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(-) Task Force Report
Russia's Wrong Direction
Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, "U.S.-Russia relations are clearly headed in the wrong direction," finds an Independent Task Force on U.S. policy toward Russia sponsored by the …
Task Force Report by Jack Kemp, John Edwards, and Stephen Sestanovich Europe Program
U.S. Policy Toward the Korean Peninsula
As tensions on the Korean peninsula rise after an international investigation found that North Korea was responsible for the sinking of a South Korean warship, a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) In…
Task Force Report by John H. Tilelli John Tilelli Jr., Scott A. Snyder, and Charles L. "Jack" Pritchard
Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations
July 12, 2011—Over the course of a generation, Brazil has emerged as both a driver of growth in South America and as an active force in world politics. A new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)-sponso…
Task Force Report by Samuel W. Bodman, James D. Wolfensohn, and Julia E. Sweig Latin America Studies Program
U.S. Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan
Ahead of President Obama's December review of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)-sponsored Independent Task Force report on U.S. Strategy for Pakistan and Af…
Task Force Report by Richard L. Armitage, Samuel R. Berger, and Daniel S. Markey
Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy
In his April 5 Prague speech, President Obama called for the United States to lead international efforts toward a world free of nuclear weapons. A new Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independe…
Task Force Report by Charles D. Ferguson, Brent Scowcroft, and William J. Perry
Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century
Cosponsored by James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University There could be more Californias in America's future unless the U.S. government adopts a long-term, comprehensive en…
Task Force Report by Amy M. Jaffe and Edward L. Morse
U.S. Middle East Policy and the Peace Process
The collapse of confidence between Israelis and Palestinians over the past year and the ability of opponents of peace on both sides to exploit incremental measures to their advantage have brought the…
Task Force Report by Henry Siegman
Rethinking International Drug Control
Despite the growing severity of the drug abuse problem in the United States and evidence that supply-control programs are ineffective, the supply-side approach to drug control has endured. This task …
Task Force Report by Mathea Falco
Promoting U.S. Economic Relations with Africa
In 1997, Washington paid unprecedented attention to Africa and its continental rebirth. Both then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright toured the continent. Presi…
Task Force Report by Peggy Dulany, Frank Savage, and Salih Booker
Economic Crises
Lessons of the Mexican Peso Crisis
What the United States and the international community have done for Mexico is unique. No other country, with the exception of Canada, could muster such support from the U.S.government. The Mexican p…
Task Force Report by John C. Whitehead and Marie-Josée Kravis


The Kavarna City Center - a shopping mall with commercial and office space - was opened Monday in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort town of Kavarna.
The mall was opened by the Kavarna Mayor Tzonko Tzonev, and the owners of the construction company Planex that built the City Center, Plamen Hristov, and Hristo Dimitrov.
The complex has a total all-out are of 12 700 square meters, and three parking lots. A store-chain hypermarket has already been open in the Kavarna City Center for two weeks.
The new complex is also going to host a number of stores, restaurants, a night club, and business offices. It was erected in less than a year at a spot in downtown Kavarna where an unfinished building had been decaying for more than 30 years.


AccorHotels wanted to create a strong visual identity for its 2017 Convention. In this meeting were invited hotels directors of Sofitel, Pullman and Mgallery.
The aim of this Convention was mostly to create a cohesion time but also to encourage these hotels directors to think differently about luxury.
They wished to free their team creativity so that they never take their job as granteed but always try to reinvit it...So that they always reinvent luxurious customer experience.
Made for you took up the challenge to illustrate the following idea: "What is luxury if not to gather the un-associable", to picture it on the invitation, on the note books given to attendees, as well as in the meeting place on Convention D day in both posters and a motion design video. The agency "gave birth" to several daily objects which at first sight have no meaning, reminding various aspects of the hosting and catering industry: the paper clip for admistrative work, lemon and pie to evoke gastronomy, cutlery to remind of customer service + the Eiffel tower representation to highlight French luxury, and to finish foliage & bird to evoke ornaments & gardens.
Made for you designed an original concept which enabled teams to change their view of their business, starting by changing their vision of daily objects. Being creative and innovative in a sector often starts with being able to look at customer needs, and by adding a little magic and emotion. Being professionals of course means to be conscientious and rigorous but also to bond with customers: a true experience beyond service.


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HC: Expiry date labels on medicine need to be clear, understandable
World Court orders review of Pakistan death sentence for Indian convicted of spying
GM Quader announced JaPa chairman
India aims to expel all illegal migrants, Amit Shah says
Knowledge deficit and freedom deficit
Esam Sohail , Esam Sohail
Published at 05:26 pm October 13th, 2017
The benefits and costs of pluralism are a package deal. Those who scream themselves hoarse that we can and should adopt the benefits without the costs are either being disingenuous or displaying an ignorance of monumental proportions.
Higher education in the Muslim world is a glaring example. From the dawn of the post-colonial era, autocrats of all stripes have dismissed calls for greater participatory governance and civil liberties as mere "Western" ideas and instead, in typical Oriental condescension, have called for their subject -- and subjects they are in reality, the constitutional nomenclature of citizenship notwithstanding -- to partake in "Western" learning without the "Western" ethos of freedom.
As late as two years ago, Egypt's American educated former President Morsi was peddling that opportunistic nonsense.
Morsi, like the vast majority of his current peers amongst presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs of Muslim-majority countries simply doesn't understand how the creation, dissemination, and refinement of knowledge work.
Financial investment alone doesn't do the trick, or else by now Americans and Europeans would be trekking to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to get their graduate degrees, instead of the reverse. The social and legal environment of open inquiry, encouragement of cross-disciplinary frameworks of scholarship at every level of education, and constant iconoclasm of "settled" concepts of history, physics, and biology are sine qua non for the advancement of knowledge in the modern world.
Such an environment simply doesn't exist in the Muslim world. If you think that is too broad of a statement, take a look at the 2017 Freedom House report on Global Freedom where every country of the world is ranked on a comprehensive set of measurable criteria for pluralism, democracy, rule of law, social liberty, and economic freedoms: Of the 60 odd countries where Muslims are in a majority, only two (Tunisia and Senegal) are considered fully free.
Nice sounding wordings in ignored constitutions, exhortations to "Islamic justice," and phony elections leading to pretend parliaments simply do not impress scholars who examine reality.
The price of that reality has been brutal. Each year, untold billions are transferred as payments from Muslims countries to those free societies where higher education thrives so that young Muslim women and men can avail educational opportunities they don't have at home.
The brain drain of the finest young minds has left too many Muslim countries no better in their human development metrics than they were half a century ago
The brain drain of the finest young minds -- future top level economists, scientists, engineers, professors, entrepreneurs -- has left too many Muslim countries no better in their human development metrics than they were half a century ago.
And the situation shows no sign of slowing down.
As late as 2015, a report commissioned by the Prime Minister of Malaysia and authored by Nidhal Guessoum and Athar Osama painted in stark relief the knowledge gap that has been created by the democracy gap: The world's Muslims countries, home to one in every four human beings on the planet, have together contributed 6% of the globe's patents, less than 2% of its scholarly publications, and fewer than 3% of its research dollars investment.
Amongst the world's Nobel science laureates and top 500 universities, any connection to Muslim societies is virtually non-existent.
The deficit of pluralism is a direct cause of the deficit of intellectualism.
Academic freedom, like freedom per se, is indivisible. Setting political and ideological boundaries around what can and cannot be inquired into in one discipline affects the sustainable environment of discovery in almost every other field of research very quickly.
It is not a surprise, thus, that despite having immediate applicability of their engineering feats, eventually the former communist bloc simply withered in terms of knowledge creation once the Cold War curtains came down.
The harsh truth is this: The creation, sustenance, diffusion, and refinement of knowledge thrive in those places where pluralism, democratic governance, and social freedoms are greater than those places lacking in such attributes of freedom.
And in terms of religion, no other geographical fact is more stunning for freedom than the reality that it simply doesn't exist in the Muslim world barring a couple of remote outposts. No amount of phony nostalgia about "Islam's Golden Age of Science" or the "Oxford of the East" can change that most inconvenient truism of contemporary intellectual life.
If the clarion call is indeed for the knowledge deficit in the Muslim world to be bridged quickly, the responsibility should rest squarely not on the "bad" West or some bogeyman of "colonialism" or even scholars, but on those rulers who have squelched individual freedoms and democratic pluralism while their own scions have been able to get the best education that the pluralist societies of the West have to offer.
Esam Sohail is a college administrator and lecturer of social sciences. He writes from Kansas, USA.
To learn from the best
Learning away from home
RMM celebrates Canadian Multiculturalism Day in Toronto
Education, discrimination, and revival of the American dream
Developing sustainably
Rise of the educated unemployed
Western Education

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Froth flotation - WikipediaFroth flotation is a process for selectively separating hydrophobic materials from hydrophilic. .. Froth flotation cells to concentrate copper and nickel sulfide minerals, Falconbridge, Ontario. Froth flotation is a process for separating minerals from.copper froth floatation,Froth Flotation Process - Mineral Processing / MetallurgyNov 23, 2016 . The Froth Flotation Process is about taking advantage of the natural . The copper concentrate from a copper lead zinc flotation circuit.
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The process of froth flotation entails crushing and grinding the ore to a fine size. . The froth, enriched in copper and molybdenum, is removed from the flotation.
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Patent US2048370 - Method of froth flotation ore separation .
(Cl. 209167) This invention relates to improvements in differential froth flotation process for use on ores containing copper and in which a separation is to be.
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procedure for an oxide copper ore from a Region in Central Africa for producing an . Keywords— Froth flotation, Sulphidisation, Copper oxide ore,. Mineralogy.
Oct 25, 2014 . Evaluation of sodium isobutyl xanthate as a collector in the froth flotation of a carbonatitic copper ore. Authors; Authors and affiliations. N. T. N.
Froth Flotation of Copper and Copper Compounds from Fine .
Keywords: Copper recovery, Froth flotation, Municipal solid waste incineration bottom ash .. The copper concentration of these fine fractions is still in a range of.
Sep 10, 2011 . The development of froth flotation had an enormous impact on copper mining, enabling chalcopyrite and other sulphides to be efficiently.
Froth flotation | Open Access articles | Open Access journals .
The development of froth flotation improved the recovery of valuable minerals, such as copper- and lead-bearing minerals. Along with mechanized mining,.


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[Editor's note (18/12/2009): the following article was published in Summer 2008. Despite strong cross-party support, the Heritage Protection Bill has since been shelved, ostensibly to make room in the parliamentary legislative programme for measures to deal with the credit crunch.]
The Heritage Protection Bill
Fundamental reform for England and Wales?
Roger Mascall
Bentley Priory, Stanmore, Middlesex: future inclusion of heritage assets such as this Grade II* listed building and surrounding Grade II historic park and garden would be as 'heritage structures' and 'heritage open spaces' on the register maintained by English Heritage in England.
The Heritage Protection Bill for England and Wales was published in draft on April 2nd and launched with this accompanying sound bite from Culture Secretary Andy Burnham: 'Heritage protection is as important as anything else we do in this department. But nobody can sit in an office in London and decide what is heritage or not. Local
communities have strong feelings about their own heritage and it is important that those voices are heard.'(1)
However, the draft bill, a culmination of proposals aired in the 2004 Green Paper Review of Heritage Protection: The Way Forward and the recent White Paper Heritage Protection for the 21st Century, remains a work in progress.
This is not surprising given the ground that the proposed reform now ambitiously seeks to cover. The drafting hands of two departments, the DCMS for protection and the DCLG for control, are apparent, and this has resulted in some clunky legislative drafting. Some new terms such as 'registered heritage structures' (in place of listed buildings or ancient monuments) do not trip easily off the tongue.
As currently drafted, the bill will replace provisions of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, the Historic Buildings and Ancient Monuments Act 1953, and the Ancient Monument and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 in respect of England and Wales. A considerable raft of supporting secondary legislation will be required to implement many of the clauses.
The bill is promoted under the themes of unification, simplification and greater public say in matters of heritage protection. The extent to which the draft bill addresses the concerns expressed in the Green Paper (that the system is too complex, processes are inaccessible, several consents are needed, and too much is protected) is less clear. While some reforms are aimed at directly addressing criticisms of the system, the opportunity has been taken to address other issues, some of which have considerable significance for those who manage or promote change in the historic environment.
THE HERITAGE REGISTER
A new Heritage Register is proposed for England and Wales to comprise heritage structures (no longer to be known as listed buildings or ancient monuments), heritage open spaces (registered parks and gardens and historic battlefields), and possibly historic landscapes (a category previously undefined in England). World Heritage Sites will also be included, but not conservation areas. English Heritage will have a duty to maintain the registers in England and the Welsh Ministers will bear this responsibility in Wales.
The definition of 'special interest', the trigger for heritage protection, will be expanded to denote 'special historic, archaeological, architectural or artistic interest'. It will be interesting to see whether this leads to wider registration of structures and spaces or further designation of conservation areas now that archaeological and/or artistic interest can be additional reasons for the asset to be considered to be of special interest.
Complex new procedures are proposed for the inclusion, amendment and removal of items from the register, incorporating processes for consultation, interim protection until a decision is made, and appeals. Cumulatively, the timescale for these processes has the potential to be drawn out; however, this is often the price to be paid for more openness and wider consultation. A likely concern is the effect of any such delays on development projects when the asset in question will be protected until a decision is reached and the time period for appeal has lapsed.
A new 'certificate of no intention to register' would be introduced for historic structures and, for the first time, for historic open spaces.
HERITAGE ASSET CONSENT
A core proposal of the draft bill is the replacement of listed building consent and scheduled monument consent with a new Heritage Asset Consent (HAC). In addition to works resulting in demolition, consent will now be required for works which result in 'damage, disturbance, removal, repair, alterations or additions' to registered heritage structures which affect their special historic, archaeological, architectural or artistic interest. In practice, this will serve to widen the nature and extent of works that will require consent. However, Heritage Asset Consent is not to be extended to include works to registered heritage open spaces.
It is noteworthy that while applications for scheduled monument consent are currently determined by the Secretary of State, DCMS, under these proposals all applications would be determined by local planning authorities. Clearly, authorities will require specialist expertise to determine complex applications currently approved by the Secretary of State, and this raises a resourcing issue during a period of acute financial restraint in most planning authorities.
The concept of class consent is also introduced for registered heritage structures. This is an order issued by the Secretary of State or Welsh Ministers that effectively grants advance consent for certain types of works to certain types of heritage structure.
CONSERVATION AREA CONTROL
The bill makes no reference to conservation areas other than in the accompanying explanatory notes. These, however, make it clear that sections on conservation areas will be included in the bill on introduction, and outline how further controls will be introduced through amendments to the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 1995. The need for conservation area consent for the demolition of buildings in a conservation area would be scrapped and planning permission required instead for both total and partial demolition of buildings in conservation areas. In effect this would reverse case law arising from the 1997 Shimizu case(2) which ruled that consent was only required for total or substantial demolition. Subject to how these provisions are enacted, it seems that we will return to the situation where even quite minor demolition, such as the removal of windows and chimneys – which does so much harm in a conservation area – will require consent. However, the explanatory notes make clear that the existing provisions relating to conservation area consent in the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 will not be replicated. This will presumably mean that unauthorised demolition in a conservation area will not, as now, constitute a criminal offence.
Perhaps the most radical proposal suggests that a section of the bill will contain 'provisions to reverse the case of South Lakeland District Council versus Secretary of State for the Environment'. In this well-reported case from 1992, it was held that the duty under section 72 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and conservation Areas) Act(3) did not require that development had to enhance the area in question. Preservation, by causing no harm, was sufficient. As the explanatory note clearly states, the bill will ensure that where change (development) does not benefit (or 'enhance') the conservation area, it will not be considered 'appropriate' and should presumably therefore be refused.
HERITAGE PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENTS AND CLASS CONSENTS
Heritage partnership agreements are essentially development or management agreements for listed buildings. The concept originated in the model developed in 1992 for the Willis (Faber) Building in Ipswich. While they have remained non-statutory, several models have since been developed including, for example, that prepared by the City of London for the residential elements of the Barbican and, more latterly, English Heritage's pilot projects for diverse assets such as the London Underground and historic bridges in North Cornwall.
Class consent is a tool promoted to give teeth to the heritage partnership agreements by enabling estates, for example, to avoid the need for repeatedly making identical applications for consent where the work concerned is routine.
The clauses in the draft bill finally make provision for statutory agreements between the owners of heritage assets and the local planning authority. All such agreements would be subject to the approval of English Heritage or the Welsh Ministers. Furthermore, relevant work would still require heritage asset consent, even if specified in the agreement, unless covered by a class consent order. This does, in part, address the existing weakness of such agreements by allowing them to include schedules of works that will not require consent. However, the two-tier process, including setting up the agreement itself and the seeking and approval of the necessary class consents, seems unduly
cumbersome.
HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT RECORDS
A specific new duty is imposed on local planning authorities (other than London where English Heritage will assume this duty) to create and maintain a historic environment record (HER). The HER will include details of registrable structures and open spaces which the local planning authority considers to be of special local interest. Such records must be publicly available and only subject to charges relating to the cost of the service.
SPECIAL LOCAL INTEREST
The draft bill introduces the concept of special local interest (whether historic, architectural, archaeological or artistic) where local planning authorities will be required to assess such assets against published principles of selection and to consult the owner(s). In effect, locally important assets will need to be included in the HER, but the draft bill is specific that they would not form part of the national register or require heritage asset consent for works to them. The simple transfer of locally listed buildings for example, to the HER may not be possible without thorough review against the principles of selection.
CONSERVATION AREA DESIGNATIONS
According to the explanatory notes accompanying the draft bill, the basis for designation of a conservation area will be expanded to include special archaeological and artistic interest in addition to the current criteria of special architectural and historic interest. It will be interesting to see what type of area could be deemed to be of sufficient archaeological or artistic interest to warrant designation as a conservation area.
FUNDAMENTAL REFORM?
Clearly the draft bill attempts to do much with varying degrees of success, and some of its more radical proposals have yet to be fleshed out. The re-naming and re-ordering of assets into the register cannot be considered a fundamental reform. However, the proposed widening of the tests of special interest for registration and designation, the widening of the criteria for requiring the new consent, together with the implied re-casting of the statutory duty in conservation areas, could have far reaching effects on the system. It would seem that more assets can be protected for wider reasons; more works to those assets will potentially require consent; and the bar will be raised for what is likely to be considered appropriate in a conservation area. Clearly, PPG15 and PPG16 will need to be radically revised when the new PPS on the historic environment is eventually drafted to reflect these changes.
The degree to which the draft bill has addressed the perceived problems of the existing system is questionable. However, it is clear that significant reform will be achieved in strengthening both the protection and control systems – in ways that were not perhaps expected.
The draft bill has a long path to the statute book and is likely to evolve further in light of scrutiny and consultation. The headline reforms are promoted as:
A single system for designating historic places, to replace listing, scheduling and registration, to be called the Heritage Register
Responsibility for designation in England to go from the DCMS to English Heritage
Introduction of a new system for the 'interim protection' of historic assets while they are considered for designation
Replacing listed building consent and scheduled monument consent with a new Heritage Asset Consent (HAC) and merging conservation area consent with planning permission
A duty for local authorities to maintain or have access to a Historic Environment Record (HER).
Draft Heritage Protection Bill, Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, April 2008
Heritage Protection for the 21st Century, Department for Culture Media and Sport & Welsh Assembly Government, March 2007
Review of Heritage Protection: The Way Forward, Department for Culture Media and Sport, June 2004
Protecting Our Historic Environment: Making the System Work Better, Department for Culture Media and Sport, July 2003
(1) DCMS press release 031/08, 2 April 2008
(2) Shimizu (UK) Limited versus Westminster City Council (1997)
(3) Section 72(1) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 requires local planning authorities to have regard to the desirability of preserving or enhancing the character or appearance of a conservation area in the carrying out of planning functions.
This article is reproduced from The Building Conservation Directory, 2008
Update, September 2012
Recently there have been several significant changes in UK government planning guidance and policy.
In England Planning Policy Guidance Note 15: Conservation of the Historic Environment (PPG15, 1994) and Planning Policy Guidance Note 16: Archaeology and Planning (PPG16, 1990) have been cancelled by the Government. Initially replaced by Planning Policy Statement 5 (PPS5) in March 2010, current policy guidance for England is now given in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) issued in March 2012. Further guidance is proposed, but in the meantime the guide which originally accompanied PPS5 remains in force - see PPS5 Historic Environment Planning Practice Guide.
In Scotland the principal statutory guidance on policy is now Scottish historic environment policy (SHEP), which was published in December 2011, with subsidiary guidance given in Historic Scotland's Managing Change leaflets. These documents together replace the Memorandum of Guidance on Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas published in 1998.
ROGER MASCALL is a partner at planning consultants DPP. He leads a team that provides heritage and conservation planning services to public and private sector clients across the UK and Ireland. He has worked at English Heritage and as a conservation officer.
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When Disaster Strikes: Preparing to Weather the Storm
Features Health Data
November 1, 2018 at 12:02 am 1
The United States healthcare system has learned a lot of lessons in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed an estimated 400,000 medical records in a matter of hours, according to a Journal of AHIMA analysis of the event. The rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) in the years since the disaster has helped ensure that the health information of evacuees and individuals who ride out future storms at home will retain access to critical information.
In recent years, the United States has seen a number of devastating storms and resulting floods on its coasts, tornadoes in the Midwest, and unprecedented wildfires in California and other western states. And while disaster response is never perfect, the creation of health information exchange (HIE) and cloud storage systems have made it much more difficult for extreme weather to delay treatment. But plans and procedures must already be in place—before disaster strikes—for these systems to be effective.
The nimbleness with which healthcare providers can respond to disasters has been put to the test recently during Hurricanes Harvey, Florence, and Michael, and at least one survey suggests provider readiness is lacking. According to a survey conducted by the e-prescribing vendor DrFirst, only slightly more than half of healthcare providers believe their organization's disaster plan is comprehensive enough to cover a variety of disaster scenarios both inside the organization and across the community.
"We must take measures now to address the critical gaps impacting patient care and safety, such as communication challenges and ready-access to medical records and specialty care providers," G. Cameron Deemer, president of DrFirst, said in a press release.
Disaster preparedness continues to be an important consideration for provider organizations—especially those most likely to contend with natural disasters such as hurricanes. Scientists predict more extreme weather events to increase in the future in line with increasing global temperatures. A major new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveals that global temperatures are trending upwards at an alarming rate.
"To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a 'rapid and far-reaching' transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before," a Washington Post analysis of the report states.
While the connection between climate change and extreme weather is complicated, researchers indicate that climate change makes certain kinds of extreme weather-related events more common—such as wildfires and intensified rainfall—and 2018 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record. That results in wildfire seasons lasting longer than the norm—and that, combined with rapid rates of development and urban sprawl in vulnerable geographies makes fires more devastating, National Public Radio (NPR) noted.
"What we see from climate change is that you lose a lot of these very moderate and light rainfall storms and replace it with very intense storms," Andreas Prein, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told NPR. For example, the number of large rainstorms has increased by as much as 70 percent over the last 50 years, according to that article.
HIEs and Disaster Preparedness
Health information management (HIM) professionals are in positions that can greatly assist provider response and enable the swift treatment of evacuees and other groups impacted by storms through their involvement with HIEs. HIM professionals are regularly tasked with ensuring data integrity in HIEs and can play a role in advocating that their organizations partner with new and existing HIEs.
The Sequoia Project, the largest HIE network in the country, has spent considerable time preparing its members for disasters, said Mariann Yeager, MBA, CEO of the Sequoia Project. It supports the Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE), which can be made available in any geographic area to support healthcare professionals and first responders caring for displaced individuals or volunteer healthcare workers who are deployed to a disaster area outside of their normal health IT environment.
Yeager says her organization got involved with PULSE last year and is leveraging its own HIE networks to expand and support it. The system was initially developed in preparation for a major West Coast earthquake, but it was activated this year in response to California's wildfires.
"What PULSE addresses is if someone can't receive care in a normal care setting—their hospital or clinic is destroyed or damaged or there's not enough capacity and they're seeking care in a tent or parking lot or a school or some other building where they stand up field clinics," Yeager says.
Emergency workers are given credentials to log in to PULSE through their state's website so they can access patient documents such as prescriptions and recent test results. The networks they're linked into have already taken the necessary HIPAA precautions to protect the data. As an article in Wired notes, this could have been useful in scenarios such as Hurricane Harvey.
Yeager says that professionals in the emergency management profession are very attuned to the risks of storms of increasing intensity as well as man-made and natural events. She acknowledges PULSE isn't a one-stop solution for disaster response, "but it opened our eyes that interoperability doesn't have to be perfect. Every record means every life. That's what we're trying to do—get more universal coverage and make it more accessible across the country," Yeager said.
Joanna Pardee-Walkingstick, integrations specialist at the Georgia Regional Academic Community Health Information Exchange (GRAChIE), is a lifelong Oklahoma resident, where her region has seen some of the deadliest tornadoes in recent years, including the EF-5 tornado that destroyed the former Moore Medical Center.
"Cloud housing and cloud services have been a true gamechanger in the last couple years. Having the technical infrastructure to access remote servers during a disaster is huge. We haven't had to worry about complete and total data loss during a disaster," Pardee-Walkingstick says.
Like others who work for HIEs, she's had plenty of experience deploying and preparing to deploy HIE connections during weather events. Right after Hurricane Katrina she assisted a group that was one of the administrators of a FEMA grant that helped to maintain medication continuity in behavioral health patients who were Hurricane Katrina evacuees sent to Oklahoma. And now, in her current job, she has helped activate HIE networks in advance of the last several major hurricanes to strike the southeast including Irma, Maria, Florence, and Michael.
She says GRAChIE's work is focused on doing its best to be prepared to handle and protect the health information of anyone who will be affected by storms in the future, regardless of cause. During discussions in President George W. Bush's administration that sparked the national push for EHRs, Pardee-Walkingstick says the concept of enabling a person's medical records to follow them in the aftermath of a disaster has been a long-term priority. Since then, she says, things have come a long way.
"It's been a long-standing effort to have these tools [HIEs and EHRs] and now we need people to use them. We're finally hitting the level where there's a huge adoption of HIEs. Now we're at that point of that convergence of technology and it's very real and keenly felt," she notes.
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Laurie Taylor (she/ella). Her work is geared towards enabling a culture of radical collaboration that values and supports diversity, equity, and inclusion. Kindness counts. Thoughts my own.
Laurie N. Taylor, Librarian
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Jam Session: America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World
By: Laurie
In: Collection Items, exhibit
Meridian International center is hosting an exhibition, Jam Session: America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World, on Thursday, April 3, 2008. The exhibition will feature photographs and documents drawn from archives around the country. The brochure cover image, shown above, includes Dizzy Gillespie's horn from a Cuban magazine, held at the University of Florida and scanned for especially for Jam Session. Unfortunately, the magazine is under copyright so we couldn't put it online, but the Jam Session exhibit will be filled with many important items not online, but far too wonderful to miss. The exhibit:
chronicles the tours of American jazz legends as they traveled the globe on behalf of the U.S. State Department. From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and others served as cultural diplomats. They toured through over 35 foreign countries in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, where they played their world-famous music and interacted with citizens—promoting a positive view of the United States at a time when Cold War tensions were at their height.
The exhibit even opens with a concert on April 3, at 6:30pm. See more about the exhibit and related events here. I wish I could make it, but if someone else does, please share comments and photos of the exhibit!
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https://etcl.uvic.ca/2023/01/17/2023-open-scholarship-awards/ https://twitter.com/INKEproject/status/1615528191015223296
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12 of 15: Frédérick Madore @fmadore, 2023 Emerging #OpenScholarship Award Winner for Islam Burkina Faso Collection. https://islam.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/s/bf
(to be continued in 13)
I have been working on this project since 2018! Islam Burkina Faso Collection is an open-access database containing over 2600 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications and photographs, and over 215 references on Islam and Muslims in BF
https://islam.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/s/bf/page/home https://twitter.com/UFSahelResearch/status/1486339891302600705
Sahel Research Group @UFSahelResearch
Very happy to launch the Islam Burkina Faso Collection, an open-access digital database containing over 2,600 documents, led and curated by SRG @fmadore https://sahelresearch.africa.ufl.edu/research/islam-burkina-faso-collection/
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The Call for Participants is now OPEN for NetWorkLab: a new, fully-online institute aimed at teaching remote work methodologies to professionals in the digital humanities and related fields. Don't miss out! https://greenhousestudios.uconn.edu/projects/networklab


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Hunter Weeks is an American filmmaker and producer of documentaries.
He has directed and produced seven feature-length documentaries including 10 MPH, 10 Yards, Inspired to Ride (about the Trans Am Bike Race), Reveal the Path, Ride the Divide (about the Tour Divide mountain bike race, Where the Yellowstone Goes, and WALTER: Lessons from the Worlds Oldest People. Hunter is also a producer and director of season 1 and 2 the Carbon TV original documentary series, American Harvest.

References

Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American documentary filmmakers

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      Jan 7, 2017 • Taylor Lloyd •  gpu,  pascal,  cuda

Understanding the Pascal GPU Instruction Pipeline

There is lots of literature on instruction pipelines in CPUs, but GPUs remain poorly understood.
GPUs execute instructions in a wildly different manner, and many common compiler transformations that are effective for CPUs – such as strength reduction, or partial dead code elimination – can actually hurt GPU performance. Through the lens of NVidia's latest series of GPUs, let's take a look at how instructions are actually executed and how that affects us as programmers and compiler developers.

The NVidia GP100

The latest GPU from NVidia is downright impressive. Each GPU contains 56 SMs, each capable of issuing 4 warp-instructions per cycle, for a monstrous theoretical 7168 instructions per cycle. This theoretical limit is sadly, not reachable due to a relatively meager set of functional units behind the massive pipeline front-end. Each SM is divided into 2 symmetric halves, each containing 2 warp dispatchers, 8 memory load/store units, 16 double-precision floating-point units, 8 special function units (SFUs), and 32 general-purpose cores.
Due to unit saturation, the actual maximum IPC is only 5376.

So why set up a GPU this way? The answer lies in the architecture, which can only rarely push instructions maximally through the front of the pipeline. Previous CUDA architectures often left many functional units idle, so the Pascal architecture reduced their number, instead adding additional SMs.

Mapping the Grid

Before we can discuss instruction execution, we need to understand what happens when a CUDA kernel is invoked. When you invoke a kernel such as kernel<<<gridDim, threadDim, sMem, stream>>>(d_ptr), the following things happen:

If the stream provided is a blocking stream, we will wait for the stream to become idle before continuing

The CUDA binary is selected as follows:

If there is a cached binary for this kernel and compute architecture on the GPU, it is used.

If there is a binary included in the executable for this kernel and compute architecture, it is sent to the GPU cache, and used.

If there is PTX for this kernel in the executable, it is assembled by the CUDA runtime into a binary, sent to the GPU cache, and used.

A compute work-unit is appended to the work queue for each unique grid index in gridDim

Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) each accept up work units until a resource limit is hit. Possible limits include number of threads(2048), blocks(32), registers(65536), or available shared memory(64K).

The Streaming Multiprocessor assigns all required resources for all accepted threads, including registers and shared memory assignments. This allows for zero-overhead context switching, used later.

The Pascal Pipeline

At this point, each SM is ready to execute instructions. SMs manage threads in warps of 32, and decode/issue/execute those groups simultaneously.

Instructions flow down through the instruction cache, to the instruction buffer, are scheduled to a dispatch unit, which then executes in the appropriate CUDA core for the instruction.
Similarly to many modern CPUs, Pascal GPUs contain a dedicated instruction cache, with extremely high hit rate. Unlike CPUs, when there is an instruction cache miss, the latency can often be hidden by other instructions already present in the instruction buffer.

The instruction buffer is where the SM first partitions. At initialization time, threads are assigned to one half of the SM or the other. NVidia has never published exactly how this split is done, but we can assume something simple like even/odd warp IDs is used. The instruction buffer does not just hold instructions, but rather (instruction, warpID, threadMask) tuples. The warpID is used to calculate the offset into the register file for each thread within the warp, and the threadMask is used to specify threads that should not execute the current instruction.
Within the instruction buffer, entries are divided into ready and not-ready sets, where instructions in the ready set have all data available and are ready for execution.

For the moment, let's step over the warp scheduler. It's important, and we'll get back to it, but we need to understand some other parts first. Let's talk about dispatch. The dispatcher is responsible for ensuring threads get executed. It takes the given instruction, the warp ID, and the thread mask, and calculates the thread IDs that will actually execute the instruction. Using these thread IDs, it calculates absolute register addresses for each thread. Then, the dispatcher sends each thread-instruction to a free, applicable functional unit. If there are insufficient functional units, then the dispatch will queue the remaining thread-instructions for the following cycle.

So what do we have for functional units? The pascal architecture defines 4 different types of addressable functional unit: Load/Store memory units, Double precision floating-point units, Special functional units (used for approximate transcendental functions, such as sqrt, sin, etc), and "cores", responsible for all remaining operations.

It's at this point we reach the Warp Scheduler. The job of the warp scheduler is simple: Each cycle, try to fill both dispatch units. If you can't, then stall one or both dispatch units. Complicating this job are a some requirements:
1. Sometimes, one or both of the dispatch units will still be busy.
1. Don't dispatch an instruction that we have no free functional units for.
1. If we dispatch 2 instructions, they must come from the same warp.

Each cycle, the warp scheduler recieves the number of available functional units, and the number of free dispatchers, as well as the instructions in the ready set.
If both dispatchers are free, the warp scheduler preferentially selects a pair of sequential independent warp instructions. (Assuming both instructions have some free functional units)
Failing that, it will stall one of the dispatchers, and selects an instruction with functional units available. Notably, the warp scheduler does not attempt to maximize functional unit usage.

So far, we've discussed how thread masks are used, but not how they are generated. Thread masks are generated by CUDA cores when a conditional branch is executed, and threads within the warp evaluate the conditions differently. You can imagine a stack of thread masks, where each subsequent divergent condition produces an additional thread-mask in the set. When some threads in a warp take a conditional branch, a mask is generated and put on top of the stack, executing the not-taken branch first. Masked execution continues until a compiler-injected merge point is reached. Then, the complement of the mask is generated and execution begins again from the taken branch target. When the merge point is reached again, the mask is popped off the stack.

Key Differences from CPUs

Some of the above sounds a little bit odd, but it's worth pointing out how this system differs from traditional CPUs. The key idea behind the GPU architecture is clear: We don't care about instruction latency.
GPUs can execute an instruction from any thread, and each functional unit is fully pipelined (within reason, the memory subsystem has a finite request buffer). This means GPUs don't have to wait for an instruction to complete before moving on, they just do something else while they wait. As long as there's other work to be done, the GPU is working.

Pascal GPUs do not attempt to do register renaming, or pass results backwards. There's no branch prediction, and most of the addressable functional units are multipurpose, to reduce the required complexity on the warp scheduler and dispatcher. Memory access is SLOW, with cache hit times upwards of 50 cycles, and cache misses climbing above 500 cycles. The goal of the GPU is to always be doing something else to hide latency, rather than trying to reduce it.

Takeaways

Aside from learning about a downright odd computing architecture, I hope you take some things away from this post. Here's what I learned while writing this:

In order to write performant code on the Pascal GPUs, the level of both thread-level and block-level parallelism must be extremely high.

Branch divergence within a warp can halve performance because of the need to travel both paths, but phrasing the problem as arithmetic may not help if it uses more functional units.

Using instructions that target previously unused functional units can actually unlock hidden additional performance

Even as GPUs emphasize massive thread-level parallelism, instruction-level parallelism is still required for full performance.

If you made it this far, you're probably way too interested in GPU architecture. I hope you learned something! Feel free to comment below, or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks!

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ABOUT

My name is Taylor Lloyd, and I love fiddling with development tools and optimizing day-to-day work. I'm currently working on a Masters Thesis at the University of Alberta, looking into compiler optimizations for GPU computing. In my free time (hah!) I dabble in Android and Home Automation.

Plugging it in Wrong

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At Universitas, helping you save for your child's education is our priority! But we are more than an RESP company; like you, most of us are parents who wish to nurture our children's curiosity, talents and dreams.
We all know reading to children at an early age has incredible benefits. In addition to favouring intellectual development, reading creates special bonding moments, instills a lifelong love of books and establishes a strong foundation for education.
So in 2015, we are calling on you to help us create the ultimate booklist with our series "Story Time Favourites!" We will regularly present books recommended by Universitas employees all year. Let us know which stories you and your little ones love by "liking" or commenting our Facebook posts or blog. Make your own recommendations so we can post these and add them to our list too!
Promote reading by sharing the booklist with your friends and family. Let's find out our children's story time favourites... and make your next visit to the library or bookstore a little easier!
THE FIRST BOOK ON OUR LIST!
We thought we would kick things off with a timeless classic. Our first recommendation is: "Love You Forever" by Canadian author Robert Munsch. It is one of the most beloved children's stories ever written.
Robert Munsch had made up the song after he and his wife had two stillborn babies (they have since become the adoptive parents of three children).
This story chronicles the everyday life experiences of a mother and her son from his youth to adulthood. Despite the exasperation the mother feels when faced with the daily challenges of parenthood, every night, she cradles her son and sings him the above lullaby, promising to love him forever. The story is simple and humorous, but also conveys a profound message about the circle of life, love and parenting throughout the different stages of our lives.
As adults, our busy schedule doesn't leave us much to do a simple thing that used to bring us such joy as children... playing. Take a moment to rediscover the pleasure of sharing family moments through playtime, and strengthen your family's bond while having fun.
The "Terrible Two": When, why and what to do about it?


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share data in memory between VU and a program (solver, mesher, etc.) for visual monitoring.
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Q: Python- Multiple os.path.split() Do you guys know a more intelligent way to do this ?
os.path.split(os.path.split(os.path.split(os.getcwd())[0])[0])[0]

os.getcwd() is for example:
/my/path/to/my/directory

I should get
/my/path/

That is really an exaggeration and duplication of the os.path.split()
Thanks

A: I would suggest you using os.sep:
os.sep.join(os.getcwd().split(os.sep)[:-3])

A: You can use pathlib
from pathlib import Path
path = Path('/my/path/to/my/directory').parents[2]
print(path)

>>> /my/path

As of Python 3.4, pathlib is part of the standard libraries, but you can install in earlier versions

pip install pathlib

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text:
Squircle review: Squircle MP3 player
Nate Lanxon
June 12, 2008 4:48 a.m. PT
Compare These
Astell & Kern AK Jr
SanDisk Clip Jam
Apple iPod Touch 2015
The Good It has twin LEDs; works as a card reader; skims across a lake nicely; rock-bottom price.
The Bad That it exists; sound quality; battery life; design and buttons.
The Bottom Line Quite simply the most horrible MP3 player we've ever seen. It sounds abysmal and looks grotesque. Although it technically does work as a card reader, it should be considered an absolute emergency backup at best. Give your £15 to a charity and leave the Squircle on the shelf
Review Sections
Squircle
The Squircle could pretentiously be called a convergence device, but it's really just a glorified card reader. Zero internal memory, no screen, a rubbery shell and a peculiar shape aren't the best starting points for an MP3 player.
But play MP3s it does, and to boot it'll jack into your nearest USB cable for all the card reading fun you can wave a stick and an SD card at. For just £15, we felt we should give this little guy a chance.
Find yourself a large lump of black Plasticine and squish it into a flat square shape. Then round off two opposite corners and leave it to go stagnant. The result is a lump of rubbery gunk that resembles half a square, half a circle -- hence the name. There are also five large rubbery buttons that require significant pushing and endless patience. It's about as pleasant to use as putting your hand in a trouser press.
On one side there's a mini-USB port and a headphone socket. On another, an SD card slot. There's no cover for any of these ports, so don't take it to the beach.
The back of the Squircle holds a single AAA battery, hidden behind a little flap. There's also a lanyard hook -- you'll be able to show off this grotesque piece of kit to all your friends.
We hoped the Squircle's primary feature was its card-reading abilities. Sadly, it's very slow as a card reader. It took over five minutes to transfer 90MB of digital photos from our SD card, as opposed to about 40 seconds using our usual reader. It also reads and writes to MMC memory cards. For emergency use, the Squircle will do the job.
Aside from being a card reader, the Squircle plays MP3s. If you have an old 256MB SD card hanging around, load it up with your least favourite songs and thrust it into the Squircle's card slot. Tracks can be skipped through quickly using the bloodcurdling navigation buttons. The Squircle will support memory cards up to 2GB in capacity.
Continue to next page
Best MP3 Players for 2020
All best mp3 players
Astell & Kern's first "budget" player, the AK Jr marries classic design with class-leading...
The SanDisk Clip Jam offers what the iPod Shuffle doesn't: a screen and more storage space.
Apple's iPod Touch gives you a good portion of the iPhone 6 experience in a tiny package,...
35 of the best movies to stream on Netflix
Not sure what to watch tonight? Here are some of the best movies Netflix has to offer.
20 best movies to stream on Amazon Prime Video
Not sure what to watch on Amazon tonight? Let's round up some of its best gems.
Best dating sites for 2021
Get swiping.
54 best TV shows to stream on Netflix
Looking for a great show to watch? Here are some of the best Netflix has to offer.
14 best TV shows to watch on Disney Plus
Looking for more great shows like WandaVision? Let's round up Disney's best gems.
Now on CNET News
How the hunt for COVID-19's origin became a twisted, confusing mess
Biden as president: What it will mean for tech
Trump's love-hate relationship with tech eventually backfired
Discuss Squircle
Discuss: Squircle review: Squircle MP3 player


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text:
Journal of Computer Research and Development ›› 2018, Vol. 55 ›› Issue (12): 2794-2809.doi: 10.7544/issn1000-1239.2018.20170756
Abstract: The problem of differentially private data publishing has attracted considerable research attention in recent years. The current existing solutions, however, cannot effectively handle the release of high-dimensional data. That is because these methods suffer from curse of dimensionality and various domain sizes, which will lead to the lower utility of publication. To address the problems, this paper presents PrivHD (differentially private high dimensional data release) with junction tree, a differentially private method for publishing high-dimensional data. PrivHD firstly generates a Markov network with exponential mechanism, which employs the high-pass filter technique to reduce the candidate space in the sampling process. After that, based on the network, PrivHD obtains a complete cluster graph in terms of full triangulation and node elimination, and then relies on the cluster graph and maximum spanning tree method to construct a differentially private junction tree. Finally, PrivHD uses the post-processing technique to boost the noisy counts of marginal tables in each cluster in junction tree, and based on the boosted result, PrivHD produces the high-dimensional synthetic dataset. PrivHD is compared with the existing approaches such as PrivBayes, JTree on the different real datasets. The experimental results show that PrivHD is better than its competitors on k-way query and SVM classification.
Key words: high-dimensional data, differential privacy, Markov network, junction tree, marginal distribution
Zhang Xiaojian, Chen Li, Jin Kaizhong, Meng Xiaofeng. Private High-Dimensional Data Publication with Junction Tree[J]. Journal of Computer Research and Development, 2018, 55(12): 2794-2809.
https://crad.ict.ac.cn/EN/Y2018/V55/I12/2794
[1] Li Song, Hu Yanming, Hao Xiaohong, Zhang Liping, Hao Zhongxiao. Approximate k-Nearest Neighbor Query of High Dimensional Data Based on Dimension Grouping and Reducing [J]. Journal of Computer Research and Development, 2021, 58(3): 609-623.
[10] Tang Benxiao, Wang Lina, Wang Run, Zhao Lei, Wang Danlei. A Defensive Method Against Android Physical Sensor-Based Side-Channel Attack Based on Differential Privacy [J]. Journal of Computer Research and Development, 2018, 55(7): 1371-1392.
[11] Zhang Xiaojian, Jin Kaizhong, Meng Xiaofeng. Private Spatial Decomposition with Adaptive Grid [J]. Journal of Computer Research and Development, 2018, 55(6): 1143-1156.


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Integrated Human-Animal Disease Surveillance
| Contributor(s):: Whitney A Mauer, John B Kaneene
Wild Health: Dogs and Bats and Chickens, Oh My!
| Contributor(s):: Voelker, R.
2019Jama321181756-17570098-748410.1001/jama.2019.2026engtext
Prevalence of Disorders Recorded in Dogs Attending Primary-Care Veterinary Practices in England
| Contributor(s):: Dan G. O'Neill, David B. Church, Paul D. McGreevy, Peter C. Thomson, Dave C. Brodbelt
Purebred dog health is thought to be compromised by an increasing occurence of inherited diseases but inadequate prevalence data on common disorders have hampered efforts to prioritise health reforms. Analysis of primary veterinary practice clinical data has been proposed for reliable...
Performativity and a microbe: Exploring Mycobacterium bovis and the political ecologies of bovine tuberculosis
| Contributor(s):: Robinson, Philip A.
Implementing a One Health approach to emerging infectious disease: reflections on the socio-political, ethical and legal dimensions
| Contributor(s):: Chris Degeling, Jane Johnson, Ian Kerridge, Andrew Wilson, Michael Ward, Cameron Stewart, Gwendolyn Gilbert
Background: 'One Health' represents a call for health researchers and practitioners at the human, animal and environmental interfaces to work together to mitigate the risks of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). A One Health approach emphasizing inter-disciplinary...
Zoonotic diagrams: mastering and unsettling human-animal relations
| Contributor(s):: Lynteris, Christos
A first estimate of the structure and density of the populations of pet cats and dogs across Great Britain
| Contributor(s):: James Aegerter, David Fouracre, Graham C. Smith
Policy development, implementation, and effective contingency response rely on a strong evidence base to ensure success and cost-effectiveness. Where this includes preventing the establishment or spread of zoonotic or veterinary diseases infecting companion cats and dogs, descriptions of the...
Member Perceptions of the One Health Initiative at a Zoological Institution
| Contributor(s):: Hannah Padda, Amy Niedbalski, Erin Tate, Sharon L. Deem
Zoological institutions play an important role in promoting the goals of the One Health movement. We launched the Institute for Conservation Medicine (ICM) at the Saint Louis Zoo in 2011 to advance the goals of One Health. In 2016, we distributed a survey to Zoo members to evaluate member...
Model-Based Reverse Translation Between Veterinary and Human Medicine: The One Health Initiative
| Contributor(s):: Benjamin Schneider, Violeta Balbas-Martinez, Albert E. Jergens, Inaki F. Troconiz
There is growing concern about the limitations of rodent models with regard to recapitulation of human disease pathogenesis. Computational modeling of data from humans and animals sharing similar diseases provides an opportunity for parallel drug development in human and veterinary medicine....
VetCompass Australia: A National Big Data Collection System for Veterinary Science
| Contributor(s):: Paul McGreevy, Peter Thomson, Navneet K. Dhand, David Raubenheimer, Sophie Masters, Caroline S. Mansfield, Timothy Baldwin, Ricardo J. Soares Magalhaes, Jacquie Rand, Peter Hill, Anne Peaston, James Gilkerson, Martin Combs, Shane Raidal, Peter Irwin, Peter Irons, Richard Squires, David Brodbelt, Jeremy Hammond
VetCompass Australia is veterinary medical records-based research coordinated with the global VetCompass endeavor to maximize its quality and effectiveness for Australian companion animals (cats, dogs, and horses). Bringing together all seven Australian veterinary schools, it is the first...
Canine Detection of the Volatilome: A Review of Implications for Pathogen and Disease Detection
| Contributor(s):: Craig Angle, Lowell Paul Waggoner, Arny Ferrando, Pamela Haney, Thomas Passler
The volatilome is the entire set of volatile organic compounds (VOC) produced by an organism. The accumulation of VOC inside and outside of the body reflects the unique metabolic state of an organism. Scientists are developing technologies to non-invasively detect VOC for the purposes of medical...
Elimination of Dog-Mediated Human Rabies Deaths by 2030: Needs Assessment and Alternatives for Progress Based on Dog Vaccination
| Contributor(s):: Ryan M. Wallace, Eduardo A. Undurraga, Jesse D. Blanton, Julie Cleaton, Richard Franka
Background: Rabies imposes a substantial burden to about half of the world population. The World Health Organization (WHO), World Organization for Animal Health, and the Food and Agriculture Organization have set the goal of eliminating dog-mediated human rabies deaths by 2030. This could be...
Application of the welfare quality protocol in pig slaughterhouses of five countries
| Contributor(s):: Dalmau, A., Nande, A., Vieira-Pinto, M., Zamprogna, S., Martino, G. di, Ribas, J. C. R., Costa, M. P. da, Halinen-Elemo, K., Velarde, A.
The objective of the present study is to assess the variability of the measures used in the welfare quality (WQ) protocol for pigs among slaughterhouses in five different countries and to propose alarm and critical thresholds for the calculation of scores for future development of an animal...
Current opinion on maximizing veterinary profession growth and contributions
| Contributor(s):: Nimmanapalli, R., Donapaty, S. R.
Veterinary profession sphere overlaps three major biology arenas namely agriculture, basic sciences, and human medicine. Thus, so far the investments in veterinary field are not proportional to the scope of their responsibilities. Rededication and rejuvenation can help veterinary profession to...
Welfare effects of a disease eradication programme for dairy goats
| Contributor(s):: Muri, K., Leine, N., Valle, P. S.
The Norwegian dairy goat industry has largely succeeded in controlling caprine arthritis encephalitis (CAE), caseous lymphadenitis (CLA) and paratuberculosis through a voluntary disease eradication programme called Healthier Goats (HG). The aim of this study was to apply an on-farm welfare...
Company human-animal interaction in the municipality of Paragominas, southeast of ParaInteracao homem-animal de companhia no municipio de Paragominas, sudeste do Para
| Contributor(s):: Santos, R. C. B., Moura, K. B., Sousa e Sousa, E., Oliveira, R. A. de, Soares, B. C., Melo, W. de O.
Objective of this study was to characterize the creation of companion animals raised in the southeastern region of Para. The study was conducted in the municipality of Paragominas-PA, from June to July 2015. The method used in data collection was the survey with questionnaires containing open and...
Risk behaviors for disease transmission among petting zoo attendees
| Contributor(s):: M. McMillian, J.R. Dunn, J.E. Keen, K.L. Brady, T.F. Jones
To evaluate risk behaviors for transmission of zoonotic diseases at petting zoos during a period without a recognized disease outbreak. Observational survey with environmental microbiologic sampling. 6 petting zoos in Tennessee. Attendees were observed for animal and environmental contact, eating...
Sero-epidemiological and haematological studies on toxoplasmosis in cats,dogs and their owners in Lahore, Pakistan
| Contributor(s):: Azeem Shahzad, Muhammad Sarwar Khan, Kamran Ashraf, Muhammad Avais, Khalid Pervez, Jawaria Ali Khan
The current study was conducted to find out the epidemiological status of toxoplasmosis in cats, dogs and human population in Lahore city of Pakistan and to determine the possibility of transmission of toxoplasmosis from cats and dogs to their owners. Overall 56% cats were seropositive for...
The Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance: A One Health Consortium
| Contributor(s):: Mark M. Rweyemamu, Peter Mmbuji, Esron Karimuribo, Janusz Paweska, Dominic Kambarage, Luis Neves, Jean-Marie Kayembe, Aaron Mweene, Mecky Matee
Formed in 2008, the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS) is a One Health consortium of academic and research institutions involved with infectious diseases of humans and animals. Operating in partnership with world-renowned centres of research in industrialised...
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\section{Introduction}

Statistical parametric methods are frequently used in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, with two main machine learning techniques: hidden Markov-models (HMM, \cite{Zen2007}) and deep neural networks (DNN, \cite{Zen2013}). Recently, the focus of TTS research has moved to end-to-end solutions, applying  neural vocoders (e.g.~WaveNet~\cite{Oord2016} and WaveGlow~\cite{Prenger2019}) and sequence-to-sequence models using attention (e.g.~Tacotron2~\cite{Shen2018}). Still, traditional (non-end-to-end, vocoder-based) DNN-TTS systems are useful in limited data scenarios, when there is few training data available, for example with speech and biosignal recordings, or in case of audiovisual speech synthesis.

\subsection{Audiovisual speech synthesis}

Audiovisual speech synthesis is a subfield of the more general areas of speech synthesis and computer facial animation \cite{Massaro2015}. The goal of the visible speech synthesis is typically to obtain a mask with realistic motions, not to duplicate the musculature of the face to control this mask.

The field of visual speech synthesis is fairly well established and a variety of approaches have been developed (including rule-based \cite{Perrier2014} and data-driven methods \cite{Schabus2013}). Rule-based systems include models for speech sequence planning, for muscle mechanisms and for the physical speech production apparatus. Within the biomechanical model of the vocal tract, the tongue can be represented as a finite element mesh \cite{Perrier2014} and complex biomechanical simulations are necessary to estimate the internal muscle stresses during the movement of human articulators \cite{Stavness2014}.
In the context of data-driven approaches and HMM-based synthesis, there are two main categories: image-based systems are supposed to look like a video of a real person, while motion capture based systems derive features from facial points tracked over time \cite{Schabus2013}.
For HMM-based audiovisual synthesis, a synchronous corpus of parametrized facial motion data and acoustic speech data is necessary.
Schabus et al. showed that in combined HMM-based text-to-speech synthesis and facial animation, joint audiovisual models perform better than training separate acoustic and visual models \cite{Schabus2013}.

\subsection{Predicting articulatory movement from text}

Another type of TTS extension is when the target is to predict articulatory motion (e.g.~lip or tongue movement) and not just the face of the speaker, besides the speech output. This requires special biosignals to be recorded, which can track the movement of the articulatory organs (e.g.\ EMA, X-ray, vocal tract MRI, and ultrasound tongue imaging). With such a system, by giving an arbitrary input text, one is able to hear the speech and, in synchrony with it, see how to move the tongue in 3D to produce target speech sounds. This visual feedback can make a big difference for pronunciation training in L2 learning, especially when the target language contains speech sounds which are difficult to articulate.

Most earlier studies in this context were using point-tracking devices, like electromagnetic articulography (EMA)~\cite{Ling2010,Ling2010a,Wei2016a,Steiner2017,LeMaguer2017,Yu2018}. Ling and his colleagues proposed a HMM-based text-to-articulatory movement prediction system, i.e.\ which can synthesize the speaker's mouth from text~\cite{Ling2010}. Here, the durations were not modeled, but in a subsequent study, they also investigated the timing aspects and analyzed the critical articulators~\cite{Ling2010a}. Wei et al.\ used DNNs for the text-to-EMA prediction and confirmed that stacked bottleneck features are effective for this purpose~\cite{Wei2016a}. Steiner and his colleagues experimented similarly with text-to-EMA prediction using HMMs (with synchronous text-to-speech), and  they also included a geometric 3D tongue model as the target~\cite{Steiner2017}. Next, they compared HMMs and DNNs for the text-to-tongue model prediction~\cite{LeMaguer2017}. It was found that with less than 2 hours of data, DNNs outperformed HMMs. Yu and her colleagues predicted 3D articulatory movement, from text and audio inputs, therefore combining the text-to-speech and acoustic-to-articulatory inversion fields~\cite{Yu2018}. For the machine learning approach, they used a bottleneck long-term recurrent convolutional neural network. They showed that the text information complements well the acoustic features during the prediction of EMA-based articulation. The final output of the system is speech synchronized with 3D articulatory animation, using a facial mesh model~\cite{Yu2018}.

As shown above, there have been several studies investigating text-to-articulatory motion with HMMs or DNNs, but all of them are using point-tracking equipment (electromagnetic articulography). Medical imaging target, like ultrasound or MRI, have not been used before in this context.

\begin{figure*
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0.0cm 25.4cm 0.0cm 0.0cm, clip=true, width=0.9\textwidth]{figs/Fig_txt2ult.pdf}

\caption{Block diagram of the proposed approach.}
\label{fig:txt2ult}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{Ultrasound tongue imaging}

Ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) is a technique suitable for the acquisition of articulatory data. Phonetic research has employed 2D ultrasound for a number of years for investigating tongue movements during speech \cite{Stone1983}. Stone summarized the typical methodology of investigating speech production using ultrasound~\cite{Stone2005a}. Usually, when the subject is speaking, the ultrasound transducer is placed below the chin, resulting in mid-sagittal images of the tongue movement. The typical result of 2D ultrasound recordings is a series of gray-scale images in which the tongue surface contour has a greater brightness than the surrounding tissue and air.
Compared to other articulatory acquisition methods (e.g.\ EMA, X-ray, XRMB, and vocal tract MRI), UTI has the advantage that the tongue surface is fully visible, and ultrasound can be recorded in a non-invasive way~\cite{Stone2005a,Csapo2017c,Ramanarayanan2018}. An ultrasound device is easy to handle and move, since it is small and light, and thus it is suitable for fieldworks, as well. Besides, it is a significantly less expensive piece of equipment than the above mentioned devices.

In our earlier studies, we have shown that ultrasound is a feasible solution for articulatory-to-acoustic mapping~\cite{Csapo2017c,Csapo2020c} and acoustic-to-articulatory inversion~\cite{Porras2019}. However, text-to-ultrasound synthesis has not been investigated before.

\subsection{Contributions of this paper}

The goal of this paper is to extend DNN-TTS with articulatory movement prediction, using ultrasound images of the tongue. We show on the data of several speakers that the combined TTS and synthesized articulatory motion is feasible and can result in acceptable articulatory movement video. Text-to-articulatory movement prediction might be useful for computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) applications and articulatory visualization.

\section{Methods}

\subsection{Data}

For the data, we used the UltraSuite-TaL80 database~\cite{Ribeiro2021} (\url{https://ultrasuite.github.io/data/tal_corpus/}). We chose four English male (03mn, 04me, 05ms, 07me) and four female speakers (01fi, 02fe, 06fe, and 09fe). In parallel with speech, the tongue movement was recorded in midsagittal orientation using the ``Micro'' ultrasound system of Articulate Instruments Ltd.\ at 81.5~fps. Lip video was also recorded in UltraSuite-TaL80, but we did not use that information in the current study. The ultrasound data and the audio signals were synchronized using the tools provided by Articulate Instruments Ltd. Each speaker read roughly 200 sentences -- the duration of the recordings was about 15 minutes, which was partitioned into training, validation and test sets in a 85-10-5 ratio.

\subsection{Processing the ultrasound data}

In our experiments, articulatory features estimated from the raw scanline data of the ultrasound were used as the additional target of the networks (see Fig.~\ref{fig:txt2ult}). The  64$\times$842 pixel images were resized to 64$\times$128 pixels using bicubic interpolation, and we calculated PCA coefficients, similarly to EigenTongues~\cite{Hueber2007}. While calculating the PCA, we aimed at keeping the 70\% of the variance of the original images, thus having 128 coefficients. An example for the PCA eigenvectors can be seen in Fig.~\ref{fig:ultpca}, and the result of PCA is presented in Fig.~\ref{fig:ultpca_pred_video}. To be in synchrony with the acoustic features (frame shift of 5~ms), the ultrasound data was resampled to 200~Hz.

\subsection{DNN-TTS framework}

Fig.~\ref{fig:txt2ult} illustrates the proposed approach, i.e.~the combined acoustic and articulatory feature prediction using a DNN from text input.
The experiments were conducted in the Merlin DNN-TTS framework~\cite{Wu2016} (\url{https://github.com/CSTR-Edinburgh/merlin}). Textual / phonetic parameters are first converted to a sequence of linguistic features as input (based on a decision tree).
Next, neural networks are employed to predict acoustic (60-dimensional MGC, 5-dimensional BAP, and 1-dimensional LF0, with delta and delta-delta features) and articulatory features (128-dimensional ULT-PCA, with delta and delta-delta) as output for synthesizing speech, at a 5~ms frame step with the WORLD vocoder. From the predicted 128-dimensional articulatory features, the 64$\times$128 image is reconstructed using the PCA matrix, and bicubic interpolation is applied to resize the image to 64$\times$842 pixels, to be comparable with the original data. For visualization purposes, we transformed this raw scanline data to wedge format, which shows how the real aspect ratio of the tongue surface (for an example, see Fig.~\ref{fig:ultpca_pred_video}). The transformation was done with 'ultrasuite-tools' (\url{https://github.com/UltraSuite/ultrasuite-tools})

\subsubsection{FC-DNN}

The DNN used here is a fully-connected feed-forward multilayer perceptron architecture (FC-DNN, six hidden layers, 1024 neurons in each). We applied tangent hyperbolic activation function, SGD optimizer, and a batch size of 256. The input features had min-max normalization, while output acoustic features had mean-variance normalization. We trained the networks for 25 epochs with a warm-up of 10 epochs, applying early stopping, and a learning rate of 0.002 after that with exponential decay. We only trained both a duration model and an acoustic model, the latter also containing the articulatory features.

\subsubsection{LSTM}

Recurrent networks are typically more suitable to process sequential data. Therefore, we also trained an LSTM network following the Merlin recipe (four FF layers with 1024 neurons each, and one LSTM layer with 512 neurons). To ensure a longer training with the recurrent network, we used ADAM optimizer, and a warm-up of 30 epochs with early stopping. The other parameters were the same as for the FF-DDN. We trained both duration and acoustic models.

All neural network trainings were done individually with each speakers' data, without average voice training or adaptation.

\section{Experimental results}

After training the above models, we synthesized sentences from the test parts of the ultrasound datasets. To measure the validation and test error, we calculated both spectral prediction error (Mel-Cepstral Distortion, MCD), and an articulatory feature related error (ULT-PCA/RMSE, calculated on the normalized PCA values). We trained both duration and acoustic models, but for the error calculations, we synthesized the test sentences with their original timing. This way, warping the features in time was not necessary for calculating the error measures.

\subsection{Demonstration samples}

An example for the PCA eigenvectors are in Fig.~\ref{fig:ultpca}, and the predicted articulatory feature sequence can be seen in Fig.~\ref{fig:ultpca_pred} (speaker '01fi', sentence '201\_aud'). As lower dimensional PCA vectors contain more information, the visualization was done in an exponential way and only 8 dimensions are plotted out of 128. Clearly, both the FC-DNN and the LSTM are following the tendencies found in the original data (e.g.\ in case of PCA-1, PCA-2, PCA-4), but the fine details are not modeled well. This type of oversmoothing is a frequent phenomena in statistical parametric speech synthesis. The higher dimensions (e.g.\ PCA-64 and PCA-128) are almost constant; i.e.\ they could not be modeled well with neural networks.

To visualize the individual ultrasound images, we plotted several ultrasound frames from the original videos and from the predicted ones, as a function of time, in Fig.~\ref{fig:ultpca_pred_video}. The reason why we are plotting every third frame is that for the 5~ms frame step of the Merlin toolkit, the 81.5~fps ultrasound video was interpolated to 200~Hz, and therefore, in the predicted data, roughly every 3rd frame contains visible tongue motion. In case of speaker '01fi', we can see in the top row (original ultrasound images after PCA) that there is a significant tongue movement, i.e.~the tongue tip (on the right) goes higher, as the time passes. Both the predictions with the DNN and LSTM network follow the articulatory movement, but the images are smoothed -- again, resulting from the statistical training. For speaker '03mn', similar tendencies can be observed: the movement of the tongue is changing its curvature as a function of time, but in the DNN-predicted and LSTM-predicted images, the tongue surface is not as clear as in the original data.

As the synthesized motion of the tongue is more visible in real-time videos, we made available several samples at \newline \url{http://smartlab.tmit.bme.hu/ssw11_txt2ult}.

\begin{figure*
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0.0cm 0.0cm 0.0cm 0.0cm, clip=true, width=0.9\textwidth]{figs/UTI_PCA_spkr-01fi.pdf}

\caption{PCA eigenvectors, from speaker '01fi'. Top: raw, scanline data (resized to 64$\times$128 pixels). Bottom: wedge orientation.}
\label{fig:ultpca}
\end{figure*}

\begin{figure*
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0.0cm 0.5cm 0.0cm 1.2cm, clip=true, width=0.9\textwidth]{figs/Fig_predicted_ULTPCA128.pdf}

\caption{Original and predicted articulatory features, from speaker '01fi'. Sentence: '"I leave it to nobody," said Shakespeare, sulkily.'}
\label{fig:ultpca_pred}
\end{figure*}

\begin{figure*
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0.0cm 0.0cm 0.0cm 0.0cm, clip=true, width=\textwidth]{figs/Fig_UTI_sequence_01fi.pdf}

\vspace{4mm}

\includegraphics[trim=0.0cm 0.0cm 0.0cm 0.0cm, clip=true, width=\textwidth]{figs/Fig_UTI_sequence_03mn.pdf}

\caption{Original and predicted articulatory feature sequences. Top: speaker '01fi', bottom: speaker '03mn'. The numbers at the bottom-left correspond to the frame number of the video.}
\label{fig:ultpca_pred_video}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{Objective measures}

Table~\ref{tab:objective_MCD} summarizes the MCD results. The MCD values of the test sentences with the FC-DNN are between 5.8--7.0~dB (average: 6.228~dB), whereas with LSTM they are between 6.0--7.5~dB (average: 6.593~dB), indicating that the recurrent neural network was not helpful in estimating the acoustic features. The reason for this might be that we have limited articulatory-acoustic databases (roughly 200 sentences for each speaker), which is too small for training an LSTM model.

The results of the RMSE calculated on the articulatory feature are summarized in Table~\ref{tab:objective_ULTPCA128}. The lowest error was achieved with the data of speaker 09fe: with FC-DNN, the test error is 2.9, while with LSTM, the test error is 3.1. The tendency is similar to the case of MCD: the LSTM network was not helpful in predicting the articulatory features, probably due to the small size of the data.

\begin{table}
\caption{MCD errors on the dev/test set.} \label{tab:objective_MCD}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l||c|c}
     & \multicolumn{2}{c}{{MCD}} \\
Speaker & FC-DNN & LSTM \\
\hline\hline
01fi & 6.995  / 6.971  & 6.647  / 6.588  \\
02fe & 6.095  / 5.803  & 6.486  / 6.259  \\
03mn & 5.781  / 5.785  & 5.977  / 5.948  \\
04me & 5.896  / 6.024  & 6.318  / 6.312  \\
05ms & 6.244  / 6.256  & 7.235  / 7.083  \\
06fe & 5.758  / 5.582  & 6.444  / 6.330  \\
07me & 6.589  / 6.562  & 6.831  / 6.749  \\
09fe & 6.516  / 6.844  & 7.197  / 7.472  \\
\hline
average  & 6.234  / 6.228  & 6.642  / 6.593  \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\begin{table}
\caption{ULTPCA/RMSE errors on the dev/test set.} \label{tab:objective_ULTPCA128}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l||c|c}
     & \multicolumn{2}{c}{{ULTPCA128/RMSE}} \\
Speaker & FC-DNN & LSTM \\
\hline\hline
01fi & 3.292  / 3.223  & 3.319  / 3.208  \\
02fe & 3.533  / 3.732  & 3.753  / 3.904  \\
03mn & 3.147  / 3.660  & 3.289  / 3.680  \\
04me & 3.849  / 3.985  & 4.031  / 4.033  \\
05ms & 3.133  / 3.233  & 3.249  / 3.405  \\
06fe & 3.439  / 3.250  & 3.743  / 3.451  \\
07me & 3.544  / 3.595  & 3.498  / 3.461  \\
09fe & 3.022  / 2.864  & 3.234  / 3.133  \\
\hline
average  & 3.370  / 3.443 & 3.515  / 3.534  \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\section{Discussion and conclusions}

We have shown above that text-to-ultrasound video prediction is feasible as an extension to traditional DNN-based text-to-speech synthesis, despite the relatively small amount of training data. Although the synchrony between visual and speech output is not enforced by the model, the tied acoustic and articulatory features during the DNN training ensure that the audio and visual features are in synchrony, i.e.~that in the generated ultrasound videos, the tongue is moving according to the synthesized speech. To objectively check this, SyncNet, part of Wav2Lip could be applied to assess synchrony~\cite{Prajwal2020}. Our paper found that the joint learning of both acoustic and articulatory features has advantages, but this is not substantiated -- a comparison of the joint model against two separate models remains future work.

Although there have been several earlier attempts for extending text-to-speech synthesis with articulatory data, all of these studies were using EMA, being a point tracking equipment~\cite{Ling2010,Ling2010a,Wei2016a,Steiner2017,LeMaguer2017,Yu2018}, and containing less spatial information about the tongue than ultrasound. The advantage of ultrasound in this context is that the resulting video shows a larger portion of the tongue, compared to EMA.

Articulatory movement prediction from text input can be useful for audiovisual speech synthesis. A specific application is computer-assisted pronunciation training / computer-aided language learning~\cite{Katz2014,Jones2017,Agarwal2019}, which can be beneficial for learners of second languages. With such a combined TTS and text-to-articulatory prediction system, by giving an arbitrary input text, one is able to hear the speech and, in synchrony with it, see how to move the tongue in 2D or 3D to produce target speech sounds. This visual feedback can be helpful for pronunciation training in L2 learning, especially when the target language contains speech sounds which are difficult to articulate.

In the future, we plan to investigate speaker adaptation and speaker-independent training. For this, a common articulatory space has to be defined, as the currently used PCA representation is specific for each individual speaker. Also, multi-task learning might be useful in this context: a system could potentially be pre-trained on speech-only material which is easier to acquire, and the UTI be trained only in addition. Besides, we plan to investigate the effect of the misalignments in the ultrasound transducer position~\cite{Csapo2020d,Csapo2020e} on the text-to-ultrasound prediction results.

The code is accessible at \url{https://github.com/BME-SmartLab/txt2ult}.

\section{Acknowledgements}

The author was partly funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary (FK 124584 and PD 127915 grants). We would like to thank CSTR for providing the Merlin toolkit and the UltraSuite-TaL articulatory database.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

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