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East Meets West in Mandala Art
by Julie Schauer | Jan 26, 2014 | Asian Art, Buddhism, Collage, Folk Art Traditions, Mandalas, Medieval Art, Mosaics, The Sackler Gallery of Art
Temporary floor mandala, flashed by light onto the floor
of the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery of Asian Art
Mandalas, an important tradition in India, Nepal and Tibet have spread well into the West, or as some think, have always been in the West. The exhibition, Yoga: The Art of Transformation at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery of Art, takes us into art and history surrounding the physical, spiritual and spiritual exercise of yoga. It's the first exhibition of its kind. This is the last weekend of the show, featuring works of art in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist practice. Yoga hold some keys to mental and physical healing.
We're led into yoga's 3,000-year history by a series of light patterns flashed on the floor–patterns that are mandalas and have lotus patterns. (Lotus is also the name of a yoga pose.) After this weekend, they'll be gone with the show, but that's the spirit of mandalas, at least in the Tibetan tradition.
Light Pattern on the floor of the Sackler Gallery of Asian Art forms a Mandala
Mandalas have radial balance, because their designs flow radially from the center, somewhat like the spokes of a wheel. Traditional Buddhist monks in Tibet spend time together making mandalas of colored sand, working from the center outward using funnels of sand that form thin lines. Deities are invoked during this process of creation, following the same ancient pattern of 2,500 years. The creation is thought to have healing influence. Shortly after its completion, a sand mandala is poured into a river to spread its healing influence to the world.
Chenrezig Sand Mandala was made for Great Britain's House of Commons in honor of the Dalai Lama's visit in May, 2008. Material: sand, Size: 7′ x 7′ Source of photo: Wikipedia
Like the Buddhist Stupas which began in India, the Mandalas are microcosms of the macrocosm, or small replicas of the universe. Yantras are mandalas that are an Indian tradition which may have a more personal meaning. Their beautiful geometric designs can be highly efficient tools for contemplation, concentration and meditations. Concentrating on a focal point, outward chatter ceases and the mind empties to gain a window into truth. Making mandalas can be a powerful aid in Art Therapy.
North Rose Window of Chartres Cathedral, France, c. 1235
Circles, without a beginning or end, have an association with God and perfection. They're an integral part of the design of Gothic Cathedrals, such as Chartres Cathedral and Notre-Dame of Paris which are among the most famous. Their patterns radiate out from the center, into rose patterns. I didn't believe it when, years ago, a student mentioned they were inspired by Indian mandalas. The greater possibility is that spiritual wisdom comes from the same or similar sources.
Sri Chakra Mandala, ceramic tile, made by Ruth Frances Greenberg
17-1/4″ x 17-1/4″ x 1-1/4′ photo Lubosh Cech
Artist Ruth Frances Greenberg makes ceramic tile mosaic mandalas in her Portland, Oregon studio, and sells them for personal and decorative use. Some are inspired by the Om symbol and by the home blessing doorway mandalas of Tibet. Others are inspired by the Chakras, the energy centers in ancient Indian tradition. The Sri Chakra Mandala has nine interlocking triangles and beautiful geometric complexity. It combines the basic geometric shapes of circle, square and triangle, and expresses powerful energies.
Hildegard of Bingen, Wheel of Life, c. 1170, photo courtesy of Contemplative Cottage
The circle within a square is common in many traditions, but in Indian art the openings of the square represent gateways. Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, a study of perfection in human proportions, has a circle within a square. Medieval mystic, St. Hildegard of Bingen, a Doctor of Church, wrote music and created art in response to her visions. Wheel of Life is one of her many visions that were put into illumination in the mandala form, in the 12th century.
Chicago artist Allison Svoboda makes mandalas from a surprising combination of media: ink and collage. She explains, "The same way a plant grows following the path of least resistance, the quick gestures and simplicity of working with ink allows the law of least resistance to prevail….With this process, I work intuitively through thousands of brushstrokes creating hundreds of small paintings. I then collate the work…When I find compositions that intrigue me, I delve into the longer process of collage. Each viewer has his own experience as a new image emerges from the completed arrangement. The ephemeral quality of the paper and meditative aspect of the brushwork evoke a Buddhist mandala."
Allison Svoboda, Mandala, GRAM, 211–detail
The 14′ by 14′ Mandala GRAM from the Grand Rapids Art Museum is a radial construction with many inner designs. Some of these designs resemble a Rorschach test, but infinitely more complicated.
The intricacies of the GRAM Mandala alternate and change as our eyes move around it. It's like a kaleidoscope or spinning wheel. But a configuration in center pull us back in, reminding us to stay centered and whole, as the world changes around us.
Allison Svoboda, Mandala, GRAM, 2011, Grand Rapids Museum of Art, in on paper, collaged 14′ x 14′
The Words of Art and the Art of the Word
by Julie Schauer | Nov 16, 2012 | Collage, Conceptual Art, Contemporary Art, Modern Art, Picasso, Pop Art
Semen Fridliand, Die kaüfliche Presse (The Venal Press) 1929 halftone reproduction,
6 1/4 x 8 1/4 in. (16 x 21 cm) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
At least four exhibitions on the Mall, at the National Gallery of Art and Hirshhorn Museum, take a look at printed word in painting and other art forms of the past century. Chronologically, these exhibits begin with the avant-garde artists of circa 1910 at the National Gallery of Art's "Shock of the News" exhibition. They end with today's leading provocateur-artist, Ai Weiwei of China, at the Smithsonian's contemporary art museum, the Hirshhorn. So we search for the meaning of the word in art.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, O Pti Cien, 1902, is an academic style
In 1902, Jean-Léon Gérôme, a leading academic artist of the day, painted O PTI CIEN, a puppy wearing a monacle. The letters suggest a reading of "au petit chien" ("at the little dog"), which would sound approximately like Oh P T shee-en to the French. But the letters also form the French word for an optician. This work actually was a competition for an advertisement, but Gérôme's humorous pun set the stage for the Cubists, Surrealists and other artists who brought the painted word into prominence: Picasso and Georges Braque, Dada artists and even Surrealists like Magritte.
The intersection of the news media and visual art is the subject of the National Gallery's Shock of the News. This cultural force burst onto the scene around the 2nd decade of the 20th century, when an Italian group, the Futurists, published their manifesto in 1909. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were soon incorporating collage into Cubism and using words from the newsprint to articulate their artwork. Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass, 1912 has the masthead from "Le Journal," a Paris daily. The letters Jou appear as reminders of le jour, meaning day, journal, the daily newspaper and jouer, which means to play.
Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass, 1912 sheet music, newspaper, colored and white paper, charcoal, and hand-painted faux-bois paper on wallpaper 47.9 x 36.5 cm (18 7/8 x 14 3/8 in.)Collection of the McNay Art Museum, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay ©2012
Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork
That last word is the key, because modern art, if anything, is playful and ironic. If you can't make the world better, why not laugh about it? The Dadaists, who followed Picasso, were despondent over the established civilization and the horrors of World War I. Particularly in urban centers of Germany and in Paris and New York, they couldn't fight the world, so ridiculed it. Their art is full of newsprint, ready-made objects and things not expected to part of aesthetics. Hannah Hoch's collages are particularly playful and interesting
Hannah Höch Von Oben (From Above), 1926-1927 photomontage and collage on paper 30.5 x 22.2 cm
(12 x 8 3/4 in.)Des Moines Art Center's Louise Noun Collection of Art by Women through Bequest, 2003
Semen Fridliand's photo halftone image, The Venal Press, above center, is a commentary on the public's capability to let the press influence their to beliefs in everything. How much greater that power is with the blogs, the facebook and Twitter of today!
Of course, Picasso continued to respect the power of print media in Guernica, of 1937 (not in the exhibition), which is his commentary the first time a bomb was dropped from air, hitting the Basque city of Guernica in Spain. He wanted the monumental, 25-foot painting to have journalistic quality and therefore imitated the lettering of newspapers, while painting only blacks, whites and grays.
On Kawara,Oct. 26, 1971 (Today series no. 97), 1971
cardboard box, newspaper, and liquitex on canvas
painting: 10 1/8 x 13 in., box bottom: 10 1/2 x 13 3/8 x 1 3/4 in. box lid: 10 5/8 x 13 1/4 x 1 3/16 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2007. The Panza Collection
On Kawara painted the date, October 27, 1971, in white on a black canvas. It is one of over 5,000 such images his has done over many years. Each painting goes along with a cardboard box and cover and the packing functions as a time capsule, because the news of that day is place in the box with the painting. After leaving the Shock of the News exhibition, National Gallery visitors move onto the next exhibition, Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.
Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 175.3 cm (48 x 69 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington
First and foremost, we think of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) as the artist who transformed the art of the comic book into a higher form of art. As a Pop artist, he is often eclipsed in reputation by Warhol. This large exhibition brings together works from his entire career, encompassing several themes. Throughout his long career, he used bold colors and ben-day dots. The dots imitative of a printer's dots for the comics and newsprint remain a consistent signature of his style, but Lichtenstein's late work parodies earlier art history using few words. His images of the 1960s borrow from cartoons, but he added captions and details to complete the compositions. His captions capture the spirit and humor of certain cultural icons like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Other large cartoon-like images fill rooms on the specific themes of war and romance. He uses boldness, humor and a surprising amount of emotion in a simplified style.
Barbara Kruger, an installation at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, through 2014
The bold, sans serif letters of Barbara Kruger overwhelm the ground floor of the Hirshhorn right now. The exhibition, called Belief + Doubt = Sanity, uses words in every way to make us think. Kruger was a graphic artist before she became a fine artist and the heritage of graphic art remains part of her style and her appeal, much like it did for the Pop Artists before her. The stairs and adjoining rooms are dressed in bold letters using only black, yellow, red and white, an overwhelming effect. Her messages are arresting, questioning thought about politics, consumerism and all sorts of aspects of contemporary life. We realize the dichotomy of much in the world in which political banter stems from belief in one truth. The only sane way to evaluate it is with a blend of belief and doubt. Her art functions to ask questions, to question the cultural norms and to make us stop to think. As we ponder one of her bold messages, we recognize ourselves in the lines: "YOU WANT IT, YOU BUY IT, YOU FORGET IT."
Ai Weiwei, Coca-Cola Vase, 2007, paint on Qing Dynasty
ceramic at Hirshhorn Museum until February 24, 2013
The Ai Weiwei exhibition, According to What (named after a painting by Jasper Johns currently in a Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition, Dancing around the Bride), is on the 3rd and 4th floors of the Hirshhorn. Like many contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei doesn't limit himself to one medium; he does photographs, sculptures installations. He critiques American and Chinese governments, most notably the shoddy building construction which led to the death of 4,000 plus children in an earthquake. Ancient culture and modern life clash, but come together in Coco-Cola vase. He disrespects tradition but forces us to think how consumerism, corporate marketing and globalism meet ancient culture.
The works of Ai Weiwei and Barbara Kruger entertain, but those artists also challenge us and make us think more than Pop Art does. This summer I saw another contemporary, conceptual artist's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in of University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Stefan Sagmeister's The Happy Show, is also the work of a graphic artist, like Kruger. The words printed are in black on a yellow ground, the typeface combination that can be read most easily in the mode of the yellow pages. Yellow is the happiest of colors. Sagmeister made me think of a modern "pursuit of happiness" written into the Declaration of Independence. The exhibition questioned, provoked, entertained, tried to make us laugh and added one more valuable asset, encouraging happiness. If we recognize the paradoxes that Barbara Kruger and Ai Weiwei demonstrate, it's possible to use the art of the word to promote not just "JOU" (play), but also joy in the world, or joy in the word.
Stefan Sagmeister, The Happy Show, at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, April 4 – August 12, 2012


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Alberto de Agostini National Park
National Park in Chile, South America
Cordillera Darwin Photo © lluis Cabarrocas Ribas
Alberto de Agostini National Park is a National Park in Chile, South America. See other National Parks in Chile. There is currently no additional information available regarding Alberto de Agostini National Park. Do you see any omissions, errors or want to add information to this page? Sign up.
Pictures of Alberto de Agostini National Park
Ainsworth bay and Marinelli glacier / Bahía Ainsworth y glaciar Marinelli - Alberto de Agostini National Park. Photo by Luis Alejandro Bernal Romero http://aztlek.com
Monte Olivia - Alberto de Agostini National Park. Photo by maxtdf
Landmarks nearby Alberto de Agostini National Park
47.4km Cordillera Darwin
Mountain Range in Chile
101.7km Tierra del Fuego
Island in South America
Tierra del Fuego is a natural wonder, noted for its scenic landscape, and can be found in South America.
211.9km Punta Arenas
Town in Chile
A windswept frontier town at the tip of South America.
233.7km Isla Magdalena
Protected Area in Chile
Isla Magdalena
Isla Magdalena is a sanctuary for Chile's Magellanic penguins.
Location in Chile
54° 44' 57" S, 70° 26' 22" W (Large Map)
Parque Nacional Alberto de Agostini
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5 Reasons Why Your Next Getaway Should Be In Ireland
Where Was HBO Max's "The White Lotus" Filmed?
The Ultimate Visitor's Guide To Arches National Park
by Team JST
Ireland, affectionately called 'The Emerald Isle', is well worth visiting.
Photo by John Finkelstein on Unsplash
It's known worldwide for its beer and whisky, not to mention its vibrant cities, fascinating culture, and stunning countryside.
Natural Landscapes
The Cliffs of Moher are a great destination for anyone who loves being wowed by nature. These sea cliffs stretch for over 14 km and offer incredible coastal views. There's also Sliabh Liag, which is Ireland's second-largest mountain. See these and more by completing the Wild Atlantic Way. This is a lengthy coastal route that covers the island's west coast and part of its northern and southern coasts.
Grand Castles
Ireland is replete with history and its collection of surviving castles pay tribute to it. The ruined Dunluce Castle dates back to the early medieval times and is connected to the mainland by a bridge. There's also the well-preserved Rock of Cashel which was built in the 12th century. Another castle worth visiting is Bunratty Castle. This is known for being the most complete and – some would say – impressive one in all of Ireland.
Festivals and Music
St. Patrick's Day, which takes place on 17 March, is of course widely celebrated. For traditional music lovers, there's Tradfest. Held in Dublin in late January, this festival is a fitting tribute to the country's folklore music which may remind you of the music played in Irish-themed Megaways games online.
Rich Heritage
Ireland is steeped in heritage and history. We've already mentioned some castles, but there are many more historical sites to discover. In the cities, for example, you'll find lots of buildings, not to mention traditions and customs, that date back hundreds of years. Visit some of the many museums and stop by some World Heritage Sites to learn more about Ireland's fascinating past.
Guinness and Whiskey
Stop by the Guinness brewery in Dublin and learn more about the world-famous drink that originated in Ireland. There are dozens more breweries throughout Ireland that are worth visiting too. For lovers of whiskey, there are a few dozen distilleries. The Kilbeggan Distillery dates back to the mid-18th century and is the world's oldest.
This is just a sample of the many reasons there are to visit Ireland. Whatever your tastes, preferences, and interests, you'll find that Ireland has a lot in store for you.
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'Tis the season for horror and gore, on the big screen at least. While R-rated movies have been flopping lately—Crimson Peak and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension have each grossed less than $15 million—that didn't always used to be the case.
Americans like to shell out for scary things. Consumers are expected to spend $6.9 billion on Halloween this year, with $2.6 billion going toward candy and $2.5 billion on costumes.


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Wilmington For Christ
» Popular Culture
Last Updated on Sat, 13 Jul 2019 | Popular Culture
In Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, next to a cart selling roasted pecans and hot pretzels, is a kiosk with Empire State Building pencil sharpeners, Statue of Liberty snow globes, and the standard-issue rack of souvenir postcards. On this rack are pictures of Grand Central Station, St Patrick's Cathedral, Central Park, the United Nations Plaza, the Chrysler Building, the American Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim Museum, and Macy's Department Store. That each of these architectural marvels came to be built represents not only a confluence of political clout, engineering expertise, artistic craftsmanship and vast outlays of cash, but also a considerable level of public consent for what kinds of aspirations are worth enshrining in beautiful buildings.
This rack of postcards, like that at any tourist kiosk in any big city, can be read like a book that tells us what matters most to its citizens. The objects depicted on these postcards are human values that have been sheathed with rebar, stone, and glass and veined with romex and fiber optics. In this manner, they serve both as monuments to human values, and as instruments which can further extend the reach of those values into the community. They are monuments in that much creative genius has been lavished upon them to testify to the worthiness of a particular value; they are instruments in that they create a venue for that particular value to be pursued. We build magnificent buildings to provide physical bodies for our cultural values.
Thus, the landmark architecture pictured on New York City postcards can be read as an inventory of the particular human activities that are valued in American culture. Grand Central Station is a monument to and instrument of freedom (of physical movement); Central Park is a monument to and instrument of leisure; St Patrick's Cathedral is a monument to and instrument of religion; the Chrysler Building and Macy's are monuments to and instruments of the economy; the United Nations Plaza is a monument to and instrument of politics; the Guggenheim Museum is a monument to and instrument of art; the Museum of Natural History is a monument to and instrument of knowledge. It is in this respect that ecclesial terms are sometimes used as metaphors in relation to such landmark structures: Macy's is a "cathedral of commerce"; the Guggenheim is a "sanctuary of art"; the Museum of Natural History is a "temple of science," etc. Some discrete cultural value is being venerated and practiced within the walls of each.
The use of this sacred space metaphor in landmark architecture has a parallel in more general discussions of the value spheres that the buildings are built to enshrine. It has become common to say "art is religion," that we should have "faith in science," or that "the market is God." What is meant in these expressions is that something like faith and worship has come to be attached to art, science, and the economy. Just as the veneration of certain values may be expressed through the beauty of great architecture, these values can also become objects of a more generalized religious piety. Sociologists such as Max Weber and Michael Walzer have argued that at an earlier period in the history of the West, our ancestors conceived of their primary identity as tribal or religious (these typically overlapped), but that there has been a gradual differentiation or separating out of the cultural value spheres (religion, family, art, science, politics, economy, etc.) such that it is now possible for a person to claim that their primary identity derives from any one of these - e.g., profession, economic status, national origin, etc. - and to view religion as a secondary attribute. What is happening here is that the good for which one of these other value spheres exists to serve is being asserted as the most central or ultimate good in one's life.
The status of art as "religion" in some quarters is a good illustration of this. It is common today to view the artist as a prophet or seer. Wassily Kandinsky's 1911 manifesto, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, captured this notion of the artist who "is not born to a life of pleasure," but undergoing scorn and hatred must "see and point the way," dragging humanity forward. He wrote,
Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what at first was only a little point of light noticed by few and for the great majority non-existent. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but on the other hand they turn away from the soulless life of the present towards those substances and ideas which give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul.1
This attribution of prophetic insight to the artist who has the power to see behind the surface of things, to reveal what is otherwise hidden, developed into the prototype of the avant-garde artist who tells the truth of his feelings and sheds an unflattering light on a society's sins and the dangerous directions in which it is headed, and then pays the consequences for rendering this service. This is a modern conception in its assertion that art is an autonomous source of knowledge about the truth of reality. Previous to this, art was viewed as mediating an authority that was not its own, and in the West, this meant the authority of the religious tradition. As one author has described it, "Whatever moral passion a medieval artist brought to a fresco, contemporaries viewing it would regard the biblical story - not the artist himself or his illustration of it - as the source of authority."2 The Renaissance was the turning point here. For a variety of reasons - disenchantment with corruption in the Church, diverging sources of patronage, the rediscovery of classical learning - iconography began to slide away from the monopoly of religion and re-root itself in other domains of culture - art and literature in particular. This had the effect of sacralizing art and literature as independent sources of wisdom and revelation.
Symbols once inseparable from religious myth and ritual thus began to wander, often in disguise, into other cultural spheres, carrying with them their inherent aura and an authority that was once derived from religion but became autonomous. Art is not unique in making this excursion. Science, politics, family, and the economy were also once acolytes of the religious sphere in the history of the West. Their justification as domains of human activity was that they served the good of religion -the knowledge of God and God's ways (science), the governance and the containment of sin in the kingdom of God (politics), the multiplication and nurture of souls on their journey to God (family), and management of the household of the children of God (economy). Here, too, it was with the Renaissance that these once dependent cultural spheres began a long protest that won their independence and progressed into the precious achievement of modernity, viz., the refraction of our lives into multiple autonomous spheres of activity (art, science, politics, family, economy). In practice, we assume that each of these spheres stands on its own bottom -we presume a discrete good is being pursued within each one. There are clues to this assumption in slogans such as "art for art's sake," "science is the uninhibited pursuit of truth," "my country, right or wrong," "blood is thicker than water," and "the invisible hand of the market." Indeed, there is a distinct and legitimate good inside each of these spheres that each of the spheres exists to protect, proclaim, and foster - with all the instruments at their disposal: creeds, laws, institutions, poetry, monuments, schools, myths, and rituals.
This differentiation of the spheres has been an important achievement, one that ought not to be reversed. Nevertheless, it is worth noting a few implications of this brief archeology of the concept of cultural spheres. First, the differentiation itself was driven by the belief that some transcendent good is at the center of each sphere and that the activities and pursuits distinct to that sphere are authorized by the good that is being served through it. Second, there is what has been called a "sovereignty" to each of the spheres that ought not to be violated by the other spheres.3 The good of the family, for instance, ought not to be violated by the good of the market. Frequent job transfers necessitated by one's desire to climb the corporate ladder would be an example of such a violation - at the point when these moves threaten to unravel the family. But from the other side, the good of the market ought not to be violated by the good of the family - nepotism would be an example here. Third, given that each sphere is oriented to a distinct good, each sphere develops its own norms of inquiry and analysis. Norms are always subordinate to the good they seek to protect - different goods give rise to different norms. Thus, each sphere can be identified with its own discipline of inquiry. For art there is aesthetics, for politics there is political science, for the economy there is economics, etc.
To illustrate this last point, take the phenomenon of the American lawn. The Puritans did not find neatly trimmed expanses of grass when they landed on these shores. The lawn is a social phenomenon with a cultural history that can be submitted to different kinds of analysis, each one of which gives us a fuller understanding of what a lawn "means." An aesthetic analysis might seek to better understand the peculiar notion of beauty or naturalism that inspires us to lay down yards of mown green grass on the landscape around not only our homes, but our factories, colleges, corporate headquarters, boulevards, municipal buildings, and graveyards. A socio-political analysis might concentrate instead on the City Beautiful Movement or the spread of Garden Clubs in the early twentieth century and their expressed desire to promote health and sanitation, civic pride, neighborhood stability and a work ethic among the urban poor through "beautification campaigns" designed to stimulate their desire for lawns and gardens. And an economic analysis might uncover the efforts of seed companies, mower manufacturers, and chemical producers to increase the national demand for lawns, or the lobbying of the US Golf Association, a private sector trade organization, for substantial government grants to develop turf-grass hybrids and to promote golfing and a grass aesthetic across the country.4
With this in mind, the purpose of this book is to undertake a theological analysis of ordinary cultural phenomena, such as the lawn, that will bring to bear concepts and norms that have been honed within the disciplines of theology and religious studies. It is not offered as a line of inquiry that replaces all others, but as a way of inquiring into aspects of these phenomena that the norms and methods of other disciplines, such as aesthetics, political theory, and economics, are not designed to detect. What might a theological analysis of the American lawn discover? It might draw attention to the systole and diastole one finds in the Bible between city and wilderness, with recurring admonitions of the Hebrew prophets for the faithful to return to the wilderness as a place they had once traversed and where they had been closer to God. Or it might draw a connection between the myth of Eden, a place where the footsteps of God could be heard in the cool of the evening breeze, which was not raw wilderness but a cultivated garden, and the blend of nature and horticulture that the modern lawn represents. Or, it might review the long and honored tradition in America of looking to nature for direction and purpose, with various permutations from the Puritans who undertook a divine "errand in the wilderness," to Emerson, Thoreau, and the Boston Transcendental-ists who expected to find God more unobstructed in nature than in church, to various more contemporary deep ecologists who seek in the processes of nature a moral teacher and spiritual guide. In light of these more overt religious symbols and aspirations, what does it mean that we surround the lodgings of all our endeavors - our homes, schools, factories, corporate headquarters, government buildings, museums, highways, hospitals, and final resting places with green vegetation that someone has to fertilize and mow?
Again, while this line of inquiry is not meant to replace all others, it is my belief that it, in a literal sense, transcends them. It seeks to go beyond the limits of other inquiries, limits that they properly impose upon themselves (when they behave as they should). I am convinced that it is worthwhile to resume Paul Tillich's efforts to interpret cultural artifacts for the religious substance that rumbles in their deeper regions. As he proposed and argued repeatedly, beginning with his groundbreaking 1919 essay, "On the Idea of a Theology of Culture": while religions depend upon the cultures in which they find themselves for their forms of expression, cultures draw the meaning that they hold for those who inhabit them from an underlying substrate of religious faith. Without this, there is little passion for the culture's achievements and aspirations.
Christian theology is an old discipline which has been used to make sense of human life through twenty centuries and from within virtually every culture in the world today. It is ancient yet still active, experienced on many fronts, capable of learning from grievous transgressions of which it has periodically been guilty (anti-Semitism, autos-da-fe, slavery, misogyny, witchhunts) and from other moments in which it has been a historically effective instrument of grace (the rise of the universities, literacy, democratic movements, abolition, women's suffrage, prison reform, civil rights). In certain respects it is a large vessel into which its practitioners - who have been around to observe, learn from, and sometimes instigate all manner of historical experimentation and popular movements - have deposited their accumulated lessons. I view this vessel as a resource of paradigmatic plots, symbols, ideals, visions of good and evil - reference points upon which to draw in trying to make sense of our collective life. Christian theology has certain enduring - although not changeless - conceptions about an ultimate reality in response to which we are to measure our actions, intentions, and aspirations. For this reason, it is a valuable resource for interpreting our cultural life as it is unfolding, and offering commentary and guidance, dissent and endorsement.
One historian, Eugene McCarraher, has recently argued that most of the effective cultural critique in twentieth century America - effective in the sense that it actually precipitated social reform - originated from certain strains of progressive Christian theology (Dorothy Day, John Ryan, H. Richard Niebuhr), and not from their secular counterparts. Their effectiveness can be attributed, he argues, to three things: first, that they really believed in the possibility and imperative of redemption; second, that their critical capacities were informed by norms that had been formed outside the immediate Sturm und Drang of the cultural situation; and third, that they were inside members of organized cells of workers, viz., congregations, cells which already had so permeated the society that they could transform class struggle into a historical movement. As a historian applying these lessons to the present, he ventures: in the face of "a brawny and agile capitalism, religion may well become the last refuge of hope for a world beyond the rule of Mammon."5
But theology could use some help, and coming to a better understanding of popular culture and its fascinations might assist theology to overcome some of its own prejudices and break through some of its impasses. It is worth noting that a great number of people are finding solace in popular culture, solace they find lacking in organized religion. Theologian Richard Mouw suggests that there is a middle range of concerns for ordinary people (health, financial resources, intimate relationships, loss of loved ones, depression, guilt) toward which "high theology" remains aloof. Consequently, people turn to things like folk religion, the New Age, superstition, belief in angels and demons, which offer an account of and techniques for dealing with these concerns.6 Trusting that there is a practical wisdom to be found in ordinary people, Mouw advises that it will be worthwhile to examine popular culture for legitimate critique of the shortcomings of theology that have so distanced it from people struggling to believe. He writes, "We must probe the hidden places: looking for the signs of eloquence and grace to be found there; listening for deep calling unto deep; searching, not only for the Deeper Magic, but also for the Deeper Quests, the Deeper Pleasures, the Deeper Hurts, the Deeper Plots."7
Theologians in the past have tended to assume, correctly for the most part, that the believers they addressed had a basic working knowledge of the biblical stories, paradigmatic figures in the church, sanctioned ritual actions and symbols, and the essentials of the creeds. We are in a new era now, however, in which, for reasons that will be explored as we proceed, whole generations in the West have had their basic conceptions of the world formed by popular culture. Television, movies, a multitude of genres of music, amusement parks, fast food franchises, action heroes, Dr Seuss, Disney, DreamWorks, comic books, advertising, soundtracks, mail order catalogs, video games, contemporary fiction, sports, celebrities, journalism, wall art and science fiction have been the primary sources of the myths, parables, iconographies, hagiographies, devils and heroes that orient them in life. From this plethora of material whole generations now attempt through bricolage to invest life with meaning and find a justification for their lives. The mechanization of production, advances in communications technologies, and increased expendable wealth have made this possible. At least these are the material causes of this cultural development. They have not only made the artifacts of popular culture accessible to us, they have also altered the world of work and the demands of the household in ways that have shifted more of our time from work to leisure. And we spend more and more of our leisure time plugged in to the media-world8 of popular culture.
This has meant, for many, shifting to a different arena in our search for our identities as human beings. As rock critic Simon Frith has suggested, it is in our leisure activities that we find our "pathways" through life, more so now than through our "paid employment." We find in pop music and other storytelling media the narratives about life that are most convincing to us, that best make sense of our lives, and we are persuaded that they express our "most deep-seated ethical views."9
The media-world has, in this sense, become a new cultural sphere with its own distinctive good and guiding norms, its own protective institutions, its own creeds, laws, monuments, prophets, myths and rituals, and discipline of inquiry (culture studies). We are coming to inhabit this sphere with as much comfort and conviction as we have inhabited the spheres of science, art, family, economy, and politics in the past. It is telling that when all of our obligations (to the other spheres) are met, when we can freely choose what we want to do - at the end of the day, at the end of the week, during holidays and vacations - the vast majority of us, at least in the US, choose to enter the media-world. In the words of the advertising motto for Play Station video games: "Live in your world, play in ours."
And we are finding more excuses to reduce our other obligations in order to spend even more time immersed in it.
What has been said so far is not intended to be a harangue, but rather a quick justification for what lies ahead in this book, and for why a theologian might venture into this territory, and why it is worthwhile to undertake a theological analysis of popular culture. Souvenir postcards, landmark architecture, Kentucky bluegrass - these and other cultural artifacts, properly interrogated, might divulge to us something about the ultimate yearnings of our culture. That's what this book is about.
Government Grants Database
Conclusion On Popular Culture
Hegemony - Popular Culture
Covenants and Jeremiads - Popular Culture
Tillich and the Frankfurt School
Franco Ferrucci The Life of God as Told by Himself 1996
Lawn, Demons, Lawns, Promote Health, Golfing, Government Grant Website


Grace Covenant Church invites you to join us at the Women's Empowerment Breakfast featuring author, speaker and musician, Kelly Minter!
The program will begin with a delightful breakfast buffet at 10 am and will conclude at 1 pm.
*Childcare is available for single mothers and wives with deployed husbands -- for children ages 2 yrs through 5th grade. Please email childcare@gracecov.org to secure childcare.


In 2007, Tony Dungy became the first African-American head coach to win the Super Bowl and in 2016 he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He is a winner, but winning is not his purpose.
This attitude is consistent with the Apostle Paul's command in 1 Corinthians 10:31. It is also representative of the idea that we are to represent the invisible God upon the earth since we are created in His image (Genesis 1:26-27).
One of the ways Coach Dungy and his wife, Lauren have fulfilled their purpose of glorifying God and representing Him well on the earth is through their generosity to others. One fine example is the Tony and Lauren Dungy Scholarship Fund they established at Crossroads Bible College in Indianapolis. Thousands of dollars have been distributed to scores of students at Crossroads Bible College who could not have otherwise attended a Bible College.
Crossroads is inviting friends of Tony Dungy and Crossroads to have a part in this legacy of generosity by donating to Crossroads Bible College on #GivingTuesday.


The mod adds almost 500 radio messages ( in English language ) for the Black Sea Campaign .
To use it : in the game folder / data / Campaign - rename your messages_en file and copy this one .
- lots of extra new entries for each patrol with details according to the historical data, in some cases ( where i had access ) i used the original radio messages of the time .
- all kind of small trivia details from the patrols, etc.
Considering the smaller scale of this theater of operations, this is more that just a collection of messages, they also tell a story about this lesser-known U-Flotilla.
If you don't want to break immersion, i suggest NOT picking for your U-boat any of the six numbers that took part in the Black Sea campaign : U9, 18, 19 , 20, 23, 24 since there will be lots of messages between their commanders and 30-th Flotilla HQ .
For those who want to use it with basic GWX Black Sea Campaign, just ignore those " special missions" that you receive .
I hope you will enjoy it, it took me more than a month to put it together .
Last edited by ThePrody; 12-05-2018 at 02:03 PM.
This will be a great immersion boost!!!
I am playing with U9, i hope be abble to play her in Black sea and use your great work!
Nicely done sir! Like the additional immersion this mod adds and appreciate the time you put in on it.


text:
De Tour Cycliste Féminin International de l'Ardèche is een meerdaagse Franse wielerwedstrijd voor vrouwen. De Tour de l'Ardèche wordt vanaf 2003 jaarlijks georganiseerd in het departement Ardèche door de VCVRA: 'Vélo Club Vallée du Rhône Ardéchoise'. De eerste editie telde drie etappes en viel in de UCI 2.1 categorie. Vanaf 2011 valt de wedstrijd in de (lagere) 2.2 categorie en bestaat uit een proloog en zes etappes. Sinds 2014 is de proloog vervangen door een tijdrit halverwege de ronde. De Tour de l'Ardèche wordt vaak gelijktijdig verreden met de Nederlandse Holland Ladies Tour. In 2017 won Pauliena Rooijakkers solo de slotrit op de Mont Lozère en in 2019 won Marianne Vos vijf van de zeven etappes en het eindklassement.

Erelijst

Meervoudige winnaars

 Overwinningen per land

Externe links
 Officiële website

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
HomeHorrorHow Much Wood
How Much Wood
"He isn't real, he can't hurt you," the words of my father echoed in my head.
Those are the words he used to tell me when I would have nightmares. Recurring dreams of the same monster every time. Some crappy horror movie I had saw on TV when I was up too late. Those are the words I repeated now, trying to wake up from this nightmare, but I just can't.
"Are you comfortable," my tormentor asks me as he closes the door behind him.
"No," you can only be so comfortable when you're tied to a metal chair.
"Don't worry, you'll be free to go soon enough," he promises while wringing together his crooked fingers topped with yellow fingernails.
"Do you enjoy hurting people," I ask.
"Oh no, but it is a necessary evil," he almost looks regretful.
"Just let me go then," I start to beg. "I haven't done anything to you, or anyone. I'm a good person."
"It's not what you've done to me, it's what you've done to him," he backs out of the door, not even looking behind to open the door.
The minute he's out of the room I start trying to break free. I can't see what's behind me and that door may be the only way out, but I won't wait. I need to at least take a chance to get free. I can't seem to loosen the ropes or even tip over the chair.
"Sit your ass down," a voice fills the room as the door flies open again.
A different man stands before me. Tall, much more muscular, tattoos covering his bald head. If I didn't know any better I'd think he was Bam Bam Bigelow. Dragging behind him was a sledgehammer. I didn't have to think about what he would do with it. I already knew he was coming to smash bones not concrete.
"I have a question, if you're lying to me, or you're wrong, I'm going to hit you with my friend Sledgy" he asks as tears start to fall from my eyes.
"I'll tell you anything," I promise.
"If a woodchuck could chuck wood, how much wood, would a wood chuck chuck," he asked with a smile.
"I don't know, that's just a tongue twister," I scream out in fear.
"Yeah, I know. But you didn't know the answer. I think I'll start with a knee."
He inches towards me and examines each knee. He nods silently to himself. He grips the hammer with both hands and swings back leaving a white mark on the ground as he uses momentum to bring it into the air. The hammer seems to be falling slow motion as it passes over his head and makes a downward decent towards my right knee.
Superstar Sh*t


text:
\section{Introduction}
Facial expressions are important non-verbal cues that convey emotions. Macro-expressions are the common facial expressions in our daily life, which are the types we usually know. There is a special type of expressions called ``micro-expressions" that were first found by Haggard and Isaacs~\cite{firstFind}. Micro-expressions (MEs) are involuntary facial movements occurring spontaneously when a person attempts to conceal the experiencing emotion in a high-stakes environment. The duration of MEs is very short. The general duration is less than 500 milliseconds (ms)~\cite{time1,time2}. The close connection between MEs and deception makes the relevant research have great significance on many applications such as medical care~\cite{appCare} and law enforcement~\cite{appLaw}.

Spotting expressions is to find the moment when expressions occur in the whole video sequences. In the past decades, several explorations for spotting MEs have been done: Early work studied on posed MEs~\cite{posedMethod1, posedMethod2, posedMethod3, posedMethod4, posedMethodStrain}. After several spontaneous ME datasets were established~\cite{SMIC, CASMEI, CASMEII, CASME2, SAMM}, later work explored ME spotting methods on the spontaneous MEs. Some methods\cite{X2, MESTowards, MDMD} designed a hand-crafted value to measure the difference between frames, and then used the value to spot ME frames. Some methods spotted ME frames based on a neural network~\cite{MES_DL_dense, SMEConvNet}. In the Second Micro-Expression Spotting Challenge (MEGC 2019)~\cite{MEGC2019}, a method for spotting ME intervals in long videos were explored~\cite{MESLongvideos}.

However, MEs are often accompanied by macro-expressions, and both of the two types of expressions are valuable for affect analysis. Therefore, developing methods to spot both macro- and micro-expressions is the main theme of the Third Facial Micro-Expression Grand Challenge (MEGC 2020).

In this paper, we provide the baseline method and results for MEGC 2020, spotting macro- and micro-expression intervals in long video sequences from the dataset CAS(ME)\(^2\) and SAMM Long Videos. The main method is Main Directional Maximal Difference Analysis (MDMD)~\cite{MDMD}. The original MDMD only predicts whether a frame belongs to facial movements. To obtain target intervals, the adjacent frames consistently predicted to be macro- or micro-expressions form an interval, and the intervals that are too long or too short are removed. Parameters are adjusted to specific expression types for specific datasets. The performance metric, F1-scores, is used for the evaluation on the two long video datasets.

The rest of paper is organized as follows: Section~\ref{sec:challenge} presents the challenge details. Section~\ref{sec:method}  introduces the the baseline method. Section~\ref{sec:result} shows the the experiment results. Section~\ref{sec:conclusion} concludes the paper.

\section{Challenge Details}\label{sec:challenge}
This section introduces the benchmark datasets and the performance metrics.
\subsection{Datasets}
\textbf{CAS(ME)\(^2\)} \cite{CASME2}: In the part A of CAS(ME)$^2$ database, there are 22 subjects and 98 long videos. The facial movements are classified as macro- and micro-expressions. The video samples may contain multiple macro or micro facial expressions. The onset, apex, offset indexes for these expressions are given in the excel file. In addition, eye blinks are labeled with the onset and offset time. The offset is labeled with 0 when a macro-expression continues and doesn't end. When it happens, we make the true interval be [onset, apex] (i.e. the offset equals the apex).

\textbf{SAMM Long Videos} \cite{yap2019samm} : The original SAMM dataset \cite{SAMM} contains 159 micro-expressions, which was used for the past two micro-expression recognition challenge \cite{MEGC2018, MEGC2019}. Recently, the authors \cite{yap2019samm} released the SAMM Long Videos dataset, which consists of 147 long videos. There are 343 macro-movements and 159 micro-movements in the long videos. The indexes of onset, apex and offset frames of micro- and macro-movements are outlined in the ground truth excel file.

More detailed and comparative information of these two datasets is presented in Table \ref{tab:dt_info}.

\begin{table}[h]
\caption{A Comparison between CAS(ME)$^2$ and SAMM Long Videos.}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}
\hline
Dataset & \textbf{CAS(ME)$^2$} & \textbf{SAMM Long Videos} \\ \hline
Participants & 22 & 32 \\ \hline
Video samples & 98 & 147 \\ \hline
Macro-expressions & 300 & 343 \\ \hline
Micro-expressions & 57 & 159 \\ \hline
Resolution & 640\(\times\)480 & 2040\(\times\)1088 \\ \hline
FPS & 30 & 200 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}\label{tab:dt_info}
\end{table}

\subsection{Performance metrics}
In order to avoid the inaccuracy caused by annotation, we propose to evaluate the spotting result per interval in MEGC 2020.
\subsection*{1. True positive in one video definition}
The true positive (TP) per interval in one video is first defined based on the intersection between the spotted interval and the ground-truth interval. The spotted interval $W_{spotted}$ is considered as TP if it fits the following condition:
\begin{equation}
   \frac{W_{spotted}\cap W_{groundTruth}}{W_{spotted}\cup W_{groundTruth}} \geq k
\end{equation}
where $k$ is set to 0.5, and $W_{groundTruth}$ represents the ground truth of the macro- or micro-expression interval (onset-offset). If the condition is not fulfilled, the spotted interval is regarded as a false positive (FP).

\subsection*{2. Result evaluation in one video}
Suppose there are $m$ ground truth intervals in the video, and $n$ intervals are spotted. According to the overlap evaluation, the TP amount in one video is counted as $a$ ($a\leq m$ and $a\leq n$), therefore FP = $n-a$, FN = $m-a$. The spotting performance in one video can be evaluated by following metrics:
\begin{equation}
    Recall = \frac{a}{m}, Precision = \frac{a}{n}
\end{equation}

\begin{equation}
    F-score = \frac{2TP}{2TP+FP+FN} = \frac{2a}{m+n}
\end{equation}
\par
Yet, the videos in real life have some complicated situations which influences the evaluation per single video:
\begin{itemize}
    \item There might be no macro- nor micro-expression in the test video. In this case, $m=0$, the denominator of recall would be zeros.

    \item
    If there is no spotted intervals in the video, the denominator of precision would be zeros since $n=0$.

    \item It is impossible to compare two spotting methods when both TP amounts are zero. The metric (recall, precision or F1-score) values both equal to zeros. However, the Method$_1$ outperforms Method$_2$, if Method$_1$ spots less intervals than Method$_2$.
\end{itemize}
\par
Thus, to avoid these situations, we propose for single video spotting result evaluation, we just note the amount of TP, FP and FN. Other metrics are not considered for one video.
\par
\subsection*{3. Evaluation for entire dataset}
Suppose in the entire dataset:

\begin{itemize}
    \item There are $V$ videos including $M_1$ macro-expressions (MaEs) sequences and $M_2$ micro-expression (MEs) sequences, where \[M_1 =\sum^V_{i=1} m_{1i} \text{ and } M_2 =\sum^V_{i=1} m_{2i};\]

    \item The method spot $N_1$ MaE intervals and $N_2$ ME intervals in total, where \[N_1 =\sum^V_{i=1} n_{1i} \text{ and } N_2 =\sum^V_{i=1} n_{2i};\]

    \item There are $A_1$ TPs for MaE and $A_2$ TPs for ME in total, where \[A_1 =\sum^V_{i=1} a_{1i} \text{ and } A_2 =\sum^V_{i=1} a_{2i}.\]
\end{itemize}
The dataset could be considered as one long video. The results are firstly evaluated for the MaE spotting and ME spotting separately. Then the overall result for macro- and micro spotting is evaluated. The \textit{recall} and \textit{precision} for entire dataset can be calculated by following formulas:
\begin{itemize}
    \item for macro-expression:
        \begin{equation}
            Recall_{MaE\_D} =\frac{A_1}{M_1}, Precision_{MaE\_D} = \frac{A_1}{N_1}
        \end{equation}

    \item for micro-expression:
    \begin{equation}
        Recall_{ME\_D} = \frac{A_2}{M_2}, Precision_{ME\_D} = \frac{A_2}{N_2}
    \end{equation}

\item for overall evaluation:
    \begin{equation}
        Recall_{D} = \frac{A_1+A_2}{M_1+M_2}, Precision_{D} = \frac{A_1+A_2}{N_1+N_2}
    \end{equation}
\end{itemize}
\par
Then, the values of \textit{F1-score} for all these three evaluations are obtained based on:
\begin{equation}
    F1-score = \frac{2\times (Recall \times Precision)} {Recall+Precision}
\end{equation}

The champion of the challenge will be the best score for overall results in spotting micro- and macro-expressions.

\section{Baseline Method}\label{sec:method}

\subsection{Preprocess}
Expression spotting focuses on facial regions. So we preprocess every video sample by cropping and resizing facial regions in all frames. For each video, we locate the rectangular box that exactly bounds the facial region in the first frame, and then all the frames of the video are cropped and resized according to the box located in the first frame. We locate the bounding box according to facial landmarks detected by the corresponding function in the "Dlib" toolkit \cite{King2009Dlib}, as we found that applying a face detecting algorithm directly cannot behave very well. The preprocess details are as follows.

Firstly, we use the landmark detecting function in the "Dlib" toolkit to obtain 68 facial landmarks on the face in the first frame of the video, as illustrated in Fig. \ref{fig:pre1} -- the first frame of s23\_0102 in CAS(ME)\(^2\). The landmarks are marked as \(L_1,L_2,\cdots,L_{68}\) in the sequence of the list returned by the landmark detection function in "Dlib", and the corresponding coordinates are marked as \((x_1,y_1), (x_2,y_2), \cdots, (x_{68},y_{68})\). The coordinate system is consistent with the one in the OpenCV toolkit~\cite{opencv_library}, i.e. x-axis means the horizontal direction from left to right, and y-axis means the vertical direction from top to bottom. The green dots in Fig.  \ref{fig:pre1} are the landmarks, and some of the serial numbers are marked by the red text.

Secondly, in order to form a rectangular box that bounds the facial region exactly, the leftmost, rightmost, topmost and bottommost landmarks are marked as \(L_l, L_r, L_t, L_b \) with coordinates \((x_l,y_l), (x_r,y_r),(x_t,y_t), (x_b,y_b) \), respectively. Rather than forming the box directly according to \(L_l, L_r, L_t, L_b \), we form two points: \(A(x_l,y_t-(y_{37}-y_{19})),B(x_r,y_b)\) to obtain the box \(\textbf{B}\) with \(A\) as the upper left corner and \(B\) as the lower right corner. The coordinate \(y_t-(y_{37}-y_{19})\) means that the upper edge of the box is moved up a relative distance to maintain more regions around eyebrows. In Fig. \ref{fig:pre1}, the box \(\textbf{B}\) is illustrated by the blue rectangular.

Thirdly, as shown by Fig. \ref{fig:pre2}, which is the region in \(\textbf{B}\), we found there are redundant regions in the bottom for several subjects in the two datasets because of the inaccuracy of landmark detection, and so, we detect landmarks again on the region of the first frame in \(\textbf{B}\) for cropping faces more precisely. It is shown in the Fig. \ref{fig:pre3}. Then, we get a new bottommost landmark \(L'_b(x'_b,y'_b)\). \(B\) is updated to \(B'(x_r,y_{min})\), where \(y_{min}\) is the smaller one of \(y_b\) and \(y'_b\). Then a new rectangular box \(\textbf{B}'\) is formed with \(A\) as the upper left corner and \(B'\) as the lower right corner. In Fig. \ref{fig:pre3}, the box \(\textbf{B}'\) is illustrated by the blue rectangular. And the region of the first frame in \(\textbf{B}'\) is illustrated in Fig. \ref{fig:pre4}, in which we can find that the facial region is located better.

Finally, after obtaining the box \(\textbf{B}'\), we crop all the frames of the video in the rectangular box \(\textbf{B}'\), and thus get the facial regions. The cropped regions are then resized to the size of \(227\times227\).

\begin{figure*}[htbp] \centering
\subfigure[] { \label{fig:pre1}
\includegraphics[height=0.45\columnwidth]{s23_0102_ldmrk1.jpg}
}
\hspace{2mm}
\subfigure[] { \label{fig:pre2}
\includegraphics[height=0.45\columnwidth]{s23_0102_crop1.pdf}
}
\hspace{2mm}
\subfigure[] { \label{fig:pre3}
\includegraphics[height=0.45\columnwidth]{s23_0102_ldmrk2.jpg}
}
\hspace{2mm}
\subfigure[] { \label{fig:pre4}
\includegraphics[height=0.45\columnwidth]{s23_0102_crop2.pdf}
}
\caption{Diagram of how we obtain facial regions in the preprocessing step: (a) detect facial landmarks and form the rectangular box \(\textbf{B}\); (b) the region in \(\textbf{B}\); (c) detect facial landmarks in the region in \(\textbf{B}\) and form the rectangular box \(\textbf{B}'\); (d) the region in \(\textbf{B}'\).}
\label{fig:preprocess}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{MDMD}
The method of Main Directional Maximal Difference Analysis (MDMD) is proposed in the literature \cite{MDMD}. The main idea is that: when an expression happens, the face will experience a process of producing an expression and returning to a neutral face. The main movement directions will be opposite in the process. By analyzing it, expressions can be spotted. Here we review the MDMD method.

Given a video with \(n\) frames, the current frame is denoted as \(F_i\). \(F_{i-k}\) is the \(k\)-th frame before the \(F_i\), and \(F_{i+k}\) is the \(k\)-th frame after the \(F_i\). The robust local optical flow (RLOF) \cite{Senst2012Robust} between the \(F_{i-k}\) frame (Head Frame) and the \(F_i\) frame (Current Frame) is computed. We denote the optical flow by \((u^{HC}, v^{HC})\). For convenience, \((u^{HC}, v^{HC})\) means the displacement of any point. Similarly, the optical flow between the \(F_{i-k}\) frame (Head Frame) and the \(F_{i+k}\) frame (Tail Frame) is denoted by \((u^{HT}, v^{HT})\). Then, \((u^{HC}, v^{HC})\) and \((u^{HT}, v^{HT})\) are converted from Euclidean coordinates to polar coordinates \((\rho^{HC}, \theta^{HC})\) and \((\rho^{HT}, \theta^{HT})\), where \(\rho\) and \(\theta\) represent, respectively, the magnitude and direction.

Based on the directions \(\{\theta^{HC}\}\), all the optical flow vectors \(\{(\rho^{HC}, \theta^{HC})\}\) are divided into \(a\) directions. Fig. \ref{fig:directions} illustrates the condition when \(a=4\). The \emph{Main Direction} \(\Theta\) is the direction that has the largest number of optical flow vectors among the \(a\) directions. The main directional optical vector \((\rho^{HC}_M , \theta^{HC}_M )\) is the optical flow vector \((\rho^{HC}, \theta^{HC})\) that falls in the \emph{Main Direction} \(\Theta\).

\begin{figure}[htbp] \centering
\includegraphics[width=0.75\columnwidth]{MDMD_direction.pdf}
\caption{Four directions in the polar coordinates.}
\label{fig:directions}
\end{figure}

\begin{equation}
\{(\rho^{HC}_M , \theta^{HC}_M )\}=\{(\rho^{HC} , \theta^{HC}) | \theta^{HC} \in \Theta\}
\label{eq:MDMD12}
\end{equation}
The optical flow vector corresponding to \((\rho^{HC}_M , \theta^{HC}_M )\) between \(F_{i-k}\) frame and \(F_{i+k}\) is denoted as \((\rho^{HT}_M , \theta^{HT}_M )\).

\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
\{(\rho^{HT}_M , \theta^{HT}_M )\}=&\{(\rho^{HT}, \theta^{HT}) | (\rho^{HT}, \theta^{HT}) \text{ and } (\rho^{HC}_M , \theta^{HC}_M ) \\
&\text{ are two different vectors of the same} \\
&\text{ point in } F_{i-k} \}
\label{eq:MDMD13}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
After the differences \(\rho^{HC}_M-\rho^{HT}_M\) are sorted in a descending order, the maximal difference \(d^i\) is defined as the mean difference value of the first 1/3 of the differences \(\rho^{HC}_M-\rho^{HT}_M\) to characterize the frame \(F_i\) as in the formula:

\begin{equation}
d=\frac{3}{g} \sum \max_{\frac{g}{3}} \{\rho^{HC}_M-\rho^{HT}_M\}
\label{eq:MDMD14}
\end{equation}
where \(g =|\{(\rho^{HC}_M-\rho^{HT}_M)\}|\) is the number of elements in the subset \(\{(\rho^{HC}_M-\rho^{HT}_M)\}\), and \(\max_mS\) denotes a set comprised of the first \(m\) maximal elements in the subset \(S\).

Since our method is a block-based analysis, the cropped facial region of each frame is divided into \(b{\times}b\) blocks, as shown in Fig. \ref{fig:block}. And we calculate the maximal difference \(d^i_j (j = 1, 2, \cdots, b^2)\) for each block in the \(F_i\) frame. For frame \(F_i\), there are \(b^2\) maximal differences \(d^i_j\) due to the \(b{\times}b\) block structure. Then, we arrange the \(b^2\) maximal differences \(d^i_j\) in a descending order where \(\bar d^i\) is the first 1/3 of the maximal differences and characterizes the frame \(F_i\) feature:

\begin{equation}
\bar d^i = \frac{1}{s}\sum \max_s\{d^i_j\},
\label{eq:MDMD15}
\end{equation}
where \(j = 1,2,\cdots,b^2\).

\begin{figure}[htbp] \centering
\includegraphics[width=0.55\columnwidth]{block.pdf}
\caption{An example of facial \(6\times6\) block structure.}
\label{fig:block}
\end{figure}

If a person maintains a neutral expression at \(F_{i-k}\), her/his emotional expression, such as disgust, starts at the onset frame between \(F_{i-k}\) and \(F_i\), and is repressed at the offset frame between \(F_i\) and \(F_{i+k}\), and then the facial expression recovers a neutral expression at \(F_{i+k}\), which is presented in Fig. \ref{fig:situation1}. In this circumstance, the movement between \(F_i\) and \(F_{i-k}\) is more intense than the movement between \(F_{i+k}\) and \(F_{i-k}\) because the expression is neutral at both \(F_{i+k}\) and \(F_{i-k}\). Therefore, the \(\bar d^i\) value will be large. Another situation is that a person maintains a neutral expression from \(F_{i-k}\) to \(F_{i+k}\). The movement between \(F_i\) and \(F_{i-k}\) is similar to the movement between \(F_{i+k}\) and \(F_{i-k}\); thus, the \(\bar d^i\) value will be small. In a long video, sometimes an emotional expression starts at the onset frame before \(F_{i-k}\) and is repressed at the offset frame after \(F_{i+k}\), which is presented in Fig. \ref{fig:situation2}. In this case, the \(\bar d^i\) value will also be small if \(k\) is set to be a small value. However, \(k\) cannot be set as a large value because this would influence the accuracy of the computing optical flow.

\begin{figure*}[htbp] \centering
\subfigure[] { \label{fig:situation1}
\includegraphics[width=1.5\columnwidth,height=0.53\columnwidth]{explain1.pdf}
}

\subfigure[] { \label{fig:situation2}
\includegraphics[width=1.5\columnwidth,height=0.53\columnwidth]{explain2.pdf}
}
\caption{Two situations: (a) An emotional expression starting at the onset frame between \(F_{i-k}\) and \(F_i\) is repressed at the offset frame between \(F_i\) and \(F_{i+k}\) and recovers a neutral expression at \(F_{i+k}\); (b) An emotional expression starting at the onset frame before \(F_{i-k}\) is repressed at the offset frame after \(F_{i+k}\).}
\label{fig:situations}
\end{figure*}

We employ a relative difference vector for eliminating the background noise, which is computed by:

\begin{equation}
r^i = \overline d^i - \frac{1}{2}\left(\overline d^{i-k+1} + \overline d^{i+k-1} \right),
\label{eq:MDMD16}
\end{equation}
where \(i=k+1,k+2,\cdots,n-k\).

Therefore, the frame \(F_i\) is characterized by \(r^i\). A threshold is used to obtain the frames that have peaks representing the facial movements in a video:

\begin{equation}
threshold = r_{mean} + p \times (r_{max} - r_{mean})
\label{eq:thresh}
\end{equation}
where \[r_{mean} = \frac{1}{n-2k}\sum _{n-k}^{i=k+1}r^i\] and \[r_{max} = \max_{n-k}^{i=k+1}r^i. \] \(p\) is a variable parameter in the range \([0,1]\). The frames with \(r^i\) larger than the \(threshold\) are the frames where expressions appear.

\subsection{Parameter settings and post process}
In the literature \cite{MDMD}, several parameter combinations are explored to spot micro-expressions on the CAS(ME)\(^2\) dataset. For spotting both macro- and micro-expressions on the two datasets for MEGC 2020, i.e. CAS(ME)\(^2\) and SAMM Long Videos, we select the best combination of blocks and directions explored in \cite{MDMD}, and we set other parameters according to the video FPSs of the two datasets. Moreover, since the original MDMD only predicts whether a frame belongs to facial movements, a post process is added in order to output target intervals required by MEGC 2020. The details are as follows.

The number of blocks is set to \(6\times6\) and the number of directions \(a\) is set to 4. In CAS(ME)\(^2\), the \(k\) is set to 12 for micro-expressions, and 39 for macro-expressions; in SAMM Long Videos, the \(k\) is set to 80 for micro-expressions, and 260 for macro-expressions. Concerning the threshold, \(p\) varies from 0.01 to 0.99 with a step-size of 0.01. And the final results are reported under the setting of \(p=0.01\). The original MDMD only predicts whether a frame belongs to facial movements. To output target intervals, the adjacent frames consistently predicted to be macro- or micro-expressions form an interval, and the intervals that are too long or too short are removed. The number of micro-expression frames is limited between 7 and 16 for the CAS(ME)\(^2\) dataset, and between 47 and 105 for the SAMM Long Videos dataset. The number of macro-expression frames is defined as larger than 16 for the CAS(ME)\(^2\) dataset, and larger than 105 for the SAMM Long Videos dataset.

\section{Results and Discussion}\label{sec:result}
\begin{table*}[htbp]
\caption{Baseline results in CAS(ME)\(^2\) and SAMM Long Videos with \(p\) varying from 0.01 to 0.20 with a step-size of 0.01.}
    \centering
    \begin{tabular}{|c|cc|cc|cc|cc|}
        \hline
        Dataset & \multicolumn{4}{|c|}{\textbf{CAS(ME)\(^2\)}} & \multicolumn{4}{|c|}{\textbf{SAMM Long Videos}} \\
        \hline
        Expression & \multicolumn{2}{|c|}{macro-expression} & \multicolumn{2}{|c|}{micro-expression} & \multicolumn{2}{|c|}{macro-expression} & \multicolumn{2}{|c|}{micro-expression} \\
        \hline
        \(p\) (\%) &TP &F1-score &TP &F1-score &TP &F1-score &TP &F1-score \\ \hline
1 & \textbf{109} & 0.1196 & \textbf{21} & 0.0082 & \textbf{22} & \textbf{0.0629} & \textbf{29} & \textbf{0.0364 }\\
2 & 107 & 0.1408 & 18 & 0.0093 & 20 & 0.0627 & 25 & 0.0356 \\
3 & 96 & 0.1455 & 15 & 0.0100  & 18 & 0.0627 & 19 & 0.0309 \\
4 & 92 & 0.1573 & 14 & 0.0115 & 16 & 0.0588 & 17 & 0.0306 \\
5 & 91 & 0.1738 & 12 & 0.0121 & 16 & 0.0626 & 14 & 0.0282 \\
6 & 88 & 0.1857 & 10 & 0.0120  & 14 & 0.0574  & 11 & 0.0245 \\
7 & 81 & 0.1879 & 10 & 0.0142 & 12 & 0.0510  & 11 & 0.0266 \\
8 & 74 & 0.1876 & 8 & 0.0131 & 10 & 0.0443 & 9 & 0.0239 \\
9 & 73 & 0.1984 & 8 & 0.0155 & 9 & 0.0407 & 7 & 0.0201 \\
10 & 68 & 0.1954 & 8 & 0.0176 & 8 & 0.0371 & 7 & 0.0214 \\
11 & 61 & 0.1863 & 6 & 0.0150  & 8 & 0.0378 & 7 & 0.0228 \\
12 & 61 & \textbf{0.2013} & 6 & 0.0173 & 8 & 0.0382 & 7 & 0.0245 \\
13 & 57 & 0.1949 & 6 & 0.0190  & 7 & 0.0337 & 6 & 0.0219 \\
14 & 56 & 0.2007 & 6 & 0.0214 & 7 & 0.0340  & 6 & 0.0227 \\
15 & 50 & 0.1859 & 5 & 0.0197 & 6 & 0.0299 & 5 & 0.0200  \\
16 & 50 & 0.1927 & 5 & 0.0214 & 6 & 0.0301 & 5 & 0.0210  \\
17 & 48 & 0.1886 & 5 & 0.0236 & 6 & 0.0304 & 5 & 0.0222 \\
18 & 46 & 0.1855 & 5 & 0.0253 & 6 & 0.0305 & 4 & 0.0183 \\
19 & 43 & 0.1795 & 5 & \textbf{0.0275} & 6 & 0.0310  & 3 & 0.0146 \\
20 & 42 & 0.1783 & 3 & 0.0179 & 6 & 0.0313 & 3 & 0.0152 \\ \hline
    \end{tabular}
    \label{tab:p_vary}
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}[htbp]
\caption{Baseline results for macro- and micro-spotting (\(p=0.01\)) in CAS(ME)\(^2\) and SAMM Long Videos.  }
    \centering
    \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|}
        \hline
        Dataset & \multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\textbf{CAS(ME)\(^2\)}}& \multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\textbf{SAMM Long Videos}} \\ \hline
        Expression &macro-expression &micro-expression &overall result &macro-expression &micro-expression &overall result \\ \hline
        Total number &300 &57 &357 &343 &159 &502 \\ \hline
        TP &109 &21 &130 &22 &29 &51 \\ \hline
        FP &1414 &5014 &6428 &334 &1407 &1741 \\ \hline
        FN &191 &36 &227 &321 &130 &451 \\ \hline
        Precision &0.0716 &0.0042 &0.0198 &0.0618 &0.0202 &0.0285 \\ \hline
        Recall &0.3633 &0.3684 &0.3641 &0.0641 &0.1824 &0.1016 \\ \hline
        F1-score &0.1196 &0.0082 &0.0376 &0.0629 &0.0364 &0.0445 \\ \hline
    \end{tabular}
    \label{tab:result}
\end{table*}

For the parameter \(p\), we have studied the evaluation results by varying \(p\) from 0.01 to 0.99 with a step-size of 0.01, and the 20 results from 0.01 to 0.20 are shown in Table~\ref{tab:p_vary}. In Table~\ref{tab:p_vary}, we list the information of TPs and F1-scores for macro- and micro-expression spotting respectively. We observe that, for both types of expressions in the two datasets, the number of TP is decreasing with the increase of \(p\). Regarding the F1-score, it also shows a decreasing trend in SAMM Long Videos. Yet, in CAS(ME)\(^2\), the F1-score increases at first and then begins to decrease. The initial increase of the F1-score in CAS(ME)\(^2\) is mainly because the number of the total predicted intervals (\(n\)) becomes smaller with the increase of \(p\), making the precision (\(a/n\)) increase.

Since the amount of TP is an important metric for the spotting result evaluation, we select the results under the condition of \(p=0.01\) as the final baseline results. The details of the final baseline results for spotting macro- and micro-expressions are shown in Table \ref{tab:result}. For CAS(ME)\(^2\), the F1-scores are 0.1196 and 0.0082 for macro- and micro-expressions respectively, and 0.0376 for the overall result. For SAMM Long Videos, the F1-scores are 0.0629 and 0.0364 for macro- and micro-expressions respectively, and 0.0445 for the overall result. More details about the number of true labels, TP, FP, FN, precision, recall, and F1-score for various situations are shown in Table~\ref{tab:result}.

\section{Conclusions}\label{sec:conclusion}
This paper addresses the challenge in spotting macro- and micro-expressions in long video sequences, and provides the baseline method and results for the Third Facial Micro-Expression Spotting Challenge (MEGC 2020). The Main Directional Maximal Difference Analysis (MDMD) \cite{MDMD} is employed as the baseline method, and the parameter settings are adjusted to CAS(ME)\(^2\) and SAMM Long Videos for the spotting challenge in MEGC 2020. Slight modification is done to predict more reasonable intervals on the post-processing of results. Experiments were done and the predicted results were evaluated using the metrics in MEGC 2020. The results have shown that the MDMD method can produce reasonable performance, but there is still a huge challenge to reduce the amount of FPs.

\section{ACKNOWLEDGMENTS}
The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of reviewers' comments, which greatly improve the quality of this paper.

\bibliographystyle{ieee}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Against the date 01, the day is Saturday. The sidereal (star) time is GMT.
The Sun is at 08 degrees 31 minutes Virgo.
The Moon is at 12 degrees 12 minutes Taurus.
Mercury is at 21 degrees 34 minutes Leo.
Venus is at 23 degrees 30 minutes Libra.
Mars is at 28 degrees 45 minutes Capricorn.
Jupiter is at 17 degrees 10 minutes Scorpio.
Saturn is at 02 degrees 34 minutes Capricorn.
Uranus is at 02 degrees 19 minutes Taurus.
Neptune is at 15 degrees 16 minutes Pisces.
Pluto is at 18 degrees 58 minutes Capricorn.
Node is at 04 degrees 02 minutes Leo.
Ephemeris September 2018. Where Are the Planets Right Now?
The astrological ephemeris table below is for the month of September 2018; it shows day-by-day positions by sign as well as the degree of the celestial bodies – the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Node.


Lawton high Charleston SC has 2 properties for sale on MLS. Homes for sale Lawton high SC have an average list price of $252,500 ranging in price from $210,000 to $295,000. The average size property is 1,481 square feet. Largest for sale being 1,726 sqft and smallest 1,236 sqft.


text:
San Bernardino County supervisor's push…
San Bernardino County supervisor's push to ban raves reignited by Fontana deaths
Concertgoers cool off in the water walk installation during the HARD Summer Music Festival at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana July 31.
HARD Summer Music Festival at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana July 31.
By Joe Nelson | jnelson@scng.com | San Bernardino Sun
PUBLISHED: August 6, 2016 at 7:48 p.m. | UPDATED: September 1, 2017 at 12:31 p.m.
The recent deaths of three people at the HARD Summer Music Festival in Fontana reignited a push by San Bernardino County Supervisor Janice Rutherford to ban raves at the San Manuel Amphitheater in Devore.
Officials at Auto Club Speedway, in unincorporated Fontana, and Live Nation have remained silent since the deaths of Derek Lee, 22, of San Francisco, Alyssa Dominguez, 21, of San Diego and Roxanne Ngo, 22, of Chino Hills, following last weekend's event. Their causes of death remain under investigation and appear unrelated, authorities said.
In a statement released Friday, Rutherford said that while the causes of death have yet to be determined, it is common knowledge that many young people die at electronic dance shows due to overdoses.
"In light of these recent deaths, the Board of Supervisors should seriously consider banning these events from taking place at the county-owned San Manuel Amphitheater in Devore. We cannot wait for more young lives to be lost before we decide enough is enough," Rutherford said.
Rutherford plans to discuss the matter with her fellow county supervisors during Tuesday's board meeting.
Despite two deaths since 2013 and hundreds of complaints from area residents about excessive noise, loitering, drug use and heavy traffic generated by the Nocturnal Wonderland electronic dance show and its sister events at the San Manuel Amphitheater, Rutherford's measure to terminate the county's contract with Live Nation failed June 28 due to lack of board consensus when Supervisors Josie Gonzales and board chairman James Ramos did not show for the meeting. Supervisor Curt Hagman was against terminating the contract, saying revenue generated from the raves helps fund other county parks and infrastructure.
Another rave, Insomniac's Nocturnal Wonderland, is scheduled for Labor Day Weekend at San Manuel Amphitheater.
Autopsies on Lee, Dominguez and Ngo were completed Thursday and toxicology tests were taken, said Capt. Kevin Lacy of the San Bernardino County coroner's office on Friday. He could not say how long it would take for toxicology results or the causes of death to be determined.
HARD Summer spokeswoman Alexandra Greenberg declined to comment on what action the promoter was taking in response to the deaths.
"We were deeply saddened to learn about the deaths of three people who attended the festival this weekend," Greenberg said in a statement. "Our sincerest thoughts and condolences are with their family and friends."
Auto Club Speedway President Dave Allen and spokesman David Talley did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Live Nation spokesman Victor Trevino also did not respond to repeated telephone calls seeking comment.
The three deaths at the Fontana festival bring the total number of people who have died at the HARD Summer Music Festival to six since 2013. Jonathan Reyes, 21, of Rosemead died after taking the drug Ecstasy at the festival in 2013 at the Los Angeles State Historical Park. Last August, Katie Dix, 19, of Camarillo and Tracy Nguyen, 18, of West Covina died of drug overdoses after attending the event at the Pomona Fairplex.
The deaths of Dix and Nguyen in Pomona last year prompted Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis to call for a ban on raves in the county. In March, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors stopped short of imposing a ban on raves, instead adopting an ordinance calling for a case-by-case threat assessment of events, including raves, expected to draw 10,000 or more people on county property or in unincorporated areas.
In April, HARD Summer promoters announced the event would be moving to Fontana this year. More than 146,000 people attended last weekend's event, where police arrested 325 people, most for narcotics-related offenses, San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said.
Solis said she was deeply saddened by the news of the most recent rave deaths in Fontana.
"I extend my deepest condolences to the families and friends of these victims," Solis said in a statement. "We hope that tragedies such as these can be prevented in the future."
Solis said the county's new threat-assessment ordinance for events drawing 10,000 or more people was prompted by a recommendation from the county's Electronic Music Festival Task Force formed in September in response to the deaths of Dix and Nguyen and the hospitalization of dozens of others at the Pomona Fairplex last August.
San Bernardino County is now following Los Angeles County's lead. At the June 28 San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors meeting, the board directed staff to draft an agenda item proposing the creation of a rave task force similar to the one in Los Angeles County.
But Los Angeles County has also modeled some of its measures after San Bernardino County's efforts, San Bernardino County spokesman David Wert said.
"When Los Angeles County decided to adopt measures to make these types of events as drug-free as possible in their county, they simply adopted the measures that have been in place at San Manuel (Amphitheater) since the first (electronic dance music) event took place there," Wert said in an email. "Those measures include surrender bins, which patrons actually use; mandatory ID scans so that drug offenders and anyone with arrest warrants can be denied entry; and a heavy presence of uniformed and undercover law enforcement, all in addition to the usual regimen of searches upon entry."
Since 2013, when the San Manuel Amphitheater began hosting electronic dance shows, two people died from drug overdoses after attending the events. Arrel Cochon, 22, of Hollywood died after attending the inaugural Nocturnal Wonderland event in 2013, and John Hoang Dinh Vo, 22, of San Diego died after attending the Beyond Wonderland event in March last year.
Live Nation's contract, which allows the entertainment company to host up to four electronic dance shows a year at San Manuel Amphitheater, expires in October.
"Devore residents are subjected to window-rattling noise until 2 a.m., drugged out young people wandering through their yards, and intense traffic for entire weekends when the San Manuel Amphitheater hosts these events," Rutherford said in her statement Friday. "The short-term economic benefits of these events do not outweigh the impacts they have on Devore residents, and they certainly do not warrant putting more young lives at risk."
Auto Club Speedway
Joe Nelson | reporter
Joe Nelson is an award-winning investigative reporter who has worked for The Sun since November 1999. He started as a crime reporter and went on to cover a variety of beats including courts and the cities of Colton, Highland and Grand Terrace. He has covered San Bernardino County since 2009. Nelson is a graduate of California State University Fullerton. In 2014, he completed a fellowship at Loyola Law School's Journalist Law School program.
jnelson@scng.com
Follow Joe Nelson @GumshoeJoe


text:
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text:
#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

#include <jeffpc/error.h>
#include <jeffpc/sexpr.h>

#include <nomad/config.h>
#include <nomad/objstore.h>
#include <nomad/objstore_impl.h>

static struct list backends;

struct backend *backend_lookup(const char *name)
{
	struct backend *backend;

	list_for_each(backend, &backends) {
		if (!strcmp(name, backend->def->name))
			return backend;
	}

	return NULL;
}

static struct backend *load_backend(const char *name)
{
	char path[FILENAME_MAX];
	struct backend *backend;

	cmn_err(CE_DEBUG, "Loading '%s' backend...", name);

	snprintf(path, sizeof(path), "libnomad_objstore_%s.so", name);

	backend = malloc(sizeof(struct backend));
	if (!backend)
		return ERR_PTR(-ENOMEM);

	backend->module = dlopen(path, RTLD_NOW | RTLD_LOCAL);
	if (!backend->module) {
		free(backend);
		return ERR_PTR(-ENOENT);
	}

	backend->def = dlsym(backend->module, "objvdev");
	if (!backend->def) {
		dlclose(backend->module);
		free(backend);
		return ERR_PTR(-ENOENT);
	}

	return backend;
}

static int __load_backends(void)
{
	struct val *backends_sexpr;
	struct val *cur, *tmp;
	int ret;

	backends_sexpr = config_get_backends();

	ret = 0;

	sexpr_for_each(cur, tmp, backends_sexpr) {
		struct backend *backend;
		struct sym *name;

		ASSERT3U(cur->type, ==, VT_SYM);

		name = val_cast_to_sym(cur);

		backend = load_backend(sym_cstr(name));
		if (IS_ERR(backend)) {
			ret = PTR_ERR(backend);
			break;
		}

		list_insert_tail(&backends, backend);
	}

	val_putref(backends_sexpr);

	if (ret) {
		/* TODO: remove & free all backends */
	}

	return ret;
}

int objstore_init(void)
{
	int ret;

	list_create(&backends, sizeof(struct backend),
		    offsetof(struct backend, node));

	ret = vdev_init();
	if (ret)
		return ret;

	obj_cache = mem_cache_create("obj", sizeof(struct obj), 0);
	if (IS_ERR(obj_cache)) {
		ret = PTR_ERR(obj_cache);
		goto err;
	}

	objver_cache = mem_cache_create("objver", sizeof(struct objver), 0);
	if (IS_ERR(objver_cache)) {
		ret = PTR_ERR(objver_cache);
		goto err_obj;
	}

	ret = vol_init();
	if (ret)
		goto err_objver;

	ret = __load_backends();
	if (ret)
		goto err_vol;

	return 0;

err_vol:
	vol_fini();

err_objver:
	mem_cache_destroy(objver_cache);

err_obj:
	mem_cache_destroy(obj_cache);

err:
	vdev_fini();

	return ret;
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


CLIPS (Chemical Linkage of Peptides onto Scaffolds) Cyclization is an integrated technology that combines chemical linkage of a linear peptide to a synthetic scaffold with conformational fixation of the peptide. The reaction conditions of CLIPS Cyclization are extremely mild (<15 min at 258℃, aqueous-buffered solutions, pH 7.8) and fully compatible with un/deprotected side-chain functionalities (NH2, COOH, OH, imidazol, etc.) in the peptide. The reaction of CLIPS Cyclization is extremely clean and fast. It runs very well with linear peptides which have 2–30 amino acids. The reaction is compatible with all possible unprotected side-chain functionalities (except for free cysteine). Therefore, CLIPS Cyclization avoids the need for complex synthetic strategies and this makes the reaction highly versatile with a very wide scope. The ingle-, double-, and triple-loop peptide constructs by treating di-, tri-, and tetracysteine containing peptides with bis, tris-, and tetrakis(bro- momethyl)- benzene de-rivativnetse.
As a technology for peptide cyclization, the CLIPSTM (Chemically Linked Peptides on Scaffolds) has been applied successfully in identifying the epitope on human CD20 and reconstructing the conformational epitope on follicle stimulating hormone.
Single-constrained CLIPS-peptides generally show large animal-to-animal variations, most likely the result of insufficient preorganization.
It is worth noting that the CLIPS−peptides are relatively large cargos.
The CLIPS architecture afforded peptides with long-term proteolytic stability which promoted uptake efficiency.
In summary, the application of CLIPS-technology may have the broad applicability for the reconstruction of other protein surfaces with even higher structural complexity, such as, the transmembrane proteins (TKR's, GPCR's), or certain viral proteins (HIV).
1.	Timmerman, P., Beld, J., Puijk, W. C., & Meloen, R. H. (2005). Rapid and quantitative cyclization of multiple peptide loops onto synthetic scaffolds for structural mimicry of protein surfaces. ChemBioChem, 6(5), 821-824.
2.	Timmerman, P., Puijk, W. C., & Meloen, R. H. (2007). Functional reconstruction and synthetic mimicry of a conformational epitope using CLIPS™ technology. Journal of Molecular Recognition: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 20(5), 283-299.
3.	Wallbrecher, R., Depré, L., Verdurmen, W. P., Bovée-Geurts, P. H., van Duinkerken, R. H., Zekveld, M. J & Brock, R. (2014). Exploration of the design principles of a cell-penetrating bicylic peptide scaffold. Bioconjugate chemistry, 25(5), 955-964.