text:
\section{Related work}
Metric learning is an active research field with many algorithms, generally divided into linear \cite{lmnn} which learn a Mahalanobis distance, non-linear \cite{nonLinear} that learn a nonlinear transformation and use $L_2$  distance on the transformed space, and local which learn a metric per datum.
The LMNN and MLMM \cite{lmnn} algorithm  are considered the leading  metric learning method. For a recent comprehensive survey that covers linear, non-linear and local methods see \cite{survey}. \\

The exemplar-SVM algorithm \cite{exemplar} can be seen as a local similarity measure. This is obtained by maximizing margins, with a linear model, and is weakly supervised as our work. Unlike exemplar-SVM, we learn a Mahalanobis matrix and can learn an invariant metric.
Another related work is PMLM \cite{PMLM}, which also finds a local Mahalanobis metric for each data point. However, this method uses global constraints, and therefore cannot work with weakly supervised data, i.e. a single positive example. All the techniques above do not learn local invariant metrics.\\

The most common way to achieve invariance, or at least insensitivity, to a transformation  in computer vision applications is  by using hand-crafted descriptors such as SIFT \cite{sift} or HOG \cite{hog}. Another way, used in convolutional networks \cite{cnn}, is by adding pooling  and subsampling forcing the net to be insensitive to small translations. It is important to note that transformations such as rotations have a global behaviour, i.e. there is a global consistency between the pixel movement. This global consistency is not totally captured by the pooling and subsampling. As we will see in our experiments, using an invariant metric can be useful even when working with robust features such as HOG.

\section{Local Mahalanobis}
In this section we will show how a local Mahalanobis distance with maximal margin can be learned in a fast and simple way.\\

We will assume that we are given a single query image $x_0$ that belong to some class, e.g. a face of a person. We will also be given a set of negative data $x_1,...,x_N$ that do not belong to that class, e.g. a set of face images of various other people. We will learn a local Mahalanobis metric for $x_0$, $M(x_0)\succeq 0$, where $M\succeq 0$ means $M$ is positive semi-definite. For matrices  $M,N$, we will denote by $||M||$ the Frobinous norm $||M||^2=\sum_{ij}M_{ij}^2$ and by $\left<M,N\right>$ the standard inner product $\left<M,N\right>=\sum_{ij}M_{ij}N_{ij}$.\\

We wish to find a Mahalanobis matrix $M$ given the positive datum $x_0$ and the negative data $x_1,...,n_n$. Large margin methods have been very successful in metric learning \cite{lmnn}, and more generally in machine learning, therefore, our algorithm will look for the PSD matrix $M$ that maximizes the distance to the closest negative example
\begin{equation}
M=\arg\max_{M\succeq 0}(\min_{1\leq i\leq n}(x_i-x_0)^TM(x_i-x_0))
\end{equation}

The optimization cannot be solved as it is not bounded, since multiplying $M$ by a scalar multiplies the minimum distance by the same scalar. This can be solved by normalizing $M$ to have $||M||=1$. As normally done with margin methods, we can minimize the norm under fixed margin constrained instead of maximizing the margin under fixed norm constraint. The  resulting objective is

\begin{equation}\label{noRelax}
\begin{split}
M(x_0) &=\arg\min_M \frac{1}{2}||M||^2 \\
subject\,\, to :\,\,& (x_i - x_0)^TM(x_i - x_0) \geq 2\,\,\,\,\forall i \in \{1,..., n\} \\
&M \succeq 0
\end{split}
\end{equation}
Where the constant $2$ is arbitrary and will be convenient later on. While this is a convex semidefinite programming task, it is very slow for reasonable dimensional data (in the thousands)  even for state of the art solvers. This is because PSD solvers apply a projection to the semidefinite cone, performing an expensive singular value or eigen decomposition at each iteration.\\

To solve this optimization in a fast manner we will first relax the PSD constraint and look at the following objective
\begin{equation}\label{relax}
\begin{split}
M(x_0) &=\arg\min_M \frac{1}{2}||M||^2 \\
subject\,\, to :\,\,& (x_i - x_0)^TM(x_i - x_0) \geq 2\,\,\,\,\forall i \in \{1,..., n\}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
We will then see how this is equivalent to a kernel SVM problem with a quadratic kernel, and therefore can be solved easily with off-the-shelf SVM solvers such as LIBSVM \cite{libsvm}. Finally we will show how the solution of objective \ref{relax} is in fact the solution of objective \ref{noRelax} resulting in a fast solution to objective \ref{noRelax} without any matrix decomposition.

\begin{theorem}\label{trmSVM}
The solution of objective \ref{relax} is given by running kernel SVM with kernel $k(x,y)=\left<x,y\right>^2$ on inputs $\tilde{x}_0,\tilde{x}_1,...,\tilde{x}_n$ where $\tilde{x}_i= x_i-x_0$
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
Define $\varphi(x)=x\cdot x^T$, a function that maps a column vector to a matrix. This function has the following simple properties:
\begin{itemize}
\item $k(x,y)=\left<x,y\right>^2=\left<\varphi(x),\varphi(y)\right>$,  i.e.  the function $\varphi$ is the mapping associated with the quadratic kernel.
\item For any matrix $W$, we have $\left<W,\varphi(x)\right>=x^TWx$.
\end{itemize}
which can be easily verified using $\varphi(x)_{ij}=x_ix_j$. We can define auxiliary labelling  $y_0 = -1$ and $y_i=1$ for $1\leq i \leq n$. Combining everything objective \ref{relax} can be rewritten as
\begin{equation}\label{svm}
\begin{split}
M(x_0) &=\arg\min_M \frac{1}{2}||M||^2 \\
subject\,\, to :\,\,& y_i\cdot\left(\left<M,\varphi(\tilde{x}_i)\right> -1\right)\geq 1\,\,\,\,\forall i \in \{0,1,..., n\}
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where we can include $i=0$ as $\left<M,\varphi(\tilde{x}_0)\right>=0$ for any matrix. \\

Objective \ref{svm} is exactly an SVM problem with quadratic kernel, with bias fixed to one,  given inputs $\tilde{x}_0,...,\tilde{x_n}$, proving the theorem. Notice also that for the identity matrix $M=I$ we have $\left<M,\varphi(\tilde{x_i})\right>>0$ for $i\geq 1$ and $\left<M,\varphi(\tilde{x_i})\right>=0$ for $i=0$, therefore the data is separable by $M=I$ and the optimization is feasible.
\end{proof}

Now that we have shown how objective \ref{relax} can be converted into a standard SVM form, for which efficient solvers exists, we will show how it is the solution to objective \ref{noRelax}.

\begin{theorem}\label{trmRLX}
The solution to objective \ref{relax} is the solution to objective \ref{noRelax}.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
To prove the theorem it suffices to show that the solution is indeed positive semidefinite. A well known observation arrising from the dual formulation of the SVM objective \cite{svmTut} is that the optimal solution $M$ has the form \begin{equation}
M=\sum_{i=0}^n\alpha_iy_i\varphi(\tilde{x}_i),\quad \alpha_i\geq 0.
\end{equation} Since $\varphi(x)\succeq 0$ for any $x$, as its only nonzero eigenvalue is $||x||$,  $\varphi(\tilde{x}_0)=\varphi(0)=0$, and $y_i=1$ for $i\geq1$  we get
\begin{equation}\label{9}
M=\sum_{i=0}^n\alpha_iy_i\varphi(\tilde{x}_i)=\sum_{i=1}^n\alpha_i\varphi(\tilde{x}_i)\succeq 0,
\end{equation}
where the positive semidefiniteness in eq. \ref{9} is assured  due to the set of PSD matrices being a convex cone.
\end{proof}

Combining theorem \ref{trmSVM} with theorem \ref{trmRLX} we get that in order to solve objective \ref{noRelax} it is enough to run an SVM solver with a quadratic  kernel function, thus avoiding any matrix decomposition. \\

Looking at this as a SVM problem has further benefits. The SVM solvers do not compute $M$ directly, but return the set of support vectors $\tilde{x}_{i_1},...,\tilde{x}_{i_k}$ and coefficients $\alpha_{i_1},...,\alpha_{i_k}$ such that $M=\sum_k\alpha_{i_k}\varphi(\tilde{x}_{i_k})$. This allows us to work in high dimension $d$, where the $\mathcal{O}(d^2)$ memory needed to store the matrix can be a problem, and can slow computations further. As the rank of the matrix is bounded by the number of support vectors, one can see that in many applications we get a relatively low rank matrix. This bound on the rank can be improved by using sparse-SVM algorithms \cite{ssvm}. In practice we got low rank matrices without resorting to sparse $SVM$ solvers.

\section{Local Invariant Mahalanobis}
For some applications, we know a priori that certain transformations should have a small effect on the metric. We will show how to include this knowledge into the local metric we learn, learning locally invariant metrices. In section \ref{experiments} we will see this has a major effect on performance. \\

Assume we know a set of functions $T_1,...,T_k$ that the desired metric should be insensitive to, i.e. $d(x,T_i(x))$ should be small for all $x$ and $i$. A canonical example is small rotations and translations on natural images. One of the major issues in computer vision arises from the instability of the pixel representation to these transformations. Various descriptors such as SIFT \cite{sift} and HOG \cite{hog} offer a more robust representation, and have been highly successful in many computer vision applications. We will show in section \ref{experiments} that even when using a relatively robust representation such as HOG, learning an invariant metric has a significant impact.\\

A natural way to mathematically formulate the idea of being insensitive to a transformation, is to require the leading term of the approximation to vanish in that direction. In our case this means
\begin{equation}
(T(x_0)-x_0)^T\nabla^2_yd(x_0,y)(T(x_0)-x_0)=0.
\end{equation}

If we return to our basic intuition of the local Mahalanobis matrix as the Hessian matrix $\nabla^2_yd(x_0,y)$, we can now state the new local invariant Mahalanobis objective
\begin{equation}\label{invariant}
\begin{split}
M(x_0&) =\arg\min_M \frac{1}{2}||M||^2 \\
sub&ject\,\, to :\\ &(x_i - x_0)^TM(x_i - x_0) \geq 2\,\,\,\,\forall i \in \{1,..., n\} \\
&(T_j(x_0) - x_0)^TM(T_j(x_0) - x_0)=0\,\,\,\,\forall j \in \{1,..., k\} \\
&M \succeq 0
\end{split}
\end{equation}

We will show how by applying a small transformation to the data, we can reduce this to objective \ref{noRelax} which we can solved easily.

\begin{theorem}
Define $V=span\{T_1(x_0)-x_0,...,T_k(x_0)-x_0\}$, then the minimizer of objective \ref{noRelax} with $x_i-x_0$ replaced by $z_i$, its projection to $V^\perp$ is the minimizer of objective \ref{invariant}.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
For PSD matrices, the constraint that $(T_j(x_0) - x_0)^TM(T_j(x_0) - x_0)=0$ is equivalent to $M(T_j(x_0) - x_0)=0$. This can be seen if we write the vector in the basis of $M$ eigenvectors, and notice that components with positive eigenvalues have a positive contribution to the quadratic form. This means that $Mv=0$ for all $v\in V$. Each vector $x_i-x_0$ can be split into two orthogonal elements, $x_i-x_0=z_i+v_i$ where $v_i$ is its projection onto $V$ and $z_i$ is its projection onto $V^\perp$. Our equality constraints $(T_j(x_0) - x_0)^TM(T_j(x_0) - x_0)=0$ now imply
\begin{equation}
(x_i-x_0)^TM(x_i-x_0)=(z_i+v_i)^TM(z_i+v_i)=z_i^TMz_i
\end{equation}
since all the other terms vanish. We can now rewrite objective \ref{invariant} as

\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
M(x_0) &=\arg\min_M \frac{1}{2}||M||^2 \\
subject\,\, to :\,\,& z_i^TMz_i \geq 2\,\,\,\,\forall i \in \{1,..., n\} \\
& Mv=0\,\,\,\,\forall v \in V\\
&M \succeq 0
\end{split}
\end{equation}
If we forget the equality constrains we get objective \ref{noRelax} with $x_i-x_0$ replaced by $z_i$. To finish the proof we need to show that the solution to the optimization without the equality constraints, does indeed satisfy them. \\

As we have already seen in the proof of theorem \ref{trmRLX} the optimal solution is of the form $M=\sum\alpha_i\varphi(z_i)=\sum\alpha_iz_i\cdot z_i^T$. The vector $z_i$ is a member of $V^T$ so  for $v\in V$
\begin{equation}
Mv=\left(\sum\alpha_iz_i\cdot z_i^T\right)v=\sum\alpha_iz_i\cdot (z_i^Tv)=0
\end{equation}
Proving that the solution satisfies the equality constraints.
\end{proof}

A few comments are worth noting about this formulation. First the problem may not be linearly separable, although in our experiments with real data we did not encounter any unseperable case. This can be easily solved, if needed, by the standard method of adding slack variables. Second, the algorithm just adds a simple preprocessing step to the previous algorithm and runs in approximately the same time.
\section{Experiments}\label{experiments}
\subsection{Running time}
We compared running the optimization with an SVM solver \cite{libsvm}, to solving it as a semidefinite problem and as a quadratic problem (relaxing the semidefinite constraint). The main limitation when running off-the-shelf solvers is memory. Quadratic or semidefinite solvers need a constraint matrix, which in our case is a full matrix of size $n\times d^2$ where $n$ is the number of samples and $d$ is the data dimension. We tested all three approaches on the MNIST dataset of dimension 784 using only 5000 negative examples, as this already resulted in a matrix of size 24.6Gb. \\

Currently first order methods, such as ADMM  \cite{ADMM}, are the leading approaches to solving problems such as quadratic and semidefinite programming for large matrices. We used YALMIP for modeling and solved using SCS \cite{scs}. The time to run this as an semidefinite program was $1152\pm417sec$. The time it took to run this as a quadratic program was $545\pm74sec$. In comparison, when we run this as an SVM problem it took at most  $0.36sec$. We excluded the time needed to build the $n\times d^2$ constraint matrix for the quadratic and semidefinite solvers. \\

This order of magnitude improvement should not be a surprise. It is a well known that while SVM can be solved as a quadratic program, generic quadratic solvers perform much slower then solver designed specifically for SVM. \\
\subsection{MNIST}
\begin{table}
\caption{Classification error for MNIST dataset.}
\label{mnistErr}
\vskip 0.15in
\begin{center}
\begin{small}
\begin{sc}
\begin{tabular}{lcccr}
\hline
Method & Error\\
\hline
eSVM    & 1.75\%  \\
eSVM+shifts & 1.59\% \\
Local Mahal    & 1.69\%  \\
quadSVM+shifts    & 1.50\%     \\
inv-Mahal (our method) & 1.26\%   \\
LMNN     & 1.69\% \\
MLMNN      & 1.18\%  \\
   \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{sc}
\end{small}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.1in
\end{table}
The MNIST dataset is a well known digit recognition dataset, comprising of  $28\times 28$ grayscale images on which we perform deskewing preprocessing. For each of the $60,000$ training images we computed a local Mahalanobis distance and local invariant Mahalanobis(using only negative examples). On test time we performed $knn$ classification with $k=3$ using the local metrics. We show some examples of nearest neighbours in Figure \ref{mnistFig}. We compared this with exemplar-SVM, as the leading technique most similar to ours. We also compared our scores to exemplar-SVM where we add the tansformed images as positive training data. To show the importance of the invariance objective, we compare also to SVM with quadratic kernel to which we add the transformed data as positive training data (unlike the way we use the shifted data). Finally, we compared our results to the state-of-the-art metric learning LMNN method (linear metric), and to MLMNN,  a local version of LMNN, which learns multiple metrics (but not one per datum). \\

As can be seen in table \ref{mnistErr}, we perform much better then exemplar SVM and are comparable with MLMNN. It is important to note that unlike MLMNN, we compare each datum only to negatives, so our methods is applicable in scenarios where MLMNN is not. \\

\begin{figure}[h!]\label{mnistFig}
  \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.3\textwidth]{mnistNN.pdf}
      \caption{Nearest neighbour for various matrices. (a) original image (b) $L_2$ distance (c) exemplar-SVM (d) local-Mahalanobis (e) local invariant Mahalanobis}
\end{figure}

Another key observation is the difference between the invariant-Mahalanobis and the quadratic-SVM with shifts. While very similar functionally, we see that looking at the problem as a local Mahalanobis matrix gives important intuition, i.e. the way to use the shifted images, that leads to better performance.

\subsection{Labeling faces in the wild (LFW)}
LFW is a challenging dataset containing 13,233 face images of 5749 different individuals with a high level of variability. The LFW dataset is divided into 10 subsets, when the task is to classify 600 pairs of images from one subset to same/not-same using the other 9 subsets as training data. We perform the unsupervised LFW task, where we do not use any labelling inside the training images we get, besides the fact that they are different than both test images. \\

We used the aligned images \cite{deepFunnel} and represented using HOG features \cite{hog}. We compared our results to a cosine similarity baseline, to exemplar-SVM and exemplar-SVM with shifts. We note that we cannot use LMNN or MLMNN on this data, as we only have negative images with a single positive image.

\begin{table}[h]
\caption{Classification error for LFW dataset.}
\label{LFWerr}
\vskip 0.15in
\begin{center}
\begin{small}
\begin{sc}
\begin{tabular}{lcccr}
\hline
Method & Error\\
\hline
cosine similarity & 30.57$\pm$ 1.4\% \\
eSVM    & 26.90$\pm$2.2\%  \\
eSVM+shifts & 27.12$\pm$2.3\% \\
Local Mahal    & 19.85$\pm$1.3\%  \\
inv-Mahal (our method) & 19.48$\pm$1.5\%   \\
   \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{sc}
\end{small}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.1in
\end{table}

As we can see from table \ref{LFWerr}, the local Mahalanobis greatly out-performs the exemplar-SVM. We also see that even when using robust features such as HOG, learning an invariant metric improves performance, albeit to a lesser degree.
\section{Summary}
We showed an efficient way to learn a local Mahalanobis metric given a query datum and a set of negative data points. We have also shown how to incorporate prior knowledge about our data, in particular the transformations to which it should be robust, and use it to learn locally invariant metrics. We have shown that our methods are competitive with leading methods while being applicable to other scenarios where methods such as LMNN and MLMNN cannot be used.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
<!DOCTYPE html>

    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title></title>
    <link rel="Stylesheet" href="../css/analysis.css" />

Create Buffers

A buffer is an area that covers a given distance from a point, line, or area feature.

Buffers are typically used to create areas that can be further analyzed using other tools. For example, if the question is What buildings are within 1 mile of the school?, the answer can be found by creating a 1-mile buffer around the school and overlaying the buffer with the layer containing building footprints. The end result is a layer of those buildings within 1 mile of the school.

Choose layer to apply buffer to

The  point, line, or area features
to be buffered. The input  layers must be in a projected coordinate system or the processing spatial reference must be set to a projected coordinate system using the  Analysis Environments.

In addition to choosing a layer from your map, you can choose  Browse Layers at the bottom of the drop-down list to browse to your contents for a big data file share dataset or feature layer.

Select the type of buffer to apply

There are three ways you can specify the size of the buffer for your input features:

Specify a distance that is applied to all features.

Specify a field on the input layer that contains the distance value. You can use a string field or a numeric field. If a linear unit is not defined, the units of the spatial reference will be used. If you are using a geographic coordinate system, the unitless field will be assumed to be meters.

Build an expression with multiple fields and mathematical operators.

Select the buffer method

You can choose to use a  Planar method or a Geodesic method. The Planar method may be faster and is appropriate for local analysis on projected data. The Geodesic method is appropriate for
large areas and any geographic coordinate system.

Select the type of dissolve method

Options to specify the dissolve method.   If a dissolve method is chosen,  you will be given the option of creating multipart or single-part areas and you will be able to  calculate statistics based on the fields provided.

 All—All features will be dissolved. If multipart features are allowed, all features will be dissolved into a single feature. If multipart is not allowed, features that are adjacent or overlapping will be dissolved.

 Fields—Features that share the same specified field or specified field combination will be dissolved. If multipart features are allowed, all features with the same field will be dissolved into a single feature. If multipart is not allowed, features that are adjacent or overlapping with the same field value  will be dissolved.

 None—No features will be dissolved.  This is the default.

Allow multipart features

Option to specify if your result will consist of single-part or multipart features.

Checked—The results of your analysis will be contain multipart features.

Unchecked—The results of your analysis will contain single-part features, This is the default.

Add statistics (optional)

 You can calculate statistics on features that are summarized. On numeric fields you can calculate the following:

Count—Calculates the number of nonnull values. Can be used on numeric fields or strings. The count of [null, 0, 2] is 2.

Sum—The sum of numeric values in a field. The sum of [null, null, 3] is 3.

Mean—The mean of numeric values. The mean of [0, 2, null] is 1.

Min—The minimum value of a numeric field. The minimum of [0, 2, null] is 0.

Max—The maximum value of a numeric field. The maximum value of [0, 2, null] is 2.

Range—The range of a numeric field. This is calculated as the minimum values subtracted from the maximum value. The range of [0, null, 1] is 1. The range of [null, 4] is 0.

Variance—The variance of a numeric field in a track. The  variance of [1] is null. The variance of [null, 1,1,1] is 1.

Standard deviation—The standard deviation of a numeric field. The standard deviation of [1] is null. The standard deviation of [null, 1,1,1] is 1.

On string fields you can calculate the following:

Count—The number of nonnull strings.

Any—This statistic is a random sample of a string value in the specified field.

                All statistics are calculated on nonnull values. The resulting layer will contain a new field for each statistic calculated. Any number of statistics can be added by choosing an attribute and statistic.

Choose an ArcGIS Data Store to save results to

GeoAnalytics results are stores to an ArcGIS Data Store and exposed as a feature layer in   Portal for ArcGIS. In most cases, results should be stored to the spatiotemporal data store and this is the default. In some cases saving results to the  relational data store is a good option. The following are reasons why you may want to store results in the relational data store:

Use results in portal to portal collaboration.

Enable sync capabilities with your results.

You should not use the relational data store if you expect your GeoAnalytics results to increase, and need to take advantage of the spatiotemporal big data store's capabilities to handle large amounts of data.

Result layer name

 This is the name of the layer that will be created in My
Content and added to the map. The default name is based on the
tool name and the input layer name. If the layer already exists, the tool will fail.

Using the  Save result in drop-down box, you can specify
the name of a folder in My Content where the result will be
saved.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


A magnificent eco-project providing a world-class, utterly unique holiday destination. Not merely the most luxurious of villas or boutique hotels – more a work of art with nature, architecture and design in perfect harmony.
Neither hotel nor villa, The Houses of Gökçe Gemile offer something truly unique: Without parallel in the Mediterranean, and possibly worldwide - a breathtaking eco-paradise with private bays, unique luxurious houses & hotel-style services. The three houses can be enjoyed independently or together, either way creating a completely private idyll.
Gökçe Gemile translates as Sky Blue Gemile Bay, the name given by locals to this astonishingly blue bay. Undeveloped and unspoiled, the Gemile Peninsula is a heavily protected region of natural beauty, one of mountains, coves, crystal clear waters and lush greenery meeting turquoise water where the only sound is the occasional splash of a diving turtle.
Gökçe Gemile is the sole construction in the entire region, permitted only as this special eco-project is considered a unique example of innovation within Turkey - both conceptually and architecturally.
Indeed the peninsula feels as if it is your own Private Island paradise.
Extreme luxury co-exists in complete harmony with its surroundings with not one tree or bush touched during the entire construction. Great lengths have been taken to ensure nature has not been spoiled to create artificial luxury, to the extent that one of the houses (Gökçe) has been literally created around a tree which stands magnificently through its very heart.
And the extraordinary furnicular lift that links the houses to the waterfront has again been created without a single tree impacted - absolutely vital to Gökçe Gemiles' ethos.
That goal has undoubtedly been achieved with Gökçe Gemile providing a real and unique experience – a perfect sense of peace.
Hidden corners are located throughout the grounds and surrounding forest all the way down to the beach below, providing areas to sit, contemplate and do little other than breathe in the surrounding nature. The ruins of an old stone house set on the boundary wall are lit at night and provide a perfect spot to relax with a book and absorb 'the sounds of the forest'.
And with a final touch, cars are parked away from the property, thus ensuring that on entering the hidden grounds all that remains are the 'Sounds of Gökçe Gemile'.
In our opinion, Gökçe Gemile should be considered more as a piece of creative art, rather than in any way merely a holiday property, no matter how luxurious. It is truly unique not only in Turkey but throughout the world.
The owner Malik has worked tirelessly to fulfil his long-held dream - remarkably being his own innovative architect, and working closely with the regulatory authorities for permission to create this unique eco-friendly project that works entirely in harmony with the surrounding nature.
Less a construction, more a journey of passion where every minute aspect has been considered in great detail and each single item has its own story to tell. One of the heritage and nature of Turkey, where hand-made skills and local craftsmanship have been used throughout.
Each house is built using stone painstakingly collected from a different village in Turkey – Elmali, Eşen and Alaçati. No stone is mined – instead each is literally picked from the ground, weather-beaten and gloriously recycled. Indeed, the house named Gemile is created from a single ruined dry-stone wall collected from the village of Eşen.
A standard luxury such as a pool jacuzzi is not simply integrated into a swimming pool. A boulder has been collected from the depths of Turkey and transported to Gemile where it has been split apart and individual jacuzzi's carved in free-form fashion from the rock by hand.
No fabricated tiles are utilised in the concept – all are natural marble sourced in and around Turkey.
As with the houses no tiles are used for the natural lake-pools, instead all are lined with natural stones collected from local rivers.
Each room in each house has its own unique style, with use of differing materials, textures and design.
70% of the main furniture has been hand-crafted on-site from beds, to tables, chairs and mirrors.
Even the sinks are not bought – instead painstakingly carved from metamorphic rocks brought from all over Turkey.
All the wood used is reclaimed and plastic does not appear at all - stone, iron and reclaimed wood only.


text:
Bushnell University bringing back baseball after 50-year absence
Ashley Conklin
Register-Guard
Bushnell University announced Tuesday that it is bringing back baseball as its 17th varsity sport after nearly a 50-year hiatus.
The Beacons will begin play in spring 2022.
Former Whitman College assistant Tommy Richards has been named the first Beacons' head coach.
Previous coverage:Bushnell basketball teams send plea to Gov. Brown requesting they be cleared to play
"We are excited to have baseball back as an intercollegiate sport on campus after a 50 plus year hiatus," Bushnell president Joseph D. Womack said in a news release. "Bushnell Baseball complements the educational and co-curricular activities at a Christ-centered University like ours because each practice and each inning provides the student-athlete with an opportunity to gain in wisdom, faith and service."
"We are thrilled to bring good news to our conference and community," athletic director Corey Anderson added. "Baseball provides more opportunities for high school baseball players and transfers to receive a liberal arts education while continuing to play baseball at the collegiate level."
Previous coverage:Bushnell University freezes tuition for 2021-2022 school year
Richards, who played four years at Washington State from 2009-12, spent four seasons as an assistant coach at NCAA Division III Whitman College where he led the offense and infield units, coordinated student-athlete recruiting, and led the strength and conditioning program. Whitman improved its win total in all four year Richards was on its staff, including a 29-win season in 2019.
Richards was drafted in the 24th round of the MLB draft by the Baltimore Orioles in 2012. After three seasons in professional baseball, including a season in the Australian Baseball League, he began his coaching career at Lindenwood–Belleville, an NAIA college in Illinois.
High school and junior college players interested in joining the Beacons should complete an online form at BushnellBeacons.com/baseball or contact Richards at trichards@bushnell.edu.
The school is also working on finding a field for practices and games, and according to the news release, will announce that decision in the coming weeks.
Contact reporter Ashley Conklin at aconklin@registerguard.com or 541-338-2337, and follow him on Twitter @Ashleyrgsports.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


This election cycle has dialed the national discussion up to eleven. Everyone is pounding on their keyboards with the caps lock on, but let's put a pin in that politically polarizing conversation and acknowledge how draining the news can be even when Trump isn't stealing headlines.
Tragedies happen with such frequency they seem like they're competing for coverage. They say if it bleeds it leads, but the paper can only fit so much red on the page. It's gotten to the point where we hope the headline is more information on yesterday's tragedy and not a new one that broke while we were sleeping.
24-hour news stations have to pick which terrorist attack will engage their demographic, which riot will play best in the sticks, and which spree-shooting will get better ratings.
The American flag flies at half staff so often it's hard to trace the reason.
When we login online we see bodies float down our news streams. We share snuff films in gif form and react with frowny face emojis. We're getting used to the view from police dashboard cams, desensitized to the sound of screaming widows, and the sight of dead men armed only with their open arms.
It seems like the only way to will ourselves out of this funk is to stay willfully uniformed. Taking a mental health day means ignoring current events, and taking a breather means sticking our heads in the sand.
We become shut ins in our own minds, walking the halls of narrow world views, framing events the way we want to see them, curating the reality we want to see. We stick our fingers in our ears and dig our heels into our opinions. We're so sheltered we only go out when our bias needs confirmation.
We fight our tribal disputes on social media, shooting flaming arrows from the safety of our armchairs, copying and pasting talking points to avoid having to make our own arguments. We perpetuate debunked claims to keep our favorite roleplaying games going. We defer to officials whose only claim to authority is their brazen personality.
We heckle when we have nothing to add to the conversation. Our every post is an excerpt from a comedy roast. Our comebacks are pre-rendered memes, cartoon characters with connotations, and captioned stills from films. We dust off jokes from the same stockpile and wonder why no one has a sense of humor anymore.
Outrage is our default setting. We jump at headlines, without so much as skimming the article on our way down to comment. We have hair trigger warnings. We're so on edge we mistake satire with extremism, celebration with self-congratulation, and pet peeves with personal attacks.
The dictionary is our armory. We keep adding to it, stock piling cutting edge jargon in case we need to take someone down. Ours is the generation of hyper-categorization, and if they don't understand why, we block our parents.
We argue semantics. We lash out over lingo. We get stuck in irony loops mansplaining the definition of "mansplaining" to women who know we're musing the term.
We speak with so much nuance we've lost the ability to communicate with those we agree with. If the like-minded question our logic we accuse them of aiding the opposition. We ask friends to cite their sources so we can scrutinize them, because we know all articles are editorials and everyone is quoting fiction.
We trust no one. We dismiss allies as white knights, and rebuttals as trolls. We can't hear the chorus for the voices. We can't separate the signal from the noise, because it's all starting to sound the same.
If writing is a form of telepathy, skimming social media can be a psychic fire storm. We writers need to be mindful of how much of that we can afford to have knocking around our noggins. Me, personally, I needed the space for other things.
I want to get back to sharing short stories and writing advice. I've written a novella in my time away. I'll be sharing more from that too.
So yeah, timely post. I need to see if I can figure out how to strain through the news and not go back into "head in the sand" mode.
It seems like authors absolutely have to try to build their brands online if they're serious about writing, but I think we shouldn't devote half our creative energy to interacting or worse putting out twitter fires and stuff like that. I think we should reserve the right to do social media on our own terms.
Agreed. I've heard several authors also talking about just selecting a few social media options that really seem to work for you, rather than trying to manage a bunch that you might not like using.
That's a good idea. Limit the focus instead of throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
This is so scarily close to the truth. I've recently got i to mindfulness meditation. I think I should be spending more time in that mode than the default facebook theme.
Too many of my friends of Facebook feel like every issue under the son is the hill the want to die on. Sometimes just looking is enough to put me out. I've had so much fun writing a novella in the few months I've been gone. Now that I'm back maybe I ought to give mindfulness meditation a try.
Funny you should mention that he put off posting that article until today. I'd put off posting mine for a month too and sadly it's still just as relevant. Thanks for sharing the link.
Brilliant article Drew. And I agree completely, I recently did a stint away from Fb particularly to avoid all the noise and hate (from both sides) around brexit in the UK. I decided some time ago to just share writing related stuff, and the things I want to write about, not posting for the sake of posting..
I've been tempted to unplug, but so far I've not managed to do it for more than about twelve hours at a time. I have to keep writing, and social media is a necessary tool. What I try not to do is get involved in the firestorms.


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Molson Coors to brew all products in the UK with green energy
Posted on April 6, 2021 by Elodie
Molson Coors Beverage Company has signed a ten-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with RWE, which will see all of its UK operations powered by renewable electricity. With the deal, Molson Coors claims it has become the first major UK brewer to produce all of its beers and ciders using 100% green electricity. As part of the PPA, 22 turbines at the Tween Bank wind farm in Yorkshire will supply renewable electricity to all of Molson Coors' UK operations. This includes the breweries at Burton, Tadcaster and Sharps in Cornwall, as well as the Aspall Cyder House in Suffolk, all offices, the national distribution centre and the national call centre in Cardiff. Under the terms of the ten-year agreement, RWE will deliver around 75 gigawatt hours of green electricity annually. In an average year, Molson Coors uses the same amount of electricity as around 25,000 households.
tagged with Green energy, Molson Coors


Vendre (to sell) is a regular -dre French verb.
Qu'est-ce qu'ils vendent dans ce magasin ?
What do they sell in this store?
Take a look at our verb tables for Vendre (to sell) conjugations in all tenses and moods, with sound files.


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Open source in government IT: It is about savings but that's not the whole story
The mood in governments around the world has swung behind open source and open standards, but the shift is not being driven by cost cutting alone.
By Tina Amirtha for Benelux | November 17, 2016 -- 11:00 GMT (03:00 PST) | Topic: Enterprise Software
Could open source help cut the White House's multibillion-dollar software bill?
Image: iStockphoto
The US government spends about $6bn per year on software licenses and maintenance, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
Given the scale of that spending, it's understandable that the US, like other administrations around the world, is considering open-source software and open software standards as a way of saving money.
But more than just seeing the move to open source as a cost-effective alternative, public officials worldwide view it as a means of speeding up innovation in the public sector.
In October, the Dutch government set into law a proposal that all government bodies should use open document formats starting in 2017. In addition, the Dutch government will be promoting open-source software across the public and private sector.
The open document format is a digital file type that meets open-standards requirements, a set of technical software specifications that encourages open and proprietary software applications to integrate seamlessly with one another.
White House launches Code.gov to share open source government code
The repository should help federal agencies avoid duplicative custom software purchases and promote cross-agency collaboration.
For example, the open document file type .odt is compatible with both the proprietary Microsoft Office and the open-source OpenOffice and LibreOffice alternatives.
In June, the US government passed into law the Megabyte Act, which aims to streamline software license spending with a projected savings of up to $181m per year for a single internal agency.
And in August, the US government issued a new federal software policy that aims to improve efficiency, transparency, and innovation across government by promoting the use of open source.
In many ways, these software licenses are a symptom of the tech world's hold on governments. In Europe, governments struggle to keep tech companies publicly responsible by urging them to pay their fair share of taxes, while they rely on these companies' technologies to keep their administrations running.
Avoiding entering into binding licensing contracts is one way that governments can separate themselves from the power of tech companies.
"You create a lock-in situation, where company X created it and they are the only ones who know how relationships in the data and database itself work well enough to maintain it," says Kane McLean, a public-sector technology consultant and co-chair of Open Source for America.
Before the UK government implemented its open-standards plan in 2014, Microsoft threatened to move its Microsoft Research laboratories out of the UK, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Adopting this type of strategy often means refraining from using proprietary software and choosing open-source software instead. As part of its ongoing open-standards program, UK government officials who wish to set up new services must avoid software licenses that require them to use proprietary software.
The Microsoft Office suite is one of the most expensive software licenses for governments to maintain, and governments are among Microsoft's largest customers. While the rates Microsoft charges to governments are not publicly available, the business consumer price of the Microsoft 365 suite jumped by 59 percent at the end of 2015.
The Australian government's spending on Microsoft desktop licenses jumped by 33 percent in 2016, a significant jump from previous years, according to iTnews. From the middle of 2016 to the middle of 2019, Australia's Department of Finance will pay A$67m ($50m) per year on Microsoft licenses.
Some large tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, are committed to the spirit of open-source software. And to support the demand for open document formats, a few years ago Microsoft introduced the .docx format, which is compatible with most text programs.
As governments disseminate increasingly more information and offer more services online, they need to connect new websites and applications to older ones, as well as across departments. To avoid having to rewrite old software code to function with new apps, governments are encouraging developers to use software with built-in open standards.
The primary goal of employing open source in government is to facilitate the transfer of data as smoothly as possible. Open-standards proponents say this approach would lead to more innovation within government and better citizen services.
"The database itself is so intertwined with the data, and the data is so intertwined with the database, that they are virtually inseparable. So once you are intimately familiar with both the data and that database, reinventing it would be a very, very difficult challenge," says Open Source for America's McLean.
The new Dutch law's sponsor, Astrid Oosenbrug, told Dutch iT-channel that open-document formats would improve information sharing from the government to citizens and give the government more freedom in choosing IT suppliers. Meanwhile, using open-source software would improve competition in the software industry, she said.
Open Source for America's McLean says his organization is seeing far more smaller projects becoming parts of major systems in federal IT, in a way not experienced before the adoption of open standards.
"It really is amazing when you level the playing field and drop the barriers, the people who come out and want to play, they've had some amazing ideas," he says.
Read more about governments and open source
Bulgaria passes law requiring government software to be open source
The US government buys into open-source programming
Indian government mandates use of open source software
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Groupon Offers
About Girl Pow-R
Acting for Young Actors: The Ultimate Teen Guide Paperback
Mary Lou Belli is the coauthor of The Sitcom Career Book, published by Back Stage Books. An Emmy Award–winning director, she has worked on Girlfriends, The Hughleys, Major Dad, and Charles in Charge, among many other shows. She is the mother of two children who act professionally. She lives in Los Angeles.
Dinah Lenney is an adjunct professor at UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television. An actor as well as an acting teacher, she is currently appearing on ER as the no-nonsense nurse Shirley. She lives in Los Angeles.
Last updated on April 14, 2018 10:35 am
Tags: art, books, children's books, drama and theatre, film, music and photography, performing arts, teens, theatre.
Do you know a teen that's been bitten by the acting bug? Here's just the book they need! Acting for Young Actors, aimed at teens and tweens, lets kids hone their skills and develop their craft. It begins with the five W's: WHO am I? WHAT do I want? WHY do I want it? WHERE am I? WHEN does this event take place? Sounds basic – but many young child actors are told simply to "get up there and act." This book explores each of these questions, using helpful exercises to allow young actors to work through problems of character identity and motivation. With comprehensive chapters on auditioning, rehearsal, and improvisation, plus a primer on how young actors can break into film, theater, and television, Acting for Young Actors is every kid's ticket to the big time
Acting for Young Actors: The Ultimate Teen Guide
46 new from $8.81
98 used from $1.75
as of July 15, 2019 9:35 am
Acting for Young Actors The Ultimate Teen Guide
Dinah Lenney
Edition Unstated
Back Stage Books
EAN List Element: 9780823049479
Height: 696, Length: 500, Weight: 44, Width: 59
Height: 70, Length: 690, Weight: 45, Width: 500
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Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything Hardcover
Just Dance Kids Ubisoft
Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History Hardcover
Star Wars For Beginning Piano Solo Paperback
Copyright © 2016-2018 Canyon Entertainment Group. Girl Pow-R is a trademark of Canyon Entertainment Group. All Rights Reserved.


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Q: Add content of a url to respondText in Ktor
I have a url that i want to display as the content of my webpage using Ktor framework.
fun Application.module() {
    install(DefaultHeaders)
    install(CallLogging)
    install(Routing) {

        get("/") {
            call.respondText(/*Content of that url in the output ?*/, ContentType.Text.Any)
        }
    }
}

Thanks in advance.

A: This looks like a kind of a proxy. You can check a reverse proxy sample here: https://github.com/ktorio/ktor-samples/tree/master/other/reverse-proxy

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Геваристка революционна армия (ГРА) () е колумбийска партизанска организация, създадена през 1992 г., като отцепническа фракция от Армията за национално освобождение (АНО). Групировката носи името и е кръстена на аржентинския революционер Че Гевара. Неин създател и лидер е Олимпо де Хесус Санчес Каро.

Първоначално групата наброява едва 18 души, в това число Каро и братята му, но постепенно нараства до 400 партизани. Въпреки че е свързана с АНО и също извършва отвличания, тя е много по-малобройна и не е включена в списъците на САЩ и ЕС като терористична организация.

Когато се демилитаризира през август 2008 г., групировката наброява едва 45 души. През 2015 г Лидерът на ГРА е осъден на 20 г. затвор за убийства и отвличания.

Източници
 Георги Коларов, Латиноамериканската левица в края на XX век, 2001, Издателство УИ Климент Охридски
 Георги Коларов, Мистика и тероризъм. Кървавата смес на "Сендеро Луминасо", 1996, Издателство Академ

Политика на Колумбия
Ляворадикални терористични организации
Основани в Колумбия през 1992 година

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Azimut Benetti is the largest network producing megayachts and the world's leading private group in the luxury boating sector.
Currently, under the leadership of Giovanna Vitelli, owner of Azimut/Benetti, and daughter of Azimut's founder — Paolo Vitelli, Azimut Yachts boosts yacht industry and Turino tourism, establishing yacht as a popular leisure among European millionaires and socialites.
The company gradually expanded its range, focusing on the lower end of the market – with the launch of the AZ 32' Targa in 1977, the "Ford T" of the boat world – and upper end too – (with the memorable début of the Azimut 105' Failaka in 1982, the biggest mass-produced yacht in fibreglass at the time).
This leadership position was confirmed in subsequent seasons, thanks to numerous business successes and an investment policy which has consolidated Azimut's technological and production capacities over the years, with sites now established in Brazil.
The construction of luxury yachts requires production efficiency, advanced technologies and an ability to innovate. Boat owners who choose Azimut choose luxury, hi-tech yachts, built at cutting-edge boatyards where the Group's investments in research culminate.
Azimut-Benetti's R&D Centre develops technologies that are unique worldwide, for an experience at sea that is effortless and safe. In fact Azimut's technologies are always designed to deliver safety and comfort to yacht owners.
To maximise the eco-compatible standards of the yachts produced at its boatyards, Azimut decided to adopt RINA principles and to achieve RINA Green Plus notation. The result is a remarkable range of innovative solutions, including first and foremost hybrid propulsion motors, to sail with a near-zero reduction in noise levels and lower consumption on short day trips. In addition to: high performance propellers, LED lighting, anti-UV film on windows for better thermal efficiency and environmentally compatible materials. Experiments continue at Azimut's research centres, with the introduction of nanotechnologies to develop a longer-lasting anti-fouling coating with a lower impact for marine life.


1. Toss the bananas in the lemon juice and set aside. Put the biscuits in a food processor and whiz to a crumb. Add the melted butter and ginger and process for 1 minute to combine.
2. Butter six 10 cm (4 in) metal rings or tartlet tins and line with greaseproof paper. Press the biscuit mixture into each ring.
3. Divide the toffee sauce equally among the rings and top with the bananas. Pipe or spoon on the cream, sprinkle with chocolate shavings and chill. Remove from the rings or tins and serve.


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FreeAgent Launches a New Alerts Tool
By Raju Shanbhag , TMCnet Contributor
Enabling accountants to automatically track their clients' finances and highlight in real-time areas of opportunity or concern, FreeAgent has launched a new Alerts tool, the company has announced.
Apart from a portal to drill into the specifics of any one of their accounts, the new feature is available exclusively through the accountant's existing dashboard – which presents an at-a-glance view of all of the clients on the FreeAgent platform. It also provides better accessibility for users and a significant reduction in time spent on manual or paper based processes, because FreeAgent is entirely online and has been seamlessly integrated into the IRIS accounts production solution, the company stated in a press release.
Alasdair McGill, managing director of Freelance World, said, "Online accountancy has revolutionized the way accountants work with their clients and FreeAgent's latest Alerts tool goes even further to help us keep on top of our clients' accounts. Alerts will give us the ability to monitor our clients' accounts on a daily basis, giving them peace of mind that we're watching the numbers. I'd like to congratulate FreeAgent on how far they've come over the last year."
To monitor their clients' account activity for transactions and entries that may warrant closer examination by using Alerts, accountants will also be able to take a more proactive approach in helping their clients keep on top of their finances, and ensure that potential issues are spotted and acted on sooner rather than later.
In April 2011, the company partnered with Plendi, a Dublin-based mobile expense management company. Plendi takes the pain out of tracking out-of-pocket expenses. Customers take a picture of their receipts using Plendi's iPhone (News - Alert) or Android app.
Each receipt is transcribed by Plendi's data entry staff, and the image and transaction data are permanently stored in an online receipt manager. The partnership with FreeAgent means that the transaction data, including the date, vendor, net, VAT, and total, along with an image of the receipt are automatically recorded in the customers' FreeAgent account.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO, click here.
Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO. Follow us on Twitter.
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell


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The Language of Game of Thrones: How Different Accents Tell a Story
Chris Anderson
It's not unusual for people who speak the same type of English to sound quite different. Pronunciation and vocabulary change depending on the region a person is from. In the UK, long years of history have resulted in quite distinct accents in different cities, which tell a rich story about that specific place.
For TV shows that take place in made-up places, accents are great way to help tell the audience a little bit about important characters. Game of Thrones, the popular HBO phenomenon, is no different. Many of the characters' accents teach you a little bit about their history.
It's worth noting that Game of Thrones is an American-produced show based on novels by American author George R. R. Martin. Many Americans can't tell the difference between the various British accents, simply because they don't interact with British people very often, and most accents they are exposed to in movies and television are typically southern English accents.
The North: The Starks and Jon Snow
House Stark lives in the North, so it's fitting that Ned Stark is played by Sean Bean. Bean grew up outside Sheffield in Northern England and uses his native Northern accent to portray the Lord of Winterfell.
How to spot it: Although there are a few slightly different Northern English accents, they're generally obvious by slight vowel changes. You may note that the words of House Stark, for instance, might sound more like "Winter is cooming," with a "oo" sound as in broom.
What it says: Just as in the UK, there is a slightly different identity between the North and the South. The people of the North in George R. R. Martin's world consider themselves separate from the rest of the kingdoms. The Northern accent of the characters emphasizes this split.
Putting on accents: Ned Stark's sons Jon Snow and Robb Stark both grew up in the North, so it makes sense that the characters would have the same accent as their father. But Richard Madden and Kit Harrington, the actors who play these roles, are actually changing their accent onscreen. Richard has a noticeable Scottish accent in real life, and Kit Harrington has the Southern accent of his native London.
Born out of wealth: The Lannisters
The accent of the proud, powerful Lannister house is known as Received Pronunciation, which is an accent that typically represents wealth.
How to spot it: RP lacks any regional varieties and avoids non-standard grammatical structures. As a result, it's often used as the standard for teaching non-native speakers.
What it says: "Received" has the original meaning of "accepted" or "approved," emphasizing the fact that this was the supposedly "correct" way for the educated to speak. These days, only about 2% of the UK population speaks with this accent.
Putting on accents: Tyrion, a common fan favorite, is meant to speak in Received Pronunciation, like his father Tywin and the rest of the Lannister house. Peter Dinklage, originally born in New Jersey, does a decent job of it, but some avid fans can tell that he is putting an accent on. You can hear his native accent in the clip below:
Interestingly enough, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Tyrion's brother Jaime, is actually Dutch, but does a fairly good job of bringing out his inner RP.
The Family Outcast: Theon Greyjoy
Although Theon was born in the Iron Islands, he was forced to grow up far away from home in Winterfell with the Starks. Based on the area he grew up, he developed the local accent and carries a touch of Northern in his voice.
How to spot it: see above
What it says: Because Theon grew up away from his home, he changed the way he dressed and his views on the world. One of the most noticeable changes is his accent. Listening to Theon and his father speak, you can hear the difference between the two.
Putting on accents: Just like Madden and Harrington, London native Alfie Allen is hiding his Southern accent when playing Theon, which you can hear below.
The Other Starks
Wait a minute: not all of the Starks speak with the Northern accent. Arya, Bran, and Sansa have somewhat generic Southern accents, in fact.
How to spot it: These accents are referred to as Southern British English. Though there are many dialects of SBE, the one most commonly heard in movies and television shows is Estuary English because it is softer and a bit closer to US dialect so that broader audiences can understand it. It shares many similarities with RP, especially in the pronunciation of consonants.
What it says: In this case their accents might be explained by their mother Catelyn's Southern accent. She moved up North when she married Ned and at times feels disconnected from the local customs, as shown in her different accent.
Putting on accents: Michelle Fairley, who plays Catelyn, hides her Northern Irish accent when she plays the devoted mother of the Stark children.
Do the accents of any of the other characters in the show seem to say anything about them? You're sure to learn something from paying attention to the way characters speak – even if all you learn is that the actor could have used a few extra days with a vocal coach!
If you want to experience the different accents of English, consider studying abroad in one of our school in the UK and Ireland.
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An ancient (7th century AD) hindu god, Vishnu's idol was found during excavation in an old village in Russia's Volga region.
The idol found in Staraya (old) Maina village dates back to 7th century AD. Some readers raise question if this is Goddess Kali. That is not what I want to explain here. Here I want to show how old Russia was connected with India and Hinduism even before 7 th century.
Staraya Maina village in Ulyanovsk region was a highly populated city 1700 years ago, much older than Kiev, which was so far believed to be the mother of all Russian cities.
Prior to unearthing of the Vishnu idol, Dr Alexander Kozhevin, Reader of Ulyanovsk State University's archaeology department, has already found ancient coins, pendants, rings and fragments of weapons.
He believes that today's Staraya Maina, a town of eight thousand, was ten times more populated in the ancient times. It is from here that people started moving to the Don and Dneiper rivers around the time ancient Russy built the city of Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine.
The discovery of the idol confirms the location in Russia, identified in the Rig Veda asrus soviath sapthamahanagaratham (ancient and holy land of the 722 flying vehicles).
Ancient connections between the Russians and the Indians has been unequivocally confirmed.
In Russian orthodox Christianity, worship is conducted very much like in Indian Vishnu temples.
Russians refer to the feast of Vizhnyir Ekoratsya Vikhunh, directly corresponding with VaikhunTa Ekadasi.
Russian language also owes a lot to Sanskrit, whose origins 50,000 years ago roughly correspond with the language of the people of theSmritzyi archaeological site, along the banks of the now-dried up Vernstokhlin (Varnasatyakhalini) river system.
Vishnu idol is depicted in form of Varaha (Wild Boar), which is 3rd incarnation of Vishnu among his 10 (Dasavataras), with a hammer in one left hand while the deconglated seventh arm on the right side holds a reticulated sickle.
This hammer and sickle imagery is also found in the Parasurama Sutra, conclusively placing the origin of great and popular Russian political ideology in Vedic India.
Parasurama, the 6th incarnation of Vishnu is depicted with Sickle/Axe in one hand.
Parasurama Sutra, the basis of all government policy in the erstwhile Kerala kingdom of Vaazhappazhaa, contains the lines Sthulyam Kaamyunishancha kalanam brighahaha.
Links between the ancient Russians and Indians almost certainly aided by the 60,000 odd scholars of the University of Vexalate(Sanskrit. Vekhshalatha, Russian. Vekholotsla), in modern-day Central Afghanistan, in the 17th Century BCE, is said to have transferred political ideas through the land of the Vanga (Russian. Vangnya) in modern-day West Bengal (vanga became banga).
For many years, western historical study dominated by Greco-Capitalists, attributed the ideology of Communism to the work done by Karl Marx, one of their own.
It has been well documented that Marx indeed visited Kerala and West Bengal, and had thorough understanding of the Parasurama Sutra, a copy of which he picked up in the old-book-stall near the Cochin (Kochi) airport.
Later on, as part of the larger Greco-centric Capitalist conspiracy, Karl Marx took all the credit himself.
If one reads Parasurama Sutra or Parasurama Smriti now, they can understand communism better.
Parasurama, killed all anachist rulers and established a new system to rule his country. He wrote those rules and ideologies asParasurama Smriti.
During 1952, in Soviet Russia, an archaeologist, Prof. Varely Smirzkoff of Odessa University found artefacts near the ancient Belarussian town of Kozhikodz.
He was the first to speculate that the ruling political ideology of his country could well have had its origins in Vedic India rather than Modern Europe.
Stalin funded Smirzkoff's research until Smirrzkoff was suddenly found to have stolen over 500,000 paper clips from work over the course of his tenure at Odessa University.
He was sent to Siberia, and with him went almost all academic proof that would have certainly brought Russia and India closer together.
This entry was posted on March 30, 2015 by Sanatan Dharm and Hinduism in god vishnu, kali in russia, russian indian connection, vishnu in russia and tagged GOD VISHNU, kali in russia, Lord Vishnu, russian and indian connection, visnu idol.


A clip I put together from a 1967 interview, in which, pressed to put down The Monkees (yawn...), Jerry mans up and, like most musicians at the time, gives them props. Really, it was only journalists who hated the Monkees. Everyone from The Beatles and The Who to Buffalo Springfield and Frank Zappa gave much support to The Monkees.


Porcupine (PORCN; EC 2.3.1.) is a a multi-pass integral membrane-bound O-acyl transferase (MBOAT) that is required for post-translational modification of all Wnt proteins to enable their transport, secretion, and activity. Since PORCN has no known function beyond its role in the biogenesis of Wnts, it is therefore an attractive therapeutic target in diseases with dysregulated Wnt signaling (e.g. diseases related to stem cell biology, proliferation and angiogenesis). Compromised Porcn activity commonly results in developmental disorders including focal dermal hypoplasia (Goltz syndrome), whereas hyperactivity of Porcn is associated with cancerous cell growth. Inhibition of PORCN can be an effective strategy for broadly suppressing Wnt signaling and thus hold potential in regenerative medicine and anticancer applications.
 T.M. Covey et al. PORCN moonlights in a Wnt-independent pathway that regulates cancer cell proliferation. PLoSONE 2012, 7, e34532.
 X. Wang et al. The development of highly potent inhibitors for porcupine. J. Med. Chem. 2013, 56, 2700-2704.


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Amazing GUI Environment for Arduino!
By Christian Cawley / News / 23rd March 2018
Using an Arduino is straightforward. You hook it up to your PC via USB, install the IDE software, and create programs. These are uploaded to your Arduino and used until the program is updated.
That's all there is to it; but what if you could do even more with an Arduino/? Wouldn't it be great to be able to directly access Arduino through a monitor, and interact with it via a mouse or keyboard?
That's the idea behind Bowie Poag's Halogen, "a scriptable, programmable GUI environment for the Arduino."
While not a full-blown operating system, the GUI (graphical user interface) certainly has the feel of one. Amazingly, it's running only on an Arduino, too. Says Poag: "I'm building it on the stock Arduino Uno, with a simple 3.5 inch TFT LCD screen with a microSD slot on the back … It boots up immediately into the interpreter."
To make it more useful, Halogen also features a "primitive scripting language" which Poag says can be used to write rudimentary apps, such as that seen in the demo. You can, for instance "display images anywhere on screen, and display however many images you like."
Crucially there is no upper memory limit because the images are dumped to the display as they're loaded up. Halogen's creator also explains how primitive commands can be used. These "directives" include SSL (for set status line) which sets the line of text at the top of the screen ( as seen in the demo video). Meanwhile, another directive is SHI (show images), and this will pull an image from the SD card; the image is displayed at the coordinates you specify. Other directives control delay, loading other apps, drawing boxes, drawing text, loading more images, and so on.
All of this means that you could create a GUI for an Arduino project with buttons on a touch-enabled TFT. Scripting through Halogen lets you create rudimentary apps on Arduino. Pretty amazing, we think you'll agree. But how? Well, it's all about making the most of the hardware. Says Poag "If anything, this style of development should be taught as mandatory. Learning to code within extreme constraints gives a programmer an appreciation for the hardware."
At present, Halogen is unavailable to the public; let's hope that Bowie Poag can complete and share his work soon.
Christian Cawley spends a lot of time with Raspberry Pis and scours the web looking for interesting DIY electronics projects and news for ElectroMaker. He's currently trying to show his 7 year old son how to get to grips with Scratch, but so far to no avail.
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The cryptocurrency market saw the prices of most cryptocurrencies rise a few days back. However, this uptrend did not impact XRP much, but at a time when most cryptocurrencies were correcting themselves, XRP was seen pumping.
At press time, XRP was registering a massive growth of 7.72% over the past 24 hours. The market sentiment pushed the cryptocurrency to break the resistance and pushed its value to $0.37, with a market cap of $15.53 billion. XRP noted a 24-hour trading volume of $2.07 billion while also noting a rise of 1.06% within the past hour.
XRP was highly traded on ZBG exchange via the XRP/USDT pair, followed by Upbit via XRP/KRW pair. The registered trading volume of the coin on the exchange was $122 million. The third place was taken by BW.com with a volume of $121 million via the XRP/USDT pair.
Another reason speculated for this sudden surge is exchange-traded products [ETPs] tied to the prices of XRP going live on the Nordic Growth Market, which is a subsidiary of the Borse Stuttgart exchange. The announcement that two ETPs for XRP would be available for investors based in the European Union, was made on Thursday.
A few days back Bitcoin showed a similar surge which helped it break the strong resistance at $5,000. However, the price dipped again. At press time, BTC was valued at $4,987.26 with a market cap of $87 billion as the largest cryptocurrency corrected itself.
The post XRP spikes by 7% as XRP ETPs go live on Nordic Growth Market appeared first on AMBCrypto.


Gather and Gown Bridesmaid Dresses, Spring 2016. Strapless Ballgown in Luster Satin: A simple, clean bodice, such as the one here, lends a modern look to our sumptuous ballgown in satin. Don't forget the statement necklace or light shrug to fend off cool breezes.
Boning, side pockets, removable patent belt, invisible back zip.


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Home / analytics / BI / business analytics / business intelligence / data discovery / data warehouse / data warehousing / discovery / dwh / in-memory / qlik / qliktech / qlikview / Qlik: Newer, Bigger, Better?
Qlik: Newer, Bigger, Better?
Jorge Garcia - analytics, BI, business analytics, business intelligence, data discovery, data warehouse, data warehousing, discovery, dwh, in-memory, qlik, qliktech, qlikview
Originally published in the TEC Blog
During the second half of last year and what has already passed this year, the Pennsylvania-based software company QlikTech has undergone a number of important adjustments, from its company name to a series of changes allowing the company to remain as a main force driving the evolution of the business intelligence (BI) and analytics scene. Are these innovations enough to enable the in-memory software company to retain its success and acceptance within the BI community?
From QlikTech to Qlik
One big shift in the past few months was with the company's name, from QlikTech to Qlik; though a mainly cosmetic change, it's still worth being taken into account, as it will enable the software provider to be more easily identified and better branded, and also to reposition its entire product portfolio stack as well as all the company's services, resources, and communities.
Having a name that is simple to identify, as the biggest umbrella of a product stack that has been growing over time, is a smart move from business, marketing, and even technical perspectives.
Qlik goes Big… Data
A second recent event within Qlik's realm is the revelation of their strategy regarding big data, something that Qlik had been quietly working on for some time. During a very interesting call with John Callan, senior director of global product marketing, Callan took us through some of the details of Qlik's recently revealed strategy to help users make use of the company's big data initiatives. Two starting statements could not state more clearly the role of Qlik, and many other BI providers, in the big data space:
QlikView as the catalyst for implementing big data
This certainly is true, as many new big data projects find their motivation in the data analysis and discovery phases, and it's also true that an offering like QlikView can lower some of the technical and knowledge barriers when implementing a big data initiative.
The second statement was:
QliKView relieves the big data bottleneck.
According to Qlik, it grants access to a wider number of users, augmenting the potential use of big data and providing implicit benefits—access to a wider number of data sources while at the same time having access to QlikView's in-memory computing power.
True to its goal of bringing BI closer to the business user, the approach from Qlik is to enable the use of big data and offer a new connection and integration with technology provided by some of the most important big data players in the market: Cloudera, Hortonworks, MongoDB, Google BigQuery, Teradata, HP Vertica and Attivio.
What makes QlikView so interesting in the context of big data is that, being a long-time provider of an in-memory architecture for data analysis and having a unique data association model, it can not only ensure a reliable architecture for a big data analysis platform, but it can also add speed to the process. Plus, QlikView's data association model, along with its business user orientation, can provide an ease-of-use component, often hard to accomplish within a big data initiative.
So, while QlikView provides for its users all the necessary connectors from their big data partners, it also makes an effort to maintain simplicity of use when dealing with information coming from other more common sources.
On this same topic, one key aspect of Qlik's approach to big data is the vendor's flexibility regarding data sourcing; Qlik provides users with three possibilities for performing data exploration and discovery from big data sources:
Loading the information within Qlik's in-memory computing engine;
Performing data discovery directly from big data sources; and
A hybrid approach, which includes the possibility to combine both previous models, configuring which data should be in-memory and which should be based on direct discovery.
Having this three-pronged approach could prove to be effective for those organizations in initial phases of big data adoption, especially while undergoing initial tests, or those that already require big data services with a certain degree of functionality, but it would be interesting to see if it brings about some difficulties for users and organizations regarding finding the appropriate schema or identifying when and where to apply which approach for better performance and effectiveness.
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New "Natural" Analytics
Recently, a blog written by Donald Farmer, VP of product management at Qlik, established what Qlik has been up to for some time now: working towards bringing a new generation of analytics to the market. In this sense, two things seem to be particularly interesting.
First, Qlik's continuous work towards changing and evolving analytics from its traditional role and state and delivering new ways analysis can be performed, thus improving associations and correlations to provide extensive context. As Farmer states:
Consider how we understand customers and clients. What patterns do we see? What do they buy? How are they connected or categorized? Similarly every metric tracking our execution makes a basic comparison.
These artifacts may be carefully prepared and designed to focus on what analysts used to call an "information sweet spot"—the most valuable data for the enterprise, validated, clarified, and presented without ambiguity to support a specific range of decisions.
Second, regarding providing users with the necessary abilities to, beyond predict, actually anticipate and help discover:
It's not enough to know our quarter's sales numbers. We must compare them to the past, to our plans, and to competitors. Knowing these things, we ask what everyone in business wants to know: What can we anticipate? What does the future hold?
Particularly interesting is how Farmer addresses a core aspect of the decision-making process, which is to anticipate, especially in our modern business world which operates increasingly in real-time, ways to get away from traditional operations in a linear sequence with long time latencies.
Of course, little can be said here about Qlik's future vision, but we can get a glimpse—Qlik has built a prototype showing its new natural analytics approach and much more in QlikView > next, Qlik's own vision of the future of BI.
This is a vision in which analysis is carried following five basic themes, to accomplish, according to Qlik, two main objectives: 1) an understanding of what people need, and 2) an understanding of who those people are.
These five themes are:
Gorgeous and genius—a user interface that is intuitive and natural to use, but aiming to be productive, improving the user's visual and analysis experience.
Mobility and agility—having access to the Qlik business discovery platform from any device and with seamless user experience.
Compulsive collaboration—providing users with more than one way to collaborate, analyze, and solve problems as a team by providing what Qlik call a "new point of access".
The premier platform—Qlik's vision for providing users with improved ways to provide new apps quickly and easily.
Enabling the new enterprise—Qlik aims to provide IT infrastructure with the necessary resources to offer true self-service for their users while easing the process of scaling and reconfiguring QlikView's infrastructures to adapt to new requirements.
Qlik, Serving Modern BI with a Look Into the Future
It would be hard not to consider Qlik from its inception, as an in-memory computing pioneer in the business space, and Qlik is keeping that pioneer status two decades later, innovative both in backend and forefront design, and able to wear more than one hat in the business intelligence space. An end-to-end platform, from storage to analysis and visualization, Qlik is both adapting to the increasingly fast-paced current evolution of BI and looking into the future to maintain and gain markets in this disputed space.
However, to maintain its place in the industry it will be crucial for Qlik to maintain the pace on the many fronts where QlikView, its flagship product, is front-and-center: business-ready for those small to medium-sized customers, as well as powerful, scalable, and governable for large organizations. These days Qlik is surrounded by other innovation sharks within the BI ocean, so remaining unique, original, and predominant will prove to be increasingly difficult for Qlik and the rest of the players in the space. As with nature, let those more capable of fulfilling their customer's need survive and prosper.
It comes as no surprise that Qlik is already looking forward to anticipating the next step in the evolution of BI and analytics. Qlik has a brand that stands for innovation, and certainly, Qlik is working to make QliView newer, better, and bigger. It will be really interesting to see how the company's innovative vision will play out, and if it will gain the same or more traction as Qlik's previous innovations in the market.
Have a comment on Qlik or the BI space in general? Let me know by dropping a line or two below. I'll respond the soonest I can.
Qlik: Newer, Bigger, Better? Reviewed by Jorge Garcia on April 14, 2014 Rating: 5
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One of the difficult things for people to grasp about liberal democratic politics is that the process is just an extended morality play. While the pretext for public discourse may be a particular public policy, the motivation of the participants, the ones with some chance of success, is to display their piety and thus win the crowd. The resulting policy, if there is one, which is rare, is never the point of the process.
The simplified version of this in America goes like this: The progressives begin the process by going on stage and identifying an enemy or a victim. Sometimes they do a combination with an enemy and a victim. In the case of the enemy, the point of the presentation is to sow fear in the hearts of the people. In the case of the victim, the point is to play on the natural sympathies of the crowd.
Once the crowd is properly excited, the conservatives waddle onto the stage to play their standard role in the drama. They will say the alleged enemy is not real or that the victim does not deserve sympathy. The crowd, of course, will boo and hiss. This will lead some of the conservatives to break ranks and join the other side. The remaining holdouts get pelted with rotten vegetables as the curtain closes the show.
"The real point of the performance is for the players to display their piety in an effort to win the crowd."
The roles can be reversed from time to time just to keep it fresh. You see this when the topic of the show is foreign policy. The conservatives get to be the star telling the crowd about some new bogeyman. It is the turn of the progressives to pretend they oppose the conservative scheme to deal with the new enemy. Like the standard version of the drama, the outcome is agreed upon by both sides in advance.
The point of these shows is not to settle a question of public policy. The issue at the center of the drama is just a plot device. It sets the scene for the players to perform their role in the drama. The real point of the performance is for the players to display their piety in an effort to win the crowd. That means the good guys always win, so that the audience always feels good about themselves.
A real-world example of this is the civil trial taking place in Charlottesville, Va., over the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Sines v. Kessler is a lawsuit against the organizers and promoters of the rally. The nine plaintiffs assert that the 24 defendants participated in a conspiracy to commit violence against racial minorities and their anointed protectors, who rioted once the rally got underway.
The fact that the defendants are penniless and the plaintiffs are billionaires means the whole thing is a ridiculous farce. The court can offer no remedy, assuming the plaintiffs can prove a conspiracy. In a sane society this never sees a courtroom, but the point of this show is for the good guys to play the role of good guys by accusing the designated villains of the worst crimes against public morality.
Another example is also from Virginia. The race for governor is in the last days, so the Democrats hired people to pretend they are white supremacists supporting the Republican. They kitted them out in the style of the Charlottesville protestors and gave them each a tiki torch. The scheme backfired when one of the white supremacists was a black guy. Another was a chubby lesbian working for the local Democratic Party. Like the trial, the whole thing was an absurd farce.
The point of these ridiculous performances is not to alter public policy or argue on behalf of some cause. The people involved primarily want attention, but they also hope to be seen as the good guys, the people wearing the white hats. That means they need to find someone willing to wear the black hat as in the Charlottesville trial or conjure one in the case of the governor's race.
While these Off Broadway performances bring with them all of the ham-handedness you expect from the provincials, the model is the same on the big stage. The Democrats have been stalled in their Build Back Better agenda by groups of young female performers who are enjoying the attention. Kyrsten Sinema, a bisexual Betty Boop character from Arizona, has clogged up the Senate for ten months.
On the House side, a collection of extras from a poorly conceived Marxist melodrama have tangled Nancy Pelosi in knots over the legislation. The you-go-girl chorus called the Squad is enjoying the spotlight too much to give in on anything, so the legislation remains stalled in the House. Between the demands for attention and the demands for top billing, the House now has the maturity of a high school girl's lavatory.
The issue at the center of the legislative quagmire is the Build Back Better agenda, a piece of legislation that does not actually exist. Instead, it is a concept, a set of moral assertions about how the world should be and which government agencies should be tasked with wishing it into reality. Its fictional nature is actually an asset, as it is just a plot device so the show can happen.
The ongoing melodrama that is American politics has produced the greatest political fiction in human history. That would be the Biden administration. As Michael Tracey points out, they ran the first virtual campaign. It was like an open-air theater, except the audience was also composed of actors. Once in office, Biden appearances are done on a soundstage across the street from the White House. The first virtual campaign has led to the first virtual presidency.
It is tempting to blame the shabby state of American society on the people at the top, but the general public deserves its share of the blame. The original intent of Juvenal's observation about bread and circuses was to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of important matters in favor of trivial entertainments. In other words, the people get the government they deserve.
That said, one has to wonder just how long American life can remain a farce. In the great melodrama of politics, the crowd is now throwing chairs at one another, and the actors are hurling objects at the audience. It is beginning to look like the final act of the American show is where everyone involved agrees to disband the performance, burn down the theater, and head off in separate directions. One can always hope.
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