text:
Q: Codepush deployment to staging triggers production app update request I've integrated CodePush into my react-native app and set up the Staging and Production environments. I've set it up so I can run the app locally in debug and have that use the staging config and also run the app in release mode and have that use the release config (https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-code-push/blob/master/docs/multi-deployment-testing-android.md).
After releasing to staging (not promoted to production at this point), when I run the app locally in release mode it prompts to update. This shouldn't happen as it should only happen on the promotion of that release to prod?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
HomeEnjoy the Stunning Luxury Tower in NYC Through This Virtual Reality Tour
virtual realityFebruary 6, 2020
Enjoy the Stunning Luxury Tower in NYC Through This Virtual Reality Tour
Virtual Reality Tour is a way to immerse its users into a virtual world. Clients can interact with the surroundings that a 360 video can't do. You are not only in control but can also go into an alternate world.
The latest smartphone devices can support the VR-quality graphics making virtual reality accessible to everyone. The built-in accelerometers detect movements as you navigate your way into your virtual space. Businesses do better using Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies.
New York's 57th street is the world's most luxurious street in the world! In the last five years, more houses were bought on Billionaire's Row. The properties amounted up to $25 million that's way more than any other road around the world. It's rife with super-tall towers: 432 Park Avenue, 111 West 57th Street, and Central Park Tower. All these towers are taller than 1,300 ft. That's about a quarter of a mile high.
Shadows of these skyscrapers cast on Central Park. Critics noting that building owners of the multi-million dollar residences pay little or no property tax at all.
Not everyone can experience being in these towers but the virtual reality tour makes it possible. Imagine immersing in an apartment in one of the towers. The height as high as a helicopter could fly that some even described being occasionally above the clouds. Perplexed whether its terror or exhilaration, the view will leave you euphoric.
Why A Virtual Reality Tour?
There are many benefits as to why people are using a virtual reality tour. Here are a few of them:
Instead of printed promotional outputs, Virtual reality allows business owners to show the real beauty. There won't be a need for designing new concepts. A virtual reality tour is an efficient way to connect to fresh leads.
Reach Remote Prospects
The augmented reality still allows for printed collateral but made better by bringing an interactive experience. Think of it as the combined use of a custom brochure, a tablet, and an app.
Remote leads will find luxurious NYC towers accessible to them, especially when they're caught up in business somewhere else. VR's ability to reach a wider audience within minutes create a meaningful and impressive experience. It conveys quality graphics for leads without requiring them to travel pronto.
Emotional Experience
A virtual reality tour places its users inside a new world. Imagine viewing a home for the first time, the elegant and luxurious tower in New York. you'd still get stunned with the views virtually, in awe of how the virtual world connects you to its virtual representation.
Customized Surface
VR is more than a walk through the towers of New York. Sudden changes in renovations can easily be modified to make an updated version of the layout and design. The up-to-date modification bringing a rewarding experience on what's to be expected in the home's every corner and hallways. Even the fabrics can be designed meticulously.
Angle Inside and Out
The virtual reality tour includes a great copy including the interiors and exteriors of the stunning NYC tower. It will give you the feeling of the ultimate experience of an overlooking room in one of the suites in the building. The VR experience reflects the euphoric journey into a sales-generating campaign.
The best advantage you can get out of this experience is that it's just a virtual reality. It can be a preparation for what you could expect before actually going there. You still see it's beauty and look at the amazing view up and down. You can get away anytime you feel like it's way too high for your taste. Reality would take a lot of factors before you reach the lowest ground. Explore more about the Virtual Reality Tour by creating your free account!
Tags: augmented realitytechnologyvirtual realityvirtual reality industries
360 Virtual Tour Mistakes You Must Avoid Right Now!
real estate, virtual reality September 23, 2019
Virtual Staging Adds Real Impact to Multifamily Marketers
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


One of my readers sent me a list of questions on asymmetrical traffic flows in IP networks, particularly in heavily meshed environments (where it's really hard to ensure both directions use the same path) and in combination with stateful devices (firewalls in particular) in the forwarding path.
Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet (and the more I think about this problem, the more I feel it's not worth solving).
IP was designed as a datagram protocol where (A) every packet is independently forwarded across the network and (B) paths are unidirectional – path taken from source to destination is in no way related to the return path. Even MPLS (which is effectively a form of circuit switching) doesn't have bidirectional paths… and this fact annoyed traditional transport equipment vendors (and their customers) so much that they tweaked MPLS until they got MPLS-TP. I've seen many networks using MPLS, and I have yet to see one using MPLS-TP (or maybe I'm speaking with the wrong people).
As long as you understand these principles and don't try to tweak IP into something it was never designed to be life's good and your network is simple. The moment you're trying to enforce traffic flow symmetry you're trying to squeeze overripe tomato into a small square hole – it's bound to get messy, and you'll probably increase network complexity to ridiculous levels.
I was involved in one such attempt - the customer had VLANs stretched across multiple data centers and wanted to ensure symmetrical traffic flow through the "preferred" device - and while we got it semi-working (on the whiteboard), it got ridiculously complex.
Speaking of stateful devices: one of the underlying assumptions of IP networks is the end-to-end transparency, and stateful devices break that assumption. No wonder things get complex.
The only "reliable" way to enforce symmetrical traffic flow across a stateful device (that I'm aware of) is to use source address NAT, forcing the return traffic to go through the same device. Alternatively, make sure that the stateful device is the only path between the endpoints – that's why we use pass-through load balancers and make them default gateways for server segments.
Of course you can also deploy a cluster of stateful devices across all possible paths, and exchange state across them. I wish you luck… let's talk after your concoction survives the first DDoS attack, a serious port scan, and a split-brain-inducing link failure.
Please think of VRRP also as a source of asymmetry (tracking WAN interface is not a solution when you have many WAN links with redundancy and some of them can be active or master router whereas the other is backup router).
VRRP is another ugly hack trying to fix a wrong assumption ("we'll never need more than one gateway per LAN"). CLNP had ES-IS built in; there was nothing like that in IPv4, and even in the IPv6 world some people want to replace RA with the kludge they know (DHCP-assigned default gateway + VRRP).
Also, the interface tracking (or any other means of selecting active VRRP peer) is there just to ensure most of the outbound traffic doesn't traverse too many hops. Trying to solve asymmetrical traffic flows with it is another great way of making your network unnecessarily complex.
Finally, there's IP multicast and RPF checks… and no, I'm not opening that can of worms.
State exchange could also be a solution with a rate limit on the number of sessions that could be synchronized (DDoS & Big Scan would not be a problem). If the DCI link goes down (Split-Brain) everything will still working as in the case where there was no Firewall, this would not increase the risk.
You could also move the firewall to the edge...I don't follow what happens lately in the industry but isn't this one of the promises of SDN / openflow / vmware NSX etc? I think Cisco tried to scratch the area of integrating more brains in the switches with PISA SUP some years ago but it probably didn't work out.
As always - it's only a problem if it causes a problem for the business. Networkers, including myself, can get a bit 'OCD' sometimes, performing IT for IT's sake, and crafting the network as if it was a sculpture.
To be sure, the asymmetric flows could be classed as technical debt that makes troubleshooting harder during an issue. But that troubleshooting effort needs to be balanced against the effort and additional complexity that forced symmetry brings.
Symmetric routing could be important for special applications such an RTT measurements based dynamic delay compensation.
The best solution is to move to a hybrid SDN architecture and just control the interesting traffic flows.
Based on the knowledge of the full topology you could select the same paths for both directions and then execute this policy in the network.
Of course, it has a price, so do it just for those flows where it is really necessary.
Many customers/people just don't know the "interesting" traffic. Not everybode is Facebook or any other "one" content provider, exactely knowing what's interesting.
From my point of view in a "normal" latency network this kind of problem should not bother a normal behaving application.
Broad topic. Just to touch it. Same stateful device and different interfaces for ingress and egress paths is easy as long as both share the same security zones. Most devices have zone level policies (not interface level). Not hitting the same stateful device (ingress and egress traffic goes through different devices) can be sometimes solved by using HA clusters. The worst is when we do not hit the same HA cluster (different paths). It depends on topology.
No quick, general fixes. Disabling the tcp-syn check moves us to 90ties where we had to have acl for both direction because the returning traffic is not automatically enabled. Not always acceptable.
To Jumbo or Not to Jumbo?
Want to Learn Something New? Learn Git!
Where Do You Want to Move the Complexity?


text:
Q: TSQL to compare data and return results on different rows I'm trying to write a SQL query that will compare the same data in two tables, one is the original data and another will be an updated version of this data.  I want to compare the two datasets for any changes and return those changes.  That I have managed to do, but I'd like to return the results in different rows not in the same row.
So currently my result set looks like this:

Type of Change
Original Staff Number
New Staff Number
Original Name
New Name
Original Title
New Title

UPDATE
1234
1234
Joe Smyth
Joe Smith
Mr
Mr

UPDATE
4321
4321
Sally Green
Sally Green
Ms
Mrs

I can see that it returns two Staff members who have changes in their details.  Joe Smyth's name was wrong and has been corrected to Joe Smith and Sally Green has changed from Ms to Mrs.
However, I'd like my returned dataset to be in this shape:

Type of Change
Data Source
Staff Number
Name
Title

UPDATE
Original Data
1234
Joe Smyth
Mr

UPDATE
New Data
1234
Joe Smith
Mr

UPDATE
Original Data
4321
Sally Green
Ms

UPDATE
New Data
4321
Sally Green
Mrs

This is the query I used to put it this way:
First I returned any changes to a temp table.
    SELECT      b.StaffNumber
    INTO        #StaffNumbers
    FROM        OriginalData a
    LEFT JOIN   NewData b
    ON          a.StaffNumber = b.StaffNumber
    AND         (a.Name != b.Name
    OR          a.Title != b.Title)
    WHERE       b.StaffNumber IS NOT NULL

Then pulled the data I wanted from the different data sets using UNION to join them:
    SELECT  *
    FROM    (
                SELECT      'UPDATE' as [Type Of Change],
                            'Original Data' as [Data Source],
                            StaffNumber as [Staff Number],
                            Name,
                            Title
                FROM        App_Person a
                INNER JOIN  #GmcNumber b
                ON          a.StaffNumber = b.StaffNumber
                UNION
                SELECT      'UPDATE' as [Type Of Change],
                            'New Data' as [Data Source],
                            a.StaffNumber as [Staff Number],
                            Name,
                            Title,
                FROM        PersonExtract a
                INNER JOIN  #StaffNumbers b
                ON          a.StaffNumber = b.StaffNumber
            ) sub1
    ORDER BY [Staff Number]

So while I'm getting the result I want, I'm wondering if there's a smarter way to do this than what I've done above.  If anybody has any ideas/suggestions.
Many thanks!!

A: You can use CROSS APPLY to unpivot the old and new data out of the join.
No temp tables necessary.
SELECT
  'UPDATE' AS [Type of Change],
  a.StaffNumber,
  v.[Data Source],
  v.Name,
  v.Title
FROM OriginalData a
JOIN NewData b ON a.StaffNumber = b.StaffNumber
    AND (a.Name != b.Name OR a.Title != b.Title)
CROSS APPLY (
  SELECT 'Original Data' as [Data Source], a.Name, a.Title
  UNION ALL
  SELECT 'New Data', b.Name, b.Title
) v

If you want all the differences, you need a FULL JOIN
SELECT
  CASE
    WHEN a.StaffNumber IS NOT NULL AND b.StaffNumber IS NOT NULL
      THEN 'UPDATE'
    WHEN a.StaffNumber IS NULL
      THEN 'INSERT'
    ELSE 'DELETE'
    END AS [Type of Change],
  ISNULL(a.StaffNumber, b.StaffNumber) AS StaffNumber,
  v.[Data Source],
  v.Name,
  v.Title
FROM OriginalData a
FULL JOIN NewData b ON a.StaffNumber = b.StaffNumber
    AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT a.Name, a.Title INTERSECT SELECT b.Name, b.Title)
CROSS APPLY (
  SELECT 'Original Data' as [Data Source], a.Name, a.Title
  WHERE a.StaffNumber IS NOT NULL
  UNION ALL
  SELECT 'New Data', b.Name, b.Title
  WHERE b.StaffNumber IS NOT NULL
) v


text:
Here's where you can get Oregon's best BBQ, according to Food Network
Updated: Jan. 12, 2023, 7:41 a.m. |
The Pit Boss, which is 2 sides, cornbread and 1/4 pound of brisket, 1/4 pound of pulled pork, 2 pork ribs and a hot link. Podnah's Pit has been around since 2006 and expanded into a bigger space on NE Killingsworth in 2011.LC- The Oregonian
Julie Evensen | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Michael Russell | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Food Network has crowned the 'best barbecue' spot in Oregon.
The network's '50 States of Barbecue' list ranks the best BBQ restaurant in each state.
Northeast Portland's Podnah's Pit Barbecue claimed the top spot for Oregon. Unsurprising, maybe, because Food Network stars like Guy Fieri have long appreciated the restaurant's Texas-style BBQ. Fieri is a particular fan of the lamb ribs.
- Breakfast tacos at Podnah's Pit Michael Russell | The OregonianMichael Russell | The Oregonian
Podnah's Pit is a long-time Portland BBQ favorite, and offers traditional smoked barbecue favorites like beef brisket, pulled pork and ribs. It came in at No. 4 the last time we did a comprehensive round-up of Portland's best BBQ.
Our critic's take: Like the list that named Ken's Artisan Pizza the second best pizzeria in the world last month, most of these national and international roundups seem to be put together via little more than a cursory Google search. It was appropriate, then, that owner Rodney Muirhead wasn't even aware that Podnah's had made the list until he was contacted by a local TV news channel Tuesday. But that doesn't mean the selections don't have merit.
When it opened in 2006, Podnah's blazed a trail in Portland, becoming one of the first local spots to slow-smoke brisket, ribs and other meats in the Central Texas style, with a simple salt-and-pepper rub rather than a saucy marinade. Over the past half decade, as Austin's barbecue scene has risen on the national stage, several upstart food carts and pop-ups — most notably Matt's BBQ — have opened, taking the crown as Portland's "best" barbecue.
But among proper restaurants, there's no place I'd rather eat barbecue in Oregon than Podnah's, with its well-lit dining room, daily Tex-Mex and fried chicken specials, budget-friendly kid's menu, beer on tap and margaritas both traditional and slushie.
Podnah's Pit is located at 1625 NE Killingsworth, Portland, OR 97211. Hours: Wed - Sun 12-8pm
Portland's best new food carts of the past decade — where are they now?
These are the Portland restaurants Guy Fieri visited on 'Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives'
Portland's best barbecue joints, ranked (from 2017)


Are there nontoxic nail products?
Some chemicals in nail polish and polish remover are known to cause cancer, and others lead to birth defects.
What's the best way to navigate the supermarket?
Cut through all the labels and find the healthiest, safest food in the store.
What's the most environmentally sound way to care for my lawn?
You don't need grass to have a lush yard.
Forget store-bought cleaning products and let these natural cleaners do the dirty work.
How can back-to-school be less wasteful?
Vanessa dives into the issue of lower pH levels in the sea.
As CO2 levels rise, the pH level of the ocean lowers.


text:
Unconventional Revision: MFA vs. Therapy
Wendy J. Fox June 3, 2019 | 1 book mentioned 6 min read
For emerging writers, often the advice is "find your voice," but it's hard to know what that actually means. In the mid 2000s, I began seeking therapy for anxiety and depression, and my doctor gave me writing assignments: He'd ask me to fictionalize events in my real life that had been painful as a way to reframe the narratives. He'd also ask me to write happy endings or to write myself as the person I wanted to become, rather than the person I currently was.
Most writers are familiar with journaling, and many writers are familiar with writing in order to process. By the time I was in treatment, I already had an MFA—and with that came significant revision experience. But my therapy assignments dug deeper than anything I would have ever been willing to share in grad school workshops, and one of them became my first published work, another the opening story to my debut collection, and another the genesis for a novel. But before that, I was just another person on a psychiatrist's couch.
"I read this article," I tell my psych, Dr. D., "About people who eat their own hair, and while it sounds pretty, uh, terrifying, I also wonder if it's better to have a specific problem?"
"Sure," he says, "Could be trichotillomania, or could be pica. Maybe something else. It's not so scary if it's what you need, by the way. Everyone has their own ways of coping."
My doc actually wasn't all that into diagnosis, or at least if he was, he wasn't doing it with me. He prescribed me antidepressants, and when I said I wasn't comfortable with the idea of taking a pill every day, he dismissed me, telling me that at some point, I'd want to flush the scrip, but for now, fill it. He reminded me that I had told him I was taking a regular antihistamine.
So, I filled it. That was at a time in my life when I also bought way too much makeup, because I was frequently wandering the aisles of Bartell's while the pharmacy filled my Zoloft or Wellbutrin or Claritin or birth control. I would wait for my name to be called through the loudspeaker, and then go up to the counter with a jumble of lash extending mascara, pots of eye cream and face powder, and maybe something practical, toothpaste or bandages, a packet of dish sponges or a box of trash can liners.
I was trying. The pharmacy tech would ring up my purchases along with my script. I was lucky enough to have health insurance, so the ancillary products were usually more than my copay.
When I pushed Dr. D. again, a few weeks later, he pulled out his Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and thumbed to some page about unattached anxiety and slid it across the floor from his upright seat to my reclined couch.
"Does that make you feel better?" he asked.
"No," I said, because it didn't.
I flipped the manual closed and looked at his huge collection of Legos. He sometimes saw children, I knew, but it wasn't just the children who played with the Legos. When I asked him once why he had so very many baskets of Legos, he said that he wanted to see what people would build if they were not restricted by their materials. "What do they make?" I asked. "A lot of things," he said. "But, mostly houses with no windows and no doors."
"I read this thing," I say to Dr. D. "About how people who are diagnosed with terminal illness experience manic productivity, how it reorganizes their life."
At this point, outside of Dr. D.'s writing prompts, I'd really not written anything in years. His exercises were the only connection I had to the page, and my reading was confined to magazines. Though I had always loved novels, story collections, and sprawling autobiographies, I didn't have, at the time, the concentration for anything over a couple thousand words.
"Sure," he says. "That happens."
In the same session, I read one of the assignments: to write about my body. I share a story about a girl who is knit together with bird feathers and beeswax, with a hybrid heart cobbled from bits of offal bound by fired clay and wrapped in rags. How the parents of this girl are present at her making, along with the potter and the forge worker and the weaver and the glassblower, and the local seamstress who stitches it all together at no charge.
Reading those old paragraphs now, it's not hard to identify the ache I had and the feeling of deep disconnection from everyday life paired with blood connection to my folks. I probably spent a dozen hours on those two pages, trying to translate the idea from brain to paper.
On a creaky old sofa, my creaky old doctor offers me an affirmation.
"Good," he says. "That's good."
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The thing is, the experience I had with mental health services was actually ultimately positive.
"Dr. D?," I ask. "You must have had patients who have suicided, right?"
He pauses. "It's part of the work I do."
To be clear, while many times I wanted to disappear, I never wanted to die. I tell Dr. D. this. I ask him if I'm not suicidal, do I really need to be in weekly therapy. I'm being disingenuous. Even I know that there is a large difference between sad and jumping, and I'm somewhere deep in the middle.
"You tell me," he says. "You came here on your own."
The final sentences I take to Dr. D. are much more fully formed than anything else I have brought to his office. Structured in three parts, I think it's the best thing I have written in my life to date. I feel the same way I felt when I handed in my master's thesis, scared and tentatively proud.
We only have enough time for me to read through the first part before we need to move onto the insurance-covered portions of our session, which turns out to be our last. Dr. D. says he thinks that I should stay in talk therapy, but we've done all we can do together. And I haven't yet flushed the meds, but I'm feeling close.
I actually don't think he's wrong, but I'm terrified to seek out a new therapist and highly concerned about finding someone who respects my writing life in the same way. This feels critical in a way I hadn't known before.
A month later, I print out the same pages on clean paper and mail it to a handful of lit mags. A week later Howard Junker leaves a message on my answering machine. He says ZYZZYVA will publish me if I rewrite a bit. "Put it in the first person," Junker says. "Bring the narrative in closer." He is right, as editors often are.
I do the rewrite and the piece runs. I get my contributor copies. I read my own bound work, silently, to myself, when it arrives in the mail.
I don't have a new therapist yet, just a prescription with two refills and too much eyeshadow I will never wear.
I don't know yet that it will take me another decade to publish my slim debut, don't know that two novels will follow relatively immediately.
Of those patients who built Lego structures of houses with no windows and no doors, of course, I was one, though I put a porch on my house, a little space to walk up, a place to knock. I can't say now if that was hope or hubris or the memory of the back deck on my childhood home where in the dead heat of summer my brother and I used to drag our mattresses out to so we could sleep in the cool high-country air.
What I finally understand is that I could have never shown up to a traditional writing workshop with the same bag of guts, no way I could have shaped that rawness into narrative if I were revising while receiving group feedback from under the "cone of silence," a tenant of some writing workshops where the person being workshopped may not speak while their work is being discussed. While I value my MFA immensely, it was a lesson in craft and the academic practice of art; therapy was a lesson in starting to understand why I wanted to write in the first place and how to use art to excavate ideas and feelings that had been buried.
Now, my novel, If the Ice Had Held, has just come out, and for someone who has always been a pretty good sleeper, I am waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about what reviewers will say and have said, which really has mostly been kind. I'm worrying about how the sales will be; I'm worrying about people in my life who might recognize parts of themselves in my work—it's fiction, the book is not thinly or otherwise disguised memoir, but it's still informed by my own experience—because my writing both before and after therapy has always been a way to surface and process internal life. This book feels personal in a different way than my others. It feels more public. It feels more colored by the time I spent on Dr. D.'s sofa, trying to parse through murky recollections and the way that memory shifts over time. How he would say some version of, "It doesn't matter what actually happened. It matters how you feel about it now," and I would think, But I want facts!, even though I knew that's not how life works.
Fiction is like that as well: it's about emotional truth rather than the reporting of a timeline or the transcribed recording of an event. Perhaps learning to negotiate plot and structure and the scaffolding of a novel while tackling loss, secrets, and the things that prevent us from caring for one another—in other words, part of what sent me to therapy in the first place—is what finding my voice has been all about.
Image credit: Aaron Burden.
Wendy J. Fox is the author most recently of the novel If the Ice Had Held. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University, lives in Denver, Colorado, and tweets from @WendyJeanFox.
My Adventures in Hell
Zak Salih July 25, 2019 | 1 book mentioned 8 min read
On one particular drive, I interrupted my father and told him, apropos of nothing other than to see how he would react, that I didn't think Hell was real.
Zak Salih | 1 book mentioned 8 min read
Just What Is It That Makes Today's Eco-terrorists So Different, So Appealing?
Bill Morris August 18, 2014 | 1 book mentioned 3 9 min read
Are these activists terrorists, as the government would have us believe, or are they avenging angels performing a vital service, as they themselves believe?
Bill Morris | 1 book mentioned 3 9 min read
Dogs, Revolutionary Road, and The Thunderous Sea of Silence
Sonya Chung November 23, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 6 7 min read
The intimacy—the purity—of silent togetherness is—I agree with Doty—a basic and original creaturely longing, and one that we find in our relationships with dogs.
Sonya Chung | 1 book mentioned 6 7 min read
Teaching the 'Law and Order' Short Story
Kevin Clouther February 25, 2014 | 1 book mentioned 12 7 min read
On Being a Trend
Marta Bausells April 30, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 6 min read
This is the reason millennials are arguably the most annoying of generations, besides the economic collapse. They are caught in the middle. Too obsessed with social media to be relaxed in the "real" world; too unnatural to it to feel at ease within it.
Marta Bausells | 1 book mentioned 6 min read
What I Learned on My Debut Book Tour From the Books I Read Along the Way
Alex Lockwood August 26, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 13 min read
I learn this lesson well: you don't write the book for yourself. Once it's published, it's not yours. It's theirs.
Alex Lockwood | 1 book mentioned 13 min read
Nepantla and Gloria Anzaldúa's Queer of Color Legacy
Christopher Soto January 17, 2019 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read
In more recent years, I have began to question this essay by Anzaldúa, both of our usages of the word "Nepantla," and also her ideas around mestizaje.
Christopher Soto | 1 book mentioned 5 min read
The Road To Baghdad: Remembering Michael Kelly
Noah Deutsch April 3, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 1 7 min read
1.Four years ago today, Michael Kelly became the first journalist to lose his life in Iraq while covering The U.S.A.'s most recent war there. He was young, 46, and remarkably accomplished, having recently been named editor of a reinvigorated Atlantic Monthly. This after he had made a name for himself writing for some of the big boys, the Sun and the Globe, the Times and the Post, the New Yorker, and then editor of the New Republic at an age when many men these days are googling the term 'quarter-life crisis' on their under-used laptops. He was a rare individual, and he left behind a wife and two sons, aged 3 and 6, when he died.Twelve years before he left home for the last time, Michael Kelly, who was raised on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (his parents and mine remain close friends and neighbors), wrote the definitive account of the Gulf War, the first Iraq War, also known as Operation Desert Storm. It was a war that went by many names, America's 1991 military foray into the Persian Gulf. But the book goes by just one: Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War (Random House, 1992). It is based on the revealing, carefully crafted pieces that Kelly, stringing to the Boston Globe, GQ, and the New Republic while bouncing around the Middle East on his borrowed freelancer's scratch, sent over the wire. Often mentioned in the same breath as Michael Herr's searing account of the Vietnam War, Dispatches, Martyr's Day stands among the very best in a decorated tradition of American war correspondence.On April 3, 2003, Michael was no doubt pulsating with his writer's instincts and observations, which surely would have become the follow up to Martyr's Day. Embedded with the Third Infantry Division, U.S. Army, and headed down the road to Baghdad International Airport in a Humvee driven by an army staff sergeant, Michael was, as usual, in the right place at the right time. The city of Baghdad at that moment was being liberated from Baath party control by the Marines. Here, on this very roadway perhaps, was an opportunity for Michael, twelve years removed from covering his first Iraq War, to reflect on the fact that this was the one event that neither he, nor anyone, had witnessed back in 1991: the fall of Saddam's Baghdad. They took mortar fire, the Humvee went off the road, landing upside down in a ditch, and both Michael and the staff sergeant were killed.2.In 1991, Iraq was a nation led by a belligerent, authoritarian dictator, Saddam Hussein, who had ordered Iraq's tanks and battalions into the oil-wealthy and blithely vulnerable neighbor state of Kuwait. The ensuing military conflict pitted a coalition of many nations, with the U.S. in command, against the Iraq army. It was soon apparent to the reporters at the "front" that the Iraq army was composed of men who felt about as much motivation to fight in defense of their tyrannical leader's capriciousness as you might expect from right thinking, sane individuals – none at all. The rout was on.Maybe the most indelible passage in Martyr's Day is Kelly's description of an encounter he had with a ragged band of Iraqi soldiers on the road to Kuwait City. He and another reporter were eager to chronicle the post-liberation conditions in the invaded capitol and were driving their rented pickup truck hard to get there. Their nervousness at seeing Iraqi soldiers on the road gave way to astonishment when the soldiers, unarmed, under-clothed, and numbering around ten, eagerly surrendered to them, two American journalists.Now, said the lieutenant, he and his men were very cold and hungry and they would appreciate it if we would take them prisoner. I am five feet six inches tall and bespectacled and running slightly to poundage. Dan [Fesperman, Baltimore Sun reporter] is taller and doesn't wear glasses, but he is not an overwhelming figure either. I don't think either of us felt that we were the sort of men that take other men prisoner.Instead, they gave the men food and water, and piled them into, and onto, the pickup, driving a ways down the road, where they ran into a Saudi army unit, out doing its part for the coalition, though there was nothing much to do.It is at this point in the narrative, when the reader's laughter at the perfect absurdity of the scene is beginning to subside, that Kelly brings it back to reality, to war, or the sobering specter of it. The Saudis, a bit starved themselves – for combat action – rounded up the Iraqis, now proper prisoners, and began hectoring them, and taking aim with their automatic rifles as though they meant to execute the men then and there.They screamed and shouted and made as if, any moment, they were going to shoot. The Iraqis, stunned and terrified, sat down in the dirt, their hands on their heads still, and their faces to the wind, in a ragged little line. One man clutched his Koran to his chest for protection and rocked, moaning, back and forth on his haunches. Another cried for Allah, and wept, and clutched at his crotch and hair in little paroxysms of terror. I watched them weeping and begging for their lives, and I had to turn aside so they wouldn't see me crying too.Reading this passage reminded me of the battered canteen, olive green, and with liquid of dubious nature still sealed inside, that Michael gave to me upon his return. It belonged to an Iraqi soldier, he had said. I was fourteen years old. The soldier was probably dead.3.As the subtitle of Kelly's book suggests, the Gulf War was a "small" war. It was a nasty, pathetic affair. It was not World War II, so well chronicled in multiple theaters of battle by Ernie Pyle, whose collection of dispatches, Ernie Pyle's War, remains a benchmark classic of war correspondence journalism. Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper on a Pacific Island, his war so close to its end.What Kelly witnessed in 1991 was a far cry from Ernie's War. And as a consequence, his book was necessarily more than blood-and-guts war journalism. This is not to say that the Gulf War was not a horrible, traumatizing, and often deadly experience for many people. Kelly describes many scenes of suffering. The squalid Kurdish refugee camps come to mind. But there is a bemused puzzlement, indeed, at times an absurdity to many of the proceedings. Kelly's description of wartime Tel Aviv, under constant threat of a Saddam Scud missile attack, is memorable. What emerges is a vision of a modern day London during the Blitz – with kibbutz, and bits of rhinestone fashioned by the ladies to their government-issue gas mask kits to match their eveningwear. The Scud raids were infrequent and ineffective, and on the whole you'd have to say that 1991 Tel Aviv, with its discotheques, its beaches, its conscripted, no-nonsense army, and its irrepressible pro-American fervor, was a safer place than London in '40 and '41.Kelly's engaging, funny, conversational writing, his man-on-the-street (of Baghdad, of Amman, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Dhahran, Kuwait City) perspective, assisted by his broad but honest impressions of some of the maddeningly complex political relationships among Middle Eastern states, regions, and peoples (of which there are a few), these qualities add much to Martyr's Day. In addition to being a book about war, Martyr's Day is history (the opening discussion of the history of Iraq from ancient empire to modern dictatorship comes to mind), and it is also armchair cultural anthropology: "I knew by now that in Arabia [Egypt in this case] office life was patterned after an older rhythm. An official in his government room received visitors in much the same fashion as his grandfather had in his courtyard – casually, endlessly, and with a good deal of overlapping, since no one was ever in any particular hurry. The love of talk and the love of manners dictated against hurrying into any matter at hand." The book can sometimes sound like a very amusing travel guide to the Middle East, such as when Kelly describes the grand farce that is traveling into and out of Israel, for which he needed to carry two passports, one of which would never show a mark of having been to Judea, in order to appease the firm policy of non-recognition adhered to by Israel's neighboring Palestinian nation states.There is one final important tonal element to Martyr's Day, and it emerges early on, as Kelly describes the culture of Baghdad, where he spent a good deal of time in the days leading up to January 17, 1991, when American bombs began to fall on the city. This final element is a mixture of pride and disgust. The disgust is evident in his appraisal of the Saddam Hussein regime, its moral bankruptcy, its physical and ideological feebleness, and the mostly closeted dissatisfaction of an Iraqi populace that had been too long under the thumb of a tyrant, but had not the first clue of how to live in any other way. The pride is that of a patriot: being on the right side of things was important to Michael. His book of collected writings – essays, dispatches, op-ed pieces and the like, published in 2004, is called Things Worth Fighting For, and the book is a testament to his conviction as a man, a father, husband, citizen, and reporter. The strength of this conviction is evident in his words, the words of someone who believed in America, and freedom, and the inalienable right to drive a pickup truck out into the Arabian desert in order to Get The Story, which for Michael was not so much a right as a need.4.It is hard not to wonder where that need would have taken Michael Kelly if he were living today. It is hard to imagine that his pride in American global authority, so evident in Martyr's Day, when the world really was on our side, would not now be muted, or questioned outright. He would have to confront the divisions in our society and in our government, divisions that have deepened as the state of the U.S.A.'s latest Iraq war has worsened, those heady days that witnessed the fall of Saddam four years ago slowly bleeding into a morass of sectarian violence and a mounting toll of American dead.Sometimes it seems like the needle in our country's collective moral compass has been set spinning, as though in the presence of a malevolent magnetism. While I did not always agree with Michael's opinions, I do believe that he was someone whose compass rarely failed him, and this sure-footed approach, honest, blue collar reporting, is something that is sorely lacking in our current climate of partisan rancor. I may not know exactly what he would write today, but I do know that he would make his voice heard, and do it with his unfailing wit, wisdom, and grace so that, agree or disagree, time spent reading his words would still be, as it always has been for me, time well spent.
Noah Deutsch | 1 book mentioned 1 7 min read


text:
Woman gives birth to twins with different dads after cheating on husband
Basit MahmoodTuesday 26 Mar 2019 6:38 pm
A woman in China has given birth two twins with different DNA.
The mother has been forced to admit that she cheated on her husband in a one-night stand after he grew suspicious that one of the boys didn't look like him.
When DNA test results came back he raised questions with her and she finally had to tell the truth, according to the Strait Herald.
A woman in China reportedly gave birth to twin boys with different fathers (Picture: Getty Images)
The story was revealed after the couple, from south-eastern Xiamen city, had to register the birth of their twin sons at the local police station early last year.
In order to complete the registration, they had to produce the results of a paternity test to prove that the babies were theirs.
The husband, known only by a pseudonym, Xiaolong, had wondered why one of his sons didn't look like him.
Upon receiving the DNA results, he was still shocked at discovering that one of the boys did not have any biological relationship with him, according to a director at the Fujian Zhengtai Forensic Identification Centre.
The centre arranged the paternity test for the couple.
According to the director, Mr Zhang, Xiaolong was furious after reading the DNA report and confronted his wife.
More: Children
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The couple are from south-eastern China's Xiamen city (Picture: Getty Images)
The father was shocked after receiving DNA test results (Picture: Getty Images)
It is reported that the wife initially denied the affair, and accused her husband of falsifying the results.
Upon being confronted by Xiaolong, the wife admitted she had slept with another man and that it was a one-night stand.
The father said he was happy to raise his own child, but not the one from someone else.
Twins being born with different fathers is an extremely rare occurrence, known as heteropaternal superfecundation.
According to experts, the exact odds of the phenomenon are hard to calculate, but previous studies suggest the chance could be between one in 400 pairs and one in 13,000 pairs, according to The Guardian.
Got a story for Metro.co.uk?
If you have a story for our news team, email us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
BabyChildrenWeird news
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This is the moment a hooked manta ray begs divers for help


At the end of every short article you can provide a complete and detailed version of the short article beneath the form of an eBook in exchange for funds or you can offer an app that makes specifically what you wrote. I've often had passion for blogging but did not exactly know how to go about it. And then the situation of continuity comes in. Beneath, we are going to look at 3 of the most successful methods to make money blogging in 2016.


text:
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34 yrs experience | Licensed in CO, MA | verified
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John Fallone
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Strike Price Startup: Everything You Need to Know
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I am trying to locate information on the Finneran's of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I know that my great grandfather John Vincent Finneran was a police officer in Pawtucket. Do you have any information regarding any Finneran's in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Any information you might have would be helpful. I know Finneran is not a common name.
: I am trying to locate information on the Finneran's of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I know that my great grandfather John Vincent Finneran was a police officer in Pawtucket. Do you have any information regarding any Finneran's in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Any information you might have would be helpful. I know Finneran is not a common name.
My great, great grandfather John Vincent Finneran was married to a Eva Marrin. They had 5 children, they were Peter, Thomas, Edward, Terrance, Mary and Theresa. Maybe you might recognize the names.
: My great, great grandfather John Vincent Finneran was married to a Eva Marrin. They had 5 children, they were Peter, Thomas, Edward, Terrance, Mary and Theresa. Maybe you might recognize the names.
: : My great, great grandfather John Vincent Finneran was married to a Eva Marrin. They had 5 children, they were Peter, Thomas, Edward, Terrance, Mary and Theresa. Maybe you might recognize the names.
Sorry no e-mail as yet, using works computer, my father Peter Finneran now lives in Scotland, his father from Ireland. Interesting huh?
My grandfather was Lawrence "Red" Finneran from Columbus, OH. My grandmother's name is Esther A. Zang Finneran. They had 2 children, JoAnne & Thomas Robert.
Thomas has 4 children, Suzanne Finneran Clifford, T. Robert Finneran, (me) & Kathleen A. Finneran.
I was born Rosemary Finneran in England in 1946. My father was Luke Francis Finneran born 1906 or 1907. Possibly from New York/Massachusetts. Any information please.
: I was born Rosemary Finneran in England in 1946. My father was Luke Francis Finneran born 2nd March 1908.Possibly from New York/Massachusetts. Any information please.


text:
Home All issues Volume 69 / No 6 (November-December 2014) Oil Gas Sci. Technol. – Rev. IFP Energies nouvelles, 69 6 (2014) 1105-1119 References
A Technical and Economical Evaluation of CO2 Capture from Fluidized Catalytic Cracking (FCC) Flue Gas
Oil & Gas Science and Technology – Rev. IFP Energies nouvelles, Vol. 69 (2014), No. 6, pp. 1081–1089
Development of HiCapt+TM Process for CO2 Capture from Lab to Industrial Pilot Plant
ACACIA Project – Development of a Post-Combustion CO2 Capture Process. Case of the DMXTM Process
Pilot Plant Studies for CO2 Capture from Waste Incinerator Flue Gas Using MEA Based Solvent
Hollow Fiber Membrane Contactors for CO2 Capture: Modeling and Up-Scaling to CO2 Capture for an 800 MWe Coal Power Station
Dossier: Post Combustion CO2 Capture
Oil Gas Sci. Technol. – Rev. IFP Energies nouvelles
Volume 69, Number 6, November-December 2014
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Pennine House, a short term detention facility beside Terminal 2 at Manchester Airport detains up to 32 people - refugees whose claims for asylum have been failed by the Home Office - for up to seven days until they are deported or transferred to another centre.
On 26th July 2013, Tahir Mahmood, a 43 year old man from Pakistan man, died in Pennine House. Mr Mahmood's is the first death in a short term facility.
Currently, Pennine House at Manchester Airport is being run by Tascor, the "largest private sector provider of secure immigration detainee escorting". They are working without any published rules because the Home Office keeps postponing the publication of a set of rules about what the minimum provisions in short term detention should be.
Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport,Tameside, Trafford, Wigan, and the cities of Manchester and Salford.
o	Tell the Home Office to publish their short term facility rules with immediate effect.
o	Publicly commit to doing everything in their power to ensure that the official account is completely transparent and accountable about how and why Tahir Mahmood died at Pennine House.


text:
\section*{Acknowledgment}
This work was partially funded by the BMW Group and partially by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany under the project DECODE (01IW21001).

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

\section{Conclusion}
In this paper, we have proposed \name{} -- an efficient and fully supervised network for multi-scale scene flow estimation in large-scale point clouds.
Utilizing \acrfull{rs} during feature extraction, we could boost the run-time and memory footprint to allow for an efficient processing of point clouds at an unmatched maximum density.
The novel \acrlong{fe} block (called \PTDP{}), resolves the prominent challenges when using \acrshort{rs} for scene flow estimation.
Consequentially, \name{} reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on \acrshort{ft3d} and generalizes well over a wide range of input densities as well as to the real-world scenes of KITTI.

\section{Introduction} \label{introduction} \glsresetall
Scene flow estimation is a key computer vision task for the purposes of navigation, planning tasks and autonomous driving systems.
It concerns itself with the estimation of a 3D motion field with respect to the observer, thereby providing a representation of the dynamic change in the surroundings.

Most of the popular scene flow methods use monocular images \cite{brickwedde2019mono, hur2020self} or stereo images to couple the geometry reconstruction with scene flow estimation \cite{aleotti2020learning, ilg2018occlusions, jiang2019sense, saxena2019pwoc, schuster2021deep, schuster2017sceneflowfields, yang2020upgrading}.
However, the accuracy of such image-based solutions is still constrained by the images quality and the illumination conditions.

In contrary, LiDAR sensors provide accurate measurements of the geometry (as 3D point clouds) with ongoing developments towards increasing their density (\ie the sensor resolution).
Leveraging this potential is becoming increasingly important for the accurate computation of scene flow from point clouds.

To this end, many existing approaches \cite{liu2019flownet3d, wu2020pointpwc, wang2021hierarchical, kittenplon2021flowstep3d} focus on the 3D domain and present highly accurate scene flow with better generalization compared to the image-based modalities.
Such approaches use \gls{fps} \cite{li2018pointcnn, qi2017pointnet++, wu2019pointconv, zhao2019pointweb} leading to a robust feature extraction and an accurate computation for feature similarities.
However, the expensive computation of \gls{fps} decreases their capabilities to operate efficiently on dense point clouds.

\input{figures/Figure1}

We present in this paper our \name{} -- a hierarchical point-based learning approach that relies on \gls{rs} for scene flow estimation.
It is therefore more efficient, has a smaller memory footprint and shows comparable results at lower run-times compared to the state-of-the-art methods as shown in \cref{Figure1_Teaser}.
The use of \gls{rs} for scene flow estimation introduces big challenges and is infeasible together with existing point-based scene flow techniques \cite{wu2020pointpwc, wang2021hierarchical, kittenplon2021flowstep3d}.
This has mainly two reasons as clarified in \cref{Figure2_FPSvsRS}.
1.) \Gls{rs} will reflect the spatial distribution of the input point cloud, which is problematic if it is far from uniform.
2.) Corresponding (rigid) areas between consecutive point clouds will be sampled differently by \gls{rs}, while \gls{fps} will yield more similar patterns.

To overcome these problems, we propose a novel \PTDP{} flow embedding, which consists of three embedding layers with lateral connections (see \cref{Figure5_FlowEmbedding}) to incorporate a larger receptive field during matching.
Overall, our fully supervised architecture utilizes \gls{rs} and consists of a hierarchical feature extraction, an optimized flow embedding and scene flow predictions on multiple scales.
Our contribution is summarized as follows:
\begin{itemize
	\item We propose \name{} -- an end-to-end scene flow estimation network that operates on dense point clouds with high accuracy.
	\item Our network uses \acrlong{rs} for a hierarchical scene flow prediction in a multi-scale fashion.
	\item We present a novel flow embedding block (called \PTDP{}) which is suitable for the combination with \acrlong{rs}.
	\item Exhaustive experiments show the strong results in terms of accuracy, generalization and run-time over the state-of-the-art methods.
\end{itemize}

\section{Network Design}

Our \name{} predicts scene flow from two consecutive scans of point clouds.
These point cloud sets are ${PC^t = \{pc^t_{i}\in \mathbb{R}^3\}}^N_{i=1}$ at timestamp $t$ and ${PC^{t+1}=\{pc^{t+1}_{j}\in \mathbb{R}^3\}}^M_{j=1}$ at timestamp $t+1$, whereas ($pc^t_{i}$, $pc^{t+1}_{j}$) are the 3D Cartesian locations and ($N$, $M$) are the sizes of each set.
Our network is invariant to random permutations of the point sets.

\name{} seeks to find the similarities between point clouds to estimate the motion as scene flow vectors ${SF^t = \{sf^t_{i}\in \mathbb{R}^3 \}}^N_{i=1}$ with respect to the reference view at timestamp $t$, \ie $sf^t_{i}$ is the motion vector for $pc^t_{i}$.
The model is designed to predict the scene flow at multiple levels through hierarchical feature extraction, flow embedding, warping and scene flow estimation.
The following sections describe the components of each module in detail.

\subsection{Feature Extraction Module} \label{feature_extraction}

The feature extraction module consists of a feature pyramid network to extract feature sets from $PC^t$ and $PC^{t+1}$ separately.
The construction of our module involves top-down, bottom-up pathways, and lateral skip connections between them as clarified in \cref{Fig3_FeatureExtraction}.

The top-down pathway computes a hierarchy of feature sets at four scales $L=\{l\}^3_{k=0}$ from fine-to-coarse resolution, where $l_0$ is the full input resolution and the resolution of the down-sampled clouds are fixed as ${\{\{l\}}^3_{k=1}\mid l_1 = 2048, l_2 = 728, l_3 = 320\}$.
Inspired by RandLA-Net \cite{hu2020randla}, which focuses on semantic segmentation, we exploit the efficient \gls{rs} strategy combined with \gls{lfa} \cite{hu2020randla}.
\Gls{rs} has a computational complexity of $\mathcal{O}(1)$ and is therefore much more efficient compared to $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ of \gls{fps}.
Previous works \cite{liu2019flownet3d, wu2020pointpwc, wang2021hierarchical, kittenplon2021flowstep3d} take an advantage of \gls{fps} at the cost of expensive computations.

\Gls{lfa} is employed at all scales $l_k$ except the finest one and starts by searching $K_p=17$ neighbors with \glspl{knn} and aggregates the features with two attentive pooling layers designed as in \cite{hu2020randla}.
\Gls{ds} is used to reduce the resolution from $l_k$ level to $l_{k+1}$.
We sample randomly to the defined resolution and merge the $K_p = 17$ nearest neighbors in the higher resolution for each selected sampled with maximum pooling as shown in \cref{Fig3_FeatureExtraction}.

The bottom-up pathway in our module involves ${L=\{l\}}^3_{k=1}$ layers excluding the \gls{us} to the full input resolution.
For up-scaling from level $l_{k+1}$ to $l_k$, \acrshort{knn} is used to assign the $K_q=1$ nearest neighbor for each point of the higher resolution to the lower one, followed by transposed convolution.
To increase  the quality of the features, lateral connections are added to each level.
This module predicts two feature sets ${F_k^t = \{f_{ki}^{t}\in \mathbb{R}^{C_k}\}}^{l_k}_{i=1}$ and ${F_k^{t+1}=\{f_{kj}^{t+1}\in \mathbb{R}^{C_k}\}}^{l_k}_{j=1}$ for $PC_k^t$ and $PC_k^{t+1}$ respectively.
Here, $C_k$ is the feature dimension fixed as ${\{\{C\}}^3_{k=1}\mid C_1 = 128, C_2 = 256, C_3 = 512\}$.
The complete feature extraction module with output channels is visualized in \cref{Fig3_FeatureExtraction}.

\input{figures/Figure3}

\subsection{Flow Embedding} \label{Flow_embedding}
A flow embedding block across two scans is the key component for scene flow estimation.
Using \Gls{rs} requires a special flow embedding for the mentioned difficulties in \cref{introduction}.
To overcome the challenges of \Gls{rs}, we design a flow embedding block that is different from state-of-the-art.

In this context, we establish a novel and efficient concept, called \PTDP{}, to aggregate the relation of features. This embedding block has a larger receptive field without the need to increase the number of the nearest neighbors.
To achieve this, we combine three sequential steps with lateral connections as presented in \cref{Figure5_FlowEmbedding}, and apply the entire block at each scale.

\input{figures/Figure4}
Starting by searching $K_o = 33$ nearest neighbors for each point $pc^t_{ki}$ within $PC_{k}^{t+1}$ at each scale $l_k$, the flow embedding consists of the following:
\begin{itemize
	\item {$1^{st}$ Embedding} (\textit{Patch-to-Point}): It starts by grouping $K_o$ nearest features of ${F_{k}^{t+1}}$ with each point $pc^t_{ki}$. Thereafter, these grouped features will be passed into two Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) followed by maximum pooling for feature aggregation. Each MLP yields features of $C_k$ dimensions at scale $l_k$.
	\item {$2^{nd}$ Embedding} (\textit{Point-to-Patch}): It aggregates the $K_p$ nearest features within the reference point cloud into each $pc^t_{ki}$ by computing attention scores and summation, \ie the features are weighted.
	\item {$3^{rd}$ Embedding} (\textit{Point-to-Dilated-Patch}): It repeats the previous step on the previous result with new attention scores for the $K_p$ nearest features. This embedding layer results in an increased receptive field.
\end{itemize}
Technically, we do not increase the number of the nearest neighbors for the $3^{rd}$ Embedding, but we aggregate features from a larger area by repeating the aggregation mechanism (see \cref{Figure5_FlowEmbedding}).
Overall, the three steps result in our novel \PTDP{} embedding.
This way, we are able to obtain a larger receptive field with a small number of nearest neighbors, which is computationally more efficient.
\input{figures/Figure5}

The attention-based aggregation technique \cite{yang2020robust, zhang2019pcan} learns attention scores for each embedded feature $f_{ki}^{t}$, followed by a \textit{softmax} to suppress the least correlated features.
Then, the features are weighted by the attention scores and summed up.

Additionally, we concatenate the features $F_k^t$ and add a residual connection (Res. Conn.) to increase the quality of our flow embedding (\cf \cref{Figure5_FlowEmbedding}).
This design is validated in the ablation study (\cref{Ablation}).

\subsection{Multi-Scale Scene Flow Estimation}
As mentioned, \name{} predicts scene flow at multiple scales inspired by PointPWC-Net \cite{wu2020pointpwc}, but we consider significant changes in the conjunction with \gls{rs} to make our prediction more efficient.
Our prediction of scene flow over all scales consists of two \glspl{wl}, three \glspl{fe}, three scene flow estimators and \acrfull{us} blocks as shown in \cref{Figure3_MultiScale_Prediction}.
Compared to the design of PointPWC-Net \cite{wu2020pointpwc}, we save one element from each category and we base our complete design attention mechanisms.
Consequentially, we speed-up our model without sacrificing any accuracy as shown in our results, \cf in \cref{Table1_Comparison}.
The multi-scale estimation starts at the coarsest resolution by prediction $SF_3^t$ with a scene flow estimation module after a first \gls{fe}.
The estimation module consists of just three MLPs with 64, 32 and 3 output channels, respectively.
Thereafter, we up-sample the estimated scene flow as well as the coming features from the \gls{fe} to the next higher scale using \acrshort{knn} with $K_q = 1$.

Our \acrlong{wl} utilizes the up-sampled scene flow $SF_k^t$ at scale level $l_k$ to warp $F_k^{t+1}$ towards $F_k^{t}$.
To this end, we add the predicted scene flow $SF_k^t$ to $PC_k^{t}$ to compute the warped ${\widetilde{PC}}_k^{t+1}$ and then we group the features $F_k^{t+1}$ into $F_k^{t}$ by using KNN search across $PC_k^{t+1}$ and ${\widetilde{PC}}_k^{t+1}$.
This warping is more simple and efficient compared to the process in PointPWC-Net \cite{wu2020pointpwc} which associates firstly the predicted scene flow to $PC_k^{t+1}$ by KNN search in order to warp $PC_k^{t+1}$ into $\widetilde{PC}_k^{t}$ and then grouping the features with another KNN search.

\subsection{Loss Function}
The model is a fully supervised at multiple scales, similar to PointPWC-Net \cite{wu2020pointpwc}.
If $SF_k^t$ is the predicted scene flow and the ground truth is $SF_{GT,k}^t$ at level $l_k$, then the objective can be written as:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
	\mathcal{L}(\theta) = \sum_{k=0}^{3} {\alpha}_k \sum_{i=1}^{l_k} {\| sf_{ki}^t - sf_{GT,ki}^t \|}_2,
\label{Equation1_TrainingLoss}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
with ${\|.\|}_2$ denoting the $L_2$-norm and weights per scale of $\{\{{\alpha}_k\}^3_{k=0} \mid {\alpha}_0 = 0.02, {\alpha}_1 = 0.04, {\alpha}_2 = 0.08,  {\alpha}_3 = 0.16 \}$.

\input{tables/Table1}

\section{Related Work}

\textbf{Learning-based scene flow from point clouds:}
Estimation of the scene flow from point clouds is a sub-field that became prominent with the availability of accurate LiDARs.
In this domain, PointFlowNet \cite{behl2019pointflownet} learns scene flow as a rigid motion coupled with object detection.
Focusing more on point-based learning with a single flow embedding, FlowNet3D \cite{liu2019flownet3d} proposes a learning-based architecture based on PointNet++ \cite{qi2017pointnet++} and MeteorNet \cite{liu2019meteornet} adds more aspects by aggregating features from spatiotemporal neighbor points.
PointPWC-Net \cite{wu2020pointpwc} is the first point-based approach that predicts scene flow hierarchically based on \cite{wu2019pointconv} without structuring or ordering them.
Despite of its high accuracy, the designed architecture is computationally expensive because of \gls{fps} with more memory consumption.
Utilizing \gls{fps}, FlowStep3D \cite{kittenplon2021flowstep3d} computes scene flow at the coarsest level and updates it iteratively through the Gated Recurrent Unit \cite{cho2014properties}.
However, this method is computationally further expensive due to the iterative update.
Unlike the aforementioned methods, our design uses \gls{rs} instead of the expensive \gls{fps} over all its modules presenting superior efficiency and accurate results.

Alternatively, some structure-based learning methods are employed for scene flow estimation.
In this context, Ushani \etal \cite{ushani2018feature} present a real-time method by constructing occupancy grids and HPLFlowNet \cite{gu2019hplflownet} orders the points using a permutohedral lattice.
Although their efficiency, the accuracy of such methods are limited.
Different from structure-based learning methods, our \name{} relies on point-based learning and exhibits more accurate results than the aforementioned methods at lower run-time.

Some other methods \cite{li2021self, pontes2020scene, mittal2020just} lean themselves to self-supervised category having less accuracy than our \name{}, which is designed in a fully supervised manner.

\textbf{Flow embeddings:}
A flow embedding is a crucial part for the computation of scene flow.
It focuses on the correlation and aggregation of corresponding features across subsequent measurements to encode the spatial displacements.
In this context, FlowNet3D \cite{liu2019flownet3d} proposes a single patch-to-point embedding block by searching 64 nearest neighbors across the consecutive point cloud at a low resolution, followed by a maximum pooling and a series of propagation and refinement blocks.
A patch-to-patch correlation is used by HPLFlowNet \cite{gu2019hplflownet} for 3D point clouds through the lattice representation.
Recently, PointPWC-Net \cite{wu2020pointpwc} aggregated patch-to-patch features from unstructured point clouds based on a continuous weighting \cite{wu2019pointconv} which is computationally heavy.
Utilizing the pyramid architecture as in \cite{wu2020pointpwc}, HCRF-Flow \cite{li2021hcrf} adds a high-order conditional random fields (CRFs) \cite{ristovski2013continuous} as a refinement module to explore both point-wise smoothness and region-wise rigidity.

Utilizing \gls{fps}, HALFlow \cite{wang2021hierarchical} proposes a hierarchical attention mechanism for flow embedding.

Recently, FLOT \cite{puy20flot} built a model utilizing optimal transport based on global matching \cite{titouan2019optimal} without the use of any sampling techniques.
Inspired by RAFT \cite{teed2020raft} to construct all-pair correlation fields, FlowStep3D \cite{kittenplon2021flowstep3d} proposes point-based and PV-RAFT \cite{wei2020pv} computes point-voxel correlation fields.

Different from all these methods, we propose a novel and efficient \PTDP{} flow embedding block, which works reliably together with \gls{rs} without sacrificing accuracy.

\input{figures/Figure2}

\section{Experiments}
We run several experiments to evaluate the results of our \name{} for scene flow estimation.
Firstly, we demonstrate the accuracy and the efficiency of \name{} compared to the state-of-the-art.
Secondly, we verify our design choice with several analyses.
\input{figures/Figure6}
\subsection{Evaluation Metrics and Data Sets} \label{Data_Metrics}
For a fair comparison, we use the same evaluation metrics as in \cite{gu2019hplflownet}. Let $SF^t$ denote the predicted scene flow, and $SF_{GT}^t$ the ground truth scene flow. The evaluation metrics are averaged over all points and computed as follows:
\begin{itemize
	\item {\textit{EPE3D [m]}}: The 3D end-point error computed in meters as ${\|SF^t-SF_{GT}^t\|}_2$.
	\item {\textit{Acc3DS [\%]}}: The strict 3D accuracy which is the ratio of points whose EPE3D $< 0.05~m$ \textbf{or} relative error $< 5\%$.
	\item {\textit{Acc3DR [\%]}}: The relaxed 3D accuracy which is the ratio of points whose EPE3D $< 0.1~m$ \textbf{or} relative error $< 10\%$.
	\item {\textit{Out3D [\%]}}: The ratio of outliers whose EPE3D $> 0.3~m$ \textbf{or} relative error $> 10\%$.
\end{itemize}
We train our~\name{} on the established data set~\gls{ft3d} \cite{mayer2016large} which consists of $19640$ labeled scene flow scenes available in the training set.
We exclude the occluded points and the points with a depth above $35$ meters as~\cite{liu2019flownet3d, wu2020pointpwc, wang2021hierarchical, kittenplon2021flowstep3d, gu2019hplflownet, puy20flot, wei2020pv} considering most of the moving objects within the scenes.

For testing, we evaluate our model on all $3824$ frames available in the test split of~\acrshort{ft3d}.
Since~\acrshort{ft3d} scenes are only synthetic data, we verify the generalization ability of our model to real-world scenes of the KITTI \cite{menze2015object} data set without fine-tuning.
For both data sets~\acrshort{ft3d} and KITTI, the setup of evaluation is exactly the same as in related works.

Since the existing labeled data does not provide a direct representation of point cloud information (\ie 3D Cartesian locations), we follow the established pre-processing strategy of HPLFlowNet~\cite{gu2019hplflownet}\footnote{{\url{https://github.com/laoreja/HPLFlowNet}.}} which is commonly used also in the state-of-the-art methods.

For training and evaluation with a specific resolution, the pre-processed data is randomly sub-sampled to $N$ points with random order.

\subsection{Implementation and Training} \label{Implementation}
We use the Adam optimizer with default parameters and train our model with $800$ epochs divided in two phases:
To speed up the convergence of our model, we first train $120$ epochs with a fixed set of points for each frame and apply an exponentially decaying learning rate, initialized with $0.001$, then decreased with a decaying rate of $0.7$ each $10$ epochs.
For the next $680$ epochs, the learning rate is fixed to $0.0001$ and 8192 points are sampled randomly for each frame in each iteration.

Moreover, we add geometrical augmentation as in the related works, \ie points are randomly rotated around the X, Y and Z axes by a small angle and a random translational offset is added to increase the ability of our model to generalize without fine-tuning.

\input{figures/Figure7}

\subsection{Comparison to State-of-the-Art} \label{Comparison}
\textbf{Evaluation on~\acrshort{ft3d_bold}:}
In order to demonstrate the accuracy, generalization and efficiency of our model, we compare to the state-of-the-art methods in \cref{Table1_Comparison}.
Our~\name{} outperforms the methods of~\cite{liu2019flownet3d, wu2020pointpwc, gu2019hplflownet} over all evaluation metrics and shows comparable results to ~\cite{wang2021hierarchical, kittenplon2021flowstep3d, puy20flot, wei2020pv} with lowest run-time and low memory footprint.
Compared to the concurrent methods~\cite{wang2021hierarchical, kittenplon2021flowstep3d}, which use~\gls{fps},
our \name{} shows comparable accuracy utilizing \gls{rs}.

\textbf{Generalization to KITTI:}
We test the generalization ability to the KITTI data set~\cite{menze2015object} without fine-tuning.
The reported scores in~\cref{Table1_Comparison} provide an evidence about the robustness on real-world scenes.
Our~\name{} outperforms over all the methods of~\cite{liu2019flownet3d, wu2020pointpwc, wang2021hierarchical, gu2019hplflownet, puy20flot} and presents comparable results to \cite{kittenplon2021flowstep3d, wei2020pv}.

Visually, three examples on KITTI are shown in~\cref{Figure5_QualitativeComparison} where the scene flow of a moving car and the surroundings are with low deviations compared to ground truth.

\textbf{Efficiency:}
To verify the efficiency of~\name{}, we run the official implementations of the state-of-the-art methods~\cite{liu2019flownet3d, wu2020pointpwc, kittenplon2021flowstep3d, gu2019hplflownet, puy20flot, wei2020pv} on a clean environment with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and measure the average inference time in milliseconds (ms) over the test set.
As shown in \cref{Table1_Comparison}, \name{} is more efficient in terms of run-time than any other method for 8192 input points and it's near to \cite{kittenplon2021flowstep3d} in terms of memory use.
Hence, our method is~\mytilde1.5x faster than~\cite{liu2019flownet3d, wu2020pointpwc, gu2019hplflownet}, ~\mytilde4.5x faster than FLOT~\cite{puy20flot} and ~\mytilde18x faster than~\cite{kittenplon2021flowstep3d, wei2020pv} which are the main competitor to our method in terms of accuracy.

Due to the unavailability of an open source code of HALFlow \cite{wang2021hierarchical} and missing efficiency analysis in its original paper, we can not analyze the efficiency but we assume its less efficiency than us due to the use of \gls{fps}.

\input{tables/Table2}
\subsection{Varying Point Densities} \label{Density}
We evaluate our method against the important competitors~\cite{wu2020pointpwc, kittenplon2021flowstep3d, gu2019hplflownet, puy20flot, wei2020pv} on different point densities as shown in~\cref{Figure6_AccVsMethods}.
Acc3DR and inference time on~\gls{ft3d} are measured for a wide range of densities ${N = \{2048 * 2^i\}^6_{i=0}}$, and finally all available non-occluded points are used, which corresponds on average to \mytilde225K points (see~\cref{Figure6_AccVsMethods} and \cref{Figure7_TimeVsMethods}).
For the competing methods of FLOT~\cite{puy20flot}, PV-RAFT~\cite{wei2020pv}, PointPWC-Net~\cite{wu2020pointpwc} and HPLFlowNet~\cite{gu2019hplflownet}, the maximum possible densities are limited to $8192$, $8192$, $32768$ and $65536$, respectively, due to exceeding the memory limit of the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti for our tested range.
We have limited as well the number of points for FlowStep3D~\cite{kittenplon2021flowstep3d} to $16384$ in our test, due to the bad run-time ($>2.5$ seconds) for each frame with more dense scenes.

\input{figures/Figure8}

In contrast,~\name{} can operate on more than 250K points efficiently with high accuracy and low run-time.
In order to keep the accuracy stable for densities $> 32$K, we have increased the resolution of the down-sampled features (\cf \cref{feature_extraction}) to ${\{\{l\}}^3_{k=1}\mid l_1 = 8192, l_2 = 2048, l_3 = 512\}$ without further training or fine-tuning at all.
As a result, the accuracy remains stable over a wide range of densities (see \cref{Figure6_AccVsMethods}).
Even with this change, our~\name{} is more efficient and faster than previous works for increased input densities (see \cref{Figure7_TimeVsMethods}).
The design of~\name{} allows to operate on a much higher maximum density compared to other methods, due to their memory footprint and the time consumption.
However, the run-time of our~\name{} still increases super-linear with growing input density due to the~\acrshort{knn} search.

\subsection{Ablation Study} \label{Ablation}
Finally, we verify our design choices for the~\gls{fe}~on~\gls{ft3d}~\cite{mayer2016large} by removing components of the~\gls{fe} and compare the variants in~\cref{Table2_costvolume}.
The models in this comparison are trained only for the first phase as explained in~\cref{Implementation} and without augmentation.
Each part clearly adds a contribution to the overall accuracy when using~\gls{rs}.
The $1^{st}$ Embedding with maximum pooling, as basically used in FlowNet3D~\cite{liu2019flownet3d}, is not able to resolve the challenges of the \acrshort{rs} strategy for scene flow estimation.
The complete design -- three embedding layers with lateral connections -- leads to the best results.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Welcome to the 12th Exceptional Schools Fair!
Be prepared, visit individual school sites to learn about their missions.
Elect to reach attendees through the take one table offered in the middle of the fair.


Today's automotive news begin with the 2016 Mercedes GLC 300, one which known as a simple evolution of previously GLK. It is not a simple car though. If you examine it closer, then what you will find is a C-class with off-road capability. Moreover, the car is a simply revision over the small-luxury department previously produced by the company. As a part of revision, this time the car brings larger cargo area, means you got a big-good SUV gaining 4.6-inch in total length.
The 2016 Mercedes GLC 300 is also lower in terms of producing emissions. As a part of such term, you got 4-cylinder capable of producing 241 hp at 5500 rpm. At 1300 rpm the car produces 274 lb-ft of torque. Plus, you will get an addition flat torque curve when the engine pushed to 4000 rpm. Basically, such specs offer you linear, pleasant acceleration, one which generally can be expected from such a car of the class. However, such impression won't be enough for X3 35i driver, for example. There is nine-speed transmission (9G-Tronic) to help you keep the RPM in low numbers. The car needs 7.45 seconds before it reaches 60 miles/hour. Sure it's a bit unimpressive but enough nonetheless.
Another good aspect from the GLC 300 is that your driving style can be adjusted with a number of driving modes, each of which can be selected easily. The driving modes consist of Sport plus, eco and comfort and Dynamic Select. Aluminum parts have been put as the addition, which can be seen throughout the car. At the same time they are accompanied with four-link suspension that provides articulation and comfort of the wheels. Judging from the capability, the new 2016 Mercedes GLC 300 will easily put a lot of impression for those who are looking for luxurious SUV.


text:
Der Codex diplomaticus Anhaltinus (Abkürzung CDA) ist eine Sammlung von Urkunden für das Gebiet des Fürstentums Anhalt von 936 bis 1400 von Otto von Heinemann.

Geschichte
Dieses Werk wurde ab 1867 auf Befehl seiner Hoheit des Herzogs Leopold Friedrich von Anhalt vom anhaltischen Hofarchivar Otto von Heinemann in Dessau herausgegeben. Es enthält alle damals bekannten Urkunden in Bezug auf Anhalt der Jahre 936 bis 1400 im vollen Wortlaut und als Regest und ist damit die wichtigste Grundlage für die Erforschung der Geschichte dieses Gebietes.

Bände
Die Bände 1 bis 6 erschienen von 1867 bis 1883 sämtlich in Dessau bei unterschiedlichen Verlagen:
 Erster Theil. 936–1212.
 Erster Theil. Erste Abtheilung. 936–1123. Mit vier Siegeltafeln. A. Desbarats, 1867 (Digitalisate:  bei BSB; ).
 Erster Theil. Zweite Abtheilung. 1123–1170. Nov. 18. Mit drei Siegeltafeln. A. Desbarats, 1869.
 Erster Theil. Dritte Abtheilung. 1170. Nov. 18.–1212. Febr. Mit drei Siegeltafeln. In Commisssion bei Emil Barth, 1873.
 Zweiter Theil. 1212–1300. Mit fünfzehn Siegeltafeln. In Commisssion bei Emil Barth, 1875 (Digitalisat: ).
 Dritter Theil. 1301–1350. Mit acht Siegeltafeln. In Commisssion bei Emil Barth, 1877 (Digitalisat: ).
 Vierter Theil. 1351–1380. Mit acht Siegeltafeln. In Commisssion bei Emil Barth, 1879.
 Fünfter Theil. 1380–1400. Mit zwei Stammtafeln. In Commisssion bei Emil Barth, 1881.
 Sechster Theil. Orts- und Personenregister. Paul Baumann's Verlag, Emil Barths Hofbuchhandlung, 1883.

 Neudruck: Biblio-Verlag, Osnabrück 1996, ISBN 3-7648-0206-5.

Siehe auch
 Anhalt
 Askanier

Weblinks

Einzelnachweise

Diplomatik
Quellenedition
Codex diplomaticus Anhaltinus

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Toby C. Jones is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He teaches courses on global environmental history, energy, and the modern Middle East. During 2008-2009 he was a fellow at Princeton University's Oil, Energy, and the Middle East project. From 2004 to early 2006 Jones worked as the Persian Gulf political analyst for the International Crisis Group. His research interests focus on the environment, energy, and the history of science and technology. He is the author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Harvard University Press, 2010), Running Dry: Essays on Energy, Water and Environmental Crisis (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and is currently working America's Oil Wars (under contract at Harvard University Press). He has written for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of American History, Middle East Report, Raritan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and elsewhere. In 2015 Jones was recognized as a Rutgers Chancellor's Scholar for distinguished scholarship.
"America, Oil, and War in the Middle East," Journal of American History (2012) 99 (1): 208-218.
Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Harvard University Press, 2010).
"Crude Ecology: Technology and the Politics of Dissent in Saudi Arabia," forthcoming in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., The Technopolitical Shape of Cold War Geographies, (MIT Press).
"Embattled in Arabia: Shi'is and the Politics of Confrontation in Saudi Arabia," Occasional Paper Series, Shi'a Militancy Program, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, June 3, 2009.
"Saudi Arabia's Silent Spring," Foreign Policy online magazine, February 2009.
"Saudi Arabia's Not so New Anti-Shi'ism," Middle East Report, 242, Spring 2007, pp 29-32.
"Rebellion on the Saudi Periphery: Modernity, Marginalization and the Shi'a Uprising of 1979," International Journal of Middle East Studies. 38:2. May (2006), 213-233.
"Shifting Sands: The Future of U.S.-Saudi Relations," Foreign Affairs, Volume 85, Number 2, March/April, 2006.
"The Iraq Effect in Saudi Arabia." Middle East Report. 237. Winter 2005, pp 20-25.
"The Clerics, the Sahwa and the Saudi State." Strategic Insights. Volume IV, Issue 3, March 2005.
"Violence and the Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia." Middle East Report Online. November 13, 2003.
"Seeking a 'Social Contract' for Saudi Arabia." Middle East Report, 228, Fall 2003, pp 42-48.
Bahrain's Sectarian Challenge. International Crisis Group Middle East/North Africa Report N°40. May 6, 2005.
The Shiite Question in Saudi Arabia. International Crisis Group Middle East/North Africa Report N°45. September 19, 2005.


Just sorting out all my skincare to take away with me.Travels size Liz Earle Rocks! I have a top tip. The Palmers Body Oil is amazing to use when you shave your legs, when I get out the shower I rub the oil all over my legs and shave them you get a closer shave and it is also very moisturising I have also never cut myself doing it like this.


The company has been pushing ahead with its growth plans as it engages in a direct battle with Bloomberg.
Symphony Communication Services has been quickly growing since raising $63 million from a group of investors in May 2017. As part of that growth, it has appointed Michael Birshan, previously of Bloomberg, as a senior account manager. He will be responsible for maintaining key accounts in Europe.
Mr. Birshan worked as a regional sales manager at Bloomberg for four years, and had been with the group for around eleven years in various capacities. He also managed the media distribution revenues of Bloomberg and worked as a sales manager.
"I chose to join Symphony as I wanted to be part of something big. There was a clear gap in the market for an enterprise-wide collaboration solution which was cloud-based and secure," explained Mr. Birshan.
In his new role, Mr. Birshan will be reporting to Dogan Calmaz who is the head of sales and business management for Europe and Middle East (EMEA) at Symphony. Symphony was launched in 2015 and is seen as being in a direct battle with Bloomberg with its messaging system for traders. Thus this appointment has heightened significance.
The group also added the Dow Jones News App to its platform last month which further heightened its capacity to stream news in real time and share updates through the chats on its messaging platform.
The platform was launched by a group of traders from sell-side brokers such as Goldman-Sachs, Deutche Bank, and Citi, among others, and continues its competition with the Bloomberg messaging platform.