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Middle Township is one of twelve townships in Hendricks County, Indiana, United States. As of the 2010 census, its population was 6,170.
History
Middle Township was organized in 1833.
Geography
Middle Township covers an area of ; of this, or 0.04 percent is water.
Cities and towns
Brownsburg (west edge)
Pittsboro
Unincorporated towns
Maplewood
Tilden
(This list is based on USGS data and may include former settlements.)
Adjacent townships
Harrison Township, Boone County (north)
Perry Township, Boone County (northeast)
Brown Township (east)
Lincoln Township (southeast)
Washington Township (southeast)
Center Township (southwest)
Union Township (west)
Cemeteries
The township contains six cemeteries: Hughes, Long, Roberts, Saint Malachy West, Weaver and White Lick Baptist.
Major highways
Interstate 74
U.S. Route 136
References
U.S. Board on Geographic Names (GNIS)
United States Census Bureau cartographic boundary files
External links
Townships in Hendricks County, Indiana
Townships in Indiana | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaWikipedia'} | 0 |
Muse Games, the developers of the steampunk team-based airship battle game Guns of Icarus have been working on something a little bit special. In what seems like a significant departure from the formula of their other game, Hamsterdam began as a pet project, and has ended up exceeding everyone's expectations by being subject to an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign which will allow the game to be released in full. Developer Wendy Fritscher spoke to us at EGX about the growth of the project, and told us about how from those humble beginnings as a side project, it is going to be released on mobile, PC, Mac, Switch, and PS Vita. Combining the most adorable protagonist I've ever seen, Pimm the hamster, with a snarky attitude and sweet kung-fu skills, Hamsterdam is one of those games that just makes you smile. Maybe it's because I have a hamster who looks a lot like Pimm. You decide.
Tasked with taking down an evil mob boss chinchilla, Pimm must work his way through the city of Hamsterdam, getting ever deeper into spooky dark territory as the game progresses. The control scheme is an intuitive mix of tapping and swiping, on the tablet version I played, and it mixes planned combinations of hits with intuitive reactions to (still kinda cute) baddies. I almost feel bad smacking up these cute lil rodents. Until I miss a counter attack and they slap poor Pimm across the face.
The final total raised on Hamsterdam's Kickstarter was $15,725, given by 699 backers - indicative of just how pumped people are getting. Full disclosure: I'm one of those backers. Games too often try to take themselves too seriously. The market for cuteness is there - just look at the number of followers puppy accounts get on Twitter - but no one seems able to quench that desperate desire for angry cartoon fighting hamsters (other moods, art styles, genres, and animals are available).
Hamsterdam is fun, whimsical, and adorable. A lot of us have our eyes out for stuff like this. It's gonna be fab. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 1 |
This page provides detailed information about the SystemC TLM2 Fast Processor Model of the RISC-V rv64q (RV64G) core.
This page is information about the RV64Q alias of the RV64G variant.
Full model specific documentation on the variant rv64q (RV64G) is available OVP_Model_Specific_Information_riscv_RV64G.pdf.
No FIFO Ports in RV64Q.
The RV64Q SystemC TLM2 Fast Processor Model also has parameters, model commands, and many registers.
Click here to see the detailed document OVP_Model_Specific_Information_riscv_RV64G.pdf. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 2 |
Dreamy in navy, this feminine and romantic number by Grace & Hart features a body sculpting silhouette and gorgeous sweeping mermaid hem. Made of a fluid satin with minimal stretch, this v-neck crossover pleated bodice wraps around the upper body, accentuating the curves in all the right places. With slim, adjustable straps criss-crossing at the back, this dress is perfect to hire for your next formal or black tie event.
For a glamorous look, style with statement earrings, gorgeous black heels and a silver clutch available to hire. For more inspiration and ideas, read our 'What To Wear To A Black Tie Wedding' blog feature.
LENGTH: This dress is floor length and measures 104cm from neckline to front hem.
GREAT FOR: Straight, Hourglass, Pear, Tall body types.
Juliets Delight Gown - Navy is rated 5.0 out of 5 by 7.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Bec from Beautiful dress for a Ball I rented this dress for a Black . The fabric is beautiful and the dress is super comfortable. The size was perfect.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Meg from Amazing dress for formal Really loved this dress, looked so nice and fit me really well.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Monica from Beautiful dress for university ball Rented this dress and wore it last week to a university ball and had the best experience! I rented it too late to try it on but the dress fit true to my size and looked lovely. It was a little long even with heels but I didn't mind holding the dress up a bit when I danced.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Kira from Beautiful dress for a wedding I rented this dress for a wedding at dolton house in sydney. It was very classy and fit beautifully. I wore spanx under the dress because the farbic does show undergarments. Im very short so i had to hold the train of the dress as i walked. But overall the dress fit really well and gave good shape to my body. I ordered a size 10 and im always between sizes of 8 and 10. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 3 |
Kyle Brown has stepped down as Springbok Sevens captain and will instead settle into a more supportive role to the younger leaders in the squad, with Philip Snyman appointed as the team's new skipper.
Springbok Sevens coach Neil Powell praised Brown for the role he played over the last five seasons and emphasised that the Blitzbok veteran still has an important role to play in the team.
Powell also confirmed that Snyman, who captained the Blitzboks earlier this year in four tournaments, will take over as captain of the team.
"We already had a strong leadership group in the squad and Philip is a natural leader of men, so it was an easy choice. He will do well, I have no doubt," he said.
Brown, who has played in 56 World Rugby Sevens Series tournaments to date, said: "The time has come where it feels right for me to step aside as captain of the team.
"It is has been an immense privilege that I have had for the better part of five years and we are in a great position to bring some new, fresh ideas into the role. I discussed the move with the Coach shortly after our return from the Olympics and we made the decision in the last week."
He will not neglect any leadership duties, Brown confirmed.
"This season I look forward to moving into a supportive role with the aim of helping the young leaders find their rhythm and, most importantly, concentrating on adding as much value to the team on and off the field," he added.
Powell said he accepted and respected Brown's decision.
"Kyle always put the team before himself and this is another example of that," explained Powell.
The Springbok Sevens team for Dubai, the opening tournament of the 2016/17 World Rugby Sevens Series, will be named on Friday. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 4 |
NORML balances federal, local action after Cole memo reversal
January 11, 2018 by Alison Kanski
Once Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the Cole memo, NORML began applying pressure both locally and nationally for changes in marijuana laws.
WASHINGTON: Pro-marijuana groups have seen years of steady wins as state after state has legalized some uses of the drug and it subsequently brought in millions of dollars in tax revenue.
However, that momentum began to slow as the Trump administration took office, dealing blows to several federal decriminalization and legalization guidelines that allowed states more freedom on the issue. Those changes at the federal level culminated last week when Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the "Cole memo," a policy that prevented the federal government from enforcing marijuana laws in states where it has been legalized.
One group, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, known better as NORML, a nonprofit that works to decriminalize and legalize marijuana in the U.S., stepped up to fight the reversal through social media, lobbying, and awareness efforts.
"Marijuana is an issue that when discussed, we win," said Justin Strekal, political director at NORML. "Now is the time we're having this national discussion, the time for lawmakers who want to build support for their political platforms or for their personal brands to recognize the will of public, with a majority supporting outright legalization. It's time for them to make that known because with so many issues percolating in the national dialogue, marijuana reform is a freedom issue, a states rights issue, a social justice issue, and it's a fun issue."
The organization, founded in 1970, has 164 local chapters around the country that are lobbying for change in marijuana laws from city councils to the federal government. Because the marijuana legalization movement has become a state-by-state issue, these local chapters largely work close to home with city and state governments. NORML has also planned "lobby days," a coordinated effort across the organization that focuses on issues like public education or state and federal lobbying.
The challenge of pushing for marijuana reform is that each state—or in NORML's case, each individual chapter—is facing a different legislative environment. While the national NORML organization is focused on Sessions' decision, local chapters are fighting their own battles. In New Hampshire and Vermont, for example, state legislatures voted to legalize possession and cultivation of marijuana shortly after Sessions's announcement.
Simultaneously fighting the Department of Justice's reversal and celebrating the wins in Vermont and New Hampshire means that NORML is working in a very noisy space.
"Right now, America sits in almost a bipolar policy state when it comes to marijuana," Strekal said. "We have more than 10,000 pages [on our website] chronicling marijuana policies jurisdiction to jurisdiction."
Strekal said NORML's Colorado chapter had reached out to Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) to discuss the reversal of the Cole Memo. Gardner tweeted that he met with Senators to discuss the path forward on legal marijuana, pledging to "respect the will of the people [and] defend states' rights."
On social media, NORML has stressed the same will of the people, focusing on the 64% of Americans who support legalization, according to Gallup, to make its case for reform.
"94 percent of Americans support medical marijuana — and you couldn't get 94 percent of the public to agree that the American flag was designed correctly."https://t.co/IxB2oDqfEG via @DenverWestword
— NORML (@NORML) January 9, 2018
The group is also providing an avenue for people who support marijuana reform to reach out to their representatives through action alerts that send a prewritten letter in support of the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act. Tens of thousands of people have sent letters using the platform in the past week, Strekal said.
"Never in American history has support for marijuana legalization been as high as it is today," Strekal said. "That's a result of the decades of work by individuals who have tried to raise awareness through public education and citizen-led lobbying efforts to change lawmakers' minds."
US Democrats
Lobbying & public affairs
Purple Strategies names Jennifer Kohl as senior director
'From footballer to one of UK's top lobbyists' - industry leaders praise Marcus Rashford's 'blinder' of a campaign
Qorvis takes on Saudi Human Rights Commission account
Meet the newest government PSA mascot, Quinn the Quarantine Fox
BCW names new Brussels CEO | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 5 |
I know, I know. We normally don't bother our readers on Sunday, but this sale was just too good to keep to ourselves. Bloomingdale's currently has tons of great designer clothes, shoes and bags on sale–we're talking rag & bone, Equipment, Rebecca Minkoff and more. But that's not all. If you use code SALEONSALE today, you'll get an extra 20% off almost all sale and clearance items. I currently have two under-$100 designer jeans in my cart, plus some cute booties for fall so you shouldn't miss out. Code expires tonight!
SHOP THE BLOOMINGDALE'S SALE ON SALE NOW!
Don't miss Barbie x Forever 21, fall's best burgundy booties and jeans that make your booty look great. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 6 |
The 10th Annual Spring 2015 Penn IT Staff Convention will be held at Huntsman Hall on June 4th, 2015. This year's Keynote speaker will be Dr. Vijay Kumar, presenting "Aerial Robot Swarms". Come for the keynote, sessions, vendor show, lunch, and/or the reception - whatever works for your schedule!
Registration information and session details will be made available starting May 4.
Please follow us on Twitter @PennITSC for updates and more information! | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 7 |
While CodeIgniter does come with a reasonable error logging tool its simple nature of just dumping a single line report to a file on a distant server does not seem too pro-active for my tastes.
The following helper replaces the default CI error reporting with a new error reporting interface that also emails any errors that occur to a nominated developer.
// (Not relative to the working directory because that doesn't specify correctly with fatal errors).
// By default this assumes that the 'phpMailer' folder is located in the same directory as this script.
Then open the above and change the constants at the top of the file to specify where the error messages are sent.
In order to send mail the above component needs the truly excellent PHPMailer package which can be stashed in the same helpers directory. If you do decide to move it somewhere else change the corresponding constant that specifies the location of the library. A small note of warning though – the path to the PHP mailer libraries must be relative to the current file NOT the current working directory. This is due to how PHP handles fatal errors which for some reason sets the working directory to '/'.
Should there be any interest I may extend the above with other useful features such as RSS, SMS (text messaging) or other non-SMTP methods of emailing.
By the way, download button of the wp-codebox is not working.
nice one erwin! this is very helpful!
Nice class. I am not using CI, but my custom MVC framework, and I modified your class for my framework.
Very good job, this is going to be implemented in all my present and future projects. Thank you very mutch !
I had to make a small modification to make it fit though.
in recent versions of CI (at least), you need to use the session library to get session content ($_SESSION is never set). | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 8 |
This Elliott Brass Flugel, is a professionally built, quality instrument throughout. Its rich tone and depth within the full range brings complete confidence to all players. Designed to aid projection, through ultimate compression within the instrument, achieving a unique sense of intonation. Solidly built throughout.
This Flugel has a Gold Brass Bell and a 3rd slide trigger for fine tuning.
Finished in a choice of Bright Silver Plate with Gold Trims or Lacquer and supplied with a Mouthpiece and new design Hard Case.
"Having been a musical instrument repairer for over 30 years, I consider this new brand of instruments by Elliott Brass to be amongst the finest and well crafted, at unbelievably competitive prices." | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 9 |
Travels Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa
Colonia Ulpia Traiana Augusta Dacica Sarmizegetusa was the capital and the largest city of Roman Dacia, later named Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa after the former Dacian capital, located some 40 km away. Built on the ground of a camp of the Fifth Macedonian Legion, the city was settled by veterans of the Dacian wars. From the very beginning it received the title of colonia and the status of ius Italicum. With an area of 30 hectares (74 acres; 0.12 sq mi), a population between 20,000 and 25,000, and strong fortifications, Ulpia Traiana was the political, administrative and religious centre of Roman Dacia in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
The settlement was built at a distance of 8 km from Tapae, a pass between Banat and Transylvania (today known as the Iron Gates of Transylvania). The choice was based on the military and economic advantages given by the natural barrier represented by the Retezat Mountains in the south and Poiana Ruscă Mountains in the north. The territory of the metropolis extended from Tibiscum to Micia and to the Jiu canyon, the city being protected by several castra: Tibiscum, Pons Augusti, Micia and castra of Bumbești.
The city was crossed by the imperial road from the Danube that linked the north of the province with Porolissum (Moigrad).
The city was destroyed by the Goths. Today Ulpia Traiana remains in ruins, with a partly preserved forum, an amphitheatre, and remnants of several temples. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 10 |
Finding aid for the Cleveland, Ohio Charter Commission Records, Series II
Creator: Cleveland, Ohio Charter Commission
Title: Cleveland, Ohio Charter Commission Records, Series II
Abstract: The Cleveland, Ohio Charter Commission was a fifteen-member commission elected to write a new city charter for Cleveland, Ohio following passage of the Home Rule Amendment to the Ohio constitution in 1912. The commission disagreed over the size of city council, with some pressing for a small council elected at large for the purposes of efficiency and to guard against the corruption of political machines, while others advocated a large council elected by ward which would be more democratic and answerable to ward concerns. The home rule charter, approved by voters in July 1913 and effective 1 Jan. 1914, was modeled basically on the federal plan (council-mayor), providing for nonpartisan election of a 26-member council on a ward basis. A preferential voting system was established offering 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices, with the mayor controlling city government administration and the appointment of department heads. Along with an item veto, the mayor could veto council ordinances. The charter provided for initiative, referendum, and recall. In 1923, voters replaced the charter with a city manager plan, which was replaced in 1931 with a return to partisan elections for mayor and council. The collection consists of typescript copies of letters, minutes of meetings, calendars, resolutions, recommendations, and speeches relating to the activities of the commission preparing a home rule charter for Cleveland. Members of the commission represented in the collection include Newton D. Baker and Mayo Fessler. The collection includes copies of The Charter of the city of Cleveland. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 11 |
La Robe d'écailles roses est un recueil de nouvelles et de contes suivi d'un court roman et d'une pièce de théâtre, tous écrits par Maurice Leblanc.
La première publication chez Lafitte date de 1912, avec pour sous-titre Aventures sentimentales et tragiques. Le livre est décrit comme un recueil d'aventures sentimentales et tragiques, émouvantes et divertissantes dans un long article de Jean Ernest-Charles dans Excelsior du .
Le roman, intitulé Le Roman d'une jeune fille, est une reprise de celui paru en 1902 sous le titre Les Yeux purs dans Femina.
Seule la réédition illustrée chez Lafitte en 1922 (coll. Idéal-Bibliothèque) est complète.
Toutes les autres rééditions sont partielles, avec 10 contes et le court roman (Lafitte/Hachette, 1920, 1934, Hachette, 1941, Glénat, 1979).
Contenu du recueil
Contenu du recueil tel que publié en 1935 aux Éditions Pierre Lafitte dans la collection Le Point d'interrogation :
La Robe d'écailles roses, nouvelle publiée originellement in Excelsior du
Les Épingles d'or, nouvelle
La Belle Madame de Gimeuse, nouvelle publiée originellement in Excelsior du
L'enveloppe aux cachets rouges, nouvelle publiée originellement in Excelsior du
Ma Femme et son Mari, conte publié originellement in L'Auto du
Un Amour, nouvelle publiée originellement in Excelsior du
Noël tragique, nouvelle
L'École du mensonge, nouvelle
Le Bon Rire, conte publié originellement in L'Auto du
La Lettre anonyme, nouvelle publiée originellement in Excelsior du
Le Roman d'une jeune fille, roman repris de Les Yeux purs
Notes et références
Recueil de nouvelles de Maurice Leblanc
Recueil de nouvelles paru en 1912 | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaWikipedia'} | 12 |
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5 in 1 baby crib.
5 in 1 baby crib 5 in 1 convertible crib crib silo w snow fall.
5 in 1 baby crib dream. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 13 |
Each Governor has completed a Declaration of Pecuniary / Business Interests, held in a register and reviewed annually each September. At each meeting Governors are asked declare any potential conflict of interest, which is minuted.
Board of Directors - School Governors are like a board of directors, who are there to make sure that the school provides the best possible education for all its pupils.
The Headteacher and Leadership Team manage the school on a day to day basis, but Governors look at the school in terms of planning ahead, checking that the school is running smoothly, ensuring standards are high and acting as a "critical friend".
Governors are not education experts - they leave that to the staff. Governors come from many different sectors of the community and what they offer the school is a view from the world outside education. The headteacher and staff welcome the support offered by Governors, which often covers management areas outside traditional educational expertise.
Why do people become Governors?
Governors are people who have an interest in education and want to get more involved in the life of the school. Governors work as a team, in partnership with the Headteacher and staff. They share decision making and they share responsibility.
Governing covers all aspects of school activities, including curriculum, finance, staffing, premises, discipline, communication and inspections. Governors support the school, but also have other roles to play - monitoring, judging, mediating and determining changes to be made. No individual has to bear these responsibilities alone though - they are the collective responsibility of the whole governing body.
Hertfordshire Governors are well supported by the School Governance team within the local authority. There are training courses provided and the Governance unit offers advice on any situation that may arise. The Headteacher and Clerk to Governors are also well placed to offer any guidance needed.
What do you need to become a Governor? - Enthusiasm, a willingness to learn, an ability to work with others and a bit of spare time! There are no special qualifications required - more important is a commitment to achieving the best for the pupils at the school. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 14 |
Introduced in January of 1983, the F/A-18 Hornet is a multi-purpose combat jet operating with the U.S. Navy and Marines. The aircraft participated in both the Gulf War and Iraq War, and is still in service around the world, including the United States. It can perform both fighter and attack duties, powerfully equipped with a wide variety of bombs, in addition to air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. More than 1,400 units have been built and it has spawned the more modern variant, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. Made by Hobby Master, this colorful die cast model is a 1/72 scale replica of an F/A-18C as it appeared with the Swiss Air Force in 2018. It features engraved panel lines, an opening canopy, a removable pilot figure, a well-equipped cockpit (including a detailed instrument panel), optional-position landing gear, authentic markings, and a mid-flight display stand. Measures approximately 9.25 in long with a 6.25 in wingspan. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 15 |
Built for security from the ground-up, the Super Card® is much more fortified than your existing bank card. Check out its class-defining features.
Secure payments with a dynamic PIN that changes with every transaction.
Enjoy online shopping without the risk. Simply swipe on your phone to confirm your purchase.
Ensure your Super Card® is being used only in your city with our geo tagging.
No fear of card loss. Block your card via the Zeta app if you ever lose your card. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 16 |
This is a placeholder page for Michael Shenberger, which means this person is not currently on this site. We do suggest using the tools below to find Michael Shenberger.
You are visiting the placeholder page for Michael Shenberger. This page is here because someone used our placeholder utility to look for Michael Shenberger. We created this page automatically in hopes Michael Shenberger would find it. If you are not Michael Shenberger, but are an alumni of Bermudian Springs High School, register on this site for free now. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 17 |
Poems, in Two Volumes
Written by: William Wordsworth
Edited by: Richard Matlak
ISBN: 9781554811243 / 1554811244
304 pages; 5½" x 8½"
Print US $24.50
eBook US $14.43
Broadview eBooks are available on a variety of platforms. To learn more, please visit our eBook information page.
Note on pricing.
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Availability: Worldwide
Published seven years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's popular collection Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes shocked readers and drew scornful reviews. Poems was a revolutionary challenge to literary taste in revolution-weary times. The poems were perceived as inappropriately personal and egotistical in the attention that the poet pays to "moods of [his own] mind." The collection is now seen as containing some of the most enduring works of British Romantic poetry, and Wordsworth's achievement in opening up new worlds of subject matter, emotion, and poetic expression is widely recognized.
Richard Matlak places the initial reaction to Poems in its historical context and explains the sea change in critical and popular opinion about these poems. The extensive historical documents place the poems in the context of Wordsworth's life, contemporary politics, and the literary world of the early nineteenth century.
"Broadview's Poems, in Two Volumes provides an accessible edition of this text, perfect for classroom use. Editor Richard Matlak places Wordsworth's poems in their personal, political, and poetic contexts. Beautifully edited and skillfully arranged, this one-volume edition also contains supplementary materials and appendices that highlight major issues. Helpful footnotes on each page and Wordsworth's own original footnotes in the back ensure that readers will find this edition both illuminating and inviting." — Judith W. Page, Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Scholar, University of Florida
"Richard Matlak's edition of Poems, in Two Volumes is an important addition to scholarship on the Romantic period in general, and Wordsworth's poetry in particular. The introduction places the publication of P2V in its historical context, revealing the remarkable range of contemporary concerns and pressures, both personal and political, which inform and inspire the poems. Both Wordsworth the poet and Wordsworth the man emerge with energy and vitality from the pages of Matlak's fine edition. Readers will marvel at the wide array of illustrations and contemporary essays that place Wordsworth's 1807 volume in its original historical location. This is clearly the work of a careful, diligent, and indefatigable editor. Matlak's edition presents a singularly original biographical, historical, and literary frame through which future readings of Wordsworth's poetry will emerge." — Michael Raiger, Ave Maria University
"We continue to be indebted to Broadview Press for issuing first-rate editions, with the past year bringing Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes, edited by Richard Matlak, which allows us to teach many core Wordsworth texts as they appeared in print and as they engaged a wide range of contexts marshaled in the appendices by Matlak" — Jeffrey N. Cox Studies in English Literature
"Having read through this volume twice, I shall return to my cherished facsimile with greatly enriched understanding of many things I didn't even know I didn't know. And in a culture wherein editorial preference for chronological or thematic arrangements often usurps upon authorial privilege, one can only celebrate the availability of an edition that (in many essentials) presents a great work as it was intended to be read. In short, bravo!" —Richard Gravil, Review 19
"A clear and judicious introduction, written in Matlak's approachable style, is structured around the various contexts that conditioned or fed the making of the poems and their immediate reception … In presenting readers with the Poems, in Two Volumes as they were collected in 1807, Matlak's fine edition allows the poems to speak not just singly, but together—in their original daring and abundance of form—of 'the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be'." — Gregory Leadbetter
William Wordsworth: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Appendix A: Love, Money, Marriage, Dorothy
Lines on Dorothy Wordsworth from "Home at Grasmere" (1800-06)
From Thomas De Quincey, "The Lake Poets: William Wordsworth" [1839]
From Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal (1802)
On the bitten apple (March 1802)
On William composing the Butterfly poem (March 1802)
On lying as if dead (April 1802)
On listening to Wordsworth and Coleridge read their poems (May 1802)
On the eve of William's marriage (October 1802)
Wordsworth's Wedding Band on Dorothy's Journal Entry
Appendix B: Politics and History
A Fantasy of the French Invasion
Fantasies of Invasion Vessels
Martello Towers
British Popular Art against Napoleon
From The Anti-Gallican, "A Parody on Hamlet's Soliloquy" (1804)
From The Anti-Gallican, "The British Heroes" (1804)
From The Anti-Gallican, "Parody, Adapted to the Times" (1804)
From The Gentleman's Magazine, "Song" ["Here's a health to right honest John Bull"] (1805)
James Willson, A View of the Volunteer Army of Great Britain in 1806 (1807)
Jacques-Louis David, Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in the Notre-Dame de Paris, December 2, 1804 (1807)
George Cruikshank, Crowning Himself Emperor of France (1814)
"The Battle of Trafalgar," The Gentleman's Magazine (November 1805)
J.M.W. Turner, The Battle of Trafalgar (1824)
Scott Pierre Nicolas Legrand, Apotheosis of Nelson (1818)
Appendix C: Influence and Poetic Dialogue
Dorothy Wordsworth and the Leech Gatherer
Dorothy Wordsworth and "I wandered lonely as a Cloud"
Manuscript of Wordsworth's Ode
Coleridge's "Dejection," Morning Post (4 October 1802)
Sir George Beaumont, Piel Castle in a Storm (1806)
Appendix D: Family Tragedy
From Naval Chronicle for 1805 [Eye-witness testimony on the sinking of the Abergavenny] (January-June 1805)
The Distress'd State of the Crew of the Abergavenny When She Was Sinking (1805)
The Model Ship Abergavenny
William Wordsworth, "I only looked for pain and grief"
Grisedale Tarn
Appendix E: Critical Backlash
From Unsigned Review [Lord Byron] in Monthly Literary Recreations (July 1807)
From Unsigned Review [Francis Jeffrey] in Edinburgh Review (October 1807)
From Unsigned Review [James Montgomery] in the Eclectic (January 1808)
From Richard Mant, The Simpliciad (1808)
Wordsworth's Letter to Lady Beaumont (21 May 1807)
Richard Matlak is Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Peru and Peruvian Tales
Mary Robinson: Selected Poems
The Siege of Valencia
Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose
Tales of Wonder
Epistles On Women and Other Works
Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose and Letters
Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works
The Keepsake for 1829
Letitia Elizabeth Landon – Selected Writings
Lyrical Ballads | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 18 |
Justice Delayed: Mercedes-Benz's Diesel Pollution Remains Unprosecuted
Joel Mintz
Joel A. Mintz is a Professor Emeritus of Law and C. William Trout Senior Fellow in Public Interest Law at Nova Southeastern University Law Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
For more than 30 years, Professor Mintz has taught a variety of substantive and clinical environmental law courses, including offerings on the federal law of pollution control, comparative environmental law, environmental aspects of land use planning, and other subjects. He has written extensively on environmental enforcement, the Superfund program, growth management, sustainable development, and certain international environmental agreements.
Professor Mintz co-founded Nova Southeastern Law Center's in-house Environmental and Land Use Law Clinic, which provides representation to environmental citizens groups and neighborhood organizations in matters that concern implementation of the Florida Growth Management Act and protection of the Everglades and the Florida Keys. He has testified as a legal expert witness in judicial and administrative proceedings, and has given numerous presentations on environmental topics at gatherings of professional and trade associations and on radio and television public affairs broadcasts.
Professor Mintz serves on the board of directors of the Everglades Law Center, Inc., a not-for-profit environmental public interest law firm based in South Florida. He chairs that firm's Litigation Screening Committee.
Mintz is an elected member of the Environmental Law Commission of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and of the International Council on Environmental Law, and he is a member of the Environmental Law Institute, the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects, and other professional, environmental, bar and civic organizations. He is a member of the executive committee of the Section on State and Local Government Law of the Association of American Law Schools, whose Section newsletter he has edited annually since 1991. He has also served on the Committee on Source Removal of Contaminants in the Subsurface of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council.
In the early and mid-1970's, on a pro-bono basis, Professor Mintz lobbied successfully for the passage of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. In recognition of those voluntary efforts, President Carter invited him to attend the White House ceremony at which that statute was formally signed into law.
Prior to becoming a professor at Nova Southeastern, Professor Mintz worked for six years as an enforcement attorney and supervisory attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Chicago and Washington, D.C. He handled or supervised numerous complex cases involving air, water, and hazardous waste/groundwater pollution from such varied industries as iron and steel, electric utilities, petroleum, pulp and paper, portland cement, and rubber manufacturing. Mintz was the lead attorney on the first EPA criminal contempt case brought in a U.S. District Court to redress a knowing violation of a signed Consent Decree; and he served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Wisconsin with respect to a precedent-setting Grand Jury investigation into criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. In recognition of his EPA enforcement work, he received EPA's Special Service Award as well as its Bronze Medal for Commendable Service.
Professor Mintz also worked (more briefly) as a law clerk with both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Public Education Association, and as an editor for West Publishing Company (now West Group, Inc.) in New York.
Professor Mintz has published extensively in the fields of environmental law and state and local taxation and finance. He authored a critically acclaimed history of EPA's enforcement programs, Enforcement at the EPA: High Stakes and Hard Choices (University of Texas Press, 1995), and a well received treatise on the potential liabilities of subnational governments under federal environmental laws, State and Local Government Environmental Liability (West Group, Inc., 1994), which he has updated on an annual basis.Mintz also co-authored an introductory casebook on environmental law (published in 2000 by Lexis-Nexis, Inc.), Environmental Enforcement: Cases and Materials, (with CPR Member Scholar Clifford Rechtschaffen and Robert Kuehn, Carolina Academic Press, 2007), and State and Local Taxation and Finance in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition (with Gelfand and Salsich, West Group, Inc., 2007).
In addition, Professor Mintz has written several book chapters and contributions, and he is the author of numerous law review articles that have appeared in journals published at Harvard, Yale, Virginia, Georgetown, Columbia and other well known law schools. His journal articles have repeatedly been considered to be among the 30 best articles of the year in the environmental law field by peer reviewers.
Professor Mintz has consulted, on an informal basis, with officials of the EPA with regard to environmental issues and policy matters. He has peer reviewed the written work of other academics in several disciplines. His name appears on a list, compiled by the U.S. Department of State, of potential speakers at U.S. embassies and consulates with respect to environmental issues.
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center
To serve the cause of justice, law enforcement must be prompt, even-handed, and appropriate to the circumstances of individual cases. In their handling of an important recent pollution case, however, the enforcement activities of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have been none of those things.
The case involves the alleged use by Mercedes-Benz of software "defeat devices" in its diesel cars to override pollution control devices. There is considerable evidence that Mercedes' misconduct was intentional, and that over a period of years, its systematic cheating resulted in the emission of many times the allowable amount of nitrogen oxide – a pollutant that harms human health and contributes to climate change, smog, and other air pollution problems. In fact, one Mercedes diesel model's maximum emissions were found to be a whopping 91 times the emission standard.
The Mercedes-Benz defeat device scandal came to light in early 2016, prompting EPA and DOJ to launch investigations into Mercedes and its parent company, Daimler AG. However, since the Trump administration took office in January 2017, this investigation appears to have stalled. No enforcement action has been taken against Mercedes or any of its executives, and Trump administration officials have offered no explanation for the more than two-and-a-half-year delay in completing a review of the facts.
We know that U.S. authorities can move quickly in such cases because they did so when Volkswagen (VW) broke the law in the same way. In 2015, EPA received information that VW was using defeat devices on its diesel vehicles when they were driven on roads but not during testing, and, as a result, unlawfully emitting vast quantities of nitrogen oxides into the air. After 18 months of providing the regulators with bogus "explanations" for its diesel car pollution, VW ultimately admitted to California and EPA that its sophisticated cheating was the cause of the air pollution in question.
During the Obama administration, the government's responses to emissions cheating were firm and speedy. Only two weeks after receiving VW's grudging admission of its scheme, EPA issued a Clean Air Act Notice of Violation. Less than three months later, DOJ filed a civil lawsuit in federal court and undertook a criminal investigation into VW's misdeeds. Contentious negotiations followed, at the close of which DOJ obtained a record-breaking settlement. VW agreed to plead guilty to three criminal felony counts, to pay substantial criminal and civil fines, and to recall the vehicles and replace the defeat devices in them with legitimate pollution control systems. All told, federal authorities garnered $25 billion in fines, penalties, civil damages, and restitution from VW for the illegal diesels it sold in this country.
Both the VW and Mercedes cases appear to involve intentional wrongdoing by automakers who knowingly tricked federal and state regulators, and their own customers, by using identical techniques to bypass pollution controls and release significant amounts of air pollution. So why treat VW and Mercedes differently? The most logical explanation seems to be that the Trump administration is doing one more favor for a wealthy and powerful company by overlooking its egregious environmental violations.
As things stand now, the only credible explanation for the kid-glove treatment the Trump administration is giving Mercedes is that it's yet another example of the administration's wholesale abandonment of its obligation to faithfully execute the nation's environmental laws and protect Americans' health. Complaining about environmental regulations is a standard track on the president's rhetorical play list. This is what it translates to in the real world: Letting a rich company off the hook for deliberate cheating so that it can make a few extra bucks while polluting the air we all breathe.
Read More by Joel Mintz
enforcement Clean Air Act | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 19 |
Rodano e Loira (in lingua francese: Rhône-et-Loire) è stato un dipartimento della Prima Repubblica francese con capoluogo Lione. Il suo nome deriva dai fiumi Rodano e Loira. Comprendeva i territori del Lyonnais, il Beaujolais ed il Forez.
Storia
Venne istituito il 4 marzo 1790, come gli altri dipartimenti francesi, e abolito il 12 agosto 1793 quando venne diviso nei dipartimenti del Rodano (Rhône, con prefettura a Lione) e Loira (Loire, con prefettura dapprima a Feurs, poi a Montbrison ed infine a Saint-Étienne, l'attuale capoluogo). La suddivisione del dipartimento fu una risposta alle attività contro-rivoluzionarie a Lione, la seconda città francese per popolazione.
Se fosse ancora esistito, il dipartimento del Rodano e della Loira avrebbe avuto nel 1999 (in base ai dati del censimento francese) una popolazione di 1.799.812 abitanti (1.578.869 nel dipartimento del Rodano e 728.524 nella Loira).
Altri progetti
Rodano e Loira | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaWikipedia'} | 20 |
NewsTeamAdvisory BoardHistoryOrganisationBMBF InitiativeJobsPressLocationContact
Research AgendaPathways and mechanismsPolycentric governanceLegitimation and delegitimationConceptions of world orderPolicy FieldsResearch Projects
Opinion (current)
Trump has, in a way, sped things up
A talk with Prof. Christoph Bieber about the US electoral system, a divided media sphere and the prospects of right-wing extremism on social media
Andrew Costigan:I'd like to begin with a prompt in the form of a quotation that you gave in the Westfalen Spiegel, where you assert that, 'Trump's reaction is not surprising.'
Prof. Christoph Bieber: I started covering the Trump presidency back in 2016 together with my colleague Klaus Kamps, and we thought at that point that there might be some time that the mandate would get hold of Donald Trump and transform the way he conceives the presidency as some kind of personal job—but that didn't happen. It took maybe half a year, until we stopped waiting for the moment he would start to behave like a regular politician. Instead, he even added more and more damage to the political stage in Washington, D.C.; he kept hiring and firing his aides, he tried to obstruct and destruct the work of specific departments and he was everything but productive for the political capital of the US and maybe even the world.
Towards the end of his presidency, after four long years we had to learn about the pandemic, and saw Trump mishandling the entire Covid-operation. This added up to a very difficult situation during the last months before the election. Everything fell into place during that time, if you will. The stolen vote narrative was already there half a year before the election. He kept repeating it, and still denies what has happened at the ballot boxes. So no, it was not surprising.
Andrew Costigan: There has been an acceleration of Trump's social media practices, including his use of Twitter. The platform has begun tagging his posts as containing misinformation just over the last few months. Where was that kind of control before now?
Prof. Christoph Bieber: You could also ask where was this kind of control four or eight years ago. Twitter didn't do anything to posts from other politicians or any dubious news outlets before Trump. It is only a recent development that Twitter and, to some extent, Facebook, are trying to engage in electoral content moderation. This process slowly emerged after the 2016 election when it became clear that Trump had considerable success in using Twitter as his primary outlet to spread misinformation for his own benefit. After the Cambridge Analytica Scandal broke in 2018, the companies could have tested some of those moderating techniques during the midterms later that year. But only since 2020 it became a more heated argument between Washington, D.C. and the Silicon Valley companies, when Trump started to meddle with their harsher reactions to what he was posting. As there is no precedent, we're not sure if and how those moderating efforts helped. Yes, they flagged some of the controversial Tweets that Trump sent out, but we don't know what will the platforms do after the election. They will perhaps challenge dangerous or misinformative content, but we don't know how long they will maintain this operation because it's costly and technically difficult. We only can assume that content moderation will have an impact on the political public sphere – and that there´s a need for political regulation of online communication.
By the way: Barack Obama also circumvented traditional media outlets by using digital platforms, but of course he had a completely different style of messaging, of reaching out to the public. If you asked members of the Washington press corps at that time, they would also have had some reasons of critique. Obama played the social game very well. With his team, he produced a lot of quasi-journalistic content. There was his court photographer, who always had the best shots for any situation, and put them on display via the White House website, on Facebook, or Twitter. Since long, there has been a struggle between the White House and Washington journalists – but in the Obama years that was different from the situation with Donald Trump, who was totally biased towards friendly outlets like Fox News and he denied discussions with 'real' journalists. Now, there is a much harsher tone and a more dangerous situation with Trump in the White House holding up the "stolen election"-narrative. One must hope that digital platforms stick to their decisions to moderate political content until Trump has left the building.
Andrew Costigan: Trump has attacked traditional media on at least two fronts, on the one hand downplaying the true value of certain networks and on the other expressing these criticisms in large part on social media. What is the role of these platforms when it comes to moderation, and what is your perspective on the ethical dimension behind using these platforms in modern politics?
Prof. Christoph Bieber: You would assume that something has to happen, not only considering the social media platforms but with the media system in the US as a whole. Looking at the US from a European perspective, you learn to appreciate a public media system that can be held responsible for reporting in a neutral, non-biased way – and even here this is disputed by a small group. But it is a huge difference to the US where the media environment is completely market-driven – and that´s also true when it comes to political news media. They act as aggressive entities, and they have decided to get their share of this huge market by favoring one ideological perspective over the other. And now, the digital platforms have entered the market, too. They have to compete with each other but also with the traditional media outlets to get outreach and, in the end, generate profit.
When you have a clearly divided media sphere, the networks have to decide which side they are on. On the conservative end there are Fox News, One America News Network and Breitbart, and a lot of talk radio hosts. On the progressive end you will find CNN, or MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The digital platforms are also actors on this market and they seem not to be aligned with the idea of the political public sphere as an important space for the exchange of arguments within the political system. Maybe the last four years helped to start a process of critical self-reflection.
John King, tirelessly explaining the 'maths' of the presidential election on CNN (screenshot GCR21)
Andrew Costigan: There is some debate about the role of platform and a responsibility for the public discourse in the US. What makes these platforms different?
Professor Christoph Bieber: What we have seen in the US in the last couple of years was a strict polarisation of this public sphere from an ideological perspective—you are either republican-leaning or democratic-leaning as a media company, and then your programs are structured with your own share of the audience in mind. This does not create a healthy political discourse crossing the gap between the democratic- and the republican-leaning parts of the US. The digital platforms can act differently; there is no clear division because they don't provide linear formats like the TV outlets or the talk radio. They stick to the view that they are acting as a platform, and they don't seem to care what happens there—they're just enablers.
Beginning in 2016, ideas of more strict regulation and of holding those companies accountable for what's happening on their platforms broke ground in Washington. There has been a more politically heated discussion between D.C. and Silicon Valley. We've seen during the last couple of months the experiments of electoral content moderation as an attempt to improve political discourse online. This additional transparency was the beginning of a process of reflecting the role those digital platforms have in a more complex, diverse, and networked public sphere. Trump has, in a way, sped things up. Lots of these problems became much clearer since he has been at the helm in the White House, tweeting like hell.
Basically, I think there are two ways the situation could be improved. There could be regulation from Washington, that would require consent across party lines, which is difficult to achieve, especially in these times. The other option might be new forms of self-regulation, set into place by the platforms themselves. It's a mix of being transparent, showing what kind of mechanisms are in place, and creating new mechanisms of internal self-regulation at a time when those companies are still evolving. This is really difficult and I think it depends a lot on the personal ideals and values of the people in charge of the platforms.
Andrew Costigan: I think the public will to want to see how the moderation process works because these platforms are so massive. In your view, how should the platforms actually be moderated?
Prof. Christoph Bieber: I think that what is clear is that it can't be moderated by hand, you will have to put some kind of algorithmic monitoring system in place that at least does some filtering and prepares humans to better decide. There are also ethical issues in designing and implementing such technology – and this would also be something that should be made visible to the outside world. While you can see some dynamics and new developments inside the companies, you might also have to ask whether this is something like "ethicswashing." They might form, for example, an internal commission, that they called on some experts for communication, data or maybe ethical algorithm development. That's a first step, but it's probably not enough; it depends very much on the extent to which the governing board of Facebook or Twitter is able and willing to act transparently when engaging in an open discussion process. They have to realise and to embrace the responsibility they face when delivering such platforms to the public.
Andrew Costigan: We've seen the immense impact that social media can have on mobilisation of fringe political movements. In a recent discussion moderated by Christopher Smith Ochoa, you had an exchange about future of right-wing extremism in America. Can you elaborate a little on that exchange? How do you see the future of militia groups like the Proud Boys?
Prof. Christoph Bieber: Right now we still don't know how big these movements are. We do know that there are militia groups, but we do not know how many of them are out there and where. But I think Christopher's main point of reference was the term 'Trumpism,' as a concept for a new form of right-wing extremism fueled by excessive media usage, both traditional and social. Yet, is there such a thing like Trumpism? Do republican politicians really act like Trump? Can and will they really do that? I don't believe that one just turns into some kind of mini-Trump, then wins an election bid and heads into leading government. I'd guess that this is a very special situation caused by very special individual that is doing things in the White House that some consider to be politics – but maybe it's just Trump being Trump. Some of those republicans that came into office during this election while mimicking some of the moves that Donald Trump showed off, they will realise that this is not a very good way to act as politicians—but maybe I'm a bit too optimistic in this view.
New office holders in the "Trumposphere" bring other ideas and other personalities into politics and they don't necessarily have to be good, but I don't think they are as bad and as harmful as what Trump has done to the White House. But of course there are exceptions: nobody would have needed a house republican promoting ideas provided by QAnon. Nevertheless, I don't think there is really something like ready-to-use concept of 'Trumpism' that can be easily copied and pasted into political strategies all over the country. I would hope that when Trump and his minions leave the White House things calm down – and that it might be possible for the GOP to return to normalcy. Indeed it would be helpful to see the republican elite turning away from Trump and not helping him to further undermine the integrity of the electoral process. You never know though—there are rumours of Trump running again in 2024. I think that is very much tied to Donald Trump, or the person he will become after leaving the White House. Let's hope that he finds an exit strategy or that his family will lead him to the door at 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue so that there finally can be a peaceful and productive transition to the next President of the United States.
Andrew Costigan: Dear Professor Bieber, thank you very much for this discussion.
Andrew Costigan
Milena Gaede
Please contact us with any questions. If you wish to contribute an opinion piece, please write an email
to [email protected]. We're looking forward to hearing from you.
This website uses cookies. By using this site, you agree to our use of cookies. Privacy Information.[x] | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 21 |
Featured Program University of Mississippi
Office of Undergraduate Admissions
145 Martindale
The University of Mississippi,
University, MS 38677
University, MS
Welcome to the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Mississippi. We are proud of our outstanding faculty and strong tradition of scholarship and dedication to teaching. The Department of Modern Languages offers a B.A. in Chinese, French, German, Linguistics and Spanish.
Students may pursue advanced proficiency in a foreign language through classes taken on the Oxford campus or through a combination of courses taken on campus and overseas, at one of the university's study abroad sites. Undergraduate minors can be pursued in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Linguistics, Russian and Spanish. The Department also offers intensive instruction in Arabic.
Information on study abroad programs is available from the Office of Study Abroad.
Featured Language Studies Videos | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 22 |
The construction of urban highways continues in many places. In Latin America, we see ongoing projects in Santiago (Américo Vespucio Oriente), Lima (Línea Amarilla), Quito (Solución Vial Guayasamín), São Paulo (Rodoanel Mário Covas) and Mexico City (Segundo Piso a Cuernavaca), to name a few.
In Colombia, the National Government just announced a new program for improving access to urban areas during the Thirteenth Congress of the Colombian Infrastructure Chamber. In the words of the Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, "our purpose is also transforming access to cities. It is not useful to save time in intercity trips if it is lost in urban areas." With this, President Santos alludes to the great challenge of urban congestion. Constructing impressive highway systems doesn't lead to more efficient and better transport infrastructure if, within urban areas, traffic prevents the easy navigation of city streets.
Colombia has a large road construction program, which aims to complete 5,803 km (3,414 miles), investing close to 40 trillion Colombian pesos (USD$13 billion). This not only impacts the economy and employment in the short term, but it helps in catching-up with a decades-long backlog in national connectivity. The last link, urban access, complements this effort, particularly in the country's capital, Bogotá.
Urban access is helpful in improving national logistics and trips between cities, but it may result in induced demand for automobiles and negative effects that should be mitigated: congestion, urban sprawl, traffic incidents, air pollution and social exclusion.
Since the 1950s, experts have recognized the negative effects of increasing urban road capacity. The explanation is rather simple: reducing automobile travel time with freeways is equivalent to reducing cost. Similar to any good or service, cost reduction results in increased demand, and, in this case, increased trips. As Lewis Mumfurd, a technology philosopher, said in1955: "Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity." Induced demand, or rebound effect, has been well-documented; new trips absorb between 50 and 100 percent of new road capacity in just three years (see also The Life and Death of Urban Highways).
According to Anthony Downs, from Brookings Institution, "traffic congestion is here to stay… and will get worse." He suggests mitigating congestion with dynamic tolls: higher cost in peak hours and lower costs off-peak. He also recommends complementing toll roads with high-quality, frequent and reliable public transport. By utilizing tolls and devoting space to public transit, highways can be a good use of scarce space; one lane for light rail or buses, for instance, can carry up to 15,000 passengers per hour, while the same lane for cars can carry up to 7,200 people (with four occupants per vehicle), but typically, on average, cars only carry 1.1 people per car—1,980 per hour.
Probably the most direct impact of freeways is urban sprawl, and this has been known for a long time. In 1974, Yacob Zahavi, a researcher from the U.S. Department of Transport, found that commute times were very consistent across urban areas (around one hour per day). The anthropologist C. Marchetti, qualified this average value as a "basic instinct" of human nature. This means that if travel time is reduced (for instance with the construction of an expressway), people would tend to live farther away, keeping their "travel budget" fairly constant. The good thing about houses in the periphery is that they usually have outdoor green space. The bad thing is that the resulting low-density development occupies agricultural or protected land. Low density also makes public transport, walking or bicycling infeasible, making residents car dependent, even for the simplest errands.
One way to mitigate sprawl is through urban planning: managing urban expansion with compact and mixed-use development, with good quality access to public transport. This is exactly the opposite of what is happening in Latin American cities, where low-density, gated communities proliferate at the urban periphery.
Managing urban planning is outside the mandate of road construction agencies, and in many cases, it is not a concern for city mayors. Municipalities around large cities prefer high-income residential dwellings in their territory, as this brings additional tax base. As a result, national planning authorities and metropolitan coordination may be required to help mitigate sprawl.
Another impact of urban freeways may be an increase in traffic deaths and injuries (see Why Reducing Speeds Is Key to Improving Traffic Safety). A few ways to improve road safety are to separate road users, control road-access and keep pedestrians and bicyclists outside high-speed lanes. It is a matter of design.
There are also impacts on air pollution, resulting from increased vehicle-km (mileage). An economist's approach to this would be to charge for these externalities; not only have congestion tolls but also emission charges. While this is politically difficult, it is progressive, as revenues can be used to improve the quality of public transport, which is used by the majority of people in Latin American cities.
Last, to make urban freeways inclusive, it is necessary to prioritize pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and public transport. Road infrastructure is not only about making fast lanes for cars, but it is about complete avenues, with wide sidewalks and safe bicycle and transit lanes.
There are good opportunities in the announcements by the Colombian Government to invest in urban access, but there are also challenges. National and local governments can confront these challenges by considering road-use planning, dynamic tolls, controlling access to fast lanes and providing for all road users, particularly the most vulnerable. Otherwise we will be putting out fire with gasoline. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 23 |
The Image Makers
June 2 – 6, 1999
Production Language Swedish
Country of Origin Sweden
Description Ingmar Bergman's long career in theater has tended to be overshadowed by his fame as a film director. For nearly half a century, however, he has been one of the most prolific and innovative stage directors working in Europe today. With this production of The Image Makers, Bergman proves why he has been hailed as "a poet of film and stagecraft" by The New York Times. Written by Per Olov Enquist, one of Sweden's foremost contemporary dramatists, The Image Makers threads together several "Bergman-esque" motifs and features Bergman's mentor in filmmaking, the legendary Victor Sjöström.
The play revolves around the imagined arrival of Nobel-prize winning novelist Selma Lagerlof to Sjöström's studio to screen the film adaptation of her novel, The Phantom Carriage. (A silent film adapted from Lagerlof's book, The Phantom Carriage is considered to be Sjöström's greatest achievement and was declared a "tour de force" by the international film community when it premiered in 1921.) During the course of her two-day visit, the elderly Lagerlof meets Tora, a young and feisty actress. Lagerlof's troubled childhood with an alcoholic father is revealed under the pressure of her charged relationship with Tora, as Sjöström's film uncovers the subliminal story in The Phantom Carriage. Both witty and devastatingly confrontational, the production comes alive in the hands of the masterful director.
actorAnita Björk, Elin Klinga, Lennart Hjulström, Carl-Magnus Dellow
companyThe Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden
costume designerMago
directorIngmar Bergman
lighting designerPierre Leveau
playwrightPer Olov Enquist
producerSofi Lerström
set designer/decorGöran Wassberg
top billingIngmar Bergman, The Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 24 |
Q: Problems with installing SASS React I want to install SASS to my react app.
I try yarn add node-sass my console return error:
./src/comopnents/Form/Form.scss (./node_modules/css-loader??ref--6-oneOf-5-1!./node_modules/postcss-loader/src??postcss!./node_modules/sass-loader/lib/loader.js!./src/comopnents/Form/Form.scss)
Node Sass version 7.0.1 is incompatible with ^4.0.0.
I found advice to uninstall node-sass and install sass. I did it, but then I have got this error:
../src/comopnents/Form/Form.scss (./node_modules/css-loader??ref--6-oneOf-5-1!./node_modules/postcss-loader/src??postcss!./node_modules/sass-loader/lib/loader.js!./src/comopnents/Form/Form.scss) To import Sass files, you first need to install node-sass. Run npm install node-sass or yarn add node-sass inside your workspace. Require stack:
*
*/Users/madlen/(...)/node_modules/sass-loader/lib/loader.js
*/Users/madlen/(...)/node_modules/loader-runner/lib/loadLoader.js
*/Users/madlen/(...)/node_modules/loader-runner/lib/LoaderRunner.js
*/Users/(...)/node_modules/webpack/lib/NormalModule.js
*/Users/(...)/node_modules/webpack/lib/NormalModuleFactory.js
*/Users/(...)/node_modules/webpack/lib/Compiler.js
*/Users/(...)/node_modules/webpack/lib/webpack.js
*/Users/(...)/node_modules/react-scripts/scripts/start.js
I try to upgrate yarn, add sass-loader, nothing helps
A: Do this in your package json
"node-sass": "npm:sass@^1.49.9",
React still asks for node-sass after removing it and replacing with sass so you can alias it like this and now react will use sass
A: Maybe try updating your project's react-scripts, as doing so fixed the issue for me.
I was having the same issue - saw advice elsewhere to switch node-sass out for sass, and then had the same errors mentioned in the OP. Tried Mark O's solution to alias sass, which worked. However, then I tried setting up absolute imports in my project (with jsconfig.json in the way described here), and that was mysteriously failing too.
I then realized that my project had a very old version of react-scripts for some reason, as it was on 2.x.x. So I swapped react-scripts in my package.json to be "react-scripts": "4.0.3", ran npm install, did npm run start and now absolute imports work. I then tried using sass instead of node-sass again and that works too (npm uninstall node-sass, then npm install sass).
A: try stopping the current development server, and install node-sass again.
A: I was having similar problem. These steps fixed my problem.
*
*Delete node_modules rm -rf node_modules
*Delete package-lock.json rm package-lock.json
*Run npm install or yarn install
I am using;
*
*node-sass: ^6.0.1
*npm: 7.24.2
*node: v16.13.0
| {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaStackExchange'} | 25 |
\section{Introduction}\label{s:intro}
For most computer vision tasks, such as object detection and identification, it is desirable to use the in-focus images as input rather than blurred ones. However, due to the limited depth-of-field (DOF) of cameras, it is usually difficult to capture the all-in-focus images directly. Therefore, multi-focus image fusion, a technique to fuse two or more partially-focused source images into an all-in-focus image, is very important in the fields of computer vision and image processing, and has drawn considerable attention in recent years.
Existing multi-focus image fusion methods can be roughly categorized into three groups: transform-domain-based methods, spatial-domain-based methods, and deep-learning-based methods.
Transform-domain-based methods usually first decompose the source images in a transform domain, then fuse the features in the transform domain, and finally reconstruct the all-in-focus image. Laplacian pyramid (LP) \cite{LP}, ratio of low-pass pyramid (RP) \cite{RP}, curvelet transform (CVT) \cite{CVT}, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) \cite{DWT}, dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) \cite{RDTCWT}, non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) \cite{NSCT}, principal component analysis (CPA) \cite{Rcpa}, and sparse representation-based methods \cite{SR,nsctsr,SPpr} have been explored to build transform-domain-based methods.
Spatial-domain-based methods can be further classified into three sub-groups: block-based methods, region-based methods and pixel-based methods. The block-based methods \cite{block} first divide images into blocks, then calculate the focus measure of each block, and finally choose the block with the highest focus measure as the corresponding block in the fusion result. Consequently, these algorithms are often affected by the granularity of block partitioning. The region-based methods \cite{region} first segment the input images and then fuse the focused segments of these input images. Therefore, the fusion results of region-based methods highly rely on the segmentation accuracy. The pixel-based methods \cite{DSIFT} calculate the focus measure and fuse the images at the pixel level. Usually, pixel-based methods often produce poor results near the boundary between a focused area and a defocused area.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure1.pdf}
\caption{Examples in our dataset. (a) and (d) are the source images focused on the foreground; (b) and (e) are the source images focused on the background; and (c) and (f) are the all-in-focus images. The upper row is for a complex example and the lower row is for a simple example.}
\label{fig1}
\end{figure*}
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Characteristics of various datasets.}\label{table1}
\begin{tabular}{lllll}
\hline
Dataset & Data generation method & size & realistic & ground truth\\
\hline
Lytro \cite{lytrodata} & Captured by light field camera & 20 pairs, 520$\times$520 & Yes & No \\
CNN \cite{cnn} & Synthetically generated based on the ImageNet dataset & 1,000,000 pairs, 16$\times$16 & No & Yes \\
BA-Fusion \cite{icme2019ours} & Synthetically generated based on the Matting dataset & 2,268,000 pairs, 16$\times$16 & No & Yes \\
FuseGan \cite{fusegan} & Synthetically generated based on segmentation datasets & 5,850 pairs, 320$\times$480 & No & Yes \\
Our Real-MFF & Captured by light field camera & 710 pairs, 625$\times$433 & Yes & Yes \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
In the past several years, many deep learning methods have been proposed for multi-focus image fusion. Liu \textit{et al.} \cite{cnn} used a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to generate a decision map just like the pixel-based methods, and then did some post-processing to produce a final decision map. FuseGan \cite{fusegan} used a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate decision map. Such methods can be regarded as the network-based implementations of the spatial-domain-based methods. Different from them, Wen \textit{et al.} \cite{ecnn} designed an end-to-end neural network for image fusion.
One of the bottlenecks of using deep neural networks to solve multi-focus fusion problems is the lack of suitable large and realistic database with ground truth for the network training. The most widely used dataset in this area is the Lytro Multi-focus dataset \cite{lytrodata}, which contains 20 pairs of multi-focus images with size 520$\times$520 pixels. This dataset is very small and has no ground truth, therefore, it cannot be used for training a deep neural network. To break through this bottleneck, there are some valuable trials. Liu \textit{et al.} \cite{cnn} used high-quality natural images blurred by Gaussian filters with five different levels of blur to generate a dataset. The images generated by this method were not as real as naturally defocused images, because they were blurred with a spatially invariant defocus kernel and therefore lacked defocus changes. \cite{fusegan,ecnn} used segmentation datasets with manually labeled segmentation as the ground truth map. The ground truth was used as a 0-1 mask map, with '0' for foreground and '1' for background. The foreground and background were then blurred by Gaussian filters separately and finally merged together. In our previous work of BA-Fusion \cite{icme2019ours}, we generated a dataset based on a matting dataset. We chose matted object as the foreground object and high-quality picture as the background. However, the images generated by these methods do not follow the real defocus model and thus need further improvement.
In this letter, we propose a new large and realistic dataset for multi-focus image fusion. The dataset, called Real-MFF, consists of various natural multi-focus images with ground truth, generated by light field images. Fig.~\ref{fig1} shows two pairs of partially-focused source images and their all-in-focus ground-truth images in our dataset for examples. The contributions of our work can be summarized as follows.
Firstly, we construct a new large and realistic multi-focus dataset, which contains 710 pairs of images that can be used for training deep neural networks. Each pair of images contains two partially-focused images as the source images and an all-in-focus image as the ground truth. The dataset is generated using a light field camera: Lytro illum camera. The source images are produced by choosing different focus planes.
Secondly, to the best of our knowledge, our dataset is the first large and realistic dataset that can serve as a test bench for validating multi-focus image fusion methods.
Finally, the proposed dataset is both large and realistic so that it can benefit the development of deep-learning-based multi-focus image fusion methods.
\section{Related Work}\label{s:related}
\subsection{Multi-focus image fusion dataset}
As mentioned in Section~\ref{s:intro}, Lytro \cite{lytrodata}, currently the most widely used multi-focus image fusion dataset, only has 20 pairs of images without ground truth. Therefore, it cannot be used for training of deep neural networks. Alternatively, many deep-learning-based algorithms \cite{cnn,ecnn,fusegan,icme2019ours} generated datasets artificially as the training set. But these generated datasets are not natural or realistic, especially near the focused/defocused boundary. The characteristics of these datasets are summarized in Table~\ref{table1}.
\subsection{Light field image processing}
Different from the conventional cameras, the light field camera records the complete light field information in one shot, and generates images afterwards. In 2005, Ng proposed a Fourier Slice Photography Theorem \cite{Ng}, which proved that images focused at different depths can be computed from a single light field image. Dansereau \textit{et al.} \cite{Donald2015} designed a 4D hyperfan shaped band-pass filter in the frequency domain, which can control the range of focused depths of images in the spatial domain.
\section{Dataset}\label{s:dataset}
\subsection{Image capture and categories}
We use the Lytro illum camera to capture light field images at different places, such as square, campus, shopping mall and street. Photo categories include people, plants, buildings, objects, etc. In addition to the photos taken by us, we also selected 443 images from the Stanford database \cite{datasetsf}, which mainly include some scenes with obviously separable foreground and background, especially those with more complex boundary between foreground and background.
\subsection{Pre-processing}
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure2.pdf}
\caption{Refocusing. (a) is the 4D light field captured by a Lytro camera and (b) is the corresponding 4D Fourier spectrum. (c) shows three 2D slices of the 4D Fourier spectrum, and (d) demonstrates the images generated via applying inverse 2D transforms on (c).
}
\label{FIG2}
\end{figure}
We use the \emph{LFLytroDecodeImage} function in the light field toolbox (LFtoolbox) \cite{Donald2013} to decode light field data and obtain the raw 4D light field data as well as the 2D Lenslet images. A two-dimensional representation of 4D light field data is shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(a).
Then, we use the \emph{LFdisp} function to generate 2D images. However, the images generated by LFtoolbox are with color deviation and shape distortion effects. We fix the color difference problem through the gamma transform; and with the help of a calibration plate, the problem of shape distortion is solved.
An illustrative example is shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG3}. In Fig.~\ref{FIG3}(a), the image before color correction is dim and lacks color details; in Fig.~\ref{FIG3}(b), the problem has been fixed after color correction. However, it still can be seen that the object shape in Figs.~\ref{FIG3}(a) and (b) has obvious distortions (e.g.~the table is curved). After distortion correction, the table becomes straight in Fig.~\ref{FIG3}(c).
\begin{figure*}[htbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.80\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure3.pdf}
\caption{Example for pre-processing. (a) is the original image before pre-processing, (b) is the intermediate image after color correction and (c) is the final image after color correction and distortion correction.}
\label{FIG3}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Refocusing}
The main processing of the dataset is refocusing. For better visualization, we illustrate the processing with an example in Fig.~\ref{FIG2}. Firstly, a 4D light field image (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(a)) is transformed to a 4D Fourier spectrum space (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(b)):
\begin{equation}
F(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t) = DFT( f(u,s,v,t) ),
\end{equation}
where $f$ denotes the 4D light field image, $DFT$ represents the discrete Fourier transform, $F$ is 4D Fourier spectrum, $(u,s,v,t)$ are the two-plane parameterizations of light rays, and $(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t)$ denotes the corresponding coordinates in the 4D Fourier spectrum space.
According to the Fourier Slice Photography Theorem~\cite{Ng}, we then use 4D hyperfan, \emph{LFBuild4DFreqHyperfan} in LFtoobox~\cite{Donald2013}, as a high-dimensional passband filter to filter the 4D Fourier spectrum (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(c)):
\begin{equation}
F_{depth} = H_{HF}(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t, \theta_1,\theta_2)F(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t),
\end{equation}
where $H_{HF}$ is the 4D hyperfan passband filter, $F_{depth}$ means the 4D Fourier spectrum of 2D image focused on the specific depth, and parameters $\theta_1$ and $\theta_2$ are the slope parameters of the 4D hyperfan.
Finally, the 2D images (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(d)) can be generated by the inverse Fourier transform of the processed 4D Fourier spectrum:
\begin{equation}
I = IDFT(F_{depth}),
\end{equation}
where $IDFT$ represents inverse discrete Fourier transform, and $I$ denotes the 2D image focused on the specific depth.
Since the depth range usually changes for different scenes, we need to first manually select the specific depth range of focus in the Lytro software, then record the depth of focus for each image, and finally generate the desired image focused on different depth ranges. Therefore, $\theta_1$ and $\theta_2$ usually change for different images. Typically, both $\theta_1$ and $\theta_2$ are in the range of [-2, 2].
The pseudocode of the algorithm is shown in Algorithm~\ref{alg1}.
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{Refocusing}
\label{alg1}
\begin{algorithmic}
\FOR{each light field image}
\STATE Decode the light field data: $f$;
\STATE Transform $f$ into the frequency domain by FFT:
\STATE $F = DFT(f)$;
\STATE $j$ = the depth at foreground;
\STATE $k$ = the depth at background;
\STATE $l = (j+k)/2$ ;
\STATE \# Generate the foreground focused image
\STATE Build the 4D hyperfan with slopes $j$ and $l$:
\STATE $H_{FG} = H_{HF}(j,l)$;
\STATE $F_{FG} = H_{FG}F$;
\STATE $I_{FG} = IDFT(F_{FG})$;
\STATE \# Generate the background focused image
\STATE Build the 4D hyperfan with slopes $k$ and $l$:
\STATE $H_{BG} = H_{HF}(k,l)$;
\STATE $F_{BG} = H_{BG}F$;
\STATE $I_{BG} = IDFT(F_{BG})$;
\STATE \# Generate the all-in-focus image
\STATE Build the 4D hyperfan with slopes $j$ and $k$:
\STATE $H_{AF} = H_{HF}(j,k)$;
\STATE $F_{AF} = H_{AF}F$;
\STATE $I_{AF} = IDFT(F_{AF})$;
\ENDFOR
\end{algorithmic}
\end{algorithm}
\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Dataset}
\begin{figure}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure4.pdf}
\caption{Example of the generated images. (a) is the all-in-focus image; (b) is the image focused on the background; (c) is the image focused on the foreground; (d) is the difference map between (a) and (b); and (e) is the difference map between (a) and (c).}
\label{FIG4}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure5.pdf}
\caption{Visual comparison. (a) and (b) are the two partially-focused source images; (c) is the ground truth all-in-focus image; and (d)-(m) are the fusion results of the 10 methods.}
\label{FIG5}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationPSNRnew.pdf}
\caption{PSNR}\label{fig:matrix:PSNR}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationSSIMnew.pdf}
\caption{SSIM}\label{fig:matrix:SSIM}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationEPE.pdf}
\caption{EPE}\label{fig:matrix:EPE}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationALL.pdf}\hfill
\caption{ALL}\label{fig:matrix:ALL}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Significance testing results for the performance of different methods in terms of (a) PSNR, (b) SSIM, (c) EPE and (d) the intersection (denoted by `ALL') of (a)-(c), where `1' indicates that the algorithm of the row is significantly better than the algorithm of the column, and `0' otherwise, at the significance level of 0.05.}
\label{FIG6}
\end{figure*}
Our Real-MFF dataset contains 710 pairs of images, where each pair includes two partially-focused source images focused on the foreground or background respectively, and an all-in-focus image as the ground truth. We hope that the ground truth is similar to the composition of two source images: the foreground region should be similar to the source image focused on the foreground, and the background region should be similar to the source image focused on the background. Fig.~\ref{FIG4} shows an example for the difference maps between the all-in-focus image and the two source images. The difference shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(d) indicates that the ground truth (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(a)) matches the background of the image focused on the background (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(b)); and the difference shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(e) indicates that the ground truth (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(a)) matches the foreground of the image focused on the foreground (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(c)).
\begin{table*}[h]
\centering
\caption{Quantitative comparison of multi-focus image fusion methods on our dataset.}\label{table2}
\begin{tabular}{lllllllllll}
\hline
& Dsift \cite{DSIFT} & CNN \cite{cnn} & SR \cite{SR} & GF \cite{GF} & LP \cite{LP} & RP \cite{RP} & DTCWT \cite{RDTCWT} & CVT \cite{CVT} & NSCT \cite{NSCT} & NSCT-SR \cite{nsctsr}\\
\hline
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{on the whole dataset}\\
\hline
PSNR & 39.96 & 40.46 & 39.68 & 40.74 & 41.32 & 40.37 & 40.86 & 40.90 & 41.18 & 41.32\\
SSIM & 0.9865 & 0.9880 & 0.9857 & 0.9890 & 0.9904 & 0.9891 & 0.9896 & 0.9892 & 0.9905 & 0.9906\\
EPE & 1.959 & 1.901 & 2.060 & 1.865 & 1.790 & 1.939 & 1.876 & 1.886 & 1.762 & 1.736\\
\hline
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{on the simple dataset}\\
\hline
PSNR & 42.71 & 43.41 & 42.13 & 43.45 & 43.93 & 42.88 & 43.46 & 43.52 & 43.72 & 43.87\\
SSIM & 0.9902 & 0.9920 & 0.9888 & 0.9921 & 0.9924 & 0.9914 & 0.9922 & 0.9921 & 0.9926 & 0.9927\\
EPE & 1.446 & 1.375 & 1.526 & 1.357 & 1.294 & 1.408 & 1.349 & 1.349 & 1.268 & 1.244\\
\hline
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{on the complex dataset}\\
\hline
PSNR & 38.39 & 38.76 & 38.26 & 39.18 & 39.81 & 38.92 & 39.35 & 39.38 & 39.72 & 39.85\\
SSIM & 0.9843 & 0.9857 & 0.9838 & 0.9873 & 0.9892 & 0.9878 & 0.9881 & 0.9876 & 0.9894 & 0.9894\\
EPE & 2.255 & 2.205 & 2.368 & 2.159 & 2.076 & 2.245 & 2.181 & 2.196 & 2.048 & 2.020\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
Furthermore, in order to evaluate the effect of difficulty level on an algorithm, especially for simple and complex boundaries, we manually divide the dataset into a simple set (260 pairs) and a complex set (450 pairs) according to the complexity of focused/defocused boundary. The division is conducted via a three-person majority voting to reduce the bias caused by subjective selection. Two examples are shown in Fig.~\ref{fig1}, where Fig.~\ref{fig1}(a) is a complex case and Fig.~\ref{fig1}(d) is a simple case. For the complex case in Fig.~\ref{fig1}(a), we can find it difficult to draw a curve as the boundary of the foreground and the background, whereas for the simple case in Fig.~\ref{fig1}(d), we can easily take the border of the cistern as the boundary.
\subsection{Test Bench}
We evaluate 10 typical multi-focus image fusion methods, including some transform-domain-based methods (LP \cite{LP}, RP \cite{RP}, DWT \cite{DWT}, CVT \cite{CVT}, DTCWT \cite{RDTCWT}, NSCT \cite{NSCT}, SR \cite{SR}, NSCT-SR \cite{nsctsr}), some spatial-domain-based methods (Dsift \cite{DSIFT}, GF \cite{GF}), and a deep-learning-based methods (CNN \cite{cnn}), on our dataset.
We employ the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structure similarity (SSIM) and end point error (EPE) as the evaluation measures, and in terms of these measures, the performances of the 10 multi-focus image fusion methods on the whole dataset, the simple dataset and the complex dataset are listed in Table~\ref{table2}.
Unsurprisingly, the results of these algorithms on the simple dataset are generally better than those on the complex dataset. The results also show that, among these algorithms, NSCT and NSCT-SR are the top two on our dataset.
For illustration, we choose an example with complex foreground borders from our dataset, and show the visual results of various methods in Fig.~\ref{FIG5}. We can see the difference among these 10 methods in the regions of the falling leaves and the people in the background. It is hard for the spatial-domain-based methods to generate a precise decision map, which means that the resultant images from these methods have some quite blurry areas. Consequently, their PSNRs are usually lower than those of other methods. For the transform-domain-based methods, complex boundaries will decrease the performance of the algorithms, but fortunately this bad effect will not result in complete failure of the algorithms. Moreover, we can see that CNN and Dsift have blurred results for the falling leaves, while NSCT-SR has better results in this area.
In order to further analyze whether the performances of these methods are statistically significantly different from each other, we perform the Wilcoxon signed rank tests \cite{wilcoxon1945individual} on the experimental results in Table~\ref{table2}. The significance testing results in PSNR, SSIM and EPE are shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG6}, as well as the intersection of these three results (denoted by `ALL'), in all of which the number `1' indicates that the algorithm of the row is significantly better than the algorithm of the column at the significance level of 0.05, and the number `0' otherwise. Based on the results, NSCT-SR performs the best on our dataset.
\section{Conclusions}\label{s:conclusion}
In this letter, we propose a large and realistic dataset for multi-focus image fusion tasks. To the best of our knowledge, our Real-MFF dataset is the first large and realistic dataset for this purpose. The dataset is generated by light field images captured with a light field camera. We use the 4D hyperfan in the frequency domain as a band-pass filter to produce images focused on different depths manually. The proposed dataset can serve as a test bench for evaluating multi-focus image fusion methods; furthermore, it can benefit the development of deep-learning-based methods for multi-focus image fusion in the future. It is also our future work to continuously increase the size, diversity and quality of this dataset.
\section*{Acknowledgement}
We thank the reviewers and editors for their constructive comments that improved our manuscript. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61771276).
\section*{Statement}
This paper has been pubilished on Pattern Recognition Letters.
\bibliographystyle{elsarticle-num}
\section{Introduction}\label{s:intro}
For most computer vision tasks, such as object detection and identification, it is desirable to use the in-focus images as input rather than blurred ones. However, due to the limited depth-of-field (DOF) of cameras, it is usually difficult to capture the all-in-focus images directly. Therefore, multi-focus image fusion, a technique to fuse two or more partially-focused source images into an all-in-focus image, is very important in the fields of computer vision and image processing, and has drawn considerable attention in recent years.
Existing multi-focus image fusion methods can be roughly categorized into three groups: transform-domain-based methods, spatial-domain-based methods, and deep-learning-based methods.
Transform-domain-based methods usually first decompose the source images in a transform domain, then fuse the features in the transform domain, and finally reconstruct the all-in-focus image. Laplacian pyramid (LP) \cite{LP}, ratio of low-pass pyramid (RP) \cite{RP}, curvelet transform (CVT) \cite{CVT}, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) \cite{DWT}, dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) \cite{RDTCWT}, non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) \cite{NSCT}, principal component analysis (CPA) \cite{Rcpa}, and sparse representation-based methods \cite{SR,nsctsr,SPpr} have been explored to build transform-domain-based methods.
Spatial-domain-based methods can be further classified into three sub-groups: block-based methods, region-based methods and pixel-based methods. The block-based methods \cite{block} first divide images into blocks, then calculate the focus measure of each block, and finally choose the block with the highest focus measure as the corresponding block in the fusion result. Consequently, these algorithms are often affected by the granularity of block partitioning. The region-based methods \cite{region} first segment the input images and then fuse the focused segments of these input images. Therefore, the fusion results of region-based methods highly rely on the segmentation accuracy. The pixel-based methods \cite{DSIFT} calculate the focus measure and fuse the images at the pixel level. Usually, pixel-based methods often produce poor results near the boundary between a focused area and a defocused area.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure1.pdf}
\caption{Examples in our dataset. (a) and (d) are the source images focused on the foreground; (b) and (e) are the source images focused on the background; and (c) and (f) are the all-in-focus images. The upper row is for a complex example and the lower row is for a simple example.}
\label{fig1}
\end{figure*}
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Characteristics of various datasets.}\label{table1}
\begin{tabular}{lllll}
\hline
Dataset & Data generation method & size & realistic & ground truth\\
\hline
Lytro \cite{lytrodata} & Captured by light field camera & 20 pairs, 520$\times$520 & Yes & No \\
CNN \cite{cnn} & Synthetically generated based on the ImageNet dataset & 1,000,000 pairs, 16$\times$16 & No & Yes \\
BA-Fusion \cite{icme2019ours} & Synthetically generated based on the Matting dataset & 2,268,000 pairs, 16$\times$16 & No & Yes \\
FuseGan \cite{fusegan} & Synthetically generated based on segmentation datasets & 5,850 pairs, 320$\times$480 & No & Yes \\
Our Real-MFF & Captured by light field camera & 710 pairs, 625$\times$433 & Yes & Yes \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
In the past several years, many deep learning methods have been proposed for multi-focus image fusion. Liu \textit{et al.} \cite{cnn} used a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to generate a decision map just like the pixel-based methods, and then did some post-processing to produce a final decision map. FuseGan \cite{fusegan} used a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate decision map. Such methods can be regarded as the network-based implementations of the spatial-domain-based methods. Different from them, Wen \textit{et al.} \cite{ecnn} designed an end-to-end neural network for image fusion.
One of the bottlenecks of using deep neural networks to solve multi-focus fusion problems is the lack of suitable large and realistic database with ground truth for the network training. The most widely used dataset in this area is the Lytro Multi-focus dataset \cite{lytrodata}, which contains 20 pairs of multi-focus images with size 520$\times$520 pixels. This dataset is very small and has no ground truth, therefore, it cannot be used for training a deep neural network. To break through this bottleneck, there are some valuable trials. Liu \textit{et al.} \cite{cnn} used high-quality natural images blurred by Gaussian filters with five different levels of blur to generate a dataset. The images generated by this method were not as real as naturally defocused images, because they were blurred with a spatially invariant defocus kernel and therefore lacked defocus changes. \cite{fusegan,ecnn} used segmentation datasets with manually labeled segmentation as the ground truth map. The ground truth was used as a 0-1 mask map, with '0' for foreground and '1' for background. The foreground and background were then blurred by Gaussian filters separately and finally merged together. In our previous work of BA-Fusion \cite{icme2019ours}, we generated a dataset based on a matting dataset. We chose matted object as the foreground object and high-quality picture as the background. However, the images generated by these methods do not follow the real defocus model and thus need further improvement.
In this letter, we propose a new large and realistic dataset for multi-focus image fusion. The dataset, called Real-MFF, consists of various natural multi-focus images with ground truth, generated by light field images. Fig.~\ref{fig1} shows two pairs of partially-focused source images and their all-in-focus ground-truth images in our dataset for examples. The contributions of our work can be summarized as follows.
Firstly, we construct a new large and realistic multi-focus dataset, which contains 710 pairs of images that can be used for training deep neural networks. Each pair of images contains two partially-focused images as the source images and an all-in-focus image as the ground truth. The dataset is generated using a light field camera: Lytro illum camera. The source images are produced by choosing different focus planes.
Secondly, to the best of our knowledge, our dataset is the first large and realistic dataset that can serve as a test bench for validating multi-focus image fusion methods.
Finally, the proposed dataset is both large and realistic so that it can benefit the development of deep-learning-based multi-focus image fusion methods.
\section{Related Work}\label{s:related}
\subsection{Multi-focus image fusion dataset}
As mentioned in Section~\ref{s:intro}, Lytro \cite{lytrodata}, currently the most widely used multi-focus image fusion dataset, only has 20 pairs of images without ground truth. Therefore, it cannot be used for training of deep neural networks. Alternatively, many deep-learning-based algorithms \cite{cnn,ecnn,fusegan,icme2019ours} generated datasets artificially as the training set. But these generated datasets are not natural or realistic, especially near the focused/defocused boundary. The characteristics of these datasets are summarized in Table~\ref{table1}.
\subsection{Light field image processing}
Different from the conventional cameras, the light field camera records the complete light field information in one shot, and generates images afterwards. In 2005, Ng proposed a Fourier Slice Photography Theorem \cite{Ng}, which proved that images focused at different depths can be computed from a single light field image. Dansereau \textit{et al.} \cite{Donald2015} designed a 4D hyperfan shaped band-pass filter in the frequency domain, which can control the range of focused depths of images in the spatial domain.
\section{Dataset}\label{s:dataset}
\subsection{Image capture and categories}
We use the Lytro illum camera to capture light field images at different places, such as square, campus, shopping mall and street. Photo categories include people, plants, buildings, objects, etc. In addition to the photos taken by us, we also selected 443 images from the Stanford database \cite{datasetsf}, which mainly include some scenes with obviously separable foreground and background, especially those with more complex boundary between foreground and background.
\subsection{Pre-processing}
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure2.pdf}
\caption{Refocusing. (a) is the 4D light field captured by a Lytro camera and (b) is the corresponding 4D Fourier spectrum. (c) shows three 2D slices of the 4D Fourier spectrum, and (d) demonstrates the images generated via applying inverse 2D transforms on (c).
}
\label{FIG2}
\end{figure}
We use the \emph{LFLytroDecodeImage} function in the light field toolbox (LFtoolbox) \cite{Donald2013} to decode light field data and obtain the raw 4D light field data as well as the 2D Lenslet images. A two-dimensional representation of 4D light field data is shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(a).
Then, we use the \emph{LFdisp} function to generate 2D images. However, the images generated by LFtoolbox are with color deviation and shape distortion effects. We fix the color difference problem through the gamma transform; and with the help of a calibration plate, the problem of shape distortion is solved.
An illustrative example is shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG3}. In Fig.~\ref{FIG3}(a), the image before color correction is dim and lacks color details; in Fig.~\ref{FIG3}(b), the problem has been fixed after color correction. However, it still can be seen that the object shape in Figs.~\ref{FIG3}(a) and (b) has obvious distortions (e.g.~the table is curved). After distortion correction, the table becomes straight in Fig.~\ref{FIG3}(c).
\begin{figure*}[htbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.80\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure3.pdf}
\caption{Example for pre-processing. (a) is the original image before pre-processing, (b) is the intermediate image after color correction and (c) is the final image after color correction and distortion correction.}
\label{FIG3}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Refocusing}
The main processing of the dataset is refocusing. For better visualization, we illustrate the processing with an example in Fig.~\ref{FIG2}. Firstly, a 4D light field image (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(a)) is transformed to a 4D Fourier spectrum space (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(b)):
\begin{equation}
F(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t) = DFT( f(u,s,v,t) ),
\end{equation}
where $f$ denotes the 4D light field image, $DFT$ represents the discrete Fourier transform, $F$ is 4D Fourier spectrum, $(u,s,v,t)$ are the two-plane parameterizations of light rays, and $(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t)$ denotes the corresponding coordinates in the 4D Fourier spectrum space.
According to the Fourier Slice Photography Theorem~\cite{Ng}, we then use 4D hyperfan, \emph{LFBuild4DFreqHyperfan} in LFtoobox~\cite{Donald2013}, as a high-dimensional passband filter to filter the 4D Fourier spectrum (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(c)):
\begin{equation}
F_{depth} = H_{HF}(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t, \theta_1,\theta_2)F(\Omega_u,\Omega_s,\Omega_v,\Omega_t),
\end{equation}
where $H_{HF}$ is the 4D hyperfan passband filter, $F_{depth}$ means the 4D Fourier spectrum of 2D image focused on the specific depth, and parameters $\theta_1$ and $\theta_2$ are the slope parameters of the 4D hyperfan.
Finally, the 2D images (Fig.~\ref{FIG2}(d)) can be generated by the inverse Fourier transform of the processed 4D Fourier spectrum:
\begin{equation}
I = IDFT(F_{depth}),
\end{equation}
where $IDFT$ represents inverse discrete Fourier transform, and $I$ denotes the 2D image focused on the specific depth.
Since the depth range usually changes for different scenes, we need to first manually select the specific depth range of focus in the Lytro software, then record the depth of focus for each image, and finally generate the desired image focused on different depth ranges. Therefore, $\theta_1$ and $\theta_2$ usually change for different images. Typically, both $\theta_1$ and $\theta_2$ are in the range of [-2, 2].
The pseudocode of the algorithm is shown in Algorithm~\ref{alg1}.
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{Refocusing}
\label{alg1}
\begin{algorithmic}
\FOR{each light field image}
\STATE Decode the light field data: $f$;
\STATE Transform $f$ into the frequency domain by FFT:
\STATE $F = DFT(f)$;
\STATE $j$ = the depth at foreground;
\STATE $k$ = the depth at background;
\STATE $l = (j+k)/2$ ;
\STATE \# Generate the foreground focused image
\STATE Build the 4D hyperfan with slopes $j$ and $l$:
\STATE $H_{FG} = H_{HF}(j,l)$;
\STATE $F_{FG} = H_{FG}F$;
\STATE $I_{FG} = IDFT(F_{FG})$;
\STATE \# Generate the background focused image
\STATE Build the 4D hyperfan with slopes $k$ and $l$:
\STATE $H_{BG} = H_{HF}(k,l)$;
\STATE $F_{BG} = H_{BG}F$;
\STATE $I_{BG} = IDFT(F_{BG})$;
\STATE \# Generate the all-in-focus image
\STATE Build the 4D hyperfan with slopes $j$ and $k$:
\STATE $H_{AF} = H_{HF}(j,k)$;
\STATE $F_{AF} = H_{AF}F$;
\STATE $I_{AF} = IDFT(F_{AF})$;
\ENDFOR
\end{algorithmic}
\end{algorithm}
\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Dataset}
\begin{figure}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure4.pdf}
\caption{Example of the generated images. (a) is the all-in-focus image; (b) is the image focused on the background; (c) is the image focused on the foreground; (d) is the difference map between (a) and (b); and (e) is the difference map between (a) and (c).}
\label{FIG4}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{submission/figs/figure5.pdf}
\caption{Visual comparison. (a) and (b) are the two partially-focused source images; (c) is the ground truth all-in-focus image; and (d)-(m) are the fusion results of the 10 methods.}
\label{FIG5}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationPSNRnew.pdf}
\caption{PSNR}\label{fig:matrix:PSNR}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationSSIMnew.pdf}
\caption{SSIM}\label{fig:matrix:SSIM}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationEPE.pdf}
\caption{EPE}\label{fig:matrix:EPE}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{0.245\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{submission/figs/significationALL.pdf}\hfill
\caption{ALL}\label{fig:matrix:ALL}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Significance testing results for the performance of different methods in terms of (a) PSNR, (b) SSIM, (c) EPE and (d) the intersection (denoted by `ALL') of (a)-(c), where `1' indicates that the algorithm of the row is significantly better than the algorithm of the column, and `0' otherwise, at the significance level of 0.05.}
\label{FIG6}
\end{figure*}
Our Real-MFF dataset contains 710 pairs of images, where each pair includes two partially-focused source images focused on the foreground or background respectively, and an all-in-focus image as the ground truth. We hope that the ground truth is similar to the composition of two source images: the foreground region should be similar to the source image focused on the foreground, and the background region should be similar to the source image focused on the background. Fig.~\ref{FIG4} shows an example for the difference maps between the all-in-focus image and the two source images. The difference shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(d) indicates that the ground truth (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(a)) matches the background of the image focused on the background (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(b)); and the difference shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(e) indicates that the ground truth (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(a)) matches the foreground of the image focused on the foreground (Fig.~\ref{FIG4}(c)).
\begin{table*}[h]
\centering
\caption{Quantitative comparison of multi-focus image fusion methods on our dataset.}\label{table2}
\begin{tabular}{lllllllllll}
\hline
& Dsift \cite{DSIFT} & CNN \cite{cnn} & SR \cite{SR} & GF \cite{GF} & LP \cite{LP} & RP \cite{RP} & DTCWT \cite{RDTCWT} & CVT \cite{CVT} & NSCT \cite{NSCT} & NSCT-SR \cite{nsctsr}\\
\hline
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{on the whole dataset}\\
\hline
PSNR & 39.96 & 40.46 & 39.68 & 40.74 & 41.32 & 40.37 & 40.86 & 40.90 & 41.18 & 41.32\\
SSIM & 0.9865 & 0.9880 & 0.9857 & 0.9890 & 0.9904 & 0.9891 & 0.9896 & 0.9892 & 0.9905 & 0.9906\\
EPE & 1.959 & 1.901 & 2.060 & 1.865 & 1.790 & 1.939 & 1.876 & 1.886 & 1.762 & 1.736\\
\hline
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{on the simple dataset}\\
\hline
PSNR & 42.71 & 43.41 & 42.13 & 43.45 & 43.93 & 42.88 & 43.46 & 43.52 & 43.72 & 43.87\\
SSIM & 0.9902 & 0.9920 & 0.9888 & 0.9921 & 0.9924 & 0.9914 & 0.9922 & 0.9921 & 0.9926 & 0.9927\\
EPE & 1.446 & 1.375 & 1.526 & 1.357 & 1.294 & 1.408 & 1.349 & 1.349 & 1.268 & 1.244\\
\hline
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{on the complex dataset}\\
\hline
PSNR & 38.39 & 38.76 & 38.26 & 39.18 & 39.81 & 38.92 & 39.35 & 39.38 & 39.72 & 39.85\\
SSIM & 0.9843 & 0.9857 & 0.9838 & 0.9873 & 0.9892 & 0.9878 & 0.9881 & 0.9876 & 0.9894 & 0.9894\\
EPE & 2.255 & 2.205 & 2.368 & 2.159 & 2.076 & 2.245 & 2.181 & 2.196 & 2.048 & 2.020\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
Furthermore, in order to evaluate the effect of difficulty level on an algorithm, especially for simple and complex boundaries, we manually divide the dataset into a simple set (260 pairs) and a complex set (450 pairs) according to the complexity of focused/defocused boundary. The division is conducted via a three-person majority voting to reduce the bias caused by subjective selection. Two examples are shown in Fig.~\ref{fig1}, where Fig.~\ref{fig1}(a) is a complex case and Fig.~\ref{fig1}(d) is a simple case. For the complex case in Fig.~\ref{fig1}(a), we can find it difficult to draw a curve as the boundary of the foreground and the background, whereas for the simple case in Fig.~\ref{fig1}(d), we can easily take the border of the cistern as the boundary.
\subsection{Test Bench}
We evaluate 10 typical multi-focus image fusion methods, including some transform-domain-based methods (LP \cite{LP}, RP \cite{RP}, DWT \cite{DWT}, CVT \cite{CVT}, DTCWT \cite{RDTCWT}, NSCT \cite{NSCT}, SR \cite{SR}, NSCT-SR \cite{nsctsr}), some spatial-domain-based methods (Dsift \cite{DSIFT}, GF \cite{GF}), and a deep-learning-based methods (CNN \cite{cnn}), on our dataset.
We employ the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structure similarity (SSIM) and end point error (EPE) as the evaluation measures, and in terms of these measures, the performances of the 10 multi-focus image fusion methods on the whole dataset, the simple dataset and the complex dataset are listed in Table~\ref{table2}.
Unsurprisingly, the results of these algorithms on the simple dataset are generally better than those on the complex dataset. The results also show that, among these algorithms, NSCT and NSCT-SR are the top two on our dataset.
For illustration, we choose an example with complex foreground borders from our dataset, and show the visual results of various methods in Fig.~\ref{FIG5}. We can see the difference among these 10 methods in the regions of the falling leaves and the people in the background. It is hard for the spatial-domain-based methods to generate a precise decision map, which means that the resultant images from these methods have some quite blurry areas. Consequently, their PSNRs are usually lower than those of other methods. For the transform-domain-based methods, complex boundaries will decrease the performance of the algorithms, but fortunately this bad effect will not result in complete failure of the algorithms. Moreover, we can see that CNN and Dsift have blurred results for the falling leaves, while NSCT-SR has better results in this area.
In order to further analyze whether the performances of these methods are statistically significantly different from each other, we perform the Wilcoxon signed rank tests \cite{wilcoxon1945individual} on the experimental results in Table~\ref{table2}. The significance testing results in PSNR, SSIM and EPE are shown in Fig.~\ref{FIG6}, as well as the intersection of these three results (denoted by `ALL'), in all of which the number `1' indicates that the algorithm of the row is significantly better than the algorithm of the column at the significance level of 0.05, and the number `0' otherwise. Based on the results, NSCT-SR performs the best on our dataset.
\section{Conclusions}\label{s:conclusion}
In this letter, we propose a large and realistic dataset for multi-focus image fusion tasks. To the best of our knowledge, our Real-MFF dataset is the first large and realistic dataset for this purpose. The dataset is generated by light field images captured with a light field camera. We use the 4D hyperfan in the frequency domain as a band-pass filter to produce images focused on different depths manually. The proposed dataset can serve as a test bench for evaluating multi-focus image fusion methods; furthermore, it can benefit the development of deep-learning-based methods for multi-focus image fusion in the future. It is also our future work to continuously increase the size, diversity and quality of this dataset.
\section*{Acknowledgement}
We thank the reviewers and editors for their constructive comments that improved our manuscript. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61771276).
\section*{Statement}
This paper has been pubilished on Pattern Recognition Letters.
\bibliographystyle{elsarticle-num}
| {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaArXiv'} | 26 |
How Long Does It Take To Write A Novel?
Between plotting, drafting time and editing time, you'll be surprised what the answer is.
Brian A. Klems
That's the question I asked myself when I started to outline my second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind.
I hear you say: Surely, you already knew!
But I didn't. I wrote my first novel, A Calculated Life, over the course of several years with frequent breaks of many months. I kept coming back to the incomplete manuscript, reading it afresh each time, and then pressing on, adding a few thousand words before I had to put the manuscript away again. Life kept intervening.
This guest post is by Anne Charnock. Charnock's debut novel, A Calculated Life, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick and Kitschies Golden Tentacle Awards. Her new book, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, is out now. Her writing career began in journalism and her articles appeared in the Guardian, New Scientist, International Herald Tribune, and Geographical. She travelled widely as a foreign correspondent and spent a year overlanding through Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya. Visit her at annecharnock.com and follow her on Twitter @annecharnock.
When I started my second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, I vowed that I'd keep a detailed record of my progress. I created a spreadsheet, and in the first column I logged every date that I sat at my laptop to work on the novel. I specified whether I was outlining, drafting (in which case I typed in the word count) or editing. And because the novel had three storylines, set in the past, present and future, I added extra columns to keep a tally of the word count in each of the three time settings. When I'd completed the first draft of Chapter 1, I decided I deserved a new column titled 'Milestones.'
It's worth pointing out that I didn't include all my research time!
Several years of art study are unaccounted for in the spreadsheet. But once I'd met my deadline and submitted my novel to 47North, I revisited my diary and counted the days I'd spent in China and Italy carrying out research specifically for this novel.
[The Top 10 Elements of a Book People Want to Read]
So how long did it take?
I started the outline on 12 May 2014, the day after I arrived home from China. I emailed the full manuscript to my editor, Jason Kirk, on 20 April 2015.
It took me 222 days of outlining, drafting, and editing to complete the manuscript, which had a word count of roughly 70,000. Adding my research days in China and Italy, and assuming a five-day working week (in fact, my working week varied from three days to seven days per week), it took me exactly 52 weeks to write my novel.
That's right. Exactly one year. How strangely rounded is that?
You'll see from the screen capture that my output was pretty pathetic some days. However, I found that the chapters I wrote quickly were the ones that needed the most editing. This brings me onto …
Drafting versus editing time
I can't be definitive on this. I always edit as I go along rather than writing a full rough draft for a whole novel. In other words, as I go along, I'll edit the previous paragraph, my morning's work, my previous day's work, and so on until the chapter is finished. On my spreadsheet, I regarded this on-the-hoof editing as drafting.
What I classed as 'editing' were the edits I made at the end of each chapter.
How long does it take to write a novel? Well, I now know how long it takes ME! Here's a screen capture of my first 50 days. I reckon 60 words on 17 July was my low point, but I notice I worked on the outline, too, that day.
Now, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind has a fragmented structure, and the time setting switches, chapter by chapter, from future to present to past. I re-edited after every third chapter—partly to make sure the pace was comparable across the three story lines. I also checked the threads/themes/motifs, which I intended to weave through the narrative. I kept two more spreadsheets (I don't favor white boards and Post-Its, though I'm sure other writers find them helpful):
An outline spreadsheet. I started my draft with the barest plot outline so, as I progressed with the manuscript, I summarized the main events in each chapter—four or five entries at most—for easy future reference.
A themes/motifs spreadsheet. I charted the positions of my recurring themes/motifs across the 21 chapters (see photograph).
In addition, when I reached the halfway point with the manuscript, I stopped to polish everything I'd written so far. Many writers may regard this as madness. However, I felt I needed to feel confident about the novel thus far before adding to an already heavily interwoven narrative.
I pressed on with the second half of the novel, repeating the editing process that I'd used for the first half. By the time I'd drafted the final chapter, I was ready to polish the entire novel.
I suspect this is not how most authors operate! And this only emphasises how each writer has his/her own methodology partly determined by personal preference and partly dictated by the nature of the writing project.
According to my spreadsheet, the split was 50/50 between 'drafting' and 'editing.'
Don't forget, additional rounds of editing ensued once I'd submitted my completed manuscript—development edits, copy-edits, and proofreads.
[Here are 10 Questions You Need to Ask Your Characters]
How does this compare with my first novel?
I adopted a similar process forA Calculated Life though this first novel had a linear narrative—far less complicated in many ways. But I was a novice and when I reached 'The End,' I found that my manuscript needed far more than a final polish! For example, I changed the beginning of the novel twice before I felt it was ready for submission.
This week—though distracted by the release of Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind—I'm working on the manuscript of my third novel, Dreams Before The Start Of Time. Maybe I'll speed up with the experience of writing two novels, but somehow I think that's unlikely. Each writing project throws up new challenges—there are new writerly problems to solve. And, as I keep reminding myself, it's not a race.
If you are considering writing a novel with a fractured structure, here are a few fine examples:
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Hours and Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Life: A Users' Manual by Georges Perec
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
Here are 4 things to consider when researching literary agents.
What are overused openings in fantasy, sci-fi, romance and crime novels?
What to write in the BIO section of your query letter.
Here are 7 reasons writing a novel makes you awesome.
New Agent Alerts: Click here to find agents who are currently seeking writers.
Download a year's worth of writing prompts right here.
BEST RESOURCE FOR WRITERS:
GET A LITERARY AGENT contains advice from more than
110 literary agents who share advice on querying, craft,
the submission process, researching agents, andmuch more.
Click here to order now!
Thanks for visiting The Writer's Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer's Digest and author of the popular gift bookOh Boy, You're Having a Girl: A Dad's Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
Sign up for Brian's free Writer's Digest eNewsletter: WD Newsletter
beginnersBrian KlemsHow to Write Better | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 27 |
In 1968 Andy Warhol stated "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes". We're not sure whether this was a prophetic vision based on the ease to gain internet fame in the 21st century, but wanting our "15 minutes" Elldrew decided to seize an opportunity to put themselves in front of the camera for Amazon's pre-Christmas "Approved By Customers" online campaign, with our bundle of fluff @TomKatsu.
Elldrew have no experience in front of the camera and 18-month-old TomKatsu even less. Having barely ventured beyond the four walls of our house with a small inner city garden (we are referring to the cat), all three of us nervously approached the film studios in East London early one Sunday morning wondering how the day would evolve.
We were greeted by Amazon and their PR firm's ebullient staff and shown into a rather vast 'green room'. That's fine we thought, a larger room then expected, we'd get TomKatsu comfortable and used to the smells and sounds before taking him into a similar studio. For the hour we sat in the room our normally very curious and confident TomKatsu barely came out of his travel case, and when he did he hid behind the sofa. We started to get a tad stressed about his ability to perform, so called the casting agent who reassured us that the team at Amazon were fully aware that we had no prior experience in front of the camera and that we and TomKatsu would be fine. TomKatsu did manage to greet some of the team as they popped in to say hello, he was happy to show off to the Director (phew), but he did take a particular dislike to the Production Assistant – we don't know why but every time she came in he scurried off to a hidey-hole. Thankfully she didn't take it personally…we've stopped trying to wonder what goes on in that fluffy mind of his long ago.
An hour or so later, with make-up done (us not him), appropriate clothing chosen from the selection we brought with us, we were shown into the filming studio. WOW. If we thought the green room was large then the studio was massive. Panic attack kicked in as we scoped out the warehouse sized studio with its dark corners and large shipping crates and boxes everywhere…this was indeed the perfect playground (or hiding place) for a small feline. We were worried but the amazing crew reassured us that it would be fine and they offered to spread out around the actual set, forming a human line, to ensure that if he did run off they would either stop him or send him back in our direction.
All started off positively, TomKatsu was still nervous but also a little inquisitive. He sat patiently on Elldrew's lap whilst we introduced him to the range of cat products. We showed him a 3ft high cardboard pet castle which he loved jumping into and burrowing around it's three levels – after all, in the vast studio it was a nice small secure space; perfect for a little kitty. He played with some catnip toys and we all had a good giggle at the catnip Christmas stocking pack that contained a catnip Christmas tree, a catnip candy cane and a catnip banana (banana? Yes, don't ask, we couldn't work out the association either).
Several times we took him out of the castle and showed him some of the other products we were reviewing, alas the diva that he is, he wasn't too interested and promptly jumped back into 'his' castle. We took him out again and tried to get his attention with a laser pointer. TomKatsu jumped back into the castle. We lifted the castle off him and showed him an amazing turntable scratch mat. TomKatsu ran back into the castle. We moved the castle away altogether and tried to get his interest in his favourite toy at home, catnip bubbles, but this time he looked around and sprinted off to a dark corner of the studio…the staff sprang into action, as if playing a game of tag, with Ell racing after him, almost rugby tackling a crew member, catching TomKatsu before he dived behind a stack of boxes.
It was around that point we realised TomKatsu was possibly never going to be a film star. Whilst Drew may have had a certain panache in front of the camera, Ell wasn't doing a whole lot better than TomKatsu, having failed to grasp the simplest task of looking at the cameraman and not the camera. We persevered for another hour by which point the crew said they were happy with the footage and we would call it a day as TomKatsu was showing signs of needing a nap.
We had a fun day out, loved the experience and loved showing off the video to our family and friends. We will stick to our day jobs and leave TomKatsu to laze around the house all day (or hide out in the cardboard castle which we ultimately got for his Christmas present). The Amazon crew managed to wave their magic wand and pull together our best bits in the review video. Whilst over 41,000 Facebook views wont bring us internet fame we can at least say we gave it a try. For you viewing pleausure, here's the full video featuring some other pets including Instagram French bulldog sensation @judethefrench, so we were in good company at least. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 28 |
Q: C# How to make a thread wait for either of two Manual Reset Events? I have a thread that grabs messages from a concurrent queue and writes them to a network stream. The loop inside the thread looks like this:
while (!cancel.IsCancellationRequested)
{
messageBus.outboundPending.WaitOne();
var message = messageBus.GetFrom(Direction.Outbound);
if (message == null) { continue; }
MessageWriter.WriteMessage(networkStream, message, cancel, OnStreamClose).Wait(cancel);
}
The requirement is that the thread stops if the cancellation token is set. However, since it waits for pending messages in the queue, the thread will stay blocked. How could I "combine" both the cancellation token and the outbound event so that if either of them are set, the thread unblocks?
The only convoluted way that I can think of to make it work is to replace the outboundPending event with a new third event, and start two new threads: one that waits for the outbound event, and another that waits for the cancel event, and have both of them set the third event when they unblock. But that feels really bad.
A: Try WaitHandle.WaitAny and include the CancellationToken.WaitHandle.
A discussion of a cancellable WaitAll can be found here
A: Use the WaitOne(TimeSpan) method. It will return true if it was signaled, and false if the timeout was reached.
e.g, if you send TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1) and a second has passed without a signal, the execution will continue and the method will return false. If the signal was given, it will return true.
| {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaStackExchange'} | 29 |
Service Full Description Provides four management services: Catalog Database Service, which confirms the signatures of Windows files and allows new programs to be installed; Protected Root Service, which adds and removes Trusted Root Certification Authority certificates from this computer; Automatic Root Certificate Update Service, which retrieves root certificates from Windows Update and enable scenarios such as SSL; and Key Service, which helps enroll this computer for certificates. If this service is stopped, these management services will not function properly. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 30 |
United Nations Mongolia
About the UN
The UN in Mongolia
UN Entities in Mongolia
The Resident Coordinator Office
Our team in Mongolia
Sustainable Development Group
The UN Resident Coordinator Office
Tapan Mishra
Resident Coordinator
[email protected]
Mr. Tapan Mishra has taken over his role as the United Nations Resident Coordinator (UN RC) for Mongolia in September 2019. As UN RC, the highest-ranking representative of the United Nations Development System in Mongolia, he has been designated by the UN Secretary General to lead the UN Country Team in coordinating operational activities for development in the country. Before this post in Mongolia, Mr. Mishra served as UN RC in DPR Korea from 2015 to 2019.
Mr. Tapan Mishra first joined the UN system in 2003 as the UNDP Learning Advisor and Deputy Chief of the Learning Resources Centre (LRC) in the Office of Human Resources, Bureau of Management where he moved up to become the Director and Chief of LRC from 2007 to 2013.
The work of the United Nations in Mongolia is guided by the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) that provides a strategic guidance to the UN system work in the country. The current UNDAF 2017-2021 was signed with the Government of Mongolia in 2016 and is designed to foster cooperation, enhance coordination and strengthen partnerships to support attainment of Mongolia's Sustainable Development Vision 2030.
The UNDAF demonstrates a strategic focus supporting Mongolia in achieving its sustainable development objectives and focuses on (1) promoting inclusive growth and sustainable management of natural resources; (2) enhancing social protection and utilization of quality and equitable social services, and (3) fostering voice and strengthening accountability.
For successful implementation of UNDAF 2017-2021 the UN will utilize its comparative advantages in Mongolia that are as follows:
Strong reputation with the Government of Mongolia and a consolidated relationship built on decades of successful cooperation;
Convening ability and role of international broker;
Credibility with NGOs, civil society (at all levels);
Knowledge and international standards;
Independence and neutrality;
Strategic support for SDGs (expertise, reporting);
Window to international/regional expertise on complex development issues, and Guarantor of international quality of norms and standards.
The UN Resident Coordinator in Mongolia
Mr. Tapan Mishra first joined the UN system in 2003 as the UNDP Learning Advisor and Deputy Chief of the Learning Resources Centre (LRC) in the Office of Human Resources, Bureau of Management where he moved up to become the Director and Chief of LRC from 2007 to 2013. Thereafter, he served on numerous assignments as Senior Advisor at the Business Solutions Exchange, supporting Country Offices as well as Offices in Headquarters including the Human Development Report Office, and the Bureau of Policy and Programme Support till 2015 when he was appointed as UN RC.
Prior to joining the UN, Mr. Mishra worked in India both in private and public sector organizations. He started his career in 1984 as a human resource professional in Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd (erstwhile Burma Shell Co), where he was the Head of Industrial Relations of the Northern Region in India. He then became the All India Training Manager in Mumbai and finally an Internal Coach for Organizational Learning and Change Management. He also served at Infosys Leadership Institute as a Faculty Member and at Grow Talent Co. Ltd in Gurgaon as Vice President (Consulting).
A Management Postgraduate from XLRI, Jamshedpur, a premier Business School in India, Mr. Mishra has also been active in academia through teaching HR Management at leading institutions in India, like NMIMS in Mumbai and at Columbia University, School for International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in the United States.
The Sustainable Development Goals in Mongolia
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© Copyright 2021 United Nations in Mongolia | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 31 |
The last news about Mortal Kombat (aka Mortal Kombat 3). Watch the movie trailer soon.
Looks like Director Christopher Morrison, aka Mink, is still trying to push for a new Mortal Kombat movie. Former "Mortal Kombat" actor Chris Casamassa recently said that the new opus of the Mortal kombat movie series will start principal photography in September 2009.
It's quite strange: it's either a low-budget flick that can't garner any buzz or they're trying to keep the lid on any news about it.
Details about this new Mortal Kombat movie are rather scarce. We don't really know if it's a sequel to the two previous movies or a reboot. IMDb is listing the movie under the title of Mortal Kombat. It is slated fr a 2010 release.
Well, we'll have to wait for more details about this new Mortal Kombat movie. Just hope that the movie will have enough budget to render gorgeous fatalities on screen! | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 32 |
Flights from Europe
Flights from London Heathrow
You are here: Flights from London Heathrow (LHR) to Durban (DUR)Flights from London Heathrow (LHR) to Durban (DUR)
Flights from London Heathrow (LHR) to Durban (DUR)
Flights to Durban
Flights from Durban to London Heathrow
5 weekly flights between London Heathrow (LHR) and Durban (DUR)
Outbound from London Heathrow (LHR) to Durban (DUR)
London Heathrow (LHR)
flight numberEK002 / flight numberEK775 / flight numberEK775
Durban (DUR)
Departing from London Heathrow Airport (LHR) at13:40
arrives Next day to O R Tambo International Airport (JNB) at10:45+1Next day
Continuation in Johannesburg (JNB) : 1h 40m
Departing from O R Tambo International Airport (JNB) at12:25+1Next day
arrives Next day to King Shaka International Airport (DUR) at13:35+1Next day
LHRDeparting from London Heathrow Airport (LHR) at13:40
Aircraft Type :Airbus 380View servicesavailable on EK002
JNBarrives Next day to O R Tambo International Airport (JNB) at10:45+1Next day
JNBDeparting from O R Tambo International Airport (JNB) at12:25+1Next day
DURarrives Next day to King Shaka International Airport (DUR) at13:35+1Next day
Inbound from Durban (DUR) to London Heathrow (LHR)
Total journey18h 5m
Departing from King Shaka International Airport (DUR) at15:05
arrives Next day to London Heathrow Airport (LHR) at07:10+1Next day
DURDeparting from King Shaka International Airport (DUR) at15:05
LHRarrives Next day to London Heathrow Airport (LHR) at07:10+1Next day
Before you fly from London Heathrow to Durban
Learn more about Durban
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Every destination is different. Learn about Durban before you fly from London.
Find out useful information about Durban, or search for our local offices at airports around the world.
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Flights to Kuwait | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 33 |
Sourcing the right help when looking for shipping to Durban South Africa, isn't always easy, but by coming with us, we can give you the results you've been looking for. Here at Luna Shipping we are specialists in shipping goods across the world and we are confident that we can help make your move simple and easy.
Not only does our work speak for itself, but by choosing us, you are choosing a professional company who offer years of experience. We always do our best to go above and beyond for every one of our clients and will do all we can to make sure you're happy with the results. Thanks to our can-do attitude and clear communication, we are one of the most trusted and reliable companies to choose when looking for shipping services.
If you would like to learn more about this and our other services, take a look around our website today. For any questions or to go ahead with our services, we would like to hear from you. Call us on 0208 508 8088 or fill out the contact form where a member of the team will be happy to help. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 34 |
Hoping to follow the lead of Seattle and a handful of other cities across the nation, the Healthy Tacoma coalition launched a campaign to require that businesses in the city provide paid sick leave for their employees.
To create the proposal, the coalition looked at paid sick leave requirements in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.
Like Seattle, accrual rates would vary based on the size of the business.
Currently, two in five Tacoma workers — about 40,000 — have no paid sick leave.
In these instances, people with low incomes are particularly vulnerable since a lack of paid sick leave forces them to choose between health and financial security, paid sick-leave proponents say.
They add that the benefits of paid sick days extend far beyond the workers taking them, noting the swine flu pandemic. They point to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's public health recommendation to "just stay home," when sick.
Seattle's ordinance took effect September 2012, despite opposition from the Washington Restaurant Association and critics who said it would be too costly for struggling businesses.
Since then, bills on both sides of the aisle — either to restrict Seattle's ordinance or expand it statewide — have been introduced in the Washington Legislature but aren't expected to go anywhere.
Some states have banned city sick leave requirements altogether, leaving the power in the hands of employers.
Connecticut is the only state with mandated sick leave.
Healthy Tacoma currently has the support of four Tacoma City Council members and will continue working to build momentum before a final ordinance is proposed in the next few months, Restrepo said. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 35 |
Another chance looms to transfer refugees to New Zealand
By David Crowe
July 21, 2019 — 5.24pm
Australia has another chance to transfer refugees from Manus Island or Nauru in a renewed offer from New Zealand to resettle 150 people, just as Papua New Guinea demands the closure of the detention centre on its soil.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said her government remained willing to accept the refugees on humanitarian grounds, confirming the number of places during her visit to Australia last Friday.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says "we've consistently" made the offer to Australia to resettle 150 people. Credit:Simon Schluter
But Prime Minister Scott Morrison has rejected the chance to resettle the refugees on the grounds it would weaken border security.
Ms Ardern told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that the offer remained on the table and could be used to resettle 150 refugees, while emphasising it would cover people with approved refugee status.
"We've consistently made it," Ms Ardern said. "The Australian government knows that it's there. We've always said that it's a matter ultimately for them.
"However, of course we've always said as well it would be an offer for refugees. So that's the area where we would make sure New Zealand's input would be."
The offer was first made by former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key in February 2013 and was continued under his successors, Bill English and Ms Ardern.
While the Gillard government accepted the original offer, Tony Abbott rejected it upon becoming Prime Minister in September 2013.
The offer was rejected again during the Turnbull government after a failed attempt to legislate a "lifetime ban visa" to stop the refugees moving from New Zealand to Australia.
Refugee advocates took the streets in Sydney in national rallies to mark six years since the implementation of offshore detention on Manus and Nauru. Credit:AAP
Labor adjusted its position last October to accept the "lifetime ban" subject to conditions, but Mr Morrison did not take up the chance to compromise on the bill.
Ms Ardern confirmed in an interview the size of the proposed refugee intake had not changed.
"The offer hasn't changed and the offer was 150 places," she said.
Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape, who took office in May, has arrived in Australia for meetings in which he will urge the Morrison government to speed up the removal of refugees from Manus Island.
"These are human beings we're dealing with. We can't leave them all hanging in space with no serious consideration into their future," Mr Marape told ABC Radio last Friday.
Mr Marape arrived in Canberra on Sunday for a dinner with Mr Morrison ahead of a formal bilateral meeting on Monday.
An estimated 450 asylum seekers are in Papua New Guinea while 350 are on Nauru.
Mr Marape said last Friday he had asked Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for faster action.
"I've met Immigration Minister Peter Dutton already. I've asked him to expedite the processing of asylum seekers," he said.
Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister James Marape and wife Rachel Marape arrive at Fairbairn Airbase in Canberra on Sunday, July 21, 2019. Credit:AAP
Greens Senator Nick McKim was told to leave Papua New Guinea after visiting Manus Island last week to mark six years since the Australian government imposed policies to transfer asylum seekers to the detention centre.
David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 36 |
We welcome people to contact us to become a volunteer, no matter how little time you may have, we always value any help that can be provided. We will pay travel expenses.
All monies donated are used for the benefit of people who have suffered a stroke and their families, and help towards the running costs of the groups e.g. Family and Carer Support, TALKBACK Communication Support Group.
With special thanks to, and in loving memory of Geoffrey William Setchfield. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 37 |
Q: google map api in javascript : how to dinamic setCenter in two layer for loop function start()
{
var lastcenter = map.getCenter();
for(var i = 0;i<2/*18937*/;i++)
{
var run = lastcenter;
var lat = run.lat()-(0.00018*i);
var lng = run.lng();
for(var j = 0;j<3/*11276*/;j++)
{
var rlng = lng+(0.00018*j);
run = {lat:lat,lng:rlng};
map.setCenter(run);
PrintMap();
}
}
}
**I try to cut many small square from google map,and wanna to setcenter to Visit every square and capture them but the program will setcenter at last point and cut many square for last point,How can i fix it....
demo:https://jsfiddle.net/awalker0215/u0s9kna1/1/
**
A: Both html2canvas and setCenter are asynchronous. So your code needs to "wait" until one call has been finished and then proceed further.
It could look something like this
<input type="button" value="startCut" onclick="moveMap()">
and
var i = 0, n = 3;
function moveMap()
{
google.maps.event.addListenerOnce(map, 'idle', function() {
printMap();
})
map.setCenter({lat: map.getCenter().lat() - 0.1, lng: map.getCenter().lng() - 0.1});
}
function printMap()
{
html2canvas(document.getElementById("map"),
{
useCORS: true,
onrendered: function(canvas)
{
document.body.appendChild(canvas);
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("br"))
i++;
if (i < n) {
moveMap();
} else {
google.maps.event.clearListeners(map, 'idle');
}
}
})
}
The problem in this case is that the map sometimes is idle but tiles are still being loaded (note the last image). So it would be better to use timeout.
var i = 0, n = 3;
function moveMap()
{
map.setCenter({lat: map.getCenter().lat() - 0.1, lng: map.getCenter().lng() - 0.1});
setTimeout(function() {
printMap();
}, 200);
}
function printMap()
{
html2canvas(document.getElementById("map"),
{
useCORS: true,
onrendered: function(canvas)
{
document.body.appendChild(canvas);
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("br"))
i++;
if (i < n) {
moveMap();
}
}
})
}
| {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaStackExchange'} | 38 |
Who are Byakuya and Juushirou referring to in chapter 117?
At the beginning of chapter 117 of Bleach, Juushirou Ukitake says, "Byakuya... Who is he?" (referring to Ichigo) and Byakuya replies, "He's not related. At least not ... to the one you're thinking of. He's no one. Just a ryoka. I'll dispose of him. And then... this trifling conflict... will come to an end."
Who is Byakuya referring to when he says, "He's not related. At least not ... to the one you're thinking of."? Or another way to say it, who did Juushirou Ukitake think that Ichigo was related to?
He's referring to Kaien Shiba, the former lieutenant of Jūshirō Ukitake's squad.
In the anime, his wife Miyako who was the 3rd Seat was possessed and devoured from the inside by one of Sōsuke Aizen's Hollows Metastacia. Kaien decided to track her down and kill her. However, Rukia followed him and saw him becoming possessed by the Hollow which leads to her having to reluctantly kill him and then deliver his body to the Shiba clan.
This begins Ganju's hatred for Soul Reapers as Kaien was his brother and he knew a Soul Reaper killed him because of the sword wounds on his body. However, Kūkaku knew full well it was Rukia who killed him and knew why she did and vowed that should she confront her about Kaien and apologize she would forgive Rukia.
Now, what Jūshirō Ukitake talking about is Ichigo's appearance in relation to Kaien's as they both look similar which in some cases may explain Rukia's actions as she's always felt guilty having been the one to kill Kaien, one of the 2 people who didn't treat her differently because she was Byakuya sister, the other was Miyako.
I should point out that this is from the Anime. From my understanding, apart from fillers, the anime is faithful to the manga.
What are Byakuya's Gokei, Senkei and Shuukei?
What happened to Ichigo in Urahara's training area after meeting Byakuya (for the first time)?
Who are the shadows that speak to Grand-Fisher?
How old are Ururu and Jinta?
How did the last threat disappear in the last chapter?
Are Hollows defeated by humans who are not Quincies considered as destroyed or "purified"?
Can Byakuya overcome Aizen's Kyoka Suigetsu as easy as he overcomed Koga since both of them are based on illusion? | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 39 |
1. Perfect By: Ellen Hopkins- I was excited for this book to come out anyway because I liked Impulse, but then when I saw the cover I got really excited! I just think it's cool and beautiful, but also dark in a way.
2. The Lying Game By: Sara Shepard- Cool cover idea for a book about twins. I think it just looks freaky and unique.
3. The Lonely Hearts Club By: Elizabeth Eullberg- I have to admit, I hated this book! The way it was written made everything in the book seem super corny. BUT this is about covers, and the whole reason I read this book is because the cover is awesome! It's not super original, I mean it's a direct play on Abbey Road, but it just turned out so cute!
4. Bunheads By: Sophie Flack- This one and the next few are books I haven't read yet, but because of the covers, they've made it onto my to-read list. This cover is gorgeous! I guess it also helps that I used to be a dancer, and I love watching dance. It's on my list to read, and hopefully I will get to it soon.
5. Between By: Jessica Warman- Ok I don't really know how this cover relates to the book, the description doesn't really make the link for me, but I guess I'll have to read it to find out. Anyhow I think this cover is beautiful and haunting.
6. Pieces of Us By: Margie Gelbwasser- Another one on my to-read list. I just really like this cover, it gives me a lost/lonely feeling. This book comes out this week!
7. Shine By Lauren Myracle- Haven't read this one yet either, but I LOVE the colors on this cover! It looks aged, but the opening flower gives a feeling of newness and hope.
8. Twenty Boy Summer By: Sarah Ockler- I did read this one, and it's a good one. The cover is simple but still eye-catching.
10. Hold Still- Nina LaCour- Not much to say about this one. It's a really good book with a really good cover!
So that's it! A little harder than I thought since like I said, all the really cool covers are fantasy books. One thing I learned from doing this list is: YA has the best covers hands down!! You gotta admit that!
Thanks for stopping by my top ten this week! The name of your blog is great, btw! | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 40 |
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Set up in 1969 by a young entrepreneur who fell in love with the wines of Bordeaux, there are now over 1,500 wines and gifts on sale at any one time at Laithwaites, and many of them have Laithwaites voucher codes or discount codes attached for a great deal.
Check back here for the latest Laithwaites discount codes and sign up to the newsletter for Laithwaites deals. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 41 |
Toxicology and Carcinogenesis Studies of Barium Chloride Dihydrate in F344/N Rats and B6C3F1 Mice (Drinking Water Studies)
Chemical Formula: BaCl2.2H2O
Report Date: January 1994
These studies were supported in part by funds from the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act trust fund (Superfund) by an interagency agreement with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, U.S. Public Health Service.
Barium chloride dihydrate, a white crystalline granule or powder, is used in pigments, aluminum refining, leather tanning and coloring, the manufacture of magnesium metal, ceramics, glass, and paper products, as a pesticide, and in medicine as a cardiac stimulant. Toxicology and carcinogenicity studies were conducted by administering barium chloride dihydrate (99% pure) in drinking water to F344/N rats and B6C3F1 mice for 15 days, 13 weeks, and 2 years. Genetic toxicology studies were conducted in Salmonella typhimurium, cultured Chinese hamster ovary cells, and mouse lymphoma cells.
Fifteen-day study in rats
Groups of five males and five females received barium chloride dihydrate in the drinking water at concentrations of 0, 125, 250, 500, 1,000, or 2,000 ppm for 15 days, corresponding to average daily doses of 10, 15, 35, 60, or 110 mg barium/kg body weight to males and females. No chemical-related deaths, differences in final mean body weights, or clinical findings of toxicity were observed. Water consumption by male and female rats exposed to 2,000 ppm was slightly less (S16%) than controls during week 2. There were no significant differences in absolute or relative organ weights between exposed and control rats. No biologically significant differences in hematology, clinical chemistry, or neurobehavioral parameters occurred in rats.
Fifteen-day study in mice
Groups of five males and five females received barium chloride dihydrate in the drinking water at concentrations of 0, 40, 80,173, 346, or 692 ppm for 15 days, corresponding to average daily doses of 5,10, 20, 40, or 70 mg barium/kg body weight to males and 5, 10, 15, 40, or 85 mg barium/kg body weight to females. No chemical-related deaths, differences in mean body weights or in water consumption, or clinical findings of toxicity were observed in mice. The relative liver weight of males receiving 692 ppm was significantly greater than that of the controls. The absolute and relative liver weights of females that received 692 ppm were significantly greater than those of the controls. No histopathologic evidence of toxicity was observed in mice.
Thirteen-week study in rats
Groups of 10 males and 10 females received barium chloride dihydrate in the drinking water at concentrations of 0, 125, 500, 1,000, 2,000, or 4,000 ppm for 13 weeks, corresponding to average daily doses of 10, 30, 65, 110, or 200 mg barium/kg body weight to males and 10, 35, 65, 115, or 180 mg barium/kg body weight to females. Three males and one female in the 4,000 ppm groups died during the last week of the study. The final mean body weights of male and female rats receiving 4,000 ppm were significantly lower (13% and 8%) than those of the controls. Water consumption by male and female rats in the 4,000 ppm groups was approximately 30% lower than that by the controls. No clearly chemical-related clinical findings of toxicity or neurobehavioral or cardiovascular effects were noted. Serum phosphorus levels in 2,000 and 4,000 ppm male and female rats were significantly higher than those in controls, but there were no biologically significant differences in hematology parameters or in serum sodium, potassium, or calcium levels. Renal tubule dilatation in the outer stripe of the outer medulla and cortex occurred in male and female rats receiving 4,000 ppm.
Thirteen-week study in mice
Groups of 10 males and 10 females received barium chloride dihydrate in the drinking water at concentrations of 0, 125, 500, 1,000, 2,000, or 4,000 ppm for 13 weeks, corresponding to average daily doses of 15, 55, 100, 205, or 450 mg barium/kg body weight to males and 15, 60, 110, 200, or 495 mg barium/kg body weight to females. Six males and seven females that received 4,000 ppm and one male that received 125 ppm died during the study. Final mean body weights of male and female mice receiving 4,000 ppm were significantly lower (>30%) than those of controls. Water consumption by male mice in the 4,000 ppm group was 18% lower than that by the controls; water consumption by other exposed groups of male and female mice was similar to that by the controls. Clinical findings of toxicity were limited to debilitation in the surviving male and female mice receiving 4,000 ppm. The absolute and/or relative liver weights of mice receiving 1,000, 2,000, and 4,000 ppm were significantly lower than those of the controls. Multifocal to diffuse nephropathy characterized by tubule dilatation, regeneration, and atrophy occurred in 4,000 ppm male and female mice.
Groups of 60 males and 60 females received barium chloride dihydrate in the drinking water at concentrations of 0, 500, 1,250, or 2,500 ppm for 104 (males) or 105 weeks (females), corresponding to average daily doses of 15, 30, or 60 mg barium/kg body weight for males and 15, 45, or 75 mg barium/kg body weight for females. The high dose of 2,500 ppm was selected based on decreased final mean body weights, mortality, decreased water consumption, and chemical-related kidney lesions observed in the 4,000 ppm groups in the 13-week study.
Survival, body weights, water consumption, and clinical findings
Two-year survival of exposed male and female rats was similar to that of the controls. The final mean body weights of male and female rats that received 2,500 ppm were (5% and 11%) lower than those of controls. Beginning as early as week 5, water consumption by male and female rats receiving 2,500 ppm was substantially lower than that by controls (male: 11% to 30%; female: 19% to 33%). There were no chemical-related clinical findings.
Hematology and clinical chemistry
There were no chemical-related differences in hematology or clinical chemistry parameters in male or female rats.
At the 15-month interim evaluation, the plasma barium concentrations (mg/ml) were significantly increased in males receiving 1,250 and 2,500 ppm and in all exposed groups of females (male: 0 ppm, 0.98; 500 ppm, 1.00; 1,250 ppm, 1.23; 2,500 ppm, 1.68; female: 0 ppm, 0.74; 500 ppm, 0.99; 1,250 ppm, 0.97; 2,500 ppm, 1.43). Barium levels in bone in rats from the 2,500 ppm groups were about 400 times greater than those in the controls.
At the end of 2 years, there were no increased incidences of neoplasms or nonneoplastic lesions that could be attributed to barium chloride dihydrate. However, there were dose-related decreased incidences of adrenal medulla pheochromocytomas and mononuclear cell leukemia in male rats.
Groups of 60 males and 60 females received barium chloride dihydrate in the drinking water at concentrations of 0, 500, 1,250, or 2,500 ppm for 103 (males) or 104 weeks (females), corresponding to average daily doses of 30, 75, or 160 mg barium/kg body weight for males and 40, 90, or 200 mg barium/kg body weight for females. The high dose of 2,500 ppm was selected based on decreased final mean body weights, mortality, decreased water consumption, and chemical-related kidney lesions observed in the 4,000 ppm groups in the 13-week study.
Two-year survival of male and female mice receiving 2,500 ppm was significantly lower than that of the controls due to renal toxicity. Final mean body weights of 2,500 ppm males and females were 9% and 12% lower than those of controls. Water consumption by male and female mice receiving barium chloride was similar to that by the controls. There were no chemical-related clinical findings.
There were no differences in hematology or clinical chemistry parameters measured at the 15-month interim evaluation.
At the 15-month interim evaluation, plasma barium concentrations (mg/mL) were significantly increased in all exposed groups of mice (male: 0 ppm, 0.62; 500 ppm, 0.77; 1,250 ppm, 0.89; 2,500 ppm, 1.49; female: 0 ppm, 0.52; 500 ppm, 0.74; 1,250 ppm, 1.01; 2,500 ppm, 1.35).
At the end of the 2-year study, there were increased incidences of nephropathy in male and female mice (male: 1/50, 0/50, 2/48, 19/50; female: 0/50, 2/53, 1/50, 37/54).
There were no chemical-related increased incidences of neoplasms in male or female mice. The incidence of hepatocellular adenoma was significantly decreased in male mice receiving 2,500 ppm.
Barium chloride dihydrate was not mutagenic in Salmonella typhimurium strains TA97, TA98, TA100, TA1535, or TA1537, with or without exogenous metabolic activation (S9). It was mutagenic in L5178Y mouse lymphoma cells in the presence of S9, but it did not induce sister chromatid exchanges or chromosomal aberrations in cultured Chinese hamster ovary cells, with or without S9.
Under the conditions of these 2-year drinking water studies, there was no evidence of carcinogenic activity of barium chloride dihydrate in male or female F344/N rats that received 500, 1,250, or 2,500 ppm. There was no evidence of carcinogenic activity of barium chloride dihydrate in male or female B6C3F1 mice that received 500, 1,250, or 2,500 ppm.
There were chemical-related increased incidences of nephropathy in male and female mice.
Web page last updated onLast updated July 21, 2021 | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 42 |
I don't ever remember a time growing up when there wasn't a large coffee can in the freeze with homemade "season flour" in it. Every time Granny M made chicken, pork, or even a beef roast, out came the frozen can of season flour. For fried chicken or breaded pork chops she would add some bread crumbs to the flour to add the extra crunch, for beef roast she would coat the roast in the flour before she would brown it in a deep cast iron roaster. The seasoned brown bits at the bottom of the pan would make the gravy taste so yummy!
I don't keep a large coffee can in the freezer full of seasoned flour; I do keep a jar of our everyday spice mix that I use to make seasoned flour when we need it. This way I always have a yummy spice mixture on hand that goes with EVERY THING! Eggs, chicken, beef, vegetables, pork – you name it works on it!
Granny included the list of spices that she would use regularly but also said that every time she made it she would use any other spice that she felt like using and happened to have on hand. She never used hot red peppers and I always do…. so I guess you could say that this is more "the idea" of Granny Mack's original recipe!
You can buy already ground red peppers but I have found that the flavor is so much better if you grind up your own. You need a really good blender for this though. I personally think there is no better blender on the market then the Blendtec.
Lochlan this is one of your favorite spices, you use it on everything.
A mixture of four different dried red peppers, dried herbs and spices. This makes a very flavorful spice mixture that works for just about everything! It is our every day spice.
5 to 6 ounces whole dried red pepper (medium heat) I REMOVE the stems and most of the seeds, I cut up the peppers to help with blending. , I use Ancho peppers - these are dried poblano peppers so they have a "sweet heat" flavor.
5 to 6 ounces whole dried red pepper (medium heat) I REMOVE the stems and most of the seeds, I cut up the peppers to help with blending. Either Guajillo Chile Peppers or New Mexican "Anaheim" Chile Peppers work great!
1 or 2 peppers whole dried chipotle pepper With this you get a nice hint of smoke.
1/2 cup salt sounds like a lot of salt but when it is mixed its not!
Take a trip to either an Asian or a Hispanic market. They are the best places I hace found to get your spices and dried peppers in bulk.
Snip or pull of the tops of all the dried chili peppers. Empty out the seeds (they add more heat - so feel free to leave them in if you want the extra heat.
Next add the minced onions, dried savory and dried chives. These are not already ground and need a couple extra pulses with the blender to get them to a powdered state.
Measure out and add the rest of the dried ingredients. At this point all you need to do is pulse the blender a couple of times to fully mix all the ingredients. If you do not have a top blender it will take you a bit more time to get everything ground up fine!
Move spice mixture to a couple of mason jars. Keep the bulk of the spice mixture in the freezer to maintain freshness.
For Season Flour - Mix 2 cups flour with 2 heaping Tablespoons of "Everyday Seasoning". For extra crunch add 1 cup panko bread crumbs.
When I make this I make a HUGE batch. I save it in mason jars and keep it in the freezer to help keep the spices fresh and full of flavore. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 43 |
I recently had writer's block for the first time in decades. It was perpetrated by sore hands and wrists, so bad that I was waking up in tears during the night. Just the idea of writing left me staring at a blank page.
Osteoarthritis and rheumatism runs in my family, so this experience had me more than a little concerned, especially since I already follow a healthy diet and exercise lifestyle. How would I find even more healthy options, and especially relief from the pain? Painkillers will be my last choice of remedy. I also don't want to step away from the computer too often, as Helen suggested in her recent post, though that is a good way to get back into typing shape. But weeks at a time can be tough on the pocketbook.
I quickly found the fastest and easiest relief came from heat, especially hot water soaks. My husband was really quite thrilled that I'd taken over doing all the dishes last month! Epsom salt soaks and soothing capcaisin cream (red pepper) also aided tremendously. This kept me going during a blog book tour, because face it, you can't promote online if you can't use your keyboard.
I also remember from my jewelry-making days that copper is considered a holistic remedy for arthritis pain. The research on this is mixed. I believe it's less about the benefits of absorbing the metal, than the fact that copper is a "heat sink". That means it absorbs and holds heat very rapidly. I have copper wrist cuffs and that is exactly my experience.
However, I don't find hard metal on my wrists to be very comfortable to wear all day long. I much prefer wool pulse warmers or mitts like these, which I wear daily especially when the weather is cold. They give me more pain relief over the long run than anything else. Wool and silk are the best for holding heat, and nothing beats the softness of alpaca or cashmere. I've even taken to collecting different patterns. One of my favorites is this Susie's Reading Mitts pattern.
What about you? Do you experience hand and wrist pain associated with writing? How do you handle it? Do you have any special techniques to 1. avoid stress and 2. deal with it when it occurs? We'll share more, including exercise and diet tips, in our ongoing Care and Feed of the Writer series. Shon Bacon is next on Monday with her suggestions for coping.
Dani Greer is founding member of the Blood-Red Pencil. She writes, edits, critiques, blogs, and is Special Projects Coordinator for Little Pickle Press, the coolest environmentally-conscious children's book publisher ever. New and intriguing projects are always of interest to her.
I drink chamomile tea with spearment or green tea, it sooths inflamation of the joints.
I have what may be the beginnings of carpal tunnel, and often have pain. Where do you find these mitts? Can you buy them already made?
I've also found that Aspercreme rubbed on the hands and fingers seems to help when I wake up stiff in the morning. The mitts are fabulous, because keeping the hands warm is key.
Lorna, my double dilemma is that I knit the mitts, which obviously I can't do during a bout of pain. Also, knitting was always one of my back-up moodling activities. Write, knit, write, knit... you see the problem when I can't do either one. I just recently read the chamomile tip - I grow it and the mints and drink green tea daily anyway, so I'm sure that's helping. Later we'll do a post about foods that cause inflammation - like coffee and sugar. So stay tuned! I'll try the clove oil, too... under the gloves sounds loverly!
I've never experienced finger/wrist pain, but I do have knee pain and other chronic intractable pain. There are topical anti-inflammatories available. The idea is that you can concentrate the anti-inflammatories right where they are needed without exposing your whole system, therefore allowing you to use less and avoid side effects (such as fatigue or sleepiness). One of the best, but very expensive, is topical voltaren (however, one $500 tube looks to last me several years because of the small amount needed!). You can also get topical ketoprofen—you may need to go to a compounding pharmacy and it may require a knowledgeable naturopathic-type doctor to get a prescription. There is also topical lidocaine, which is available without a prescription at 4%. All topical compounds such as the above are absorbed better if you heat the skin first and if they are covered by saran wrap after application. Because of all the meds I'm on, I'm constantly in search of topical pain-relief options to save my liver, kidneys, and stomach. In my experience, your regular doctor will not think to prescribe these things unless you push them to investigate them.
P.S. Topical voltaren (2%) is available over-the-counter in almost every country in the world except the US. So, next book tour to Canada, stock up. In Canada, it's a very common remedy for osteoarthritis, especially of the knees.
I have wrist pain after smashing my wrist - heat is best - i use glove wraps like you but I made mine out of socks as I couldn't hold a crochet hook at the time - rubs I use as well and when its to bad I take the painkillers - I know I shouldn't but sometimes - well sometimes I get desperate.
I know many writers do end up with some wrist and hand pain but I've been spared so far. Hope your wool mittens help.
Sorry about the wrist pain, Dani!
When I had a spate of carpal tunnel pain, I got one of those wrist splints that are available at your neighborhood drug store and wore it while I was typing. I also focused on proper hand position. Your wrists should be held ABOVE the keyboard with the fingers draping down onto the keys versus resting on a pad or the table, causing your wrists to be bent back for your fingers to reach up to the keys.
I hope you're pain-free soon!
I don't have any remedies to offer, but I'll keep some of the above in mind for my own wrist and finger problems.
Since this is likely to be an ongoing problem for you, you might want to think about a speech to text program. From what I've read, Dragon Naturally Speaking is topnotch and can save you an enormous amount of keyboarding. I'll probably be buying it some time in the future when my finances are in better shape.
Beth, I'm hoping Deb Stover share her hand brace experience with us. I don't have any experience in this regard.
Yes, I do delete unnecessarily negative comments from this blog. It's my playground and we play nice, even when we have differing views.
I have poor circulation in my extremities, and my office is chronically too cold, so my wife made me a pair of the fingerless mittens that you show, and they are a real lifesaver.
Tim, I made a nice cabled manly pair for my husband - he likes them, too. His studio is a converted garage with a wood stove, but it still can get a little chilly in winter. There's a reason people in Nordic lands have used pulse warmers forever - they work! Keep the extremeties warm and it improves overall comfort. I think this is important for children, too.
My mother has early-onset arthritis, and she says she's had much less pain in her joints since she started taking daily doses of glucosamine. Although from what I read about glucosamine, it doesn't have a noticeable effect on everyone who takes it.
So sorry about your pain! I'm still getting over a two-year bout of Tendonitis, which forced me to quit music. Omega-3, MSM and collagen supplements helped a lot, but stretching and core exercise finally pushed me back over the top. It's also important to pay attention to your posture and position.
Dani, I have been lucky with no pain in my wrists or hands. I do have issues with arthritis in my back and neck and have discovered that moving periodically is the best thing to do. I take a break every hour or two and spend five to 10 minutes doing some stretches, as well as walk around the house or outside. That really helps.
I had a lot of hand and wrist pain a few years ago, but it seems to be under control now, since I bought a curved ergonomic keyboard iwth a great hand rest. I also have a mouse pad with a cushion on the near side to rest your wrist. Also, I use those wrist braces at night occasionally. You slip your thumb through a hole, then close the rest quickly and hold it in just the right place with velcro. You can also buy heat mitts with heat pads that you put inside them.
I also have an ergonomic chair with a lower-back pad for support and armrests to support my arms. That helps a lot. And lastly, I don't work on a laptop, as they cause me to get cramped and sore. I work on my PC with the large monitor, and all the other stuff I mentioned.
Also, I find the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin really does work for me.
Jodie, I have someone guest posting about hand splints, but you could do a guest post about the keyboard and chair, backpad, etc. With photos. Would you? I think it would be good to see that set-up.
Maryann, exercise is amazing. Getting on a exer-cycle revs up that oxygen and blood, and odd as it sounds, it relieves the pain in the hands. I'll post more about that down the road.
Here's a link to some incredibly cute striped alpaca wool mitts for only $28.
Typing one-handed gives the other hand/wrist a rest for a while. I learnt to do this while breastfeeding at the keyboard.
Elle, have you figured out voice recognition in Word yet? We could use a future tutorial about that - why don't we use that more often? It all comes with the software and I know enough to know it's pretty user-friendly. Just haven't practiced with it enough.
I don't have the wrist or finger pain. My knees get stiff from sitting at the computer for a long time, though.
Love those fingerless mitts you gave the URL for. They're cute and look warm.
Lots of good advice for pain relief here. Thanks.
I've had arthritis in my hands years and the pain associated this. Five years ago, I was fortunate enough to come across a natural product that has saved me a lot of grief. I'm going to recommend this product to you and post the link here, but keep in mind that I'm not in any way associated with it. Just trying to be helpful. So check it out for yourself.
Hi Dani, Sure, I'll be glad to take some photos and write a short piece to go with them.
It'll be interesting to do more research about this!
On days my hands ache, I stop typing and do a set of hand exercises and stretches that I learned in an exercise class for seniors. Then I use very warm water soaks.
Our local hospital senior club offers occasional warm paraffin hand treatments on their massage days, and that sounds great too. I'd be afraid to try it on my own for fear of burning my hands.
When I wrecked my hands fixing several hundred feet of chain link fencing, warm paraffin baths really helped. I find they're marvelous for any type of hand/wrist pain. The temperature is controlled in the unit I have, so there's really no danger of burns. Leaves your skin marvelously soft, too. One used to be able to buy the machines & wax anywhere, but now they're a bit harder to find. Walmart and Bed, Bath & Beyond had them around Christmas time. Don't know about now. Maybe Amazon?
My husband says fish oil helps with his arthritis. I use my laptop on my knees to prevent a recurrence of my RSI.
I think, though, the thing that would most help keyboard-related pain - and I have no clue if this is even possible - would be to rearrange the keys! The marvellous Bill Bryson writes that the qwerty layout of the keyboard is a hangover from typewriter days, when the typing needed to be done slowly so as not to tangle the keys; it made the typing harder to do and therefore slowed the typist down. There were intially alternative layouts but qwerty proved the most efficient, and thus, it persists to the modern day when our keys no longer tangle but we need to type fast.
I use Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software for long passages and first drafts -- after the initial week or two of 'wearing in' (training it to recognise my voice / certain words) I found it quick and fairly effective. It does need an edit, so then I type manually. I work as a writer in my day job, and touch type at speed for hours; during these periods, I wrap fabric plasters around my finger joints by way of support before they start to hurt, and wear them throughout the typing day. I find this helps a lot and my slight-but-constant joint pain has now all but vanished.
Wrist pain -- I suffered from this for a while due to bad posture/angle -- it was cured by sitting on two cushions.
My wrists are okay, unless I do some kind of exercises when I lean on them, like sit ups, so I avoid doing any of those exercises.
I must thank all of you ladies on here. I recently had an MRI done at Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists on my wrists and am anxiously awaiting the results. In the meantime, I have tried (and continue to try) some of your suggestions to relieve the pain. You all rock! Thanks again. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 44 |
51. Telegram From the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Smith) to the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy)1
Washington, September 16, 1964, 1432Z.
CAP 64320. This is preliminary CIA comment on Khrushchev's weapon statement:
"1. On 15 September Khrushchev told a visiting delegation of Japanese socialist members of parliament that the Soviet Union has developed a 'monstrous new, terrible weapon.' He stated that on 14 September he had been shown a weapon of terrible destruction by military men, scientists and engineers. He is quoted as having said, 'I have never seen anything like it. It is a method of destroying and exterminating mankind. It is the strongest and most powerful of existing weapons. Its power is limitless.'
2. After mentioning the weapon, Khrushchev launched into an attack on Chinese border claims and accused Mao Tse-tung of spreading warlike sentiments. Earlier Khrushchev has recalled the tragedy of the Japanese people, the first in history to suffer the atomic bomb. Alluding to the Chinese, Khrushchev said that he who says that the atomic bomb is a paper tiger is crazy.
3. The choice of audience, and the context in which Khrushchev's statement regarding the new weapon was delivered, suggest that he intended the threat implied by this new development to be taken as directed primarily against the Chinese.
4. While Khrushchev gave no specific clues concerning the nature of the weapon, we did have an indication four months ago that Khrushchev wanted us to know beforehand that he was going to make such an announcement.
5. Last May [less than 1 line of source text not declassified], two Soviet KGB officers deliberately revealed themselves as such to a CIA officer, and told him that they knew he was a CIA officer. The spokesman for the two then asked twice 'very positively' that the CIA officer inform Washington that the Soviet Government was soon to make a very important announcement on development of a Soviet military capability [Page 152] which 'would not be used against the West but would be very effective against the Chinese.' The spokesman said he was not authorized to reveal the details.
6. The delay between this tip-off is that Khrushchev wanted us to know that the announced claim of a new weapon, when it came, would be directed at the Chinese and that we should not be concerned by it. It also is possible that Khrushchev had information indicating that the Chinese were going to claim a nuclear capability this year and timed the announcement to blunt the political effect of such a development.
8.2 We have no information on any specific Soviet weapon development which would equate to Khrushchev's description.
9. It is improbable that a new delivery system was the subject of his remarks since the Soviets have long claimed the ability to deliver their largest nuclear weapons by missile and to attack from any direction, although a January 1960 Khrushchev statement referring to a 'fantastic weapon' then in the hatching stage may have referred to the 100 megaton bomb. It seems improbable that his present 'new weapon' would refer to such a previously well publicized capability. It is unlikely in the absence of appropriate nuclear tests that the Soviets have had the opportunity to develop significantly larger nuclear weapons that could be used with confidence.
10. It is similarly difficult to conceive of radiological weapons that would fit Khrushchev's description. It is now possible, through appropriate selection of weapons and burst altitude, to contaminate very large areas with lethal radioactivity. These effects probably could be somewhat enhanced by alterations in weapon design, perhaps including the salting of weapons with materials such as cobalt. Such capabilities would not appear to be new or very significantly superior to those now possessed by the major nuclear powers.
11. In the biological warfare field, we have no information that agents capable of the extermination of mankind have been developed. Other scientific developments with weapons potential, such as lasers, do not appear to meet the mass destruction criteria of Khrushchev's description.
12. If in fact a monstrous new weapon exists, Khrushchev's statements imply that it is in the developmental rather than production state. If the weapon is 'very effective'against the Chinese but not against the West, anti-personnel weapons such as biological or radiological weapons, are suggested. We have, however, no evidence of spectacular developments in the fields."
Recommendations on U.S. public reaction will follow.
Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Subject File, Nuclear Weapons, USSR, Vol. I, Box 34. Secret; Noforn; Flash. There is no indication where the cable was sent, but on September 16 Bundy accompanied the President aboard Air Force One to Seattle, Washington, with stops en route at Great Falls, Montana, and Vancouver, Canada. (Ibid., President's Daily Diary) An identical typewritten draft from which this cable was prepared is ibid., National Security File, Subject File, Nuclear Weapons, USSR, Vol. I, Box 34.↩
There is no numbered paragraph 7.↩
Bundy, McGeorgeSmith, Bromley
CIAUSSR | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaCommonCrawl'} | 45 |
They'll change the way you bake. Except No. 4 — that one might make you cringe.
Rolling out Christmas cookie dough just got so much easier.
I spent one month in a French pastry shop—and left with seven life-changing tricks. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 46 |
Replacement for the 'dbm' and 'ndbm' libraries.
GNU dbm is a set of database routines that use extendible hashing and works similar to the standard UNIX dbm routines. The library provides also an optional compatibility layer for UNIX-like dbm and ndbm calls. | {'redpajama_set_name': 'RedPajamaC4'} | 47 |
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