too small, less positive instances could be identified and this would again adversely affect the effectiveness of learning.

\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[height = 40mm]{./figure/fig6}
	\caption{t-SNE visualization of embedding for (a) CPM (w/o. PM) and (b) CPM on the NTU-60 X-View task (best view in color).}
	\label{fig:tsne}
\end{figure}

\textbf{Embedding Visualization}: t-SNE~\cite{van2008visualizing} is used to visualize the embedding clustering produced by CPM (w/o. PM) and CPM as shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:tsne}. Note that embedding of $10$ different action categories are sampled and visualized with different colors. The visual results show how well the embedding of the same type of actions form clusters while different types of actions are separated. By comparing the t-SNE of CPM and CPM (w/o. PM), CPM has clearly improved the clustering of actions, which indicates that the learned latent space is more discriminative than the space learned without using positive-enhanced learning strategy.

\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclusion_future_work}
In this paper, a novel unsupervised learning framework called Contrastive Positive Mining (CPM) is developed for learning 3D skeleton action representation. The proposed CPM follows the SimSiam~\cite{chen2021exploring} structure, consisting of siamese encoders, student and target. By constructing a contextual queue and identifying non-self positive instances in the queue, the student encoder is able to learn a discriminative latent space by matching the similarity distributions of individual instance's two augments with respect to the instances in the queue. In addition, by identifying positive instances in the queue, a positive-enhanced learning strategy is developed to boost the robustness of the learned latent space against intra-class and inter-class diversity. Experiments on the NTU and PKU-MMD datasets have shown that the proposed CPM obtains the state-of-the-art results.

\clearpage
\bibliographystyle{splncs04}

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text:
MNLU, Nagpur| Call for Chapters for an edited book on "Climate Change Crisis: Assessing the actions for future"
Published on January 20, 2023 January 21, 2023 By Bhumika Indulia
MNLU, Nagpur — the nineteenth National Law University in the country, was established by the Government of Maharashtra by enacting the Maharashtra National Law University Act (Maharashtra Act No. VI of 2014). Located in the Orange City of Nagpur, Maharashtra, the University endeavours to impart excellence in knowledge and professionalism. The University has marked rapid progress towards its dream of achieving excellence in the field of legal education with the aid of its dedicated faculty members, staff and students, working under the able guidance and supervision of its founding members, visionaries, well-wishers and members of different statutory bodies of the University. The University works with the primary objective of advancing and disseminating the knowledge of the law and of developing a sense of responsibility among the students and research scholars of serving society by furthering their advocacy and legal service skills via organizing lectures, seminars, symposia, conferences and capacity building programmes. Further, the University not only aspires to promote legal knowledge but also to make law and legal processes – efficient instruments of social justice and development, to promote and foster the rule of law and the objectives enshrined under the Constitution of India.
About the Centre for Environmental Law
The Centre for Environmental Law (CEL) established at the National Law University, Nagpur, (MNLU, Nagpur), is an endeavour of the University to respond to the need for legal scholarship in the area of conservation of the environment and various components of the same – such as forests, biodiversity, pollution control, arresting climate change, improving environmental awareness and education, etc. With this commitment, the Centre undertakes interdisciplinary studies involving legal academia and the other stakeholders involved in the conservation of the environment and preservation of its wholesomeness. The Centre believes in promoting environmental sustainability through action-oriented education, awareness and advocacy.
The Centre for Environmental law, to achieve its goal of disseminating knowledge and furthering the cause of environmental sustenance, invites chapters for publication in this book. The tentative title for the book is "CLIMATE CHANGE CRISIS: ASSESSING THE ACTIONS FOR FUTURE". The book attempts to provide an overview of the present issues concerning climate change and the various dynamics attached to it. Considering that the issue of climate change is often ignored in the backdrop of development and advancement, by countries all around the globe, this book aims to highlight the importance of climate change and afford better solutions towards climate and environmental sustenance. This book will be published by one of the leading publishers.
The central theme of this book is the crisis accelerated by climate change and the chapters will focus on various problems, consequences and impacts of climate change, and how legal systems can help in mitigating these consequences.
Sub-Themes
Climate change and the Indian legal framework
Climate change and International legal regime
Climate change and global politics
Climate change and gender
Climate change and migration
Climate change and indigenous communities
Climate change and international trade
Climate change and green finance
Climate change and the fashion industry
Climate change in literature and literary studies
Note: The given sub-themes are only indicative and not exhaustive. The submissions are not restricted to the sub-themes but must adhere to the central theme of the book.
Co-authorship of only one co-author is allowed.
Submissions are invited from legal practitioners, academicians, and researchers. Entries from students may also be accepted, provided they co-author it with legal practitioners, and/or academicians, and/or researchers.
Submissions must be in the form of chapters, ranging from 3,000 to 6,000 words, exclusive of footnotes.
All submissions must be made in MS Word Document format (.doc/.docx) only, having 'Times New Roman' font, with font size of 12, and line spacing of 1.5 with justified alignment.
The MS-word file of the manuscript must be named in the following manner: o Name of the Author and Co-author (if any) followed by the title of the work.
Example "Amit Gupta_Climate Action and Developing Nation"
"Amit Gupta_Narendra Singh _Climate Action and Developing Nation"
The manuscript shall be accompanied by a brief profile of the author, including- Name of the author(s), affiliation, e-mail address and contact number.
Authors must follow the OSCOLA 4th Edition.
The manuscript submitted must not be previously published or currently under review at any other journal/conference/book and should also not be submitted to any other journal/conference/book while under review with us.
The manuscript must be the original work of the author and free from plagiarism. Any form of plagiarism detected will lead to disqualification as per the UGC Regulations.
Editors shall reserve the right to change/ modify/ alter the text of the manuscript submitted by the authors before publication.
The final decision as to acceptance and publication of the manuscript rests with the Editorial board.
Guidelines for Submission
All the submissions must be made through the link provided. Submissions through any other medium will not be considered.
BROCHURE: CEL- MNLU – Call for Chapters – Climate Change
Last date for submission of the chapter — 18th February 2023.
Intimation of acceptance of the chapter — 28th February 2023.
Final submission of the revised chapter — 31st March 2023.
For further queries, the following may be contacted:
Rajas Salpekar (Student Editor), rajassalpekar@nlunagpur.ac.in, +91 9370908899.
Shivam Sharma (Student Editor), shivamsharma@nlungapur.ac.in, + 91 8818972039.
Ishika Patodi (Student Editor), ishikapatodi@nlunagpur.ac.in, +91 9826329090.
Sukriti Nigam (Student Editor), sukritinigam@nlunagpur.ac.in, +91 7571975540.
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The Lady Eagles finished 3rd at the Bankers Classic at Northridge on Thursday with 2 solid wins. in game 1 of the Day, Sam Jankowski had 16 points, Lakara Taylor 11 and Amanda Ellison 10 as the Lady Eagles beat Northwood 58-45. In the 3rd place game Adams beat East Noble 63-48. The Eagles were led by Jankowski with 15, Teonna Miler with 14 and Ellison with 10. Reynia Columbus was named to the all tourney team. The Eagles are now 10-6 on the year.


text:
Trade Secret Disputes: Identifying Mutual Interest in the Face of Major Disagreement
By James Pooley
"The most popular way of getting more streamlined resolution is arbitration. A major advantage of arbitration is that it is completely private. But there are some systemic drawbacks of arbitration for trade secret disputes.
I am willing to put the case into any shape you choose.
– Lord Ellenborough, 1816
It's a challenge to resolve business disputes when emotions run high, which includes almost all trade secret cases. So, I was especially pleased when, in a hard-fought litigation where I had been appointed as a "referee" to resolve discovery disputes, both lawyers eventually reached out to tell me how much they appreciated my involvement in the case, which had settled.
What was it about this variation on typical legal combat—where a private party is selected to rule on some important aspects—that they found so satisfying? First, they had saved their clients a lot of time, and probably money, compared to the cost of dealing with unpredictable court calendars. And second, they felt that the decisions they received were thoughtful, balanced and practical, reflecting an understanding of the relevant business environment.
The Arbitration Advantage
So-called "private judging" can be particularly useful in trade secret cases between companies. Confidential information of both sides can be more reliably protected. Important context gets the attention it deserves, which is often just not possible for a judge who handles a caseload of several hundred matters. And decisions can be informed by the special background and experience of the person selected to do the job.
The most popular way of getting more streamlined resolution is arbitration, in which the dispute is handed over to a trusted private party hired to hear the evidence and render a decision. A major advantage of arbitration is that it is completely private. When the dispute involves exchanging important confidential information of both companies, this feature can be compelling.
Arbitration also allows the parties to pick the decision-maker, rather than take their chances with the court system. This is about more than just choosing a reliable and experienced former judge or senior lawyer. You can select for specific attributes like industry or technical background, or specialty in an area of law. And whoever is chosen, the arbitrator will be able to devote substantially more time and attention to the matter than the typical judge.
So why don't companies in trade secret disputes always choose arbitration? There are some systemic drawbacks. One of those is that the decision of the arbitrator (or panel of three arbitrators) is almost always final, without the possibility of meaningful review through the court system. While that expediency can be an advantage in many cases, it also can create risks in trade secret disputes, where the range of possible outcomes can be large and unpredictable.
In one recent case from Texas, an arbitrator awarded $6 million to the founder of a company who had invested only a small fraction of that amount. On appeal from that decision, the court explained that it was powerless to do anything about it, even if the arbitrator had been mistaken about the law.
Besides offering only limited review of decisions, arbitration also typically restricts the kind and amount of available discovery—that is, the ability to get information from the other side in advance of trial. This can be a serious problem for a trade secret owner. Misappropriation rarely happens in broad daylight, and usually the facts are known only to the defendant. Although reasonable suspicion of theft is enough to make a claim, the plaintiff usually needs discovery from the defendant in order to prove what actually happened.
Whether because of this asymmetry of available proof, or some other aspect of arbitration that both sides find wanting, seldom do both companies in a trade secret dispute agree to arbitrate if their contract doesn't require it. It is just too difficult to identify a mutual interest once a major disagreement emerges. Instead, one side or the other (and occasionally both) sees it to their advantage to stick with litigation.
Enhancing Efficiency
But even within the framework of existing court procedures, there may be some opportunities to enhance efficiency in the interests of both sides. For example, in the case that I referred to at the beginning, I was acting as a "discovery referee" (also known in some courts as a "special master"). Basically, the judge in the case, with the approval of the parties, had outsourced the management of all pre-trial disputes over the exchange of information: document requests, depositions and the like. As with arbitration, private referees have more time to consider those specific disputes and to propose a resolution to the judge. Although more costly than using normal court procedures, a referee can move the discovery process much more quickly and efficiently, which is usually in the interest of both companies.
Several states, most notably California, even allow an entire civil case to be handled through trial by a private person, usually called a temporary judge, whose ruling can be appealed through the court system just like any other case. Unlike arbitration, however, this form of judging is private only in the sense that you get to pick (and pay for) the decision-maker; all the filings and hearings will be subject to the same rules on public access as apply to the courts.
The vast majority of trade secret disputes are resolved by an agreement of the parties, without a trial. In an upcoming article, we'll look at the most effective way to make that happen: mediation, in which an experienced professional helps the combatants find success, often in ways they never would have discovered on their own. Mastering mediation is an art of its own.
Copyright: jamesgroup
James Pooley is a former Deputy Director of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Having returned to Silicon Valley, Mr. Pooley established a private law practice where he specializes in high-level litigation counseling and strategy.
For more than 35 years, Jim has represented clients as lead trial counsel and strategic advisor in high-stakes patent and trade secret disputes. His broad litigation experience, combined with his service as an international diplomat and business executive, make him uniquely qualified to handle today's global IP challenges. Jim testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Defend Trade Secrets Act, and has worked with congressional staff on the legislation. His most recent book is Secrets: Managing Information Assets in the Age of Cyberespionage, available here.
Tags:arbitration, Guest Contributor, James Pooley, mediation, misappropriation, Trade Secrets
Posted In:Courts, Guest Contributors, IPWatchdog Articles, Trade Secrets
There are currently 1 Comment comments.
Paul F. Morgan January 27, 2019 11:21 am
Yes, it is also too bad patent attorney special masters handlng discovery disputes and settlement talks are not used more in patent suits. It does not have arbitration disadvantages. I had a great experlence with one.


One News Page > News Videos > Tone Bell On His Show, "FAM," & The Comedy, "Little"
"FAM" is a new CBS comedy that follows Clem, a woman whose vision of a perfect life with her adoring fiancé, Nick (Tone Bell), and his wonderful family is radically altered when her 16-year-old, out-of-control half-sister unexpectedly comes to live with her.
As the family Clem chose and the family she has blend, Clem realizes that this happy fam may be the perfection she's been seeking.
Bell joined BUILD to chat about the new CBS series and his role in the comedy, "Little."
"This Is Us" chronicles the Pearson family across the decades: from Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) as young parents in the 1980s to their adult kids - Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate..
The team behind 'Girl Trip' is back with a new comedy. The movie is "Little." The film is about an abrasive woman who is cursed to live life as a small child. The movie is a reverse of the 1980's..


text:
Scientists Studying Zoonotic Feline Tularemia by Finding Influential Geospatial Factors
A Kansas State University epidemiologist is helping cats, pet owners and soldiers stay healthy by studying feline tularemia and the factors that influence its prevalence.
Ram Raghavan, assistant professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology, and collaborative researchers have found that a certain combination of climate, physical environment and socio-ecologic conditions are behind tularemia infections among cats in the region. More than 50 percent of all tularemia cases in the U.S. occur in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Raghavan says.
Francisella tularensis, a bacterium that causes tularemia, commonly circulates among ticks, rabbits and rodents in the wild, but also frequently infects domestic cats. Tularemia is a zoonotic disease that can spread to humans through ticks or insect bites, eating undercooked rabbit meat, close contact with infected animals or even through airborne means. If left untreated, it can cause death in humans and animals, Raghavan said.
While it is not known exactly how many human tularemia cases are caused by exposure to infected cats, it is possible for cats to transmit the disease to owners through bites and scratches. Cats also can be reliable sentinels for recognizing disease activity in the environment. If cats hunt outdoors or come into contact with an infected rabbit or animal, they can bring tularemia back to their owners.
Raghavan's research so far has found that tularemia is more likely to appear in newly urbanized areas, in residential locations surrounded by grassland, and in high-humidity environments. Raghavan found that locations where tularemia was confirmed had high-humidity conditions about eight weeks before the disease appeared.
For the research, Raghavan is partnering with the university's geography department and the Public Health Department of Fort Riley Medical Activity. Raghavan maps tularemia cases confirmed by the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and then collaborates with John Harrington Jr. and Doug Goodin -- both professors of geography -- to compile geospatial data for tularemia locations. By bringing in layers of data the researchers are determining how different influential factors -- such as climate, land cover, landscape and pet owners' economic conditions -- can lead to feline tularemia.
"Taking a multidisciplinary and computational approach helps us quickly understand the disease and make new discoveries," Raghavan says. "We use diagnostic information collected over time at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and a wealth of extremely useful information from NASA and other agencies. We can then put all these data in a framework where it is useful for public health and animal health."
While tularemia is more common in young children and men, people also can get the disease when mowing lawns in a contaminated area, Raghavan says. Both human and feline tularemia cases peak through late spring and summer -- when the weather is warmer, more ticks are present and more people are outside. Tularemia cases decrease at summer's end.
"Climate plays such a huge role in zoonotic diseases," Raghavan says. "With all the talk about climate change, we need to know if there are any significant climate effects that are causing tularemia cases to increase."
Tularemia also poses concerns for the military and soldiers during training exercises, whether they are training in U.S. bases or bases around the world. During training, soldiers are actively engaged in the environment and that increases the risk of tularemia infection.
"They could be crawling on the ground and may come in contact with a dead animal or rabbit that was infected with tularemia," Raghavan says. "The soldiers also can be bitten by ticks. All it takes is a few bacteria to cause infection."
Because of the low infection dose of organisms, it is even more important to understand tularemia because of its potential as a bioterrorism tool, Raghavan says.
"If a little of the bacteria was present in the form of an aerosol, it could be released in a crowded area and potentially infect a lot of people very quickly," Raghavan says. "Because it is such a rare disease, not everyone is prepared for it, even though the treatments are very simple. Untreated infections can cause death."
Symptoms of tularemia in humans may include fever, swelling of lymph nodes, skin ulcers near tick bites, or cough, chest pain and difficulty breathing in more serious cases. Clinical signs in cats include lethargy, anorexia and fever. People should contact their doctor or their veterinarian if they observe tularemia symptoms, Raghavan said.
The researchers recently published their work in the journal of Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. Raghavan also is collaborating with Dan Andresen, associate professor of computing and information sciences at Kansas State University, and is using the university's high-performance computing cluster, Beocat, to run simulations. Raghavan received support from the National Science Foundation Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or EPSCoR.


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Russian Punitive Psychiatry Suppresses Political Prisoner
Maricor Zapata
A psychiatric hospital in Chelyabinsk released Alexei Moroshkin on June 14, 2017.Moroshkin, now age 36, spent over 18 months in the hospital after he was convicted in November 2016 of inciting separatism.The court ruled that Moroshkin used social media to advocate organizing a "Urals People's Republic," but it bizarrely concluded that he was a paranoid schizophrenic.A post-facto diagnosis supported the ruling, and he was admitted to the Chelyabinsk hospital.
OVD-Info is an analytical, human rights group in Russia that purports itself as a domestic law enforcement watchdog.The organization focuses on the transparency of law enforcement, having originally been founded in 2011 on grassroots activism aimed at police accountable for protest mismanagement by monitoring arrests made during public demonstrations.Now with a full-scale publication and consistent reporting on law enforcement transparency in Russia, the group looks into what it refers to as "a compulsory psychiatric detention center" in Chelyabinsk broadly where prisoners are subjected to so-called punitive psychiatry.
"In March 2014, Moroshkin volunteered to participate in the Crimea annexation campaign, and then joined the Vostok separatist battalion.But after becoming disillusioned in the 'Russian spring', Moroshkin returned to Chelyabinsk, and became an advocate of Ukraine online.He has also been charged with vandalism over an incident in which a bust of Lenin in Chelyabinsk was painted in the colours of the Ukrainian flag.According to Moroshkin's mother, there is no evidence that he was involved in the incident, but the investigation continues.Memorial Human Rights Center declared Moroshkin a political prisoner in July 2016," writes OVD-Info.
OVD-Info interviewed Moroshkin about his experience in psychiatric detention, and though it sounds like an experience wrought of solely inhumane duplicity from Moroshkin's perspective, it implies a level of neurological manipulation on the part of Russian psychiatrists that exemplifies the limits of the human mind and human will.In describing the conditions in the hospital, Moroshkin says that the staff there started him on a regimen of unidentified tablets that made him feel so terrible that he couldn't walk.
"I had this feeling, you know, like when I stood up, I wasn't really standing, and when I laid down, I wasn't really lying down.I wanted to do something all the time, not knowing what that was.A real restlessness.You're in such a state, it's like it's impossible to live," Moroshkin says.
Moroshkin adds that he felt better once they stopped giving him the pills but that the regimen lasted about a month.When asked about what these drugs he was given might be or what they were intended to accomplish, Moroshkin describes the staff as not having been transparent and proceeds to explain the difficulties of dodging unwanted treatment.
"No.They didn't say what kind of medication they were giving me.They look in your mouth, tell you to lift up your tongue—to see whether you've swallowed the tablets or not.The worst thing is the injections that are absorbed by the body over the course of a month.The tablets you can hide somewhere, but you can't hide from the injections.They give you the injection, and just one injection makes you shake for a whole month."
Moroshkin says that the injections did not persist indefinitely and that they were eventually no longer administered to him.He feels the staff feared that what they were doing to him might become public knowledge and that, for this reason, they stopped giving him the injections.He was, after all, a political prisoner with a public profile.Without the injections, though, he found the conditions to be marginally more bearable.
Moroshkin also feels that his public profile ensured that conditions did not worsen for him.He attributes the fact that no one physically attacked him to this advantage as well.No one talked to him about his trial or about politics either, yet the facility issued a statement explaining that he considered himself a political prisoner.
"Yes, that's true.But it's the standard thing: a person has to accept they are ill.If you don't do that, for them it means that you don't have your critical faculties and your condition hasn't improved.It's the general approach to patients.If you don't recognise you're ill, you'll simply never get out."
OVD-Info asked Moroshkin whether or not the hospital staff's behavior changed at all when the date of his next hearing in court was announced in light of the fact that this meant Moroshkin's hospitalization could be extended.Moroshkin said it didn't, and that the staff informed him upfront that his detention would be prolonged the first two times.They backed this up by saying that this was always the case.
"They said that the charges against me were not minor ones.They said it was because of the political situation in the country, I should understand, because of the threat of extremism.If I'd been sent to prison, they said, my sentence would have been a light one, and I wouldn't have been in jail for long, but in hospital I will have to stay longer.They even said that the charges against me were equivalent to terrorism, that extremists and terrorists are pretty much the same."
One of the hospital's department heads reportedly told Moroshkin this.Moroshkin said there was also no need for the hospital to put any kind of additional restrictions, restraints or pressures on him because the conditions were psychological restraint enough.
"Apart from the medication, which can make you feel bad, the main thing is the utter boredom.I read magazines, books, of course.But to be honest the atmosphere is not conducive to reading.Everyone says that.In prison you can read.But in the hospital things, on the whole, are worse than in prison.In prison the attitude of staff was also better, they use the respectful 'you' form in speaking.And for some reason if you are a 'political' prisoner they treat you better.I really had no complaints about staff."
Moroshkin's experiences seemingly pushed him to the brink of sanity, and the ostensibly coercive methods of psychiatry at this Russian facility illustrate the form of manipulation psychology can take.Russia is a country commonly accused from within as well as without of suppressing dissidents and criticism in wide variety of ways, sometimes including creative and perhaps even inhumane methods to the occasional extent of alleged murder.As such, the Kremlin is constantly managing incessant protests and demonstrations.The use of punitive psychiatry in Russia, regardless of purpose, dates back to the Soviet Union's Committee of State Security or KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov.


Vehicle Control Systems give enhanced street wellbeing by permitting the vehicle to help the driver. Vehicles have been produced that keep track of the steadily changing driving situations and take important measures to keep away from mishaps.Vehicle's gadget is a quickly growing range with an expanding number of wellbeing, driver help, and infotainment gadgets getting to be normal in latest vehicles.
Existing vehicles by and large utilize various diverse networking conventions to incorporate the systems into the vehicle. There has been higher demand for speedier and more adaptable system network communication technologies inside the automobile. This has been due to the use of sensors to assist the drivers and the related high-data transmission needed for these sensors. In this future system there are seven methods of protection being incorporated into this system. These security procedures are the most widely recognized explanations behind street mishaps amid day and evening time driving (Rausch and Niebuhr, 2011).


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FREE SCREENING
The Trials of Muhammad Ali
Saturday, July 19, 2014, 1:00 p.m.
Followed by a panel discussion with Miya Ali, David Banks, Warrington Hudlin, and William C. Rhoden
Dir. Bill Siegel. 2013, 86 mins. Digital projection. The Trials of Muhammad Ali investigates its extraordinary and complex subject's life outside the boxing ring. From joining the Nation of Islam and changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, to his refusal to serve in the Vietnam War, to his global humanitarian work, Muhammad Ali remains an inspiring and controversial figure. Outspoken and passionate in his beliefs, Ali found himself in the center of America's controversies over race, religion, and war. From Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters), The Trials of Muhammad Ali examines how one of the most celebrated sports champions of the twentieth century risked his fame and fortune to follow his faith and conscience. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Miya Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali; Warrington Hudlin, Museum trustee and President of the Black Filmmaker Foundation; and William C. Rhoden (The New York Times); moderated by David Banks, president and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation.
Free screening. Tickets available on request at the admissions desk. Please note the 4:00 p.m. screening of The Trials of Muhammad Ali has been cancelled.


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Home > Shows > Hidden Treasures & Unusual Stories
Hidden Treasures & Unusual Stories
Date Thursday - May 14, 2009
Guests Lionel Fanthorpe, Howard Bloom
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Lost Treasures & Civilizations
Goblin Hill & Excavations
The Coglin Vampire
Incomparable storyteller Lionel Fanthorpe discussed hidden and lost treasures, as well as vampire lore & time slips. He also shared unusual & favorite stories such as the mystery of the Barbados coffins, the Green Children, and Spring Heeled Jack. Treasure can be what people typically think of-- precious metals and gems, but it can also take the form of magical secrets or lost knowledge, he noted. Egypt's Pharaoh might have chased the Israelites across the Red Sea in order to recover the Ark of the Covenant, an object that contained secret knowledge, he conjectured.
At the ancient Goblin Hill in Wales, excavators found a prehistoric sheet of gold, while archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann uncovered artifacts in Anatolia that he believed belonged to the ancient city of Troy, Fanthorpe reported. Digging at the mysterious 'Money Pit' in Nova Scotia yielded a coded sign saying that millions of pounds were buried there, yet no treasure was ever found. He speculated that the site could have been a protected Templar grave. Some treasures are associated with curses such as the Hope Diamond, which was said to have been stolen from an Indian statue.
Fanthorpe recounted Augustus Hare's tale of the 'Vampire of Coglin Range' in which a scarecrow-like creature with red eyes clawed its way through a window and attacked a woman. He also detailed the life of Vlad the Impaler, who killed thousands with spikes outside his castle. In 1931, his tomb was exhumed, and a golden crown and other items were taken to a Bucharest museum, where they were later stolen.
Fitting In & Standing Out
First hour guest, author Howard Bloom reacted to a story about how in the animal kingdom, freaks of nature survive because of their traits. Relating this to humans, he suggested that people first seek out others they fit in with, then within this group, they try to stand out and show their individuality.
lionel-fanthorpe.com
HowardBloom.net
bigbangtango.net
Secrets of the World's Undiscovered Treasures
The World's Most Mysterious Castles
Mysteries and Secrets of Time
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Bumper music from Thursday May 14, 2009
Bur Said
The Logical Song
Big Log
Taken In
Carly's Song
Love My Way
When You Come Back to Me
Premonitions


Organizations are being confronted with a new wave of technology and applications. There is the need for digital engagements with customers and suppliers while remaining true to their core business value. Ultimately, however, any new business project will still require data to be effective. Creating an end-to-end enterprise data governance experience makes data governance everyone's business. Managing, preserving and protecting data is taking increasingly more advanced skills and solutions.


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I lied to him and said I didn't have my start certificate with me. "He obtained indignant and advised me the only means I would be allowed to go house was if the wedding organiser would pay again the cash he'd spent on me. He locked me in the house for 2 days and I was not allowed out," she says. "I didn't have a lot money, as a result of I didn't work, and my mom didn't have a lot cash either.
The brother of the groom lived in the home too, with his household. My potential husband was quite good, but he didn't speak a lot," says Anna.
Boho Latvian Wedding Deliberate Across The Solstice
My household was living on about 250 lats [€300] per month," she says. "I flew to Ireland in October last year and was met by two Pakistanis, who brought me to meet my potential husband.
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Many of the Africans who've taken half in sham marriages are asylum seekers. Some EU international locations have legal guidelines against "marriages of convenience", but Ireland does not, making it a target for fake marriages. Since the directive turned law, in 2006, the number latvian mail order bride of people making use of for residency rights based mostly on marriage to an EU citizen in Ireland has increased steadily, reaching 2,129 in 2009. The "paper marriage" exploits an EU directive on free motion that provides residency rights for non-EU residents who marry EU nationals.
Marriages to Irish residents do not provide these residency rights. He has labored at weddings in Drogheda, Tipperary and Donegal. Dublin isn't a typical venue, because of delays of up to 5 months in arranging a ceremony, in contrast with the standard three-month wait at register workplaces outdoors the capital.
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He says his unit is investigating a number of cases of alleged rape and human trafficking, although none has up to now gone to court docket. Many of the Africans who have taken part in sham marriages are asylum seekers, a few of whom have already had their claim for asylum rejected by the State. Under the Civil Registration Act, all marriages have to be notified to a registrar three months earlier than a ceremony can take place, necessitating Liene's journey out of Dublin. The economic disaster in Latvia is a big consider engaging women to travel to Ireland to get married for cash.
A sure Polish nobleman named Adam Jakubowski, disregarding Maija's and Viktor's love for one another, decided that he was a greater match for the young magnificence. Apparently, inside Jakubowski's insanely narcissistic world, coercion, cruelty and deception have been acceptable components of courtship. And modern love stories appear destined to follow the identical tragic format. RIGA – For years I've wondered why essentially the most revered and longstanding love stories are those with catastrophic endings. Yet these tales, thought to epitomize "true love," have flourished over the centuries. Mail-order bride web web pages let you examine your date.
A Latvian-English interpreter who has worked at 10 marriages over the previous two years says he has by no means seen a registrar block a marriage. "Most of these had been sham marriages, and it's straightforward to tell. Everyone is dressed casually, often in jeans and T-shirts, and it's not a celebration. There are often two witnesses with the groom," says the interpreter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Anyone has the best to object to a wedding during the three-month discover period before the ceremony takes place. If an objection is lodged, the registrar must examine the wedding before it could possibly proceed. But it stays unclear if registrars have the required authorized powers to block the marriages, and there are fears they might be sued by couples.
Over the previous two years unemployment has surged to 22 per cent, and 1 / 4 of the inhabitants reside at risk of poverty – the highest rate throughout the EU. The women acquired threatening textual content messages from the organisers, making the two older women worry for the security of their youngsters back in Latvia. "I was dropped at get a PPS number because he stated he had got a job in a restaurant for me. He additionally asked me if I had my birth certificates with me, because I wanted this to register to get married.
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"Some big and bad noise is gonna happen" promised Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson to a packed house at St David's Hall. The mixture of acoustic blues, classical music, jazz and prog rock that followed certainly delivered.
The show kicked off with special guests, Welsh band, The Crook family performing tracks from their new CD including the memorable and catchy track A Twisted Kind Of Love before Ian Anderson and veteran Tull drummer Doanne Perry joined them on stage for a few numbers.
After a brief change over period, Ian Anderson along with Martin Barre, John O Hara , David Goodier and Doanne Perry took the audience back forty years to the beginnings of Jethro Tull, kicking off with That Old Feeling and then straight into their 1969 hit Living in the Past.
It was great to see that Ian Anderson still carries as much charisma on stage as he appeared to back in the early days, frequently dancing around and standing on one leg while playing his flute.
Other tracks performed were One for John Gee their tribute to the aforementioned Marquee club manager who gave the band their big break back in the 1960's and So Much Trouble, a popular track from an early John Peel session. Another highlight was a version of Bach's Bouree which brought classical right into mainstream.
Other tracks from albums Thick as a Brick , Crest of a Knave, Stand Up and Heavy Horses made this retrospective concert an enjoyable evening and demonstrated why Jethro Tull are still top of their game four decades on from their initial success.


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The New Digital Age: Reshaping The Future Of People, Nations And Business
Author: Eric Schmidt, III
Publisher : John Murray General Publishing Division
Imprint : John Murray Publishers Ltd
Dimensions : 233x156mm
Out of Print Date :
Author : Eric Schmidt, III
'This is the most important - and fascinating - book yet written about how the digital age with affect our world' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve JobsFrom two leading thinkers, the widely anticipated book that describes a new, hugely connected world of the future, full of challenges and benefits which are ours to meet and harness. The New Digital Age is the product of an unparalleled collaboration: full of the brilliant insights of one of Silicon Valley's great innovators - what Bill Gates was to Microsoft and Steve Jobs was to Apple, Schmidt (along with Larry Page and Sergey Brin) was to Google - and the Director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, formerly an advisor to both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Never before has the future been so vividly and transparently imagined. From technologies that will change lives (information systems that greatly increase productivity, safety and our quality of life, thought-controlled motion technology that can revolutionise medical procedures, and near-perfect translation technology that allows us to have more diversified interactions) to our most important future considerations (curating our online identity and fighting those who would do harm with it) to the widespread political change that will transform the globe (through transformations in conflict, increasingly active and global citizenries, a new wave of cyber-terrorism and states operating simultaneously in the physical and virtual realms) to the ever present threats to our privacy and security, Schmidt and Cohen outline in great detail and scope all the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades. A breakthrough book - pragmatic, inspirational and totally fascinating. Whether a government, a business or an individual, we must understand technology if we want to understand the future. 'A brilliant guidebook for the next century ...Schmidt and Cohen offer a dazzling glimpse into how the new digital revolution is changing our lives' Richard Branson
'This is a book that defines both the nature of the new world which the internet is creating; and its challenges. It describes a technological revolution in the making. How we navigate it is a challenge for countries, communities and citizens. There are no two people better equipped to explain what it means than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen' -- Tony Blair 'At last, a brilliant guide book for the next century - what the future holds for entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, politicians and ordinary citizens alike. Schmidt and Cohen offer a dazzling glimpse into how the new digital revolution is changing our lives. This book is the most insightful exploration of our future world that I have ever read, and once I started reading I was simply unable to put it down' -- Sir Richard Branson 'Every day, technological innovations are giving people around the world new opportunities to shape their own destinies. In this fascinating book, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen draw upon their unique experiences to show us a future of rising incomes, growing participation, and a genuine sense of community - if we make the right choices today' -- Bill Clinton 'Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen's thoughtful, well-researched work elucidates the staggering impact of technology on our daily lives, as well as what surprising and incredible developments the future may hold. Readers might be left with more questions than answers, but that's the idea - we are at our best when we ask "What's next?"' -- Elon Musk 'Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced a searching meditation on technology and world order. Even those who disagree with some of their conclusions will learn much from this thought-provoking volume' -- Henry A. Kissinger 'The New Digital Age is must reading for anyone who wants to truly understand the depths of the digital revolution. Combining the skills of a social scientist and a computer scientist, Cohen and Schmidt blend the technical and the human, the scientific and the political, in ways I rarely saw while in government. They challenge the reader's imagination on almost every page. Indeed, what will be the impact of virtual and physical worlds coexisting, the first generation of humans to have an indelible record, or more frequent revolutions without resolution as the digital age nurtures more celebrities than leaders. And these questions are just the beginning. Read on' -- General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA 'This is the book I have been waiting for: a concise and persuasive description of technology's impact on war, peace, freedom and diplomacy. The New Digital Age is a guide to the future written by two experts who possess a profound understanding of humanity's altered prospects in a wireless world. There are insights on every page and surprising conclusions (and questions) in every chapter. For experts and casual readers alike, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced an indispensable book' -- Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State 'This is the most important - and fascinating - book yet written about how the digital age will affect our world. With vivid examples and brilliant analysis, it shows how the internet and other communications technologies will empower individuals and transform the way nations and businesses operate. How will different societies make tradeoffs involving privacy, freedom, control, security, and the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds? This realistic but deeply optimistic book provides the guideposts. It's both profoundly wise and wondrously readable' -- Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs 'The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business offers an intriguing fusion of ideas and insights about how the virtual world is intersecting with the "Westphalian order". It seeks a balance between the discontinuities of technologists' "revolutions" and the traditionalism of internationalists' study of states, power, and behaviour. The authors explain that technology is not a panacea, yet the uses of technology can make a world of difference. This book should launch a valuable debate about the practical implications of this new connectivity for citizens and policy makers, societies and governments' -- Robert B. Zoellick 'Few people in the world are doing more to imagine - and build - The New Digital Age than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. With this book, they are looking into their crystal ball and inviting the world to peek in' -- Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City Mayor 'We have long needed an incisive study of how the ever evolving world of technology leaves almost no aspect of life unchanged. We have it in The New Digital Age. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen offer a rigorous approach to decoding what the future holds in a story that is as well written and entertaining as it is important' -- General Brent Scowcroft 'Starting with a simple, powerful and terrifying observation - that "the internet is among the few things humans have built that they don't truly understand" - this fascinating book takes you on a wonderfully stimulating and important journey. It will make you rethink your concepts of the digital age, the way the world works, what lies ahead, and what all this means for you, your family and your community. You don't need to know much about technology to benefit from this incredibly insightful book. Using their repeatedly-tested talents and their highly successful experiences, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen brilliantly detail for us how the digital age is rapidly altering the balance of power between citizens and governments, between the physical and virtual worlds, and between good and bad. Whether we like or not, technology is fundamentally changing the manner in which we all interact and depend on each other - and in an accelerating manner whose scale and scope remain obscure for too many of us. This brilliant book is a must read for all those seeking to understand, and navigate well a fundamental structural shift that will play a critical role in determining the wellbeing of current and future generations' -- Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of Pimco