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Paul Ryan's Way Forward
In a 1996 interview, Robin Williams described Claremont McKenna College, where he spent his freshman year, as "very conservative, with a lot of economists, a lot of think tank guys."
The school has changed a good deal since Williams was on campus; but there is still a sizable subset of students who dream to work at the American Enterprise Institute or National Review.
Such think tank-types are engaging in a debate that is reshaping and revitalizing the conservative intellectual scene. Many of these thought leaders are coalescing around what is commonly described as "reform conservatism." Congressman Paul Ryan, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee and the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee, is a think tank-type and a leading reform conservative. A frat member in college who majored in economics, he would have fit in well at CMC.
The Way Forward, focuses on the importance of empowering civil society, as opposed to the government, in order to reinvigorate the "American Idea."
He describes the "American Idea" as "a way of life made possible by our commitment to the principles of freedom and equality—and rooted in our respect for every person's natural rights." Maybe it's necessary that he coin a term that encompasses his principles; but, for a term referenced a couple dozen times in 260 pages, the "American Idea" comes off a bit flat on paper, kind of like the word "leadership" at CMC. Ryan and his team could have done better.
A term used to describe views not unlike Mr. Ryan's is "libertarian conservatism." For those not so familiar with Ryan's philosophy, it's mainstream conservatism with Catholic influences mixed with a light version of libertarianism. It's a modern middle ground between Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, applying their principles to policy in new and innovative ways.
Whatever his views on the "American Idea," Ryan is much clearer when he talks about the subjects with which he is more comfortable. Ryan champions civil society. In his language:
It's that vast middle ground between the government and the individual where our families, our neighborhoods, our businesses, our groups and associations, and our places of worship reside. It's the space where we live our lives—and it's been a prominent characteristic of our culture from the very beginning.
The autobiographical aspects of his book convey the importance of these voluntary associations to the successes of cities and of individuals.
One type of association is mentorship. Ryan attributes his successes in large part to his many mentors. Perhaps his most important mentor was Jack Kemp, who Ryan worked for at Empower America. Ryan saw Kemp "tour poverty-stricken areas and inner-city communities. He brought the message of conservatism to people who had never heard it before." Kemp served as Ryan's political mentor while influencing his policy ideas.
Soon after leaving Empower America, Ryan was elected to Congress, where he quickly became a budget expert. After the 2010 Republican wave, he went from an outsider within the party to chairman of the Budget Committee, providing a better platform to advance his annual budget proposals. When Mitt Romney chose Ryan as his running mate, the Congressman realized that by joining the ticket, "it could make [his] proposals some of the guiding documents in a Republican presidency."
But they lost. Ryan spent 2013 on a sort of listening tour in those places that don't see national Republican leaders, the kinds of places Jack Kemp visited. This year, Ryan has focused on poverty, issuing a report and a policy proposal on the issue through his budget committee in addition to his annual budget.
Ryan sees the government as partly responsible for making poverty more difficult and more widespread in America. His case study for dysfunction is Detroit, where government "eroded the space for the community," contributing to the sorry state of the city today, where it's a victory not if a house is built but instead, razed. Detroit is a harbinger of things to come, a place where, "the encroachment of government facilitated by liberal progressive policies weakens our bonds with one another and drains our communities of their vitality."
For Ryan, "the solution to these challenges often involves government, but in a supporting role. The people—in a robust and free civil society—should have the lead." Ryan's poverty reform program fills a chapter in his book. It is focused on making the safety net, like the rest of the federal government, "simpler, smaller, and smarter." The centerpiece of Ryan's reform is a consolidation and reorganization of many of the federal government's at least 92 programs that in 2012 spent at least $799 billion on efforts to help low-income Americans. Ryan would provide block grants to those states that chose to try his reform program. The states would then contract with nonprofits and for-profit corporations to hire caseworkers who would not just pass out checks but show their clients the path to a better life and use their discretion to provide aid based on regional and individual circumstances.
Ryan speaks from experience when it comes to the safety net. After his father's death, he "saw government make a difference for the better in our lives" through survivor benefits. They helped him go to college and in a few years his mother "transformed from a widow in grief to a small businesswoman."
As Ryan has traveled the country these last two years, he's seen civil society in action, revitalizing neighborhoods by helping addicts escape their disease and rescuing the homeless. Ryan wants government to help society heal its own wounds.
For all the promise of Ryan's poverty proposals, one risk remains: If Ryan's programs were put into place, would we run the risk that enmeshing civil society more deeply with the government could undermine it? Introducing tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of new federal money to non-governmental organizations could lead to some serious distortions and perversions in the motivations of the organizations that make up civil society. Couldn't such a system in fact make government stronger and undermine a powerful mediator between government and the individual? Ryan calls for conditions on federal disbursements. They make sense, but conditions are already a major tool for the federal government to exert its influence in state policy and could prove excessive or counterproductive for anti-poverty grants.
Speaking of making things worse, Ryan does criticize his fellow Republicans for doing so. He directs some blame toward himself, speaking of his own error in using the language of "makers and takers" to describe those who are net contributors and net recipients of federal tax money, when recipients include soldiers, retirees, and the upwardly mobile poor. He also writes that he wishes Romney's team made 2012 less a referendum and more a choice election, with lines like: "You can't simply run against your opponent; you have to stand for something."
Ryan's most aggressive language, however, is reserved for the Ted Cruz faction of the Republican Party, which he views as excessively opposed to compromise and, perhaps, immune to reason. Although he is known for his strong conservative credentials, Ryan provides examples of bills that came up during his legislative career that he did not like, but that he voted for nonetheless. Responsible legislators accept the best legislation possible at a given time since "votes that look 'pure' can really pave the way for a more harmful policy." The government shutdown was the Cruzers' lowest point:
For weeks, a few conservatives in the Senate and some outside groups had been claiming that the House could unilaterally defund Obamacare by refusing to fund the government. That's not how the law works.
Ryan references James Madison in response to Ted Cruz-style Republicans. Ryan applauds Madison for making serious concessions in the process of crafting the Constitution and then ardently working to see it ratified by the states. "We became the country we are because James Madison was a prudent man."
Now, on to the real question: Is Paul Ryan running for president in 2016? Does he see himself as the next James Madison? He's a young man. At 44, Ryan still has about a quarter century ahead in which he could and at some point probably will seek the presidency. But is 2016 the year? Based on his book, it seems likely. It reads like a campaign book with its mix of autobiography and policy prescriptions. In a sign of restraint, there is no chart or data table in the book from the first page to the last. He will confront Ted Cruz. And look at that cover.
The policy issues raised in his book are just a few of the many conservatives must consider if they are ever to attempt an aggressive reform of the massive modern bureaucratic state. If we want a government that is more comprehensible, more manageable, and less irrational, Ryan's ideas aren't perfect, but nobody's are. His do seem likely to lead the right direction, toward a "simpler, smaller, smarter" federal government.
This review opens a series on the changing philosophical bent of contemporary conservatism and the ways it can be applied to policy.
Watch/Read: – Mitt Romney interviewing Paul Ryan on C-SPAN – Ryan Lizza's 2012 profile of Ryan – The 2015 Ryan Budget – The Budget Committee's report on the War on Poverty – Ryan's poverty proposal, "Expanding Opportunity in America"
#BookReview #ChrisGaarder #PaulRyan #Republican #Conservatism
Pro-Democracy Hong Kong Activist Visits Claremont Colleges
Claremont McKenna Attempted to Punish a Professor for His Speech
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Florida State Board of Administration official killed in apparent road-rage shootout
Seth Meyers, Bernie Sanders, John Mina: Sunday guests
Late-night talk show host Seth Meyers is a writer and executive producer of IFC's "Documentary Now!" (Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images)
UPDATED: The Sunday morning guest lists ranges from well-known television hosts to the vice presidential candidates. The lineup:
Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton's running mate, and Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trump's running mate, talk to CBS' "Face the Nation" at 10:30 a.m. on WKMG-Channel 6. Other guests are House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The program looks at polls from Missouri, Virginia and Colorado, and Bob Schieffer will weigh in.
John Podesta, Clinton campaign chair, and Lt. General Michael Flynn (Ret.) of the Trump campaign preview the first presidential debate on NBC's "Meet the Press" at 9 a.m. on WESH-Channel 2. Other guests are Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Stephanie Cutter, former deputy campaign manager for President Obama; and Steve Schmidt, former strategist for the 2008 McCain presidential campaign. The panel will be presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, radio host Hugh Hewitt, Gwen Ifill of PBS' "Washington Week" and "NewsHour" and Republican strategist Mike Murphy.
Gov. Pence and Joel Benenson of the Clinton campaign preview the debate on "Fox News Sunday" at 10 a.m. on WOFL-Channel 35. Another guest is Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress. The panel will be Juan Williams, Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal, Julie Pace of The Associated Press and Rachel Campos-Duffy of The LIBRE Initiative.
Kellyanne Conway of the Trump campaign and Robby Mook of the Clinton campagin talk to CNN's "State of the Union" at 9 a.m. and noon. Previewing the debates will be David Axelrod, former Obama senior adviser, and Mark McKinnon, former senior adviser to George W. Bush and co-creator of Showtime's "The Circus." The panel will be Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and CNN commentators Van Jones, Andre Bauer and Angela Rye.
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Conway and Mook are guests on ABC's "This Week" at 10 a.m. on WFTV-Channel 9. Other guests are Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. The panel will be GOP Alex Castellanos, ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.
Eric Trump, son of the Republican presidential nominee, talks to "Sunday Morning Futures" at 10 a.m. on Fox News Channel. Other guests are Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas; San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan; Orlando Police Chief John Mina; and Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. The panel will be Mary Kissel of The Wall Street Journal, GOP strategist Ed Rollins and Democratic strategist Stephen Sigmund.
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Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine, and Aung San Suu Kyi, state counsellor of Myanmar, are guests on "Fareed Zakaria GPS" at 10 a.m. on CNN.
Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum, anchors of "America's Newsroom," talk to "MediaBuzz" at 11 a.m. on Fox News Channel. Other guests are Republican strategist Lisa Boothe, political commentator Erin McPike, Fox News contributor Julie Roginsky, Amy Holmes of Rasmussen Reports, Democratic strategist Joe Trippi and Joe Concha, media reporter for The Hill.
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Seth Meyers, host of NBC's "Late Night," discusses his Trump critiques on "Reliable Sources" at 11 a.m. on CNN. Other guests are Jim Lehrer, former host of "PBS Newshour," former ABC correspondent Ann Compton and Janet Brown, executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The guest list also includes Eleanor Clift of The Daily Beast, Frank Sesno of George Washington University, CNN's Dylan Byers and Brian Fallon, press secretary for the Clinton campaign.
The panel on "Inside Politics," at 8 a.m. on CNN, will be Jonathan Martin of The New York Times, Molly Ball of The Atlantic and CNN's Manu Raju and Jeff Zeleny.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The City of San Leandro and Pasadena Fire Department in California have switched out diesel for renewable diesel.
The South Dakota's Division of Fleet and Travel Management, which includes 3,987 vehicles, utilized nearly 2.5 million gallons of E-10, E-30, and E-85 fuels in one year.
Located in Fair Oaks, Ind., the dairy project will be Renewable Dairy Fuels second biogas facility producing renewable natural gas from dairy waste for transportation fuel.
Clean fuel has never been more important for proper fleet equipment operation and diesel fuel filtration has become more complex. Here are five facts that you may not have known about fuel quality and today's technology.


Archeoastronomy is the study of how ancient cultures understood various phenomena in the sky and how that played into their culture. Because archaeoastronomy is about the many and various ways people interacted with the sky, there are a diverse range of sources giving information about astronomical practices. One thing is clear - ancient cultures looked to the skies in awe and wonder.
Much of the modern astronomy lore is based on ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Many of the current star names are derived from the Arabic culture. Eclipses were important events in many cultures around the world. How did the ancient people of the Americas, specifically here in the Southwest, see their place in the Universe?
The Mayan counting was a Base 20 system (as opposed to our modern Base 10 or deci- counting system). The Mayan counting system was one of the first to use the concept of "zero". It was much more efficient than the Roman and Greek counting systems in use at the same time. The Mayan counting method used 3 symbols and can be compared to the binary system used by modern computers.
The Mayan counting system was integral in the development of the Mayan calendars. The Mayans actually had 4 calendars to track time: The Tzolkin, Haab, Calendar Round, and Long Count. The Tzolkin calendar consisted of 260 days or 13 cycles of 20 days. We are not certain why 260 was chosen although it has been proposed to be related to the slight error in the 8/13 resonance between the Earth's 365.25 day orbit and Venus' 224.7 day orbit. The Haab or civil calendar consisted of 365 days. The Mayans appear to have been aware that a year is slightly longer than 365 days (365.24 days). The Tzolkin (13x20 or 260 days) and Haab (365 days) systems aligned every 52 years and was the basis of the Calendar Round. The Mayan Long Count is similar to our Julian calendar, the Long Count is simply a count of days since a particular starting point. That point is believed to be August 11, 3114 BC. The Mayans used a base 20 counting system and kept time in units of 20 days, called a uinal.
Mayan observatories (like Chichen Itza ) were often aligned with the rising Sun, groupings of stars, and equinoxes. The Mayans were able to observe the spring and fall equinoxes with high precision because their locations near the Earth's equator made these observations easier. The Mayan observations rivaled anything done in Europe through the Dark Ages. Priests studied the movements of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. The Mayans could predict the orbit of Venus and Mars with a fair amount of accuracy. Constellations of the Mayans included the Scorpion (our Scorpius), the Jaguar (now known as Capricorn), the Owl (Taurus), the Turtle (today's Gemini), and the Tale of the Rattlesnake (our modern Sagittarius).
Chichen Itza: This is a square-based, stepped pyramid approximately 75 feet tall, constructed by the Mayans circa 1000-1200 AD, directly upon the multiple foundations of previous temples. The axes that run through the northwest and southwest corners of the pyramid are oriented toward the rising point of the sun at the summer solstice and its setting point at the winter solstice.
Casa Rinconada: This is one of five great kivas in Chaco Canyon - 60 feet in diameter and 15 feet deep. Casa Rinconada was probably built between 1070 and 1110 AD. The symmetry axis defined by the two T-shaped doors is aligned with the North-South line to within 20 arcminutes. Shortly after sunrise on the summer solstice, as the Sun rises a beam of light shines through a lone window on the N-NE side of the kiva and moves downward and northward until it illuminates, on the interior West wall, one of the five larger, irregularly spaced niches in the kiva.
Sun Dagger: At the top of Fajada Butte, along a narrrow ledge is a sacred Native American site given the name Sun Dagger. On the day of the summer solstice, a slender beam of sunlight passes between two rock monoliths, and bisects the center of a spiral-shaped petroglyph. Two parallel daggers bracket the larger spiral at the spring and fall equinoxes. The Sun Dagger formation is estimated to be a thousand years old, and was constructed by the Anasazi. The sun dagger remained hidden until 1977 when it was rediscovered by archeologists studying the petroglyphs.
Chimney Rock in southwestern Colorado was used by an outlying colony of the Chaco culture to mark the rising locations of the Moon during its 18.6 year (Saros) cycle. The ancient people constucted a "great house" near the feature to witness the event.
The true purpose of the "big house" at Casa Grande (located between Tucson and Phoenix) is unknown, however some evidence suggests the Hohokam incorporated their knowlege of astronomy into its architecture. They may have used a window in the west wall to record the setting Sun on the summer solstice (June 21st). Other windows and doors at Casa Grande align with the Sun or Moon at significant times of the year. The vernal equinox (Mar 21st) appears to be particularily important in determining when to plant crops.
Archeoastronomy is not just limited to the Mayan culture and the people of Chaco Canyon. The Mogollon people that resided in what is now Otero County from 100 BC -1000 AD (and possibly earlier) established some primitive observatories referred to as Wizard's Roost and Wally's Dome. Wizard's Roost is located near the peak of Sierra Blanca and appears to be dated from 100 BC - 900 AD. From its location it appears that the winter solstice (Dec 21st) was its key alignment. Wally's Dome is located near Pajarito Peak, about 23 miles east of Wizard's Roost. Wally's Dome is composed of dry laid rock, a circle of boulders in a miniature "Stonehenge" configuration that is aligned with the summer solstice (June 21st). Other possible alignment features might correspond to the rising of Sirius. Prehistoric artifacts located in the area leads to dating around 1000 AD. The Mogollon people most likely used these structures to time agricultural events.
Read Peter Eidenbach's report Wally's Dome and Wizard's Roost here.
While the Three Rivers area north of Tularosa contains a significant number of petroglyphs - none at this time can be linked directly to any astronomical events.


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Allen Named Perseus CFO
Perseus Books announced last week that Thomas Allen will join the company December 6 as chief financial officer. Formerly a senior finance v-p at Random House Inc., Allen will replace Thomas Kilkenny, who is leaving the company. Perseus CEO David Steinberger hinted strongly at acquisitions in his explanation of the change, citing Allen's experience with the merger between Random House and the former Bantam Doubleday Dell in 1998. "As Perseus grows, organically and through acquisition," he said, "only a handful of people in this industry" can manage the complicated effects of a merger or other growth.
A version of this article appeared in the 11/15/2004 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:


RETIRE IN STYLE BLOG: Tucson for Snowbirds...a season at a glance!
Tucson for Snowbirds...a season at a glance!
It occurred to me that I had never written about a total retirement snowbird season in a RV Resort. The emotional and financial implications of making the decision to leave home for a whole season are big. Here is a small glimpse of what your life might be like. Additional links to information is at the bottom of the page. You will find more information on costs, real estate possibilities and park model living.
We begin our snowbird season in October. In Oregon, our home state, it begins to rain and turns cold. As soon as we have a few dark days our thoughts turn to our winter home. When we travel south, we leave the cold behind. It is generally very warm when we arrive but I am not sure if we just notice because it is cold in Oregon or because it is hot in Tucson. I shed my warm clothes in favor cooler ones. The warm clothes I arrive in go into storage for 6 weeks or so.
This brings up the issue of clothes that fill our needs for six months. While my husband leaves shorts, jeans, etc here in our park model, I don't do that. He tells me women are different. I don't know about other women but that does not work for me. I need clothes for the weather we find in Oregon from March through October. I use the same clothes year around. While we don't need fur lined coats in Tucson, it does make sense to pack for lots of layers. Each day in March or November, for example, can call for long pants with a jacket to short sleeve and crop pants. I change my clothes a lot. When it is winter in Minnesota it is winter in Tucson. It can snow, hail, freeze and blow here just like back home. I do not own two sets of everything so I take my clothes back and forth.
As we move from October toward December and the days grow shorter, the days get cooler. Actually this is one of my favorite times of the year. We golf and I plant flowers in my little plot in front of my park model. The park begins to fill back up and the snowbirds fly south to find warmer weather. Our park will begin to have dances on Halloween and a big Thanksgiving dinner is served for everyone. The people here do become like a second family.
In December we fly back home to be with our family for the holidays. By using a Amex credit card or airline miles, we usually have enough in point to buy at least one round trip ticket. Most years we only stay for a week. Many times we have been back in the park to celebrate New Years Eve to go dancing with friends.
It will freeze here around Christmas. The flowers will need to be covered for a few nights. We even protect the water on some nights. I wear jeans, long sleeved tees and sweaters. We have bocce ball fun league in Nov-Dec and all the activities in our park will keep even the most dedicated recluse active. What we have here in the park coupled with all those things going on in the city make it hard to be bored.
Tucson is a city! We live fairly near the Park Mall on Broadway. In the winter we love to take in a movie in the afternoon...like all senior citizens we take advantage of better rates on special days and hours. The mall also has restaurants and great shopping. When we settle in for the remainder of the season our life becomes very routine. But, as compared to our summer home, we are not isolated from other people. We can be with people all the time or stay out of sight. It is our choice. People gather in the coffee room in the morning and read the paper, share a story or two and then move on to the rest of their day.
January is cool and the days are short. We place bocce ball and if we play at three in the afternoon, we are wearing ALL our layers before the game is over. February begins to warm but it can still freeze. Frost delays are common on the golf courses up through March. In spite of the nippy mornings the pickle ball players are whacking the ball around almost every day. We have a table outside that overlooks the courts and we are regular spectators. We love to eat breakfast in the sunshine and we always have entertainment.
We live very frugally here. Our park model is beautiful on the inside but cost us less than a car. We pay rent for the space. Our washer and dryer were added in the shed this year. Before, I used the laundry room. I like that a lot. I met some friends there. The pool is just outside the door of the laundry and I would sit in the sunshine and read as my wash tumbled dry. The clothes lines are very handy too.
Our library here in the park is really quite extensive. Residents read their books and then donate them. There is no cost. Neighbors read the wide selection and do it year after year.
I am a great reader but I use a ipad or kindle to read most books. We subscribe to Cox internet. We can afford this because we but our internet and TV service back home on vacation. No good internet service or tv package is cheap so you may as well bite the bullet and go ahead and get it. We have a wireless network in the park you can pay a monthly fee for...it is worthless and a big pain. Talk to your neighbors before you subscribe to any wireless service. I have yet to see one that is worth the money.
I tried the line dancing class but it turns out I don't like to get up and be at the recreation hall at 9:30 am. Oh well, line dancing is fun to watch anyway. They added a Zumba class this year and that is a great favorite. Cards are a big favorite too and Texas Hold Em or Bridge will fill the card room.
It is March now. The wind is blowing today and it has been windy off and on all week. But next week the temps will be in the 80's. My husband will play golf a couple of times. By using GolfNow.com or Easylinks he always gets the best rates. The city golf course are generally much cheaper if you use these websites. In fact I cannot imagine not using the computer here. Restaurant.com and Groupon are our go to places for almost everything. Like most seniors we try to live high style at a reasonable price. Go figure!
We love the outdoors and eat outside as much as possible. We own a space heater for our patio. The Saguaro National Park is very nearby and we visit to watch the sunsets whenever possible.
By April the days will be getting very warm. We usually leave the third week in the month. Water is turned off, refrigerator emptied and windows shuttered. Our little park model "doll house" will sleep until next fall. It stays very clean because it is closed up tight. When we come back in the fall, it will not even be dusty.
What Does Tucson Have to Offer?
Tucson is just an hours or so north of the Mexican border. The city is divided into two section; South Tucson is a separate town and made up mostly of Hispanic residents. Tucson proper has a upscale north side and the rest of us live middle class lives in the rest of the city. The area around the U of A is the old part of town and some beautiful Territorial style houses can be found there.
City center is beginning to show signs of a return to usefulness but really the banking and business community occupies it during the day and disappears at night. It is interesting to drive through because it retains the look of the Old Pueblo back in the day. Tattoo parlors are prevalent so the downtown has a very counter culture look. The addition of some condos and space for stores is helping the area now. There are some very old buildings and the Congress Hotel has a great restaurant. Just so you know, John Dillinger was captured here and the likes of Wyatt Earp visited nearby. I like that history a lot.
Living for six month in a culture so different from the one we enjoy in summer is one of the great pleasures of this location. I always have the feeling that this is where the "Old West" lived and breathed.
The food is fantastic. Mexican Sonoran food can be found in small family owned restaurants. We visit one on 22nd Street called Taco Giro. We are told that it has the best Sonoran cuisine around. If you are a fan of great New Mexico Mexican food, a small place called Poco and Moms is the place to go. For more main stream Mexican we visit a place called El Rio. But if you are in the notion for white table clothes and wonder cuisine, you can find that in Tucson too. Beautiful resort like Lowe's Ventana Canyon and Marriot Resorts dot the area close to the Catalina Mountains. Tanque Verde Guest Ranch is a world renowned dude ranch and features horse back riding, bicycle tours and beautiful barbeques.
Hopefully, if you decide to come to Tucson, you will embrace the Hispanic and Native American culture along with all that it brings. An evening spent watching the Day of the Dead parade near the University of Arizona will give you a look at what this world has to offer. People sit in the cemeteries on the holiday with picnics and barbeque's to spend the day remember a loved one. Small monuments sit in front of houses on country roads with a shrine housed in a tiny concrete house. The San Xavier del Bac Mission is home to the Tohono O'odam Nation.They are having the nations largest Indian PowWow this weekend. This very old mission is so very charming and the photographer's dream come true.
However, if you don't want to ever rub shoulders with people that are unlike the ones back home or try food that is different, you should not come here. You will not like it.
A small community called Tubac is about 40 minutes south of Tucson. Here you will find a growing thriving art community. North of Tucson along the foothills of the Catalina Mountains you will also find art studios for famous artist Diane Maderas studio is here as is De Grazia's Studio in the Sun. The University of Arizona brings performances in through out the school year. The Tucson Gallery of Art is located in the old downtown area.
I hope this post has been helpful for you. Be well!
Wow! Great post, Barb, full of snow bird information for those of dreaming of escaping cold winter temps and rain.
Thank you Denise...pass the word!
We're in Tucson for the moment (or for the month, or for the winter), and we were told to come check out your blog. We're boondockers, so our style is a little different, but I love to hear about things to do and see here.
Terrific information. Tucson is exactly where we have been talking about moving to for the winters. Interesting that it still sleets and snows occasionally. This will be my first year as a snow bird and I have lots to learn. I didn't even know about the park models. Definitely something I needed to know!
Do you have to rent the park model for the entire year or only while you're there?
We rent the space for our park model year around. We pay the fee annually. Thank you for your interest.
Do you have to rent the park model the entire year or only the months you are there?


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Home » TIMag.com news » Squash » Squash pros speak in support of rules change
Squash pros speak in support of rules change
*Natick, MA — * The US based Pro Squash Tour last week released its Rules of Play for the 2010/2011 season. The traditional "let" will no longer be a part of the game. This change, which will take effect beginning with the Baltimore Open in September, was immediately hailed by opinion leaders as a positive step for the game. Some of their feedback is below:
John White (Former World #1 Squash Player; Head Coach at Franklin & Marshall College)
It has been years of frustration in trying to figure out the best way to clean the game of squash up. It has turned into a game where players are fishing and stroke hunting for the cheap point, creating their own interference when being out played and blocking. There are too many easy 'lets' given when players should be punished when looking for the cheap point or let.
I believe the 'no let' rule will be the best thing for squash and spectators. It will take time but the rule will clean all the ugly squash up and get it back to where players get rewarded for out playing their opponent. It will punish the blockers and players who Stroke Hunt. It will make the game a lot more enjoyable to watch and make the players think a little more of what shot they should play to get them out of trouble rather than a shot that may create the interference when clearing which will result in a stoke against them. Referees will have to be more strict in making this new rule work from day one.
It will take time to get across to all squash lovers but in the long run this is the best way forward in improving this great sport we all love.
Shahier Razik (Touring Pro, 4-time reigning Canadian National Champion)
The no let rule creates more flow in the rallies which will result in more excitement for the spectators. Once players and referees fully adapt to the system, it will prove to be a positive move for squash. There is no doubt the game will change, but to the better!
Christopher Gordon (Touring Pro, U.S. National Team Member)
By instituting no lets, the U.S. Pro Squash Tour continues to be on the cutting edge of sport entertainment by bringing a new brand of high paced, more free flowing squash that the spectating public is bound to enjoy. As a player, I am very excited to be a part of these unprecedented changes.
Wade Johnstone (Touring Pro based in Baltimore, BD)
"Regarding the no let rule, it's the way to go. There's too much bending of the rules with the let calls. I think it's a purer game of squash with no lets. Players can now play squash instead of playing the referee."
Nathan Dugan (Former Touring Pro, Head Squash Pro at Cleveland Racquet Club)
"In general I like the idea a lot of making players play and clear the ball. There are going to be situations where a no let call will be perceived as harsh. But I want to see progress toward a cleaner game."
Tyler Hamilton (Touring Pro)
"I think the new [no] let rule is a step in the right direction. I agree that it provides the spectators overall with a more exciting experience as the players will have to try and play through everything. Although from the players perspective I am still undecided as I have never played with the new rule. I think it will take some getting used to but it definitely has the potential to create a game with much less blocking and delays."
Bob Hanscom (US Nationally Certified Referee)
FINALLY….! I've been writing, lecturing and advocating this concept for over five years, i.e. that movement interference should result in either a "No Let," or a "Stroke" decision. It goes without saying that racket interference should always result in a "Stroke" being awarded.
Paul Ansdell (US Nationally Certified Referee)
"Taking away the 'yes let' will make the players work harder to play the ball and get out of the way, thus making the game far more exciting and enjoyable to watch."
"Our elimination of the traditional let is a dramatic leap forward for both players and fans," said Pro Squash Tour Commissioner Joseph McManus. "We did retain a small provision to protect player safety and allow for equipment failure," added McManus. "These will be exceptional occurrences though."
More than 150 years old and played by more than 20 million people in 175 countries, squash has shown sustained growth at the junior level in the US. in recent years. The US based Pro Squash Tour was founded in 2009 and coordinates a tour with stops across the United States. The season begins in September and runs through April.


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Obama nomination of donor as envoy put on hold
By Jim McElhatton - The Washington Times - Thursday, October 29, 2009
President Obama's nomination of a major campaign fundraiser as ambassador to Spain has been delayed in the Senate over questions about whether the White House is withholding information from lawmakers about the abrupt firing of a government watchdog official.
The nominee, Alan Solomont, served from April until recently as chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, whose former inspector general, Gerald Walpin, was fired by the White House on June 10. Mr. Solomont, a Massachusetts health industry entrepreneur, helped raise at least $500,000 for Mr. Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and was among a group of top fundraisers, elected officials and others invited to a St. Patrick's Day party at the White House.
Mr. Walpin has said that his firing came because of his investigation into Obama supporter and Sacramento, Calif., Mayor Kevin Johnson involving the misuse of hundreds of thousands of federal grant dollars by a nonprofit group, of which Mr. Johnson was executive director.
Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a leading whistleblower advocate who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has requested records from the White House and the Corporation for National and Community Service about Mr. Walpin's firing.
But committee aides say that about half of the records provided so far, including several last week, include documents Mr. Grassley already had, redacted records, old press releases and newspaper articles. Among the records delivered to Mr. Grassley were documents related to his own requests for information.
"There's no justification for withholding information from Congress here," said Mr. Grassley, who has blocked Senate action by placing a "hold" on Mr. Solomont's nomination amid the dispute. "This administration talks a lot about openness and transparency, but the true test is in cases like this."
White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said officials have delivered on Mr. Obama's promise to make government more transparent in their handling of Mr. Grassley's request.
"Our administration has demonstrated the president's commitment to transparent government by meeting regularly with members of Congress - in both parties - to discuss this issue and sharing more than 450 pages of documents," Mr. Vietor said.
Mr. Walpin was appointed inspector general by President Bush in 2006. In his position, he was the official watchdog for Americorps and other national service programs and regularly issued reports about potential misspending and government waste. His investigation into Mr. Johnson, a former NBA basketball star-turned-Democratic politician, was among his most high-profile cases.
Mr. Walpin reported that St. Hope Academy in Sacramento, where Mr. Johnson previously served as executive director, mishandled about $850,000 in grant money, including using volunteers to run personal errands. The academy and U.S. Attorney's Office in Sacramento later resolved allegations of wrongdoing through a civil settlement that required half of the federal grant money to be repaid to the agency.
Mr. Walpin has said he was fired in retaliation for his work on the investigation and has filed a federal lawsuit seeking his job back.
Mr. Solomont and Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican member of the corporation's board, backed Mr. Walpin's firing. The acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, Lawrence Brown, also criticized Mr. Walpin, saying he provided "selected information" and withheld other details about the Johnson case, according to records sent to Congress.
Mr. Grassley sought records in June after Mr. Walpin was fired, writing in a letter to the corporation, "I am very concerned about the appearance that the IG's communications with my office about this matter may have contributed to his removal."
An attorney for the corporation, which is an independent federal agency, said that the "White House has directed us not to disclose" information related to "deliberative discussions between the corporation and the White House."
Meanwhile, Mr. Solomont's nomination as ambassador to Spain remains on hold until the dispute over the records is resolved. His nomination has drawn attention for other reasons as well.
In August, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics said that Mr. Solomont was just one of a growing number of Democratic fundraisers and political donors picked by Mr. Obama for ambassadorships, a practice that career diplomats in the State Department have long criticized.
Mr. Solomont helped solicit - or "bundled" - at least $500,000 for Mr. Obama's White House run, while he and his family have given about $1.8 million to politicians and political causes since 1989, almost entirely to Democrats.
The contributions include about $770,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Overall, Mr. Solomont is the biggest political donor among Mr. Obama's ambassadorial picks, according to the center.
• Jim McElhatton can be reached at jmcelhatton@washingtontimes.com.


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I agree with your comment of "a nice, stylish memory of our time here". You totally deserve to splurge on yourself. It's time to something for Karyn and not everyone else. I know how hard it is for you to get into that head space. Most of my favourite things are stylish memories from my travels. I'm also pretty sure that a pair of boots will not compromise your reno loan nor your car loan. In fact, you will impress your bank manager with your impeccable style. You also need to keep up with your fashion plate husband!
ps: what car did you finally buy?


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Distance Learning Blog Homepage
Meet Your Academic - Simon Murray
The programme lead for our Surveying Masters, Simon Murray, tells us more about his successful career in the industry, and how he believes this course could help others to build one of their own.
Can you tell us a little bit about your educational background?
I studied extensively between the 1970s and 1990s: I have two undergraduate qualifications – one in Building and Surveying and the other in Civil Engineering – as well as two postgraduate qualifications in Construction Management and Economics. I then went on to spend 12 years in practice as a chartered surveyor, before making the transition to teacher in the 1990s. I worked in academic institutions originally on a part time basis and then full time until 2002, when I returned to the business sector. After selling my businesses interests, I returned to academia in late 2017 and have taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate level on a range of surveying programmes since. I became the current programme leader for this distance learning Masters in 2018.
What is your professional background in relation to this course?
As mentioned before, I am a chartered surveyor with a specialism in the field of contract administration, law and practice. I have experience of working both in the public sector, as well as in private practice, and I also have a limited amount of experience working on site. In addition to being a chartered surveyor and a senior lecturer, I also worked as a regional strategy adviser and as a national education manager for ConstructionSkills – the former sector skills council for construction and civil engineering. As well as all of that, in the last 10 years, I found time to own and manage two businesses of my own. One was an eLearning training firm for the surveying sector, while the other was a company that used unmanned aerial vehicles for surveying film and photography purposes – one of the first businesses in the UK to use such technologies.
Do you have any involvement with the surveying industry more widely?
I have always been actively involved with the wider surveying profession, and I have strong links with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). This has included me being a regional board member, a regional chair, a member of the Council for England plus a member of International Governing Council. I've served on a number committees within the institution over the last few decades, was formerly a teaching and research fellow and I'm currently an APC assessor.
Outside of RICS, I have served as a board member for Constructing Excellence and I'm currently chair of the regional awards panel and a national judge for this organisation. For the last two years, I have also been actively involved with engaging employers and businesses about our Surveying Apprenticeship degree at the University.
Why should people choose one of our distance learning Surveying MSc programmes and how will completing one transform their lives?
In the UK, and beyond, there is a skills shortage for certain types of surveyors. This is despite it being a rewarding career; the latest RICS salary survey indicates the average annual salary for surveyors in the UK is just over £50,000. Northumbria University is one of the leading UK universities for the provision of built environment courses, and we are passionate about helping people to break into this exciting, fulfilling and challenging sector. All of our surveying qualifications are recognised worldwide and are accredited by RICS. This particular distance learning Surveying MSc programme is great as it enables both people who are currently working in the sector and those that wish to join to acquire a recognised postgraduate award that provides a direct route to the globally recognised, chartered status (MRICS).
Studying by distance learning can be seen as a difficult method of studying, especially when balanced with full time employment and the other demands of life. However, as a university we recognise these difficulties and, having spent many years as a student myself, I also understand of the impact that learning can have on people's lives. The curriculum and delivery techniques we use on the programmes are constantly being reviewed and changes brought in to improve the student learning experience to reduce this.
Why are you passionate about teaching surveying?
I have over 40 years' experience in the built environment industry, in a range of positions and organisations at a regional, national and, at times, international level. I take pleasure in being able to pass on some of that experience and acquired knowledge to my students, so that they can build successful, fulfilling careers of their own.
Aside from being able to meet the entry requirements, is there anything else that you would like to see in your students?
Other than meeting the entry requirements for the Surveying Masters programmes, ideally we would like to see a personal drive, motivation and ambition to meet the demands of a two year, or more if you choose to take a break in your studies, distance learning programme.
Tell us about a passion of yours, outside of Surveying...
I have been involved in a lot of sport, both as participant and as a manager, for over 50 years at an area, regional and national level. I'm currently president of one of the oldest athletic clubs in the UK, and I'm a secretary and treasurer of a cricket club. I have played in various leagues for a number of decades and eventually 'hung up' my boots some 5 years ago due to long term injuries.
Discover more about our RICS Surveying Masters pathways:
Surveying (Real Estate) MSc
Surveying (Building Surveying) MSc
Surveying (Quantity Surveying) MSc
Other Architecture And Built Environment Courses


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PACKABLE: Lightweight and stackable design allows the user to transport ladder sections to and from the field with ease.
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Just insert the nock, align it and go. Incorporates an index and alignment feature and a nock recess. Made of durable polycarbonate.
Friction design works in any arrow with 0.244 inside diameter. When the arrow is shot, the nock is compressed and turns the light on. The Lazereye is only 18 grains, 25% lighter than other lighted nocks.


SINGAPORE: Two US pathologists on Wednesday supported Singapore police findings that an American scientist found hanged last year in the city-state committed suicide and was not murdered as his family claims.
Medical examiners David Fowler of Maryland and Valerie Rao of Florida testified as independent experts a day after the family of the late researcher Shane Todd walked out of a coroner's inquest in Singapore.
Fowler rejected a theory put forward by the family's star witness, Missouri deputy medical examiner Edward Adelstein, who said Todd may have been killed by assassins working for two Asian high-tech firms involved in a secret project.
Adelstein on Tuesday as proof of a fight with killers in his apartment were "the most classical example of post-mortem lividities" in hanging cases.
Rao, chief medical examiner of two districts in Jacksonville, Florida, also cited "asphyxia due to hanging" as the cause of death and agreed that there were no injury marks indicating a struggle.
Are there alternatives to electricity rate hikes?


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Undated handout photo issued by the National Television Awards of former X Factor host Dermot O'Leary who says it is "nice to be missed" - but he is trying not to wish failure on his successors. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday January 10, 2016. Long-time presenter O'Leary quit in March before the 2015 series began, and was replaced by co-hosts Caroline Flack and Olly Murs. See PA story SHOWBIZ OLeary. Photo credit should read: National Television Awards/Indigo Productions/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.
Everything you need to know about NTA's 2016!
CelebMix January 20, 2016, 10:50 pm
The NTA's – or The National Television Awards – celebrated it's 21st Birthday in style last night, with it's annual award ceremony taking place live in the o2 arena, presented once more by Dermot O'Leary!
The show started with a performance from Gloria Gaynor and Revelation Avenue, who found fame on Britain's Got Talent, with further performances from Fleur East with her new single, and saw some of our favourite TV personalities take home awards.
To absolutely nobodies surprise Ant and Dec took home the Best Entertainment Presenter award for the 15th year in the row, and Strictly Come Dancing took home the final award of the night for Best Talent Show.
The recently concluded Downton Abbey beat the likes of Casualty, Broadchurch and Doctor Who to take home Best Drama, and The Great British Bake Off saw off competition from The Apprentice, Masterchef and Bear Grylls: Mission survive to be crowned Best Challenge Show.
Eastenders was crowned Best Serial Drama, and Peter Kay's Car Share took home the award for Best Comedy.
Doctor Foster was crowned best new Drama, and the shows star Suranne Jones was awarded The Best Drama Performance, after announcing news of her pregnancy on the NTA red carpet, and announcing that a second series of Doctor Foster would start filming in September!
Gogglebox won the award for Factual Entertainment, and This Morning took home the gong for Live Magazine Show. Other winners were pop star Shane Wards (Best Newcomer), Danny Dyer (Serial Drama performance) and Aidan Turner (The TV Impact Award).
I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here won the award for Best Entertainment show, and The Chase for Best Daytime, whilst the gong for Best International Program was awarded to The Big Bang Theory.
This years Special Recognition Award, presented by Hollywood superstar Dustin Hoffman, was awarded to actor and comedian Billy Connolly, in honour of a career that has spanned 50 years.
Written by CelebMix
The next series of Sherlock could be its last
Pearl Mackie Announced as New Doctor Who Companion
Steven Moffat stepping down from Doctor Who after series ten
Get to Know Pentatonix With Our Playlist
Kocktails with Khloe Begins With A Prank
Sherlocked is back for 2016!


Sonntagstouren Nationalparkführungen Betriebsausflüge Gruppentouren MTB-Tour - NEU!!!
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It's avaliable for you to present additional content, links, insert a quick contact form or suprise your visitors with a special offer. We'll leave imagination to you.


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what is the smallest and shallowest ocean
The Global Ocean. The five oceans from smallest to largest are: the Arctic, Southern, Indian, Atlantic and Pacific. …
The Arctic Ocean. …
The Southern Ocean. …
The Indian Ocean. …
The Atlantic Ocean. …
The Pacific Ocean.
What is shallowest sea in world?
the Azov
Nestled in Europe's southeast corner is the world's shallowest sea: the Azov. It is no more than 50 feet deep and smaller than Lake Michigan. But it's come to bear outsize geopolitical importance because of the territories that bound it: Ukraine to the west, Russia to the east, and Russia-annexed Crimea to the south.Nov 27, 2018
Why is it called the Black Sea?
Why is the Black Sea black? The sea was first named by the ancient Greeks who called it "Inhospitable Sea." The sea got this reputation because it was difficult to navigate, and hostile tribes inhabited its shores.
Which sea is the least salty?
Although a vast majority of seawater is found in oceans with salinity around 3.5%, seawater is not uniformly saline throughout the world. The planet's freshest (least saline) sea water is in the eastern parts of Gulf of Finland and in the northern end of Gulf of Bothnia, both part of the Baltic Sea.
Which ocean is the largest in square kilometers quizlet?
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceanic divisions. The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's oceans with a total area of about 106,460,000 square kilometers (41,100,000 square miles).
What is the name of the shipping lane through the Arctic ocean along the coast of North America quizlet?
Description: The Northwest Passage is a sea route connecting the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic Ocean, along the northern coast of North America via waterways through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
Which ions comprise about 85% of the solutes in seawater?
Chloride and sodium, the components of table salt (sodium chloride NaCl), make up over 85% of the ions in the ocean, which is why seawater tastes salty (Figure 5.3.
Which sea is deepest?
The Pacific Ocean
Map of the world's oceans. The Pacific Ocean is the world's deepest ocean and water body, with an average depth of 4,280 meters, and a maximum depth of 10,911 meters. It contains the Earth's deepest point (Challenger Deep, at 10,928 m) and the Southern Hemisphere's deepest point (Horizon Deep, at 10,823 m).May 6, 2021
What is the deepest ocean?
the Mariana Trench
The deepest part of the ocean is called the Challenger Deep and is located beneath the western Pacific Ocean in the southern end of the Mariana Trench, which runs several hundred kilometers southwest of the U.S. territorial island of Guam. Challenger Deep is approximately 36,200 feet deep.Feb 26, 2021
What is the second smallest ocean?
The Southern Ocean is the second smallest ocean in the world. It is also known as the Antarctic Ocean as it surrounds Antarctica.
Are there 8 seas?
The Seven Seas include the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans. … In Medieval European literature, the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Arabian seas.
How many seas are on earth?
In general, a sea is defined as a portion of the ocean that is partly surrounded by land. Given that definition, there are about 50 seas around the world. But that number includes water bodies not always thought of as seas, such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Hudson Bay.
Who named the oceans?
explorer Ferdinand Magellan
The ocean's current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. He called it Mar Pacífico, which in both Portuguese and Spanish means "peaceful sea".
Which is the largest ocean?
The Pacific Ocean is the largest body of water on Earth. Located between the Southern Ocean, Asia, Australia, and the landmasses of the Western Hemisphere, the Pacific Ocean contains almost twice as much water as the world's second largest body of water, the Atlantic Ocean.
Where are the 7 seas and 5 oceans?
More modernly, the seven seas have been used to describe regions of the five oceans—the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans.
What is the warmest ocean?
The waters of the Pacific Ocean comprise the world's largest heat reservoir, by far, and it is the warmest ocean, overall, of the world's five oceans.
Where is the Black Sea?
The Black Sea is located at the southeastern extremity of Europe. It is bordered by Ukraine to the north, Russia to the northeast, Georgia to the east, Turkey to the south, and Bulgaria and Romania to the west.
How deep is the Black Sea?
How big is the Black Sea?
436,402 km²
Why Red sea is red?
Normally, the Red Sea is an intense blue-green; occasionally, however, it is populated by extensive blooms of the algae Trichodesmium erythraeum, which, upon dying off, turn the sea a reddish brown colour.
Is the Red Sea really red?
Not really. So where did it get its catchy name? Occasionally, the sea becomes filled with blooms of cyanobacteria algae, called trichodesmium erythraeum, which, upon dying, turn the usually blue-green water, reddish-brown. The color is not intense and is said to vary across the expansive body of water.
Can you swim in the Dead Sea?
There is no such thing as swimming in the Dead Sea. … Fast Facts: The Dead Sea is actually not a sea at all, but a lake that's made up of about 30 percent salt. It is the lowest place on earth at 417 feet below sea level.
Why is the ocean blue?
The ocean is blue because water absorbs colors in the red part of the light spectrum. Like a filter, this leaves behind colors in the blue part of the light spectrum for us to see. The ocean may also take on green, red, or other hues as light bounces off of floating sediments and particles in the water.
Where is the the Dead Sea?
The Dead Sea is a landlocked salt lake between Israel and Jordan in southwestern Asia.
Why is Hawaii water so salty?
Yes. On the mainland, salt in the soil has built up over time, mostly from sediment and from land that was once under seas or oceans. New volcanic rock is made from molten magma and contains little salt.
What country is the Arctic in?
The Arctic region covers parts of eight countries: Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and the United States.
What is the Arctic sea ice minimum?
Arctic sea ice has likely reached its minimum extent for the year, at 4.72 million square kilometers (1.82 million square miles) on September 16, 2021, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder.
What is Arctic sea ice?
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Every Wi-Fi connection is potentially vulnerable to an unprecedented security flaw that allows hackers to snoop on internet traffic, researchers have revealed.
The vulnerability is the first to be found in the modern encryption techniques that have been used to secure Wi-Fi networks for the last 14 years.
In theory, it allows an attacker within range of a Wi-Fi network to inject computer viruses into internet networks, and read communications like passwords, credit card numbers and photos sent over the internet.
There is however, no reason to panic. It's patchable, the scripts to exploit devices are not in the wild, and many devices already received updates. You'll probably hear a lot over the next few days that WiFi is "broken beyond repair" but it's not entirely true.
From what I've read: Microsoft say they've issued patches for supported OS's, users who receive updates automatically should be patched; no news I've seen re Apple macOS; Linux patches available / soon available. Sounds as though Android users could get caught out. Not sure how it'll affect things such as modem/routers (or the IoT).


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\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
Over the past few years, thanks to the advances in deep learning, significant progress has been made in \gls{asr}. Both \gls{dnn}/\gls{hmm} hybrid systems and \gls{e2e} systems have attained surprisingly good performance in close-talk scenarios \cite{Deep-Hinton2012,xiong2018microsoft,chiu2018state,karita2019comparative}.
However, it is still a challenging task to recognize speech signals in far-field scenarios, where background noise and reverberation are commonly observed and even interfering speech from other speakers is involved \cite{haeb2019speech,watanabe2020chime}.
In recent years, many studies have been focusing on the far-field speech recognition task, including the combination of the speech enhancement frontend and \gls{asr} backend \cite{Single-Isik2016, Multi-Yoshioka2018} and noise robust adaptation approaches \cite{Joint-Narayanan2014, Adaptive-Tan2018}.
Meanwhile, it is commonly observed that speech processing with multiple microphones usually outperforms the single-microphone one, because additional spatial information can be exploited. Therefore, many existing microphone array signal processing methods can be utilized as the frontend for end-to-end far-field speech recognition, such as the multi-channel Weiner filter \cite{Spatially-Spriet2004, Optimal-Souden2009}, \gls{mvdr} and \gls{mpdr} beamforming \cite{Optimum-Van2004, Optimal-Souden2009}, multi-frame beamforming \cite{Sequential-Wang2019}, etc.
In addition, reverberation is also an important problem in real scenarios, which can lead to dramatic degradation in the \gls{asr} performance \cite{Distant-Wolfel2009}. Various deep learning based methods have been proposed for dereverberation, including \gls{dnn} based approaches \cite{Neural-Kinoshita2017, Joint-Heymann2019, Generalized-Taniguchi2019} incorporating the \gls{wpe} algorithm \cite{Speech-Yoshioka2010, Generalization-Yoshioka2012} and complex ideal ratio mask based approach for denoising and dereverberation \cite{Time-Williamson2017}.

In this work, we propose a novel \gls{e2e} architecture that can perform dereverberation, beamforming and recognition simultaneously. Inspired by the recently developed unified convolutional beamformer for simultaneous denoising and dereverberation, named \gls{wpd} \cite{Unified-Nakatani2019, Simultaneous-Nakatani2019}, we reformulate \gls{wpd} by replacing eigenvalue decomposition with an equivalent matrix inverse operation, which makes it differentiable and more stable.
The new architecture consists of a frontend and an \gls{asr} backend. In the frontend, two novel architectures are explored for joint speech dereverberation, enhancement and separation. In the backend, a joint \gls{ctc} / attention-based encoder-decoder model \cite{Joint-Kim2017} is used to recognize each separated speech stream.
Note that our proposed framework can be used for both single-speaker and multi-speaker scenarios. And in this paper, we mainly focus on the multi-speaker case, which is a more difficult task.
It is worth noting that this end-to-end architecture is optimized only based on the final \gls{asr} criterion, which was also proven feasible in previous works \cite{Joint-Heymann2019, MIMO-Chang2019, End-Chang2020, Speech-Subramanian2019}.
Our experiments show that our newly proposed method outperformed the conventional end-to-end ASR systems \cite{MIMO-Chang2019, End-Chang2020,Subramanian-arxiv-2019} in both single-speaker and multi-speaker reverberant conditions.

\vspace{-.7em}
\section{End-to-End Multi-Channel ASR}
\label{sec:MIMO-Speech}

This section reviews the end-to-end multi-channel speech recognition system for both single-speaker $(J = 1)$ \cite{Subramanian-arxiv-2019} and multi-speaker $(J > 1)$ \cite{MIMO-Chang2019, End-Chang2020} conditions, as shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:MIMO_Speech}. Without loss of generality, we consider the input speech as a mixture of $J \ (J \ge 1)$ different speakers. For simplicity, we consider the noise as the $0$-th source ($j=0$) in the input signal.

The model is composed mainly of two modules, namely the frontend for speech separation and the backend for ASR. The frontend is a mask-based multi-source neural beamformer. First, the masking network estimates the masks $\mathbf{M}_c^j$ for every source $j \in \{0, 1, \dots, J\}$ on each channel $c \in \{1, \dots, C\}$ from the input spectrum  $\mathbf{X}_c = \left(x_{t, f, c}\right)_{t, f} \in \mathbb{C}^{T \times F}$:
\begin{align}
    \resizebox{0.9\columnwidth}{!}{
    $\mathbf{M} = \left(m_{t, f, c}^{j}\right)_{t, f, c, j} = \text{MaskEstimator}(\mathbf{X}) \in \mathbb{C}^{T \times F \times C \times (J+1)} \,,$
    }
\end{align}
where $m_{t, f, c}^{j} \in[0,1]$, $T$ and $F$ represent time and frequency dimensions respectively.
Second, the multi-source neural beamformer separates the mixture into $J$ streams using the \gls{mvdr} formalization \cite{Optimal-Souden2009}. The estimated masks are used to compute the cross-channel \gls{psd} matrices $\mathbf{\Phi}^{j}$ \cite{NTT-Yoshioka2015,Neural-Heymann2016,erdogan2016improved} and then the time-invariant filter $\mathbf{g}^{j}_f$ for each speaker~$j$:
\begin{align}
    \mathbf{\Phi}^{j}_f &= \frac{1}{\sum_{t=1}^T m^j_{t,f}} \sum_{t=1}^T m^{j}_{t,f} \mathbf{x}_{t,f} \mathbf{x}^{H}_{t,f} \; \in \mathbb{C}^{C \times C} \,, \\
    \mathbf{g}^j_f &= \frac{(\sum _{i \neq j} \mathbf{\Phi}^{i}_f)^{-1} \mathbf{\Phi}^{j}_f}{\text{Trace}((\sum _{i \neq j} \mathbf{\Phi}^{i} _f)^{-1} \mathbf{\Phi}^{j}_f)} \mathbf{u} \; \in \mathbb{C}^{C} \label{eq:mvdr-filter} \,,
\end{align}
where $\mathbf{x}_{t,f} = \{x_{t,f,c}\}_{c=1}^C$, $m^{j}_{t,f} = \frac{1}{C} \sum_{c=1}^C m^{j}_{t,f,c}$, $(\cdot)^H$ represents the conjugate transpose, and $\mathbf{u} \in \mathbb{R}^{C}$ is a vector denoting the reference microphone estimated by an attention mechanism \cite{Multichannel-Ochiai2017}.
\begin{figure}[t]
  \begin{minipage}[b]{\linewidth}
    \centering
    \centerline{\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/MIMO_Speech2.pdf}}
  \end{minipage}
\caption{End-to-End Multi-channel \gls{asr} Model.}
\label{fig:MIMO_Speech}
\end{figure}
Finally, the separated speech $\hat{\mathbf{X}}^{\mathrm{enh},j}$ of each speaker $j$ is derived by applying the filters $\mathbf{g}^{j}$ to the input speech $\mathbf{X}$, from which the log Mel-filterbank feature with global mean and variance normalization ($\text{GMVN-LMF}(\cdot)$) is further extracted:
\begin{align}
    \hat{x}^{\mathrm{enh}, j}_{t,f} &= (\mathbf{g}^{j}_f)^{H} \mathbf{x}_{t,f} \; \in \mathbb{C} \,, \\
    \mathbf{O}^{j} &= \text{GMVN-LMF}(|\hat{\mathbf{X}}^{\mathrm{enh},j}|) \,,
\end{align}
where $\hat{\mathbf{X}}^{\mathrm{enh},j} \!\in\! \mathbb{C}^{T \times F}$, and $\mathbf{O}^j$ is the extracted feature for \gls{asr}.

The backend is a joint \gls{ctc}/attention-based encoder-decoder model \cite{Joint-Kim2017} for single-channel speech recognition. First, the encoder transforms the feature $\mathbf{O}^{j}=\{\mathbf{o}^{j}_1,\dots,\mathbf{o}^{j}_T\}$ of each speaker $j$ into a high-level representation $\mathbf{H}^{j}=\{\mathbf{h}^{j}_1,\dots,\mathbf{h}^{j}_L\} \ (L \leq T)$ with subsampling.
Then, the representation is processed by the attention-based decoder to generate the output token sequences $\mathbf{Y}^{j}=\{y^{j}_1,\dots,y^{j}_N\}$. The \gls{asr} process is formulated as follows:
\begin{align}
    \mathbf{H}^{j} &= \text{Encoder}(\mathbf{O}^j) \,, \\[-1ex]
    \mathbf{y}^{j}_n &\sim \text{Attention-Decoder} (\mathbf{H}^{j}, \mathbf{y}^{j}_{n-1}) \,,
\end{align}
where $\mathbf{y}_n^j$ is the posterior probability vector for the $n$-th token.
Note that in the multi-speaker case, i.e.~$J > 1$, in order to solve the label ambiguity problem, the \gls{pit} technique \cite{Permutation-Yu2017, Multitalker-Kolbaek2017,End2End-Seki2018,Improving-Zhang2020} is further applied in the \gls{ctc} module to determine the order of the label sequences.
The whole model is optimized with only the ASR loss $\mathcal{L}$ combining the attention and CTC losses with the determined label sequence order.

\vspace{-.8em}
\section{End-to-End ASR with Unified Frontend}
\label{sec:MIMO-REVERB-SPEECH}
\vspace{-.3em}
In this section, we introduce the proposed multi-channel speech recognition architecture for coping with the reverberant speech.
First, we describe the mask-based WPE model for multi-channel dereverberation.
Then, we show a cascade integration method which incorporates the mask-based WPE model followed by the model introduced in last Section, where the WPE filter coefficients are estimated for each speaker.
Furthermore, another frontend architecture extending the \gls{wpd} beamformer \cite{Unified-Nakatani2019} is designed, which unifies the dereverberation and beamforming modules with our new formulation.
\vspace{-.6em}
\subsection{Mask-based WPE model}
\label{ssec:dnn_wpe}
The mask-based \gls{wpe} algorithm \cite{Neural-Kinoshita2017} is introduced in this subsection. First, the input spectrum $\mathbf{X} = (\mathbf{x}_{t,f})_{t,f}$ is fed into a neural network to estimate a time-frequency mask $\mathbf{m} = (m_{t,f,c})_{t,f,c}$, as formulated below:
\begin{align}
    \mathbf{m} &= \mathrm{MaskEstimator}(\mathbf{X}) \qquad\qquad \in \mathbb{R}^{T \times F \times C} \label{eq:mask} \,,\\
    \mathbf{x}_{t, f} &= \mathbf{x}^{\prime}_{t, f} + \mathbf{n}_{t, f} \approx \sum_{j=1}^J \mathbf{v}^j_f s^j_{t, f} + \mathbf{n}_{t, f} \quad \in \mathbb{C}^{C}\,, \label{eq:signal}
\end{align}
where $\mathbf{x}^{\prime}_{t, f}$ is the direct path and early reflection of the source signal, $s^j_{t, f}$ is the $j$-th source signal, $\mathbf{v}_f = [v_{f}^{(0)}, v_{f}^{(1)}, \cdots,$ $v_{f}^{(C-1)}]^T \in \mathbb{C}^{C}$ is the steering vector, and $\mathbf{n}_{t, f} \in \mathbb{C}^{C}$ is the noise and late reverberation of source signals.

With the estimated mask, the time-variant power $\mathbf{\lambda}_{t,f} $ of the input signal can be estimated by Eq.~(\ref{eq:psd}), and then the signal can be dereverberated via a standard WPE procedure:
\begin{align}
    \mathbf{\lambda}_{t,f} &= \frac{1}{C}\sum_{c=1}^C \frac{m_{t,f,c}}{\frac{1}{T}\sum_{\tau=1}^T m_{\tau,f,c}} \left|x_{t,f,c}\right|^2 \quad \in \mathbb{R} \label{eq:psd} \,, \\
    \hat{\mathbf{x}}^{\mathrm{wpe}}_{t,f} &= \mathrm{WPE}\left(\mathbf{x}_{t,f}, \mathbf{\lambda}_{t,f}\right) \label{eq:wpe} \,,
\end{align}

\subsection{Cascaded dereverberation and beamforming}
\label{sssec:arch1}
\begin{figure}[t]
  \begin{minipage}[b]{\linewidth}
    \centering
    \centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{figs/MIMO_Reverb_Speech2.pdf}}
  \end{minipage}
\caption{Proposed end-to-end ASR arch\#1: cascaded dereverberation and beamforming frontend.}
\label{fig:MIMO_Reverb_Speech}
\end{figure}
One straightforward way to enable dereverberation in the multi-channel \gls{asr} system in Section~\ref{sec:MIMO-Speech} is the cascade integration of the mask-based WPE model and the neural beamformer like \cite{Speech-Subramanian2019}. As illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:MIMO_Reverb_Speech}, the multi-channel input speech mixture is first fed into the mask-based WPE model, which is composed of a mask estimator and a WPE filter. Then the dereverberated speech is processed by the beamformer introduced in Section \ref{sec:MIMO-Speech} to generate the enhanced single-channel speech of $J$ speakers for speech recognition. The frontend process can be formulated as follows:
\begin{align}
    \hat{\mathbf{X}}^{\text{enh}} = \text{Mask-Beamformer}\left(\text{Mask-WPE}\left(\mathbf{X}\right)\right) \,,
\end{align}
where $\hat{\mathbf{X}}^{\text{enh}} = \{\hat{\mathbf{X}}^{\text{enh},j}\}_{j=1}^J   \in \mathbb{C}^{T \times F \times J}$ is the set of the separated speech from all speakers, $\text{Mask-Beamformer}(\cdot)$ and $\text{Mask-WPE}(\cdot)$ denote the respective modules in Fig.~\ref{fig:MIMO_Reverb_Speech}. The ASR backend here is the same as that described in Section \ref{sec:MIMO-Speech}.

\begin{figure}[t]
  \begin{minipage}[b]{\linewidth}
    \centering
    \centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.76\textwidth]{figs/MIMO_WPD.pdf}}
  \end{minipage}
\caption{Proposed end-to-end ASR arch\#2: unified dereverberation and beamforming frontend.}
\label{fig:MIMO_WPD}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Unified dereverberation and beamforming}
\label{sssec:arch2}

The original \gls{wpd} beamformer \cite{Unified-Nakatani2019} aims to eliminate the late reverberation and noise from the noisy signal, while keeping the direct signal undistorted. It combines the ideas of \gls{wpe} and \gls{mpdr} beamformer \cite{Optimum-Van2004}, and optimizes their filters at the same time, with the constrained optimization objective below:
\begin{align}
    \bar{\mathbf{w}}=\argmin _{\bar{\mathbf{w}}} \sum_{t} \frac{\left|\bar{\mathbf{w}}_{f}^{H} \bar{\mathbf{x}}_{t, f}\right|^{2}}{\lambda_{t, f}} \quad \text { s.t. } \quad \mathbf{w}_{0, f}^{H} \mathbf{v}_{f}=v_{f}^{(\text{ref})}
\end{align}
where $\bar{\mathbf{w}} = [\mathbf{w}_{0,f}^T, \mathbf{w}_{D,f}^T, \mathbf{w}_{D+1,f}^T, \cdots, \mathbf{w}_{K+D-1,f}^T]^T \in \mathbb{C}^{C(K+1)}$ is the \gls{wpd} filter coefficient, $\bar{\mathbf{x}}_{t,f} = [\mathbf{x}_{t,f}^T, \mathbf{x}_{t-D,f}^T,$ $\mathbf{x}_{t-D-1,f}^T, \cdots, \mathbf{x}_{t-K-D+1,f}^T]^T \in \mathbb{C}^{C(K+1)}$ is the concatenation of input signals of current and previous frames, $D$ is the delay parameter, $K$ is the number of filter taps, $v_{f}^{(\text{ref})}$ is the value of the steering vector at the reference channel, and $\lambda_{t,f}$ is the power of the desired signal as in Eq.~(\ref{eq:psd}).

By solving the above constrained optimization problem, we can calculate the \gls{wpd} filter $\bar{\mathbf{w}}_{f}$ and the enhanced signal $\hat{\mathbf{X}}^{\text{enh}}$ by the following formulas:
\begin{align}
    \bar{\mathbf{w}}_{f} &= \frac{\mathbf{R}_{f}^{-1} \bar{\mathbf{v}}_{f}}{\bar{\mathbf{v}}_{f}^{H} \mathbf{R}_{f}^{-1} \bar{\mathbf{v}}_{f}} \left(v_f^{(\text{ref})}\right)^* & \in \mathbb{C}^{C(K+1)} \label{eq:wpd} \,,\\
    \mathbf{R}_f &= \sum_{t=D}^{T} \frac{\bar{\mathbf{x}}_{t-D,f} \bar{\mathbf{x}}_{t-D,f}^{H}}{\lambda_{t,f}} & \in \mathbb{C}^{C(K+1) \times C(K+1)} \label{eq:corr_mat} \,, \\
    \hat{\mathbf{X}}_{t, f}^{\text{enh}} &= \bar{\mathbf{w}}_{f}^H \bar{\mathbf{x}}_{t, f} & \in \mathbb{C} \,,\qquad\quad \label{eq:wpd_enh}
\end{align}
where $\mathbf{R}_f$ is the power normalized covariance matrix, $\bar{\mathbf{v}}_f = [\mathbf{v}^T_f, \mathbf{0}, \cdots, \mathbf{0}]^T \in \mathbb{C}^{C(K+1)}$, and $(\cdot)^*$ denotes complex conjugate.
While the original \gls{wpd} can perform denoising and dereverberation simultaneously with an elegant formulation, it is only designed for speech enhancement of the single-speaker input. In addition, the steering vector $\bar{\mathbf{v}}$ in Eq.~(\ref{eq:wpd}) is needed for calculating the beamformer weights, which requires the direction information of the sound source or needs to be approximated by eigenvalue decomposition of a complex matrix \cite{Simultaneous-Nakatani2019}.

Based on the above formulation, we first derive another equivalent formula that no longer requires the steering vector $\bar{\mathbf{v}}_f$, and then extend the original \gls{wpd} to the multi-speaker case. Consider the padded speech signal $\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime T}_{t, f} = [\mathbf{x}^{\prime T}_{t, f}, \mathbf{0}, \cdots, \mathbf{0}]^T \in \mathbb{C}^{C(K+1)}$, it is easy to derive from Eq.~(\ref{eq:signal}) that:
{\allowdisplaybreaks
\begin{align}
    \tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}_{t, f} &= \bar{\mathbf{v}}_f s_{t, f} \,, \label{eq:stacked_obv} \\
    \!\!\!(\mathbf{\Phi}_{\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}})_{f} &= \sum_{t=1}^T \dfrac{m_{t,f} \tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}_{t, f} \tilde{\mathbf{x}}_{t, f}^{\prime H}}{\sum_{\tau=1}^T m_{\tau,f}} = \bar{\mathbf{v}}_f \phi_{f} \bar{\mathbf{v}}_f^H \!=\! \bar{\mathbf{v}}_f \bar{\mathbf{v}}_f^H \phi_{f} \,, \label{eq:cov_stacked} \\
    v_f^{\text{(ref)}} &= \bar{\mathbf{v}}^T_f \bar{\mathbf{u}}  \,, \label{eq:ref_ch}
\end{align}}
where $(\mathbf{\Phi}_{\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}})_f \in \mathbb{C}^{C(K+1) \times C(K+1)}$ is the cross-channel \gls{psd} matrix of the padded speech signal $\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}_{t, f}$, $\bar{\mathbf{u}} = [\mathbf{u}^T, \mathbf{0},$ $\cdots, \mathbf{0}]^T \in \mathbb{R}^{C(K+1)}$ and $\mathbf{u} \in \mathbb{R}^{C}$ is the reference vector denoting the reference microphone estimated by an attention mechanism. Substitute Eq.~(\ref{eq:stacked_obv}) -- (\ref{eq:ref_ch}) into Eq.~(\ref{eq:wpd}), we can derive that:
\begin{align}
    \bar{\mathbf{w}}_f = \dfrac{\mathbf{R}^{-1}_f (\mathbf{\Phi}_{\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}})_{f}}{\operatorname{Trace}\left[\mathbf{R}^{-1}_{f} (\mathbf{\Phi}_{\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}})_{f}\right]} \bar{\mathbf{u}}  \label{eq:new_wpd} \,.
\end{align}
This new formula is equivalent to Eq.~(\ref{eq:wpd}), but no longer requires the steering vector for calculating the filter weights.

Furthermore, we can easily extend \gls{wpd} to the multi-speaker case. For each speaker $j$, the corresponding covariance matrix $\mathbf{R}_f^{j}$ can be derived from Eq.~(\ref{eq:corr_mat}) and (\ref{eq:psd}), where the estimated mask $\mathbf{m}^j$ for speaker $j$ is used for both dereverberation and beamforming. Then the \gls{wpd} beamformer for speaker $j$ can be calculated from Eq.~(\ref{eq:new_wpd}). Finally, the separated speech of each speaker can be derived from Eq.~(\ref{eq:wpd_enh}), using the corresponding \gls{wpd} beamformer.
Note that the masks for calculating $\mathbf{R}_f^{j}$ and $\mathbf{\Phi}_{\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}\tilde{\mathbf{x}}^{\prime}}^{j}$ for each speaker $j$ can be either shared using a single mask estimator or estimated by two separate mask estimators.
The \gls{wpd} based architecture is illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:MIMO_WPD}.
\vspace{-1.3em}
\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:exp}

To make our experimental results comparable to previous results of MIMO-Speech \cite{MIMO-Chang2019,End-Chang2020}, we evaluated the proposed methods on the same spatialized wsj1-2mix dataset as in \cite{MIMO-Chang2019,End-Chang2020}, which consists of two sub-datasets: anechoic and reverberant.
The reverberation time (RT$_{60}$) of the reverberant data ranges from 200 ms to 600 ms. In each sub-dataset, the duration of the spatialized speech for training, development and evaluation is 98.5 hr, 1.3 hr and 0.8 hr respectively. We also adopt the multi-condition training in \cite{Does-Ochiai2017, MIMO-Chang2019}, i.e. include the WSJ train\_si284 in training to improve the performance.
We also test our methods for single-speaker speech recognition on the REVERB dataset \cite{kinoshita2013reverb}, which uses 2-channel simulated reverberant data for training and 8-channel real data for evaluation.

For feature extraction, the \gls{stft} is performed with a 16-kHz sampling rate and a 25-ms Hann window with a 10-ms stride, and the spectral feature's dimension is $F=257$. After the frontend processing, 80-dimensional log Mel-filterbank features are extracted from the enhanced spectrum of each separated speech, where the global mean and variance normalization is applied using the statistics from the single-speaker WSJ1 training set. The number of channels for training in our experiments is $C=2$. But it can be extended to an arbitrary number of channels as described in \cite{Multichannel-Ochiai2017}.

\vspace{-.8em}
\subsection{Experimental Setup}
\label{ssec:setup}

All our proposed end-to-end multi-channel speech recognition models are implemented based on the ESPnet framework \cite{ESPnet-Watanabe2018}.\footnote{Our experimental setup is available at \url{https://github.com/Emrys365/espnet/blob/wsj1_mix_spatialized/egs/wsj1_mix_spatialized/asr1/}.}
The AdaDelta optimizer with $\rho=0.95$ and $\epsilon=10^{-8}$ is used for training. The data in both anechoic and reverberant conditions are used for training.

In the mask-based \gls{wpe} module, the mask estimation network is a 3-layer bidirectional long-short term memory with projection (BLSTMP) network with 300 cells in each direction. The number of iterations for performing mask-based WPE is set to 1. The prediction delay $D$ and the number of taps $K$ is set to 3 and 5 respectively. The mask estimators in both the \gls{mvdr} beamformer and the \gls{wpd} beamformer are 3-layer BLSTMP networks with 512 cells.
Note that in all our experiments except Section \ref{ssec:exp3}, we used a shared mask estimator instead of two separate ones in Fig.~\ref{fig:MIMO_WPD}.
In the \gls{asr} module, following the configurations in \cite{End-Chang2020}, we use the CNN-Transformer based encoder, which consists of 2 CNN blocks and 12 Transformer layers, and the 6-layer Transformer-based decoder. The self-attention in all Transformer layers has the same configuration as in \cite{End-Chang2020}, i.e.~4 heads and 256 dimensions. As for decoding, a word-level language model \cite{End-Hori2018} trained on the official text data included in the WSJ corpus is used.
The interpolation factor between CTC and attention losses is set to 0.2.

For experiments on REVERB, the network configuration and experimental conditions are the same as \cite{Subramanian-arxiv-2019}. The reference microphone is fixed as the second channel. Both dereverberation and denoising subnetworks are trained to predict two dimensional time-frequency masks.

\subsection{Evaluation of the proposed architectures for multi-speaker speech recognition}
\label{ssec:exp1}

\begin{table}[t]
    \caption{Performance (WER [\%]) of the proposed arch1\,/\,arch2 models with different numbers of filter taps ($K$) and microphones ($C$) on the spatialized reverberant wsj1-2mix eval set.}
    \centering
    %
    \begin{tabular}{c|ccc}
        \toprule
        \diagbox[height=1.6\line]{$K$}{$C$} & 2 & 4 & 6 \\
        \hline
        1 & 28.87\,/\,27.44 & 17.95\,/\,16.67 & 14.92\,/\,\textbf{13.97} \\
        3 & 27.62\,/\,26.42 & 16.65\,/\,15.95 & 14.63\,/\,14.23 \\
        5 & \textbf{21.88}\,/\,25.54 & 15.93\,/\,\textbf{15.72} & 15.46\,/\,16.81 \\
        7 & 26.62\,/\,25.68 & 16.09\,/\,16.32 & 18.67\,/\,22.40 \\
        10 & 26.64\,/\,25.81 & 18.67\,/\,19.55 & 27.79\,/\,36.28 \\
        \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}%
    %
    \label{tab:exp2}
\end{table}
\begin{table}[t]
    %
    \caption{Performance evaluation on the spatialized reverberant wsj1-2mix corpus.}
    \centering
    \resizebox{\columnwidth}{!}{%
    \begin{tabular}{lcc}
        \toprule
        \formattitle{Model} & \formattitle{dev WER (\%)} & \formattitle{eval WER (\%)} \\
        \hline
        baseline (RNN backend) \cite{MIMO-Chang2019} & 34.98 & 29.99 \\
        $\ \ +$ Nara-WPE \cite{End-Chang2020} & 24.45 & 17.67 \\
        baseline (Transformer backend) \cite{End-Chang2020} & 32.95 & 28.01 \\
        $\ \ +$ Nara-WPE \cite{End-Chang2020} & \textbf{19.17} & \textbf{15.24} \\
        \hline
        proposed arch 1 & 19.37 & 14.63 \\
        %
        %
        proposed arch 2\footnotemark & \textbf{18.34} & \textbf{13.97} \\
        %
        %
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}%
    }
    \label{tab:exp1.1}
\end{table}
\footnotetext{The arch 2 model in Table~\ref{tab:exp1.1} was trained on the basis of a pretrained MIMO-Speech model, since the direct training of arch 2 currently does not work well due to numerical instability issues.}

Since our proposed architectures can be tested flexibly with different numbers of microphones $C$ and filter taps $K$, even if the model is trained with fixed $C$ and $K$, we first evaluate the performance of the proposed two architectures with different numbers of filter taps and microphones for inference on the reverberant wsj1-2mix dataset. The results are presented in Table~\ref{tab:exp2}.
We can observe that the performance can be significantly improved when more microphones are available. The number of filter taps closer to the training setup ($K=5$) usually leads to better results, but with more microphones, using fewer filter taps may also provide enough information for dereverberation and increases the stability of the operations in Eq.~(\ref{eq:new_wpd}).
The best performance for arch 1 and arch 2 is achieved with $C=6, K=3$ and $C=6, K=1$ respectively.

Then we compare the performances of our proposed models with the baseline models. In Table \ref{tab:exp1.1}, the baselines are the MIMO-Speech models with RNN backend (row 1) and Transformer backend (row 3) from our previous study \cite{MIMO-Chang2019, End-Chang2020}.
Since these baseline models do not contain a dereverberation module, we also introduce two enhanced baselines (row 2 \& 4), i.e.~MIMO-Speech with iterative Nara-WPE\footnote{\url{https://github.com/fgnt/nara_wpe}} preprocessing.
We ran Nara-WPE with 10 filter taps for 5 iterations to preprocess both training and evaluation data for the baseline models.
By comparing the four baselines and our proposed two architectures with best results taken from Table~\ref{tab:exp2}, we can observe that both proposed models combining neural dereverberation and beamforming in the end-to-end structure achieve comparable results to the best baseline ones.
Note that our models do not need an iterative process compared to the Nara-WPE preprocessing baselines.
Finally, our proposed arch 2 model based on WPD outperforms all baseline methods.

\subsection{Effectiveness of unified filtering for single source robust speech recognition}
\label{ssec:exp3}
\textcolor{black}{We also evaluated our methods in the single source condition on REVERB.}
We first trained a single source multi-channel E2E ASR model, which is a variant of a cascaded architecture in Section \ref{sssec:arch1} based on the WPE and MVDR frontend \cite{Subramanian-arxiv-2019}.
Then, we replace the cascaded frontend with the proposed unified WPD frontend, and compare both frontends.
Using our WPD unified filter gives a significant improvement in performance over the cascade configuration, as shown in Table \ref{tab:result_reverb}. This shows that using our unified frontend is also effective for single source data.

These results indicate that our proposed E2E multi-channel speech recognition model is a powerful method for applications in reverberant single-speaker and multi-speaker scenarios.

\begin{table}[tb]
    \centering
    \caption{ASR performance on REVERB evaluation real dataset comparing unified and cascade filtering
    with $K=5$ \& $C=8$.}
    \label{tab:result_reverb}
    %
    \centering
    \begin{tabular}{lcc}
        \toprule
     \formattitle{Frontend} & \formattitle{Near WER (\%)} & \formattitle{Far WER (\%)} \\
     \hline
WPE + MVDR & 10.8 & 13.6       \\
proposed arch 2 & \textbf{8.9} & \textbf{11.1}   \\\bottomrule

    \end{tabular}
\end{table}

\vspace{-.3em}
\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclusion}

In this paper, we proposed an end-to-end multi-channel far-field speech recognition framework with unified dereverberation and beamforming, which is capable of performing speech dereverberation, separation and recognition simultaneously. The whole model is optimized via only the \gls{asr} criterion but can still learn relatively good dereverberation and separation skills. Two novel frontend architectures are explored, and promising performance is achieved on the spatialized wsj1-2mix corpus compared to the previous MIMO-Speech model. Experimental results on REVERB dataset also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed \gls{wpd} based architecture.

\vspace{-.3em}
\section{Acknowledgement}
\label{sec:ack}
This work was supported by the China NSFC project No. U1736202. Experiments have been carried out on the PI supercomputers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
We would like to thank the NTT Communication Laboratories for the use of their DNN-WPE module\footnote{\url{https://github.com/nttcslab-sp/dnn_wpe}} for our implementation.

\vfill
\pagebreak
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


dc.identifier.citation Barr, M. and O'Donnell, K. and Fahy, A. and Allison, W. and Dastoor, P. 2012. A desktop supersonic free-jet beam source for a scanning helium microscope (SHeM). Measurement Science and Technology. 23 (10): Article ID 105901.
A simple design for an inexpensive, compact, desktop-sized helium free-jet beam source is described. The apparatus, which is Campargue-like in design and utilizes mostly off-the-shelf parts, is capable of producing a centreline intensity of 1.2 × 10^19 atoms per second per steradian. The beam performance was investigated using a conventional ion gauge and a stagnation detector, with the latter being used to produce beam flux profiles. The profile of the macroskimmed beam has been experimentally demonstrated to be strongly Gaussian.


We stumbled upon Sou and Taira, whose graphic tees and denim jeans caught our attention in Harajuku.
On the right is Taira in a black graphic T-shirt from Dog Harajuku tucked into Kinji denim jeans with snap button closures and a flared silhouette. The 16-year-old student styled them with a black belt, a vintage black floral bag hooked onto a belt loop, and Eytys black sneakers with white platform wedges. Vintage accessories provided the finishing touches to his look. For more on Taira, follow him on Instagram.
17-year-old Sou donned a black Harley Davidson T-shirt tucked into vintage and handmade denim cropped jeans with ripped knees and white paint splatters. He cinched them at the waist with a black grommet belt and styled them with white socks and Eytys white sneakers. Sou completed his look with accessories from Ambush and Vivienne Westwood. His favorite fashion labels include Comme des Garçons and Keisuke Yoshida, and he enjoys music from Boøwy. Follow Sou on both Instagram and Twitter to keep up with his social media updates.


text:
K-12 Zone
More college money, please
By Jeannie Kever on February 16, 2010 at 1:40 PM
The first stop for anyone applying for college financial aid can be daunting.
That's true even after a much talked-about effort to simplify the form, available online at www.fafsa.gov.
"It is simpler," said Twiana Collier, coordinator of student financial aid for the Aldine Independent School District. "It's still tricky."
That's especially true for students who are the first in their families to go to college, she said.
Some families balk at providing what they consider to be private financial information.
There's no way around that — federal financial aid, and many university-based grants and scholarships, are based upon the family's income tax forms — but you can get help navigating the application.
Volunteers will be at high schools and colleges around the state on Sunday to help with the forms. It's free, but people are encouraged to register at http://finaid.tamu.edu/cgs. Bring all 2009 tax information — that's W-2 forms, tax returns and other documents — for both the college-bound student and his or her parents or guardians.
See the Web site for more information, including times. Sessions in the Houston area include:
• Lone Star College — Cy-Fair, 9191 Barker Cypress Road.
• Bellaire High School, 5100 Maple.
• East Early College High School, 220 North Milby.
• Houston Community College — Northeast, 8001 Fulton.
• HCC –Southeast, 6815 Rustic Lane.
• San Jacinto College — North, 5800 Uvalde.
• San Jacinto College — South, 13735 Beamer Road.
• San Jacinto College — Central 8060 Spencer Highway.
• Texas A&M University-Galveston, 200 Seawolf Parkway in Galveston.
Jeannie Kever