text:
WATSEN - A Mid-IR spectrometer, humidity sensor and optical microscope to identify the subsurface water and mineralogy of Mars
Grady, M. M.; Tomkinson, T.; Wolters, S. D.; Guthery, W.; Bohman, A. F. and Sund, A. T. (2009). WATSEN - A Mid-IR spectrometer, humidity sensor and optical microscope to identify the subsurface water and mineralogy of Mars. LPI Contribution, 1502 p. 14.
Mars is currently the main focus of extra-terrestrial planetary investigation in terms of the number of surface and orbital instruments deployed there. Although several missions have scratched into the surface (most recently Phoenix) there have not been deeper measurements of the martian subsurface. Phoenix has discovered the surrounding soil to be comparable to soils found in Antarctica's Dry Valleys [1]. It seems clear from the initial results that the soil is pH alkaline (8.3 ± 0.5) [2] and that water has been involved in the formation of the soil, detected in the form of subliming ice [3]. The presence of CaCO 3 and soluble ionic species detected by TEGA and MECA [4,2] further suggests the presence of water interacting with soil at some point. Since conditions at the martian surface are unfavourable for the presence of water and potential organic signatures [5] it is necessary to look deeper into the subsurface. Recent classification of geological eras [6] suggests an early warm and wet martian environment in which phyllosilicates formed (called the Phyllosian era). Nili Fossae [7] is a region that the orbital VNIR and IR spectrometers OMEGA and CRISM [8,9] have indentified which correspond mineralogically and through crater counts to this early Phyllosian era. This location would be a prime candidate for the detection of Mars' fluvial past, with phyllosilicates detected and CRISM indentifying MgCO3 [ 10] (known to be abundant in the presence of water, CO, and an alkaline pH; all conditions hospitable for most terrestrial life).
Journal Item
This volume of this publication contains the program and abstract details of The New Martian Chemistry Workshop, July 27-28, 2009, Medford, Massachusetts. This volume was compiled in 2009 by Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston
© The Authors
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/marsche...(Other)


That's fast. That gives me some hope I might one day find some font artists! Either way, awesome job.
How long did that font take you to do? It's beautiful and it makes me sad I never see pixel artists for hire who show fonts in their portfolios.


I placed and order with zkarlo (zkarlo.com) via ebay - the order arrived - it was wrong - they shipped the wrong products though the correct item was clearly pictured on the order form. I immediately contacted the company regarding the mistake - asked them to send the correct item that was still being advertised on ebay. Asked that they ship the correct items immediately so the items I bought to replace the failed shipment could be returned. To replace the incorrect items on Christmas eve cost me an additional $75.00. They didn't do this, failed to communicate and did not credit my account. I contacted ebay, they sent a return label. I shipped back the incorrect items - BUT the company said the item was never shipped! I was not given a credit. It's taken me a month and a half to resolve this problem - zkarlo took my money, sent the wrong items which were returned (and cost much less than the items I ordered), kept my money, and stopped communicating! I invested more money to replace the failed shipment, and have spent literally over 10 hours to get this resolved. I've sent numerous emails and made several calls in an effort to get my money back, having to work with ebay, zkarlo, my bank, and Pay Pal. I've gotten a credit (from Pay Pal) for the initial amount but am out an extra $75 because of zkarlo's negligence and bad business practices. I placed the order 12/21/09 and this issue was partially resolved 2/5/10.
Yes, the wrong items were sent by mistake. We needed nothing returned. If the buyer had simply emailed we would have sent out the correct items. We did not even need the intercoolers returned. The buyer instead got angry, sent multiple rude emails and immediately opened an eBay dispute. eBay had the buyer return the items and a full refund was given. This person is angry that we didn't refund her an additional $75 on top of the full refund because she had to pay that much more than our price to buy her items locally.
I am currently going through the same thing with this company, my 17 yr old Son purchased a ps3 and the first was damaged and you could not play, it on-line.
The Controllers were also broken we sent it all back they bragged there heels on a replacement.
I purchased a guitar hero work band kit from ZKarlo or Krazeekrazees.com and paid for expedient shipping of $33 to have it shipped within 2-9 days. The product was listed as like new, and was supposed to include the game, complete drum set, mic, and guitar. They claimed to have shipped it on the 30th of December, but not get here till the 20th of January! I tried to be patient, but the items were not like new, they were dusty and dirty, and to top it all off, they didn't even include the high hat or cymbals so the drums don't work! I waited over 3 weeks for a package that should have been here in at most over a week, and when it did get here, important pieces were missing! I had to go out and buy replacement parts because of their incompetence. I sent them an email, I don't expect anything back. I don't recommend using their company. You will be wasting your time and money.
Vhill1015 The USPS Parcel post shipping option you chose to HI can take up to 6 weeks to deliver -check USPS.com You received $19.48 refund for the items you had to purchase and we would have sent them to you free of charge.
I bought from Zkarlo through ebay from Krazee Deals. They shipped a phone, it didn't work, so I sent it back and they shipped another. Phone was supposed to have been "tested" but 2 buttons didn't even work. Poor customer service, poor product testing, poor company. A refund was issued, but only after I spent $10 shipping it back to them twice (on a $30 purchase). WATCH OUT!! They don't pay for return shipping.
I would never do business with them again.
I bought a Wii Rockband for my son's birthday in March 2010. First, they sent me equipment that didn't work. I tried to contact their customer service department with no reply, so I sent it back via UPS and ZKarlo stated I never sent anything back to them...I had UPS investigate and it was signed for by their company. I was never contacted - NOTHING! I FINALLY got ahold of someone from their company and they stated they would send me out another 1. It was received and once again the guitar didn't work (and still doesn't to this day) and I haven't been able to contact anyone FOR MONTHS!! So this has been going on over a YEAR my son still doesn't have a rockband like he wanted and I'm out of $225. I just want to return this item and get my money back...I WILL NEVER DEAL WITH THIS COMPANY AGAIN!!! THIS IS A WARNING FOR EVERYONE THAT EVEN THINKS ABOUT DOING BUSINESS WITH THIS COMPANY - YOU WILL NEVER HEAR BACK FROM THEM!!!
Already paid for an eBay item number #360384098779, zkarlo open a case for unpaid item and not ship my item.. they even won't respond my message.. beware everyone..
can someone post their phone number I am having the same problem getting a defective item replaced.
In a nutshell I ordered an e-book reader.I received it but it did not work properly. They instructed me to return it, which I did, and they replaced.
The replacement acted exactly the same and did not work. Again they said to return it for a refund. Which I did.
We do apologize for any issues your having with the item. We would love to get our feedback revised from the negative comment that you left us to a positive. We are willing to offer a $25 refund for you on this purchase and we would even be willing to let you keep everything without having to return it. Please let us know if that is satisfactory and we can send the feedback revision request to you.
eBay is our full time business and with the economy in slow-down it is effecting everyone. We depend on our eBay sales to pay our daily expenses and are trying to keep our eBay standing as best as possible. If you have any further questions please email our customer support directly at [protected]@zkarlo.com.
I replied saying I had sent it back already.
Further e-mails to them got the response that they could not do anything without the eBay item number of my purchase and my eBay user ID please? Which was sent a number of times.
Then they stopped answering my e mails.
they state they did not enter into a contractual agreement with you OR they have chosen to voluntarily walk away from the job prior to any work being done.
WHAT THIS HAS GOT TO DO WITH RETURNING MY MONEY I DON'T KNOW.
plus they did enter into a contract by accepting my money. They contracted to sell the product.
They did not voluntarily walk away from the job prior to any work being done because they sent 2 faulty products that were returned. .
I WILL NEVER DEAL WITH THIS COMPANY AGAIN!!! THIS IS A WARNING FOR EVERYONE THAT EVEN THINKS ABOUT DOING BUSINESS WITH THIS COMPANY - YOU WILL NEVER HEAR BACK FROM THEM!!!
y daughter purchased a Jawbone for me last December as gift for me from ebay seller zKarlo.com in Burnsville, Mn.
It worked for a couple of weeks but then quit working right. I returned in Jan for a replacement. It did not work as well as the first one so I packaged it up and finally returned it in late Feb or Mar asking for a full refund.
The first contact for a replacement was very prompt and courteous. Although it was totally via email.
However, I have made numerous complaints directly to zKarlo with absolutely NO response since returning the second one.
I may very well spend more than the $85.oo lost just to get them to tell me they refuse to do anything.
I don't have any beef with ebay except that at this point I haven't figured out how to complain back thru their site.


Discusses all types of corporate risks and practical means of defending against them.
Security is currently identified as a critical area of Information Technology management by a majority of government, commercial, and industrial organizations.
Offers an effective risk management program, which is the most critical function of an information security program.


text:
Hōkūleʻa Returns Home
In Newsletter, Teachers, Updates, Voyaging
At approximately 9:45 a.m. Hawaiʻi Standard Time, legendary voyaging canoe, Hōkūleʻa, sailed into the harbor at Oʻahu's Magic Island after completing a 42,000-mile open-ocean journey around the world. Nearly 50,000 people gathered to celebrate the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) and the conclusion of the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage sponsored by Hawaiian Airlines. Through sharing indigenous wisdom, groundbreaking conservation and preservation initiatives, creating global relationships, and discovering the wonders of the Island Earth, the epic journey has inspired practices to protect our environment for future generations.
Hōkūleʻa's return to Hawaiʻi marks the first time in history that a Polynesian voyaging canoe has sailed around the world. The voyage was led by a crew of skilled navigators using ancient Polynesian wayfinding techniques, observing the stars, ocean, winds, birds and other signs of nature as mapping points for direction.
View a video highlighting Hōkūleʻa's successful circumnavigation of Island Earth.
"The wisdom and knowledge of our ancestors coupled with inspirational, forward-thinking about connecting people and cultures to preserve our Island Earth, allowed us to create an unprecedented movement called Mālama Honua and navigate toward a more sustainable world," said Nainoa Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. "Our voyage continues. We must keep inspiring the stewardship of our earth, perpetuation of our culture and learning how to care for environment and the people around us."
Themed Lei Kaʻapuni Honua, meaning "A Lei Around The World," the homecoming celebration honored the journey of connecting cultures and people across the globe. Dignitaries, leaders, sponsors, partners and the community joined the Polynesian Voyaging Society to watch as Hōkūleʻa sailed into Magic Island along with a fleet of seven deep sea voyaging canoes from Hawaiʻi, Tahiti and New Zealand. This historic return to Hawaiʻi was observed with a cultural welcoming ceremony followed by an all-day event filled with music and entertainment for the entire community.
"The State of Hawaiʻi is tremendously proud of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, crewmembers, volunteers and community partners of the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage for their efforts to share our knowledge and values and work collaboratively with cultures around the world to protect our environment," said Hawaii State Governor David Y. Ige. "As a global leader in sustainability, Hawaiʻi and its people will continue to support environmental conservation and preservation initiatives that make our world a better place."
"The Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage is a shining example of what we can accomplish together and the change we can initiate to realize a brighter future for Hawaii and the world," said Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell. "This global movement has not only encouraged stewardship of our island Earth, but also has inspired the next generation of navigators, explorers and engaged citizens who are proud of where they come from and what our culture stands for. The value and lessons from this voyage will continue to help our community thrive for years to come."
A series of additional homecoming events are planned throughout homecoming week, including the Mālama Honua Fair and Summit, a three-day summit, will highlight the voyaging, cultural, environmental, educational and health and well-being missions of the Worldwide Voyage by sharing mālama honua "stories of hope" and voyage-inspired initiatives and activities with the public. The event's inspirational speaker series will feature local and global speakers who have engaged with the Voyage including: Megan Smith, 3rd chief technology officer of the United States; Dieter Paulmann, founder of Okeanos Foundation for the Sea; and Ocean Elders Sylvia Earle, Jean-Michel Cousteau, and Don Walsh.
The mission of the Voyage has been to spread the message of Mālama Honua (caring for Island Earth) by promoting environmental consciousness, fostering learning environments, bringing together island communities and growing a global movement toward a more sustainable world. The voyage has encouraged a resurgence of pride and respect for native cultures and has created opportunities for people throughout the world to honor our shared heritage.
Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia will continue to sail around the Hawaiian Islands to reconnect with local communities and schools to share stories and lessons learned on the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage.
The Mālama Honua sail plan included more than 150 ports, 23 countries and territories, and eight of UNESCO'S Marine World Heritage sites, engaging local communities and practicing how to live sustainably. During the voyage, over 245 participating crew members, including more than 200 formal and informal educators, have helped to sail the vessel and connect with more than 100,000 people throughout the world in communities across the South Pacific, Tasman Sea, Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea, including Samoa, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Indonesia, Mauritius, South Africa, Brazil, U.S. Virgin Islands, Cuba, the East Coast of the United States, Canada, Panama, and the Galapagos Islands.
We've got new gear in the PVS Store!
Shop Hōkūleʻa Gear Now!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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In Frozen In Time: Weekly News, Retro Reviews
Here are the dark ambient albums that we at This is Darkness have been listening to this month – some are new releases, but a few are older gems we've just (re)discovered. Please check these out by clicking on the Bandcamp links, and consider supporting the artists. Enjoy!
Matthew Mercer – Nocturnalism
I'm a big fan of music that is experimental or tries to do something a little different, so Matthew Mercer's latest release, Nocturnalism, really struck a chord with me. Gritty industrial textures, disembodied voices and instruments, and eerie drones all combine together to create a wonderfully dark sonic soundscape that invokes feelings of isolation and starkness. This is the perfect soundtrack for late night urban exploration and self-reflection. Very highly recommended.
Peter Bjärgö – The Translucency of Mind's Decay
The latest album from Peter Bjärgö is a masterpiece of neoclassical / dark ambient, combined with elements of ritual ambient and folk music. It is, in a word, gorgeous – with rich multi-layered textures that pull you in under its spell, and provide something new on each and every listen. The album has a melancholic ambiance to it, that is both soothing and thought provoking. With The Translucency of Mind's Decay, Peter has created something very special, and I will definitely be checking out his other work on the strength of this breath-taking release.
Brunstein – Not Doing Something
Not Doing Something by Brunstein is an experimental album of beautifully crafted drones and harsh, electronic tones. At first, it doesn't feel like an easy listen, but as I played the album I soon found myself drawn in and really enjoying the resulting audio experience. This is an album that rewards careful listening and is definitely worth checking out if you're looking for something a little different.
Alphaxone & ProtoU – Back to Beyond
The Cryo Chamber label is releasing a lot of high quality content just now, and Back to Beyond, the latest album from Alphaxone and ProtoU, is a perfect example of that. Dark ambient soundscapes are blended with subtle field recordings and elegant harmonic drones, producing an album of atmospheric space ambient that is – pun intended – out of this world. Unlike some space-themed dark ambient releases that can be quite 'cold' sounding, this is an album of warm, smooth tones that provides a comforting yet exhilarating listen. Wonderful.
Peur du noir – Calling the Ancients
Calling the Ancients, the debut release from French musician Peur du noir, is an intriguing gem of an EP. Electronic tones and liminal drone sounds have been perfectly combined together to create two wonderful tracks, and the end result is a rewarding listening experience. On the strength of this initial EP, I will definitely be following to see what Peur du noir releases next.
Narconia – Exit Wounds
Exit Wounds, the debut release from Narconia is an impressive album combining elements of dark ambient, electronica, ritual ambient, and drone. Each track here offers something different, and yet the album has a cohesive feel to it – meaning that the listener it taken on a rewarding audio journey as the album unfolds. With this debut solo release, Ian White has shown what a talented musician he is, and if you're a fan of the more adventurous side of dark ambient then this is definitely worth checking out.
Long the Night – Illusion
Illusion is the debut release from Long The Night, the dark ambient side project by multi-instrumentalist / composer Derrick Stembridge known for his longstanding Drifting in Silence body of ambient work. Drones and dark ambient soundscapes have been beautifully melded together to create an album that is hypnotically deep and multi-layered, with an underlying feeling of melancholy and despair. Highly recommended.
In the Absence of Words – A Collection I
As the title suggests, A Collection I is a compilation of dark ambient works by In The Absence of Words – each track having originally been released individually between 2017 and 2019. The music here is dark / glacial ambient, with elements of evolving long form drones, providing a meditative, almost hypnotic, listening experience. This is the perfect music for unwinding to at the end of a stressful day, or for a spot of relaxing and self-reflection. Lovely.
Schloss Tegal – Musick from Madness
Now this is very cool – a classic dark ambient / industrial / drone album, recorded way back in the late eighties, and only ever previously released on cassette in 1991! That is reason enough to get yourself a copy of this masterpiece, but in case you had any doubt – the music here is simply incredible, especially considering it's over 30 years old (!) and hasn't dated at all. This is dark and edgy stuff, where the dark ambient and industrial genres collide and cross over, taking the listener on an extraordinary sonic journey deep into the depths of despair and insanity. An absolute must have.
Memory Of Sho – Life at the seaside
Tiny Drones For Lovers is one of my favourite labels, and this delightful 4 track EP by Memory Of Sho is another excellent release. Ambient soundscapes, warm drones, and haunting vocals & field recordings are layered together to create a mesmerising, dreamlike ambiance. It's beautifully done, and I found myself losing track of time as I listened to this wonderful, unfolding music. Very highly recommended.
Peur du noir – Pontii Heremitae
As you'll have read above, I really liked Peur du noir's debut EP, so I was thrilled when I discovered he had already released this follow-up. The music here is just as wonderful, but this time there is a darker, more melancholic edge to it, with elements of noise added to the mix. This is perfect for listening to on headphones, as you lie back on the sofa in the dark. Highly recommended.
Death Star – Obsidian
Obsidian is the second release from Death Star (the dark ambient side project of Equal Stones), and is an impressive album of dark, brooding dark ambient, with subtle industrial and noise elements added to the mix. In places the album is bleak and challenging, and in others it is lighter and more reflective – but talented musician Amandus Schaap has done an amazing job of ensuring the album has a single cohesive feel to it, with each track naturally leading into the next. Wonderful.
Equal Stones – Liberation
Liberation, the latest release from Equal Stones, is a deep, multi-layered album of dark ambient soundscapes and evolving long form drones. An underlying feeling of melancholy runs through the heart of this album, and it's all so beautifully done that the music transports the listener away on an audio journey into the depths of darkness. This is one of those albums that you keep returning to, to listen to – and experience- again and again. Fantastic.
Artist: Infinexhuma
Album: Frontier
Release date: 1 January 2021
Label: Alchemy Labor Unit
01. Converter
02. Orbital ft. Blood Box
03. Sword
04. Sweeper
05. Heaven March ft. Nerraterrae
06. Position in Flames
01. Catharsis of Goodbye
02. Deep Runnel ft. Common Eider, King Eider
03. In the End
04. Forged
05. Every Door
06. Stormless
Much time has passed during severance. Alone now at this gate.
Prepared for a second entry into chaos, but now as one, no longer two.
No longer without a purpose, now with aim, now with death hands, life heart
Now solidified, now for genocide of evil, to send ashes back up
To crush all flesh of those who fell from the sky to experiment.
Flames grow as I scream, flames resolder the soul
Beware this force, forever thankful to the spiritual loss
For the gain is unblurring the mission, cleaning begins now
SOUL DIVERGENCE AFTER PASSING
THE SEARCH CAUSED MANY LOSSES
SECOND ENTRY INTO FALLEN LAND
NOW AS ONE ONLY WITH AIM
DEATH HANDS, LIFE HEART
SOLIDIFIED, GENOCIDE OF EVIL
THOSE WHO FELL WITH TARGETS BEWARE
FLAMES RESOLDER THE SOUL
FLAMES GROW BLUE AS I SCREAM
YOU ARE WARNED, I AM COMING FOR YOU
YOU TOOK FROM ME
SO YOUR EXPIRATION IS NOW
WE BEGIN
I have been aware of the works of Infinexhuma for quite some time now. I have given a few of his albums a passing listen over the last few years. While I always enjoyed the sounds, I didn't find something that immediately drew me to the music, or made it stand out especially well from everything else I was hearing at the time. However, the unexpected arrival of this latest release, Frontier, in the mail a few months ago, led me to finally give Infinexhuma the proper listen that I'd denied them for so long, up to this point.
The first thing with this release that stood out for me, upon inspection, was that it was mastered by Grant Richardson of the brilliant death-industrial project Gnawed. Furthermore, I noticed that there were collaborations with Blood Box, Common Eider, King Eider, and Nerraterrae, so this piqued my interests even further.
A double-disc length album might seem like a bit of an overwhelming place to start discovering a new musician. But, I discovered from the very first moments through the end of the second disc, that Infinexhuma has really hit the mark with this one! The album starts with the track "Converter", which sounds like a cross between Atrium Carceri and Theologian. Crisp field recordings combine with harsh industrial sounds, (never coming near wall-of-noise status though). Later in the track, children can be heard playing in the background while something that sounds like an alien invasion or some apocalyptic storm unnaturally shifts through the air around them. Needless to say, this all easily pulled me into the mix. The wealth of elements all come together to create a really well-rounded piece of dark ambient composition, with a hint of death-industrial vibes.
As the album progresses, we are able to hear equal parts of the dark ambient and that subdued death-industrial vibe, similar to the more dark ambient leaning albums of Gnawed. The second track, "Orbital" starts with an airy almost spacey, relaxed ambiance that slowly evolves into something much more energized and cacophonous. Again, comparisons to something like Theologian are present on this one, but there is also a tinge of more traditional, yet still harsh dark ambient sounds, like those made prominent by AUN. As the track slows, it feels like we've just witnessed the explosion of a planet or something equally devastating. Now we watch from an ever-increasing distance as the carnage recedes.
While I'm not one for track-by-track analyses, to some degree they are necessary. So, I'll share a few more highlights with you all. The third track, "Sword" applies what appear to be choir samples, presented as almost a dronework with a constant barrage of torturous screams. An Atrium Carceri-esque sound, which almost feels like an explosion recurs throughout the track, filling the role of 'percussion'. Something like the inquisition comes to mind with this track, on account of the juxtaposition between the light of the choir and the darkness of the screams. As if all this suffering is for the greater good of… something.
While there are some quite intense sections of the album, it is not all aggressive. As we wind down from the heat of the first three tracks, "Sweeper" appears, giving us a needed break. This track starts with more of a ritualistic vibe, using instrumentation like bells and singing bowls, along with a gentle rain. In the distance we can hear what is likely chiming from a church's bell-tower.
"In the End" is definitely one of the more unusual tracks on Frontier. We are presented with a slowly building techno-esque repetitive combination of percussion and synths. Overlaying this beat is a deeply embedded and reverberated screaming. Unlike on previous tracks of the album, the screaming here follows something more akin to Theologian. It is by no means front and center, but it is 'lead vocals' in a more traditional sense than you will find in most dark ambient, aside from the likes of the aforementioned Theologian and other similar acts like Gnawed, Phragments or The Vomit Arsonist. It is certainly worth mentioning here, that this album and these vocals were likely able to reach that pinnacle of dark ambient / death industrial cross-over territory at least in part because of the mastering duties being helmed here by none other than Grant Richardson of Gnawed.
The last track I'd like to mention is "Every Door". We are again presented with these death-industrial style vocals, but this time the track is much more subdued, more dark ambient. The voice gives a menacing presence, as if we are hooded and caged in some serial killer's basement, listening to their maddened rants through a thick layer of fog and confusion. This track and the way I've interpreted its theme also draw me to a quote from Charles Manson which he often said, "The way out of the room is not through the door." Here, meaning to me, this 'prisoner' is looking for an escape from this dungeon/hell, however 'Every Door' he checks is the same and leads him right back to the same dungeon/hell.
Frontier is presented in a well-crafted 6 panel digi-pak. It's the first release on Alchemy Labor Unit, which is run by the man behind Infinexhuma and is primarily a place for release of his own music, but also will be home to other friends' and collaborators' projects in the future.
I would highly recommend Frontier, as one of the more interesting dark ambient / death industrial releases so far in 2021. It's also a great place to first discover the sounds of Infinexhuma if you, like me, had not previously given their music much of a chance. I will now be planning to slowly move backward through their other releases, as I assume there will be some more overlooked gems for me/you to discover!


Variable displacement pump is equipped with axial conical piston rotor group designed with oblique shaft for hydrostatic transmission in open loop.
- used for walking machinery and fixed applications.
- the flow rate is proportional to the drive speed and displacement.
By adjusting the inclined shaft, the stepless change of flow can be realized.
- there are many kinds of control equipment to choose from.
Compact and firm pump with long service life.
- the A7VO pump is designed for open circuit.
- the project planning, installation and commissioning of the axial piston unit must be carried out by qualified personnel.
- read the corresponding instruction manual before using the axial piston unit. If necessary, you can obtain it from BOSCH Rexroth.
Axial plunger units (especially electromagnets) may be at risk of burning during and shortly after operation. Appropriate safety precautions should be taken, such as wearing protective clothing.
The characteristics of the axial piston unit may vary with different working conditions (working pressure, oil temperature).
Oil and fixed threads are designed for maximum pressure. The machine or system manufacturer must ensure that the safety factor of the connecting components and pipes meets the specified operating conditions (pressure, flow, hydraulic oil, temperature).
The service line and function port are only used for hydraulic piping.
- pressure shut-off valves and pressure controllers do not provide overvoltage safety protection. Overflow valve will be provided in hydraulic system.
- the data and instructions contained here must be followed.
- the product can not be approved as a component that follows the general mechanical safety concept of ISO 13849.
For fastening torque of the used joint, please contact us.
For installation bolts with ISO metric threads in accordance with DIN 13 and ASME B1.1, we recommend checking the fastening torque of each box according to VDI 2230.
The maximum allowable tightening torque MG Max is the maximum value for internal thread holes, and shall not exceed that value.
For the metal locking screws provided with the axial piston unit, the fastening torque MV required for the locking screws should be used.
In the process of commissioning and operation, the axial plunger unit must always be filled with hydraulic oil and discharge air. These precautions must also be followed after a relatively long shutdown because the axial plunger unit may drain the hydraulic oil back into the tank through a hydraulic line.
Especially in the "transmission axis" installation position, oil injection and exhaust must be thoroughly carried out, otherwise there will be no oil operation and other dangers.
The shell drain chamber is internally connected to the oil suction cavity. No shell drain line is required between the shell and the fuel tank. Exceptions: For operations using pressure controllers or pressure shutoff valves, shell drain lines are required from nozzle T1 to tank.
In order to obtain a lower noise level, all the connecting pipes should be separated by elastic elements.
Under all operating conditions, the suction line and the shell drain line must go below the lowest oil level in the tank. During operation, the minimum oil suction pressure of the oil port S should not be reduced to 0.8 bar under the absolute pressure.


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text:
University of Beira Interior
Covilhã, Portugal
The University of Beira Interior's mission is "To promote high-level qualification, production, transmission, criticism and dissemination of knowledge, culture, science and technology, through study, teaching and research".
The first steps on the path of what is now the University of Beira Interior (UBI) were given in the 70, when the Instituto Politécnico da Covilhã (IPC) was born, in 1973.
UBI should assume itself as a vibrant and alive community, recognized for the quality of its performance in teaching, research and knowledge transfer, and with a strong commitment to the region.
1281 -106
1175 -41
The network of university residences, apartments and suites of SASUBI are intended to accommodate displaced students, enrolled in the University of Beira Interior and, preferably, scholarship holders. These homes provide several services that may be of interest to the student, and whose applications are formalized on an annual basis, in the determined periods by the services. The analysis of each application is based on the evaluation criteria defined in the regulation of the halls of residence of SASUBI.
The library of the University of Beira Interior, in comparison with other secular university libraries, is too young. Very recently, by Rector's proposal and decision of the General Council of UBI (2014), it has also joined the UBI's Graphic Services and Publications, which are called Typography.
Service offer:
Medicine at work (compulsory examinations: regular and occasional entrance medical exams, clinical analyses – electrocardiogram at rest, eye exam-"visiotest", verification of the vaccination plan and blood pressure, and biometrics).
Preventive medicine and sports medicine.
Nutrition consultations
Physiotherapy appointment
The main mission of the Cuture and Sports sector of the Social Action Services of the University of Beira Interior (SASUBI) is to promote the regular practice of sports by the entire academic community of UBI.
This sector aims to:
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\section{Introduction}
Automatic speech recognition\acused{asr} (\ac{asr}) systems have increased their performance steadily over the years. The introduction of \acp{nn} into the area of speech recognition led to various improvements. Hybrid approaches replaced traditional Gaussian mixture models by learning a function between the input speech features and \acused{hmm}\acl{hmm} states in a discriminative fashion. However, these approaches are composed of several independently optimized modules, i.e., an \acl{am}, a \acl{pm}, and a \acl{lm}. As they are not optimized jointly, useful information cannot be shared between them. Furthermore, specific knowledge is necessary for each module to retrieve the optimal result.

Recently, \ac{s2s} models are gaining popularity in the community\,\cite{graves2006connectionist, graves2014towards, sutskever2014sequence, tuske2019advancing, weng2018improving, chan2016listen, chiu2018state, chorowski2014end, bahdanau2016end, bahdanau2014neural, graves2012sequence, graves2013speech, sak2017recurrent} since they fuse all aforementioned modules into a single end-to-end model, which directly outputs \acp{char}. Works like \cite{chiu2018state, tuske2019advancing} have already shown that \ac{s2s} models can be superior to hybrid systems\,\cite{chiu2018state} if enough data is available.
\ac{s2s} models can be categorized into approaches based on \ac{ctc}\,\cite{graves2006connectionist, graves2014towards}, on transducer\,\cite{graves2012sequence, graves2013speech, sak2017recurrent} and on attention\,\cite{sutskever2014sequence, tuske2019advancing, weng2018improving, chan2016listen, chiu2018state, chorowski2014end, bahdanau2016end, bahdanau2014neural}.

In \ac{ctc}, a \ac{rnn} learns alignments between unlabeled input speech features and a transcript. The basic idea is to assume the conditional independence of the outputs and marginalize over all possible alignments\,\cite{graves2006connectionist}. For \ac{asr}, this assumption is not valid, as consecutive outputs are highly correlated. Transducer models relax the conditional independence and add another \ac{rnn} to learn the dependencies between all previous input speech features and the output\,\cite{graves2013speech}. Attention models also combine two \acp{rnn} with an additional attention network. One \ac{rnn} acts as an encoder to transform the input data into a robust feature space. The attention model creates a glimpse given the last hidden layer of the encoder, the previous time-step attention vector and the previous time-step decoder output. The decoder \ac{rnn} then utilizes the glimpse and the previous decoder output to generate chars\,\cite{bahdanau2014neural}.

In our work, we propose a novel regularization technique by utilizing an additional decoder to improve attention models. This newly added decoder is optimized on time-reversed labels. Since we primarily focus on improving the training process, we utilize the decoder only during the optimization phase and discard it later in the inference. Thus, the network architecture of a basic attention model is not changed during decoding. A recent study demonstrated that it is beneficial to add a \ac{r2l} decoder to a conventional \ac{l2r} decoder\,\cite{mimura2018forward}. The \ac{r2l} decoder is trained on time-reversed target labels and acts as a regularizer during optimization. Their work focused mainly on the advantage of using the additional information to improve the beam search in decoding. They applied a constant scalar value, which attached a more significant weight on the loss function of the standard \ac{l2r} decoder. Furthermore, they trained their models on Japanese words whereby label and time-reversed label sequences were equal. Another comparable work has been published in the domain of speech synthesis. In\,\cite{zheng2019forward}, they also utilized a second \ac{r2l} decoder, combined both losses and added another regularizing function for the \ac{l2r} and \ac{r2l} decoder outputs. Similar to\,\cite{mimura2018forward}, they trained only on equal sequence lengths. In the English language, however, \acp{bpe} for encoding the target transcripts seem superior\,\cite{chiu2018state, tuske2019advancing}. As encoding a time-reversed transcript produces unequal sequence lengths between \ac{l2r} and \ac{r2l} decoders, regularization of these sequences is challenging. To the best of our knowledge, an in-depth study on how to solve this problem and leveraging the newly added decoder during the optimization process has not been done for attention models. Our contributions are to introduce an optimization scheme inspired by \cite{zheng2019forward} for attention models in \ac{asr} and utilize the added decoder during the training. Furthermore, we propose two novel regularization terms for equal and unequal output sequence lengths and demonstrate their superiority over conventional attention models.

\section{Proposed Method}

\subsection{Attention Model}

The standard attentional \ac{s2s} model contains three major components: the encoder, the attention module and the decoder. Let ${\boldsymbol{X}=(\boldsymbol{x}_1, \cdots, \boldsymbol{x}_t , \cdots, \boldsymbol{x}_T)}$ be a given input sequence of $T$ speech features and let ${\boldsymbol{y}=(y_1, \cdots, y_k , \cdots, y_{K})}$ be the target output sequence of length $K$. The encoder transforms the input sequence into a latent space:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
\boldsymbol{H}^{\text{enc}} & = (\boldsymbol{h}_1^{\text{enc}}, \cdots, \boldsymbol{h}_t^{\text{enc}}, \cdots, \boldsymbol{h}_T^{\text{enc}}) \\
& =\text{Encoder}(\boldsymbol{x}_1, \cdots, \boldsymbol{x}_t, \cdots, \boldsymbol{x}_T),
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $\boldsymbol{H}^{\text{enc}}$ encodes essential aspects of the input sequence, i.e., characteristics of the speech signal. The resulting hidden encoder states $\boldsymbol{H}^{\text{enc}}$ and the hidden decoder state $\boldsymbol{h}_{k-1}^{\text{dec}}$ are fed into the attention module to predict proper alignments between the $t\text{-th}$ input and $k\text{-th}$ output sequences:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
\alpha_{k,t} & = \text{Attention}(\boldsymbol{h}_{k-1}^{\text{dec}}, \boldsymbol{H}^{\text{enc}}) \\
& = \exp(e_{k,t}) / \sum_{t'=1}^{T} \exp(e_{k,t'}),
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $\boldsymbol{\alpha}_{k} = (\alpha_{k,1},\cdots,\alpha_{k,t})$ are the attention weights and $e_{k,t}$ is the output of a scoring function:

\begin{equation}
e_{k,t} = \text{Scoring}(\boldsymbol{h}_{k-1}^{\text{dec}}, \boldsymbol{h}_t^{\text{enc}}, \boldsymbol{\alpha}_{k-1}).
\end{equation}

Depending on the task, there are several ways to implement scoring functions. We choose the content-based and location-aware attention from\,\cite{chorowski2015attention} for scoring. Based on the attention weights $\boldsymbol{\alpha}_{k}$, a context vector $\boldsymbol{c}_k$ is created to summarize all information in the hidden states of the encoder for the current prediction:
\begin{equation}
\boldsymbol{c}_k = \sum_{t}\alpha_{k,t}\boldsymbol{h}_t^{\text{enc}}.
\end{equation}
The decoder generates the output distribution using the context vector $\boldsymbol{c}_k$ and the decoder hidden state $\boldsymbol{h}_{k-1}^{\text{dec}}$:
\begin{equation}
p(y_k|p_{1:k-1}, \boldsymbol{X}) \sim \text{Generate}(\boldsymbol{h}_{k-1}^{\text{dec}}, \boldsymbol{c}_k),
\end{equation}
where $\boldsymbol{h}_{k-1}^{\text{dec}}$ is a recurrency, usually a \ac{lstm}:
\begin{equation}
\boldsymbol{h}_{k}^{\text{dec}} = \text{LSTM}(\boldsymbol{h}_{k-1}^{\text{dec}}, \boldsymbol{c}_k, y_{k-1}),
\end{equation}
with $y_{k-1}$ being the predicted target label of the previous prediction step. The resulting model is optimized by cross-entropy loss $\mathcal{L}_{\text{CE}}$.

\subsection{Adding a Backward Decoder}
For a traditional attention model, the char distribution $p(\overrightarrow{y}_k|\newline p_{1:k-1}, \boldsymbol{X})$ is generated by a single \ac{l2r} decoder. This distribution is dependent on the past and thus, has no information about the future context. For this reason,  we extend the model by adding a second \ac{r2l} decoder, which is trained on time-reversed output labels to generate $p(\overleftarrow{y}_l|p_{L:l+1}, \boldsymbol{X})$. The reverse distribution contains beneficial information for the \ac{l2r} decoder since the decoder has no access to future labels. The \ac{r2l} decoder contains an individual attention network, which includes a likewise scoring mechanism as the \ac{l2r} decoder. The decoders learn to create the posterior $p(\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}|\boldsymbol{X}, \overrightarrow{\theta})$ for the \ac{l2r} and $p(\overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}|\boldsymbol{X}, \overleftarrow{\theta})$ for the \ac{r2l} case, respectively. Thus, $\overrightarrow{\theta}$ represents the attention and decoder parameters for target labels, which are typically time encoded (e.g., \textit{cat}) and $\overleftarrow{\theta}$ are the attention and decoder parameter of the time-reversed target labels (e.g., \textit{tac}).

In an ideal case, the posteriors of both decoders should satisfy the following condition:
\begin{equation}
p(\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}|\boldsymbol{X}, \overrightarrow{\theta}) = p(\overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}|\boldsymbol{X}, \overleftarrow{\theta}),
\label{eq:posteriors}
\end{equation}
as both networks receive the same amount of information. However, the decoders depend on a different context, i.e., the \ac{l2r} on past context and the \ac{r2l} on future context, which results in a similar but not equal training criterion.

\subsection{Regularization for Equal Sequence Lengths}

If we apply chars as target values for training the attention model,  we are dealing with equal output sequence lengths since there is no difference between the forward and reverse encoding of a word. Therefore, we extend the loss $\mathcal{L}_{\text{CE}}$ similar to\,\cite{zheng2019forward} with a regularization term to retrieve the global loss $\mathcal{\tilde{L}}$:
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{\tilde{L}} = \alpha \mathcal{L}_{\text{CE}}(\overrightarrow{\theta}) + (1 - \alpha)\mathcal{L}_{\text{CE}}(\overleftarrow{\theta}) + \lambda \Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta}),
\label{eq:char_regularization}
\end{equation}
where $\alpha$ defines a weighting factor for the losses, and $\Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta})$ is a regularizer term weighted by $\lambda$. We apply the $L_2$ distance between the decoder outputs $\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}\in\mathbb{R}^{K}$ and $\overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}\in\mathbb{R}^{L}$ with $K=L$ as regularization. Thus, $\Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta})$ is defined it as:
\begin{equation}
\Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta}) = \frac{1}{K} \sum_{k=1}^{K} ||\overrightarrow{y}_k - \overleftarrow{y}_k||_2.
\label{eq:omega}
\end{equation}
The regularization term forces the network to minimize the distance between outputs of the \ac{l2r} and \ac{r2l} decoders. Therefore, the  \ac{l2r} network gets access to outputs that are based on future context information to utilize its knowledge and increase the overall performance.  Note that this kind of regularization is only feasible as we are dealing with equal sequence lengths, which makes it simple to create $\Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta})$.

\subsection{Regularization for Unequal Sequence Lengths}

We can extend the approach above by applying \ac{bpe} units instead of chars. However, in contrast to chars, we face the problem of obtaining unequal sequence lengths $\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}\in\mathbb{R}^{K}$ for \ac{l2r} and $\overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}\in\mathbb{R}^{L}$ for \ac{r2l} decoders with $K \neq L$. In fact, we create the same number of \ac{bpe} units, however, they differ between the \ac{l2r} and \ac{r2l} decoders, which results in a difference encoding (e.g., c a t\_ for \ac{l2r} and ta c\_ for the \ac{r2l}). Thus, the proposed regularization in \autoref{eq:omega} is not feasible. We resolve this issue utilizing a differentiable version of the \ac{dtw} algorithm\cite{cuturi2017soft} as a distance measurement between temporal sequences of arbitrary lengths the so-called soft-\ac{dtw} algorithm. By defining a soft version of the \textit{min} operator with a softening parameter $\gamma$:
\begin{equation}
\min^{}{\hspace{-2px}}^\gamma \{ a_1,\cdots,a_n \} \coloneqq
\begin{cases}
\min_{i \leq n}a_i & \gamma = 0\\
-\gamma\log\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n}\text{e}^{a_i / \gamma} & \gamma > 0,
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
we can rewrite the soft-\ac{dtw} loss as a regularization term $\Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta})$ similar as above:
\begin{equation}
\Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta}) = \min^{}{\hspace{-2px}}^\gamma \{ \langle \boldsymbol{A}, \Delta(\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}, \overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}})\rangle, \boldsymbol{A} \in \mathcal{A}_{k,l} \}.
\label{eq:bpe_regularization}
\end{equation}

Here, $\langle\cdot{,}\cdot\rangle$ is the inner product of two matrices, $\boldsymbol{A}$ is an alignment matrix of a set $\mathcal{A}_{k,l} \subset \{0,1\}^{k,l}$ which are binary matrices that contain paths from $(1,1)$ to $(k,l)$ by only applying $\downarrow$, $\rightarrow$ and $\searrow$ moves through this matrix and ${\Delta(\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}, \overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}) \coloneqq [\delta(\overrightarrow{y}_k,\overleftarrow{y}_l)]}$ is defined by a distance function $\delta(\overrightarrow{y}_k,\overleftarrow{y}_l)$ (e.g., Euclidean distance). Based on the inner product, we retrieve an alignment cost for all possible alignments between $\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}$ and $\overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}$. Since we force the network to also minimize $\Omega(\overrightarrow{\theta}, \overleftarrow{\theta})$, it has to learn a good match between the different sequence lengths of the \ac{l2r} and \ac{r2l} decoders.

\section{Experiments}

\begin{table*}[htbp]
	\centering
	\caption{Evaluation of our approach on TEDLIUMv2 and LibriSpeech with the resulting \acp{wer} (\%) for all five setups}
	\begin{tabular}{p{5.91em}cccccccccccc}
		\toprule
		\multicolumn{1}{r}{} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{TEDLIUMv2\cite{rousseau2014enhancing}} & \multicolumn{8}{c}{LibriSpeech\cite{panayotov2015librispeech}} \\
		\cmidrule(lr){2-5} \cmidrule(lr){6-13}    \multicolumn{1}{r}{} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{char} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{BPE} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{char} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{BPE} \\
		\cmidrule(lr){2-3} \cmidrule(lr){4-5} \cmidrule(lr){6-9} \cmidrule(lr){10-13} \multirow{2}{*}{\hfil Methods} & \multirow{2}{*}{\hfil dev} & \multirow{2}{*}{\hfil test} & \multirow{2}{*}{\hfil dev} & \multirow{2}{*}{\hfil test} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{dev-clean} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{\hfil dev-\newline{}other} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{\hfil test-\newline{}clean} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{\hfil test-\newline{}other} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{\hfil dev-\newline{}clean} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{\hfil dev-\newline{}other} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{\hfil test-\newline{}clean} & \multicolumn{1}{P{2.365em}}{\hfil test-\newline{}other} \\
		\midrule
		\multicolumn{1}{l}{Forward} & 16.77 & 17.32 & 17.83 & 18.00 & 7.69 & 20.67 & 7.72 & 21.63 & 7.59 & 20.98 & 7.67 & 21.92 \\
		\multicolumn{1}{l}{Backward} & 18.12 & 18.47 & 18.57 & 17.99 & 7.60 & 20.78 & 7.54 & 21.83 & 7.53 & 20.94 & 7.60 & 21.71 \\
		\multicolumn{1}{l}{Backward Fixed} & 23.34 & 23.77 & 25.55 & 25.01 & 11.39 & 28.36 & 11.75 & 28.53 & 12.07 & 28.63 & 12.39 & 29.06 \\
		\multicolumn{1}{l}{Dual Decoder} & 16.47 & 17.12 & 17.70 & 18.08 & 7.29 & 20.99 & 7.60 & 22.00 & 7.46 & 21.29 & 7.70 & 22.01 \\
		\multicolumn{1}{l}{Dual Decoder Reg} & \textbf{15.68} & \textbf{15.94} & \textbf{16.75} & \textbf{17.42} & \textbf{7.24} & \textbf{19.96} & \textbf{7.02} & \textbf{20.95} & \textbf{7.17} &  \textbf{20.01} &  \textbf{7.33} &  \textbf{20.63} \\
		\bottomrule
	\end{tabular}%
	\label{tab:results}%
	\vspace{-0.3cm}
\end{table*}%

\subsection{Training Details}
All our experiments are evaluated on the smaller dataset TEDLIUMv2\,\cite{rousseau2014enhancing} and the larger dataset LibriSpeech\,\cite{panayotov2015librispeech}. TEDLIUMv2 has approximate 200\,h of training data, whereas LibriSpeech contains of 960\,h of training data.

We preprocess both datasets by extracting 80-dimensional log Mel features and adding the corresponding pitch features, which results in an 83-dimensional feature vector. Furthermore, we apply chars and \ac{bpe} units as target labels. The chars are directly extracted from the datasets, whereas the \ac{bpe} units are created by a language-independent sub-word tokenizer. For all experiments, we select 100 \ac{bpe} units, which seem sufficient for our approach.

The proposed architecture is created in the ESPnet toolkit\,\cite{watanabe2018espnet} and trained by the standard training script for attention models. The encoder is built up by four \ac{blstmp} layers of dimension 1024. Each decoder contains a single \ac{lstm} network with 1024 cells and a linear output layer.

We perform a three-stage training scheme inspired by \cite{zheng2019forward}. In the first stage, we train a standard attentional network with a \ac{l2r} decoder. Then, we apply the pretrained encoder, freeze its weights and train the \ac{r2l} model. Finally, we combine both networks into one model to receive the final architecture. In all stages, we optimize the network with Adadelta initialized with an $\epsilon = 10^{-8}$. If we do not observe any improvement of the accuracy on the validation set, we decay $\epsilon$ by a factor of $0.01$ and increment a patience counter by one. We apply an early stopping of the training if the patient counter exceeds three. The batch-size is set to 30 for all training steps.

Depending on the target labels in the third training stage, i.e., chars or \ac{bpe} units, we deploy two different techniques to regularize the \ac{l2r} decoder. For chars, forward sequences $\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}$ and backward sequences $\overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}$ have equal lengths. Thus, we add a $L_2$ regularizer identical to \autoref{eq:char_regularization} and scale it with $\lambda = 1$ for the smaller and $\lambda = 0.1$ for the bigger dataset. On the other hand, for \ac{bpe} units, we utilize the soft-DTW from \autoref{eq:bpe_regularization} as a regularizer since it represents a distance measurement between the unequal sequence lengths $\overrightarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}$ and $\overleftarrow{\boldsymbol{y}}$, which we want to minimize. Here, we set $\gamma = 1$ and scale the regularization with $\lambda = 10^{-4}$ for both datasets.
Besides the added regularizations for chars and \ac{bpe} units, we regularize the \ac{l2r} network further by applying $\alpha = 0.9$ in all the experiments. Thereby, we ensure that the overall training is focused on the \ac{l2r} decoder network.
During decoding, we remove the \ac{r2l} network since it is only necessary in the training stages. As a result, we are not changing or adding complexity to the final model during decoding.

\subsection{Benchmark Details}

We evaluate our approach on five different setups. In the \textit{Forward} setup, a model is trained with a standard \ac{l2r} decoder, which is the baseline for all experiments. The second setup is the \textit{Forward} setup, where a model is trained on time-reversed target labels, which results in a \ac{r2l} decoder. We perform a similar approach in \textit{Backward Fixed}, however, we apply the pretrained encoder from the \ac{l2r} model and freeze its weights during training. To solely investigate the effect of the \ac{r2l} decoder as regularization, we define the \textit{Dual Decoder} setup. The model consists of a shared encoder from \textit{Forward} and the pretrained \ac{l2r} and \ac{r2l} decoder from the \textit{Forward} and \textit{Backward Fixed} setups. The combined model is trained with $\alpha = 0.9$ and $\lambda=0.0$. In the last \textit{Dual Decoder Reg} setup, which is similar to the \textit{Dual Decoder} setup, we include the $L_2$ distance\,\cite{zheng2019forward} for chars and the soft-\ac{dtw} loss\,\cite{cuturi2017soft} for \ac{bpe} units as target labels.
Instead of performing the forward and backward beam search as in\,\cite{mimura2018forward}, we only apply a forward beam search deploying the \ac{l2r} decoder with a beam size of 20.

\subsection{Results}

In \autoref{tab:results}, we present the results of our approach applying chars and \ac{bpe} units for the TEDLIUMv2\cite{rousseau2014enhancing} and LibriSpeech\,\cite{panayotov2015librispeech} datasets.

For the smaller dataset TEDLIUMv2, we observe a clear difference in \acp{wer} between the \textit{Forward} and the \textit{Backward} setup. Ideally, the performance of these setups should be equal, as both networks receive the same amount of information. However, we observe an absolute difference of 1\% \ac{wer} for all evaluation sets, except for the test \ac{bpe} set. One explanation for this variation may be that the \textit{Backward} setup is more complex. Since the dataset contains only around 220\,h of training data, the number of reverse training samples could not be sufficient. In the bigger dataset LibriSpeech, the first two setups obtain nearly the same \ac{wer} with only a minor difference. This dataset contains nearly five times the data of the smaller dataset and therefore, the network in the \textit{Backward} setup receives enough reverse training examples. It seems, that the amount of data seems crucial for the \ac{r2l} decoder to satisfy \autoref{eq:posteriors}.

In the \textit{Backward Fixed} setup, we can verify the strong dependency of the decoder, relying on the high-level representation of features created by the encoder. Although we do not change the information of the target labels by reversing them, the fixed encoder from the \textit{Forward} setup learned distinct, high-level features, which are based on past context. We observe this by a decline of the \acp{wer} in both datasets. Even though, the utilized \acp{blstmp} in the encoder network receive the complete feature sequence in the input space, they generate high-level features based on past label context, since they do not have access to future labels. As a result, the \ac{r2l} model applying a fixed encoder from the \textit{Forward} setup is worse compared to the trainable encoder in the \ac{r2l} model.

In the \textit{Dual Decoder} setup, we follow the idea of \cite{mimura2018forward} to apply the \ac{r2l} model as a regularizer of the \ac{l2r} network. Interestingly, the \ac{r2l} decoder is not able to effectively support the \ac{l2r} decoder. We recognize only a slight improvement of the \ac{wer}, which is not consistent in both datasets. Therefore, a simple weighting of the loss during training is not sufficient to enhance the \ac{l2r} decoder. One reason might be that the \ac{l2r} decoder receives only implicit information from the \ac{r2l} decoder by weighting the losses, which is considered not valuable for the optimization of the \ac{l2r} decoder.

To induce valuable information, we add our proposed regularization terms in the last \textit{Dual Decoder Reg} setup. The overall network is forced to minimize the added regularization terms explicitly. The \ac{l2r} decoder can directly utilize information of the \ac{r2l} decoder to improve its predictions. We receive the overall best \ac{wer} for the last setup. For the TEDLIUMv2 dataset, we recognize an average relative improvement of 7.2\% for the char and 4.4\% for the \ac{bpe} units. For the LibriSpeech dataset, we are able to receive an average relative improvement of 4.9\% for the char and 5.1\% for the \ac{bpe} units.

Compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, we decided not to include \ac{ctc} and a language model since their integration into our approach raises several issues as we deal with a shared encoder and unequal sequence lengths among the two decoders.

\section{Conclusion}

Our work presents a novel way to integrate a second decoder for attention models during the training phase. The proposed regularization terms support the standard \ac{l2r} model to utilize future context information from the \ac{r2l} decoder, which is usually not available during optimization.
We solved the issue of regularizing unequal sequence lengths, which arise applying \ac{bpe} units as target values, by adding a soft version of the \ac{dtw} algorithm. We outperform conventional attention models independent of the dataset size. Our regularization technique is simple to integrate into a conventional training scheme, does not change the overall complexity of the standard model, and only adds optimization time.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran1}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


A friend and a teacher once told me that creativity is about finding connections between things that are not seemingly related. The rational part of my mind dismissed this as superficial and vaguely self-indulgent. But I present you a case where I found a movie, a book and a song inspired by one event – a coup.
I was introduced to a Costa-Gavras' movie one late summer night in Chennai in the mid-80s. The movie Missing, based on a book by Thomas Hauser, is about the 1973 kidnap and murder in Chile of Charles Horman, a young, Harvard-educated, counterculture journalist. It is the belief of Costa-Gavras, as well as of Thomas Hauser that young Mr. Horman was executed by Chilean authorities, probably with the tacit approval of some United States representatives on the scene, because he had knowledge of United States involvement in the military coup that had overthrown the Marxist government of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, the Chilean President. See this video homage to this beautiful movie.
Dictator Augusto Pinochet assumed power in Chile following a United States-backed coup d'état on 11 September 1973 that overthrew the democratically elected socialist Unidad Popular government of President Salvador Allende and ended civilian rule.
Miguel Littin, a filmmaker, fled Chile during this coup. After 10 years of dictatorship, Augusto Pinochet issued a list with the names of exiles allowed to return to Chile. Miguel Littín was not included in this list, instead, he found his name in another list of people who are banned from visiting Chile. Littín decided to return to his beloved country by using a false passport, a false career background, a false excuse and even with a false wife.
During his visit Miguel, disguised as an Uruguayan businessman, directed three European film crews shooting a documentary about Chilean life under the dictatorship. He shot interviews with ordinary Chileans and people of organized resistance movements who operate underground. You can watch this documentary here.
Later I read the book Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín. It is a reportage written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1987, about the Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littín's clandestine visit to his home country after 12 years in exile.
Now listen to this song.
In 1988 Sting released They Dance Alone or Cueca Solo in his album Nothing like the Sun. The song, he said, is a metaphor referring to mourning Chilean women (arpilleristas) who dance the Cueca, the national dance of Chile, alone with photographs of their disappeared loved ones in their hands. Sting explained his song as a symbolic gesture of protest against the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet whose regime killed thousands of people between 1973 and 1990.


text:
Massive collection of one hundred ten vintage muscle motors found out in southwestern Iowa beforehand of public sale
The life of a one hundred ten-robust "muscle car hoard" has been discovered to the public for the first time. In September, most of the gathering will be auctioned off on the Sir Bernard Law County Fairgrounds in Red Oak. The series was the existence's work of Coyote Johnson and hidden in a series of sheds built around organizations of the motors' property close to Red Oak. Few outdoor of his on-the-spot family knew the extent of Johnson's collection.
Within the hoard lies numerous Chargers, Challengers, Camaros, Impalas, GTXs, Chevrolets, Chevelles, Trans Am's, Roadrunners—Johnson's vehicle of choice— and at least one Firebird convertible, all entombed of their sheds and lined up in dusty, multifoliate rainbow rows. Most of the collection is made out of models from the 1960s and '70s. The oldest car in the sheds is a 1955 two-door Chevrolet. Most of the automobiles haven't been moved in years, although there may be little rust to found, and that they appear to be largely intact. The exact states of functionality for many of the motors might not be discernable till they're eliminated from the sheds and organized for auction. Johnson sold his first vehicle from his grandfather at the age of sixteen. Now, at age 65, he has decided it is time to sell the maximum of them.
"There's usually a time for the whole lot," Johnson said of his selection to sell his collection. "Sometimes it's tough to confess you gotta do matters in life in which, you know, you do not want to pass a large number onto your kids. I've were given one daughter. I certainly wasn't playing 'em like I wanted to, and I'm growing older." Johnson traces his love of traditional muscle vehicles again to his teenagers, wherein his group of buddies owned 4 Roadrunners and spent most of their time sprucing and competing with one another. While others of that generation grew up and moved on from the chrome allure, Johnson maintained his devotion to a selected breed of boxy, effective vehicles built in the course of the zenith of the American classic car.
Yvette VanDerBrink, owner of the auction residence as a way to be carrying out the sale of Johnson's collection, first became aware of the sheds full of muscle vehicles ultimate summertime. After a harsh winter that protected a fireplace, a caved-in roof, and his father's death, Yvette said Johnson became convinced that it was finally time to part with most of the vehicles. Johnson has made peace with promoting them off. However, he recognizes that accumulating them turned into his existence's paintings. "Everybody's was given their very own way of existence. Some human beings collect dishes, money, farms," he stated. "It's just something that grows on you, something approximately automobiles. You understand, there is track approximately 'em… The Beach Boys sang approximately 'em and all the other humans too."
"Cars have been simply one of these matters that made lifestyles move on. Some humans enjoy 'em more than others; I much like having them around." Coyote Johnson's muscle automobile series can be had to the best bidder at a no reserve auction that may be attended in individual at the 1st viscount Montgomery of Alamein County Fairgrounds in Red Oak. Potential buyers can also be able to bid on the motors remotely through an internet interface. You can analyze greater approximately the auction right here. As for Coyote Johnson, he plans to preserve many motors, a remember of painful selection he claimed changed into too personal to delve into too deeply.
One of the stored motors will almost sincerely be his liked 1969 Roadrunner, the car he continues inside the storage in his home and sleeps above every night.
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Academic Digest
Honors and Enhanced Connections for Online Students
Academic Digest , Online & Experiential Learning
Since 2013, Wilmington University has been honoring the accomplishments of students who are earning degrees remotely.
The Summer 2019 Online Student of the Block is Matt Blood, a champion of older adults, who earned his MS in Administration of Human Services at WilmU.
"It puts a face to online learning, touting students' accomplishments and sharing a little about their lives," says Dr. Matthew Davis, senior director of Online Learning.
Since the rollout of Canvas, WilmU's learning management system, activity has increased via the online student association, whose features include monthly discussions in which students are invited to give feedback.
"The real core is to connect online students, who are a part of our community even though they don't set foot on campus," Dr. Davis says. "Canvas is a lot more user friendly, especially for mobile phone users."
Blood, who lives in Seattle, is an investigator for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services investigating allegations of abuse, neglect, exploitation and abandonment of vulnerable adults. He has worked with older and disabled adults throughout his career and was inspired by caring for his great grandmother.
Past Online Student of the Block honorees have included such diverse students as a grandmother pursuing a degree in Business Management, a former minor league baseball player who enrolled in the Educational Leadership Doctoral Program, and a Behavioral Science major who maintained a 3.9 GPA while planning a wedding, having a baby and volunteering in the community.
Students can be nominated by faculty, students, people in the community or self-nominated.
Rebecca Slinger
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text:
Q: Which one is the Official Ubuntu Channel? I found 2 Ubuntu Channels on YouTube, celebrateubuntu and planetubuntu.  Both had similar names, but planetubuntu had more videos.  Which one is the Official Ubuntu Channel?

A: Celebrate Ubuntu is an Official channel:

A new official Ubuntu YouTube channel has popped up stuffed with short promotional videos.

Planet Ubuntu is also an Official channel for Ubuntu.

Planet Ubuntu is a window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu developers and contributors.

Ubuntu Contributor Channel is also an Official Ubuntu channel.
So, all three are Official.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


WCCTV - WCCTV Provides Time Lapse Video for Gateway Village, Denison.
WCCTV Provides Time Lapse Video for Gateway Village, Denison.
WCCTV's Time Lapse Video services, provided to the City of Denison to capture the construction of Texoma Health Foundation Park, part of the Gateway Village project, have been featured by the local media in Texas.
The Texoma Health Foundation Park, located just off of U.S. Highway 75 and Spur 503, is a $14 million development that broke ground back in 2016.
The 80-acre development will feature a variety of outdoor avenues for visitors such as soccer fields, baseball fields, softball fields, splash pad, covered stands, plus miles of trails and open spaces.
You can view the media article and learn more about the development by clicking the links below.
WCCTV partnered with the City of Denison to provide Time Lapse Video footage of the construction from groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting.
WCCTV provided update videos every month during the construction, showing the ongoing progress from the site.
The Company also provided the City of Denison with a live video stream from the site which was embedded onto their website, and upon completion of the construction, provided a fully edited final video in time for the Park's grand opening.
WCCTV's time lapse video cameras can be installed by utilizing the additional video output channels on a WCCTV 4G Mini Dome, on a WCCTV Mini Dome Solar Trailer or as a completely standalone system.
We can provide time lapse video cameras without the need for any additional onsite infrastructure or installations work, making us the most flexible and convenient provider of time lapse video services.
You will also be provided with access to WCCTV's time lapse portal, where you can review images and footage, download progress videos and even embed the live stream into your websites.
To see our most recent time lapse video productions click here.


ViLTE stands for video over LTE. It's an extension of VoLTE, which enhances voice services with a high quality video channel.
Who is ViLTE valuable for?
What are the benefits of ViLTE?
Both end users and those in the mobile industry will benefit from ViLTE.
Enjoy an enriched experience of mobile telecommunications (point-to-point and multi-party video calls).
Benefit from an industry-agreed progression in voice services (i.e. point-to-point video calls and multiparty video conference calls).
What is the GSMA doing to help in relation to ViLTE?
Uncover further information on ViLTE by exploring the GSMA's valuable resources: The All-IP Business Guide, Permanent Reference Documents and technical support from industry experts.


DUNEDIN, Fla. (AP) - A father fed up with his son for spending too much time on the computer, allegedly fired shots at the monitor, authorities said.
Joseph Langenderfer, 44, was arrested Monday afternoon at his home, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
Langenderfer allegedly told deputies he was angry that his son had neglected the laundry and was spending all his time playing computer games. He told deputies the gun accidentally fired and the bullet hit the wall a few feet from where his son, Tim, was sitting.
Tim, 22, called 911 and said he and his dad were arguing and his dad had just shot at him.
Langenderfer was taken to the Pinellas County Jail and charged with one count of attempted murder.


Partner David Delaney, who is based in North Carolina's Research Triangle, recently acquired the "Certified Information Privacy Professional, U.S. Private Sector" (CIPP/US) designation through the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).
Privacy certifications such as the CIPP/US provide people like Mr. Delaney "with the knowledge they need to help you meet your privacy program goals of reduced risk, improved compliance, enhanced brand loyalty and more," according to the IAPP website.
In fact, the IAPP's programs are the only credentialing programs in information privacy that are globally recognized.
"I have long viewed the IAPP as providing an essential function establishing standards of knowledge to apply to privacy issues. The CIPP/US certification process has expanded my knowledge base on data privacy and connected me with many technologists and other professionals addressing privacy issues in corporate, government, and non-sectors" Mr. Delaney said.
This ANSI/ISO-accredited certification enhances Mr. Delaney's ability to serve the various data and privacy-related needs that a company may have.
Mr. Delaney's practice is focused on clients' cyberspace needs, business issues (including data security, privacy, breach response, product development, contracts, internal, policies, and regulatory compliance), strategic risk management, corporate governance, and leadership programs.
Read more about Mr. Delaney here.
*CIPP/US is not a law-practice certification of expertise or specialization in North Carolina.


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At www.comillas.edu we want to offer you all the necessary information about the types of cookies used in our website, so that you have full decision-making capacity with regards to using them an in regards to the protection of your privacy.
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text:
The First Quarto of King Henry V
William Shakespeare og Andrew Gurr (red.)
The Quarto text of Henry V is of unique importance. It is the first and probably the only text of a Shakespeare play which provides the playscript corresponding to the version that was actually performed by Shakespeare's own company. It has the authority of being transcribed by actors in the company as a record of their original staging at the Globe in 1599. The quarto version differs radically from the First Folio text which is used as the source for all other editions. Half as long as the Folio, it represents a practical staging text that streamlined the script supplied by Shakespeare. This edition of the Henry V quarto provides a modernized text alongside the extensive commentary. Andrew Gurr examines each variant from the Folio text in detail, shedding new light on what happened to scripts that the Shakespeare company bought from their resident playwright.
• An evaluative edition of the quarto text • Provides a most detailed study of this text • The quarto of Henry V is uniquely important, as the only text that can be shown to have been produced by Shakespeare's own company for staging
List of illustrations; Preface; Abbreviations and conventions; Introduction; 1. The significance of the quarto text; 2. The nature of playhouse manuscripts; 3. The history of Henry V\'s quarto text; 4. The quarto printings; 5. The copy for and printing of Q1; 6. The so-called 'reporters' of Q1; 7. Compositor errors in Q1; 8. Mishearings from dictation; 9. Re-lineation; 10. Premeditated revisions; 11. Reassignments of parts; 12. Q's use of the cuts from F; 13. Verbal alterations for consistency; 14. Shakespeare's changes or the players'?; 15. Stage history; Note on the text; List of characters; The Play; Textual notes; Appendix 1: some of Q\'s re-lining of verse; Appendix 2: Q\'s rendering of Pistol\'s lines as verse; Bibliography.


STANLEY® is proud of its reputation for excellence. They are dedicated to continually testing, designing and improving their products to ensure quality and maximum results.
The STANLEY Works, originally a bolt and door hardware manufacturing company located in New Britain, Connecticut; was founded in 1843 by Frederick T. STANLEY. In 1857, Frederick's cousin, Henry STANLEY, founded The STANLEY Rule and Level Company.
In 1920, the Companies merged to become the famous Hand Tools Division.
Over the years, STANLEY® has produced some of the most innovative and useful tools ever made. Today, more than ever, STANLEY® continues to be an industry leader in hand tool innovation.


Shaw Montessori Music is a classroom for fun and learning. All students have the opportunity to experience music. Kindergarten through second grade have general music, third grade learns the recorder, and fourth through eighth grade take part in one of our strings or band programs. All music courses are structured to help the student learn about music and most importantly, to learn through music. Through creating, instrumental practice, music theory, music history and performances, all students receive a well-rounded music education. Students also learn about commitment, patience, taking risks and how to work in groups. Every day in music is an opportunity to learn and grow as young musicians and as individuals.


The regular opening times of Bath and Body works Oxon Hill Rd in Oxon Hill are Monday to Friday 9AM-9PM, on Saturday 9AM-9PM, on Sunday 10AM-7PM. View the actual opening times of Bath and Body works Oxon Hill Rd in Oxon Hill in our branch locator.
For more information about opening times on Sunday or late night shopping make sure to view the information in the designated blocks. If this Bath and Body works isn't nearby your location you can use the 'Map & Directions' tab to find the fastest route to Oxon Hill Rd in Oxon Hill. This location's coordinates are specifically 38.821 latitude, -76.9881 longitude.


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Pink Floyd's The Wall: 'a bleak, manic and agonised album' – archive, 1979
Robin Denselow
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
The Pink Floyd are not available for comment on their first recording in nearly three years, a bleak, manic and agonised double album simply called The Wall (Harvest SHSP 4111). They were told that due to an accounting problem they would have to leave the country, very fast, if they didn't want to pay a gigantic tax bill. So they've gone, leaving their record company with no new promotional pictures or biographies, yet alone explanations of this quite extraordinary work, that comes suitably packaged in a forbidding, anonymous design of a wall (with Scarfe cartoons breaking through it inside the gatefold), and without even the title printed on the sleeve. It's somehow appropriate for an album that will be a smash with analysts, dealing as it does with alienation, madness and death.
Related: Pink Floyd's The Wall film review – archive, 15 July 1982
The Floyd have dealt with such themes before, from The Dark Side of the Moon to Animals, but never with such bitter passion. This is a long, uneven work that seems to lose direction on the confusing third and fourth sides, and it veers uneasily between crazy indulgence and nihilistic brilliance. But shows that those members of the new wave who attacked the band because of their vast concerts and use of elaborate technology, had really missed the point. This album will either be praised or damned. It's a strong, frightening statement that shows why the Floyd never were – yes, and are still not – redundant, in spite of their wealth and success, because they still question themselves and the world around them. Roger Waters, who wrote almost all of The Wall, has never sounded less complacent or more suicidal.
The first bombastic passage shows that he will be questioning his own role with the Floyd, rather than just the alienated society he sees about him. There's a parody of Floyd's famous stage-show special effects, and he asks "is this not what you expected to see?" The question is not answered until the song is repeated on side four, by which time his vision has become so wild that a neo-Nazi gang are on stage in place of the Floyd, checking "where you fans really stand" and taking gays, blacks and Jews from the audience. And that comes after a whole depressing life and death "Wall" saga. No, this is not easy listening.
The most accessible, central part of the work is contained on the first two sides. From the first sounds of a baby crying to the final suicide note, Waters describes the "wall" that he sees built around people, cutting them off from each other and leaving them frightened and lonely inside. As the wall is built and the figure inside gets more crazy, there are attacks on those he sees laying tile bricks — schoolteacher, mother, lover and wife.
Sound effects from bird song to random television noise build up the feeling of alienation, while the music uses the full range of the Floyd's long-established talents, from grand melodic themes to gentle acoustic patches, held together by the mesmeric, jangling choruses of Another Brick In The Wall (in which a London children's choir perfectly follows Water's clipped vocals). Add to this some classic Dave Gilmour guitar breaks, and lyrics like "love turns grey, like the skin of a dying man" and the first two sides are a chilling Floyd classic.
But there are two more sides to go, from which one presumably concludes that the suicide wasn't real after all, or that the "wall" theme is now being localised to the Floyd's own problems. Side three includes a piece on the West Coast trendster who has everything but still gets no answer on the phone, a strange piece about Vera Lynn (complete with operatic chorus singing "bring the boys back home") that presumably questions the disappearance of the cameraderie that existed in wartime, and an excellent song, Comfortably Numb, that leads back to the rock 'n' roll band theme.
The finale is a musical asylum. There are Nazis on stage in place of the band, there's a pounding piece of paranoia Run Like Hell, a worryingly sick piece Waiting For The Worms that mixes the themes of performance, the wall and fascism with morbid fascination. As if that wasn't enough, it's followed by The Trial. The "prisoner is accused of showing feelings of an almost human nature" and the wife and mother reappear in an operatic sequence that I suspect sounds like listening to Lionel Bart during a very bad acid trip. It ends with Outside The Wall and (I think) some sort of hope.
The first section is brilliant, the second patchily fascinating, and I sympathise with those who find it all too bleak to handle. But the Floyd's new work is frighteningly strong and genuinely experimental, and it quite overshadows all other British releases this month.
Baraja's unique and ingenious take on lidar shines in a crowded industry
A Cheech & Chong style Big Ben bong