With the Volkswagen Connect app on your phone, all the vital information about your Volkswagen vehicle is instantly accessible. You can easily track what roads you have been on or know when your car requires its next service. You can even monitor your fuel costs!
Available for selected Volkswagen models from 2008 onwards, the smartphone application can be downloaded on the AppStore and Google Play for free. All you need to do is visit one of our Volkswagen dealerships and pick up your free DataPlug.
This feature of the app acts as your digital vehicle log, by recording all the important parts of information about your journey, such as: starting and finishing point, duration, route taken and more.
You'll be easily able to access lots of data about your driving history at your leisure. You can even export the data into a PDF document.
The Driving Style feature records statistics about your driving style whilst driving your Volkswagen.
It assesses statistics like acceleration, braking, speed, rpm, and coolant temperature to figure out your efficiency as a driver, reflected by a score. When driving effectively you can even collect points as well as improve your style with a selection of tips and hints.
The Fuel Monitor keeps track of your fuel stops to give you a useful hub of information about your fuel stops.
When you fill up your tank, the app will notice and send you a notification asking if you would like to input extra data about your fuel stop, for the app to record. This allows you to easily see when you last filled your tank and how much it costed.
If you want more excitement on the way to your destination, Challenges allows you to test your driving abilities against other Volkswagen drivers by earning points and trophies which unlock levels.
Every new level brings you a new set of challenges to overcome such as the efficient driver trophy, which is unlocked by avoiding short journeys.
This displays where your vehicle is currently parked allowing you to easily find it with the use of a detailed map. Parking Space also shows the time when you parked so you know precisely when your parking ticket expires.
Two other features are Route which tells you how to get to your vehicle and Share, which allows you to send the location of your vehicle to a friend.
If your Volkswagen is experiencing technical difficulties whilst out on the road, you can directly contact a 24-hour breakdown service or the Volkswagen Roadside Assistance through this part of Volkswagen Connect.
Service Partners displays any Volkswagen Service Partners in your general vicinity and allows you to call them via the app.
You can also send over your vehicle's data to a service partner of your choosing if you have any queries about the data or performance of your vehicle.
You can also book a service appointment that is tailored towards your vehicle's needs through this part of the app.
With Volkswagen Connect you also gain access to My Volkswagen, which gives you a quick check-up on the health of your vehicle and displays all the relevant important information.
The app will alert you when it detects an issue and the most prudent course of action. You can also contact your preferred retailer or the Volkswagen Emergency Call Centre.


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Prithvi Shaw could be part of Indian Test squad as third opener for New Zealand tour: Report
The 20-year-old returned to competitive cricket after serving an eight-month doping ban last month and has been in touch in domestic cricket.
Dec 10, 2019 · 02:42 pm
Prithvi Shaw could make his comeback in the Indian Test team soon, after an extended spell away due to injury and then a ban over doping violation. Shaw returned to competitive cricket after serving an eight-month doping ban last month and has been playing domestic cricket for Mumbai since.
According to a report in The Indian Express, the 20-year-old might be part of the India's Test squad for the New Zealand tour early next year. The selectors are considering him for the third opener's slot for the series in February.
Shaw, who has played just two Test matches – against West Indies last year – was part of India's squad for the Australia tour last December but was ruled out of the entire series after suffering an ankle ligament tear during a warm-up game.
Mayank Agawarl, who was called up in his absence, has since made his way into the team and established a good opening partnership with Rohit Sharma. The other potential back-up openers for India are KL Rahul and Shikhar Dhawan, who have both been dropped due to form.
Before the Test series, Shaw is set to part of the India A team that will play two four-day games against New Zealand A, continued the Indian Express report.
The other Indian Test specialist players – Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane and Agarwal – are also expected to be part of India A tour for one game in order to get acclimatised to the conditions.
Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
Prithvi Shaw
New Zealand vs India
I don't think MS Dhoni will play for India again, says Harbhajan Singh

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005)
Storyville (1992)
The Believers (1987)
Bright Wall/Dark Room December 2019: To the Very End by Calvin McMillin
The Editors | 2019-12-18
An essay by Calvin McMillin on Twin Peaks, as excerpted from the December issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room.
The Best Television of the Decade
Allison Shoemaker and Brian Tallerico | 2019-11-26
The top 50 shows of the 2010s.
Our TV critics pick the best of 2017.
The Truth Will Out: What Happened to "Rubicon"?
Chris Evangelista | 2017-11-06
A reappreciation of a lost AMC classic.
Bright Wall/Dark Room September 2017: "That Which Is and Is Not: On 'Twin Peaks' and Trauma" by Kelsey Ford
An excerpt about "Twin Peaks" from the latest articles published by online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room.
Revisiting "The Hidden," the '80s "Twin Peaks" Doppelgänger
Max Kyburz | 2017-07-10
A look at the '80s sci-fi/horror hit "The Hidden" in light of "Twin Peaks: The Return."
A Look At "Twin Peaks: The Return"
Peter Sobczynski | 2017-05-22
A review of the first four hours of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: The Return".
Thumbnails 3/3/17
Matt Fagerholm | 2017-03-03
"Get Out" is the best movie about American slavery; In praise of Jordan Horowitz; That Oscars shocker; Painful black/white Oscar moment; Who killed "Twin Peaks."
Thumbnails 10/9/14
"Twin Peaks" returns; Is Cancellation Bear unbearable?; Richard Kelly on "Gone Girl"; MZS on "American Horror Show"; Remembering Geoffrey Holder.
Ebert Club
#56 March 30, 2011
Marie Haws | 2011-03-22
"Of few deaths can it be said that they end an era, but hers does. No other actress commanded more attention for longer, for her work, her beauty, her private life, and a series of health problems that brought her near death more than once." - Roger, from Elizabeth Taylor, a star in her own category
Mad Men (and Mad Women) from Twin Peaks
Jim Emerson | 2010-08-26
The first time I remember seeing Lesli Linka Glatter's name was in a directing credit on "Twin Peaks." She directed four episodes of David Lynch's television masterpiece, 13 installments of "E.R.," eight of "The West Wing," five of "Gilmore Girls" and segments of other series, including "Freaks and Geeks," "House, M.D.," "Law and Order: SVU," "Numb3rs," "Weeds," "The Mentalist," "The Unit" and "True Blood." She's worked a lot. "The Crysanthemum and the Sword" is her sixth episode of "Mad Men" -- and the one that reminded me the most of "Twin Peaks," mostly in little visual touches.
(Although, come to think of it, she also directed the episode with the riding lawnmower accident, which could be seen as a Lynchian in-joke about "The Straight Story"...)
A few images, and then a few thoughts about other possible "Twin Peaks" connections:
'Fire Walk With Me' and the Lost Language of Code
Here is Lil. She indicates that this is one of Gordon's blue rose cases.
When I saw David Lynch's "Inland Empire" for the first time a few weeks ago, I knew I was going to be reviewing it for the Chicago Sun-Times and, given the quintessentially Lynchian, fractal nature of the three-hour film, I didn't know how I was going to do that. It's just not a movie that you can summarize in the usual terms of story, character, cinematography, direction, etc., and still convey a sense of what it's about, and what it's like to watch. The first thing I thought of was a scene near the start of Lynch's radically underestimated "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," in which a complex set of coded information is conveyed entirely through pantomime, involving facial expressions, gestures, dance and dressing up. I wish I could have reviewed "Inland Empire" by doing something like what Lil does in "Fire Walk With Me." (If I could, I'd try dressing up like Grace Zabriskie and contorting myself into a writhing human mobius strip...)
Please consider this article my contribution to The Lynch Mob at Vinyl Is Heavy, where this week you'll findt lotsa Lynch links and criticism. What follows is a slightly revised and updated version of a piece I wrote about nine or ten years ago for my Twin Peaks site at cinepad.com.
"Break the code, solve the case." -- Agent Dale Cooper
"Twin Peaks" was conceived as a series (like "The Fugitive" before it) in which the central "mystery" (Who killed Laura Palmer? Who killed Dr. Richard Kimble's wife? And what of the one-armed man?) would spin off new complications, week after week, but would never really be solved -- at least (in the case of "The Fugitive") until the end of the series. (I like to think of it as sort of the TV series version of Buñuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," where the characters keep on walking but never seem to get anywhere. Instead of preventing these people from eatinga meal, "Twin Peaks" would continually deny the audience and the characters a solution to the mystery. I still think that's a great idea.)
But soon (or finally, depending on how you look at it), public and network pressure forced the hand of "Twin Peaks" co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, and they revealed Laura Palmer's murderer a few weeks into the second season. Lynch said recently (2007) in Seattle that, for him, the series was basically over once identity of Laura's killer was exposed. Ratings dived and creative ennui set in shortly thereafter. But a year later Lynch released a feature film (hissed and booed at the Cannes Film Festival) that promised to go into explicit detail (certainly more so than you could do on network television in the early 1990s) about exactly what happened on the night of Laura Palmer's death.
It was a typically perverse Lynch move -- belatedly rehashing details about a year-old, already-solved murder on a TV show that had been cancelled by the time the movie was released. Even more perversely, Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels began this feature-film prequel with an absurdist prologue that -- in case you hadn't caught on by know -- pretty much explained the spirit, and method you should have invoked to watch "Twin Peaks" in the first place. (The film -- originally sub-titled "Teresa Banks and the Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer" -- was supposedly re-cut before release; Lynch's full shooting script is available online here.)
Lynch himself reprises his role as FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, standing in front of a woodsy photorealistic backdrop in his office that recalls the tropical mural used for trompe l'oeil effects at the house of Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) in the series. Gordon, as you may recall, can't hear too well. He is accustomed to communicating in other ways -- through signs, signals, symbols, omens, clues. And he expects his agents to speak his language.
"I've got a surprise for you. Something interesting I would like to show you," Gordon yells into the phone at Special Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaac). When Desmond and Sam Stanley from Spokane (Kiefer Sutherland) ("Sam's the man who cracked the Whitman case") meet Gordon at the private Portland airport, they're treated to a peculiar, ritualistic display of body language by a woman in a reddish-orange dress with flaming hair to match. Gordon introduces her as Lil, "my mother's sister's girl." Lil makes faces, blinks, sashays around, and waddles away.
Afterwards, in the car, Sam asks the questions that all good "Twin Peaks" devotees are meant to ask again and again: "What exactly did that mean?" And Desmond matter-of-factly ("I'll explain it to you") deciphers a bizarre series of signs and signals and symbols and omens and clues that Lil's little "dance" conveyed about the case they were about to embark upon.
The details don't really matter much (a sour face indicates trouble with local authorities, one hand in her pocket suggests they're hiding something, walking in place means a lot of legwork, tailored dresses are code for drugs, etc.) -- it's the manner in which this info is coveyed that's important. In its secret heart of hearts, "Twin Peaks" is an epistemological thriller about perception and the ways that we assemble information about the world around us (see Mystery Without End, Amen). We humans may be capable of certain higher brain functions, but Lil's dance conveys information in a sophisticated, ritualized way that isn't that far evolved from, say, the dances of cranes. In "Twin Peaks," dreams and Tibetan rock-throwing rituals are just as vital and valid forms of detective work as forensic science. Maybe more so.
View image Me at the Double R Diner (aka the Mar-T) in the spring of 1990, with a waitress who looks suspiciously like Laura Palmer.
Oh, and the most important sign was that Lil was wearing a blue rose. But, Desmond says, "I can't tell you about that."
"You can't?" asks Stanley.
"No," repeats Desmond. "I can't."
And here we have a little mystery. The conundrums without answers are, of course, the most intriguing of all. Suddenly, all the other stuff evaporates from our consciousness -- OK, drugs, legwork, local authorities, fine. Got it. Let's move on: What about the blue rose?!? All we ever really learn about it in the rest of the movie is a remark Agent Cooper makes to Diane that this is "one of Gordon's 'blue rose' cases" -- whatever that may mean. I can't tell you.
[For more about the thematic and geological territory of "Twin Peaks," please take the Topography (or "Top-off-graphy") of Twin Peaks Guided Photo Tour, part of my Twin Peaks site.]
Relevant excerpt from the script after the jump.


This copy shows the entry on 22-Apr-2019 at 19:51:52.
Settlement enclosure, 963m north east of East Farm.
In Cumbria and Northumberland several distinctive types of native settlements dating to the Roman period have been identified. The majority were small, non- defensive, enclosed homesteads or farms. In many areas they were of stone construction, although in the coastal lowlands timber-built variants were also common. In much of Northumberland, especially in the Cheviots, the enclosures were curvilinear in form. Further south a rectangular form was more common. Elsewhere, especially near the Scottish border, another type occurs where the settlement enclosure was `scooped' into the hillslope. Frequently the enclosures reveal a regularity and similarity of internal layout. The standard layout included one or more stone round-houses situated towards the rear of the enclosure, facing the single entranceway. In front of the houses were pathways and small enclosed yards. Homesteads normally had only one or two houses, but larger enclosures could contain as many as six. At some sites the settlement appears to have grown, often with houses spilling out of the main enclosure and clustered around it. At these sites up to 30 houses may be found. In the Cumbrian uplands the settlements were of less regimented form and unenclosed clusters of houses of broadly contemporary date are also known. These homesteads were being constructed and used by non-Roman natives throughout the period of the Roman occupation. Their origins lie in settlement forms developed before the arrival of the Romans. These homesteads are common throughout the uplands where they frequently survive as well-preserved earthworks. In lowland coastal areas they were also originally common, although there they can frequently only be located through aerial photography.
The settlement enclosure 963m north east of East Farm is preserved as a cropmark and its below ground features such as its ditch will contain archaeological deposits relating to its construction, use and abandonment and environmental deposits relating to the use of the surrounding landscape. The monument provides insight into the character of settlement and subsistence during the Iron Age/Romano-British period. The significance of the monument is increased by its presence within a landscape littered with archaeological monuments dating from the prehistoric to the post-medieval period. The majority of these sites relate to the Iron Age and the Romano-British periods and include the Roman military defences of the Cumbrian coast. Taken together these monuments provide an excellent resource for understanding the significant socio-political changes that occurred during the Roman occupation of Britain.
This record was the subject of a minor enhancement on 02 March 2016. This record has been generated from an "old county number" (OCN) scheduling record. These are monuments that were not reviewed under the Monuments Protection Programme and are some of our oldest designation records.
The monument includes the remains of a settlement enclosure of Iron Age/Romano-British date, situated on a ground overlooking the Cumbrian coastline to the west. The sub-oval enclosure, which is preserved as a cropmark, is surrounded by a curvilinear ditch with traces of an internal bank and measures approximately 71m by 82m.


The industrial base that supports the amphibious transport dock (LPD) construction hopes Congress will help accelerate the follow-on LX(R) dock landing ship replacement program by two years, an idea first floated in the House Armed Services Committee last year.
As it stands now, the Navy intends to buy its first LX(R) in 2020 and then procure one a year beginning in 2022. Based on the timing of LPD-28, the final ship in the class, the industrial base believes Fiscal Year 2018 is the best time to begin the new LX(R) program, rather than waiting two more years. Through its advocacy group, the Amphibious Warship Industrial Base Coalition, the suppliers wrote to Congress to ask for continued support in the FY 2017 budget to make this happen.
"As the House Armed Services Committee noted in its report accompanying the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2016, '[T]he optimum construction start for the LX(R) class of vessels is in fiscal year 2018 rather than the current Navy program of record of fiscal year 2020,'" according to the Feb. 4 letter AWIBC wrote to Congress.
The Navy's FY 2017 budget request will be released Feb. 9 and will reveal more about the service's plans for the LX(R) program. Last year, during FY 2016 budget negotiations, the House and Senate armed services committees added in money the Navy did not request to support an earlier start to the LX(R) program.
AWIBC is administered by public relations firm Powell Tate on behalf of Huntington Ingalls Industries.
An unspoken assumption in the drive for accelerated LX(R) funding is that the same industrial base currently working on the San Antonio-class LPDs– more than 2,000 companies total, Schires said– would move over to the LX(R) program. HII builds the LPDs at its Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Miss. The company, however, is not guaranteed the LX(R) contract – it will have to compete for the construction contract for the new ship program.
The Navy is finalizing its big-picture design efforts now – going through the LPD design, taking out features not necessary for the LX(R) mission, adding in new features where needed – and will hold a competition for contract design this spring, program officials have said. Only after that more detailed design is complete would the Navy host a competition for the ship construction, which is currently scheduled for FY 2020. It is unclear if that timeline could be bumped up if more funding were available for the program.


Is The BTS Burn The Stage Movie Really Worth A Watch?
As a big BTS fan inevitably I was going to end up watching their Burn The Stage movie. Not heard of BTS? Well BTS are a Korean boyband made up of seven members. There's Jimin, Jin, Jungkook, J-Hope, Suga, V and leader RM. I've talked about BTS quite a bit here on my blog. From talking about my favourite BTS tracks to sharing my favourite tracks on their Love Yourself: Answer album to even dissecting the BTS Idol video, I've shared a fair bit of love for the K-Pop group. BTS are basically a group who've exploded worldwide and nobody really saw it coming. Not even they saw it coming.
Now Burn The Stage The Movie is actually a follow on from the groups YouTube Red docuseries of the same title which was released back in March. In the film, you're taken on a behind the scenes journey as the group tour on their BTS Live Trilogy Episode III: The Wings Tour. You see each of the seven members both performing and away from all the fans as they prepare for each show and take time out inbetween each performance.
What is Burn The Stage The Movie actually about?
As I said early, the film shows behind the scenes footage of the septet on their Wings Tour. Now firstly, at the beginning of Burn The Stage, you're shown two ads. One for the BT21 characters and then another for the BTS Lightsticks. The second advert will seriously have you wanting to get your groove on. Then before you know it the movie begins. You are taken on a journey where you see fans showing the group love. You then see the band performing on their tour and you also see the behind the scenes footage. In the behind the scenes footage you see two things. BTS as normal regular young men and you see how hard they work.
It's no secret that the K-Pop industry is tough. Idols work super hard and really give it their all. BTS are no different. Throughout the film you see the seven guys suffering from injuries as they overwork themselves. You see the sheer amount of time and effort they put into every single performance. And then you see how much they sacrifice to achieve the success they have. Some scenes in the movie were hard to watch as I felt super bad for each member pushing themselves to the absolute limit. And what for? Us. The fans. Many would argue and say they do it for the money and in a sense that is what all artists do. However, BTS do genuinely care for their fans which is something else you see the seven members talk about frequently throughout the film.
My highlights of the film?
So what did I really love in the film? Well, my first highlight of Burn The Stage would definitely have to be J-Hope playing with V's dog Yeontan. Yeontan and J-Hope team up for a unique and very funny version of MIC Drop which is sure to make you giggle. Many have most likely seen this before but it's even better on the big screen. Another highlight for me? Mom Suga. As the rest of the group really let their hair down and act like the boys they are, Suga takes a more sophisticated approach. Instead, he opts for a glass of red instead. He basically sits at the side of the pool with his legs crossed sipping away as the rest of the members jump in and splash about. It's a total mood, trust me.
Other highlights? Their interviews were brilliant towards the end of the picture. They showed each member quite stripped back away from the spotlight and their usual comical and energetic personas. The group share heartfelt words and talked raw about their experiences of being part of one of the biggest boybands in the world. They also share their love and respect for their ARMY and it is so obviously genuine unlike a lot of other artists.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. However, there were a couple of things that I wasn't keen on. Firstly the narrator. Now I liked the whole concept of the narrator and the fact that there were deep meaningful messages spoken. However, the narrator was a totally random guy, aside for the very end of Burn The Stage when Suga took over that is. I feel like the movie really should have been narrated entirely by the BTS members but hey ho, the dudes are busy enough without having to do that too! My second complaint? The lack of music. Now don't get me wrong, there were snippets of music here and there but they were often interrupted by the narrator right as the tune was about to kick in.
Now I know this wasn't a concert movie, it was a documentary. However, at points, I honestly felt like I was being teased with snippets here and there. Guess it just goes to show that BTS songs really do leave you wanting more! Aside from my two little qualms, I really did enjoy the movie and I do recommend giving it a watch. I always love seeing BTS stipped back so this film was right up my street. It's also worth mentioning that Burn The Stage has done very well globally. So well in fact that it has been given an encore and will be released again on the 5th and 6th of December so if you want to view it, keep your eyes peeled for dates at your local cinema.
Have you seen Burn The Stage? Who is your favourite BTS member?
The first of the 3 great tracks you should listen to in November 2018 is Steve Aoki ft BTS - Waste It On Me. Now although this track does feature BTS, not all members actually feature on the track. You only actually hear members Jungkook and RM with a hint of Jimin during the chorus. However, that doesn't mean to say the track is a letdown, because it isn't. Unlike previous BTS tracks, this song is entirely in English. Now, this isn't the first time DJ Steve Aoki has worked with the band. Steve has previously remixed the track MIC Drop and even featured on the Love Yourself: Tear Album. Now he's got BTS featuring on his very own track and the song certainly pleased my ears.
Waste It On Me is a chilled toe-tapping track that features brassy synths. The track is very smooth and showcases Jungkook's wonderful vocals with pops of Jimin's angelic voice in the chorus. Also in the track not only do we hear RM's unique rap skills, but we also hear Namjoon sing which is always a treat. I think this is a great track featuring BTS. Plus undeniably it is one aimed more at the Western market compared to other tracks featuring the Korean boyband. In my eyes, this is a good thing as it means the group is being recognised and taken seriously more globally.
The second of the 3 great tracks you should listen to in November 2018 is Of Mice and Men - Back To Me. Of Mice and Men have produced some absolute bangers over the years like Second and Sebring but be warned this track isn't for the faint-hearted. If you're not a fan of screaming and heavy language, I'd give this one a miss. However, Back To Me is much toned down in the sense it contains no screaming. This could be due to the fact the Of Mice & Men have a new lead singer after Austin Carlile stepped down due to health reasons before the track was created.
Now although the track kinda sways away from Of Mice & Men's signature metalcore sound, at its heart it is still noticeably the band's work. Despite not being super heavy and intense as a lot of their other tracks, it's still recognisably Of Mice & Men. If I'm being really controversial I'd even go as far as saying this track kinda has a more mainstream sound. However, that isn't necessarily a bad thing as I think it could mean that more people discover the band. However, I think that fans of that really heavy sound may be left feeling a little disappointed and left down.
Regardless the track is empowering with pretty clean vocals. It has an infectious chorus that you can't help singing along to. Plus it kinda gives you a glimpse into the groups new era and updated sound. Oh and it's also worth noting that this track isn't super new. However, it was released on Of Mice & Men's most recent album Defy which came out at the start of the year.
The third of the 3 great tracks you should listen to in November 2018 is Key ft Soyou - Forever Yours. Now you may know Key from K-Pop group SHINee who I mentioned in my September music favourites, August music favourites and my June music favourites. Well, Key has basically launched his solo career and his first track released from his upcoming album is Forever Yours. Forever Yours is a catchy track that combines tropical beats with a hint of synthpop. The song in a lot of ways has a similar feel to some of SHINee's newer material such as Countless and I Want You which I simply love.
Also on the track is Soyou who many will know from the now no more girl group Sistar who disbanded over a year ago. The first voice you hear on the track is Soyou's which is very soft and sweet. Am I a massive fan? Not really but the addiction isn't utterly terrible. It just seems to get a little washed out as the track goes on and on. Even more so when Key's vocals come in. Overall the track is catchy. The chorus gets you grooving and if it had more English lyrics I could definitely see the Western top 40 taking a shine to it.
What songs have you recently been loving?


Former U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius said he resigned from his post last year after the Trump administration asked him to pressure the Vietnamese government to receive more than 8,000 Vietnamese refugees marked in the U.S. for deportation.
The vast majority of the people targeted for deportation — sometimes for minor crimes — were war refugees who had established lives in the U.S. after fleeing the Vietnam War more than 40 years ago, Osius wrote in an essay this month for the American Foreign Service Association.
"And they were to be 'returned' decades later to a nation ruled by a communist regime with which they had never reconciled. I feared many would become human rights cases, and our government would be culpable," he wrote.
The State Department declined to comment Friday. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Osius, now vice president of Fulbright University Vietnam, a private, nonprofit institution in Saigon, described his three-year tour as U.S. ambassador in Hanoi as "the high point of my 30-year career in the Foreign Service and the honor of a lifetime." Efforts to reach him through the university and the foreign service association Friday were unsuccessful.
Osius's admission took on significant resonance in San Jose, which is home to more than 100,000 Vietnamese Americans, one of the largest populations of Vietnamese-born people outside of Vietnam.
It comes months after Vietnamese activists across the country, including many in the Bay Area, raised concerns that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was rounding up undocumented immigrants from Vietnam in unprecedented numbers that left communities shocked and fearful. They estimated more than 100 Vietnamese were detained across the country in October alone.
The surge in ICE activity appeared to spring in part from the Trump administration's aggressive efforts to deport immigrants with criminal records, even in circumstances where their home countries haven't traditionally cooperated with U.S. removal orders. In the past, immigrants in that situation have been allowed to stay in the U.S., but the Trump administration has been pressing Cambodia and Vietnam, in particular, to take back their deportees.
The result is that immigrants who have established roots and lives in the U.S. in spite of their eligibility for deportation are suddenly being detained and shipped out.
Vietnamese and U.S. officials in 2008 signed a repatriation memorandum that in part said Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in America before 1995 would not be subject to deportation. Activists, however, say some of the individuals being detained arrived before 1995, leaving them to wonder whether some of these deportations are illegal. Several organizations filed a lawsuit against the federal government in February for violating its repatriation agreement with Vietnam.
In his essay, Osius said he feared "this repulsive policy" would destroy any chances Trump had in fulfilling other goals for relations with Vietnam, among them reducing trade deficit, strengthening military relations and coping with regional threats, such as those from North Korea.
"I voiced my objections, was instructed to remain silent, and decided there was an ethical line that I could not cross if I wished to retain my integrity. I concluded that I could better serve my country from outside government, by helping to build a new, innovative university in Vietnam," he wrote.
Phi Nguyen, litigation director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Atlanta, said she's happy the former diplomat spoke out.
Nguyen said many of the Vietnamese immigrants with deportation orders came to the U.S. after the Vietnam War and no longer have ties to their home country.
"They are people who came here as refugees and who don't really recognize the Vietnam that exists today as their country anymore," she said.


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Home Meet Your Merchant Island Music
Meet Your Merchant: Island Music
Gwyn McAllister
From left, Becky Williams, Ed Griggs, and Andrew Herr jam out with some of the store's many instruments. - Stacey Rupolo
Island Music on Main Street, Vineyard Haven, is a true labor of love for owner Ed Griggs. A longtime musician and music lover, Mr. Griggs makes his living through his construction businesses — Ed Griggs Builder and Island Door and Window — and keeps the music store alive through the profits from his other Island businesses. Although he often does work tuning, repairing and rebuilding pianos, Mr. Griggs is rarely in the store, having turned those duties over to his valued staff. His plan is to settle into running the store once he has stepped down from the construction business. "I'm saving it for when I retire," says Mr. Griggs. "So I have somewhere to go every day."
How long has the store been around?
Since 1991. We've moved around quite a bit. I started out at the old Hancock Hardware Building across from the gas station. Then we were at Ralph Packer's building — the one that moved, and then in Ernie Boch's place for a couple of years. We were on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs for a while before settling here.
What do you sell?
Guitars are No. 1 — electric, acoustic, basses. We also sell a lot of ukuleles. We have a wide array of percussion and drum gear. We sell pianos and keyboards. We also carry all kinds of sound gear, stage gear, mics, accessories, headphones, amps, and speakers. We carry sheet music for classical and modern, song books, instruction books.
Andy Herr (employee, musician, and teacher) adds: We like to offer as many local CDs as possible. One of my missions is to encourage people to record and sell their music in the shop. Visitor are often interested in what local musicians on the Island are doing.
Instrument rentals, lessons — piano, guitar, ukulele, banjo and voice, piano repair and tuning. We also do consignments of used instruments.
How long have you been on-Island,
and how did you end up here?
I've been here for 45 years. I was about 20 when I moved here. I had a friend who came up to work on a house, and I did some painting for him in the wintertime. I camped out in the woods. My first job was washing dishes at the Black Dog.
What other type of work have you
done in the past?
I worked in a pickle factory for a while. I worked on shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico. I hopped trains and traveled around Canada. Back then, 40 years ago, they didn't really care if you rode the rails.
What inspired you to open a music store?
At the time there was no music store here. I was trying to buy reeds for my saxophone. I went to Boston, and just for a joke I asked Elio at Rayburn Music if he would give me a bunch of instruments and I would go back to the Island and sell them. He agreed, and I packed my van, went back to the Island. And I sold them at the old Hancock Building, where I was set up rebuilding pianos. I had a good street location, and the instruments sold. We had a good relationship with Rayburn for a while, and then I started opening up a few accounts, and did consignment at first.
What's the most challenging thing about running a business on the Island?
Competing with online retail. People automatically think we're going to be more expensive. We'll match online prices. If something breaks, we'll take care of it. We stand by our products. We only sell things that we know are good quality. People can keep the music store alive on-Island by supporting us. I believe in supporting the community. I always buy here if I can. The arts and music are important aspects of the Vineyard community that we need to keep going.
How have things changed over the years?
The culture is leaning away from music. It's become a fast-paced culture where people have to be entertained constantly. It's a challenge for a kid to latch onto music. They don't have the patience. It's all about instant gratification. It's kind of sad that the kids are being dragged away by video games instead of playing the guitar.
Four: Becky Williams is the manager and teaches singing and piano. Andy Herr works in the store, and teaches guitar, ukulele, and piano; Lucy Mayhew works in the store. Will Pfluger teaches guitar and uke. This is by far the best overall staff I've ever had.
What's the most rewarding thing
about your job in the music store?
One of the most fun things is when kids come in with their parents to rent an instrument. When they first open up the case I like to see the expression on their face. I love selling guitars. I think it's just adding to people's lives. Singing and playing music brings you closer to the Lord. Playing music is a really healing thing.
What are some of the more
interesting things that you carry?
(answered by Andy Herr) We have a huge collection of Native American flutes on sale from the William Waterway estate. He had close to 100 handmade flutes. Some are very high-quality and valuable, others are more affordable. He also had pan flutes and a didgeridoo. My favorite recent aquisition was an oud — an 11-string Middle Eastern instrument. We only had it in the shop for a couple of days before it sold. People sometimes bring in very old wooden instruments. People will go through their family estate, and they'll find some sort of interesting antique in the basement.
What are some of the new things you're trying out?
(answered by Andy Herr) We just started doing open mic nights every other Tuesday. It's been really successful. I started out by having a couple of workshops — one with Mike Kerr demonstrating effect pedals, then a flamenco workshop. The next one I'll be teaming up with Anthony Esposito to demonstrate finger-style playing. We also had a pop-up shop on Earth Day, with locals selling artwork and jewelry, and the Maniacs of the Heart played in the window.
What do you feel grateful about?
God has been very good to me in my life. When I came to the Island, I was washing dishes and camping out, and He has brought me so many friends and family. I always put Him first.
What do you like about the Vineyard?
I think it's a really friendly place. I love the vacationers. I have the opposite feeling of most people who don't like tourists. I love meeting new people. I'm happy to stop and give people directions and let people in on things they might not know about the Island.
What do you like to do with
your spare time?
In the summertime my wife and I go to the beach. We bring a barbecue and stay on the beach till the stars come out.
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text:
Senate Votes for Workaround on Federal Property Tax Deduction
Homeowners could get around the new $10,000 cap on property tax deductions on their federal tax returns by turning them into charitable contributions. At least that's the plan behind a bill approved by the Senate yesterday.
Legislation on interstate tax agreements and Urban Enterprise Zones also saw action.
Property Tax Deduction
Senators voted 28-9 to allow municipalities to set up charitable foundations for the collection of money that would otherwise be paid as property taxes by establishing a framework for creating such charitable funds. Municipalities would decide for themselves whether or not to give their taxpayers the option.
The bill is in response to federal tax reform that limits the amount of state and local taxes individuals would be allowed to deduct from their federal income taxes in the 2018 tax year. The federal tax law caps so-called SALT deductions at $10,000, which is less than many New Jersey homeowners pay annually.
S-1893 (Sarlo, D-36; Sweeney, D-3) would offer a possible way out for those taxpayers since the tax reform law preserves deductions for charitable contributions.
"We won't sit back and allow the new federal tax law to impose a financial burden on middle class families in New Jersey," Senate President Steve Sweeney said. "The full deductibility of property taxes has long been the foundation of home ownership and it has helped to sustain the strength of hometown communities."
Interstate Tax Agreements
Senators also voted to protect New Jersey's bi-state agreement with Pennsylvania that allows taxpayers to pay income taxes in the state where they live rather than where they work. S-878 (Madden, D-4); Sweeney, D-3) would prevent the NJ Division of Taxation from unilaterally withdrawing from these pacts without legislative approval.
Currently, the division has broad powers to enter into and terminate reciprocal personal income tax agreements, which came to light in 2016 when former Gov. Chris Christie announced that he would terminate the agreement between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He eventually withdrew the proposal.
Approximately 125,000 New Jersey residents commute to Pennsylvania and another 125,000 make the reverse trip, according to Census Bureau estimates. Pennsylvania has a flat 3.07 percent income-tax rate while New Jersey has a more progressive tax structure with rates from 1.4 percent to 8.97 percent.
Urban Enterprise Zone Designations
The former Urban Enterprise Zones (UEZs) in Bridgeton, Camden, Newark, Plainfield and Trenton would get new life under S-846 (Turner, D-15; Cruz-Perez, D-5), which as approved by the Senate yesterday. The bill would reinstate the designations that expired at the end of 2016.
The UEZ Program provides incentives to encourage businesses to locate to urban areas and create private sector jobs. Under the bill, the UEZ designations of these five cities would be reestablished until Sept. 30, 2019. The bill would also require the UEZ Authority to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the program and to issue a report on its findings on or before the date the Governor's annual budget message is presented to the Legislature in Feb. 2019.
All three bills now await consideration in the Assembly.
Federal Tax Reform, Government Affairs, property taxes, tax deductions, Taxes
More Federal Affairs
Volunteers Needed to Provide Free Tax Assistance Services to Needy
Texting Scams Targeting Taxpayers on the Rise, IRS Says
US Labor Dept. Breaks Down Workers' Access to Various Benefits
Reminder: File 2019 and 2020 Returns by Sept. 30 to Get COVID Penalty Relief
Heavy Highway Vehicle Taxes Due by Aug. 31


The sounds of a steam whistle and a puffing train can evoke another era. At Museum Meiji-Mura, tel: (81-568) 670 314, they take you to one. Set outside Inayuma, near Nagoya in central Japan, the open-air museum park comprises a collection of splendid, century-old buildings rescued from demolition, linked by historic train and trolley cars.


The regeneration of the Lyng lay at the heart of key national, regional and local priorities.
The Lyng is an identifiable place in the history of West Bromwich, being first settled in the late 17th century and then absorbed into the industrial heartland of the Black Country during the Industrial Revolution. In the 1960′s, slum clearance and redevelopment swept away the legacy of that period, replacing it with low medium and high rise blocks, which to many lacked a sense of place or identity.
However one very noticeable feature of the Lyng, which remains today, is its very strong community spirit.
In May 1995, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council (SMBC) embarked on a consultation exercise with the Lyng community to identify what needed to be done to regenerate the Lyng estate. A major vehicle for this was the establishment of a Working Group involving residents. Detailed resident consultation was held throughout 1996-97, producing a clear picture of needs and aspirations.
In order to satisfy the long-term ambitions of residents it was agreed that comprehensive redevelopment was the key to generating the right kind of opportunities, encouraging a more economically active mix of people onto the Lyng. This would not only breathe new life into the Lyng, but also benefit the wider proposals being developed for West Bromwich Town Centre.
d) Introduce additional private finance options to aid the regeneration.
In January 1999, after further residential consultations, a group of 15-20 volunteers commenced an intensive training programme in order to prepare for the establishment of an organisation that would meet these requirements. Training included financial, technical and legal issues, both in terms of specific regeneration and development as well as the corporate functions that must be fulfilled as a Board Director.
The original Business Plan focused on the development and management of up to 200 homes at affordable rents although with a recognition that should there be opportunities to extend its regeneration role to developing new homes for private sale or shared ownership, it would consider establishing a separate trading operation for that purpose.
To ensure the successful delivery of the Vision for the Lyng, the LCA Board and SMBC adopted a set of clear interlinking objectives, against which all redevelopment and refurbishment proposals for the Lyng were appraised.
In 2014 the Lyng Redevelopment Project won the Housing Excellence – Best Regeneration Scheme Award and followed this up with the Builder and Engineer – Residential Project of the Year Award.
Added to this the Lyng Project also named as one of the twenty best developments in the West Midlands.
The role of the LCA has continued to evolve to enable it to develop other projects that benefit people living on the Lyng and the wider community. The Lyng today is a desirable place to live with a vibrant community that is enjoying the benefits of a redevelopment that was based on local pride and a deep desire to create a great place to live and work.
Many people have contributed to the success of the Lyng Regeneration and as we develop the Lyng story we will look to give due recognition to all those who helped build the success of the project.


text:
Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K and Video Assist 4K Shoot MAX's 'Lights Down Low' Music Video
Blackmagic Design announced that URSA Mini 4.6K EF was used to shoot the music video for "Lights Down Low" by MAX. Blackmagic Design Video Assist 4K was used for 4K monitoring and recording on the intensely packed two day shoot, while DaVinci Resolve Studio was used for color grading the video.
…when it came down to choosing a camera, the Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K was ideal for the shoot.
MAX collaborated with production company and full service music management label Crush Music on "Lights Down Low" to create a music video emblematic of MAX's personal experience behind the song, telling a love story over the better part of a lifetime. "We wanted to show what it would be like to be a fly on the wall," explains Jade Ehlers, creative director at Crush Music. "It's a one shot video that we shot with just one camera mounted directly above the room, and you watch MAX experience various relationships. The music video depicts what one's life might look like if they lived in one apartment their whole life. And when it came down to choosing a camera, the Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K was ideal for the shoot."
With just 15 feet between the floor and the ceiling, Crush was challenged with capturing the full scope of the studio built bedroom, complete with fake windows and artificial lighting. They paired a Sigma 8mm super wide angle lens with the URSA Mini 4.6K to account for the lack of distance between the camera and subject. "We wanted to be sure we had a lens that would give us a wide enough angle to capture the whole room, and the Sigma 8mm worked perfectly with the URSA Mini, which gives us as full frame as we can get."
Because the video for "Lights Down Low" is shot entirely from the ceiling looking down on the room, the production crew had to mount the URSA Mini 4.6K camera above the set using C-clamps and a dolly. Once the camera was set in place and the shoot began, it was imperative that the camera was not moved, so as not to compromise the steady shot, not to mention the camera was far out of reach from the ground. To work around the physical limitations, Crush hooked up the Blackmagic Video Assist 4K to the URSA Mini 4.6K, which enabled them to manage all camera operations as well as to frame and focus their shot perfectly.
"Everything came out great, we were really stoked on it. Being able to shoot RAW, which gave us tons of information to use in post, and capture 4K was super important for us to be able to deliver an amazing looking music video for MAX," says Ehlers. "Even before we went into grading with DaVinci Resolve Studio, when we just had the base color, I could already tell the color was going to be amazing."
"The video for MAX's 'Lights Down Low' was a unique concept because there was so much we had to do in regards to getting the camera just right, and in most music videos you can just shoot something and then scale different angles. This one was more complex in trying to find something that worked perfectly. Luckily, the Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K and Video Assist 4K did just that."
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The Players Have Spoken! Welcome The 9th Airsoft Players' Choice Awards Winners!
It's the moment that the finalists of the 9th Airsoft Players' Choice Awards have been waiting for, the winner announcement. After two months of working on getting the nomination and then rallying fans, customers, and friends to vote for them, they will finally find out if they have bagged one of the biggest achievements in airsoft, a win in a category in the Airsoft Players' Choice Awards.


text:
\section{Introduction}

Auto-encoder \citep{vincent2010stacked} is a class of models which aim to map the input to a latent space and map it back to the original space, with low reconstruction error as its objective. Previous approaches for building such device mainly came from the neural network community. For instance, a neural network based auto-encoder usually consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder maps the input to a hidden layer and the decoder maps it back to the input space. By concatenating the two parts and setting the reconstruction error as learning objective, back-propagation can be used for training such models. It is widely used for dimensionality reduction \citep{hinton2006fast}, representation learning \citep{bengio2013representation}, as well as some more recent works in generative models such as Variational Auto-encoders \citep{kingma2013auto}.

Ensemble learning \citep{Zhou2012} is a powerful learning paradigm which trains multiple learners and combines to tackle the problem. It is widely used in a broad range of tasks and and demonstrates great performance. Tree ensemble methods, or forests, such as Random Forest \citep{Breiman2001}, for instance, is one of the best off-the-shelf methods for supervised learning \citep{fernandez2014we}. Other successful tree ensembles such as gradient based decision trees (GBDTs), \citep{chen2016xgboost} has also proven its ability during the past decade.
Besides supervised learning, tree ensembles have also achieved great success in other tasks, such as isolation forest \citep{Liu:Ting:Zhou2008} which is an efficient unsupervised method for anomaly detection. Recently, deep model based on forests has also been proposed \citep{Zhou:gcForest17}, and demonstrated competitive performance with DNNs across a broad range of tasks with much fewer hyper-parameters.

In this paper, we present the EncoderForest, (abbrv. eForest), by enabling a tree ensemble to perform forward encoding and backward decoding operations and can be trained in both supervised or unsupervised fashion. Experiments showed the eForest approach has the following advantages:
\begin{itemize}
  \item Accurate: Its experimental reconstruction error is lower than a MLP or CNN based auto-encoders.
  \item Efficient: eForest on a single KNL (many-core CPU) runs even faster than a CNN auto-encoder runs on a Titan-X GPU for training.
  \item Damage-tolerable: The trained model works well even when it is partially damaged.
  \item Reusable: A model trained from one dataset can be directly applied on the other dataset in the same domain.
\end{itemize}

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: first we introduce related works, followed by the proposed eForest model, then experimental results are presented, finally conclusion and future works are discussed.

\section{Related Work}

Auto-encoding an important task for learning association from data, which is one of the key ingredient of deep learning. \citep{Goodfellow:Bengio2016}.
The study of auto-encoding dates back to \citep{bourlard1988auto}, of which the goal is to learning an auto-association relation which can be used to for representation learning.
\citep{bengio2013representation}.  Most of the previous approaches on auto-encoding are neural network based models. For instance, the under-complete auto-encoder, which purpose is to compress data for dimensionality reduction \citep{hinton2006reducing} and efficient coding\citep{liou2008modeling}, sparse auto-encoder gives a sparsity penalty on the on the activation layer \citep{hinton2010modeling}, which is related with sparse coding \citep{willmore2001characterizing}, and denoising auto-encoders \citep{bengio2013generalized} forces the model to learn the mapping from a corrupted input to its noiseless version. Applications ranging from computer vision \citep{masci2011stacked} to natural language processing \citep{mikolov2013distributed} and semantic hashing \citep{salakhutdinov2007restricted} which uses autoencoders in information retrieval tasks. In fact, the concept of deep learning stated with training a stack of auto-encoders in a greedy layer-wised fashion. \citep{hinton2006fast}. Auto-encoding has also been applied in some more recent works such as variational auto-encoder for generative models \citep{kingma2013auto}.

Ensembles of decision trees, or called \textit{forest}, are popularly used in ensemble learning \citep{Zhou2012}. For example, Bagging \citep{Breiman1996} and Boosting \citep{Freund:Schapire:1999} usually take decision trees as component learners. Other famous decision tree ensemble methods including Random Forest \citep{Breiman2001} and GBDT\citep{Friedman2001}; the former is a variant of Bagging, whereas the latter is a variant of Boosting. Some efficient implementations of GBDT, e.g. XGBoost \citep{chen2016xgboost}, has been widely used in industry and various data analytics competitions. In addition to the above tree ensembles constructed in supervised setting, there are unsupervised tree ensembles also proven to be useful in various domains. For example, the iForest \citep{Liu:Ting:Zhou2008} is an unsupervised forest designed for anomaly detection, and its ingredient, completely-random decision trees, have also been applied to tasks such as streaming new class learning \citep{Mu:Ting:Zhou2017}. Note that both supervised and unsupervised forests, i.e. Random Forest and completely-random tree forest, have been simultaneously exploited in the construction of deep forest\citep{Zhou:gcForest17}.

\section{The Proposed Method}

An auto-encoder has two basic functions: encoding and decoding. There is no difficulty for a forest to do encoding, because at least the leaf nodes information can be regarded as a kind of encoding; needless to say, the subsets of nodes or even the branch of paths may be able to offer more information for encoding.

First, we propose the encoding procedure of EncoderForest. Given a trained tree ensemble model of $T$ trees, the forward encoding procedure takes an input data and send this data to each root node of trees in the ensemble, once the data traverse down to the leaf nodes for all trees, the procedure will return a $T$ dimensional vector, where each element $t$ is an integer index of the leaf node in tree $t$.

A more concrete algorithm for forward encoding is shown in Algorithm~\ref{alg:Encoding}.
Notice that this encoding procedure is independent with the particular learning rule on how to split the nodes for trees. For instance, the decision rule can be learned in a supervised setting such as random forest, or can be learned in an unsupervised setting such as completely random trees.

\begin{algorithm}[H]
\caption{Forward Encoding}
\label{alg:Encoding}
\KwIn{A trained forest $F$ with $T$ trees, an input data $x$}
\KwOut{$x_{enc}$}

 $x_{enc}$ = $zeros$[$T$,$1$]         \%  initialize $x'$ \\
\For{$i$ in range($T$)}
{\
     $x_{enc}[i]$ = $Forest.tree[i].encode(x)$ \\
    \% returns leaf index for tree $i$ \\
}
return  $x_{enc}$
\end{algorithm}

On the other hand, however, the decoding function is not that obvious. In fact, forests are generally used for forward prediction, by going from the root of each tree to the leaves, whereas it is unknown how to do backward reconstruction, i.e., inducing the original samples from information obtained at the leaves.

Suppose we are handling a binary classification task, with four attributes. The first and second attributes are numerical ones; the third is a boolean attribute with values {\textit{YES}, \textit{NO}}; the fourth is a triple-valued attribute with values {\textit{RED}, \textit{BLUE}, \textit{GREEN}}.  Given an instance $\bm{x}$, let $x_i$ denotes the value of $\bm{x}$ on the $i$-th attribute.

Now suppose in the encoding step we have generated a forest as shown in Fig~\ref{fig:subregion}. Now, we only know the leaf nodes on which the instance $\bm{x}$ falling into, as shown in Fig~\ref{fig:subregion} as the red nodes, and wish to reconstruct $\bm{x}$.

Here, we propose an effective yet simple, possibly the simplest, strategy for backward reconstruction in forests.
First, each leaf node actually corresponds to a path coming from the root, we can identify the path based on the leaf node without uncertainty.

\begin{figure*}[t]
   \centering
   \includegraphics[scale=0.25]{subregion.PNG}
   \caption{Traversing backward along decision paths }
   \label{fig:subregion}
\end{figure*}

For example, in Fig~\ref{fig:subregion} the identified paths are highlighted in red color.
Second, each path corresponds to a symbolic rule; for example, the highlighted tree paths correspond to the following rule set,
where $RULE_i$ corresponds to the path of the $i$-th tree in the forest,
where $\neg$ denotes the negation of a judgment :

$RULE_1$: $(x_1 \geq 0)\wedge (x_2 \geq 1.5) \wedge \neg(x_3==RED) \wedge \neg(x_1 \geq 2.7) \wedge \neg(x_4==NO)$\\

$RULE_2$: $(x_3 == GREEN) \wedge \neg(x_2 \geq 5) \wedge (x_1 \geq  0.5) \wedge \neg(x_2 \geq 2)$  \\

... \\

$RULE_n: (x_4 == YES) \wedge \neg(x_2 \geq 8) \wedge \neg(x_1 \geq 1.6)$

This rule set can be further adjusted into a more succinct form:

$RULE_1':   (2.7 \geq x_1 \geq 0) \wedge ( x_2 \geq 1.5) \wedge \neg(x_3==RED) \wedge (x_4==YES)$  \\

$RULE_2': (x_1 \geq 0.5) \wedge \neg(x_2 \geq 2) \wedge (x_3 == GREEN)$ \\

...\\

$RULE_n': \neg(x_1 \geq 1.6) \wedge \neg(x_2 \geq 8) \wedge  (x_4 == YES)$

Then, we can derive the Maximal-Compatible Rule (MCR). MCR is such a rule that each of its component coverage cannot be enlarged, otherwise incompatible issue will occur. For example,from the above rule set we can get the corresponding MCR:

$(1.6 \geq x_1 \geq 0.5) \wedge (2 \geq x_2  \geq 1.5) \wedge (x_3 == GREEN) \wedge (x_4 == YES)$

For each component of this MCR, such as  $(2 \geq x_2  \geq{ 1.5})$,
its coverage cannot be enlarged; for example, if it were enlarged to  $(3 \geq x_2\geq 1.5)$, it would have conflict with the condition in $\neg(x_2 \geq 2)$ in $RULE_2$. A more detailed description is shown in Algorithm~\ref{alg:MCR}.

It is very easy to prove the following theorem, and thus we omit the proof.

\begin{theorem}
The original sample must reside in the input region defined by the MCR.
\end{theorem}

Thus, after obtaining the MCR, we can reconstruct the original sample. For categorical attributes such as $x_3$ and $x_4$, the original sample must take these values in the MCR; for numerical attributes, such as $x_2$, we can take a representative value, such as the mean value in (2, 1.5). Thus, the reconstructed sample is ${\bm x}$ = [0.55, 1.75, GREEN, YES]. Note that for numerical value, we can have many alternative ways for the reconstruction, such as the median, max, min, or even calculate the histograms.

\begin{algorithm}[H]
\caption{Calculate MCR}
\label{alg:MCR}
\KwIn{A list $Rule\_List$ consists of $T$ rules defined by a forest}
\KwOut{$MCR$}

$MCR$ = initialize\_list()  \\
\For{$i$ in $range(T)$}
{\
$path\_rule$= $rule\_list[i]$\\
\For{$node\_rule$ in path\_rule.node\_rule\_list}
	{\
	j = node\_rule.attribute \\
	$MCR[j]$ = $intersect(MCR[j],node\_rule.bound)$
	}
}
return MCR \\
\end{algorithm}

Given the above description, now we give a summary for conducting backward decoding of eForest. Concretely, given a trained forest with $T$ trees along with the forward encoding $x_{enc}$ in $R^{T}$ for a particular data, the backward decoding will first locate the individual leaf node via each element in $x_{enc}$, and then obtain $T$ decision rules for the corresponding decision paths accordingly. Then, by calculating the MCR, we can thus get a reconstruction from  $x_{enc}$ back to $x_{dec}$ in the input region. A concrete algorithm is shown in Algorithm~\ref{alg:Decoding}.

By enabling the eForest to conduct the forward encoding and backward decoding operations, autoencoding tasks can thus be realized. In addition, although beyond the scope of this paper, the eForest model might give some insight on a theoretical treatment for the representation learning ability for tree ensemble models, as well as helping to design new models for deep forest.

\begin{algorithm}[H]
\caption{Backward Decoding}\label{alg:Decoding}
\KwIn{$x_{enc}$, trained eforest $F$ with $T$ trees}
\KwOut{$x_{dec}$}
rule\_list = list() \\
\For{$i$ in range($T$)}
{\
path = forest.tree[i].get\_path($x_{enc}[i]$ ) \\
$path\_rule$ = calculate\_rules(path) \\
$path\_rule$ = simplify($path\_rule$)\\
rule\_list.append(path\_rule)
}
 $MCR$ = calculate\_MCR(rule\_list) \\
$x_{dec}$ = sample($MCR$) \\
return  $x_{dec}$ \\
\end{algorithm}

\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Image Reconstruction}

We evaluate the performance of eForest in both supervised and unsupervised setting. In this implementation, we take Random Forest \citep{Breiman2001} to construct the supervised forest, whereas take the completely-random forest \citep{Zhou:gcForest17} as the routine for the unsupervised forest. Notice that other decision tree ensemble construction methods can also be used for this purpose. Concretely, for supervised eForest, each non-terminal node randomly select $\sqrt{d}$ attributes in the input space and pick the best possible split for information gain; for unsupervised eForest, each non-terminal node randomly pick one attributes and make a random split.
In our experiments we simply grow the trees to pure leaf, or terminate when there are only two instances in a node. We evaluate eForest containing 500 trees or 1,000 trees, denoted by $eForest_{500}$ and $eForest_{1000}$ respectively. Note that $eForest_N$ will re-represent the input instance as a $N$-dimensional vector.

Since auto-encoders especially DNN-based auto-encoders are mainly designed for image tasks, in this section we run some experiments on image data first. We use the MNIST dataset \citep{LeCun:Bottou1998}, which consists of 60,000 gray scale 28$\times$28 images (784 dimensional vector per sample) for training and 10,000 for testing. We also use CIFAR-10 dataset \citep{krizhevsky2009learning}, which is a more complex dataset consists of 50,000 colored 32$\times$32 images (therefore each image is in $R^{1024}$ per channel) for training and 10,000 colored images for testing. For colored images, the eForest process each channel separately for memory saving.

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\caption{Performance comparison (measured by MSE). The subscript $s$ and $u$ denote supervised and unsupervised, respectively.}\label{table:ae}

\centering
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
                                 & MNIST                 & CIFAR-10 \\ \hline
$MLP_{1}$                  & 266.85                & 1284.98        \\ \hline
$MLP_{2}$                   & 163.97               & 1226.52       \\ \hline
CNN                              &  768.02                &   865.63       \\ \hline
$eForest^{s}_{500}$       & 1386.96               & 1623.93      \\ \hline
$eForest^{s}_{1000}$       & 701.99                & 567.64      \\ \hline
$eForest^{u}_{500}$        & 27.39                 & 579.337  \\ \hline
$eForest^{u}_{1000}$       & \textbf{6.86}         & \textbf{153.68}  \\ \hline

\end{tabular}

\end{table}

MLP based AutoEncoders (MLP-AEs) and a convolutional neural network based auto-encoder (CNN-AE) are used for comparison. For MLP-AEs, we follow the suggestions in \citep{bengio2007greedy} and use two architectures, with 500-dimensional and 1000-dimensional inner representation, respectively. Concretely, the MLP-AE $MLP_{1}$ for MNIST is $(input-1024-500-1024-output)$ and the $MLP_{2}$ for MNIST is $(input-2048-1000-2048-output)$. Likewise, the MLP-AE $MLP_{1}$ for CIFAR-10 is $(input-4096-1024-500-1024-4096-output)$ and the $MLP_{2}$ for CIFAR-10 is $(input-4096-2048-1000-2048-4096-output)$. For CNN-AE, we follow the implementations in the Keras documentation \footnote{https://blog.keras.io/building-autoencoders-in-keras.html} with the following architecture: It consisting of a conv-layers with 16 (3 $\times$ 3) kernels followed by 2 conv-layers with 8 (3 $\times$ 3) kernels, and each conv-layer has a 2 $\times$ 2 maxpooling layer followed. The decoder we used  has same structure as encoder except using up-sampling layer instead of pooling layers (for mapping the data back to its original input space). ReLUs are used for activations and logloss is used as training objective. During training, dropout is set to be 0.25 per layer.

Experimental results are summarized in Table \ref{table:ae}. For DNN auto-encoders, cross validation are used for hyper-parameter tuning; for eForest, we just take the min value of the interval defined by the corresponding MCR as indicated in the last sampling step of decoding.

\begin{figure}[!h]%
\centering
\subfloat[Reconstructed samples on CIFAR-10] {\includegraphics[scale=0.418]{part1_cifar_1000_new0922.png}}
\subfloat[Reconstructed samples on MNIST]{\includegraphics[scale=0.418]{part1_mnist_1000_new0922.png}}
\caption{The original test samples (first rows) and the reconstructed samples}
\label{fig:recon}
\end{figure}

It can be seen that eForest achieves the best performance. Some reconstructed samples on the test set are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:recon}. This result looks sad for CNN based auto-encoders on CIFAR-10 dataset, as we are using the architecture recommended for image auto-encoders by Keras documentation and have carefully tuned the other hyper-parameters via cross-validation. We believe that the DNN autoencoders can get improved performance by some further tuning; nevertheless, the eForest auto-encoder works well without careful parameter tuning.

It is worth noting that the unsupervised eForest had a better performance compared with the supervised eForest, given the same number of trees. Note that each decision tree path corresponds to a rule, whereas a longer rule will define a tighter MCR. We conjecture that a tighter MCR might lead to a more accurate reconstruction. Therefore for a forest with longer tree depth may have a better performance. For example, we measured the maximum depth as well as the average depth for all trees on MNIST dataset, as summarized in Tabel  ~\ref{table:length}. Experimental results give positive supports, as shown in Table~ \ref{table:length}. An unsupervised eForest indeed has a longer average depth.

\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\caption{Length of tree depth on MNIST}\label{table:length}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
                                & Max depth                 & Ave. depth \\ \hline
$eForest^{s}_{500}$       & 48               & 34.82      \\ \hline
$eForest^{s}_{1000}$      & 48                & 34.79      \\ \hline
$eForest^{u}_{500}$        & 93                & 70.87  \\ \hline
$eForest^{u}_{1000}$       & 101         & 70.07  \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\subsection{Text Reconstruction}
In addition to image tasks, other tasks may also require auto-encoders. Thus, we study the performance of eForest for text reconstruction. Note that the DNN auto-encoders are mainly designed for images, and if to be applied to texts, some additional mechanism such as word2vec embedding\citep{mikolov2013distributed} is required for pre-processing. Here, in our experiments, we want to study the performance of doing auto-encoding directly on text data.

Concretely, we used the IMDB dataset \citep{Maas:Daly:Pham2011} which contains 25,000 documents for training and 25,000 documents for testing. Each document was stored as a 5,000 dimensional vector via tf/idf transformation. We used exactly the \textbf{same} configuration of eForests for image data. Cosine distance is used for evaluation metric, which is the standard metric for measuring the similarities between documents represented by tf/idf vectors. The lower the cosine distance, the better. The results are summarized in Table ~\ref{table:imdb}.

\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\caption{Text reconstruction}\label{table:imdb}

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
                                 & Cosine Distance               \\ \hline
$eForest^{s}_{500}$       & 0.1132                     \\ \hline
$eForest^{s}_{1000}$       & 0.0676                    \\ \hline
$eForest^{u}_{500}$        & 0.0070                   \\ \hline
$eForest^{u}_{1000}$       & \textbf{0.0023}         \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

It should be highlighted that CNN based auto-encoders can not be applied on this kind of input data at all and MLP based auto-encoders is barely useful. After extensive cross-validation for parameter search, the best structure for MLP we could obtained is $(Input-4096-2048-1024-2048-4096-Output)$, with the performance of 0.512, more than two hundred times worse than eForest.

From the above results, we showed that eForest can also be applied on text data with high performance. In addition, notice that by using only $10 \%$ of the bits of representation (eForest of 500 trees trained unsupervisedly), eForest can already reconstruct the original input with high accuracy. This is a promising result which can be further utilized for data compression.

\subsection{Computation Efficiency}
As a common advantage for tree ensemble models, eForest is also inherently apt for parallel implementation. We implement eForest on a single KNL-7250 (belongs to Intel XEON Phi many-core product family), and achieved a 67.7 speedup for training 1,000 trees in an unsupervised setting, compared with a serial implementation. For a comparison, we trained the corresponding MLPs and CNN-AEs with the same configurations as in the previous sections on one Titan-X GPU and the results for training cost as well as testing per sample cost are summarized in the Table ~\ref{tab:HPC}.

\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\caption{Time cost (in seconds). Decoding time is measured in sample per seconds.}\label{tab:HPC}
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|l|}
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{Models} & \multicolumn{2}{l|}{MNIST} & \multicolumn{2}{l|}{CIFAR-10} \\ \cline{2-5}
                  & Train     & Decode    & Train       & Decode      \\ \hline
$eForest_{1000}$   & 22.174       & 0.725       & 66.201        & 4.296         \\ \hline
$MLP_{2}$      & 274.757      & 0.003       & 1606.89       & 0.004         \\ \hline
CNN               & 214.901      & 0.021       & 253.57        & 0.021         \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

From the above results, eForest is more than 100 times fast when training, but is slower during encoding time than DNN based auto-encoders. We hope that the decoding can be speedup by some more optimization in the future.

\subsection{Damage Tolerable}

There are cases when the model is partially damaged due to a various reasons such as memory or disk failure.
For a partially damaged model is still able to function in such cases is one characteristic towards model robustness.
The eForest approach for auto-encoding is one such model by its nature since we could still estimate the MCR when facing only a subset of trees in the forest.

In this section, we test the damage tolerable empirically on CIFAR-10 and MNIST datasets. Concretely, during testing time, we randomly drop 25\%, 50\% and 75\% of the trees and measure the reconstruction error based on the pattern recovered using only the remaining trees. For a comparison, we also randomly turned off 25\%, 50\% and 75\% of the neurons in the $MLP_{2}$ with structure exactly the same as in the previous section. The performance results are illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:sec2_part}.

Form the above result, the eForest approach is more damage tolerable than a MLP-AE, and the unsupervised eForest is the most damage tolerable model among others.

\begin{figure}[!h]%
\centering
\subfloat[MNIST] {\includegraphics[scale=0.4518]{sec2_part_cifar10_newnew.png}}
\subfloat[CIFAR-10]{\includegraphics[scale=0.4518]{sec2_part_mnist_newnew.png}}
\caption{Performance when model is partially damaged.}
\label{fig:sec2_part}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Model Reuse for eForest}

In an open environment, the test data for encoding/decoding may belong to a different distribution with the training data. In this section, we test the ability for model reuse and the goal here is to train a model in one dataset and reuse it in another dataset without any modifications or re-training. The ability for model reuse in this context is an important property for future machine learning developments \citep{learnware}.

\begin{figure}[!h]%
\centering
\subfloat[Reconstructed omniglot samples by models trained from mnist.] {\includegraphics[scale=0.328]{mnist2omni_gai2.png}}

\subfloat[Reconstructed mnist samples by models trained from cifar.]{\includegraphics[scale=0.328]{cifar2mnist_gai2.png}}
\caption{The original samples(first rows) and the ones reconstructed by different AEs, where $eForest_{s/u}$ correspond to supervised/unsupervised setting, respectively.}
\label{fig:mnist2omni}
\end{figure}

Concretely, we evaluate the ability for model reuse as follows. We trained an unsupervised and an supervised eForest on CIFAR-10 dataset (converted and rescaled to 28$\times$28 gray scale data), each consisting of 1,000 trees , and then use the exact models to encoding/decoding data from the MNIST test dataset. Likewise, we also trained eForests consists of 1,000 trees on MNIST dataset, and directly test the encoding/decoding performance on the Omniglot datasets \citep{omini}. For a fair comparison, we trained a CNN-Autoencoder and MLP-Autoencoder on the same dataset without fine-tuning. The architecture for MLP/CNN-AEs and the training procedures are the same in the previous sections accordingly. MSE is used for performance evaluation.

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\caption{Performance comparison for model reuse (measured by MSE).}\label{table:autoencoder1}
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|}
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{Model} & cifar train & \multirow{2}{*}{Model} & mnist train  \\
                       & mnist test  &                        & omniglot test \\ \hline
$MLP_{2}$               & 1898.76          & $MLP_{2}$     &     596.24      \\ \hline
CNN                & 2657.69          & CNN      &     1280.60      \\ \hline
$eForest^{s}$         & 652.38         & $eForest^{s}$  &  270.54         \\ \hline
$eForest^{u}$          & \textbf{90.43} & $eForest^{u}$  & \textbf{12.80}          \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\label{tab:cifar2mnist}
\end{table}

Some randomly picked reconstructed samples are presented in Fig.~\ref{fig:mnist2omni}, and the numerical evaluation on the whole test set is presented in Table ~\ref{tab:cifar2mnist}. It can be inferred that eForests has out-performed the DNN approach by a factor more than 100.  Specifically, for an eForest trained on CIFAR-10 can perform a better encoding/decoding task on MNIST dataset, and these two dataset are quite different. It showed the generalization ability in terms of model reuse for eForest.

\section{Conclusion}
In this paper, we propose the EncoderForest (abbrv. eForest),  the first tree ensemble based auto-encoder model, by devising an effective procedure for enabling forests to reconstruct the original pattern by utilizing the Maximal-Compatible Rule (MCR) defined by decision paths of the trees. Experiments demonstrate its good performance in terms of accuracy and speed, as well as the ability of damage tolerance and model reusability. In particular, on text data, by using only $10\%$ of the input bits, the model is still able to reconstruct the original data with high accuracy. Another advantage of eForest lies in the fact that it can be applied to symbolic attributes or mixed attributes directly, without transforming the symbolic attributes to numerical ones, especially when considering that the transforming procedure generally either lose information or introduce additional bias.

Note that supervised and unsupervised eForest are actually the two ingredients utilized simultaneously in each level of the deep forest constructed by gcForst. This work might offer some additional understanding of gcForst\citep{Zhou:gcForest17}. Constructing a deep eForest model is also an interesting future issue.

\bibliographystyle{elsarticle-harv}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


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Posted on October 8, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Michele Kirichanskaya
Interview With April Daniels
A graduate of UC Santa Cruz, April Daniels is the Lambda Literary Award nominated author of the Nemesis series, following trans superhero, Danny Tozer, who inherits her superpowers after a fateful encounter with a dying superhero. Adding to the growing LGBTQ+ superhero narrative, Daniels continues to write characters who are queer, powerful, and often a little imperfect. I had the opportunity to interview April, which you can read below.
Who are some of your favorite superheroes, fictional or in real life?
Spider-Man, when done well, is hands down the best superhero. His mix of powers and vulnerabilities is perfectly tuned. His motivations and weaknesses are tightly wound through each other and his supporting cast is balanced and expansive. He is relevant everywhere from street-level crime to cosmic warfare. The rest of us can only hope to create a character so versatile and finely conceived. Also, I just want to take this opportunity to point out that he's even more interesting if you read him as Jewish and bisexual. No, it's not cannon, but come on. Come on.
In various interviews, you had spoken about how you had written Danny's physical transformation as a response to the media's fixation/ fetishization of the trans (especially trans female) body. Could you expand on this?
Sure. Trans girls have body issues just like cis girls, and I blame ads targeted at young women for this. If, at the start of my awareness that I was trans, I'd had the option to completely rewrite my body and look however I wanted to, I'd have ended up looking something like Danielle–with a form that validates and answers the unrealistic demands of the advertisement agencies. Transition is scary. Transition is hard. Transition seems like it's going to take forever. And at the end, there's a big unknown of how we will look, and it's terrifying.
Fear of ending up looking "bad" kept me from transitioning as soon as I could have. It has taken me years to understand that feeling good about how I look doesn't require me to look like the girls in magazines. A big part of my life was spent feeling ugly and unlovable. For this, I blame the beauty and fashion industries, which push a very narrow concept of feminine power.
This is why one of Danielle's superpowers is being "super pretty" and also why she is disgusted when she realizes what caused her to make that choice–her perceptions of herself and what she could be were warped by a childhood growing up around ads targeted at creating and exploiting insecurities among women. At first, she's scared of losing this narrowly-proscribed beauty, but by the end of the book, after she's seen that her beauty helped her accomplish none of the tasks that mattered, she doesn't care so much.
Noticing the general landscape of publishing and media, while trans representation seems to be steadily (if slowly) expanding, there continues to be a dearth of rep for trans people who do not identify as straight. Why do you think that is and was Danny, who identifies as a trans lesbian, written as a response to this?
Oh Dreadnought was absolutely a reaction to that state of affairs. There was nothing–nothing–like Dreadnought out there for me when I was young. Anything which featured trans women was a Very Indie And Painfully True kind of affair set in the real world I was trying to escape, or it was lurid cis-gaze bullshit centered on demonizing and exotifying trans women. Or it was both, that was always an option, too. A really popular option, as it turned out. (Transamerica is a terrible movie that should eternally shame everyone involved.) The idea of someone changing their gender presentation was "wacky" or "scary" or "outrageous" but not "empowering" or "beautiful" or "healthy." Transition was something broken, depraved adults did. It wasn't something kids daydreamed about–not officially. Not publicly.
So I sat down to write what I wish I'd found when I was 15: crunchy wish fulfillment that almost completely avoided reckoning with the cruel realities of being trans while also leaving the facts that will inevitably force such a reckoning hanging out clearly in the background of the narrative. Then her parents showed up in Chapter 3 and there was no avoiding them. I realized I'd have to wing it for most of the emotional texture, and just do what felt "right." It ended up being as much a howl of outrage as it was a celebration.
While the books fit into the superhero narrative of containing dastardly foes with larger than life powers, it seems that the actual villains are those who bear a closer resemblance to people in real life, like the TERFy Graywytch and Danny's abusive parents. How do you think fiction can reflect the real challenges queer teens go through and inspire them to be their own heroic selves?
Really, I'd like a world where queer kids didn't need to be heroes. I don't really know what advice I can give except that it's a good idea to learn when to run and when to fight and how to tell the difference. If you find yourself doing one all the time, try doing the other.
As a writer what advice would you give to other young queer writers on their own creative journeys?
Write what makes you excited. Don't worry about breaking radical new ground, just make it as good and satisfying and exciting as you can. If if it doesn't sell, write something else that also makes you excited. Keep writing different things that make you excited. Sooner or later, someone else will get excited, too. Don't get too attached to your projects; none of my early work got published. The important thing is that you learn something every time you complete a project. And yes, you need to bring projects to completion even if it looks like nobody is interested in what you're doing. They'll become more interested once you've completed a few and shown them that you're the real deal.
Are there any stories you are currently working on and are at liberty to speak about?
Yeah, I'm working on Dreadnought 3. I can't say much about it, except that I'm determined to stick the landing on this trilogy. There aren't many new faces in this one, but there are a lot of returning players, some whom have radically new relationships to each other, and some who are in a very different place in their lives than when we last saw them. It's taking a long time because to tell a coherent story I have to understand how I think the world works, but after the monster's inauguration, I decided I didn't really know anything after all. As a consequence it's taken a while to build back up to a coherent idea of how Danielle's world functions. Anyhow, totally unrelated, but remember Bosco the superpowered bully? He's a cop now.
Finally, what are some LGBTQ+ books you would recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
CategoriesBlog TagsApril Daniels, Danny Tozer, Lambda Literary Award, Nemesis, Trans Superhero
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president eli capilouto
WUKY's "UK Perspectives" Talks about UK in Appalachia
WUKY's "UK Perspectives" focuses on the people and programs of the University of Kentucky and is hosted by WUKY General Manager Tom Godell. This week News Director Alan Lytle guest hosts and visits with UK President Eli Capilouto about the new "Rooted in our Communities" Appalachian initiative recently launched by the university.
This podcast provided courtesy of 91.3 WUKY.
wuky
uk perspectives
tom godell
Read more about WUKY's "UK Perspectives" Talks about UK in Appalachia
Department of Mathematics awarded National Science Foundation Grant - "UK at the Half" with Carl Nathe
The Department of Mathematics within the College of Arts and Sciences was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation. In this recent episode of "UK at the Half," which aired on Saturday during the UK vs. Texas A&M game, Nathe speaks with President Eli Capilouto, Elizabeth Lorch, and Peter Perry about how the NSF grant reflects the success of UK's past and ensures that future students will also have opportunities to grow and achieve. "UK at the Half" airs during halftime of each UK football and basketball game broadcast on the radio and is hosted by Carl Nathe of UK Public Relations and Marketing.
elizabeth lorch
peter perry
uk at the half
carl nathe
Read more about Department of Mathematics awarded National Science Foundation Grant - "UK at the Half" with Carl Nathe
Mathematics Receives More than $550,000 to Support Inclusive, Diverse Graduate Program
Reflecting the University of Kentucky's growing leadership in ensuring more diversity in graduate studies, President Eli Capilouto Friday announced that the university's Department of Mathematics, within the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a $559,626 National Science Foundation grant to fund the new Graduate Scholars in Mathematics program.
Read more about Mathematics Receives More than $550,000 to Support Inclusive, Diverse Graduate Program
'Rooted in Our Communities: The University of Kentucky in Appalachia'
Over the next several months, we'll be examining and discussing the special relationship and partnership UK has with the Central Appalachian region as part of the "Rooted in Our Communities: The University of Kentucky in Appalachia" series.
Read more about 'Rooted in Our Communities: The University of Kentucky in Appalachia'
UK, ARC, and CDC Announce Initiatives to Address Health Disparities in Eastern Kentucky
Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR) Health Impact Series will discuss health challenges and announce two new UK initiatives to address them.
Read more about UK, ARC, and CDC Announce Initiatives to Address Health Disparities in Eastern Kentucky
Staff Members Honored by University
Along with 44 others, the College of Arts & Sciences' own Cheyenne Hohman and Jenny Casey received Outstanding Staff Awards for their exceptional contributions to the university.
Read more about Staff Members Honored by University
Strengthening Ties Between UK & Lexington
Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Auditorium, Davis-Marksbury Building
roshan palli
kerby neill
The community of Lexington and the University of Kentucky are intimately connected, and these connections provide both points of contention and opportunities for mutual progress. Our leaders—Mayor Jim Gray and President Eli Capilouto—clearly recognize the important relationship between Lexington and UK, and a number of student groups and community organizations work diligently to improve our community. Still, more work needs to be done.
This event will…
1. Enhance our understanding of the needs of Lexington that faculty and students can address.
2. Improve our understanding of the framework currently in place for addressing community needs.
3. Celebrate the UK/Community collaboration that produced UK's Peace Studies program.
UK Joins Forces With National Education Provider to Increase Student Readiness, Lower Costs
The University of Kentucky, in an effort to enhance student readiness and performance, has launched a partnership with the country's leading massive open online course (MOOC) platform, Coursera.
Read more about UK Joins Forces With National Education Provider to Increase Student Readiness, Lower Costs
President's Blog: A Partnership with Potential
On Thursday morning, one of the nation's leading online learning companies, Coursera, is announcing that UK is among a handful of public, flagship universities it is partnering with to further expand learning opportunities for more students across our country.
Read more about President's Blog: A Partnership with Potential
President's Blog "146th Commencement"
President Eli Capilouto's blog celebrates the work of UK's student scholars and their experiences while on campus.
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